Cold Quiet Country (31 page)

I’ve been mulling over Burt and Gwen. Watching pictures flash through my mind, sometimes so clear I can smell the day like I’m sitting in it. Taste the Budweiser I drank with Burt while we memorized Masonic catechisms. Smell the perfume Liz Sunday wore that day I caught her and Gwen skipping school.

She had long brown hair, like the girl helping G’Wain back at the house, and up there on the side hill.

She was big-boned, a farm girl, and G’Wain’s partner had a certain workhorse heft to her movements, dragging men’s corpses through the snow. This girl’s got thighs. Strong back.

The mind wanders. Some thoughts are like briars; you get a few feet in, and find so many snags, it’s best to set the mind to staying while you pick them out one by one. Thinking on that Sunday girl is like that. She meets the physical description. Would she have the wherewithal to get over to Coates’s place? Some girl did. May as well be a tough farm girl with a brother the same age as the dead girl’s brothers. A brother who, against his father’s obvious inclinations, flirted with joining the Militia and had a cordial relationship with Burt Haudesert and his sons.

Those jaggers scrape but they don’t hold. For the real tangle, let’s speculate Gwen and Liz were bosom friends. Shared their secrets—like you’d expect out of girls that hold hands. Maybe there was more. Could that situation launch the Sunday girl onto a snowmobile to track down the boy that killed Gwen? I can see it.

G’Wain and his partner look to be helping each other—and that opens up another set of brambles. Gale G’Wain lived and worked at Haudesert’s, but boys sniff tail all over. Sunday farm only sits a mile beyond Haudesert’s—scrappy boy like G’Wain could trot that distance in five minutes. Some kind of free love between the two? The three? Maybe he turned over one field, ran over and planted seed in the other. It ain’t unusual. And it ain’t hard to imagine Liz Sunday’s been involved from sunup ’til now.

Thoughts turn every which way, trying to find a route out of the briar patch. What if Gale was set to run with Sunday and Gwen found out? Called him on it and involved Burt?

Maybe I’ll never know. None of it matters. I’ll guaran-goddamn-tee one thing. When we meet up, it won’t be to tell G’Wain how a Bittersmith man needs to comport himself. This isn’t a tough love mission to turn the wayward back to the straight and narrow.

No, that conversation implies the recipient has a future.

Liz mounts her rumbling snowmobile. I slip behind her, grateful for the seat back that supports the weight of the duffel and presses my pelvis snug into Liz. She nestles against me. I position the Krag across her legs and do my best to hold both it and her as she lays her duffel of booty across her lap and the heavy Bolens grumbles forward.

Between killings—I know I’m about to do another—I yearn for some metaphysical banister, because the heights get dizzying. Yearn for something stronger than the Golden Rule or Murphy’s Law. I’m on a course that defies everything I’ve ever learned yet this course came
out of
everything I’ve ever learned. I don’t see how I’ve erred, and I don’t see how I can fail to complete what I’ve started.

I whiff Liz’s hair. She must use the same shampoo as Gwen. I first smelled it in the barn loft at the end of summer. The heat was heavy and the hay was scratchy. Humidity kept our skin flush and with the dust in the air and salt in our sweat—it was as if the barn itself chastened us. I smelled her hair then and through the fall when she would nose against me. As the season got colder the perfume became more fragile, so that last night Gwen smelled the same as Liz does now. Flowers. In the icy air, a whiff brings with it the worry the smell will freeze like a petal and crumble, and nothing will remain save snowmobile exhaust.

We’re on top of the hill. The valley is like a ghost seen through dead twigs and trees. Burt Haudesert’s barn stands against the fields and its darkness merges with the swampy forest below the garden. From this vantage the surrounding hills look less imposing. Somewhere beyond a fold and around another bend waits the Sunday farm. Liz’s father maybe wonders about his son and daughter.

Liz jockeys back and forth, throws her weight twice as far as normal to offset my mass. She is alive under my arms; her thighs continually shift below my hands; the rifle is wobbly like a pole lashed across the top of a buoy.

We blaze across an open field. Liz steers diagonally and every second a twelve-inch cornstalk thwacks the sled’s underbelly. We crest a knoll and there’s a house and barn. The porch light beckons. The barn seeps yellow through gaps in the wallboards and knotholes.

