In Western Counties

by Nickolas Butler

  In Western Counties

  Nickolas Butler

  Thomas Dunne Books

  St. Martin’s Press

  New York

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Excerpt from Shotgun Lovesongs

  Also by Nickolas Butler

  About the Author

  Copyright

  More from Nickolas Butler

  Her face had been made into a jigsaw puzzle. Aida saw how the poor girl tried to hide the scars: the cake makeup, the masking hands, the long hair and baseball cap. The edges of the puzzle pieces purple and crudely lined. Her mouth crooked, but somehow sweet. She smiled painfully at Aida. Pushed an envelope of money across the sticky surface of the café table. The envelope was not thick; it was all that the scarred woman had left.

  The restaurant was abandoned. The waitress hovered around them, refilled their mugs, nodded gamely at Bethany. Said to her, “These are on me.” Then leaned into the table, wiped the surface with her bleachy rag and said, “There’s a way out. Always is. I been there too. Don’t let him beat you like that. You’ll be dead inside a year by the look of it.”

  Some of the fortitude seemed to leak out of Bethany and she deflated slightly, set her mug down, and readjusted the bill of her cap. She looked up at the waitress and said, “God bless you.” But Aida could see that she didn’t believe in God at all, that her eyes contained only anger and fear.

  The waitress nodded and then went away, near the coffee urn, where she watched them, sometimes kibitzing with the cook, a pock-faced man with a long ponytail who peered out at the two women from behind the heating elements glowing red and orange.

  They sat for a while, saying nothing, glancing all around the café, and then Aida said, “Let’s go outside, then,” taking Bethany by the elbow and gently lifting her up. She took the money and stuffed it into her jacket. Hoped she would remember it was there. She was always losing things, so many things.

  They went to Aida’s truck, an old F-150. Aida opened the door and guided Bethany onto the bench seat. She went around behind the truck and looked at the woman’s slumped shoulders framed in the rear window. Bethany, she reminded herself. With her long finger, she wrote the name in the palm of her hand, making the calloused skin go white where the letters were: BETHANY. She wrote the name again in the dirt and dust that clung to the metal of her truck: BETHANY. There were chains in the bed of the truck and a tire iron. A spare tire, a bag of last year’s autumn leaves, and two cement blocks.

  Aida was not in the habit of driving the truck. That morning, en route to Red Wing, she forgot where the knob for the headlights was. She’d just retired from the state highway patrol after twenty-five years and was accustomed to driving a police cruiser. She kicked the gravel. Hail was in the forecast and she waited for it to hit, the violence of the blue-white pellets. She got inside the truck, slamming the door. Bethany shuddered.

  “I’m tired of it,” Bethany said. “Tired! He does this to me, but there ain’t anything for me to do. Nothing to do to make him stop! Goddamn it!” She beat her fist into the dashboard.

  Aida rolled down her window and withdrew a package of cigarettes from her jean jacket. Offered the package over to Bethany, who shook her head. Aida rarely smoked, but just now needed the fire and smoke to fill the silence she was incapable of filling herself. She took a Zippo lighter from the glove box and lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply. Still no hail, but the sky was yellowing, the clouds scudding quickly, oddly no wind to rile the ditch grass. It was late in the year for hail. Bethany’s outburst apparently over, they sat again in silence. Beyond the café and the highway running past it: a barbed wire fence, the concrete skeleton of an abandoned silo, the stone footings of a bygone barn. Then just blue and yellow sky and rapidly circulating clouds. Aida’s ears popped, the pressure changing.

  “All right,” Aida said, her voice husky and sandpapery, “what do you want me to do?”

  Bethany stared back at her pitifully. She had once been attractive. The huge blue eyes, a thick rope of brown hair. Her skin otherwise alabaster, perfect. Aida could see how quickly the bravery came and went in her face, how the strength was braided together with rage, and how Bethany was most cogent when the memory of her attack resurfaced and she needed to strike out and be her anger. All the violence that had preceded her mauling.

