Steps (20 page)

Chapter 36

Him Potty Man   
(Shelly Lynn)

T
here was a man not Daddy who lifted her and carried her. Shelly Lynn cradled her head against his shoulder and listened to the voice of Him Potty Man, who flowed beside them. He did not walk, but stuck to her heels like a glowing shadow, and His was the language of shadows. He sang a song of light in her head, displaying a smash-up of colors, sound, and images which swirled about in a booming silence. Him Potty Man always sing-said a flood of emotions that did not make sense, and when words came to her, she would ask, “Daddy, what does this mean?”

She no longer had to ask her father what Him Potty Man meant, because she felt it, and she understood. Things clawed at her throat, and He said,
I will quench you.
Her eyes burned like sand was in them, and He said,
I will guide you
. He trailed beside her, no definable beginning or end, and it was as if He were not beside her but all around her, above and below and behind, but still gliding beside her, next to the soldier who lifted her and carried her down the stream.

The soldier stumbled. Another soldier caught them, helped him to his feet and said, “You want me to take over?”

“No. I got this. Help me stick my metal leg under me though. Like that. Grab it by the ankle, yeah, right there. Now twist it back into place. Thanks, bro.”

The world exploded into white, silent but for the throbbing of blood through her ears, and when the world came into focus, they were camped along the shore. She lay on her back between Gentry and Billings. Fletcher stood on the far side of the fire, alert. It was so dark she could see nothing beyond the firelight orange of Fletcher’s back, seeming to move with the flame, but utterly stoic as a petrified oak.

Shelly Lynn spoke. Fletcher faced her, his cheeks orange in the fire. He considered her for a moment, and then rotated to his post and moved only his neck, an owl on the limb searching for night-creatures to pluck and break and shred.

Him Potty Man said for her to sleep, and when she woke, she rested on Billings’ shoulder again, and it the sky had lightened to the gray of day. The river fanned out into a lake. Billings lowered her to the ground. She felt thirsty, and Him Potty Man said,
Drink of me.

She drank of Him, but not of water, of something else, a feeling, an emotion. Her throat loosened, and she opened her eyes and tried to focus. She stood, swiped an arm at Him Potty Man, but it passed through as it would a shaft of light. She stomped up the shore away from Him, but He was always there, clinging to her heels, and she trudged away from the camp, away from the river and away from the mountain.

“Leave me ’lone,” she said. Her hands passed through Him, and she fell onto the rocks, and now the front of her shirt was wet and muddy. On all-fours she crawled into the lake and dunked her head. He was there inside the water when she opened her eyes. She sloshed to the surface, and there was a reflection of her father and a woman, not her mother. She rubbed the water from her eyes. The reflection shimmered, and her father became Perry, the woman Moore. Her brother leaned down and hugged her, and Him Potty Man stood silent behind and around and above them.

Perry released her and held her at arm’s length. He seemed taller, thicker, graver. Creases had formed along his eyes and the corners of his mouth. His voice had become deeper, or at least raspier, something that sounded hoarser and coarser than it had before. She could not remember what color his eyes had been, but they had not been smeared red like this. They were like bloody holes in his head that swiveled with the hint of an iris. He held her shoulders and said, “Shelly Lynn, where’d you go, huh?”

“I went swimming.” The syllables slid out slow and thick over her tongue, as if she had been numbed by the dentist and it was wearing off. She could tell the words were not clear, but they were clear enough that Moore and Perry seemed to understand.

“You sure did,” Moore said. Her eyes were clear and white.

She was hungry, and Moore led her back to their camp and helped her spoon down a can of refried beans. Perry sat across from the fire until dusk began to settle over the lake, and then he said, “I’m gonna go look for the others.” He carried a stick with him, and he hiked down the shore, glance back once before he disappeared and waved the stick at her.

