She saw her mother’s shoes at the entrance, and other people’s shoes, and Gwen pressed along the man’s chest for his sternum, and finding the bottom, measured two fingers’ width, and locked her right palm to the back of her left hand, interwove her fingers and bore down with all her weight. She rocked on her knees. Let up. Pressed again. Back and forth, forgetting to count. She wiggled across the waxed floor and pinched his nose, blew into his lungs, and allowed the air to trickle back out, and did it again. What was the count? The Devil grinned. Fuck you, he said, I win. And Gwen scooted to the man’s side and locked her hands together and heaved her weight to his chest again and again.
“Gwen,” her mother said.
“Sweetheart,” another said.
Gwen closed her eyes and it was just she and the Devil. His mocking laughter rattled from one side of her mind to the other, and she looked through his flat eyes into darkness where the noise continued until echoes piled on his voice a thousand times over and it was an army of devils laughing at her. She heaved against the dead man’s ribs. A hand touched her shoulder and she pushed it aside. Gwen moved to the man’s face, lifted his neck, watched his blank eyes for the smallest twinkle of life. But his skin held the marks of her last touch, and not a muscle moved.
“Gwen, it’s time to stop,” her mother said.
“No!”
Gwen pinched his nose and blew into his mouth. She was dizzy and slowed to catch her breath before inhaling and blowing into his mouth again. She rested her head on his chest and again felt a hand on her shoulder. Firm, insistent.
“What!”
She looked up and her mother was still several feet away; no one was there, and the pressure continued though no one touched her. Heat spread through her shoulder. She pressed one hand to the other and lurched to the dead man’s sternum, dropped her weight like a sack of feed, almost assisted by the dark hand on her shoulder, which now squeezed as if seeking that nerve that Cal and Jordan pinched to make her squeal. Still Gwen heaved.
“Go away, Devil!”
Him, or you.
She pressed the man’s chest, slammed a three-count against him, hurried to his head. She exhaled into his mouth again and again until the weight on her shoulder made her struggle to bear up against it. Each breath she fed the man was lighter, and each time she pounded his chest she was weaker. Flats and sneakers and heels circled her but she never looked higher than the people’s knees so she wouldn’t have to read the defeat on their faces.
“Get off me, Devil,” she whispered. “You can’t have everyone.”
I’ll have him, or you.
His laughter whipped through her like a cold winter gale.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ain’t a damn man the whole world over ever been seventy-two and had joints felt like two pieces of sandpaper, a back felt like a log split by a maul.
The sun is two-thirds to noon. Clouds blow in like a summer thunderstorm—but it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a billiard table. Seems the machinery of nature ought to run as slow as the machinery of man. It doesn’t. Look at a crick bubbling under ice, or ice pellets blasted by a gust, and it’s an illusion. Man at the center believing everything feels like he feels. There’s nothing farther from the truth. All this belief that the world is thinking and feeling, and maybe empathic in misery, or delighted with reverie, is the worst kind of dreaming. Nothing out there gives a rat’s rotten ass. I’m carrying a coat for a girl in the middle of a storm; she’s got one foot bare and the other shoe full of snow and toes so numb she’s forgotten she has them, or burning like as to catch flame. She’s getting the full dose of nature right now. She knows there isn’t a tree or a brook or a deer or fox that would spit to save her. She knows she’s all she’s got, and she’s only sixteen. Girl that age is just getting ripe, and it makes me madder’n all hell.
The going is slow. Gale and Gwen’s tracks are mostly filled. The wind screeches across the field driving snow and icy crystals, and any holes in the covering get filled on the lee side first, so the footsteps I’ve been following have become peanut-shaped crescents. Spotting them now is no trouble, but they won’t last long.
Halfway to the woods I arrive at a mixed-up jumble of tracks. They lost their gait. Gwen—judging from the print size—stumbled in a drift close to a windrow of trees, and Gale came to her. I study the impressions on the white canvas, and the footprints tell of a dance, him coming to her, bracing, lifting. They didn’t roll around and fight, but putting myself in Gwen’s mind, why would she? She’d just seen Gale murder her father.
