Chris Bohjalian

by The Buffalo Soldier

  Here’s the pattern, Laura: You steal something small. Then you steal something a little bigger. It’s progressive. You just know he’s taken dollar bills out of our wallets, you just know—

  He has a job. He doesn’t need to do that. If you had any involvement with him at all, you would have figured that out.

  And there are—excuse me, were—there were guns in this house. It seems to me, I had—

  I think you should leave.

  What?

  Go. Leave. I think you should leave, and we can talk in the morning.

  Tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve, he said, unsure what he was driving at.

  That’s fine.

  He was aware of a low rumble—a murmur, actually, just loud enough to muffle (though not quiet completely) the sounds all around him. He realized it was the sound of shock. He’d experienced it once before, when he was in the passenger seat of Henry Labarge’s cruiser, when the man was driving him home from deer camp after dropping on him the bombshell that his daughters were dead. The engine, the radio, the occasional moments when Henry would open his mouth on the long drive back to Cornish and tell him something were all noises that had sounded to him like they were muted by a thin sheet of water. As if his ears were just below the surface in the bath.

  It was like that now. Laura was saying something more to him, something about finding a place to stay for the night, a friend or a motel, it didn’t matter to her, but he could only hear select words and syllables through the wet curtain that seemed to surround him.

  He nodded that he would leave—yes, yes, for the night, he was saying, and he found that even his own voice was strangely muffled, we’ll talk in the morning—and he saw that his sandwich was still incomplete. He’d never finished making it. He didn’t need to, because he really wasn’t hungry, but he knew he was going to miss it. He didn’t know if it would be the very last thing he would do in this house, but it was the very last thing he would do before…before this.

  This confrontation. This rupture. This…

  She was still talking to him and he was still nodding, and he realized he should be paying attention. Wasn’t this exactly the opening he wanted? Wasn’t this what on some level, low and cruel as it was, he’d been hoping would happen? He could never leave her, he’d concluded, but if she initiated it, if she took that crucial first step…

  But that had all been predicated upon the notion that she took the first step because she found out about Phoebe Danvers. She was kicking him out now, however, and she hadn’t said one single thing about that other woman. Not one word. Still didn’t know Phoebe even existed as anything more than a girl he’d once had a drink with in a bar.

  And yet she was kicking him out anyway, sending him alone into the night because of…the boy. Alfred.

  She was actually picking some boy she barely knew over him.

  PART THREE

  New Year

  “George seemed to be around often that summer. He liked me, I could tell. And I was grateful for what he had done for my children. Then he just disappeared, and he was gone for most of the autumn. His company was on the march. I told myself he was chasing Apaches—maybe the Lipan—because I didn’t want to believe he might be fighting my people. But I didn’t know for sure, and of course no one would tell me. I missed him.”

  VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),

  WPA INTERVIEW,

  MARCH 1938

  Terry

  He drove the cruiser up into Cornish, his first time there in almost a week, and the first time in the new year. He didn’t guess anybody would be home: Alfred would be at school, and Laura would be at the shelter. Instead of veering off the main road and returning to the house via the notch, he decided to stay on the River Road. He hadn’t planned to visit the river—hell, he hadn’t even planned on going to Cornish—but here he was, following the paved road for a change as it curled side by side with the water.

  It had been cold and snowy for almost the full week. Winter had finally arrived, and though it had come late, it had come with the storms and icy gales they took for granted. He could only remember two days when he’d seen blue skies and sun in the last seven, and on both occasions it had been so cold that the smoke from the woodstove chimneys he’d glimpse as he drove rose straight into the sky like flagpoles.

  When he reached the spot where the girls’ bodies had been recovered, he came to a stop and parked the cruiser as close to the drift as he could. He felt particularly alone—more so than usual—because he was in one of those dead spots in the county where the radio wouldn’t work. He climbed from his car and guessed the temperature would hit twenty today, perhaps even a few degrees above that. But it was gray and damp and raw, and there was just enough wind to cause him first to blow on his hands, and then reach back into the vehicle for a pair of gloves. Then he started over the snow, telling himself with each step into the knee-deep powder that this was an asinine idea and he should turn around, shake the snow off his pants, and get on with his day.

  But he couldn’t stop, and he knew that. He’d come this far, he may as well go all the way. So what if his pants got wet? Troopers could always find something to bitch about when it came to their cars, but he had no complaints with the heater. A fucking oven, if he wanted. He’d blast the heater on his legs, and they’d probably be dry by the time he got back to the barracks.

  He pushed aside the leafless branches of a pair of sugar maples, stepped over what he guessed was a cluster of raspberry bushes—in the snow he could see only the very tops of the twigs—and stared for a brief moment at the tracks from a snowshoe hare. He wondered if he’d see a river otter or a beaver when he arrived at the water, and guessed there was a chance. At least he’d see signs.

  There was a thick wall of ice on the surface of the river, and flat kaleidoscopic filigrees of frost along the smooth surfaces. Frozen white daggers were suspended mid-drip like stalactites from the edges of a great many stones, including parts of the pair of boulders—each nearly half the size of a mobile home—that he knew had caught some of the debris from the village that had been swept downriver in the flood.

