Cold Quiet Country

by Clayton Lindemuth

  A cloud passed and the moon cast an eerie, dim glow across the landscape. Gwen gasped. A man wearing a straw hat and a greasy jacket stood behind Liz.

  “Hey, baby,” he said.

  Liz spun. Scooped the strap of her bag and sidestepped.

  “What you doing, Liz? Time to come home.”

  “No!”

  He lunged and missed. “You airing family business all over, huh?”

  “Mister Sunday?” Gwen said.

  He looked at her. “Shut up. Get in your house, there.”

  “Mister Sunday, you better keep your voice down. You’ll find my father doesn’t appreciate men sneaking around after dark.”

  Liz stepped farther away. One foot behind the other, until a dozen feet separated them.

  “That so? You’ll find your neighbor doesn’t right give a shit.” Sunday turned and said, “Liz, we’re going home.”

  But Liz had already disappeared.

  The front door opened. Gwen spun. A hammer clicked. Burt stood in the aperture. His boxer shorts glowed. He pointed a rifle from his hips.

  “That you, Sunday? You made a royal damn mistake comin’ here after dark.”

  “This ain’t got nothing to do with either of you.” Sunday stepped backward, lifted his hands.

  “Prowlin’ after my girl, huh?”

  “Liz was here,” Gwen said.

  “You and your kind is what’s wrong with this country. But if I was to put a bullet in your in goddamned head, they’d say I was wrong.”

  Sunday backed another step into darkness. “Just here fetchin’ my daughter home. Easy, Burt.”

  “All I see is my girl wearing a blanket.”

  Burt seemed provoked by his own voice. Gwen stepped closer, almost fearing he would turn the rifle on her, but somehow knowing he wouldn’t. No one would die tonight. She was certain. She opened her mouth to speak and a blast flashed in the darkness. The sound crashed under the porch roof and the ringing shock of it seemed to hang there. Sunday shouted. Burt levered the rifle and another bullet clicked into place.

  “Get out of here and don’t ever come back! Go on!”

  “Hey, goddammit! I’m here after my girl. My daughter run off!”

  “I ought to take her in so she don’t grow up red. Now get the fuck off my land, ’fore I bury you on it.”

  Sunday backpedaled and in a moment was gone. But from the darkness came a shout. “This ain’t over, Haudesert! Not by a damn stretch!”

  Burt kept the rifle trained ahead. Feet shuffled in the kitchen. Gwen heard whispers. Minutes passed in silence.

  Burt said, “His girl was here?”

  “Liz. She got away from him just before you came out.”

  “I don’t want you around her.” Burt stepped back inside the house and stopped. Cal and Jordan were behind him, each brandishing a rifle. Fay turned on the light over the sink. “No need to call up the militia, boys.” Burt’s voice carried a wink. He turned back to Gwen and nodded at the doorknob. “Noticed the door was locked. How’d you get outside?”

  Gwen was silent.

  “I’m going to nail that window shut.” Burt ejected a shell from the rifle and left the breech open. The shell clattered on the floor. “You should have seen your sister’s face,” he said to Cal, and then looked at Jordan. Gwen watched in silence. “Eyes the size of a cross-cut log, and jumped three feet when I let out that shot. She thought that Commie was going to meet his maker for sure. How ’bout that, Gwen?”

  He was ribbing her. He was elated with having driven off a dreaded communist. He was strutting for his sons. This is how you defend the homestead.

  “I didn’t think he’d die.” Gwen threaded a path between her father and brothers. She stopped in the hallway and faced Burt. “I would have known two hours ago.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I got the idea after watching Burt take joy in slaughtering hogs—the way he disrespected the carcasses. A dead pig is only so much meat, but it ought to be more than that in a decent man’s mind, at least the man that watched it find its mother’s teat though its eyes were blind. The man that named it and fed it day in and out. It was a vessel that held something. Sure it was just a hog, but anything with eyes has something behind them. Sneering at a carcass illustrated a man’s character.

  Those times Burt asked if I wished I was out in the fields and I said no, I wasn’t fibbing.

