House of Gold (33 page)

"Buzz, you sound like you're getting a conscience. Have you ever killed anybody?"

"No," Buzz said. "But I've done a lot of bad things in my life. I've lied. I beat my ex-wife. I was... an alcoholic. I tried to kill myself once. What if God holds that against me when I die?"

Buzz let that sink in.

He felt for a sign in Rheumy's muscles, but found none. Nevertheless,
he could practically see the wheels churning beneath Rheumy's scalp.

"Buzz drank a beer," he must be thinking...

"If there is a God, Buzz, and I'm not saying there is, then you and me are in deep trouble. And if there is a hell, then you'll go to it. And you'll meet me there."

Rheumy paused, thinking.

"No regrets, Buzz," Rheumy continued. "That's my motto. Rheumy Marks, for good or for bad, is
the owner of his own decisions. All the liberal hand-wringing over right and wrong from the old world was a sign of weakness. Morality is for the weak. A real man makes his choices and moves on. No regrets.

"But the afterlife is a hypothetical. The only reality is the here and now. I seriously doubt there's a God. The final judgment is moot court."

"I guess you're right," Buzz agreed weakly, lying.

Buzz was losing his determination. His heretofore bold, heroic plan was fading into a moral cloud of unknowing. Talking too much with Rheumy was all wrong–a big mistake. For all Rheumy's macho Nietzschean hyperbole, his honesty, along with the ordinary sound of his voice, were-humanizing.

Buzz had his hands on his flesh.

This is not going to be easy...

"Can I ask you another question, a more personal
question?" Buzz began again.

"Sure. Oh, that feels good, by the way."

Buzz paused to work the muscle to which Rheumy was referring.

Give him one more chance,
Buzz thought, feeling weak.

Procrastinating.

Buzz was concentrating on keeping the movements of his hands light, natural, soothing. Having finished the lower back, he had slowly worked his way up to Rheumy's neck and shoulder area.

"So what's
your question?"

"After dinner, you asked me if I had thought about leaving the farm–"

"I knew you were hiding something from me," Rheumy said happily, as if he was pleased to discover that he had been right...

Buzz leaned forward, but Rheumy didn't see this...

"You're right. I've been having...doubts. I guess I'm weak. And I was wondering, like we were talking about, what if I did have a family?
Not that I do. But what if I did? What if I was on my way to go see my wife and kids before I ran into you? And what if I wanted to move on...would you let me take off?"

It was a small thing.

A tiny thing, but in the tips of his fingers, he felt Rheumy's shoulders tense up ever so slightly. And he thought he saw the muscles in Rheumy's forearm–the one with the hand beneath the pillow–flex a bit.

Rheumy laughed a small laugh.

He's stalling,
Buzz thought.

"Of course I would let you go. You're free to go anytime," Rheumy said breezily. "But it would be too bad for me. I'd have to find another chiropractor. We'd all miss you."

You're lying,
Buzz concluded wearily. Buzz himself had been lying to Rheumy for what seemed like forever. One liar knows another.

What happened next, happened quickly.

A unique melancholy flowed into Buzz's heart. A sadness of the ages. A blue melody every untried soldier sings in the trench, in the waning moments before the bullets fly...

Buzz deftly lifted his knee, and brought it down on the center of Rheumy's back...

"Hey–" Rheumy called out, raising his voice, struggling to raise himself up, not yet realizing that even if he possessed three times the strength,
he would still be pinned beneath a foe with overwhelmingly superior force.

Yahweh, make strong the hands of your chosen one. Lay mine enemies down before me.

...and in a flick of an eye, Buzz clamped a powerful forearm around Rheumy's skinny, crooked neck; then closed thick, strong fingers on Rheumy's jaw. Buzz's other hand had already darted down onto Rheumy's right forearm, his hand still beneath
the pillow...

Rheumy made a fruitless effort to speak.

"Do not attempt to call out," Buzz whispered into his ear.

Rheumy struggled anyway, but could not budge.

"Listen to me," Buzz continued softly, "Listen to me because I'm only going to tell you this once. I do have a wife and three children. They're waiting for me. And Lloyd murdered a friend of mine, a young Christian, Tom Kasovich.

"In a
matter of seconds, you will be dead, Benjamin Marks. I will give you this time to ask God for His mercy–"

Buzz, who now felt the adrenaline streaming into his own shoulders, and arms, and legs, and back, watched with detach-ment as Rheumy's eyes bugged out, as understanding dawned, and prepared for the small man to struggle.

Rheumy did not. Instead, he allowed all his muscles to go slack. Anticipating
this feint, Buzz clamped down all the more.

