by Tim Johnston
Fields buried in snow, windbreaks of black winter cottonwoods and then the old farmhouse rising out of the land just as he remembered it—twelve, thirteen years ago that would’ve been. Anyway it was before she moved out here and before her father passed, because she’d asked him to come out and talk to the old man, who seemed to think there was something wrong with the septic—he was smelling it all the time now, and no wonder because he hadn’t had the thing pumped in three years, and there was a broken pipe, and it was high summer and by the end of the day Gordon was so covered in filth and flies she’d turned the hose on him like a dog, the two of them laughing like they hadn’t laughed in a long time. Since before Roger died. Since before Meredith left.
Thin line of smoke rising now from the chimney and that could mean she was home or not home, but then he saw her green wagon in the drive and the sight of it did something funny to his guts, to his heart, and he almost drove on; she might recognize the Crown Vic as Wabash’s loaner but she would not put it together with him.
Unless the boy told her so, when she picked him up later in the day; unless the boy told her Mr. Burke had been at the garage that morning and had driven off with the Crown Vic, and then she’d know it was him who’d driven by, who’d slowed down but hadn’t turned in, and he said, “Just to hell with everything,” and braked and made the turn in time, fishtailing a little in the packed snow of the drive.
He parked behind the wagon and stepped from the Crown Vic and shut the door and looked for her to come to one of the windows so he wouldn’t have to stand on that porch waiting for her to answer the door. But she didn’t come to any window and he was making his way to the porch when he heard something off to his right, toward the back of the property, out of view, and he stopped where he was, ear-cocked, until he heard it again: a muted, earthy thunk. Like something pounding at slow intervals on the stony ground.
He turned back and trudged through the snow alongside the house, making his way to the backyard, where the sound was louder—hard metal and hard earth and also the breaths, the grunts, of human exertion—and as he came around the corner he saw the figure in the middle of the yard, standing beside the T of the iron clothesline bar. A man’s canvas workcoat, his watchman’s cap, his rawhide gloves. The man standing knee-deep in the snow and not moving, taking a moment, gathering his strength and his breath before he raised the pickax shoulder-high and swung once more at the frozen earth, dull ring of iron, sharp grunt of effort in a high register. Not a man, of course. A woman. Rachel Young, dudded up in her dad’s old workgear.
Somehow—maybe her exertions, maybe the noise of the pickax—she didn’t hear him until he was nearly at her shoulder, and then she turned abruptly and faced him, the pickax held crossways to her body, smoke huffing from her mouth and nose, her eyes pink-veined and wet, and there she stood, trying to make sense of him. Gordon trying to make sense of her, the pickax, the rough box of space she’d cleared in the snow down to the turf, big enough for her to stand in and to swing at with the tool. And only then, after he’d taken all this in, did he understand that the darkness in the snow to her left, that dark bundle, was the old dog, Wyatt, wrapped in an old blanket.
She held the pickax as if to stop him, as if to meet him in battle—seeing him, not seeing him, seeing God knows what in those raw eyes, but when he said her name, “Rachel. Rachel . . .” and reached for the pickax, she lowered it. Or the pickax lowered itself, by its own weight. Like something she never could have lifted in the first place.
He took one step forward into the space she’d cleared and took the pickax from her and held it one-handed at his side as she fell sobbing to his chest.
23
It was just dark when they began coming out of the garage. A light snow falling through the headlights of their cars and trucks as they started them up and pulled out of the lot one by one and onto the street, some going left, some right.
Sutter tailed the two-tone pickup as it crossed through town, as it passed under an old railroad overpass, as it drove another half mile down industrial streets before turning, finally, into the lot of a small bar with the name jack’s in failing red neon over the door. He watched Radner park and get out of the truck, wearing a billed cap now, and cross the lot toward the gray metal door and pull the door open and step inside. Then he parked his own car and gapped the window and killed the engine. He lit a cigarette and sat watching the gray door, the few other cars and trucks in the lot. It was Friday, a quarter past five, and as he sat there another truck, a black Ford, pulled into the lot and two men got out and slammed the doors and walked toward the gray door and opened it and went inside.
A red dust of snow fell before the neon sign and vanished. He smoked, and when the cigarette was gone he stubbed it out and turned the key and put the sedan in gear and drove out of the lot.
When he returned to the lot ten minutes later he was on foot, and he walked up to Radner’s Chevy and tried the driver’s door, then walked around and tried the passenger’s. He glanced around the lot; he watched the door to the bar, the red-stained flecks of snow in the neon, then pulled the thin metal tool from his hip and fed it down the glass into the guts of the door and felt with it for perhaps a second before he gave one quick yank and slipped the tool back under his belt.
The dome light came on with the opened door and he got into the truck and pulled the door shut and removed the plastic light cover and took out the little bulb and put it in the ashtray, replaced the cover and got out of the truck again and stood in the open door. He adjusted his mini MagLite for its tightest spot and roved it over the benchseat and the junk that lay there: plastic Mountain Dew bottles, mechanic’s rags, a rumpled back issue of Field & Stream, a black watchman’s cap, a flattened box of tissues. He probed the light under the benchseat on both sides of the tranny hump and saw nothing but garbage and dust and a long metallic ice scraper. In the glovebox he found a handgun, a Colt .45, with much of the factory bluing worn from the slide. The safety was on and a round was chambered. He slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, then slid the benchseat all the way forward and ran the spot over the garbage behind it, stirring it with his free hand. He saw a skinny wooden length and his heart jumped, but when he pulled the stick free it was another ice scraper, this one about as old as the truck.
