Текст книги "Buried Alive"

Автор книги: Jack Kerley

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3

We adjourned to the observation room adjacent to where Crayline would be hypnotized, a one-way mirror allowing viewing. The room was small and dark. Speakers piped in conversations from the meeting room, the on/off switch beside the mirror. The set-up made me think of a recording studio without the electronics.

Slezak, Wainwright and I took chairs. We peered through the glass into the adjoining room and saw Dr Neddles and Bridges. The room was painted in soft and neutral tones, calming, perhaps to distract from several steel rings recessed into the concrete floor. Two chairs sat within, as well as a small round table. A sofa was to the rear.

“I want a guard in there,” Wainwright said.

“Mr Bridges is an ex-Marine,” Slezak said. “Very capable should extra restraint be needed. He’ll stay.”

Bridges puffed out his chest and jutted his jaw, looking tough. Wainwright looked to me for a verdict. I knew Bridges was a contract employee for a firm like Dunham Krull, inhabiting a hard-edged world of bail bondsmen and bodyguards, repo men and bounty hunters. He’d be mean and hard and proud of the fact, since it was his sole selling point.

“We can live with that,” I said.

Wainwright plucked a phone from the table beside her chair. “I’ll have Bobby Lee brought in.”

Crayline shuffled through the door a minute later, grinning as if he’d called the meeting. He was six-two or -three, two hundred ten pounds, wide shouldered but wasp-waisted. His head was shaved, the bright flesh webbed with scars. Some of the healed wounds looked decades old and I wondered how they’d been inflicted. He was wearing an institutional sweatshirt and pants, muscle-crowded arms and chest filling his shirt; his thighs pulsing against the fabric like beating hearts. Crayline radiated so much force that a blind person would have sat up straighter when he entered a room.

Crayline surveyed his surroundings with electric green eyes, as if determining whether accommodations and participants met his standards. He’d obviously been told of the lawyer’s visit – his right – and the wrangling on the subject of hypnosis. He had just as obviously agreed to the procedure, probably to break the monotony of his day.

“Have a seat, Crayline,” Bridges said.

Crayline turned to Bridges as if suddenly noticing him. “You’re a big fella, aincha?”

“Big enough,” Bridges said, putting challenge in his eyes and tapping the chair. “Sit.”

Crayline turned his head away and whispered softly.

“What was that?” Bridges asked, leaning closer. “What did you say?”

Crayline whipped his head back around and snapped his teeth like a pit bull biting a chunk off a roast. Bridges startled backwards into the table, sending it skidding across the carpet. Crayline grinned. Bridges, red-faced with embarrassment, shoved the table back in place.

“Sit,” Bridges repeated, voice taut with anger.

Crayline sauntered to the table and stood beside the chair, flexing his knees. Bridges slid the chair beneath Crayline’s buttocks and he sat. Bridges had, without thinking, moved the chair to accommodate Crayline.

Control.

The guard affixed Crayline’s leg chain to a D-ring beneath the table and retreated to the rear. Dr Neddles placed his open briefcase on the table and took the chair opposing Crayline. The prisoner had a sinus affliction, trails of syrupy yellow mucus draining from his nostrils to his upper lip. Neddles popped a few tissues from his briefcase.

“Would you like for me to wipe your face, Mr Crayline?”

Bobby Crayline drew his lower lip up and over the effluvium, scooping it into his mouth. He swished it between his cheeks as if sampling wine.

“Tastes like fresh oysters,” he grinned, winking and swallowing. “I’m my own seafood restaurant.”

Beside me, Slezak grimaced and whispered Jesus.

Crayline looked at the mirror as though seeing it for the first time. It seemed he was staring directly at me. Then he did something – I don’t know what it was – like he’d directed energy into his eyes.

For a split second Crayline’s eyes were those of a rabid wolf.

I blinked, looked again. His eyes were normal. My heart was beating faster. Bridges backed to the corner as Neddles produced a small musical triangle and its striker. “The sound starts a musical voyage, Mr Crayline. Each ring of the bell helps you float away.”

“What if I ain’t a floatin’ sort, Doc?”

“You promised to let us try, Bobby,” Neddles crooned. “Close your eyes and clear your mind until there’s nothing in it but one clear and pure note …”

Crayline closed his eyes. The psychologist struck the triangle twice.

ting, ting

“Relax, Bobby Lee. Breathe like a series of waves. Warm and gentle waves …” ting “… Foaming and flowing around your legs …”

ting … ting

Triangle tinging rhythmically, Neddles continued his hypno-patter, trying for that peculiar mental seduction called the suggestive state. After several minutes, Crayline’s head lolled to the side, his face softened, his eyes closed.

