Читать книгу My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller - Gabriel Tallent, Gabriel Tallent - Страница 11

TURTLE STANDS ON A FALLEN LOG IN THE POURING RAIN. Fifteen, twenty feet below her the flickering yellow beam of Brett’s flashlight plays across the seamed and shaggy bark of redwoods, sword ferns, thimbleberry, the scaly, fluted trunks of western hemlocks, across the stream swollen high above its banks. She picks her way down to them. Water runnels, tea-colored with tannins, wind down between the knotty fern rhizomes, cutting dollhouse waterfalls, the soil spangled with something golden but not gold, tiny wafery minerals that circle the tiny catch pools, reflecting what light there is. The flooding washes millipedes out from beneath the logs, some trick of the current sorting dozens of them onto muddy washes so they lay stacked together, nearly all curled up, blue and yellow and glossy black.

She thinks, these useless boys, useless. She needs to leave, she needs to go, but they are lost and won’t make their way down this hillside without her. Still, finding her way back home is easier said than done. Walking cross-country under a bright moon and a clear predawn sky is something entirely different than finding your way through this cloud-throttled black. It would be hard going.

Beside her, Brett says, “I don’t know, dude.”

Jacob says, “Yeah. I don’t know either, man.”

Turtle boosts herself up onto the log and backpedals quietly into the ferns, going on hands and feet just before Brett sees the log and moves to it, leans against it to take some of the weight off his pack.

“Keep going?”

Jacob shakes his head, but they can’t stop here, that much is apparent. The ground is a mess. Turtle thinks, say something, say something to them, point the way for them, but she cannot seem to say anything. The only glimmer is the treacherous light of glowworms, nearly the same phosphorescent green as the tritium sights on her Sig Sauer, and she puts her hand on it now, thinking, I am not afraid of these boys, and if I have to make my way in this dark, I will. But she is afraid of them. She knows just from wrapping her hand around the Sig Sauer’s comforting grip, that grip that says, no one will ever hurt you, just from her own willingness to brave this flooded dark alone, she knows that she is afraid of the boys.

Jacob hitches his backpack up on his shoulders and they continue down the hillside, following the stream, which has overrun its narrow trough and flooded the nearby banks so that the boys splish-splash through ankle-deep water. She thinks, I will wait and see if we come to a road. And if we do—I don’t need to do anything; they will go one way, and I the other. But if there is no road, then they’re going to need me.

They descend into a basin where the stream forms a pond before pouring over the edge, the marshy banks thicketed with cattails. The pond is full of chorus frogs, and when Brett pans the pale yellow beam across the water, Turtle can see their hundreds of eyes, the distinct ridged shapes of their heads breaking the surface.

“Let’s strike out that way,” Jacob says, and motions west across the side of the drainage, not down it. “If we follow this stream, it is gonna be too steep.”

“Dude,” Brett says, “this stream takes us to the road. That’s what the guy said. We aren’t good at, like, improvising this navigation thing.”

“What possible reason have I ever given you to doubt my navigation?” They both laugh, Jacob looking down into the gulch, nodding. “All right, bud, all right, you wanna go right down this stream?”

“Yeah,” Brett says, “that’s the way he told us.”

“All right, lead—”

“Shh!” Brett says, and turns and swings the flashlight almost onto Turtle. She sits embowered in ferns, grinning. You fuck, she thinks, delighted. You fuck! She thinks, what gave me away? She can feel it in her own face; her pleasure; her eyes slitted with happiness; she thinks, you fuck, did you hear me, did you see me, some movement? She is delighted with herself, and with him, for almost having seen her, thinking, ahh, ahh, Easy Cheese Boy isn’t blind after all.

Jacob looks at Brett.

Brett says, “Sorry, man, I just had this, like, feeling—I don’t know. I just had this feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“There’s nothing out there,” Brett says, panning the flashlight across dripping ferns, across the tangle of cattails, almost over her.

You bastard, she thinks, delighted with him, you motherfucking bastard. She is full of joy.

They go through the pond with their backpacks held above their heads, crushing their way through cattails. They climb to the muddy edge, with the waterfall pouring down beside them, and the two boys look down into the gulch. Turtle cannot see what they see, but Jacob leans out, says, “It looks pretty steep down there, bud.”

Brett nods.

