Cold Quiet Country (4 page)

Hunted buck, too. Me and Doctor Coates, rest in peace, used to meet at the far corner of the field where a tractor trail divides Haudesert and Sunday land. Coates died last month of cancer. He was dying for years and never let on. We hunted turkey in the spring, when the morning grass looked like green knives and the sky was so crisp a sneeze might break it. The only thing he said about the cancer was he’d sell his soul to see next spring’s blue skies.

We hunted buck in the fall. We stood jawin’ at the near side of the stream.

“I’ll find a perch up the hill,” he said.

He liked to wait on deer to wander by. I said I’d follow the crick a few hundred yards into the Sunday side and circle back, driving anything in front of me his direction. I reached for my tobacco and stopped. Three deer crashed through a wall of brush twenty yards off. They weren’t ball-flappin’ scared, but something got them moving fast enough to quit paying attention. Coates was closer, and I had to drop my rifle barrel to swing clear of him. Saw antlers flash against a backdrop of scrub. Aimed on the lead animal.

Out the corner of my eye I saw Doctor Coates wince. His ear was close to the muzzle. He gave a slight nod, and I fired.

“Hell!” he said, and pressed his hand to the side of his head. “Damn!”

“Got him.” The buck stepped forward; his head swiveled to me and he fell.

“Shit!” Coates said.

He moved a few yards and stared at my rifle, as if to give it hell, and I said, “You coulda plugged your ear. I’d a waited.”

“Mother of Christ, I’m deaf,” he said.

“It’ll come back. Let’s take a look.”

He lowered his hand and I slipped over the stream bank and followed a path of flat rocks to the opposite side. He shambled after me, grunting how he’d never hear again and if I wasn’t the sheriff he’d murder me in cold blood. We’d been boon companions since the age of ten, and this little incident wouldn’t change his estimation of me, whatever it was.

He’s dead now, so any harm didn’t last.

We stood at my kill and first thing I noticed was the missing antler. This buck was a spike, and not two inches at that.

“You shot a doe,” he said.

I nudged the deer’s pecker with my aught-six barrel. “What you call that?”

“The mother of all gizzies.”

I drew my knife and sliced off his stink sacs, then split him from nads to sternum. Removed my coat, rolled my sleeves, and fished out his guts. You got to be careful not to split an intestine, and shit gets dicey around the anus. Puncture the bladder and you’ll marinate the choicest cuts in deer piss—and a buck has some of the stinkinest piss in the woods. I cut an oval around his asshole, cinched it through to the inside, and my elbow nudged Coates.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“What?”

“Just seeing what he had for breakfast,” Coates said, digging in the pile for his stomach.

I reached inside the buck’s chest cavity, split the diaphragm, and damned if his heart wasn’t still pounding. Spookiest thing ever.

I told Coates.

“Let me see.”

He reached inside and his face lit up. “Still going, but alas, I’m too late to save him.”

“Rip it out,” I said.

Coates shook his head. Stood to the side while I yanked out the lungs and heart. Caught a tick on my arm, squashed it between my knife and a rock. Coates wandered a few feet and pissed against an oak. Knowing I’d have five minutes, I dug out the buck’s nuts, removed his pecker from the assembly, and hung his nads from a birch branch.

“What in God’s name,” Coates said.

I tied the deer’s hind feet together with a hemp line and started dragging, but the terrain was choppy and we hadn’t got any snow.

Coates stood by the deer’s balls, looked from them to the guts and back, and finally said, “Some kind of Mafioso code?”

I heaved to get the buck over a log and finally hoisted it over my shoulder. Crossed the stream like that.

“You’re the goddamn wop,” I said.

“I’m English,” he said.

“Guess you got your hearing back.”

Old Coates, rest in peace. His house is empty, two, three miles from here, and if I was on the lam with a blizzard on my tail, it’s where I’d go.

The crick spills into Lake Wilbur, and along the flats, patches of beech attract turkey that sit and peck apart nuts. Farther, deer bed in the pine. Ponderosa limbs break all but the coldest winds. The still air feels ten degrees warmer than twenty yards away, under bare oak or maple. The branches hold the snow, and even today, the cover will only be a few inches. If I didn’t know there was an empty house waiting a short ways off, I’d head for the pine.

I tramp to the Bronco. Sit half in, half out, and grab the radio handset. “Fenny, scare up Roy Cooper. I need his dogs. And don’t take any grief about the storm. There’s a girl missing.”

