Deep Winter

by Samuel W. Gailey

  She heard Lester’s truck pull out of the driveway and was glad to have him finally gone. He had asked her if she wanted him to stay for a while. Asked her if she wanted him to take her over to Scott or Skeeter’s house. Asked her if she wanted a drink. Asked her about a bunch of stuff that she didn’t want or care about. She shook her head to all of that. She wanted him to leave. To get out of her house and leave her alone.

  Right before he stepped outside, Lester had asked her if she was going to be okay. She thought she nodded yes, but what kind of question was that? Her daughter and husband were murdered in cold blood. Dead. It just didn’t seem real. She wished that this were all a horrible nightmare, but it wasn’t. It was really happening.

  How am I gonna go on? How?

  She bit at her lower lip hard enough to draw blood.

  Why would God let this happen to my baby? What did she do to deserve this?

  The house had never felt so quiet. The furnace was set to sixty, and the dogs were still sleeping upstairs, so only the occasional creak of the house settling interrupted the absence of noise. After all the kids had moved out, she complained to Johnny that it was too quiet. No quarreling. No tattling on one another. No whining about homework or chores. None of the squawking she thought she would never miss until it was gone.

  When Johnny was at work, the whole house sank into a horrible silence except for the sound of the wind and the ticking of clocks. Sarah didn’t know what to do with herself. Didn’t know what to do with all her free time. Johnny wasn’t so good about expressing his feelings or comforting her when she was feeling out of sorts. He told her not to get so worked up—all their kids still lived in town. Then he told her that maybe she would be able to keep the house a little cleaner with all her spare time. Son of a bitch only cared about himself. The love had slipped out of their marriage some thirty years ago.

  Sarah felt numb. She didn’t remember everything Lester had told her. She was fast asleep when he’d banged on the door. The dogs yapped a few times before burrowing back under the covers and dozing off again—guard dogs they were not. She figured Johnny was drunk again, couldn’t find his house key, and was pissed off about something. The nights of him coming home drunk and horny and wanting to crawl on top of her were long gone. Now he was always breaking something or punching walls or swearing to himself when he got all liquored up. He had hit her a few times when they were first married, so she was careful to stay clear of him when he was in a mood.

  She knew Danny Bedford. Everybody in town knew everybody. Sarah always felt sorry for the boy. Big and dumb and all on his own. First his parents had their accident, then his uncle passed young. No loss with Brett, though. Johnny used to drink with Brett and bring him into the house from time to time after working second shift over at Taylor Beef. When Johnny would get up to fetch a few more beers, Brett would sit on her couch with his dirty boots kicked up on the coffee table, staring at her with those eyes. Eyes crawling all over her backside, and she could tell what he was thinking. She didn’t like to be in the room alone with him if she could help it. And she noticed the bruises on Danny’s arms when she saw him around town. When she went to Johnny about what she suspected with Danny, he told her to keep her big nose out of Brett’s business.

  Got to be hard enough raising that retard. No harm in using the belt when the occasion calls.

  So it had made Sarah feel good that Mindy was so nice to Danny when everyone else laughed and picked on him. Even her boys, Scott and Skeeter, taunted him awful in school back in the day.

  The urge to get up and off the couch hit her, but when she tried to stand, her knees buckled and gave out and she flopped back onto the cushions. Her little girl was gone? Just like that she was no more. Mindy hadn’t even given her any grandbabies yet.

  Mindy had wanted to leave Wyalusing right after high school. She was young and wanted to spread her wings and explore the world, but Sarah encouraged her to stay put. She told Mindy that there would be plenty of time to go out on her own. She convinced Mindy that she belonged here with her family. Sarah knew that was selfish. She just didn’t want her daughter to leave. Didn’t want Mindy to leave her here all alone with Johnny since the boys were married and leading their own lives.

  Oh, God, this is all my fault. I made her stay, and look what happened to her.

  She held back her tears. Not yet.