Though I imagine when they were in the loft it was for love, no child will see her father killed—by her lover or any other—and feel nothing. She wouldn’t run from the barn unwilling, and yet as I’ve plodded farther from the warmth of the Bronco, I’ve wondered with every step if I dare go much farther. This girl, with no coat, and snow in her feet, feeling the wind shred her clothes, tagging along behind the man who murdered her pappy—wouldn’t she reach a moment where she’d stop and look back? Imagine the smell of baked bread? The taste of salt on beef? The warmth of her mother’s arms? The agony in her mother’s eyes? And if she imagined these things, wouldn’t she take a step closer to home, like this moon-shaped bowl indicates?
What prevented her from the next step and the next? Did she spin to Gale and race after him, or did he jerk her arm and drag her farther from home?
I peer deep into the forest ahead, searching tree trunks for motion. The bark is bold against the snow, and anyone passing through would be evident. I scan the treeline left to right and stop at a clearing midway up the hill. The easiest view draws the eye, though no stone-cold killer’d be stupid enough to traipse across an open section like that.
Though as I think on it, Gale killed Burt with a pitchfork, and that shows a madman’s moxie.
At the bottom of the clearing, I see motion and my chest tightens. A flicker of black melding into a tree, emerging. It bounds away.
Deer.
Spooked?
I scan down the hill. Whatever set him running came from below. I look through the trees, downward, to the right, until I’m seeing dead ahead. Right where Gale and Gwen’s tracks point.
A burst of wind cuts into my neck and ice stings my ear. I turn into it and stoop. Cast a sideways glance back to the house and barn, fuzzy with distance and the snow in between. Shift Guinevere’s coat and sweater from my left arm to my right, and dig a piece of jerked venison from my pocket while watching the goings-on at the Haudesert farm.
The coroner beat Cooper to the scene. He pulls a case from his trunk. The gusts are gone. Standing here, I am suddenly warm and unbutton the top of my coat.
Up ahead there’s a possibility that Gale and Gwen have rattled a deer loose from the underbrush. Cooper can catch up. I’ve got to keep on. There’s only one more dead body I want to see today, and it damn well isn’t Gwen’s.
In forty years of lawing I’ve seen a lot of dead men and women, some more gruesome than Burt Haudesert. Bodies of geezers like me, pretending to be made of steel, face-in-the-soup dead. Bloated and black when a grandkid finds them. Or mangled in car accidents. Heroes wrap themselves around oak trees and their bodies come out like so many pounds of hamburger wrapped in blue jeans and t-shirts.
But of all the death and all the bodies, only two were the machination of an angry man. It was about the militia. This was eight years back.
Every state’s got a gang of men with guns and tattered U.S. Constitutions stowed next to their dog-eared John Birch pamphlets. Bitching about government makes men happy, and in recent times, country folk have been fucking euphoric. Rumor was the boys in my neck of the woods were getting rowdy and ready to switch gears from talking to walking. I don’t mind ten men at a hunting camp chucking bottles and blasting away. Any fella dumb enough to get drunk around a crew with guns half deserves a bullet. But I got a tip. One of the wives overheard talk of linking the local group with some radical faction out of Denver and mar
ching with guns to Washington to take the country back from the jigs and the Jews. A sheriff can’t truck with that, but in a county of twenty thousand, everybody knows everybody, almost. At least the men who would be of age and frame of mind to join such a group knew everyone else who might be. I didn’t have anyone to put inside. I kept my ear out, but no more tips came.
There was only fifty of them. They recruited primarily through the Masonic Lodge, though they were careful not to bring the Lodge into it. Of course, it’s a different thing, what a group does in the Fourth of July parade versus what secret conversations goes on in the Blue Room. I wasn’t privy, but I knew when the men who were part of the militia hushed at the Lodge, they weren’t talking about saving widows and orphans or tuning Harley engines.
