Dismember

EIGHT

Dave carried Georgie half a mile through the woods before the kid began to gasp and sputter and generally wiggle about. He stopped beside a dead tree and lowered the boy. The kid flopped back against the scarred trunk and breathed so shallowly and raggedly that Dave wondered if he might have asthma.

“You—” the kid started but never finished.

Dave would have added bastard, but he was glad Georgie hadn’t. He didn’t want to have to punish him.

Dave reached for the boy’s forehead. Georgie tried to pull away, but Dave grabbed hold of the side of his face and took another look at the wound above his eye. It had bled freely for a while, the blood running into the boy’s hairline while he hung from Dave’s shoulder. A dried clot reached from his hair down to his eyebrow like an unfortunate birthmark. Dave would wash it clean later. Didn’t want to risk infection. Daddies knew better than that.

His own wounds still throbbed. He reached an exploratory hand to his cheek, pulled it away, and looked it over. Blood, and plenty of it, but none fresh. It caked under his fingernails and packed into the creases and wrinkles like dried paint. He wondered if an artist felt this way, stained by his chosen medium.

For a while, he said nothing, just stood and waited for the boy’s breathing to return to normal. Finally, he asked his question: “Do you have asthma?”

Georgie looked at him strangely and said, “No, I…no.”

Good, Dave thought but didn’t say. Asthma would have meant medicine and doctors, maybe hospitals with questioning nurses and forms to fill out in triplicate. Dave would take care of his boy, but he didn’t want to deal with those kinds of complications if he could avoid them. Nodding satisfactorily, but not enough to worsen the pain in the gouges on his face, he curled the tips of his fingers upward a couple of times and asked the boy to stand.

“No, I don’t want to,” Georgie said in a tone that could hardly have been more impudent. The boy wriggled back on his butt a little, straight back, though he had nowhere to go but up the tree.

Dave grabbed him by his armpits and jerked him to his feet. “Don’t ever tell me no,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t even really change his tone, but thought he managed to convey a sense of authority regardless.

He would get the hang of this.

The boy sighed, nodded, and acquiesced when Dave told him to get moving.

They followed an old game trail through a dense section of forest—a trail Dave had found and taken advantage of many times in the last few months. The tracks in the mud consisted mostly of deer prints. At points, the path narrowed to almost nothing, but it never completely disappeared. Even if it had, Dave would have managed to pick it up again. He wasn’t an expert tracker, probably couldn’t have followed a chipmunk from California to Maine on a two week delay, but he could sure as hell keep his eye on a deer-wide rut. To a woodsman (and Dave considered himself one), this path might as well have been a newly paved interstate.

Dave walked behind the boy, nudged him in the back when he slowed or seemed to get confused about which way he was supposed to go, wiped occasionally at his eye. The sneakers on the kid’s feet were well tied (of course) but otherwise cheap and worn; one of the soles flapped and smacked against the shoe’s upper with every step the boy took. Dave hadn’t noticed the damage before, so it must have happened only recently, perhaps during the kid’s unsuccessful rush in the tree fort. The shoes showed no brand name, only an icon he didn’t recognize. He’d have to get Georgie some decent hiking boots.

They continued to move, and Dave wondered if he should have spent a little more time inside the house, gotten some of the kid’s clothes and maybe some food. Might have made the transition a little easier, both on Georgie and on himself. It wasn’t too late to go back—he doubted anyone had heard the woman scream, and there wasn’t a husband to come home early—but the house was the kid’s territory. He might know of another hiding place back there, or of a weapon to use against Dave. Dave didn’t want to chance anything like that, not when he could just as easily pick up some boots off a back stoop or a porch somewhere along the way. Or he might find something back at Mr. Boots’s house, something left over from his own boyhood. He had a few outfits at least and maybe some toys (or toy-like objects anyway). It was his job to provide now. And he would.

They crossed a narrow stream, Georgie slipping once but catching himself in that acrobatic way of his, Dave never missing a single step. Once he’d reached the other side successfully, the boy said, “My mom—”

But Dave cut him off. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said. The boy meant his old mother, of course, and Dave knew it, but he didn’t want to risk a conversation about her. Not now or ever.

“Why are you doing this?”

Dave nudged him again. “No more questions,” he said, still keeping his voice perfectly cool and level. “Georgie never asked so many stupid questions.”

“I don’t know who Georgie is,” he said. “My name is Zach.”

Dave smiled and nudged him forward. “Used to be. You used to be Zach, I used to be Davy, everybody used to be somebody.”

The boy didn’t respond to this. He pushed on, warding off a low-hanging tree branch with one arm and letting it swing back when he’d moved out of its way. He didn’t look back to see if it had hit Dave (which it had not), and Dave was glad. He didn’t want to think Georgie had tried to hurt him on purpose, although at worst it would have thwacked him in the chest and maybe given him a little welt.

The trees thinned ahead. Not far from where they walked, sunlight cut through the canopy in wide swaths. The road beyond was really more of a gravel walkway that had once been wide enough to allow a vehicle passage to a pair of cabins in the mountains above. The cabins had burned a long time ago, and nature had crept in to reclaim what had been leveled, but Dave had managed to get his truck most of the way up the forgotten road and knew he could get it all the way back down. He’d done it before.

