Cold Quiet Country (8 page)

Gwen steadied her mother’s bleeding index finger under the water. “Does it sting?”

“A little.”

“You see what he’s doing, right? You see it, Mother?”

“I’ll get this. Just a little old Band-Aid.”

“Why did you hate Grandpa? Grandma?”

“Stop, Gwen. Please stop.”

“Because of what he did to you? And because your mother knew, and did nothing?”

“Please…”

“How can you be so weak?”

“You don’t know—”

Gwen released her mother’s hand.

Mother stopped shaking, and Gwen found her eyes in the mirror. They dipped, and Mother said, “I’ve got this. Go back to supper.”

* * *

Liz had been late to start school in the fall. This morning, weeks into the school year, she carried a new blankness, a dazed shock that eclipsed the wounds that had fed the girls’ silent commiseration. After much hesitation, Gwen leaned across the aisle between their schoolroom desks, and tossed a note onto Liz’s open textbook.

Liz read the note.

She looked down at her blouse, muffled a shriek with her hands, covered her bosom with her elbows, and ran from the room. Boys and girls twittered.

Gwen snatched the note off her desk and raced after Liz.

Mister Fitzsimons glanced up from his lectern. Alarm flashed across his face. “Girls!”

Gwen closed the door. She followed Liz into the restroom. Cornered Liz and pulled her hands from her chest. “How do we make them stop?” Gwen said.

“I don’t know.” Liz blinked away spaced-out tears.

Gwen gathered toilet paper into a ball. “Can you squeeze it out?”

“It’s going to stain,” Liz choked. Her face was red, her eyebrows dimpled. Mucus dripped from her nose and tears fell from her cheeks and she coughed.

“It won’t stain,” Gwen said. “It’s only…milk?” Gwen pressed the ball of toilet paper to Liz’s leftward wet spot and wiped. She tossed the paper to the trash and put her arm across Liz’s shoulder.

“Everybody saw,” Liz said.

“No one saw.”

“Mister Fitzsimons gawked at my boobs.”

“He’s a boob gawker. Yours, mine. Everything’s going to be fine. And if he says a word, I’ll kill him.”

Liz smiled, and it was repugnant, almost. Her face was red and her eyes bloodshot and far-off, and the white spots on her forehead were still there, and here was this silly simper on her face while the dark circles at her nipples expanded. She was interested in talk about killing. Dare Gwen go farther?

“I’ve killed two so far.”

Liz glanced beyond Gwen to the entrance. It was a doorless restroom, privacy provided by two ninety-degree turns. Voices easily echoed into the hallway. Liz canted her head sideways; her face betrayed credulity and candor. “Two? Tell me how.”

“Didn’t anyone tell you how to get them to stop leaking?”

Liz unbuttoned her blouse. “Look what they said to do.” She pulled a flaccid, pale leaf from the cup of her bra. “Cabbage. The nurse said this would dry me up.”

“Can’t you press the milk out?”

“You’re not supposed to. You make more.”

The bell rang. In seconds, the restroom would swirl with girls crowding in front of the mirror. Waiting outside a stall.

Gwen took Liz’s hands. Hurried her into a stall and swung the door as giggles and gossip rushed closer. She wrapped the half-undressed Liz in her arms and shushed her. Gwen waited for the light pressure of Liz’s hands on her back, her side, anywhere. Liz let her arms hang. “You have to tell me how you did it,” Liz whispered into Gwen’s ear.

“I’ll go to the nurse for some pads,” Gwen said. “It’ll be okay.”

They waited three minutes until the traffic cleared. Gwen listened to the silence and rubbed Liz’s shoulder, and when she was sure the restroom was empty and the next class had begun, she said, “I’ll go now.”

“You said you killed two people. I want to know.”

The bell rang.

“The first was my grandfather. I was in bed. I saw his face, and heard music that sounded like dozens of singing bullfrogs. Grandfather looked past me like he saw the Devil. And I didn’t do anything—”

“It was a dream?”

“No. I was awake. Wide awake.”

“That’s all?”

“The next morning my mother said he’d died overnight.”

“You saw his face and heard music, and then he died.” Liz pulled away. “You fucking lied.”

“No! Listen. The next was my grandmother. It was the same thing; I was in bed and…and I was upset, a little, and I saw her.”

“Why were you upset?”

“I can’t talk about it. It’s too complicated to say, here. It’s…”

“Worse than this?” Liz cupped her shoulders and her breasts, still exposed on their cabbage leaves, swelled.

