Cold Quiet Country (23 page)

They’ve got murder in their hearts but I’ve got to give them the opportunity to prove it.

Besides, Sergeant York faced a line of attacking Huns and shot the last one first, and then the next so the closest wouldn’t see his comrades fall and lose heart, stop the attack.

I wait.

Three hundred yards is my guess. Two-cycle engine noise comes muffled through the falling snow. The sleds are green and red, like Christmas.

Two hundred yards. The noise separates into the distinct sounds of different engines. I see individual riders on the sleds, each man with a scarf across his face and goggles over his eyes.

Where’s the safety? I haven’t checked the rifle. I didn’t dry fire it. Nervous, I crack the bolt and confirm a chambered round. The safety is forward, but does that mean it’s on? I push it back, and hope it operates as Mister Sharps’s did.

At one hundred yards the snowmobiles fan and one of the green sleds follows my tracks to where I dropped through the ice. It splashes ahead, throwing water ten feet to each side. The sled bounces over the bank. Another is at the corner where the stream feeds the lake. They’re only thirty yards away, maybe, coming from six angles, and I can’t see each at the same time. I glance from one to the next and the middle rider waves a pistol in the air with his left hand. His right is on the throttle.

They’re coming full speed, but without closing in, as if they intend to pass the house and keep going. I hunker lower.

The man with the pistol aims it toward the window as he zooms closer. He fires and I duck but I don’t move a quarter-inch before the window shatters above me and there’s a thwack at the other side of the room.

The snowmobiles roar around the house, both sides.

I had a feeling from the beginning that there was no way this would end good.

* * *

Gwen and I spent the night in her father’s barn wrapped in coats and each other’s arms, tangled in kisses.

We should have left—but we’d gone there to talk, and touch. As the wind outside grew shriller, it was like the air was rarefied and intoxicating.

I couldn’t think.

Life is a harsh sport. The memory of rugged things improves the memory of soft things. The barn was frozen and outside, the harvest season had long ago faded into winter, the season of death. The air was winter-clean. The sky was brittle with stars and moonlight. But in our nest of hay, cozied between two winter coats, our talk drew away from escape, and we were warm giggles and sweet breath and perfumed hair, trapped in the forever green scent of hay and body heat.

Hours had passed. I expected at any moment to poke my head above the coat and find dawn upon us. We drifted in and out of sleep. Sometimes I would wake and realize I was kissing her, and she too was waking—so that both of us were roused by the other’s kisses. As if something bigger than both of us had commanded us to forget saving our futures and love in the present. Our passion seemed beyond our wills. My hands over her body, hers across mine. My fingers probing. Hers grasping and guiding. My hips thrusting. Hers receiving.

When I finished she held me against her, and locked her legs around mine. I propped my weight on my elbows and let my forehead rest in a tangle of her hair. Before long I slipped to the side a little so I could ease the weight off my arms, and we fell asleep again, all the while me inside her.

“GUINEVERE!”

I jumped. It was light out and the hay over us was frosty with our condensed breath. I was stuck in her, dried to her. I grunted. She inhaled. I eased back, and she bucked, saying, “Fast, just pull!”

“Gwen! I know you’re in there…”

“Oh shit!” I said. “Oh shit.”

“Quick!” she said, hand on my hips, pushing.

I jerked away, rolled aside. She scrambled for her bottoms and I struggled into my underwear, still on one leg, and realized I’d slipped my boot back on after taking my underwear down and now couldn’t fit my booted foot through the leg hole, and I’d have to take the boot off again. She searched on top of the coat and then under the coat for her underclothes and quit looking.

“Guinevere! Come out! You too, Gale. I goddamn warned you.”

I shoved my boot through my underwear and the heel caught. I ripped it through.

The barn door creaked open and a shaft of morning light spilled inside. I slipped my boot off and wove my foot through a pant leg cold as the snow outside, then shoved my foot back into the boot. I had to face him dressed.

Lord, my heart pounded.

I cinched my belt and tied my shoe. I took Gwen’s face in my hands and pressed my forehead to hers and with my eyes open and her eyes open I said, “I love you, Guinevere Haudesert, and don’t you ever forget how much.”

