Minus Tide (27 page)

When he drew away his hands he looked up and saw Ann’s mother.

She reminded him of a demon story he’d heard as a boy. A tale his grandmother once told him. About a beautiful woman who’d died under suspicious circumstances. And when the townsfolk began seeing her ghost, some warned that she could not accept what had happened to her, that eventually a madness would develop and she’d turn into something terrible.

Most of the time Ann’s mother no longer resembled the woman he’d met years before. What Cyclops saw now was the face of a woman who’d been pulled from a shallow desert grave by coyotes, her eyes milky white and her flesh bubbling with sores from the day’s scorching rays.

You must give me my child!

Cyclops staggered to his feet and tried to run. He threw back his head and screamed in agony. The shadow-dogs clung to his body from his neck down. Their electric teeth sinking deep into his flesh. He stretched his arms out to his sides and the dogs wriggling bodies caused him to sway—moving him past Ann and toward the cliff as if he’d become their marionette. They brought him up to the crumbling edge. He spotted an exposed tree root and looped his arm through it.

“Leave me!”

The shadow-dogs pulled him over and he swung above the dark chasm until they tired and let go, dropping from his body toward the rocks and roaring surf, taking Ann’s mother screaming down with them.

When they were all gone, he climbed back up to look at Ann. She lay on her back, coughing. Her chest heaving for fresh air. He pulled off the remains of his shredded jacket and threw it over her before picking her up in his arms.

Chapter 60

Many times after they fought Duane would take off in his car. The screams and shouting beforehand often woke Ann up, and sometimes she’d hear her mother sobbing and go to their room and lie down next to her until the growl of Duane’s Camaro rattled the windows again and she’d slip back to her own bed. If she was lucky enough to fall back to sleep, her dreams would still arrive to scare her and she’d end up lying in bed, staring up at faces in the wood ceiling until the morning half-light came through her window and showed her they were only knotholes. Often her mind was still dreaming when she opened her eyes and the things in the ceiling would whisper too softly for her to understand.

One night she woke up from a bad dream and thought Duane hadn’t come back and she wanted to crawl into bed with her mom because when she did the scary dreams wouldn’t bother her. At the end of the hall, however, she’d seen a strange light coming from the kitchen and decided to see what it was. The side door to the kitchen had been left open and moonlight was pouring inside on the linoleum and she’d gone and stood in it and it made her feel good.

The kitchen door shouldn’t be left open, and she wondered if Duane had just forgotten to close it or if the raccoons were now trying doors in the middle of the night. She heard someone crying, and it sounded a lot like her mother.

She padded into the doorway and saw light coming from the garage door and she went outside to see who was in there. It was a warm night, and the buttons on her pajamas twinkled. She glanced around the yard and didn’t see any raccoons watching her. When she reached the door she could hear Duane and her mother talking, but the window was set too high for her to look through.

She was about to knock but something stopped her hand. Instead she flipped over an old milk crate her mother used to sit on when she was picking peas and set it next to the door. The window was still too high and she’d needed to stand on her tiptoes to be able to see her mother lying back on the old couch and Duane bent over her outstretched arm and giving her a shot like a doctor would do. Her mother’s eyes were glazed and when she looked up and saw Ann’s face floating in the window she began to laugh like she did sometimes when she didn’t think anyone else was around to hear.

Ann suddenly didn’t recognize her and fell off the crate. She hit her head on a stepping stone and lay there until Duane found her and they took her to the hospital. And that’s when the doctor said her trouble with faces may have started, because she’d hurt the place in her brain that did that kind of thing but she’d never told him what she’d seen that night to make her fall.

Chapter 61

After learning that their little brother had been last seen headed for Traitor during the storm the night before, Chad’s brothers had started to worry. The phones were still out and no one they spoke to had any idea what had happened to him. And although a second storm was due to hit, they decided to drive up over the old mountain road in a pickup loaded with chainsaws and extra gas.

Chad hadn’t drifted far out into the bay before deciding he wasn’t going to leave Ann behind. When he got back to shore Ann and the sheriff were nowhere to be found. He’d discovered blood on the ground and tracked it from the boat ramp up to the highway. He was limping down the middle of the highway when his brothers found him, shivering and barely able to speak.

Ann was discovered by the side of the highway—semi-consciousness, talking deliriously about a hobo who was trying to kill her. She was wrapped in a blanket and taken to her aunt’s house where she was set next to a blazing fire. A doctor who happened to be down visiting relatives had come over and treated the infected wound in Ann’s leg. He insisted that she still needed to get to a hospital as soon as possible. If the highway was not passable by morning, some locals planned to take her to the hospital in Buoy City by boat. The sheriff was still missing.

