“The Olsens can have their million dollars,” he says, “and they can shove it up their ass.”
“Daddy!” She laughs and he winks and she elbows him and he elbows her back. “Well, it’s not all doom and gloom,” she says. “I’ve got a job offer for you.”
“Say again?” He pivots toward her, but he looks like he’s tottering, uncertain of his balance.
“A job offer. An outfitter trip.”
He has a way of smiling with his whole face. She hasn’t seen him look like that in a while. “Oh, do you, now? Well, how about that? Is it one of those boys down at the department? They interested in a day trip or a backcountry experience?”
“Nope.”
“Then who?”
“It’s me.”
The smile fails. “Say again?”
“It’s me, Daddy. I want to hire you.”
“You?” His forehead creases with confusion. “Well, you . . . you can’t hire me. Come on, Stacie. If this is about pity —”
“It’s police business.”
He takes a while to answer. “You’re serious?”
“I’m serious. I need you to help me find someone.”
“Who?”
“A man named Dan Swanson.”
“Who’s Dan Swanson?”
“He’s a fellow deputy. He’s gone missing.”
“And you think something bad happened to him?”
“I do.”
“What makes you think I can find him?”
“If you’re going to get rid of a body in northern Minnesota, you’re not going to bury it—the coyotes and wolves will dig it up. You’re going to dump it in a lake.”
“And nobody knows these lakes better than me.”
“Nobody,” she says.
“Well, then,” he says, “I guess we better go find ourselves a body.” He nods and hooks his thumbs into his pockets—then wrinkles his forehead and changes his tone. “That’s not something I ever thought I’d say.”
“You ready?”
He blinks at her a few times. “You mean now?”
“Why not?”
“‘Why not,’ she says.” He shakes his head as if it’s loose on its hinges. “Okay, boss. Why not?”
Only an hour later, they are loading the rear of his Ford Explorer with supplies and hefting a canoe onto the roof rack.
18
* * *
The west wing of the Frontier compound wasn’t worth salvaging, so the bulldozers cleared it away. Thirty years of family history hauled off by dump trucks. All that remained was a muddy scar on the hillside. The windowed hallway that led to it had been temporarily capped with plywood. Two weeks later, the air still smelled of smoke.
Talia’s office is in the east wing. While their father’s was dark-wooded and walled with bookshelves, hers is windowed and washed with light. And while their father’s had oriental rugs thrown over rough wide-plank flooring, hers has white plush carpeting that shows off every footstep and vacuum stripe. Instead of oxblood leather wing-back chairs, she has decorated the space with unforgiving, straight-lined black and orange and yellow Nordic-influenced furniture. Her desk has no drawers, but it is topped by three computers. This is where they gather now, the four of them. The children. John and Nico and Yesno and Talia.
Their father remains in a coma. After the near miss with the IED embedded in the floral arrangement, they transferred him out of the hospital and into private care. He’s home with them now, stationed in one of the guest rooms downstairs, a nurse constantly by his side, a doctor visiting twice daily. Drones and guards patrol the property. One of their trucks is parked in front of the gate as an extra precaution.
In the corner of Talia’s office, there is an exercise station consisting of a bench, a chair, an exercise ball, a pull-up bar, and three racks of plates and dumbbells, and she busies herself with the equipment, rearranging the angle on the bench, clamping plates onto bars. She wears a snug purple tracksuit. Some sweat glistens on her upper lip. As they talk, she does curls, military presses, triceps extensions, rear delt flies. At one point her husband walks in and she flicks her hand and says, “We’re busy,” and he turns on his heel without a word and leaves them.
John paces a long oval of footsteps into the carpet. Nico sits with perfect posture and stares straight ahead and says nothing. Yesno scratches notes on a yellow legal tablet and answers questions when asked, including giving the story of what transpired when he visited Gunderson Woods. He talks about Mickey Golden blocking the road, the threats made, and the impossibility both companies face in securing the land. Mother would not negotiate with either of them. There was one thing—and one thing alone—that would convince her to sign away the property.
“Her son,” Nico says in a dreamy voice.
John stops pacing. “What did you say?”
“Hawkin Gunderson,” Yesno says. “Her son. He vanished five years ago during the meteor shower. Mother refuses to accept that he is dead. She’s convinced that he’s being held prisoner in the DOD facility outside of town.” He tips his head and bites down on the butt of his pen. “Perhaps denial is easier than grief. Or perhaps it’s a paranoid delusion brought on by smoking space dust.”
John can’t stop himself from saying, under his breath, “Or she’s right.”
Nico turns his head slowly toward him. And nods.
Talia doesn’t seem to notice. She goes yeesh-yeesh-yeesh as she finishes her set and then drops the dumbbells with a boom and says, “Black Dog is looking for a fight. I say we give them one.”
“Let’s just settle down,” John says.
“Settle down? Hell-raiser here’s telling me to settle down. Can you believe that?”
Yesno gives John a small smile and makes a gesture with his hand to indicate the floor is his.
“For one,” John says, “I’m not convinced it was them that tried to kill Pops.”
“Oh? Are you confessing, then? Because that’s another theory floating around.”
