by Thomas Perry
“They’d be better off letting the kids run wild until the beginning of hunting season. Where we live, bobcat season opens on September 1 and lasts until the end of February. I don’t know if whoever is listening has been up close to a bobcat. Probably even if you were, you don’t know it. They’re very hard to find. But if you get one of those boys cornered and wounded, then you’ve got a reason to think. He’s not as big as a man, but the reason he doesn’t have to be bigger is because all he consists of is claws and teeth and a pair of pointy ears. A young person who is skilled enough to bag a bobcat is wasting his time in any grade below the tenth. And if you have one of those prodigies who is ready for postgraduate study, there’s also a bow-hunting season for bear. It starts a bit later, on September 23, and only lasts until November 30.
“If you want to teach a teenager that life doesn’t give you seven or eight do-overs and one-more-chances, have him go out to kill a bear with a bow and arrow. A bear is a big animal, and he’s not that hard to hit, especially when he gets up on his hind legs and waddles toward you. But he only does that when he’s too close to run away from. So he’s easy to hit, but hard to kill. You have to draw the bow back pretty far to get the power, and then keep your head and hit him in a vital spot. At that point, if he’s not dead, you are.”
Leah listened to minute after minute of the diatribe until he finished. It went on for some time. When Lee Wolf concluded, she glanced at a note she’d written down and then started typing into the laptop. The bobcat hunting season was September 1 in the state of Arkansas. In Missouri it wasn’t until November 15. The Swift Sword of the Savior was in Arkansas.
At the Ararat community, Lonny Mann and Edison Leonard were helping clear a new plot for a vegetable garden. The process required hard labor. A line of men with machetes waded into a large, rectangular plot, which had been marked by rags tied to a branch on each corner, and hacked down and carried off a thick layer of weeds and brush. Men with axes, chain saws, and spades followed them. They cut the trunks of trees, saplings, and bushes, dug down and severed roots and pulled the stumps, and carried them off the plot. Behind them came Ed Leonard, Lonny Mann, and other men with mattocks and hoes to break up the sod to expose the soil. As they worked, they found and dug out rocks and carried them to the perimeter.
Lee Wolf’s advice had not been wasted on either of them. There was no way to know what the ramifications of the disastrous raid on Weldonville might be. Violent acts could leave dozens of trails to the person who had done them. And in this particular situation, the authorities already knew their names and had their fingerprints, DNA, and photographs.
Wolf was out working in the patch too. The group had grown some vegetables in the spring and early summer, but now they were making a bigger effort. Second plantings of beets, kale, carrots, lettuce, peas, squash, and spinach could all be harvested late in November most years, and this large plot could make a big difference. Whatever they grew, they wouldn’t have to buy.
Wolf made a big show of being one of the first to begin work and the last to stop to rest. He had no shirt on, but wore a bandanna around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. Lonny Mann and Edison Leonard did the same to give the impression of hard labor. They knew that what caused the need for more food was more people, so they needed to be counted in this project.
It occurred to Edison Leonard that what had got him into trouble in the first place was not wanting to spend his days sweating in a field like this. But here he was, twenty years down the line, doing the same work he had stolen and killed to avoid. It was kind of funny, and he chuckled as he swung his mattock to claw up a clump of weedy earth, then pried it out effectively. He decided that he and Lee and Lonny were about the best laborers in the crew, because they had all spent years in prison, where there was a lot of time to fill, and they had all built muscle by lifting weights and doing pull-ups and push-ups.
“What are you laughing at?”
He turned his head in surprise, because it was a female voice. The woman was in her early thirties, and she wore a T-shirt, a long and loose skirt, and a wide straw hat. She was carrying a pair of plastic buckets that contained water and a couple of ladles and tin cups.
“I was just thinking about how many surprises there are in life,” he said. “I went to school to be an engineer, and a few things happened, and here I am.” He grinned at her. “Not all surprises are that kind though. Some are the ‘prize’ in ‘surprise.’”
“All I’m offering you is water, hon’.” Her smile was bright, pretty, and knowing. She fished a blue-speckled metal cup out of the water, gave it to him full, and locked eyes with him as he drank it down.
He finished and handed it back to her, and she dropped it back in the bucket. “That was great, thank you,” he said. “But is that sanitary?”
She shrugged and smiled. “Probably not. But I’ve noticed none of the very best things are.”
He said, “You’re right about that. Thank you again, ma’am.” He turned to look at the next yard of turf ahead.
“Charlotte.”
“Hmm?” He turned to her.
“My name is Charlotte.”
“A beautiful name for a beautiful person. Not a bad city either.”
“See you.” She bent at the knees to pick up the pair of buckets. She had wrapped the handles with a pair of dishcloths to keep them from hurting her hands, so she adjusted them, stood, and moved on to the next man, who was one of the locals. She gave him the same cup.
The sun was hot, and the work was hard and repetitive. Just being able to straighten his back and pause for a minute or two had been a pleasure.
