The Captive (13 page)

Oh no! Not again. But I sense her this time before she is even close. The tall woman with the shotgun. She is not driving up this time, but stalking along the line of trees  beside the road. She is at the very limit of my perception, coming very quietly, carrying the shotgun at hunter's ready. I pull up on the other bar a bit too violently, wrenching a muscle in my sore arm, but it matters little. I lie on the iron floor for the last time and wriggle out through the opening. One of the dogs wakes, but before he can make a sound I silence him with a joyful burst of will that puts him hard asleep. I do the same for the other dog, keep the figure of the woman fixed in my spatial perception, leap down and creep around the end of the truck. I feel about for other life, but even the old woman upstairs must be asleep. The clouds hang heavy tonight, so the moon is hidden. I sprint across the hard packed dirt of the yard, wanting, just for the joy of it, to leap over the new fence they have put up, but holding off for fear my leg will not take it. Freedom and the ability to run again is like the bursting of alcohol in my system. I feel a great smile stretching my jaws, hear Barry exulting inside me, taste the cool night air with delight and feel my muscles responding again. I had not believed that the cage was so injuring me, but now I know that without Barry's urging I would have given up the idea of escape until it was too late, until I had succumbed to the kind of apathy that steals the will to live, makes the cage and its hideous,  slothful, slow death the rationalized safe place, the accepted death in life. I slip behind the trees, waiting for the woman.

As her tall, angular figure approaches through the trees, I am surprised to hear her whispering. "This time, devil beast, this time you're dead. You're going to pay for Martin, the best man in the world, my man. You pay this time, this time down to hell, demon, monster."

I wait, feeling strangely frightened as she approaches. She is an aging woman carrying a shotgun. Surely nothing to fear. But she wears the amulet, one like Charles had that kept me from shifting. I wonder in something close to panic if she will be able to keep me from touching her, and if I will have no choice when close to her, no power, so that she will indeed get me this time. I had not considered the power of the amulet. For a brief moment I wonder what it can be to have such power, but this is not the time for such  debilitating worries. She will pass within ten feet of me.

She is close, so close I can smell her body, the familiar smell that weakens me with the love Little Robert had for her, but there is something else. I cannot touch her, I know. And I flatten my body against the tree trunk, hoping she does not look toward me, for I know that I can only stand and be killed if she sees me. The power is very great. As she passes on her way toward the yard where the empty cage stands on its truck, I begin to be able to think again. Well, then someone else must take it from her. I reach out for the guard where he sleeps in the door of the tool shed, wake him. He comes awake, grabs his rifle, and I reach out to touch the dogs with my will, waking them with a stinging command. They both leap up and begin barking at the same moment, too soon! The woman is still at the edge of the trees. She is looking at the cage and not seeing the familiar shape in it, perhaps able to see the bent bars, but probably not in the cloudy darkness. I move silently in the trees  behind her.

"I can take it from her," Barry's voice says.

I'm not sure you can move on your leg yet.
I tell him, anxious to keep him back so that I can think.

"Let me try," he says.

And let you break it all over again?

"You can't get the amulet," he says. "I can."

And suddenly I catch his repressed thought.
Barry
, I say with a smile,
I'm surprised at you, trying to trick your old buddy.
For I have caught the flicker of Barry's plan. He would indeed take the amulet from Aunt Cat. Yes, and wear it around his own neck so that, like Charles, he can keep his form, keep me from shifting back.
You must rest, Barry
, I say, pushing him back firmly.

