Cold Quiet Country (15 page)

I lived on hog side meat ends and hamburger and sausage, cooking on an electric grill, and washing it down with pork and beans. I was a regular stink machine, but I saved dollars and on Christmas Eve it was dark at five and I set out with boots and long underwear and a coat and hat and gloves. Set out like I was never coming back. I didn’t want anyone to know I was out, and on rare occasions when car headlights flashed ahead, or when one of my rearward glances caught a vehicle approaching from behind, I ducked into the woods. Given the chance, I cut through fields to save time, though I wasn’t happy about leaving tracks. In truth, I didn’t know if when I got there I’d actually ask her. It was a lonely, frightening walk, the temperature far below freezing. Would her heart be as cold as the winter blackness? She’d told me to go and never come back. Did she mean it? Would I find her father in her room and overhear her gasp of pleasure instead of Burt’s animal grunt?

Foolish fears, maybe. But real.

I waited at the edge of the swamp until long after dark. When her bedroom lights had been out a while I approached. I tapped on Gwen’s window. She opened it and I passed her a box with a ring in it and waited for her to say something. She cried. She closed the window and reopened it and then slipped outside and wrapped her arms around my neck and said, “What’s it mean?”

“It means I’m going to take you away from here.”

“Now? Tonight?”

“We have to do it right,” I said. “If I just take you away, we’re on the lam. We’d have to leave in the dead of winter.”

“What else is there?”

“I’m going to ask Burt for your hand.”

“Don’t you think you’d ought to ask me?”

I fell to my knee and took her hand. It was cold, and I sandwiched it in mine. “Guinevere Haudesert, I love you and want you to marry me. I love your freckles and I love when your eyebrows are mussed. I love watching you pray. And… so…what do you say?”

“What if my father says no?”

“He won’t have a chance if you don’t answer first.”

“Yes!”

“Shhh.”

“Yes.” She kissed me on the cheek.

* * *

I wake to the frozen metal of a handgun against my temple. The barrel has been outside very recently. It is dead cold.

“Don’t move,” he says.

I am still. My leg is overwhelmingly uncomfortable, bent at a funny angle, and my neck is crooked. I open my eyes. The fire is embers and tiny blue wicks. The front door is open, and a gust blows ice grains across the floor.

“Where’s the girl?” he says. “I know you killed her.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.” My voice is husky, but if I clear my throat…

“Of course not.”

The barrel leaves my head and he steps in front of me. Maybe his eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark room. Maybe he doesn’t see my hand is on the butt of a pistol in the shadow on the side of my leg.

“Who are you?” I say.

“Death, boy. Death. You ever hear of the Wyoming Militia?”

“I’ve heard.” My hand closes around the pistol grip. My fingers slip deeper inside the holster and touch the trigger. When I pull it the cylinder will rotate and click. I had it on an empty chamber. No matter how quick, the noise will alert him.

“You killed a leader in that organization. A friend.”

“I didn’t kill—”

“Shut up, boy!” He swings his pistol hand and catches the side of my head with his knuckles. My brain rings, and I see sparkles that aren’t fire. “Shut up!”

He steps backward as he aims at me. I see shadows, his outstretched arm and the glint of metal. He swings his arm higher, points at my head. We’re but a few feet apart.

My ears ring and my thoughts are murky from just waking, though the blow spurred my nerves. Yet in this moment of antagonism, a bullet hole in the ceiling reminds me this is not my hour. Having failed to blow my head off, I meet this man with a sense of calm that would have been impossible a day ago—calm I didn’t have facing Guinevere’s father this morning. If I wait for him to regain his faculties, I will live or I will die. I don’t know what he’ll choose. The longer I wait, the more opportunity I give him to deliver a final surprise.

Or I squeeze the trigger and take my chances.

“You killed a good man. Stand up.”

“All right, mister. Easy.” I shift my leg and aim my knee at his right shoulder, pointing and lifting the gun. The trigger is tight; the cylinder rotates slowly within the holster.

“I said—”

The revolver explodes and a flame licks out the end of the holster. The man jerks two steps back and his hand falls to his side.

I draw the pistol free and point at him.

“You…killer…” he gurgles.

