Nathan Grundy’s Bloodline
by Catherine J. Link
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 1
Funny how a man can have his whole world changed just by taking a long walk down a lonely road. When I think back to that day, my morning is a blank. All I remember of the accident is being hoisted into an ambulance by two rough old boys with no compassion for their fellow man. I do believe I used my outside voice to call them some ugly names.
There was a lone witness who said I had been hit by a Chevy pickup. It was vintage, and by that I think they mean old. It had a nice paint job, so somebody loved it, and it was being driven by an old man wearing a straw hat. You’d think in a small town like Griffin that description would have been good enough to find the man who hit me, but no one has come forward to identify him.
I wonder what was so distracting that I did not see that truck coming at me. Was I drunk, or was the driver? Was I high, maybe? Or was I just unusually stupid that morning? I don’t have an answer yet, but I am looking for one, and when I find out who is responsible for the mess I’m in, I am going to kill somebody, even if it turns out to be me.
I’ve been hiding out in this old travel trailer that was my grandpa’s hunting cabin. He told me he had stolen it from a man in Macon. He hooked it up to his own trailer hitch and drove off while the guy who owned it was in some dive, feeding dollar bills into a stripper’s G-string. Grandpa didn’t know the man. The guy didn’t owe him money or vengeance. Grandpa simply decided he needed a place of his own, deep in the forest, and he took advantage of the first drooling idiot to come along. I loved my Grandpa, mostly because I had to. He was a bad man.
* * *
Nathan Grundy put down his pen and pushed the leather-bound journal aside. He couldn’t write anymore. His hands were shaking, and he felt restless, like he could run for miles.
Often, he felt claustrophobic in the trailer. The air inside was rank from twenty years of accumulated sweat, smoke, and his grandfather’s bad cooking. Nathan preferred the outdoors. Bursting out of the narrow door, he paused, taking a time-out to breathe in fresh air, filling his lungs and clearing the fog from his brain.
Standing perfectly still, with his eyes closed, Nathan felt tuned in to the natural world. He breathed in the scent of pine trees, the smoldering cinders of last night’s campfire, scorched green wood still sticky with sap, and the pine cones that had so pleasingly crackled and popped. He could smell ripe berries, some of which had been on the vine too long and fermented into little beads of alcohol that made the birds drunk. He smelled sweet grasses and wild garlic. He could also smell a dead deer that was being feasted on by a wake of vultures and a murder of crows. He found the smell of raw venison appetizing.
He caught the faintest whiff of a fawn, and that surprised him. His grandfather had taught him that fawns had no scent, which allowed them to hide from predators, but his grandfather had been wrong. The scent was faint, but it was there. The fawn was hiding in the grass nearby, watching its mother being devoured. He smelled rabbits. There had to be a million rabbits around the trailer. He smelled water from a fresh running stream just a few yards away, and he could smell people. Campers were upwind tonight.
He was as tuned in to the wilds as any animal that had ever prowled these woods. His eyesight had dulled in the daylight, but at night he could see heat signatures from every living thing that flew in the air or crept on the ground. He could hear barks, squawks, high-pitched whines, low growls and even the breathing of animals tucked away in their burrows. He had never felt like this before his accident. If he ever found the man who did this to him, he would rip him apart with his bare hands.
Nathan looked down at his hands, not so bare any more. There were coarse black hairs growing on his arms, past his wrists, and down to his knuckles. It was sparse, for now, but it was still growing.
“What the hell am I turning into? What kind of life am I going to have? Especially since I just yesterday beat the hell out of my fiancé’s father. That was a bit extreme, even for me. I don’t have the sweetest temperament in the world, but damn.
“I guess the wedding will need to be postponed until Calvin can walk his daughter down the aisle. Assuming I won’t be in jail, that is.” Nathan roared with frustration. His face was stressed by a sardonic grin. After letting out one final, gut-wrenching primal scream, he started to run, and running felt good.
“That would be a pretty sight,” he mumbled between breaths. “Me turning hairy and mean while wearing penitentiary orange. I’ll have no worries about dropping the soap in the shower. Grandpa used to say, ‘There’s a bright side to every dark cloud’.”
Nathan reached the stream and followed it to a paved road, coming across the dead doe. The crows were alarmed to see him. Most took flight, while the greedy vultures stood their ground, holding out their wings to make themselves look formidable. Nathan took no notice of them. He walked away from the road to a clump of tall grass. He pulled the newly born fawn out of its hiding place and tucked it under one arm. The fawn let out two loud cries of distress, sounding a bit like a human child.
“Well, now. Let’s see what we’re gonna do about you.”
* * *
Doctor Russell Thompson was tossing and turning in his bed, thrashing in his sleep so badly that his wife, Virginia, was again forced to take refuge in the guest bedroom. He was reliving a significant moment in his life, one that haunted him. It had been a sliver of time pregnant with endless possibilities, both good and evil. He was reliving that moment in a dream, watching himself operate.
“Don’t do it!” he said. He was looking down from the ceiling, watching himself remove a man’s diseased kidney.
Am I dead? he wondered. He heard himself calling for instruments, then the familiar slap in his gloved hand when the nurse dutifully attended him.
“Wipe...” he muttered aloud, as the doctor in his dream called for his forehead to be dabbed. Sweat was rolling down the doctor’s face. It covered Russell’s body and dampened his bed. Then the critical moment came; an organ was passed to him by the assisting surgeon.
“No. Not that one!”
He thrashed about in his bed, while the Russell on the ceiling struggled in vain to knock the organ from his own hands.
“Don’t do it, man! Do no harm! Remember your oath,” he said.
He watched himself working, using skills that he had honed over the years. Skills that allowed him to save lives. Skills that supported his exorbitant lifestyle, that paid for his two-million dollar palatial home outside of Atlanta, his vacation home in Tuscany, the Rolex he wore proudly, and the five-carat diamond pendant hanging around his lovely wife’s neck.
His cries had become so loud that Virginia was holding a pillow over her head to drown them out.
“Shut up!” she screamed at him from down the long hallway. She picked up a lamp and threw it against the wall, and her husband’s screaming stopped. But after the passing of too few peacefully silent moments, the shouting began again.
“What have I done? God forgive me!” Russell cried.
Russell Thompson’s torment stopped at sunup, after which he slept soundly for two hours before getting up and dressing. His wife had breakfast on the table. She looked exhausted. Still in her robe, her hair wild and her face haggard, she put a glass of orange juice on the table, next to a dish of warm buttered scones.
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking in the sight of her. “I did it again?”
“Oh, yeah. This was a good one. So good that I got a call from Chrystal. They could hear you across the street. She said it sounded like we were having a brawl. She almost called the cops.”
“Sorry, again.”
“It wasn’t all your fault this time. I smashed that lamp your cousin gave us last Christmas.”
“I knew you hated that lamp,” he said with a grin.
“When are you going to tell me what’s going on, Russell?” she asked. She sat down next to him with a mug of black coffee in her hand.
“Never, I hope,” he said. “I’d like to spare you.” He sipped orange juice.
“Just how stupid are you? How can I help if you won’t let me?”
“You’re not much of a trophy wife, are you?” he said with a smile.
“And you’re not as great as my friends told me you were,” she replied.
“So, what do we do now, twenty years later?” he asked. He took her hand and kissed it.
“Hang around until something better comes along?” she said. “That’s what I’m going to do. How about you?”
“I’m biding my time,” he said, getting up from the table. He grabbed a scone, then kissed her on the head. His eyes fell on the diamond pendant nestled just above her breasts.
“Don’t get too attached to that,” he said. “We may have to pawn it someday.”
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by Catherine J. Link
