Cold Quiet Country

by Clayton Lindemuth

  “I sent Roosevelt to Coates’s.”

  “You sent—why are you here?”

  Odum kills the engine. Opens the car door and steps out. Spits, and spends a moment with his gaze pointed at the snow, studying the brown spit hole. He raises his eyes like he’s found his resolve. “I’m taking over.”

  “The hell—”

  He holds up his hand. “Go talk to the council. They feel the investigation will last more than one day. We’ve got two bodies and a fugitive, and the worst storm in thirty years coming through. Town leadership wants continuity.”

  “I’ll shove continuity up their asses. Up all your asses!”

  “You had any decency, you’d have stepped aside on your own. Not make other things an issue.”

  “Other things…”

  “Yeah, Bittersmith. Other things. You going to shove them up my ass, too?”

  He folds his arms and leans against the doorframe.

  Don’t this beat all? Odum’s found his sac.

  “You’ve had a good run. But that little episode out in the field…coroner saw you drop like a sack of meal and not get up. He was a hundred yards after you when you finally wobbled to your feet. Didn’t take three minutes for Coop to give up the details, ’cause he thought we’d be fetching two bodies across the field. You had a heart attack, and you’re still too stupid to call it quits.”

  “Real damn nice, that concern in your voice.” I pull my Smith & Wesson by the top of the grip, like to hand it over, and then snap the pistol into place in my hand. Point at his belly. “But it’s bullshit. All this is bullshit. I’m sheriff of this town.”

  “You’re an ex-sheriff about to get his ass thrown in the can.” He spits tobacco juice. “There’s other things you don’t want drawn into this, out in the light any more than they are. You want me to say it? Bring out your philandering ways? Half the town knows your connections to the Haudeserts.”

  I get a tingle in my arm and feel my pulse in the side of my head. Squeeze my teeth so hard I could bust them.

  “You got your stuff packed, Bittersmith. All that’s left is to take off that badge. So take the Bronco back to the station and do whatever the hell you planned to do after you retire. Leave the badge on the desk. You ain’t sheriff no more.”

  He climbs back inside his vehicle. “You want to move that fuckin’ Bronco off the drive?”

  I get an idea. I’ll bet a sow’s rear tits Odum ain’t going to like it.

  I lower my gun and stare until the pressure in my chest backs off a notch. “Yeah, I see things your way, Odum. You handle the lawin’.”

  I get back inside the Bronco and reverse to the farm. You handle the fuckin’ law side.

  * * *

  I’ve spent today like a man on death row, believing I had a certain number of hours before the end. Now I feel like they’re marching me to the chamber eight hours early.

  “Fenny—you get word from Roosevelt?” I un-thumb the radio. The road bounces me and Fenny comes through broken with static.

  I’ll wait.

  I arrive at the station and first thing see Travis’s car is gone. Could be nothing. Could be Marge Whitmore wouldn’t stop calling until someone came and cleaned her steps. Travis is the kind of boy who’d volunteer on the first call. But I know it wasn’t Marge that called him. It was Odum.

  Inside, Fenny jumps from her seat and races to me. “Good Lord!”

  “Don’t call me that,” I say.

  She touches my cheek with her hand, pushes them old tits against my belly. I give one a squeeze.

  “You look like hell, you old fool,” she says.

  “I liked ‘Lord’ better.”

  “Sager said what you was up to, marching out into the storm, and you wouldn’t let him go instead. Then have yourself a heart attack. Lincoln County’s got sixteen inches and it’s coming our way. And you out there in it.”

  “Sixteen?”

  “That’s so.”

  “Been a little while since you had sixteen inches.”

  “You’re confusing your metric system again.” She pours coffee and I sit on the corner of her desk.

  “What’s word from Odum?”

  Fenny hesitates, like she’s wondering if I’m allowed to know what the new sheriff is up to. “No word, other than Roosevelt called in that there’s smoke at the Coates farm. It’s in the log, there.”

  “In the log? Where was you?”

  “Across the street. Lunchtime. Travis took the call.”

  “Where’s Travis?”