He drops to his knees and sprawls to the floor. He spits black blood. I kick the gun from his hand. Roll him by the shoulder and a silver star on his chest glints firelight.

“Who are you?” I say.

He wheezes with his arms wrapped around his chest.

“Who?”

“Deputy…”

He shakes and his breath is like a rasp on ironwood. And then it comes—the spasm. The death clench. I’ve seen it on a thousand animals.

He is gone. I stand in a puddle of his blood, press fingers to his neck. Silence has reconquered the house. I add wet logs to the fire. They sizzle. As minutes pass, a flicker of virgin flame invigorates the atmosphere. I have killed a deputy.

I drag him by his boots. He’ll bother me if I leave him in the living room bleeding out. The fire casts long shadows across his face that turn his scowl into a demonic mask. Outside in the brightness his face reverts to a mere dead man surprised to greet his last moment. He leaves a red streak across the porch, and I drag him over the end and to the side of the house.

I could prop him like a law enforcement scarecrow, reminiscent of a head on a pike. I dismiss the thought, though the ones he might ward off will surely come.

I study a dotted line of tracks from the porch that trail down the steps and across an otherwise unbroken plain of whiteness. He left his patrol car on the road, two hundred yards away. I return to his corpse and remove the keys from his pocket.

Strange intimacy, rifling a dead man’s pants.

I replace the spent shell in my pistol and head inside to resume the debate. Leave? Steal a patrol car and drive until the snow is so deep the car will go no farther and then seek new shelter? The prospect of living on the frontier in the winter, maybe inside a hollowed tree or a small cave, roasting game over a tiny hardwood fire, appeals. Grappling with the land and the natives made us who we are, and when I dream of being strong, it is the frontiersman’s strength I see.

I don’t want to be foolish. I’m under no illusion everything will be better if I remain at the house. Men who stalk, assault, and shoot are coming—men with killing skills. Others with badges will follow, and they won’t come to hear my story. They’ll come to end it.

Staying here is as clear a death verdict as a man would receive from a judge reading a jury’s condemnation. If I hadn’t already tried to carry out that sentence with the old carbine on the wall, perhaps I’d flee in the policeman’s car.

I take a parka, hat, and gloves from the closet by the front door. The brim cuts the snow glare. The deputy strode with two strong legs; I have one. I exhaust myself trying to match him. Every fourth step is easy. The rest is trail-breaking. I fix my gaze to the left-most corner of the field, where additional cars would first appear, but there is no traffic.

I slip behind the wheel of the deputy’s car. Look straight ahead and wonder what the dead man thought when he made the decision that ended his life. Ahead on the right are beech and white birch—a grove of ghostly trees that might have haunted a less intrepid deputy.

I knew when Guinevere and I ran from Burt Haudesert that I would be accused, and I didn’t shrink from it. Honesty is a path through a minefield and if a man strays one step, one inch, he places everything he holds dear in jeopardy. But I have to believe virtue will steer me true.

Still warm, the engine turns over easily and the heater blows hot air. The deputy didn’t sit for an hour in the car, equivocating once his mind was made up. He didn’t ponder the unknown, the risks.

I slip the transmission to drive and press the gas.

I’ve driven before. I know the pedals and the shifter—it’s just like a pickup on the farm, or Mister Sharps’s car—though negotiating the snow is new. I tramp too hard and the tires spin, but it does no harm. The car rocks; I cut the wheel, ease off the gas, and float along listening to the crunch of snow.

The gas tank is almost full. If I caught a break long enough to get ahead of the storm, I could cross a county or two before emptying the tank. At least they’d have no idea where I’d gone.

The road turns and I greet it by easing the wheel left. The car slides straight—I bounce in a ditch and jerk the wheel, but a rut has me. Reverse. Forward. Tramp the gas and the car rocks back to the road and I yank the wheel right. I bust through a snow bank and the car jerks to a stop. I turn off the engine and leave the keys in it. The car has plowed sideways into a snowdrift and it takes me a minute to shove the door open. I pause to the faint sound of snow sizzling on the undercarriage.

I head into the woods.

