The Lure, The Hook

by Cy Hill

After falling two hundred feet onto rocks above a wave-wracked beach, Monte was lowered the final six within a closed casket into ordered earth. His widow and three daughters, covered in black, held hands before the hole in the ground; the hole in their lives. Their uneven heights were fence posts around nothingness.

Burt thought, “It should be raining.” If it was determined that 27-year old Monte had committed suicide, the electrical construction worker’s family would not collect on his life insurance. Their situation reminded him of unwanted domesticated animals dumped in the wilds, and it hurt his heart. There was a hollow in him over this, and he filled it with a prayer that he might be able to do something — anything — and that sound resonated within him as if he were a reed instrument.

Although they had worked on several construction sites together, Burt did not know Monte well. He was always outgoing and friendly, but when the crew went out partying late into the night, Monte went home.

Burt attended the wake with the rest of the crew, said a few heartfelt but, he knew, forgettable words to the widow, and reported to the construction site. Hours were available for those who wanted to work the last half of the day and, because Burt was a mason, there were portions of the project he could complete unsupervised. He needed the money. He was a junior at the University, majoring in Business and minoring in Art Appreciation.

They were constructing a luxury condominium complex wrenched out of primeval forest and rock, on a high cliff. Behind double-paned glass, the occupants would have views of the rugged cove with crashing waves on one side, and thick heavy woods extending miles to a thumblike mountain peak on the other.

Parking for the workers was at the unpaved upper end of the project, near the cliff wall. Four vehicles were already there when he arrived. Because the site was large, he might not encounter anyone before sunset, when they all had to knock off. The only one he would definitely see was the security guard in the shack on the way out.

The 100-foot long cliff wall, a curved rib with the luster of bone, was bracketed by fissured ochre granite on either side. It rose to his diaphragm. You could not accidentally fall over something this high. Moist salty air filled his sinuses, but the familiar odor was off, as if something alien had been added.

He drifted, attracted to a hollow steel ring projecting out of the cliff wall. There was no reason for it to be there, it just was. Coincidentally, the preexistent ring marked the spot above where Monte’s body had landed. Even when the tide came in, the waves had not reached far enough up the cliff wall to seize it and bear him away.

There was something about the ring. Burt bent over and looked through its empty aperture; not looking down, but straight ahead, as if it were a periscope. The cliff’s parapet on which he stood became a ship’s wooden deck: the sky, the sea, the blurred horizon where they intermingled — a furious cauldron of blues, grays, and olives, all bubbling up, the black seabirds racing towards him, all escape routes blocked.

Burt pulled back. Those were the old days, before the hazards around this cove were marked. There had not been a shipwreck in decades. There were lighted buoys now, to mark the danger: so many ships had crashed here, so many sailors drowned.

A wisp of wind went through him. Chilled him. And he sensed there was a part of Monte that was not in the ground.

Burt returned to his pickup and donned work boots, tool belt, and hardhat. He walked down and around the skeletal timbers rising up out of the concrete, the framing for structures that would civilize this space, and went to work on his charge, a brick enclosure, and as he worked, he daydreamed.

In Art Appreciation, he enjoyed what was ordered, clean, and sensory. Lines and color spoke to him. This wall that he built was solely functional. How he would have liked to turn it into art relief, something like a frieze-projected Babylonian sphinx, or a Gorgon after the Temple of Artemis.

But this was a blank wall because that was what it had to be, what those who were paying for this project wanted it to be. After hours of work, he stepped back and observed its flat emptiness; this barren choice.

The image he had seen through the ring at the seawall returned to him, projected upon this brick wall. It reminded him of Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields with Crows, one of the painter’s final canvases before his suicide. The rural painting and Burt’s vision at the sea wall were widely different, of course, but it was the feeling they elicited in him — they were common — his mind ran to a woman he knew who helped him understand Art, the smartest person he had ever met, and he wondered what she would make of his finding commonality.

Kathleen also took Art Appreciation, but she could have taught it. Where might she be today if she had not had a daughter when she was fifteen? And how had she managed to raise her daughter, attend college, and work, all at the same time?

And from there his mind asked what Monte’s wife would do now, with three daughters to raise on her own. He saw them at that open grave, heads bowed, penniless if Monte’s death was determined a suicide — and what Life Insurance company would want to pay off what was rumored to be a massive double indemnity policy?

He checked his watch. Time to go. A drop of rain pinged off his hardhat. Hurriedly, he covered his work with a tarp and anchored the covering down.

Strapping on his tool belt, walking back up towards his parked pickup, he saw his vehicle was the last remaining. The sky was a soup of roiled clouds, and beyond the cliff wall, the sea at twilight was topped with froth.

