Saved

Saved
By Jen Maki

         Mike couldn’t stop looking at the wedding ring on the dead man’s finger. He saw it now encrusted with bile, blood and dirt, the slightly translucent skin puffing around it, seeking to encapsulate it. Scott had maintained the ring had been royal at one time, eight carats of antique gold and a purple square cut diamond the size of a dime, the 5 million dollar price tag perfect for a wealthy man’s finger. Mike wondered what kind of ring Scott gave his wife.
         Yet Scott liked to spit, chased rye with water, and sported a nasty prison tattoo on the small of his back.
         And because Scott liked to foreclose mortgages on a whim, destroying whole families, a corn farmer from Iowa murdered both him and Mike. Scott, deliberately.
         Mike? Just in the wrong place at the wrong time, doomed to death because he always did the right thing.
         There was a cloud of no-see-ums and midges surrounding the fleshy puppet that was so recently playboy Scott. From time to time advance scouts would leave the cloud and venture toward Mike as he lay propped up with his back against a boulder, his mangled legs in a tangle of debris and clotted with pain. Mike barely had the energy to wave his hand against them. When the blazing summer mountain sunshine shone directly on him he felt cooked.
         Mike’s cracked lips split into a freakish grin. “Soup’s on, boys!” he screamed, or thought he screamed. It came out a croak and died quickly in the water-laden air.
         His gaze wandered up the rock fall. It looked surly and bruised, tinged with Scott’s “blue” blood.
         “Royal, indeed,” he muttered. The midges, feasting merrily on Scott’s eyes, paid him no mind.
         Near the top of the rock fall there was an open wound in the rock and dirt where a small tree had once enjoyed its precarious existence. Scott had been holding on to it with his surprisingly callused hands as Mike dove to his stomach to rescue him.
         “Don’t let me fall, man!” Scott had screamed, one hand holding his lifeline of leaves and pith, the other stretched out to Mike.
         Never mind that he secretly detested the man, loathed his incessant teasing and aristocratic airs. He was stunned by Scott’s callousness, the ease by which he boasted of the lives he destroyed, counting them up deliciously in his mind the way a serial killer might. Never mind that he had been doing the right thing for his entire life, often to ill consequence.
         “In saving the world have you ever discovered how to save yourself?” his elder sister Paige had once asked.
         Solid, predictable Mike had held out his hand to scrabbling Scott. There was crunching noise of boots on shale and Mike turned around to see which of his hiking companions was coming to rescue them both. Scott latched on to Mike's hand. The solid, blocky massive growth that was Terry, a farmer from Iowa, knelt down next to Mike. But he had only grinned, in a kind of feverish maniacal way that reminded Mike sharply of his father.
         “Where are your homies, now?” Terry spat. Only then did drunken Scott remember one of his ‘acquisitions’ of four years ago. Terry’s wife had lingered with the cancer and Terry spent every last drop of his money to cure her. But she died. And Scott turned a deaf ear to Terry’s plea, save my farm, please!
         Not a chance, not while there are five million dollar rings to display so arrogantly on well-pampered fingers. He showed no remorse then. He sure did now.
         “I’m sorry!” Scott screeched in terror. “Please, I’ll give you anything! I’ll give you my ring!”
         “Rings don’t buy wives,” Terry responded. In the madness of the moment, somehow so surreal, birds were chirping, wind was hissing, and Terry was pulling on a well-used set of brass knuckles. Scott’s eyes had flown wide, and then his whole face was a mess of pulp and bone.
         Scott had screamed, loosing his hold on the tree, slipping through Mike’s fingers. Before Mike could turn away (could this really be happening?) he saw Scott’s skull make a blistering impact with the rock wall, a mini-bomb that exploded with fireworks of arterial spray.
         “Chilled monkey brains,” Mike now croaked as he looked over at his unfortunate companion. The Indiana Jones movies had led him to believe that brains were pink. Scott’s were rather gray, with hideous streaks of red. “We named the dog Indiana.”
         Mike knew he was going crazy. Nuts. Three fries short of a happy meal. His fevered and pain-addled mind sifted through associations and memories, scattering them into his consciousness to wander every which way like a puff of dandelion on the wind.
         “I have fond memories of that dog,” Mike continued quoting, but instead of thinking of Indiana Jones he thought of Tripod, his boyhood bull mastiff. Tripod had lost a back leg in a fight with a coyote when Mike was six years old. That dog remained the one constant in Mike’s precarious childhood. The lies, the screams, the booze, the drugs, the man he was supposed to call father, Mike absorbed it all. When he was full to bursting with the hot vileness of it, he would run with Tripod into the nearby ravine and spill his guts, vomiting up the blistering exchanges between his father and his family. The words could never char Tripod as they did him.
         Poor, blind Tripod lived to be thirteen years old. His joints seized with arthritis, his eyes clouded over, his every hair turned gray and white. He lost his life quite suddenly the day before Mike graduated high school, when Mike’s drunken father kicked him to death as he lay sunning himself on the porch.
