The Hills at Wallston Park

Patrick could never take bottled water seriously.  Bethel and Shaney loved the junk, but he could never get his head around spending money on it.  It didn't mean that he was unhappy to have the 24 ounces in his hand.  The bottle was at the point where the thinness of the Earth conscious product packaging crinkled every time he brought it up to his lips.  He rubbed the sweating label against his forehead and blonde eyebrows and closed brown eyes.  There was something satisfying knowing they would both be waking up soon and see the note he left by the key dish and would, in all likelihood, proceed directly to the mini-fridge in Carson's bedroom to help themselves.  He would be beyond upset if he knew they were attacking his fridge instead of Pat's.  "Be back soon.  Do not touch my stuff. -Pat"  Carson was a push over, because he had to be.  It's what happened when you lived on someone else's dime.  Beth and Shane knew it.  They knew him for so many years before Pat ever met him.  They knew him like the rope jumping number games of fifth grade math.  Pat still did the long division by hand, but eventually he got answers down on paper the same as them.  It took a while longer, but he figured it out all the same.





There was a slip of paper in Carson's jean pocket.  The little pocket for pocket change and condoms and a lighter.  The rest of the pockets were empty.  He checked them twice, the ground beneath him wet with morning and a few days of rain.  The water was soaking in to the seat of his pants.  Behind him tree bark mosses ate into his shirt with the same cold touch.  He leaned forward into the darkness and bucked backward again, the back of his head bouncing off the tree trunk and loosing ants and mossy bits of dirt down the back of his tee.  He fidgeted in place, trying to kill the crawling legs and bodies and began to sweat despite the unseasonably cool air.  He rubbed and rubbed, like a bear with a bug bite from sleeping wrong, until his shoulder blades slipped and he tumbled to one side.

Carson shoved his hands into the spongy, pine needle thick, ground, keeping the tiny slip of paper, now dewy wet between the index and middle fingers of his right.  He pushed himself upright again and rubbed harder until the tickle itch of ants and tiny moss leaves subsided.  Though everything was dark, the prickling skin on his cheeks told him the sun was hours into its transit.  He drew the paper down into his palm and jammed his hand back into his hip pocket, the larger one, along with a fistful of what his nose and his bare feet could tell him must be forest floor.

His mind began, slowly at the start, to flip through his memories of places past he already went and might still be able to know now.  A mosquito buzzed his ear and he jerked his head away, immediately regretting the reflex as his ear caught against the tree's trunk and hauled on the hoop earring there like a clueless infant on a dog's ear.  "Jesus!"  Hearing his own voice brought him back to a center, but the exclamation came back to his own ears a broad marbled gasp.  Hearing his voice echo reminded him that he could call for help.  He wasn't ready yet.  The dull hammer pounding in his eye sockets asked him to investigate further.  The blindness was deafening.  He shoved his hands into the dirt at his sides and felt it warmed by the sun and still night cool underneath its topsoil.  It was still early.  He tried to swallow, his mouth full and paper dry, and could not.

"Help?"  The question fell like a rock on a mud mound.  "Help," he asked again, eyes still closed, face still numb.  His fingers and nails still dirt caked began to trace his face.  Ears first, then nose, then eyes.  Eyes with caked bits of mud where the lids met.  He rubbed.  He rubbed harder.  "Help?"  He held his hands cupped before his mouth and tried to spit and spit again.  Nothing.  He brought his hands to his mouth.  More bits and chunks of mud.  All as numb as his eyes and nose and cheeks.  He dragged his fingernails across his eyes, pulling away curled finger fulls of caked dirt.  "Help!"  The word sounded like the dry heave of a homeless man with a lung infection.  "Help!"  Though the skin of his lids would not register the touch of fingertips, his fingertips knew the feel of his eyelids and pulled and plucked with greater care as the mud disintegrated.  His mind began to fade in its ability to process what began to come new.

Daylight, but not far removed from night.  Blind, but the darkness was beginning to crack into a red slit.  And mute, but not unable to speak.  Carson ran his fingers in prodding dashes up and down his eyelids.  They were puffed like two bags of house flies on the wing.  The simple fact began to gain ground.  Sewn shut.  Sewn shut.  Sewn shut.  What started as a methodical exploration quickly deteriorated into scratching plucks at the thick threads of what could only be sutures.    His eyes were sewn shut.

