by Craig Nova
He picked up the rifle and walked back along the road he had driven in on, looking for a piece of high ground with good cover, below which there wouldn’t be much brush. He stopped when he came to a clearing in the woods, above which, on the bank, a couple of old pine trees grew, each as big around as a barrel. He began to climb. At least he’d have good visibility.
The sun had come out in the afternoon, and it would be behind him. It felt good as he sat there, waiting. He knew that they would come, since the tracks of the cruiser at the beginning of the woods road would show that someone had driven up here, and when they began to check every road off the main one, they would surely see the marks. When they came along, they would approach from his left. He was about thirty feet above the road they would be on. A tree would give him cover and a rest to keep the forearm steady. He knew that the best way to hit someone who was moving wasn’t to move the sights with him, but to keep them steady and just ahead of the man he wanted to shoot. Let him walk into it.
Kohler began to push the leaves away from his feet in a widening circle about five feet across. He wanted to have just the bare earth under his feet, since if he didn’t have to worry about stepping on the leaves, he would be much quieter. No one would hear if he moved a little. He looked down at the brown dirt he stood on, soft and a little loamy. His feet moved in it without making a sound. Then he looked around, feeling the sunlight on his back. The caress of it made him think of the girl with the red hair.
She had a gift for reducing problems to their basic elements, and while she was superficial, with her Kool-Aid-dyed hair, her slang, and her teeny-bop clothes, she made him think that other, larger matters could be easily understood. It wasn’t the simplicity of his circumstances that made him try to recall her red hair and her goofy smile, but how she would have made sense of this. The weight of the rifle and the certainty of what was coming was her kind of clarity, and even though he was glad she was gone, he still missed her. But the more he thought about her, with his feet on that circle of earth, the more he realized that this was about understanding. Or doing something that was to the point and definite.
The sunlight slanted through the woods, and in the long, cathedral-like lines of it, he saw the shadows of the trees delineated as though they were part of an art-deco design. The lines of light and shadow, the absolute stillness, hit him with a sense of longing and regret. No one wants to die. You always think of it as coming sometime, and everyone knows it is coming, but even so, in that final instant, you think, Not now. He swallowed. Well, this is another item to make definite, his fury about this last, horrifying regret. He stood there shaking, looking down at the wood road, ready to face everything that he couldn’t shake.
He imagined the smell in the house where he had grown up, the aroma of rum and coke and the scent of perfume too expensive for someone like his mother to use. He remembered his uncle’s house, too, and the bags from the fast-food places, McDonald’s and Taco Bell, which was the best part: the paper had been clean. Then he thought of one of the Bob Jacks who had told him that he should never back down in a fight, that if he was going to have to fight, he should fight to win, and that there was nothing to do but to realize that that was the way things were. This brought him to a teary state again. The way things were. Well, he had some ideas about what to do about that.
He thought of Katryna’s desire to be a train conductor and how she wanted to have a blue uniform with a hat with a gold badge on it and with brass buttons on the tunic. That was the word she’d used: tunic. He said it out loud. Then he thought of that click, click, click of the paper punch. He could remember the sound of it from the few times he and his mother had taken the train from Northampton to New Haven to go to the discount mall there, where he had been so happy to get a North Face coat that was a second. No one could see that the zipper didn’t work. The reason Katryna had wanted to be a conductor was—or so she’d said—that on a train you were always getting away from somewhere. But now, as Kohler stood there desperately trying to remember the sound of that paper punch, he realized that yes, you can get away, but one day you are going to arrive, too.
He wondered how long it would be. The sun lay across his back and he closed his eyes from time to time as he trembled in the warmth.
Kohler noticed that the shadows of the trees all moved along together with the inexorable sweep of a sundial. As the sun moved, it settled in directly behind him, or that was the way it would seem to anyone walking on the road. Every now and then, no matter how hard he tried not to, he still moved his feet around in that brown circle.
He looked at the empty sky, just as he noticed, too, that these woods were unusually quiet. Even the smallest sounds and movement, which was a matter of small birds, like chickadees, had vanished, and as he sat there, trying not to move, he wondered if these creatures were able to sense something about to happen. He guessed it was possible. But he wished the birds would return, not because he cared about them, or wanted to see the small shapes of them, the chickadees flitting around like torn bits of black and white cloth, but because he didn’t want the unnatural lack of sound to give him away. The dirt had thawed out in the circle at his feet and he smelled the acrid odor of it, like something at once familiar and yet unknown. The odor, perhaps, of a newly dug grave.
He had often seen vultures. They circled over the dump on the other side of the river, lifting together in a slow, wheeling circle, like bits of ash rising from a smoldering fire. He guessed that their feathers were black and as shiny as those long-playing vinyl records they used to have when he was a kid. That wheeling circle, those somber colors, or the spectral sunlight on them as they turned around and around, all meant something to him: that movement, around the attraction of a particular place, was precise in the face of everything that was vague and uncertain, and of course it was a sign of a final thing. He thought he should be able to take comfort in finality, which was all he had, but it was just another item that left him concentrating on the weight of the rifle.
