Cold Quiet Country (13 page)

Sometimes I’d ask after his mother.

Lodge meetings were Tuesday nights at seven. I watched Burt with a critical eye, like a father, and listened to the others for militia talk. If a group assembled at the rifle range to sight in for buck season, I made sure to arrive with my aught-six coming in high. When a group went fishing, I brought a case of beer. They were testing me, and I was testing them.

I placed each foot on the ground almost sideways, watching for twigs, and rolling across the leaves without a whisper. With a gurgling crick as a backdrop, an elephant could sneak up on two arguing men. I stood behind an oak so big it was prob’ly here when Jack La Ramie came through and lent his name in, what, 1812?

“It’s time,” Steward Pounder said. “We can’t wait forever. They’re waiting on us to get our asses in gear.”

And Burt said, “We wait and don’t get involved. We’re not about going someplace else. This’s about stopping them goddamn Commies from coming here. Takin’ our houses and guns. Fuck Denver, and fuck Washington.”

“Well, it’s a goddamn good thing you ain’t runnin’ this outfit,” Steward says.

“You don’t understand anything.”

“Just who the hell you think you’re talking to?”

“Go fuck a goat. And don’t think I’m going to let you get the boys riled up for someone else’s fight.”

“You ain’t runnin’ shit no more.”

“By God, I’ll knock your ass into next week and kick it again on Tuesday.”

Steward splashed upstream and Burt crossed to the other side of the crick and wandered downstream. My thought was to pull Burt aside later and begin extracting him from the group. Steward was crazy, but nowhere near the worst of the bunch. That honor belonged to his brother, Marshall, a giant man whose footsteps shook the forest and left an imprint like a dinosaur hoof. Had no luck as a hunter. Every animal a mile around felt him coming.

The situation for Burt was the kind you could see taking a good man and gradually turning him against his better judgment. Last thing I wanted was for him to wind up in a pissing contest with Steward and Marshall Pounder. Dicks like them wouldn’t lose a pissing contest.

When two weeks later they were both dead, I had a suspect in mind.

It was late and Gwen couldn’t sleep. She listened to the ghostly creaking of the house for any noise that might indicate her father slinking down the hallway. Fear was a weight that rested upon her, and thinking of her father called to mind her strange gift.

She’d often considered the implications of the man’s death at the grocery—how it seemed to expand the rules that governed her visions. Her first, the one of her grandfather, had been immediately after her father…visited her. So had the second. But when she saw the man at the grocery, she had merely been trapped in a terrible rumination on the previous night’s experience. Why hadn’t the vision arrived the night before, while she wept in bed?

Gwen rolled sideways in bed and pulled up her knees. Her mind drifted. Sleep neared.

Maybe she had things backward. Her gift required an aggrieved state of mind, but also, a person’s death had to be imminent—although each vision seemed to provide an earlier warning. Even if every criterion were met, someone had to be close to death, or she would have no one to see.

But there were people dying all the time, all over the town. All over the country. Her talent required proximity; she had to know the dying, even if only from a flash connection—like when the grocery man dropped four grapefruit and glanced up and met her eye.

Gwen flopped to her other side. At any sour-mooded moment, she might see the death-face of any person she had ever known. “Why?”

Him or you…

She blinked and stared into black shadows. There could be only one answer. She could affect the outcome.

* * *

Gwen knew Gale’s window tap: three muted percussions with the round of his index finger, always barely audible, in case Burt was with her. But Gale had gone to work for the butcher Haynes, and the way they’d parted left little hope he’d be back. She’d told him to stay away.

So who had just tapped five times with fingernails?

Gwen approached the window from the side. Liz Sunday faced the glass. Her eyes were closed in a prolonged, tired blink. Faint moonlight gave her skin a weary pastiness reminiscent of Dust Bowl farmers frozen in black and white. But when she opened her eyes, her lips seemed drawn in scowl and her face became an edifice of desperation.

Gwen retreated to the edge of her bed. She collected her thoughts. Liz had never confessed the exact source of her problems, preferring to leave the father of her child a mystery while the deed eroded her grasp on sanity.

Now it seemed another of the frayed bands holding Liz together had snapped. How many remained?

Rapping sounded again, louder.

Gwen stood. Opened the window.

