In the next moment the wall behind her shook and her eyes leapt open and the edge of the ax was in the door again, more of it than before, rocking in the splintered wood. It withdrew again and she heard the wheezing effort of his backswing and the ax came crashing once more through the wood, the entire axhead now, wrenching in the ragged seam like the head of a panicked animal. Freeing itself, crashing through again. She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand. Had he lost his keys?

The axhead fell again and pieces of wood flew across the room, and the axhead was jerked from the door and did not return. There was hole enough now she could see the white of the snow in the trees beyond, luminous in the moonlight. Then the hole was blacked out and she knew he’d blocked it with his head. She held her breath. White fingers sprouted in the black hole and gripped the wood. The door shook. The fingers withdrew.

There followed another blow of the ax and this time the axhead did not stop but continued on its downward arc as the plank of the door split all the way to the floor and the entire door shook in its frame. For a moment all was still. Then the door banged violently once, and a second time, and at last swept open in an explosion of light and snow and shards of wood spinning through the air, followed by the man himself, crashing into the room like someone stepping through a rotted floor. He fell to his hands and knees and remained that way, gasping, the ax pinned to the floor under his right hand. He’d fallen in with the moonlight, and the longer he remained in this all-fours position the more he appeared to be captive to the box of light in which he crouched. When he looked up at last his face was ghastly in that light. Ghastly in any light. What may have been the very last of his blood ran in a black syrup from his mouth. Something rattled deep inside him, as though every breath passed through a wet cloth.

She shrugged off the sleeping bag and Billy watched as she separated from the heap of bedding like bones from hide, so skinny, so pale in her thin rags. Dark hair snarled about her face, her filthy bare feet. The dragging chain and the padlock rocking at her ankle like some grotesque idea of jewelry. They each looked into the other’s eyes and saw there the pitiful thing they had become.

She put a hand on his shoulder. The first touch of another human not him in so long. Kept her hand there, fighting the desire to wrench the ax away—Mine, give it to me.

“Billy,” she said. “Where is he?”

He spat blood and wheezed, then pushed himself to his knees and sat back on his heels. He knuckled the blood from his lips and looked about him. “My God,” he said.

“Billy,” she began again, but then his balance gave out and he toppled backward, landing heavily against the doorjamb. His legs unfolded before him one at a time, and now the only part of him she could easily reach was his boots. She put her hand on the ax and slid it closer to her.

He was blinking at her sleepily. The smell of him, like the moonlight and the cold, had invaded the room. He was the smell of cigarettes and car exhaust, of pine trees and snow and mud. Of unwashed hair and vomit and alcohol. He smelled of sweat and flesh and of cowhide and of something metallic and primal that she thought must be his blood. He smelled of the world.

“Billy,” she said again. “Where is he?”

“S’who?” he said.

“The man. The man who shot you.”

His raised his hand in a vague gesture. “Stabbed.”

“You stabbed him?”

He nodded.

“Is he dead? Billy, is he dead?”

He sighed. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.” His lips were blue; his teeth had begun to chatter.

She looked beyond him, into the moonlight, at the trees and the mountain. She could not see high enough to see the moon but she knew it was up there, bright and whole.

The room was growing cold but she didn’t feel it. She was burning up. Her heart was punching at her wasted ribs.

“Billy,” she said. She grabbed his boot and shook it. “Billy.”

He opened his eyes. Glassy, drowsing eyes struggling to focus.

“Billy, you said the sheriff was coming. Is that true? Is he coming?” He winced, and she realized it was his ankle and eased her grip on it.

He wagged his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “My phone.”

“Yes?” she said, “yes? You have a phone? Where? Where’s your phone, Billy?” She reached out toward him.

“Not here,” he said. “Down. In the car.”

She stared at him, disbelieving. “Why would you leave it there?”

“You go,” he said. “My car.” He shuddered. His gloved hand lifted from the floor and stabbed at his jacket pocket and at last found its way in. She heard the sound of keys and he brought out his fist and held it out to her. She could just reach it. Her hand touched his bloody glove and she had the keys.

“My tracks,” he said. “Down the mountain. Understand?”

She nodded. She clutched the keys. They were not the set of keys she wanted and he seemed to know it. Such sadness in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shuddering. “Can’t chop. Anymore.”

“It’s okay. You rest. I’ll get you some water.” She’d begun to stand but he raised a hand to stop her. He wanted to speak again.

“Do you know,” he said, “what timezit?”

She turned and looked instinctively for the coin of light on the floor but it wasn’t there.

“Ten,” she said. “Maybe ten thirty.”

He nodded.

“Your people,” he said.

She looked at him. She held absolutely still.

“Your people,” he said again. “Down there still,” he said. “Still looking.”

She bowed her head. She placed her hand on his boot again. Her thin small shoulders shaking. After a moment she wiped her face and looked up again and said she would get him some water.

She dragged the chain into the bathroom and collected the quarter-full bucket, the last of her water, and returned to the outer room, and stopped short, and set the bucket down, for she could see from there that he was dead.

Outside, the wind blew in the pines. A flurry of snow seethed over the floor and settled alongside his leg. She looked behind her at the dark stove, the last small chunk of firewood next to it. Then she looked beyond him, out into what she could see of the world in the corridor of door and moonlight.

“Come on if you’re coming,” she said, and stood holding the ax.

60

She’d never used one before but the shape of the handle and the weight of the head told her how it must be done and she took her stance over the chain, raised the ax as high as the ceiling would allow and with all her strength brought it down. Sparks leapt and the axhead twisted and the handle convulsed from her hands like something alive. The effort left her panting and dizzy and furious with her body. She bent and gathered the chain in her hands and found no sign of the blow and only a scrape of raw steel in one tarnished link, the link itself unharmed, and she understood at once a combination of truths: the chain was too strong, the ax too dull, her body too weak. In the air was an acrid, ferric smell, like the smoke of sparklers that burns in the nose on the Fourth of July.

She took up the ax again and this time aligned herself over the bolt plate in the floor, over the half hoop that was conjoined with the final link of the chain, that perversely enduring union that had defied her every effort to break it. She raised the ax and brought it down and the axhead did not twist but merely rang out a flat note and bounced back into the air, having struck the face of the plate an inch from the hasp.

Dizzily she raised the ax again and brought it down again and the blade glanced off the hasp but she held on. She knelt to feel the hasp and the link but they remained bound to each other as ever. She turned the ax and drew her thumb along the nicked and blunted edge. Despair rose in her and she fought it down. She looked at the door, the thick wreckage of it, and she looked at the floor around the bolt plate. Having swung the ax she now understood what it had taken to break through the door, and what it would take to do the same to the floor, and she knew she could never do it.