I concentrate on the guard, take his mind and lead him around the other side of the shed. I must operate him as if he were my own body. I have him drop the rifle in the weeds and dash along the back fence into the trees beyond the barn. Now he can circle around behind her. He is making good progress as she stands at the last tree peering at the truck, trying to make out if I am lying down or if I have been removed. I hear her whispering, "Come out, demon, come out, demon. I will send you home." The man is less than twenty yards from her now. If she sees him, she may kill him. I concentrate on his perceptions, aiding them with my own as he sneaks up behind her. In another part of my mind I sense people moving about in the house. The damn dog barkings have wakened someone. Aunt Cat has not moved. The guard, feeling where she is through my perceptions,  is close. He runs to another tree so that now he can almost leap far enough. She turns. I have him wait until she starts back toward me, then as she passes his tree he leaps, trying to get the shotgun. He has the barrels in his hand, ducking under the end as he pulls on them, and both barrels go off over his head. Poor devil, I am thinking, your hearing won't be good for a while. She had her finger inside the  trigger guard. Desperate woman! Now he has her on the ground, and she is wrestling with him. She is strong. He is fumbling about at her neck for the string of beads. She  realizes what he is doing and gets her knee into his groin. He hollers and rears back, but he has his hand on the beads, and they come with him, spilling out across the ground, and as he doubles up in agony and Aunt Cat reaches out wildly trying to grab the amulet, I feel it is gone from her person, lost in the leaves somewhere.

I run forward, scoop the woman up and tuck her under my good arm. The guard is rolling on the ground with his back to us in the dark as I move away through the trees carrying the squirming, cursing woman under one arm, keeping her flailing hands in a tight grasp with my other hand while her feet kick against my leg. It is not hard to find her car, and when I am in the back seat and she in the driver's seat, I take some measure of control and have her drive us away into the night.

Barry is being impatient again.

"Where is she driving?"

To the farm
, I answer,
her farm.

"Goddammit," he screams. "We're out. Go north. I have to see Renee."

You must wait, Barry
, I answer him, trying to mollify his intensity with good sense.
This woman is dangerous, and she will continue so if we leave her like this. We must talk with her.

Barry curses and wants to come out, trying to force me out of my form. I speak harshly to him.
Stop it, you fool! You want your woman. I want you to have her. It is my plan also, fool! I want to be safe to enjoy a life without watching every corner for a crazy woman with a shotgun.

He is silent. Then he agrees and I hear nothing more. The car bumps along over the dirt until it makes a final hard jolt up onto the paved highway and slews to the right. After perhaps half an hour, I perceive the farm, its outlines  familiar as the face of a relative, a parent. In the night it might seem nothing had changed in the past year.

I follow the tall woman toward the farm house. Dawn is graying the sky and in the chicken house the roosters are fumbling awake, separating themselves from their sleeping fat women, making ready the morning call that will bring the sun. The back porch, the steps, the kitchen-dining room with the old oak table that is still too big for two people. Aunt Cat lights a lamp and sets it on the small kitchen work table and we sit. For the first time she sees me fully in my natural form, and although I retain some control over her actions now to keep her from stabbing me with a kitchen knife or something equally inept, I release her mind. While she sits and looks at me in the lamplight, I muse on my childhood in this kitchen, the short childhood I had with Martin, that good man, and Aunt Cat, who now has tried earnestly to kill me. The round braided rug is still on the floor in front of the stove, and the kitchen still has that air of warmth and that loving, harmonious quality that first drew me to the farm, to this family. There is, even without Martin being alive, some force of his still present, as if this wife retains even after his death some of what their love has created between them as a third and encompassing entity, something, I suppose, that she will never entirely lose.

"Why did you come here?" Aunt Cat says quietly, her hands on the table top in a pose that reminds me of that day long ago when the strangers filled the kitchen with anger and then death. I know she doesn't mean this night, but why, at all.

I am of your family. You adopted me.

"You are a demon."

I am not evil. I choose not to be evil.
I feel uncomfortable sitting in a chair. In my natural form, I am not constructed for sitting.
I cannot prevent accidents.

"If you had not appeared, that man would not have shot Martin," she says, holding her head up in the light as if to keep tears from spilling.

I study her homely face, the eyes that are Renee's and Vaire's eyes, that make her face warm and intelligent, even in her despondency and madness. Her hair is more gray now, and she has cut it in a short style instead of piling it up on her head in a kerchief as she had done. It makes her look older.