“My lord,” Doc Wainwright said. “I think it’s working.”

Neddles set the triangle aside and reached in his pocket, snapping open a folded page of questions. Crayline looked as close to benign as someone like that could get. We heard his breathing through the sound system, relaxed and regular. I was beginning to look forward to the show when Slezak stood and strode to the switch beside the mirror. He snapped the speakers off and the room went silent.

Wainwright scowled. “I have to monitor the procedure, Mr Slezak.”

“It’s privileged information,” Slezak said. “I demand privacy with my client.”

“How about I leave the room, Slezak?” I offered. “It’ll be you and the doctor. That work?”

“No. Both of you please leave us until we’re finished.”

Wainwright looked into the adjoining room, saw all was calm. She frowned at Slezak. “We’ll be right outside the door.”

“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.

Wainwright and I stepped outside. “You think he’s really under?” I said. “I can’t figure Crayline being hypnotized.”

“Sometimes people who seem the worst potential subjects go under in a fingersnap. You can’t tell who’s a good candidate until you swing the watch.”

“I assume Slezak never told you who he’s really representing?” I asked.

“He suggested it was Bobby Lee.”

“Bobby Lee wouldn’t know Slezak from Muzak,” I said. “Someone else is paying for all this.”

I sat and read a three-day-old newspaper fetched from the employee lounge. Doc Wainwright busied herself reading case histories. I heard a sound from the room with Crayline, lifted my head and, hearing nothing, resumed reading.

After twenty-five minutes, I set the paper aside. Another sound, like a squeal, issued from the room. Then something louder, a moan. I looked at Wainwright.

“Privacy be damned,” she said, turning toward the observation room. “Something’s going on.”

She entered with me at her heels. Slezak stood, his eyes sizzling with anger. “I want you both out, now!”

We strode past him like he was furniture and went the mirror. Bobby Lee Crayline was rolling his head like it was on gimbals. His mouth opened in a howl but nothing transmitted through the glass.

“Doctor Neddles touched something painful,” Wainwright said.

“You’re risking a lawsuit,” the lawyer barked. “I’ll have your …”

Slezak’s voice tapered off as Crayline howled loud enough to hear. His body began to spasm. His fists were clenching and releasing. “Crayline’s too deep,” Wainwright said. “God knows what he’s re-living.”

Another cold and quivering howl pierced the glass. I slipped my hand to the switch on the wall, snapped the speakers on.

“I KILLED THEM WRONG!” Bobby Lee howled. “THEY’RE STUCK THERE FOREVER!”

Neddles looked confused; the words made no sense. Bobby Lee began leaping as if to touch the ceiling with his head. Great pumping leaps in time with his howls, like the floor was on fire. He’d compact himself, leap, repeat. Bridges was beside Crayline, trying to get an arm around the man’s neck.

One of Crayline’s arms flew wide, chain whipping through the air. My heart froze. Crayline had summoned a demonic reserve of strength and torn the ring from the floor.

“He’s loose,” I yelled.

I watched in horror as the madman head-butted Neddles, who collapsed like deflated skin. Bridges aimed a kick at Crayline’s groin. He took it on his thigh, ducked, and shoulder-rammed Bridges into the wall, dropping him. Bobby Lee turned and stared into the mirror, his eyes radiating the rabid-wolf look I’d seen before.

He lowered like a bull preparing to charge.

“Oh Jesus,” Wainwright whispered. I pulled her aside as Crayline exploded through the glass like a missile launched from hell. I dove for his shoulders, tried to snake an arm around his phone-pole neck. Doc Wainwright was screaming for the guards. Crayline bucked like a rodeo bull, sending me spinning across the room. When I spun back to the tumult, Crayline had Slezak’s head under his arm, trying to snap the man’s neck. I grabbed Crayline’s arms, his biceps like living cannonballs.

Emergency horns blared. Guards exploded through the door. Stun guns sizzled. A final howl from the subject, his voice a high tremolo, like a child sucked down a drain.

The hypnosis of Bobby Lee Crayline was over.

4

Wainwright and I stood in the bright Alabama sun and waited for a heavily restrained Crayline to return to the prison van. He was belted to a gurney, not allowed to stand. I’d fixed Mix-up’s leash to his collar and kept him to my side.

