Lester didn’t know why, but he smiled. Maybe that’s what folks do right before they’re taken to their Maker. He wondered whether he had done all the things he’d set out to do as a young man. He felt pretty confident that he had. He never had the yearning to move away from the place where he was born and raised. He had wanted kids, sure, but that wasn’t in the cards. And that was okay with him. He fished and hunted and watched football and baseball. Played cards once a month or so. Those things made him happy. He knew of many men who constantly wanted more out of life. Wanted more money, a bigger house, a younger wife, a job that wasn’t real work. More stuff parked out in the driveway. Those men made themselves crazy. Pacing and grumbling and hating everyone and everything they weren’t.
Lester pretty much accepted what he got and didn’t complain. He loved his wife and liked his job. His friends who were still living treated him well and were there for him if he needed to bend their ear. He had done good with his life.
He found himself getting a little misty and shook away all the sappy thoughts. “Hell, old man, you ain’t in the grave just yet.” He reached down into the snow and grabbed hold of a fallen branch and set it in the ground beside him. He readied himself and pushed up. His knees popped and his lower back ached, but he managed to right himself.
He waited a bit before trying to walk. While his body played catch-up with his brain, he looked around to get his bearings. Footprints trailed off to the left of him—the direction he’d come from. He looked at the sky again and figured he hadn’t been out for very long. Maybe twenty minutes or so, but darkness wasn’t far off.
He put his right foot forward, but his left wasn’t so accommodating. He dug his makeshift cane deeper into the frozen ground and pushed himself ahead, dragging his left foot and leg behind him like a gimp.
He laughed at himself again and kept hauling himself forward. He was in sad shape, but he intended to take care of the unfinished business at hand. He pictured Danny in his head. Poor, big, slow Danny. Just an overgrown kid with his crew cut and clean-shaven face. Then it hit him. Just like that.
Clean-shaven. That boy doesn’t wear a beard. Never has. Mindy’s face was all scuffed up by a man’s facial hair. Those marks weren’t from the carpet. Hell.
Then he got to thinking about Mike’s face and neck when he first saw him out at Mindy’s trailer. The deputy said he got into a scuffle at some party in Towanda.
Lester pushed himself to limp faster, but his weary bones would only move so fast. Hell, old man.
Danny
Danny hoped that the voice in his head was right. It hadn’t told him who was out there in the woods who would be able to help him. It hadn’t said anything else to him since he started to follow the deer. Hopefully the voice would lead him to the sheriff—Lester would have to believe Danny now.
But if the voice in his head was wrong, and there was no one out there, Danny knew he would get lost. And, if he got lost, he sure was worried that Mrs. Bennett wouldn’t get the help she needed. So many people had been hurt and worse.
The deputy was a bad man. Kinda like his Uncle Brett, but a whole lot worse. Maybe Uncle Brett would drink too much and hit Danny when he was a little kid, but Danny knew that Uncle Brett was just real sad about losing his brother and having to take care of him. Uncle Brett used to blame Danny for him not being able to marry a young woman and told him as much. Uncle Brett used to blame Danny for lots of things, like having to spend too much money on him for food and clothes and visits to Doc Pete—money he didn’t have, he told Danny. Maybe if Danny wasn’t around, Uncle Brett would have gotten married and finally been happy. Maybe, just maybe. That’s why after Uncle Brett went away to heaven, Danny knew he should live on his own and take care of himself. If he wasn’t anybody else’s problem, then he couldn’t make anybody else sad or mad and he couldn’t get anyone hurt again.
He watched the three-legged deer hopping ahead of him. He had been following her for a while now, but she never let him get too close. Danny guessed that he scared her a little. Especially now with his face looking like some kind of monster’s face and the fact that he was carrying a gun. Hunters carry guns and bows and arrows. A hunter is who hurt her and made her walk funny.
Maybe he should drop the gun in the snow and bury it so it couldn’t hurt no one else. All guns did was hurt folks.
Keep the gun, Danny.
He looked toward the doe. She was standing still and staring back at him with big black eyes.
Keep the gun for a little while longer.
Danny nodded and kept walking toward her. The doe stayed put where she was and watched him approach. He got real close to her. Could see the deer breathing and the crystals of snow frozen around her mouth. If he reached out, he would be able to touch her soft fur now and pet the doe like a dog. He didn’t do that, though.
The doe stuck her nose close to the snow and sniffed around for something. It was gonna be dark soon, so Danny didn’t understand why they were staying put.
“I’m hungry, too, but I think we should keep going.”
The doe looked up from the ground. Her nose was wet and had a clump of snow stuck to the end of it.
It’s almost time.
Her ears twitched, then snapped straight up in the air. She looked forward and stared into the forest ahead of them. Danny stared in the same direction. He saw something move between the trees. Something big. And it was moving straight toward them.
The three-legged deer kept her watch and waited, and Danny stood beside the doe and waited right along with her.
Lester
His left leg had stiffened up like a son of a bitch. Lester thought that maybe it would loosen up or get some feeling back once he was on his feet and moving again, but the paralysis—he hoped to God it was only temporary—was getting progressively worse with time. The cold wasn’t helping matters—the temperature dipping down in the low teens.