  All that blood dripping into the ground and all those jeers and curses made me wonder how an artisan might kill an animal. Death finds us all, and there ought to be a special heaven reserved for those who deliver it with skill and respect, and I set my mind to discovering if the local butcher, Haynes, was a clean-hearted man.

  At that time I didn’t know his name. I had time on Saturday evenings and Sundays to myself and hitched into Bittersmith. One of Burt’s militia buddies saw me at the end of the driveway with my thumb in the air and let me ride in the front seat with him. We never exchanged names, but he knew I worked for Burt, and he was forthright about how the Militia could use young blood.

  “Burt’s taking me to a meeting,” I said.

  “That right?”

  “It’ll be interesting.”

  “Where you headed in town?” he said.

  “The butcher.”

  “Haynes?”

  I shrugged. “If that’s his name.”

  The man spent the last five minutes of the ride telling me how property rights are the foundation of liberty and how it takes a patriotic man with a gun to defend freedom. He said he’d look for me at the next militia shindig and even said he’d vouch for me. He offered a pull of Beechnut. I never took to spit tobacco and said no thanks; he let me off at Haynes’s Meats.

  A Sorry We’re Closed sign hung in the door. Through the window I saw lights in the back. I tried the knob; it was locked. I walked around to the rear and the smell of death overtook me. All at once it was like I was in quicksand of blood and whiz and rotting meat, flies swarming in heavy black thunderheads around gloomy cattle that looked at me without a shred of interest. They stared between two-inch brown-painted bars and nothing dispelled the knowledge their noses imparted: that this place they’d been ushered to was a place of death, and that their kind did the dying.

  “You, boy! What you doing?”

  I swung around. There was a door I hadn’t seen leading to the back of the butcher shop.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing, hell. What you want?”

  Lying only made me look like a liar and I had nothing to lose by the truth. It was just the surprise of being asked while I was studying the cattle’s mournful eyes—

  “Looking for Mister Haynes.”

  “Well, you found him. What you want?”

  “I want to work. Learn the trade.”

  He looked me over from my boots to my neck and it put me in the mind of the cover of an old Frederick Douglass book I’d read, where a slave stands on an auction block. Mister Haynes was a man accustomed to sizing up the worth of animals, so he could literally cut them to pieces, and having those cleaver eyes dissect me didn’t leave me feeling all that worthy. He studied my face as if to burn its impression on his memory, and said, “You’ll work for me on Monday.”

  “I appreciate that, but there’s more to it,” I said.

  “What more?”

  “I’m staying with Burt Haudesert in his barn loft, but I won’t be welcome there if I come work for you, and I don’t know about leaving him high and dry.”

  “You asked for work. You want work?”

  “You have a loft I could stay in ’til I find my legs?”

  “It’ll eat some of your pay, but there’s a shanty with a cot I could let you have.”

  We shook on it and he said, “You be here at sunup on Monday.”

  I didn’t want to be late, so I said my goodbyes Sunday night. Burt wasn’t pleased. He sat with his eyebrows looking like two fists grinding together.

  Cal said, “I’m ready to work, if
he’s too faint.”

  Gwen watched with wide-open, blatant eyes and finally turned to her mashed potatoes like a good enough stare would make them disappear. She came to me most every night, slipping out her window, tomboy fashion, and I knew she’d find me that night.

  I waited in the barn loft for her. She never came, and at one point I realized I’d been asleep and that the hour was late enough she wasn’t going to come at all. I climbed down from the loft and stood atop the barn runway looking over the house and lawn and garden in the thin starlight. Everything was silent and the air felt like all it had to do was make up its mind and there’d be frost.

  I circled behind the house and stole to Gwen’s window. I reached to it, but before I tapped the glass, I heard a single, muffled sob, and paused. I was crouching below the sill; slowly I rose to where I had an angle to glimpse inside, and before I saw it was too dark to see anything, a grunt came through the glass.

  Burt.