  “You know what I want you to do?” Bethany said. “I want you to get him. And I don’t care what you do as long as you understand that I want my revenge. You look at my face if you need a reminder of what I want you to do. And don’t take him to your friends in the police either. ’Cause we already know that ain’t going to help.” Her voice quaked. Aida squinted behind the smoke and dimly remembered that her old colleagues would not be of any assistance. She felt something in her chest like remorse, the knowledge that she had failed this woman, Bethany, before. Bethany, Bethany, Bethany.

  “Is it he out there?” Aida asked. “On that farm?”

  Bethany seemed to shake her head just slightly, as if she could not understand how Aida had forgotten some crucial detail. It was a politely confounded expression she had seen on more and more faces of late, and it frustrated her. It had been her job to look strong, to appear inscrutable.

  “Do you need to write this stuff down?” Bethany asked.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Aida said, breathing out smoke. “No, I’ll take care of it. But you need to leave town for a while. I’ll take you to the Greyhound station and then you have to go away. I don’t care where.”

  The hail hit miles away from the bus station, and they pulled over under a bridge crumbling and rusted. Swallows swooping in and out of their nests. They watched the hail bounce off the asphalt. Ping-pong balls of ice out on the road. They rolled down the windows and felt the cold in the air. Aida opened up her door and slid out, stood underneath the last vestige of protection that the bridge provided. She collected a stone of hail from the ground and held it in her palm, then watched as it melted away. She drank the remaining water. Far away she saw a conical cloud lower toward the ground, but it never did touch and after a while it seemed to lose steam, retreating back up into the heavens. Then the sun reappeared, and a rainbow broke extravagantly across the sky, deep-toned and immense.

  They drove over the hail-strewn road toward the city of Albert Lea and the Greyhound depot, nothing more than a glass room attached to a Shell gas station. There were old magazines on tables near the big windows and a view of the prairie and passing eighteen-wheelers. Two children were pounding the Plexiglas of a vending machine where a candy bar hung on a thin spiral of aluminum. Their little fists and bodies unable to shake the machine adequately. Bethany punched the squat rectangle once and the chocolate bar fell into an awaiting trough. The children snatched the bar and then looked up into her face, as if to thank her, but their own diminutive faces fell apart and they ran away, outside the waiting room. Aida watched as they ran across the parking lot to a woman—their mother, she guessed—and pointed back at the stranger with the hideous face.

  In front of the idling bus Aida handed Bethany the envelope of money. “You hold on to this until I’m done,” she said. “Better you pay me when I finish things up.” I’ve been losing so many things.

  Bethany nodded, clutched the money, shoved it back into her purse, and boarded t
he bus. A few minutes later, the bus driver rolled a placard in the window to DULUTH and drove off. Bethany’s mutilated face in the window, looking out, her hand pressed to the glass.

  * * *

  He fought dogs in an old barn out on the prairie. Had stolen the land from a widow. He came to her house before dusk, smiling in the glow of the porch light, ignoring the moths powdering his face. She answered the door with a shotgun. He told her that he was her nephew, from Butte, Montana, come with money to buy the family farm. He waved a wad of paper in the air, two fifties on the outsides and nothing in between but thin cardboard coupons for car washes. She looked at him warily, rubbed her forehead as if to loosen out a memory. She undid the lock, lowered the weapon, let him in.

  He had watched her for a few weeks from the road with a pair of binoculars. Knew that she rarely left the house and that she lived alone. Knew she was frail. He’d gleaned too that she was senile: She talked to herself incessantly and he had seen her feeding invisible chickens, broadcasting seeds from her hands to nothing but the sparse grass and gravel of her yard. In other cities he had lived in trailer courts or apartment buildings, but inevitably his neighbors complained about the dogs. Their barking, their waste, their potential for violence. He knew he needed privacy and space. The widow’s name was Ione Miller. He knew this from stealing her mail.

