Steps (14 page)

Chapter 26

Edwin’s Choice   
(Edwin)

G
et him! Get him!” Edwin screamed in one long breath with a rise and dip in the syllables. He ran toward the cliff after Perry, and part of his mind said he would not make it up, he should dodge around the bend and climb up the way Billings had earlier, but his body disobeyed his mind and slammed into the muddy cliff and dug its fingers into the dirt. He ignored the pain in his fingers and clawed up the route Perry forged ahead of him. He grabbed the same roots and saplings his son grabbed and levered himself over the lip of the ridge, came to his feet, and ran headlong into the smoke and flame of the forest fire, making no mental calculation of the damage done to his fingers in the climb.

He did not put his hand to his mouth to cover it against the smoke. He did not raise his arm to stave off the heat rolling out of the trees. He flew down the trail cut by the truck, past the busted tricycle and propane tank, and then he halted next to the old house, miraculously untouched by the fire even though it raged in every direction.

Edwin searched the trees for movement. He spun a circle, confused, almost as if he had forgotten why he was here. He thought for a moment he was searching for Amalie. He pounded the side of his head as if to shove clear thoughts into the dead meat between his ears. He glanced at his fingers and thought he should feel the pain of the cuts on them, but all of him felt numb as if from a hard drunk. He slapped his hands together, and when he remembered why he was here he yelled, “Perry!”

He waited for a response and received none. He ran until he reached the abandoned house, leapt up the porch, shot past the rocking chairs made from rough-cut wood, and darted through the broken screen door and across the foyer area. A slick grime coated the floor, and he fell, righted himself and burst into the first bedroom he came to. An aluminum-framed poster-bed lay in pieces on the floor with the mattress tucked into the corner, stained and grimy with some sort of animal nest. Smoke filled the house in a gray fog that must have torn at his throat if he would only give it a moment of thought.

“Perry!” Edwin ran through the house, into the destroyed kitchen, its cabinets splintered and the doors ripped off, into the bathroom with its tattered shower, into another bedroom, this one a child’s room with handmade bunk beds lacking their mattresses.

Edwin froze, and even though his lungs burned for air, he held his breath. A piece of plywood served as the base for the top bunk. On this rested a large stuffed panda bear the size of a child, facing outward toward the door at the edge of the bed. Filth covered its matted black and white fur, and a candy-faced smile played on its snout and up its cheeks. The patch around its eyes amplified an expression of discontent and alertness, and in its arms had been placed a wedge axe, the sort used to split wood, a well-worn weapon-tool with a black-charred head.

Behind the panda bear jutted a pair of child’s knees, bare and dirty, pulled tight against a pair of cheeks, beneath a pair of eyes so red and bright they could have been burning coals. Long strands of hair fell around the knees, curly and brown and unmoving. The eyes did not move, but words rose from a mouth hidden behind the knees. “Bump a fish, bump a fish, are you my bump a fish?”

The girl appeared about Shelly Lynn’s age. He should not have entered the house. Perry must have kept to the woods, and now Edwin had lost both his son and his wife to one bloody cut of fate. Here sat a girl who was not his, but could be, growling sounds which should not come from such a young throat. The bass roar of the fire penetrated the floorboards of the house, a flaming train rolling through the mountains, and then the girl flew off the bed with wild hair and wild arms flailing. She moved like a squirrel up his leg, found a toe-hold on his belt, and wrapped her legs around his torso. Edwin defended his eyes against the rake of her fingers. She did not knock him down, but he stumbled and managed to raise an arm as her head craned toward his neck.

She bit into his raised arm, cleaved out a piece of flesh, and then Edwin pried her off his chest and slung her across the room. She felt light and small, nothing but empty clothes. She hit the wall hard and bounced to her feet. One arm hung cocked and broken, with the hint of a bone grinding beneath the skin.

She rushed him with blinding speed, locked onto his leg, and bit into his thigh. Edwin grabbed the back of her head and wrenched her away from his leg, and with her head tilted back he identified the two big-girl teeth she used with such effectiveness. They were huge things, the cutters of a rodent, and to either side he saw gum and the hint of adult molars poking through.

He wound her hair around his hand and used it to lever her head away from him, holding it like a leash as he worked his other hand between her and his body. She clawed at him with her broken arm, but now that he had her by the hair, she was manageable. He yanked her to the floor, shoved her face-down, and fell on top of her.

