Being - Chapter One
I dread the time
When your mouth
Begins to call me hunter
- “Beneath Your Hands” by Leonard Cohen
One day I will become fully human
But at this moment (7 am, alive)
I sincerely doubt it.
- “Sermonette” by Mary Ruefle
ONE
The last of the daffodils are dying and Scout thinks of the unfinished garden at her parents’ house. The dirt tilled and ready for the seeds that sat in packets or jars in the kitchen, the azalea bushes around the back of the house starting to bloom in pinks and purples. It’s almost time to start planting the tomatoes and peppers; time to stick baby stalks of corn into the ground. But last she spoke to her mother, Ingrid said she was in Colorado, and her father is in England. The garden will lay untouched until she gets home, after this assignment.
It’s just as well, she thinks. In Pennsylvania, and most of the east coast, spring plays jump rope with winter; this week would be warm, next week it would snow again. You’d lose your budding plants if you started too soon. She’s not sure how it works in Indiana, but it’s April and she wears jeans and a jacket. Her breath condenses in light puffs on the air. But she keeps the window cracked while Cam waits in line inside the gas station.
The truck runs and the heater pumps out luke-warm air. She sits in the passenger seat with her legs tucked under her, going over notes she had scribbled down on the back of a paper placemat from the quaint dinner they ate at the day before. The call came from a contact of his; she wrote down what he repeated; name, location, supplies. An estimation how long the job would take.
People walked in front of the truck, laughing loudly. She glances up at them, then past them to the sky where the moon hung low, bright silver and cold. She clicked her jaw and put down the notes.
Cam waltzes out of the station and holds the door open for the two girls who walk past giggling and grabbing onto each other by the hands. They smile at him and he grins back before letting go of the door. He gets into the truck and drops the plastic bag on the floor. She digs through it for a bottle of water.
“You didn’t get any crackers,” she says.
“Didn’t have any. Look at the size of that place.” It doesn’t even have a bathroom, he had to go around back to piss.
“But they have beef jerky?” she pulls it out and waves it back and forth. He tries to snatch it from her but she holds it back.
He sighs and reaches over the middle of the seat for her; putting one hand on her hip and stretching out the rest of his body over her to grab the meat. She narrows her eyes and he kisses her chin before leaning back in his own seat. “You want some?” he asks.
“No.”
She rolls down the window the rest of the way to inhale the sharp coolness outside, away from the scent of the dried teriyaki beef. Her stomach growled and settled. She tapped her nail along a scratch in the paint on the outside of the door. “We’re going to be late,” she says, still watching the moon.
“We got everything ready?” he finishes off the jerky.
“Yeah it’s in the back.”
He puts the truck in reverse and pulls out of the parking lot. “Jesus, it’s freezing,” he says while pressing the button to roll up the window. She rests her head on the glass. He’s not built for the cold, not like she is, Southern summers and springs bred into his skin and bones. He dresses in too many layers during the winter; a t-shirt, a long-sleeved, a flannel and a coat, while she’ll walk around the hotel room in her underwear and one of his shirts.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asks, turning to look at her a second, waiting for her to visually acknowledge him before putting his attention back on the road.
She glances at him long enough for half a smile and a shrug. “Not really.”
“You’re weird.” He chuckles. She nudges him with her foot and he puts down his hand to rest on her ankle, running his thumb over the bone, under the cuff of her pants.
The cemetery is just over the hill. Cam parks the truck in a gravel parking lot. They slip out of the cab and he pockets the keys. She unlocks the footlocker in the back and they stare at their equipment a minute.
“Sure we have enough holy water?” he asks, grabbing a jar and swirling it around a bit.
“Yeah. They’re zombies, not vampires.”
He still looks skeptical as he loads his pistol. She takes the rounds of rocksalt from her coat pocket and stuffs them into the shotgun. Old Blue she calls it, the name etched into the barrel. They start up the hill, towards the orange glow of a bone fire. Scout hears the low banging of a drum, throaty singing, and the unmistakable groans and shambling of the undead.
~
2003
There were 145 tiles on the ceiling. Scout leaned on the couch, scratching at the fraying fabric with one hand and tipped the bottle of vicodin over and over in her other. The tiny pills cascaded in a sound similar to a rain storm. She was vaguely aware that she was a bit stoned, and suddenly the thought that her count was probably off passed through her mind, but that panic only lasted a second. She tipped the bottle again, latching on to that sound of falling rain.
She sat in what the nurses told her was the ‘family room’. She’d seen places like them on television and movies. It’s where they sat people to deliver bad news. Of course, she had been there for the bad news, she caused the bad news, and now she waited for her parents to come and pick her up and to sign the papers for her brother’s body.
The couch made her skin itch, near the fourteen stitches on her right arm that was covered by gauze. She played with the tape a bit, wanted to peer under the wrappings to see her pinking skin being held together with black thread. But that involved moving. She tipped the bottle. Against warnings from the label and that perky nurse with the sad smile, Scout doubled the dose, enjoying the lulled numbness she sat in. like a life raft before the sharks appeared.