  She served him stale cookies and reheated coffee. He pretended to eat, spit the cookies into a napkin, wiped off his tongue. At the kitchen table he let her talk for two hours, the darkness of the house closing in around them. Then he produced a document that he had her sign, his hand on her frail wrist. She fell asleep in the chair later and he carried her up a flight of stairs to her bed. She weighed next to nothing. When he held a pillow over her face, she did not struggle, her hands swatting weakly at his wrists, as if shooing flies. He pressed his ear to her chest and held a mirror before her thin lips, terrified of her bony fingers reanimating.

  And then he went outside to his truck, where he let the three dogs out, kissing at them and clapping his hands. They wagged their tails in the darkness and urinated. He reached into the truck and illuminated the headlights. They shone out onto the prairie, its grasses bending with the evening wind. In the distance, one giant oak. He set off across the field, the dogs at his heels. He collected fallen limbs until dawn, stacking the wood behind the house. In the barn he found kerosene and some rotten lumber, which he also assembled behind the house. Exhausted, he went back inside the house, wrapped the old woman in her bedsheets, carried her out to the barn, and then returned to her bedroom, where he fell into her ancient mattress and went instantly to sleep, boots still on, and the dogs staring at him from the floor, where they curled in on themselves, their eyes soft and wet. In the mattress he felt the depressions of where she had slept for so many years, her ghost in bed with him. He considered burning the thing, but did not want to leave behind its ancient metal coils. He would buy a new one. The mattress was loud and lumpy, but he dozed heavily.

  The next evening he lighted a huge pyre behind the house on the margins of the prairie. He watched the flames envelope the figure in bedsheets and then returned to the house, where he looked for a television for over an hour before turning on an old record player, the volume of which filled the house and set the dogs to barking. He quickly threw the machine out onto the lawn before retiring to the bedroom, where he pulled the mattress onto the floor. He lay down and the dogs nestled their bodies against his, warming his thighs and belly. Every time he rolled over, the mattress made a sound like dry leaves. He stripped the mattress of its stale sheets, wrapping them around him, and then he fit the mattress into the old woman’s closet, shutting the folding doors, the mattress still alive sounding, everywhere the noise of dry papers being rattled. He went back to the dogs on the floor and fell asleep, the flames of the pyre burning wide and high into the night. It would be impossible for anyone to see the black smoke.

  In the morning, a pile of hot ash and coals. He kicked the cinders for bone but saw nothing discernible. The dogs sniffed the air and there was the bouquet of prairie grasses and flowers. Fresh dry summer air being pushed across the flatlands from the Dakotas. He threw a baseball across the fields and the dogs chased it endlessly. The leather of the dirty orb almost torn away, the marks of the dogs’ teeth everywhere, dimpling the baseball a thousand times over. He hung the bedsheets out on the line and they whipped in the wind like spinnakers, the dogs nipping at the moving fabric.

  Months passed and he collected dogs, training them, hardening them. He rescued them from overburdened kennels and from the houses of parents with small children, the houses of the frail and elderly. He had moved around the country like this, fighting dogs and organizing circuits: Detroit, Cody, Corvallis, Tempe, Tulsa, Des Moines. He had always loved dogs. His parents had let the family Rottweiler sleep in his crib with him.

  * * *

  Bethany first met him at the pet store where she cashiered. She was timid around men, afraid she smelled of dog food and cat litter. She rarely made eye contact with customers, often leaning back against the till to read thick paperback books. Thirty-one years old, and she had made love only once, during the night of her junior prom. And now Bret Kruk was placing his fingers underneath her chin and lifting her startled face to look into his. There was a line behind him, but no one complained or even coughed. He was handsome in a dangerous-looking sort of way, the muscles in him coiled up like a rattlesnake. In bars and restaurants he demanded the best service without so much as raising his voice, just by darkening his face. People seemed to respect him without reason.

  “We should go for a walk sometime,” he said. “I’m new around here. You could show me around. Meet my dogs. I bet they’d like you.” His voice was warm. His fingertips were warm. He smelled of fresh air.

