by Paula Guran
By the time the rains came, we didn’t have much left in us besides a whisper. There wasn’t a way out, and the words that might have found one were hard to cough up. Honest explanations, sob stories, alibis . . . even the truth seemed like begging. Russell couldn’t do it, and I didn’t want to. If you asked me, our words belonged in our bellies the same as our guts. Our stories, too. Wrapped up in our skins, locked in bone houses we’d built for them . . . way down deep.
Like they say: to each his own. It was that way for me and it was that way for Russ. We fell into silence. Summer slipped into fall. The black wind howled, and the rain beat down. The fruit rotted on the vine. Russell got a cough. I listened to it night after night in one tent or another, and soon I heard little else. The cough rattled, and it made me think of a desperate man trying to pick a safe, twisting the dial ’round and ’round, the tumblers never falling in place. But the dial spun on, and the storms drenched the land, and our work washed away in a flood. And soon there was nothing to do but turn our backs on the fields and orchards, the rain and the mud.
We found a new way of doing things.
A way that let us put away our words for good.
No more honest explanations. No sob stories. No alibis.
We started over.
We did our talking with a gun.
The first one was a .38 missing the pistol grips. Russell took it from the labor contractor who tried to cheat our crew out of one last payday, a mouthy little runt named Koslow. Russ also took the bankroll Koslow was going to pocket for himself. Only the idiot didn’t get the message. He figured he was still the boss, and he started jabbering about company muscle and cops and what was going to happen to us.
So Russ smacked him around with the busted pistol. As big as Russ was, it was like watching a tiger bat around a house cat. Koslow was lucky it ended that way. Russell carried a German trench knife in a steel scabbard that hung from his belt, and I had no doubt he knew how to use it. Anyway, the bastard was smart enough to shut up before it came to that, and we took his car keys to seal the deal.
We never paid a price for what we did. At least, not the kind of price you’d figure. And if what we did felt good, Russell didn’t say so and neither did I. I didn’t say anything about how the roll of greenbacks felt tucked into my pants pocket, either. But the truth is that having those bills in my jeans gave me a hard-on . . . the first one I’d had in months. Jesus, life is funny.
The stolen Ford took us north of Fresno. We bought some groceries at an Armenian market along with a few bottles of bootleg wine. I picked up a local paper and a local map. Pickings were slim, but I knew what I was looking for. I checked the obituaries and circled a few addresses, and we drove around casing houses. The rain had slacked off at long last, but that black dog of a wind was still behind us . . . ahead of us . . . everywhere. It raged like a twister and wiped away the clouds, pushing them over the mountains to the east. The sky it left behind was as flat and gray and empty as the country roads we traveled.
The Ford’s bald tires hummed over blacktop as we drove from one house to the next. I crossed addresses off the obit page as we went – most of the places were in town, with too many neighbors around. Finally we found an old ramshackle farmhouse just past the outskirts where the windows didn’t light up at night.
The house was surrounded by overgrown fields, set back from the road down a gravel drive that twisted through an old stand of eucalyptus. We parked the car, and Russell yanked his German Nahkampfmesser from its steel scabbard. In his big hands it looked like a butter knife. Two seconds later he levered open the back door, and that was that.
Inside, there was nothing to greet us but a boxed-up sour smell – not like death, but the kind of feral scent that lingers in a house when there’s an animal holed up in the crawlspace. Either way, the stink didn’t bother me. Even a dead man’s clapboard was a big step up from a leaky tent in a migrant camp. And anyway, the smell wasn’t so bad on the second floor.
There were two bedrooms upstairs. We couldn’t tell which one had belonged to the dead man. To tell the truth, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to me was that my bed was soft, and I slept better in it than I had in months. My brother was another story. That lingering cough had Russell up and down all night. He must have memorized every corridor. Hearing him move around in the darkened house, I wondered if my brother had ended up in the dead man’s bedroom, even toyed with the idea that Russell’s cough was some kind of ghostly echo. That’s the way things would have ended up in a pulp magazine. But I tried not to think about it, and eventually that twister wind spun over the old gables and took those sounds away.