  I knelt and palmed a rock the size it would take to brain him. I squeezed like to make it a diamond. I bit my lip to keep from crying out. If I’d had a gun I’d have gone inside and shot him; if I’d had a pitchfork, I’d have run it through his guts and taunted his dying face.

  When Gwen had confessed about him almost strangling her, I’d told myself I’d kill him if he ever did it again, but this go-around I sat like a miserable coward squeezing a rock. There, on the ground getting ready to freeze. I leaned against the wall, careful, and listened.

  There was no way every soul in that house couldn’t hear them. No way they couldn’t smell what was going on under their noses. But Cal and Jordan didn’t care; Fay lacked the courage; and Guinevere suffered.

  And I sat there.

  Eventually the noise faded to nothing and I still sat out of regard for Gwen. How would she feel to have me there after what she’d faced? In the barn, earlier, I’d thought she might misunderstand my leaving as abandonment instead of what it was—a tactical step toward getting her away from her torturer. Now, outside her window, I didn’t imagine she’d welcome the humiliation of me being there while her father was, and maybe that would overshadow what I was there to tell her—I’ll be back for you, I promise.

  My bottom fell asleep and my feet were almost numb. I moved sideways to get from under the window, and I heard a click and the window slid open. One leg followed another and she slipped out and I said, “Psst!”

  She twisted, leaped back.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  She was in my arms, sobbing, “What’d I do? What’d I do?”

  “I’ll come back for you,” I said.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Then I’ll take you away tonight.”

  “I can’t stand any more!”

  “Then come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Butcher Haynes is giving me a shanty. We’ll save.”

  “Save.”

  She pulled from me, crossed her arms low, not defensively. “You better go, Gale. You better go and never come back.”

  And what was I to say to that? She was out of her gourd, nuts.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  She pushed me. Not hard, but steady, and then backed away. “Go.”

  Still, I stood.

  She stepped into me, arms locked, and drove me back. My legs were numb and I lost my balance. I sat on the cold ground looking up at her, mostly a shadow. “Just go,” she said.

  I walked away, not believing, wondering. I was the only one that cared a whit for her, and me willing to work my guts out to keep her safe and sane seemed better than the alternative, being her daddy’s plaything.

  I arrived at Bittersmith more bewildered than when I’d left Haudesert’s, and spent half the night pacing to stay warm in an alley that sheltered me from a breeze running up Main. I started back to Haudesert’s a half-dozen times thinking I’d steal her away and she’d see things more clearly, later. But each time I started I stopped, always for a different reason. The last was petty insecurity. She’d been with her father and favored him. My mind couldn’t reach far enough to grasp another possibility, and I resigned by dawn that I would someday revisit Gwen, but not before I was in a position of strength. When I had money in my pocket and I wouldn’t be leading her deeper into desperation, I’d try again.

  I was at Haynes’s before dawn and sat on his doorstep. Haynes looked at me as he approached, and by the time he reached me the confusion writ on his face had disappeared and he said it would be a big day.

  “Monday we slaughter. Thursday we slaughter. Where’s your things?”

  “What things?”

  “Your stuff.”

  “I’ve got no stuff.”

  He fished a key from his pocket. He blinked a few times, and since I was still there he said, “Come inside.”

  Since working for Burt hadn’t made me rich, and since taking care of Gwen would require dollars, I decided not to give away my labor for nothing. “What terms am I working under, sir?”

  “We’ll work something out.”

  “Can we do that now?”

  He stood with the key in the lock and said, “You think we could make coffee?”

  “Okay.”

  I followed him. He tidied a couple shelf items, barbeque sauce and mayonnaise jars, as he walked by, and at the back by the entrance to a darkened room, he took a giant coffee percolator from a small table and ducked into a closet.

  “What you figure your time’s worth?” he said.

  Minimum wage was one-sixty and a man can’t take care of a woman on that—but a man can’t demand more than he’s worth and expect to have employment. “I’ll work harder than anyone you ever saw. What’s that worth to you?”

  “I start my help at two bucks an hour, and you get scraps, and that saves the budget.”

