Cold Quiet Country (3 page)

* * *

More paper. A wooden bin to the side of the hearth holds dry oak and cherry logs, already split. Many have long splinters barely attached and quickly fuel the blaze. I load the fireplace and huddle close, breathing smoke because it’s hot and painful.

The chimney is open but the fire has yet to establish the right drafts through the house. Smoke hangs a foot below the ceiling. In the flickering light, ghosts almost lift up from the photos on the wall.

I fall to my behind and press stupid fingers to my belt. My leg wound seeps. Progress. With my belt undone, I look at my boots. Blow into clasped hands and then swing my arms. I fumble with the laces, pancake them between my fingers and pull. Toe the heels off and push until my boots clonk on the hardwood floor. Pull my shirt over my head and shake my hair. Ice flies. I’m naked on the floor, shaking, rapidly dying despite the inferno a few feet away. I crawl to the hearthstones and sit so close steam rises from my skin.

Heat scorches my face. Everywhere my flesh warms, it burns, and an image flashes through me—the hunched Buddhist who doused his robes in gasoline and lit them. A quiver originates in my spine and undulates through me until I am powerless. Violent action brings a measure of control that eludes my slower, studied motions. If I act quickly I might gain the precision to do ordinary things—like remove the carbine from above the mantle.

My thigh has a knife hole that goes in horizontal and flat, the direction a knife would take if it wanted to cut a leg clean off. The blade had dried blood and whitetail deer hairs stuck to it, and some maybe came off inside me.

Blood trickles toward my groin. I unfold my arms. The bulb at the tip of the rivulet plows over goosepimpled hair, and as I watch, another column joins, and another.

I’ve got to find clothes.

From the smell, this house has been empty for weeks. Pressing my wound, I limp to a desk holding a telephone. No dial tone. Perhaps this home’s owner is on an extended visit with children or—again from the smell—grandchildren. Clearly, a woman has not been here for years, or she passed without leaving the faintest impression or barest scent. There’s no lace around the curtains. No doilies under photographs, and none of the baubles that demand doilies, like little ceramic angels. No cinnamon or nutmeg smell.

I climb the stairs sideways. The floorboards groan at my presence. I deposit blood on each doorknob and drops on the floor. One room is an armory. Two gun cabinets, each full. Antlers adorn the walls, and a bear rug the floor.

At the end of the hall, a larger room retains a human smell. Old fabric and old things. Old man. I open the closet and drape a coat over my shoulders. As I throw pants and shirts to the bed, my leg bleeds freely. I passed the bathroom on the way.

My bare feet are tingly numb—a painful improvement. I open the bathroom medicine cabinet and see razors and hair pomade, combs and aftershave.

In a hallway medicinary I find Bag Balm, Mercurochrome, and peroxide. Gauze and tape and cotton bindings. I heap the items in my arms, return to the old man’s bedroom, and toss everything on the bed. The curtains are drawn. I brush them open and light comes in so diffuse it leaves shadows undisturbed. On the bed, I throw the blanket over my unwounded leg.

I daub blood with gauze, but the wound flows too fast. There’s no use for salve or peroxide. I press a fresh pad to the hole and add another on top, wrap them in place with a long bandage and tie the ends.

Did Gwen hear the frogs and music for this? Did her gift fail her in my case, or was it premature? Should I have drowned in the lake? Frozen before starting the fire?

With my leg wrapped as tight as I can bear, I open the bureau by the closet and shiver into a pair of old-man boxer shorts and a V-necked t-shirt. Pulling heavy winter socks on feet that can’t move is like slipping a rubber on a cucumber. It doesn’t cooperate—and the real question is why I know it’s hard to put a rubber on a cucumber. That goes back to Guinevere, too.

I don pants that fit slack about my waist but cinch good with a belt, and choose the heaviest wool sweater on the top shelf. It fits loosely, and I bunch the sleeves at my forearms. For the first time since I was warm with Guinevere in the loft, hours ago, I begin to feel as if this is my body and it might eventually get warm enough to follow instructions.