“Depends,” Gwen said, “on who the father is.”

“What?”

“I’ve got to go to the nurse. Stay here and I’ll be right back.”

Liz frowned, tilted her head.

Gwen unlocked the stall door and slipped through, quickly scanned the restroom, and rushed to Mrs. Reynolds, the school nurse.

Nurse Reynolds stood eight feet tall, was blade-of-grass slender, and wore her gray hair in a bun. Her face was all smile and spectacles, and from Gwen’s posture, she immediately diagnosed the problem. She mouthed, “Pad?” and Gwen nodded.

As Reynolds turned, Gwen said, “Two, please.”

Reynolds stopped.

“Another girl…”

In a moment Nurse Reynolds returned with a pair of maxi pads in a discretely flamboyant pink plastic bag. “Do you have more at home?”

“I’m fine. I just forgot. Thank you.”

Moments later Gwen stood in the restroom. “Liz?”

The toilet flushed and after a second the stall door opened and Liz stood there, arms crossed at her bosom. Gwen slipped into the stall with her, gave her a pad, and opened the other. Liz applied each inside her bra, and threw the cabbage leaves to the floor behind the toilet. Liz buttoned her blouse. “I can’t go to class like this.”

“I’ll go back and get our stuff. It’s seventh period. We’ll walk home.”

Again Gwen set out. Fitzsimons had left the classroom door ajar. She looked inside and saw someone had secured her and Liz’s purses and books by the window. She would have to walk in front of the study hall students. Juniors.

Gwen opened the door. Fitzsimons stood and hurried to her. “Is everything good with Liz? And you? What was the matter?”

“It was a…it was—”

“A
female
matter?”

Gwen nodded. She peered closer at Fitzsimons, a man with, what? An English name? He looked like a Russian Ichabod Crane. His hair was jet black and always needed cut, and his features were blunt like God had cut them out of granite and quit before rounding the angles. His chin was covered in a beard like Lenin wore, and if any man would be sensitive to a brooding gray girl with a communist father…

“Would you allow me to get our things?” Gwen said. “She’s not well and I’m staying with her.”

“Right over here.”

He crossed the room and the juniors snickered. Gwen stood at the corner.

Fitzsimons returned with both purses and an armload of books.

“Thank you.”

She threw both purse straps over her shoulder and filled her arms with texts and notebooks. She noted the concern in Fitzsimons’s eyes as she backed away and fleetingly questioned whether his sweat would smell as disgusting as her father’s. She looked at his hands, his clean fingernails, and spun the other direction not knowing if she would vomit or begin sobbing. She scampered down the hall, her soles barely rising from the linoleum. She ducked into the restroom yet again.

A pair of seniors huddled in the corner. Smoke curled from their cigarettes and a cloud lingered at the ceiling.

With Liz behind her, Gwen held the older girls’ eyes. The blonde shifted sideways. “You ever get burned?” the blonde said, and dragged from her cigarette until the cherry glowed.

Gwen backed away.

“That’s right, lezzie.” The dark-haired girl grabbed her crotch like a rutting boy.

Gwen navigated the two right-angle turns and backed into the hallway. Liz grabbed her books from Gwen’s arms and they hurried around the corner and sixty feet farther to their lockers, on opposite sides of the hallway.

“Okay,” Gwen said. “Right out the front door.”

Liz stared through her. “You need to tell me how you killed them.”

* * *

They reached the street and turned left, toward town, and then crossed to the west side. After a quarter mile they’d pass Sheriff Bittersmith’s station and then the Main Street businesses. On the concrete bridge that crossed Mill Creek, Gwen stopped and leaned over the side. A storm the night before had swollen Mill Creek’s waters; the stream rushed with muddy runoff and over-spilled its banks.

Liz came beside her and looked over the edge. “Think about being swept away,” she said.

“It doesn’t work like you think,” Gwen said. “I can’t just see someone and make him die.”

“It would be nice if you could.”

“The first was my grandfather. I saw him and heard funeral music, and the next day my mother said he was dead. Eight months later I saw my grandmother. I tried to warn her; I tried to reach into the picture; I said her name but she didn’t know I was with her. She had her eyes fixed on the Devil, I think. She was looking down.”

“What happened?”

“I went into the kitchen and called her on the phone. I let it ring for a few minutes, and when I gave up, my mother came out, and she tried calling, and Grandma never answered.”