Fay Haudesert stands by my door.

“We’ll need something of your daughter’s for the blueticks to sniff,” I say.

A car door slams and we turn. Snow and wind muffle sounds. It’s Deputy Odum, and Deputy Sager follows. Odum approaches like it’s caused him a moral crisis to have disobeyed me. Walks past Fay Haudesert and crosses into the barn. Stands, hands on hips. Sager dips his head at Fay. Odum says, “Lord.”

“Missus Haudesert, go inside the house and bring me one of your daughter’s sweaters.” I step out and close the door.

“Her name is Guinevere.”

“I know her name is Guinevere.” I squeeze her shoulder. She’s a hard woman. I don’t know if it’s from throwing hay bales or whether she’s just one of those women. She plods into the Bronco’s tire tracks and slips along.

I watch Odum.

He kneels at Burt Haudesert; Sager faces away and unbuckles his drawers and re-tucks his shirt. Worse than a woman. Always pressed and shiny.

“What the fuck you doing, Odum?”

“Examining the crime scene.”

“Did I tell you to come out here?”

“Wanted to see things for myself.”

“I wanted you deployable. If there’s any God at all, when you’re sheriff, you’ll hire a fuckin’ bushel of Odums, every one as ambitious as you.”

He watches me silently. There’s something working underneath the surface. He isn’t here because he wants to own the crime scene. No, this goes back to the Militia, the Lodge.

“You think you ought to look which way your killer went?” I say.

“I bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Took Haudesert’s little girl with him.” I face the barn door. “They’re out there, in that.”

“On foot?”

“There’s tracks, for now.” I pull a hanky from my pocket and wipe my nose. “I don’t give a shit for the politics, you taking my job. We got a girl to find. So run the show if that’s what you want. Tell me what to do, boss. We got to get a move on.”

“Did the wife see the killer get away?”

“No. He’s headed at the lake. You want to work the scene, or catch a murderer?”

“What are you thinking?”

“He’s got a girl slowing him down. He’s going to hole up somewhere, and there’s only one place within a couple miles of here, that-a-way.”

“That farm. Coates’s place.”

“That’s right. Empty the last month, and more guns inside than butter.”

Odum stands. “What do we know about the killer?”

“Not a damn thing. But a man named Gale G’Wain took a young girl out across the field—”

“How young?”

“Too goddamn young. I’m going to keep Sager here. You head to Coates’s and radio when you get there. Tell me what you see.”

Odum stands at the Bronco, puts his hands on the hood while gazing into a gust that makes a million snowflakes into angry white hornets. Wind howls at the barn roof and a purple cloud blows past the sun. The land sparkles with whiteness and on the timber by the door, the blood drops glow like rubies.

Odum squints across the field and says, “Coates’s place?”

“Been dead a month, and the whole county knows it. Gale G’Wain knows it.”

He studies me.

“I’ll check it out,” Odum says. Looks away. “Tomorrow this is my scene. I want prints off the fork handle. Photos before the body is moved. You got to write down the widow’s statement. You got to mind the rules, Bittersmith.”

“That’s Sheriff Bittersmith.”

Odum looks again at Burt Haudesert; his eyes follow the length of the pitchfork handle. “How do we know it wasn’t the wife that did him? She’s plenty stout.”

I point at a boot print in blood. “Yeah. Then she ran inside and took off her size elevens.”

“All that proves is your boy was here when the blood was here.”

“Goddamn it! We’ve got a girl out in that. Are you going, or am I?”

Odum shakes his head, heads back to his vehicle.

“And don’t take Travis. I’m keeping him in reserve. Might need him out here.”

I wipe my nose again. With the wind, the temperature has fallen. Air that was comfortable a moment ago has become brittle. Them kids out there got to wonder what’ll become of them. With the right clothes, a man and woman can tramp around all day, and, if they’re smart, build a shelter and a fire to keep alive at night. But I don’t know if Gale G’Wain learned those skills. I don’t know who the hell Gale G’Wain is. The name sounds foreign—like a medieval hero. Only thing I do know: today is my last with this badge.

“Look at this,” Sager says. He’s drifted to the loft ladder on the east side and stands above a girl’s coat on the floor. Discarded, in a pile.