A farmer works in a harsh economy; must tend the animals before he can tend his family. Her father will be working with the cows; he’ll hear the noise and come out. He’ll see two of us on one sled and imagine his son has returned with his daughter. Will he be angry about the missing snowmobile?

Liz trembles below my hands.

She slows the snowmobile. We reach the farm at a scant crawl. The trail leads across a flat to the barn. The sled drifts to a stop. Liz kills the engine. The headlight beam vanishes and I smell her hair again.

“You or me,” I say.

“Me.”

I press my good hand to her shoulder and dismount the machine. The Krag is loaded and I face the barn. The bay light is on and the tractor-door is partly open. A butchered hog hangs from his hind legs. Liz retrieves her rifle from the scabbard on the side of the seat, and standing on the opposite side of the sled, turns to the barn.

“In there?” I say.

She plods forward. Though her first step is short, the next are longer. I clamber around the back of the sled and follow, already ten paces behind. She carries the rifle at port arms, the stock at her right hip, barrel across her chest.

A door thuds closed behind us. I turn, but Liz keeps walking. Her old man stands on the porch under a light and looks like a yellow dog in flannel and overalls. He holds a pistol in his right hand, loose at his side. He’s got hog blood on his arms.

“Whole county lookin’ for you, boy.”

Behind me, the sound of Liz’s boots on the packed snow ceases.

I say, “What does a fellow say to that?”

“Liz, come on back here.” He watches me. “What, boy? You figure to kill one girl’s daddy, and when that don’t work, you come looking for another? That it?” He taps his leg with the pistol barrel. “Come here to take me out?”

How many years of playing the game? Of acknowledging another man’s strength only because he is willing to break the rules? How many victims are stronger than the men who subjugate them? How many could rise against the bastards holding the chains that shackle their ankles? How many of those bastards owe their seats of hubris and animosity and greed to the tolerance of their betters, the men and women and daughters who do the toiling and the sweating and the grunting, but equate morality with meekness?

He raises the pistol toward me. “Well, boy?”

“Nah, it’s not like that,” I say. “There was an accident at the Haudeserts’ and I flipped out. I ran away, and Liz here’s the only one that knows the truth of it.”

“What’s the truth of it, Liz?”

“Truth is, I’m freezing. Let’s go inside.”

“Where’s Link?”

“I don’t know. He took off on the other sled and I haven’t seen him.”

“He better bring it back in one piece.”

“That’s what’s important,” I say.

Sunday lowers his gun as Liz steps beside me. She’s dropped the rifle to one hand. “Inside,” she whispers. I follow. Sunday stands aside on the porch and hair rises on the back of my neck as I hear his footsteps behind me.

The kitchen air hits me like a wall. Blood rushes to my cheeks and the warm air gives me vertigo. I reach to a countertop and my hand brushes an upside-down copy of a tattered newspaper that is no less strident looking for all its wear.
The Daily Worker
. It’s old. Torn edges, yellowed, folded and opened so many times the paper seems to have peach fuzz.

Liz lays her rifle on the kitchen table.

God knows how long Sunday’s been a Red encircled by townsmen with a different take on injustice. They rail against the Commies, and Sunday points to the capitalists manipulating the prices of corn and beef and oil and railcars. Except the others have the numbers, and Sunday has to turn his insufficient strength against something even more insignificant in the grand scheme: the girl growing into a woman under his roof. She isn’t his daughter. She isn’t sacred. She’s a place to rub his dick.

I watch condensation form on the blued metal. Sunday steps inside and closes the door. Liz sits at the table, facing him. His eye whites are like busted egg yolks. His skin is creased and sunburned, though it’s been months since he’s done fieldwork.

“What you got in mind, coming here?” Sunday leans against the countertop by the stove. He crosses his arms and the pistol dangles. His thumb crosses the hammer.

I look at Liz. At some point she’s going to decide what she wants to do. She’s in the house where it all happened, the refuge that was the site of her terror, at the hands of the man whose politics maybe included her in the town’s ostracism. She’s a cagey creature, this girl who doesn’t know how to be a girl. She glances at me and suddenly I’m in Burt Haudesert’s kitchen, at the table. Jordan’s at my elbow and Gwen is opposite, and she’s got that same stare as Liz does now. She’s looking straight at the center of the table. Her jaw is set but her brow is soft. There’s concentration in her eyes, but no anger or consternation. Her heart’s probably beating like a rabbit flushed from the briar, but outward she’s spaced out and for the life of me I’ll never understand how a man can do that to a girl.

