“Thank you.”
She threw both purse straps over her shoulder and filled her arms with texts and notebooks. She noted the concern in Fitzsimons’s eyes as she backed away and fleetingly questioned whether his sweat would smell as disgusting as her father’s. She looked at his hands, his clean fingernails, and spun the other direction not knowing if she would vomit or begin sobbing. She scampered down the hall, her soles barely rising from the linoleum. She ducked into the restroom yet again.
A pair of seniors huddled in the corner. Smoke curled from their cigarettes and a cloud lingered at the ceiling.
With Liz behind her, Gwen held the older girls’ eyes. The blonde shifted sideways. “You ever get burned?” the blonde said, and dragged from her cigarette until the cherry glowed.
Gwen backed away.
“That’s right, lezzie.” The dark-haired girl grabbed her crotch like a rutting boy.
Gwen navigated the two right-angle turns and backed into the hallway. Liz grabbed her books from Gwen’s arms and they hurried around the corner and sixty feet farther to their lockers, on opposite sides of the hallway.
“Okay,” Gwen said. “Right out the front door.”
Liz stared through her. “You need to tell me how you killed them.”
* * *
They reached the street and turned left, toward town, and then crossed to the west side. After a quarter mile they’d pass Sheriff Bittersmith’s station and then the Main Street businesses. On the concrete bridge that crossed Mill Creek, Gwen stopped and leaned over the side. A storm the night before had swollen Mill Creek’s waters; the stream rushed with muddy runoff and over-spilled its banks.
Liz came beside her and looked over the edge. “Think about being swept away,” she said.
“It doesn’t work like you think,” Gwen said. “I can’t just see someone and make him die.”
“It would be nice if you could.”
“The first was my grandfather. I saw him and heard funeral music, and the next day my mother said he was dead. Eight months later I saw my grandmother. I tried to warn her; I tried to reach into the picture; I said her name but she didn’t know I was with her. She had her eyes fixed on the Devil, I think. She was looking down.”
“What happened?”
“I went into the kitchen and called her on the phone. I let it ring for a few minutes, and when I gave up, my mother came out, and she tried calling, and Grandma never answered.”
“She was already dead…”
“That’s what I thought,” Gwen said. “But she wasn’t. Not when I called.”
“What?”
“They found her on the floor, sprawled out, dead…she’d been crawling to the phone.”
CHAPTER TEN
I climb the steps sideways, carrying a chunk of salted venison on a fork while it drips into a Mason jar. I want to be on my way before law enforcement follows my footprints from Burt Haudesert’s blood to this front porch. More pressing is the likelihood a platoon of Wyoming Militia will storm the house riding thirty snowmobiles through the drifts, right across the lake.
It would be nice to know when the storm is going to be over, but unless I can find a radio and batteries, I won’t know until I spot dripping icicles. There is such a thing as snow so deep a snowmobile will bog down, but until I know how the storm is shaping, I won’t fathom how to survive any of it—the blizzard, the police, or the militiamen.
The room with the rifles overlooks the fields toward the road, about two hundred yards off.
I rub my bunched-up wool sleeve against the frost on the window. The road is hard to see, a gray line that traces all the way from left to right. I’ve been on that road, and seeing it and knowing the lake is behind me helps put my location in context. In fact, I passed by this place last summer working for Burt Haudesert.
The gun cabinets are locked, but the glass doors display their contents. I feel along the crown of the first, and then the second cabinet, and find a ring with a pair of keys.
I shot a lot of squirrel with Mister Sharps’s .22, and lining up the open sights and holding a steady bead is my strong suit. If a bullet comes out the other end, I’ll hit what I’m pointing at. I choose the rifle with the longest barrel and examine the top of the breech for a stamp.
.30-06.
It’s a bolt action, something I’m familiar with. Good for shooters, Mister Sharps said, because the bolt won’t wiggle.
If that’s what it takes, I said.