“Run away with me. Tonight.”

“Shhh.”

“Don’t shush me. I have to get away.”

Gwen opened her window all the way. “Shhh. I’m coming out.” She grabbed a blanket from her bed, slipped into her shoes, and crawled through the window.

Gwen draped the blanket over her shoulders and led around to the front porch. If she could get Liz to whisper, they wouldn’t have to go all the way to the barn—where being with Liz in the dark would be utterly sinister. Gwen sat in the chair that Burt preferred. Liz remained standing, holding a stuffed satchel by its strap. She dropped it.

“Sit down a minute,” Gwen said.

“You didn’t grab your things.”

“I can’t run away just this second.”

“You said you would.”

“I did not. But why now? What’s happened?”

Something in the darkness toward the driveway pulled Gwen’s attention. A reflection. She looked into the shadows.

Gale, visiting from the butcher’s?

“What?” Liz said.

“I—nothing.”

“I knew I couldn’t trust you. I was right.” Liz snorted. “You know what I’m going through.”

“You mean—”

“With my father. You know.”

Gwen felt bile rise into her throat.

Liz stepped closer and hulked above Gwen. “I told him I’d run away if he ever touched me again. I told him I’d do worse than that.” Liz hiccupped. “That’s why I asked you…about the music.”

Liz swallowed. Caught her breath and shuddered as if from the chill. She cleared her throat. “I wanted to kill it,” she said. “He sent me away to have my baby, and I hated that little fucker and I wanted to find a doctor who would cut it out. But when I saw him come out of me, and the doctor smacked him, and he cried, I wanted…to…keeeeeep—”

“Shhh. It’s okay. Be quieter, if you can.”

Between Liz’s sobs, Gwen heard feet dragging on dirt. Pant legs. Surely Gale would know to stay away.

Liz croaked, “They took him to an orphanage.”

Gwen studied Liz’s profile, parsed the hopeless shock evidenced in broad shadows, the bereft cant of her frown.

“Something will work out.”

“You won’t go with me to get my baby back?”

“Liz, this is crazy! How are you going to get him back? How would you take care of him? Maybe it’s best that he’s there.”

“At the orphanage?”

Gwen didn’t breathe for a moment. “The best person I know came from there.”

“Gale?” Liz shook her head. “He’s why you won’t go.”

“Don’t you have family somewhere? There has to be someone who would—”

“I thought you were someone. But you’re really quite a bitch. You know that?”

“That’s terrible.”

Liz stepped away, backed off the porch. “I’ll do it myself. I’ll get him back. And I’ll make you sorry.” She lifted her bag at the edge of the cement.

A cloud passed and the moon cast an eerie, dim glow across the landscape. Gwen gasped. A man wearing a straw hat and a greasy jacket stood behind Liz.

“Hey, baby,” he said.

Liz spun. Scooped the strap of her bag and sidestepped.

“What you doing, Liz? Time to come home.”

“No!”

He lunged and missed. “You airing family business all over, huh?”

“Mister Sunday?” Gwen said.

He looked at her. “Shut up. Get in your house, there.”

“Mister Sunday, you better keep your voice down. You’ll find my father doesn’t appreciate men sneaking around after dark.”

Liz stepped farther away. One foot behind the other, until a dozen feet separated them.

“That so? You’ll find your neighbor doesn’t right give a shit.” Sunday turned and said, “Liz, we’re going home.”

But Liz had already disappeared.

The front door opened. Gwen spun. A hammer clicked. Burt stood in the aperture. His boxer shorts glowed. He pointed a rifle from his hips.

“That you, Sunday? You made a royal damn mistake comin’ here after dark.”

“This ain’t got nothing to do with either of you.” Sunday stepped backward, lifted his hands.

“Prowlin’ after my girl, huh?”

“Liz was here,” Gwen said.

“You and your kind is what’s wrong with this country. But if I was to put a bullet in your in goddamned head, they’d say
I
was wrong.”

Sunday backed another step into darkness. “Just here fetchin’ my daughter home. Easy, Burt.”

“All I see is my girl wearing a blanket.”

