by Logan Miller
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“Who the fuck are you working for?” Ruben demanded, pressing the pistol barrel into the back of Jake’s head. He slapped Jake in the ear with his free hand. “Who?”
“Nobody,” Jake replied, his ear ringing. “I’m just a logger. I’m just up here getting firewood. I sell firewood.”
“Bullshit. Who sent you up here? Who told you about this?”
“I swear. I swear it. Nobody sent me up here. I just found this place. I just found it. You gotta believe me. I’ll put it all back. All of it. Just let me go.”
Jake felt intensely alone, cold and shivering in the heat. His vision was already dimming and he was flinching in anticipation of the bullet that would soon drive through his brain. He was about to die and there was nothing heroic about it. He should’ve listened to his brother. His brother was right. He was going to leave the best friend he ever had.
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Caleb shot the truck off the wilderness road and bounced over the uneven ground. He turned off the engine and coasted to a stop.
“Stay here, Lelah.”
Caleb limped over to the wood truck and grabbed the hunting rifle from the gun rack above the bench seat. He slid back the bolt and chambered a .270 round and moved up the rise toward the garden, cursing his prosthetic leg and the shrapnel in his hip for slowing him down. Through the trees he could hear his brother and another man speaking in loud and harsh tones. His brother was pleading and this quickened his pace. He’d heard such pleadings before and dormant senses came alive in him.
The rifle was now pressed into his shoulder and he slipped through the pine branches as he had been trained to kill. The soft pine needles and grass under his boots made his approach nearly silent.
“Please don’t kill me,” Jake said.
“It’s too late for that,” said Ruben.
Caleb pushed away the last branch and he was looking at the scene. The man with the gun had his back to him.
“Put your gun down,” Caleb said.
Ruben startled and whirled around. There was a lack of resolve and experience in his movements that Caleb immediately perceived. But these were also the most dangerous people with guns—the frightened ones without real knowledge of murder and only the fantasy of it.
“Put your gun down,” Caleb repeated in a measured tone. He limped forward with his rifle aimed on the chest of his target. “Nobody needs to die today.”
Ruben held his .40 cal on Caleb and then pointed it back at Jake, nervous, shaking, unsure what to do, frantic and jumpy. Back and forth, who to put the gun on, who is the greatest threat?
Caleb remained calm and levelheaded and tried to reassure the man with the handgun of his peaceful intentions. He needed to take command of the situation and lead it to a safe resolution. Quickly. “Nobody needs to die today. Put down your gun.” He continued sliding forward, closing the gap, thirty feet away now.
“I don’t trust thieves,” Ruben shouted. “You put down your gun.”
“Don’t do it,” Jake yelled. “Shoot him, Caleb.”
“Be quiet, Jake,” Caleb said.
“Shoot him.”
“Jake…be quiet.”
But amid the swirling turmoil Caleb was struck with the image, ludicrous, absurd, comical—the man with the gun was still wearing those ridiculous red-mirrored goggles. He looked like a retarded bank robber, a criminal with special needs. It was impossible to take him seriously. But here he was waving a gun and you had to take him seriously. Caleb had seen men killed under the most benign conditions. That was the peculiar thing about war—you were never worried when you should be and by the time you started worrying someone was already dead.
“You’re going to put your gun down and we’re going to give you back your crop. Then we’re going to leave and nobody will be the wiser. Okay? Does that sound like a deal?”
Ruben was losing a handle on himself, his faculties unhinging. The different voices, the conflicting orders, the cheap malt liquor in his blood, the rifle pointed at him, the crop destroyed, gone, everything ripped up—how would he explain it? He’d already fucked up more than once. More than twice even.
“Why should I trust you?” Ruben said.
“Shoot him, bro.”
“Fuck you,” Ruben yelled down into Jake’s face. “Fuck you—and-shut-the-fuck-up.”
“Be quiet, Jake…please be quiet.” Caleb stared through Ruben’s red-mirrored goggles and into his panicked eyes. Just keep looking at me. Keep looking at me, kid. “You have my word. Nobody needs to die today. Nobody is going to die. But I need you to put down your gun. It’s that simple.”
The stress had become unbearable for Jake and the frayed ropes that held his ragged nerves together finally snapped. He’d been looking for an opening, a way to get the gun barrel away from his pounding head, a way to break free from this son-of-a-bitch who was threatening to kill him—and found one. He spun and knocked the gun from Ruben’s hand.
“No!” Caleb shouted.
Jake tackled Ruben and slammed his head into the ground. Then Jake lunged for the gun and snatched it off the forest floor.
“No—Jake—Don’t!” Caleb yelled, pulling his bad leg behind his good one. “No!”
But Jake could hear neither sound nor wisdom, his instincts overriding all subtlety and discretion—he spun and squeezed the trigger in one furious motion. A flash of fire from the gun barrel and a spray of blood and Ruben caved from the blast. The bullet ruptured his heart and exited through his upper back and hurled a chunk of meat with it. He was dead by the time Jake lowered the smoking barrel.
The mountains rang with the killshot and the echo settled among the trees and became silent.