  “Then I’ll work even harder,” I said, giddy like I hadn’t been awake all night.

  Haynes looked at the coffee pot. “What am I doing this for? I’ll show you one time.” He demonstrated disassembling the percolator and washing it. The faucet splashed to a floor-level concrete basin with a drain and built-up walls two inches high. Later, I’d see that just about every liquid you could imagine went down that drain, and I’d understand the smell that the water forced out of it.

  By the time I’d seen Haynes stun a half-dozen cattle, slit their necks, and let them stand until they bled out and buckled, I’d had my answer about whether a professional killer did it any different. When a cow walks between ever-narrower steel bars until she stands over a drain and can’t wiggle sideways and smells the blood that’s only been hosed away a few minutes before, her eyes say she knows what’s coming. She’s been dreaming of it—wide-awake dreams—since she was standing outside. As if the shed full of salted cowhides baking in the sun didn’t clue her in. There’s no way to make death mechanical yet beautiful. It is always ugly, and those about to die see it.

  * * *

  I was sleeping in Haynes’s shed when a clatter outside roused me. I had left a dozen metal shelves stacked precariously. I’d been stripping them with an electric drill and a wire wheel. The noise was a bolt of sobriety through an intricately detailed dream. I lay awake and beautifully warm in my cot between two wool blankets with my winter coat on top of my upper half.

  It was a strange time for Haynes to make a racket.

  I held my wind-up alarm clock to the moonlight coming through the window. Two in the morning.

  A thief?

  I jumped into my pants and boots and grabbed a section of pipe leaning against the wall. I threw open the door and, bursting outside, collided with a hooded figure. She gasped. She was shorter than me. Dark hair flowed from under the hood.

  “Gale?”

  Her voice was hoarse. Seductive.

  “Let me in.” She’d placed a travel bag beside the door. She was a runaway. I stepped back, and she swelled forward. I hung my coat on a nail and leaned the pipe back against the wall.
/>   “Who are you?”

  “Shhhh.”

  I looked past her to the silver night, saw nothing out of sorts. “Who are you?”

  She slipped past me. “Does a girl need a name to come in out of the cold?” She collided with my cot and fell onto it. “Close the door. Come sit beside me.”

  I stepped outside, looked around. Across the dirt side street, dead leaves fluttered crisply on frozen wind. I went back inside and closed the door.

  “What kind of trouble are you in?”

  “All of them.” She giggled, but her shrill voice was frosted with desperation. She mumbled something under her breath mixed with more giggles. “Every kind of trouble there is. Are you going to save me, Gale G’Wain? Because I can’t go home.”

  “How do you know me?”

  “Sit down. I’ll tell you everything.”

  I sat at the other end of the cot, and tried to remain utterly upright. But the more I slumped, the more I recognized the danger of being supine. She pulled off her coat, and the glow of her white sweater revealed a chest like to find gold in.

  I wanted to stop her, but I watched.

  “You must be cold,” she said. “Don’t you want to get back under the blankets?”

  “Look here. I don’t know who you are or what you’ve got in mind, but you can’t stay here. I asked if you’re in trouble and you just giggle.”

  She leaned toward me. “You think I am trouble, is that it?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Liz.”

  “You assume much, Liz.” I crossed the small floor and rested against the workbench. My hot plate knocked over a glass of water, and I stooped to unplug the plate from the outlet below the bench. I backed from under the shelf and bumped into Liz. She dragged her hand along my groin. I jumped and rattled the hotplate again. “What are you doing?”

  I knew what she was doing.

  I liked what she was doing and I hated myself for liking it. Gwen had convinced me we were through, and the only thing preventing me from bedding this crazy giggling fool was my fear. An ugly part of me rose up and I wanted to take her. I wanted to stake a claim upon her like no man had ever done. I seized her by the shoulders and she seemed startled by my decisiveness. I leaned to her and she thrust up her chin. I pushed my hands under her top and felt the warm softness of her back. She lost her balance and lurched against me. Her hand slipped between us. Down.