She writhed and screamed beneath him. She clawed and gnashed her teeth. Blood seeped from her eyes and nose and smeared around her mouth as if she had eaten a fistful of blackberries. Her tinny screams pierced his ears, shrieks of a girl the size of Shelly Lynn in a pitch almost too high for human hearing.

Edwin searched the room as his mind half-started to function again. He needed something or someone. He needed help, but where? He was alone with the girl and the dirty panda bear with its axe.

“Hello!” Edwin screamed. “Help me! Billings! Goddammit!”

The girl spun out of his grasp and managed to hang her rat-teeth into the flesh of his forearm. He yanked her hair, and her head snapped back. Edwin adjusted his weight until he heard the grind of her breath pressed between him and the floorboards.

“Daddy!” She gasped the words. “Daddy help me!”

“Stop it!” Edwin yelled at her, but with every breath she spoke again.

He must have loosened his grip or shifted his weight, because she slipped out from under him, and with her broken arm stumbled into the hallway. He heard the slapping of little feet as he rose, and by the time he was up, she stood in the doorway, this time holding a hunting knife with a bone handle. She slashed the knife, and the rat now had both claws and teeth. She raced around him fast enough to spin Edwin in circles.

Her attacks sliced through his jeans and shirt, but did not cut deeply into his flesh. She swiped low at her height, and when Edwin reached out to defend himself, she slashed his forearm and opened a long line that might be to the bone.

Edwin kicked her, and she crumpled into the bottom bunk, rolled to her feet and tucked herself into the nook, a safe place with her knife and teeth exposed, panting.

He grabbed the axe from the panda bear and held it in front of him. He swished it back-and-forth to keep the girl in her place, to ward her off and stay the attack. She slunk from side-to-side in the cubby beneath the top bunk with an animal expression, her eyes always on Edwin, head swiveling as she paced, her body crouched and cocked and ready to launch. She spoke, but the words were not English. They might have been German or some other guttural language, or maybe they were not words at all but random syllables strung together by the girl’s disease-ravaged brain.

She lunged at him with the knife, teeth bared, and Edwin felt his hips sway and his weight shift and his shoulders rock forward. It was like watching someone else as the axe sliced through the air and embedded itself in the little girl’s shoulder.

She stumbled back, and the axe came out of her flesh. Her left arm hung limp, severed half from the bone. The knife in her other hand slashed up at Edwin as if his attack had no meaning, and this time he brought the axe to bear against the side of her head. There was the
thunk
of it through the bone just above her left cheek. It lifted her off the floor and sent her spinning into the wall. She dropped the knife and rose to her knees, and then she propped herself on her right arm with the other dragging along, crawling at Edwin with her mangled left eye angled up, and the other staring right through him.

Her mouth chocked open with a smack, “Daddy,” and she was not Shelly Lynn, though she was small enough with the same long hair. Her right arm gave out. She fell to the floor, stiffened and twitched as the shock of nerves let loose. Edwin did not stay to watch the rest. He bolted from the room and tore through the house with the axe dragging behind him, a sacred thing christened with the blood of a child, and he would never, never let it go.

He fell off the porch, lay on the ground and vomited. Urine soaked his pants. He could not remember wetting himself, and he imagined that was exactly how it happened.

The fire avoided the house as if a line had been drawn along the dirt road. It stopped just on the other side. He stood, balanced himself on the axe, and using it as a cane, he wandered through the ruts cut by the truck back toward the lake. When he came to the lip of the ledge, he counted those below. Shelly Lynn and Moore huddled on the far side of the bonfire, away from where Perry had attacked his mother. Arroyo sat by himself, while Fletcher and Gentry paced along the shore in either direction, both of them searching over the lake and down the shore. He did not see Billings.

Amalie had not moved, and this was exactly what Edwin had expected, even if a small part of him wanted to disbelieve it. His wife lay still and dead, his son had not returned, and he had just killed a little girl with a splitting axe.

A shiver shot through him. It was not much, but his back stiffened and his legs locked. His throat itched either from the vomiting, or something he did not want to consider. He stepped away from the edge and knelt as muscles cramped in his arms and stomach. He vomited again, and when he wiped his mouth, he was not sure if the blood was new, or that of the girl. When it passed, he stood, held the axe above his head, and shrieked down at them. Arroyo raised his rifle.