She liked this sudden sensation of floating. It bobbed her, it kept her just out of reach of the harsh lights and jagged edges of the shore. She could ebb here for a while. Maybe actually get a tan instead of just burning; her red hair would blond, freckles would sprout all over her body.
Suddenly she saw fins on the horizon getting closer. Through the window (the blinds were drawn; no one wants random people to see their ugly crying grief) she recognized the silhouette of her parents’ bodies. The thin slouch of her father’s shoulders, the lopsided shape of her mother’s blond hair up in a bun. She must have been in the middle of laundry or cooking. Scout imagined her twisting and pulling at the strands on the drive down.
A doctor stood with them, a man, the one who had stitched up her arm. Through the fog of her mind she remembered his soft features, old eyes and graying hair. He made small talk with her, asked her about her brother while she sat there and cried, clutching Rhett’s jacket with her free hand.
She decided to sit up a bit, but it was a struggle; the couch seemingly weighed her in place, the cushions trying to suck her in, take her some place. For a moment, she didn’t care. Some Place was better than here.
There was a sudden wail and her mother disappeared, sinking down. Some one rushed to her side, probably some perky nurse. The door pushed open and Tony stood there, his mouth gaping open, his eyes red. He wore his work clothes; jeans and a button-up shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, a tie that matched his eyes.
“Cricket,” he said, his voice a twisted croak. Scout looked at him, then titled forward a bit, to see past him and her mother huddling against the wall like refugee, the nurse with her arms around Ingrid’s shoulders.
Scout stood, but wobbled. Tony briskly approached her. They stared at each other a moment. She felt out of place; she didn’t belong in the family, in this world, where her brother was dead, while she continued to breathe. It didn’t make sense. “Thank God you’re still here,” said her father, before he pulled her complaint body to his. Loosely she hooked her hands at his shoulders.
But he was a million miles away with Ingrid. Scout heard her cries on the wind, howling, like a wolf as she started to sink.
~
1997
“Come on, Penny,” Cam said, tugging at the hospital gown. “Don’t you want to change?”
She didn’t say anything. She just stood in the middle of the room, her arms crossed over her chest, staring at her bare feet. The will of a three-year-old is tough to best.
They didn’t have much with them; the police didn’t allow them to grab enough. They couldn’t disturb the crime scene. So it was a few pairs of jeans in trash bags for Cam and his brother Mitch, some t-shirts (he didn’t know whose was whose, he just grabbed them from the dryer in the basement) and a pink pair of pants for Penny. She shook her head.
“Okay.” He stood back up and dropped the pants on the bed. At four in the morning, the only room the Motel 6 had left was one bed smoking room; the ashtrays were cleaned and over turned on the tables, the carpet had tiny burn marks over by the bed. “Okay.” He dragged his hand over his face.
Mitch sat on the edge of the bed, still crying. He sniffled, reached up to wipe under his eyes. He smudged his glasses, but didn’t seem to care.
The air suddenly became stiff and left his lungs and his head started to throb. He turned for the bathroom, but Penny instantly attached herself to his leg. He groaned and reached down to carefully remove her. “I gotta pee, I’ll be right back,” he promised and passed her off to Mitch.
He locked the door behind him. Penny had just starting the phase of bursting into rooms with explanation. More than once she had barged into the bathroom while Mitch was peeing, or while Cam stood over the sink shaving. A knick on his chin was still healing.
Just as suddenly as the air left his lungs, his knees buckled and he almost smashed his head against the toilet. Penny started crying, even over Mitch’s soft and cooing words. Like when she was a baby and whined until someone, anyone would pick her up to cuddle. But she kept chanting for Mommy.
A tightness in his chests grew, twisting like metal against his bones, hot wrought and swearing. It moved up his chest and throat and down to his gut. He turned his head in time to vomit into the toilet. He kept throwing up until it was nothing but bile, then three minutes of dry heaving. The smell of blood and lemons is in his nostrils, metal in the back of his mouth.
Mitch knocked. “You okay?”
“Fine.” He sputtered, wiping spit and puke from his chin. He leaned back on his ass and sprawled out his legs, knocking his head against the wall. Hot tears stained his face, his abs were twisted and sore. Penny still cried. Mitch tried haplessly to sooth her, tried to hum some sort of kid’s song, but she just cried harder and kept choking on the word Mommy.
When he could breathe again, Cam stood and flushed, then rinsed his face with ice cold water. He scrubbed until he didn’t feel, until his fingers were pruned over. Until he started drinking the water and inhaling it through his nose. He almost fell over from the rubbing, but caught himself on the edge of the sink, bracing himself, his nails almost breaking against the Formica surface. He stood up straight and counted to five, a trick Dad taught them. Count to five before you shoot boys. Just in case. He opened the door.
Mitch stopped crying as he paced and tried to swoon Penny. “Cam’s back,” he whispered and put her on the floor. She stood still again.
“Okay, Princess,” he started as he dug through the trash bag. He pulled out a t-shirt, one of his and unfurled it in front of her. “Is this okay?”
