Mr. Splitfoot

~ ~ ~

HE PUSHES UP TO SITTING. “Ouch.” Mr. Bell grabs his arm. Blood darkens his sleeve. “That’s a bit sore, Mardellion. And not entirely fair.” The tiny bombs that parents bury under their child’s skin take years to explode.

Zeke aims again.

“No!” Ruth screams. “No.”

Mr. Bell breathes heavily. “Run, Ruth. Get out of here. What’s he going to do? Shoot his own son?”

“I just did.”

“Step onto the shore,” Ruth tells Zeke. “Let me attend to him first, and then I’ll get your money.”

“What freaking tenderness.” Zeke smiles. “You’re lucky, Carl. ‘337 A solid house and wealth comes from your parents but a prudent wife comes from above.’” As if numbering the verses makes them unchangeable, unquestionable plotted points on a map, meteorites that land along the shores of a canal, instead of random rocks, mistakes, and drunken mothers, winding up wherever they choose. Zeke waves Ceph’s gun up to the sky, one finger in the trigger guard. He lifts his empty palm with a crooked arm, a mockery of surrender. He backs his way onto the shore.

Ruth goes to Mr. Bell. She inspects the wound, imagining she’ll look through his body straight into the lake and all the way down, one thousand feet in dark liquid. His blood makes a mist in the cold air. “Are you OK?”

“I’m so sorry.” Mr. Bell breathes heavily. “Believe me. Please.”

She ministers to him. Her mouth is open. “Shh.” She swabs blood with her shirt and some spit, some of the freezing lake slush.

“Believe me,” he says again.

She strokes his face. “I think I’m done believing.” Ruth sits on the ice, cross-legged, freezing, wasted. She drops her arms open so Mr. Bell can rest in her lap. “Come,” she pulls his head into the cradle of her legs, and there she curves her body over to protect him, looking to the darkness between them. She sees stars. She sees Nat. She sees Mr. Splitfoot. Help us, she asks them all, asks them hard. Help us, Nat. Her shoulders curl. She covers Mr. Bell with what she feels, grave love, a synapse. He is hers. He breathes into her damply, through her, as if they could fall into one another. The lake takes on the heat between them, between the distant planets. Steam and stew. You, it says, and you, activating a crack as swift as any gunshot, as swift as, say, a meteor that traveled across time and space to crash into this remote, accidental mountaintop lake in the Adirondacks. The ice opens up. The lake swallows two humans in love without knowing or caring, loathing judgment if the lake could loathe, if the lake could judge.

Underwater Ruth’s lungs despise the cold. They spasm. She screams for Nat to help her, but something happens to sound underwater.

If Zeke, alone now, stunned far further than stupid, calls for them, pleads mercy, they don’t hear it. If he drives the Father’s absurd truck like a blind maniac down the twisted, snow-covered road, crossing the river chasm or maybe plunging into it, they don’t hear because under the water the sky is ice, darkening with their descent blue to black and places beyond.

Mr. Bell holds her in his good arm, fighting for the surface using all the life he has inside to continue living. And Ruth holds Mr. Bell. They fall. The water is frigid and Ruth never could swim. Down, down, his boots, her hair tangled in his. The deepest lake in the Adirondacks is made by men and full of enough mystery to betray all humankind. There’s water in their lungs. Mr. Bell holds her now and afterward. There’s water in their ears and a voice warm as a mother’s should be. They fall toward the voice, through the deepest lake in the Adirondacks. “When you were a baby,” the voice says, “you used to point at birds.” The gesture of their hands entwined, reaching up through their descent, clawing for the disappearing surface, could be misconstrued as fingers pointing out a goldfinch on a branch, a red cardinal nosing the grass for some seeds.

Later that night the lake freezes, sealing the scar under a dusting of snow.

Later still, days, maybe weeks, two crows fly past without even stopping. They were living. They are dead. We will change them into cedars. We know that this is impossible.