The Missus catches her breath. Tears stream and drips form at the line of her strong jaw.
“The man you know isn’t the man I married, but he’s all I got. How dare you come into his house and eat his food and wish upon him bad things, wishing him dead.”
But I’m confused. Because if we are sitting here, long after dark, then he is in fact already dead. Or gravely injured. I’ve done it already. That’s why he hasn’t come home. But will I get no joy from seeing it? Or is it yet to be done?
The Missus, face glowing in the red firelight, grabs my hands. “You’ve got me scared, now. You’ve frightened me with your dark words. Pray with me.”
“I don’t want to,” I whisper, trying to wriggle away.
The Missus squeezes my hands. “Pray with me, if you don’t want to see me and my baby and this whole household starve. Pray with me, unless you’re a devil yourself.”
“I’m no devil.”
“Then how come you can do what you do? How come you can shoot a dozen rabbits or birds with the ease of a man shooting one? How come you can make a grown man go weak in the knees? You pray with me, Phoebe Ann Mosey.”
And the Missus says the words and makes me repeat them. “Lord Jesus, I am sorry for my sins.”
“. . . sorry for my sins.”
“I renounce Satan and all his works.”
“. . . Satan and all his works.”
“I receive and accept you as my personal Lord and Savior.”
“. . . Lord and Savior.”
“Forgive me my sins.”
“. . . my sins.”
“As I forgive those who sin against me.” Then she commands, “Pray for the father of this family.” She squeezes my hands harder. “Say the whole thing out loud. Not like you’re doing but the whole thing, with your whole heart. Say it again, louder now.”
“I won’t!”
Suddenly, I am in the Chief’s tent. I shout, “I don’t want any water!” and fling out an arm. The tin cup goes flying. I hear the gasp of the young woman kneeling next to me.
Sitting Bull’s expression does not change. He says, “You are suffering.”
“Then let me. I didn’t want to come here just now.”
“You are free, daughter. We’re all free.”
“It doesn’t feel like freedom. Stop this. I don’t want your kindness anymore.”
He closes his eyes, and the interruption of that stony glance loosens my bonds to this place. The tent dissolves.
I am, again, somewhere else. Some when else. I feel the cold wind again and see his head turn, as his gaze turns from the axle to the sound of my step. Outside again: the pink so faint, the bare trees so black, the entire world bleeding, weeping, just before darkness shrouds everything, a blanket tossed over the carcass to keep the flies out.
The Wolf does not scowl or laugh. His eyes meet mine.
He has frozen in place like an animal knowing it has nowhere to run. I wait for him to beg for mercy. I want him to beg. Then I can forgive him, if I so decide. Then the words from my mouth will have meaning. Let him beg. Let him say he has a wife he still loves and a baby to feed. Let him be the one to cry out about his sins and beg for mercy.
But he doesn’t speak or move. His eyes are blurry from the wind and cold.
He says, with a sober dignity that surprises me, “Go ahead, Annie.”
I lift the rifle a little higher, narrowing my eyes against the wind. The tremor that curses me in my older woman’s form is less pronounced here, but it is not absent. The damage has found its way, finally, to all of my selves. But I can override it.
He says, “You don’t have to be afraid, go right on ahead,” and closes his eyes.
“Look at me now,” I say. But he doesn’t.
His face relaxes, the worry about the axle and the pained tooth and not enough money for groceries and the horse going lame just as winter’s coming on, all gone in this moment. The guilt for not being a good provider. The sadness for the little girl they lost, the precious little girl before their baby boy. The sadness for what they’d once been and hoped to be. All gone.
“I’m ready, Annie. You just go ahead.”
“Unless you want to suffer more than you’ve got to, open them eyes, I’m telling you.”
“I don’t have to open ’em. I can see what’s coming. I’ll sleep good for the first time in ages, better than all the rest of you. I will sleep just fine.”
43
Ruth
Dear H.D.,
I was with the Wolf. I had the gun in my hands, his frail body in my sights.
You may insist on calling it a dream or a delusion. Once, I cared, because I needed you to believe. But I am now past needing permission or sympathy. What would happen has happened.
I was ready to shoot when I heard him weep. It didn’t make me hate him any less. It didn’t make me pity him any more. He was already about as pitiable as a creature could be.
The last thing he said was, “Why won’t you do it, already.”
He continued to weep, even after I had unhitched his horse and he had taken off riding, back into town, losing himself in a night of drink that would leave his wife worrying, but not a widow.
Dear doctor, that was my last visitation.
The letter continued on another page, but Ruth paused in her reading.
Her last visitation?
Ruth reread the next-to-last sentence: . . . that would leave his wife worrying, but not a widow.
Annie had chosen not to kill the Wolf.
Ruth tried to absorb what she’d just read. She pictured Annie standing there, gun lowered, feet freezing in her tight black boots, eyes narrowed against the stinging wind.
She tried to imagine how Annie must have felt. Tried to see past her own disappointment.
Her own disappointment.
Because Ruth had wanted the Wolf destroyed. How could she possibly want that more than Annie herself?
