A Simple Plan (2 page)

“It had one of Pederson’s chickens,” I said.

“Stole it.” Lou nodded. “Broad daylight.”

Jacob whistled for Mary Beth. After a while it seemed like he’d stopped moving away. The barking neither decreased nor increased in volume. We listened to it, tilting our heads toward the woods. I was getting cold—there was a stiff wind cutting across the road from the field—and I was eager to climb back inside the truck.

“Call him again,” I said.

Jacob ignored me. “She’s treed it,” he said to Lou.

Lou’s hands were deep in the pockets of his jacket. It was an army surplus jacket, white for camouflage in the snow. “That’s how it sounds,” he said.

“We’ll have to go in and get her now,” Jacob said.

Lou nodded, took a wool hat from his pocket, and pulled it down over his pink skull.

“Call him once more,” I said, but Jacob ignored me again, so I tried calling the dog myself.

“Mary Beth,” I yelled. My voice came out pitifully thin in the cold air.

“He’s not coming,” Lou said.

Jacob shuffled back to the truck and opened the driver’s side door. “You don’t have to go, Hank,” he said. “You can wait here if you want.”

I didn’t have a hat with me, and I wasn’t wearing boots—I hadn’t planned on hiking through the snow—but I knew that both Jacob and Lou expected me to stay behind, expected me to wait like an old man in the truck, and I knew that they’d joke about it while they made their way off through the trees and tease me when they returned.

So, against my will, I said, “No, I’ll go.”

Jacob was leaning into the truck, fiddling around in the space behind the seat. When he emerged he was holding a hunting rifle. He took a bullet out of a little cardboard box and loaded it into the gun. Then he put the box back behind the seat.

“There’s no reason,” he said. “You’ll just be cold.”

“What’s the rifle for?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Lou grinning.

Jacob shrugged. He cradled the gun in his arms, flipped the collar of his jacket up around his ears. His parka was bright red and, like all his clothes, a size too tight for him.

“It’s posted land,” I said. “You can’t hunt here.”

Jacob smiled. “It’s compensation: that fox’s tail for my broken headlight.” He glanced toward Lou. “I’m only taking one bullet, like the great white hunter. That seem fair to you?”

“Perfectly,” Lou said, drawing out the first syllable so that it sounded like “purrrr.”

He and Jacob both laughed. Jacob stepped awkwardly up onto the snowbank at the side of the road, balanced there for a second, as if he might fall backward, then gathered himself and lumbered down into the trees. Lou followed right behind him, still giggling, leaving me alone on the road.

I hesitated there, wavering between the twin sins of comfort and pride. In the end it was pride and the thought of Lou’s snickering that carried the day. With something bordering on revulsion, I watched myself climb up over the bank and set off through the snow, hurrying lest they get too far ahead.

T
HE SNOW
was shin deep in the woods, and there were things hidden beneath its smooth surface—the trunks of fallen trees, stones, broken branches, holes, and stumps—which made the going much harder than I’d anticipated. Lou led the way, spry, scurrying ratlike between the trees, as if he were being chased. I followed directly in his tracks, and Jacob brought up the rear, a good ways behind us, his face turning a brilliant pink, just a shade lighter than his jacket, with the effort of moving his huge body forward through the snow.

The dog’s barking didn’t seem to get any closer.

We continued on like this for about fifteen minutes. Then the trees suddenly thinned, and the land dropped away before us into a wide, shallow bowl, as if, millions of years before, a giant meteorite had landed there, carving out its impression in the earth. Parallel lines of stunted, sickly looking trees transversed the hollow—they were apple trees, the remains of Bernard Anders’s orchard.

Lou and I stopped on the edge of the bowl to wait for Jacob. We didn’t talk; we were both out of breath. Jacob shouted something through the trees at us, then laughed, but neither of us understood him. I scanned the orchard for the dog, following his paw prints with my eyes. They disappeared in the distance beneath the trees.

“He’s not in there,” I said.

Lou listened to the dog’s barking. It still seemed very far away. “No,” he agreed. “He isn’t.”