“It was self-defense,” Jake gasped, doubled over, hands on his knees. “He would’ve killed both of us.”
“Goddamnit, Jake. Goddamnit.” Caleb shook his head and looked at the lifeless body on the ground and then back at his brother. “Goddamnit.”
“It was self-defense,” Jake said with thinning confidence. His legs and arms trembled and he looked to his brother for guidance.
Branches snapped underfoot and the forest floor rustled behind them as Lelah ran to the edge of the clearing and saw the young man dead on the ground and the blood seeping from the hole in his chest.
“Go back to the truck, Lelah…please, sweetheart. Go back to the truck.”
Lelah stood paralyzed with her hands over her mouth. She could not take her eyes off the dead man. She’d never seen a dead body before.
“What are we gonna do?” Jake asked.
“Leave,” Caleb said.
“What about him? Should we bury him?”
“No.”
“We can’t just leave him here like this.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you shot him. How do you know there’s not twenty more of him coming up the road right now?”
Jake looked down at the young man he had just killed. His throat clenched and he was unable to swallow. His shoulders sagged and he became terribly heavy and he wondered if he could take even one step right now when Caleb took him by the arm and commanded his attention.
“Grab your chainsaw and let’s get the fuck outta here while we still can.”
14.
Caleb ripped open the sliding aluminum door to the woodshed as Jake backed up the truck until the tailgate was flush. Then Caleb unlatched the tailgate and it dropped with a clang and the brothers began to drag the plants out of the truck bed and across the dirt floor to the back wall. The pungent leaves and ripe marijuana buds overpowered the dank odor of rotting grease and mothballed tools and stale work rags. The plants were the size of bushy Christmas trees and they had a surprising weight to them.
Lelah stood a few steps back from the doorway watching what she could not believe. What was supposed to be an innocent afternoon up on the mountain with her man, her fiancé, the father of her future children, the one she believed she was carrying inside her, the simple act of sharing a cold bee
r at the end of the day had now escalated into a capital offense in just a few hours.
In short order the truck was emptied in the dimming light and the plants were stacked to the roof in a bushy heap. The brothers threw a large blue tarpaulin over the plants and set a discarded truck axle and two greasy hydraulic car jacks on the edges to secure it in place.
“I’m going home, Caleb,” Lelah said.
“Let’s stay here tonight.”
“No. I don’t want to be here.”
“I’ll come with you then.”
Lelah walked over to her pickup truck and climbed inside.
The veins in Caleb’s neck were tense green ropes and there was a fierce edge to his voice when he turned to his brother and said, “Call your buddy and get this shit out of here.”
Then Caleb pointed to the .40 cal Beretta tucked in Jake’s waistband.
“And get rid of that guy’s gun.”
“Don’t worry. I’m gonna set things right.”
“You better. ’Cause you sure did fuck them up.”
15.
The sun had disappeared behind the mesas and the prairieland was settling into the shapeless dark of a moonless night. The road was empty save the pickup truck and there were no oncoming headlights for miles ahead and they wouldn’t see any for several minutes more.
“We should tell my dad,” Lelah said. “He can help us.”
“No. Not unless we have to.”
“He’s the sheriff, Caleb. He’ll know what to do.”
“Do you want to go to jail? I don’t.”
“It was self-defense.”
“You have to prove that.”
“There’s a dead man lying in the forest up there.”
“Yes. There is.”
“How can you be so calloused?” she asked. “How can you say it like that?”
“I’m not worried about the dead guy right now. Those are the stakes when you walk around with a gun and pull it on somebody. He knew them. If he didn’t, he should have.”
“A young man lost his life.”
“He did. And I don’t want any of us to either. This may all blow over. Then again it may not. If I’m a betting man, the people he was working with probably won’t report his death to the authorities. Maybe he was working alone. Pray that he was. Pray that he was some stupid kid up there trying to make a move all by himself. We don’t know anything yet. And until then, we need to be patient and lay low. There’s already been enough stupidity for one day. We need to stay calm and see how things play out.”
“Be patient? Stay calm? Who are you?”
“I’m trying to keep all of us alive and out of prison,” Caleb said. “It’s that simple. What do you want to say to the police: Jake was stealing some guy’s marijuana and then Jake shot the guy in self-defense—the guy whose marijuana he was stealing? And we just happened to be there but we weren’t part of it? There’s not a jury in this land that will buy that. Or a prosecutor for that matter. Or whomever. And guess what? We’re accessories, whether we like it or not. Once we open our mouths and start talking we can’t go back. That’ll be it. They’ll pit us against each other. Or me and you against my brother. Or any other combination that serves them and there won’t be a damn thing your dad can do about it. And what if that guy was part of a cartel or something? They’ll have our names. They’ll know who we are. Nobody will be able to protect us from that. Not your father. Not prison. Nothing. At least we have a chance if we keep quiet. We have time. I just don’t know how much.”
They were traveling through the dark with only the headlights from the truck showing the way.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “I really am. But we can’t go losing our heads now. Jake lost his head and look what happened. We can’t take that back. We can’t rewind things. And I figure the best we can do right now is let everything settle: our nerves, our emotions, and wait until we can think clearly again. The best thing to do right now is nothing.”
