Cold Quiet Country (22 page)

Fay Haudesert is still in the window. I look at Margot’s car. I never imagined Margot becoming a mother-in-law. Never foresaw her being a mother.

I was thirty-six and she was nineteen, an angel with a beauty that produced a purple aura. She walked in it; she was something different. Fresh out of high school and full of dreams. She talked about everything without talking too much.

In the summer, the fields are green and the air is sweet with corn. Tramping through the woods, dried leaves rustle underfoot and smell rich with decay. Take a woman to a brook where the water’s so clear you see trout twenty feet off and have her pose in the shadows with the sunshine breaking through the leaves, forming little golden stars on her flesh. Listen to her voice mingle with the stream; see her perfect ass disappear as she wades into the water. She’ll turn sideways and you’ll see nipples like acorns.

Margot was nineteen when I took her on a three-foot-wide oak stump—three times. She wasn’t yet used to her powers. Hadn’t learned how to
stop
attracting a man. You know sometimes when she says “no, please, no” she means give me everything, hurry. And you do it enough, she gets real honest. She’ll tell you she was looking for the man could tame her.

That was Margot, and how she conceived Burt Haudesert. She was married to a salesman no one ever heard of and stayed hitched for two years. Later, Margot latched onto a farmer named Otis Haudesert. He died, and Burt took his name and his farm. Margot moved out when Burt married Fay.

It’s going to be interesting, saying hello.

Fay meets me at the door. Her eyes are wide, lifted in expectation—but she’s a woman and I don’t have to say a word. Don’t even have to think her baby girl is gone. She reads it, and hope slips her face. She retreats to the hutch, wraps her arms around her shoulders and hugs herself.

Margot is in the other room, back to me, staring through the picture window into the cold. Fay pivots and rushes to me. Pulls Gwen’s shoe from my front pocket and presses it to her cheek, and weeps.

“We found her,” I say.

Her eyes blaze. “How? The cold?”

I shake my head.

“How?”

“She was stabbed. One time.”

Fay staggers back. Her hands are fists. Her cheeks flushed. “My boys are going to handle this. You get the hell gone.”

“They took off on the sleds before I got here,” I say.

She stares at me. In the dining room, Margot turns. “You can go now, Josephus.” Her voice warbles like a bird’s.

“I appreciate you saying that, Margot.” I hold her look until she turns. “But I think we all know I’m not going away. Missus Haudesert, where are your sons?”

“You’ve got no further call in my house.”

“Was you the one found Burt? Or was it the boys?”

Silence.

“I’m betting Cal or Jordan found him, and it was a long shot earlier than you called. I think they went out looking to recruit Burt’s friends. I’m betting you told them to—and none of you knew Gwen was out there with Gale. And now that the deed is done, you got a lot of blame on your shoulders, and you’re wanting to cast some off.”

“You’ve done enough,” Margot says.

She’s a curious interlocutor. Hasn’t said nary a word to me in all these years Burt was alive. On the day of his death, we’re reunited.

“I tried, but it wasn’t enough,” I say. “I was late to the woods. Late to the farm. Late to get the call maybe. Fay?”

“What.”

Outside, the snowmobile engine runs fast and Sager and Fields must be setting out after Guinevere.

“You sent them boys to get Burt’s lieutenants,” I say.

“What of it? What’re you going to do? Didn’t they vote your sorry ass out? Burt was right about you. Always was.”

Margot looks at a picture of Burt on the wall.

I remove my pipe, pack the bowl, tamp it just so. Light the tobacco and blow a cloud toward Margot. “You cry for a strong man, and cry when you get him.” I nod. “I’ll leave you to your crying. Ladies.”

* * *

No sooner than a set of tires stamp out a trail, snow blows in and covers it. I ease down the driveway in the Bronco and another vehicle’s blocking the way, slipping sideways and straight. I swallow back a taste of bile, and the side of my chest gets tight.

Odum’s come back.

I stamp the brake and the Bronco slides. I jump out. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

He’s gunning the engine and can’t hear. The vehicle lurches out of a rut. Odum puts it in neutral and rolls down the window.

“What the goddamn holy fuck are you doing here? I told you to go to Coates’s place!”

“I sent Roosevelt to Coates’s.”

“You sent—why are you here?”

Odum kills the engine. Opens the car door and steps out. Spits, and spends a moment with his gaze pointed at the snow, studying the brown spit hole. He raises his eyes like he’s found his resolve. “I’m taking over.”

