Читать книгу The Drop Edge of Yonder - Rudolph Wurlitzer - Страница 9

When he woke, a hard brittle light was splattering against the cabin walls. There was no sign of Lobo Bill. When he questioned Not Here Not There, she shook her head and rolled her eyes back and forth, which made him think that Lobo Bill had either gone off to find his mules and traps, or he had decided to skip out altogether. Around him the cabin had been swept clean. The slop bucket had been emptied, his stock of flour, tobacco, whiskey, coffee, and dried jerky were stacked neatly in one corner, and split logs were piled up on either side of the fireplace.

The extreme tidiness of the cabin, together with Not Here Not There’s sullen silence, made him uneasy, as if she were harboring secret thoughts, or maybe, god help him, some ill-intentioned plan. Never mind, he thought. Whatever was meant to come would come, ready or not.

While they both waited for Lobo Bill to appear, Zebulon hunted for small game and prepared for the annual spring rendezvous by taking down and sorting the hundreds of muskrat and beaver pelts he had stashed in the crooks of several trees.

After three days Lobo Bill still hadn’t returned. Most of the time, Not Here Not There sat on the bench outside the cabin, staring at the river and the dark blue ice that had begun to splinter into large moving cracks. In the evening she avoided looking at him as she cooked one of the rabbits he had shot. After they ate dinner, instead of retreating to the corner she had chosen to sleep in, she joined him near the fire. Looking at him with a sly grin, she took his bottle of Taos White Lightning from him and drained the rest of it, then swayed back to her place across the room.

That night he was woken by her long nails scratching lines of blood down his stomach and across his groin, a violent gesture which she repeated even as she pulled him inside her, locking her legs around his waist as if she wanted to break him in two.

For the rest of the night, she dictated their furious passion on her own insatiable terms. In the morning she left the cabin without looking at him or saying a word.

Two days later she returned in the middle of a thunderstorm. Standing before him, she looked into his eyes as he removed her clothes and positioned her over the table, pinning her arms above her head.

When the door opened, he was plunging on inside her as if they had never been apart. When he became aware that Lobo Bill was standing above them with a raised hatchet, he decided that he might as well go out in the same way that he had been conceived. Part of him enjoyed the prospect, and he was damned if he was going to give Lobo Bill the satisfaction of an apology. He continued to thrust himself inside her with even more abandon, letting out a long mountain yell: “Waaaaaaaaagh!”

His fury broke the table, sending them both to the floor. Lobo Bill’s hatchet missed Zebulon’s skull by an inch and sliced a large hole in the middle of Not Here Not There’s stomach.

Before Lobo Bill could react, Zebulon reached for a pistol inside Lobo Bill’s belt and shot him between the eyes.

Unable to move or speak, he sat on the floor, watching Not Here Not There stagger through the door.

When he finally went after her, she was standing naked on a slab of ice halfway into the river, her hands trying to hold back the blood oozing from her stomach.

“You killed the only man that ever cared for me,” she said. “And now you’ve killed me.”

They were the first words that he had heard her speak.

As the ice sank lower, carrying her downstream, and the black freezing water rose over her legs and hips, she called out to him again: “From now on, you will drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you’re dead or alive, or if the unseen world exists, or if you’re dreaming. Three times you will disappear to yourself and all that you know, and three times you will—”

She said something more, but he was unable to hear the words as she slowly sank beneath the ice.