Him Potty Man lay next to Shelly Lynn and patted the blanket strewn beside the fire. He lay His head down, and Shelly Lynn lay inside Him, wrapped in His warmth. She dreamed of her mother and father, and even though nobody had mentioned her father, she sensed he was no longer there. She felt his absence, opened her eyes, and for a moment was unsure if she were still asleep, of if she were wake-dreaming. Him Potty Man sat beside her, but still all around her. He rang out colors that showed where her mother and father had gone off to. It was a place like here, but like before, comfortable, warm, better than before, but still the same. Their bellies were full, and what more could you ask for?

“You okay?” Moore said. She sat cross-legged with a stick, swiping at the dying embers to keep them stoked. She rolled a log and a flame licked up. “You’ve been staring at the fire for like a half hour.”

“I okay,” Shelly Lynn said. The after-image of the flames burned into her eyes, and like Him Potty Man, it floated wherever she looked and hung there, shadowy and shimmering, until a few blinks dimmed it, and a few more erased it altogether.

She heard splashing water down the shore. Moore stood, glanced at Shelly Lynn, and said, “It’s okay. You stay here. I’ll be right back, okay.”

Shelly Lynn got up anyway and followed Moore. The woman jogged ahead, and Shelly Lynn’s legs were hard-pressed to keep pace. She felt all plasticky, like one of her stiff-legged dolls whose arms and legs were molded into place, with joints at the hips and shoulders. Every once in a while, Moore peeked back at her but said nothing.

It was still dark, and phantom figures hovered above the lake, shin-deep, all the same but for the voices. One of the voices was Billings, and he said, “Get in the water. Where’s Shelly Lynn?”

“Behind me.” Moore didn’t seem to question Billings, because she backpedaled and lifted her into the water.

She met them knee-deep in the lake. Perry drifted a few feet behind Billings, in tow as a large boat might tow a smaller one, swinging his stick, while Gentry flanked them shoreward and behind. Gentry’s eyes darted backward, where Fletcher marched a good ways behind them all, half cocked backward with his legs pointed this direction while his torso swiveled toward the farther darkness. Like Perry, he carried a large stick that he swung as he waded.

Billings plucked Shelly Lynn out of Moore’s arms. “We found some friendly neighbors to follow us. Keep in the water, ’cuz their shit don’t float.”

“Shit melts,” Gentry said.

“Like the wicked witch,” Shelly Lynn said.

“Now you’re getting it, Baby Bird.” Billings rubbed her head and pointed toward their camp. “We’re gonna miss those rifles, soon. Now let’s hit the road before the road hits us. Keep moving.” Perry pushed ahead of them with his stick, and they all sloshed forward. Billings set the pace, raising his good leg and dragging his bad leg in a hop-jog sort of gait that quietly amazed her.

The campfire glowed, and she could see the outline of the truck in the water. Billings frogged Perry on the shoulder. “Maybe we should get the truck ashore and drive off, eh, Maggot? Think you can carry it up for me? Think you can drive?”

“Sir, I think whatever thoughts I’m issued, sir.”

“There you go. You’re getting it, too. I’m rubbing off on both you chitlens. Now let’s—”

Billings’ metal leg caught, and it was as if someone had yanked him from behind. Falling, he shoved her into Gentry’s arms and slapped face-first into the lake.

He rose, cursed, tugged on his leg, and waved Perry over. “I’m anchored between some rocks. Help me get unhitched.”

As Perry knelt to dislodge his foot, shadows quietly formed on the shore behind Fletcher. There crowded men, women, and children beyond what Shelly Lynn could count, more than she had fingers. They were a quiet, ragtag group, hard to say in the dark, but some appeared to be soldiers, others regular people. A couple wore hats, some nothing at all. Most of them walked erect, but with a stiffening of joints that appeared distinctly abnormal. A few stumbled drunkenly, fell, bear-crawled, rose and stumbled on. Over the water drifted their low mumblings and a rank smell of feces, as if they were messing their pants.

Billings motioned them to crouch, and they all knelt while Perry rocked Billings’ foot back-and-forth. Gentry inched her deeper into the water, while Fletcher seemed not to be crouched, but rather cocked, like a sprinter on the block with his stick perched over his shoulder.

“Put some muscle in it,” Billings said. He whispered, and Perry pressed his breast into the water, reached under and grunted.

