Under normal circumstances his people rarely asked for his help, but the situation in Traitor Bay was bigger than they could handle and they feared the rot had spread much too deep. Word came to him while he dozed in a boxcar near Tucson by a boy with large terrified eyes. The boy leaned his head inside the darkness and his voice trembled. Children were fast and light. They made good messengers, could out run the railroad cops who came at you with their clubs. Cyclops cursed the child anyway. He’d been approaching the end of an important dream, anticipating a vital teaching. Cyclops had a lot of dreams of this nature, visions that would forewarn him with signs. He’d started having them at the age of ten, had seen his father drown in the icy river days before leaving for St. Petersburg on a business trip. It was reported as an accident after it happened, but later his mother told him it wasn’t true, that the other driver who’d caused his father’s death had been an assassin. Cyclops father, an intelligence officer in the KGB, had a lot of enemies.
In this boxcar dream he was back at the moldy plankboard house of his childhood, watching his mother in her dusty black dress with the lace trim. She’d reminded him of a crow standing in front of the roaring fireplace, her glassy eyes lifted toward something above his head. When he’d turned to look up, he heard the boy’s voice, and when he sat up in the semidarkness, his face was struck by a square of yellow light beaming from a rusted rivet hole in the ceiling of the boxcar. His hair was kept parted above his good eye, so that it appeared to be staring out from the center of his forehead. When the boy saw him, he screamed and ran off, and when Cyclops thought he heard the boy’s father calling, he smiled and knew the boy would one day be fine. Not right away, of course, for a strong impression was like a sliver lodged into the flesh. And not unlike the body, the boy’s mind would need time to build up enough puss before it could expel it.
He was making far better progress now walking down the highway, listening to the surf hiss against the cliffs far below, feeling its tendrils of mist. If he had the time he would have liked to have climbed down to the water and rinse his face in it. It had been years since he’d ventured this far off the edge of the railway network, his iron web. The ocean brought back memories of when he first saw America from the deck of a merchant ship, drenched in icy spray, drinking vodka to stay warm and singing with the men his mother had begged him not to leave with. What a different person he’d been back then, still more a boy than a man, wide-eyed and dream-led and utterly oblivious to what was in store for him.
He was hit by a sudden wave of nausea that made him stumble to the side of the highway. A tide of hot bile rose up to the roof of his mouth and caused him to choke. He hadn’t felt this alive for months, with the elk he’d already eaten deep inside him and its timeless wild soul struggling against the coiling snake of his guts. This is turning out to be a better trip than I imagined, he thought, wiping the acid from his mouth.
Having been distracted by his digestive Chernobyl, he’d failed to notice the headlights coming from behind and he knew it was too late to try and hide in the undergrowth. When the Volkswagen slowed, he saw the face of the elk-worshipping woman inside. She pulled onto a shoulder several yards ahead and waited for him to approach, but he crossed the road to give her a wide berth.
“Are you okay mister?” she asked.
Pretending he hadn’t heard her, Cyclops kept moving through the silver light coming from her car. He briefly turned his head so that she could get a glimpse of his face. Usually that’s all it took to get people to leave him alone and let him be on his way. He was shocked to see her standing outside of her car watching, her hands thrust into the deep pockets of her jacket.
“I’m only asking because of that accident up the road. Thought maybe you were in it. Are you hurt?”
Cyclops raised his hand and waved. He didn’t slow his pace. He heard the woman get into her car and turn around. Was she brave or was she soft and too trusting? He wondered. Maybe he should have helped her join her friend the elk in the afterlife. An image of her running naked through the forest made him laugh.