Bridges stood a dozen feet away, humiliated by the man he’d been charged with controlling. Dr Neddles probably had a mild concussion, but was coherent and expected to do fine. The medics were putting a restraint collar on Slezak’s neck. His face was ashen, like he’d looked into a grave and realized it was his.

“Coming through,” the younger of the guards yelled, rolling Bobby Lee Crayline to the van. Crayline was grinning again, as if the gurney was a sedan chair and he was being borne aloft through adoring throngs. Mix-up lunged toward Crayline, like the man smelled of raw meat. I pulled my dog tighter against my leg and saw Bridges’s knuckles turn white as Crayline rolled nearer. Bridges strode to the restrained Crayline and stared down at him. Uh-oh, I thought, tensing.

Bridges cleared his throat deep and spat thickly in Crayline’s face. Said, “Try my oysters, faggot.”

“Get back from him, now,” the guard growled, shouldering Bridges aside as the gurney clattered to the van.

“How much inbreeding did it take to make you, Crayline?” Bridges yelled at the retreating prisoner. “How many generations of retards fucking their retarded sisters?”

Wainwright strode to Bridges, grabbed his arm. “Bridges! That’s enough!”

But Bridges wasn’t finished. “How was your childhood, Crayline?” he railed. “Bet you got used like a girl by all the men in your family. Bet you put on lipstick and begged for more.”

The grin on Crayline’s face was replaced by a blank screen. His head twisted back as he was hustled across the asphalt, his voice no longer giggly but rasping, the sound of a henchman’s axe on the grindstone.

“You best move to another planet, girly,” he hissed. “Bobby Lee’s gonna fry your guts for his supper.”

“Fuck you, you genetic moron,” Bridges snarled. He strode to his Corvette and roared away. Neddles and Slezak limped to the Benz and followed. A minute later, the van with Crayline pulled away.

Wainwright and I watched the vehicle pass the checkpoints, then swerve on to the road a half-mile distant to become a brown speck against green fields. Wainwright fumbled in her purse and produced a rumpled pack of cigarettes, lit one.

“Didn’t figure you for a smoker, Doc,” I said.

“I have two cigarettes a week, Detective. I’m having them both now.”

“I fully understand,” I said.

“I owe you for coming up here,” Wainwright said, exhaling a blue plume of smoke. “I know there’s nothing I can do for you, but if ever there is …”

I waved her promise away and we stood quietly for a couple minutes to watch a jet pull a slender contrail from the west to the east. Wainwright lit her second cigarette from the first, squinted over my shoulder. Frowned at something. My eyes followed to a black rope of smoke rising into the sky perhaps five miles away. I knew there was nothing in that direction but cotton fields and pasture.

“What do you think it is?” Doc Wainwright said.

“Nothing good.” I told her to call the local cops, then sprinted to my truck with my dog at my side.

From a quarter-mile away, the scene sent ice cubes clattering through my belly. The Holman van lay on its side in a ditch, orange flames licking from the windows and turning to smoke the color of raw petroleum. I saw a green tractor in the middle of the road and wondered if the vehicles had collided.

I pulled to the side of the road, jumped out, hearing the distant whine of approaching sirens. Mix-up followed, keeping a wary eye on the fire. The tractor was a John Deere with a trailer behind, piled high with hay bales. A farmer in blue overalls and work shirt knelt above the young guard, severely burned, his clothing smoldering. His face was pocked with shotgun pellets.

The farmer turned to me, his face a mask of terror. “I was in the field, saw smoke, drove over on my tractor. I pulled this man from the van. There’s another man in there, a driver. I couldn’t get to him, the flames …”

I looked into the fully engulfed van. A lost cause. I saw Mix-up in the corner of my eye, grubbing in the hay atop the trailer. The farmer started to touch the man, give comfort, but his hands couldn’t cross the distance to the dying guard. He looked at me, helpless, almost in tears.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Help’s coming,” I said, hearing the sirens, loud now.

5

Months passed with no new details added to Crayline’s escape, save that the farmer mentioned hearing a motorcycle racing away in the distance as he arrived. It was theorized that a motorcyclist passed the lumbering Holman van and fired a shotgun into the windows. The speed limit on the stretch of road was thirty-five miles per hour. No matter what the van did when the driver lost control, the chances were Bobby Lee – strapped in from several angles – wouldn’t get hurt too badly. I always pictured him laughing as his rescuer pulled him from the broken vehicle, like a guy getting off a roller-coaster.

