Driftless (45 page)

“What are you talking about?”

He returned to the oak tree, reached around the trunk, and pulled an unseen rope. The movement was accompanied by the sound of breaking stems and leaves. A human figure, a dummy, fell out of the overhead branches and hung suspended in midair, its sewn feet inches from the ground.

“They have targets all over the valley. Someone in here by mistake could get hurt.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“This is the militia’s practice area.”

“Did you pick those mushrooms?”

“Yes.”

“You stepped on some.”

“I know,” he said. “I was in a hurry.” The dummy still turned in the air beside him, a featureless, generic effigy. “Are you mushroom hunting?”

Winnie remained silent.

“Look, I’ll take you to another place. I found it last year. Then you really must leave.”

“Where’s the rest of your militia?”

“It’s not mine. Moe Ridge is the leader and I don’t belong to it. I do some work for them and that’s all.”

“You called me late one night. I know it was you.”

“You’re right. After you answered I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’m sorry. I know it was late.”

“Why would you do something like that?”

Jacob paused, looked at the ground, shifted his weight to the other leg, and said, “I needed to hear your voice.”

“That’s insane.”

“Probably. Listen, you really must not be in here. I can take you to another place to look for mushrooms. It’s not far away and my jeep is over here.”

“How did you get your jeep in here?”

“That’s a secret.”

Winnie followed him. The jeep was parked behind several hawthorns and a protecting escarpment of rock.

“I’m not riding in that,” announced Winnie, looking at the dented door suspiciously.

“Then we can walk,” said Jacob, and they went along a path that was little more than several tire tracks made earlier in the day. After another mile they neared the Heartland River, and Jacob pointed through the trees.

“Over there.”

Winnie saw mushrooms growing out of the sloping ground leading down to the water, beneath corkscrew willows and birch.

“Look!” she shouted and ran forward.

They hunted for nearly an hour, without talking, walking along the river and filling up the majority of Winnie’s bread bags, which they left along the bank to recover later. Their meandering course brought them to a steep rock wall, where the river spilled down from twenty-five or thirty feet above.

“I didn’t know this was in here,” said Winnie, watching the falls plunge with a watery roar into a frothing pool at the base of the rocks.

She could feel Jacob staring at her, but when she looked at him, he looked away.

Winnie inspected the rock sides of the falls and they decided to climb up, she on the right and he on the left. The handholds were more numerous on Winnie’s side and she reached the top before Jacob did. They sat on the ledge overlooking the valley, the water running beside them. The afternoon sun heated their clothes.

“What happened to your hair?” asked Jacob.

“I obviously cut it,” said Winnie, moving farther away from him. “This militia—what do they hope to accomplish by teaching people to hunt each other like animals?”

“I can’t speak for them, but I think they want to be prepared.”

“For what?”

“For when the federal government finally goes out of control. And you can’t really blame them for feeling the way they do.”

“Why not?”

“Because many of them have watched their jobs go overseas, their farms be sold out from under them, their parents suffer from diseases they can’t afford to treat. And when their children get in trouble for stealing, fighting, or taking drugs, they don’t get the same kind of legal help that other people’s children get. They’re angry about all that.”

“Even if the government is corrupt—and for the most part I think governments are always satanic—no one can defeat it.”

“It’s not about defeating it; it’s about surviving.”

“Is everyone in the militia unemployed with ailing parents and delinquent children?”

“Of course not, and everyone in the government isn’t corrupt.”

In the distance they saw several human shapes moving in and out of the covering of trees.

“They’re coming,” said Winnie.

“We’ll collect the mushrooms and I’ll take you back to your car,” said Jacob. “But we should hurry. They usually hold meetings before their maneuvers begin, but the meetings don’t last long.”

“How do you know where my car is?”

“I saw it earlier. Come on, let’s go.”

