The door to Bread’s house rattled tight, and Fish pedaled as hard as he could down the gravel street. Every time he left Bread, he’d race his bike back to his grandpa’s farm, trying to pray for help, or trying not to, until the quiet of the fields and fireflies offered its solace again. This time, though, something different happened inside him. This time, from somewhere or something, a reply seemed to come from all that stillness and sky. He couldn’t hear it, but it was spoken somehow, this crystalline understanding. Fish was the change being sent. It was loud enough to make him lock up his coaster brake in the gravel. Stars aligned overhead. The moon and crickets waited.
Fish clenched his fists on his handlebar tape. He wasn’t going to leave Bread this time, and the bravery of that thought seemed so foreign to him it was almost as if it belonged to someone else. But it didn’t. It belonged to him. Maybe it was because he’d known Bread for three summers, and Bread had become more like a brother than a friend. Maybe it was because Fish was ten years old now, and would turn eleven by fall, and there was a very big difference between the heart of a boy turning ten and one turning eleven. Maybe it was because he’d overheard his grandfather, a good and strong man, declare him good and strong. Something deep in his gut, something bright and dangerous and match-like, made him stop on that road. And it felt right and made his heart hammer like it did when he rode out with his grandpa to kill coyotes.
Fish looked out toward the marshes. Then he looked back at Bread’s house. The moon witnessed the decision. Fish turned his bike around.
Two
THE DOOR OF THE SIT & GO GAS STATION TWO MILES NORTH OF Claypot swung open, and two men walked in from the purple dusk—one a thickset farmer wearing dirt-caked coveralls, a John Deere ball cap, and incredibly thick glasses, the other a man in his early thirties, tall and wearing a vest with a badge, a radio and pistol on his belt, a cowboy hat on his head.
Tiffany Robins looked up from where she leaned behind the counter. Her eyes brightened at the sight of the taller man. She’d been reading her latest library loan, a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, one about the author’s life compared to a loaded gun, a thing so latent and potent, ready to be lifted from its corner and fill the hills with echoes. Tiffany tried to imagine herself as a gun, even a great big shotgun like Dickinson seemed to do, but the best Tiffany could muster was an image of a beat-up rabbit rifle, her dad’s .22, the only gun she’d ever really handled, and that before her parents divorced. Upon spotting the sheriff, Tiffany hid the book and stood to pull her dark green sweater down to the hips of her jeans. She smiled and tucked her purple hair behind her ears. Last night, out of boredom, she dyed a few highlights in her bathroom. She regretted it even as she was dyeing it, just as she did the time before that, and she regretted it even more now that the sheriff was here. She didn’t need the man, but she did wonder about him and had for some time. She reminded herself that she’d proved her independence last year, during a hungry summer spent alone in a tent, but she remained unconvinced.
“Hey, Sheriff Cal,” she said, trying not to sound overeager, looking forward to hearing him say her name. She loved his Texan voice, the way it carried hints of sweet tea and rattlesnakes and desolate places. This close to Wisconsin’s northern border, a man from Texas was downright exotic.
“Hey, Tiff,” said the sheriff, in midconversation with the older man. The smell of leather and sweat and manure swept inside with the men. “I’ve told you ten times, Burt, I’ve got no authority to tell game wardens to back off. If they don’t want you shooting coyotes on public land, they don’t want you shooting coyotes on public land!” The sheriff didn’t stop to face the other man when he spoke, but moved with purpose toward the coffee carafes. The farmer’s lips pursed together as he followed. He seemed to boil a bit before he popped. Tiffany had seen it happen many times. She herself had caused Burt Akinson to erupt once or twice. She took pride in it. It was a game the two played.
“You know as well as I do, Sheriff—hey there, Tiff.”
“Hey, Burt,” she said.
“You know as well as I do them wardens is working according to state numbers and don’t know local needs. They think with their fancy charts since there’s no coyotes in Milwaukee, there ain’t no coyotes in Claypot, so we’re the ones have to get into that forest and push them packs of bastards off farms.” Burt said the word coyotes like oats—no coyoats in Claypot—and as he did, he held his hands in the air and threw them forward as if holding gnats at bay. Tiff shook her head and put together a fresh filter of coffee behind the lotto tickets. Burt threw his hands forward again. “Gotta push ’em back into them woods or they’ll keep coming after calves.”