More raindrops fell. All of his thoughts, all of his feelings, everything he had observed on this abysmal day ran counter to his usual cheeriness, and he knew it was because he had reached the conclusion that Monte had forsaken his family and life’s responsibilities. Monte had taken his own life.

A woman? What was she doing here?

Wrapped in a long green dress and shawl, she sat precariously atop the wall facing out to sea — legs dangling over the wall that gleamed with sparks of sunlight in sunset — approximately where the steel ring was planted.

Hoping not to upset or panic her, Burt eased to a position at the wall thirty feet distant from her perch. In her arms she held a bundle against a bared breast. Over the lip of the blanket, he saw the back of a baby’s head. The woman was red-headed and hollow-cheeked, her face a copper etching of grief. She stared out to sea, oblivious to the mounting wind and rain and how close she was to falling to her death.

“Hello,” he said softly. “My name is Burt. What’s yours?” A cool breath of wind slipped up his work shirt and tickled his ribs. The rain came down in earnest; ran in rivulets off his hardhat. What sorrow brought her to this place? He thought of his friend Kathleen and her daughter, and of Monte’s widow and her daughters. Compassion welled up in his heart for this woman and her child.

“What is your baby’s name?”

The heavens cracked and rain fell in a flattened sheet.

She stared at him over her nursing bundle. His eyes touched hers through the pounding veil.

“That’s not a good place for you to sit. Why don’t you come back on this side?”

“Monte died down there.”

“You knew Monte?”

“This is his child.”

Jumbled thoughts, words, emotions; tumbling like thrown dice. “Monte’s child?” Was Monte’s death related to this mother and child?

She read his thoughts — and, yeah — they were related. But not as he thought they were.

As she looked down at the rain-splashed doll pressed to her breast, her flashy lure for attracting prey, he reached to grab her, as she knew he would. She made as if to lose control of the false thing, the counterfeit of a mother’s love. And he grabbed for it — he bit — as she knew he would.

He caught the doll, leaning out over the wall, but its head broke off in his hands. The eyes were gone. There was a black X across each empty eye socket.

“You prayed to know what happened to Monte?” She grabbed him by the waist with one arm and slammed him in the back with the other. “Now you know.”

That should have been it. Monte went over the wall easily because he had a higher center of gravity. But this shorter one did not, and unlike Monte, he was wearing a heavy tool belt.

As Burt fought to keep his balance, battled to retract his torso back over the wall, she clawed and bit, tugged and pushed, scarlet hair loose and flying, ripping his shirt and skin with nails and teeth.

Sinking to his knees on the earth side of the wall, he pushed her away; pushed her off the wall, even as she clung to him. She wedged her knees against the outside of the wall as she continued to fight, trying to pull him down with her. Finally, all that remained of her grip on him was his shredded shirt. There was a rip, and it gave way.

He thought that was it.

But she did not fall.

It took him a moment to see that she was tethered to the ring atop the wall by a clamp attached to a short leather belt around her waist. Within that moment a long knife appeared from her dress’s folds and she struck down at him, her knees still pressed against the outer wall.

His hardhat had landed in the dirt during the struggle, and he swung it upward as a shield. It deflected the blow, but then shot up and out of his hands. Caught in a seaward wind current, the plastic protective object spun and flipped upward through the rain; arose like a loosed kite; then dropped like a stone, out among the waves.

The deflected blow altered the downward trajectory of the woman’s knife. Burt watched as it just nicked her leather umbilical cord. With her added weight and outward angle, it was enough. The cord separated. She shrieked all the way down.

From his knees, shaking, clutching the ring with both hands, he peered over the wall’s rim. Their struggle had provided her with the arc of a diver, and she had landed out amongst the cove’s sea-whipped rocks. Her green draped form lasted through one brief wave cycle. Then, she was gone.

In the shack at the entrance to the worksite, the security guard was drinking a cup of black coffee. Rain pelted the roof, and the thin walls shook as if slapped. Lightning flashed with its attendant thunder, putting it, he knew, directly overhead. The door smashed open. Presuming the work of the elements, he was moving to close it when a barechested young man, ripped across face, arms, and chest, stumbled in.

The guard dropped his coffee cup. “Here,” he sat the victim down, and then closed and locked the door. Facing it, he set his weapon on the desk, ready for immediate use. Whatever had done this was still out there.

Burt heard himself make noises that were not language, because he could not verbalize his experience. By way of explanation, he held up by the hair the doll’s head with its X’d-over eye sockets, a trophy for surviving a wrestling match with a demon.

Eventually he heard himself say, “She went after what is best in us. Our compassion.” He blinked into the guard’s eyes. “I know what happened to Monte.”