Cold Quiet Country Read online

  I squeeze my teeth against the barrel until the pain is all that holds my thoughts together. I reach to the trigger. Wiggle it.

  My eyes flit from the couch to the roll-top desk, to the floor, to the window I smashed. The ceiling. Plaster grit still floating down lodges in my eye, and I blink—the irritation is a sudden respite from the ache in my teeth and all these crazy thoughts have juddered me right up to the edge.

  I can’t do this.

  I’ve seen terrible things I don’t understand, and I’m a fool. But for the moment, I live.

  I shift the carbine away. The stock jars against the floor and the carbine explodes. A fireball envelops my face and eyes and the roar deafens.

  I hold the carbine like a rabid porcupine. My eyebrows burn and my eyes are like someone threw red-hot sand grains into them. More plaster falls from the ceiling and it mists my hands and face.

  Smoke floats from the barrel. Through it I see a small painting of Jesus Christ on the wall, the Lord with his hands together, looking at me, wavering ghostlike an inch above the canvas.

  His head moves side to side, tut-tut.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Gwen supposed it was her fault. Hadn’t she been a little suggestive? Maybe aggressive for Burt’s attention? And when she’d realized he intended to capitalize on her teasing willingness and do things that made biological, anatomical, barnyard sense, wasn’t it her fault for having so much as proven her desirability?

  Hadn’t she almost—almost—wanted it? Before she knew what it was? Before she knew the visions the trauma would unleash?

  She’d struggled that very first night with wordless questions, directionless anger, and pain down there, and her grandfather’s face had arrived unbidden to her clamped, salty eyes. It wasn’t a pose she’d seen in a photo or real life, not like a memory. His eyes were narrow and his grin was the kind a man assumes when he evaluates unknowns informed only by prejudice. The background to his face was azure, and his skin threw off a glow. She heard the throaty sounds of bullfrogs: oboes, brass. Somber instruments playing grave notes. A symphony composed by Mozart or Bach and performed by amphibians.

  Grandfather hadn’t seen her. He’d looked through her to something beyond, something he recognized but perhaps wasn’t overjoyed to greet.

  Gwen had no idea what the vision portended.

  The image lasted a few seconds. A minute, at most. Gwen promptly layered the memory under a quilt of more ruinous, terrifying thoughts—her father—and slept.

  “Morning,” her mother had said.

  “Good morning.”

  “You look like hell.”

  “Ginger slept on my face.”

  “Why do you let him in your room?”

  “Where else is he going to sleep?”

  “He’s a cat. He can sleep in a damn tree. You’re going to be late for school.”

  Gwen watched the floor.

  “Oh, and your grandfather died last night. Funeral’s Friday night.”

  “Oh, Mother! Are you okay?”

  Fay smiled. “We’ll be driving half the day to get there, so you tell ’em you won’t be in school on Friday.”

  Gwen attended school that day, Thursday, and remained quiet. Her friend Liz Sunday sensed her unease, and when the winds of gossip carried the news that Gwen and Cal and Jordan’s grandfather had died the night before, Liz patted Gwen’s shoulder and defended her from less sensitive heathens who’d learned the old man had died in bed, and grew intoxicated on obvious punch lines.

  Liz and Gwen were of the age when girls sometimes held hands. Guinevere found this comforting and was tempted after school to tell Liz about the evening before, sparing no detail from the pubic hair pinch to the vision of her grandfather. She didn’t, and they rode the school bus home in the same seat, fewer than a dozen words passing between them.

  Liz was a quiet girl, susceptible to long, vacant stares out the window, and obeisant glances at the floor. She suffered continual abuse, particularly from the boys, who taunted that her father was a communist.

  None of this bothered Gwen. She appreciated silence.

  Guinevere discovered her mother in the kitchen preparing deviled eggs while a ham roasted. Her sisters and in-laws could make the damned scalloped potatoes and bean casseroles. It was enough that she’d worked her fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove all day…yet she never seemed gayer than preparing food for her father’s wake. Mother chattered like Gwen’s aunts and uncles unburdened by too much Christmas brandy. How the weather couldn’t be better for a good funeral. How the insects weren’t bad, and her father did a fine job at picking the season of his exit, if not the year. It was convenient—if she dared say—that he’d be laid to rest on a Friday, and they could spend the night at her sister’s house and not have to trouble with the drive home.

  Friday morning, Gwen sat in the middle of the back seat between Cal and Jordan, who took turns pulling her hair and squeezing her legs above her knees. She yelled that they ought to leave her alone, and punched Cal, and found her father’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He turned toward Fay as she clucked about how green the alfalfa was, and how blue the sky; but then his eyes found Guinevere’s and held them. As if to say something. As if to throw her down on the hot car hood and wrap his fingers around her throat, to stifle her voice and drive himself inside her again. His eyes held an appetite, and worst of all, unlike the boys that noticed her sprouting breasts and rounding derriére at school, her father had the courage to hold her eyes as long as he wanted.

  “Dad! Look!” Gwen screamed.

  Burt swerved. Tires squealed. The car shook left and right.

  In the approaching lane, a tractor-trailer barreled through a downhill turn, and in their path, a muscle car with a block on the hood attempted to pass. Burt split the distance between them. The truck roared by, inches outside their windows. The car passed to their right and kicked a plume of dirt from the shoulder and fishtailed back onto the pavement.

  Burt pounded the ball of his fist to the steering wheel, and the car rocked. “Goddamn!” He punched the dash above the radio. “God fuckin’ damn!”

  “Burt…” her mother said, one hand on her chest, the other braced on the dash.

  “Fuck!” Burt swerved to the side of the road at the top of the hill and three-point-turned. He sped after the muscle car.

  Her mother’s voice lifted in pitch. “We’re going to be late for the funeral, Burt.”

  They raced down the hill.

  “Burt? For so long I’ve wanted—don’t do this to me, please? Burt?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I fetch field glasses from the Bronco’s glove box, wipe the object lens with a flap of cloth from the seat cover. Climb out. A pair of tracks wander across the field. I can make them out for two hundred yards, then they fade into drifts and cornstalks. Somewhere beyond the fuzzy white, those tracks lead into the forest. I’ve hunted turkey in that stretch.

  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.r />
  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.”