Cold Quiet Country

by Clayton Lindemuth

  Snow falls and a good headwind keeps it in my eyes. It’s been two, three miles, limping. I’ve got no coat and my calf is bare from where I cut away the corduroy. My skin is numb. My lungs burn. Ahead, a gray house sits at the lake edge, framed in the dusky storm. I’m in the middle of the lake and everything is flat to where trees border in the distance, and looking from my bloody boot to the far-off swirl of snow and trees gives me vertigo.

  I turn. No one on my trail. Yet.

  There’s no way this ends good.

  It’s been less than an hour since Guinevere was in my arms. Struggling, maybe. Eyes wide. There is something strange and fascinating about her hearing music when people are about to die. What she called the bullfrog notes. She heard the song for both of her grandparents years ago, and once for a man about to suffer a heart attack at the grocery.

  While we fondled in the loft, did she hear music for me?

  Is that why?

  Each step is agony. My tracks are clean. The bleeding stopped when my blood became ice, but inside the muscles are chopped. The house draws near, as if it approaches me.

  The house.

  Falling snow obscures a drifted slope at the lake’s edge. The wind has sheathed its fangs; snow falls straight down, like rain. I press my arm to my stomach and there’s frozen blood there, too. I blow my nose without plugging either side. Six hours ago I was inside her and warm and smelling her sweet breath and hair. Hearing telltale giggles. Too-loud giggles.

  I near the bank and look things over. An inlet feeds from a draw in the woods off to the left; the streambed is evident under the drifts. The ice is thin at the edge. The first indication is a cracking sound and then there’s a decrease in the ice’s rigidity. Ten feet from the bank, I shatter through, slash forward, run on a sheet that plunges and slips, and I’m submerged and gagging…

  It doesn’t feel bad. The cold shock imposes a comfortable void between my thoughts and me. My leg doesn’t hurt, though I’m walking on the lake bottom, chin barely above water, eyes peeled back and dancing freaked-out crazy-cold and maybe I’ll stay. How long would it take to end? Two minutes? Thirty seconds? But I never stop moving. I rake snow and icicles, claw out on the bank, and the air is warm.

  The two-story house looms, looking like thirty-year-old bird shit and absolutely still. The windows are dark. The chimney is a monument of cold stones.

  I fight up the bank. Climb the steps. Hear my teeth chatter, but don’t feel them. The door is locked and the knob sticks to my hand. I jerk away and leave a film of skin frozen to the brass. There’s a rock on the porch, a doorstop. I cradle it between my palms and heave it through a window.

  The glass is jagged. I push the doormat with my boot until it folds and then lift it, mash it against the standing shards. I duck through belly down, slip to the floor and huddle. Crawl as if drawing deeper into a cave. Darkness resolves into a fireplace, chairs, a sofa. The smell is damp ashes. I’m about to freeze to death.

  If I get warm, the bleeding in my leg will resume. If I bandage my wound and survive the morning, men with guns will descend on this house.

  I spot a box of matches on the hearth and slide the sleeve open. Matchsticks tumble in a pile. With inflexible fingers, I scrape one across the stone. It flares, and others beside it ignite. I cup my hands above. The color on my skin is red like Gwen’s hair and freckles.

  * * *

  I met Gwen in the summer. She had a faraway, shattered look. A quick smile that said she knew more than her age entitled, said her flirting wasn’t a tease but a promise of goods for the taking. I watched the dust at my feet. When you walk everywhere, you see your feet a lot. Hungry and unfed for two days—except what I scrounged from the forests and fields at night—I came upon the Haudesert farm knowing only that I smelled cow dung and saw fields of waist-high corn, and others of alfalfa.

  Guinevere answered the door. Her eyes were startling and her hair was as red as mine. I didn’t try to feel anything toward her, but in that very first moment I knew she had a pathway into me, if she wanted it. I didn’t want to be her deliverer. Didn’t even know she needed delivering. I saw her thoughtfulness and mistook it for empathy. In hindsight, she was edgy like a cat watching a caged bird. Her eyes flared and then narrowed. She was aware of biology and what it clamors for between men and women, and more so. Was eager to experiment with me. Perform.

