“Hi, Bob,” Anna said. By rights, her voice should have been squeaky and high, the voice of a mouse being swooped up out of a meadow by a hawk, but the world-class screaming she’d indulged in trying to run Menechinn down with the sled, then hurtling down the switchbacks, had given it a nice brave, gravelly quality. “You should put a hat on. Your ears and nose are frostbitten. They’ll rot away and leave black holes. Hard to get a date, once the ears and nose go.” She didn’t lower the army blanket. She didn’t even widen the gap through which she looked at him with one eye.
Bob’s smile pulled another half inch back toward his spine, his eyes momentarily invisible behind the slabs of cheek. Rictus apparently set in; the smile stayed exactly the same as the eyes came back out a fraction, and Anna had the weird feeling that she was watching the thing that was Bob Menechinn, the thing that wasn’t human at all, peeking out from under the rock of his brow bone.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you if you make a face, it will freeze like that?” Anna snapped to make the thing go back inside Bob’s skull.
“Did your mother ever tell you you’re a fucking cunt?” he asked with the same razor-edged merriment he’d used with Katherine.
He had to be in pain. His brain had to be crashing from the cat tranquilizer. The parts of him that weren’t past feeling the cold must ache with it. Still, it was clear he was beginning to enjoy himself.
Tucking her chin against her chest so the blanket wouldn’t fall, Anna loosened her fingers where they clutched the rough wool over her face and let her hand slide slowly down her chest till it rested on top of the arm dislocated at the shoulder. “No,” she said. “‘Fucking cunt’ doesn’t ring any bells. Once in a while she called me ‘knucklehead,’ but I think she meant it in a loving way.”
Bob seemed to suck her words through the screen of spruce needles and into his nose. Against the gray static of snow and clouds, his head was enormous, and Anna believed she saw it swell when her words were vacuumed into his brain. It bobbed, balloonlike, and she had to remind herself to stay in her skin, stay alert, when what she most wanted to do was close her eyes and let it all be a dream.
“What did Katherine say?” Anna asked conversationally. “The night she died, she called you. What did she say?”
“You think if you keep me talking long enough, somebody will come and rescue you?” Bob put his hands on his knees and bent forward, the better to peer into her hiding place. “They won’t. The girl never gets rescued. Nobody fucking cares about you – any of you.”
“That has crossed my mind a time or two,” Anna admitted. The blanket started to fall away from her head and face. She clamped her chin down more tightly to hold it in place.
“Aaaaw,” Bob crooned. “You’re all shy and virginal now, got your blankie covering your face? Gonna hide under the covers?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Hiding under the covers never fails. Monsters can’t find you under the covers. What did Katherine say when she called you?”
“She said, ‘Anna Pigeon is a cunt.’ Nobody likes you, Danger Ranger.”
“It seems we have something in common after all,” Anna said.
“What did she say after the cunt proclamation?” A searing flare of agony fired her shoulder as she moved her damaged arm. Pride touched through the pain when she did not let her hurts show, not in her voice, not in any untoward disturbance of the blanket covering her from head to toe. The story of the Spartan boy, the stolen fox held tight to his middle, showing such stoicism the guard questioning him never suspected until the fox had eaten so far into the boy’s innards that the kid died on his feet, flickered in her mind. Anna wished the story had ended better. The guard adopting the little boy; fox and the lad becoming fast friends, chasing goats together through the Grecian hills; maybe the fox saving little Timmy Tchopotoulis from some Greek variation of a well.
“Bobby,” she said in her sharpest schoolmarm voice. “Tell me what Katherine said or you’ll be in big trouble.”
Bob blinked twice, his face lost all tension as if she’d slapped him. “She thought she’d broken her ankle,” he said quickly.
“And?”
Bob was stoned and traumatized and a wretched excuse for a man, but he wasn’t stupid. Two more blinks and he dragged himself out of whatever place Anna’s authoritarian voice had taken him.
“Why do women ask so many questions?” he asked, his terrifying bonhomie back in place.
“For the sheer joy of hearing men talk,” Anna replied. Wrestling with her metaphorical fox, she accidentally dislodged the blanket and it began to slip away from her face. “What else did Katherine say?” she managed before she caught it and held it between her teeth. Half her face was exposed, and the overwhelming relief startled her. Maybe women had to be raised in burkas before they could seem like protection instead of prison. The wool tasted of motor oil and its coarse fuzz drew the moisture from her mouth.
Bob shook his head from side to side as if trying to clear it. His hands slid from his knees up his thighs as he pushed himself upright. He was tiring of the game. Anna wondered how Scheherezade had managed to keep her train of thought going a thousand and one nights when a misstep meant her death.
