Cold Quiet Country (33 page)

I keep the pistol sights steady on his head and a memory seizes me, cotton candy smells and all, in a single flash. I watch his feet. The rope. I want to prolong this for just a moment. I want to study his face.

“I remember as a boy my father took me to the fair in Monroe. I was walking in front of him, and another man was coming. There was plenty of room on both sides, see? But he was coming straight for me. I shifted out his way and he didn’t even look down. I didn’t see half of it, but my father didn’t step aside. He knocked that man on his ass. And after the brouhaha, Dad cuffed the back of my head like to raise a knot a calf could suck on. Spun me around and grabbed my neck. He said, ‘Never step out of another man’s way. Make him knock you aside. The day’ll come when he can’t.’”

G’Wain studies me. “So we’ve got shitty fathers in common.”

I fire again. He stares. I miss.

G’Wain looks at the floor, then to his right, at a stack of bales. “How many have you raped? Did you count? Because I don’t think it was just my mother.”

I shift my pistol and step closer.

“I’ve been thinking what it must be like,” he says. “You see something you want and you take it. Have you ever had to admit what you’ve done?”

“I’ve lawed this town forty goddamn years!”

“Whose laws?”

“Mine!”

“You’re a ravager with a badge living in a town of cowards. None of them have the guts to meet your eye and you think their fear gives you impunity. But I’m calling you out. You raped my mother.”

I fire again. This one nicks his arm.

He lurches back but keeps his left foot planted on the rope.

I’m mad enough to piss blood. “There wasn’t a single damn woman didn’t want it. You wasn’t there! Who the fuck are you to question me?”

“Your son.”

“You’re not!”

I’m going to put a bullet in his head. I lurch forward, stop inches shy of the hog. He was goading me. It was an act.

The harrow blocks me on the right. Looking up at the hog, I step around its path and into a mess of straw—and my leg drops. I fall and my legs wishbone—big snap in my thigh—one leg sideways on the barn floor and the other hangs down below. My gun hand slaps a plank and my Smith & Wesson clatters away.

A full five seconds of shock pass and then my groin feels completely ripped out. Never such pain…There was no board… He pulled up the board and covered it with hay…

G’Wain smirks. He lifts his foot from the rope and the rope don’t move. I follow his gaze to the hog, swinging above. They’re not connected.

I strain for the pistol but I’ve got coffee and sandwiches wanting to scoot out the way they came in.

“You—”

He steps closer. “What?”

“You deceived me.”

“Yeah.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. My nuts feel like the inside of a pin cushion and I swear my boot is filled with blood—but this skinny clothesline of a boy just put a hurt on me. Out-clevered me. I laugh. “You got me.”

* * *

Bittersmith wriggles back and forth. Sweat beads on his brow and his breath comes out like steam from a train, each blast followed by a prolonged, regenerative pause. He reaches for his pistol. I lift it.

“So that story about your father. You blame him?”

Bittersmith emits a long, gritty sigh. With one hand he tries to shift his topside leg closer to the hole he’s fallen into, but the bone is shattered. I can tell from the angle and blood.

“Ah, shit. That’s homage. I don’t blame my father. That’s respect. You wouldn’t know a thing about that.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You missed. Why didn’t you hit me?”

He laughs. Pain—or hopelessness—makes him merry.

“Didn’t want to.” He snorts back a laugh, then groans. “You want to pull me out of this mess, or push my leg straight so I can drop it down with the other?”

I aim at his head. “Why didn’t you shoot to hit me?”

He looks everywhere but at me. I believe I’m the first person to ever put his mind in a vise and twist the handle. I see the struggle in his eyes. The madness. Finally his gaze meets mine.

I say, “I’m your son.”

He chuckles. Coughs. “Fuck this hurts.”

“You raped my mother. In ten seconds you’ll have to confess it to another.”

“You got no fucking authority!”

“No, I have a gun. Confess?”

“Never.”

I get down on both knees. I press the barrel to his temple.

“NEVER!”

I squeeze the trigger.

* * *

After a minute of looking at his dead face and not feeling any better about my life, his death, the day that has passed, or my prospects for the days that will follow, I kick his leg until it aligns and he drops through. The pressure from his ribs forces a final grunt from his mouth. It sounds lascivious. Horrific.

Maybe he’ll fall all the way to hell.

I’m tempted to find a horse blanket and nap in the loft. Maybe I’ll wake and find the day has been a nightmare and that Gwen and I escaped to Mexico.

I see Gwen with more clarity, now. And Liz.

Their situations made them consider self-preservation above all. Survival required them to use any available means to end their subjugation. Liz took it farther. She was ready to use her sex to trap me. It became a tool.

Gwen started down that path and turned from it.

Neither girl was bad, but only one was good. I loved her. How could Gwen have loved anybody? Or seen any man as anything other than a new instrument of oppression? The world presented Gwen a hard vision and she willed herself to see softness. Our romance began because of proximity, but she loved because she knew it was better than the hatred, anger and pain her father had visited upon her. She was strong enough to see beauty in an ugly world. She was an eminently lovable woman.

I better leave.

Sunday’s truck is out front, but the keys burned with Liz. There’s a snowmobile halfway to the house, but I won’t be able to steer it.

And there is Bittersmith’s vehicle, parked out there somewhere.

I find stairs. Bittersmith has fallen into a milking stall, and is bent harshly backward over one of the tubular steel dividers. The structure holds him with his head wound lower than his body. Blood trickles to the shit trough at the end of the stall.

When I kicked his leg straight and he vanished through the floor, the image convinced me he might fall all the way to hell. That’s what he earned; he sowed his seeds and how many women suffered the harvest? But looking at him with his head bled out on the cement, his eyes blank, and his crotch saturated with blood…

Now men will know fear.

I fish keys from his pocket.

I’d like to thank Julie, my wife, for honest help and ongoing support. Sometimes it isn’t easy to be interested in a new “greatest paragraph ever written”—especially an hour past bedtime—but you always were.

Thank you to my mother and father, Georgina and Donald, for the exact life you gave me. I wouldn’t change a moment of it.

Thank you to Cameron McClure, my agent, for your belief in
Cold Quiet Country
, for really getting it, and for making it so much better with your insights. And thank you for the title!

To Guy Intoci, my editor; it’s a thrill seeing you make this book more crisper, clearer, stronger. Thank you.

Thank you to Loren Fairman. This book wouldn’t exist without your encouragement and surgical criticism. Truly, you’re one in a million.

There are a thousand people whose encouragement has kept me writing. Dan Youatt, Fatima Sharif, thank you. Oh, and Michel Rau. You said, “This sounds like a real book.” That was great.

And finally, thank you, Cathy. We all love and miss you.