It was a brilliant plan, probably hatched in Holman when Crayline discovered his upcoming trip to the Institute. Prisons had “alumni associations”, and someone with the demonic charisma of a Bobby Lee Crayline would have outside connections, men who’d risk their lives to say they’d helped him escape.

In the meantime, people in Mobile were bludgeoned, stabbed, poisoned, shot and, in one memorable case, vacuumed to death. Harry and I investigated, putting in a lot of eighteen-hour days. Then, good news. Financial stimulus funds reached the understaffed Mobile Police Department and sparked the hiring of new officers. This allowed the promotion to detective of several deserving uniformed men and women. The workload decreased.

I was thinking about taking some time off, when my supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason walked to my desk. Tom had been trying to get me to take a lengthy vacation for years. I’d get close, but the caseload would balloon and I’d truncate my plans to a long weekend getaway. At least that’s what I told myself. My partner muttered that I was an investigation addict afraid of missing a fix, but he muttered a fair amount.

But in truth, even I felt increasingly frazzled. Cases were becoming less a rush than a drudge. The slackening of pressure had me thinking it was finally time to take a break and get my edge sharpened.

“You and Harry have had a tough year,” Tom said. “He got his head banged like a gong. You put in eighty-hour weeks on that case with Sandhill. Not to mention this current crop of madness.”

“The point being, Tom?”

“The Department owes you forty-three days of accumulated vacation, Carson. Now, I can’t order you to take time off, but I think it would be good if you gave it some thought and …”

“I’ll do it,” I said, clapping my hands.

“Do what?”

“Like you just said. Go on a vacation. What a great idea!”

Tom paused. “You will? Just like that?”

“It’s brilliant, Tom,” I said, standing to do a little shuffle-foot dance. “I’ll start making plans.”

Tom nodded and turned back to his corner office, stricken mute. I could tell he’d prepared an entire lecture on Why Carson Ryder Should Take a Vacation.

Tom paused at his doorway, fingers tapping the frame. He turned.

“You’d planned to take some time off, right, Carson? Is that it?”

I did cherubic innocence. Tom waved the question away and went inside his office, his long face heavy with puzzlement.

Which explains, in a roundabout way, how I ended up in Eastern Kentucky, hanging off the side of a mountain while being yelled at by a gnome.

6

“Hey Carson!” called a voice from way below my feet. “You get lost again? Yoo-hoo, Earth to Carson Ryder.”

“I hear you, Gary,” I called over my back. Above me I saw two hundred feet of Corbin sandstone, the leavings of untold millennia of alluvial flooding. I was climbing through the compressed floor of an ancient sea that flowed during the Mississippian era, 400 million years ago. My fingers clutched small handholds. My toes were wedged into clefts. At my back lay nothing more than air.

“Others are waiting their turn, bud. Come on down.”

I pushed away from the rock face, dropping a foot until the rope through the bolt jolted me to a stop and I was lowered thirty feet to the ground. Gary, the twenty-five-year-old rock-climbing instructor, a diminutive guy who was part gnome, part mountain goat, grinned as my feet hit the ground. Pete Tinker, the other instructor from Compass Point Outfitters, grabbed the control rope and launched another aspiring climber up the cliff face. Gary patted my back.

“You seem to get lost up there, Carson. How was it?”

“I’m sweating like a sprinkler,” I said, pulling my soaked tee from my chest to put air over my skin. “My muscles are quivering. My fingers ache. But I’m ready to go back up right now.”

“I’m not surprised. A lot of folks don’t have the physicality for rock climbing, the strength and elasticity. You do. But even more, you have an intuitive feel. You don’t waste motion.”

“I’m surprised to hear that. I feel clumsy as a first-step toddler.”

Gary grimaced toward the young woman just sent up. She’d lost her grip and was spinning in the air as Tinker belayed rope and shouted instructions.

“These folks are toddlers, Carson. Four days of lessons and you’re up and running. But you’ve done this before, I take it?”

I grinned. “I dated a climber a few years ago. She gave me the basics.”

“She done good. But you’re ready to move past the basics. You’re coming back, right?”

“Try and keep me away.”