  “He said Mrs. Whitmore phoned.”

  Fenny depresses the switch and speaks into the microphone. “Travis, you there?”

  Static.

  “Travis?”

  His voice comes through. “Roosevelt’s not at his car, Fen. You better tell Sheriff Bittersmith to boogey on up here.”

  “We’ll get somebody up there. Bittersmith don’t boogey.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I stand at the window and ponder spending the night at Doctor Coates’s house. Ice has frozen to the pane in a pattern like a thousand snowflakes holding hands.

  Behind the pattern—through it—black dots move on the lake.

  I press my palm to the glass and melt the ice. Wipe it aside with my sweater sleeve.

  Those spots could be deer. Loose cattle. A posse of men from town. They could be anything, but they are not. I open the window six inches and reach for the .308 leaning against the sill. Drop to my knees and find a good picture through the scope.

  Six snowmobiles. Cal, Jordan, and a few of the Wyoming Militia, if I’m right.

  They’ll arrive in minutes.

  Cal is crazy as a rabid dog. Some of his talk around the supper table, once he could get around on a cane, would’ve had a man hanged for sedition in earlier times. He said if one true patriot just had the onions, he’d go put a bullet in Nixon’s head and spare us from the fascists. The oligarchs. The polygarchs. The petrogarchs. I didn’t know half his words because he minted so many. But he was all for shooting politicians, and in general, anybody else. When I approached the house on Christmas night and felt a rifle trained between my shoulder blades, I imagined Cal’s face behind the sights.

  The snowmobiles come.

  Jordan held the same opinion of Cal. I spent the better part of a month walking alongside a hay wagon throwing bales up to him. My arms got tore up like I’d slap-boxed a cat and got the worst of it, and in the sun, sweat glazed my skin and it wouldn’t have been any worse if I’d have gone to the kitchen and rubbed a handful of salt into the cuts. The only part of the whole process I enjoyed was climbing on top of the wagon for the ride home. The work didn’t permit much jawing, but up on top in the wind, bouncing along like we were riding stilts, by and by we’d strike a conversation.

  One day we got on the subject of the toughest people we knew, and I mentioned Dan Burkett, a boy from the Youth Home who was part Irish and part ox. He had shoulders like twenty-pound rump roasts and his neck was wider than his head. He wasn’t afraid to tuck anyone in his arm, holler “Noogies!” and beat his skull.

  “He’d chuck bales like these all day long, and all night too.”

  “Well,” Jordan said, “before Cal busted every bone in his body, he could toss a bale clean over. You could stand on top and jump as it come over, and still miss.”

  “I don’t know. Sounds like a wasted effort. Like maybe he’s a bit touched.”

  “Oh, he’s sharp as a tack. Wily-sharp.”

  “How’d he manage to fall off that beam, then? And get himself in a body cast? That’s crazy. Not smart.”

  “Crazy? You don’t have a clue.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He’ll do it someday. All his talk about killin’ politicians.”

  “He’s got a ten-gallon mouth.”

  “Windier than a bag of assholes. But he’ll do it. He will. All he wants is to prove he’s the toughest, meanest, whatever. You heard the story about him chasing
a gutshot deer around a hill thirty times?”

  “Right?”

  “You know what he did when he found it?”

  “You were there?”

  “Of course I was there.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “It was still alive. I said I was going to finish him, and had my .30-30 at the base of his neck, so I wouldn’t bust his skull and cave his rack. Cal said ‘Hold up,’ and kicked him in the teeth.”

  “So someday,” I said, “when he’s squeezing the trigger and there’s a fat cat politician at the business end of the barrel, where’ll you be?”

  “Maybe sitting in the getaway car, listening to the radio.”

  “You’re batshit crazy too,” I said.

  “Yeah. I suppose. But I’m crazy loyal, see?”

  They’re all batshit. Burt was, and Cal, and Jordan. Jordan talked up his brother, but it wasn’t because he thought Cal was better, or smarter, or crazier. Cal might have been more daring, more needy of the spotlight. But Jordan was cunning. If someday Cal shoots a politician, he’ll have gotten the idea of which one to shoot from Jordan, and if either of the two is ever caught and electrocuted, it won’t be Jordan.