I pulled away to the edge of the loft.

“Don’t!” she said.

I looked back and she crawled closer. I went over the side and found the ladder rungs and while I climbed down, Burt started talking.

“Just what I figured. An alley cat.”

Burt worked sideways, his stance like a football player’s. Arms wide. Knees bent. Low center of gravity. Legs ready to pounce. A man who’d decided his opponent was more likely to run than throw a punch. A man who’d decided there was no way in hell someone was going to get past him. He shifted closer and closer to the workbench, and I figured he planned to grab a pipe wrench or a hammer.

I stood at the base of the ladder with one hand on it.

“Burt, you got to let us get married. It’s the right thing to do.”

“What do you know about right!”

“Are you going to try to kill me again? Because I love your daughter and want to take care of her? What’s wrong with you?”

He hefted a crescent wrench; in one motion he wound up like a baseball player and whipped it at me. The wrench spun end over end in a whirling silver circle and missed me by a few inches.

I moved sideways. I wanted him outside, away from all those tools. Eventually he’d hit me with one and then I’d be in trouble. I kept stepping to my left, and he sorted through tools, lifting and dropping them with frustrated jerky movements.

“Burt, you can’t do what you been doing with her forever. It ain’t the way of things.”

He chucked a screwdriver at me, but with too much follow-through. It bounced off the floor a couple feet past me. He looked up and I lifted my eyes to what he saw—a two-by-four suspended by a rope where we’d hung the hogs to cool after slaughter.

Burt lit up.

“Gale, I always liked you. You worked good on the farm…” He held his eyes on mine and talked slow like he was charming a snake while he gradually made his way to the end of the workbench, to an electric grinding wheel.

I crept toward the entrance, still open, and met him with the same tone. “I liked working for you, and I appreciated having a place to sleep and make my living…”

“Then how’s come you went trying to steal a sixteen-year-old girl?”

“Well how did you figure it was right to poke your sixteen-year-old daughter?”

Burt was a flash of motion; he reached to the bench and grabbed something dark and hurled it. Pain shot through me. A deer knife stuck from my leg. It had brown and white hair sticking to the handle and clumps of deer fat dried to the finger guard. The blade had found my leg bone and the pain was so sharp I couldn’t see straight and could barely stand.

Burt strode toward me with another knife in his hand.

I pulled the knife in my leg—but the point was buried in bone.

Burt trod closer, easily. “What’d you think, boy? You’d come here and have your way with my family? Do as you damn well please and no one’d do anything about it? In my house? With my little girl?”

I fell. Landed on my ass and kicked back a couple feet. He towered above, switched the knife from one hand to the other, as if debating whether he was going to slice my throat from the left or the right.

“Daddy! No!” Gwen teetered at the loft edge, fifteen feet away, twelve feet high. She’d donned her pants and top.

Burt looked to her, and I tugged again at the handle sticking from my leg.

“You just go back a couple feet and turn away,” Burt said. “You don’t need to see this.”

“Can’t you give me this one thing?” Gwen said. “Can’t you let me go with him? I did what you said. I kept my mouth—”

“You shut up!” He pointed at her with the blade. “Shut your damn mouth.”

She wiped her eyes and backed from the edge of the loft. I looked away. On my own again, like every other day. All night I’d been tangled in her limbs and hair and it was a feeling like no other. Pairing up was a metaphysical thing. An illusory thing.

I couldn’t run. Couldn’t fight him.

“You know the devil’s waiting for you, Burt. You can’t do that to your own blood and not go to hell for it. No amount of church on Sunday will absolve you. You’ll be seventy years old with white hair and quaking hands and you’ll be on your knees saying Lord! Lord! And He’ll say He doesn’t know you.”

“Then I won’t waste my time on church.” He stepped closer. I kicked back. He lunged behind me, wrapped one arm under my armpit and across my chest, and lifted me. I felt his belly behind my head, and I knew what was coming. He wanted to feel my blood on his forearms. He squeezed his arm so tight I couldn’t breathe, and raised the blade. “You see that? See the dried blood and hair?”

Gwen ran to the loft edge with a pitchfork in her outstretched arm. She halted, teetered at the edge.

