Just a little bit of (edited) almost-wrap up...
13
You remembered the damndest things, when you were this close to dying…
One thing about fence-work; it paid. Kept him busy, too. John's mind was frequently in such a tumult of theory and planning that he would have found rest impossible if he hadn't worked himself into numbed insensibility.
It was a windy, ice-bright day in early June, in the rocky highlands of northern Wyoming. His father had left the week before, returning to the world of high finance and corporate intrigue, and John was out restringing a barbed-wire fence with Ken Flowers. It was a tedious process; slow, back-breaking and more than occasionally painful.
The wooden fence posts were still in pretty good shape. It didn't rain enough up here for much rot to set in. The posts had gone grey, splintered and fragrant, their bruised-needle smell reminding John of the big chest where Grandma kept her wedding finery and her spare guns. But posts weren't the problem, wire was.
Someone… hired by one of those giant, government-run 'cooperatives', maybe… had taken a pair of shears to three miles of fence, cutting the wire and releasing most of Ross's cattle. Other friends and relations had been tasked with retrieving the strayed herd. Their job was the fence.
Ken held the heavy roll in his leather-gloved hands, slowly unreeling it as John stapled sharp, twisted wire to each and every post in the compromised section. They were close to the end of their fourth strand. After this, only the top row remained to be done, working back the way they'd come. The wire was hard to handle, though, sometimes springing away to slash at hands or faces, and they had to be constantly wary.
As the two boys followed the perforated fence line down a wind-scoured gulley, across a brook and up the other side (Ken's battered truck was in sight, parked beneath a stand of scrub pine), trouble struck. Walking backward, Ken turned his ankle, had to grab for a post to keep his balance, and dropped the roll of wire.
Shining, fanged coils immediately sprang free, striking like rattlesnakes. Bright-ground barbs slashed clean through Ken's jacket and plaid shirt, gashing the left side of his stomach and hip. A loose coil hissed back and slit John's arm, where he'd had it stretchedout to hold the wire taut.
"Shit!" Kenneth shouted, slapping at first one cut, then another, driving the barbs deeper. "Dammit! I hate this stuff!"
Ken was a big, rangy guy, brown-haired, ugly and muscular. He played football for the Wildcats, tending to react first, think later. Now, with his leaping and lunging about, he was making the situation worse, knocking John off his feet, and loosing more wire from the dropped roll.
John wriggled free of the fanged loops, clamped a hand to his sliced flesh, then got up from the stony creek bed. With the other hand (his right), he retrieved the staple gun.
"Stop jumping, and let me have a look," he said, next disentangling his friend. The older boy stopped cursing and held still. His grey eyes drilled the jagged horizon as John pulled the bloody plaid shirt out of his waistband and examined the cuts. Eight bruised and oozing punctures trailed into shallow, claw-like scratches. Messy, but nowhere as bad as it could have been. Out here, job-related wounds were a fact of life, and you got used to treating all but the worst, yourself.
"How bad?" Ken asked him, worriedly.
"You'll live… but we ought to get them cleaned and patched up."
"Guess so," his partner assented morosely. "It's lunch time, anyhow. Leave this crap here, John. We'll come back for it."
The sun-faded truck wasn't far, just at the top of the nearest rise. A few minutes' scrambling over loose rock and tangled brush got them to the first aid kit. Ken had to be dealt with, first. He sat on the lowered tail gate with his back to a pile of old horse blankets, squinting upthrough pine shadow and dancing sun spears.
John prepared a betadyne mixture, then set about cleaning the ragged wounds. Stomach and hip were disinfected and bandaged with a touch that was thorough, if not particularly gentle. John had a way of making his feelings known.
"Want to quit for the day?" He asked Ken suddenly, as though it hardly mattered.
"Uh-uh," the older boy replied with a firm head-shake. "We don't finish on time, we don't get paid, an' I ain't fixin' to have you freeze up on me, again."
In Ken's experience, nobody turned a colder shoulder than John Tracy, robbed of cash.
"…'Sides, Ross'll have his herd back, soon, but it won't do him no good if the fence ain't up."
The hulking boy then saw to his friend's gashed arm, washing it clean with disinfectant before sticking the edges together with a large bandage. John hardly seemed to notice, staring off into the chilly distance, thoughts ticking over so fast that Ken could just about hear them tumble.
To make conversation and break the long silence, the older boy asked,
"Ready for lunch?"
John shook his head, fair hair falling into violet eyes. He'd forgotten to pack anything to eat, again. Grumbling...
"Keep skipping meals, like that, an' one a these days, the wind's gonna carry you clean back to Kansas,"
…Ken Flowers gave the other boy one of his own sandwiches. Ham and cheese with mayonnaise, which John liked well enough, although he at first shrugged it away.