Edwin yelled, “Shoot if you want, Arroyo. Aim for the head!” He touched his forehead between the eyes.

“Stand down,” Fletcher yelled.

Edwin slid down the embankment as Arroyo lowered his weapon. They gathered beside the bonfire and stood away from him and his axe. Blood leaked down his arms and legs where the girl had cut him, and gruesome remains clung to the axe head. It took Edwin a few seconds to understand their unspoken question, and he held up the axe and said, “It wasn’t Perry.”

Arroyo motioned with his rifle up the cliff. “Any more up there?”

“No. At least not in that house. Can’t say otherwise.”

There was silence, and then Gentry spoke. “You okay, man?”

“How the hell you think I am!” Edwin didn’t mean to scream the words, but with the release, he was suddenly tired and exhausted and could think of nothing more than sitting. He sat cross-legged and laid the axe across his lap. His body shook, his hands shook, and he began to sob. Nobody moved to help or comfort him.

After a while, a small hand touched his shoulder, and a voice in his ear said, “It’s okay, Daddy.”

He caught his breath and said, “Don’t say that, Baby Bird.”

“Don’t say what?”

“Daddy. Call me something else. Call me Edwin or something.”

“But you’re Daddy.”

“I know, Baby Bird. I’m sorry. It’s okay. Call me Daddy.” He replaced the axe for his daughter in his lap. They huddled together in silence while the soldiers left them to their mourning.

Moore reached into the pile of supplies and came up with a muddy blanket. She carried it into the lake until she was waist-deep, where she washed the blanket and came out of the water wringing it. “It isn’t clean or dry, but it’s cleaner.” She spoke the words to Edwin as she moved past him, and then she covered Amalie with it.

Moore sat beside him and Shelly Lynn and said, “I don’t guess you, um . . .”

“I couldn’t find him. I don’t think I want to.”

“Why not, Daddy?” Shelly Lynn said.

“I just don’t think I want to find him, Baby Bird.”

“Would you find me if I got lost?”

“You won’t get lost.”

“But what if I do.”

“You won’t.”

“Will Perry come back?”

“No telling, Baby Bird. Just let me worry about that, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy.”

Edwin tried to imagine what he would do if Shelly Lynn’s eyes bled red like the girl in the house, but he could think of nothing at all. The whole of his head felt filled with sand, and but for the blurred vision in his eyes, his senses became a numb buzzing.

Gentry knelt next to him and spoke. “We’ll need to do something with her.” He pointed at Amalie.

“Okay. Take care of it,” he said. Gentry squeezed his shoulder and stood. Along with Fletcher, they lifted Amalie’s body beneath the blanket and disappeared behind him, carrying her toward the fire.

“Are they going to burn Mommy?” Shelly Lynn asked.

“Ask God, Baby Bird. What does He say?”

Shelly Lynn put her head against Edwin’s shoulder. The gash in his forearm covered his hand in blood, and smeared more on Shelly Lynn’s shirt. Neither she nor the others cared or noticed. Blood had become part of them as much as clothing and mud, and they wore it in that way of ancient man, but without streaking it along their cheeks and chest. He displayed his blood in its natural state, and Edwin doubted he would ever feel clean again.

Rising with Shelly Lynn, he carried her into the lake until they were deep enough, and then he lowered himself into the water and tasked himself with rinsing away what blood he could. He wiped his face and ran his fingers through Shelly Lynn’s hair to untangle the knots. Shelly Lynn’s hair was Amalie’s job, and he resisted the urge to look behind him at the fire. He couldn’t braid it or wrap that ponytail thing around it, and he thought maybe Moore could help.

“I love you, Baby Bird,” he said. “More than anything in the world.”

“That’s what Him Potty Man says, too. He says He loves us, but this doesn’t feel much like love, Daddy. I don’t think I want to be loved anymore.”

Edwin lifted her from the water, and with her arms around his neck carried her ashore. They stood with their backs to the fire as they dried. When he finally faced the fire, his wife had become a charred thing mixed one with charred wood.

“Daddy,” Shelly Lynn said. “I don’t want to see Him Potty Man anymore.”

“Me neither.”