I packed up my rented climbing gear and began coiling ropes. The eight other climbing students did the same under Gary and Pete’s watchful eyes. We heard the labored grind of an engine and turned to an SUV arriving on the old logging trail connecting the main road to our cliff face. The insignia on the door read US Forest Service. We were on their turf, inside the Red River Gorge Geological Area of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

The high-sprung vehicle crunched to a stop and two occupants exited, a big, square-built county cop about my age, mid-thirties. His face was a broad, flat plain centered by a button nose, as if a normal nose had been sectioned and only the tip pasted to his face. The man’s eyes were a gray wash and his mouth so lipless and tight I couldn’t imagine it smiling. His belly rolled three inches over a wide belt hung with police implements. The cowboy boots were alligator and the hogleg pistol he carried would only be standard issue in a Wild West wet dream. His uniform was too many hours from an iron.

Beside him, in visual opposition, was a trim and tall older guy in a hard-creased green uniform that looked ten minutes from the dry cleaners. It took a second to register that he was a forest ranger. He had a relaxed and dreamy smile on a tanned and ruggedly pleasant face, leaning back to stretch his spine. But I noted his half-closed eyes vacuuming in his surroundings. It was interesting.

The cop went to talk to Pete and Gary. I carried on coiling rope and watching from the corner of my eye. The ranger had nodded to the instructors before leaning against the trunk of a hemlock, whistling to himself and studying the sandy ground.

I looked up and caught a hard and cold appraisal from the sheriff, like he found something offensive in my bearing. I feigned indifference and walked my coil of rope to the van. Turning, I saw the ranger cross my path to pick up a tiny foil wrapper, as if collecting errant litter. He tucked the foil in his pocket, looked down again, headed back toward the SUV.

I knew what he was doing, and it had little to do with litter collection.

“Sheriff Beale,” the ranger said.

The cop turned from Gary, pushed back his hat. “E-yup?”

“We’re done.”

The big cop shot me another hard glance, then nodded and followed the ranger. They climbed in the Forest Service vehicle, pulled away slowly, the ranger at the wheel. As he passed in front of me, I smiled.

“Not the shoe prints you were looking for, right?”

His eyes held mine for a two-count. Then the eyes and the SUV were moving away and I tossed my second coil of rope in the van with the gear of the other students. They’d driven six miles from the outfitters in Pine Ridge. The cliff we’d been using for practice was only three miles from my lodgings, so I’d driven over on my own.

Gary shot a thumbs-up out the window, said, “See you later,” and the van rattled away.

I stared up the wall of rock – for a brief moment wondering how far up I could get on my own – then came to my senses and climbed into my pickup, pausing to enjoy the view and the strange journey that had led me here, a pas de deux with fate, or perhaps blind luck.

After talking with Lieutenant Mason, I had been sitting at home and shuffling through a lapful of travel brochures snatched from rest stops over the years. They were heavy on entertainment-oriented venues: Branson, Orlando, Gatlinburg, and other places that made me break out in a cold sweat. I was wondering if I should just put Mr Mix-up in the truck and start driving à la Steinbeck when the phone rang.

“Mr Ryder? This is Dottie Fugate at RRG cabin rentals up here in the Kentucky mountains. Feel like a little vacation getaway?”

“I, uh … What?”

“You stayed with us a while back, right?”

My family had lived in the area for four months when I was a child of seven, following my father in his job as engineer and bridge-builder. Then, almost a decade ago, at age twenty-seven, I’d returned before joining the MPD, a self-imposed weekend retreat to sort out a jumble of warring factions in my head. It hit me that I must have stayed at an RRG cabin.

“The last I was in your neighborhood was nine years ago, Miz Fugate. You keep records that long?”

She laughed. “Yep. An’ ever’ year we drop all the previous guests’ register cards in a hat and my daughter pulls out a winner of free use of a cabin. She plucked out your name. I sure hope you can come back and stay with us.”

Clair Peltier, a pathologist for the state of Alabama and my significant sometimes other, believes in the concept of synchronicity, thinking a webwork of logic underlies the fabric of the visible world, a fluid and spiritual mathematics with a sense of humor. She would have explained that my seeking a vacation spot and one arriving via phone was synchronicity: it was not luck, but an item on the universe’s to-do list.

To me it was just weird. But it had dropped in my lap, and it was free.

“You got any cabins available, say, next week?” I asked.

I heard pages flipping, Dottie Fugate checking a calendar.

“Choice is tight, cuz it’s summer tourist season, but we got one open starting Saturday. It’s in a holler in the backcountry and damn remote, to tell the truth.”

“I’ll take it.”