Jacob says, “All right.” He sheds his backpack and goes down over the lip. Brett passes him the backpacks one at a time, Jacob carefully banking them into the hillside. Then Brett climbs down. They help each other with the bags, and then drop out of her sight. When they have gone, Turtle crawls through the water after them. The muck of the pond bottom is knotted with water lily tubers. They are as thick as her arm, their flesh ridged and scaled, textured almost like pinecones not yet sprung. The drifts of algae feel like thick, sodden spiderwebs. She comes to the pond’s edge and climbs out, shedding water in curtains. Below, the gulch is dark except for the blue glow of Jacob’s headlamp and the lance of Brett’s flashlight. Over the sound of the rain and the torrent of the waterfall, she can hear them calling out to each other. Their heads cut above the ferns like rats through water.

Brett pauses and looks back in Turtle’s direction, and Turtle lowers herself into the weeds. Jacob plays his headlamp through the dark. Brett says, “I swear, I just—I had this bad feeling.”

She lies perfectly still and looks right back at them.

“Like what?”

“Something,” Brett says.

Jacob wades out toward her, moves the headlamp in meticulous search. “There’s nothing here,” he says.

“Just a bad feeling, a spooky feeling.”

Jacob stands, turns a slow circle, peering into the dark. He looks back at Brett helplessly.

Brett says, “If there’s nothing there, then there’s nothing there.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“I just hope it’s not that guy.”

“It’s not that guy.”

“I just hope he’s not, like, following us through the dark.”

The gulch narrows and grows steeper, spanned by fallen redwoods, the banks scarred by mudslides. Twenty feet below, it is finally blocked by an impenetrable wall of poison oak. Brett’s flashlight grows pale, dim, and then dies. He slaps the light into the palm of his hand and it glows to life, a sullen filament lit for a moment before it dies again. Turtle waits above, nervous, thinking, just do it, Turtle. She thinks, nothing for it now, but still she cannot. She is going to have to get down on hands and knees and beg Daddy’s forgiveness, beg, and maybe then he will let her off.

She hears Brett work the cap and dispense D-cell batteries into his hands. He cups them in his palms and blows on them.

Jacob says, “If there’s a road, we’ve got to be right on it.”

“Shit,” Brett says, “oh shit.”

“There’s no alternative.”

“That’s a lot of poison oak we’d have to go through.”

“The road’s gotta be right past it.”

Brett hunches over the flashlight, whispering to the batteries. “Come on, come on, come on.”

In the moment of silence, all they can hear is the rain, soft, padding on leaves, and the crackling of the wet soil, the sound of the river.

“He said,” Brett says, sounding betrayed, “that we just go this way, and we’d hit the road.”

“We must be right on it,” Jacob says, “we’ve got to be right goddamn there.” He starts precariously down, clutching at ferns and shoots of poison oak, each step sinking into the mud. Turtle can see that he will never make it down the hillside, and before she can stop herself, before she can hesitate, she rises out of the weeds and steps up onto a log above them and says, “Wait.”

They both turn and search the dark for her, and then suddenly she is bathed in Jacob’s bright LED light, standing among cow parsnips and nettles, conscious of her ugliness, her lean bitch face and tangles of silt- and copper-smelling hair, half turning away to hide the pale oval of her face. For a moment, no one says anything.

Then she says, “Are you lost?”

Jacob says, “Not so much lost as unmoored from any knowledge of our location.”

Brett says, “We’re lost.”

Turtle says, “I don’t think that’s the way.”

Jacob looks down the gulch. The light pans over the riot of poison oak, the mud, the water sheeting the ground. He says, “I don’t know what would make you think that.”

Brett says, “Are we above a road?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

Brett says, “Who are you?”

“I’m Turtle.” She comes down and stands in front of Jacob, and he reaches out and they shake hands.

“Jacob Learner,” he says.

“Brett,” Brett says, and they shake.

Jacob says, “What are you doing here?”

“I live near here,” she says.

“So we’re near a road?”

“No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”

Brett looks wonderingly up at the hillside. “People live near here?”

“Sure.”

Jacob looks back at her, and she is blinded with the blue light again. “Sorry,” he says, angling the light away. “Can you lead us down to the river?”

Turtle looks away into the dark.

Brett says, “What happened? Is she still there?”

“She’s thinking,” Jacob says.

“Did we make her mad?”

“She’s speculative.”

“She’s still not talking.”

“Okay: She’s really speculative.”

“This way,” Turtle says, leading them in a muddy traverse along the hillside, looking for a clear place farther out.

“Holy shit,” Brett says, “holy shit. Look at her go.”

“Hey!” Jacob says. “Wait up.”

Turtle leads them across fallen redwoods and then descends to the river among grand firs on a low, sloping ridge, Jacob’s light casting her shadow out ahead of her, the boys crashing behind.

