Cold Quiet Country (16 page)

When you fight, there’s a switch that if it goes one way, all a man thinks about is getting away, and he doesn’t care about shame or saving face. If the switch goes the other way, he’s ready to die for his cause.

It went the second way for me.

Burt glanced his boot against my ribs. I caught his leg and hung on, rolled and pulled. He bounced on his behind. Table silver clanged.

I looked in his face, and instead of the man who gave me work and a place to sleep, I saw the man who’d slipped his pecker in my girl. The one who was supposed to defend her from all assaults, defend her mind and body and soul until she was old enough to deliver to the world a finely finished young woman. I saw the man charged by
God Almighty
with the most precious task ever given to any man of any generation—and he was the one who snuck into her room and covered her mouth with his stinking hand. The switch went the second way and I didn’t think about anything save breaking his neck.

I scrambled to my knees and swung my fist at Burt’s eye, but he moved too quick and my knuckles went by his hair. He grunted and somehow after that first missed punch I stopped throwing singles and instead fired barrages, salvos. Fay Haudesert shouted something and I knew Cal was coming, but I didn’t stop.

Burt grunted.

I felt his blood on my hands. I was berserk and he was panicked. I felt strength in my back and force in my arms and shoulders. I wailed on him faster and faster. I shrieked. Each time my fist connected I felt the world getting a little better. I felt Gwen healing. My knuckles hit bone and teeth. My knees drove air from his lungs, and all I wanted was to hit him so hard his lungs would never again have need of air. I wanted to hit him until his bones gave away and I was pounding the soft flesh within.

Guinevere rushed from the wall and screamed, and I didn’t know any more until I came to. Burt had my boot. I was outside, and he was dragging me through the snow. Gwen shouted for Burt to stop and Cal pulled her back inside the house.

Gwen huddled in bed and her anger focused in a single place—the spot between her legs where she was soaked, where she burned, where skin was raw. If she could cut that part of her out and never have to feel this confusion again…if she could drive from her mind the self-loathing, for daring to stand up to him when he wasn’t there, only to crumble into slutty obeisance when he snuck to her room. If she could stash a gun by the bed and make sure that the next time he invaded her, a bullet invaded him…

Her eyes closed, opened; she couldn’t tell. It was dark, and the covers were over her head. The vision came like a memory; soon Gale would take her away. What had started as a plan had become something more; her visits to him in the barn had begun as calculated seduction, but became succor. Her sanity.

He had proposed last night, and asked her father this morning. Tonight he would come for her. If he was alive, he would come for her. He had to be alive. She would have known. She would have seen him.

And now that he was about to take her away, she saw his face. His brooding eyes looked hurt, even when buoyed by a smile. His hair, not a sunny red, but deep and muddy like the clay in an exposed stream bank. His cheeks burned like they had in the fall, when he spent his time in the fields.

Even as she saw him, it was like he was outside, framed by a cold blue sky…

She heard an oboe. A bullfrog note. A slow, earthen tune; it vibrated through her like an approaching train. Higher notes, faster notes tethered to the ground by that low bullfrog rumble.

Gale was going to die.

Gwen jerked upright in bed and looked out the frosted window to the silvery gray outside, the snow and cold. He was alive now, she knew. Alive for the moment. The history of her visions proved her ability was growing. She’d explored each vision with more confidence. Gale might be close to death, but he might not. It could be hours. Was it too much to hope it could be days? Long enough to do something about it?

Gwen brought her hands to her eyes and pressed until she saw stars. When the colors were dizzying and the pressure brought pain, she slammed her fists to the bed. She stared at the ceiling. Tears welled. Soon her temples and ears were wet.

Him or you
, the Devil had said about the man at the grocery, as if there was a deal to be had.

She’d stifled growing rage at Burt by honing the knowledge that someday she’d escape. Someday she’d be away from the constant threat, protected by Gale’s arms and by his ownership. She’d be his, and hence, no other’s. Every time her father had visited her, she consoled herself with thoughts of freedom.

But without Gale?

How would he take his last breath? Would he die violently, at her father’s hand? Would it be an accident at night in the cold, on his way to see her? Or after their escape, tomorrow, thumbing for a ride along the road?