Do it now,
he told himself.
Or you'll never do it.

Still, Buzz had to say something more...

"I beg you, Rheumy, I beg you. I beg you to ask for God's mercy. He'll give it to you, He will. He's a merciful God. Maybe then, after I die, we can have another conversation..."

Buzz closed his eyes. He took a breath. One last pang of conscience.

What is prudent?

Johnny. For Johnny.

That was simple.

God have mercy on us both.

After a pause, relying on his certain knowledge of the human body, Buzz pressed down hard on the man's back with his knee, quickly pulled his right hand from Rheumy's forearm, wrapped it around his neck–and snapped the life from him with a quick jerk and crack.

Rheumy Marks went limp.

Buzz reached over and lifted the pillow.

There
was no gun in the dead man's hand. It was empty.

In a hard world, there was no time to dwell on details.

Buzz turned the head of the corpse away from the door.

He walked quietly to the bar and tried to open the drawer where he had seen Rheumy stash a gun. It was locked.

No gun, no time,
Buzz thought.
Plan B.

He grabbed a clear bottle on the glass shelf behind the bar–Chivas Regal.

He padded over
to the door, then, after a pause to run through the plan in his mind, he opened it, holding the bottle to the side, out of sight.

"Lloyd!" he whispered with concern. "Something's wrong with Rheumy!"

"Hey?"

Lloyd jumped to his feet, and dumbly, left his shotgun leaning against the wall. He walked in, and Buzz calmly stepped aside, letting him go past.

Buzz raised the bottle and brought it down
squarely on the base of Lloyd's neck. Lloyd crumpled to the carpet with a dull thump.

Buzz paused, listening for a sound from Ralph's room down the hall. Nothing.

Buzz crouched down, then lifted Lloyd's right hand–his trigger hand–and broke his meaty thumb and index finger with two muted cracks.

He walked out of the room, picked up the shotgun by the barrel, then noiselessly closed the door behind
him. Carefully placing one foot before the other, he left the house in silence.

He did not look back.

+  +  +

Buzz went to the slave house. The guard had been sleeping. He awoke to a shotgun. Buzz ordered him to turn around, then knocked him out.

He broke bones in this guard's fingers, too, before entering the house. Not only was Buzz sure that the guard would not be able to fire a gun, but also
that he was truly out cold–not playing possum.

He padded along the hallway upstairs to Johnny's room, which, fortunately, was marked with a nametag.

Johnny was awake–and packed.

"How did you know I was coming tonight?" Buzz whispered.

"I woke up ten minutes ago from a sound sleep. The Lord told me to get ready."

Buzz wondered, but did not ask Johnny, how the Lord spoke so clearly to him. No time.

They walked out the rear of the compound, on the far side of the dog kennel, and taking an escape route which Buzz had planned from the start, doubled back to the dirt road, well beyond the remaining sentry.

"What happened?" Johnny asked after a while.

"Shush," Buzz cautioned. "No talking."

When they emerged onto Route 100, behind the roadblock, he ordered Johnny to wait in the shadows. He darted
out to the cab of the fire truck (he knew, he just knew, that the sentry would be in the cab, facing the other way on Route 100).

He quietly jumped up on the running board, tapped the window with his knuckle, holding his shotgun out of view.

"Buzz, is that you?" the startled sentry, a man named Rory Parker, asked. "Something wrong?"

Rory did not have his rifle in his hands.

Poor training, Buzz
thought absently.

"No, everything's great," Buzz said in a clear voice, raising his shotgun. "Now get out of the cab."

Buzz knocked Rory out, too, but decided against breaking his fingers. He was sick of the sound. He found a cord in the cab, and did tie the guard's hands and feet.

"Okay," Buzz called over to Johnny in a normal tone of voice. "We're okay. Come out."

"What next?"

"We're free to
go. Let's get my backpack. We can share the bike. We've got about four hours until daybreak, and we've got to put some distance between us and this hellhole."

"Okay," was all Johnny said.

Then they climbed over the roadblock, and started jogging up to the crest. An hour later, they were four miles north of Brixton. Buzz was jogging alongside Johnny, who was riding the bike. Buzz was thankful for
the cloud cover. It made the darkness darker.

It made it easier to imagine that the Man was with them, jogging on the other side of the bike.

"Aren't we forgetting something?" Johnny asked.

"What's that?" Buzz replied.

"To pray?"

"Johnny, I've been praying ever since we came to Brixton."

Even so, they stopped, and each man, raising one hand to heaven, and holding hands with the other, prayed a
silent prayer of thanks.

