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Stricken By John J. Barnes (Issue 8)

They were the icy rings of Saturn, frosty halos of galactic eminence filtering neon light from the sun’s rays. That’s what Miles Chandler came to call the winding roads of Crystalline Pass. The rise and sudden fall of its twisting geography strangled the mountainside like a constrictor in hold of prey.

He rounded the curve at intrepid speed, mounted on his full-suspension Cannonrail Elite mountain bike like a jockey on a sleek prized horse. The weather was particularly nice today. The sun hung brightly in the sky and a refreshing breeze flowed steadily through the air. The pine and spruce were a lofty green and the last of the previous evening’s snowfall now ran in clear runnels down the slopes of the mountain.

Miles was a cyclist, had been for most of his adult life. It was his release from the daily grind. Not that he really needed the exercise—his metabolism kept him at a sleek one fifty- five his entire life. He was one of the few mountaineers of Colorado to take up the sport over more indigenous activities such as skiing or snowboarding. “You’re going to get yourself hurt now, mister Chandler,” Ivory Bronfman would always tell him whenever he walked into Bronfman’s store for a new pair of spandex biking skivvies. “That black ice will creep up on you.” And it was true; the ice, no more than a quarter-inch thick on the asphalt, was a silent killer—like the tobacco industry, Miles always thought.

One night of subzero temperatures on the mountain would be enough for the ice to embed itself into the porous surface of the road. And there it would sit, sometimes for days on end. They called it black ice for one simple reason: it was transparent all the way to the ebony surface of the asphalt, making it invisible even to the most cautious of travelers.

Miles didn’t care though, not today. This day he needed his release perhaps more than any other. It was not the taxing pressures of his job. What job? His wife, Melinda, was now five months into carrying their child. It will change your life forever. He remembered those words vividly the day he and Melinda had given the news to his parents. His father spoke them. They welcomed it as a blessing, but to Miles it was the uncanny calm before the storm. Did he want it? That was easy for him. Yes, of course, but was he ready for it? That was the question of the year. And the answer was he didn’t know, not for sure at least. And that fine sense of timid uncertainty had just been pushed over the edge, brutally and mercilessly.

It’s not my fault, he thought, as the wind whistled against his ears like a howling breeze passing the neck of an empty bottle. “Cutting the fat,” is what the corporate bulldogs called it, and Miles couldn’t help but think that that was what he’d been to them all along, just a useless hunk of clinging lard on a magnificent cut of sirloin. The once prosperous car salesman had been given the boot, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The idea of fatherhood to him was a milestone on its own. But now he was jobless, with a bank account growing thinner and thinner every month.

He dipped into a steep downward spiral in the road, his senses brought to the highest point of physical acuity of which they were capable. He’d been down this way several times now, always sure of the hidden patches of slick black ice which sometimes hid in the shadow of the rock face. He zigged, zagged, straightened the rubber grips of his handlebars, and surged forward. This was his release, sometimes his passion, but today it was his outing. The quickening pace of the Elite served as a possible vent for his entire confection of mind-numbing issues which seemed to pile themselves onto him all at once.

“What are we gonna do for money once the baby arrives?” Melinda had said. “I won’t be a charity case for my parents”. I had said. Oh God, what was it going to take for this all to be behind me?

No matter how fast he pedaled—his legs were moving like pistons on a high-speed locomotive—the answer wouldn’t come. And this is supposed to be your best thinking time, he thought, cracking a slight grin and feeling his chapped lips excoriate in the dry cold. The wind blew into the freshly reddened fissures and the sting was discomforting.

He came to a hairpin turn in the road. Dead man’s curve number seven of twelve on Crystalline Pass. He knew from previous rides that number seven held the most danger. It stood in constant shade for only two hours out of the day, which meant it held a potentially deadly field of black ice. Miles knew this like he knew that number seven had claimed the lives of a few wayfaring tourists of whom had driven it.

He squeezed the brake gradually and started to panic when the bike failed to slow. Miles hunched and looked between his legs. Everything was there, intact. What he couldn’t see was the thin sheet of sleet that had been kicked up on the wheel during his ride, covering the metal rim with a slippery mixture of water and filmy street oils.

The corrugated aluminum guardrail was fast approaching. He rode right into the shaded turn of the dead man’s curve. The shadow of the rock face hindered his vision as if time had been thrust straight into night. And then it happened; the black ice took hold of any existing control he’d had over the Elite, aiding the unexpected crutch of the brakes.

He felt his clenched teeth grind over each other as the Elite smashed into the rail and tumbled over the side. And the last thing that sprung into his head as he was thrown airborne was: let me live.

