Run - Blake Crouch [43]
“I just wish you had seen the lights, too,” Cole said.
“Why is that?”
“They were real pretty. More than anything I ever saw.”
They drained the cooler as the sun dropped and carried it back to the cabin, fish flopping inside against the plastic.
Jack and Dee sat in rocking chairs on the front porch drinking ice cold bottles of Miller High Life from a case that had been left behind. They were watching great spirals of smoke swirl up into the sky sixty miles northwest near the base of Grand Teton.
“What’s burning out there?” Dee said.
“I think that’s Jackson.”
They ate dinner and put the kids to bed. When they came back out onto the porch, the sun had finally crashed, leaving the flames of that distant, burning city to stand out in the darkness like an abandoned campfire.
Jack cracked open a new pair of beers, handed one to Dee.
Tired and strangely satisfied with the soreness in his body.
He’d been rehearsing how he would say it all day, the last two days even. Figured he might as well get on with it, though the phrasing had completely escaped him.
“Does it feel to you,” Jack said, “like we’re starting a new life?”
“Little bit. How many days have we been here?”
He had to think about it. “Three.”
“Feels longer. A lot longer.”
“Yeah.”
He could feel the good beer buzz beginning to swarm in his head. Didn’t know if it was the altitude or malnourishment, but he couldn’t think of the last time two beers had gotten him this close to drunk.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“What?” she laughed. “You’re seeing someone?”
None of the permutations of this conversation, as he’d imagined it, had involved Dee asking that question. His head cleared so fast it left him with a subtle throbbing at the base of his skull—a premonition of the hangover to come.
“Two years ago.”
Dee’s face emptied of the lightness of the moment and her bottle hit the porch and the beer fizzed out and drained through a crack between the two-by-sixes. The air suddenly reeked of yeast and alcohol.
“Lasted a month,” he said. “Only time I ever…I ended it because I couldn’t stand—”
“One of your fucking TAs?”
“We met in—”
“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear a single detail of any of it and I don’t ever want to know her name. Nothing about her. Just why you’re telling me this now. In this moment. I could’ve died never knowing and you took that from me.”
“When we left Albuquerque, our marriage was on life support. I mean, three nights ago was the first time we’d been together in…I don’t even know—”
“Seven months.”
“Dee, I know I’ve been checked out on our family, and for a long time. Because of guilt, depression, I don’t know. These last nine days have been the worst, hardest of our life, but in some ways, the best, too. And now, it feels to me like we’re starting something new here, so I don’t want to start it with any lies. Nothing between us.”
“Well, there is now. And… … …why the fuck would you tell me this?”
She shrieked it, her voice bouncing back from the invisible wall of trees.
“At least I was always honest with you about Kiernan,” Dee said.
“Yeah, that was such a comfort as our marriage imploded.”
Dee jumped up from the rocking chair and walked off the porch and vanished into the meadow.
Jack slammed the rest of his beer, threw it in the grass.
Sat watching the horizon burn to the soundtrack of his wife crying out there in the dark.
5:15 a.m. and Jack rose up slowly, shouldered the shotgun. He took aim on the neck of the same giant bull he’d seen two mornings ago on the hike up from the road. The recoil drove a splinter of pain through his left shoulder, a thundering blast across the clearing.
The elk’s head dipped. It staggered.
Jack on his feet, bolting through the frosted grass as he pumped the Mossberg and fired again.
When he reached it, the animal lay on its side, eyes open, breathing fast and raggedly. Jack knelt beside it and held one of the spurs on the enormous rack while the blood rushed out across the ground.
He hadn’t field-dressed an animal in over twenty years,