He thought of those times in winter when he’d had to go out on a call and hadn’t had the time to do a good job cleaning the snow off his car, and then, when he’d turned on the defroster, the snow had blown into the front seat. The golden and spectral particles revolved around him, like chaos visible, and yet like a hidden mystery that had just decided to let him have a glimpse of itself after all. And what was that mystery? Then, in a teary moment, he tried to say to himself, I don’t have time for that anymore. I am going to solve it. I am going to know.
No birds. Nothing. Not a sound aside from the occasional rush of a jet overhead. The trails those planes left were white scratches in an otherwise pale blue sky, and they reminded Kohler of the time he had seen a piece of glass scored with a diamond. He was glad the girl had gotten away. She was so skinny and had those funny moles. Then he went back to waiting. He wished he had slept with her, but then, pretty soon, he was going to find a way to do something about regret.
From the main road, he heard a dog bark. In the cool air the sound seemed to float, to come and go, and then to disappear altogether. Kohler stared in the direction from which the barking came, and as he turned his head now, putting an ear toward the road rather than his eyes, he imagined the open mouth, the red tongue, the sharp teeth. Then he tried to feel the warmth of the sun, but there wasn’t anything on his back except that slow, constant breeze, which came and went with an intermittent pressure. The dog went on barking.
RUSSELL BOYD
THE COMMAND POST HAD BEEN SET UP AT THE SIDE of the road in an old logging stage. At least it was a flat place, but now there were so many cruisers, from Vermont, New Hampshire, the Department of Fish and Game, and other outfits, like the U.S. Border Patrol, that it looked like a used-car lot for cruisers. In the center, two of them were parked side by side, nose to tail, one from Vermont and one from New Hampshire. That way the drivers could talk to each other just by speaking out the window. It was a method of trying to deal with the fact that V
ermont and New Hampshire used different radio frequencies.
Russell looked at the two of them and glanced away. It was makeshift, and not very reassuring. Still, the men here began to work their way through the reports that came in, sightings of Kohler, or small robberies that could have been done out of desperation, but then there were always a fair number of these. The troopers tried to act as though everything was business as usual, but many of the men had known Tony and liked him.
Russell was assigned to look into a report that Tony’s cruiser had been abandoned in the woods with the radio blaring. A boy had been out looking for his lost dog and heard the radio and seen tire tracks on the grown-over logging road. At least he’d had the sense not to go look for himself. The boy said that something about the unnaturalness of the noise made him walk down to the main road where he called the police. Still, it was hard to know what he had really seen and heard, since by the time Russell had been told to take a look, the report had gone through three dispatchers, a couple of troopers, and an administrator who had been called in to take charge. So, Russell drove to the beginning of the wood road where the tracks had been seen and waited for the other men who had been assigned to go along with him. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t have to go up there alone.
While he waited for the others he ate his sandwich, taking a bite, chewing slowly, and thinking about Zofia. He wished that he could have said something before he left, but what? That he cared about her? Would that have been sufficient? He didn’t know. The sandwich had been in a brown bag, and now he held the empty thing in his lap, not knowing what to do with it. He folded it up and left it on the seat.
The others began arriving. The first was a dog handler, a Vermont state police officer with graying hair. He was a tall man with a face that looked weathered, not by being outside in the winter, or in the heat of summer, but by looking into trouble. His name was Richard Bonowski. His German shepherd stood at the beginning of the wood road, tall at the shoulder, narrow in the hips, with very black eyes and pointed ears, and from time to time it looked in the direction they were going to go and barked. A man from the Department of Fish and Game arrived, too, Peter Michaels. He was in his forties and he was wearing the dark green uniform of a game warden.
“What’s it like up there?” Russell said to Michaels, who, he guessed, as a Fish and Game officer, must have walked over every square foot of Vermont. He gestured up the wood road.
“I don’t know,” said Michaels, who had red hair and blue eyes. “I’ve never been up here. But that’s where the cruiser is. I know the kid who heard it.”
“Heard it?” said Santini, a blond trooper from a northern barracks, whose car had pulled up after Michaels’s. “He didn’t see it?”
“No,” said Michaels. “He just heard a blaring police radio and came back out of there.”
The four men stood at the beginning of the wood road, and there was an air of uncertainty about them, although each one looked in the direction they were going to go. It was as though they were wired together: one looked up the wood road, which disappeared in a V of the two hillsides, then the next looked, and then the others. After that they checked a firearm or tried to see if a portable radio was working, but there was so much traffic on the airwaves that they couldn’t get through very often. The dog looked up the road, too, mesmerized, taking the air. They had started the dog on Kohler’s jacket, which had been in the black car.