Ann recalled only fragments of what happened after Cyclops left her lying on Raven Point. She remembered how cold she was, of the persistent howling of dogs on the trail above her. The skin of her throat felt as if it had been burned and she probed it with the tips of her fingers, expecting bandages but not finding any. When she looked up she saw Aunt Kate beaming down at her.

“How do you feel now, Ann?”

“Better…I’m really thirsty.”

“I think your fever has finally broken. And they say the highway is going to open up.”

Ann heard some shuffling and pulled back the blanket from her face. Chad and his brothers were sitting around a table playing a quiet game of cards. Chad’s left eye was swollen shut but he looked up and smiled when he saw her face. She recognized his shorter blond hair.

“Hey.”

“Hey Chad."

“Where did you go?” she asked Kate. “Chad said he visited you earlier, then went by again later and you weren’t home. I thought something had happened to you.”

“Mrs. Nathan came by the check on me early in the morning. She’s got a generator, you know, and insisted I go stay at her house for a few hours. Some people went out looking for you. I was worried sick. What happened?”

“You must let her rest,” the doctor said, rising from his chair. He was very tired himself and anxious to go back to bed.

Chapter 62

As they headed east the air became warmer and drier. He could smell dust and dried hay and knew it would only be another hour before the train would stop at a grain silo where they’d get off. He knew from experience there weren’t any railroad bulls to worry about, but if some of the local famers were in a mood, they might get shot at or have dogs set on them for sport.

Cyclops thumbed the cork off a small bottle and drank. The last time he’d crossed this line of his iron web he’d just been freshly robbed and beaten by a group of hobos in Baker City and left to die. He’d come to when the next train came through and managed to haul himself inside a boxcar even with a broken arm and several mashed fingers. And it wasn’t until later that he discovered his attackers had hopped the same train that night instead of taking his money and getting drunk like he’d heard them talking about. Before the train reached Salt Lake he’d killed them all.

Sheriff Dawkins lay on some molding hay, not sleeping but just gazing out of the boxcar at the landscape sliding past. His appearance had already changed a lot, Cyclops noted. In the short time they’d spent on the rails, the sheriff’s clothes were going baggy and his thinning body was becoming brown and muscular and he’d already acquired an impressive collection of recent scars. As the nicotine fits died away he also seemed more relaxed and reflective. His sense of smell had started to return and he’d begun seeing with his nose like Cyclops had taught him.

“What are you going to do to the kid when we find him?” The sheriff asked. But he already knew.

Cyclops pulled his curtain of hair aside and looked at him. “You got something in mind?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t think about it too much. If he’s too dumb to know how to disappear then the money he stole shouldn’t be hard to find either. Son of a bitch has got a real pair on him if you want my opinion. Too bad they’ll be the first things he watches me take from him.”

The sheriff sat up and rubbed his face where the flies kept tickling him. “I’ve known that kid since he was young. Other than having a smart mouth he was never really much trouble. I guess I rode him kind of hard though. But I had to do something so I could get up to his house once in a while and talk to his folks. His older sister had some nice curves on her and I’ll be damned if she didn’t know what she was doing to me.”

Cyclops nodded and took another drink. He didn’t offer any to the sheriff. He was beginning to tire of his company, of listening to him talk about his obsession with young women. But that was the way it always went when you joined the life. Some things took longer than others to fade away.

Chapter 63

It had become a hot day after the fog had burned off and Tammy had somehow gotten way ahead of her.

“Hey, what’s the rush!” Ann shouted.

The outgoing tide had really picked up. Ann watched Tammy get smaller in the distance while seals popped up to the surface, their dark heads glimmering in the sun. She’s just anxious to get back to shore, Ann thought. Wants to get in her sunbathing fix while she can.

Well I’m in no rush to get burned.

Ann pulled her paddles into her kayak and lay back while the water below pulled her toward the mouth of the jetty still a mile away. She stared at the green-blue water and watched the patterns of crescent-shaped silver until it made her feel drowsy.

She closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift until she felt she’d become like the light itself.

She still slept better during the daytime when there were fewer shadows for her to worry over. Although her leg had healed, the doctor said the rest would take more time. The sleeping pills he prescribed for her didn’t seem to work more than a few hours, and she often found herself getting up and turning on all the lights in her room and reading until morning.

He promised you she wouldn’t come back.

Ann remembered his arms holding her as he hiked up the switchbacks, watching as his fast stride caused the forest shapes above them to blur. When she’d tried to wriggle free, he’d held her tighter and warned her not to move and she smelled his foul breath and thought she was going to be sick. But she asked him what was happening anyway, and Cyclops told her she had nothing to worry about anymore, that she’d never see him or her mother again.

And yet it didn’t seem to make a difference. She had been scared of the dark, especially on nights when she could hear coyotes up in the woods, until one night the herd of elk came through the neighborhood, eating from the unprotected vegetable gardens. She’d seen their shadows from her window. She hadn’t seen any since the night she’d found the dead one off the highway.