He worked steadily, pulling up more grass and brush to bare the soil, trying to make as much progress as he could. Whenever his mattock hit rock, he would pry the stone up if he could and set it at the edge of the plot. A bit later he came to a patch where there must have been a lot of shrubs and saplings. One of the men with the chain saws had come through to get rid of the standing wood, but did little with the roots. Ed stuck the pick side of the mattock under each of the roots, leaned back on the handle, and pried up the root, then tossed it aside with the rocks.
Lonny Mann was slacking. Leonard could tell. He was probably tired, or maybe just bored from the work. His movements were exaggerated. When he picked up something he’d extracted from the garden plot, he would stagger with it to the edge as though it weighed hundreds of pounds, sometimes grunting with the supposed effort.
Leonard resented it. Mann was endangering him too. The hard labor was intended to bring them closer to the members of the community, a show that the two guests were willing to make a sincere effort to fit in and contribute to the welfare of all. Leonard had been working in all sincerity from the moment he’d been awakened in the morning until now. What was now? About two-thirty, judging from the height and ferocity of the sun. Eight to noon was four hours, which made it six and a half hours he’d been at it today. He had assumed Mann was doing the same until now.
Leonard forced himself to keep his eyes off Mann while he worked. When people saw someone looking, they looked in the same direction. When he had worn himself out with the mattock and reached the edge of the cleared ground with the other men in the line with him, he stood and leaned on the handle for a moment. One of the others near him said, “Boy, I’m glad to get to the end of that row.”
“Me too,” Leonard said. “It’s a lot of work, but when the vegetables grow in, it will be worth it.”
When Lonny Mann came up to join them a few minutes later, Ed Leonard moved off to return his mattock to the tool shed and trade it for a long-handled pry bar. He returned to the foot of the vegetable plot and began to pry up rocks he hadn’t been able to budge with his mattock. He was determined to keep himself from being grouped with Lonny Mann as a faker and half-hearted worker.
A short time later, he heard the woman’s voice. “Hey, farm boy. You thirsty again?”
Charlotte was close to his shoulder with her bucket
s. She set them down and handed him the blue cup again. “Thank you,” he said. “This really helps.”
He looked at her, but saw that she wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her eyes were focused on something far off. She looked away from that direction and said, “Don’t wait for somebody to come to you. Drink whenever you can. If you faint out here, they’ll never let you forget it.”
“I’ll remember that.”
She took the cup back, tossed it in her bucket, and moved on to another thirsty worker.
There were men returning from other places now, probably from jobs in the surrounding towns, or from supply trips. Many of them picked up tools and stepped onto the ground that was being cleared for cultivation. Within about a half hour, the original crew that had begun in early morning was nearly replaced. Chain saws whined again, and men and women with hoes and mattocks followed them in lines on the field. Eventually a large man Ed didn’t know came up to him and said, “Why don’t you let me take over for a while?”
The man seemed friendly, and didn’t seem to expect a refusal, so Leonard let him go to work. The man was strong and fresh, so he made good progress in removing rocks.
Ed walked up the hill to the pond where people swam, immersed himself in the cold spring water, lay on the bank for a few minutes resting, and then walked down to the storehouse, where he had been living with Lonny Mann. As he put on some clean clothes, he heard voices.
He moved slightly closer to the center of the storehouse and saw a scene that seemed tense. Lonny Mann was sitting on his bunk with his arms folded, staring at Lee Wolf with a sullen expression. Wolf said, “I’m only trying to help you. If they think you’re faking the work, they’ll wonder what else you might be faking. You have to realize that these people are tender anyway. For their adult lives, they’ve been told that the way they think is so old-fashioned, it’s stupid. The jobs they know how to do are practically obsolete. If a machine isn’t already doing them, it’s because the machine is too valuable to use that way. They can’t live on the money they make. They feel like their country has been taken from them and given to other people. They were lost and scared and mad to begin with, and since I’ve been with them, the government locked a bunch of them up with me. I’m out, but the others are still in cages in different parts of the country. Just don’t play with these people.”
Ed Leonard felt a slight, barely perceptible sense of satisfaction. He let it carry him out the door, then to dinner at the picnic tables in the middle of the common green, and through the nightly meeting, and then well into the next morning of work. What carried him through the rest of the day’s work was that the woman named Charlotte visited him three times in the field, and introduced him to two other women on the water crew. As they left, she told him that they had seen how hard he worked and had asked about him. That carried him through another day of work, and he knew he was working even harder because of what they’d said. He wondered if they were laughing at him for it, but he decided that motivation was a gift, even if it wasn’t intended that way.
32
Narrowing down the places where the Swift Sword of the Savior might have settled was a slow process for Leah. She kept making the circuit of small Arkansas Ozark towns. She went to Laundromats and coffee shops and hair stylists and post offices and churches to read the announcements and invitations on the bulletin boards, hoping for a meeting or a picnic or a potluck open to new members.
She didn’t expect the group to use their name. She expected instead that there would be hints. Maybe there would be a white cross in a red circle, maybe a blood drop in a diamond shape, or a Confederate flag. If there was text, it might overuse the word “Christian,” or it might use less ambiguous words like “Aryan” or “Nordic” or even just plain “white.” It was also possible the messages would not be overt, because the hosts would wait to deliver them orally at the event.
