Cold Quiet Country (28 page)

“We got to a spot under a giant ponderosa where the snow was thin and Gwen said this looked good, and I said, ‘In a little ways we can be where I spent half the night. There might still be some coals.’ The night before I spent about eight hours drying my boots and socks. A rock overhang reflected heat from the fire. We kept going and it was only a couple minutes until we came up to the rock and the ashes were still warm.”

I can hardly go on. Liz stares at the fireplace.

“There were so many things we could have done! She could have put on one of my boots and snuck back to the barn for her shoe. We could have built a fire long enough to get her foot warm and then gone to Haynes’s, where at least we could lay low through the storm. She could have gone back to her mother and said I dragged her away and she escaped. Anything!”

“What did you do to her?”

I swallow. Exhale.

It’s taken Odum a half hour to talk things over and start deploying his men. I drove ahead to the bend beyond where Roosevelt’s cruiser is parked half into the woods. Slipped back on foot, but on the other side of the road, behind it all. It’d be no good to have another unexplained set of tracks mingled with the rest.

I knock a thin layer of snow off a log lying under the protective wing of a pine. Park my tired ass on it. The air is still and silent and my view to the farm is unobstructed. I turn away and light a pipe bowl.

The line between dusk and night is never clear. The moon is already midway through the sky. It won’t get truly bleak until around midnight.

That’s better for Gale than it is for Odum and company.

Coates was a hunter and his house is an arsenal. He reloaded his ammo in the basement. Kept enough powder on hand to launch a brick house, let alone a wood one. G’Wain has access to all of it.

And that house…I helped Coates replace the front door years ago. The jamb was water-rotted and we pulled it out. The walls are boards, four thick. Modern house, bullet hits a sheet of plywood, goes through some insulation, and then a little plaster. This house? Any bullet makes it through that wall is going to come out in ten pieces, and each one’ll drop to the floor.

Suppression fire has to be direct, concentrated on the window Gale’s shooting from. They’ll have to expose themselves trying to keep him from shooting back—but they don’t have the manpower to cover all of Gale’s options. If Odum has any smarts, he’ll deploy two men on the same side of the house—the one with the fewest windows—and have a third covering escape out the back.

But Odum’s got the brains of a frog fart, and G’Wain will pick off his deputies one by one.

The dome light in Odum’s cruiser flashes yellow. Deputies spill out.

Travis gets in his vehicle and drives forward. Sager heads to the corner by the driveway, and keeps looking at the others as he moves closer to the house under the cover of trees. Once he gets to the pasture, he’ll stop. Odum walks fifty yards along the road toward Roosevelt’s ditched vehicle, and turns into the woods.

Travis drives to the opposite side of the field in front of the house and parks. He steals along a windrow. Looks like he’s going to follow it to the slope by the lake and angle to the house.

Odum takes off into the woods, like to make a circle and come at the house from the orchard. So him and Travis will come in facing each other, the house between them.

Odum’s already fucked this up.

I clean out my pipe and tuck it into my pocket. Step out from under the bull pine limb and start moving toward the house.

* * *

Liz’s finger is on her trigger. “What did you do to Gwen?”

“I dropped the birch bark I’d picked off the tree onto the ashes and walked off to find wood. I’d burned up every last bit of what I’d had the night before, thinking it might keep the coals burning longer in case I had to come back. I brought a few pieces of brush and knocked the snow off them. They were too big to light with a few scraps of birch bark, so I had to find some pine scrub. I said, ‘Hang on, baby. I’ll have your feet warm in no time, and you can take my boot.’

“Her eyes had been melancholy but they firmed. She stood and walked through the snow to me like she was walking across a ballroom floor in the middle of July. She took my face in both her hands and then slid them to my neck and pulled me to her, began kissing me with her eyes open. She said, ‘I love you, Gale.’”

Liz comes forward a little and sits on the arm of the sofa. Her rifle points toward the stairway.

