Cyclops glanced at his pocket watch. He sat on a wooden bench in front of the store that hadn’t opened all day. The snack and beer advertisements taped to the windows were making him hungry. He removed a copy of the local paper from its salt-ravaged steel box and glanced over the pages until a story about Sheriff Dawkins caught his attention. Dripping with praise, the article described how the sheriff’s no bull attitude kept the bad elements from even attempting to spoil his beloved county. He was even presented an award for outstanding service, an idea that set in the Cyclops stomach worse than the half-cooked elk liver. There was a shot of a perky high school girl in a short dress handing him a brass plaque, and while the sheriff kept his eyes humbly lowered, it wasn’t difficult to notice that they were stealing a glance at the girl’s shapely brown thighs.
Cyclops laughed. He dug a hand deep into his overcoat and smiled when he felt the elk heart against his palm, soft and still warm from being cooked over a blazing fire next to where Ann lay. He wrapped the organ with a sheet of newsprint and raised it to his mouth. Taking a deep bite, he felt the blood jam pour into his throat and seek out his soul. The heart made for a good dessert, he decided. There was gentle sweetness in the middle, unlike the liver which seemed to draw up the bile and try to turn the eater’s body against itself. He knew this was how the wildness in things often behaved. It had tricks up its old sleeve that we could only dream of understanding.
He’d never trusted Duane from the moment they’d met. The sheriff had said he was alright, but Mikhail only saw a liability.
“It’s his wife Sarah I’m worried about,” Dawkins had said.
“His wife?”
“She’s unhappy. And she knows too much.”
At the time Mikhail was living in Seattle, in the process of setting up a chain of operations on the west coast. The disfiguring accident wouldn’t happen until he moved back to New York a few years later, but up until then women had found him handsome and exotic, and unlike the men he knew that preferred to pay for their female companionship, Mikhail enjoyed the thrill of the chase, of often topping off his seductions by reading from a slender book of Pushkin’s poems that he kept in his pocket.
He’d stayed in a motel next to the highway while he met with Duane and the sheriff to work over the details. Invariably they would go to the local bar afterwards and drink and later Mikhail would wake up in his cheerless room thinking that Duane was still going to get them all into big trouble some day.
The next night after the bars closed, Duane had no clue he was being followed home. He was too drunk and shouldn’t have been driving, Mikhail thought. It was a bad sign. When he’d driven past Duane’s house he’d seen Sarah in the window. Their eyes had briefly faced and a frame of time seemed as if had been to jarred loose from its river of continuity, her image suspended in a flash of white light that seared itself permanently into his mind and did not weaken with time.
Earlier the following evening he’d walked to the house, while Duane and the sheriff had only begun to work through another round of drinks at the local bar. Mikhail had stood quietly under the trees and watched the woman and her young daughter sitting in front of the blue glow of a television. Her face was much like Ann’s now, reminding him of rare bloodlines and pale flowers up in the alpine slopes of mountains. Yes, he guessed that he was that kind of man when it came to women. He’d watched as they got up to refill glasses and microwave popcorn, let their cat in and out the back door. It wasn’t until they glanced out the window that he began to see their fear, how its weight seemed to pull down whatever happiness they’d allowed themselves to feel. Was it me? Did they sense they were being watched?
His answer came soon after the bars had closed and the girl had been tucked into bed, when Duane had come roaring up to the front of the house, stereo kicking out an ugly bass that shook window panes. Mikhail had watched him stumble from his car, unzip his pants and piss in the flowerbox. Not long after he’d gone inside, all the lights had come on. Shouting followed, and he’d heard sharp thudding sounds like someone punching drywall with their fist. When he’d heard the woman cry out, he’d wanted to go inside and save her.
And you did save her, Cyclops thought. He took another bite of the elk’s heart and chewed slowly, gazed at the wet highway before him, a spooled out reel of film.
After all their arrangements had been made, Mikhail had checked out of his motel and said goodbye to the sheriff. For the next few nights he parked his car in front of Duane’s house and kept watch while bad thoughts charred in his mind. One night before Duane had come home from drinking, Mikhail was surprised to see Sarah emerge from the house carrying a suitcase, a dark bruise smudged across her cheekbone. He followed her from a distance down to the Greyhound bus stop, couldn’t tell if she’d seen him park beneath some trees, and shut the lights.
He’d wanted to talk to her but was afraid he’d only frighten her more. Where is your little girl, he remembered thinking. And then everything that happened next was a blur, Duane’s tires billowing smoke after making a sudden U-turn in the middle of the highway and speeding back toward Sarah who tripped and fell as she tried to get away. Duane wasn’t drunk tonight but wired on something stronger and he’d jumped out of his car and run after the woman whose only place to go was an empty phone booth. When she slammed the door shut in his face he’d started to punch webs into the glass while she tried to find change in her purse with shaking hands.
“You goddamn bitch!” His eyes were dark and pitted and drew the night like iron filaments being pulled toward a magnet. And then Duane was no longer thinking about his current emotional pain, but trying to wrap his mind around why his testicles suddenly felt as if they’d just been crudely wired to an electrical outlet.
After he collapsed to the ground screaming, he’d tried his best to roll over and get a look at his attacker. Mikhail saw it coming and applied the stun gun to the back of Duane’s neck, not caring if he’d gone too far. Duane had writhed some more and pissed himself before his limbs went limp and he lay quietly on the ground with cigarette butts clinging to his face. Mikhail had watched him breathe while he decided what to do next. One idea had been burning a hole through him in the past few days.
When he turned his head toward the phone booth, Sarah was standing frozen behind the cracked glass, her face washed in tears. He looked into her eyes and didn’t see what he’d expected. The animal who had beat her was now lying helpless in front of her, and clutched in Mikhail’s hand glittered the knife his mother had once given him as a young man.
“Don’t you want me to kill him?”
“Go away!” she’d screamed.
She had no reason to trust Mikhail. She didn’t even know him, had only seen him riding around with the sheriff and glimpsed him once when he’d driven by the house. When she’d asked Duane who the man was, he’d just stared ahead and pretended he hadn’t heard her.
Yet he learned that she’d left her child with her sister. That she planned to start a new life in Southern California and would send for her daughter as soon as she could. It wasn’t a very good plan but it was all she had. She feared Duane would kill her if he saw her again. She told him all that she knew about the smuggling operation and who was involved, but she hadn’t figured out how Mikhail fit in, had no idea how much higher up the food chain he was than the sheriff or her husband. She brought up the subject a couple of times and each time he warned her it was a bad idea.
He’d insisted on driving her as far as she wanted, to be sure that Duane didn’t try to follow. Sarah cried off and on until they reached the redwoods. In a small town strip mall she bought new clothes and some hair coloring. When they checked into motels he slept in a chair next to door where he could be ready for trouble. One night they’d stayed up later than usual talking, and before he’d turned off the lights she’d asked him if he would hold her…