  That should have been my warning.

  “Burt’s in the barn,” she said.

  “Burt one of your brothers?”

  “My father.”

  On the short walk to the barn I puzzled over her calling her father by his Christian name.

  I found Burt Haudesert hammering steel around an anvil. He was dressed in a green flannel shirt and corduroys. Everything was one shade of green or another save his boots; the dust covering them caught a splash of sunlight that left them almost gold. I came alongside and he explained what he was doing without me asking: re-fabricating a busted hay wagon support that he’d asked Carl somebody to weld back together—Carl being a person who could weld but couldn’t shape.

  “I’m Gale G’Wain, and I’m looking for work.”

  “I’m Burt Haudesert, and I got work all around me.” He studied my eyes, my clothes, my hands. “An unplanned labor shortage on account of Cal bein’ so goddamn dense. There’s tree stumps in that pasture with a higher IQ.”

  “Yes sir,” I said, and stepped away.

  “Stoned as a rock star, he gets up on that crossbeam and tries to walk it with a shovel for balance. Busted half the bones in his body.”

  “That’s something else, sir.”

  “You go inside the house, and if you ask Gwen real nice, she won’t bite your head off,” he said. “She’ll scare you up something to eat.”

  I shook his hand and he winked at me and laughed. He read me right; I was grateful. But the feeling I got at his mention of Gwen should have sounded alarm bells in my head. His ease-making euphemisms about his baby girl. The tropes he put into play with a stranger. And if not that, if not him, the feeling I got as my mind followed through on those lascivious wanderings, as if Burt Haudesert had just granted permission to strip his daughter naked and enjoy her any vulgar way I wanted to—assured that she wouldn’t bite my head off.

  That should have been enough, but it wasn’t.

  I hadn’t eaten anything but bitter, half-grown apples, two-inch carrots, and tiny shoots of corn ears since Mister Sharps cut me loose from the Youth Home, saying I was a precocious young man and the world would reward a boy of my bent. It was that time of year when summer isn’t sure if it wants to come out and play but spring is sure it doesn’t want to leave. Crops were growing slow and all the talk in the barbershops and seed stores was on the drought. How the almanac said it was this year for sure, and the best thing to do with seeds was to save them or grind them into flour, but don’t plant them, because anything that grows will bake dry before it gets six inches off the ground. Farmers can be a superstitious lot but their bellies force them to be pragmatists, so they spend their idle minutes framing every sort of omen in every shade of light, casting gloomy predictions of their own demise, and when the luxury of idle time disappears, they set about breaking their backs to ensure no axis of foul weather or nutrient deterioration or market glut or bad health will prevent them from feeding their babies and living as free men.

  Burt Haudesert struck me as being like the men in the barber shops and seed stores. He stood in the barn hammering steel, and I got that he was as much a part of the earth as a cornstalk.

  Just as stiff-backed and silly.

  The front door opened before my foot hit the steps. Gwen stood with her arms folded below her bosom, plumping it. She had one leg forward, her ankle to the curve of her calf showing a lot of shape. Girls are spindles until they become women and there’s nothing straight left. Gwen was a curvy country road. Red hair and freckle-faced, and freckles all the way down her arms. Her hair was up, and that made her look older. I allowed mys
elf a good look as I came toward her and she retreated inside, still facing me, and backed against the counter.

  With all the books I’d read and all the words I’d studied and all the miraculous fictions I’d imagined, the best I had for her was, “Burt says you’ll find some lunch for me.”

  She studied me like she was taking the measure of a dolt and then swallowed slowly. “There’s the refrigerator.” She spun with a move that flared her dress and left the room. Thirty seconds after she was gone, her calves were still burned to my eyes.

  I filled a glass with water and sat at the table with the chair sideways so I could open the refrigerator door and study what was inside. I ended up slathering a couple slabs of fresh-baked bread with butter and jam.

