Wolf Flow (7 page)

    Still, when there wasn't anybody around giving you shit, it was kinda nice. Doot's father, when he'd told him what was going on and what he wanted him to do, had said that he should get an early start, knowing that the bike had a top speed that only beat a slow trot because it could keep it up longer. So when he'd heard his dad's truck pulling out, before the first light, he'd already been awake and drawing on his jeans and T-shirt. And he had been on the road, with the stuff his dad had told him to pack, when the hills were all red with the sun coming up, the air still smelling like night, cool in the lungs, and unbroken by any human sound. He'd fired up the bike with regret; if he could've gotten to where he had to go by walking, with the food and the water and the other things in a backpack, he would've done it that way. The bike's engine had sawed apart the quiet, and it wouldn't come back together again until nightfall.

    The road cut straight across the landscape, low brush on either side. He hadn't bothered putting on his helmet, leaving it strapped to the bike's frame. Out here, the world was so flat that he could see miles off anything that might give him trouble. Like one of the shit-for-brains types from the high school, horsing around with his daddy's pickup truck. He'd already taken a bad spill in the center of town, the one spot where there was an actual traffic light-not that the rednecks around here paid any attention to it. That Garza fellow, who should've graduated a couple of years ago and was still hanging around looking for trouble and finding it, and one of his buddies from the county correctional farm had pretty much taken dead aim at him, laughing and pounding their beer cans against the dashboard as they'd come barreling around the corner. He'd had to dump the bike to get out of their way-the pickup had gone right over the bike without touching it, thank you, God-and he'd gotten up without anything worse than a bleeding road rash underneath the left sleeve of his denim jacket. Those fuckers had just headed on out of town, braying away and tossing the empties out the side windows.

    That was a big reason it was so pleasant out here. The absence of assholes. As long as he kept an eye open for potholes gouged out by the winter's snow and ice, it was clear sailing.

    The building, the old clinic, showed up ahead, still a couple of miles away. It looked like the stump of a broken tooth, dirty white except for the blackened part to the side where the fire had been. A faint sulfurous smell moved in the wind, like duck eggs that had been laid in a barn and then forgotten until a pitchfork had broken them open in the old straw. Behind the clinic building, the first set of low hills interrupted the flat terrain.

    A lane curved off the county road, leading to the clinic. The tires of the motorbike bumped over the rusting metal of the rail line that had run out here, ages ago. Brown weeds bristled up from between the ties. A stagnant-looking pond, the surface coated with swirls that reflected oily rainbows, stretched to the right, with one of the clinic's outbuildings, a little stucco hut, at its edge.

    Doot halted the motorbike halfway down the lane. From here, he could see the boarded-over windows all along the ground floor, the shingles of the covered verandah sagging or broken through to the planks beneath. Up at the top of the building, braced by a framework of iron grown fragile, big letters spelled out THERMALEN. There had been another E at the end. but it had fallen off in a windstorm and now lay facedown near the steps going up to the building's front doors, stenciling itself into the dry weeds.

    The bike's racket snapped back from the looming front of the building, the echo fluttering at his ears. He walked the bike through the deepest rut in the lane, then lifted his feet to the pegs and rolled on a touch of the accelerator.

    When he got off the bike, pushing down the kick-stand, he combed his hair back into place-or close to-with his fingers. Tooling around without the helmet always left him looking like he had yellow straw sticking straight up from his forehead; with the helmet on, and sweating into it, made him look as though the straw had been glued all over his skull.

    The hills' silence wrapped around him, now that the bike's engine was shut off. He glanced over his shoulder as he untied the bundle from the carrier rack. The blank windows in the stories above stared down at him.

    "Shit." The hook at the end of the bungee cord had snagged his fingertip; he hadn't been watching what he was doing. A drop of blood oozed up. He stuck the finger in his mouth for a moment, then shook it dry. Another drop seeped out, smaller than the first. That would have to do for now. He lifted the pack's strap onto his shoulder and mounted the buckling steps up to the clinic's door.