Moving back downstairs, I think about the carbine above the mantle. There are lots of other guns in the bedroom upstairs—newer guns, maybe—but the carbine has character. A scar on the stock looks like it came from a bayonet. Who knows if the man who carried it fell and a man with a different color coat lifted the carbine from his hands? Who knows if that happened a dozen times before it came to rest on this mantle, to be passed down from one man to his son and to his son, until I take it from the wall…

This morning in the loft, I wondered about Guinevere hearing music. She hears what she calls bullfrog music whenever someone that she’s close to is about to die. Before Burt surprised us in the barn, saying, “I know you’re in there…” Long before that, she shushed me and said, “I hear bullfrogs,” and her stare was like a needle sunk right into me. She had me in her hands, and all I wanted was to replace those hands with something twice as warm and seventy-seven times as slippery, but she said, “Wait,” and I lay there with my behind hanging outside the coat, and it hasn’t been warm since.

The bullfrog song might have been for Burt. But maybe the song came on double strong, and maybe the extra was for me. It’s difficult to guess the way occult things work. What they put in the books is all made up, demons and spirits aside. I’ve heard of a cat that likes to go through the old folks home and lay on the lap of the next person to die, and I’ve heard of dogs that sniff out cancer. A girl hearing music before people die might be something the scientists will explain someday. I told her all that and she shook her head, said she knew when the visions had started, but not when they’d end.

The music must have been for me.

The fire has settled, and though it makes no sense, I pile on more logs. I feel better with movement. Unlock the front door. Step to the porch and look across the lake. The sun’s climbed to a high angle. Wind blows over my tracks, and there is a chance I could stay here a while. With the blizzard they’re calling for, it might be a couple days until a snowplow cleans the road. The only caveat is that Cal, Jordan, and their militia cohorts all ride snowmobiles.

I retreat inside and lock the door. Take in the gloomy sofa, chairs, mantle. More mounted heads of deer and bear. I pull the carbine from the rack, turn from the fire holding the rifle with both arms straight. The stock has been oiled for years, coat upon coat. I buff part with the wool of my sweater, and the walnut glows an orange luster warm as the flames.

I crack the lever, find a round in the breech. I close it, point to the ceiling, pull the trigger. The carbine leaps and the blast deafens me. Plaster rains through the smell of burnt powder.

With the carbine leaning against the fireplace, I kneel at the hearth and stretch my hands to the fire, rub them in the heat.

I sit where I won’t fall into the flames. Cycle another round. The spent cartridge jingles across the floor as I cock the hammer and reverse the carbine. I press the muzzle to my clamped-shut teeth, and pry them open with cold metal that tastes of powder and carbon.

I squeeze my teeth against the barrel until the pain is all that holds my thoughts together. I reach to the trigger. Wiggle it.

My eyes flit from the couch to the roll-top desk, to the floor, to the window I smashed. The ceiling. Plaster grit still floating down lodges in my eye, and I blink—the irritation is a sudden respite from the ache in my teeth and all these crazy thoughts have juddered me right up to the edge.

I can’t do this.

I’ve seen terrible things I don’t understand, and I’m a fool. But for the moment, I live.

I shift the carbine away. The stock jars against the floor and the carbine explodes. A fireball envelops my face and eyes and the roar deafens.

I hold the carbine like a rabid porcupine. My eyebrows burn and my eyes are like someone threw red-hot sand grains into them. More plaster falls from the ceiling and it mists my hands and face.

Smoke floats from the barrel. Through it I see a small painting of Jesus Christ on the wall, the Lord with his hands together, looking at me, wavering ghostlike an inch above the canvas.

His head moves side to side, tut-tut.

Gwen supposed it was her fault. Hadn’t she been a little suggestive? Maybe aggressive for Burt’s attention? And when she’d realized he intended to capitalize on her teasing willingness and do things that made biological, anatomical, barnyard sense, wasn’t it her fault for having so much as proven her desirability?

Hadn’t she almost—
almost
—wanted it? Before she knew what
it
was? Before she knew the visions the trauma would unleash?

She’d struggled that very first night with wordless questions, directionless anger, and pain down there, and her grandfather’s face had arrived unbidden to her clamped, salty eyes. It wasn’t a pose she’d seen in a photo or real life, not like a memory. His eyes were narrow and his grin was the kind a man assumes when he evaluates unknowns informed only by prejudice. The background to his face was azure, and his skin threw off a glow. She heard the throaty sounds of bullfrogs: oboes, brass. Somber instruments playing grave notes. A symphony composed by Mozart or Bach and performed by amphibians.

