Driftless (5 page)

From a green tin Grahm poured black and gray powder into a paper funnel, the shiny, slick particles sliding over each other and cascading into the pipe’s open throat until it was filled within an inch of the top. The mounded surface shimmered like live hair. With wire cutters, Grahm snipped off several feet of orange dynamite fuse from a spool hanging on the wall and clamped the pipe into an upright position in the vise. After screwing on the second iron cap, he inserted one end of the stiff, coiled wire through the drilled hole until he was
sure it nestled safely within the black heart of the powder. To keep the fuse from moving, he applied a generous glob of epoxy, forming a collar where the fuse entered the pipe. With a single turn of the vise, the Promise of Just Vengeance was freed, and Grahm held it before him for several minutes in the yellow light, contemplating the scheduled violence contained in the heavy, mute, smooth, compact form. He then put it in the corner of the shed under a rumpled tarp, extinguished the kerosene heater, silenced the radio, turned off the light, and opened the shed door. The dog scrambled to her feet and bolted through the narrow opening, nearly toppling Grahm in her race to be first outdoors.

A fine mist had developed in the air, drifting through the moonlight, settling like breath on the grass. Grahm walked to the barn, through the milk house, and into the darkened interior.

Not wanting to turn on the light, he carefully made his way along the north wall as his Holsteins slept, chewed, groaned, and switched their ropy tails. Lulled by the nocturnal peace of the animals, he sat for several minutes on a bale of straw near the freshening cow he had come to check on. Because she was not breathing heavily, the flesh around her pin bone was still soft, and she was standing calmly, he thought her calf would not try to come out until sometime tomorrow. He listened to animal sounds in the darkness and thought about crawling under the covers with his wife, her body warm, smooth, and pliant from sleep. He tried to imagine her welcoming him, eager for touch, but his imagination failed.

MOTTLED SUNLIGHT

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG AS GAIL SHOTWELL WAS RINSING SHAMPOO from her short, curly blond hair. “Drat,” she sputtered, invoking a childhood curse she had never managed to purge from her adult vocabulary. She had no intention of leaving the steaming shower, but the ringing nagged at her warm, watery comfort.

Rinsed, she stepped from the stall and pulled a blue towel from the wooden rack. Several jars of cream, liquid soap, and perfume fell from the overcrowded ledge and clattered horribly into the porcelain sink.

“Drat.”

Dried and seeing better, she opened a hole in the foggy mirror, fluffed out her hair, returned the jars to their earlier congestion on the shelf, and brushed her teeth.

On the way downstairs, she inspected her home disapprovingly. So far, she was turning out to be a mediocre home owner. Her parents, well, her father, to be more accurate, had given her the little house on the edge of Words two years ago as a way of saying that Grahm and Cora were getting the farm—all of it—so obviously her subconscious harbored some unresolved feelings about keeping it clean. Still, she was glad to have it, even in its unkempt and unrepaired state. Most of the people she worked with at the plastic factory rented, even couples who both worked.

How nice it would be, she thought, to have someone steal into your house in the middle of the night and straighten everything up, the Snow White Silent Night Maid Service. Perhaps this was the origin of many fairy tales—storytellers wanting their houses cleaned up by unobtrusive, unpaid workers.

From the refrigerator she took a diet soda and the last, slender wedge of caramel fudge cheesecake, so narrow it leaned and
threatened to collapse. She transported breakfast into the living room. The telephone rang again and she returned to the kitchen.

Buzz Scranton, her band’s drummer and booking agent, was irritated, his voice shooting over the wire in menacing chirps. Mike’s Supper Club had canceled Thursday night due to scheduling problems with a wedding party. The Straight Flush wouldn’t play until next Saturday, six days from now, at the county fair. They would have to leave early to set up the equipment. Jim had the van. She could meet him in the trailer park.

This brief conversation had the effect of chasing away her mostly good mood. To be more accurate, she became aware that she must have been in a good mood earlier when she noticed a desperately sinking feeling inside her after hanging up the telephone. She returned to the living room and discovered her cat gulping her way through the cheesecake.