  Burt put me to work forking compressed hay from the goat stalls. No one I knew raised goats, and I was unfamiliar with them, but the odor was just a new twist on the old rotten ammonia stink of composted urine and hay. I couldn’t shovel very much before I had to run from the stall to gulp a few breaths of clean air. The goats didn’t mind, because the smell was trapped; it was only digging a foot of hay that released its full power. I shoveled all afternoon for a belly full of food and a rip in my pants when I caught a nail sticking out of the wall.

  I only had the one pair. Didn’t have the money to buy another until two weeks ago, and that from working for the butcher Haynes. The whole time I worked for Burt it was mostly for food. I saved a few dollars and he allowed me to sleep in the barn and wash in the trough.

  My first evening at the Haudesert place, Burt told me to get cleaned up, because even he—reeking of the barn and unaware of it—smelled goat stalls on me. I sat to dinner with his family, his wife Fay and his boy Jordan, and Guinevere. Burt’s other son, Cal, had his supper brought to him in bed. The first month I was there I only saw him once, when Fay asked me to run him a glass of water because she was a mess with bread dough in her fingers and he was hollering for a drink.

  Burt gave me a beer that night while we sat on the porch smoking stogies. He asked questions about politics. Had I done any thinking about natural rights? What did I think about the Commies taking over the country? I listened and he explained what a reasonable man would believe about the subjects. As I tried not to puke from cigar smoke and beer, Burt announced he held rank in the Wyoming Militia. His boys were old enough to have made up their minds, and each of them were joining, and that’s how I know that one way or the other when they see the way I left Burt, they’ll be on their way to find me at this house. They’re country boys with snowmobiles and friends. Heavy-artillery friends. They’ll come for me. Them and every redneck militiaman they can find.

  * * *

  More paper. A wooden bin to the side of the hearth holds dry oak and cherry logs, already split. Many have long splinters barely attached and quickly fuel the blaze. I load the fireplace and huddle close, breathing smoke because it’s hot and painful.

  The chimney is open but the fire has yet to establish the right drafts through the house. Smoke hangs a foot below the ceiling. In the flickering light, ghosts almost lift up from the photos on the wall.

  I fall to my behind and press stupid fingers to my belt. My leg wound seeps. Progress. With my belt undone, I look at my boots. Blow into clasped hands and then swing my arms. I fumble with the laces, pancake them between my fingers and pull. Toe the heels off and push until my boots clonk on the hardwood floor. Pull my shirt over my head and shake my hair. Ice flies. I’m naked on the floor, shaking, rapidly dying despite the inferno a few feet away. I crawl to the hearthstones and sit so close steam rises from my skin.

  Heat scorches my face. Everywhere my flesh warms, it burns, and an image flashes through me—the hunched Buddhist who doused his robes in gasoline and lit them. A quiver originates in my spine and undulates through me until I am powerless. Violent action brings a measure of control that eludes my slower, studied motions. If I act quickly I might gain the precision to do ordinary things—like remove the carbine from above the mantle.

  My thigh has a knife hole that goes in horizontal and flat, the direction a knife would take if it wanted to cut a leg clean off. The blade had dried blood and whitetail deer hairs stuck to it, and some maybe came off inside me.

  Blood trickles toward my groin. I unfold my arms. The bulb at the tip of the rivulet plows over goosepimpled hair, and as I watch, another column joins, and another.

  I’ve got to find clothes.

  From the smell, this house has been empty for weeks. Pressing my wound, I limp to a desk holding a telephone. No dial tone. Perhaps this home’s owner is on an extended visit with children or—again from the smell—grandchildren. Clearly, a woman has not been here for years, or she passed without leaving the faintest impression or barest scent. There’s no lace around the curtains. No doilies under photographs, and none of the baubles that demand doilies, like little ceramic angels. No cinnamon or nutmeg smell.

  I climb the stairs sideways. The floorboards groan at my presence. I deposit blood on each doorknob and drops on the floor. One room is an armory. Two gun cabinets, each full. Antlers adorn the walls, and a bear rug the floor.

  At the end of the hall, a larger room retains a human smell. Old fabric and old things. Old man. I open the closet and drape a coat over my shoulders. As I throw pants and shirts to the bed, my leg bleeds freely. I passed the bathroom on the way.