Two cabinet doors and three drawers sit below the rifles. I pull the top and find boxes of bullets. Fat boxes with shotgun shells. Long skinny boxes for rifles. I locate one that has .30-06 on the side, made by a company called Federal. There are smaller boxes and out of curiosity I open one. The bullets are the length of a .22 but plump as my pinky. They go to one of the pistols tucked between the rifle stocks.
I open the .30-06’s bolt and press rounds inside. It holds seven.
I came here for a radio, but firepower seems more pressing. Militia could be on the lake right now. They could be at the front door. I cross to a bedroom on the other side of the hallway and pull the curtain. The snow falls harder, and the sky, way off, broods as dark as any summer thunderstorm.
I return to the gunroom. There’s another rifle almost as long as the .30-06. I pull it down and it reads .308. Better by eight-thousandths. I locate the box that goes with it.
In Westerns, good guys cache rifles by windows, as they won’t have time to reload running from one blind to the next. Seems like sound policy. One by one I remove rifles, load them, and place them with their ammunition boxes next to different windows. Upstairs and downstairs. I read the manufacturers and calibers; everything starts with a three. Remingtons, Winchesters, and a strange war gun called a Krag-Jorgensen.
One fellow would be proud of my preparations: Burt Haudesert. I worked for him all of three months and he sat me on his porch twenty times, and said in slave countries they don’t have guns, and through history, the first thing a despot does is take a man’s firepower. Burt would sit and clean a rifle for an hour as the sun drew into the hills, until he was cleaning it by a yellow bulb over his head that flickered with moths. He’d talk to the rifle with a softer voice than he ever used on his wife. If he could see all the guns in this room, he wouldn’t forgive me, but he might be misdirected long enough for me to make a break for it.
Of course, Burt Haudesert is dead.
It’s the living chasing me…on account of Guinevere Haudesert.
In the beginning she was a tart. Burt worked me hard enough that some days the only time I saw her was when I sat down for supper. If she walked by and I was in a field or the barn or even on the porch with Burt, there was no way I’d look at her. I think she knew, and at some point Burt noticed I didn’t see her.
But she took advantage of times alone with me. I didn’t know what fabric she was weaving. I didn’t know I played by one set of rules, and she played by none.
Burt sent me to work in the garden one morning. Told me there was a hand-pushed harrow in the shed out back the house, and he wanted each row dug up and the weeds pulled, since Gwen hadn’t been living up to her chores. I did as he said and no more than twenty minutes passed before Guinevere came out of the house and stationed herself where I’d already roughed the ground. She crouched with her back to the fields and barn, and her knees were far enough apart that it only took one glance to see she was a full-grown woman and had forgotten her underpants that morning.
I reacted to that, and at the end of the row I didn’t want to turn around, knowing she’d see, and I stood there examining the harrow’s wheel, pretending it wasn’t operating correctly. I pushed it a foot, and stooped, and jiggled it back and forth, and knocked a clump of mud from a spoke. But all I was seeing was a mat of red like something you’d find strawberries and mint leaves in. The more I thought about not thinking about her, the worse I got, until I dropped the harrow and walked out into the trees by the swamp where I could see her a
nd be sure she wasn’t coming my way.
When I came back she was still there and my problem was gone for the time being. I resolved I wouldn’t even look at her until the garden was done. I started back toward her with the harrow and a little blue packet landed at my feet. I stopped.
“Pick it up,” she said.
The devil got the better of me and I said, “You don’t even know what that’s for.”
“I surely do, Gale G’Wain.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Not tellin’.”
“You shouldn’t have that. If your father saw—”
She sniggered. Stood, retrieved it. Walked the length of the garden to an area that I’d avoided, the cucumber patch. She sat cross-legged at the edge of the leaves and snapped a harvestable cuke from the vine. “You watching?” she said, and it was like she was chewing bubble gum while she wasn’t. She ripped the package open and rolled the prophylactic over the end of the cucumber, and I watched because even though I’d seen them I’d never actually owned one. The way her hands moved was like the way you’ll see ballroom dancers glide over a parquet floor.
“What do you think of that, cowboy?” she said.
My mouth was dry, and I had another problem in my pants.
“Now the cucumber won’t get you pregnant,” I said, and headed back to the woods.
