Hummingbird Salamander Page 12

  I looked back, and the guy had gained on me. A kind of determined calm look on his hangdog face that irritated me. Like I was just all in a day’s work. Like, this woman isn’t going to be a problem. I couldn’t tell if he was just trying to shadow me in his clumsy way or catch up.

  I slowed again and could feel a kind of calm come over me. Something about the anonymous nature of it all. Something about still being in the dark. About having Silvina’s journal to defend. How I told myself this was probably the guy who had taken the hummingbird. How I felt that loss like the hummingbird had been alive. Grave-robbing after the grave had already been robbed once.

  Slowed still more. I could hear his heavy tread now. What if he had a gun?

  But I was angry. A kind of rage building up and spilling over. Too much of this skulking around. Too much of it. The guy watching the house. Fusk with his threats. Larry in the hospital and me unable to connect the dots, recognize the significance. I was bigger than the man following me. I was more dangerous. Why should I be the one to run? Why bother? It was tiring. It was a role that wasn’t me. Just something people thought I should be.

  I stopped, pretended to dig around in my purse, as the man approached. Twenty feet, ten feet. I didn’t look up. I don’t know if I imagined him lunging at me or he’d just arrived in my space. But I hit him with my purse anyway. I hauled off and “went for the country mile,” as Dad would’ve said.

  Shovel Pig, full force, smashed into his face, and he staggered back, holding his head with both hands, bent over. I rushed him, pulled his head forward and down with my hands behind his head … while I brought my knee up into his chin.

  That made a sound. I even felt it in my knee. When I hit a person, they don’t forget it. I don’t know any other way.

  He dropped to the sidewalk, rolled over, tried to get up. I kicked him in the chest, and he came to rest against the wooden fence, which buckled but held.

  “Who the hell are you?” I screamed in his face. “And why the fuck are you following me?”

  I had my pepper spray out and was threatening him with it. Which felt like anticlimax. But I don’t think he knew what was happening yet. He looked around, in his rumpled suit, like someone was going to stop and save him. But it was quiet. Or no one wanted the trouble. Or the neighbors were used to this kind of trouble.

  I repeated my question.

  He looked up at me through a bloody eye. A trickle of blood from a split lip. His left eye already had a black circle around it.

  “Stop looking for Silvina,” he said. Local muscle? He had an accent like he’d grown up here. “Stop looking for Silvina. Or you’ll pay.” He had a good chin to be so coherent already.

  I lunged like I was going to kick him again, and it felt good when he flinched, held up his hands. It was like being back in the wrestling ring. Me circling an opponent, looking for the opening. Them already down, at a disadvantage.

  “How about this,” I said. “You stop following me. You stop threatening me. And you stop stealing things from me.”

  Was that surprise in his eyes? Like one of those things I’d accused him of something he hadn’t done?

  “You won’t like what’s going to happen if you don’t stop,” he said, already readying himself for another assault. His gaze unfocused.

  But my anger was banking. More cars were driving down the street. I saw someone looking up at us from around the corner of the parking lot down below. A distant siren that probably had nothing to do with us.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “Or I’ll go to the police. Now, get out of here.”

  I held Shovel Pig and my go-bag in one hand and the pepper spray in the other.

  With difficulty, without another word, the man got up and staggered back down the hill, down the sidewalk. I’d torn his suit in the back. The white shirt beneath protruded like the inside of a stuffed animal.

  My heartbeat was going to overwhelm me, so I steadied myself. Slowed myself down. Took some deep breaths. Watched the man disappear around the corner into the parking lot.

  I started back toward my car, up the hill.

  That’s when I heard it. The sound of someone on the other side of the fence. Someone shadowing me. I stopped walking. They stopped walking. I started up again, they started again. I kept walking. Stopping again would be a tell. I was shaky, not ready for more.

  Maybe just a concerned neighbor? How long had he been there? Every instinct told me it was a man.