I made a complete circle of the horizon with my eyes, taking in both the orchard and the woods behind us. The only thing moving for as far as I could see was Jacob, working his way aggressively through the snow. He still had another fifty yards to go and was progressing at a pathetically slow rate. His jacket was unzipped, and even at that distance I could hear the tortured sound of his breathing. He was using his rifle like a cane, digging its butt into the snow and pulling himself forward by its barrel. Behind him, he’d cut a wide swath of deep, messy tracks, so that it looked as if he’d been dragged through the woods against his will, struggling and kicking the entire way.

By the time he reached us, he was soaked with sweat, his skin actually steaming. Lou and I stood there watching him try to catch his breath.

“Christ,” he said, gasping, “I wish we’d brought something to drink.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on his jacket, squinting down at the ground as if he half-expected to find a pitcher of water sitting there in the snow.

Lou waved his hand in the air like a magician, snapped his fingers over the right-hand pocket of his jacket, then reached in and pulled out a can of beer. He popped its top, slurped the foam from the lid, and, smiling, offered it to Jacob.

“Always be prepared,” he said.

Jacob gulped twice at it, pausing in between to catch his breath. When he finished, he returned the can to Lou. Lou took a long, slow swallow, his head tilted back, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down the wall of his throat like a piston. Then he held the can out toward me. It was a Budweiser; I could smell its sweetish scent.

I shook my head, shivering. I’d started to sweat hiking through the snow, and now, standing still, my damp skin was becoming chilled. The muscles in my legs were trembling and jumping.

“Come on,” he said. “Have a sip. It won’t hurt you.”

“I don’t want any, Lou. I’m not thirsty.”

“Sure you are,” he prodded. “You’re sweating, aren’t you?”

I was about to decline again, this time more forcefully, when Jacob interrupted us.

“Is that a plane?” he asked.

Both Lou and I glanced into the sky, searching the low clouds for movement, ears keyed for the hum of an engine, before realizing that he was pointing down into the orchard. We followed his finger to the very center of the bowl, and there, nestled among the rows of stunted apple trees, hidden almost completely by its covering of snow, was indeed a tiny single-engine airplane.

L
OU AND
I reached it first, side by side.

The plane was resting perfectly flat on its belly, as if it were a toy and a giant hand had reached down out of the sky to set it there, snug beneath the branches of the trees. There were remarkably few signs of damage. Its propeller was twisted out of shape, its left wing was bent back a bit, tearing a tiny hole in the fuselage, but the land itself was relatively unmarked; there were no upturned trees, no jagged, black gashes in the earth to reveal its path of impact.

Lou and I circled the wreck, neither of us approaching close enough to touch it. The plane was surprisingly small, no bigger really than Jacob’s truck, and there was something fragile about it: it seemed far too tiny to support the weight of a man in the air.

Jacob came slowly down into the orchard. The snow had settled more deeply here, and he looked like he was wading or shuffling toward us on his knees. Off in the distance, Mary Beth continued sporadically to bark.

“Jesus,” Lou said. “Look at all these birds.”

At first I didn’t see them—they were so still in the trees—but then suddenly, as soon as I saw one, they all seemed to jump out at me. They were everywhere, filling the entire orchard, hundreds and hundreds of black crows perched motionless on the dark, bare branches of the apple trees.

Lou packed some snow into a ball and tossed it at one of them. Three crows lifted into the air, completed a slow half circle over the plane, and settled with a soft fluttering onto a neighboring tree. One of them cawed, once, and the sound of it echoed off the shallow sides of the bowl.

“It’s fucking spooky,” Lou said, shivering.

Jacob came up, huffing and puffing. His jacket was still unbuttoned, his shirttails hanging out. He took a few seconds to catch his breath.

“Anybody inside?” he asked.

Neither of us answered him. I hadn’t even thought about it, but of course there had to be someone inside—a pilot, dead. I stared uneasily at the plane. Lou threw another snowball at the crows.

“You haven’t checked?” Jacob asked.

He handed his rifle to Lou and lumbered up to the plane. There was a door in its side, just behind the damaged wing. He grabbed its handle and gave it a tug. The plane made a loud creaking sound, metal pushing against metal, and the door swung open about five inches, then stopped. Jacob tugged again, putting his weight into it, and got another inch and a half. Then he grabbed the edge of the door with both hands and pulled so hard that the whole plane rocked back and forth, dislodging its shell of snow, revealing the shiny silver metal beneath, but not moving the door at all.