Then Winnie’s own feelings came around a corner and surprised her. She didn’t want to leave. She hated the idea of leaving. All the time that she had been sitting on the high rock ledge and listening to Jacob talk about the militia—she now understood—she had been hoping he would explain what he’d said earlier. Because when he’d said that he needed to hear her voice she’d heard something in
his voice
that absolutely needed explaining. She wanted to know if the quality she now clearly remembered hearing in his voice—a quality that both threatened and promised to be a surefire antidote to loneliness—had actually been
in
his voice, or if it was something she misremembered or simply made up. Because if it really had been
in
his voice, then things were certainly different now.

INSIDE THE NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE

A
FTER LEAVING SETH AND GRACE AT THE FARM, GAIL RETURNED to Words, parked the convertible in her driveway, and walked across the yard and through the hedge and knocked on the Brassos’ back door. She looked through the laced window as Violet’s dog came across the living room to a silent, menacing stop on the other side of the beveled glass.

Drat, thought Gail, that face would stop a drill.

Soon, Violet rushed from the kitchen, pushed the dog aside with a sidewise thrust of her hip, and opened the door.

“What a surprise,” she said. “Here, get out of the way, Trixie, for land sakes. Come in, come in. What a surprise.”

It was the first time Gail had been inside the Brasso home, and with each step more of the interior came into focus. It looked like an antique shop. The only things missing were paper price tags hanging from loops of string, and there were even some of those. Old Age was carefully preserved in the furniture, the artfully organized clutter on the walls and shelves, and the odor of some prehistoric mold culture ingeniously nurtured to withstand modern antiseptic cleaning methods and modernity itself. Passing a doorway leading into the darkened hallway, Gail noticed the lingering smell of cloves, so fragile, lazy, and succulent it frightened her.

A meager breeze languished through an open window, headed in the direction of a metal window fan in the kitchen, directly beneath a framed embroidery of Jesus with hair down to His elbows, holding a very, very woolly lamb.

“Don’t mind her,” said Violet, referring to the dog. “She’s just interested in you. How about a glass of iced tea?”

“Sure,” said Gail. “What happened to your dog’s ear?”

“Oh, she just accidently lost it. It doesn’t seem to bother her, though.
Here, Trixie, come over here and have one of your little sausages. Oh all right, have two. There now, sit. Sit. Good girl. Now lie down, and stay. Stay, stay. Sit, stay.”

“The reason I’m here,” said Gail, “is somebody took something out of my house. I was wondering if you’d seen anyone.”

“Oh my,” said Violet, leaving the dog and hurrying Gail into a chair at the kitchen table. “That’s terrible. I’d better tell Olivia to turn on the scanner. Oh my. I had no idea, no idea. Land sakes, oh yes, I was getting some tea. Now you just sit right there. Right there. Trixie, stay, stay. Sit, stay. Olivia! You’d better come out here. We have a visitor. There’s been a break-in and we’re having tea! Sit and stay.”

“Maybe she’s sleeping,” said Gail.

“She’s not. She went back to her room a couple minutes ago. She’ll be out any second, the dear thing. She’s the one who keeps an eye on the neighborhood. I mean the dog and I have little things we’re interested in, but the rest we just ignore. I guess I’ve always been that way. The house you live in, for instance, used to belong to a very private family. They kept to themselves. Everyone wanted to know about them and frequently asked me, because, well, because we lived right here. But I never paid any attention. It just wasn’t any of my business why they did what they did, even when it amounted to never paying their fair share. I mean they had plenty of money but people always said they never paid their fair share. Anyway, here’s the tea. I should get out the scrapbook and show you some pictures from the old days, if I could just remember where I put it.”

“Perhaps some other time,” said Gail.

“That scrapbook used to be in the living room in the corner, and as long as it was there I always knew where it was. I mean it was so big no one could miss it. But for some reason it got moved.”

Violet went down the hall to check on Olivia and returned pushing her sister before her. She parked her across the table from Gail and set a glass of iced tea before her.

Gail looked into Olivia’s face and quickly looked away. She had never seen such a depressed face.

“Our neighbor Gail says something was taken out of her house. She wonders if we saw anything suspicious.”

