Emily Kimelman - Sydney Rye 02 - Death in the Dark Read Online Free Page B

happens.”
    “But so how did you get involved with dogs?”
    “After I left the army I was all strung out. I’d been posted in Japan and a friend of mine, an ex-addict himself, pushed me to get treatment. He sent me to China to this place in the middle of nowhere. There were these crazy mountains,” he sat up tall and spread his hands like he was showing me the size of a big fish. “They were the kind that look like one half of a giant narrow oval. You know what I’m talking about?”
    “I think so.”
    “And they were all covered in vegetation. ‘How is that possible?’ I thought when I first got there. How can something grow there?” He shook his head. “To get there we drove on this rutted dirt road for hours. I thought I would die. I mean I was going cold turkey. You should not be bumping along a dirt road in an old van that lost its shocks years ago when you are going cold turkey.” He laughed. “It will fucking kill you. By the time I got there I must have been half dead. I thought I’d died and that it was heaven.” He laughed again. “It’s funny that I thought I would go to heaven, a junky with no loyalty.”
    Merl shook his head and played with the edge of his coffee cup. “It was this big white building that just kind of rose out of the river bank. The road was a slick, muddy mess but somehow this white building was totally clean. There was a large wooden deck that stuck out over the water and there were all these people in silk pajamas practicing Tai Chi. Of course, at the time I didn’t know that’s what it was called. I thought it was some kind of dance. I was so fucked up that when I got out of the van I immediately threw up.” Merl shook his head. “I was a mess,” a sheepish smile crossed his face before he continued. “The most beautiful woman helped me up to my room. It was narrow with a small window that looked out over the river and a single bed that felt like it was made of nails. I was delirious. Absolutely delirious. I thought that maybe the mountains were filled with heroine and that if I climbed out the window I could go to them. But,” he bit his lip and shrugged his shoulders, “she was always there to stop me. This woman had incredible strength. I remember thinking that she was much stronger than me and that it must be the dancing. Or the fighting. Whatever that thing was that they were doing. I thought that was why she could move me around.”
    He laughed again. “And maybe it was that but it also could have been that I was little more than a bag of bones. The bathroom and my room were the only places I went for the first week. Once the fever broke, that woman, whose name was Mei-Ping, took me outside. I remember not wanting to go but she just smiled at me. It smelled so sweet, the air out there. My room was putrid and stifling, I realized, once I stepped out to the river bank. Mei-Ping mimed that I should wash myself in the river, which, by the way, was like this big muddy spill. I mean it was hardly better than the road. But I did it. At this point Mei Ping was my guiding light. She had control over me and not just because she was so strong.” He laughed deeply at that one. “No, she was so soft, you know? She really taught me about the different aspects of strength. It’s not about how much you can lift but about how calm you can be.
    “I washed in the river. Which made me pretty dirty really, but I think she was trying to baptize me in a sense. I needed to wash away the old me and it had to be done in a way that would leave me dirty. You can’t ever be clean. There is no salvation really. I don’t know what happens after we die. Maybe when you go to real heaven the water is clean and takes away all your sins. But this river water just washed me dirty. It helped me let go of what had happened. The slave I’d been, the trusts I’d broken.”
    Merl paused and looked toward the cement house. “I like a beer every now and then but that’s it for me. Nothing