The river has flooded its banks and Turtle comes down into a great tangle of alders hip-deep in water, long whips of stinging nettle bent in the current and swinging like seaweed, submerged skunk cabbages nosing out of the torrent, rafts of dead leaves scummed up against every nook and cranny, eddies circling blackly with huge dollops of foam.

“Holy shit on a shitty, shitty shingle,” Brett says, and whistles.

“There’s no road,” Jacob says.

“We’re fine without it,” Turtle says.

“Maybe you are,” Brett says.

Jacob stands there, sheathed to the waist in mud, and laughs and says, “Man,” drawing it out into a long syllable, his voice giving it somehow a richness of humor and a depth of optimism that she is unused to, running his tongue along muddied lips with pleasure and saying again, “Oh man,” like he can’t believe the incredible good fortune of being so entirely lost beside a river so flooded, and Turtle has never seen anyone confront misfortune this way.

Brett says, “Oh man,” and he says it differently, and then he says, “We are fucked.”

Turtle looks from one to the other.

“We are fucked,” Brett says. “We will never, ever get home. We are fucked.”

“Yes,” Jacob says in hushed awe, weighting his words with relish. “Yes.”

Brett says, “It’s ironic, because we were fine before, we had the perfect campsite before, but nooooo, we needed water.”

“And look,” Jacob says. “Hashtag success! Hashtag winning!”

“We need somewhere to hole up,” Brett says, then, to Turtle, “Do you know where we are? Is there somewhere we could sleep? It’s all mud, isn’t it? There’s nowhere not covered in mud.”

It is still raining hard, and everyone, including Turtle, is cold, and there is nowhere level here, not with the river flooded, and to find a campsite, they would need to climb the ridge again, and though Turtle could, she doesn’t know about the boys.

“I’m so cold,” Brett says, “dude, so incredibly goddamn cold.”

“It’s chilly,” Jacob agrees with deep humor, trying to wipe the mud out of his eye sockets. He stands stiffly, in the way of people whose clothes are cold and for whom every movement brings new flesh into contact with gritty wet fabric. He looks at Turtle, and something occurs to him. “How did you find us?”

“Just ran into you,” she says.

The boys look at each other, shrug, as if to indicate they’ve heard stranger things.

“Can you help us?” Brett asks. He hunches shivering under his backpack. Rain sleets around him. Jacob finds a poison oak leaf stuck to his cheek, flings it disgustedly away into the dark. Turtle chews her fingers in consideration.

“Jesus,” Brett says, “you don’t feel any urgent need to fill the gaps in conversation, do you?”

“What does that mean?” Turtle says.

“Nothing,” Brett says.

“You seem very patient,” Jacob says.

“You move at your own pace,” Brett says.

“Speculative,” Jacob says.

“Speculative, that’s right, thoughtful,” Brett agrees.

“Like, where did you study Zen Buddhism?”

“And was your Zen master the ancient, slow-moving reptile on whose shell rests the entire universe, known and unknown, fathomed and unfathomed?”

“Is that what your name means?”

“Is this a koan? Can you help us? To which the reply is, and can only ever be: silence.”

“Dark, dude.”

Turtle is surprised that they would go on like this in a cold downpour and then she thinks, they’re waiting on you, Turtle. They’re waiting on you and the talking helps them. “This way,” she says, and leads them back into the forest.

In the dark, she circles the largest trees, Jacob shining his light on them. She leaves the boys huddled together and ventures out in every direction, cutting back to them when she doesn’t find what she’s looking for. She is hoping for a burned-out redwood with a hollow chamber, but the best she finds is a stump, crosscut long ago, with axe-cut notches in the sides where the scaffold was pegged to the trunk.

She looks up at the stump’s hidden crown and Jacob watches her, shading his eyes from the rain, and then follows her gaze. Lightning strikes on Albion Ridge across the river, and Turtle counts it, two miles before the thunder comes, rolling with the distance.

She climbs up the bark, hooks the top with a long reach, and drops into a deep, circular pit where the heartwood has rotted out. The hollow crown is ten feet across and tall enough to sit in without being able to see over the sides. A single huckleberry grows up through the middle in a rough circle of punky wood that drains the water. She wraps her fist around its base and rips it out and pitches it into the dark. She helps Brett and Jacob up, and they begin digging out leaf litter. She opens Brett’s backpack, finds a hundred feet of parachute cord still in its tight store-bought bundle, teases the bundle apart, quarters the line, and passes her knife through the loops to make four twenty-five-foot lengths.

