Wounds Read online

Page 2


  Our guide points, and I see a shack: a small, single-room architectural catastrophe, situated on the dubious shore and extending over the water on short stilts. A skiff is tied to a front porch that doubles as a small dock. It seems to be the only method of travel to or from the place. A filthy rebel flag hangs over the entrance in lieu of a door. At the moment, it’s pulled to the side and a man I assume is Tobias George is standing there, naked but for a pair of shorts that hang precariously from his narrow waist. He’s all bone and gristle. His face tells me nothing as we glide in toward the dock.

  Patrick stands before we connect, despite a word of caution from our guide. He has one hand on his hip, like Washington crossing the Delaware. He has some tough-guy greeting halfway out of his mouth when the airboat’s edge lightly taps the dock, nearly spilling him into the swamp, arms pinwheeling.

  Tobias is unaffected by the display, but our guide is easy with a laugh and chooses not to hold back.

  Patrick recovers himself and puts both hands on the dock, proceeding to crawl out of the boat like a child learning to walk. I’m grateful to God for the sight of it.

  Tobias makes no move to help.

  I take my time climbing out. “You wait right here,” I tell the guide.

  The guide nods, shutting down the engine and fishing a pack of smokes from his shirt.

  “What’re you guys doing here?” Tobias says. He hasn’t even looked at me once. He can’t peel his gaze from Patrick. He knows what Patrick’s all about.

  “Tobias, you crazy bastard. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Tobias turns around and goes back inside, the rebel flag falling closed behind him. “Come on in, I guess.”

  We follow him inside, where it’s even hotter. The air doesn’t move in here, probably hasn’t moved in twenty years, and it carries the sharp tang of marijuana. Dust motes drift across spears of light coming in through a window covered over in ratty, bug-smeared plastic. The room is barely furnished: There’s a single mattress pushed against the wall to our left, a cheap collapsible table with a plastic folding chair, and a chest of drawers. Next to the bed is a camping cooker with a little saucepot and some cans of Sterno. On the table is a small pile of dull green buds, with some rolling papers and a Zippo.

  There’s a door flush against the back wall. I take a few steps in the direction and I can tell right away that there’s some bad news behind it. The air spoils when I get close, coating the back of my throat with a greasy, evil film that feels like it seeps right into me. Violent fantasies sprout along my cortex like a little vine of tumors. I try to keep my face still as I imagine coring the eyeballs out of both these guys with a grapefruit spoon.

  “Stay on that side of the room, Patrick,” I say. I don’t need him feeling this.

  “What? Why?”

  “Trust me. This is why you brought me.”

  Tobias casts a glance at me now, finally sensing some purpose behind my presence. He’s good, though: I still can’t figure his reaction.

  “Y’all here to kill me?” he says.

  Patrick already has his gun in hand. It’s pointed at the floor. His eyes are fixed on Tobias and he seems to be weighing something in his mind. I can tell that whatever is behind that door is already working its influence on him. It has its grubby little fingers in his brain and it’s pulling dark things out of it. “That depends on you,” he says. “Eugene wants to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

  The violence in this room is alive and crawling. I realize, suddenly, why he stays stoned. “We want the book, Tobias,” I say.

  “What? Who are you?” He looks at Patrick. “What’s he talking about?”

  “You know what he’s talking about. Go get the book.”

  “There is no book!”

  He looks genuinely bewildered, and that worries me. I don’t know if I can go back to Eugene without a book. I’m about to ask him what’s in the back room when I hear a creak in the wood beyond the hanging flag and someone pulls it aside, flooding the shack with light. I spin around, and Patrick already has his gun raised, looking spooked.

  The man standing in the doorway is framed by the sun: a black shape, a negative space. He’s tall and slender, his hair like a spray of light around his head. I think for a moment that I can smell it burning. He steps into the shack and you can tell there’s something wrong with him, though it’s hard to figure just what. Some malformation of the aura, telegraphing a warning blast straight to the root of my brain. To look at him, as he steps into the shack and trades direct sunlight for the filtered illumination shared by the rest of us, he seems tired and gaunt but ultimately not unlike any other poverty-wracked country boy, and yet my skin ripples at his approach. I feel my lip curl and I have to concentrate to keep the revulsion from my face.