* * *
The fire has taken the edge off the house. Only upstairs do I see my breath. In the living room the air is almost too hot, but I leave my sweater on.
My leg is going to be a problem. When the blade went in, I felt a jolt as it hit my femur. Pulling it out was difficult; it stuck in the bone like an ax in a knotty log. Every walking step intensifies a deep, skeletal ache, so much that I’d like to stretch on the sofa and watch the fireplace and its leaping orange ballet dancers. But if I allow my leg wound to become infected, my survival today will be for nothing. I’m not going to hike a thousand miles south on a rotten leg.
I’ve got to kill whatever bugs are growing in me.
I check a window on each side of the house and there’s no indication I’ll ever see another human being the rest of my life. If the storm keeps on, it’ll bury the porch by dawn. Every minute makes it less likely Cal and Jordan will come, but these are not men who stop shy of their objective. I know from listening to Cal—Cal always took the lead over Jordan—revel in a story about tracking a gut-shot buck by lantern light, over fifteen miles of smaller and smaller spirals until he found it dead in a briar patch at dawn. The way he told the story it was adventure, but it was personal between him and the buck. It was about who was going to give up, and Cal was damned sure he wouldn’t. And to show his cleverness, he liked to add a punch line at the end of the story, to make up for the fact that Jordan, Burt, and I had heard the tale a half-dozen times. He added that after he cleaned the buck, the only honest way to get it off the hill was the same way he’d come in, mile after mile around the hill, unwinding the corkscrew.
Cal and Jordan are coming for me.
I expropriate a can of Lysol from under the kitchen sink. Shake it and it’s live. From the lower hutch cabinet, a bottle of 151 rum. I uncap it and sniff. Mister Sharps, at the Youth Home, watered down his whiskey. He said it was to make it less strong, but I suspect it was to stretch a bottle. This rum smells potent. I pour a drop on the sink ledge and reach a match from the cabinet with the candles. The rum flashes and flickers and it’s an amazing sight, a flame that isn’t attached to anything.
From the roll-top desk I kife an ink pen and a roll of tape. A letter on the calendar pad is addressed to Doctor Wilbur Coates, and I surmise I’m wearing Doctor Coates’s pants and boxer shorts and everything else, and digesting his venison and peaches.
I carry the items to the coffee table and drag the table to the hearth. Lastly, I return to Doctor Coates’s bedroom, and gather the gauze and ointments and bandages on his bed.
The brass poker I put into the embers glows red. I sit on the hearth with my pants drawn to my knees. The heat from the fireplace rises and the cool stones remind me I’m not warm all the way through. I undo the knot, and round and round, unwrap the bindings. After a couple circuits the gauze becomes bloody and handling it without getting blood all over my clothes and hands becomes an exercise. I ball them up and toss them in the fire.
The wound is an inch and a quarter wide, and three inches deep to the bone.
I disassemble the ink pen, and when the guts are on the coffee table I chop the ballpoint mechanism from the end of the plastic tube, so that what remains has no ink. I pour some rum onto the plastic tube, then drink a tiny swallow from the bottle. I spit into the fire and figure it is better to feel the pain in my leg, and not in my mouth and throat, too.
I press the ink pen tube into the hole in my leg. It slides and I’m numb until it gets close to the bone and sends a jolt of electricity through me that makes me almost empty my bladder. Instead, I shake the Lysol, and after a moment of thought, slip the white nozzle off the end. I tear a few lengths of tape and stick them to the table, then use one to affix the nozzle to the tube barely protruding from my leg. I cover it over and over until it’s secure and there’s no wiggling one and not the other, and then slip the tube from the spray can inside the nozzle, and before I have time to second-guess my way out of it, I mash the nozzle.
Lysol bursts through the clear tube and there is a second between seeing it go and feeling it hit the meat inside. I scream until I have no voice and Lysol foams out of my leg. I spray and spray and somewhere in all of it I find I’m sitting in a puddle of piss and my face is salty and my eyes inflamed. With no Lysol left I cast the can across the room and press the wound from the sides. Pink liquid squirts out, and panting and choking, I wipe it away with gauze. In one motion I throw the gauze into the fire and grab the brass poker and press it to my skin until the smell of charring, smoking flesh finishes me.
