Hunger and Thirst Page 4
She sat and positioned the leather disk on her lap.
“I can't believe the luck we've been having. The pantry's nearly full. And today....” She let the finger bones fall from her hands onto the intricate patterns on the disk.
“The weather's changing,” Jack said. “They're desperate. I remember what that was like. I saw a guy trade his coat for a hot meal. That evening he froze to death.” By now he was accustomed to her finger bone readings. He didn't have a guess how it worked, but he was convinced that it did.
Natalie studied the bones.
“The traps will be empty today. But two travelers are coming in about half an hour — with a bag of sugar, two sweet potatoes, and a few other things he might be willing to part with. Luckily we still have those two rabbits from last week. I'll gut one out for him. And my bones tell me I should be very good to you, which I plan to do.”
“I worry about you, out there by yourself, dealing with those people. Hewitt wasn't the only psychopath on the road.”
She patted his hand, stood up, then leaned down and gave him biting kisses on the neck. She whispered, “They wouldn't have a chance.” She pulled back from him enough that out of her black hair, her face suddenly appeared. “I'm not one you have to worry about.” Then, “I saw you working on the south end of roof. You don't need to do that.”
“I have a lot of time.”
“I promise we'll eat well tonight.” She headed for the back door. “I have to hurry to get the rabbit cleaned out.”
Through the wide windows, he watched her cross the desert scrub to the rabbit hutches twenty or thirty yards away. He watched her pull a struggling rabbit from its cage and strike it behind its head. The rabbit slumped like a rag in her hand.
Jack took a pause to consider how she had struck it. She hadn't done it like he thought a woman might. It was a swift, violent, straight-down strike that Jack guessed would have dropped or debilitated a human. There was nothing tentative about it. He had seen her do this before: She would splay the carcass on her butcher board and with a thin knife slice it open as easily as if it were bread. With a dozen quick moves, she would have the guts scraped into a pile and the skin peeled off.
Jack turned away. She did this before every meal where they ate one of them. He didn't like to think about it, but he had the idea that if he watched the killing once in a while, it would relieve the guilt of eating in ignorance of how it got to his plate. He only had to watch; the rabbit had to get butchered.
His eyes caught on the leather disk and the finger bones spread across it. She had left it on the sofa where he had been reading when she came in. He went over and sat beside it. The finger bones looked like something between a twig and a cigarette butt — six of them. He picked one up and held it in better light. It was smoothed from handling, but whether it was a bone or not, he didn't know. He picked up the others, looked them over, then held them like Natalie held them, and dropped them on the disk.
It seemed to be a random pattern. It meant nothing to him. Twig-things lying on a piece of marked-up leather.
“You have to learn what they mean,” Natalie said.
Jack gasped and threw himself back.
“I'm sorry. I thought I made noise coming in.” She smiled and nodded at the bones. “You can touch them if you want. They didn't mean anything to me either, at first. It takes a while to learn. Quite a while.”
“I should have asked.” His heart was still thumping. He finally noticed that she was bloody up to her wrists and held the blood-streaked rabbit by its back feet.
Natalie circled the counter and dropped the rabbit flat in front of her and began trussing it.
“I apologize for bothering your things.” He sat on a stool opposite her, close to her.
“No need,” she said, as her hands kept busy with the cord. “You can touch me or anything of mine all you want. Maybe we could get you a set of finger bones some day.” She reached across and affectionately touched his cheek, leaving a smear of blood. Then she leaned toward him and kissed the spot. Her lips came away reddened, but not bloody-looking.
“No, I couldn't use them.... I was just—” He absently touched his cheek; his fingers came away red. “— curious.”
Natalie busily wrapped the rabbit in a piece of newspaper and made a final tie. “I won't be long. I'm looking forward to the sweet potatoes.”
Jack had gone around to the sink and was rinsing his fingers and cheek out of a bowl of water.
“You're sure you'll be safe?” he said. “Some of those people.... I could come along.”
“Me be safe? I'm the biggest predator in this valley of the shadow of death. Why should I fear evil?”
As she stepped around him, she kissed him on the cheek, leaving a red smear where he had just wiped his face clean. “While I'm gone, decide what glasses we'll have the wine in tonight.” Then she was out the door with her parcel.
He wiped his cheek again and noted that where she had been working with the rabbit, there wasn't a trace of blood. He wandered aimlessly around the room a minute until a movement caught his eye, out the window near the rabbit hutches.
He went outside to the cages to check if it was Artie. “Artie pal! Stick your head up!” Jack stood motionless and listened. There was nothing except a ruffling noise from the hutches. He looked inside the nearest one.
The big rabbit stood terrified of him, flat against the back of his cage. His facing eye was large as a marble and black as Natalie's hair. Jack couldn't imagine how it could breathe that fast. Its sides almost fluttered.
Jack reached for the latch and had touched it before he stepped back. “Nooo. Sorry guy.” When he turned to go back, he nearly walked into her butcher board. It was a dark-stained slab; her skinning knife stood perpendicular by its point. Around on the ground were wads of bloody hair and few strings of intestines.
