All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 33

33

“Can I help you?”

Eli Aaron looked like he belonged in the woodland. He wore a plaid shirt and heavy work boots and jeans slashed at one knee. Saint took a step back before fishing the poster from her bag.

“Can you make me a model?” she spoke quiet, the breeze stealing her words as he leaned down a little then studied the trees behind her.

“You came here alone?”

“I hiked from the service road.”

“Ought to be careful. Wild snakes in the fields. I trap what I can… serpents rear up.”

More than anything she noticed his size. Maybe six four and three hundred pounds. Heavy, sloping shoulders. His hands hung like meat by his side. His eyes were empty till he smiled, his teeth bright against stubbled skin, his hair long and parted with oil. She could not recall him from school, instead remembering someone entirely different. As if he shifted shapes when he had to.

He rubbed at his chin like it itched him. Saint had read in the biography of New York Detective Roger Gable of something called the feel, that it would later become his best friend, and under no circumstance would he ever ignore it. More than fear or distrust, it was a belief low in the bones, beneath the layers of skin and blood and guts, it was something that ached, it was something that told you soon enough you’d be drawing your gun, and you’d better be damn well ready to end a life.

Eli Aaron stepped aside and she walked in.

He took the poster from her and stared at it.

“You all think I can make you look like that. Jealousy…ain’t becoming,” he said carefully. “You have the money?”

She nodded.

“Nobody knows you’re here?”

She shook her head.

The big man made small talk. Told her his grandmother had passed and left him a Leica and his passion was woodlands, but he took the school jobs because the price of gas had done nothing but soar. He cursed about embargoes and Israel.

She saw photographs in black frames of scenes she had passed walking in. Even there in sepia and black and white the despair could be felt, like the land used to be more in some uncountable way.

On the wall was a large crucifix of sawn timber. A single nail split the grain dead center. The kitchen was a single stove and pots that hung from wire, the windows behind blocked with sheets, bloating light through the thin of their thread.

Saint knew to keep him in front of her, enough of a distance away.

Exposed pipework crawled along and up and through gaps in the wood to other rooms.

“Misty Meyer, the girl in your advert, she’s in my class at school.”

He leaned back against a hearth capped by thick cedar. A couple of candles burned halfway and disfigured.

“I saw it on the news.” His eyes darted up once.

“You remember where you were the morning it happened?” she said, aiming for casual, but each word quavered.

“Brooks Falls. Bears come out of hibernation and pluck salmon from the river. I liked them since I was a kid. You see all the blood around their

mouths like that.”

“You stay in a motel?”

“Campsite.”

“You live here alone?” she said, glancing around again.

He smiled like she amused him, like he skimmed every thought in her head and guessed her moves before even she knew them.

The sink was filled with pans, the dark metal sheared off to the bone of silver beneath. He pushed open a door and she glanced into a small bedroom with a bare mattress yellowed with sweat. He grabbed a couple of

sheets from a dresser.

She saw books stacked floor to roof.

“Best education you can get,” he said. “See through someone else’s eyes

and you understand more of everything.”

He hauled on a leather shoulder bag.

Outside she imagined Patch there, maybe beneath the dirt she trod. The

thought sharpened her.

Her eyes fell on the red barn.

“My darkroom.”

“You develop yourself?” she said.

“I used to go into the drugstores. It’s expensive.”

“How about the store in Alice Springs?”

He bristled a little. “The guy in there…he doesn’t understand art. He doesn’t see what I see.”

Eli Aaron trudged the leaves, glancing back every three steps.

Right then Saint longed to hear an engine, maybe sirens, anything that would tell her there was more than her, her grandfather’s gun, and a giant in those Missouri woodlands.

She took a last, longing, look behind, and followed him in.

Inside the light was red and low. The corners of the room were lost to shadows, a maze of tables and machinery and the low whine of a generator.

The smell burned the back of her throat.

She knew she was in trouble then.

Not the kind a kid finds themselves in, the kind teachers yell at, the kind her grandmother could forgive.

This was the kind of trouble she read about in newspapers and saw on news bulletins.

The kind of trouble that no one recovers from.

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