She gazed at the vastness of it, of AC/DC scrawled in block print on the front and nodded. She allowed him to peel off the tiny hospital gown and pull the shirt over her tiny body. It was practically a dress, hanging down past her knees, almost at her feet. A nurse at the hospital had washed her clean of blood, even though she cried the whole time. They told her she was beautiful and brave and braided her hair after the shower was done and the doctor’s checked her over. She didn’t have a single scratch.
She stood on her tiptoes and reached out to be lifted. Cam obliged, taking her close to his chest. Her grip is vice-like, her legs around his chest, arms around his neck and her face finding a comfortable fit between his neck and shoulder. “How about we buy you some socks tomorrow?” he said, cupping his hand around her foot that fit perfectly in his palm.
Mitch sat down, kicking off his shoes. “What are we supposed to do?” he looked and sounded like a little kid, not a teenager as he’d bee professing all over the house that summer.
Cam shrugged and gave Penny a kiss on the head. “Dunno. Get some sleep.”
His brother snorted. “Seriously?” he reached for the remote and clicked through the channels before setting on an infomercial about cleaning products. The woman selling the stuff had a wide smile, and trimmed black hair. Cam sat on the mattress, pushing himself against the headboard. Penny fell asleep clutching his collar. Mitch dozed off on his side.
Cam stayed awake and watched his brother and sister until the sun rose.
~
Gravel crunches under Scout sneakers and she drags the shovel behind her, the metal point making a terrible scrapping sound. She looks ahead to Cam, walking with a slight limp, his shoulders arched in a perfect curve, his own shovel held across his back. He makes it to the pick-up truck first, pulling down the tail gate and tossing in the shovel; another horrible ruckus of metal. He hops on to the tail, his boots just touching the rocks on the ground.
Scout pauses to watch and listen; the only sounds in the graveyard at two in the morning, crickets and the breeze, rustling trees. No evidence of the struggle, of the shotgun and pistol fired, the reanimated corpses and practicing voodoo priestess that they left lying under a tree, tied to the trunk, her bottles and chicken bones broken, the zombies beheaded and burned, buried in shallow graves. None of that. Only the crickets. Their breathing.
She starts down the hill again, wiping dust on the back of her thighs.
“Come here,” Cam calls, shifting on the tail, the truck moving with him.
She does, with raised eyebrows. She tosses her shovel in the back too, wincing. “You okay?”
She stands in the space between his legs. He tilts her up her chin. “Think I dislocated it.”
“Naw, you’d be in more pain if you did. Probably just jammed it. I can get it at the hotel.”
“Yeah.” She grimaces.
He touches her chin again. “You’re beautiful.”
“Liar.” She laughs out loud, her bangs shifting from their desired position. To cover a molten glazed scar, a line from her temple just shy of her eyebrow. A mark earned from a demon born of flames, trying to break free to the surface of Earth, dedicated to engulf the world in fire. Sometimes in her dreams she felt the hot blade of the demon’s finger across her skull, the smell of flesh cauterizing itself. She moves the hair back in place.
He places his palms against her cheeks, hot, sweaty. His gaze melts and burns her all the same time. Like she’s important, the only one there. She meets his stare. Hazel eyes, long lashes, feminine for a man, a slick contrast to his rough edges, his hands and ripped jeans, sweaty t-shirt. Sometimes she tried to count the freckles across the bridge of his nose, but that was like trying to count stars, universes, the demons in Hell.
Cam moves his hands to the back of her neck, pulling her to him, pressing their foreheads together, breaths collecting as one white puff, hot on the cold air.
She clicks her jaw and drags her nails over his thighs. “You stink.”
He chuckles in his throat. Deep, graveled, like his voice. “So do you.”
They smell of death; real death. The kind that takes more than one shower to get rid of, deep down in the fat of their cells, their pores. “Ready to head back?” he asks.
“Yes.”
She glances back to the oak sitting over a cluster of tiny tombstones, a family plot, where they had Duchess of Yorn-her own ridiculous self-chosen name-tied. “Think she’ll remember?” Cam pulls back Scout’s attention.
“Eventually. But we’ve got some contacts who keep up with her.”
The spell cleared Yorn’s memory of her time as a practitioner. With mandrake root and ground hops mixed in a silver flask, poured down her throat. She struggled and tried to choke it up.
Scout copied the spell from her own mother’s book of shadows. Ingrid had been habitually collecting and scouring spells, endlessly throwing herself into the craft since Rhett died. Scout didn’t like spells; the way they could weed into the mind, change things, take things. Her brain still held the phantom fingerprints where Ingrid had pried, taken and changed. Her mother wanted to see, claimed she wanted to help. And in a way, Scout didn’t blame Ingrid. After all, she was there the night her brother was killed, with the werewolf, a silver bullet to the head.
Cam arches his back, each vertebra pop-pop-popping. A quick peck on the lips and she tries to move back, to grab the keys, but he tightens his legs, trapping her. A smug grin, a hand on her hip.
“What?” she asked, touching his eyebrows, the hair-thin scar on his chin. They’re both littered with marks, medals of their side-line careers.
“Nothin’. Come on.” He let her go and hopped down. She put up the tail as he went to the cab.