* * *
After a day’s farm work, sleep is sweet. Muscles ache, depending. If the work took a shovel or a pitchfork, there’s likely skin missing on the inside of your thumb, and the muscle above your shoulder blade that you didn’t know you had burns like a devil. Or if you were throwing bales from the field to the wagon all day, your forearms are chafed like you wrestled a kitten for sixteen hours, and the muscle ache starts at the back of your legs and goes all the way to the base of your skull.
And there are lesser pains. You pass a corner in the barn too close and a rusted nail slices your shoulder. Heck, you whittle a whistle from a shaft of elderberry and nick your finger. Say you drop to the ground to hitch a cart to a tractor and rap your knee on a stone. At night you’ll lie there and wonder what you did that caused the bruise and it won’t come to mind until three days later when you rap it again on the same spot doing the same exact thing.
Going to bed was as much respite as rest. Haudesert’s loft became a sort of hospital. Other men might have done farm work without so many aches and injuries, and after a while I toughened up. But in the beginning I was sore all the time and bedding in a nest of hay, which I could clump up wherever I wanted, was the thing I looked forward to all day long.
After Gwen slipped the prophylactic on the cucumber, I steered clear of her. She was trouble. I hadn’t grown up around girls at the Youth Home. Only time I saw them was in town, and all the boys would gape at anything shorter than a full-blown woman that smelled nice. Mister Sharps and the faculty didn’t often take us into public. Even boys unschooled by actual experience wish for a pure harlot willing to get dirty at the first smile—but when a boy sees one acting out his most grotesque fantasies, he knows right off something’s wrong. Gwen slipping that rubber on the cuke after disremembering her underwear signaled she knew what she was doing with her body—and worse, what it did to a boy’s.
We boys at the Youth Home weren’t fools. While the specific mechanics of a boy and girl consummating their interests were a mystery, and imagining how it would work was slightly absurd, we talked some
times about how difficult it must be to find where you were supposed to go. You take plenty of lessons on the farm. I couldn’t count the times I saw a stud miss a mare altogether, and he’s bumping her and she’s fit to giggle. We boys talked about that happening to us, and generally one of the older guys would say something smart about the last time he diddled Mrs. Smart she was so easy to find he could have drove a tractor in her. But that was when I was really young. Even older, though, the whole thing was an unknown. Most times I’d go to sleep trusting every other guy in the world figured it out, and I would, too.
But how did Gwen already know? Her comprehension extended far beyond the syntax of two bodies, how they fit together. She didn’t even need to demonstrate that knowledge, hers eclipsed it by such a margin. She knew the fundamentals. The biological mechanics. But she also knew how to attract, how to tease. She added fifteen years to her age by pouting her lips and making her brows dark like stormy skies. Daydreaming about her was like slipping off into town and finding a thirty-year-old woman—monstrously old, but magnificently schooled—who teases you to her cozy shack and devours you all day long. Thinking about Gwen was like thinking about an older girl, she seemed to know so much, and presented her complexity with such clarity and charm.
One night, after pitching bales from the field to the wagon and from the wagon to the loft, we sat to supper of dumplings and roasted chicken. There were carrots and potatoes and corn, and spices that seemed to come from heaven. Smelling them was enough to make a whole day’s aches disappear.
“Guinevere did most of the cooking,” Missus Haudesert said, and Burt nodded and beamed like his daughter was his prize, and Missus Haudesert caught his look and she didn’t seem quite as happy as she had a second before.
Her look only lasted a few seconds, and I spent them shoveling dumpling and chicken into my mouth. I always wanted to get at least a piece of a carrot with each mouthful; something about the flavor of the carrots pulled the whole thing together for me. But then I realized there wasn’t any talking going on and started watching the table politics around me. There was a signal being sent from Burt to Gwen, and Missus Haudesert seeing it, and Jordan, the cunning son, making sure he didn’t.
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