Ruth scrolled to the next and last page, Annie’s final words to Breuer.
I have resisted the desire to return, and it’s been no easier than resisting any other kind of strong medicine. But I’m a disciplined woman.
I am writing not so much to establish my innocence with you as to petition for your continued attention and good will. You warned me when we first met that patients become attached to their caregivers. It’s true. Even in writing you these letters, I’ve counted on your audience. I couldn’t have put my own experiences into writing if I hadn’t had an audience I could trust not only to hear me out, but to keep my story safe.
I could have killed the Wolf. I didn’t.
But maybe that wasn’t kindness on my part. Maybe if he hadn’t wanted to die, I would have killed him. Maybe it was only seeing him so debased and miserable that stopped me, in order that his misery would last. I’m not sure.
As for the tremor, there is no change yet, but I expect that with the urge to go back kept at bay, my own fortitude will step in. I’ve recovered from many infirmities in my life.
There is no easy answer. One discovers a magic door and seemingly magic powers, and even so, the puzzle remains: how to cure a heart that has rotted all these years, eaten through with the desire for revenge.
According to your method, even telling this story will help to heal me.
Truly—I must have hope.
Z
Weak autumn sunlight filtered in through the half-closed blinds. Ruth had fallen asleep on the couch after Reece had left. It felt like midmorning, but that slant of light told her it was midafternoon. Half a day, gone. Her body and her brain must be trying to recover, taking by force what she hadn’t bothered to supply.
She went to pour herself coffee. Even in its stay-warm carafe, it had gone cold. She drank it anyway, impatient and brooding. Then she returned to the living room a
nd read the whole set of scanned letters again, in order. There would never be more.
With effort, she pulled her mind back out of the past, away from Darke County.
Ruth made a guttural sobbing sound. It had come over her quickly after the happy glow from reconciliation sex: this frustration, deep sorrow and something more. Scott seemed to be safe, but the past—Annie, Kennidy—was still all wrong.
The old Ruth would have found ways to extend her research into Annie’s life, to consider the possibility that the sharpshooter had lied in her final letter. Perhaps she had killed the Wolf after all. One could check the county records to see if any men of the right age and background had died from a gunshot wound or in a mysterious accident from 1869 through 1871.
The old Ruth might have dedicated herself to researching the American mythos of the vigilante and why it filled a need for so many. But the old Ruth was gone. She had felt her fading back in that motel room, and now there wasn’t a trace left. She didn’t want documentation. She was bored—no, offended—by something as passive as academic conjecture.
She got up from her chair and went to the bathroom. In the mirror, her vision was still doubled and fuzzy. She lowered herself into a meditative cross-legged position on the linoleum floor. Thoughts of Scott did not come to her.
Instead: only Vorst, and not the old Vorst, but the younger one, still stooped, moving away from the cabin window, and Kennidy swinging the golf club. Ruth wanted to put herself back there. She wanted to take the club from Ken and break not only the garden gnome, but all the windows.
Open the cabin door.
She hadn’t opened it enough: not for Annie, not for Kennidy. The words were back, ready to haunt and punish her. Or maybe just to coax her.
Try harder.
She wanted to start further back, at the house, where Gwen’s then-boyfriend had a gun stored. Ruth knew where he kept the key. How hard could it be? Ruth hadn’t known how to shoot a gun back then, but thanks to her visits to the range with Scott last year, she knew now.
Thank you, Scott, for teaching me. You were right. I needed to know.
Ruth went through the steps, visualizing the nightstand drawer with the half-broken knob, the tiny bronze key, the gun, the car, the gravel road, the red plastic cups, the cigarettes, the music, the cabin. But it wasn’t enough. She was hurrying through it instead of reliving it. She tried to feel the key in her hand, the steering wheel shuddering between her fingers. She tried to smell the cigarette smoke and the dust rising up from the road. She tried to hear the Foo Fighters album they’d been listening to and the other sounds she’d forgotten, like the cicadas screaming when they cut the car’s engine, the oak to one side, the cabin in front of them. Ruth had never remembered the cicadas. But these were still only memories. She wasn’t time traveling. She wasn’t there.
Open the door. Shoot the fucker, once and for all.
“It’s our neighbor Van, isn’t it?” she’d say to Kennidy if she had the chance to live it all over again. “You stay in the car.”
44
Caleb
An hour after turning the truck around, Caleb was idling in a line of cars on a side road headed toward the school parking lot. At first period and again after lunch, the traffic backed up here, but it rarely came to a complete halt unless people were collecting donations. Caleb squinted at a sandwich board on a grassy median, rolling forward when the car in front of him did the same, until he could make out the sign: vets for school safety.
Well, he didn’t have any quarters—or any patience—for that cause.
