THE TWO BOYS RAN WITH THEIR BIKES BENEATH EMERGING STARS through the plowed field. The earth was uneven and perilous, and sometimes one of the boys would tumble and take a mouthful of dirt, and the other would have to stop and untangle him. They reached a fence line between fields and collapsed for a moment’s rest.
“We’re almost there,” said Fish, heavily winded, panicked. Bread just panted and nodded in the moonlight, still unable to speak. Mud stuck to his cheeks, his eyes. They were crossing the fence line onto Blind Burt Akinson’s land now, which meant they were one farm away from Fish’s grandpa’s. Crossing Blind Burt’s fields was always a gamble. Last fall, Burt nearly ran them over with his new tractor, steaming on by with his thick glasses blazing in the midday sun. He hadn’t even seen them. But it was nighttime now, and the fields were empty of crops. Fish wished for a field filled thick with corn to hide in, but there was only bare earth, a bright moon, everything silver and exposed.
“Come on,” said Fish. “I’ll hold the wire.”
Bread dropped his bike over the barbed wire and slipped beneath it. Fish handed his bike over to Bread. The air was growing cool already. Fish’s lungs burned from running. Overhead, the stars brightened, and Fish’s pounding heart made them blaze with accusation. The sky had eyes, and it had seen what Fish had done. Fish needed a plan. He needed to think. He couldn’t. So he just ran again, all lung and heart and foot.
When they shot the coyotes that killed the calf, Fish’s grandpa had a plan. He got the deer rifle out of the bedroom, a .243 with a walnut stock and a Bushnell scope. The .243 shot flat and straight, and didn’t recoil as badly as the thirty-aught-six Fish’s grandpa used for deer in November. “Plenty of gun for coyotes,” his grandpa said, rummaging around in a crate he pulled down from the closet shelf. Bread was over that night and stood by the lighted doorway. Grandpa waved him in. “Dale, come carry a few boxes of these shells,” he said. The boys did everything they were told. The older man knew what to do. They only had to follow.
Over the course of the last three summers at the farm, Fish’s grandpa taught Fish to shoot. He started him out on tuna cans with a BB gun, and after a week or two of that, moved him up to a .22 rimfire, then a .410 shotgun. By the end of that first summer, Fish was helping his grandfather sight-in the aught-six for deer season. The recoil of the aught-six was incredible, as was the report and muzzle flash. When his grandpa shot it, Fish felt it in his shoes and lungs. Fish remembered shouldering the rifle for the first time, placing his grandpa’s folded Army cap over its buttstock for extra padding, then sliding the bolt forward to chamber the largest brass cartridge he’d ever handled. It scared him, but it was his first summer with his grandpa. Fish hadn’t spent a great deal of time with the man prior to that and wanted dearly to please him. Fish made one good shot with the aught-six. It hurt his shoulder, but not badly enough to make him stop. He chambered another round, aimed, grimaced, and the second shot missed the target completely. After the third miss, his grandpa moved him back down to the .243. “No sense in developing a flinch,” he said. They’d work back up to the aught-six, his grandpa assured him, and then slapped him on the back and smiled a bit, his eyes shining in the bright fall field.
The three of them rode to the fields in the cab of Grandpa’s truck. Fish would do the shooting. Bread was in charge of running the spotlight. They drove back along a drainage ditch. The stars were clouded over to the west, a bank of clouds closed in on the moon. As Bread swept the spotlight along the edge of the woods, there came into focus a field of stars, the reflective eyes of a pack of coyotes. “All right,” his grandpa said, putting the truck in park. “Fischer, get as many as you can.”
It was the first time Fish had ever placed crosshairs on a live animal, unless he counted the roosting pigeons he shot with the pellet gun in the granary. But that was different. These coyotes had thoughtful eyes, full and alive and knowing. The rifle rested on the open window of the truck. Fish knew where to shoot at a coyote, or a deer for that matter, just behind the front shoulder where the lungs were, where the heart was. Fish could hear Bread breathing next to him in the cab, holding the light out over his shoulder.
“Easy, Fischer,” his grandpa said. “No different than targets.”