  “Toby?” he says. His voice is young and uninflected. Normal. “I think my brother’s on his way back. Who are these guys?”

  “Hey, Johnny,” Tobias says, looking at him over my shoulder. He’s plainly nervous now, and although his focus stays on Johnny, his attention seems to radiate in all directions, like a man wondering where the next hit is coming from.

  I could have told him that.

  Fear turns to meanness in a guy like Patrick, and he reacts according to the dictates of his kind: he shoots.

  It’s one shot, quick and clean. Patrick is a professional. The sound of the gun concusses the air in the little shack and the bullet passes through Johnny’s skull before I even have time to wince at the noise.

  I blink. I can’t hear anything beyond a high-pitched whine. I see Patrick standing still, looking down the length of his raised arm with a flat, dead expression. It’s his true face. I see Tobias drop to one knee, his hands over his ears and his mouth working; he looks like he’s shouting something. I see Johnny, too, still standing in the doorway, as unmoved by the bullet’s passage through his skull as though it had been nothing more than a disappointing argument. Dark clots of brain meat are splashed across the flag behind him.

  He looks from Patrick to Tobias and when he speaks I can barely hear him above the ringing in my head. “What should I do?” he says.

  I step forward and gently push Patrick’s arm down.

  “Are you shitting me?” he says, staring at Johnny.

  “Patrick,” I say.

  “Am I fucking cursed? Is that it? I shot you in the face!”

  The bullet hole is a dime-size wound in Johnny’s right cheekbone. It leaks a single rivulet of blood. “Asshole,” Johnny says.

  Tobias gets back to his feet, his arms stretched out to either side like he’s trying to separate two imaginary boxers. “Will you just relax? Jesus Christ!” He guides Johnny to the little bed and sits him down, where he brushes the blond hair out of his face and inspects the bullet hole. Then he cranes his head around to examine the damage of the exit wound. “Goddamn it!” he says.

  Johnny puts his own hand back there. “Oh man,” he says.

  I take a look. The whole back of his head is gone; now it’s just a bowl of spilled gore. Little cinders are embedded in the mess, sending up coils of smoke.

  “Patrick,” I say. “Just be cool.”

  He’s still in a fog. You can see him trying to arrange things in his brain. “I need to kill them, Jack. I need to. I never felt it like this before. What’s happening here?”

  Tobias pipes up. “I had a job for this guy all lined up at The Fry Pit! Now what!”

  “Tobias, I need you to shut up,” I say, keeping my eyes on Patrick. “Patrick, are you hearing me?” It’s taking a huge effort to maintain my own composure. I have an image of wresting the gun from his hand and hitting him with it until his skull breaks. Only the absolute impossibility of it keeps me from trying.

  My question causes the shutters to close in his eyes. Whatever tatter of human impulse stirred him to try to explain himself to me, to grope for reason amidst the bloody carnage boiling in his head, is subsumed again i
n a dull professional menace. “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not a goddamn kid.”

  I turn to the others. The bed is now awash in blood. Tobias is working earnestly to mitigate the damage back there, but I can’t imagine what it is he thinks he can do. Brain matter is gathered in a clump on the bed; he seems to be scooping everything out. Johnny sits there forlornly, shoulders slumped. “I thought it would be better out here,” he said. “Shit never ends.”

  “The atlas,” I say.

  “Fuck yourself,” Tobias says.

  I stride toward the closed door. If there’s anything I need to know before I open it, I guess I’ll just find out the hard way. A hot pulse of emotion blasts out at me as I touch the handle: fear, rage, a lust for carnage. It’s overriding any sense of self-preservation I might have had. I wonder if a fire will pour through the door when it’s opened, a furnace exhalation, and engulf us all. I find myself hoping for it.

  Tobias shouts at me: “Don’t!”

  I pull it open.