She glimpsed at the tree again, watching the green-turning-gold leaves sway in the light of the almost full moon. She almost felt bad for leaving Duchess of Yorn, who would wake up, not knowing why she was tied with itchy twine and blood on her palms, under her nails. Then Scout put a hand in her jacket pocket and the pain ripped, strained all the way down to the tips of her fingers. “Baruch sheptaranu,” she muttered in Hebrew. Good riddance.
He helped her buckle up, though didn’t buckle himself. How he could be so cautious with his life one minute and so careless the next baffled her, but she said nothing.
With the jostling start of the truck, the charms around the rearview swung and clanked together; a long pewter chain and pendant with a cross, a blue and green dreamcatcher, white feathers, hand-made by her cousin Misha. Scout lifted her hand to run along the feathers, the twine webbed in the circle and thought of the dreams tangled and vanquished by the sun.
On the drive back, AC/DC played low on the radio, the heater struggled to pump out some warmth. The weather had changed in the last few weeks, shifting from the comfortable jacket-weather, to a shivering cold, almost over night. “Come on,” Cam said, knocking the dash board.
“Hey, be nice.” She nudged him in the hip with her foot.
“Did you get the motor looked at like I told you?” he glanced at her, then the road.
“Maybe.”
“With a truck this old, you gotta keep up the maintenance.” He knocked the dash and he nudged again.
“I take care of it.”
“The heater-”
“That’s what coats are for.”
“Uh huh.” He chuckled and shook his head, reached an arm to fiddle with a vent.
They’d been back together on the road for two weeks now, after a whole month absence. She at her parents’ home in Pennsylvania, he on the monthly expedition trip with his younger brother, Mitch, on the everlasting search for their baby sister, sent to live with relatives two years after the deaths of their parents. Mitch thought he finally had a promising lead in one of the Dakotas. But like the check in Iowa, and that week spent in Virginia, Cam turned up on the porch with a half-smile, a slouched shoulder of defeat.
“Will you look at it later?” she asked, tilting back at him. They’d be leaving in a few days and though bred for cold weather, she didn’t much care to drive from Indiana to Pennsylvania without heat.
Another hit and a gust of warmth spat out and the radio went staticky a second, switched stations. “Yeah.” He spoke as if it was a chore, but he loved it. The times he spent in Virginia for more than a week he picked up some shifts at a local mechanic’s shop. And she had watched him lean over the engine, t-shirt slick with sweat on a summer day, grease smudged on his forehead, caked under his nails. He smirked at her, tried to explain the different parts while she sat in the cab or on the roof of the truck with her notebook, scribbling about the scenery or writing a poem about the scar on his right arm peeking from the fabric of his shirt.
Scout leaned on her good shoulder and stared at the rounded silver moon. A tugging in her gut as she tapped the glass in rhythm with the newest song and Cam’s mumbled singing. She ran her fingers over the bone ribs of the tiny Jesus attached to the rosary wrapped around her wrist. It had belonged to her brother, bought from one of the big catholic churches in New York City. She curled her hand around the cross, pushing Jesus into her palm.
“How long we gonna stay?” he asked, adjusting the radio again.
“A few more days.” She lolled her head back to him. “I have the wolf park tomorrow. Then we can relax. Do the real touristy stuff.”
Her day job for Travel Inc. magazine provided a good excuse for traveling across the country and gave a pretty good paycheck. It helped fund the hunting life, between that and the cash Cam stored away from card games or the few shifts a year he picked up at a mechanic shop down in Berkley Springs. In between the writing gigs when they lived out of cheap motels with flickering neon vacancy signs and corny western motifs or when the weather turned warm, camping in tents and on really nice nights, sleeping on a futon mattress laid in the back of her truck.
In between the in betweens, the times that she longed for and cherished were spent at her parents’ house. But her mother’s unpredictable presence made Scout weary of returning. She had been talking-thinking-of putting down money on the small house, a dinky cottage really, on the outskirts of her home town. A place they could rest-be. A place of their own, away from Ingrid’s incredulous stare and hovering words.
“We did the touristy stuff,” he said, flipping the station. He settled back into the seat that squeaked and strained under his weight, a spring under the cushioning coming loose.
She shook her head. “No, like real tourist stuff. No notes or research. Blood. Just us.”
He laughed. “You always take notes.”
Any where they went she was scribbling something down. At a restaurant, out at the lake. At four in the morning after an exorcism, sex and a shower, she sat at the hotel desk, one leg pulled to her chest, the other curled around the leg of the chair, writing, creating prose, rhymes.
“Still.”
“Yeah. I mean whatever you want.” He gave her a side smile, and put a hand on her thigh, giving a gentle squeeze before putting his full attention on the road and slipped into the chorus of Whitesnake. She liked his easy-going attitude. Liked his calm after a job. He calculated it silently, what went wrong, what worked or didn’t. He kept it all in his head, and she was a little surprised that everything, everything fit. Dates, faces, spells and cures.
She leaned against the window again, letting her left arm rest limply at her side, the tips of her fingers starting to go cold. She watched the moon slip behind the clouds and sang along with Cam in her head.
