She awoke in twilight. Lying motionless, she blinked the dream away, then rose on her elbows to see Soldier standing at the edge of the shelter. He angled one dark eye at her.
“All right already. I’m coming.”
Kerrville was four days away.
37
Kate and the girls had been with them a little more than a month. At the start, Caleb hadn’t minded. It was good for Pim to have family around, and the girls adored Theo. But as the weeks passed, Kate’s mood only seemed to darken. It filled the house like a gas. She did few chores and spent long hours sleeping, or else sitting on the front steps, staring into space.
How long is she going to mope around like that?
Pim was cleaning up the breakfast dishes. She dried her hands on a towel and looked at him squarely.
She’s my sister.
She just lost her husband.
She’s better off, Caleb thought, but didn’t say so; he didn’t have to.
Give her time, Caleb.
Caleb left the house. In the dooryard, Elle and Bug were playing with Theo, who had learned to crawl. The boy was capable of astonishing speed; Caleb reminded the girls to keep an eye on their cousin and not wander far from the house.
He was hitching the horses to the plow when he heard a cry of shock and pain. He dashed back to the yard as Kate and Pim came running from the house.
“Get them off! Get them off!”
Elle’s bare legs were swarming with ants—hundreds of them. Caleb scooped her up and ran to the trough, the little girl writhing and shrieking in his arms. He plunged her into the water and began frantically stripping the ants from her legs, running his hands up and down her skin. The ants were on him too; he felt the electrical sting of their teeth boring into his arms, his hands, inside the collar of his shirt.
At last Elle quieted, her screams yielding to hiccupy sobs. A dark scrim of ant corpses had floated to the surface of the trough. Caleb lifted her out and handed her to Kate, who wrapped her in a towel. Her legs were covered with welts.
There’s ointment inside,
Pim signed.
Kate carried Elle away. Caleb drew his shirt over his head and shook it out, sending ants scattering. He had plenty of bites too, but nothing like his niece.
Where are Theo and Bug?
he asked.
In the house.
It had been a hard spring for ants. People were saying it was the weather—the wet winter, the dry spring, the early summer, shockingly warm. The woods were bursting with their mounds, some reaching gigantic proportions.
Pim gave him a look of concern.
Is there anything we can do?
This can’t last forever. We should keep the kids inside until it passes.
But it didn’t pass. The next morning, the ground around the house was swarming. Caleb decided to burn the mounds. From the shed he retrieved a can of fuel and carried it to the edge of the woods. He chose the largest pile, a yard wide and half as high, splashed it with kerosene, tossed a match, and stepped back to watch.
As black smoke roiled upward, ants exploded from the mound in a massive horde. Simultaneously, the hardened earth of the mound’s surface began to bulge volcanically, then split open like a piece of rotten fruit. Soil cascaded down the sides. Caleb lurched back. What the hell was down there? It must have been a gigantic colony, millions of the little bastards, driven to mad panic by the smoke and flames.
The mound collapsed.
Caleb stepped gingerly forward. The last of the flames were sputtering out. All that remained was a shallow indentation in the earth.
Pim came up beside him.
What happened?
Not sure.
From where he stood, he counted five other mounds.
I’m taking the wagon. Stay inside.
Where are you going?
Pim signed.
I need to get more gas.
38
The Possum Man was missing.
The Possum Man, but also dogs—lots of dogs. The city was usually crawling with them, especially in the flatland. You couldn’t walk ten paces down there without seeing one of the damn things, all skinny legs and matted fur and gooey eyes, snuffling through a garbage pile or crouched to take a wormy shit in the mud.
But suddenly, no dogs.
The Possum Man lived on the river near the old perimeter. He looked like what he did: pale and pointy-nosed, with dark, slightly bulging eyes and ears that stuck out from the sides of his face. He kept a woman half his age, though not the sort that anyone would want. According to her, they’d heard noise in the yard late at night. They figured it might be foxes, which had gotten into the hutches before. The Possum Man had grabbed his rifle and gone out to look. One shot, then nothing.