  He’d been reassured that by the time his daughters had gotten here—this twist in the river with its gloriously big rocks and its nearby pool where his neighbors (though, thank God, not him) had once come to reel in rainbow and brown trout—they’d drowned. Yet what he would never know, and sometimes when he was alone in his cruiser he would see their small bodies pinwheeling through the water, was how much they had felt. How long they had lived. Yes, they had drowned, but there was so much more to it than that. Head traumas. Massive internal hemorrhaging. Broken bones. You don’t die instantly when you drown, that’s for sure, and that was a part of the problem.

  Back at the road he heard a truck rumble by, and he wondered what the trucker thought of the cruiser parked by the drifts here in the middle of nowhere.

  He turned around and stomped back through the snow, and through the small tangles of dormant bushes and shrubs. When he was back inside his cruiser, he sat for a moment with the engine idling and felt the warmth from the heater on his ankles—even through his boots and his pants and his socks—and though a part of him still planned to drive by the house (perhaps even wander around a bit inside), already his mind was asking, What for? Really, he thought to himself, what for? The empty house would just depress him, and there wasn’t anything there he needed—at least anything tangible he could actually take back with him to Henry Labarge’s parents’ cabin on Lake Champlain. And so he swung the vehicle around in the thin strip of pavement between the drifts and decided instead he would simply run the roads a bit on his way back to Middlebury.

  HE TALKED TO his mother that night on the phone. He spoke with his brother and his sister and, yes, Phoebe as well, but most of the time he had talked to his mother. He actually hadn’t planned on speaking to anyone but Phoebe, but first his sister called because she’d heard from their mother that he and Laura were living apart, and s
he wanted to know what was going on—how serious the rift was. Then, at Leah’s urging, he had phoned their mother to reassure her that he was fine and Laura was fine, and she needn’t fret: Soon enough, the two of them would solve their problems and reconcile.

  Oh, but she would worry, that was clear, and—if anything disconcerted him after his ninety minutes that night on the phone, it was this—now, his mother had said, honestly not trying to make him feel guilty, she was concerned about both her boys. It wasn’t only Russell who was going to cost her sleep, it was her older boy, too.

  He never liked being paired with Russell. And so he tracked his brother down at his girlfriend’s, hoping to regain a measure of separation by calling him up and checking on him. He guessed his brother saw through him, however, because even Russell—Russell with his empty beer cans rolling around underneath the driver’s seat in his truck, his weed (and who knew what else) in the glove compartment, Russell with the beaker of anger inside him that seemed always on the verge of boiling over—could see through a need that transparent.

  You’ll have to forgive me, Russell said, but I really can’t chitchat tonight. I haven’t been tomcatting around the state of Vermont, and so I actually have a girlfriend I should be paying attention to right now.

  When he went to bed that night on an unfamiliar mattress in an unfamiliar house, he told himself things would get better. He knew in reality this wasn’t always the case, but he was sufficiently tired when he turned out the light that he was able to believe it and—unlike his mother, apparently—fall asleep.

  “Rule number seven: They are to carry with them extra horseshoes and nails on the march, even though it will add extra pounds to their pack. This is just one more of the ways I encourage them to think ahead at all times, and this simple precaution has saved the lives of both horses and men.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  NOVEMBER 18, 1873

  Alfred

  He thought the veins in the horse’s forearms stood out like mountains on the topographic map of the United States in his classroom, and gently he stroked Mesa’s leg. Then he adjusted the blanket over the horse’s withers, careful to make sure it was flat across her back, and fastened the surcingle beneath her. She pounded her hoof on the barn floor.

  I know you’re bored, he said. I’m bored, too.

  Actually, he was more than bored. He was frustrated—exasperated, to use a word Paul seemed to like—because he hadn’t been able to ride in days. It was either too cold or too snowy or both. And the lessons that had seemed such a big deal to everyone after he’d fallen seemed to have been completely forgotten. Laura hadn’t said a word about them, and he hadn’t seen her write any reminders on that Humane Society calendar she kept on the corkboard in the kitchen.

  It was so very stupid of him to have allowed his foot to slip from the stirrup after permitting the girl to run a bit, because a second after that he had slid halfway off and it had taken only a small bump to send him flying.

  Of course, even if Laura had followed up on the lessons, he wasn’t sure he wanted to ride any horse but Mesa. It seemed disloyal. Moreover, every day he had come by the barn this week to do his chores, he had worried that it might be the very last time he would see the animal. Terry had been gone a full week now. The last time he knew for sure that the man had been in the house was New Year’s Day, when he’d come back late in the afternoon with some friend of his—a trooper, too—and piled a bunch of clothing into a pair of suitcases and wedged them into the passenger seat of his pickup. Then he’d driven off in the truck, while his buddy had driven away in the cruiser. He and Terry had spoken on the phone twice since then, not about much, and though the man had said he’d be back—and though both he and Laura had seemed as sad as he’d ever seen either one of them—there had been no signs yet that he’d be home anytime soon.