I joined the Lodge on Burt’s invitation, thinking it was a thank-you for having set him on the right path all them years before. I’d turned down invitations for thirty years. Every secret brotherhood, and seems like there’s more and more guilds, wants to claim the town’s most prominent citizens on its rolls. I never joined one.
But Burt had a peculiar look in his eye, and I always had an interest in him, and so I went. Took my degrees, including the third, which was more memory work than I wanted, going over lines word after word, and only able to practice while I was with him. It gave me the chance to learn the way he thought. We’d sit at a picnic table, and he’d say the script from memory because it was against Lodge rules to ever have the secrets in print, and I’d repeat each ancient phrase and watch it hit Burt like religion. The catechisms came in two parts, a call and a response. He’d say the call and I’d stumble through the answer, and after each catechism we’d rest a bit and drink coffee and swat mosquitoes and I’d ask about his family. Gwen and the boys.
Sometimes I’d ask after his mother.
Lodge meetings were Tuesday nights at seven. I watched Burt with a critical eye, like a father, and listened to the others for militia talk. If a group assembled at the rifle range to sight in for buck season, I made sure to arrive with my aught-six coming in high. When a group went fishing, I brought a case of beer. They were testing me, and I was testing them.
I placed each foot on the ground almost sideways, watching for twigs, and rolling across the leaves without a whisper. With a gurgling crick as a backdrop, an elephant could sneak up on two arguing men. I stood behind an oak so big it was prob’ly here when Jack La Ramie came through and lent his name in, what, 1812?
“It’s time,” Steward Pounder said. “We can’t wait forever. They’re waiting on us to get our asses in gear.”
And Burt said, “We wait and don’t get involved. We’re not about going someplace else. This’s about stopping them goddamn Commies from coming here. Takin’ our houses and guns. Fuck Denver, and fuck Washington.”
“Well, it’s a goddamn good thing you ain’t runnin’ this outfit,” Steward says.
“You don’t understand anything.”
“Just who the hell you think you’re talking to?”
“Go fuck a goat. And don’t think I’m going to let you get the boys riled up for someone else’s fight.”
“You ain’t runnin’ shit no more.”
“By God, I’ll knock your ass into next week and kick it again on Tuesday.”
Steward splashed upstream and Burt crossed to the other side of the crick and wandered downstream. My thought was to pull Burt aside later and begin extracting him from the group. Steward was crazy, but nowhere near the worst of the bunch. That honor belonged to his brother, Marshall, a giant man whose footsteps shook the forest and left an imprint like a dinosaur hoof. Had no luck as a hunter. Every animal a mile around felt him coming.
The situation for Burt was the kind you could see taking a good man and gradually turning him against his better judgment. Last thing I wanted was for him to wind up in a pissing contest with Steward and Marshall Pounder. Dicks like them wouldn’t lose a pissing contest.
When two weeks later they were both dead, I had a suspect in mind.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was late and Gwen couldn’t sleep. She listened to the ghostly creaking of the house for any noise that might indicate her father slinking down the hallway. Fear was a weight that rested upon her, and thinking of her father called to mind her strange gift.
She’d often considered the implications of the man’s death at the grocery—how it seemed to expand the rules that governed her visions. Her first, the one of her grandfather, had been immediately after her father…visited her. So had the second. But when she saw the man at the grocery, she had merely been trapped in a terrible rumination on the previous night’s experience. Why hadn’t the vision arrived the night before, while she wept in bed?
Gwen rolled sideways in bed and pulled up her knees. Her mind drifted. Sleep neared.
Maybe she had things backward. Her gift required an aggrieved state of mind, but also, a person’s death had to be imminent—although each vision seemed to provide an earlier warning. Even if every criterion were met, someone had to be close to death, or she would have no one to see.
