The Marsh King's Daughter(56)

I’ll admit, I was disappointed. I liked it better when these boys and girls were the same as me. I understood the concept of dates and years, of course, and why important events had their year-number attached to them so people could know which came first and which came later. But I’d never really thought about the number of the year I was born, or what year it was now. My mother kept track of the weeks and the months on the calendar she drew with charcoal on our kitchen wall, but I’d always been more interested in what the weather would be like on a given day and the seasons.

Now I realized that the numbers of my years were important as well. I subtracted the dates on the Geographics from the date of the current year and felt like my father had punched me in the stomach. The Geographics were fifty years old. Far older than the ’Teen magazine. Older than my mother. Older even than my father. My Yanomami brothers and sisters weren’t children; they were old men and women. The boy with the double row of dots tattooed across his cheeks whose picture I showed to my father so he could do the same to me was not a boy at all; he was an old man like my father. Cousteau—the real Jacques-Yves Cousteau—was a grown man in the Geographic pictures, which meant he must be very old. He might even be dead.

I looked at my mother sitting across the table, smiling like she was happy I found her magazine because now we could read it together, and all I could think was, Liar. I’d trusted the Geographics. I’d trusted my mother. She knew the Geographics were fifty years old, yet she let me believe that everything they said that was happening in the present was current and true. Color television and Velcro and a vaccine to cure polio weren’t recent inventions. The Soviets didn’t just send the dog Laika into orbit on Sputnik 2 as the first living creature to orbit the Earth. Cousteau’s amazing discoveries were fifty years old. Why would she do this to me? Why had she lied to me? What else was she not telling me?

I grabbed the magazine off the table and rolled it up and stuck it in my back pocket. After this, she was never getting it back.

Outside there was a noise. It sounded like my father’s chain saw, only it was almost dark and my father wouldn’t cut firewood at night. I ran to the window. A small yellow light was coming toward us from the direction of the tree line. It looked like a yellow star except that it was moving and it was close to the ground.

My mother came over to the window and stood beside me. The noise got louder. She cupped her hands against the glass so she could see.

“It’s a snowmobile,” she said when she turned away at last, her voice full of wonder. “Someone is coming.”





21





Rambo doesn’t bark again, but once was enough. My gamble paid off. Not only have I caught up to my father, Rambo’s bark proves he is not so very far away. Picture the quarter-mile section of road between the place where my father’s trail began and the logging road where I’m running as the base of an isosceles triangle. My house is the apex, and the paths my father and I are traveling are the sides. The closer we get to my house, the quicker our paths will converge.

I could pinpoint his location more precisely if Rambo would bark a second time, but frankly I’m surprised he was able to bark at all. I guess the pants my father stole from the man he murdered didn’t come with a belt. Back at the cabin, my father used to fasten his belt around my dog’s nose as a muzzle when we were hunting and my father didn’t want him to bark, or when Rambo was tied in the woodshed and my father got tired of listening to him wanting to be let out. Sometimes my father put the muzzle on Rambo for no reason at all that I could see and left it on a lot longer than I thought he should. I’ve read that one of the signs that a person might become a terrorist or a serial killer when they grow up is if they were cruel to animals when they were a child. I’m not sure what it means if they’re still cruel as an adult.

I shield my eyes against the rain and scan the crest of the ridge, half expecting my father’s head to poke over the top at any second. I move off the road into the trees. Wet pine needles muffle my footsteps. I shake the rain from my hair and slide the Ruger from my shoulder, holding the rifle with the barrel pointing down so I can swing it up at the first sign of trouble. The ridge is steep. I climb as quickly and quietly as I can. Normally I’d use the scrub trees as handholds, but jack pines are brittle and I can’t risk the sound of a branch snapping off.

I near the top, drop to my belly, and crawl the rest of the way using my feet and elbows, the way my father taught me. I set up the Ruger’s bipod and sight through the scope.

Nothing.

I pan slowly north and south, then check the other side of the ravine for movement. It’s movement that gives a person away. If you’re fleeing someone through a forest, the best thing you can do is go to ground as quickly as possible and stay absolutely still. I scan every conceivable hiding place a second time on the chance that my father made Rambo bark on purpose to draw me out, then pack up the Ruger and work my way down the ridge and start climbing the next.

I repeat the process twice more before I come to the top of the fourth ridge and feel like cheering. At the bottom of the slope, not more than fifty feet below me and fifty yards south, walking purposefully up the middle of a creek that normally would be little more than ankle-deep but that now reaches almost to his knees is my father.

My father.

I’ve found him. Outpaced him. Outsmarted him in every way.