Fish nestled his cheek against the smooth stock and took aim. The coyotes stood with stiff tails and alert ears, what looked to be twenty of them, smallish dogs staring into the light. Fish placed the crosshairs behind the shoulder of one of the larger ones. He felt a pang of pity, but then he remembered the calf, mud-strewn and torn. There were tipping points. Things had tipped. Poor damn things. Fish rested his finger against the trigger. He exhaled and squeezed. Boom and flash filled the truck cab. Instinctively, just as he’d been taught, Fish drew the bolt back and chambered another round as his eyes readjusted. He looked through the scope. One coyote lay dead, and the others had repositioned themselves, some nervously circling their fallen chief, some looking back into the light. Fish felt a surge of fear and triumph course through his body. His pulse and breathing quickened. He placed his finger against the trigger again.
“Steady,” whispered his grandpa.
Fish tightened his lips in the darkness. He had killed his first coyote. And now he was going to kill another. He thought again of the calf. Slowly. Smoothly. Exhale. Another round. The coyotes fell like cordwood. They didn’t run. They just stood, circled each other. By the time Fish had finished, the sun was nearly rising. Grandpa took them back to the house and put on coffee and set three mugs on the counter. Bread and Fish sat at the table, feeling as if they’d crossed over into some new threshold of life. They had. They sat and tried not to grin as they sipped black coffee, which was awful, while they listened to Grandpa tell them how they could skin out the coyotes after breakfast and sell the pelts for cash. “But first let me make you men some toast,” he said.
But that was then. Now, panic was in the stars. They had crossed about fifty yards of Blind Burt Akinson’s fields. They just had to run. They had to stay off the roads, keep away from headlights, and people, and the stars, and the sheriff. Without thinking about it, the boys ran instinctively toward Fish’s grandpa. He, of all men, could sort out this kind of thing. The web of Fish’s hand still hurt from the recoil of Bread’s old man’s revolver, which Bread now carried in a cloth sack next to his handlebars. The boys once examined it in a lilac hedge when Bread’s dad was passed out in a lawn chair. It was a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, a massive handgun, the same kind Dirty Harry used. Bread pointed it out of the lilacs at a calico cat on a fence post and asked the cat in a gravelly voice how lucky it felt. The cat licked itself. The boys chuckled. The revolver’s thick, blunt-nosed bullets were the size of color crayons. It was a pistol used out west for protection from bears, and it was Bread’s old man’s constant companion. His dad didn’t carry it holstered to his belt. He carried it around the house and shop in his hand like a heavy wrench and set it wherever he planned on being for the next hour or so. It was lying on the kitchen counter when Fish burst through the door this evening.
Fish had no plan when he turned back to Bread’s house, only bravery, but was met in the kitchen with the sight of Bread’s dad twisting up the collar of Bread’s shirt in his fist. Fish froze when the door banged shut behind him. All three of them did. Bread was on his knees and looking back at his friend. His face was bright red. His eyes were wild with horror and his face was tear-stained. Fish knew it happened, but he’d never seen it, not like this. His friend was so helpless in the blackened hands of his father. Bread looked incredibly small, his father so unbelievably large. Fish’s head thrummed. Everything in that kitchen seemed unreal and washed out, the way colors in dreams seem scrubbed over. Fish remembered Bread’s dad saying only one word—Who?—which seemed to carry all the accusation of hell inside its single syllable. He had awful eyes, which made Fish turn away toward the kitchen counter, where the revolver lay. The next few seconds moved so slowly, so automatically, the way Fish’s hand closed
on the grip of the revolver, the way Bread drifted noiselessly to the floor, his father floating across the kitchen, the weightlessness as Fish lifted the stainless barrel into the quiet, yellow light. Fish remembered frogs chirping outside the open window. He remembered smelling lilacs, and then he drew back the hammer and fired.
Bread stopped running. “Fish, there’s a light coming!” he said in a frantic whisper. From the far side of the field, a spotlight shone from a truck parked in the driveway of Blind Burt Akinson’s place. It swept along the fence line to the boys’ right, casting shadows across dirt clods. The truck was well over three hundred yards from where they stood.
They’re already coming for us, thought Fish, his breath blocking his throat. Soon there would be dogs. Sheriffs. Helicopters. Channel 13. Fish felt a deep pang of shame as he pictured his grandfather in his TV chair, his ball game interrupted by a special announcement, his grandson Fischer lit up by floodlights, lifting his hands to shield his eyes from the glare.
The spotlight by Akinson’s place swept closer. The beam froze when it reached them. Bread, standing in front of Fish, became a silhouette.