The wail began as a string of lock jawed swears uttered to every god and quickly lost their cadence and coherence and mutated into a single tooth tight scream of anguish.  He pulled at his eyelids, pulling them away from the brown irises again and again, only to spring back.  Minutes crawled until he finally fell back against the tree's trunk again and thrust a hand into his hip pocket.  He fingered the slip of paper until it unfolded and began to run it's tiny depressions over his fingertips.  Words.  There were words on the paper.

Carson thrust his paper grasping hand back into his pocket and went after his eyes again.  "Help?"  The word echoing in the boughs above and returning to his intact ears was not the one coming from behind his taped mouth.  "Jesus, help!"  He tore at his eyes and hauled on their lids until all of nature was captured in a pink shaded dashed line.  He plucked harder.  The skin would soon give.  He raised his eyebrows until blood murky tears began to wash away the dried soot still there and the thread gave way like staples on the side of a stomach popping free to appetite.  His fingers did their best to pinch the thick threads as he sobbed and pull them loose from the left eye and then the right.  His vision did not repair immediately, but remained a pink and sloshing sunlit mess, his head lolling left and right and back against the cradle of his chest and the back stop of tree.

As his tongue worked against the dead mass in his mouth, face still numb, he wondered what the damage could possibly be, both his hands gripping the long brown hairs of his head and neither one wanting to clean the dirt there away.  He knew they must, however, and slowly, the heaving of his chest subsiding, they went to the task.  And stopped.  He remembered the paper in his pocket.

Patrick could never take bottled water seriously.  Bethel and Shaney loved the junk, but he could never get his head around spending money on it.  It didn't mean that he was unhappy to have the 24 ounces in his hand.  The bottle was at the point where the thinness of the Earth conscious product packaging crinkled every time he brought it up to his lips.  He rubbed the sweating label against his forehead and blonde eyebrows and closed brown eyes.  There was something satisfying knowing they would both be waking up soon and see the note he left by the key dish and would, in all likelihood, proceed directly to the mini-fridge in Carson's bedroom to help themselves.  He would be so freaked out.  "Be back soon.  Do not touch my stuff. -Pat"  Carson was a push over, because he had to be.  Beth and Shane knew it.  They knew him for so many years before Pat ever met him.  They knew him like the rope jumping number games of fifth grade math.  Pat still did the long division by hand, but eventually he got answers down on paper the same as them.  It took a while longer, but he figured it out all the same.

"Hey there, Carson.  If you are reading this, I assume you've opened your eyes.  I believe we could have been friends in another life, but I hope that, in that other life, the me that meets you, doesn't waste nearly as much time and love before doing something about our situation.  You will be missed.  Shane and Beth will be joining you shortly.  I'm sure you'll all have plenty to talk about very soon."  The ink on the yellow, blue lined, paper was already smearing without the help of Carson's blood stained digits.  The black hand written letters wobbled before his eyes, his hands shaking like a dog too close to fire.  He crumpled the paper and his hands went, spooked birds, to his mouth.  The anesthetic was wearing off and the fire licking at his consciousness was beginning to catch in embers all along the lids of his eyes and mouth.  "Jesus," he whispered again.  The mud came away in an instant, his blood red eyes lending the effort their tears.  As he pulled at the threads and watched a black loop come free, but not break, and tighten the other sets that may as well have been railroad ties, he saw that it wasn't suture thread, but yarn.  His stomach churned imagining the size of the needle thrust through the tissue of his face.

Carson's finger nails tweezed and clipped and tweezed until a segment came free and in clawing, ripping, tears slid the rest of the mess out of the skin of his face.  His head reared backward in the early morning light.  His scalp lost several chunks of skin as his throat convulsed and drove the crown of his head into the deep slivers of tree bark behind it.  The dead, paper dry, mass inside nearly slid down his throat and his gut corkscrewed again, driving his entire torso forward and his forehead to the sodden ground.  His fingers gripped and tore at the earth as he heaved again and finally sucked in air through his mouth.

Slowly rocking backward he swiped at the stubble on his strong chin, the back of his hand tracing the braille of needle punctures begging infection.  "I will kill you, Patrick."  His head swam through thickets of bright black spots and white sparkling rivers, his vision slopped and sloshed worse than before.  His voice in his ears came clearer than he expected.  Too clear.  "If I ever get out of here, I will kill you."  The mass in his mouth, he thought, was his own tongue or perhaps a thick rag.  His eyes crawled downward along the upright trunks of the pine's nearby.  Down from the sun and clouds peeking through the overhead, and down through the branches and ivies and down to the square of upturned earth where he growled seconds ago on hand and knee.