“She was already dead…”

“That’s what I thought,” Gwen said. “But she wasn’t. Not when I called.”

“What?”

“They found her on the floor, sprawled out, dead…she’d been crawling to the phone.”

I climb the steps sideways, carrying a chunk of salted venison on a fork while it drips into a Mason jar. I want to be on my way before law enforcement follows my footprints from Burt Haudesert’s blood to this front porch. More pressing is the likelihood a platoon of Wyoming Militia will storm the house riding thirty snowmobiles through the drifts, right across the lake.

It would be nice to know when the storm is going to be over, but unless I can find a radio and batteries, I won’t know until I spot dripping icicles. There is such a thing as snow so deep a snowmobile will bog down, but until I know how the storm is shaping, I won’t fathom how to survive any of it—the blizzard, the police, or the militiamen.

The room with the rifles overlooks the fields toward the road, about two hundred yards off.

I rub my bunched-up wool sleeve against the frost on the window. The road is hard to see, a gray line that traces all the way from left to right. I’ve been on that road, and seeing it and knowing the lake is behind me helps put my location in context. In fact, I passed by this place last summer working for Burt Haudesert.

The gun cabinets are locked, but the glass doors display their contents. I feel along the crown of the first, and then the second cabinet, and find a ring with a pair of keys.

I shot a lot of squirrel with Mister Sharps’s .22, and lining up the open sights and holding a steady bead is my strong suit. If a bullet comes out the other end, I’ll hit what I’m pointing at. I choose the rifle with the longest barrel and examine the top of the breech for a stamp.

.30-06.

It’s a bolt action, something I’m familiar with. Good for shooters, Mister Sharps said, because the bolt won’t wiggle.

If that’s what it takes, I said.

Two cabinet doors and three drawers sit below the rifles. I pull the top and find boxes of bullets. Fat boxes with shotgun shells. Long skinny boxes for rifles. I locate one that has .30-06 on the side, made by a company called Federal. There are smaller boxes and out of curiosity I open one. The bullets are the length of a .22 but plump as my pinky. They go to one of the pistols tucked between the rifle stocks.

I open the .30-06’s bolt and press rounds inside. It holds seven.

I came here for a radio, but firepower seems more pressing. Militia could be on the lake right now. They could be at the front door. I cross to a bedroom on the other side of the hallway and pull the curtain. The snow falls harder, and the sky, way off, broods as dark as any summer thunderstorm.

I return to the gunroom. There’s another rifle almost as long as the .30-06. I pull it down and it reads .308. Better by eight-thousandths. I locate the box that goes with it.

In Westerns, good guys cache rifles by windows, as they won’t have time to reload running from one blind to the next. Seems like sound policy. One by one I remove rifles, load them, and place them with their ammunition boxes next to different windows. Upstairs and downstairs. I read the manufacturers and calibers; everything starts with a three. Remingtons, Winchesters, and a strange war gun called a Krag-Jorgensen.

One fellow would be proud of my preparations: Burt Haudesert. I worked for him all of three months and he sat me on his porch twenty times, and said in slave countries they don’t have guns, and through history, the first thing a despot does is take a man’s firepower. Burt would sit and clean a rifle for an hour as the sun drew into the hills, until he was cleaning it by a yellow bulb over his head that flickered with moths. He’d talk to the rifle with a softer voice than he ever used on his wife. If he could see all the guns in this room, he wouldn’t forgive me, but he might be misdirected long enough for me to make a break for it.

Of course, Burt Haudesert is dead.

It’s the living chasing me…on account of Guinevere Haudesert.

In the beginning she was a tart. Burt worked me hard enough that some days the only time I saw her was when I sat down for supper. If she walked by and I was in a field or the barn or even on the porch with Burt, there was no way I’d look at her. I think she knew, and at some point Burt noticed I didn’t see her.

But she took advantage of times alone with me. I didn’t know what fabric she was weaving. I didn’t know I played by one set of rules, and she played by none.

Burt sent me to work in the garden one morning. Told me there was a hand-pushed harrow in the shed out back the house, and he wanted each row dug up and the weeds pulled, since Gwen hadn’t been living up to her chores. I did as he said and no more than twenty minutes passed before Guinevere came out of the house and stationed herself where I’d already roughed the ground. She crouched with her back to the fields and barn, and her knees were far enough apart that it only took one glance to see she was a full-grown woman and had forgotten her underpants that morning.