And there’s Sunday. Speak of the Devil. The man at the head of the family, defending it…

He’s three steps away but ten times stronger and faster than me. But there are more guns on my side of the battlefront. And frankly I don’t give a shit.

“Liz, are you going to kill him, or what?”

I’m watching him but at my peripheral right I see her face swing to me. Sunday’s eyebrows rumble with an earthquake of rage; his face splits at the jaw and he raises his pistol to me.

Liz says, “No!” and clutches the rifle on the table. She points at her father. “Don’t,” she says.

I’m the only one with a gun who isn’t pointing it. I hold his withering gaze, and the barrel aimed at me is a dot below his right eye. He’s bore-sighting me, but the muzzle is no more alarming than the knob on the cupboard behind him. His eyes flicker to Liz, and his rage tinges a different shade as he recognizes her treason.

My throat is raspy. “Your son is dead. Are you happy to know your daughter will make it out alive?”

“This how you do your old man?” He leers at Liz. With his shifting attention, the muzzle drifts. I look at Liz.

“I can’t,” she says.

I fall leftward, swing the Krag level. Sunday fires his pistol; the muzzle explodes into orange. The shot cracks past my head. Liz screams. I cock the Krag and fire. The rifle erupts and the cupboard behind Sunday must have been filled with dishes. I smell powder. Land on my bad arm. Missed Sunday and he lines his pistol to my face. The sight posts obscure his eye. He’s being careful. Slow.

“Goodbye,” Liz says. She fires from her hip and Sunday jerks back. He stares as if unhit, though the blood on the wall belies him. A red blot expands in the center of his chest.

His eyes flit from me to her and back. He musters his strength and lifts his weapon arm, fires again. The bullet crashes into the floor beyond me. He drops.

Liz lands her rifle on the table. Circles to her father and stands above him. She kneels and takes his hand.

Sunday chokes and each breath is choppy. Drowning in blood. Sucking up the fear. Standing on the edge of the unknown, yet with the absolute certitude his future won’t be pleasant. Maybe that’s the way Gwen felt the first time she heard her bedroom door open in the middle of the night. Maybe Liz. I watch and his chest rises. His hand flops. Leg spasms.

Die, will you?

I crawl to my knees then my feet and kick away the gun in his hand. Tears fall from Liz’s eyes and I say, “You want to finish this?”

She shakes her head.

“Plug your ears.”

She plugs the ear closest the rifle, and leaves her other hand on her father’s. I place the Krag muzzle to his forehead.

“No,” he grunts.

Fuck him.

* * *

I sit on the edge of the porch.

A pile of steaming vomit marks the snow between my feet. I scoop clean cold powder from the porch and rinse my mouth. Press another handful to the top of my head.

Inside, Liz moves about the kitchen like the woman of the house. I know at least one other role she inherited from her absent mother. She steps around her father, opens a cupboard, stuffs a small item I can’t make out into a handbag. Circling the body again, a whimper escapes her. She crumples at her father’s feet. The blood on the floor won’t let her get any closer.

I think of what her life in that house must have been. He’s been her tormenter and it would be a mistake for me to think her tears and shudders are grief. Her lips are tight with anger and her brow is mottled and ridged with frustration; in the slump of her shoulders and the way her derriére rests on a twisted ankle, I see profound relief—and shock—that he is finally gone.

Bittersmith is still out there. There’s a link between his evil and Sunday, between his blood in my veins and Sunday’s blood curdling in his clothes and soaking into the floor. But I am not his victim—not like Gwen and Liz have been victims. Good people dwell on every little sin. For Gwen and for Liz…for my mother…I have to deal with Bittersmith.

* * *

Liz comes to the open door. I’m watching the barn, the sky, the snow as it is born into existence right here in the light. I hear feet scuffle and look back at Liz. She’s parked a suitcase at her feet. She has keys in her hands. “I’m taking the truck to Monroe, and then heading south.”

“Monroe?”

“My baby. Do you need to burn this place to the ground?”

“I need very little at this point. Just one thing. Do you?”