    "Hey-anybody here?" He squeezed his chest past the boards and looked around what had been the clinic's lobby. It was a dumb thing to say-as if the guy could have gone off somewhere, the way his dad had said he was all busted up-but he didn't know what else would've been appropriate. He didn't want to just burst in on the guy.
Maybe I should have knocked
. That was a dumb enough idea to be a joke.

    He pushed the boards farther back, so he could work his way in with the bundle. His dad had been the one who'd pulled loose most of the rusted nails around the door's frame, leaving just a couple at the top and bottom that could be wiggled back into their orange-rimmed holes. So that anybody who came along wouldn't think people had been going in and out of that place. That had been a long time ago, too-he'd been only ten or so when his dad, right after the divorce, had gone through a phase with a metal detector. A buddy had laid it on him as partial payment for helping him out with a load of cauliflower that had broken down on the pass through the Blue Mountains. His dad had been working a reefer truck back then, making good enough money that he had been more interested in dumb toys than cash.

    Seeing the lobby again, with its raggedy curtains and the mahogany and marble counter at the far end. busted-off pieces and all. set a little movie ticking away inside his head. Him and his dad. the round flat snout of the metal detector sniffing at the floor, his dad watching the dial on the box up at the top. He'd tagged behind him, keeping a carefully calculated distance to show that he wasn't really worried about any horrible shit happening, like ghosts or hoboes-either or both-raving down the big staircase with knives and hard-ons. The older kids in school had told him back then that that was what 'boes did to you, if they caught you snooping around where they had their fires and did all the rest of their hobo business. The knife up to your throat while they pulled down your pants with their other dirty, black-nailed hand. Ghosts he hadn't been so sure about back then, as a kid. Could ghosts get hard-ons? Something poking up under the white sheet, like a pup tent?

    That showed how long ago he'd been a kid. Nowadays, kids that young didn't know from ghosts in white sheets. Now they wore hockey goalie masks and had chain saws and knives on the ends of their fingers and shit. And even the little kids laughed their asses off, or said
"
Wow, gnarly
" at stuff like that when they watched them on their folks' VCRs. That was the way things went. It made him feel old to think about it already, and he was just goddamn seventeen.

    The smell of the musty air inside the building, cooped up and baked by long days of sun-he remembered that, too. And dust motes drifting in and out of the thin slices of light coming through the window boards. And the quiet.

    He and his dad hadn't found any treasure with the metal detector. Now that he'd thought about it, he'd realized his old man hadn't really been expecting to but had just been in some goofy screwing-around mode. The only thing had been a silver dollar, an old Standing Liberty cartwheel that had fallen down in a crack between the floorboards, and that his dad had pried out with his jack-knife blade and given to him. It was under his clean socks now, in a drawer of his bedroom dresser, back home. They had never come back out to the place, after that one time.

    "Hey," he called again; nobody had answered him from before. Maybe the guy was asleep, or passed out still. Or dead-his old man had told him the guy looked pretty close to it. Being in this place with some fuckin' corpse wasn't an idea he wanted to think about. "You here? Come on, man."

    Silence. His eyes had adjusted enough to the dim light that he could see a couple of blankets, a deflated ghost, crumpled in the middle of the lobby's floor. He recognized them as the ones his dad usually kept in the Peterbilt's sleeper. That was probably his dad's thermos beside them; he'd said something about leaving the guy some water.

    
Well, shit
… Doot walked farther into the lobby, looking around him. The guy wasn't here. Maybe he'd crawled outside. And pounded the nails back in that held the boards over the door? Not likely.

    He stood by the counter that had been the old clinic's reception desk. There were marks, like somebody had dragged his arm through the dust on the marble top, and one clear handprint.

    "Just tell me where you're at, okay?" He raised his eyes, listening to his voice bounce off the carved, interlocking beams of the ceiling. He held his breath; when the echo faded, he heard the other sound. Someone else breathing.

    Around the end of the counter, Doot saw him. The guy was sprawled out on the landing up the big staircase, shoulder and head against the wall, one hand flopped down the steps. Blood leaked through the bandages wrapped around the guy's chest.