I didn’t have a choice, Fish would tell them. He stared into the light, wondering if his eyes looked like that coyote’s—guilty, murdering, frightened. Bread tried to step free of the light and stumbled over his bike. Fish moved forward to pick him up, along with the sack holding the gun. He could see the spotlight quivering as it held on them. Anger rose in Fish’s heart. Cowards, he would tell them. You are all cowards! And then he felt like crying. He thought again of the way that Magnum filled the kitchen so full of noise, and then silence. How Bread’s father fell forward, midstride, in so unnatural a way. He fell facedown on top of his own arms, and he didn’t stir from the discomfort of lying there like that.
Fish raised his hands in the spotlight, that Magnum in its sack. He began to cry, and stepped forward. And then a rifle shot rang out in the dark. The round ripped through the air overhead. Fish heard it impact the tree line behind him. Another shot rang out, another round zipped past them. And another.
The boys bolted, and moments later were panting on their stomachs, forehead to forehead in the tall brown grass of a drainage ditch. Bread stared at Fish with wild eyes. He was shaking the way he did sometimes, trying to swallow between breaths. A memory came to Fish, at that very moment. It was a memory of his mother, staring at him with wild red eyes on the worst night of Fish’s life, three years ago, late spring of the first year he started going out to his grandfather’s farm. His mother sat on her legs in the kitchen, trying to breathe with the cord of the phone wrapped in her fists.
He is not coming back, she said.
Three
SHERIFF CAL KNOCKED ON THE ALUMINUM SCREEN DOOR OF THE Breadwin home. The door had been left ajar. Not much of a place, he knew. He’d been here before. Jack Breadwin was known around Claypot for being good with his hands. He was a natural mechanic when he was sober, and a natural fistfighter when he wasn’t. Sheriff Cal had dragged Jack home from bars enough times to know Jack was a lone father. His wife died years before. Some folks said he was mean to that boy, and Cal made it a point to keep a closer eye on things, but he knew the boy spent the majority of his summers out at the Branson farm, and Teddy Branson was a good man, grandfather to that boy Fischer. Those boys seemed happy enough, tearing all over town on their Huffys.
Cal knew from experience it was no good for a cop to push too far into other people’s business. You get too wrapped up, too tangled, and things fall apart. Familiarity destroys authority. People don’t fear a friend. These were the sorts of things his chief in Houston had tried to teach him. And while Cal had no desire to be feared—it wasn’t who he was—he did appreciate the need to have a presence and bearing that made people move, or get back inside, or sit down and shut up at his word. He was the one who needed to be able to silence a tavern with his presence. A cop had to be in the world, but not of it. That’s what his chief in Houston had told him, said it was in the King James, someplace.
“Anybody home?” Cal rapped his knuckles on the door once more and peered inside. “Sheriff’s department. Jack, you home?” The kitchen light was on, and Cal noticed an overturned chair on the kitchen floor. Then he saw a pair of boots sticking out from behind the counter. Cal’s immediate thought was Drunken fool, but as he pushed his way in the door, a coppery smell lingered in the air. He smelled blood, clear as the lilacs.
With one hand on the door, he unsnapped his holster with the other. He slipped into the kitchen, pressing the web of his hand against the familiar checkered back-strap of his Colt 1911. It was a bad habit, resting his hand on his firearm when things felt off. The guys in the department back in Houston nearly broke him of it, but now that he was a lone sheriff in a desolate county, the habit returned. He liked the way the 1911 fit in his hand. It was an outdated style of handgun, and Cal knew it, but loved it anyway. Most of the cops in Houston had switched over to the new Glocks, the polymer pistols with superior capacity and reliability, lighter weight too, they said. Cal remembered when the first guy in his department showed off a Glock in the locker room. Men gathered around with towels draped over their shoulders, the younger ones whistling praise, the older ones wrinkling their noses. Cal thought the pistol seemed soulless, utilitarian only, like a TV remote. He’d never had to shoot anyone, and feared he probably couldn’t if the need arose, so he chose his sidearm based on his attraction to it, the way a person might choose a dog. The oiled metal and checkered wood even smelled good. It was a pleasure to shoot, and shoot well. Cal enjoyed fieldstripping it, wiping down the internals. It was an emotional connection, exactly the kind of sentimentality and attachment his chief tried to warn him against. Don’t get close to them. Don’t stop by for a drink. Don’t go in.