Eustace was kneeling by what was left of the hutches, which looked like they’d been hit by a tornado. If there were tracks, Eustace couldn’t find any; the earth in the yard was packed too hard. Possum corpses were strewn around, torn to bloody chunks, although a few yards away a pair of them fidgeted in the dirt, staring at him woefully, like traumatized witnesses. They were actually kind of cute. As the closest one loped toward him, Eustace extended his hand.
“Don’t want to do that,” the woman warned. “They’re nasty fuckers. Bite your finger off.”
Eustace yanked his hand away. “Right.”
He stood and looked at the woman. Her name was Rena, Renee, something like that, as scraggly-looking a thing as he’d ever laid eyes on. It was entirely possible that her parents had given her to the Possum Man in exchange for food. Such bargains were common.
“You said you found the rifle.”
She retrieved it from the house. Eustace worked the bolt, kicking out an empty cartridge. He asked her where she’d found it. Her eyes didn’t look in quite the same direction; it made her a little hard to talk to.
“Just about where you’re standing.”
“And you didn’t hear anything else. Only the one shot.”
“Happened like I said.”
He was beginning to wonder if maybe she’d done it—shot the Possum Man, dragged his body to the river, busted up the hutches to cover her tracks. Well, if she had, she probably had a good enough reason, and Eustace sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything about it.
“I’ll put the word out. He turns up, you let us know.”
“You sure you don’t want to come inside, Sheriff?”
She was giving him a look. It took Eustace a second to figure out what it was. Her off-kilter gaze traveled the length of his body, then lingered pointedly. The gesture was supposed to be seductive but was more like livestock trying to sell itself.
“Folks say you ain’t got a woman.”
Eustace wasn’t perturbed. Well, maybe a little. But the woman had been treated like property all her life; she had no other way of doing things.
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“But what’ll I do he’s dead?”
“You’ve got two possums, don’t you? Make more.”
“Them there? Them’s both boys.”
Eustace handed back the rifle. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
He returned to the jail. Fry, at his desk with his boots up, was paging through a picture book.
“She try to poke you?” Fry asked, not looking up.
Eustace sat behind his desk. “How’d you know?”
“They say she does that.” He turned a page. “Think she killed him?”
“She mighta.” Eustace gestured at the book. “What you got there?”
Fry held it up to show him.
Where the Wild Things Are.
“That’s a good one,” Eustace said.
The door swung open and a man entered, banging dust from his hat. Eustace recognized him; he and his wife farmed a patch of ground on the other side of the river.
“Sheriff. Deputy.” He nodded at each of them in turn.
“Help you, Bart?”
He cleared his throat nervously. “It’s my wife. I can’t find her anywhere.”
It was nine
A.M
. By noon, Eustace had heard the same story fourteen times.
39
It was midafternoon by the time Caleb reached town on the buckboard. The place seemed totally dead—no people anywhere. In two hours on the road, he hadn’t seen a single soul.
The door of the mercantile was locked. Caleb cupped his eyes to the glass. Nothing, no movement inside. He stilled his body, listening to the quiet. Where the hell was everybody? Why would George close up in the middle of the day? He walked around to the alley. The back door stood ajar. The frame was splintered; the door had been forced.
He returned to the buckboard for his rifle.
He nudged the door open with the tip of the barrel and moved inside. He was in the storeroom. The space was tightly packed—sacks of feed piled high, coils of fencing, spools of chain and rope—leaving only a narrow corridor through which to pass
“George?” he called. “George, are you in here?”
He felt and heard crunching underfoot. One of the bags of feed had been torn open. As he knelt to look, he heard a high-pitched clicking above his head. He lurched back, swinging the barrel of the rifle upward.
It was a raccoon. The animal was sitting on top of the pile. It lifted onto its hind legs, rubbing its two front paws together, and gave him a look of absolute innocence.
That mess on the floor? Nothing to do with me, pal.
“Go on, beat it.” Caleb poked the barrel of the rifle forward. “Get your ass out of here before I make you into a hat.”
The raccoon scampered down the pile and out the door. Caleb took a breath to calm his heart and passed through the beaded curtain into the store. The lockbox where George kept the day’s receipts sat beneath the counter in its usual spot. He moved through the aisles, finding nothing amiss. A flight of stairs behind the counter led to the second floor—presumably, George’s living quarters.
