by Blake Crouch
“Need to warn you, Ezekiel,” she said. “I wanna say something about our little whistle.”
Ezekiel stopped, faced his wife. It was so dark outside, he could only make out the whites of her eyes.
“Told you. We don’t talk about it.” The tremor in his voice was grief, not anger, and it made Gloria’s throat tighten.
“I just need to say something, Zeke. You don’t got to talk—”
He grabbed her arms. “Said I don’t wanna hear it.”
“But I need you to,” she said, and her eyes burned as they flooded. “I can’t go on tonight and tomorrow pretending it’s like it’s always been. Only been a year, and I miss him. That’s all I wanted to say. That I miss Gus so much, I can’t breathe when I think about him.” Her husband’s eyes went wide. He turned away from her, his nose running. “I’m empty, Zeke, ’cause we don’t talk about him. That don’t make nothing better. Just makes us forget, and do you wanna forget your son?”
Ezekiel sat in the snow. “I ain’t forgot Gus. Ain’t nothin in this whole god-damn world make me forget my boy.”
She knelt behind him, Ezekiel wiping his face and cursing.
“You reckon we’ll see Gus again when we die?”
“Glori, if I believed that, I’d a blowed my goddamn head off a year ago. This is above my bend. Why you doin this to me?”
“ ’Cause I don’t remember what he looks like! He’s just a blur in my head. Remember that day I wanted to get our picture made and you wouldn’t?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, goddamn you for that, Zeke.”
The wind had changed directions and the snow needled Gloria’s face. She turned her back to the barrage of ice. Ezekiel was saying something, but she couldn’t hear. She moved forward, their faces inches apart. She asked him what he’d said.
“Said he came halfway above my knee. Close your eyes, Glori, maybe you can see him. His hair was fine, color a rust, and his skin so white, we used to say it looked like milk. He had your eyes.” Ezekiel cleared his throat and wiped his face again. “And when I . . . Jesus . . . when I kissed his neck, my mustache would tickle him and he’d laugh so hard, scream, ‘No, Papa!’ ”
Gloria had closed her eyes. “Keep going, Zeke.”
“And he called my knee his horsey, and he named it Benjamin.”
Ezekiel had stopped. Gloria opened her eyes. Her husband was shaking. He leaned forward into her cape and wept.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s all right.”
“Naw, it ain’t,” he said. “I lie in bed sometimes and try to picture what Gus would a looked like at ten or fifteen or thirty. I imagine him turned out a man. We was robbed, Glori. It ain’t never gonna be all right again.”
Ezekiel picked himself up and then lifted Gloria in his arms, both covered in snow. She bawled as Ezekiel carried her up the hill toward their dark cabin in the grove of spruce.
TEN
B
art Packer glided through the darkness in his sleigh, the whisper of the runners drowned out by the clinking of chain loops and the singletree groaning in the cold. A half mile south of town, and with the snow blowing in every direction, he could hardly see beyond the horses.
He’d have missed it, but the horses knew the way, making the turn just past the grouping of snow-loaded firs. They pulled the sled up a series of switchbacks and after awhile slowed to a walk, their legs punching through the snow, their nostrils flaring like bellows, Bart slapping the reins against their rumps, hollering, “Get up there! Go on, girls!” They climbed several hundred feet above the floor of the box canyon. The trail leveled out. “Now get on!” he yelled, and he worked the reins furiously until the horses trotted in the powder.
He wasn’t rushing them out of meanness or impatience. Nothing riled Bart like the mistreatment of horses, but they were approaching the most dangerous section of the ride home, where the trail passed through a gap between steep slopes that produced slides every winter. If caught in an avalanche tonight, he’d have almost no chance of survival.
When the sled had passed safely through the gap, Bart drew up the reins and brought the horses to a halt. He stepped down into the snow. It rose to his waist. He unfastened an ax from the side of the sleigh and waded over to a pool of ice the size of a wagon wheel. He hacked at the mouth of the spring, chipping away the ice until he could see water flowing down the rock. He let the horses blow. While they drank, he climbed into the sleigh and pulled a flask from a pocket of his wool overcoat, then leaned back, wrapped in the buffalo robe, sipping brandy, listening to the pair of horses slurp the icy water.