They unfold the blue tarp and Turtle bowlines the parachute cord to the corner grommets. Then she drops off the stump, and Jacob after her, while Brett holds the tarp. She pitches Brett a center pole, and he holds it in place. She wraps the first line around a stob, passes the bitter end back to the standing line, and ties a tautline hitch, a slide-and-grip knot that can be cinched up the wet line, though she wonders, even as she is tying it, if a tarbuck knot would be better. She guys out each line in turn. When she comes to the last, she finds that Jacob has already guyed it out and tied the tautline hitch. Water runs down the line, gathers just above the knot, and streams off in a single ribbon. The blue light from the headlamp follows the water on the parachute cord. She runs the knot between thumb and forefinger, finds it tight and well dressed. Jacob stands beside her.

She says, “You knew this knot already?”

“No,” he says, “just saw you make it.”

She plucks the line, and it thrums. She looks at him but doesn’t know what to say, because he’d made the knot well, in the dark, not knowing how to make it, and she thinks he should be told how good that is, how rare, but she doesn’t know how to say such a thing. She undoes Jacob’s knot, then makes the next knot with conspicuous slowness. She ties a slipknot high on the standing line. She takes the bitter end, which passes around a branch, and brings it through the slipknot and bends it back down, making a pulley. She hauls on the line until the cord cuts paling corrugations across her palms. The pulley tightens the whole system; the tarp creaks with strain. She looks at him again.

Rain runs down his face, and he wipes his eyes, nodding.

She ties the tension off with half hitches, making them with exaggerated slowness. She glances back at him again, and plucks the cord.

“Ahh,” he says.

“The rain,” she says, “loosens the lines.”

He nods again.

Here is the difference between me and Martin, she thinks, here is the difference—it is that I know the rain loosens the lines and I care, and Martin knows that the rain loosens the lines and he does not care, and I do not know why, I do not understand how you could not care, because it is important to do things right, and if that isn’t true, I don’t know what is.

She circles the stump, testing each guyline, cinching them down and doubling them up with half hitches, thinking, goddamn Martin, and how I will pay for this, how I will get down on my knees and beg not to pay and how I will pay anyway.

“It’s like she can see in the dark,” Brett says.

“She can,” Jacob says. “You can tell she can.”

“No, like she can really see in the dark. And not just a little.”

“Yeah,” Jacob says. “That’s what I mean.”

“Where do you think she is right now?”

“In her head,” Jacob says.

“I can hear you,” Turtle says. She climbs up the side of the stump and helps Jacob after her.

“She’s so quiet.”

“Not all of us,” Jacob says, “go through life in a caffeine-fueled rage, Brett.”

“Hey,” Brett says, “it’s good for your stomach. The coffee burns the ulcers right off your stomach lining.”

“What are you talking about?” Turtle says.

“Coffee,” Jacob says, “and how it mineralizes your bones.”

“Is that true?”

“No,” Jacob says.

Inside, they have made a kind of dark, wet grotto, ten feet across, maybe four feet deep. Brett has laid down a heavy-duty plastic ground cloth, and now he hunches at the far end of the grotto, huddled up in his sleeping bag, his arms wrapped around himself, shivering. Jacob is unpacking his bag. He takes out a siliconized nylon stuff sack and offers it to her.

“What?” she says.

“Take my sleeping bag.”

“No way.”

“You’re shivering.”

“So are you,” she says.

“I’m going to spoon Brett,” he says.

Brett says, “What?”

“Take the bag,” Jacob says.

“No,” she says.

“First of all, we owe you,” Jacob says. “We never would’ve found somewhere dry if not for you. Second of all, Marcus Aurelius says—”

Brett groans. “If only,” he says, “the emperor’s journal had been burned, as he asked. Should we really follow the instructions of a man whose final instruction was that his former instructions be destroyed?”

“Marcus Aurelius says,” Jacob continues, “that ‘joy for humans lies in human actions: kindness to others, contempt of the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.’ This—loaning you my bag—satisfies all of those conditions. Please take it.”

Turtle is looking at him, incredulous.

“What’s happening?” Brett says.

“I don’t know,” Jacob says. “Maybe she’s making an expression?”

“What?” Turtle says.

“Please, let me give you the bag.”

“No.”

Brett says, “Turtle, take the bag. Seriously. His grasp of reality is tenuous at best, so arguing with him is dangerous. Nobody knows what will shake off that last handhold and send him spiraling into madness. Also, I have a sleeping bag that we can sort of spread out like a blanket.”

Turtle looks from one to the other of the boys, and tentatively accepts the sleeping bag and begins pulling it out of its sack. The nylon is of such a high grade that it is soft as silk. It is homemade and has no zipper. She slips into it. The rain drums on the plastic ceiling, filling the chamber with noise. She can feel her breath in moist plumes, and she runs her cold hands together, the fingertips turned to raisins. She can hear the boys in the dark, their ragged exhalations, their movements as they huddle close under the one sleeping bag.

