Cold Quiet Country (12 page)

Gwen closed her eyes and shifted her frame of view. The azure background seemed limitless, and since she didn’t actually turn, she had no sense of how far she’d spun. Until she came upon another face. This one was shaded, with an outsized proboscis, a gaping rictus, eyes like flat spots of cow dung. Its frown deepened, nostrils flared.

It saw her.

Gwen glared. Clamped her teeth and locked her gaze upon its eyes, and a chill spilled from the base of her skull to her spine.

Gwen’s mother opened the driver’s side door. Gwen opened her eyes. “Wait!”

Mother slipped behind the wheel, opened her purse for her keys.

“Wait what?”

“That man in the grocery—he’s in trouble.” Gwen reached for the door release.

Mother leaned close to the wheel and looked past Gwen. “What man? Get back inside!”

Gwen raced across the lot, felt the hard pavement through her flats. Ahead, an old woman returned a cart; Gwen jockeyed to the side but the distance was too short; she slowed behind the woman, who waited for the automatic door.

“Please, excuse me!” Gwen said.

“Hmmph!” The old woman jammed the cart into the door.

Gwen stepped back, looked through the glass at the man. His smile was the kind that might accompany a bouquet of flowers for a plump housewife. Gwen looked back at her mother, scowling beside the front fender.

The man stepped closer. The old woman reared back and drove the cart into the door, popping it open. She shoved through. The man approached on the other side, only a few feet away. He stopped pushing his cart. His eyes went pie pans and his mouth gaped. One hand slapped his chest. He fell backward, clutching the cart. He slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, tearing business cards and homemade ads from a corkboard. The cart wobbled sideways and toppled with him.

The old woman charged by. Unseeing, deaf. Gwen watched her stooped determination, her angry feet scuffing the floor.

Gwen fell to the man and took his hand. His face was ash and his hand cold.

Limp. His eyes smiled at the edges though his mouth was flat. His breaths were ragged and she closed her eyes and sought his face in the darkness, that she might do battle with the Devil on the other side.

Nothing.

Gwen stood, slipped across the grocery store floor, around a corner to the service desk, which was empty, and yelled to a cashier, “A man’s had a heart attack! Call help!”

She ran back to the man and ignored the ensuing confusion behind her. He would die. The Devil would get him, and nothing she did would help.

Gwen took the man’s hand in both of hers. His face was wrinkled but not old. He was heavy-set, but not obese. Barely any flecks of gray hair. Taken too early. His bladder had released.

She closed her hands over his.

He wasn’t breathing. His head slumped forward from the wall, and as he fell away, her anger swelled.

“What’s happened?”

Gwen looked up. The cashier stood on legs parted as if to anchor a tug-of-war team. Gwen pushed the man the rest of the way to the floor and pulled his arm, dragging him away from the wall, flat on his back. “He’s had a heart attack, I think. Call the ambulance!”

Gwen tried to remember the techniques. It had been a year since the school nurse instructed the entire class in the gymnasium. Press the person’s chest somewhere—the sternum—above the sternum…but he wasn’t breathing, and something had to be done—which came first?

“What do we do!” It was a woman with a baby in her arms.

Gwen squeezed her eyes closed, trying to remember the steps, and stared again into the face of the Devil taking this man from their side to his. His smile was toothy, like a dog showing fangs. And his flat, cow-shit eyes were hollows that led to blasting winds and frigid moonless nights.

Gwen opened her eyes.

She lifted the man’s neck and elevated his chin. Pinched his nose. Covered his mouth with hers and exhaled into him, watched his chest swell from the corner of her eye. In her mind she heard laughter, and even with her eyes open saw the evil from which it sprung. She blew into the man again, watched his chest rise and fall, smelled his breath, the strange minty odor that faded into a residual coffee stink that in turn made her think of death and emptiness. Again she saw the Devil’s face, leering, vested in her comic rescue. Gwen inhaled deeply and emptied her lungs into the man’s mouth, again, and held hers against his, sustaining the pressure, so that his lungs wouldn’t collapse. Finally she slipped to his side.