(yes it's unbetad and i'm aware of some possible tense shifting)
(disclaimer: all characters are original and mine, as well as the story
When your mouth
Begins to call me hunter
- “Beneath Your Hands” by Leonard Cohen
One day I will become fully human
But at this moment (7 am, alive)
I sincerely doubt it.
- “Sermonette” by Mary Ruefle
ONE
The last of the daffodils are dying and Scout thinks of the unfinished garden at her parents’ house. The dirt tilled and ready for the seeds that sat in packets or jars in the kitchen, the azalea bushes around the back of the house starting to bloom in pinks and purples. It’s almost time to start planting the tomatoes and peppers; time to stick baby stalks of corn into the ground. But last she spoke to her mother, Ingrid said she was in Colorado, and her father is in England. The garden will lay untouched until she gets home, after this assignment.
It’s just as well, she thinks. In Pennsylvania, and most of the east coast, spring plays jump rope with winter; this week would be warm, next week it would snow again. You’d lose your budding plants if you started too soon. She’s not sure how it works in Indiana, but it’s April and she wears jeans and a jacket. Her breath condenses in light puffs on the air. But she keeps the window cracked while Cam waits in line inside the gas station.
The truck runs and the heater pumps out luke-warm air. She sits in the passenger seat with her legs tucked under her, going over notes she had scribbled down on the back of a paper placemat from the quaint dinner they ate at the day before. The call came from a contact of his; she wrote down what he repeated; name, location, supplies. An estimation how long the job would take.
People walked in front of the truck, laughing loudly. She glances up at them, then past them to the sky where the moon hung low, bright silver and cold. She clicked her jaw and put down the notes.
Cam waltzes out of the station and holds the door open for the two girls who walk past giggling and grabbing onto each other by the hands. They smile at him and he grins back before letting go of the door. He gets into the truck and drops the plastic bag on the floor. She digs through it for a bottle of water.
“You didn’t get any crackers,” she says.
“Didn’t have any. Look at the size of that place.” It doesn’t even have a bathroom, he had to go around back to piss.
“But they have beef jerky?” she pulls it out and waves it back and forth. He tries to snatch it from her but she holds it back.
He sighs and reaches over the middle of the seat for her; putting one hand on her hip and stretching out the rest of his body over her to grab the meat. She narrows her eyes and he kisses her chin before leaning back in his own seat. “You want some?” he asks.
“No.”
She rolls down the window the rest of the way to inhale the sharp coolness outside, away from the scent of the dried teriyaki beef. Her stomach growled and settled. She tapped her nail along a scratch in the paint on the outside of the door. “We’re going to be late,” she says, still watching the moon.
“We got everything ready?” he finishes off the jerky.
“Yeah it’s in the back.”
He puts the truck in reverse and pulls out of the parking lot. “Jesus, it’s freezing,” he says while pressing the button to roll up the window. She rests her head on the glass. He’s not built for the cold, not like she is, Southern summers and springs bred into his skin and bones. He dresses in too many layers during the winter; a t-shirt, a long-sleeved, a flannel and a coat, while she’ll walk around the hotel room in her underwear and one of his shirts.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asks, turning to look at her a second, waiting for her to visually acknowledge him before putting his attention back on the road.
She glances at him long enough for half a smile and a shrug. “Not really.”
“You’re weird.” He chuckles. She nudges him with her foot and he puts down his hand to rest on her ankle, running his thumb over the bone, under the cuff of her pants.
The cemetery is just over the hill. Cam parks the truck in a gravel parking lot. They slip out of the cab and he pockets the keys. She unlocks the footlocker in the back and they stare at their equipment a minute.
“Sure we have enough holy water?” he asks, grabbing a jar and swirling it around a bit.
“Yeah. They’re zombies, not vampires.”
He still looks skeptical as he loads his pistol. She takes the rounds of rocksalt from her coat pocket and stuffs them into the shotgun. Old Blue she calls it, the name etched into the barrel. They start up the hill, towards the orange glow of a bone fire. Scout hears the low banging of a drum, throaty singing, and the unmistakable groans and shambling of the undead.
~
2003
There were 145 tiles on the ceiling. Scout leaned on the couch, scratching at the fraying fabric with one hand and tipped the bottle of vicodin over and over in her other. The tiny pills cascaded in a sound similar to a rain storm. She was vaguely aware that she was a bit stoned, and suddenly the thought that her count was probably off passed through her mind, but that panic only lasted a second. She tipped the bottle again, latching on to that sound of falling rain.
She sat in what the nurses told her was the ‘family room’. She’d seen places like them on television and movies. It’s where they sat people to deliver bad news. Of course, she had been there for the bad news, she caused the bad news, and now she waited for her parents to come and pick her up and to sign the papers for her brother’s body.
The couch made her skin itch, near the fourteen stitches on her right arm that was covered by gauze. She played with the tape a bit, wanted to peer under the wrappings to see her pinking skin being held together with black thread. But that involved moving. She tipped the bottle. Against warnings from the label and that perky nurse with the sad smile, Scout doubled the dose, enjoying the lulled numbness she sat in. like a life raft before the sharks appeared.