* * *

I awoke on Christmas day with butterflies in my stomach. I lay on my cot, snug under a pile of wool blankets. I’d promised Gwen I’d be back to talk to Burt, and though I was anxious for it to be over, I was less so for it to begin. A small kerosene heater kept the shanty warm and cast a glow through blackened glass. The walls were cracked boards weathered gray on the outside. A previous occupant had stuffed rags in the knotholes and cracks. I watched the fiberglass ceiling insulation with Pink Panther cartoons on the paper. His smugness encouraged my pessimism.

How was I going to bring a bride here?

I’d saved almost every penny since working for Haynes and the money would keep Gwen warm and fed. Come spring we’d hoof overland, south, and I’d pick up whatever farm or butcher work presented. Getting Gwen out of Burt Haudesert’s house was my priority, and when she’d said she couldn’t take being there any longer, I took that to mean she’d prefer any situation to the one she was in.

But girls aren’t called the fairer sex without reason—and from what I’d read, every woman is a cultured woman, and they all want frilly things that smell nice. Not wool blankets, a saggy cot, and a cold outhouse. She’d be a sport—but I didn’t know if she’d be a champ.

While I wondered, an undercurrent of worry sloshed through me. When a crick is low, it’s plain enough how the water eroded the bank, but when the water’s high, a man can stand on the edge not knowing there’s little under him. Below all my thinking was the miserable thought she’d only go with me to get away from him. Days before I asked her, I’d prayed and thought I’d heard back, but a man can never tell one hundred percent when God has spoken, and worse, it’s oftentimes hard to parse His signals. I’d paid special attention when I asked Gwen to marry me, and when she failed to answer right off, she didn’t ease my angst. One more thing to think about while I watched the Pink Panther on the ceiling.

We hadn’t talked about many details on the night I proposed because we mostly hugged and tried to stay warm. She’d suggested going to the barn loft where we’d be out of the wind, but I knew if I went in there with her I’d want to do more than was right, and we’d made it this far without breaking too many rules. (Mister Sharps only talked birds and bees once. He’d said, “Don’t sit down to supper with a woman without saying grace…”)

It seemed like I spent half the night walking to Haudesert’s and the other half walking back. Christmas morning, trekking again, a different set of doubts filled me than the ones from the night before. What would her face look like if I swept her off her feet and carried her across the threshold—and instead of it being a nice place, I carried her inside a slaughterhouse shanty that smelled like scorched socks and a kerosene heater? I spent so much time worrying about not providing adequately for her that I never thought about what Burt would have to say.

I rapped the door. Through the window, I could see Burt and Fay arguing. I turned away, but Burt saw me, and after he said something final, Fay went into the living room and Burt came to the door. I hadn’t seen Gwen yet, and somehow it seemed wrong to ask him without double-checking that she hadn’t lost her nerve, but I couldn’t hardly ask him to chat with Gwen, so when he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me into the kitchen, like he’d forgotten his disappointment from two months earlier, I stumbled inside and tried to meet his eye.

This was the man who was raping Gwen.

Cal looked in from the other room. He wasn’t on a cane anymore. His brows were low, and when he nodded it was as good as calling out, “Hello, traitor.”

“What do you need?” Burt said. “Finally here about the militia?”

“Good morning,” I said.

“You walk from town?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

I breathed deep. “Mister Haudesert, I love Guinevere and I want to marry her. I want your blessing.”

He was standing beside me, side by side and at an angle. He stepped back like he’d lost his balance and his face had that confused, betrayed look I’d seen on a few hogs’ faces, right after he’d scrambled their brains with a .22 bullet.

“You what?”

“Guinevere and I want to get married. I’ve got a good wage in town, and I’ll take care of her. I came for your blessing.”

“My blessing.”

Cal stood in the entrance to the living room, now with his arms crossed and his head moving side to side like I had some kind of gall, and I wished he wasn’t there because I felt like the guy going unarmed to parley with the enemy camp. Behind Cal, Guinevere leaned against the far wall. She pulled from her pocket the ring I’d given her and slipped it on her finger. She crossed her arms almost like to show it off, but I couldn’t decipher the cant of her lips. Whether she was glad I was there or if she thought the ring came from the tooth fairy.

Burt launched his fist at my face, and next thing, I was on the floor looking up at my arms and legs, like a junebug when you flip him over. Burt didn’t say a word. He swung his leg back and I rolled and scampered, and he tried to kick me anyway.