He felt like old man Moses wandering the wild with his staff in hand. Except he had no flock and he sure the hell wasn’t headed toward the promised land—not yet at least. But he had put his faith in the Lord’s hands back before he got married to Bonnie, at both her urging and insistence, and he had kept it there ever since.
His progress had been slow going. It took him three times as much energy to walk three times slower.
Keep moving, old man. More than your backside at stake here.
His stomach churned and rumbled in his belly. He hadn’t eaten anything since dinner the night before, and he had smoked his last menthol cigarette a few hours ago. If God was hell-bent on testing him, he sure was doing a bang-up job of it. If Lester actually got through this mess, maybe he’d even give up smoking.
“Ha.” The laugh shot out of him, and the sound of it surprised him. Maybe he was delirious after all.
Up ahead of him was a small clearing. The trees gave way to a snow-covered area that for whatever reason didn’t have foliage of any kind. It was about twenty yards by twenty yards. He entered the clearing, dragging his useless leg and pulling himself along.
Midway through the clearing, he noticed them. It took him a second to register what exactly he was seeing, then another few seconds to convince himself that he wasn’t dreaming again.
It was Danny Bedford, or what was left of him, sitting in the snow at the other end of the clearing. He had what appeared to be dried blood on his jacket and pants and caked on his face and neck—blood all over him, in fact. Lester had seen plenty of men on the losing end of a bar fight. Their eyes blackened, a bloodied nose, a gash upside the head delivered by a cue stick or a beer bottle. He thought he had seen it all till he glimpsed Danny. The boy appeared much worse off since Lester had seen him at Doc Pete’s earlier in the day. The boy’s head seemed enormous. His jaw hung open like the bottom half of a rotted Halloween pumpkin. Danny’s eyes were swollen up like the rest of him, but they seemed pretty clear.
Or sane, which is what Lester was hoping for.
But to make the sight before him even more of a head scratcher, the boy he’d been searching for during the last fifteen hours and then some was in the middle of the forest, squatting next to a three-legged doe like it was his long-lost dog. The two of them weren’t but twelve inches apart from each other, and they just stared at Lester like they’d been waiting on him for a lifetime.
Lester had never seen anything like it. A man and a wild deer keeping each other’s company. Once he noticed the doe’s stump, he knew that she was the victim of a bow hunter. The hunter’s arrow had found its target but failed to make the kill. Lester had seen gangrene before. An animal that chewed off its own leg to free itself from a trap or deer that took a bullet or arrow but didn’t lie down and die. Most deer didn’t survive long after the infection had set in. The poison got into the bloodstream and killed them within ten days. This deer should be dead but apparently wasn’t ready to die just yet.
When Danny stood up, Lester noticed the gun clutched in the boy’s hands.
Lester took a few more steps toward the curious pair but was careful to move slow and easy. He kept his own rifle held down low in his left hand. The closer he got, the more the doe’s tail snapped back and forth like a surrender flag caught up in a gust of wind.
“Hello, son. Been looking for you.”
Danny nodded but stayed put. He watched the sheriff struggle to stay upright.
“You don’t look so good, Sheriff. What happened to your leg?” Danny asked.
Lester stopped walking and pushed his cap back on his head a little. “I guess my body needed to remind me that I’m an old man.”
“You gonna die?” Danny asked with no ill intent.
“I hope not. At least not today.” Lester noticed the pained look in Danny’s eyes. He figured that the boy must be in a world of hurt. He was surprised that he could even stand in the condition he was in.
“There’s been more killing,” Danny said. A simple statement of fact. “Up at the Bennett place.”
“That so?” Lester tried to sound calm, but he clutched at his rifle a bit tighter.
“I didn’t do nothing to Mindy, Sheriff.” Danny’s tone sounded hopeful, like he really needed the sheriff to believe him.
“Why don’t you tell me about that, son?”
Danny looked to the doe for a moment before answering, like he had to check with her before continuing on. “I was just going to her place to give her a present. Yesterday was her birthday, you know?”
“That a fact?”
“Same day as mine. That’s one reason she was my friend.”
Lester nodded. “Mindy was a good gal.”
“Yes, sir, she was. That’s why I made a present for her. When I got there, the deputy and Carl were already there. They told me that Mindy had an accident. And when I went inside, she was already . . .” Danny choked up, unable to finish. Large tears flowed down red, chapped cheeks and glistened in the setting sun.
“I believe you, son. I really do.”
Danny looked at the sheriff and seemed relieved. That brought on a new batch of tears.
“Danny, can you do me a favor and put that gun down?”
Danny looked down at the rifle he was holding and thought about it for a second, but he kept the gun right where it was. “He killed Mr. Bennett. And Mrs. Bennett is hurt real bad.”
“The deputy and Carl did that?”
“Naw. Just your deputy. Carl used the gun on himself.”
Lester was pretty sure he believed Danny but would feel a hell of a lot better if the boy would just drop his gun to the ground.
“Why’d the deputy do all these things, Danny?”
Danny gave him a strange look. “I don’t know, Sheriff. I was hoping you would know that.”
