A Far Gone Night (29 page)

I had set a fire the day before, and all I had to do was strike one of the long
fireplace
matches and touch it to the twists of paper I had built the fire around. The flame caught and caught again and the fire began. I tossed the match into the fire, then, placing my hands on my knees, I worked my way up to an upright position, bent a little at the middle.

My body was stiffening and the pain was setting in as if it intended to stay a while, look over the neighborhood, and linger. I should have attended to it. I knew better, I trained better, and my experiences had taught me to attend to wounds as soon as feasible. But I was so tired. I stumbled into the kitchen, removed a Three Philosophers from the refrigerator and a tulip glass from the cabinet over the sink, and poured. I rummaged around a little in another cabinet and found a couple of Banana Flips, which I removed from their cellophane wrappers, and ate standing up. After that, I found a recliner, fetched a blanket from the sofa, and wrapped it around myself. I plopped down, leaned back until the footrest came up, and drank my ale.

When I woke up, Olivia Olson was standing next to me, looking down.

“I must be dreaming,” was the wittiest thing I could come up with. That’s because it didn’t compute; Liv Olson in my house, the same Liv who had given up on me, given up on
us
, thought of me as a dangerous liar and a fraud?

“That’s the best you can come up with?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re an answer to prayer,” I said softly.

“Moon said you needed help,” she replied, shrugging off my statement. “He wasn’t specific, but I knew that if he wanted me to help you, it had to be serious. You look a little gray around the gills, Thomas. Now, get up and let me take a look at you. Can you walk?”

“Of course I can walk,” I said, sitting up in the chair, placing my hands on the arms, and coming to my feet.

“That look on your face indicates pain,” she said.

When I stood up, the blanket fell away and Liv’s eyes shifted from my face to my t-shirt, black with dried blood.

“What happened, Thomas?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“Come with me,” she said, taking my hand.
“Which way to the bathroom?”

“But I don’t have to go,” I said in a fake-whiney voice.

“Thomas,” she said, perfect eye contact from her perfect blue, intelligent eyes, “can we
both
be adults for a while?”

“The bathroom’s this way,” I said, nodding in the right direction, and we started off, her first, me following, hunched over. “And, to answer your question, I’ve been shot.
Twice.
Each side once.”

Liv stopped dead in mid-stride and turned to face me. “Here we go again, Thomas.”

“But this time I’m the only who’s been shot.”

“Come,” she said, and we walked into the bathroom where she flipped on every light in the place and even the exhaust.

“How did you get up here? It’s terrible out there,” I said.

“You forget I have a Subaru 4-wheel drive.”

“I didn’t forget. I didn’t know. Never seen you driving it,” I said.

“Well, I do,” she said. “Now, let’s get that shirt off.”

Together, and very carefully, we worked to pull my blood-soaked shirt over my head, the fabric tugging firmly where the wounds were. I grimaced as the shirt pulled loose. The tugging pulled dried blood away from the entry wound and the bleeding began again. I heard Liv take in a huge breath and slowly exhale.

“Is the bullet still in there?” she asked.

To answer, I turned around and showed her the exit wound. She rubbed her left hand over her mouth and then there were tears in her eyes and her right hand went behind my neck and she pulled my face down to her and she kissed my lips and I almost forgot my pain. Then she excused herself for a moment and came back with a book bag that she had set next to my recliner when she first came in. It was filled with medical supplies. And then she went to work, cleaning me, pouring hydrogen peroxide into the wounds, applying antiseptic,
then
bandaging me with gauze and adhesive tape.

She rummaged around in her book bag and pulled out a capsule of meds, shook out two, and gave them to me. “For pain,” she said. “Take them with food.”

“I just ate a little while ago.”

“What did you eat?”

I ignored her questioning skepticism and told her the truth. She shook her head and said, “Oh, Thomas, you just might be a lost cause. Go ahead, then, take the pills.”

“With Baileys?”

“With water, dear.”

I tossed the pills back and drank water.

“I’m feeling better already,” I said, “and the pain is ebbing.”

“Good. I have another instruction for you,” she said, repeating her previous topography of pulling my head down and kissing my mouth, her tongue exploring. She reached over and turned out the lights there in the bathroom.

“What instruction is that?” I asked when we came up for air.

“Undress me, Thomas,” she whispered.

I
n the morning, I awakened first, and tried to collect my thoughts. And when I had collected them, I thought I was mistaken. Just to make sure my thoughts were
real,
I glanced to my left to see if the warmth next to my body was Gotcha. It was not. It was Olivia Olson, a much better face, all things considered.

She was still asleep, at my left side, turned toward me, her short blonde hair a brief penumbra of light on the pillow, her lovely face in repose more beautiful than when she is awake. She looked as content as I felt.
Liv Olson, sleeping next to me.
Imagine that
, I said to myself. This was something I had only allowed myself to hope for in brief moments of feeling sorry for myself over the last year plus. I stared at her face, memorizing every line, every little wrinkle around her eyes, her defiant chin,
her
lips.