Sheriff Cal plucked a cup from the stack and turned toward the older man. “Burt, I know you got cattle, and on your own land you can shoot all the coyotes you want.”
“Sheriff Cal?” said Tiff.
He didn’t hear her. “And I don’t care about state or county numbers or anything else.”
“Sheriff Cal,” said Tiff. “There’s no coffee in that one.”
“But I do care that when the wardens find dead coyotes on state land, they start asking me questions.” Cal pushed the dispenser and the carafe sputtered. “Tiff, there’s no coffee in this carafe.”
“Fresh pot’s coming,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Burt wagged his head. “We call ’em cows here, Texas Ranger. Cow farming, not cattle ranching. And those parklands sit right up against my farm,” he complained. “You know when I was a boy, them parklands belonged to my—”
“I’m making light roast, Sheriff. Do you like light roast?”
“That’s just fine, Tiff. And when wardens start asking me questions, Burt, and I tell them I don’t know who’s shooting coyotes, it makes me look like the only fool in this town who doesn’t.”
Burt wrinkled his face. “Nobody knows it’s me shooting them coyotes. And they’re bad this year, too many of ’em. I’m doing folks a favor, before the coyotes run out of calves to eat and start picking off children.”
The sheriff closed his eyes a moment, left them shut. “Tiff,” he asked, “would you please tell Burt who people say has been shooting coyotes?”
“Everyone knows Burt’s been shooting coyotes.”
The sheriff lifted his eyebrows.
Burt raised his hands and boiled. “Oh, bah,” he said, and left his hands in the air this time, as if overwhelmed by the gnats. “She knows because she just heard you talking all about it!”
“People know, Burt,” said Tiffany, and she frowned. “And who ever heard of coyotes eating children?”
“Shows what both of you know, then,” said Burt.
Sheriff Cal set his empty cup on the counter. “Shoot all the coyotes you want. Just shoot them on your own side of the fence.”
“But that land used to belong to my—”
“On your own land, Burt.”
There was deep frustration in Burt’s pinched eyes. He was killing coyotes with his pupils, and maybe game wardens too, blowing them out his nostrils.
“What’s the missus going to say,” asked Cal, “when you’ve got to sell off that new tractor to pay for shooting coyotes?”
“What’s my tractor got to do with it?”
“What’s she going to say, Burt? You got a rig so big and shiny your whole farm’s got to be leveraged on it. And how are you gonna pay a fifty-thousand-dollar fine?”
“Fifty thousand!” Burt’s eyes got wide. “For poppin’ coyotes?”
Tiffany frowned at him again, shook her head in exaggerated pity. “Missus is gonna snip your balls off, Burt.” She lifted her fingers in the air, made two neat snips, and grinned at him. Burt was a friend, and Tiffany knew how to talk to him. He used to let her parade his prize hogs at the fair when she was a girl in 4-H. Now that she’d grown, they’d often cross paths and tease each other in the Sunrise Café. Last year, during her hungry summer, Burt was kind enough to pretend he didn’t notice that she w
as squatting on the back forty of his property in a Coleman tent for four months, bathing in the creek, and helping herself to a few of his chickens’ eggs once a week. In late fall after the apples had all dropped, she stole a whole chicken. Burt’s wife noticed, and Burt had to drive his truck back there over the corn stubble and say something. He asked Tiffany through the wall of her zipped tent if she needed help. She told him if she needed help she’d have asked for it, and she’d thank him for minding his own business. When he told her she might get a boyfriend who’d take care of her if she’d only stop scrunching her face so much, she leapt out of her tent in her long underwear and dragged the whole works fifty yards onto state land—which was illegal without permits, but she wasn’t about to pay the money she was saving for an apartment on a corner of brambles no one ever looked at. Burt liked banter. It was his first language. And Tiffany’s work at the gas station made her well suited to it, although it never felt entirely natural to her, never her true self telling the jokes, blocking the jabs, smiling so long.