The only bathroom was next to Russell’s bedroom. It was a dull little pocket with a burned-out lightbulb and a little bit of a window set high near the ceiling. Most nights that window allowed enough moonlight to let you do what you needed . . . or maybe it allowed too much. In the middle of the second night, Russ smashed the bathroom mirror. He said he saw a shadow moving behind the glass. He slept better after that, though some nights I was sure I heard him rooting around in that dark bathroom, shifting pieces of that broken mirror in the sink like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But Russ never said a word about it, and I didn’t ask.
I’d get up in the morning, and the broken glass would still be there. I’d wash up, my eyes staring at me from the same broken shards as they had the day before. Russell never did clean up the mirror. Of course, I didn’t clean it up, either. I could have, but I didn’t want to mess with it. After all, I hadn’t broken the thing, and I figured we’d earned letting things go at least a little bit after busting our asses to survive for so long. Even if it couldn’t last, it seemed a stretch of rest was the least we deserved before we faced up to whatever was coming next.
Slice it up neat and clean: We both knew that we should move on. But neither one of us said it, and one day seemed to snake into the next before we could make a new start. I gained a few pounds eating the groceries we’d bought at that Armenian market. Russell drowned the last of his cough in wine. He’d developed a taste for the grape in France and slept sounder for it now, but it didn’t help where it really counted. A couple slugs too many and Russ would end up out in the scrubby yard beneath the moon, staring at the stars with that lone eye of his, shouting at the cosmos in gutter Deutsch I figured he’d learned from a German whore. The dead man’s house was in the sticks – there was no one around to hear but me . . . except the sky, I suppose – and it sounded like my brother was cursing the gods, or maybe their absence.
Those words spilled out, and across the fields, and into the night. Maybe there was nothing to understand in them at all. I just sat in the house and listened. There wasn’t much else to do. We hadn’t found a radio, and there wasn’t a single book in the whole place . . . not even a pulp magazine. I loved those things, but no dice here. The only reading material was that local newspaper I’d bought at the market. I read it over and over, until I got the idea that simple act had set the whole world in stone. So I burned the paper in the fireplace. After that I fell asleep in an armchair while Russell drank and shouted at the stars.
Late that night I awoke to the sounds of my brother’s screams. I crossed the room in two steps. Headlights washed the front of the house. A black Nash was parked on the gravel driveway. I snatched open the front door and the cold wind blasted me along with sounds that would have been right at home in a backwoods butcher shop.
But that didn’t slow me down, because those sounds were coming from my brother. I crossed the porch and hit the scrubby grass in a dead run. Russell was down on his knees, his screams gone now, grunting as two guys worked him over with switchman’s clubs. I tackled the first one before he saw me coming and rammed him against the Nash. His head hit the fender with a sickening thud, and that spelled lights out. By the time I grabbed the switchman’s club from his hands and turned to face his partner, Russ had already gone to work.
Bark peeled as Russ shouldered his atta
cker against a thick eucalyptus. Then he moved in low, hooking to the belly like Dempsey, punching so hard I thought the stranger would spit up his liver. The guy was finished before he dropped, but Russ was just getting started. His left hand whipped back, fingers closing around the trench knife that hung at his side.
It took everything I had in me to grab Russ and pull him away before he could turn that German steel loose. Even so, the stranger shrank away like a dead man. His long black overcoat gathered around him as he collapsed, as if he were sinking through a trapdoor. Another second and he wasn’t moving. Neither was the guy by the Nash.
We didn’t need to yank their wallets to find out they were private cops set with the task of rousting squatters for a local bank, but we yanked their wallets anyway. They had thirty bucks between them. Toss in the Nash, and it amounted to a fair night’s work. We dragged them inside the dead man’s house and trussed them up. Then we closed the door behind us, and we left the two of them in that house with its feral smell, and the ashes of the last newspaper I’d ever read, and a busted bathroom mirror that tossed moonlight at the shadows.
