Chapter 21
Forest Service employees stood in the parking lot talking. Helmeted, dirt smeared. If the Wub was at Henry’s house and shots started, Sipe wondered how long it would take them to figure out they needed to duck. The dark green pants and bright, bright yellow long sleeved shirts worn by several of them reminded him of Tiffany’s shirt and shorts.
Henry’s driveway was unoccupied. Sipe parked in the driveway, bumper facing the garage door and got out and walked around the house, between the house and the metal shed, and looked down the lawn. Nobody stood at the clothesline. The Wub wasn’t at the base of the lawn, either, admiring the tree swing or the picnic table.
Back at Lori’s car Sipe got inside and shut the driver side door and said to Connie, “He isn’t here.”
“Where do you think he went?” asked Connie.
“Don’t know. This should be it. This is where I’d go.”
“Why?”
“Phone number.”
“Oh. Right. They got it. Tracked it.”
Sipe put the car in reverse and backed up. Pulling forward he turned the tires toward the gravel road up the hill and hit the brakes.
“This is where you get out,” said Sipe.
“Seriously?”
“I don’t have time to talk.”
“Don’t you need me? He needs to see me, right?”
“At some point, but if you get shot? That’s no good.”
“He wouldn’t shoot me.”
“He wouldn’t mean to shoot you.”
“Fuck.”
“Connie. You need to get out.”
Connie punched the seat belt release. Opened the passenger side door. He started to get out and then he stopped.
“How do we…You got a phone, right?”
“There’s one in the case I took out of the car.”
“You know my number?”
“No,” said Sipe. “The kid has it.”
“Tiffany? Yeah, but do you have it? You want it?”
“Connie, there are 250 people in this town. If I need to find you, I’ll find you.”
Connie got out and started to close the door. He halted up and looked in at Sipe.
“I’m going to try to call him. Mr. Wub. You wouldn’t. The Old Man wouldn’t. You dinosaurs just don’t get it. Use the technology for fuck’s sake.”
Sipe looked at him, Connie hunched over, holding the door. Maybe if he looked at the door long enough it’d pop out of the kid’s hand and slam shut.
“This is so fucked.” Connie slammed the door. Sipe pulled forward and looked right, looked left, and turned left, up Old School Road, forcing gravel to migrate, a rising coil of dust marking his path.
The sign at the top of the hill read School Street. He’d missed it, walking with Tiffany. Adrenaline kicked in he was seeing what earlier he might have missed. To the left the gravel road ran down a length of trailer houses. Sipe drove down it, the highlight some woman in sunglasses sitting on a green plastic chair and talking into her phone. He turned around and drove back.
He stopped in the middle of the intersection and looked right back down Old School Road towards Henry’s house, the northern face and part of the roof of the Forest Service in view. No black sedan. Connie stood where the driveway met the road. He raised his arm. Hailing or flipping Sipe off.
Sipe drove east on School Street. Past Gwen’s house. Across the street a small white house and then a coffee colored trailer, a metal shed erected at the head of the narrow driveway beside the trailer. Two cars parked in the driveway, the car closer to the street a black sedan.
Sipe drove just past the trailer and then pulled to the left and parked alongside the wire fence. On the other side a field and trees, the grass the color of a lion’s mane. The next building on the street, after the fenced in field, the school, the gymnasium Tiffany said that was so small basketball spectators had to slide on the single bench spacing to get out of the way of an in-bounds pass.
After Sipe took the handgun out of the black case and checked the clip he laid the gun on the passenger side seat and tucked the case back into the rear footwell on the passenger side. He put the gun in the shoulder holster, shut the engine off, and got out of the car. A late afternoon breeze tugged at the weeds and the tree branches. According to Tiffany, a few years ago the whole field had caught fire. Sipe thought he could smell it, sulfur stirred up by the breeze.
At the trailer, Sipe walked around the rear of the parked black sedan, and up the driver side. He put his hand on the hood. Warm. Hot even. The porch overhang hid him from the people he could hear talking inside the trailer. He could knock on the door. Ask how long ago they’d been driving. Were they at the intersection, had they come from Pendleton?
The back window of the car parked ahead of the black sedan was a Beepers holding cell. A cowboy, a cook, a ballerina, an astronaut, and something indefinable. That last one looked like maybe too much sunlight had begun to melt it down into component parts. Someday soon the slag might encompass its brethren.
A woman on a ten-speed bike zipped by behind him. Sipe looked over his right shoulder as she pedaled towards the school, looking over her left shoulder long enough to satisfy her curiosity. He walked back towards the Honda. The woman on the bike past the school and kept going, down the street, descending, out of view.