Lester nodded and gazed at the three-legged doe. He wished he had a good answer for that. “And what about the deputy? Where is he now?”
“Carl shot him. Before he put the gun under his chin. The deputy was gonna kill Mrs. Bennett. She’s hurt real bad, but she ain’t dead. I put her up in her bedroom. Told her I would go for help.”
“I guess we should do that, but it sure would make me feel a whole lot better if you put that gun down. Those things can go off if you ain’t careful.”
Danny guessed that it was okay now if the sheriff wanted him to. He started to lower the rifle to the ground when a shot rang out, and the three-legged deer flinched. A splatter of blood exploded from her chest and she fell to the ground and twitched a few times before she stopped moving at all.
Danny and Lester ducked for cover with their hands held over their heads. They both watched wide-eyed as Sokowski stepped into the clearing with his rifle secure against his shoulder. He was swaying a little and struggled to maintain his balance. His right side was soaked with blood still flowing like a leaking bottle of maple syrup.
Sokowski looked at Lester with eyes so red that it was hard to see his pupils. “Guess we finally got our man, huh, Sheriff?” His speech came out slow and mumbled.
Lester stood upright and pulled his left leg under him and tried to stand tall. Sokowski noticed anyway.
“What’s the matter with you? You look like shit.”
Lester took a breath and was careful to speak nice and easy. “Been a long day, Mike. More walking than I’m used to. And my old bones don’t like the cold so much, I guess.”
Sokowski kept his ground, never taking his rifle off the sheriff. “The ticker, huh?”
Lester sighed his response. He had never seen his deputy in such sorry shape. Boozed up beyond repair, all the anger boiling to the surface. His gut told him that this wouldn’t end well. Just like with Johnny Knolls.
“Why don’t you go ahead and drop that rifle to the ground, Lester? You won’t be needing it no more.”
Lester kept the rifle clutched in his hand. “Now, listen here, Mike—”
“Go on. I ain’t gonna tell you again.”
Lester hated to do it, but he lowered the gun onto the snow and winced at the discomfort bending down caused him.
“Ain’t so easy taking orders from other folks, is it, Lester?”
“No. Guess it ain’t.”
Sokowski had a strange smirk creasing his lips. “Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way, Lester. All this killing, you know? But it’s done and can’t be undone.”
“All right. That’s a fact,” Lester agreed.
A hard gust of wind swept through the clearing, whipping up sheets of powdery flakes all around the three men like they were standing in a snow globe.
“But I guess there’s a few choices yet to be made. Danny here ain’t nothing. You know that. No one really gives a shit about him.” Sokowski looked at Danny for a second, then refocused his drunken gaze back on the sheriff.
“It’s time to stop all this nonsense, Mike. No sense in going on with it. Enough bad has happened.”
Sokowski lost his balance a bit but kept his rifle up.
“I don’t want to kill you, Lester. Already going to hell for all that I’ve done today. But from the looks of you, I might not have to go and do that. You’re a walking dead man unless you get some medical attention.”
Lester nodded. “You’re right about that, too. Been in better shape.”
Sokowski spit and lowered his gun a little. Just a little. “I can walk away from all this. All that really stands in my way is you. Maybe it ain’t right, but what choice do I got?”
Lester’s heart pounded erratically in his chest. The big muscle felt like it was pulsing upward and might burst right out of his throat and drop into the snow. Sweat rolled from under his hat and down his neck and back.
“You got choices, Mike. You’re right about not being able to undo what’s happened, but there’s still right and wro
ng here. Too many folks have died here today. No sense in any more.”
Sokowski almost lost his balance. Squinted his eyes to block out the pain, then let go with a small laugh. “Right and wrong? Shit, Lester, when did I ever pay attention to the difference between right and wrong? You, maybe. You’ve always seemed to do the right thing in your life.”
Lester wanted to keep Sokowski talking. If he got him talking long enough, maybe he could get some reason into him. If that didn’t work, he needed to try to take the rifle away from him.
“Well, I try to do the right thing, Mike. Don’t know if I always succeed, but I give it my best shot. Damned if I don’t.”
Sokowski shook his head at him. “What does doing the right thing get you here and now, Lester? Seems like it ain’t gonna get you shit.”
“It’s not too late here, Mike. Just think about it for a moment.”
Sokowski smiled at him and shook his head again. “Sorry, Sheriff. I’ve already thought about it, and I know what I gotta do.” He turned the rifle toward Danny.
But Danny didn’t flinch. Didn’t cower or duck for cover. He just studied Sokowski with all the blood running down the side of him. Then he stared at Sokowski’s messed-up ear, a brown, shrunken piece of flesh. He knew how mean kids could be and knew that something like that would be made fun of. He kept staring at the deputy’s deformity, and for some reason he didn’t quite understand, Danny didn’t feel angry or scared of him anymore. He only felt sadness for the man.
“What you did to Mindy and the Bennetts was wrong, Mike.”
Sokowski gave him a funny look, surprised that he would be talking right now. “Yeah? Is that right, Danny?”
“I guess what I mean to say is that you did something real bad, but maybe you couldn’t help it. Like me, it’s just who you are.”
Deep Winter Page 21