Emboldened by his aggressiveness, I approached the plane more closely. I tried peering in through the windshield but could make nothing out. The glass was spiderwebbed with a tiny, intricate matrix of cracks and frosted over with a thick sheet of ice.

Jacob kept tugging at the door. When he stopped, his breath was coming hard and fast again.

Lou stood a little ways off. He looked like a sentry, with Jacob’s rifle cradled in his arms. “It’s jammed, I guess,” he said. He sounded relieved.

Jacob peered in through the crack he’d made, then pulled his head back.

“Well?” Lou asked.

Jacob shook his head. “Too dark. One of you’ll have to go in and check it out.” He took off his glasses and wiped at his face with his hand.

“Hank’s the smallest,” Lou said quickly. “He’ll fit the easiest.” He winked at Jacob, then grinned toward me.

“I’m smaller than you?”

He patted his little stomach, the beginning of his paunch. “You’re thinner. That’s what counts.”

I looked toward Jacob for help but immediately saw that there’d be none forthcoming. He had a toothy smile on his face, his dimples cutting into his cheeks.

“What do you think, Jacob?” Lou asked.

Jacob started a little laugh but then stopped. “I can’t imagine you fitting, Lou,” he said seriously. “Not with that gut of yours.” They both turned to look at me, straight-faced.

“Why go in at all?” I asked. “What’s the point?”

Lou started to grin. A handful of crows flapped heavily into the air, changing trees. It seemed like the whole flock was watching us.

“Why not just get the dog,” I said, “then go into town and report this?”

“You scared, Hank?” Lou asked. He shifted the rifle from one arm to the other.

I watched myself cave in, disgusted by the spectacle. I heard a voice in my mind very clearly analyzing the situation, saying I was acting like a teenager, doing something pointless, even foolish, to prove my courage to these two men, neither of whom I respected. The voice went on and on, reasonable, rational, and I listened to it, agreeing with everything it had to say, while I strode angrily around the plane to its open door.

Jacob stepped back to give me room. I stuck my head inside the doorway, let my eyes adjust to the darkness. It seemed even tinier inside than it had outside. The air felt warm, and humid, too, like in a greenhouse. It gave me an eerie feeling. A thin stream of light entered from the tear in the fuselage and shot across the cabin’s darkened interior, like a weak flashlight beam, forming a tiny crescent moon against the opposite wall. The rear of the plane was almost completely dark, but it appeared to be empty, a bare metal floor growing narrower and narrower the farther back it went. Just inside the doorway was a large duffel bag lying on its side. If I’d reached in with my hand, I could’ve grabbed it and dragged it out.

Toward the front, I could see two seats, gray with the light filtering in through the ice-covered windshield. One of them was empty, but there was a man’s body slouched in the other, his head resting against the control panel.

I pulled my head out of the doorway.

“I can see him from here.”

Jacob and Lou stared at me. “Is he dead?” Jacob asked.

I shrugged. “We haven’t had snow since Tuesday, so he’s been out here for at least two days.”

“You aren’t going to check?” Lou asked.

“Let’s just get the dog,” I said impatiently. I didn’t want to go into the plane. It seemed stupid of them to make me.

“I think we ought to check.” Lou grinned.

“Come on, Lou. Cut the crap. He can’t be alive.”

“Two days isn’t that long,” Jacob said. “I’ve heard of people surviving stuff longer than that.”

“Especially in the cold,” Lou agreed. “It’s like keeping food in the refrigerator.”

I waited for the wink, but it didn’t come.

“Just go in and check him out,” Jacob said. “What’s the big deal?”

I frowned, feeling trapped. I stuck my head back inside the plane for a second, then pulled it out again. “Can you at least scrape the ice off the windshield?” I asked Jacob.

He gave a deep, theatrical sigh, more for Lou’s benefit than mine, but nevertheless shuffled off toward the front of the plane.

I started to squeeze my way in through the doorway. I turned sideways and slipped my head and shoulders inside, but when I got to my chest, the opening seemed suddenly to tighten, gripping me like a hand. I tried to pull back, only to find that my jacket and shirt were snagged. They bunched up under my armpits, exposing the skin above my pants to the cold air.