Hummingbird Salamander(62)

Hillman shrugged again. “Here’s one answer, but you won’t like it.”

Grunting, he turned my messed-up chair around until I was face-to-face with a bloody mask of a face, the body beneath it slouched in a torn dress shirt and black trousers. He had no shoes, just black socks.

It took a moment. But then I recognized him.

Alex. They’d interrogated Alex. He was breathing. I could tell because of the blood bubbles popping around his mouth. But I didn’t think he’d ever be able to see out of his left eye again.

“A kind of premonition, you think? A kind of prequel, you think?” Hillman said.

A kind of bloody sack of meat. Who’d known nothing.

Hillman opened his mouth to add something. But I never found out what he would’ve said next.

Because I’d sprung to my feet and bull-rushed him.

Maybe if I’d made a move for the door, he would’ve been ready. But I didn’t. So I plowed him under. Something snapped inside of Hillman and he screamed and his leg collapsed under him. And his collapse knocked Alex over.

Just as the goons came back into the room, struggling with a plastic tarp. One had had to put his gun down. The other had no clear line of sight.

By then I was lunging through the screen door to the balcony, breaking the mesh out of its frame.

I didn’t think. I hurled myself over the balcony, as another fucking mosquito of a bullet clipped me in the left arm. I went over the side snarling like an animal, feeling all my weight in the fall and trying in that split second to protect my vulnerable spots, hands still tied, entangled in pieces of chair, but most of it mercifully left behind at the balcony door.

Just a wrestling move. Just a dive and roll. Choreograph it in your head as you tumble. Something I’d practiced a hundred times.

The fall took forever. The fall took no time at all.

Did I care if I died this way?

I was going to die another way, if not.

Screaming from the heat of the smoldering salamander clenched in my hands.

But I would not let go.





[67]


My brother’s name was Ned. Yes, let’s call him “Ned.” We lived in the wildest part of, say, Oregon. That’s where the farm was: out in the boonies. The place that eventually gets broadband and chain stores and isn’t much different from the rest of the world. But people who don’t live there don’t understand that.

Ned was the earnest, open type, with a strong jaw and a shock of thick brown hair and striking blue eyes. He’d tried wrestling, too, but sports couldn’t much hold his attention. He wasn’t built that way. On top of all the rest, no matter how Shot tried to cure him of it, Ned was thoughtful, introspective. He considered things before he spoke and he didn’t waste words, and you could already see in him, as a teenager, the man he would’ve become. Because he was that man even at fourteen. I wondered sometimes if my mother had had an affair.

To watch the girls in town look at him as he walked by … this was something I’d never have from the boys, and yet I didn’t begrudge Ned. For one thing, he didn’t even know he was beautiful. No, the only thing I begrudged Ned was a kind of secretiveness that came with the introspection, built in. He kept things to himself.

But even then, in the last years, as the divide increased between us, because of our age, because I wasn’t a boy, our expeditions kept us close. That and surviving Shot. Or “Shit,” as we also called him.

Ned’s fascination with things under rocks as a child only in tensified and sharpened as a teen. He could have a kind of lazy aspect because he didn’t act right away, but things under rocks brought out a laser-like attention. It coalesced around more than just salamanders. But I noticed the salamanders more because he had to work for them harder and harder. They became a rare treasure around the farm as creeks dried up, or maybe it was the herbicides and pesticides to protect the crops. Or maybe the new development by rich folks up in the heights, and the runoff from that. But in the little hidden ravines where creeks ran at the bottom … we still would find them.

This could be Sundays with the forest beyond the farm as our church. Or we’d finished our chores after school and Shot was off at a bar getting drunk. We had to do things we liked while Shot was getting drunk, to store up kindliness, laughter, nice memories, as a kind of barricade.

Ned had learned of the megafauna of the Trinity Alps of California, and even though that was far distant from the farm, he hoped for some local sighting.

“Those places we can’t get to—the gorge, maybe.”

The gorge bordered an abandoned quarry, so I didn’t think so. But I never said that.

Ten feet long, the Trinity Alps Giant Salamander had first been reported in the 1920s by a trapper. Basking in the headwaters of a remote river. Brown-black, strong, and broad. Never caught. Not a single photograph, even with sightings through the 1970s. But Ned fixated on the expeditions of Captain Hubbard in the 1950s. Which found nothing. Except the vast, unconquered wilderness that exists there today.

I knew why Ned clung to these mysteries. It was the same reason I lost myself in a stack of old Nancy Drew novels, and, when those ran out, the Hardy Boys. Then you didn’t have to think about where you were or sullen, terrible dinners with your mother half-insane and your father absent enough that Shot could do whatever he wanted. Verbal abuse. Being slapped around. Pushed into walls. Punched in the gut. It was easier to ignore when I got into wrestling just because I didn’t have to explain the injuries anymore.