The coffee pot gurgled and hissed, and Tiffany filled the sheriff’s cup before pouring the rest into the empty carafe.
Burt took a step backward. He’d completely ignored Tiffany’s remark. “Sheriff, I—” He swallowed. “I had no idea they could do that to a man, for varmints?” His face reddened, then grew white, and then couldn’t decide which color to turn, so it just stayed mottled. He wiped his stout fingers on the chest pockets of his coveralls, then spoke in a conspiratorial voice. “You think they know it’s me that’s been shooting?”
“Wardens don’t know yet,” said the sheriff, “but people do. So stop doing it.”
Burt reached his hand out to shake the sheriff’s. “I’ll do that, Sheriff. Thank you. You’re a good man, Sheriff, that’s what we all said since you come here. He’s a good one, Sheriff Cal. A bit inexperienced, but cares for people. I had no idea they could bring that kind of hurt down on a man, for varmints?”
Cal dropped the handshake and winced at the floor. “It’s all right,” he said.
Burt had his John Deere cap off his head now. He wrung it in his hands. Thin, matted hair crossed his forehead above his glasses. Then anger flashed in his eyes.
“I’m gonna go sit out by my field tonight and shoot at every set of eyeballs I can shine. Bears. Coyotes. Porkies. I figure I’m gonna pretty much shoot at everything.” He smiled a bit, like the declaration had allowed him to regain a piece of himself, remedy some wrong. Burt nodded and made his way toward the door. He stopped. “Oh, by the way, Tiff, I seen a hawk pick up a year-old puppy once, dropped it right on a barn roof.”
Tiff and Cal just looked at him, waiting.
“So there ain’t no saying what coyotes will get after—calves, children—if a hawk can pick up a dog. Nature’s a hell of a thing when it’s hungry.” He shook his head at the floor. “Fifty thousand!”
“See you, Burt.”
“See you,” he said, and he got a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Say, Tiff, you found a boyfriend to kiss on yet?”
Tiff raised her eyes at him like a teacher would, a warning for silence.
“I’d give that Texas Ranger a smooch if I was a lonely girl like you,” and then Burt pushed through the door, muttering about damning game wardens and all of Milwaukee as he went.
Tiffany wiped some spilled sugar from the countertop with a napkin. “Could wardens really fine him that much?”
Cal smiled as he watched Burt walk off toward his truck under the station lights. Burt’s truck was a big diesel with a spotlight attached to the driver’s side mirror. He used it for shining, which Cal learned was a pastime for many of the men in the county. They’d drive the back roads with a case of beer and shine for deer, not to poach but just to see what was out there, see whose fields had the biggest bucks. Cal had had a lot to learn in the past year. People didn’t go shining for deer in Houston.
“I have no idea, Tiff. I just figured if I threatened his tractor, he’d stop causing me trouble.”
Tiff smiled as she placed the empty pot back on the rack. She tucked her purple hair behind her ears and stole a glance at the sheriff’s pistol. It was a beautiful firearm, not plastic and soulless like the guns they carried on cop shows. Cal’s was made of brushed steel, buckled to his waist by a thick leather belt. The gun had checkered rosewood grips—she loved rosewood—and black sights and a black hammer. At least she thought that was what it was called, a hammer. It was the kind of gun a person could write a poem about.
“So when are you gonna take me shooting like you said you would, Sheriff?”
“What’s that, Tiff?”
“You promised to take me shooting at the range last month. You haven’t.”