    The guy moaned when he raised him up. Doot squatted on the stairs below him, trying to get the weight onto his own shoulders. It flashed on him then that maybe he was fucking it up, maybe the guy had one of those injuries where if you tried to move him, you'd just killed him right there on the spot. But it was already too late; he'd got the guy up into a fireman's carry, or as much of one as he could manage-the guy seemed to weigh a ton, all loose and uncooperative like that-and had already stumbled with him down to the lobby. Besides, he didn't see how he could have left him all bent up like a rag doll on the landing.

    He dragged the guy over to the blankets and lay him down. The eyes fluttered open as he stood back up; they drifted, then fastened on his face.

    The man's lips were dry and cracked; the point of his tongue moved across them, then drew back in. His voice rasped out, "Who…" He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, having pulled up some fragment of strength inside. "Who are you…"

    He wiped his hands on his jeans. He'd gotten the guy's blood on them. "Uh… my dad sent me. He told me you were out here. Said you might need some stuff."

    He'd dropped his pack down by the blankets when he'd walked over to the reception counter. Now he squatted down, opened the pack and started pulling out things.

    "I got something to drink here-Pepsi; is that okay?" The words tumbled out of him. He'd never seen anybody in as bad shape as this fellow. "And I made you some sandwiches, and I brought along some canned chili-we could make a fire or something, you know, to heat it up…"

    He managed to get the brakes on at last. He stayed squatting on his heels, holding the can of Nalley's Extra Beefy in his hands. The focus of the man's gaze had moved from Doot's face up to the ceiling.

    "Is there…" The rasp had dwindled to a whisper. "There's water there, isn't there… He said…"

    Doot filled up the cup from the thermos bottle and held it to the man's lips, cradling the back of the bandaged head with his other hand. Some of the water trickled out of the mouth's corners, turning pink as it sluiced through the red-black crust and down to the throat.

    The man drew his head back from the cup, and Doot laid him back down as gently as he could. One hand lifted from the blankets and smeared its palm across the man's mouth, drawing the blood and water into ragged stripes across his cheek.

    "Thanks…" The voice was a little stronger. The gaze came slowly back around to Doot. The pupil of one eye was bigger than the other; it looked like a hole somebody could drop a nickel down. "So-that was your father? The guy with the truck?"

    Doot nodded. "Yeah-he told me you looked like you'd got in a bit of trouble."

    The man grunted, even managing a faint smile. "Bit of trouble" was the understatement of the year. He rolled onto his side, pushing with one hand-Doot could see that the other one, the right, was no good, paralyzed or something. The man grabbed one of the sandwiches, pinning it against the floor to tear off the clear plastic wrapping. His teeth tore at the white bread and pink lunch meat.

    Doot let his own voice go softer. "He said it was like… law trouble, or something… That was why you couldn't go to the hospital."

    The eyes with their mismatched pupils looked over the sandwich at him. The man chewed and swallowed. "Is that a problem for you?"

    He shook his head. "Hell, no-I don't care." He'd learned a long time ago to keep his mouth shut about certain things. Like what his dad was up to these days. "I was just… you know… curious. That's all."

    Another chew and swallow. The man took smaller bites now. "There's just some people in this world," he said slowly, nodding his head, eyes looking at some point past Doot, "that you just have to watch your step around them."

    The man fell silent, working away at what was left of the sandwich. His face darkened, brooding, as Doot watched him. After a moment, Doot figured that was all the explanation he was going to get for now.

    He filled the plastic cup again for the man, who drank it down greedily.

    "So where's your father, then?" The man breathed hard after gulping the water. "Is he going to come back around here?"

    Doot shook his head. "He's off on some job. Hauling something-I don't know." He shrugged. "He's gone a lot. Said he'd be back in a week or so. I'm on my own most of the time. My mom walked out on him a long time ago." Immediately, he regretted saying that last bit, and wondered why he had. This guy didn't need to know shit like that.