Maybe it was the alcohol, but he imagined his lips tingled from their contact with Miss Hartman. He replayed the kiss. Why had he waited so long? ’Cause of your pride, man. Your fucking pride.
The horses lifted their heads and neighed. They backed away from the spring and stomped their hooves. Bart grabbed up the reins.
“What is it, girls?” His first thought was they’d sensed a slide. He peered up, listening for the rumble of snow raging down through the darkness above him, heard only the horses nervous ly clicking their teeth on the steel bits. He took a final swig of brandy, stuffed the flask into his coat, and had just lifted the reins to put his team into motion when one of the horses snorted.
Bart cocked his head, strained to listen. He heard the whoosh of animals struggling through deep snow. Two riders appeared twenty feet up the trail, their horses buried to their stomachs. It occurred to Bart that they resembled phantoms in the snow.
He blinked, half-expecting them to have vanished when his eyes opened, but they were still there, and close enough that he could see the clouds of vapor pluming from their horses’ nostrils.
“Evening!” Bart called out. There was no answer, and he thought maybe they hadn’t heard him, so he yelled, “Merry Christmas!” The rider on the left said something to his companion, and Bart heard the click of tongues. The riders came up on either side of the sleigh. They wore wide-brimmed hats topped with several inches of snow, had draped themselves in blankets and wrapped their faces in pieces of a torn muslin shirt, so that Bart could only see their eyes. Those belonging to the rider on his left exuded a cold focus. The other pair of eyes were wide and twitching with fear and nerves.
“Merry Christmas,” Bart said, more cheer in his voice than he felt, and wondered if he was facing a couple of road agents. “Hell of a storm. Ain’t on the prod. Just trying to get my ass to a fire—”
“I’d appreciate you shuttin that fuckin hole in your face.” The rider on the left had spoken, his voice low, metallic.
Bart said, “Sir, I’m sorry, I don’t understand what the problem—” The business end of a double-barreled scattergun peeked out from under the rider’s blanket. “You shoot that gun, sir, you’re liable to bring a slide down on us all.”
“Didn’t you hear what he said?” Bart looked at the rider on his right. He was smaller than his partner, much younger, barely a man, if that. But what struck Bart was his accent. Pure Tennessee.
“I don’t understand,” Bart said. “You work for me, son.”
The boy’s eyes darted to his companion, then back to Bart.
“N-n-n-n-not no more I don’t, Mr. Packer.” Bart saw the six-shot Colt patent revolver trembling in the boy’s hand, a huge sidearm, de cades old, a relic from before the war.
“Easy son,” Bart said, and though his intoxication had faded fast, he was far from clearheaded. He thought for a half second that maybe he’d been caught in a slide and was lying packed in snow, suffocating, hallucinating this nightmare. “What in holy hell are you doing? I don’t under—” The other man put his horse forward and rammed the barrel of the shotgun into Bart’s face. Blood poured through his mustache, between his teeth, down his chin.
Bart pulled off a glove and cupped his hand over his nose.
“Goddamn you, it’s broke!”
“Now go on and drive the sled up to your mansion. We gonna follow behind. D
on’t know if you got a shoulder scabbard, but I wouldn’t advise reachin into your coat for any reason. Rest assured I’ll err on the side a blowin your goddamn head off. Savvy?”
“What do you want? I’m a rich—”
“You remember what happened last time you opened that mouth? Now go on.” Bart lifted the reins and urged his team up the trail, his nose burning, tears running down his bloodied face. The riders followed close behind, and they hadn’t gone fifty feet when one of them retched into the snow.
The other muttered, “Christ Almighty.” Bart didn’t dare look back, but he figured it was the boy, wondered if he’d gotten sick because he was going to kill his first man tonight.