I am sorry. I loved Martin
, I say, easing myself by getting off the chair and crouching down next to the cold stove.
I was young then, and I had imperfect control.

"You were young?"

Little Robert was young. I was young.

"What are you?" The woman does not desire to move. She is heavy with despondency and a sense of defeat. I release my control of her body. It makes me uncomfortable to hold her in that way.

I am a living being, like you.

"Not like a human," she says with repugnance. "You are a beast, and so you must be an evil demon that can change shape as you do. Nothing but an unholy creature could do that." She puts her hands in her lap and leans forward. "You are afraid of the Indian charm. You could not touch me when I wore it." Her eyes are gleaming with madness again.

That is true.

"Then you are a demon." She leans back, folds her arms, a smile playing about the corners of her wide mouth. "If I had another amulet, I would put a stake through your heart, destroy you with holy spells." Her face glows in the lamp light.

I'm sure the stake would be sufficient
, I say amiably,
but if you want to think like that, why not consider yourself the devil and me the poor holy creature who is destroyed by your evil?

"The devil may quote scripture to his town ends," she says, sneering.

I remember the preacher who spoke the morning Little Robert went to church with the Woodsons
, I say, trying to recall his words as well as I recall the bad feeling he gave my stomach.
He spoke of punishment instead of God, threats instead of goodness. He seemed more like a devil than I.

"You're just a poor innocent bear, or cat, whatever you are," she says. She holds her hands out to me as if offering me her sympathy. "You are an impossible thing!" She grits her teeth in rage, her mood shifting suddenly so that I almost expect her to shift into another form, so great is the  transformation. "I don't believe you exist, and here I am sitting in my own kitchen talking to you as if you were a - a person."

I am a person.

"No person can do what you do. You are a devil."

And yet you believe in an unseen God
, I say, thinking along with her and musing on this as I speak the words.
I am only the things I am, and if that thing seems impossible, perhaps you have the wrong idea of what is possible. Am I more impossible than an unseen God who sees and hears all everyone everywhere does, that sends those who do not please him to burn forever in eternal pain?

"You can change into anything," she says, peering at me with narrowed eyes in the lamp light. "Nothing real, nothing made by a loving God can do that."

I share this world with you, Aunt Cat.

She moves so fast I almost do not duck in time as she hurls the heavy cut glass salt and pepper shakers at me, the ones that are shaped like field glasses. Robert loved them. I try to catch them, but they sail past my shoulder and  shatter against the stove. I wipe the glass out of my fur and take control of the woman so that she sits quietly again.

I don't like holding you like that
, I say.
But I can do nothing else if you keep trying to hurt me.

She nods her head, and I ease off the pressure. She takes a deep breath and pulls her shoulders back in a stretch. She is very tired.

"This is all a dream," she says, closing her eyes briefly. "I am dreaming. I dream all the time of you. I dream of Martin. He comes to me." She squeezes her eyes tightly together and does not cry. "I dream of killing you."

Then you would be the murderer, not I.

"You're nothing but a beast escaped from his cage. Open season on you." She smiles a bitter smile at me. "I could kill you without thinking twice about it."

I am about to speak again, but she interrupts me.

"He was much kinder than I. He had the milk of human kindness in him. He'd excuse you. He might even  understand you."

Her face softens as she thinks about her dead husband. I wait. 

He told Little Robert once that all beings share the world together and we must try to make room rather than kill
, I say, thinking of that time when he killed the snakes and then talked about them afterward when we were burying them.

"Yes," she says, her neck bent again in her tiredness. "He's the kind they kill. The good die young, and he was sixty, but he was still a boy."

He loved Little Robert
, I say, thinking back and feeling the love the boy had felt for the old man.
And Robert loved him.
I watch the woman's face for the effect of the next thing I am going to say.
Little Robert loved you. He had no mother but you. And the boy is part of me.