  A charred skull, oily smoke coiling from its fissures, is propped on a stool in an otherwise bare room no bigger than a closet. Black mold has grown over the stool and is creeping up the walls. A live current jolts my brain. Time dislocates, jumping seconds like an old record, and the world moves in jerky, stop-motion lurches. A language is seeping from the skull—a viscous, cracked sound like breaking bones and molten rock. My eyes sting and I briefly squeeze them shut. The skin on my face blisters.

  “Shut it! Shut the door!”

  Tobias is screaming, but whatever he’s saying has no relation to me. It’s as though I’m watching a play. Blood is leaking from his eyes. Patrick is grinning widely, his own eyes like bloody headlamps. He’s violently twisting his right ear, working it like an apple stem. Johnny is sitting quietly, holding his gathered brains in his hands, rocking back and forth like an unhappy child. My upper arms are hurting, and it takes me a minute to realize that I’m gouging them with my own fingernails. I can’t make myself stop.

  Outside a sound rolls across the swamp like a foghorn, a deep, answering bellow to the language of Hell spilling from the closet.

  Tobias lunges past me and slams the door shut, immediately muffling the skull’s effect. I stagger toward the plastic chair but fall down hard before I make it, banging my shoulder against the table and knocking Tobias’s drug paraphernalia all over the floor. Patrick makes a sound, half gasp and half sob, and leans back against the wall, cradling his savaged ear. The left side of his face is painted in blood. He’s digging the heel of his hand into his right eye, like he’s trying to rub something out of it.

  “What the fuck was that!”

  I think it’s me who says that. Right now I can’t be sure.

  “That’s your goddamn ‘atlas,’ you prick,” Tobias says. He comes over to where I am and drops to the floor, scooping up the scattered buds and some papers. He begins to assemble a joint; his hands are shaking badly, so this takes some doing.

  “A skull? The book is a skull?”

  “No. It’s a tongue inside the skull. Technically.”

  “What the Christ?”

  “Just shut up a minute.” He finishes making the joint, lights it, and takes a long, deep pull. He passes it to me.

  For one surreal moment I feel like we’re college buddies sitting in a dorm. It’s like there’s not a scorched, muttering skull in the next room, corroding the air around it. It’s like there’s not a man with a blown-out head moping quietly on the bed. I start to laugh, and I haven’t even had a toke.

  Tobias exhales explosively, the sweet smoke filling the air between us. “Take a hit, man. I’m serious. Trust me.”

  So I do. Almost immediately I feel an easing of the pressure in the room. The crackle of violent impulse, which I had ceased even to recognize, abates to a low thrum. My internal gauge ticks back down to highly frightened, which, in comparison to a moment before, feels like a monastic peace.

  I gesture for Patrick to do the same.

  “No. I don’t pollute my body with that shit.” He’s touching his ear gingerly, trying to assess the damage.

  “Patrick, last night you single-handedly killed half a bottle of ninety-proof bourbon. Let’s have some perspective here.”

  He snatches the joint from me and drags hard on it, coughing it all back out so violently I think he might throw up.

  Johnny laughs from his position on the bed. It’s the first bright note he’s sounded since his head came apart. “Amateur!”

  Johnny’s head seems to be changing shape. The shattered bone around the exit wound has smoothed over and extended upward an inch or so, like something growing. A tiny twig of bone has likewise emerged from the bullet wound beneath his eye.

  “We need to get out of here,” I say. “That thing is pretty much a live feed to Hell. We can’t handle it. It’s time to go.”

  “We’re taking it with us,” Patrick says.

  “No. No, we’re not.”

  “Not up for debate, Jack.”

  “I’m not riding with that thing. If you take it, you’re going back alone.”

  Patrick nods and takes another pull from the joint, handling it much better this time. He passes it back to me. “Okay, but you gotta know that I’m leaving this place empty. You understand me, right?”

  I don’t, at first. It takes me a second. “You can’t be serious. You’re going to kill me?”

  “Make up your mind.”