“Don’t, Talia.”
“Then shut the fuck up. It was them. No doubt in my mind.”
“The night of the fire,” John says. “Did anything turn up in the surveillance footage?”
Yesno shakes his head no. “It was clipped. It went dark.”
Talia swings her arms back and forth while giving John a baleful stare. “You heard about how Mickey Golden was talking to Yesno? Bullying him with his truck? That’s a declaration of war. And we’re not going to sit around with our thumbs up our asses while they figure out the next move.”
“Okay, you two,” Yesno says and holds out his arms as if to keep them apart. “What do you have in mind, Talia?”
She flexes an arm, feels the muscle, seems satisfied by the bulge. “Dad kept you around because you were smart. So you tell me, smart guy.”
Yesno smiles a little sadly. “Well . . . we could start with basic retaliatory gestures. Slash the tires of their trucks. Destroy the engines. Raid their equipment warehouse.”
“That’s not —” John begins, but Talia takes over before he can finish. “Sure. Fine,” she says. “But that’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Some people have to bleed for this.”
“How ambitious are you feeling?” Yesno says.
She picks up an insulated cup and the straw pinkens with the power shake she sucks from it. “Pretty fucking ambitious.”
“Walter Eaton ambitious?”
John holds up his hands and says, “I’m going to go.”
“Stay right fucking there. Don’t you move. Don’t you move an inch. You’re part of this conversation, whether you like it or not.”
“I don’t want to be.”
“Shut up,” Talia says to John, and then to Yesno: “Why not? They go after the head of Frontier, we go after the head of Black Dog. That’s good math. That makes sense to me.”
Yesno darts his eyes from Talia to John, then clicks his pen, retracting the tip. “Last I heard, Walter Eaton was back in Texas.”<
br />
“Oil fields were calling, huh? That fat fuck knows better than to stick around.”
“So.” Yesno clicks the pen again and poises it above the paper. “Mickey Golden would be the obvious target. But not an easy one. He was with Blackwater for a decade before signing on with Eaton back home in Houston.”
John raises his voice to a near shout when he says, “There’s more than one way to fight.”
The straw croaks and gurgles as Talia sucks the shake dry. “Go on, you giant pussy. What’s your giant-pussy plan?”
“Gunderson Woods.”
“What about it?”
“That’s what Black Dog wants. And if they get it, they’ll own this industry and this town.”
“So?”
“So we get there first.”
“Johnny, news flash—we’ve been trying to do exactly that for five fucking years. That bald witch won’t sell.”
“That’s not what she said. You heard Yesno.”
“She’ll give us the land—or some portion of it, anyway—in exchange for her son,” Yesno says. “She did say that, but . . . I’m afraid it’s wishful thinking.”
“Why?” John says.
“Don’t you think it’s a little unlikely that her son—who is officially dead—is secretly housed in a government facility?”
John waits a long beat before he answers. “I think it’s worth looking into.”
Talia picks up a medicine ball and tosses it from one hand to the other and loses herself in thought for a moment. “Hey, Nico.”
Nico does not respond. He remains stiffly seated in his chair, staring out the window. He wears all black and appears as thin and insubstantial as a shadow.
“Nico!” Talia says and slaps the medicine ball. “Earth to Nico!”
He shifts his gaze to her, his eyes a luminous blue. “Yes?”
“Stay with me, okay? I’m talking. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Is she serious or is she blowing smoke?”
“Who?”
“For fuck’s sake. The cult leader! The worm! Big spooky mama-jama over at Gunderson Woods!”
Nico takes all of this in before saying, “Her name is Mother.”
“Is Mother as good as her word?”
“Her word is true.”
“How does she know her boy is still alive?”
“Because the metal told us.”
Talia drops the ball and throws up her hands. “Because the metal told you? That’s just great. That’s wonderful. Do me a favor and lay off the space dust before you lose the last three brain cells left in your head.”
“I think she’s right,” John says. “I think the boy’s alive.”
At first Talia’s face twists in irritation, but then it settles into an expression of suspicious wonder. “I guess you’d be the one to know . . . wouldn’t you, Johnny?” Silence brittles the air. They stare at each other a long moment.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Yesno says and clicks his pen several times as though to capture the ellipsis in his mind. “What are you two talking about? Why would Johnny know anything about this?”
Slowly Nico turns his head to study John and his eyes seem to burn a little brighter when he says, “Metal is.”
“It sure is, Nico,” John says.
“I’m sorry, but what’s going on?” Yesno says. “Please enlighten me.”
John puts a hand on Yesno’s back, right over the warped hump of his spine, and says, “You know we love you, Sam. You know you’re like a brother to me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“Tell me what?” His head swings back and forth between John and Talia. “Tell me what?”
John nods at Talia. She nods back. “Five years ago,” he says. “Something happened.”
“Tell me,” Yesno says.
John brings his thumb and forefinger to his eye and delicately toys with the contact lens. He peels it from his pupil and deposits it in his palm and holds it out to Yesno. It is colored, as brown as a shelled nut. And now, when John blinks, the one eye glows blue.
“I don’t understand,” Yesno says. “You’re like Nico.”