"Do you have a scripture?" Buzz asked.

Johnny's eyes were closed. "The Kingdom of God is near you. But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, 'Even the dust of your town that sticks to our feet, we wipe off against you. Yet be sure of this: the Kingdom of God is near.' I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for
that town."

When they had gone far enough, Buzz Woodward lowered his danger-antenna, and allowed himself, finally, to think about what he had done.

I killed a man.

It was that simple, and it was that complicated.

He was not happy. He was not sad.

He remembered when it had all started, when he heard the gunshot that ended Tom Kasovich's earthly life. When he had decided to walk down the hill for
Johnny, instead of jumping on his bike and taking off south.

It had been the sound. The sound of the gunshot.

That gunshot meant others had declared war in a hard cold world.

Live by the sword. Die by the sword.

War is for men who cut things down.

I knew then. I knew then.

For all the anxiety, moral ambiguity, and second-guessing between that gunshot and the final crack of Rheumy's neck, he had
known his purpose. The reality of the situation. That whatever the name, there would be a compound, and in that compound there would be a Rheumy.

He had known all this, because he was Buzz, and because he just knew things.

There are on this earth hard men like Buzz–warriors. Guys who know how things work. Men who cut things down for the sake of other men who raise things up–men like Johnny Bryant.

So when Buzz Woodward had taken the long walk down the hill toward the enemy line, he was prepared to kill.

Chapter Fifteen

The Last Leg

They reached Holland Pond after four days of hard walking and riding. Johnny Bryant was thrilled and relieved when he discovered that his Uncle Reginald, a bachelor, had survived, and was only a little worse for the wear.

Unfortunately, the killer flu had taken its toll in the town. In fact, in the northern part of Vermont, perhaps because the winters were long and
harsh, the influenzas and pneumonias had done almost as much damage as in the big cities.

Reginald Bryant's congregation had been cut in half as a result, but the townspeople, by and large, had planted as soon as the weather broke. A hand-tilled harvest was finally coming in. Also, there were still fish in the lake–traditionally called
ponds
in the north country.

Perhaps as disturbing to Buzz
as the killer flus were the rumors of bands of roving marauders–some from Quebec–who would appear unexpectedly and plunder farms or towns, stealing food. Some of these gangs were heavily armed, with Hummers or jerry-rigged armoured vehicles. Sometimes, according to the rumors (for Holland Pond itself had never been directly attacked), the invaders more than met their match from resistance put up by
the better-organized towns and well-armed farmers.

Buzz, itching to move on to Bagpipe, decided to leave the next morning; he stayed for the night with Johnny in his uncle's modest cabin on the pond.

Because they were both talkers, during the journey to Holland Pond they had talked and talked–about the Bible, about how pathetic Jimmy Swaggart was, about the old world–those toasted almond ice cream
bars Good Humor used to make, Mel and the boys, and Johnny's parents and brothers and sisters, last seen in Rochester during Thanksgiving of 1999, and major league baseball and pizza-delivered to your door with any kind of topping you wanted–about lots of things, but not about–the killing.

On the day of parting, Johnny, who had spent his summers here since he was a child, walked a few miles to
guide Buzz to a dirt trail south of the pond that led east, past Halfway Pond, toward Route 114. Today they walked in silence, praying, taking turns holding the bike, enjoying the sounds of the woods–birds, leaves in the breeze, or, no sound at all.

Finally, they came to the fork.

It was early June. The weather, perfect.

"This is it," Johnny said.

Buzz remembered the first time he had seen the
young man standing with Tom Kasovich outside the post office in Argyle. He noticed that there was a new maturity in his eyes–a hardness, perhaps. But not a world-weariness.

The altruistic, almost childlike, love still shone.

What do you see in my eyes?

Buzz knew they were both thinking about Tom.

"Please, brother, ask Our Lord to forgive me," Buzz asked Johnny.

For killing Rheumy.

"I will do no
such thing," Johnny replied tersely, reminding Buzz of the Man more than ever before.

"But I killed him."

"You did what you had to do. You saved my life."

"I didn't
have
to do anything," Buzz replied, a tint of pleading in his voice.

"Right. Exactly. You could have run away when they shot Tom."

Buzz looked up toward the heavens, but the pines and maples had formed a canopy above the trail. There
was nothing more to say.

They embraced, then Buzz rode off.

Johnny prayed silently behind him. He had not seen peace in the big Catholic's eyes. The energy that had pulsed out of Buzz before the guns of Brixton was different now–forced, not natural.

