Cold Quiet Country (30 page)

“He slept like a baby? Like, on the couch?”

She turns away. Her shoulders are still. “Don’t judge me.”

“I don’t judge you. I can’t say a damned thing right.”

But did she sleep in the same bed as her brother? With her father?

She twists and her face is red. “I didn’t choose any of this.”

“We’re almost done.”

“They didn’t like Link. When Cal and Jordan came to our house this morning, they didn’t have a big enough posse. They said Link had to prove himself to the organization.”

“And you came along.”

“They said you killed their father and took Gwen.”

“Why’d you care?”

“Gwen was my friend.”

“Why put yourself in danger?”

“You came from the Youth Home.”

The night she visited me at Haynes’s, I wondered why she would seek me instead of the other boys in town.

I stumble away and circle to the porch steps. Inside the house, the fire has dwindled to coals. I cross a bloodstain from the deputy. Glance at ochre marks on the wall from Cal.

I hold my hands to the embers and they surprise me. Warmth in the cold. Like when I spent last night with Guinevere Haudesert in her father’s loft, snuggled between two coats. After a bout of love she stood in the frigid air, her arms aloft, breasts and triangle leaping through moonlight at me. She said, look at me, and I said, I can’t help it, and she said, love me. I can’t help that either. Her smile radiated heat like these embers. She was happy and loved and unashamed.

Footsteps sound on the snow-softened porch. Liz, at the door.

“My father raped me. You helped Gwen get justice. That’s why I had to know what happened to her. And that’s why there’s more to be done when we’re finished here.”

I understand where Liz has been and what makes her tick. Having killed so many, I find it easy to think about applying justice where the law has failed.

“There won’t be any going back.”

She nods. “Are you going to help me finish my story?”

* * *

Gale G’Wain has a partner. A girl I know.

They’ve been working together out front, not like she’s a hostage. They’ve been dragging bodies. Give me a chance to get my strength—though what would help me best, a bowl of tobacco, would tip them off. So I’ve been a dark clump on the field. Going numb in my legs, not knowing if my heart’s plum give out or if I’m buried in snow that comes down from above and blows in from the sides and doesn’t look to ever let up.

They go around the house and a few minutes pass before I figure they aren’t coming back. Getting from the ground to all fours is easy, but from all fours to upright takes reminding myself of Burt lying in a ruby pool with a fork run through his neck. Placing one foot in front of the next takes a vision of Gwen with an inch-and-a-half-wide slit in the side of her pert young breast.

That, by God, keeps me moving.

* * *

“I grew up at the orphanage where your son lives,” I say.

We’ve worked in silence. When I get lightheaded from my wounds, she carries on dragging bodies, driving snowmobiles into the basement, leaving one more outside. I told her to leave the sheriff outside as well, and she continued with other chores. She’s packed a second bag with food and bullets. Stuffed a coarse wool blanket inside. She’s raided desk drawers for dollars and bureaus for valuables. She’s stolen anything she’s fancied and loaded another sled. It waits outside.

Who made her what she is? Gwen wasn’t like that.

“I’m going to get my son back,” she says.

I sense this is her long-running motive. “How are you going to take care of him?”

“I’ll find work. I’ll do what I have to.”

I open the hood of a Skiroule, uncap the half-full gas tank. The sled is heavy in the front. I can’t rock it.

“Give me a hand.”

She joins me and we roll the snowmobile on its side. The fiberglass hood bends and the gasoline and oil mix splashes onto the concrete. Together we flip another sled. The scent of fuel burns my throat.

“Is the door at the top of the stairs open?”

“I’ll see,” she says, and circles the pool. She climbs the stairs.

I grab a can of gunpowder from Coates’s reloading station and place it by the exit. “Bring matches from the fireplace, and meet me outside.”

I track her upstairs by her footsteps. A few minutes ago I explained what we’re doing. This isn’t about getting rid of evidence, as if converting bodies to ashes will absolve me of killing them in the eyes of the law. Nothing since this morning has anything to do with the law. I’m not above it. I’m ignoring it, the way it ignored Gwen. My mother. Liz.

I’m going to fire this place and these bodies because when a mortgage is paid, the only thing to do is burn it.

I slip down the slope to the sheriff who replaced Bittersmith. Liz stands a few feet away.