  She smiled, wrote down her telephone number for him, her heart bursting with fire, with an inexhaustible supply of love. Hardly remembered to take his money. He pushed an entire cart of dog food into the parking lot, and she watched from inside as he loaded the heavy bags into a red Ram. She was unaccustomed to seeing new vehicles in the parking lot.

  Days later they were walking beside Crawfish Creek, not far from his farm. The fields around the great farmhouse lay fallow and there was no manure smell in the air, nor were there any animals in sight—no cows or sheep or even horses—just his dogs. At that time he had three that he favored. They rushed out to greet her car when she pulled beside the farmhouse, teeth bared, tossing creamy slobber over her windows, claws raking the metal of her small Japanese car. She waited for him to come out of the house. He smiled and waved at her. Said something almost inaudibly and the three dogs sat in rapt attention, panting.

  “You can get out,” he said. “They won’t bother you now.”

  She had brought him a loaf of homemade bread still warm from the oven and steaming its plastic bag like breath. He seemed too tall and skinny, a scarecrow of a man, though well-muscled.

  “This is my pack,” he said, “or part of it. This is Oso, Point, and Bick.”

  “Part of it?” she asked, confused.

  “I’m a breeder,” he said, touching the sinewy muscle of his own biceps where several tattoos had been crudely executed. Cartoon bulldogs.

  “Are these pit bulls?” she asked, extending her hand gingerly toward them.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said forcefully, “it spooks them.”

  Their long tongues lapped at her fingers. She giggled.

  “See?” he said, watching her from the corners of his eyes, “my babies.”

  “How long have you lived out here?” she asked, rubbing the dogs’ ears. There were scars on their heads, some old and some new. She touched the animals lightly, wondering if he had rescued the wounded trio.

  “A few months,” he said. “My grandmother passed away and left me the land. I never grew up around here, so I’m still learning the roads, where all the stores are at. It’s nice enough. Room for the dogs to roam. And I
got the barn.” He motioned toward the hulking red building, set up off the earth on a foundation of fieldstones. She thought she heard barking in that direction.

  “So you have other dogs too?” she asked, frowning.

  He shook his head, smiled. “You sure have a lot of questions,” he said. “Here. Let’s go for a walk.” He reached for her hand. His was warm, hers cold and clammy. She was conscious of her own skin on his.

  He had packed a picnic basket and they went past the farmhouse and over a field of chopped cornstalks, a year’s worth of weeds just beginning to die off. It was October, the air cool and damp. The sky was gray and they marched through the field, his dogs bounding everywhere, happy. Pheasants fluttered loudly into the sky, exploding off the ground, startling her.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he said, looking at her face, drawing her eyes up to his. “You’re gorgeous. You know that?”

  She did not know what to say, so she turned her head away but squeezed his hand with hers. She wanted to believe him but didn’t entirely. No one had ever called her gorgeous; no one had ever called her anything. At the top of a ridge the field dropped down below them toward the leaden-colored creek. The leaves on the trees had mostly turned and come down, but some still clung on in russets and gold.

  They walked until dusk, returning through the field to the farmhouse. She saw a pile of old ashes behind the house, thought she saw something like a bone. Dismissed it as one of the dog’s playthings. Went on. Her feet were tired.

  “You could come in,” he said. “I’ll make you tea.”

  He held her hands. In the wind, the sound of more barking. She looked toward the barn. She did not want to be alone. “Come on,” he said. “I won’t bite.”

  And she followed him inside the farmhouse. Later they made love on an old brass bed. He was gentle at first, then later more rough. Her underwear had remained on one of her legs, like an anklet. Afterward, lying there beside him, she watched as the dogs nosed open the door to the bedroom and stood next to his side of the bed. They looked at him patiently and one of them licked his toes, which were hanging off the bed. She looked across the room at the closet, where a broken mattress stood crookedly, pressing up against the folding doors. Out the window she looked down at the circle of ashes and dead coals. She wondered if someday this might be her own house. She stood up to go to the bathroom and the dogs growled, but she simply shushed them, patted their heads and scratched their bellies. They whined quietly in pleasure.