There was life in Buzz Woodward's eyes, but there was also something missing that had been there in Argyle.

Forty days in the desert,
Johnny Bryant
mused sadly, reminded of the half-crazed prophets, the loud-mouth dream-walkers from the Old Testament.

Did they look like Buzz when they came back from the desert?

He didn't know. Johnny did know that he was alive, and that Tom was dead, and that Buzz was now alone, still a long way from home. Buzz put himself into mortal danger to save Johnny; but Buzz had also sacrificed something else, had
killed something inside himself, when he took the life of Rheumy Marks.

Childhood? Innocence? Joy?

Johnny couldn't find the right word. And he was sure Buzz couldn't either.

Bring him peace, Lord. Bring him peace.

+  +  +

Buzz Woodward found the going difficult on the dirt road to Route 114. The path was rough, uneven, filled with rocks caked into the ground, steep hills, and washouts.

Gliding
down the backside of one of the hills, he reached to clamp on the brakes, as he had done a thousand times before. Technology failed him. The break cable snapped, the bike gained speed, and he rolled into a huge trough caused by a washout. The front tire of the bike jammed and he went flying head-first off the bike. The accident was silent except for the muted harrumph that came from his lungs as
he landed, and the clicking sound of the back wheel of the bicycle.

He felt pain in his bad ankle.

Oh no, it's broken,
he thought.
Maybe it's just a bad sprain.

He could not tell. He limped up, dusted himself off, tightened the laces of the worn-out boot on his bad ankle, and waited for the first wave of pain to subside.

It's only pain,
he told himself, well aware that the pain in his heart, duller,
was worse.

He hopped over to the bike and inspected it. The front wheel was mangled and bent.

Totaled.

He would have to abandon it. He would have to start walking again.

So be it.

He waited for a few minutes, gathered up his back-pack, checked his compass, and limped down the rest of the hill.

Mel, Markie, Packy,
he repeated his mantra, but there was something missing. He knew this in his heart.

But he kept putting one good foot in front of a painful other. He did not hear the songs of the blue jays. Despite himself, he was listening for a particular kind of sound. There it was. He heard a twig snap somewhere in the woods, and he thought of the bones in Rheumy's neck.

+  +  +

The ankle slowed him. Buzz guessed it was not broken. He found a loose branch and, using his hunting knife, fashioned
a rough crutch. This helped. It took him the entire day to reach the Coaticook River (which was not really more than a stream).

He found a railroad track just west of Route 114, and decided to hike north alongside it rather than take the road. He camped just south of the town of Norton that night. Reginald had given him a road map. He knew 114 bent east toward Canaan at Norton.

Unlike all the
other towns during his journey, he recognized the name of Canaan. He had been there. It was on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire. He knew there was a faithful little Catholic church called Saint Albert the Great in Canaan's sister town, West Stewartstown. He knew he could cross the Connecticut River there into New Hampshire.

+  +  +

Big Steve (
Grand Stephan
in French) was a collie with a
bloodline that stretched all the way back to the hillsides and heather of Scotland. A working sheep dog, he was born and lived his entire dog life on a farm on the outskirts of a hamlet called Saint-Pascal in the Province of Quebec, Canada. He spoke only French.

Big Steve was in a quandary.

His master was dead.

Centuries earlier, the Indians who originally lived in what is now known as Quebec
told their children a story about the original tribe. The Story of the Dog.

As it was told, the Great Spirit had provided a perfect paradise for the first people, where the deer ran in huge herds, and the wheat grew wild without tilling or labor. Man and the animals lived in harmony.

But then a giant earthquake had erupted violently from the bowels of the earth. This earthquake trapped the original
tribe outside of paradise. As the world heaved, an enormous gap opened up in the land, and, as it was told, man faced eternal separation from all the animals on the other side. And then, a lone dog, seeing a man across the huge divide, had leaped across the gap to be with his master.

This is why, the Indian parents told their young squaws and fledgling braves, all the other animals are wild, and
why they fear and hate man, while the dog alone remains his loyal friend.

Poor Yves Charbonneau. He had been Big Steve's master. The gnarled, devout, eighty-nine-year-old widower did not die because of the computer collapse. He had died from old age. But Yves was now across a chasm over which Big Steve could not leap.

A week earlier, Big Steve had trotted in from the fields and found the body.
He had mewled and whimpered, barked and licked, but the old Catholic had not woken up. He had fallen from his prie-dieu, rosary in hand, before the ancient statue of Saint Joseph on the little altar in his living room.