Behind him, some kid laughed, the kid in the backyard of the coffee colored trailer house. A little one brandishing a plastic sword and babbling at a dog in a monstrous voice, maybe mimicking something seen on television. The dog barked. Front end down, paws splayed, butt up in the air. The kid pointed the plastic sword and unleashed chaos energy, spit foaming on out from his mouth. The dog barked, turned and ran and the kid laughed and ran after the dog.
He walked across the dirt road. Standing on the southern edge of School Street, Sipe looked down at Little Creek.
He thought he saw Henry walking westward down Main Street. The woman next to Henry was tall. Gwen. He wondered if Henry had continued to fib. To cover Tiffany he’d fib. Down on Main, Henry and Gwen held up right beside the propane tanks and the multiple signs forming the Patriot’s Kiosk. Right after a car drove past on Main the couple cut across, and walked alongside the park fence, headed, it looked, for Auntie’s. Several cars were parked in front of Auntie’s. One little kid balance walked the logs lain lengthwise acting as front bumper rests. Another little one jumped rope in the dirt lot. In the city park, a single figure moved, bouncing a basketball, taking a jump shot, and running after the ball after the ball bounced off the front rim. Gwen and Henry walked under the front overhang and disappeared inside Auntie’s.
Back in the car, Sipe drove down School Street and down the hill to Woodruff Road, turning right, driving past Tiffany’s trailer, and stopping at the intersection with Main. No one stood on The Antler Inn porch. Sipe imagined a rocking chair set out on the porch. Some old timer sitting there working the tobacco inside a pipe and watching Sipe and The Wub face one another like gunslingers. Someone coming out, forcing the old man inside, the old man fighting them off, wanting to watch this duel, this reenactment of a supposed common occurrence from the past.
Sipe signaled, and turned left, driving past The Outpost and the post office on his left and then the bar on the right side of the road and then Pleshette’s on the left. The aged truck, Norm’s truck, parked along the west side of the store. Sipe thought the store looked like something that had been picked up by a twister and spun around the funnel a few times before being dropped out of the sky back to earth.
He rounded off the eastern reconnaissance at The Sleepy Bear Inn. If there were boarders, they were all out doing touristy things. Sipe considered stopping and going inside the office, asking the clerk if they’d seen someone matching the Wub’s appearance. Giving them a hundred dollar bill, and a phone number to call if death incarnate happened to check in for th
e night. He realized he didn’t have a hundred on him. The kid had it. The Laundromat located across the street from the Sleepy Bear some sort of socializing mecca. A half-dozen people in front of the structure, the ones not wrinkled overweight and some both, some going in and out, most staying in one place and clucking conversation. The one male in the seeming maelstrom, some hunk of meat in a motorized wheel chair. A long orange flag sprouted off the wheel chair seat. Something so motorists would make out the slow mover. The guy’s chin appeared velcroed to his right shoulder. The least of his problems, probably. The arms tucked in like he’d seized up in the midst of making fun of T. Rex and its useless little arms. Flesh-wise, better off aborted, but maybe he was a genius like Stephen Hawking. The body a betrayal, a real fuck you from God until you realized the 3 pounds encased in the skull operated at a higher capacity than 99.9% of the rest of the race. All the hens around him clucking about this and that local gossip and the whole time the grizzled meat in the polyester throne was solving the how’s and why’s of black holes and anti-matter and classic theorems even escaped Einstein’s reach. Sipe imagined the kid with the plastic sword attacking the man in the wheelchair.
Driving on Main Street towards the center of Little Creek he struggled with an impulse to stop in at The Outpost. Sipe could make it on a single meal a day, and he was long past due. Anything would be acceptable, even that hot dogs and sour cream and onions potato chip desecration Tiff had described.
Distracted, he didn’t notice a big rig, a jeep or an SUV, tail gaiting, then slowing, then making a quick turn through the intersection up Woodruff. Sipe continued past the Antler Inn, the Patriot’s Kiosk, scanning Main Street, thinking maybe Henry and Gwen would be walking up ahead of him.
Parallel to Auntie’s, a siren whooped to life, and Sipe’s bowels nearly gave out on him. The cop car invisible to him, and then it charged in and out of his rearview, roof lights flashing, zipping up Old Woods Road towards the base of the hill the school was built on. Sipe nearly came to a complete halt before pressing his foot back down on the gas.
The siren still booming through the town, Sipe kept rolling down Main, towards the far west end, fighting the impulse to flee. Trying to find Connie could be a pain in the ass. The kid likely wandered away somewhere. Sipe should’ve at least taken the kid’s number. Need be, he could turn off, work his way back to Tiffany’s trailer house, walk in, break in, get his phone back.
Up ahead, the SUV shot out into view, off of Mountain Road and turned left, a sharp and wobbling left, onto Main, and accelerated, heading east, coming towards Sipe. The cop car, red and blue lights rotating, curved on into view, pursuing the SUV. The SUV crossed the dividing line. Coming right at Sipe. Instinct kicked in. Sipe accelerated, spun the wheel towards the fence line on his right. Too late. The driver side headlight flashed past Sipe’s window. Smashed into the sedan back door, the window fracturing. The impact threw him into the steering wheel, into the air bag, the front and back bumpers switching out, the sedan spinning, his breath left him, the spinning motion lasting seconds seemed to go on and on.