“The hell—”

He holds up his hand. “Go talk to the council. They feel the investigation will last more than one day. We’ve got two bodies and a fugitive, and the worst storm in thirty years coming through. Town leadership wants continuity.”

“I’ll shove continuity up their asses. Up all your asses!”

“You had any decency, you’d have stepped aside on your own. Not make other things an issue.”

“Other things…”

“Yeah, Bittersmith. Other things. You going to shove them up my ass, too?”

He folds his arms and leans against the doorframe.

Don’t this beat all? Odum’s found his sac.

“You’ve had a good run. But that little episode out in the field…coroner saw you drop like a sack of meal and not get up. He was a hundred yards after you when you finally wobbled to your feet. Didn’t take three minutes for Coop to give up the details, ’cause he thought we’d be fetching two bodies across the field. You had a heart attack, and you’re still too stupid to call it quits.”

“Real damn nice, that concern in your voice.” I pull my Smith & Wesson by the top of the grip, like to hand it over, and then snap the pistol into place in my hand. Point at his belly. “But it’s bullshit. All this is bullshit. I’m sheriff of this town.”

“You’re an ex-sheriff about to get his ass thrown in the can.” He spits tobacco juice. “There’s other things you don’t want drawn into this, out in the light any more than they are. You want me to say it? Bring out your philandering ways? Half the town knows your connections to the Haudeserts.”

I get a tingle in my arm and feel my pulse in the side of my head. Squeeze my teeth so hard I could bust them.

“You got your stuff packed, Bittersmith. All that’s left is to take off that badge. So take the Bronco back to the station and do whatever the hell you planned to do after you retire. Leave the badge on the desk. You ain’t sheriff no more.”

He climbs back inside his vehicle. “You want to move that fuckin’ Bronco off the drive?”

I get an idea. I’ll bet a sow’s rear tits Odum ain’t going to like it.

I lower my gun and stare until the pressure in my chest backs off a notch. “Yeah, I see things your way, Odum. You handle the lawin’.”

I get back inside the Bronco and reverse to the farm. You handle the fuckin’ law side.

* * *

I’ve spent today like a man on death row, believing I had a certain number of hours before the end. Now I feel like they’re marching me to the chamber eight hours early.

“Fenny—you get word from Roosevelt?” I un-thumb the radio. The road bounces me and Fenny comes through broken with static.

I’ll wait.

I arrive at the station and first thing see Travis’s car is gone. Could be nothing. Could be Marge Whitmore wouldn’t stop calling until someone came and cleaned her steps. Travis is the kind of boy who’d volunteer on the first call. But I know it wasn’t Marge that called him. It was Odum.

Inside, Fenny jumps from her seat and races to me. “Good Lord!”

“Don’t call me that,” I say.

She touches my cheek with her hand, pushes them old tits against my belly. I give one a squeeze.

“You look like hell, you old fool,” she says.

“I liked ‘Lord’ better.”

“Sager said what you was up to, marching out into the storm, and you wouldn’t let him go instead. Then have yourself a heart attack. Lincoln County’s got sixteen inches and it’s coming our way. And you out there in it.”

“Sixteen?”

“That’s so.”

“Been a little while since you had sixteen inches.”

“You’re confusing your metric system again.” She pours coffee and I sit on the corner of her desk.

“What’s word from Odum?”

Fenny hesitates, like she’s wondering if I’m allowed to know what the new sheriff is up to. “No word, other than Roosevelt called in that there’s smoke at the Coates farm. It’s in the log, there.”

“In the log? Where was you?”

“Across the street. Lunchtime. Travis took the call.”

“Where’s Travis?”

“He said Mrs. Whitmore phoned.”

Fenny depresses the switch and speaks into the microphone. “Travis, you there?”

Static.

“Travis?”

His voice comes through. “Roosevelt’s not at his car, Fen. You better tell Sheriff Bittersmith to boogey on up here.”

“We’ll get somebody up there. Bittersmith don’t boogey.”

I stand at the window and ponder spending the night at Doctor Coates’s house. Ice has frozen to the pane in a pattern like a thousand snowflakes holding hands.

Behind the pattern—through it—black dots move on the lake.

I press my palm to the glass and melt the ice. Wipe it aside with my sweater sleeve.