He stood in the open door for a long while, darting the beam here and there, over and over again. Finally he slid the benchseat back and shut the door and peeled the rubber gloves from his hands and stuffed them in his pocket and wiped his slick hands on the sleeves of his jacket. He found his cigarettes and got one lit and, leaning his weight against the front fender, watched the gray door of the bar and the snow that fell red and silent in the light above it.
24
When she turned from the stove he’d taken the chair at the table where her grandfather would sit in the evenings bent over his ledgers, sipping mug after mug of boiled black coffee, Gordon taking the chair with no thought of her memories, of course, but only because it gave him a direct line of sight, through the window, to the fire in the yard—the fire burning strong now, sending white smoke into the sky and filling the deep snow before it with a strange trembling blush. Good old hardwood this was, he said, oak and walnut, and after it had burned down to cinders they could dig the grave and it would all be done by the time she had to go pick up Marky from the garage and tell him . . . what? That their old Wyatt, their old friend, was gone forever.
Rachel turned from the stove with the two mugs and glanced at her feet so as not to step on him, not to trip over him—hot tea everywhere, shattered mugs, shattered bones!—and her heart broke again because he was not there, was nowhere in sight and never would be again, and she fought back her tears because it was only a dog after all and what was that next to the loss of a child, a daughter, your only child?
She set one of the mugs before Gordon and he looked away from the window to thank her. He hooked his big finger through the handle but did not lift the mug, instead sat lookin
g into the steam, and how strange he should choose today of all days to show up, so that she would not have to be alone, not yet. Even if he just sat there, even if he never said another word.
He did not look up until she’d sat down and then he looked slowly around the kitchen, and when his gaze came around to her she wanted to hold it, to read his thoughts, but he moved on again, back to the window and the fire beyond. The pale tips of flame rising above the snow, the thick and twisting smoke.
“It’s a good old house out here,” he said. “It’s good you held on to it.”
She could just see his reflection in the glass. She lifted her mug and sipped and set it down again with care. The furnace had come on and the dusty heat blew on the dog’s empty blankets where they lay before the vent and blew the smell of him into the room.
“It gets noisy here, sometimes,” she said.
“Noisy?”
“Yes. Walking sounds where no one’s walking. Smells too. Cooking smells where no one’s cooking. Bathroom smells where no one’s been for hours.”
“You might have that toilet gasket checked.”
“I might have my gasket checked, you mean.”
“Didn’t say that. The mind gets . . . active when you’re on your own, that’s all. It can get to be a tricky son of a gun.”
His big hand lay on the table beside his mug, palm-down. Her own hand might cover half of it. She remembered standing on his porch that day in October as he held the stormdoor open but would not ask her in, nothing in his eyes to say he needed her or even knew her name, a gray-faced man whose heart had been torn out. The very worst thing, the unspeakable thing. He didn’t know then that the sheriff was looking for Danny. And neither did she.
Gordon turned the mug, and watching the turning said, “I guess you know all about those girls by now. Those two girls that went into the river.”
“Yes. You were the first person I thought of. I wondered if you’d seen it on the news, or if anyone would tell you. I . . .” She didn’t finish. Didn’t know how to finish.
“I drove on up to Rochester, night before last, to the hospital,” he said.
She watched him.
“I thought I wanted to see her,” he said, “but when I got there I realized what I really wanted to see was her father. Sutter. Wanted to see his face, what it looked like now.”
“And did you?”
“I did.” He nodded slowly. “He’s a sick man. He doesn’t hardly look like the same man.” He stared into the mug. “I guess I wanted to know did he have any better understanding now. Did he understand any better why I said the things I said to him. Back then.”
She waited. “And did he?”
He tilted his mug and frowned. “It just isn’t the same situation. What happened to his daughter, he’ll get over that. He’ll just pay more attention to every part of her life from here on out. Or as much of it as he gets to see. He won’t carry this thing that I carry around with me every day and every hour, these”—his hand circled in a buffing motion to the right of his temple—“thoughts that go through my head, these . . . ideas.”
He lowered the hand and looked at her from under his eyebrows, and a coldness poured into her.
He turned back to the window. The fire was burning down, the smoke thinner now and calmer.
“Is that why you—” she began, and faltered. “Is that why you came out here? Because of those two girls?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He turned back to her. “I saw your boy this morning. Marky.”
“You did?”
“At the garage. I had to take the van in. I hadn’t seen him in a while, I guess. For a second there I thought it was the other one. And then I remembered that that boy was long gone, and—”
He stopped. She was blotting up her tears with the handkerchief he’d given her earlier, outside, when she’d first turned and seen him standing there. The thin cloth damp now and no longer smelling so strongly of him as it did that first time.