         Scott’s shirt was rucked up, sprinkled with blood and dirt. Mike could see his tattoo. The man had boasted easily enough that he got the tattoo in prison. He never told Mike what he was in the slammer for; after their thunderous altercation with a corn farmer from Iowa, Mike could now guess.
         Maybe he could find out if he asked Scott’s brains.
         “Brains, brains on the wall, tell me why Scott was…” and Mike’s voice faltered. He lifted a hand, so heavy! to his face to scratch his black mustache and goatee, his favourite gesture while thinking. “Um, what rhymes with wall?”
         An iridescent beetle was crawling up Mike’s leg. Determined.
         Mike hadn’t eaten for two days.
         He cursed E-bay.
         The guided tour of  Mount Robson of Jasper, Alberta was selling with a reserve of only thirty dollars. Mike alternated between playing an online poker game with checking the auction. He waited until only a minute was left and then sniped the listing, paying a grand total of fifty-four dollars and one cent.
         He absently wondered if he could ask for a refund.
         Now the beetle was navigating Mike’s belt buckle, heading to his stifling flannel shirt.
         “In saving the world have you ever discovered how to save yourself?”
         The Mount Robson tour group was small. They had no warning about Terry. They had hiked easily the first day, arriving at a small cottage on a lake owned by the tour company. The guys had that evening to quaff beer and compare girls. Mike didn’t drink.
         No, because cold beer makes for hot nights of anything but love, nights of hot pee dribbling down pajama bottoms of terrified boys, nights of heated arguments and drunken fists that somehow always hit the right target, nights of hot blood coursing down tired female faces.
         Terry, a corn farmer turned psychopathic killer from Iowa, he killed the guide first. Guy, the deeply tanned, wind-tinted tour guide got a knife in the liver in the early morning of the second day. Jim, a scrawny youth who looked in vain every morning for beard stubble on his chin, screamed in terror and began to run but everyone knows when a killer is after you, you can never run fast enough, no, because the thudding feet are right behind you and their crazed breath is all you can hear and you can’t even look where you’re going you’re so terrified and you end up wading into a glacier fed lake and you never learned how to swim and the psychopath comes to the shore and pelts stones at you until you drown.
         And Mike followed Scott. Biggest mistake he ever made. Because Scott didn’t know where he was going and tried to stop before jumping off a cliff that suddenly loomed before them. Tried, but couldn’t stop, sliding over the edge to find faint purchase in a tiny tree and the hand of his hiking buddy who always did the right thing.
         Some part of might-as-well-be-dead Mike stopped his wandering thoughts long enough to lift a trembling hand to this iridescent beetle, clutched it’s terrified form between thick and clumsy fingers, then dropped it’s sacredness into an eager mouth, teeth crunching, throat gagging.
         “Tastes like chicken,” Mike muttered as he picked at his teeth. He would accept that cold beer now.
         Alcohol had loosened the tongues of his friends (acquaintances?). “Don’t be a sissy, have a drink with us!” they had crowed, clinking the glass necks of their beer bottles together. Scott was complaining that he had no ice cubes (there’s no electricity here, you freak). That evening, they all sat on the rickety dock, swigging Coors Light (orange juice for Mike) and bragging. The next morning each of them, save Mike and the handy-dandy-tour-guide, spent an uncomfortable amount of time with their faces over the fragrant butt-hole of the outhouse.
         Now Mike’s mouth felt thick and gross, disconcerting bits of exoskeleton stuck between his teeth. He willed himself not to, knowing he had to preserve his water supply, but his head descended anyway, to lick at the moistness at the bottom of the boulder, a small depression that had been filled with water yesterday and was now mere silt.
         And now it was gone.
         Head swimming, Mike’s attention again focused on Scott. Sunlight sparkled on the five million dollar ring. Why didn’t Terry take it? Finders keepers. The part of Mike that stayed optimistic of rescue devised ways of taking this ring to fix everything in his life. It could fill his bank account, which was shockingly empty for a thirty-five year old professional (who always did the right thing!). It could buy a new home for his mother, though it was abundantly apparent, now as ever, that she didn’t need his money or his charity. It could prop up the rehab program he had worked so hard for. Because too many of those socially rejected youth ended up in jail. Too many ended up with unsmiling faces, cynicism boiled into their skin, and their new rank in this life identified by a tattoo.
         The tattoo on Scott’s back was a dark blotch in a sea of bloated, shiny skin. It was a stylized dagger, point facing down, with the number three above the hilt and the number twenty-five on the blade. He should have asked what it meant.
         “Shoulda, coulda, woulda.”
         He should have known that the corn farmer, once started upon his murderous rampage, would leave no witnesses behind. What better place to fade out of the world, than in the vast expanse of the mountains?