He didn’t know how long he’d been out. He came to with an insufferable headache and half his face numbed by the frost caked over the soil. It wasn’t until much later that he realized the numbing could’ve potentially been frostbite if it’d been winter. He was thankful for that much. Everything remained blurry for a good minute, and it wasn’t until he was fully conscience again when he realized he was stuck.

His first thought was that he’d been paralyzed, but then he started to feel a twitch in his legs. He strained to roll over so that he might right himself with his hands. His right arm ached something terrible and there was a profound snapping sound. He felt exposed, naked in that particular part of his anatomy. Then there was the wetness. That thick unassailable wetness, like someone had thrown a bucket of creamy soup there and let it curdle in the cold, felt unnatural and he was nervous to look.

The undulating blurriness in his eyes wavered into clarity. He looked around and saw the Elite lying (to his amazement) only partially broken, having sustained only a few dents and a bent rear wheel, just out of the tree line. He tried rolling over a second time and hollered in agony. The snapping was now joined by a tender ripping sound. He couldn’t deny it any longer. He whipped his head over and saw that his right arm had been crushed up to the elbow, stricken under the immense weight of a granite boulder. The bony protrusion at the joint was smothered in dried blood and clotted by the cold, another act of nature he would later be grateful for.

“Oh my God, oh no please,” he said, and in his state of mental shock he started to feel dizzy. His eyes went smoggy once more and he dropped his head back so that the world was upside down. And just before everything went black, he swore he saw a bright pair of yellow eyes staring at him from just behind the shadow of the tree line.

The image of his arm was still floating in his head even in his unconscious state, like a recurring dream that just wouldn’t go away. The world did not ripple back into his eyes as it had before. A series of slight tugs and pulls brought relentless pain to his arm and shot abruptly awake.

It was a wolf.

A speckled gray and white canine of the untamed woods had its narrow snout wrapped around the exposed bone in Miles’s arm, lips curled back to reveal a set of long pallid fangs and ears set shamefully to its head.

“Get out of here,” Miles said, fearing the outburst might antagonize it further. Maybe it will go for throat and end this misery, he thought.

His free arm swam across the ground until it rolled over a loose rock. Without thinking twice, Miles pulled the stone over his body like a perpetual catapult and drove it into the beast’s skull. The wolf whimpered and drew back giddily on its haunches. It took off for the cover of the forest canopy, stopping one last time to glance at Miles with gem-like golden eyes. Miles regarded that look as one of unfathomed empathy—not exactly what he was expecting from a famished wolf.

Once the initial rush of adrenaline wore off, Miles was left to tend to the ache of his arm. It was a pain which would never be surpassed by any other in his life, and despite the mild topical anesthetic effect the alpine temperature had provided, would always be in close comparison to what he thought dying must be like.

He examined the wound more thoroughly and couldn’t help but think how close his gnawed flesh resembled the venison jerky he usually favored as a snack, and just how disturbing it was that he thought his pulverized arm looked appetizing. It stirred a raucous gag deep from within his bowels. He could feel his lunch funneling its way up his esophagus and flipped his head to the left, vomiting a capacious discharge of brown fluid that steamed heavily in the cold.

“Nice,” he said to himself, feeling somewhat faint again. “That’s going to smell good in a little bit.” Smell, he thought. The wound didn’t smell. And that was good perhaps. Odors in a wound meant infection or dying of the flesh, gangrene maybe.

He looked it over once more, carefully attentive to anything oozing or changing color, and thought, Nope, just an old fashioned arm hanging on for dear life by a few stubborn ligaments. Oh God, what am I saying!

He started to tear up and everything went blurry again. The despairing image of a pair of wandering nomads finding his skeleton there twenty, thirty, forty years from now frightened him to the core. He dropped his head back again to see the inverted forest moving in the wind like hundreds of restless fingers poking up from a grave.

He passed out, again; came to, again. The sun had dropped a bit, and the canopy of the tree line made everything black within its belly.

“You got to be shitting me,” he said, seeing again a pair of luminous yellow eyes staring from within the brush. He searched the ground for the rock but to no avail. The rock was gone and so was his courage. “Do your worst.” His tone was despondent, fresh out of ideas. His vulnerability stood out like a worm on a hook in a pond of Guppy.

The wolf moved from the foliage. The yellow eyes turned a brilliant gold in the sunlight. Miles watched as it circled him, snarling and dripping rich strings of saliva from its jowls. It stopped pacing and made small preparatory adjustments in its stance. “Make it quick,” Miles whispered, shutting his eyes and praying for the best.