  I shift the riflescope from one snowmobile to the other and in the minutes that have elapsed, colors have begun to resolve. Two of the sleds are green.

  The Haudeserts had a shed to the left side of the barn where they stored things: a push lawnmower they never used, a chainsaw, and three green Skiroule snowmobiles.

  Two of the six approaching riders must be Cal and Jordan. If they sought me at Haynes’s Meats after gathering their posse and then took the fastest route back to Haudesert’s, they’d have crossed my tracks on a neck of field between the forest and the lake. Or, as long as it’s been, they might have gone back to the farm and followed me all the way here, in which case they’ll blame me for Burt and Gwen both. There won’t be any explaining to do. Not with Cal already wanting to kill and Jordan urging him on.

  The snowmobiles advance across the lake. I aim the scope high, then pull my eye away and focus without the lens. Eight hundred yards? I don’t know. I’ve never shot eight hundred yards, and don’t know if a bullet will drop a foot or ten.

  They’ve got murder in their hearts but I’ve got to give them the opportunity to prove it.

  Besides, Sergeant York faced a line of attacking Huns and shot the last one first, and then the next so the closest wouldn’t see his comrades fall and lose heart, stop the attack.

  I wait.

  Three hundred yards is my guess. Two-cycle engine noise comes muffled through the falling snow. The sleds are green and red, like Christmas.

  Two hundred yards. The noise separates into the distinct sounds of different engines. I see individual riders on the sleds, each man with a scarf across his face and goggles over his eyes.

  Where’s the safety? I haven’t checked the rifle. I didn’t dry fire it. Nervous, I crack the bolt and confirm a chambered round. The safety is forward, but does that mean it’s on? I push it back, and hope it operates as Mister Sharps’s did.

  At one hundred yards the snowmobiles fan and one of the green sleds follows my tracks to where I dropped through the ice. It splashes ahead, throwing water ten feet to each side. The sled bounces over the bank. Another is at the corner where the stream feeds the lake. They’re only thirty yards away, maybe, coming from six angles, and I can’t see each at the same time. I glance from one to the next and the middle rider waves a pistol in the air with his left hand. His right is on the throttle.

  They’re coming full speed, but without closing in, as if they intend to pass the house and keep going. I hunker lower.

  The man with the pistol aims it toward the window as he zooms closer. He fires and I duck but I don’t move a quarter-inch before the window shatters above me and there’s a thwack at the other side of the room.

  The snowmobiles roar around the house, both sides.

  I had a feeling from the beginning that there was no way this would end good.

  * * *

  Gwen and I spent the night in her father’s barn wrapped in coats and each other’s arms, tangled in kisses.

  We should have left—but we’d gone there to talk, and touch. As the wind outside grew shriller, it was like the air was rarefied and intoxicating.

  I couldn’t think.

  Life is a harsh sport. The memory of rugged things improves the memory of soft things. The barn was frozen and outside, the harvest season had long ago faded into winter, the season of death. The air was winter-clean. The sky was brittle with stars and moonlight. But in our nest of hay, cozied between two winter coats, our talk drew away from escape, and we were warm giggles and sweet breath and perfumed hair, trapped in the forever green scent of hay and body heat.

  Hours had passed. I expected at any moment to poke my head above the coat and find dawn upon us. We drifted in and out of sleep. Sometimes I would wake and realize I was kissing her, and she too was waking—so that both of us were roused by the other’s kisses. As if something bigger than both of us had commanded us to forget saving our futures and love in the present. Our passion seemed beyond our wills. My hands over her body, hers across mine. My fingers probing. Hers grasping and guiding. My hips thrusting. Hers receiving.

  When I finished she held me against her, and locked her legs around mine. I propped my weight on my elbows and let my forehead rest in a tangle of her hair. Before long I slipped to the side a little so I could ease the weight off my arms, and we fell asleep again, all the while me inside her.

  “GUINEVERE!”