  For the first time since his arrival at my shop last night, I feel genuine despair. Everything to this point has had some precedence in my life. Even this brush with Hell isn’t my first, though it’s the most direct so far. But I’ve never seen my own death staring back at me quite so frankly. I always thought I’d confront this moment with a little poise, or at least a kind of stoic resignation. But I’m angry, and I’m afraid, and I feel tears gathering in my eyes.

  “Goddamn it, Patrick. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Look, Jack. I like you. You’re weak and you’re a coward, but you can’t help those things. I would rather you come with me. We take this skull back to Eugene, like he wanted. We deliver Tobias to his just reward. You go back to your stupid bookstore and all is right with the world. But I can’t leave this place with anybody in it.”

  Tobias doesn’t seem to be paying attention. He’s leaning back against the bed, a new joint rolled up and kept all to himself. I can’t tell if he’s resigned to his own death or if he’s so far away he doesn’t even know it’s being discussed.

  I can’t think of anything to say. Maybe there isn’t anything to be said anymore. Maybe language is over. Maybe everything is, at last, emptied out. I still feel the skull’s muted influence crawling through my brain. It craves the bullet. I anticipate the explosion of the gun with a terrible relish. I wonder if, when my brains are launched into the air, I’ll feel myself flying.

  The bellow from the swamp sounds again. It’s huge and deep, like the ululating call of a mountain. It just keeps on going.

  Johnny smiles. “Brother’s home,” he says.

  Patrick looks toward the flag-covered doorway. “What?”

  Tobias holds his hand aloft, finger extended, announcing his intention to orate. His eyelids are heavy. The joint he made for himself is spent. “There’s a Hell monster. Did I forget to tell you?”

  I start to laugh. I can’t stop myself. It doesn’t feel good.

  Johnny smiles at me, mistaking my laughter for something else. “It showed up the same time I did. I think it followed me. Toby calls it my brother.” He sounds wistful.

  Patrick uses the gun barrel to open the flag a few inches. He peers outside for a moment, then lets it fall closed again. He looks at me. “We’re stuck. The boat’s gone.”

  “What? He left us?”

  “Well . . . it’s mostly gone.”

  I take a look for myself.

  The airboat is a listing heap of bent scrap metal, the cage around its huge propeller a tangled bird’s nest. Ou
r guide’s arm, still connected to a hunk of his torso, rests on the deck in a black puddle. The thing that did this is swimming in a lazy arc some distance away, trackable by the rolling surge of water it creates as it trawls along. Judging by the size of its wake, it’s at least as big as a city bus. It breaches the surface once, exposing a mottled gray hide and an anemone-like thistle of eye stalks lifting skyward. The thing barrel-rolls until a deep black fissure emerges from below the waterline, and from this suppurated tear comes that stone-cracking call, the language of deep earth that curdles something inside me, springs tears to my eyes, brings me hard to my knees.

  I scramble away from the door. Patrick is watching me with sad, desperate hope, his intent to murder momentarily forgotten, as though by some trick known only to me this thing might be banished back to its home, as though I might fix this scar that Tobias George, that mewling, incompetent little thief, has cut into the world.

  I cannot fix this. There is no fixing this.

  Behind us both, locked in its little room, the skull cooks the air.

  ~ ~ ~

  It’s the language that hurts. The awful speech. While that thing languishes in the waters out front, we’re trapped inside, and I suspect that as long as the atlas speaks, the creature will not go far.

  “Why would you do that to a man?” Patrick says. We’re all sitting in a little huddled circle, passing the joint around. We might have been friends, in the eyes of someone who didn’t know us. “Why would you send him a piece of his own dead son?”

  “Are you serious? No one deserves it more than Eugene. He humiliated me. He made me feel small. All those years sending him a cut from money I earned, or doing errands for him, or tipping him off when I hear shit I think he should know. Never a ‘thank you.’ Never a ‘good job.’ Just grief. Just mockery. And his son was even worse. He would lay his hands on me. Slap the back of my head. Slap my face, even. What am I going to do, challenge Eugene’s son? So I became everybody’s bitch. The laughingstock.”