He and the rabbit observed at each other.
“You watched with your one cowering eye as your pal was killed and gutted.” Jack shoved his hands in his back pockets, took a few steps away, and looked at the far Sierra. It was covered with an even pack. Only wolverines or someone being chased would try to cross.
He turned back. “What the hell. She probably knows I'm doing it anyway.” He flipped latch and swung the door open. “Don't thank me. You'll probably be torn apart by coyotes.” The rabbit's side fluttered and its eye seemed one huge pupil. At Jack's second step backward, there was a noise and a blink of gray. It had absented its space before Jack could form the thought.
“Say hello to Artie, if you see him.”
He trudged back to the house.
....
Jack sat on the sofa thumbing through a ragged magazine when Natalie came in with a filled canvas bag — and aloft she held by the neck a bottle of white wine, like a trophy. “Chardonnay!” she said proudly. “This is going to be so good.” She rounded the counter into the kitchen area and hoisted up the bag. “Two fat sweet potatoes!” She held them up for him to see. She beamed.
“I turned the rabbit loose.”
“Two carrots, not of great quality, and a pocket knife. They do have pleading eyes. A man's shirt, about your size....”
“He expected me to kill him.”
“Two cans of beans. And look — dried pasta.”
“You're not angry at me?”
Natalie stopped in mid-motion and looked at him with some surprise. “Angry? I can't imagine ever being angry with you. Jack, I know who you are, so I know what you can or might do. How could you disappoint me? You were being a nice guy again. The rabbit is free. We're not hungry. And there are more rabbits.”
“When I looked at him, I could see he was waiting for me to kill him.... Couple times I’ve seen people look like that. They couldn’t do anything but hope it was a mistake. Bad memories.”
“I know. And that’s why I love you, Jack.”
He didn't understand her generosity. Why, he wondered, should he be troubled by that?
“You go
t a lot today,” he said.
“I drive a hard bargain. Onion.” She held it up. “It's been six months between onions. When they guy saw the rabbit — ta-da! — he gave me everything.”
He went over to the counter and leaned on it. “I don't know how you can kill them like you do.”
“And I don't understand how you can eat potatoes and peas all the time. But I do understand how people could drink chardonnay all day. Let's open it now. It's been five years since I've had a chardonnay. Let's open it right now.”
She slid him a corkscrew and two stemmed glasses.
“I'm so glad you're here, all over again,” she said. “Despite the awful world around us, we can be here, right now, safe, with chardonnay.” She had come around the counter and had her face next to his. “I like being safe with you, Jack.”
When they kissed, her mouth tasted of salt.
....
That evening, after dark, Natalie had placed six candles around the room, and slow piano music played. The two of them danced aimlessly around the room, Jack never growing tired of looking into her black-framed face.
“How can you be so beautiful?” he whispered.
“I'm the last woman in your world. You would have to think I'm beautiful.”
“In a crowd, in the old days, under gunfire, I would stare at you.”
“Jack, your love for me has deluded you in delightful ways. We need to go to the upstairs deck now.”
“Why?”
“A surprise.”
She led him up and out the double doors to the deck. It was starting to rain — not more than a heavy mist yet, but it was starting. In the northwest, lightning forked to the ground.
“How did you know?”
“I smelled it,” she said. “Don't you?”
He did. The mist slowly turned into a light rain. He took her hand. Blue-white light flashed close enough to brighten the rectangular tops of the hutches out in the scrub.
“Why do you love me, Jack?”
“You read the inside of my heart.”
“You're easy. I don't even need my bones. It surprises me that you put up with my predatory ways when you really can't approve.”
“Artie was practice for me. He's my friend and he has his bloody practices. His life is built on eating other animals. Unfortunately. I know it's normal. I wish it wasn't.”
“Out there, in all the world out there—” Lightning flashed nearer. “—there is no 'normal,' no 'right.' It's just a place where things happen.”
Now, it rained on them. They stood closer and let it run down their faces and soak their clothes. When thunder rumbled and rain poured on them, they turned to each other and they danced, in flashing light, in the rain.
....
Warm in bed, in the dark, she said, “I know you think about leaving... crossing the mountains when the snow melts.”
He held her a bit closer.
“I know you're going to leave one day, but when you're gone, I want you to know that I'll still love you. Remember that. I won't like missing you, but when you need to go—” She pulled back enough to look into his eyes. “—when you need to leave, I'll fill your canteens and give you the warm coat.”
“Sometimes I try to imagine what the ocean is like. I've never seen it. I've only seen pictures. They say the air smells different from anyplace else. Someday, I'd like to see it with you. But no time soon. Someday far from now.”
He felt her arms hold him just slightly tighter.
....
Out walking through the scrub, a mile from the house, Jack scanned the horizon and occasionally called for Artie. He still put food out at 8:00 and it was always gone, but he never saw what took it.
The Sierra was still blanketed white and impassable. The mountains looked very far away.
In the still air, he heard the baying of wild dogs long before he saw them.