She saw her mother’s shoes at the entrance, and other people’s shoes, and Gwen pressed along the man’s chest for his sternum, and finding the bottom, measured two fingers’ width, and locked her right palm to the back of her left hand, interwove her fingers and bore down with all her weight. She rocked on her knees. Let up. Pressed again. Back and forth, forgetting to count. She wiggled across the waxed floor and pinched his nose, blew into his lungs, and allowed the air to trickle back out, and did it again. What was the count? The Devil grinned.
Fuck you
, he said,
I win
. And Gwen scooted to the man’s side and locked her hands together and heaved her weight to his chest again and again.

“Gwen,” her mother said.

“Sweetheart,” another said.

Gwen closed her eyes and it was just she and the Devil. His mocking laughter rattled from one side of her mind to the other, and she looked through his flat eyes into darkness where the noise continued until echoes piled on his voice a thousand times over and it was an army of devils laughing at her. She heaved against the dead man’s ribs. A hand touched her shoulder and she pushed it aside. Gwen moved to the man’s face, lifted his neck, watched his blank eyes for the smallest twinkle of life. But his skin held the marks of her last touch, and not a muscle moved.

“Gwen, it’s time to stop,” her mother said.

“No!”

Gwen pinched his nose and blew into his mouth. She was dizzy and slowed to catch her breath before inhaling and blowing into his mouth again. She rested her head on his chest and again felt a hand on her shoulder. Firm, insistent.

“What!”

She looked up and her mother was still several feet away; no one was there, and the pressure continued though no one touched her. Heat spread through her shoulder. She pressed one hand to the other and lurched to the dead man’s sternum, dropped her weight like a sack of feed, almost assisted by the dark hand on her shoulder, which now squeezed as if seeking that nerve that Cal and Jordan pinched to make her squeal. Still Gwen heaved.

“Go away, Devil!”

Him, or you.

She pressed the man’s chest, slammed a three-count against him, hurried to his head. She exhaled into his mouth again and again until the weight on her shoulder made her struggle to bear up against it. Each breath she fed the man was lighter, and each time she pounded his chest she was weaker. Flats and sneakers and heels circled her but she never looked higher than the people’s knees so she wouldn’t have to read the defeat on their faces.

“Get off me, Devil,” she whispered. “You can’t have everyone.”

I’ll have him, or you.

His laughter whipped through her like a cold winter gale.

Ain’t a damn man the whole world over ever been seventy-two and had joints felt like two pieces of sandpaper, a back felt like a log split by a maul.

The sun is two-thirds to noon. Clouds blow in like a summer thunderstorm—but it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a billiard table. Seems the machinery of nature ought to run as slow as the machinery of man. It doesn’t. Look at a crick bubbling under ice, or ice pellets blasted by a gust, and it’s an illusion. Man at the center believing everything feels like he feels. There’s nothing farther from the truth. All this belief that the world is thinking and feeling, and maybe empathic in misery, or delighted with reverie, is the worst kind of dreaming. Nothing out there gives a rat’s rotten ass. I’m carrying a coat for a girl in the middle of a storm; she’s got one foot bare and the other shoe full of snow and toes so numb she’s forgotten she has them, or burning like as to catch flame. She’s getting the full dose of nature right now. She knows there isn’t a tree or a brook or a deer or fox that would spit to save her. She knows she’s all she’s got, and she’s only sixteen. Girl that age is just getting ripe, and it makes me madder’n all hell.

The going is slow. Gale and Gwen’s tracks are mostly filled. The wind screeches across the field driving snow and icy crystals, and any holes in the covering get filled on the lee side first, so the footsteps I’ve been following have become peanut-shaped crescents. Spotting them now is no trouble, but they won’t last long.

Halfway to the woods I arrive at a mixed-up jumble of tracks. They lost their gait. Gwen—judging from the print size—stumbled in a drift close to a windrow of trees, and Gale came to her. I study the impressions on the white canvas, and the footprints tell of a dance, him coming to her, bracing, lifting. They didn’t roll around and fight, but putting myself in Gwen’s mind, why would she? She’d just seen Gale murder her father.

Though I imagine when they were in the loft it was for love, no child will see her father killed—by her lover or any other—and feel nothing. She wouldn’t run from the barn unwilling, and yet as I’ve plodded farther from the warmth of the Bronco, I’ve wondered with every step if I dare go much farther. This girl, with no coat, and snow in her feet, feeling the wind shred her clothes, tagging along behind the man who murdered her pappy—wouldn’t she reach a moment where she’d stop and look back? Imagine the smell of baked bread? The taste of salt on beef? The warmth of her mother’s arms? The agony in her mother’s eyes? And if she imagined these things, wouldn’t she take a step closer to home, like this moon-shaped bowl indicates?