  Lester didn’t want to say who had done it, but she wouldn’t let him leave until she knew the truth. When he finally told her, she informed Lester that she wanted to see Danny. She wanted to ask him why. Why would he do that to her poor Mindy? How could he have murdered her baby? Lester wasn’t able to keep her eye when he said that Danny had run up into the woods around Spring Hill, but he promised her that they would catch him after sunrise and lock him up.

  “We’ll find him, Sarah. You’ve got my word on that. We’ll get him and lock him up so he can’t hurt anyone again,” Lester had promised. Sarah heard herself laugh at him.

  “That gonna bring Mindy back?” she had asked.

  Johnny was dead because he was drunk and stupid. Sarah knew that he probably would have shot Lester if the state trooper hadn’t shown up and killed him. She wasn’t so sad about Johnny. Not really. She hadn’t loved him in a long time. In fact, she had grown to hate the man. He hadn’t used his hands on her in the last few years, but he didn’t hold back on using his words on her. They were mean words—hateful, ugly words. She would have left him twenty years ago—after the kids were all gone—if she thought she could live on her own. As drunk as he always was, he still collected a paycheck. He paid the bills and put food on the table. She didn’t know a thing about working a job and taking care of finances.

  She felt herself stand up on legs that were cooperating now and snatch the car keys from the hook by the door. Some part of her brain was telling her body what to do, and that was fine by her. She went outside without grabbing a jacket. It was cold and snowing, but she didn’t care.

  Oh, God, my baby girl is dead.

  She got into the station wagon and felt the cold vinyl seats through her paper-thin nightgown. There was a layer of ice and snow on the windshield, but she didn’t have it in her to scrape it off. The engine turned over after a few tries, and she pulled out of the driveway. She clicked on the windshield wipers, and they slowly pushed off the top layer of snow, but the ice stuck fast no matter how many times the wipers ran over it. Heck with it—she would drive anyway.

  As she pulled the car out onto the road, she felt like she had tunnel vision. Like she was staring through a telescope. Dark on both sides of her. Through patches of ice on the windshield, all she could see was the road directly in front of the station wagon. Her hands clutched at the steering wheel, and her body began to tremble, but not from the cold—shock was creeping its way in. Closing her throat and making it dry as paper. Her tongue clicked on the roof of her mouth, and she had a hard time swallowing. The darkness on both sides of her narrowed even tighter—the road just a speck of light before her—but she needed to keep going before she completely shut down.

  Please, Jesus, let them be on time . . . just let them be there.

  Her mind felt foggy, as if she was dreaming or ready to pass out. She cranked open the window and let the bitter cold whip against her face. Her feet felt so cold. She looked down and noticed that she wasn’t wearing slippers or socks. She could feel the rubber pad of the gas pedal against her bare skin.

  She drove through town, never stopping or slowing at stop signs. If there were other cars out this early, she didn’t see any.

  She passed the feed shop and turned right at the bottom of the hill. Her bare foot pressed harder on the gas pedal, and the station wagon started to slide on a patch of ice and drift toward the ditch, but she didn’t slow down any. Her reactions were sluggish. She didn’t jerk the wheel or let up on the gas. She let the car slide—she didn’t care if she ended up in th
e ditch. If she crashed and was slung through the windshield and died, that would be fine by her. She could be with Mindy again. That thought made the lump in her throat get that much bigger. The car fishtailed two or three more times before it finally straightened out and she managed to stay in the middle of the road.

  She saw the sign up ahead for Reliable Auto Repair. The boys had painted the sign themselves. Instead of slowing, she gunned the car faster. It took the dip into the parking lot and skidded to a halt in front of the glass office door. Just a few more inches and she would have run the car right through the panel of glass. She put the station wagon into park and sat there. She wasn’t sure for how long. Her body shook, rattling the dentures in her mouth, and she couldn’t feel her numb feet and toes, which felt like they were a mile away from the rest of her.