“No,” Nico says. “He is more.”
Talia slides the plates off the bench and racks them. Then she hefts the bar off its cradle and readjusts her grip until she holds its center one-handed. “Maybe it’s easier to show you,” she says. She takes a few hurried steps and snaps her arm and hurls the bar like a javelin at John.
John doesn’t lift a hand to stop it or dodge out of the way. He lets the bar strike him right in the chest. There is a metal-on-metal clang that seems to break the very air. Yesno shrinks in his seat and cries out. The bar thuds to the floor with its steel end blunted.
“But,” Yesno says, “how?”
And then John unbuttons his shirt and pulls it aside and reveals the silver-blue throb that veins outward, one tendril snaking up his neck and along his cheek and rooting in his birthmark.
19
* * *
Jenna Swanson lives in a bungalow with a yard full of toys edged by chain link. It’s ten o’clock at night. She still wears her waitstaff uniform from the Lumberjack Steakhouse and she can smell the fryer grease puffing off her denim shirt and neck bandanna but can’t find the energy to change. She sits on the couch with the lights off, but the living room remains bright because of the neighbors. The six-unit complex across the street houses two dozen miners or more. They drive trucks; they clean equipment; they work the wizard blades sixty, seventy hours a week—and in their free time, they party.
Country music yowls from a stereo, loud enough to throb the windows with its occasional bass. A fire pit burns in the front yard, and several men stand around it. In the driveway, a truck is up on blocks, its hood hoisted. Four men lean over the engine, one of them occasionally picking a wrench out of a toolbox, but their focus seems to be more on a thirty-pack of Old Milwaukee.
A voice calls out to her from the next room. “Mama!” She waits until he calls for her again before cracking the door to his room and poking her head in to say “Yes?”
“It’s too loud, Mama.” Timmy sits up in bed and scrubs his hand across his eye. One side of his face is rashy with sleep.
“Just try not to listen,” she says, even as a guitar twangs outside and rough laughter follows.
“How can I not listen?”
“Turn off your ears.”
“Lay by me.” Timmy plops his face into his pillow and holds out his hand and curls his fingers, beckoning her.
She debates whether or not to fight him on this and decides it’s not worth it. The floor is jumbled with plastic dinosaurs, and she steps on one and hisses, “Son of a —”
“Don’t swear.”
“I didn’t.” She climbs into bed and he curls into her and his warm, toothpaste-y breath puffs against her cheek. The ceiling is dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars, and she tries to focus on them and not the kick drum across the street that makes her pulse speed up.
“Why don’t they go to bed?” Timmy says. “It’s past bedtimes.”
“I wish they would, baby.”
“Call Daddy,” he says. “Tell Daddy to make them be quiet.”
This is what she would normally do. Ask Dan. Either he would walk across the street and offer them a beer and crack a few jokes and ask them to dial it down, or, if on the job, he’d swing through the neighborhood in his squad car, maybe blip the rack lights, and the men would take their drinking inside. That’s how her husband operates. A friendly asshole. Everybody’s pal, even with a gun holstered at his side.
“Tell Daddy,” Timmy says again and she says, “I will,” because she can’t say, I can’t. His cell jumps straight to voicemail. He’s gone dark. That’s what the cops said. A phrase that makes her imagine a closed coffin.
“Call and tell him right now.”
“Not now,” she says. “He’s busy.”
She’s wished her husband dead befo
re. Isn’t that what all wives wish occasionally about their husbands? A spinout on a country highway. An aneurysm at the gym. A bit of ham clogged in a windpipe. Something quick. Something that allowed you a fresh start. It was a wish you made without believing it would actually come true. He had that frat-boy charm, but underneath it was something rank. A surface different than his center. Maybe that was the case with everybody. It was definitely the case with Northfall. Take one look and you think you’re in a piny postcard advertising Vacationland. Blink a few times and you realize you’re in the middle of an alien-ore geopolitical crisis.
Maybe Dan isn’t dead. Maybe he’s getting into the trouble that is his standard. But usually that comes with texts and phone calls. A flood of bad excuses supposed to convince her he’s not diving deep into a bottle or rolling around with another woman, despite the bad smells he sometimes brings home with him. This time, his cell history tells another story, the last tower ping eight days old.
She kisses her son on the forehead and says, “I’m going to go, okay?”
“No, stay.”
“No, go,” she says. “Love you.” She rolls out of bed and once more steps on one of his plastic dinosaurs and curses and kicks it.
“No swears!”
She tries smiling at the boy, but she’s got tears spilling out of her eyes. Tears she can’t hide, though she tries to wipe them away with her palm.
“Did that hurt?” he says.
“Yeah, it hurt.”
She’s not sure why she’s crying. Maybe sadness, but it feels like a different kind of anguish. A how-am-I-going-to-figure-this-out desperation. Their bank account doesn’t have more than a few hundred dollars rattling around in it.
When she leans in to kiss her boy, he puts both his hands on her face. Her tears dampen his fingers. He studies their tips, then puts them in his mouth to curiously taste.
“Weirdo.” She sniffs out a laugh. “What does crying taste like anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Like clouds, I guess.”
* * *
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