         Mike soon realized that he, too, would simply disappear. He had figured it out rather quickly. Because after the brass knuckles smashed into Scott’s face, Terry kicked Mike over the cliff with as much remorse as swatting a fly. Mike landed on the bottom on his legs, which then shattered like crystal. Was he lucky or not, that he didn’t open his skull like Scott? (Such pretty mini-bombs…)
         Mike had looked up and saw the leering face of his killer.
         “Why, Terry, why?” he screamed.
         “She was beautiful, Mike. Even when the cancer hollowed her, she was still beautiful. And after she died I didn't have anything except the corn. Scott took that away.” There was little remorse in Terry’s voice.
         “But why me?”
         “Because nice guys finish last.” Terry had then wandered away, lost in recollection, lost in the mountains, and finally lost his life through hypothermia.          At first Mike had screamed because of the agony of his legs. He had danced on the edge of consciousness, blackness and stars creeping upon his vision but always just denying the sweet black nectar of oblivion. Screamed and then cried.
         Mike never cried.
         He had seen what good crying did. His mother cried at first. She learned not to.
         Once he finally gained enough control to stop screaming, to brick his larynx shut, he had been deafened by the quiet. A bird here and there, screeching in delight. The quiet cheerful bubbling of a creek that was really only thirty feet away but infinitely far to a man with broken legs and no hope. The whispers of the wind, revealing the conspiracy of the marmots who dreamed of taking over the world. The devious sound of a cricket that wasn’t really a cricket, it was a…
         “Don’t be a sissy, have a drink with us!”
         “Boreal Chorus Frog”, said the handy-dandy-tour-guide. “Small enough to fit on the tip of your finger, loud enough to hear from far away.”
         Wilderness silence. No freeway, no horns honking, no sirens. No one to hear him except the contemptuous wildlife.
         Oh, and then Mike screamed again in freshened terror.
         For the first hour he expected rescue. After all, he had not witnessed the stoning of Jim and the piercing of Guy. Surely someone would realize he was missing and would rescue him. Surely the handy-dandy-tour-guide survived; he could be like MacGuyver, and Mike envisioned scenarios of Guy the Guide defeating the farmer with a roll of duct tape and nunchucks.
         Mike wished another beetle would come and hang out with him.
         “Pretty pathetic, even for a Canadian,” he wheezed with a little chuckle.
         “In saving the world have you ever discovered how to save yourself?”
         Mike couldn’t count the number of times he had been in a room with a severely damaged person. How he had sat there, a faint smile on his face, leaning forward with deliberate attention, his ears scorching with the endless tales of violence, abuse, and neglect. It was always Mike who listened. Day after day, week after week, month after month he sat benignly and let them, the feeble and tragic ones, pour blackened viscous tar all over him until the taste of violence was always in his mouth and the stench of abuse penetrated his bones.
         Here, within spitting distance of death, Mike allowed the anger to come in. He had never harnessed its power before. It lent a little tingle to his exhausted limbs. Why was it that nice guys always finished last? Why was it always he who had to listen, to save those around him?
         “Am I worth saving?” Mike wondered aloud. “Apparently not.”
         He tore his eyes away from the lecherous cadaver and looked down the mountain valley. A dementia of dehydration and exhaustion fogged his eyes. There was a knee-high black thing advancing, stopping once in a while to sniff the ground. “Any bears here?” Scott had asked Guy after hearing an ominous crashing in the woods.
         Guy the Guide answered with a smile, “Oh, yes. This is prime Grizzly habitat.”
         Mike sat up straighter, his muddled mind rejoicing. Being eaten by a bear was certainly a more desirable fate than death by dehydration and exposure.
         But it was Tripod who sauntered over to him, his awkward gait intensely familiar. It was Tripod who began wagging his tail and licking Mike’s face. And for the first time in months, maybe even years, Mike was truly happy.
         He was saved.
         “So much has happened, Tripod,” Mike whispered. Tripod merely sat to listen.
         The searing sun had begun its stately march to the horizon, soon to be buried by the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
         “I’m so sorry about what dad did to you,” Mike said. “You may be happy to learn that Paige murdered him last year.”
         Tripod’s tail thumped in approval.
         “I very nearly got married a few years ago. I broke it off, though. I told her it was because we just weren’t compatible, but I lied. It was because she laughed at me when I told her I was a virgin.
         “Once I lost almost ten thousand dollars playing poker.
         “And throughout my career I saved over a dozen kids.”
         An hour or two passed with Mike constantly whispering, telling his beloved pet all the things that had gone wrong. But the sun passed beyond the mountains and the image of Tripod started to vanish, flickering on and off, stranding Mike in the last throes of his life. Mike railed against it, but some part of him, the part that always did the right thing, knew that his body would soon be fodder for the bears and the crows. Just like Scott’s. In a dozen years, all that would remain of both of them would be the royal, five million-dollar purple square cut diamond.
         “I saved them,” Mike whispered.
         “In saving the world have you ever discovered how to save yourself?” his elder sister Paige had once asked.
         Apparently not.