  He missed him, but only a little. Still, the fact that he missed Terry at all surprised him. But he did, he missed Terry’s stories about work, he missed the times they’d thrown a football in the fall, he missed the way life became a predictable routine when Terry was around.

  Moreover, he feared the man’s decision to leave put his presence here in jeopardy. Once before he’d been in a house when the man had lit out, and within days he, too, was moved. No reason to believe it wouldn’t happen again, and so every day this week he had been careful to eat only the parts of his lunch that were perishable—the yogurt one day, the banana the next—while transferring the small bags of potato chips and snack cakes into his knapsack. (He no longer dared take anything from the kitchen, not after that morning Terry had gone ballistic.) He was usually starving therefore by the time he got home, but Laura hadn’t commented on how ravenously he would attack the molasses Anadama bread she had baked one day for an after-school snack, or the fact that he was more likely to eat two apples than one when he’d walk in the door mid-afternoon.

  He was careful to keep every penny of the money Paul paid him in his pants pocket whenever he left the house.

  And though he tried to pay attention in school, he was finding it more difficult now. Not one kid had called him between Christmas and New Year’s—not even Tim, with whose mother he’d left messages twice—and he was finding it hard to view these people as friends during recess and lunch. Besides, Tim and Schuyler were in the math group that was focused on probabilities and beginning geometry, while he was with the kids who were still doing squared numbers and factors. He found this placement galling, because he knew that he could do whatever those two could in math, but his teacher still seemed to doubt him. Most days he didn’t even see them a whole lot after lunch.

  He was careful not to act up, because he figured if he got in any trouble at all, he’d be out the door in a heartbeat. But he understood that he was angry—he was angry at Terry for leaving, because it meant he, too, might have to go, he was angry at his so-called friends for forgetting that he even existed, and he was angry at the weather because it had kept him off Mesa—and so he resolved to obey Sergeant Rowe’s rules and think carefully before he spoke, even if it meant now that he hardly ever said a word.

  AND HE WORRIED about Laura. Though he understood Terry was gone because she wanted him gone, that didn’t mean she was happy to see him leave. The first few nights she took her cats with her to bed, pulling them out from under the woodstove, where they seemed to sleep in the winter, and carrying them one at a time up the stairs to her room. He didn’t hear her crying as she had that night in November when Terry was away at deer camp and she was alone, but he guessed that she was. How could she not? When she told him that she and Terry were going to spend a little time apart, there had been a balneal gauze across her eyes and her voice had been wan.

  Most mornings, however, before he would go to school and she would go to the shelter, she was able to rally. She talked freely with him about her children when he was eating his oatmeal and she was packing his lunch. She would chat about the kinds of things nine-year-old girls liked to eat, compared to a boy who was ten (almost eleven, she would add, since his birthday now was only two months away), or how jealous they’d be of the notion that the Heberts had a horse and he was getting to care for the animal and ride her.

  He noticed that he and Laura were eating dinner a lot with Paul and Emily—practically every other night, it seemed. Each time Laura would simply join him at the Heberts’ house when he was finished with the horse in the afternoon, and the grown-ups would sit in the living room or kitchen talking while he’d watch TV or read or do his homework. He’d listen to the sounds of the voices, sometimes flipping the pages in one illustrated history book or another that Paul would find for him about the Wild West or the cavalry. Occasionally there would be a picture of a buffalo soldier, but most of the time it was as if the black horse soldiers had never existed.

  He liked those afternoons more than any other time of the day, thou
gh he wasn’t exactly sure why. One time he wandered into the room Paul called his library and looked for a long while at the photographs of the Heberts’ children and grandchildren, and wondered if the answer might not be as simple as the sensation normal kids had when they saw their grandparents—that Kwanzaa notion of assemblage, of getting all the people together.

  He certainly hadn’t gotten that feeling the two times Laura’s parents had come north from Boston, since that pair clearly viewed him as a stranger. Terry’s mother, too. She seemed nice enough—they all seemed nice enough—but none of them knew quite what to make of him. In the eyes of those old people, he was always the foster kid: the kid who wasn’t Hillary or Megan, the boy who was only there because their real grandchildren had died.

  Not here, though, not in this house. Here was a place where he was accepted and he felt right at home.

  THERE WASN’T A lot of sun, but at least there wasn’t any wind, and the temperature had climbed above freezing. He was staring longingly at the saddle and the girth, wondering if he should knock on Paul’s door and ask if he could go for a ride, when he heard the old man clomp into the barn behind him. The horse was outside in the paddock.

  How was school? he asked, offering him a piece of sliced apple from the brown paper bag in his hand.

  Okay.

  You feel like taking Mesa for a spin this afternoon?

  Yeah, I do. A lot.

  Thought so. Well, go ahead. You could both use the exercise, I imagine.

  Paul handed him the whole bag of apples now—they would feed most of the pieces to the horse—and then grabbed the saddle and a blanket. Alfred reached for the reins and the girth, and then together they started out toward the animal. She was on the far side of the small field, grazing on the hay he had brought her as soon as he arrived here and found her already turned out in the paddock. When Mesa saw them she lifted her long face from the feed, nickered once, and trotted over to the gate.