It was still snowing outside, the wind gusting and howling and showing its strength. And I was fine with that. I could hear Gotcha softly snoring from her
tuffet
on the floor at the foot of the bed. I raised my head and saw that Liv’s body was covered up to her neck. It was toasty under the covers, and then I realized her left hand was draped across my chest. I put my head back down and reviewed the day before and the night and the beginning of our morning.
Our
morning.

It seemed surreal in retrospect, as it always did in debriefings in my past when we critiqued missions filled with violence and death, gunfire and explosions, silent killings from knife or garrote. All that, so long ago, now revisited in the blood and smell of gunpowder boiling up in the middle of an Iowa blizzard in December. I wondered about Clancy Dominguez, stealing off to appropriate another car and head to
Chalaka
and the Pony Club, his mission agreed upon, knowing that, if he were successful, he would disappear and it might then be another twenty years before I saw him again. Clancy was a little crazy, but I knew that when I put out my plea for help. But his craziness was controlled, focused, and, to be candid, useful. I would go to him if he ever asked but, given his current business and those of his associates, I doubted, though, if he would ever need the likes of me to back him up.

Thinking on that, I realized I am too old for this kind of work, this kind of mission, and I found myself silently praying that the Lord would keep such things from me for the rest of my life. And then I wondered why He had me driving by the
Soderstrom
farm right after the “accident” there, and why was I the one to find Cindy Stalking Wolf in the Whitetail River? Why did He have me suffering from insomnia the very night her body had snagged on something in the river?

Liv shifted a little next to me and as I gazed upon her face, her eyelids fluttered and then those blue eyes, deep and intelligent, saw me. She smiled, and my heart soared, truly.

I kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her chin.
Her mouth.
She kissed me back, moving under the covers a little so that my left arm, under which she had snuggled, slipped down across her shoulders. She was nude and warm and soft under my touch.

“Sleep well?” I asked.

“I think
it’s
called slumber,” she murmured.

Karen and I called it that when we slept together, slumber being a higher,
better
descriptor of that benefit of being next to the one you love in the marriage bed. But this wasn’t Karen, and this wasn’t the marriage bed. I decided to let those things go.

“How did you sleep, Thomas?” she asked, her hand gliding across my chest and back again.

“Like I was shot,” I said before I realized my words. Then I laughed, felt a strong twinge in my side, the pain mitigated by Liv’s laughter.

“Astute simile,” she said. “And with that, maybe I should take a look at those wounds.” She pulled the bedding down from me.

“Oops!” she said, “You’re not wearing anything but bandages!”

“How’d that happen?” I asked. “Did someone take advantage of my weakened state?”

“Damn right,” she said, coming to her knees in order to examine me. With that, the covers fell away from her body and I nearly gasped.
Lovely in every way, erotic in her unselfconscious candor as she touched the gauze on the main bullet hole, lifting the bandage which had bled through.

“You did a good job last night. I appreciate your doctoring.”

“They wouldn’t have bled through if you had been quiet.”

“As I recall, neither one of us were quiet. Some thrashing about ensued.”

Liv blushed, God love her. She said, “But I thought I did most of the work, on purpose!”

“If what we did be work, I’m about to become a workaholic,” I said, pulling her my way again.

Later, after both of us
dozed
a bit, we woke up at the same time. The storm was still buffeting the windows. “Time to get going,” she said, kissing me quickly and scooching out of our bed and dashing, naked, for the bathroom.

“You have an exquisite derriere,” I called out, just before she closed the door, saying, “Oh, you!” The door slammed.

I started to scooch out of bed, too, but sharp pains on both sides of me stopped my progress. I recalibrated and eased out of bed, into my briefs at the side of the bed, then a clean t-shirt, Levi’s, and sweatshirt. I stepped into slippers and, with Gotcha rousing herself and following me, headed for the kitchen. I let her out and let her back in quickly, fed and medicated her, the sound of my shower blasting away around the corner. It was odd, hearing my shower going with me in the kitchen, and I liked it almost as much as seeing the yellow Subaru out front when I let Gotcha out.

I set a full pot of caffeine going in my Mr. Coffee machine and then, wondering if there was any news that might have come our way from
Chalaka
, turned on the radio on the kitchen counter. I looked at the clock. It was exactly 9 AM, so I was hoping for some local news after the national non-news of fraud, graft, rot, and corruption in politics. The local news started with the weather, informing me that it would snow all day and maybe into the night. A twelve-inch snowfall was expected, with nine already on the ground.