Burt whispered, “I don’t know if you’re worth this knife, since it split a trophy buck’s gut and sawed his meat to cubes. But what am I going to do?”

He drew the knife to my throat.

I opened my mouth but couldn’t speak.

“You got anything smart to say now?” His mouth was at my ear. He hadn’t seen Gwen. He pressed the blade into my skin.

Gwen stepped back from the edge. Pleaded silently, as if I could save myself. Then she closed her eyes and seemed to burgeon with light and confidence as if drawing from her source of visions and music. She opened her eyes, a preternatural calm flowing from her.

I relaxed.

She nodded.

I blinked an affirmation.

She stepped back two steps, lunged forward, and hurled the pitchfork with magnificent speed and flawless aim.

I threw my head to the side. My knees buckled. The blade scraped over my jaw. Burt froze—maybe he didn’t see Gwen at all—and in a split second the pitchfork tines parted my hair. The fork struck Burt’s neck and the force knocked both of us backward.

The tines hummed.

I rolled sideways and Burt bucked and wiggled. His arm slapped the barn floor and his throat gurgled but no words came. He kept backhanding the planks and his head flopped, rapping the pitchfork handle to the boards.

He grabbed the handle as if to pull it free and go on with killing me, but his strength failed. He smacked the floor with his other hand. His eyes bulged.

I wheezed and Gwen raced down the ladder. The pain in my leg was like every nerve in my body was scrunched into a ball and lit on fire. And the boys, Cal and Jordan, had to be coming. They had to have heard the commotion. They’d be on us with guns any second.

“Gwen!” She ran to me and I said, “We got to go before your brothers come!”

“I’m sorry!” she said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry!”

“You saved me.”

“Oh God!” She hugged me. Her eyes were wild. “What do we do?”

I grabbed her hand and struggled to the barn door.

The men on snowmobiles circle the house.

With the .308 scope, I track the pistol-waving rider on the green Skiroule. I could blow his head off—just like a squirrel on the run, or a bird on the fly—except when I stand before the Lord having to admit responsibility for a man’s death, I want it to be a matter of not having had a choice. It’s incumbent on the moral man to bend as much as he can while the idiot avails himself of the facts. I don’t want the fellow I shot to be up there with the Lord filling His ear with nonsense.

But is a clean conscience a luxury?

I let the man on the Skiroule pass through my sights because he wears a ski mask and I don’t know if it is Cal or Jordan or someone else I’ll be killing. But this whole situation is starting to torque my sense of right and wrong. This whole setup is about intimidation. Swarming over the house on growling sleds, waving guns, firing a shot into the window…

Who the hell do they think they are?

Engines mutter on the other side of the house. The sound drifts from all around, and one by one the motors go silent until a final snowmobile engine runs and it too sputters to a stop.

All is silent. Crouching beside the lake-facing, shot-out window, I smell sweet exhaust fumes. In my mind’s eye, I see them hiding behind trees. Low-crawling to the house, pushing rifles through snow.

A window crashes and a rifle sounds. I scrunch lower. Glass tinkles to the kitchen counter—on the other side of the house. I peek to the window; no one’s on this side. I leave the rifle and scramble across the living room, slipping in the deputy’s jellied blood. Scramble up the stairs and enter the first room on the right. I stand beside the window and peer steeply to the ground.

Thirty feet from the house, a man hides behind a tree. From the angle of his rifle, he’s the one who shot into the house. Ready to take my life when he doesn’t know what he knows? So self-sure he’s ready to kill? Wrong and all? Why doesn’t he call me out, if he intends to take me into custody?

Fuck him.

I cross the room, down the hall and slip into the last room. At the window, the angle gives me a clear field to the man’s head. A ski-masked orb that, darker, might resemble a growth on the tree trunk. Without raising the window, I lift the rifle, check the load, and rest the muzzle against the glass.

How much will the angle throw off my picture? I don’t know.

I’ll shoot twice.

The man swings his rifle to another window, to his right, and fires. I pull the trigger, but the safety is on. I flip the lever. Another villain, somewhere, fires into the house.

One at a time, boys.

Half his head is above my front sight post. Safety off. Exhale nice and easy. Lungs empty, I squeeze.