Russell wished that one of them had a topographical map so he could have an idea of what the land was like, and how high the banks on either side of the road were. He wanted to know if they were steep right along, or if they flattened out, or if there was a seasonal swamp up there, although he guessed that it might be frozen now. How frozen? Enough to walk on? Would they have to walk between these banks right along, or would the landscape give them room to move around? Now, though, he just stood there, looking up the road and imagining what it was like, but this was a matter of guessing. That wasn’t the way to approach this, and he looked around again, trying to find the right attitude to walk up there, but what was that aside from trying to anticipate what he couldn’t see? Then he wished he had said something to Zofia. I’m lost without you. I couldn’t live without you. Was that true? Russell looked around at these hillsides and thought, Yes. It is. Well, maybe law school is the answer. Is that right?
The wood road looked like any other in this part of the state, two ruts that went between two hillsides covered with hemlock, pine, maple, and birch. The ground between the trees had a layer of cinnamon-colored leaves. Rhododendron and wild berry canes were at the side of the road and on the steep hillside. Everything about the place was unremarkable.
Everything here was so bland and unknown. What can you tell about a place that is undistinguished? Russell and the others had heard of sightings of a man who looked like Kohler in places a long way from here, and some of those reports had come from good observers. This only made for more vagueness, and none of the men here knew what they were really doing. Were they just checking out another false report, or was this something else? When Russell tried to think about it clearly, he couldn’t tell what, if anything, was concealed by the lousy radio connections, the lack of a map, the different sightings and the terrain, which forced them into the bottom of a V.
The air wasn’t very cold, and yet the shadows here hinted at those nights when it was ten below zero. Russell was hoping, he realized, that the guy was already dead, that is, if he was here at all. That was the likely thing. Then he thought that this was another useless desire. Nothing moved here, not a bird, not anything at all, and this left Russell considering how much he didn’t know, rather than what he did. He looked down at the dog again.
At least Russell had had a chance to eat the sandwich.
“Well,” said Bonowski. “We haven’t got all day.”
“No,” said Michaels. “I guess not.”
They started walking.
“What are you going to do for lunch?” said Santini.
“I don’t know,” said Michaels. “There’s a diner in the next town up.”
“Is it any good?” said Santini.
“Not really,” said Michaels, putting the back of his hand to his lips as though it gave him indigestion just to think about it.
Bonowski went first, with the dog. Michaels followed next in his dark green uniform, which stood out incongruously against the landscape, and Santini walked along after him. Russell came last. He heard the sound of the dog panting as it went along the ditch at the bottom of the hill, head down, sniffing. Santini had a rifle. The others had handguns. They stayed on the side of the road that the dog worked, that is, the right-hand side, and they looked uphill from time to time, where they saw the whitish sky and the timber that was as gray as an elephant.
The half-frozen leaves made a soft crunch. As they went, Russell thought about escape, or the keen and yet panicky pleasure that people took in living in the moment, when they were trying to get away on the highway. What was it like for a man and a woman to get lucky, to slip by him and then pull into a motel? Russell imagined the sound of the clothes being removed, the sudden, impatient whisper of underwear slipping down a smooth leg, the creak of a cheap bed, the sound of the distant highway. Did they feel love then, or was it just excitement? Then he thought, Stop it, stop it. He watched the moving heads on the wood road, going in and out of those slanted rays of light.
The dog went back and forth along the ditch at the side of the road where water had collected and frozen. The ice in the ditch made a white and shiny curve about five inches wide, that ran up the road and out of sight. The air from the hillside flowed down and pooled by the ice and then probably seeped along the slight grade the men had climbed. Russell thought, Being on this road is a mistake. It is the way in. If someone is waiting, he knows we are on it. Then he looked around again at the blue sky, which seemed to form a wall just behind the trees. Russell couldn’t tell if they should stop and think this over or if th
ey should just keep going. It all looked so ordinary.
He was angry, too, and wished he wasn’t, since all he wanted was to see the hillside through the perspective of an ordinary mood. Any other perspective was going to get in the way. The dog started barking and moving from side to side. The action of it, at the end of the leash, was like a kite in a wind, swinging this way and that.
“What’s that?” said Michaels.
“He’s got something,” said Bonowski.
“Well, let’s mark it,” said Michaels. His green uniform stood out there as he looked down at ice at the side of the road. “Rub your foot in the dirt here. Then we can check it out on the way back. I think the first thing is to get to the car.”
Russell waited, looking up the hill.
“All right,” said Bonowski.
He put the heel of his boot into the soil in the middle of the road, and made a line with it, turning up the dirt in a small furrow, just like a line that a child would make at the beginning of a game. They went up a little farther, with the sun just setting at the top of the ridge. White on a cream-colored sky, like sun above a desert. The dog started barking again.