Hummingbird Salamander(64)

“What’re you doing?” The thought had struck, hard, that maybe he was running away.

“Shhhhh! Nothing.”

“That’s not nothing.”

I felt the gash in my heart again. Without Ned, I wasn’t sure I could stand things. I mean, I know now I could, but I was a large, powerful child who thought she was weak and puny.

Ned smiled in the rough light of the lamp by his nightstand.

“Not leaving, if that’s what you think. Just an expedition. I’ve got a good lead. I’ll be back by morning. Promise.”

It had begun to rain, hard, and Shot had decided to start taking out his anger on random stuff in the barn. We could hear him shouting over the rain.

“The ravines will flood if it keeps up,” I said. At the very least they’d be too muddy. “How’re you going to see?”

“Saved up. Look.” He took a miner’s headlamp out of his backpack.

At the time, I thought it was cool in a mysterious expedition way. Brave. Now it just seems sad, pointless. Anyone at all could have seen him coming.

The rain became a squall, hit the windows with a rattle and slap.

“Don’t go,” I said.

Ned took the measure of me. I remember that. He stopped, took my “Don’t go” seriously. Maybe because I hadn’t said it before. It wasn’t premonition. It was common sense.

“I have to,” he said.

Have to? But I thought I knew what he meant from the quaver I’d seen. That feeling inside that if you don’t escape, even for a little while, you’ll start screaming and you won’t stop. That there has to be something better, so you try to get somewhere better. Even if it won’t last.

I relented, or gave in, nodded, and said, “Okay, but you’ll tell me what you find when you get back? Wake me up. Promise?”

Ned smiled in the way that felt like a hug. “Yeah, I’ll tell you.” But he never would.



* * *



When I told someone Ned’s story, like my husband, or parts blurted out of me drunk at bars … I knew it came out drenched in sentiment, lingered on some rough edges while sanding off others. But it was my story, and it was true. Or one overlay of the truth, depending on the day, the month, or the things that you remember that swim up unbidden or that you try to dredge up, afraid you’re going to forget forever. And you become someone else again, and the story changes yet again.



* * *



The next morning, I woke up to the light, the storm over. I hadn’t slept at first, but then had slept like I was dead. I was worried. Ned wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t in the kitchen. My parents looked at me blankly when I asked if they’d seen him. Shot was dead drunk, asleep somewhere.

Ned wasn’t in the barn or the backyard. But when I went down to the creek behind the house, I found him. Lying there, curled up, on the sandy bank.

I remember all the air went out of me and I fell like a sack. I fell, and kept falling. But then I thought maybe he was still alive, and I got up and ran to his body.

He was soaked by the storm, face slack, one hand reaching out. Later, the autopsy would find water in his lungs.

Those blue eyes were open, but dull and staring off into the distance. I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t do anything. The grief was ripping through me, tearing me into pieces.

But even then, there by the creek, my first thought was Shot. That Shot had killed him.

Which is why, two years later, I murdered Shot.





PART 3



SALAMANDER





LIFEBOAT





[68]


A handful of months after I jumped off the balcony of Silvina’s apartment, I sat on a stool in a dive bar somewhere remote down the coast, my cane hanging from a hook by my knees. Remote the way your phone doesn’t always get reception and places are called towns, but it’s mostly a gas station and a convenience store and maybe a kiosk that’s the police station. Something you could run over in a pickup truck.

I sat at the bar—a bar, any bar—and drank, knowing I could never return to my home. The wound I couldn’t solve with painkillers. My daughter would grow up and forget me. She would actively try to forget me. And it would be easy because I’d made it easy. My husband would remarry, move on with his life. He would find someone the exact opposite of me, raise another family. I wouldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t be able to. I’d be dead by then. Tracked down by Vilcapampa’s men or a capricious “Jack” or Langer. Or maybe I’d die before all of that, from the accumulation of injuries.

I sat there, feeling the burn on the back of my neck despite the vodka shots. That throb. The flat smoke aftertaste on my clothes, the soft stale reek of that, and I drank more. They might’ve taken Hellbender’s gun from me, but I’d acquired another easily enough. Concealed carry, no permit. I called it my “Fusk” because I’d gotten the same type he’d pulled on me. A lifetime ago.

What concerned me most: keeping my hands hidden under the bartop to obscure from the bartender the way I couldn’t stop my fingers from moving. A limp folks thought understandable, familiar. They’d seen it before. Grandparents. Veterans of foreign wars. But bartenders, I’d found, took spider fingers as a sign you were unstable or alcoholic … and unstable people were trouble. Fears over pandemic and the vagueness of that, of how little was known about its spread, made spider fingers even less attractive.