“I told her I loved her too and she should just hold tight a few more minutes and we’d figure out how to get out of the mess we were in. I hugged her. You know how a dismissal hug is different from an I-love-you hug? I gave her the quick kind because I was in a hurry to get a fire going. I was only a few feet away, reaching into a ponderosa branch, when I heard a whoomp! sound, and I turned around and Gwen was lying face down by the fire. I ran back to her, best I could, and rolled her over.”

I wipe my eyes. I’ve avoided this picture all day. There’s no explanation for what she did.

“What happened?” Liz says, on her knees before me. She tugs my sleeve. “What happened?”

“She had a knife sticking out of her chest, buried clean to the hilt. She’d fallen on the same knife she’d pulled out of my leg.”

“No!”

“She did!”

“No. No.”

Liz weeps and I wipe my eyes. There’s only one more thing to tell her.

“She was alive for a minute, though the knife went right through her middle. I—I know where a person’s heart is and she must have too. She smiled, though her eyes were wet and full of panic.”

“Did she say anything? Did she say why?”

“She said something…”

“What?”

“I don’t know what she meant. Maybe… I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did she say? Tell me!”

I look past Liz to the window overlooking the lake. “She chose for her very last words, ‘I stole your music.’ I held her eyes closed for five minutes after she was gone. To make sure they stayed that way.”

Liz nods slowly, and then faster. Tears roll down her face like two columns of soldiers.

“She stole your music.” Liz lifts the rifle in her hands and points it at the ceiling. “You know what she was telling you? You—”

“Music was like her soul, I think. Maybe she meant she’d take a part of me with her.”

“You fool.” She smiles and clears phlegm from her throat. She makes a face like she has a mouthful and looks at the fire, and then turns, heads for the window. She spits through it and as she turns to me the wood at the window splinters. A rifle shot explodes at almost the same time.

“Down!” I yell. “Are you hit?”

She leaps behind the sofa and scrambles to her rifle. I low-crawl, more of a wriggle with a useless arm and half-dead leg, to the living-room window farther to the right.

More shots echo from outside—some close, some far away. There’s rifles on two sides of the house, and something smaller. A gun that yips like a small dog. Three men? Counting the dead deputy, that makes four. One shy of the whole department. They’re keeping things in-house, and one man in reserve.

I whisper to Liz, “Go upstairs. All the way down the hall. The window is shot out and there’s a rifle. You might be able to see the shooter.”

She nods and wriggles across the floor. Gunshots crash through the house, concentrated on the bottom floor. The fire is a steady patter, a shot every couple of seconds.

“I’m going to the kitchen,” I say. “There’s two shooters on that side.”

“She stole your music!” Liz says.

She ascends the stairs in a quick burst and her footsteps echo from the hallway. I grab the rifle beside the window and with all the speed I can muster, cross to the kitchen. Bullets tear through the house, but only through the windows. I stop partway and listen. Lead rips through plaster in the middle of the house, and shatters picture frames.

I peer over the windowsill. I’ve got one shooter at the pasture alternating shots through each downstairs window. Sounds like a pistol. The other shots from out front are difficult to distinguish, but it seems they’re not coming inside the house. Like the other fellow is shooting into the walls.

Upstairs, Liz fires a rifle. She follows up with several more and screams, “I missed and he’s moving around the front!”

I shift, place my back to the fireplace, where the stones will protect me from fire originating on the other side of the house.

The pistol shots from out front seem to get closer. The patter is steady, and then the loud bangs stop and it is just the rifle from the pasture that keeps hitting the outside walls. Maybe the one with the pistol is reloading. I shift to my right and see a muzzle flash in the pasture. Hear the bullet strike the side of the house to my left. Though the moonlight is strong I can’t make out any people. I approach the window, rest the muzzle on the splintered wood and wait for the next flash.

There!

I zero on it, and when the next flash comes, it is perfectly aligned with my rifle barrel.

Fuck him.

I duck and a bullet zips by me. A pistol shot from twenty feet away. Upstairs, Liz fires again and after a quick pause, again. She rattles down the stairs.

“I got him,” she says. “I’m sure I got him.”

“Stand back!”

Another pistol shot comes through the window.

“Get back! He’s right outside.”

She drops to the floor and approaches me.