“Help me drag him inside,” I say.

She grabs a foot and I take the other. He’s heavy, and going upslope quickly consumes my strength. We flop him over the edge of the stairs, and his body angles downward.

“Wait for me outside,” I say.

I stand over the new sheriff. His feet are in snowmobile fuel. I uncap the gunpowder and spill a line from the pool, over his crotch, and up the ramp. The can remains quarter full when I’m done. I toss it inside.

“Take this sled down to the other, on the lake. I’ll be there in a minute.”

She passes me a box of matches. In a moment she’s a hundred yards away, sitting on an idling sled. I strike a match and touch it to the powder. It burns quickly, a shooting line of orange and sparks. I duck and the basement whooshes with flames. There’s no explosion.

This isn’t meant to be dramatic.

* * *

I’m twenty feet away when I see orange flames. Powder from downstairs. The little bastard’s burning the Coates’s house and everything in it, as if the law won’t find bones. It would be contemptible, if the orphan wasn’t so good at killing people.

Time I get beside the house, two snowmobiles race across the lake. I pull out my Smith & Wesson and aim at the second sled. Fire one off, then another. My arm gets heavy and I can’t hold it steady, but I pull the trigger until the pistol is empty. G’Wain probably thinks the noise is reloaded cartridges exploding in the basement, if he hears at all.

That’s fine as frog hair, Gale G’Wain. It’s dark, and we got roads all over this fuckin’ state, let a man keep track of a pair of sleds’ headlamps in the woods. I’ve got more jerky in the truck. I’m coming for you. The longer I walk, the stronger I get. The blinder I get to everything save my part in your miserable goddamned fate.

I turn back for the Bronco. Follow the trail I broke coming in. My legs are dead but slowly coming back to life. They sting, but the pain is strength. Almost got a normal gait. Only takes a few minutes to move a hundred yards.

Odum’s left his car unlocked. I slip inside, but he kept the keys. Of course he kept the keys, but I curse him for it and relax on the seat to catch my breath. Not too long. Gale and his partner must be most of the way across the lake.

I’m not going to end my forty-year run as sheriff on Gale G’Wain’s escape.

I spot a lunch box in the passenger foot well. Open it and pull out a peanut butter and jelly, leaving two more inside. I bite into stiff bread. Crunchy peanut butter and cherry jelly. I shake Odum’s half-full thermos. Pour a cup of piss-warm coffee and gulp it.

Now I feel alive. I keep the sandwich with the bite marks and repack the pail. Return my feet to the snow. I’ll eat the rest on the road.

The Bronco’s only another two hundred yards.

Yes sir, Gale. Two can get lucky. I bet your luck runs out first.

* * *

If I had done a dozen things differently, Gwen would be alive. We’d be together, heading south.

I know what Doctor Coates was talking about in his letter, when he said he was giving his time to the urchins who didn’t know God’s gift and hadn’t even begun to regret being born unknowing. He was answering what I said to Mister Sharps—I didn’t want to be bad—and he was saying it’s okay. That’s what we’ve got a God for. He’s there when you finally wake to regret. When you know you are bad no matter how hard you try to live by rules that make sense.

Nothing is quite as clear as the cold air that’s setting my lungs on fire. Steering a snowmobile with one arm is a challenge, and leaning into a turn on a leg that’s earned an appointment with a surgical saw is close to crippling. I steer by applying steady pressure to one side of the bar or the other, aiming for the distant edge of the lake. Staying in Liz’s track helps.

She has an edge I’m not at home with.

The sky is black. The snow is white. Our headlights cut a yellow swath through both. Before today, I would have never thought of turning a firearm on a man, even in self-defense. I don’t know if I can remember all of them, but today’s dead men share one commonality. When I account for their deaths, I’ll look God in the eye.

But the deed that Liz and I race toward is different. It says the law isn’t good enough. Men—not institutions—must mete out justice, or it won’t be done. This is judicial in the most literal sense. If I could spend the rest of my life avenging girls like Guinevere, if I could do nothing but murder men like Burt, I’d do it. I bear wounds in my arm and leg, but the deepest is in my heart. From Burt and his ilk, child-fuckers, sex-thieves, perverts.

Snowflakes swarm to me through the headlight.