He heard the feral barking as it lunged. Go for the gullet, he thought. Make it fast. But instead, Miles felt a stiff breeze swish over his face, followed by the white light from behind his eyelids being temporarily darkened by shadow. His eyes shot open at the deep thud of the wolf’s landing on his right side.

Again, the wolf clasped its fangs around the compound fracture and pulled with all the strength of its sled-toting ancestors. Miles screamed and instinctively grabbed it by the extra skin around its neck. The wolf didn’t react. It sprang backward in one last forceful thrust, snapping the bone like a large branch off a tree.

Miles started to squirm in anguish. He released his grip on the wolf. An outpour of fresh blood broke through the clot and he rolled away from the rock, yelling with barefaced terror. It took time for the pain to level off and become tolerable, but once it had, Miles realized that he was free.

He watched the wolf make off into the woods again, leaving the rest of his limb to rot under the massive boulder. It was in that act alone that Miles came to the conclusion that it was not after food. Yesterday’s hunter brought today’s salvation, he later thought. He and the wolf met eyes for a moment—he still remembers the tiny smudge of blood smeared on its upper lip to this day—and he silently thanked it.

Then, just as fast as it had come, it was gone, off to do whatever a wolf does to occupy its time.

Miles eventually made it back home, carrying three quarters of his right arm wrapped tightly in his corduroy jacket for thirty minutes before the first car came. The loss of blood made him weak, but the cold had somehow prevented him from bleeding to death. As it turned out, dead man’s curve number seven wasn’t a straight drop like he always thought it’d been—if it was, he figured he would’ve been dead right from the start. It was a sloped incantation of rock face which led down to the forest. Later, when he would go back to visit, it came clear to him as to how he ended up in that awkward and most unlikely of positions trapped under the boulder.

I went over, tumbled down, jarred loose the rock on my way and somehow it stopped just before it proceeded to roll straight over me, he had thought, but figured such luck to be ludicrous. No, what’s ludicrous would be for you to be spared a slow death by a wild wolf. The idea seemed outlandish, and he never told anyone, not even Miranda, who he’s shared all of his hidden secrets with until that day. Nobody would believe me anyway, not something like that.

After settling back into what he considered to be some acceptable means of a satisfactory lifestyle, the event which took place on curve seven seemed a distant memory. He nestled into a job selling skis and now receives disability once a month for his missing limb. Sometimes, he found it hard to recall anything at all, giving it the substance of one very lucid dream that occurred long ago. But every time he attempted to open a bottle, wipe his ass, turn a doorknob, he would be reminded of just what reality had to offer sometimes.

Miles learned to function well as a left-hander, especially when holding his newborn baby girl just before he laid her down to sleep at night, always with the rubber hand though, never the hook. To his surprise, the hook often came in much more handy than that hand for most things, but the fear of accidently rubbing the speared tip across the fleshy backside of his baby scared him white. He made it a point to visit curve seven at least once a week. He walks there. The very touch of a bicycle now brings a turbulent unwinding of the nerves to Miles. Walking became his new form of release, and he always insists on being alone.

As he approached curve seven, he would always envision a roadside cross nailed to the side of the guardrail, the prospect of what could’ve been. It’s the same every time: white with a paradigm arrangement of flowers displayed neatly around its cruciform build—standard memorial for the highway deceased. And scrawled in black paint across the horizontal board of timber was: Miles Justin Chandler 1980-2009.

He also must inch his way toward the steep slope to look down, mystified as to how he had survived such a fall considering that it was solid rock all the way up to the tree line.

The tree line, the yellow eyes, wolf’s eyes, he would think while staring into the dark recesses of the forest, sometimes for hours on end. But he never saw the eyes again, much less any speckled gray wolf. He brought a cut of sirloin, wrapped in wax paper, with him every time and hocked it over the rail to see what he could draw out, but nothing would come. The meat would somehow disappear every time he returned though, and he would imagine seeing those yellow eyes once more, turning brilliant gold in the sun as the gray wolf would come to claim its treat. He would like to believe that it was the wolf. He really would.

Sometimes, late at night while he was in bed, he would wonder about what had happened to him that day. Had he just been lucky? Was it a one time fluke that only happens to one in a hundred people about once every thousand years, or was it something else?

The wolf had some moral compassion in its stare, and then he thought that maybe it wasn’t a wolf at all, but something playing through the wolf the way a puppeteer would pull the strings and give life to his puppets—divine intervention. Some things were better left alone, he would think, leaning over to watch his wife sleep some nights.

Yes, that would be just fine.

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