ELEVEN
I
t was almost ten o’clock, and Joss figured she’d seen all the customers she was going to see for the evening. But in no hurry to return to her cold jail cell, she didn’t disturb the deputy, who still snoozed comfortably beside the stove.
Lana had gone home for the night, and Joss hated to own up, but she missed the piano, sick as she was of the endless rotation of Christmas carols. Noise drowned out the hush of loneliness, though even loneliness was preferable to listening to that deputy blather on about what big shit he used to be down in Ouray. Joss had given serious consideration to cutting the young man’s throat while he slept—one deep swipe with the bowie she kept under the bar. She could picture his eyes popping open, him reaching for the revolver that she’d already slipped out of its holster, the puddle of blood expanding on the floorboards, sizzling where it touched the base of the stove. But that would just fuck everything up. Besides, where would she go, with Abandon as snowbound as she’d ever seen it? What was another twelve hours?
Joss smiled at the thought of Lana. On her way out, she’d actually bowed her head and mouthed “Merry Christmas”—by far the most verbose that pretty mute had ever been.
The front door swung open and the preacher walked inside and dusted the snow off his frock coat. Stephen Cole glanced around the dead saloon, then walked up and rested his forearms on the pine bar.
“Good evening,” he said.
“Evenin, Preach. Finally come to bend a elbow?”
Stephen smiled. Apparently, he’d left home without a hat, because his hair was wet with melting snow.
“Could I buy you a drink, Miss Maddox?”
“It’s Joss, and yes, always. You off your feed?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“You’re all gant up, just about the palest thing I ever saw.” She placed a new bottle on the bar, withdrew the cork, and set up two tumblers. “Pinch a cocaine with your whiskey?”
“No thank you.”
“Don’t reckon I ever got booze-blind with a man a God. Here’s to you—is it Reverend or Preacher or—”
“Stephen is fine, actually. Just Stephen.”
They clinked and drained their glasses, Stephen wincing.
Joss went to pour again, but Stephen waved her off. “No more of that snakehead for me, but you go right ahead.”
“I’ll mix you a cobbler.” She smiled. “Ladies seem to like it.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m gonna get a little more fine.”
Joss filled her glass. The preacher pulled two bits from his leather pouch, set it on the bar, but he made no move to leave.
“There somethin else I can help you with?” she asked.
Stephen pushed his hair behind his ears.
“Actually, I did have ulterior motives for coming here tonight.”
“And what might those—no, wait. Please, please, tell me you ain’t here to make some half-assed attempt to—”
“Save you? No. God saves. I am a very small part of that equation. Besides, it would be an insult to your intelligence for me to think I can convince you of your need for God. You’re a smart woman. You’ve lived many a year in this world and have certainly heard the Gospel at some point. You’ve chosen not to accept Him. It saddens me, certainly saddens God, but you have free will. I respect that.”
“Well, that’s a relief to hear. I didn’t relish the idea a throwin a Gospel sharp out on his ass, but I was prepared to.”
Stephen smiled. “I understand you’re to be sent back to Arizona in the spring to . . .”
“To be hanged. You ain’t gonna hurt my feelings sayin it.”
“Miss Maddox. Joss. I was walking home tonight from the Christmas Eve dinner, and I saw the lamps glowin in your saloon, and God put it on my heart to come in here.”
“He did.”
“I would like to pray for you, Joss. Right now. It’s Christmas Eve. You’re chained up behind a bar. I can’t imagine the fear you face at having to go back to Arizona next year. I thought I might say a prayer with you. If it could bring you any comfort at all, I would be most—”
Joss leaned toward Stephen. “You think I rejected God?”
“I just—”
“You said I had chosen not to come to God.”
“I just assumed—”
“You wanna hear a story about rejection? The cunt bitch who birthed me abandoned me in a alley in the California goldfields when I was a day old. Man who found and raised me put me up for three dollars to any son of a bitch who had a taste for ten-year-old pussy. Ever husband I ever had beat me. Now the way I figure it, God either approved or couldn’t be bothered to give a shit, so don’t come in here talkin to me about my rejection a God. I’d say He’s had His back to me ever since I took my first breath.” A vein had risen on Joss’s forehead and her big black eyes shone.