When the foot came free, both Billings and Perry fell in opposite directions, backward with their hands out as they twisted to catch themselves. It was not a loud splash, but it earned the attention of the people on the shore. A few feet stopped, a few heads swiveled. Others marched around those who halted. One of them knelt, lifted a rock, and hefted it in the water toward Fletcher.

It plunked, and a few more feet stopped, a few more heads panned toward Fletcher. Another knelt, and another rock splashed, almost hitting Fletcher. The one farthest in front, a man wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, the kind who might wear a cowboy hat even though his head was bare, suddenly burst into a run and charged the camp. For a stunned moment, all of them watched him stumble around the camp, frantic, searching for something Shelly Lynn could not discern. He kicked through the fire, tossed the bedding into the lake, and ransacked their supplies, all in a single, furious act, as if he might have stitched together each event into a choreographed sequence.

It was the plunk of another rock that redirected his attention to the lake. He seemed to see them for the first time, and he waded into the water toward Fletcher, still stepping to his original dance, a seamless transition as he pieced together random syllables end-to-end. He dipped his hands into the water and arced up a wave toward Fletcher, stiffened with the effort but holding his feet as the spasms shot through him with an electric glow.

Fletcher stepped three times toward the man, stomping the water as he cocked the stick over his shoulder. His hips jerked, unraveling the tension along his back and shoulders until it traveled along his arms and wrists and uncoiled itself with the firing of the stick into the man’s head. For an instant there was only the whistling of the stick as it sliced the air, and then it conked into the man’s head and folded him in the water, finishing the man’s choreography with a final bow and dip below the curtains.

Those ashore howled at Fletcher, still cocked with his stick as he tried to retreat to the farther safety of deeper waters. They launched a hailstorm of rocks, so many and so suddenly that the rocks seemed to be a flock of birds descending on him amidst the screeching chaotic calls of the creatures on the shore.

Billings rose from the water and ordered, “Go!” Behind him, Fletcher crumpled into the lake, and the creatures shoved one another into the water, all of them yelping and clawing as the lake boiled at their feet, fighting one another for position.

“Just go,” Billings said. He was close, almost whispering, and they waded along the shore away from the river and their truck and their supplies, away from the mountain and the giant man and woman and Fletcher behind them.

Do not be afraid. I am with you.
Shelly Lynn said nothing, but watched from Gentry’s shoulder, and tried to focus on Billings behind them. The man was crying.

Chapter 37

Mountain Rains   
(Man)

M
an strolled with Woman’s hand in his. It had been many generations since she held his hand, but the knowing of her children had awakened something in her, a primal thing, something he had almost forgotten. She entwined her fingers between his and clung to him with a force that made him want to stop and hold her to him, but he walked on, letting her lead. Still, it was more as if he led her from behind, making slow adjustments in his weight and the way he held her hand to guide her along the easiest path.

The trees were burned at their base, the underbrush ashen, all of it tinged with the lingering scent of after-burn, even the sky full of ashes like rainclouds that would not burst. The thought of rain seemed to make it so, because his nose detected the change, and he said to Woman, “It will rain soon.”

They travelled until they reached a place beyond where the fire had touched, a sharp division in the forest as if a trench had been dug to protect this patch in the odd way of any wildfire, as if from a mind of its own the flames decided for each tree whether it would live or burn.

Woman let go of Man’s hand. It was dark to her because it was night, but hers was the way of women. She knelt, pressed her hands into the earth and dug around until she extracted a ripe bitterroot, which she cracked open and shared with Man. He sucked on the seeds wishing he had killed meat for it.

She led on without reaching for his hand, and he followed her through the trees letting her blaze her own path, up the slope until it became more rock than dirt, more fern than underbrush. Another scent arose, and he wanted to turn her back, but he followed in silence, because telling her would not make it undone.

She stopped at the edge of their camp. Dawn had come even though the sun hid behind the burgeoning rainclouds. A few drops had fallen on him, enough to warn of the coming downpour, enough to clean away spots on Woman’s body, little white dots on her shoulders where the dirt had begun to cake.