Cal listened, took a step inside, listened again. When he reached the far side of the kitchen counter and saw the entirety of Jack Breadwin, he stopped in his tracks.
“Jesus,” he said.
THE BOYS RUMMAGED IN THE DARK GARAGE FOR A TARP AND SOME fish poles. Fish pocketed a barlow knife he found on the workbench, along with a piece of flint he knew was in the top drawer of his grandpa’s toolbox. The packing went quickly.
They made such lists before, planning for battle or escape. They once climbed into the hayloft of the barn and spent an afternoon planning in case the Iraqis ever attacked Claypot. Fish’s dad had been a tanker in Desert Storm, so the boys knew all about fighting Iraqis. They spent hours deliberating over the list. A radio would be good to have, but they decided it was better to be battery-free, to prepare to survive with bare essentials. They would escape into the Mishicot Forest—a wilderness that stretched for more than a hundred miles through Marigamie County’s northern region. The southern edge of the forest stopped at the fields of Fish’s grandpa’s farm, and Burt Akinson’s too. They would need fish poles, and pocketknives, and a flint, and tarps, just like the mountain men, the kind of men who could walk into a wilderness and not walk out until they were good and ready. “Mountain men usually have a sack of pemmican,” suggested Bread one summer afternoon. In school, he’d learned how Indians made a paste of meat and spices and then pounded it flat to dry. The boys tried making pemmican, drying a baking pan of bacon and hamburger meat in the sun on top of the milkshed roof, but it turned green in two days, and neither boy could lift it to his mouth. “We’ll pack Slim Jims if we ever need to take to the woods,” Fish said, scraping the pan into the weeds. “Slim Jims are as good as pemmican.”
Tonight, their planning paid off. They knew what to gather before they arrived. As they crept along the fence line behind the barn, they saw Fish’s grandpa’s truck pull out of the driveway. The taillights turned onto the asphalt and sped off toward Claypot. The tires chirped as they left the gravel.
“He’s in a hurry,” said Bread, who had stopped shaking enough to speak again. “He knows, doesn’t he?”
A cow stirred in the stable behind the barn and stamped its hoof in
the dirt. It huffed through its nose. Fish saw its startled eyes glimmer in the moonlight. “Easy, girl,” he said. “Easy.” During the three years Fish had come to know his grandpa, the man had never left for town after dark. He was a man who retired in the evening, on the porch or on the sofa, a wedge of Red Man in his cheek, with a newspaper or a ball game on the TV. As the taillights faded into the darkness, Fish knew that his grandpa knew, which only confirmed his need to flee, even more than the gunshots in Akinson’s field. To stay here would be worse. His grandpa would try to hide him, and would never turn him over. There would probably be a standoff like the one Fish once saw on Channel 13, down in Texas, in Waco. No, it was up to Bread and Fish. They had to get away and survive, alone, somehow.
“We’re in a hurry too,” said Fish in a quiet voice. “Come on.”
As the boys loaded backpacks, Bread started asking questions about where they were going. It was obvious to both boys that they would take to the forest. But it wasn’t obvious what they would do once they got in there, where they would go, or how far. Fish had an idea forming in his mind, but knew it’d be wrong to lie at a time like this.
Bread poked through an open tackle box, handpicking the better fishing lures. When he stopped and turned to face Fish in the moonlit garage, Fish stopped packing too. Bread stood still, a crankbait dangling in his fingers, the way a boy stands still when he feels tears coming on in front of his friends.
“Do you think he hurt?” Bread’s whisper filled the garage, the night itself.
Fish swallowed.
“My old man,” said Bread, “when you shot him?”
Fish couldn’t tell what the answer to that should be, or what Bread would most want to hear. Bread’s old man was awful, but he was still his dad. For the first time that evening, Fish realized how quiet the night was. He heard a pigeon flap its wings on the roof of the granary. A mouse scurried along the wall of the garage. The panic that carried him at first was all but spent. Fish had killed a man. He shot him in the head. And now Fish felt dreamy and puppetlike, as if his hands weren’t really his hands, his mouth trying to move a tongue that wasn’t his tongue. It reminded Fish—reminded him in his gut—of the night he spent on the kitchen floor with his mom, waiting for the sun to rise. He knew how long the sun could take to rise, what the dark felt like.
Raft of Stars Page 3