It is appropriate that this march of assassins is in the winter. It is the natural order that things wither and are reaped in the fall—and if any that deserved to meet their end survive, winter ensures they do not escape.

These are my thoughts as Liz leads across the lake. She slows as we approach the frozen shore, and stands as the sled plows over a small bank. Her track strips snow from tufts of dead grass; the golden blades reflect my headlamp and then I too navigate the bump. An icy lump knocks the skis hard right and the sled lurches. I press the steering bar with my shot arm, but the snow is deep. I am weak. My leg is too stiff to counterbalance a blastoff to the left. The sled plows into unbroken snow and I fight to get back to Liz’s path.

Liz’s taillight flashes red. She looks back, perhaps alarmed that my headlight cut so wildly. Two-cycle exhaust fills my nose. I ease behind her. She leaves her machine running; gray exhaust clouds her skis. Liz dismounts.

The headlight on her snowmobile dims and the swath it illuminates looks ghastly; jagged cornstalks protrude through the snow like skinny Arlington headstones. To the right, a field bends like an oxbow lake around the hill on our left. A pair of eyes, probably from a deer, reflects our headlights.

Liz wades through the snow and stands beside me. My sled’s Sachs engine vibrates heavily at idle. She leans to me and says, “Can you steer? Why are we on separate machines?”

“I don’t know.”

Joining her is not marriage, but I sense other things will follow.

Monroe.

“Are you cold enough to do this?” I say. “Your father, I mean.”

“I said ‘never again’ a month ago,” she says. “But never happened last night.”

“Saying it isn’t good enough.” I look into the darkness beyond my headlight. “It’s like telling a wolf not to hunt. Just shoot it.”

I switch the key off; the engine rattles through death throes until it stops with a ragged valve-tapping decrescendo.

She stares like something profound is behind me. She says, “You ever get the feeling things have changed? The rules you’ve followed your whole life don’t count?”

I don’t say it, but she’s describing my last three seconds before shooting the deputy. A French fellow said rebels weather abuse until one moment they understand any future—no matter how risky—is better than more of the present. They take action that hurtles them away from pain, even if it promises more of a different kind. “You get to decide your own rules today.”

She has a crafty look, like Mister Sharps playing chess. A chill descends my spine. She is moves and moves ahead. Did she help her brother and the militia boys lay siege to the house so she could learn about Gwen? Or was she pushing her knight ahead and around, on a path she conceived three moves ago, knowing all twenty-eight to come?

We’re stopped at a meadow. Thirty yards ahead, a trail cuts through the woods and passes behind the hill where Guinevere Haudesert died. The trail eventually leads to the Sunday farm, adjacent the Haudesert estate. I won’t be able to make the turns.

I shoulder my duffel with my good arm and grab my rifle, a .30-40 Krag-Jorgensen with a beastly heavy barrel. We get to Liz’s house, what’s she going to do?

“Your father associated with the Wyoming Militia, by chance?”

She snorts. “You know he’s a communist. Why? You stop feeling reckless?”

It’s like a slap to my face. “I’ve spent the day curled up in God’s hands. I was worried about you. We’re not going to have a quick getaway on just one sled.”

“We won’t need to be quick.”

* * *

All these dead deputies—town council might see the wisdom of inviting me to stay another year or two. Rebuild the force. Or a few months until they find a replacement.

But times are changing, and survivors get old. I’ve seen enough. I find Gale G’Wain and kill him, I’m quits. It’ll be good enough that they beg me to stay on.

Halfway to town, I tramp the brakes and kill the headlights. Grab a pair of binoculars and pore over a stretch of field. On an upslope at the end of the lake, a pair of piss-yellow lights cut into the dark.

Gale and his partner are dark masses moving against the dim glow. Even with a .30-06 I couldn’t reach them. But once a hunter knows an animal’s location he can figure where it’s going and get there first.

G’Wain and his friend have to choose between a trail that branches down to the Haudesert farm or continues on to Sunday’s, and beyond that joins the power lines to Monroe. Or they can ride the fields to roughly the same places. If they don’t cut around the lake, or cross the road on this side, they stay within my sights.

It happens often enough that a killer returns to the scene. But I don’t think that’s what G’Wain’s up to. I think he’s going to the Sunday place.