  Sarah gazed down at her hands and saw that she was still clutching the piece of tissue. A dot of liquid dropped onto the lap of her nightgown. Then another. A warm trickle of tears flowed from her eyes and rolled off her tired cheeks. She shoved her knuckles into her mouth and bit down hard enough to give her body a jerk.

  Just hold it together for a few more minutes. Just keep it together.

  She didn’t hear them turn in to the lot. Scott’s red pickup truck pulled up beside her, and he beeped the horn. Skeeter sat in the passenger seat smoking a cigarette. She looked over and saw them exchange a look and say something to each other.

  Sarah fumbled for the handle and tried to open the station wagon’s door, but it wouldn’t budge. She put her shoulder against the door panel and gave it a shove—the damn thing still didn’t give. She slammed harder and harder, feeling trapped and panicked. Then she noticed that the lock was down. She yanked it up, shoved once again, and the door swung open easily. Sarah toppled out of the car and landed on her hands and knees in a few inches of frozen slush on the parking lot pavement. When the boys climbed out of the truck, she began to cry—loud, gut-wrenching sobs.

  Sarah tried to stand but slipped onto her back in a frozen puddle of water. She didn’t try to get up again. She just lay in the icy water feeling the cold soak through her nightgown as her two sons swooped down on her, grabbed her by the arms, and tried to get her back on her feet.

  Taggart

  As the sun peeked over the tip of the mountain, casting an orange glow off all the snow, Taggart excused himself and made his way to the cruiser while the two detectives from Towanda walked through the crime scene with the sheriff. He closed the door behind him, placed his hat on the passenger seat, and ran his hands through short blond hair—tight on the sides and top as stipulated by the Pennsylvania State Police handbook.

  He watched as the paramedics laid Johnny Knolls in a black body bag and zipped up the plastic. He glimpsed the dead man’s hand. His left hand. A wedding band gleamed in the morning sunlight.

  Taggart peered down at his own wedding ring and thought about his wife and two girls. They were growing up fast. Emily was eleven. Jackie had just turned thirteen. Both girls were beautiful like their mother, but the lights of his life had become increasingly more and more of a drunken blur. He’d been stuck in second shift for years now and never got to see the girls. He left the house for work when they were still at school, and by the time he woke up in the morning, they were back in class.

  How in the hell did I get to this?

  A beer or two at home after work soon became four or five beers with the boys at Moriarty’s Pub. But after his drinking crew started to settle down with wives and kids, Taggart soon found himself drinking alone on a barstool with enough Jack and Cokes to make him so numb he couldn’t feel his feet. After getting drunk and belligerent one too many times, he found himself banned from Moriarty’s, then Fergie’s, then a few more neighborhood bars, until he ended up drinking alone in his car with a bottle nestled between his legs, listening to a Phillies or Eagles game. Another place he liked drinking was at the movie theater, hunched down in the dark, sipping his vodka uninterrupted for a two-hour stretch. He didn’t care what movie was being projected onto the screen—all the action and dialogue served as a diversion.

  He could barely remember how and why exactly the hard drinking had started. Chalk it up to his genes—his father and mother, both raging alcoholics. Growing up, he swore it would never happen to him, the everyday drinking. But it did, just like it did with his two older brothers, two hard-drinking Philly cops. For him and his brothers, all three apples didn’t fall far from the tree—they landed right down by the trunk, as a matter of fact.

  Drinking wasn’t fun anymore. It was just drinking. Most mornings he couldn’t remember coming home the night before. Birthdays, holidays, and special occasions were even worse. Most were vague memories, because the better parts of them were spent sneaking off to the bedroom or the den to dig into his secret stashes—water bottles filled with vodka. When he looked at pictures that were snapped on Christmas mornings or during Thanksgiving dinners, Taggart wouldn’t remember a thing about that day. He hated looking at his glassy-eyed expression in photographs. He would have a half smile on his fat, bloated face, sneering at the camera like some kind of playground pervert. Those pictures made him sick to his stomach, so he tried his best to avoid family photo ops if he could help it.