Outside, the wind was dying off. The moon was brighter now. Pale, watching. The bats were out, circling in its cold glow, gobbling any insects that dared to flap wings.
I started the Nash and we backed out of the driveway. The headlight glow spilled across the front of the old house, and we left it behind us in the darkness.
It was time to move on.
Once we were clear of Fresno, we made a quick stop to search the car. There was nothing much up front – a couple salami sandwiches in a paper bag, a couple bottles of bootleg beer, and a map in the glove compartment that was folded up in a jumble. A town up north was circled in red, but its name – New Anvik – didn’t ring a bell. Besides, any destination we might set would come later. At the moment all we wanted to do was put some distance between us and the dead man’s house.
But first we’d finish checking the Nash. The real jackpot was locked in the truck – a pump-action shotgun and a couple boxes of 00 buckshot shells. I guess it was just dumb luck the bank muscle had opted to start things off with clubs instead of the trench gun. We wouldn’t make the same mistake. We stowed the Winchester in the backseat, tossed an old blanket over it, and headed north.
We blew through Merced and Modesto. Outside Stockton, we snatched a new license plate for the Nash. Breathing a little easier, we ate some burgers at a trucker’s joint on the Delta just as the sun rose in a blue sky. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the sun, and it made me feel better . . . even kind of sleepy. We parked down by the water and I dozed a little, listening to birds call as a gentle breeze combed through the cattails.
Russ went for a walk. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing. When I awoke I went looking for him, following a deer run that cut through the cattails. The first thing I found was a broken wine bottle, the last of that Armenian bootleg. And then I found Russ. He was down by the water where it was quiet, sitting there all alone. The sun beat down on him and he stared up at it . . . at least, that’s what his good eye was doing. But whatever my brother saw, I was certain he was seeing it with the eye that wasn’t there anymore . . . the angry red socket that was scarred over like a ravaged coffin lid.
The scar twitched and heaved. Even now, I can’t imagine what Russ saw in his mind’s eye. I only know that it was the last thing he thought he’d ever see, because he had that Winchester shotgun propped under his chin and his thumb was twitching on the trigger.
As gently as I could, I took away the gun. Russ didn’t say a single word. Wherever he was, there weren’t any words at all. I didn’t have any words, either. But my hand closed around my brother’s, and together we walked back to the stolen Nash.
I opened the glove compartment and grabbed the map. Unfolding it, the first thing I saw was that little town circled in red, a place called New Anvik. It lay to the northeast, just a few hours away . . . if we were lucky, anyway. Lots of pines and mountains up there, and summer cabins that would be shuttered for the season. The way I figured it, we could find a place to hole up in the sticks and get some breathing room. Then I could figure out what to do about Russ.
My brother didn’t say a word as I drove. He just stared ahead, his one eye glazed as if a spider had spun cobwebs around his brain. A couple hours north of Sacramento the Nash overheated. I barely got it over to the side of the road, but I knew instantly we couldn’t linger there. One look at us and even the stupidest cop would start asking questions. So I wrapped the guns in a blanket, handed Russ a sack with the sandwiches and the beer, and we started walking.
A gravel road cut away from the main one, and we followed it through a field. Eventually we hit some railroad tracks and trailed them north. The air was still. The sun shone down but the light it cast was flat and cold, so barren it didn’t even glint off the railroad tracks. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving. That’s what we did. Our boots thudded over ties and gravel, and we didn’t move slowly. I set the pace, and Russ kept it.
The landscape was spare – fields rimmed by pine. We hoofed it a couple of miles and didn’t see a single house. But with guns in our possession and little else, I was still wary of any kind of law . . . even a local yokel. I felt a little safer when the train tracks cut into a wall of pine. The ground within was as red as rusty iron, and the little forest seemed to hold a month’s worth of frosty mornings. Which was another way of saying it was like a pine icebox in there, so we didn’t slacken our pace. Instead, we doubled it.