All Caleb knew was that he wanted to put himself between Mikayla’s body and Vorst’s. He knew the next time they’d be in the same place: the game at four o’clock. After that, especially if the halftime show went well, they’d probably all go out to a diner, or the popular kids would break off into their own group and go to someone’s house to party, leaving the freshmen and most of the sophomores stranded. Caleb could see exactly how it would go down: Vorst, rubbing his hand across Mikayla’s narrow back before the show when she was jittery and giving her one of those annoying sideways hugs at the end, when everyone was celebrating and radiating adrenaline. And then, as the stands thinned out and people headed to their cars, he’d offer her a ride to the diner, or somewhere else if she wasn’t up for all that. Whatever she wanted. A beer maybe, in his car? She could have one, and then he could drop her wherever she liked.
That’s when it would start. But Caleb wouldn’t let it.
Was Caleb even allowed on campus? They hadn’t said he wasn’t, only that he was supposed to come to the police station first, with his mother, for the evaluation. When she came home any minute now, she’d discover he’d taken his stepdad’s truck, and she wouldn’t be happy. She might even think about telling the police, if she was worried enough. As for his stepdad, he’d be pissed as hell, but there was no way he’d tell the cops. He’d rather find Caleb and wring his neck personally.
A tap on the side mirror startled Caleb. Some guy was motioning for him to roll down his window. Caleb saw no sign of a donation coinbox, a boot or anything else to explain what the guy wanted. The normal security guards at school tended to be younger, clean-cut but not always fit, more like sleepy mall cops in cheap uniform shirts and pleated synthetic pants you could tell they hated. The guy at Caleb’s window was different. He was older, for one—maybe his stepdad’s age. He had a tanned, deeply lined face. His bright-yellow reflective vest didn’t hide the fact that underneath, he had a barrel chest and wide biceps, pulling his long-sleeved T-shirt tight. His baseball cap read, if you love your freedom, thank a vet.
“You got your school ID, son?” the volunteer asked, once Caleb had his window down.
“In my backpack.”
“You look a little young to be driving that truck.”
Caleb ignored him.
“You gonna get your identification out for me?”
The man really just wanted to peek into the trunk’s cab and look him up and down. Caleb had worried about putting the .22 under the tarp instead of in the extended cab behind the seat, where Roger would have kept it. It only proved how uncomfortable Caleb was even having the gun. He’d shot it before, but never on his own. He should’ve just hidden it somewhere else. Even considering his concern for his little sister, it had been idiotic to take it.
Except—and here his own mind had generated two incompatible opinions, which either meant he was slowly getting smarter or just going insane—taking the gun had been a bad choice, but it had also been a good one. He did need the gun, actually. Without it, he couldn’t show it to Vorst and tell him he was in trouble if he ever touched Mikayla, even with just one finger. Otherwise the old pervert wouldn’t take him seriously.
With the self-appointed volunteer guard still watching, Caleb reached into his backpack, distracted by the sight of another volunteer coming toward the truck. This man was younger and even buffer, wearing an olive-colored T-shirt and dark sunglasses, plus a rifle slung across his chest and minus the official-looking reflective vest. Caleb followed his progress in the side mirror as the second guard walked along the side of the truck, nodded at clipboard guy, then disappeared into a blind spot, close to the back bumper.
Caleb felt his heart drop down into his stomach even as his fingers stirred the junk at the bottom of his backpack, searching without any help from his eyes, which were still fixed on the mirror. He caught a view of the guy’s top half, head tilted downward—maybe looking at Caleb’s plates?
“You’re holding things up,” the first volunteer said. “You got that card or something says you’re a student here?”
“Sorry.”
The man at the back of the truck said something to the volunteer at the side-window. Caleb couldn’t catch the words.
“Someone in your family serve in Afghanistan?”
The bumper stickers.
“My stepdad, yeah.”
The guy with the baseball hat seemed to like that.
Caleb finally had his ID between his fingers. The volunteer barely glanced at it. “All right, lunchtime’s almost over. Back to class.”
He waved him through.
Only after Caleb pulled into the farthest possible space in the student area of the lot and set his forehead down against the steering wheel did his slowing pulse give way to rising indignation. Those guys had no right to ask him for identification or search his truck.
Caleb snapped to attention at the sound of a slamming car door two vehicles down from him and the chatter of two guys walking toward the main building. He had to make sure no one saw him in the truck. He’d have to lay down and pretend to take a nap—or actually take one, if his stomach would settle and his pulse would mellow out, which was doubtful. In truth, he’d barely slept last night between the time he’d made the decision to run away and the moment, around 5 a.m., when he’d finally found the balls to do it.
When he’d slid the rifle under the tarp, he’d spotted the old blanket that his parents used as a liner when they were hauling donation items in the truck. He didn’t care that it was a little moldy. Caleb waited until no one else was in the parking lot to get out, go around back, and pull the blanket free, jostling another ripped donation bag, leaking kids’ clothing.
He grabbed the blanket, and then he grabbed another donation item: a too-small hockey stick. Just to protect himself in case anyone weird came banging on his window again. Just to help him feel safer.
He left the gun under the tarp in the back.
Not much later, Caleb opened his eyes and sat up in time to see a police cruiser pass slowly behind the truck and circle around the student parking lot. His heart was in his throat, key in the ignition even before he could think.
The plates. Vehicle description.
Annie and the Wolves Page 30