He checked the wind direction — he was probably safe. He headed back indirectly, to put more distance between him and the dogs, which took him nearer the highway than he would have gone otherwise.
Twenty or thirty yards from the edge of the broken asphalt, he saw something red in the brush. He headed toward it.
Faded and weathered, something red, plaid — a red plaid shirt. He pulled it loose and gave it a shake. Around the collar, it was stiffer and darker, probably blood. He recognized the pattern of stains in the front.
“Hewitt,” he said. “You deserved getting your throat cut.”
He stood tall and scanned the area, looking for any remains. Nothing.
He dropped the shirt and kicked some dirt over it and started back. He had gone a dozen paces when something he just stepped over caught his eye. He knelt down and brushed aside the loose dirt.
Teeth. Two upright teeth. A little more dirt brushed aside and there was the jaw... molars.... Hewitt apparently got a better burial than he deserved.
Jack had gone only a few steps when he saw a bone. Perhaps from an arm. Then another one. A pelvis. Scattered to the side were ribs, vertebrae... too many ribs and vertebrae. More and more uneasy, Jack circled the area. Whatever was here, it was more than one person. Some of the vertebrae were as small as children's. Was it Hewitt and others? Who could have done this?
He looked up suddenly and scanned the horizon, as though he might be watched.
....
Natalie sat in her living room, gazing at the finger bones on the leather disk on her lap.
“Come back to me, Jack. Come back to me.”
....
When he walked in, she was there with her arms. “I missed you,” she said.
When she'd finished with him, he told her about the dogs.
“They usually keep their distance. I would never let anything happen to you.”
“I was a mile away.”
“I'll watch you more closely then. I'll also watch the dogs more closely. They seem to come through here every three or four days. Someone came down the highway while you were gone.” They had walked around into the kitchen. “Look.” She held up a bag of loose green material. “Ganja,” she said.
“You're kidding. It's been years.”
“It's old, but we shall see.”
After dinner, after putting several pieces of meat outside the front door at 8:00, Jack noticed that Natalie had dropped her finger bones four or five times — he couldn't remember her doing it more than three times before. Then she was doing it again... six times. He asked nothing.
....
In darkness: “I love you more than anything, more than everything. Every breath I take, I'm thinking of you. Every day the sun rises I'm thinking that we have another day to walk and I can hear your voice in this dry place, and every time the sun sets, I'm thinking that it's nearly night and then I can hold you like this and feel you next to me. Stay with me, Jack. I know one day you'll go to California, but as long as you can, stay with me.”
In darkness, in silence, he wondered if he left how many minutes away from her door would he get before he stopped and grieved or stopped and returned. Leave Natalie or never see the ocean. It was a choice of losses.
....
They walked together, a quarter of a mile past the hutches. It was dazzlingly bright, crisp but not cold. The tumbleweeds were young and green and still rooted. Jack cocked his head and nodded at the ground ahead. “Rattlesnake,” he said matter-of-factly. They stepped around its sunning place.
“Jack, I have to tell you something.”
He squeezed her hand. “Last night I saw you throw the bones six or seven times. This morning, another half dozen times. I'm guessing the news is not good. Mixed, at best.”
“'Mixed' would be a best case. We're going to have some unpleasantness today. Around 1:00 we're going to have visitors. They're going to come to the house.”
“Visitors like my old pal Hewitt?”
“I'm not exactly sure. My bones didn't tell me everything I wanted to know.”
“But something isn't right.”
“Something is very wrong. The bones tell me things I'm not understanding. So we need to be alert — to say the least.”
“How many are there?”
“Three. A man, a woman, and another person I couldn't identify. They're coming to the house and I really don't like that.”
Jack looked her over. “You're not afraid, though.”
“Afraid? Of course not. They can be dealt with.”
They stepped around a flat rock on which two scorpions sunned themselves.
“Help me share your confidence.”
“They're just pathetic human beings who are going to try to take what they want. It's worked for them before, so they'll try it again. We'll fix them a nice meal and send them on their way.”
“Nothing to worry about.”
“They're not clean and they'll be in the house. But no, you shouldn't worry. After all, I am the queen predator in this valley of the shadow of death.”
“I just hope you don't wake up some morning and decide I'm for dinner.”
Natalie stopped and stared at him, stricken. Her shoulders slumped and she slowly shook her head no. Her hair, the blackest hair even in the brilliant light, fell over her face.
“I'm sorry — I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” He wrapped his arms around her.
In the moments he held her, they both heard distant barking. She composed herself instantly and stepped back to scan the distance. Jack pointed. They guessed eight dogs.
“We should just hold still. They don't see that well.”
“Have they ever attacked travelers or went after your hutches?”
“They do go after travelers, depending on how hungry they are. They seem to have got over their undue respect for humans. They came up to the house once.”
“And then?”
She almost laughed. “I sent them away.” She took his hand.
The dogs picked up their barking, as though they had found something.
Jack could see that they had stopped coursing and were trotting back and forth, active in one place. The barking turned to three or four of them howling. Even in the brightest daylight, it was eerie.