She unclenched her teeth. The blanket slid a couple of inches down her chest but didn’t fall off of her shoulders. The cold felt clean and good on her neck. “Katherine thought you’d killed the wolf, shot it with a tranquilizer, then cut its throat,” she said, desperate to put off whatever was coming for another minute. “She figured you for the kind of guy who liked other people out cold, didn’t have the balls to deal with the conscious – woman or wolf. At least that’s what she said to me. ‘Everything’s big about Bob but his heart and his cock,’ I think she said. Yeah, that was it, verbatim. Shrinkage: cold heart, shriveled cock. Makes sense, you know. Based in language: cockles of the heart, warm the cockles, cock-” Anna was babbling, but she was doing so in such a reasonable tone of voice that for half a moment she listened to what she was saying, thinking it might actually make sense.
“I told her it served her right,” Bob snarled. “She said, ‘Send somebody, you fat fuck,’ and I threw her to the wolves. Literally,” he said and laughed.
Anna wished she’d changed the subject before he’d gotten to the “fat fuck” part. Choking on the insult, his throat puffed the way a frog’s will before it sings. In a second, he would realize he’d told Anna about it and thus been twice shamed.
“Not literally,” Anna said, drenching her voice with scorn. “Figuratively. Literally you hung up on her. Literally you did nothing. Literally you showed what a spineless, pathetic excuse for a man you are.” The impromptu cowl fell from her shoulders, sliding down to pool behind her and in her lap. She made no attempt to stop it or retrieve it this time. “You don’t rape women. That’s way too scary for little Bobby, isn’t it? You rape unconscious women. Whole different thing, Bobsie. Whole different thing.”
Anna was finding it extraordinarily easy to go off on Menechinn. She didn’t have to waste a moment’s time thinking up horrible words to say, words she hoped would cut all the deeper for being true. Bob’s face shook minutely, the way she’d seen it do each time a woman had the unmitigated gall to awaken him from his happy coma of Bobness. The miniature tsunami made him look young for a brief second – very young; the face of a toddler the first time Mommy punches him or Daddy burns him with his cigarette – and, for an even shorter second, Anna felt pity for him.
Not him, she told herself. That little boy.
To Bob she said: “Since we’ve been doing business together, I’ve been meaning to tell you what a pompous ass you are, with your pouffed hair and oily smile. Women have to be drugged to keep from laughing in your face. And a hypocrite! Sheesh! It would be scary, if it wasn’t so obvious. Expert. Lord! You’re a whore, Menechinn, a prostitute; you screw whoever hands you a dollar. This time, Homeland Security; next time… well, anybody with a buck and a quarter. You’re not even a good whore. You can’t get it up personally or professionally. You’re a limp dick.
“Your raping is like your killing: no balls in it. You rape women who are not there, and you’re not there when you kill. You don’t literally kill anybody, do you, Bobby boy? You literally do nothing. If you’re going to kill me, you many-chinned fat fuck, you’re going to have to do it personally, because, unless you do, I won’t die.
“I. Won’t. Die.”
That was her best shot. She had been as vicious and mean and ugly as it was possible to be without using a thesaurus. Smiling in what she hoped was a damning and disdainful manner, she settled the last of her strength in her wrists and waited.
Through the curtain of spruce needles, she watched him, trying to read her future in his stance, the way his eyes seemed to grow larger as his face relaxed and the cheek flab melted in a grim facsimile of the melting of one of Madame Tussauds wax madmen.
She realized she was seeing his eyes for the first time. Her revulsion and his grin-narrowed gaze had kept her out till now. His irises were dark, but the color was indistinct: blue or brown or hazel, or all three mixed together. He wasn’t more than five feet away, yet Anna couldn’t have reported the color with any more accuracy than that. They were the color of old water moccasins, the thick, unpretty snakes that took on the greenish brown shades of the muddy water of the Mississippi ditches where they thrived. Like the moccasin’s eyes, Menechinn’s had a flatness. In the snake, Anna knew it to be myopia and dullness of mind. In Menechinn, she wasn’t sure what it indicated but doubted it boded well for her continued good health.
Time wasn’t in its petty-paced persona. It had ceased to be linear, and Anna watched Menechinn’s face for a moment, then an hour, then a heartbeat. She waited for the look of sly craftiness to take it the way it had before he’d gone into a berserker rage and stomped the life out of the National Park Service’s tarp. She waited for it to grow still and raw-beef red as it had when he’d walked over to slap her on the cliff top. She waited for the gleam of joy and triumph to come into his eyes as it had when he hefted the wrench to smash her ankle.