She couldn’t wait for the window tap.

Gwen threw on her clothes and tossed her coat through the window. Outside, she put it on and paced at the back of the house. Finally she waited at the corner, staring out over a bare field of six-inch cornstalks.

When Gale arrived she clutched him; they went to the barn and huddled together.

Him or you
, the Devil had said.

“You don’t seem yourself,” Gale said.

They’d been nestled a long while, silent. She kept her head pressed to his chest, listening to his heartbeat. His body smelled young, in spite of the sweat and work. His flesh was alive in a way that Burt’s was not, almost in defiance of all things that had met their peak and begun the slow trail back to dust.

From experience, she knew defiance seldom worked out.

I turn a circle where I lost Gale G’Wain’s trail. The only part of the sky that isn’t gray or purple is a sliver out west, but it’ll disappear soon. Snow falls so heavy you’d have to poke a hole to take a piss. Standing here depletes me more than work. It’s ball-frost cold. I wear long johns six months of the year, and it’s no accident I have them on now. A film of white blows across the field, and seeing up or down is like adding water to a half-full glass and trying to remember which part was which. From low on my back to the base of my neck, a shiver starts and won’t let go.

To keep moving, I step away from the woods, and after twenty paces turn right ninety degrees and march perpendicular to the way I came. Stooped, I watch whiteness that long ago lost any markings. Unblemished save the prints I leave. After fifty paces, I’ve not found the kids’ trail. I about-face and re-examine the same terrain. Reaching my former trail, I cross it and continue fifty paces beyond.

They’re lost.

“Sheriff!”

The voice arrives against the wind. I turn, each step in the foot-deep snow a minor obstacle. It’s Cooper, with one bluetick hound straining on a leash. He’s a hundred yards from me, on a tangent for a forest that has become darker with proximity and stands forbiddingly gloomy. “Are you good?” he calls.

I wave him forward. Why slow for an old man when there’s a girl? I fix on a pale stump at the forest while Cooper progresses to the field.

Step over step. Old legs. Old feet. Old man. Old father. Grandfather. My princess is going to die too.

I lift my foot. Throw it down. Lift the next. Throw it. And I taste snow, feel it in my eyes, feel pain in my arm, and wonder what happened that I’m sprawled like a dead snow angel.

* * *

Had a conversation with Burt about the Pounder boys. Of course, coroner called it a suicide pact, and it was well and good. But I wanted to be sure there wouldn’t be any more. I know the history of organizations that want to change the world.

Sidekicks get shot.

I protected Burt; damn right I protected him. What sense would it make to drag him through a court and make him prove the two of them came after him and not the other way around? The bodies were dead without marks. I couldn’t have proved they were murdered to begin with. Not a bruise on the neck. Not a frown on their faces.

Nothing like the snarl on Burt’s face back at the barn. Pitchfork through him—that’s a murder. Steward and Marshall Pounder? Neither suffered a pinhole.

* * *

I wrestle my clothes until they permit me to sit and flog the snow until it allows me to stand. My thoughts are lean, like the air at the top of a mountain. The throb in my arm lessens as the wooziness in my head fades. Gwen is my one constant notion. I follow Cooper’s tracks and pull my pipe and tobacco. Light a bowl and the smoke tastes like smoke. Gives me strength.

Man can’t shit blood for too long before his insides disintegrate and he’s shitting himself. That’s a proverb.

The going is easier following Cooper’s trail, though the drifts at the edge of the field are deep and taxing. Out of the worst of the wind, the going is treacherous; I catch my heel on a log. Snow gives way to a film of ice; the whole thing’s slippery as snot on a glass doorknob.

The quiet rallies me. Through twenty feet of jaggers, my heart keeps pounding and reaching the silence of the ponderosa I know I’ll see this ordeal through. Tobacco smoke does something good to my nerves.

These ponderosa stand fifty feet, higher. Their trunks are three and four feet in diameter. In the winter, still air feels warm. An illusion. But outside the wind, and stepping in snow only a couple inches deep, and finally out of the never-ending glare, I’ll permit it.