  I kept walking. The car would be close. I could sprint to it if I needed to. I could unlock the door fast, could get behind the wheel fast. Remember to lock the door as soon as I was in.

  But then, the sinister thing. The thing that truly unnerved me.

  I could tell that a second person had joined the first. I heard a scuff of shoe, an intake of breath, a strangled choke.

  I stopped. Frozen. Looking at the fence slats as if willing myself to see beyond them.

  A weight fell to the ground. Like a body. It had to be a body.

  Someone lit a match. Someone stood there, breathing.

  And as I stood there, I smelled cigarette smoke. A thin spiral curled up above the line of the fence. I had a sense of a darkness, of a presence that was chilling in its silence. Its precision.

  Fuck. I was immobilized like prey.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  I wrenched myself out of my fear. Whatever got me moving. Not just pinned there.

  I made for my car, all discipline gone, Shovel Pig smacking into my side. Shambolic. In sheer, instinctual panic. I ran. I ran and did not look back and I got into my car and I shoved the key in the ignition and I roared out of there without my seat belt on.

  The calm, even breathing of the person I couldn’t see. The spiral of smoke. The firm, even tread. The sense of bleakness, of darkness, and the sound of the shoes or dress boots against gravel and dirt. A body at his feet.

  It didn’t seem credible that the man I’d beaten up had anything to do with that specter, haunting me, invisible, from the other side of the fence.

  But what did I know?

  Nothing.

  [44]

  Much of Silvina’s journal described an epic journey down the West Coast. According to her account, she’d started at the border with Canada and gone as far south as Northern California. This was in the third year of her banishment after the trial. I would’ve been thirty-three at the time: oblivious, still learning the ropes at the company, not yet a manager.

  I reread the story of her “expedition” over and over. Not just because it had been important to her. But because it was odd to see the familiar through her eyes and to realize how familiar it had been to her. That Quito had been where she had felt strange. That Argentina had meant little to her. And, after her trial, even less.

  “For the first time, I felt, in a way, as if I was home,” Silvina wrote. “In those endless miles of coast, in the cold and the fog and the rain, I opened up what was closed down. I received and kept receiving. It was sunless. Bridges would appear monstrous out of endless shadow, almost brutalist. The smell of marsh water would hit unexpected and the richness of cedar. The hawks on the telephone wires felt like sentinels judging my progress.

  “I would drive until I found a wilderness trail—through hills or along the coast. I loved lighthouses because they were always somewhere isolated. I didn’t like to see lots of people when driving. How can we pretend we are alone, but I wanted to pretend I was alone. Until I wasn’t.

  “I saw deer and otters, a bobcat or two, and, once, a bear, in the distance. Just a smudge, a shadow. But that was enough. While in the trees, as I walked, so many birds, and under rocks and fallen branches a world of the small that carried on beneath our notice.

  “I fell in with strangers sometimes. I could tell by the look in someone’s eye when they said hello whether they approved or disapproved of me. But I spent time with the disapprovers, as much as the other, because I was curious. And sometimes, around a campfire, the
y would soften. Others, never lose a rigid, guarded pose, and I would make excuses soon enough.”

  She would stay in cheap motels and befriend strangers in bars and diners. Once, she stayed in a houseboat along a river delta for a month or two. A few times the folks she befriended in bars she would go home with. She described them, as above, with a miraculous miscomprehension. As if they were miracles, because most of the time she was out in the wilderness. As if, over time, she didn’t know what a human really was.

  “I wasn’t searching for anything, and yet still I found it. I found a place to work and to live and to be at peace. A place to sever myself from the past and not to seek it out anymore. If I could exist only in the present, then my problems would be gone. Or would only ever be in front of me.

