The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(95)

At last the rock lets me go.

Struggle to my feet, teeter like an old woman, head dangling, wet hair sticky on my face. Shake my head and the ends of my hair rain down splatters of blood everywhere. One step forward, then another and another toward Jim, who stands there beguiled by the power he has over life and death.

Another step, another. My foot stubs against a rock. Pale gray, not red like the others, but gray like Olin’s fieldstones. I stoop, fight for balance, pick it up, feel its heft, its potential, another step, another.

I’m behind Jim now, so close I smell sour sweat, see it stain the back of his shirt along the spine, the armpits. My stomach heaves. My hand curls, clamps around the rock. The other reaches out, loops fingers through the rear strap of his Sam Browne. I yank with all my weight, pulling him with me, back from the brink. Laurel is still in his grasp, and he stumbles backward, struggling to keep his feet, legs pedaling like crazy.

As he hangs there, off-balance, he sees my face, my fist, the rock coming at him, and for a second I see it register in his eyes—the disbelief, the betrayal, the gall—before I bring the rock down hard against his head.

It sounds like an ax hitting cordwood. Thunk.

He hits the ground with a groan, face contorting. He loses his grip on Laurel and she falls on the ground in a heap. I lose my footing and crash down next to him. Something snaps in my wrist; pain shoots up my arm.

Jim rolls away from me, his hand flying to his forehead. “Motherf*ck!” he mutters, sits up, dazed, swaying, blinking at the blood on his fingers as he pulls them away. He looks from his fingers to me, and his expression shifts. His dark eyes now as cold and empty as twin coffins. They move from me to the machete, dropped near the edge of the mesa, a few feet away.

Still fixed on it, he leans forward to stand back up, slow, methodical, like there’s a job to do and no particular hurry to do it.

But as he leans in, bracing to stand, I swing the gray rock again, wide and for effect, and it’s as if he’s moving right into the blow, in profile. I wonder that he didn’t expect I’d put up more of a fight. It hits his handsome Roman nose and I can hear, can feel the cartilage crunch underneath. Blood spurts from his face, down the front of his police shirt, sprays on my forearm.

I pull back and hit him again. His face is averted now and the rock hits his cheekbone, just below his right eye. Crack. He falls back, his eyes roll, and in an instant, with a strength and speed from no earthly source, I straddle him, pound his face, his head, over and over and over. He catches and grips my injured wrist till I think he’ll wrench it off, and white-hot pain convulses my body. My teeth sink into his fingers till I feel bones break. He screams.

“Bitch!”

And still I hit him, hit him, hit him, till his own face is blood, pulp, not Jim. Till I don’t have the strength to strike even one more blow. Till he stops moving.

I roll off and kneel panting on the ground, light-headed, fighting nausea, fighting for breath. Then I straighten and let the bloodied rock go.

I crawl to Laurel and feel for a pulse at her throat. It’s faint and rabbity. But it’s there. Her face and arms are full of scratches, from the tumble or from Jim, but otherwise she looks whole. I close my eyes, roll on my back beside her, lungs heaving, push sticky hair from my face. The wet is still running down my scalp, seeping into sandstone. My body, too heavy to move now, wants to sleep.

A whisper, an echo, low and urgent, coming from nowhere, from everywhere, coming from the rock, calling me.

Joanna.

It doesn’t want me to sleep, wants me to move move move again. I blink up at the sky, blue as a cornflower, but with a bank of gray clouds moving in fast.

I roll onto my good arm. It pushes me up till I’m sitting beside Laurel. We need to move. With my wrist, my head, I know I can’t carry her, so I call to her, a croak, from tongue dry as dust, “Laurel, please wake up. Please.”

She moans; her eyelids flutter but don’t open.

I look around me, not sure for what. I don’t know where we are, how we got here. Only that we’re somewhere in the red rock mesas east of Wheeler. That somehow we went from winter to summer in a heartbeat. That Laurel and I are both dressed in the same clothes we fled Wheeler in, back in June. Miles of empty in every direction.

I push to my feet, totter to the edge of the mesa. I see the four-lane interstate below in the desert, in the distance. Now and then a car, a truck, speeds along. Getting there is our best hope.

I stagger to Laurel, kneel down to pat her cheek, my blood dripping onto her chalky skin, try to wake her, but can’t. There’s nothing for it. We have to get out of here. I have to stop the blood. My good hand shakes as it works the buttons of her blouse, undoing them one by one, then strips it off her, down to her yellow camisole. The sleeves are long, and I use them to tie the blouse around my head like a gypsy scarf, knotting it with my good hand and my teeth.