She was growing old waiting and yet scarcely more than fifteen seconds passed before the waiting was over.
Bob Menechinn’s face crumpled and tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes. They froze before they’d traveled halfway down his face. His jaws yawned wide, rows of teeth bleached too white by the dentist’s art appearing false in the black of his mouth. He ducked his head and brought his forearms up to hide his face like a child ashamed of its tears but too broken to keep them from falling. Maybe he had regressed to a childhood state, when he’d been abused. Maybe he’d had a psychotic break and thought Anna was his dead puppy, Spot or Toughie or whatever.
A better person might have felt sorry for him, but, as far as Anna was concerned, whatever hell he was going through was way too good for him.
Then he charged, head down, mucus and tears streaming, and he crashed through the ephemeral defenses of her spruce bower and was on her. Though she’d been watching, waiting for it, the onslaught took her by surprise. Not even slowed by the tree branches, he came down in an avalanche of snow and rage, in the reckless flying tackle of a high school football player too young to know how frail the human body is.
Anna went over like a stone, Bob’s weight pinning her knees to her chest, her hands trapped between thighs and breasts. Air gusted from her lungs and she couldn’t get it back. Bob’s hands scrabbled at her head, trying to work under the layers to her throat to strangle her. Hot blood or snot or spittle hit her face. Moans and grunts, expelled on breath like sulfur, burned her nostrils. Like a trapped animal, Anna howled. Then she bit. Catching his nose between her teeth, she clamped down and hung on. Bob roared and thrashed, his fists pummeling her head. But for the hood, she would have been knocked senseless. Salty liquid filled her mouth, streamed down her throat, but she didn’t unlock her jaws. With a jerk, Bob freed himself. A chunk of his nose was still in her mouth. She spit it into his face. He reared back and her knees were free; her hands were free.
The flares were still clutched in her fingers. Striking one against the other, she heard the hiss of red fire and pushed them up into Bob’s gut. The down of his coat took the flames, then he screamed high and wild as the fire cut into his body. Anna pushed them deeper. He rolled away, pawing at his middle. Then he was up and running. Crazed with the fire in his belly, he crashed into the trunk of a tree several yards away, then fell. Screams turned to cries and cries turned to silence. Finally the only sound was the hissing of the flares, ships’ flares designed to burn underwater, under blood and flesh.
The smell of it sickened her. For a long time, she lay where she was, curled up like a sow bug, the taste of Bob Menechinn in her mouth and her mind. It was hard to remember why she lay like this, where she was and who she had killed. Presumably killed. Her eyes drifted closed and she began to fall. Through the rush of the canyon walls flashing by in her brain, she heard a growl. Bob had come to his feet, a human torch; he staggered toward her, arms outstretched, fire streaming from his hands.
With a lurch that triggered the pain in her shoulder, Anna came awake. Bob was where he had fallen. She’d gone to sleep. If she fell asleep again, she would freeze to death. More out of the habit of surviving than a force of will, she bunched her legs under her and, using the tree trunk, climbed to her feet.
Menechinn was dead. There’d be no last-minute rising from the jaws of death to make one last stand for the final scene. “Thankyoubabyjesus,” Anna muttered. He lay on his side, his hands hidden in the melted, blackened ruin of his coat where they’d clawed at the fire consuming his insides. The front and back of his parka were tarry messes of bodily fluids and goose down and synthetic fabric.
For a while, Anna stayed, looking at the wreck that had been, at least nominally, human. The sight of the damage she’d done didn’t please or displease her. It had taken time and pain to hobble the few yards to where he’d finally collapsed, and she hadn’t the energy to move away. She spit and spit again, not from disrespect – once one killed a man, there was little point in lesser forms of malice – she wanted the taste of him out of her mouth.
She also wanted his coat to keep herself warm, but hadn’t the strength to wrestle the garment off the body. Much of it would be melted to his skin. Its value wasn’t worth the calories it would take to harvest it. A story she’d read when she was a teenager flitted into her mind. To keep from freezing to death in a blizzard, a man had killed his horse, cut it open and crawled inside.
“Gross!” she said. She left coat and corpse unmolested. His radio had been melted, the leather case burned away, the buttons a mass of plastic still hot to the touch. Anna made her way painfully back to the Bearcat. Beyond hurting or thinking or much caring, she rolled herself in the army blanket, then the blue plastic tarp, leaned back against the snowmobile and let the winter coalesce around her.