  My bare feet are tingly numb—a painful improvement. I open the bathroom medicine cabinet and see razors and hair pomade, combs and aftershave.

  In a hallway medicinary I find Bag Balm, Mercurochrome, and peroxide. Gauze and tape and cotton bindings. I heap the items in my arms, return to the old man’s bedroom, and toss everything on the bed. The curtains are drawn. I brush them open and light comes in so diffuse it leaves shadows undisturbed. On the bed, I throw the blanket over my unwounded leg.

  I daub blood with gauze, but the wound flows too fast. There’s no use for salve or peroxide. I press a fresh pad to the hole and add another on top, wrap them in place with a long bandage and tie the ends.

  Did Gwen hear the frogs and music for this? Did her gift fail her in my case, or was it premature? Should I have drowned in the lake? Frozen before starting the fire?

  With my leg wrapped as tight as I can bear, I open the bureau by the closet and shiver into a pair of old-man boxer shorts and a V-necked t-shirt. Pulling heavy winter socks on feet that can’t move is like slipping a rubber on a cucumber. It doesn’t cooperate—and the real question is why I know it’s hard to put a rubber on a cucumber. That goes back to Guinevere, too.

  I don pants that fit slack about my waist but cinch good with a belt, and choose the heaviest wool sweater on the top shelf. It fits loosely, and I bunch the sleeves at my forearms. For the first time since I was warm with Guinevere in the loft, hours ago, I begin to feel as if this is my body and it might eventually get warm enough to follow instructions.

  Moving back downstairs, I think about the carbine above the mantle. There are lots of other guns in the bedroom upstairs—newer guns, maybe—but the carbine has character. A scar on the stock looks like it came from a bayonet. Who knows if the man who carried it fell and a man with a different color coat lifted the carbine from his hands? Who knows if that happened a dozen times before it came to rest on this mantle, to be passed down from one man to his son and to his son, until I take it from the wall…

  This morning in the loft, I wondered about Guinevere hearing music. She hears what she calls bullfrog music whenever someone that she’s close to is about to die. Before Burt surprised us in the barn, saying, “I know you’re in there…” Long before that, she shushed me and said, “I hear bullfrogs,” and her stare was like a needle sunk right into me. She had me in her hands, and all I wanted was to replace those hands with something twice as warm and seventy-seven times as slippery, but she said, “Wait,” and I lay there with my behind hanging outside the coat, and it hasn’t been warm since.

  The bullfrog song might have b
een for Burt. But maybe the song came on double strong, and maybe the extra was for me. It’s difficult to guess the way occult things work. What they put in the books is all made up, demons and spirits aside. I’ve heard of a cat that likes to go through the old folks home and lay on the lap of the next person to die, and I’ve heard of dogs that sniff out cancer. A girl hearing music before people die might be something the scientists will explain someday. I told her all that and she shook her head, said she knew when the visions had started, but not when they’d end.

  The music must have been for me.

  The fire has settled, and though it makes no sense, I pile on more logs. I feel better with movement. Unlock the front door. Step to the porch and look across the lake. The sun’s climbed to a high angle. Wind blows over my tracks, and there is a chance I could stay here a while. With the blizzard they’re calling for, it might be a couple days until a snowplow cleans the road. The only caveat is that Cal, Jordan, and their militia cohorts all ride snowmobiles.

  I retreat inside and lock the door. Take in the gloomy sofa, chairs, mantle. More mounted heads of deer and bear. I pull the carbine from the rack, turn from the fire holding the rifle with both arms straight. The stock has been oiled for years, coat upon coat. I buff part with the wool of my sweater, and the walnut glows an orange luster warm as the flames.

  I crack the lever, find a round in the breech. I close it, point to the ceiling, pull the trigger. The carbine leaps and the blast deafens me. Plaster rains through the smell of burnt powder.

  With the carbine leaning against the fireplace, I kneel at the hearth and stretch my hands to the fire, rub them in the heat.

  I sit where I won’t fall into the flames. Cycle another round. The spent cartridge jingles across the floor as I cock the hammer and reverse the carbine. I press the muzzle to my clamped-shut teeth, and pry them open with cold metal that tastes of powder and carbon.