She liked this sudden sensation of floating. It bobbed her, it kept her just out of reach of the harsh lights and jagged edges of the shore. She could ebb here for a while. Maybe actually get a tan instead of just burning; her red hair would blond, freckles would sprout all over her body.
Suddenly she saw fins on the horizon getting closer. Through the window (the blinds were drawn; no one wants random people to see their ugly crying grief) she recognized the silhouette of her parents’ bodies. The thin slouch of her father’s shoulders, the lopsided shape of her mother’s blond hair up in a bun. She must have been in the middle of laundry or cooking. Scout imagined her twisting and pulling at the strands on the drive down.
A doctor stood with them, a man, the one who had stitched up her arm. Through the fog of her mind she remembered his soft features, old eyes and graying hair. He made small talk with her, asked her about her brother while she sat there and cried, clutching Rhett’s jacket with her free hand.
She decided to sit up a bit, but it was a struggle; the couch seemingly weighed her in place, the cushions trying to suck her in, take her some place. For a moment, she didn’t care. Some Place was better than here.
There was a sudden wail and her mother disappeared, sinking down. Some one rushed to her side, probably some perky nurse. The door pushed open and Tony stood there, his mouth gaping open, his eyes red. He wore his work clothes; jeans and a button-up shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, a tie that matched his eyes.
“Cricket,” he said, his voice a twisted croak. Scout looked at him, then titled forward a bit, to see past him and her mother huddling against the wall like refugee, the nurse with her arms around Ingrid’s shoulders.
Scout stood, but wobbled. Tony briskly approached her. They stared at each other a moment. She felt out of place; she didn’t belong in the family, in this world, where her brother was dead, while she continued to breathe. It didn’t make sense. “Thank God you’re still here,” said her father, before he pulled her complaint body to his. Loosely she hooked her hands at his shoulders.
But he was a million miles away with Ingrid. Scout heard her cries on the wind, howling, like a wolf as she started to sink.
~
1997
“Come on, Penny,” Cam said, tugging at the hospital gown. “Don’t you want to change?”
She didn’t say anything. She just stood in the middle of the room, her arms crossed over her chest, staring at her bare feet. The will of a three-year-old is tough to best.
They didn’t have much with them; the police didn’t allow them to grab enough. They couldn’t disturb the crime scene. So it was a few pairs of jeans in trash bags for Cam and his brother Mitch, some t-shirts (he didn’t know whose was whose, he just grabbed them from the dryer in the basement) and a pink pair of pants for Penny. She shook her head.
“Okay.” He stood back up and dropped the pants on the bed. At four in the morning, the only room the Motel 6 had left was one bed smoking room; the ashtrays were cleaned and over turned on the tables, the carpet had tiny burn marks over by the bed. “Okay.” He dragged his hand over his face.
Mitch sat on the edge of the bed, still crying. He sniffled, reached up to wipe under his eyes. He smudged his glasses, but didn’t seem to care.
The air suddenly became stiff and left his lungs and his head started to throb. He turned for the bathroom, but Penny instantly attached herself to his leg. He groaned and reached down to carefully remove her. “I gotta pee, I’ll be right back,” he promised and passed her off to Mitch.
He locked the door behind him. Penny had just starting the phase of bursting into rooms with explanation. More than once she had barged into the bathroom while Mitch was peeing, or while Cam stood over the sink shaving. A knick on his chin was still healing.
Just as suddenly as the air left his lungs, his knees buckled and he almost smashed his head against the toilet. Penny started crying, even over Mitch’s soft and cooing words. Like when she was a baby and whined until someone, anyone would pick her up to cuddle. But she kept chanting for Mommy.
A tightness in his chests grew, twisting like metal against his bones, hot wrought and swearing. It moved up his chest and throat and down to his gut. He turned his head in time to vomit into the toilet. He kept throwing up until it was nothing but bile, then three minutes of dry heaving. The smell of blood and lemons is in his nostrils, metal in the back of his mouth.
Mitch knocked. “You okay?”
“Fine.” He sputtered, wiping spit and puke from his chin. He leaned back on his ass and sprawled out his legs, knocking his head against the wall. Hot tears stained his face, his abs were twisted and sore. Penny still cried. Mitch tried haplessly to sooth her, tried to hum some sort of kid’s song, but she just cried harder and kept choking on the word Mommy.
When he could breathe again, Cam stood and flushed, then rinsed his face with ice cold water. He scrubbed until he didn’t feel, until his fingers were pruned over. Until he started drinking the water and inhaling it through his nose. He almost fell over from the rubbing, but caught himself on the edge of the sink, bracing himself, his nails almost breaking against the Formica surface. He stood up straight and counted to five, a trick Dad taught them. Count to five before you shoot boys. Just in case. He opened the door.
Mitch stopped crying as he paced and tried to swoon Penny. “Cam’s back,” he whispered and put her on the floor. She stood still again.
“Okay, Princess,” he started as he dug through the trash bag. He pulled out a t-shirt, one of his and unfurled it in front of her. “Is this okay?”