  I jumped. It was light out and the hay over us was frosty with our condensed breath. I was stuck in her, dried to her. I grunted. She inhaled. I eased back, and she bucked, saying, “Fast, just pull!”

  “Gwen! I know you’re in there…”

  “Oh shit!” I said. “Oh shit.”

  “Quick!” she said, hand on my hips, pushing.

  I jerked away, rolled aside. She scrambled for her bottoms and I struggled into my underwear, still on one leg, and realized I’d slipped my boot back on after taking my underwear down and now couldn’t fit my booted foot through the leg hole, and I’d have to take the boot off again. She searched on top of the coat and then under the coat for her underclothes and quit looking.

  “Guinevere! Come out! You too, Gale. I goddamn warned you.”

  I shoved my boot through my underwear and the heel caught. I ripped it through.

  The barn door creaked open and a shaft of morning light spilled inside. I slipped my boot off and wove my foot through a pant leg cold as the snow outside, then shoved my foot back into the boot. I had to face him dressed.

  Lord, my heart pounded.

  I cinched my belt and tied my shoe. I took Gwen’s face in my hands and pressed my forehead to hers and with my eyes open and her eyes open I said, “I love you, Guinevere Haudesert, and don’t you ever forget how much.”

  I pulled away to the edge of the loft.

  “Don’t!” she said.

  I looked back and she crawled closer. I went over the side and found the ladder rungs and while I climbed down, Burt started talking.

  “Just what I figured. An alley cat.”

  Burt worked sideways, his stance like a football player’s. Arms wide. Knees bent. Low center of gravity. Legs ready to pounce. A man who’d decided his opponent was more likely to run than throw a punch. A man who’d decided there was no way in hell someone was going to get past him. He shifted closer and closer to the workbench, and I figured he planned to grab a pipe wrench or a hammer.

  I stood at the base of the ladder with one hand on it.

  “Burt, you got to let us get married. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “What do you know about right!”

  “Are you going to try to kill me again? Because I love your daughter and want to take care of her? What’s wrong with you?”

  He hefted a crescent wrench; in one motion he wound up like a baseball player
and whipped it at me. The wrench spun end over end in a whirling silver circle and missed me by a few inches.

  I moved sideways. I wanted him outside, away from all those tools. Eventually he’d hit me with one and then I’d be in trouble. I kept stepping to my left, and he sorted through tools, lifting and dropping them with frustrated jerky movements.

  “Burt, you can’t do what you been doing with her forever. It ain’t the way of things.”

  He chucked a screwdriver at me, but with too much follow-through. It bounced off the floor a couple feet past me. He looked up and I lifted my eyes to what he saw—a two-by-four suspended by a rope where we’d hung the hogs to cool after slaughter.

  Burt lit up.

  “Gale, I always liked you. You worked good on the farm…” He held his eyes on mine and talked slow like he was charming a snake while he gradually made his way to the end of the workbench, to an electric grinding wheel.

  I crept toward the entrance, still open, and met him with the same tone. “I liked working for you, and I appreciated having a place to sleep and make my living…”

  “Then how’s come you went trying to steal a sixteen-year-old girl?”

  “Well how did you figure it was right to poke your sixteen-year-old daughter?”

  Burt was a flash of motion; he reached to the bench and grabbed something dark and hurled it. Pain shot through me. A deer knife stuck from my leg. It had brown and white hair sticking to the handle and clumps of deer fat dried to the finger guard. The blade had found my leg bone and the pain was so sharp I couldn’t see straight and could barely stand.

  Burt strode toward me with another knife in his hand.

  I pulled the knife in my leg—but the point was buried in bone.

  Burt trod closer, easily. “What’d you think, boy? You’d come here and have your way with my family? Do as you damn well please and no one’d do anything about it? In my house? With my little girl?”

  I fell. Landed on my ass and kicked back a couple feet. He towered above, switched the knife from one hand to the other, as if debating whether he was going to slice my throat from the left or the right.

  “Daddy! No!” Gwen teetered at the loft edge, fifteen feet away, twelve feet high. She’d donned her pants and top.