  “I saw the naiad hummingbird at elevation, in the middle of the King Range, and I don’t think anyone was within one hundred miles. This was the off-season, cold and blustery, and I wasn’t really prepared, so I felt the chill too much and lost weight. But I was happy. The more my body reduced itself, the more my mind seemed to expand. The more I could experience what was around me. I did not bathe. I did not shower. I walked until I was tired and then tried to sleep inside my sleeping bag inside a tent. The food tasted like nothing to me.

  “By the tenth day, animals did not appear to see me. I could walk by a deer and it wouldn’t run. The otters playing by the creek gave me a first and second look, then continued with their day. Or so it seemed to me.

  “Yes, on the twelfth day, I saw the hummingbird. Coming across it with the overwhelming scent of cedar all around and the mountainside rich green with moss and lichen, and the trees, full of lichen, too, and ferns, so their leafless limbs burgeoned with life.

  “I turned a bend to see a puddle or a pond, something caused by rainwater, in the middle of the trail, and bent down over the water, to drink … the naiad hummingbird. A female. The iridescent black wings. Her sharp, long, thin beak.

  “She didn’t see me at first, her back to me, and I stood and watched as she stood there so defenseless, on the ground, drinking. Until with a little cry she sensed me and, alarmed, rose effortless and acrobatic straight up into the air and cursed me from above, hidden soon by the cedar.

  “I hadn’t eaten all day. I had drunk very little water. I felt light as air, and in the moment of seeing the hummingbird, I began to weep with the beauty of it, which I cannot convey. I cannot get across to you or anyone the emotion of that moment. Because of the hummingbird on the ground, not in flight, and knowing that not one person in a million had experienced the miracle of such a small moment.

  “So you can imagine how I felt when, later, I identified the bird and realized how rare the species was and headed toward extinction, and what I had borne witness to wasn’t just a minor miracle but, in fact, a moment that would replicate only another hundred or another thousand times.

  “That in the history of the world, a naiad hummingbird would only come to the ground to drink a finite number of times before they no longer existed.

  “This thought was unconscionable to me. Unbearable. It ripped me in two. It destroyed me. And then remade me, and I became someone different than before.”

  Just reading it on the page destroyed me. Remade Jane. I was already in the grip of such exhausting emotions and impulses. Yet I let Silvina in again when I had resolved not to.

  Because I had let the hummingbird in first.

  PART 2

  .  .        .  .        .  .

  THE TANGLE

  [45]

  I try, in these moments now of anticipation, of the possibility of the ecstatic … I try to recall the framework by which I made decisions after the encounter on the hill. It seems so far away from me and constantly receding.

  Scared, angry, wanting to punch a wall for the hazy nature of the enemy. Wanting out, but not knowing what “out” was, and, perversely, not wanting to abandon Silvina. Underneath it all, too, an elation at flexing muscle, at knowing I was built like a truck and could defend myself. As if the idea of me as analyst was a kind of disguise or deep cover or adaptation, and the true me was shining through.

  But that was a trap, too.

  How in your altered state you miss details, even when you think you’re calm. The world around you becomes a kind of blur. You turn off the radio because it distracts from the chaos in your head, only you thought it was the chaos in your head and with silence, you’re still adrift. Spinning.

  How you realize you’re hyperventilating when you hit the first stoplight and you stare in the rearview mirror and notice there’s a black SUV right behind you. Except there’s a soccer mom type in the front seat and two kids in the back giving her hell.

  But that jogged something loose. The scrap of paper Charlie had given me had slipped my mind in the aftermath of the hill encounter. I took it out and, with one eye on traffic, looked up the vehicle license number.

  It took so little time. Registered to a shell company, Offshore Shithead Corporation. A sigh of frustration, smacked my hand against the steering wheel. Trying to unravel that to a source probably would be pointless. Allie might’ve had the time and patience, but not me.

  Fuck it. I pulled into a pharmacy parking lot, across two lanes of traffic. Ignored the honking. Ignored the pissed-off looks. At least no one followed me across.

  There was only one direct lead. Even if it came with a threat.