What prevented her from the next step and the next? Did she spin to Gale and race after him, or did he jerk her arm and drag her farther from home?

I peer deep into the forest ahead, searching tree trunks for motion. The bark is bold against the snow, and anyone passing through would be evident. I scan the treeline left to right and stop at a clearing midway up the hill. The easiest view draws the eye, though no stone-cold killer’d be stupid enough to traipse across an open section like that.

Though as I think on it, Gale killed Burt with a pitchfork, and that shows a madman’s moxie.

At the bottom of the clearing, I see motion and my chest tightens. A flicker of black melding into a tree, emerging. It bounds away.

Deer.

Spooked?

I scan down the hill. Whatever set him running came from below. I look through the trees, downward, to the right, until I’m seeing dead ahead. Right where Gale and Gwen’s tracks point.

A burst of wind cuts into my neck and ice stings my ear. I turn into it and stoop. Cast a sideways glance back to the house and barn, fuzzy with distance and the snow in between. Shift Guinevere’s coat and sweater from my left arm to my right, and dig a piece of jerked venison from my pocket while watching the goings-on at the Haudesert farm.

The coroner beat Cooper to the scene. He pulls a case from his trunk. The gusts are gone. Standing here, I am suddenly warm and unbutton the top of my coat.

Up ahead there’s a possibility that Gale and Gwen have rattled a deer loose from the underbrush. Cooper can catch up. I’ve got to keep on. There’s only one more dead body I want to see today, and it damn well isn’t Gwen’s.

In forty years of lawing I’ve seen a lot of dead men and women, some more gruesome than Burt Haudesert. Bodies of geezers like me, pretending to be made of steel, face-in-the-soup dead. Bloated and black when a grandkid finds them. Or mangled in car accidents. Heroes wrap themselves around oak trees and their bodies come out like so many pounds of hamburger wrapped in blue jeans and t-shirts.

But of all the death and all the bodies, only two were the machination of an angry man. It was about the militia. This was eight years back.

Every state’s got a gang of men with guns and tattered U.S. Constitutions stowed next to their dog-eared John Birch pamphlets. Bitching about government makes men happy, and in recent times, country folk have been fucking euphoric. Rumor was the boys in my neck of the woods were getting rowdy and ready to switch gears from talking to walking. I don’t mind ten men at a hunting camp chucking bottles and blasting away. Any fella dumb enough to get drunk around a crew with guns half deserves a bullet. But I got a tip. One of the wives overheard talk of linking the local group with some radical faction out of Denver and marching with guns to Washington to take the country back from the jigs and the Jews. A sheriff can’t truck with that, but in a county of twenty thousand, everybody knows everybody, almost. At least the men who would be of age and frame of mind to join such a group knew everyone else who might be. I didn’t have anyone to put inside. I kept my ear out, but no more tips came.

There was only fifty of them. They recruited primarily through the Masonic Lodge, though they were careful not to bring the Lodge into it. Of course, it’s a different thing, what a group does in the Fourth of July parade versus what secret conversations goes on in the Blue Room. I wasn’t privy, but I knew when the men who were part of the militia hushed at the Lodge, they weren’t talking about saving widows and orphans or tuning Harley engines.

I joined the Lodge on Burt’s invitation, thinking it was a thank-you for having set him on the right path all them years before. I’d turned down invitations for thirty years. Every secret brotherhood, and seems like there’s more and more guilds, wants to claim the town’s most prominent citizens on its rolls. I never joined one.

But Burt had a peculiar look in his eye, and I always had an interest in him, and so I went. Took my degrees, including the third, which was more memory work than I wanted, going over lines word after word, and only able to practice while I was with him. It gave me the chance to learn the way he thought. We’d sit at a picnic table, and he’d say the script from memory because it was against Lodge rules to ever have the secrets in print, and I’d repeat each ancient phrase and watch it hit Burt like religion. The catechisms came in two parts, a call and a response. He’d say the call and I’d stumble through the answer, and after each catechism we’d rest a bit and drink coffee and swat mosquitoes and I’d ask about his family. Gwen and the boys.