“Oh, you shameless thing!”

Gail reclaimed her soda and carried it onto the back porch along with her electric bass.

Late-morning sun dove through leafy hickory and sumac branches and arrived bright and mottled inside the screened- in enclosure. Looking into her back yard, she felt welcomed by the quiet assurance of domestic privacy, the blessing of home ownership, insulated from the rest of Words by a thick tangle of fortifying vegetation.

Tossing the towel over the vacuum cleaner handle, she eased onto the broken glider and stretched out her legs, playing soft, deep tones that boomed from the twin fifteen-inch woofers inside the house. Shafts of sunlight struck the painted front of the guitar in a clear, spangled display.

Since early childhood, Gail had disliked wearing clothes. They never fit right, never looked right, never
seemed
right. A cloying, dolorous sensation always accompanied dressing. She suffered under clothing like violets under blankets. It was far, far worse, of course, in winter—living inside mattresses—but clothes were never good. In summer, and occasionally at other times, she let her skin recklessly inhale open air. And why not? It was her house, her porch, her back yard, her day away from the plastic factory, and her life.

Some people might be most comfortable immersed in their jobs, others while navigating a narrow channel into open water; Gail was inordinately at home in her body. It felt right, natural in the naked sense of lacking pretension and the classical sense of having appropriate proportions. She liked herself, and her surrounding self liked her. When others in moments of uncertainty and fear might close their eyes to locate a safe center, Gail found courage in her own manifestation, the sight of her knees or feet, her hands, the pressure of her fingers gripping her arms—the way she was expressed.

She plucked the coiled steel bass strings and resumed gazing into her back yard.

Soon, however, the sense of sunny peace drained away as she struggled to play the bass line to a song by the Barbara Jean Band. Gail had both of Barbara Jean’s recordings and had been trying to learn the songs on them, but they were very difficult and something always remained out of reach.

She returned to the living room and pushed the CD Play button. The room filled with the recorded singer’s darkly searching voice. Gail tried to remain neutral, unmoved, critically appraising the haunting melody, but, as always, Barbara Jean’s music evoked in her feelings of undying sadness, longing, joy, reverence, and quaking awe—all at once. There never seemed enough of her to experience the song fully, and each time she heard it a new dimension tunneled open, unexplored. She leaned against the sofa and clasped her hands together as the first verse lilted toward the refrain and into a place beyond the uncanny skill of the musicians, beyond words, beyond notes, beyond music itself—a place where the sublime simply exploded inside her heart.

Gail hurried back to the porch and tried to play along with the recording, but she sounded awful. Her fingers couldn’t move fast enough. Some of the chords were elusive, unknown. Her tone lacked clarity, and it was not just a failure of technique. She, as a person, lacked depth, imagination. The musicians on the recording were not only more practiced, they were different in kind, better.

This was the reason she played in a second-rate country band,
where her audition had not involved any bass playing at all, only, “Turn around once, slowly.”

She put her bass down and just listened, staring into the back yard. Though she could not play as she wished, at least she knew what was good. Barbara Jean’s voice floated through the doorway and merged with the mottled patterns of sunlight. After several minutes Gail looked down at her hands, watched them fold into her arms, and smiled.

GRIEF

T
HE CRYING BEGAN WITH RISING, SONOROUS HOWLS. THEN A shrill, hysterical whine joined a succession of rapid yelping barks. Primeval moans intoned the interminable sorrow ofabanbarks. Primeval moans intoned the interminable sorrow of abandonment, mocked by a wild, warbling laugh. Taken all together, they sounded to Jacob Helm like demons at a drunken feast.

But of course there were no such things as demons, and in the next instant he wondered if eight or ten people had decided for some reason to come to his remote home on the edge of the woods in the middle of the night to scream at the top of their lungs. He moved quickly away from the kitchen table, where, unable to sleep, he had been rebuilding an old carburetor, and stood beside the open window. But the frightful sound was not quite like people screaming, either, at least not normal-sized people. Little people perhaps. Very small people might be capable of . . . and then he knew what they were: coyotes.

