COLBURN SAT FACING THE valley all night. Dozing in and out of sleep. When the sun began to rise, he stood from the chair. His aching forearm from swinging the machete. His rough and damaged hands. With the first step he felt his wounded foot and he grimaced. Sat back down. He took off his boot. His sock a crust of dried blood that he peeled from his skin.
He limped inside the house and went into the bathroom. He took off his clothes and turned on the shower and stepped in. The dirt and dried blood flaking away. The wounds on his hands and foot beginning to bleed again. He got out of the shower and sat on the toilet seat, pressing a towel against the slice on his foot to slow the bleeding. Thinking of what to do.
He dressed in the filthy shirt and jeans and carried his boots and bloodied sock with him as he went outside to the truck. He drove into town. The diesel engine chugging and breaking the silence of the early morning. He parked behind his building and went inside and put on clean jeans and a shirt. He had a roll of gauze and he cut strips of fabric from an old shirt and he wound a strip around his knuckles and wrapped it in gauze and then did the same to his foot. He pulled on clean socks and then he tried to wash the blood from his boot over the sink. He then slipped it on and layered several strips of duct tape across the cut of the worn leather. His dirty clothes lay in a wad and he scooped them up and walked out and tossed them into the dumpster in the alley.
He drove over to the bar and pulled on the door. He knew if she was around, she would be here at lunch for the boy and that was what he believed he was waiting for. And I won’t tell her of all the horrible shit I’m imagining. I’ll just tell her I’m glad to see her. I’m not going anywhere. I’m a sorry son of a bitch and I’ll never let you see that side of me again. I don’t care what you did or didn’t tell me about my father coming to see your mother. I don’t care. That’s all gone. He tugged on the door once more as if he was on the other end of a bad joke and then he returned to his building. He sat on the floor and stared out of the window at the people passing along the sidewalk. At the slowmoving shadows as the morning sun crept higher. He was tired and shadoweyed and then his head leaned forward and he fell into a halfsleep and dreamed of Celia’s house and her mother come back, a frazzled woman standing in her bedroom and looking for the photographs on the wall that had been taken down and put into a box, looking for the faces of her past and wondering where they must be and she carried a long knife, a whiteknuckle grasp around its handle and her thin legs and her old and shriveled body, the skin gray and hanging and the voices of the valley now a part of her as she moved along the hallway without sound and without weight like some ghoul that simply inhabits the cross and evil air that surrounds. Coming to the door of the bedroom where Colburn and Celia slept and wondering who was lying next to her daughter and he woke with a jerk. Panting and bigeyed. Filled with the certainty that someone or something was in the building with him and he waited for a footfall or threatening voice. But there was only the pale light of noon.
He drove back to the bar but she wasn’t there. He expected to find the boy waiting but he wasn’t there either. He drove out to her house and nothing had moved and he stood at the edge of the kudzu and waited for her to come up from the trail and say I thought I’d never find my way out of there. Didn’t mean to worry you. Let’s go to the bar and get a beer. He then looked across the valley and remembered what she had told him about the house buried down below. Remembered what she had said about her mother believing there are things out there that connect us. Save us. He spotted the mound of vines covering the house in the belly of the valley. The chimney wrapped in green and reaching toward the sky in a hopeless plea for mercy. He grabbed the machete and went back under.