Brett says, “Jacob?”

“Yeah?”

“Jacob, do you think she’s a ninja?”

She says, “I’m not a ninja.”

Brett says, “She’s a ninja, isn’t she, Jacob?”

“I’m not a ninja,” she says.

“Hmmm …” Brett hems and haws. “Hmmmm … sort of, yes, actually, sort of a ninja.”

“No.”

“Where is your ninja school?” Brett asks.

“I didn’t go to ninja school,” she says.

“She’s bound by covenants of secrecy,” Jacob observes.

“Or perhaps,” Brett says, “perhaps, the animals of the forest taught her.”

“I’m not a ninja!” she yells.

The boys sit in chastened silence for a long moment. Then, as if her denial has given final proof to a theory once tenuous, Brett says, “She’s a ninja.”

Jacob says, “But does she possess preternatural powers?”

The boys talk in a way that is alarming and exciting to her—fantastical, gently celebratory, silly. To Turtle, slow of speech, with her inward and circular mind, their facility for language is dizzying. She feels brilliantly included within that province of things she wants, lit up from within by possibility. Giddy and nervous, she watches them, chewing on her fingertips. A new world is opening up for her. She thinks, these boys will be there when I go to high school. She thinks, and what would that be like—to have friends there, to have friends like this? She thinks, every day, get up and get on the bus, and it would be, what, another adventure? And all I would have to do is open my mouth and say, ‘help me with this class,’ and they would help.

Slowly, the boys drop off to sleep, and Turtle lies opposite them. She thinks, I love him, I love him so goddamn much, but, but let me stay out. Let him come after me. We will see what he does, won’t we? Here is a game we play, and I think he knows we play it; I hate him for something, something he does, he goes too far, and I hate him, but I am unsure in my hatred; guilty and self-doubting and hating myself almost too much to hold it against him; that is me, a goddamn slut; and so I trespass again to see if he will again do something so bad; it is a way to see if I am right to hate him; I want to know. So you take off and you ask yourself: should I hate him? And I guess you will have your answer when you come back, because he will respond to your absence in a way you can love or he will respond beyond all reason, and that will be the proof, but always, Turtle—and you know this—he is ahead of you in this game. He will look at you and know exactly how far he can go and he will take you right to the brink, and then he will see he has come to the brink and he will step back; but perhaps not, perhaps he will go too far, or perhaps there is no such calculation in him.

An itch is developing on her lower back. She runs her hand along the waistline of her jeans and finds the tick just above the elastic of her panties. She can feel its pearl-smooth body.

“Brett?” she breathes, unbelting her pants and removing the holster, sliding it deeper into the bag to hide it. “Jacob?”

“Yeah?” Jacob breathes back.

“Do you have tweezers?”

“Brett does,” Jacob says, “in his bag.” She hears Jacob sit up in the dark. He rustles around in the bag for seemingly a very long time before he finds them.

“Got them,” he says. “Tick?”

“Yeah, tick,” she says.

“Where is it?”

“Low down on my back.”

“All right,” he says.

“I can’t get it myself,” she says.

“All right.”

She rolls over onto her belly, hitches her jeans down and her shirt up to bare her lower back. Jacob crawls quietly over to her, trying not to disturb the sleeping Brett. She lies with her cheek resting on the cold black plastic of the ground cloth. Jacob kneels beside her. He turns the headlamp on, and they are bathed in its blue glow.

“I’ve never done this before,” he says.

“Get the head,” she says.

“Do you twist it clockwise?” he asks. “I’ve heard they screw themselves in. Their mouthparts are an auger.”

“No. It’ll vomit out its stomach contents when you start on it. Just pull it straight out in one go if you can,” she says.

“Okay,” he says. He puts one hand on the small of her back, framing the tick between thumb and forefinger. His hand is warm and confident, her skin ringing electric. Her vision is narrowly of the black ground cloth, dirty, lapped up in wrinkles, but her focus is entirely on him, unseen, bending over her.

“Just do it,” she says.

He is silent. She feels the tweezers fasten down on the tick. They bite into her flesh, and then there is a plucking sensation.

“You get it all?” she says.

“I got it,” he says.

“You get it all?”

“I got it all, Turtle.”

“Good,” she says. She hitches her T-shirt down and rolls back over. She can hear Jacob crushing the tick to death with the tweezer points. The rain drums on the tarp stretched taut above them. Jacob switches off the light, and she listens to them, there in the dark with her.