But there were people dying all the time, all over the town. All over the country. Her talent required proximity; she had to know the dying, even if only from a flash connection—like when the grocery man dropped four grapefruit and glanced up and met her eye.
Gwen flopped to her other side. At any sour-mooded moment, she might see the death-face of any person she had ever known. “Why?”
Him or you…
She blinked and stared into black shadows. There could be only one answer. She could affect the outcome.
* * *
Gwen knew Gale’s window tap: three muted percussions with the round of his index finger, always barely audible, in case Burt was with her. But Gale had gone to work for the butcher Haynes, and the way they’d parted left little hope he’d be back. She’d told him to stay away.
So who had just tapped five times with fingernails?
Gwen approached the window from the side. Liz Sunday faced the glass. Her eyes were closed in a prolonged, tired blink. Faint moonlight gave her skin a weary pastiness reminiscent of Dust Bowl farmers frozen in black and white. But when she opened her eyes, her lips seemed drawn in scowl and her face became an edifice of desperation.
Gwen retreated to the edge of her bed. She collected her thoughts. Liz had never confessed the exact source of her problems, preferring to leave the father of her child a mystery while the deed eroded her grasp on sanity.
Now it seemed another of the frayed bands holding Liz together had snapped. How many remained?
Rapping sounded again, louder.
Gwen stood. Opened the window.
“Run away with me. Tonight.”
“Shhh.”
“Don’t shush me. I have to get away.”
Gwen opened her window all the way. “Shhh. I’m coming out.” She grabbed a blanket from her bed, slipped into her shoes, and crawled through the window.
Gwen draped the blanket over her shoulders and led around to the front porch. If she could get Liz to whisper, they wouldn’t have to go all the way to the barn—where being with Liz in the dark would be utterly sinister. Gwen sat in the chair that Burt preferred. Liz remained standing, holding a stuffed satchel by its strap. She dropped it.
“Sit down a minute,” Gwen said.
“You didn’t grab your things.”
“I can’t run away just this second.”
“You said you would.”
“I did not. But why now? What’s happened?”
Something in the darkness toward the driveway pulled Gwen’s attention. A reflection. She looked into the shadows.
Gale, visiting from the butcher’s?
“What?” Liz said.
“I—nothing.”
“I knew I couldn’t trust you. I was right.” Liz snorted. “You know what I’m going through.”
“You mean—”
“With my father. You know.”
G
wen felt bile rise into her throat.
Liz stepped closer and hulked above Gwen. “I told him I’d run away if he ever touched me again. I told him I’d do worse than that.” Liz hiccupped. “That’s why I asked you…about the music.”
Liz swallowed. Caught her breath and shuddered as if from the chill. She cleared her throat. “I wanted to kill it,” she said. “He sent me away to have my baby, and I hated that little fucker and I wanted to find a doctor who would cut it out. But when I saw him come out of me, and the doctor smacked him, and he cried, I wanted…to…keeeeeep—”
“Shhh. It’s okay. Be quieter, if you can.”
Between Liz’s sobs, Gwen heard feet dragging on dirt. Pant legs. Surely Gale would know to stay away.
Liz croaked, “They took him to an orphanage.”
Gwen studied Liz’s profile, parsed the hopeless shock evidenced in broad shadows, the bereft cant of her frown.
“Something will work out.”
“You won’t go with me to get my baby back?”
“Liz, this is crazy! How are you going to get him back? How would you take care of him? Maybe it’s best that he’s there.”
“At the orphanage?”
Gwen didn’t breathe for a moment. “The best person I know came from there.”
“Gale?” Liz shook her head. “He’s why you won’t go.”
“Don’t you have family somewhere? There has to be someone who would—”
“I thought you were someone. But you’re really quite a bitch. You know that?”
“That’s terrible.”
Liz stepped away, backed off the porch. “I’ll do it myself. I’ll get him back. And I’ll make you sorry.” She lifted her bag at the edge of the cement.
Cold Quiet Country Page 10