She gazed at the vastness of it, of AC/DC scrawled in block print on the front and nodded. She allowed him to peel off the tiny hospital gown and pull the shirt over her tiny body. It was practically a dress, hanging down past her knees, almost at her feet. A nurse at the hospital had washed her clean of blood, even though she cried the whole time. They told her she was beautiful and brave and braided her hair after the shower was done and the doctor’s checked her over. She didn’t have a single scratch.
She stood on her tiptoes and reached out to be lifted. Cam obliged, taking her close to his chest. Her grip is vice-like, her legs around his chest, arms around his neck and her face finding a comfortable fit between his neck and shoulder. “How about we buy you some socks tomorrow?” he said, cupping his hand around her foot that fit perfectly in his palm.
Mitch sat down, kicking off his shoes. “What are we supposed to do?” he looked and sounded like a little kid, not a teenager as he’d bee professing all over the house that summer.
Cam shrugged and gave Penny a kiss on the head. “Dunno. Get some sleep.”
His brother snorted. “Seriously?” he reached for the remote and clicked through the channels before setting on an infomercial about cleaning products. The woman selling the stuff had a wide smile, and trimmed black hair. Cam sat on the mattress, pushing himself against the headboard. Penny fell asleep clutching his collar. Mitch dozed off on his side.
Cam stayed awake and watched his brother and sister until the sun rose.
~
Gravel crunches under Scout sneakers and she drags the shovel behind her, the metal point making a terrible scrapping sound. She looks ahead to Cam, walking with a slight limp, his shoulders arched in a perfect curve, his own shovel held across his back. He makes it to the pick-up truck first, pulling down the tail gate and tossing in the shovel; another horrible ruckus of metal. He hops on to the tail, his boots just touching the rocks on the ground.
Scout pauses to watch and listen; the only sounds in the graveyard at two in the morning, crickets and the breeze, rustling trees. No evidence of the struggle, of the shotgun and pistol fired, the reanimated corpses and practicing voodoo priestess that they left lying under a tree, tied to the trunk, her bottles and chicken bones broken, the zombies beheaded and burned, buried in shallow graves. None of that. Only the crickets. Their breathing.
She starts down the hill again, wiping dust on the back of her thighs.
“Come here,” Cam calls, shifting on the tail, the truck moving with him.
She does, with raised eyebrows. She tosses her shovel in the back too, wincing. “You okay?”
She stands in the space between his legs. He tilts her up her chin. “Think I dislocated it.”
“Naw, you’d be in more pain if you did. Probably just jammed it. I can get it at the hotel.”
“Yeah.” She grimaces.
He touches her chin again. “You’re beautiful.”
“Liar.” She laughs out loud, her bangs shifting from their desired position. To cover a molten glazed scar, a line from her temple just shy of her eyebrow. A mark earned from a demon born of flames, trying to break free to the surface of Earth, dedicated to engulf the world in fire. Sometimes in her dreams she felt the hot blade of the demon’s finger across her skull, the smell of flesh cauterizing itself. She moves the hair back in place.
He places his palms against her cheeks, hot, sweaty. His gaze melts and burns her all the same time. Like she’s important, the only one there. She meets his stare. Hazel eyes, long lashes, feminine for a man, a slick contrast to his rough edges, his hands and ripped jeans, sweaty t-shirt. Sometimes she tried to count the freckles across the bridge of his nose, but that was like trying to count stars, universes, the demons in Hell.
Cam moves his hands to the back of her neck, pulling her to him, pressing their foreheads together, breaths collecting as one white puff, hot on the cold air.
She clicks her jaw and drags her nails over his thighs. “You stink.”
He chuckles in his throat. Deep, graveled, like his voice. “So do you.”
They smell of death; real death. The kind that takes more than one shower to get rid of, deep down in the fat of their cells, their pores. “Ready to head back?” he asks.
“Yes.”
She glances back to the oak sitting over a cluster of tiny tombstones, a family plot, where they had Duchess of Yorn-her own ridiculous self-chosen name-tied. “Think she’ll remember?” Cam pulls back Scout’s attention.
“Eventually. But we’ve got some contacts who keep up with her.”
The spell cleared Yorn’s memory of her time as a practitioner. With mandrake root and ground hops mixed in a silver flask, poured down her throat. She struggled and tried to choke it up.
Scout copied the spell from her own mother’s book of shadows. Ingrid had been habitually collecting and scouring spells, endlessly throwing herself into the craft since Rhett died. Scout didn’t like spells; the way they could weed into the mind, change things, take things. Her brain still held the phantom fingerprints where Ingrid had pried, taken and changed. Her mother wanted to see, claimed she wanted to help. And in a way, Scout didn’t blame Ingrid. After all, she was there the night her brother was killed, with the werewolf, a silver bullet to the head.
Cam arches his back, each vertebra pop-pop-popping. A quick peck on the lips and she tries to move back, to grab the keys, but he tightens his legs, trapping her. A smug grin, a hand on her hip.
“What?” she asked, touching his eyebrows, the hair-thin scar on his chin. They’re both littered with marks, medals of their side-line careers.
“Nothin’. Come on.” He let her go and hopped down. She put up the tail as he went to the cab.