“Guinevere,” I say. I nudge Sager aside and try the ladder’s sturdiness. The rungs are smooth from a hundred years’ boots, polished by a hundred years’ oily hands. Slippy in the cold. One at a time, I climb. Eyes level with the loft, I go one rung higher, spot another coat spread out like a blanket on a nest of loose hay, with an imprint in the middle such as twain bodies would make. Isn’t hard to imagine a boy and a girl nestled, groping…

When it came time for a sudden escape, the coat that covered them landed on the barn floor.

Frost lines the gaps in the wall timbers, and a gust blows a fountain of snow through. A loose board bangs in syncopated time. Something half buried in the hay gives me pause as I’m about to leave the love nest. Black and tangled—the first I think is a dead cat. I study it, and anger boils out of me.

“Sager, get on the radio and see if Fenny talked to Cooper yet. We need them dogs
now
!”

“What is it?”

I look over my shoulder. Missus Haudesert holds a red sweater. Sager eyeballs me.

“Sager, goddammit, move!” I climb down, find the barn floor.

Fay Haudesert stands at the base of the ladder. “Wha’d you find?”

“A coat. Was Gwen wearing pants this morning? Or a dress?”

“Pants.”

“Tell me what happened when you found Burt.”

“Nothing. I came out and he was like that. I didn’t touch nothin’. Just ran to the house and called.”

“When did Burt leave the house this morning?”

“Around six, I s’pose. We had breakfast, and milking is always at six. Plus, he said he needed to look after Matilda.”

“Who’s Matilda?”

“Holstein going to drop a calf one of these days. I thought that was why he stayed in the barn after milking.”

I fill in the blanks. In the barn, Gale and Gwen was fooling around. She removed her shoe and pulled one leg from her pants. Burt Haudesert heard his daughter’s giggles, maybe moans.

“How old is Gwen?”

“Sixteen.”

“And Gale?”

“Nineteen, twenty.”

Three or four years. Ain’t a man alive doesn’t know his sixteen-year-old girl wants a man of her own. Hard to fathom a scene like this turning into a murder, and the weapon argues the events that unfolded in this barn weren’t planned.

I know things about Burt Haudesert…a pair of dead men in his past. Dead men who had a lot of friends that knew Burt, and could’ve got in close. And Fay Haudesert’s concern for her missing daughter over her dead husband? She’s either constipation-tight or lying through her goddamn teeth.

“It wasn’t any of them boys Burt’s been runnin’ with?”

“What do you mean?” She looks away.

“Them Militia boys.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fay, I know this is tougher’n hog hide, but you got to level with me. Who else was out here today? What kind of argument did Burt have with the boys? Not seein’ eye to eye…”

“They ain’t been no one out here save that G’Wain boy, and too much of him.”

I look to the loft. Think again. Burt Haudesert heard a giggle and decided to investigate. Snow was light, maybe, and he didn’t see any footprints. He wouldn’t have expected to hear his daughter in the barn. Or maybe Gale spoke too loud. Whichever way it worked, Burt confronted Gale and wound up stuck with a fork. Gale and Gwen left the barn in a hurry.

Fay Haudesert holds Guinevere’s coat over one arm and a sweater over the other. She brushes hay from the coat with the sweater hand while tears spill over her face.

“She should have her coat, at least,” she says.

Sager hollers from inside the Bronco, “Cooper’s on the way.”

“You might see this,” Missus Haudesert says. She pulls a photo from under the sweater. A young man, awkward grin, hair blown over half his face.

I’ve seen the face but can’t place it. “This Gale?”

She nods. “Several year ago. Face is thinner now. Longer, maybe, like yours. And he don’t shave.”

“Because he don’t want to? Or don’t need to?”

“Don’t need to.”

“He give this to Gwen?”

Another nod. “He was sweet on her from day one.”

“You approve of him and her?”

“I never—”

“Was there ever words between Burt and Gale? Was Gale welcome?”

“There was words. But words won’t find my Gwen.”

“Damn it, be straight! What kind of words?”

“Two days ago, Gale asked for her hand.”

“You saw it?”

“I saw
of
it.”

“What the hell’s that mean?”

“I saw what happened after he asked. I saw Burt go crazy like to kill him. Run him off with his tail ’tween his legs.”

Twenty-year-old boy asks the father of a sixteen-year-old girl for permission to marry her.

“Was she…?”

“She
said
not.”