The local news then morphed into a brief report about a rash of stolen cars, naming Lunatic Mooning and a farm couple from the next county north of us all reporting stolen vehicles. The announcer went on to say, “And this from
Chalaka
, Minnesota.” My ears perked up. “Speaking of stolen cars, and this might all be understood somehow once we connect the dots, not only was there still another stolen car report—in this weather?—the infamous Pony Club, a
Chalaka
nightspot famous for adult entertainment and nefarious activities, was utterly destroyed late last night by what appears to have been an explosion and fire. There was only one fatality, the owner and operator, Ted
Hornung
, whose body was found in the establishment, badly burned and identifiable only by dental records. The blizzard, even worse in
Chalaka
than here in
Rockbluff
, apparently was responsible for the club closing early, according to local reports.
Chalaka
Police and Minnesota Bureau of Investigation officers are treating the explosion and fire as ‘suspicious.’ At this time, there are no persons of interest. Moving on, due to the storm, tonight’s basketball game between
Rockbluff
High School boys’ and girls’ teams at Strawberry Point is cancelled. Likewise, the Flannel Masters Crafts Club, the Future Farmers of America meeting, and the Lutheran women’s Pole-Dancing Class will not meet. Just about everything else, too.” The announcer went on to list every activity imaginable being cancelled or rescheduled.

I had to smile. Dominguez had followed through after driving the farmer’s stolen car to
Chalaka
, then stole another car to get away into the night. By now, I imagined, he was probably on a flight headed for London, then Nairobi, and eventually back to his crew on the yacht. He had been in town exactly six days.

I withdrew his card from my billfold, finished memorizing the key numbers, and set it in the fireplace, where I started another fire. Liv’s voice startled me. I hadn’t realized the shower had shut off. She was standing in the doorway to the living room, breathtaking in a t-shirt and a pair of well-worn slacks that clung to her in a way that accentuated her attributes.

“Thomas, I want you to know that I was with you all day yesterday, last night, and into the weekend.
Snowbound.”

I nodded, looked back at the fire where Clancy’s business card had fallen into flames, then looked back at Liv. I rose to my feet, winced in spite of myself, and went to her. She folded herself into my arms and I just held her.

“Thomas, I was terrified last night when Moon called me. I didn’t know what had happened to you. My imagination ran wild.”

“I’m delighted you came over,” I said. “Worth getting shot twice. Now we both have entry and exit wounds from shootings.”

“Matched set,” she said.

“I’m glad Moon called you. Clancy asked him if he could get me some help and he just said yes, but I honestly didn’t think you’d be involved.”

“You’re lucky it wasn’t a school night.”

We both laughed, even though it snagged my sides.
“Lucky, indeed.
I might have bled to death on my sheets while your red pen was bleeding all over student papers.”

“Being shot is probably preferable to the pain I inflict with my pen on young skulls full of social media,” she said. “Now, let’s go into the bathroom so I can eyeball your marvelous physique and see about those bandages. They definitely need to be changed.”

I followed her again into the bathroom, pulled up my sweatshirt and t-shirt while Liv bent down, kissed my belly, and gently pulled the bandages away. They stuck a little, and she said there was some blood ooze, but no sign of infection. She cleaned the major wound, entry and exit, in my right side and re-bandaged, then checked my other side where I had been nicked. It was already beginning to scab over, so she just placed a big adhesive strip on it and pulled down my t-shirt and sweatshirt.

“I wonder how it was he shot you on each side. Weird,” she said as we walked back into the kitchen.

“Most shooters with any experience typically fire off two-shot bursts,
then
another two-shot burst, and so on,” I explained. “Maybe he overcompensated against a second shot going up and missing, and forced the second shot to the right, to be sure he got his grouping in the bigger part of the target.”

“Your belly is not big. On the contrary,” she said, patting me there.

“Thank you. Anyway, that’s my guess.”

“Thomas?”

“Yes?”

“Sometime I’ll ask you what happened yesterday. But I don’t want to know just now. I may
never
want to know. What I do know is that you and Moon and some third person, an old friend of yours, went up to Minnesota to deal with those responsible for killing Cindy Stalking Wolf. And I know you were wounded, Moon was not, and the third person did not come back. I don’t need to know any more, okay?”

“Suits me,” I said.
“Coffee?”

We drank coffee and waited while I prepared a subdued breakfast, by my standards. I scrambled a few eggs and a conservative number of bacon strips and even made cheese grits for the first time. Jan Timmons had taught Karen years ago, and Karen had shown me how shortly after we moved to Georgia. While the grits were cooking, Liv asked me what grits tasted like.

“If you have cheese grits, they taste like cheese. If you have buttered grits, they taste like butter.”

“What do they taste like plain?”

“Plain? They taste like spoon.”

She laughed, which encouraged me as I worked at the stove. After we ate, we bundled up and stepped out on the deck and watched the blizzard for a while, without Gotcha, who felt as if she needed to protect the interior of the house. The wind had died down a bit, and the snow was no longer falling at an angle, just coming down straight and steady and softly and going about the business of covering everything with big, pristine flakes. We could not see the Whitetail River Valley due to the storm, never mind the Mississippi River Valley beyond. But the view was beautiful, and the company extraordinary.