She glimpsed at the tree again, watching the green-turning-gold leaves sway in the light of the almost full moon. She almost felt bad for leaving Duchess of Yorn, who would wake up, not knowing why she was tied with itchy twine and blood on her palms, under her nails. Then Scout put a hand in her jacket pocket and the pain ripped, strained all the way down to the tips of her fingers. “Baruch sheptaranu,” she muttered in Hebrew. Good riddance.
He helped her buckle up, though didn’t buckle himself. How he could be so cautious with his life one minute and so careless the next baffled her, but she said nothing.
With the jostling start of the truck, the charms around the rearview swung and clanked together; a long pewter chain and pendant with a cross, a blue and green dreamcatcher, white feathers, hand-made by her cousin Misha. Scout lifted her hand to run along the feathers, the twine webbed in the circle and thought of the dreams tangled and vanquished by the sun.
On the drive back, AC/DC played low on the radio, the heater struggled to pump out some warmth. The weather had changed in the last few weeks, shifting from the comfortable jacket-weather, to a shivering cold, almost over night. “Come on,” Cam said, knocking the dash board.
“Hey, be nice.” She nudged him in the hip with her foot.
“Did you get the motor looked at like I told you?” he glanced at her, then the road.
“Maybe.”
“With a truck this old, you gotta keep up the maintenance.” He knocked the dash and he nudged again.
“I take care of it.”
“The heater-”
“That’s what coats are for.”
“Uh huh.” He chuckled and shook his head, reached an arm to fiddle with a vent.
They’d been back together on the road for two weeks now, after a whole month absence. She at her parents’ home in Pennsylvania, he on the monthly expedition trip with his younger brother, Mitch, on the everlasting search for their baby sister, sent to live with relatives two years after the deaths of their parents. Mitch thought he finally had a promising lead in one of the Dakotas. But like the check in Iowa, and that week spent in Virginia, Cam turned up on the porch with a half-smile, a slouched shoulder of defeat.
“Will you look at it later?” she asked, tilting back at him. They’d be leaving in a few days and though bred for cold weather, she didn’t much care to drive from Indiana to Pennsylvania without heat.
Another hit and a gust of warmth spat out and the radio went staticky a second, switched stations. “Yeah.” He spoke as if it was a chore, but he loved it. The times he spent in Virginia for more than a week he picked up some shifts at a local mechanic’s shop. And she had watched him lean over the engine, t-shirt slick with sweat on a summer day, grease smudged on his forehead, caked under his nails. He smirked at her, tried to explain the different parts while she sat in the cab or on the roof of the truck with her notebook, scribbling about the scenery or writing a poem about the scar on his right arm peeking from the fabric of his shirt.
Scout leaned on her good shoulder and stared at the rounded silver moon. A tugging in her gut as she tapped the glass in rhythm with the newest song and Cam’s mumbled singing. She ran her fingers over the bone ribs of the tiny Jesus attached to the rosary wrapped around her wrist. It had belonged to her brother, bought from one of the big catholic churches in New York City. She curled her hand around the cross, pushing Jesus into her palm.
“How long we gonna stay?” he asked, adjusting the radio again.
“A few more days.” She lolled her head back to him. “I have the wolf park tomorrow. Then we can relax. Do the real touristy stuff.”
Her day job for Travel Inc. magazine provided a good excuse for traveling across the country and gave a pretty good paycheck. It helped fund the hunting life, between that and the cash Cam stored away from card games or the few shifts a year he picked up at a mechanic shop down in Berkley Springs. In between the writing gigs when they lived out of cheap motels with flickering neon vacancy signs and corny western motifs or when the weather turned warm, camping in tents and on really nice nights, sleeping on a futon mattress laid in the back of her truck.
In between the in betweens, the times that she longed for and cherished were spent at her parents’ house. But her mother’s unpredictable presence made Scout weary of returning. She had been talking-thinking-of putting down money on the small house, a dinky cottage really, on the outskirts of her home town. A place they could rest-be. A place of their own, away from Ingrid’s incredulous stare and hovering words.
“We did the touristy stuff,” he said, flipping the station. He settled back into the seat that squeaked and strained under his weight, a spring under the cushioning coming loose.
She shook her head. “No, like real tourist stuff. No notes or research. Blood. Just us.”
He laughed. “You always take notes.”
Any where they went she was scribbling something down. At a restaurant, out at the lake. At four in the morning after an exorcism, sex and a shower, she sat at the hotel desk, one leg pulled to her chest, the other curled around the leg of the chair, writing, creating prose, rhymes.
“Still.”
“Yeah. I mean whatever you want.” He gave her a side smile, and put a hand on her thigh, giving a gentle squeeze before putting his full attention on the road and slipped into the chorus of Whitesnake. She liked his easy-going attitude. Liked his calm after a job. He calculated it silently, what went wrong, what worked or didn’t. He kept it all in his head, and she was a little surprised that everything, everything fit. Dates, faces, spells and cures.
She leaned against the window again, letting her left arm rest limply at her side, the tips of her fingers starting to go cold. She watched the moon slip behind the clouds and sang along with Cam in her head.
(yes it's unbetad and i'm aware of some possible tense shifting)
(disclaimer: all characters are original and mine, as well as the story