The red earth disappeared beneath a carpet of rusty needles, muffling our footsteps as we moved deeper into the forest. The only other sounds were our breaths, which by now were just short of ragged. A sour scent greeted us about a quarter mile in – the same feral crawlspace scent we’d breathed for a week running at the dead man’s house. The stink burned my lungs, and I have to admit that sucking it down made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. We found its source soon enough – a dead boar lay to one side of the tracks, body mangled and partially devoured by god knows what, bristly coat heavy with frost as if its slayer had left it on ice for another meal.
I stared down at the carcass, but not for long. Fate might be pushing us, but there was no time to consider it. Not now. I wasn’t going to gut the dead animal, spill its entrails, and give them a read. Not the way we were moving. The way I saw it we’d already placed our bet . . . wherever we were headed. And the chips could fall where they may.
So we skirted the dead boar and kept walking. Not far ahead, the forest opened on a circle of light. It was dull light, the kind only found in the shank of an afternoon, but it was light just the same.
Russell’s lone eye narrowed as we stepped into it, and I got the feeling the cobwebs in his brain were melting away. A railway station lay ahead, just a little more than a stone’s throw distant. The platform was empty, and a lone Ford was parked in the lot outside the office. If the place was as empty as it looked, we might be able to muscle our way in and steal whatever the station agent had in the cash drawer, maybe snatch a bag of mail from the warehouse . . . then keep moving. But all that was gravy. The main thing I wanted was the key to that Ford.
It was time to get it. The wind had picked up while we were in the forest, and now it was whipping cold from above and behind, driving the stink of that dead boar through the pines as if it were ready to gouge our heels with its tusks. Russ set down the bag with the sandwiches and the beer. We weren’t going to need it now. We started toward the depot as the sun dipped behind the treetops. In an instant, afternoon slipped into twilight.
The wind didn’t slacken, and the sign above the platform swayed on thick chains. As we drew closer, I recognized the station’s name. New Anvik – the same town I’d seen circled on the map I found in the Nash’s glove compartment.
Right now, it was our destination.
It looked like it had been all along.
Gravel crunched beneath our boots as we
crossed the station lot. I brushed a hand along the Ford’s hood as I passed by. The metal was as cold as a witch’s tit, which meant the car had been sitting there a while. Russ trailed behind me as I climbed the stairs that led to the station platform, and together we followed a raised walk around the front of the building. All the while, a single hope stuck in my mind – that the depot was a one-man operation, and we’d only find the station agent inside.
That’s exactly what we found, but not the way we expected.
“You’d better give me that shotgun,” Russ said as we neared the door.
I stopped dead in my tracks, turning only to meet my brother’s eye. It was as green as a piece of polished jade, and clear of cobwebs.
“Welcome back,” I said, thinking I understood.
Of course, I didn’t understand anything.
But I handed the Winchester to Russ.
And we moved toward the open door.
* * *
Deep notches marred the molding, as if someone had gained entry with a dull axe. I didn’t have time to worry about that any more than I’d worried about the dead boar, because the Ford was still parked out front and I wanted the keys that cranked its engine more than I’d ever wanted anything in my miserable life. So I nudged Russ and he took the lead, stepping into the dark room like a golem with a trench gun.
His big shadow spilled across the floor, joining other shadows that pooled on the waxed hardwood. I flipped on the light as I followed my brother inside. With the shadows gone there was nothing much in the office except a couple of desks. It didn’t take a detective to figure out they’d been moved – both rested at odd angles against the far wall, and the legs had gouged long scratches along the hardwood floor. As near as I could tell each desk had traveled about ten feet. And judging by the damage to the plaster wall the desks had moved fast and hard, as if they had been bucked across the room.