Anyone watching the two of us would swear that I was being followed, and none too inconspicuously, at that. Not that it’s me that he’s following, not as such, at any rate. I’d say that he’s more along for the ride, but that wouldn’t be quite true, either. I’ll put it this way: we’re heading the same direction, at the same time, with more or less the same end in mind – the same purpose, though not the same motive – and more or less physically together. But we’re not doing this together.
When I was a child, this was my favorite part of the yard. The detritus of years, generations gone by was then piled up behind the old shed. The shed itself had the look of an a-frame tent propped up onto a single block column, with what dad always called “stable doors” swinging together into the square middle. Ridiculously peaked for an otherwise squat building, the old-style shingles wilted around the frame of the roof where they weren’t being actively pulled off or otherwise ravaged by the encroaching limbs of the aged oak. The padlock, meant to, well, meant for not much, not much use for such a thing out here, hung on the wrong end of the l-shaped bolt latch. Didn’t keep anyone out, but it made for a convenient extension of the handle. The smudged, scratched stainless steel, its metallic sheen muddied by years of palming, slapped against the taupe tones of the door every time the door opened or closed. Lost the key about ten years ago.
Malachi has just been born. Boileau is in the shed, pondering. He’s not working yet; he’s standing, with his hands on the antique sawhorses, which he takes great care to maintain and keep in pristine shape, staring vaguely in the direction of his “work horses,” the pair of crude sawhorses that that look as though they’ve been hacked from a slab of granite. Rugged and pitted, they require periodic partial replacements in order to maintain their balance and serve their purpose; I don’t think that a single board is an original. He stands there, his hands splayed out before him, leaning into the horses, his right shoulder dipped a bit and his back crooked, slack-mouthed, mumbling to himself. He turns, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and walks out, closing the door as he does so. The lock is fast and he doesn’t have the key. Shrugging, he leaves it be and bolts the latch, slapping the lock back down against the door with the sudden fury in his turn.
The pit was still in the door three days ago, when
The key is in the nail bucket on the far side of the show horses, buried under the sixteen penny nails. Years later, Malachi finds it and, admiring its smooth surfaces, carries it with him down to the stream where, having only recently learned from me the art of skipping stones, fingers the key a few times, staring at the infinitesimally undulating surface of the stream, content and slow after passing the spring runoff, shrugs and cocks his arm back. Silhouetted against the late afternoon sun, the grass folding back in over his feet, the light contouring around him, appearing to take on a greenish hue as it bends and rushes into the immediate void of his presence. His wrist extends and flexes, the key swivels through the air, catching and deflecting some of Malachi’s light, and plunks into the stream with hardly a whisper.
I can see the faint plosive of the key where it started to sink. Malachi stands there for an extra second, scratching absently at the back of his head, before whirling furiously on his heel, striding back up the slight incline to the shed.
The path from the house to the shed has been worn smooth and sterile. The soil itself has a deceptively healthy black color, some from the rain over the last several days, some, the ash that has fallen on path and field alike, that smears off onto our feet as we walk by. You can see where I just slipped, the too-broad shape of my boot tapering too long, a flame-shaped smudge of ash relocated into a tiny mound where I finally regained purchase. The dogs have run this path over the years, from the pond to the shed and around it. It’s a little bit broad in places, where it takes angles around the end of the house and where it rights again before looping angularly around the shed, but that’s probably because Shaw is a bit longer than Asmund. Asmund is heavier, though.
I’m about fifty feet in front of Malachi right now. He’s got six inches on me, and you can see it when you look at us, even with the perspective. He’s incredibly fast, much more so than you’d think seeing his size and strength. People tend to think he’s dumb, at least, that’s their first impression. He’s not, but there’s something about him that puts people off, an unspoken but imminent threat.
I’m walking at a pretty good clip, good enough to raise a sweat on my back in this heat. still warm from the fire still wet from the
he’d catch me in under three seconds if he opened it up. He’d have me for sure, unless I got lucky enough to squirt away.
The shed doors are open. The top hinge on the right front door is loose, the screws having chewed through the frame. The door hangs limply forward; shoved slightly by the breeze off the marsh, the lock clacks rhythmically against the door, digging infinitesimally deeper into the pit in the paneling. The soft thudding of the lock is clearing an off-white patch in the door as the soot adheres to the metal or is jarred into snowing in miniscule flakes to the ground. The impression of a cattail is dimly visible in the door where the swirling wind had held it in place for the smoke to paint around it. The head of the cattail sweeps off into a narrowing arc where the wind brushed it away; the fuzzy shadow portrait left behind looks as the cattail itself were the source of the flame, that it was the slender stalk that shaped the moment.
I walked straight through the shed, without looking around or behind me. I found the widow’s nest in the back corner behind the broken-down lawn mower last summer. Malachi stormed in behind me, his torso floating level above the ground, only his legs moving. He loomed up bodily as his second leg found the level of the shed floor, eight inches above the dirt. Plume-like he burst upward that distance, leveled off, and maintained his relentless, deliberate driving.