Cooper has picked up his pace and I can’t see him. The terrain is flat, punctuated by knolls, until after two hundred yards, where Mill Crick is. I want to find a log and sit, but the dog bays and Coop shuffles after him like they’ve found something.

Gale and Gwen turned along the side of the crick where the water flows too fast to ice over, and followed upstream fifty yards to a brook and walked across there. I cross, and claw up the bank on the other side. My back aches from landing on the steps, and whatever happened in the field when I made a snow angel has left me weak like I went to bed without supper and set out without breakfast.

Black cherry grows along the stream. Beech displaces pine. The trail veers aside and veers again, and at the corner, I spot a white paper birch and follow snowed-in tracks to it. The curly, papery bark’s been stripped here and there. Enough to start a fire.

Coop’s dog lets out a long howl, lonely as a dark night. I hurry, and my heart rumbles.

I sniff, but there’s no smoke in these woods, not close by. I tell myself that by now, Odum’s arrived at the Coates place and found Gale and Gwen inside, thawing out in front of a fire made of birch bark and Coates’s kitchen table.

The hound is silent. Coop’s dropped from view.

Lungs heaving, I advance. My legs have weights attached. I pull a fleck of dried venison from my pocket and chew it, not knowing what I’ll see when I crest the next knoll.

* * *

It had to have been Burt. The exchange I overheard on the first day of trout season those eight years ago was about the leadership of the militia. Men form militias because some ideals are worth dying for. If they’re worth dying for, they’re noble enough to kill for, and once a man commits to the first, he’s obligated to the second. Enemies are for killing.

Steward and Marshall Pounder lived in the house their mother raised them in. Neither married. They did their share of carousing; I’d see one of their trucks parked at the Bear Claw Inn off Route Thirteen every night. Except for rubbing elbows at the Masonic Lodge, I didn’t have anything to do with them.

The Pounder boys were in the junk business. They converted their momma’s house—six acres of lawn and a garage set off to the side—into a junkyard. They added a new garage wing onto the old one and blacktopped an acre of lawn. They lined vehicles three and four deep the length of the woods. Cars between the windrows of spruce. Cars on top of cars. Trucks. Ferried parts and scraps from one side of the yard to the other on the bed of a World War II ducenhalf.

They were in the parts business. The shade tree mechanic business. I suspected a couple more businesses, most of them having to do with the junkyard dogs they bred or the out-of-state drifters that wandered by.

During the fishing expedition up at Elk Run, when I overheard Steward and Burt, neither one of the brothers tossed so much as a “hello” my direction. It was prickly, and afterwards I wondered if there was dissent at the Lodge about my membership.

Before a man learns his first catechism, the Lodge brothers vote on his application. Each Mason stands in a line passing a wooden box shaped like a baby carriage, open on the front top. He reaches inside, and votes with a white or black bead. A single black bead disqualifies a man from receiving the rites.

If Steward and Marshall had a problem with bringing the sheriff into their midst, it would have been easy to prevent. I learned later that neither was present. The Worshipful Master—Burt Haudesert—held the vote while the brothers were away on business in Denver.

They employed a work-release prisoner out of Monroe. Brady something-or-other, serving five years for robbing a grocery store and doing it with a gun. Long hair on the sides and bald on top. So skinny he had to stand up twice to make a shadow, and tall enough to hunt geese with a rake. Had the right mix of thoughtfulness and contrition, and always seemed more interested in how your day was going than how bad was his. Someone society could get something out of, after he paid his debt.

It was only a few months ’til his release. The county warden let him catch a bus and work all day under Steward’s watch, and so long as Brady was back by six p.m., no one much cared what he did. Brady made the phone call from Pounders’ garage phone.

This was shortly after I hired Odum. We drove out and found Brady sitting on the blacktop with his arms wrapped around his knees. He led us to the garage, which was closed up.

The Pounder boys had a reputation for building exotic derby cars for the county fair. They built machines all year long and sold them. Every autumn, Steward and Marshall took to the dirt track and half the competition drove cars they’d built. Had a trademark look. Eight chrome exhaust pipes straight up through the hood, belching flames. A sixteen-gallon beer keg where the back seat should have been, used as a gasoline tank. They only used Chevys, and preferred station wagons.