Once he processed the fact the car had stopped spinning he looked in the backseat. Instinct. The Old Man wasn’t back there. No one to check up on. Sipe pushed on the air bag, hit the seat belt release. Something to help uncrumple his chest wall.
Out on the street ahead of him, bits of broken plastic like crumbs led to the SUV, passenger side facing him, the vehicle set at an angle, rear end closer, the vehicle occupying both lanes, steam pouring out its crumpled engine compartment.
The cop pounded the Honda’s front passenger side window. A bright eyed kid in a too big hat. Sipe held up a hand. Nodded. The cop wanted to know was if he was all right. Sipe thought he said I’m fine.
“Sir, turn off your engine. Turn off your engine, ok, good, thanks. It’s off? Good. We’ve an ambulance coming. Don’t move, ok? Ok?”
Over his right shoulder he could see the cop car, roof lights flashing. The cop walked towards the damaged SUV, a phone, a walkie-talkie, a CB, something in hand, calling it in. Sipe looked out the driver side window. The door flush to the fence line. A house far back from the street. The one Tiffany had told him Henry mowed, only mowed, the owner this old woman who still took care of the landscaping. Right on the other side of the fence a carefully crafted mound of landscape, flowers, rocks, bark, and at the peak a fountain occupied by a mermaid, hair covering breasts and crotch, all of her white as chalk dust. Sipe imagined a more violent cessation of impact flight. A haze of fragmented mermaid hanging over everything.
Walking towards the SUV, the cop called out in a loud voice. A figure appeared, walking around the rear of the SUV. The cop saw her and froze mid-step.
The strapless blue stretch top might still be on her, but out of sight beneath a black t-shirt. Millicent Timbers retained the crimson colored stretch pants, the muscular legs terminating in some sort of black sneakers crisscrossed by bright orange shoelaces. Her hair in a ponytail, sunglasses on, a kitchen knife in either hand.
The Sheriff’s Deputy called on Millicent to put those knives down. His elbow stuck out, hand on the holster along his right hip.
Millicent pointed at Sipe, at the now damaged Honda, and Millicent said something to the cop. It almost sounded like she wanted to talk to Sipe.
“Ma’am, put those knives down. You need to put those knives down. Put them down now.”
Millicent looked at Sipe. The way he saw it, she’d driven from Pendleton to Little Creek and the whole time she’d had her hands on the steering wheel, all those miles, she’d had the knives in both hands. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t get in the way. When you were in pursuit of Bela Yalbo 2.0, nothing slowed you down.
She dropped the knives. The Deputy told her to put her hands behind her head and take two steps forward. Once Millicent did that, the Deputy told her to get down on her knees. She did that. She still looked at the damaged sedan. At Sipe. The Deputy asked her to lay down on her stomach then put her hands at her sides. The Deputy looked over his left shoulder at Sipe and then walked towards Millicent, laying flat on her stomach on the ground. The Deputy had a slight second chin. He’d lost weight. Gaining weight. Or it was just the genes he’d been dealt. The Deputy holding a pair of handcuffs, he told Millicent to put her hands behind her back. For good measure, he kicked the knives a little further back from their impact on the asphalt. He turned and walked forward until he was standing right above Millicent and then he knelt down.
Sipe made a noise, a not quite gelled together ‘no’.
Years ago, Greta told him she’d sucked in a breath when Sipe took a basketball and winged it right into Roxanne’s face. It was the look on little Sipe’s face even before he picked up the basketball. Greta knew what he was about to do. The breaking point had been reached.
What it was was some motion Millicent had learned competitive swimming. The porpoise. The orca. A Bela Yalbo-move reporters had learned not to ask about unless they by-passed all mention of Bela Yalbo and treated it as Millicent’s and only Millicent’s creation.
Her entire length snapped, convulsed, a thick violent 6’1” tall muscle, and the Deputy pitched back and to the side. Like she was performing a push-up, Millicent braced her weight on her palms and spun under the Deputy and slid a leg out from under him and then kicked him in the midsection. Then she was up and on top of him, hitting him in the face.
The first time Sipe turned the key the engine turned over. He backed up, the driver side of the dented sedan scraping the fence. Sipe looked out his window expecting sparks. The little old woman, the landscaper, stood on her front porch, braced on a walker. Sipe kept backing up, kept the steering wheel straight, not messing around with trying to turn the wheels one way or another. The sedan slipped clear of the fence. Nose to tail the sedan blocked access to Mountain Road. Up at the peak of the steepest street in Little Cr
eek, a tall silhouette looked down towards Main. Millicent had multiplied. Whoever it was, they looked like they were on their phone. He started to roll the car forward and to the right. The fogginess of the impact cleared enough he realized it was Gwen up there.