Every time Leah saw a pile of small pamphlets printed on newsprint, she took one. Even if all it contained were ads for post-hole diggers and weed whackers, there might be useful leads. Even the name and address of the printer could help.
She made use of every visit to a town to learn something. She didn’t just walk through a café; she sat down and ordered food and eavesdropped on the other customers while she waited for it, ate it, and paid for it.
Whenever she was on a long drive, she would listen to the podcasts of the man who sounded like Lee Wolf. She was alert for anything he said that might refer to a place. When she stopped in a hotel anywhere, she would listen. When no new podcast was available, she would search the Internet for information about people connected with Edison Leonard or Lonny Mann or Lee Wolf.
The days passed in quiet research and observation, but there weren’t any breakthroughs. She knew that this region was the most likely one for the three men to be hiding. There were mountains, thick woods, rivers, and lakes. But there was possibly one place where they were hiding, and a vast number of places where they weren’t. There were many thousands of visitors in the summer driving cars bearing out-of-state plates, and there were people who didn’t seem to be doing much, not because they were criminals or federal agents, but because they were on vacation. There were people who looked like right-wing militia members who turned out to be painters and sculptors represented by galleries in New York and Los Angeles. People she followed drove to Bentonville to pitch some product to the Walmart executives for inclusion in stores.
After three weeks, Leah asked Art Sprague at the Weldonville police station to mail her the drone she’d used in California. When it arrived, she began waiting near highways in the early morning watching for cars to come down the roads from the mountains to drive toward the towns. When she spotted a likely road, she would send the drone up to backtrack the roads to higher altitudes and search the forested land for settlements. At the end of the fourth week, she had eliminated hundreds of places, but she was aware that thousands remained.
* * *
Ed Leonard lasted through the clearing of the garden plot. The work of removing rocks and stumps was backbreaking, but then it was over. Other crews began to run a rototiller up and down the length of the field, and if any undiscovered rocks turned up, he didn’t hear of it. The next phase was to build a pipeline from the bed of one of the lakes high above the community down to the large farm plot.
Laying the pipe required that a crew of men dig a narrow trench from the edge of the lake along the wooded slope all the way down to the garden. The intake was suspended a few feet above the bottom of the lake to avoid blockages, and ten feet below the surface in summer to prevent having the intake protrude above the water line. The downward tilt of the irrigation pipe from the lake was pronounced, but shut-off valves at several spots along the route would control the velocity of the flow. The downward tilt would also facilitate the draining of the pipes in winter to prevent them from freezing and bursting.
At break time each day, Ed would walk down to the vegetable plot and watch the work. A team composed mostly of women and children worked to plant the winter seeds, and another male labor crew was laying more PVC pipe that would feed sprinkler heads to water the crops during dry weeks. He would always find a seat where he could see Charlotte work.
She was bent over with a trowel and a bag of seeds, making a hole and then putting three or so in it, stepping on it to bury them, and then bending for the next hole. He couldn’t help noticing that as she worked and sweated, the thin cotton cloth of her skirt and blouse tended to cling to her. She would go on working, pretending to be unaware that he was watching. When someone else would call, “Time,” she would straighten, appear to notice him, and smile before she walked off with the other women of her crew for their break.
He always to ok that as the sign that he should go back to his own work on the pipeline. One afternoon, as he was coming back down the hill on a wooded trail at the end of the workday, he rounded a curve and saw her sitting on a log. He stopped and stared at her for a moment, not sure what
she was doing there.
“Come on, Ed,” she said. “Are you suddenly afraid of me after staring at me all those times? Was that what you were thinking? ‘She’s scary?’”
He walked the rest of the way to the turn where she sat. “No, I guess it wasn’t.” She stood up a foot or so from him and looked into his eyes.
She said, “I know some things about you, but you know very little about me.”
“That’s true.”
“First thing is, I’m married. My husband’s name is Bob Carpenter.” She held her hand out, grasped his, and gave it a shake. “Charlotte Carpenter. Pleased to meet you.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m really sorry for that.”
She inched closer, smiling. “I didn’t mean to ruin your whole day. I just needed you to know. The first day I met you, he came home early from town, but I saw him before he saw me with you, so I could move on.”
Ed said, “I think that you just did ruin my whole day.”
She took his right hand again, and he thought that she would shake it again and say, “Now go away and leave me alone.” She didn’t. She placed his hand on her left breast.
He leaned closer and kissed her, very gently at first, and then more deeply and passionately, both hands beginning to move, to feel the shape of her body. She pushed him and stepped back.
“Cut it out now. I don’t want you to get me all hot and bothered right now. I would like to fool around with you, but I don’t want to get caught and hurt Bob’s feelings, and I certainly don’t want to get him mad at me. So you’ll have to be patient and let me handle how it happens, and when it happens.” She stepped back. “I just wanted you to know I wasn’t just flirting, and I wanted to be close up with you for a minute and see if I still wanted to.”