"Go ahead an' take it. I got another, an' we can always stop at the bait shop on the way in, buy some more."
To Ken's surprise, John gave him one of those very rare 'sunshine-through-storm-clouds' smiles of his.
"Just don't order the tuna," he quipped, cocking a blond eyebrow.
Ken grinned, adding,
"Not on a slow day, anyhow. Might turn out to be the 'minnow special'."
They both laughed a bit, slouching on the rusted blue tailgate to share ham sandwiches and cold ginger ale. Hard work, sharp air and friendship made everything taste better, even the cellophanedsnack cakes. In a fine humor, despitesabatoge and accident, Ken remarked,
"Betcha heaven looks a lot like Wyomin'… 'cept without all the damn barb wire an' BLM boys."
John only shrugged, gone suddenly bleak and quiet, again. Kenneth prodded,
"You don't think?"
Another shrug, then,
"Can't say. Don't expect to find out."
Ken stopped chewing.
"What's that s'pposed to mean!" He demanded, at once worried and confused. He'd heard that there were 'godless atheists' around, and hoped his friend didn't turn out to be one of them.
By way of answer, John got off the squeaking tailgate, picked up a stick, and started scratching something in the rocky red dirt at his feet; a long string of symbols that Ken found completely indecipherable. Realizing this, John sighed, then moved over a few feet and began again, writing new words in the tossing shadows beneath a gnarled and wind-bitten pine.
"Okay. First premise: there is a Heaven. We accept this?"
"Sure," Ken replied, coming over to watch what his very odd friend was doing, half-eaten sandwich in hand. The relieved truck springs bounced and creaked in his wake.
John continued writing, making quiet points as he went.
"Two: in the normal course of things, if all the literature is correct, good people go to Heaven."
Ken nodded. So he'd always been told, at least. His sandwich was gone, by now, the cold wind beginning to pick up, again.
"Three: good people think good thoughts. (Sort of their trademark, as I understand it.) Point four… John doesn't think good thoughts. Therefore… John isn't going to Heaven. Quod erat demonstrandum."
They stared at the diagram for a long moment before John finished, very quietly,
"Inescapable logic. Don't get me wrong, Ken. I'm glad there are good people out there. I just don't think I'm one of them. Too much else to worry about. Too many things to find out."
Ken scratched at his own mussed-up dark hair, his lumpy, stubbled chin, then said,
"Sounds scientific an' all, John… but where's God fit inna all this?"
His friend gestured at the top of the diagram.
"Up here, in the premise. But I don't know what he wants. He doesn't listen."
Ken snorted.
"You should talk to my mom, then. She's got 'im on speed-dial."
All at once, the big defensive end took up a stick of his own, and began making changes in the diagram. When he was done, the bottom read,
'…John tries to do good things, there four, John might get there someday, just like everyone else.'
(He misspelled 'therefore', but John found himself smiling a little, anyway. Ken meant well, after all, and maybe the vote of confidence mattered, somehow.)
…But the 'good things' argument was blurred just now by the smooth, cold heaviness of a gun in his hand. His left forefinger lay curved around a trigger that John vaguely recalled had been altered; filed by DNC to hair-fine sensitivity. Stroke it but lightly, and the tall figure running toward him would die, easing the terrible pressure in his head.
One shot… everything over… all debts settled. His mother's death, the baby's disappearance, the misunderstandings and lies; paid in full. One shot.
The whispering pressure urged him to do it, this one little motion… do it now. But, John had never been very cooperative. Never the ideal son, teammate, or brother. Or the ideal tool.
The grey-haired man rushed forward, still; seeing the gun, but not turning aside or seeking cover. He was struck, as John had been, by everything that the killing presence could throw at him; blizzards of jagged glass, tornadoes of metal and junk. Square in the cross-hairs, stillhe came on.
'You've lost, you know,' the Hood had gloated, slipping like a blade into John's dazed mind, like a hand curving tight around the grip of a pistol, or a coward hiding behind a frenzied attack-dog. But guns and dogs didn't make their own decisions, any better than John Tracy obeyed instructions.
The pistol went off with a deep, angry roar, its savage recoil nearly dislocating his wrist. The cement floor in front of him all but erupted, filling the air with slivers and dust. And there, all at once, was the man, panting and bloody, but there.
72 hours…
Inside John's mind, something shrieked and withered. Something returned to oblivion, writhing and clawing as it went. He dropped the gun, using the arm that still mostly worked to slow his own shuddering collapse.
"Hey, Dad," John greeted the worried man.
Jeff Tracy crouched to the ground and pulled his son offof pocked and blood-stained cement.
"Hey, Tiger," he replied, thinking of other times.