Caleb looked across the cab and saw her staring at the broken yellow lines on the road, the glow from the dashboard reflecting off her wet face. He could see the anguish in her clenched features, the confused glaze over her eyes. Speeches did not work right now. He knew that much. What could he say that would do any good?
“I love you, Lelah,” he said. “I’m sorry it’s this way. I’m sorry that this happened.”
“I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.
“Neither will I. But at least we’ll be by each other’s side.”
Caleb pulled Lelah across the bench seat and kissed her and she set her head in his lap for the rest of the way to her house. When they pulled down the dirt driveway they were relieved that her father was not home. They walked through the back door and into her bedroom and held each other through the long night.
16.
Sheriff Gates and Deputy Sparks stood over Ruben’s corpse sprawled in a puddle of glutinous blood, black against the shade of the forest. His face was burned a greenish purple from exposure and bloated from death. He was still wearing his red-mirrored goggles and the tissue around them had swollen up the sides and partially depressed them into his skin like a cookie cutter in a ball of dough. His mouth was agape in a mood of stupefied horror and his tonsils and gums had taken on the pruning texture of dried meat.
The chopped remnants of marijuana stalks and leaves were quickly withering from the rich green of the harvest to the ashen lifelessness of decay. Uprooted drip lines snaked across the decimated garden. It looked as if a pack of savage elephants had run riot over the place.
Gates kneeled beside Ruben and studied the bullet wound.
“Shot at close-range,” he said. He surveyed the matted area and the erratic grooves carved into the soil. “Looks like there was a struggle and then boom. Bye-bye Ruben.”
He stood and walked with his eyes on the ground and then bent down to pick up a brass shell casing. He read the numbers stamped into the base.
“Forty cal.”
“What did he carry?” Sparks asked.
“.40 cal.”
“What do you figure happened?”
“I don’t believe he shot himself.”
They left the garden and found Ruben’s ATV parked randomly amid the pine trees. There was a case of Mickey’s with a plastic bag of melted ice over the top fastened to the rack by a bungee chord. Pockets of ice-melt pooled the edges of the plastic. Several beers were missing.
“Do you think he traded the marijuana for the beer?” Sparks asked.
“He certainly would’ve considered it.”
They snooped around the ATV and then moved on. They fanned out and hiked over a rise and came upon an area where someone had been harvesting wood. Gates scooped a handful of sawdust and brought it to his nose.
“Fresh,” he said. “A few days at most.”
Sparks bent down and examined the deep tire ruts made by the wood truck.
“A big hauler,” Sparks said. “Probably a six-or eight-ton. That’s about as big a truck as could get up here.”
Sparks moved on. He stepped through the soft tinder and over a fallen pine branch and stopped.
“Got another set of tracks here,” he said. “Smaller vehicle. Looks like a standard four-wheel drive pickup.”
Several yards away Gates squatted and studied the forest floor, pondering the situation. He stood up and his legs tingled and he grew lightheaded. A rush of vertigo came upon him and the earth wheeled and spun on its axis. He braced himself against a pine tree and closed his eyes. He took several deep breaths and before long his equilibrium came back to him with a pounding heartbeat.
Sparks hiked over to him.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yeah, I just forgot how thin the air was up here.”
“No shit. I feel out of shape.”
“You are.”
Sparks glanced at his growing paunch and then at his flaccid arms that lacked even a hint of muscle definition or a healthy vein to circulate
his blood. “I guess so,” he said.
They looked out at a break in the trees and the land fell off before them and they could see the arid valley way below stretching for some hundred miles.
“What do you think?” Sparks said.
“Dunno just yet.”
“You think some loggers stole the crop?”
“It’s unlikely,” Gates said. “But greed is a peculiar thing.”
“Maybe they stumbled upon it when Ruben was out grabbing his beer?”
“Certainly could’ve.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“We’ll rule out dumb luck for now.”
“What are we gonna tell Marlo?”
“The truth,” Gates said. “The dumbass lush walked off the job like so many fucking times before and got our shit stolen and himself killed in the process. The fucking truth.”
“He’s gonna think it was an inside job.”
“Maybe it was. We’re not the only side involved.”
“Maybe Ruben bragged about his dealings to the wrong people.”
“Drunks have been known to do that from time-to-time. Lot’s of maybes right now.”
Gates lifted the bindle of cocaine from the shirt pocket behind his badge and tapped a power-stroke on the back of his hand and hoovered it up his nose. An instant Übermensch.
“Yola-bola-rockin-rolla. God bless Peru. Those little fucking llama riders. Lake Titi-caca.” He sniffed and wiped, then said, “Machu Picchu. Now that’s a high motherfucking city.”
“How high?”
“Higher than this mountain.”
“Can I get a bump?” Sparks asked.
Gates tossed him the bindle. Sparks snorted a bump and handed it back.
“Let’s go grab Ruben,” said Gates, “and throw his dumb ass in the trunk.”
17.
Marlo stared down at Ruben’s corpse slumped in the trunk of the patriotic cruiser and caught his reflection in the red-mirrored goggles.