I started the engine and my truck ascended from the valley through pine and hemlock and maple, passing sheer rock faces where vegetation wouldn’t grow. I saw huge house-sized chunks of rock that had toppled from the ridges eons ago. The dark boulders sat in the forest like sentinels, and I recalled that during my brief childhood stay in the mountains I had imagined the boulders whispering to one another during the night, not through the air, but the ground.

I headed back to the cabin, stomach growling, breakfast burned away by hauling my ass up rock faces. The road was asphalt, potholed, crumbling at the edges, but a main county road nonetheless, the shoulders dappled with wildflowers. I curved past a cliff face and cut on to a tight lane, the truck’s springs squealing as the tires dropped from asphalt on to rutted double track of dirt and gravel.

Directly ahead, the road seemed to disappear, the effect of a precipitous winding drop into the tight cleft between two mountains, a hollow, or what locals called a “holler”. I eased down until the lane flattened out. Another few hundred feet and the road forked. To the left was the only neighboring dwelling, a sizeable log cabin visible through the trees.

The right-hand path took me a half-mile deeper in the hollow to my cabin, slat-sided and roofed with dark green metal. Behind, three towering hemlocks pushed into the blue sky, taller by a third than the surrounding white pines and oaks. The dark, raw-wood cabin looked native amidst the forest, as if it had sprouted on its own.

I climbed the porch and pulled my key, for the first time noting that the keychain had a label with the cabin’s name. Vacation retreats were given names – Rocky Ridge, Timbertop, Braeside and so forth – mine apparently named by its remote placement.

Road’s End.

I heard a hellacious din from inside and saw a blur of frenzied motion at the window. I sighed and opened the door.

A tornado blew out.

“Jesus, ouch, damn … calm down, Mix-up.”

Having saved my dog from the euthanasia needle with about a half-hour to spare, many would have figured his wild-eyed, slobbering delight was joy at greeting his savior, but jubilant chaos was his default setting: spinning in circles, bumping my legs, rolling on his back, a dog that delighted in everything.

Mix-up thundered between my legs, and I went down. When my head was on his level he began licking it like a beef roast.

“Stop, dammit. No, Mix-up. Sit! SIT!”

A strange thing happened, something I didn’t expect in a hundred years.

He sat.

His body twitched, but his haunches stayed glued to the ground. I stood, staring at the phenomenon. For a year I’d been working on commands, Mr Mix-up immune to my imprecations. I’d say Sit, he’d thunder in circles. I’d say Stay, he’d follow me like my pants were made of bacon. I’d throw a stick and yell Fetch, he’d roll on the ground and pedal his legs at the sky.

A couple months ago I’d spoken about Mix-up’s recalcitrance to his day-care lady, Lucinda Best, who volunteered at the animal shelter from which I’d rescued him. She’d recommended a nearby obedience school and I’d taken him thrice-weekly for a month, a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of watching other dogs learn to heel, fetch, sit and stay while Mix-up went his merry way.

It appeared he’d managed to learn something, though. Did one of his many breeds have a learning lag time? I held up my hand and quietly said, Stay. I backed away. He stayed. I back-stepped down the drive for fifty paces, hand up, repeating my command every few seconds. I stopped, gestured my way, said, Come here.

He exploded toward me. When he was two dozen feet away I thrust my hand out, said Sit.

He skidded to a stop in sit position. I backed away again, keeping him in place with the Stay command. I found a foot of busted branch on the ground, threw it down the drive yelling Fetch!

He tipped over and began pedaling his paws at the sky.

“Two out of three ain’t bad,” I told him, rubbing his belly. “Let’s go grab some chow.”

I opened the cabin door and went inside, the air cool and smelling of wood and my breakfast bacon. The walls were pine decorated with cheap buys from local flea markets: a red-centric quilt, a sign advertising Texaco Gasoline, calendar-style photos from the Gorge stuck in a variety of dime-store frames. The living room had a vaulted ceiling, with loft space above. Dormers let light pour in. The dining room and kitchen made one long unit.

I showered away the morning’s sweat and grit. Afterwards, I went to the kitchen area and lashed together two sausage and jalapeno cheese sandwiches. I cracked open a cold Sam Adams and dined in a rocker on the sun-dappled porch, serenaded by insects, birdsong and the tumble of water over rock in the nearby creek. Swallow-tailed butterflies skittered through the warm air. Somewhere on the ridge above the cabin a woodpecker drilled for bugs.

I leaned back in the rocker and set my bare heels on the railing as something puzzling happened in my neck and shoulders. At first I didn’t recognize the feeling, then it came to me.

They had relaxed.