Sipe accelerated across Main Street, passing the butt end of the downed Deputy’s rig, bouncing off asphalt onto Mountain Road’s sparsely graveled southern half, up and down, in and out of summer’s deep divots, winter’s mud puddles.
Millicent had acquired the Deputy’s gun. Sipe had seen her. She’d raised it, pointed it at the damaged sedan, but hadn’t taken the shot.
Safety. Didn’t think about finding it. Or found it. Set it and hadn’t meant to.
Maybe she just had her hand up. He’d seen her so briefly his brain was betraying him.
Sipe made the first left he came to, then sped east, and turned left onto the pavement, heading north on Old Woods Road. The park flashed by him on the right. At the intersection with Main, his intention was to turn right, start heading east. A Jeep bearing west on Main, heading towards Millicent’s wrecked SUV and the beaten Deputy hurtled down Main, the driver pigging out on pavement, taking up the fat center of the street, working their horn the whole time.
Sipe turned the wheel to the left. He cut into the Auntie’s parking lot, spraying gravel, and cut the wheel to his right to avoid rolling over one of the parking perimeter logs. He hit the brakes and slid to a stop.
A small sea of people had formed. They stood on the rim of the parking lot, looking down Main Street towards the SUV, the cop car roof lights. Across the street, more on-lookers arranged outside Don’s Automotive looked down Main Street.
Sipe’s chest hurt. His right hand trembled. He looked at it. Lifted it off the steering wheel, shook it out of the deflated air bag. Willed it to still itself and it refused. Some of the onlookers were looking at him. Someone swore. Someone else swore. People started running towards Sipe. Scattering. Some headed across Main Street towards the fix-it shop to join the Don’s Automotive crowd as it dissolved. At least one man sprinted down the alleyway between Auntie’s and the house west of the store.
Millicent.
She walked, the gun in her hand, and at sight of Sipe, she ran. She raised the gun.
Sipe shifted into reverse and pressed the gas pedal into the floor. He didn’t look behind him. The driver side rear tire rolled up and over the end of the log. A terrific scraping sound accompanied the black spots, Sipe hitting the top of his head on the compartment ceiling. The front driver side tire bounced up and over the log. For a long moment, the car stopped, Sipe looked for a body. He’d run over someone. This near impossible to shed impulse to get out and look under the car, he fought it. It lost out at sight of Millicent, running across the Auntie’s parking lot, right towards him.
Making sure the car was still in reverse, Sipe hit the gas, and looked back over his right shoulder into the car’s back window. A woman ran along the park fence. He wobbled right and left but got the car centered on Old Woods Road and drove down it in reverse. He hit the brakes once he cleared the city park. Shifted into drive, and accelerated, steering right, east, along the southern edge of the park. He spun the wheel to the left and drove up gravel-covered Woodruff Road back towards Main Street. Up ahead of him the church on the right, and then the intersection, across Main Street, The Antler Inn on the left, The Outpost on the right.
On approach, he slowed down, and heard a popping noise. Something sent hurtling through space turned the rear driver side window from a portrait of cobwebbed glass into a frame decorated in fragments of glass. Millicent running towards him. Running the length of the park. Running and shooting at the same time. Sipe hit the gas and immediately stomped down on the brake, the car stopping on Main Street, the front bumper just across the center line into the westbound lane.
The tall orange flag waggled as the hunk of meat in the wheelchair rolled from The Outpost parking lot across the street towards The Antler Inn.
The guy’s chin stuck to his right shoulder, still, this dirty look sent over his left shoulder towards Sipe. The motorized wheelchair hummed. Crossing the asphalt at a glacial pace. Off the pavement, onto the gravel, the wheelchair wheels rattled, wobbled.
Another popping noise. A soft metallic thump, on the roof, like the bullet gouged the paint job, surfing, tearing, at the same time.
The meat in the chair clear, Sipe shoved the gas pedal down.
The car shot up Woodruff, past Tiffany and Norm’s trailer house, Sipe glancing into the rearview mirror - Millicent came into view, a silhouette in sprint mode - just as he finished the climb up to the top of the hill, hearing one last pop maybe two but without a physical effect, and everything flattened out before him. The school grounds on his left, and everything down below, any hint of downtown Little Creek, vanished from the view the rearview window provided.
The asphalt ran the length of the half dozen houses trailing north out of Little Creek, all the houses on the east side of the road, nothing built in the field of lion’s mane colored grass on his left.
Moments after driving past the last house he drove by the graveyard, modest, tucked into the confines of rusting chain link fencing. Seconds later, the pavement gave way to gravel road. He sped up.