“Has it come to this?” she said, after they stood inspecting the ruins of hers and Man’s mountain camp, until the rain beat its drums in the sky. A flash hidden to her eyes appeared in the sky, barely visible, high and beyond the smoke. Then a clap of thunder followed, along with a handful of rain sprinkled on his back.

She waded into her camp and picked through the rubble, the torn shelter of hides, the disarray of food, the woodpile thrown into the fire, some of it half-burned and sizzling with the raindrops. “My dryings,” she said. She dug out a hardened piece of doe meat from beneath the downed shelter. She held it to her nose and sniffed it. She put it to her mouth, tore off a piece, handed the rest to Man.

“Would you stay?” he said.

“For what would I stay? For the river? For the waters? For the Father who will not look upon me?” She touched her chest, fingered a section of torn flesh that must be painful, but pain was a thing of women, and she did not wince. “There is nothing for us here. There is no more mountain.”

The rain fell ever harder as she knelt and sifted through the remains of their camp, but there were other things to attend. Man left her and ran through the rain as it kicked up the scent he meant to follow. It fell harder as he tracked. Lightning strobed through the finger-tops of the trees amidst the clapping of thunder, and the world came alive as it can only live during a cloudburst of rain. The scents of everything blended into a single unity, as if the roots of the trees were as the giant trees to the west, one single root with a city of enormous trunks towering above the soil.

The ground softened, and he slowed not because he risked falling, but because the scent here diverged. The paths parted. One led farther down the mountain, away from the lake camp of his children. The other cut at an angle, but this was a lonely scent, a straggler, or perhaps one who chose a different path.

He followed the stronger scent down the mountainside as the water sliced its ruts in the soil. A flash blinded him, cut a tree to his left with a violent blast, and the wood burned hot as the tree fell, crashed. A flame erupted from the remains, only to be doused by the torrential downpour now falling so hard Man had to squint to see anything at all.

The Earth rumbled as if the thunder rose to meet the clouds. He stopped, considered returning to Woman, but the scent grew strong. He was on the hunt, and there was no turning back.

Water poured down the mountain in rivulets that parted around his feet. A howling wind cranked his head toward a cracking of trees. A tornado reached down from the sky in a black funnel, crept along the ground and down the mountainside, cutting a wide swath in its wake of swirling rain and limbs and rock.

He heard screaming above the rage of the funnel-cloud. He witnessed a soldier ripped from the ground and torn apart with the breaking of his limbs from his body. Another screamed nearby. Man found him, this one huddled beneath a rocky embankment as if to escape the storm.

These were not the family of Shelly Lynn, although those were the ones he meant to track. Still, water cascaded down on the soldier as he held his hands over his head in a fetal position. He batted away the raindrops as a man would insects, a futile and wasteful gesture. His face raised upward into the rain. His lips twisted and his eyes bled. His mouth opened, and he succumbed to the impossibility of escape. When the water touched the soldier’s throat, it set off a series of spasms. His eyes widened and his back arched. He fell into the running rainwater, and for a moment thrashed, and then ceased to move but for the gentle tug of gravity as he inched his way down the mountain atop an increasing flood.

Man left him and followed the scent farther until he found another of them, a woman-soldier face-down in the mud already taken by the rain, again not the ones he sought. His eyes shot upward to the clouds, and he inhaled the rainwater’s scent of smoky ruin and fresh-tilled earth. There was nothing more to be done, and so Man traced his path back up the mountain toward his camp.

Along the way his nose found the straggler’s scent, and he ran faster because the straggler’s path was along Man’s path, toward the camp and toward Woman. He found Woman cradling the head of the lonely one, still alive, his fingers wrenching at Woman’s cheeks as if to pull her face to his, eyes blinded by blood and rain. She sat with his head in her lap staring down at him.

This was the largest of the soldiers who protected Shelly Lynn, the one called Fletcher, wounded but free of the grip of the Beast. Woman did not glance up as Man knelt beside her, but sang her song of healing, and a lullaby as she tried to lull the man to sleep amidst the pouring rain. “You are right,” he said to her. “There is no mountain. Let us leave this place.”