Olivia stared into her glass of tea as though looking at her own death.

Gail wanted to dash from the house, but the dog lay squarely in her path to the door and she was afraid it might catch one of her ankles in its enormous mouth if she tried to jump over it. She nevertheless committed herself to taking the chance if a scrapbook was brought out, or the subject of their hoary religion came up. Everything here seemed so strange. How people could live like this, she couldn’t understand.

“Oh, Olivia did that,” said Violet, noticing Gail looking at the embroidery of Jesus and the woolly lamb.

“I wasn’t looking at that, really, I wasn’t,” said Gail, afraid the embroidery might offer an entryway into the subject of their religion. “I was thinking what a nice fan you had.”

“Oh, thank you. We’ve had it for a number of years. I can’t even recall where we got it. I don’t suppose its place of origin will ever be remembered now that it’s forgotten. It could have come from most any place, I suppose. Every year we take it out of the storage room and put it in the window. It’s just one of those—”

“Father paid a quarter for it at the Drickle auction,” said Olivia without looking away from her glass of tea.

“There now, see, I think you’re right. Yes, I believe so. My sister has an encyclopedic memory. There’s almost nothing she can’t remember. Of course being so much younger helps a lot. So, Olivia, have you seen anyone coming and going from our neighbor’s house? Have you listened to your scanner? Has there been talk about a break-in?”

“I’m not sure it was a break-in,” said Gail. “Nothing was broken.”

“All the same,” said Violet, filling Gail’s untouched glass to the very brim, “if someone comes into your house when you’re not home and takes something without telling you, that’s a break-in. They don’t have to actually break something. Breaking something would be an additional offense added on top of the other.”

“All the same,” said Gail, “I doubt it would be mentioned on a scanner. It was only a box of papers.”

Olivia continued to stare balefully into her glass.

“Well,” said Gail, rising to her feet, accidentally bumping the table and spilling some of the liquid from her glass. “I should really be going. Thanks for your help.”

“Oh my, you’ve hardly touched your tea,” said Violet. “Perhaps a little sugar will make it go down better. Let me get you some sugar.”

“Oh shut up,” shouted Olivia. “Just shut up. Can’t you see she can hardly wait to get out of here! She doesn’t want to listen to you. She doesn’t care about our family. She doesn’t care about anything but her sister-in-law’s papers.”

“Olivia! That’s rude!” shouted Violet, bringing the white dog to its feet and into a low, protective crouch.

“I don’t care,” said Olivia. “Of all the bad things that people have done, being rude doesn’t even count.”

“How did you know they were her sister-in-law’s papers?” asked Violet, lowering her voice so the dog would lie back down.

“They were arguing earlier today. Everybody in the whole county could hear them. If the police had voices like that, people wouldn’t need scanners.”

“Olivia!”

“Yes, I see things that go on, but nobody cares. Everybody is swallowed up by their own lives, and concern for others disappears like crows into the night.”

The sound of the metal fan established a lull in the conversation. Gail hesitated, then asked, “Is there something wrong, Olivia?”

“What do you mean?” snapped Olivia.

“You don’t look very happy.”

Olivia glared at her young neighbor. “What would you or anyone like you know about my happiness?”

Gail tried to discover a response, unsuccessfully. How could people live like this? She thanked Violet again for the tea, stepped over the dog, and left.

TRAPPED BY THE PAST

L
YING IN BED AND WATCHING THE MOON OUTSIDE HER WINDOW, Gail felt an alcoholic weight settle on her, making it impossible to sleep. The sky seeped through the window and oppressed her.

She kept thinking about her neighbor shouting at her: “What would you or anyone like you know about my happiness?”

At least there was
some
happiness, thought Gail—or had Olivia only said that to be ironic? And what did she mean by “anyone like you”? Who else was like her? Wasn’t she unique? Who was this group of people that she belonged to and Olivia didn’t?

Frustrated with her thoughts, Gail got out of bed and went outdoors, into the front yard.