The underbrush grew less dense here, and the trail widened until it became almost indistinguishable from the rest of the forest floor, though Dave could still see it clearly where it hit the road and make out the spot on the other side where it continued.

He’d parked the truck just downhill from that point, and though it seemed the boy had still not spotted it—had, in fact, strayed in the opposite direction—Dave saw the sunlight reflecting off the windshield and just a hint of blue from the hood. He touched Georgie’s shoulder and steered him in the right direction, like a shepherd with a single lamb. In a lot of ways, he supposed that was exactly what a daddy was supposed to be.

They walked through the last stretch of forest side by side, Dave’s footsteps hardly louder than the rustle of pine needles beneath them, the boy’s sounding like a slow applause as his damaged sole continued its clapping.

They reached the overgrown road. Dave didn’t see the boy speed up, but he heard it. Clap, pause, clap, became clap clap clap. And then the boy was running.

He ran uphill—his first mistake—and stayed on the road, opting for a clear path ahead rather than the possibility of cover, which made sense to an extent but was, in all the ways that mattered, very dumb. Dave was more ashamed than upset. He supposed he needed to understand that, despite Georgie having always loved the outdoors, he hadn’t had a chance to grow up in them yet. Dave had a lot to teach him.

Although the boy was graceful in some regards, he was a gangly runner, all legs and arms and flailing elbows. Dave barely had to do more than walk to catch up with the scrambling boy. Just a little bit of movement, but enough to restart the throbbing in his face and eye. Damn bitch, he thought, glad he’d gutted her, wondering how he could ever have thought she’d be an acceptable choice.

Ahead, the road curved sharply, cut uphill through a grove of thick trees and led at last to the two cabins, which Dave had investigated only once on a rainy night that spring. From the place where he overtook Georgie and latched on to the back of his t-shirt, Dave couldn’t make out the two ruined homesteads, but they were up there, hidden in the trees, home now to only the birds, the bugs, and the burrowing animals camped out beneath the rubble.

Georgie whipped around so furiously that a chunk of shirt almost ripped off in Dave’s hand, but the man twisted his fingers into the material until he had a good enough hold to make sure the kid wasn’t going anywhere. Dave saw the grass-covered stone on the road before the boy did and kicked it out of the way just as one of Georgie’s hands dipped in its general direction. Dave didn’t flip Georgie around, didn’t say anything, just turned back toward the truck and dragged the writhing child behind him.

Out here in the open, the sun baked Dave’s head and face. He’d spent so long hiding in the shade, he’d almost forgotten it was summer. A bead of sweat dripped down his cheek, hung for a moment from the tip of his chin, and then fell to the dirt below.

The boy’s thrashing had almost stopped, which seemed strange to Dave. His fits of rebellion came in spurts. Throw a rock here, run away there, but never an all-out fight for his life.

Only after he’d pushed Georgie in through the passenger-side door and buckled him into his seat did Dave say calmly, “Doesn’t make any sense to run away, does it?” He pulled the belt tighter and wrapped it once all the way around the boy. Not exactly handcuffs, but it kept him from making any sudden moves, and that would have to do for now. Eventually, Dave knew, Georgie would settle down. He was a good boy. “I’d find you, son,” he said, liking the way that last word sounded. “I’ll always find you.”

He slammed the door and circled around the front of the truck, looking once at the forest around them, not expecting to see anything or anyone, just looking, remembering. He doubted he’d ever return to this particular stretch of the mountains. He wondered if the boy had already come to the same realization.

Smiling, the birthday boy dropped into the truck behind the steering wheel. He’d started the engine and slipped the transmission into reverse, about to back his way downhill when he noticed the thing hanging from the rearview mirror. A flower-scented air-freshener. His air-freshener. He rolled down his window and ripped the thing from the rearview.

“He always liked lilac.”

The boy looked at him, said nothing.

Dave flicked his wrist and sent the air-freshener spinning out the window. It didn’t fly far before making a strange dive through the air like a wing-shot bird and landing with a soft rustle in the weeds beside the road.

“Won’t need that anymore,” Dave said, wiping his bloodstained hand on his pants as if, by touching the air-freshener, he’d only now gotten the hand dirty. “This is my truck now. Mine and yours.” He rooted around on the floorboards, found an old gas receipt, and poked it onto the rearview’s adjustment lever to replace the air freshener. Then he propped his arm on the back of the seat and backed slowly down the mountain road.

The truck bounced over large rocks and pitted areas where the road had partially washed away. The few tools in the truck’s bed—a shovel, a rake, a toolbox full of old wrenches and screwdrivers—clanged and clattered while the truck continued its bumpy ride. Dave turned on the radio, which never worked well, and got no reception; the static whispered from the speakers, sounding almost peaceful, like a bubbling brook or the wind through overhead tree limbs.

Dave reached a spot in the road wide enough to turn the pickup around and did so. When they were pointed front forward and rolling along once more, Dave said, “The family truck,” as if he’d been thinking it all along.