“Ah, damn it,” he said. “Don’t listen to me.” Shifting his weight in the old chair. Patting the tabletop with his fingers. “I never should of come out here like this, out of the blue like this. I must be crazy.”
“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. I don’t know why you came but you came. You came, Gordon, and I’m so . . . I’m so grateful.”
He turned once more to the window, and so did she. The fire had burned down out of view. A weaker cloud of smoke rising into the dusk. The light had dimmed in the kitchen too; soon she’d have to go pick up Marky.
“I sure didn’t come out here to talk about any of this,” he said. His shoulders raised with a deep breath and lowered again. He did not look at her. “I drove up to Rochester two nights ago and I saw your boy this morning and I guess that’s what put it in my head to see did you need any help out here.” She was nodding, yes, wiping at her eyes. “And now it looks like that fire is near about spent,” he said, “so why don’t we go on out there and see about giving that old boy a proper place to rest.”
25
An hour later Radner pushed through the gray door and began to make his way to the truck, loose-legged and head-down, his face shielded by the bill of his cap.
Sutter got out of the truck and shut the passenger door behind him, wondering at the strangeness of his own legs, calling it the time he’d spent sitting in the cold truck waiting and not his nerves, or his sickness. He saw Radner look up at the slam of the truck door. Saw his eyes under the bill when he saw him, and saw his gait change hardly at all as he kept on, hands in his jacket pockets. He stopped a few feet short of the truck, of Sutter, and stood taking him in, jacket first, then the face. Then the rest, down to his boots.
“I know you,” Radner said. “You’re the man had me looking under his hood today.”
In his breath cloud Sutter smelled the Seagram’s and 7. A smell and a taste from the old days, before she got him to give it up for good.
“But you weren’t wearing that jacket earlier,” Radner said, raising one forefinger in the air and wagging it at him. Playacting a man who would not be duped.
“Is this your truck?” Sutter said.
Radner lowered the finger. “What’s the trouble, Sheriff?” At the movement of Sutter’s arm he glanced down, then showed his hands. “I’m an unarmed man here, Sheriff.”
Sutter studied him. The hooded eyes. The smirking and wet, almost girlish lips. Sutter raised the gun. It was his father’s old .38 revolver. Now his. He stepped aside and gestured with it.
“I want you to shut up and place your hands on the fender of the truck.”
“What’s this about, Sheriff?”
“What did I just say?”
Radner regarded him blankly, drunkenly. Then he stepped forward and put his hands on the fender of the truck.
“Spread your feet.”
Radner spread his feet and Sutter patted him down. He collected the young man’s keys and phone from his jacket pockets and slid them into his own. He glanced at the door of the bar. If anyone else came out it changed everything.
“Put your hands behind your head and lace your fingers.”
Radner did so and Sutter gripped the fingers in his free hand and pocketed the .38. He pulled the bracelets from the hip pocket of his jeans and drew down Radner’s left wrist and cuffed it, then drew down the right and cuffed it to its fellow.
Radner was glancing around the lot. “Where’s that Ford of yours, Sheriff? With the Minnesota plates and no whattayacallit. Official insignia.”
“I won’t tell you again to shut up.”
Sutter opened the truck door and gave Radner a push and Radner got himself in and Sutter shut the door, then walked around to the driver’s side and got in. The smell of the young mechanic had already filled the cab: booze and grease and gasoline.
“Whatever this is—” Radner began, and Sutter struck him with the back of his hand.
Radner sat looking at his lap, tasting his lower lip with his tongue.<
br />
“You want to say anything else?” Sutter said. He saw Radner’s eyes go to the door of the glovebox. “It’s a short drive,” Sutter said. “It won’t kill you to keep that mouth shut till we get there.”
The truck started up, the wipers swept snow from the glass, but under the snow was a film of ice and Sutter sat staring at it, his heart pounding—all that waiting and you never thought to scrape the windshield? He tried to crank down the window but it was either frozen or didn’t work, and finally he reached under Radner’s legs for the metallic scraper, got out of the truck again and went quickly and foolishly at the ice, and with each scrape he saw more of the cab, more of Radner, and it was like the reveal on one of those lotto games, one of those scratch-and-play cards, only this one told you not what you’d won but what you’d lost.
He turned left out of the lot and drove down the road two blocks and turned right, and then right again, down a lampless road where the buildings were all dark and window-boarded and the lots had not been plowed, and he pulled into a lot where the only tracks in the snow were his own tiretracks going in and the tracks of his boots coming out and he followed these to the back of the building, a one-time machine shop, according to the faded signage, and pulled up alongside his sedan and parked the truck and killed the engine.
He turned to Radner, but Radner was looking out the ragged hole Sutter had scraped, and Sutter looked too: the flat, undisturbed snow of the lot, the dark old building. The snow that fell on everything with no prejudice and no sound whatsoever.
Sutter got out of the truck and walked around with his eyes on Radner and opened the passenger door. “Get out.”
Radner stared at him. The smirk gone from his lips. His face shining. Then he looked away. As if not seeing Sutter was the same as Sutter not being there.
Sutter took him by the arm and pulled him stumbling from the cab. He walked him a few steps and turned him around again.