The collie could smell that the old man's spirit was gone. Just a carcass. It was difficult for Big Steve to stay in the house. The smell. So he stayed outside on the worn, unpainted
boards of the porch.

The dog wondered–in the way that dogs wonder, that is, without words but with smells and sounds and images–why no people came to the Charbonneau farm anymore. Surely a human would come and put the spirit back into his master?

Yes, this would happen. Another human person would come. And Big Steve would wait while his heart ached. The collie was not accustomed to going without
the affections of his master.

There was plenty of food lying around, and rabbits in the stand of trees beyond the glen. Though his appetite had diminished in the first two days after Yves fell, Big Steve had forced himself to eat; he continued to fulfill his duties, watching the sheep, guarding the body. Keeping his ears and eyes open toward the dirt road for the sounds or sights of a man who
would most certainly come and end his quandary.

+  +  +

Well over two hundred miles south of Saint-Pascal, Gwynne "Buzz" Woodward, born and raised as a boy in New Jersey (and later on, in Ohio), a graduate with a degree in English from Notre Dame, divorced and annulled and remarried, a recovering alcoholic, the killer of Rheumy Marks–was almost to Bagpipe. He adjusted backs and received food in
Norton, Vermont, and limped his way to Canaan, where he delivered the mail, then made a beeline for Saint Albert's across the river in West Stewartstown. He did not even see the W
elcome to New Hampshire
sign when he limped across the bridge.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It seems like weeks since I've been to confession," he told the priest. "I killed a man in Vermont."

"Was it self-defense?"

"No."

"Then tell me the circumstances," the priest, a young man behind a screen, requested gently.

Buzz complied.

"I am not sure if you are culpable," said the priest finally. "But you have done a good thing to come to the sacrament. I will grant you absolution because I can hear the sorrow in your voice. For your penance, say one Our Father–"

"Only one Our Father, Father?" Buzz interrupted.

"Yes,
and when you pray it, concentrate on the words: 'deliver us from evil.'"

+  +  +

Buzz was pleasantly surprised to find that public transportation was making a comeback in New Hampshire. A horse-drawn wagon was making a twice-daily trip to Pittsburg, which was about twelve miles north of West Stewartstown on Route 3. Pittsburg, despite being hit hard by the flus early in the year, was prospering,
he was told.

At a general store in West Stewartstown, Buzz traded his fourth-to-last gold coin for a small plastic bag filled with dried corn, a tomato, a packet of beef jerky, a new pair of pants, and a bag of ten silver coins–two of which he used to pay his fare to Pittsburg. During the bumpy trip, he could not help but notice that all three of the other men in the wagon (two of whom were travelling
with their wives) were carrying rifles.

Then again, so was he.

It's a new world,
Buzz thought.
Live free or die.

Pittsburg had indeed survived the Troubles with remarkable vigor. Apparently, the locals had not only prepared, but had worked together after the lights had gone out and the diesel had run dry.

No, they told him, they had not heard word from Bagpipe across the mountains.

There were
no direct roads from here. If he wanted to take roads, Buzz would be required to double back south all the way down to Colebrook, then east on Route 26 past Dixville Notch to Errol, then north again to Bagpipe–well over sixty miles. Three to five days of walking, maybe longer if his ankle got worse. His ankle was tender and swollen, but was carrying his weight again.

"As the crow flies," an old
hunter next to him at a counter in Pittsburg told him, "I'd reckon Bagpipe is less than thirteen miles away."

Buzz would have to walk through the mountains to get there, hugging the trails south of the First Connecticut Lake, then north to Magalloway Road (not much more than a summer trail, really), around Magalloway Mountain, finding his way east by compass until he reached the Dead Diamond River.

Noting Buzz's rugged appearance, and hearing his clipped version of how he had boated and walked and biked all the way from Cleveland, they advised him that it should take less than two days.

Had he not walked through the mountains of Pennsylvania in the winter? It was summertime now, and no weather was more perfect than summertime in the North Country.

He rented a room in the small hotel in town
(one silver coin), ready to set off in the morning on the final leg of the long journey to his wife. The long walk was almost over.

For the first time, he consciously allowed himself to miss her. As he fell asleep, despite his efforts to concentrate on the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, one word welled up from his heart to his mind:

Mel.

+  +  +

He opened his eyes with the sun. It was a beautiful
day. June 11th, in the two-thousandth year of Our Lord. He knelt by the bed and prayed his morning offering. He packed carefully and methodically. There was no Catholic Church in Pittsburg, so he set off directly up Route 3. He passed several travelers–not refugees–and exchanged hellos and smiles.