“There’s time for you to go,” I say. “You can make it now. Go downstairs. Take the snowmobile and blast through the door.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies.”

“What are movies?”

She punches my good arm and I make out a smile on her half-lit face.

“I’ll stick around,” she says.

I slide across the kitchen floor, pulling with one good arm, kicking with one good leg. At the steps I sit and then work my way into the darkness, taking the first few steps on my behind. I grab a candle and a book of matches and Liz Sunday is right behind me. She swings the door closed and we’re in total darkness until I strike a match.

I hold the flame to the candle and she finds another and tilts its wick to my flame. I climb to my feet and descend. At the bottom I say, “Take the snowmobile. Blast through the door. He’ll think we’ve both gone, and I’ll surprise him from down here.”

“Whatever you do is going to work,” Liz says.

“Just do it for me!”

“You still don’t understand about Gwen?”

“What?”

“She stole your music. She died for you.”

“For me? What?”

“In your place.”

Liz rests her candle on its side on a shelf and I see what she doesn’t—a can of black powder a few inches away. I rush to her as the dust on the table ignites in a flash that leaves me half blind.

“Are you all right?”

“What was that?” she says, groping me. “I’m blind.”

“Gunpowder. Can you see? Now?”

“It was the flash. Thank God. Gunpowder?”

“The man who lived here reloaded his rifle shells. You lit powder that must have spilled on the table.”

I move the candle closer and she reads the label on the can of black powder. She looks at me, and then past me.

“Shit!” she says. “Put it out!”

She snuffs her candle and knocks mine from my hand. She shoves me aside. A bullet shatters through a window high on the basement wall and smashes into the reloading station. A second and third shot follows. I can barely see in the shadows.

Liz points her rifle at the window and blasts through it. Works the lever and fires again. I move to the end of the table and gather all my strength to topple it forward.

“Go now,” I whisper. “Blast through the door. He’ll think we’re both gone. Go—while there’s time!”

I hear her snowmobile suit zip-zip to me. She feels for my shoulders and my arms and places her rifle in my hand. “There’s two shots left. One in the chamber. The safety is off. If I don’t hear this gun go off within five minutes, I’m coming back.”

She feels for my face and pecks her lips to my cheek.

* * *

Guinevere was beyond shivering. Her foot was numb and the cold that blew through her clothes had long ago frozen her goose pimples solid. Even her eyebrows were hard, and when she squinted against the arctic wind her face remained stiff until she pressed her cheeks back to normal with her palms.

Gale limped from the wound he’d received at her father’s hand; she’d watched Burt hurl the knife, she’d seen it glint as it tumbled end over end until it stuck in Gale. So many times during the previous night she’d closed her eyes only to see Gale’s face staring into death and to hear the bullfrog dirge—croaking tunes that recalled the smell of rotten earth.

She’d thought Gale’s life would end and had closed her eyes. Then she’d seen her father’s face on an azure field and immediately cast about the loft for a weapon. She found the pitchfork and somewhere deep within found the strength to hurl it. She hurried down the ladder, wearing only one shoe, and shivered at the sight of her tormenter’s dead eyes, and the knowledge that at this moment heaven was rejecting him.

Gale would survive!

But on the long march across the field she stopped walking into the driving wind, and turned her back against the stinging ice pellets, and again she saw Gale’s face. Somewhere within the shrieking storm was the plaintive moan of the frogs.

It was remarkable that he was beside her and didn’t know another part of him was this very moment staring into the face of death…but his eyes angled upward, and Gwen realized this might be her only opportunity to see the face of God, because Gale might be the only man clean enough to deserve a place in heaven. She swiveled inside her mind’s eye and the azure field brightened until it was no different than staring into a sunny blizzard.

Was that God?

She looked farther and the whiteness intensified, almost becoming heat she could feel through her bones; she dared farther and farther and the heat burned. She fell to her knees and the snow was warm and wet; she raised her hands to shield her eyes but it was no good—the light was within. She searched the glory until her heart juddered and her lungs refused to expand and contract, farther still until she couldn’t hold a thought together, couldn’t conceive of one word to follow another.