“You think God hates you?” Stephen asked.
“I stopped caring what He thinks or don’t think a me years ago.”
“Well, I can assure you that He loves—”
“Look, you don’t gotta come down here, hat in hand, makin amends for God. He knows where I live. He can come Hisself or not at all. Thanks for the gesture, Preach, but you’re barkin at a knot, and prayin with you ain’t exactly on my wish list this year. Now, I gotta close up.” She looked at the deputy. “Al! Get your ass up!”
The deputy startled into consciousness, instinctively touched the revolver at his side, his words slurring. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“We’re done for tonight,” Joss said. “Take me back to jail.”
“But it ain’t but—”
“Al, goddamn it, contradict me one more fuckin—”
“All right, Joss, you ain’t gotta yell.”
Stephen took a step back and regarded Joss with his sad, sweet eyes.
“Merry Christmas to you,” he said, and started for the door.
Stephen Cole stood under a streetlamp, watching the wind build snowdrifts against the storefront of a vacated barbershop. Across the street, on the second floor of the hotel, Molly Madsen sat in the bay window, looking down at him, her face weakly illuminated by the candle in her hands. He waved, whispered a prayer for her.
He followed the plank sidewalk for several blocks, then turned up the side street that led to his cabin.
His mind brimmed with thoughts of his home in Charleston, South Carolina—the palm trees and live oaks and saltwater marshes, the ocean at sunrise, the faces of his father and mother.
He had come west three years ago because he believed it to be the will of God, had felt compelled to minister to those who lived in these harsh environs.
What he had found were a thousand little towns high in the Rockies, built upon debauchery and greed.
I’ve accomplished nothing, he thought. God, show me one life in these mountains that has benefited from my presence.
Overcome, he knelt in the empty street and prayed until his face had gone numb and his body shook with cold.
Stephen rose to his feet and wiped the snow from his hair.
He’d taken two steps toward home when he heard it.
He froze. Forgot that he was cold. Forgot his loneliness.
He just stood there in the darkness and falling snow, a strange war
mth spreading through him. Having now heard it, he knew with certainty that all the other times, kneeling at the foot of his bed, sometimes hours in the silence, had been imagination and hoping.
It was simply his own name that he’d heard, but it filled him with such blinding peace that he didn’t question for a moment the source.
When God speaks to you, His voice is unmistakable.
2009
TWELVE
S
ix tubes of light swung through the fog that had settled in the canyon—a colony of headlamps moving toward the ruins of Abandon. The air carried the steel smell of snow, though none was yet falling. Night had arrived moonless and overcast, with a darkness Abigail had never imagined possible out-of-doors, like they’d all been locked into an im mense, freezing closet. She walked between Emmett and June, with Lawrence a few yards ahead, the two guides relegated to the back, with orders to stay close but quiet. Abigail had brought along her tape recorder and was collecting background information from the Tozers when Lawrence said, “Hold up!” They stopped. Lawrence shone his flashlight into the darkness ahead, the beam passing over a grove of spruce. “Can’t believe I found it in this fog. Here’s what’s left of the cabin of Ezekiel and Gloria Curtice.”
Abigail followed June into the grove. The small woman, swallowed in a red ski jacket, aimed her light at the rubble. Abigail saw a cookstove, cans, rusted bedsprings amid the detritus. Emmett slipped off his camera’s lens cap and began to circle the homestead.
Abigail said, “June, while Emmett’s taking photos, could you tell me how you two got involved with paranormal photography?”
June led Abigail away from the remains of the cabin. They stood apart from the others, separated by a lightning-fried spruce, headlamps off. “Ten years ago, our son, Tyler, was out riding his bicycle in the neighborhood. He was hit by a van. Died in the street.” Abigail found June’s hands in the dark. “Night after the funeral, Emmett and I were in bed, holding each other. We were talking about taking some pills. It’s a pain like you cannot . . .