Those spots could be deer. Loose cattle. A posse of men from town. They could be anything, but they are not. I open the window six inches and reach for the .308 leaning against the sill. Drop to my knees and find a good picture through the scope.

Six snowmobiles. Cal, Jordan, and a few of the Wyoming Militia, if I’m right.

They’ll arrive in minutes.

Cal is crazy as a rabid dog. Some of his talk around the supper table, once he could get around on a cane, would’ve had a man hanged for sedition in earlier times. He said if one true patriot just had the onions, he’d go put a bullet in Nixon’s head and spare us from the fascists. The oligarchs. The polygarchs. The petrogarchs. I didn’t know half his words because he minted so many. But he was all for shooting politicians, and in general, anybody else. When I approached the house on Christmas night and felt a rifle trained between my shoulder blades, I imagined Cal’s face behind the sights.

The snowmobiles come.

Jordan held the same opinion of Cal. I spent the better part of a month walking alongside a hay wagon throwing bales up to him. My arms got tore up like I’d slap-boxed a cat and got the worst of it, and in the sun, sweat glazed my skin and it wouldn’t have been any worse if I’d have gone to the kitchen and rubbed a handful of salt into the cuts. The only part of the whole process I enjoyed was climbing on top of the wagon for the ride home. The work didn’t permit much jawing, but up on top in the wind, bouncing along like we were riding stilts, by and by we’d strike a conversation.

One day we got on the subject of the toughest people we knew, and I mentioned Dan Burkett, a boy from the Youth Home who was part Irish and part ox. He had shoulders like twenty-pound rump roasts and his neck was wider than his head. He wasn’t afraid to tuck anyone in his arm, holler “Noogies!” and beat his skull.

“He’d chuck bales like these all day long, and all night too.”

“Well,” Jordan said, “before Cal busted every bone in his body, he could toss a bale clean over. You could stand on top and jump as it come over, and still miss.”

“I don’t know. Sounds like a wasted effort. Like maybe he’s a bit touched.”

“Oh, he’s sharp as a tack. Wily-sharp.”

“How’d he manage to fall off that beam, then? And get himself in a body cast? That’s crazy. Not smart.”

“Crazy? You don’t have a clue.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He’ll do it someday. All his talk about killin’ politicians.”

“He’s got a ten-gallon mouth.”

“Windier than a bag of assholes. But he’ll do it. He will. All he wants is to prove he’s the toughest, meanest, whatever. You heard the story about him chasing a gutshot deer around a hill thirty times?”

“Right?”

“You know what he did when he found it?”

“You were there?”

“Of course I was there.”

“What’d he do?”

“It was still alive. I said I was going to finish him, and had my .30-30 at the base of his neck, so I wouldn’t bust his skull and cave his rack. Cal said ‘Hold up,’ and kicked him in the teeth.”

“So someday,” I said, “when he’s squeezing the trigger and there’s a fat cat politician at the business end of the barrel, where’ll you be?”

“Maybe sitting in the getaway car, listening to the radio.”

“You’re batshit crazy too,” I said.

“Yeah. I suppose. But I’m crazy loyal, see?”

They’re all batshit. Burt was, and Cal, and Jordan. Jordan talked up his brother, but it wasn’t because he thought Cal was better, or smarter, or crazier. Cal might have been more daring, more needy of the spotlight. But Jordan was cunning. If someday Cal shoots a politician, he’ll have gotten the idea of which one to shoot from Jordan, and if either of the two is ever caught and electrocuted, it won’t be Jordan.

I shift the riflescope from one snowmobile to the other and in the minutes that have elapsed, colors have begun to resolve. Two of the sleds are green.

The Haudeserts had a shed to the left side of the barn where they stored things: a push lawnmower they never used, a chainsaw, and three green Skiroule snowmobiles.

Two of the six approaching riders must be Cal and Jordan. If they sought me at Haynes’s Meats after gathering their posse and then took the fastest route back to Haudesert’s, they’d have crossed my tracks on a neck of field between the forest and the lake. Or, as long as it’s been, they might have gone back to the farm and followed me all the way here, in which case they’ll blame me for Burt and Gwen both. There won’t be any explaining to do. Not with Cal already wanting to kill and Jordan urging him on.

The snowmobiles advance across the lake. I aim the scope high, then pull my eye away and focus without the lens. Eight hundred yards? I don’t know. I’ve never shot eight hundred yards, and don’t know if a bullet will drop a foot or ten.