His eyes glazed the plot of land and followed the rich burgundy smears of his fingertips against the lap of his dark blue jeans and the black dirt and palms smeared across his white tee shirt.  "He must have known," he mumbled, tears drying as a breeze took crushed pine needles away from his mouth and nose, "he must have known you were my sister Shane.  I'm sorry.  If he touches you," he swiped at his eyes on fire, "if he touches you, I swear."  He retraced the length of his body, the spreading darkness along the gold studs of his fly.  The buckle on his belt was upside down.  He began to gather his feet beneath him and slipped in the churned ground where he crouched moments before.

He paused.  The balled paper still rested beneath his palm.  He brought it up before his eyes and straightened the creases.  He turned the sheet over.  There was a post script.  "The wolves are never kind, but I hear this time of year they can be particularly unscrupulous.  The downside of deer season.  For your sake I hope you never meet them.  It is one thing to believe you belong and another to find out what that means.  After all,  predators without teeth are just meat.  Have fun,  regards: your 'friend'."  He crumpled the paper again and tossed it at his feet.  The ball bounced.

His stomach was tied in knots, but he tried to focus.  Tried to ignore the pain enough to stand and could not. The drugs Patrick used to anesthetize and render Carson unconscious for the long drive to Wallston National Park were from Carson's own cabinet.  His own recreational rainy day fund of sorts.  The pills had the bad habit of torquing a person's insides like a monkey wrench with a twenty four foot long cheater bar on its handle.  He tried to stand again and collapsed face first into the chewed up dirt in front of him.  There was no pain in his tongue.  As he panted he thrust his fingers inside.  "What was it," he thought.  "Help," he shouted.  He knew he was probably too deep into the woods, whatever woods they were for anyone to hear him, but he shouted again anyway, "help!"  He thrust his fingers inside his mouth again.  The feeling was almost fully returned and the blazing pain in his gut was not fading.  He touched and pinched.  His tongue was all there.  He shoved and shuffled his hands through the dirt.  "What was it?"  The question rifled through his mind.  "What was it?"  His palm seized on it.  Gripped it.

Carson rolled onto his side to get a better look, laser sharp pain burning the insides of his hip.  He blinked his blazing eyes.  "What?"  He threw the gray away.  There was no way in his mind, but he knew his eyes were not lying.  He heard it bounce and shift to a halt yards away.  His palms flew to his temples a moment.  He knew what he had to do.  There was no way, in his mind, but he had to be sure.  As his hands went to his buckle and fumbled with the clasp fastened backward he could see him.  He could see Patrick kneeling over him.  Pulling his pants back on.  The flashlight.  The tray.  There was no way in his mind, but he had to be sure.  He could see him taking the gold zipper back up.  Popping the brass button back into place.  Slipping the leather belt back in, upside down, but right side up to him.  The clasp came loose from the eyelet and he tore it away.  The zipper came back down.  The brass button popped free and he ripped the jean fabric from his hips as though they were made of acid salted linen.

Nothing.  Nothing but loop after loop of red caked black yarn.  The wound was too fresh.  Absolutely unhealed.  With every beat of his racing heart more blood came from where his cock and testicles used to be, dark and thick and shining in the early morning light.  His vision tunneled.  Black shadows crushed inward from the edges of the moss sided trees and the scent of pine sap blew through his head like a tempest rising over heaving summer waves.  He cupped the jagged and frayed lips of what was left, his body curling like a wingless moth beside a bonfire.

A smile broke across Patrick's face as he glanced at his watch.  The bottle was empty.  He slipped it into his back pocket as he stood.  The sun would be setting in eight hours, at best.  With a sharp twist of his wrist, the shoulder sling of his .22 came to his shoulder.  Carson's wails drifted to his ears again, as he pulled his cap down tight over his eyebrows.  There was plenty of time to make it back to the camp ground station and from that station there would be plenty of gas lamps along the route back to wear he left the car.  The rifle was insurance, but as he wiped the last of the water from his lips with his sleeve he knew he wouldn't need it.  Behind him, the hill rose hundreds of feet and the last sounds Carson would make could only just kiss his ear from the side facing the ravine.  In minutes, maybe hours, it would be that much less.  He patted his vest.  Flashlight, knife, needle, all checked.  Plenty of time for everything.  It was going to be a good week.  A productive week.  The drive back into town would be tough without sleep on top of a seven hour hike if he really pushed himself, but he understood that the time for halfway answers was long passed.  "Besides," he thought as he strode down the hillside toward another gulch and low rising ridge, "house cleaning is a lot like any other job, the sooner you get done, the sooner you can move on to the things you really want to do."