  I called Fusk at his antiques store. End of the day for him. Early afternoon for me. What else could I do?

  Idling there as if I were a meth addict screwing up the nerve to go in and buy Sudafed. The Christmas decorations at the entrance were garish, incomprehensible, partisan. What kind of a country did we live in?

  Fusk answered on the fourth or fifth ring. But said nothing.

  “Fusk. It’s Jane, the detective.”

  “Can’t help you,” came the rough rasp.

  Hung up.

  I looked at the phone. Recalled the photo of his wife and two kids right before he’d pulled the gun on me. Estranged or not, I had to think he was protecting them, not himself. Or mostly them. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t still be the villain.

  I wondered if Fusk had actually read Furtown, with its psychosis and its warnings.

  “For reasons man may never fathom, the raccoon is lured by shiny metal. When the trapper learned of this weakness, he ingeniously set his traps with bright metal. The moon ray appears to brighten the silvery tinfoil image in the crystal stream. Soon, the racoon appears and is attracted by the glint and steps into the trap, to be held prisoner until the trapper appears with his final death sentence.”

  I called again. Different phone card. Still disguised, if someone tried to track it. The phone rang for a long time. Nothing. No one. Gone for the day or suspicious?

  I cursed. Didn’t want to go home without having talked to him.

  >>If you haven’t picked up groceries, I will.

  Helpful husband. I looked at that ordinary text like it came from Mars.

  There was an earlier text I’d missed.

  >>Will need help with homework tonight.

  Raised eyebrow. When had my daughter ever asked for school help from me? Never. That felt like a trap, too.

  Not thinking straight. I was still missing details. Fusk could wait. I needed calm. I needed to go home.

  Only then did I recognize that my hands were shaking.

  [46]

  But I had another problem: the go-bag. I didn’t want to leave it in the trunk of the car. That felt like mixing sanctuaries or solutions. It needed to be separate—the whole reason I’d stored it at the gym.

  A couple of Silvina’s other properties I’d already looked into at the start of my research seemed promising. One was basically an abandoned shack, a twenty-minute drive away. On the edge of an environmental easement. Maybe it wasn’t the clearest thinking, but I needed to stash my stuff somewhere.

  The detour made me ev
en jumpier, so I took a bigger risk. About ten minutes from the shed, I found a fringe of tall weeds abutting a few conifers. I pulled over, waited until there was no traffic, and I took every electronic device out of Shovel Pig, put them in a smaller purse, and shoved it among the weeds, out of sight. Then I rechecked my car for tracking devices. It was an older model, which I was thankful for. I didn’t think it’d be easy to track from an internal GPS.

  Then I went on to the property. The shed, more like a tiny house, had a fallen-in, slanted roof and a lock on the ramshackle door. Someone a long time ago had painted it jaunty bright reds, greens, and blues, as if to contrast with the yellowing grass.

  Around back, a rusty shopping cart and just as I’d relaxed—the loud sound of a body, a crack.

  I turned, fast, in time to see a raccoon run off. There had been reports of Japanese raccoon dogs roaming the area, escapees from a zoo. But, no, this was just the usual. As I watched, the raccoon slowed, stopped, watched me from the long grass. Funny. I couldn’t meet its gaze. Not while breaking into the shed. Furtown’s atrocities against raccoons had been hardwired into my head.

  How many of these run-down properties did Vilcapampa companies own? Too many, but maybe if you had that much capital, the small stuff became forgotten. Best way to live off the grid: in the amnesia zone of large corporations. Until the day they woke up and routed you with dogs or drones.

  I doubted Silvina shared much history with the place. Maybe she’d known the racoon’s grandparents. I scouted enough to confirm it was abandoned, used a cracked window to get in the back door, felt the smell and texture of abandoned, old, not-used around me, and hid the go-bag under a tarp. Put an array of rusty tools overtop like mulch. Then got the hell out.