Burt seemed provoked by his own voice. Gwen stepped closer, almost fearing he would turn the rifle on her, but somehow knowing he wouldn’t. No one would die tonight. She was certain. She opened her mouth to speak and a blast flashed in the darkness. The sound crashed under the porch roof and the ringing shock of it seemed to hang there. Sunday shouted. Burt levered the rifle and another bullet clicked into place.

“Get out of here and don’t ever come back! Go on!”

“Hey, goddammit! I’m here after my girl. My daughter run off!”

“I ought to take her in so she don’t grow up red. Now get the fuck off my land, ’fore I bury you on it.”

Sunday backpedaled and in a moment was gone. But from the darkness came a shout. “This ain’t over, Haudesert! Not by a damn stretch!”

Burt kept the rifle trained ahead. Feet shuffled in the kitchen. Gwen heard whispers. Minutes passed in silence.

Burt said, “His girl was here?”

“Liz. She got away from him just before you came out.”

“I don’t want you around her.” Burt stepped back inside the house and stopped. Cal and Jordan were behind him, each brandishing a rifle. Fay turned on the light over the sink. “No need to call up the militia, boys.” Burt’s voice carried a wink. He turned back to Gwen and nodded at the doorknob. “Noticed the door was locked. How’d you get outside?”

Gwen was silent.

“I’m going to nail that window shut.” Burt ejected a shell from the rifle and left the breech open. The shell clattered on the floor. “You should have seen your sister’s face,” he said to Cal, and then looked at Jordan. Gwen watched in silence. “Eyes the size of a cross-cut log, and jumped three feet when I let out that shot. She thought that Commie was going to meet his maker for sure. How ’bout that, Gwen?”

He was ribbing her. He was elated with having driven off a dreaded communist. He was strutting for his sons. This is how you defend the homestead.

“I didn’t think he’d die.” Gwen threaded a path between her father and brothers. She stopped in the hallway and faced Burt. “I would have known two hours ago.”

I got the idea after watching Burt take joy in slaughtering hogs—the way he disrespected the carcasses. A dead pig is only so much meat, but it ought to be more than that in a decent man’s mind, at least the man that watched it find its mother’s teat though its eyes were blind. The man that named it and fed it day in and out. It was a vessel that held something. Sure it was just a hog, but anything with eyes has something behind them. Sneering at a carcass illustrated a man’s character.

Those times Burt asked if I wished I was out in the fields and I said no, I wasn’t fibbing.

All that blood dripping into the ground and all those jeers and curses made me wonder how an artisan might kill an animal. Death finds us all, and there ought to be a special heaven reserved for those who deliver it with skill and respect, and I set my mind to discovering if the local butcher, Haynes, was a clean-hearted man.

At that time I didn’t know his name. I had time on Saturday evenings and Sundays to myself and hitched into Bittersmith. One of Burt’s militia buddies saw me at the end of the driveway with my thumb in the air and let me ride in the front seat with him. We never exchanged names, but he knew I worked for Burt, and he was forthright about how the Militia could use young blood.

“Burt’s taking me to a meeting,” I said.

“That right?”

“It’ll be interesting.”

“Where you headed in town?” he said.

“The butcher.”

“Haynes?”

I shrugged. “If that’s his name.”

The man spent the last five minutes of the ride telling me how property rights are the foundation of liberty and how it takes a patriotic man with a gun to defend freedom. He said he’d look for me at the next militia shindig and even said he’d vouch for me. He offered a pull of Beechnut. I never took to spit tobacco and said no thanks; he let me off at Haynes’s Meats.

A
Sorry We’re Closed
sign hung in the door. Through the window I saw lights in the back. I tried the knob; it was locked. I walked around to the rear and the smell of death overtook me. All at once it was like I was in quicksand of blood and whiz and rotting meat, flies swarming in heavy black thunderheads around gloomy cattle that looked at me without a shred of interest. They stared between two-inch brown-painted bars and nothing dispelled the knowledge their noses imparted: that this place they’d been ushered to was a place of death, and that their kind did the dying.

“You, boy! What you doing?”

I swung around. There was a door I hadn’t seen leading to the back of the butcher shop.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing, hell. What you want?”

Lying only made me look like a liar and I had nothing to lose by the truth. It was just the surprise of being asked while I was studying the cattle’s mournful eyes—

“Looking for Mister Haynes.”