He’d never heard them this close before.

Their voices continued. Coyotes—he was sure of it now. He’d read about them after moving into the area five years ago.
Canis latrans,
creatures of the forest and fields, often heard but rarely seen, also called prairie wolves though not as large as wolves. Nocturnal predators, they ate mostly mice and insects, supplemented by road-kill. They were not generally aggressive but were opportunistic. They lived in groups for mutual protection, mating and raising pups, though they mostly hunted individually or in pairs. Membership was for life. Packs rarely accepted new members.

“I hear you,” he said through the screened window. “Go away.”

When the howling finally stopped, Jacob glanced at the clock. He returned to the table, wrapped the carburetor in newsprint, closed his eyes, and attempted to think about sleeping. He needed at least
a couple hours of unconsciousness. His body ached with the frustrated desire for rest, but his mind’s thirst for wakefulness remained unquenched.

Then he heard them again, further away—on the ridge above him—this time even more shrill and desperate.

And out of the center of these sounds came something much wilder. A new cry cut through the night air in a single shaft of terror. And if the earlier sounds could be said to resemble the screaming of little people, this more primitive voice could only be compared to the screaming of people who were big. Something was out there, and it did not primarily eat mice. Its voice not only invoked spirits from a nether world, it provoked them. Jacob had never heard anything like it. He found his flashlight and went outside.

Assisted by light from a clear sky, he climbed up the wooded hillside, through the underbrush. The distant yapping, snarling, and shrieking of coyotes diminished to a solitary barking voice. He did not hear the other voice again.

The air seemed unusually warm, laden with the humid leftover smells of late summer. By the time he reached the open field there were no sounds at all: utter silence ruled save for the vegetative rustle of wind in tall grass. Panning his flashlight from side to side, he waded in. His pant legs rubbing against the headed- out tops of grasses made irregular loud swishing sounds. After some time he walked down into a narrow swale, and next to a pool of water lay the half-eaten carcass of a white-tailed deer and the mud prints of a cougar or some other large cat. Nearby were four dead coyotes. Mottled reddish-gray, the furry, bloody bodies seemed roughly the size of spaniels. Scattered in several directions were three more, ten or fifteen feet away, torn to pieces. One was still breathing. It raised its head and without blinking stared into the flashlight.

Jacob continued searching and then returned to sit next to the dying animal, not near enough to alarm it, but close enough to make a connection. He turned off the flashlight and listened to the creature’s labored breathing.

Later, following a rustling movement, a half-grown coyote emerged from the long grass and entered the swale, its eyes reflecting greenish
light from the sky and its body shaking visibly. It regarded Jacob with little interest, perhaps having already taken his measure, approached the dying animal, and sat next to it. Five or ten minutes later the labored breathing stopped. The young coyote stood up, sniffed the lifeless form, looked at Jacob, and gazed briefly into the western sky, as though unsure what to do next. Then it climbed out of the swale and disappeared into the grass.

Jacob remained sitting on the ground. Why had he been called to witness this if he could do nothing to prevent it? On some fundamental level it made no sense. What purpose had been served? No doubt the coyotes had come upon the cougar eating the deer carcass and, unfamiliar with the strange beast, were overly confident in their numbers. Even so, how could one kill seven? Wouldn’t their mistake have been obvious in the first moment? Why didn’t they simply run in all directions after discovering the evil they had unlocked? Wouldn’t their individual survival instincts outweigh pack allegiance? What perversion of nature had unfolded here? How was it possible for one to kill so many? What future awaited the lone pup, and would he live only to wish he hadn’t?

Jacob lay on his back. The stars looked back at him from ten million years ago, their light just now arriving. He wondered if there were other places in the universe where the rules of the living did not require feeding on each other—where wonder could be discovered without horror and learning the truth did not entail losing one’s faith.

Unwilling to go back home and face the ordeal of trying to sleep, Jacob continued in the direction the young coyote had taken, west.