Grandfather hadn’t seen her. He’d looked through her to something beyond, something he recognized but perhaps wasn’t overjoyed to greet.

Gwen had no idea what the vision portended.

The image lasted a few seconds. A minute, at most. Gwen promptly layered the memory under a quilt of more ruinous, terrifying thoughts—her father—and slept.

“Morning,” her mother had said.

“Good morning.”

“You look like hell.”

“Ginger slept on my face.”

“Why do you let him in your room?”

“Where else is he going to sleep?”

“He’s a cat. He can sleep in a damn tree. You’re going to be late for school.”

Gwen watched the floor.

“Oh, and your grandfather died last night. Funeral’s Friday night.”

“Oh, Mother! Are you okay?”

Fay smiled. “We’ll be driving half the day to get there, so you tell ’em you won’t be in school on Friday.”

Gwen attended school that day, Thursday, and remained quiet. Her friend Liz Sunday sensed her unease, and when the winds of gossip carried the news that Gwen and Cal and Jordan’s grandfather had died the night before, Liz patted Gwen’s shoulder and defended her from less sensitive heathens who’d learned the old man had died in bed, and grew intoxicated on obvious punch lines.

Liz and Gwen were of the age when girls sometimes held hands. Guinevere found this comforting and was tempted after school to tell Liz about the evening before, sparing no detail from the pubic hair pinch to the vision of her grandfather. She didn’t, and they rode the school bus home in the same seat, fewer than a dozen words passing between them.

Liz was a quiet girl, susceptible to long, vacant stares out the window, and obeisant glances at the floor. She suffered continual abuse, particularly from the boys, who taunted that her father was a communist.

None of this bothered Gwen. She appreciated silence.

Guinevere discovered her mother in the kitchen preparing deviled eggs while a ham roasted. Her sisters and in-laws could make the damned scalloped potatoes and bean casseroles. It was enough that she’d worked her fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove all day…yet she never seemed gayer than preparing food for her father’s wake. Mother chattered like Gwen’s aunts and uncles unburdened by too much Christmas brandy. How the weather couldn’t be better for a good funeral. How the insects weren’t bad, and her father did a fine job at picking the season of his exit, if not the year. It was convenient—if she dared say—that he’d be laid to rest on a Friday, and they could spend the night at her sister’s house and not have to trouble with the drive home.

Friday morning, Gwen sat in the middle of the back seat between Cal and Jordan, who took turns pulling her hair and squeezing her legs above her knees. She yelled that they ought to leave her alone, and punched Cal, and found her father’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He turned toward Fay as she clucked about how green the alfalfa was, and how blue the sky; but then his eyes found Guinevere’s and held them. As if to say something. As if to throw her down on the hot car hood and wrap his fingers around her throat, to stifle her voice and drive himself inside her again. His eyes held an appetite, and worst of all, unlike the boys that noticed her sprouting breasts and rounding derriére at school, her father had the courage to hold her eyes as long as he wanted.

“Dad! Look!” Gwen screamed.

Burt swerved. Tires squealed. The car shook left and right.

In the approaching lane, a tractor-trailer barreled through a downhill turn, and in their path, a muscle car with a block on the hood attempted to pass. Burt split the distance between them. The truck roared by, inches outside their windows. The car passed to their right and kicked a plume of dirt from the shoulder and fishtailed back onto the pavement.

Burt pounded the ball of his fist to the steering wheel, and the car rocked. “God
damn
!” He punched the dash above the radio. “God
fuckin’
damn!”

“Burt…” her mother said, one hand on her chest, the other braced on the dash.

“Fuck!” Burt swerved to the side of the road at the top of the hill and three-point-turned. He sped after the muscle car.

Her mother’s voice lifted in pitch. “We’re going to be late for the funeral, Burt.”

They raced down the hill.

“Burt? For so long I’ve wanted—don’t do this to me, please? Burt?”

I fetch field glasses from the Bronco’s glove box, wipe the object lens with a flap of cloth from the seat cover. Climb out. A pair of tracks wander across the field. I can make them out for two hundred yards, then they fade into drifts and cornstalks. Somewhere beyond the fuzzy white, those tracks lead into the forest. I’ve hunted turkey in that stretch.