  The wife didn’t know the extent of his drinking. She wasn’t dumb but had never been able to see all the signs. Or if she did, she suppressed the awareness deep down inside her. Taggart was a stoic, stone-faced drunk. He was a hands-off dad. Always had been. That’s the way he’d been raised. He felt like an outsider most of the time around the three girls. They did everything together. Always laughing and carrying on. Doing art projects or cooking together. They were a close-knit little group, and he hated that about them. He would just sit in his chair watching baseball and drinking beer. The wife would keep an eye on the number of beers he would consume, so his little trick was to fill the can half full of vodka from one of the bottles he kept hidden around the house—he could have two cans of a beer/vodka cocktail and get good and blasted. Taggart didn’t go to the park with the girls or shop at the mall with them or do whatever else they were doing. When he wasn’t working, he stayed to himself and stewed. The joke around the house was that he was moodier than a girl. Ha fucking ha.

  The shit hit the fan five years ago when he got drunk on the job and popped a supervisor in the mouth. Miserable prick deserved it, but it had cost Taggart his badge in Philly. Taggart got lucky—they didn’t press any charges and dismissed him from the department instead. He came clean to his wife about the drinking and vowed to change his ways. He gave her all the empty promises she wanted to hear and even threw in the token tears of regret and sincerity. Taggart entered into a treatment program and stayed sober for six months. He went to his AA meetings, held the hands of other addicts, and recited the same garbage along with them, week after week. Then he moved the family to Towanda to get a fresh start and joined the state troopers’ office on a probationary status. Taggart had felt clarity for the first time in twenty years, but that didn’t last long. The stress of a job he hated and a marriage that wasn’t working—or at least one he wasn’t working on—made it too easy to turn back to the bottle and crawl inside.

  Taggart dug into his pocket and felt the chip he carried everywhere with him. He took it out and rolled the bronze-colored coin between his fingers. He read the inscription on the front: TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE. UNITY. SERVICE. RECOVERY. Taggart looked at the six-month chip probably a dozen times a day. It was a reminder, all right.

  Living a goddamn lie.

  He flipped the chip over and examined the engraving on the other side: EXPECT MIRACLES.

  Still waiting for mine. Christ. A headful of AA and a bellyful of booze.

  Taggart had managed to hide his drinking from his fellow officers and supervisors pretty well over the years. If they suspected anything, they didn’t let on about it. He kept to his own business and did his job. But ton
ight he’d crossed the line. He shot a man dead while under the influence. He was pretty sure that his life, which was pretty much crap anyway, wasn’t going to survive this particular fuckup. He had put his career, his family, and his home at stake. The fact was that this mess was probably going to take him down. Part of him always expected that something like this would happen—surprised it didn’t happen sooner. When you cross the line so many times, eventually you’re going to find yourself looking back at some great regret. And lo and behold, here it was.

  All these thoughts racing through his head had his heart thudding in his chest, making it difficult to breathe, and sweat rolled down his back by the buckets. He felt the panic setting in.

  Hold yourself together, Bill. Maybe you can walk away from this. Just stay the course.

  Taggart reached under his seat and found one of his old friends. Hutch this time. The flask felt half full. That was good. His coffee was gone, though. Nothing to mix it with.

  The hell with it. Just need to stabilize.

  He poured a straight shot into a Styrofoam cup and drank it down before he could talk himself out of it. The familiar slow burn in his stomach felt good. The sweet numbing in his head would soon follow.

  Taggart was pouring a second round when the passenger door opened and the cold wrapped around him. The sheriff stood there staring down at him. A gust of wind brought a sprinkling of snowflakes into the cruiser that settled on the dashboard and seats.

  Taggart capped the flask and held the cup to his lips.

  “You don’t want to do that, son,” Lester said softly.

  Taggart stared out his windshield. “You’re wrong about that.”

  Lester removed Taggart’s hat from the passenger seat and sat down. He closed the door, cleared his throat, and joined Taggart’s gaze out the windshield. They sat in silence for a few moments. The steady strobe of the ambulance lights rolled across their faces every other second.