The sheriff’s face immediately colored a bit red. Tiffany didn’t know how to read him. Was it frustration? When she was a girl, her dad’s face used to get red when he was frustrated. She didn’t want to frustrate Cal and regretted bringing it up. She turned back toward the carafes and pretended to straighten a stack of lids. Beer coolers hummed in the quiet. The sheriff was ten years older than she was, but that didn’t matter to her at all, and it wouldn’t matter to him either, once he got to know her. He was thirty-five. Tiffany learned his age from the captain of the women’s bowling team when the woman stopped in for cigarettes on her way to a tournament. The sheriff was outside pumping gas. The woman called him a tall drink, too young for herself—but now Tiffany, on the other hand. Cal was friendly, from what Tiffany knew of him from the gas station, and he had something reluctant or reserved about him that made her want to know him more. She had that too, that reluctance to enter into others’ lives. The good thing was that Marigamie County was a big county, and the sheriff had to fill his tank nearly every night at her station before heading home. She knew he lived in a cabin by Shannon Lake just past the North Star Bar, and that hers was the nearest gas station, but she hoped there was more to it, that he chose her, nightly, in some real way. Truth was, independence wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Tiffany didn’t just read poetry. She wrote it too and had done so ever since childhood. It was her way of thinking things out, naming them, knowing them. One year prior to her hungry summer, Tiffany’s poetry became preoccupied with all the lost hopes of living alone in a small town, the slow march of writing checks to banks and utility companies, the banality of daily life. Last winter, not long after she saved enough to get back indoors, she realized she’d convinced herself too completely of the enormity of her hopelessness. It frightened her, and she woke one night and rose quickly and burned with the electric oven-top all the poems she’d written in the last two years. Since then, she’s made an effort to name beauty or gladness wherever she found it—the sound of carrots being cut against a countertop, the oddly comforting smell of blankets in need of washing. Hope was a work in progress. The sheriff’s arrival didn’t hurt. Fall came, the leaves dropped, the old sheriff died, and suddenly there was Cal.
Tiffany picked a coffee lid off the stack. She set it down again. She just had to be bold.
“I’m off this Tuesday,” she said, turning to him. Her eyes came level with the square line of his jaw, his neck in his collar. “If you want to—” she began, but was interrupted by the radio on Cal’s belt crackling to life.
He plucked it off. “This is Rover,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“—take me shooting,” finished Tiff, as quietly as she could.
A woman’s voice came loudly from the radio, and Cal turned it down a notch. “We’ve got a call for a disturbance on Bell Street. Neighbors heard gunfire coming from Breadwin’s Auto. Address is, hold on a second, okay, three-one-two East Bell.”
“What’s the time?” Cal asked.
There was a pause. Marge was working the Marigamie County dispatch, and she always held down the radio button too long. Hurried conversation came through the radio, quieter now, and Cal had to turn the volume up again.
“He said he wants the time,” said Marge’s
voice.
“What does he want?” asked a man’s.
“The time, Bobby.”
“The time for what?”
The sheriff made a painful face, closed his eyes. “Dispatch, Rover,” he said into his radio, but he couldn’t get through because Marge continued to jam the airwaves.
“Did you tell him there were gunshots as Jack’s place?” asked the man.
There was irritation in the woman’s voice now. “Bobby, you heard me tell him that.”
“Tell him again, this don’t make sense.”
“ROVER, DISPATCH!” Both Cal and Tiffany recoiled from the noise.
“I copy the call, okay! I copy the call,” Cal said, turning the radio all the way down. “I copy, it’s fine.”
The sheriff placed his radio back on his belt, steadied himself with a breath or two, and adjusted the brim of his hat. He sighed.
“Well, I’ll see you, Tiff,” he said, turning to go.
“Just a sec,” she said. “Your coffee.”
She placed it in his hand and her fingertips touched his wrist. He looked at them, and then at her, and then she swore his face colored a tiny bit before he nodded and made for the door. He never gave her an answer about the shooting range. Should she ask again? Should she invite him for dinner? She could do spaghetti and canned sauce, an iceberg salad, buy bread. Not tonight, she thought, and a part of her wilted. There was time tomorrow, and the next day, she thought. There was nothing but time in Claypot.
Cal thanked her for the coffee, and on his way out he turned back. “I like the purple, Tiff,” he said, and touched his coffee to the brim of his hat, and Tiffany lifted her chin and smiled as the door closed behind him. She watched him climb into the driver’s seat of his truck. His black and white dog moved over to make room in the cab. She hadn’t met his dog yet. The animal seemed happy, though, wagging its tail.
“And I like you,” she said, hoping for hope again amid the humming coolers and racks of candy bars and jerky. The sky outside had turned from purple to silver. She could feel it in her gut and her hands. Change was coming. God, let change come. Tonight she would write a poem about a coyote, a female, silver-furred, sprinting like fire through pine.
Raft of Stars Page 2