“George, if you’re there, it’s Caleb Jaxon. I’m coming up.”
He found himself in a single large room with upholstered furniture and curtains on the windows. The homeyness of it surprised him—he had expected a scene of bachelor squalor. But George had been married once. The room was divided into two areas, one for living, the other for sleeping. A kitchen table; a couch and chairs with lace doilies on the headrests; a cast-iron bed with a sagging mattress; an ornately carved wardrobe of a type that usually stayed within a family, traveling the road of several generations. All seemed orderly enough, but as Caleb surveyed the space, he began to notice certain things. A dining chair had been knocked over; books and other objects—a kitchen pot, a ball of yarn, a lantern—were tossed about the floor; a large, free-standing mirror had shattered in its frame, the glass cracked in concentric circles, like a reflective spider’s web.
As he moved toward the bed, the odor hit him: the rancid, biological reek of old vomitus. George’s chamber pot sat on the floor near the headboard; that was where the smell was coming from. Blankets were bunched at the foot of the mattress as if kicked aside by a restless sleeper. On the bedside table lay George’s gun, a long-barreled .357 revolver. Caleb opened the cylinder and pushed the ejection rod. Six cartridges fell into his palm; one had been fired. He turned around and swept the pistol over the room, then lowered the gun and stepped toward the fractured mirror. At the epicenter of the cracks was a single bullet hole.
Something had happened here. George had obviously been ill, but there was more to it. A robbery? But the lockbox hadn’t been touched. And the bullet hole was strange. A stray shot, perhaps, though something about it seemed deliberate—as if, lying in bed, George had shot his own reflection.
In the alley, he filled his jugs from the tank and loaded them onto the buckboard. It wouldn’t do to leave without paying; he made his best guess and left the bills under the counter with a note: “Nobody here, door unlocked. Took fifteen gallons of kerosene. If the money isn’t enough, I’ll be back in a week and can pay you then. Sincerely, Caleb Jaxon.”
On the way out of town, he stopped at the town office to report what he’d found. At least someone should fix the door of the mercantile and lock the place up until they knew what had happened to George. But nobody was there, either.
Dusk was settling down when he returned to the house. He unloaded the kerosene, put the horses in the paddock, and entered the house. Pim was sitting with Kate by the cold woodstove, writing in her journal.
Did you get it what you needed?
He nodded. Strange how Kate was now the silent one. The woman had barely glanced up from her knitting.
How was town?
Caleb hesitated, then signed:
Very quiet.
They ate corn cakes for supper, played a few hands of go-to, and went to bed. Pim was out like a light, but Caleb slept badly; he barely slept at all. All night his mind seemed to skip over the surface of sleep like a stone upon water, never quite breaking the skin. As dawn approached, he gave up trying and crept from the house. The ground was moist with dew, the last stars receding into a slowly paling sky. Birds were singing everywhere, but this wouldn’t last; to the south, where the weather came from, a wall of flickering clouds roiled at the horizon. So: a spring storm. Caleb guessed he had maybe twenty minutes before it arrived. He gave himself another minute to watch it, then retrieved the first jug of kerosene from the shed and lugged it to the edge of the woods.
He didn’t know what he was seeing. It simply made no sense. Perhaps it was the light. But no.
The mounds were gone.
40
0600 hours: Michael Fisher, Boss of the Trade, stood on the quay to watch the morning light come on. A thick, cloudy dawn; the waters of the channel, caught between tides, were absolutely motionless. How long since he’d slept? He was not so much tired—he was well past that—as running on some reserve of energy that felt vaguely lethal, as if he were burning himself up. Once it was gone, that would be the end of him; he would vanish in a puff of smoke.
He’d emerged from the bowels of the
Bergensfjord
with some vague intention he couldn’t recall; the moment he’d hit fresh air, the plan had fled from his mind. He’d drifted down to the edge of the wharf and found himself just standing there. Twenty-one years: amazing how so much time could slip by. Events grabbed hold of you and in the blink of an eye there you were, with sore knees and a sour stomach and a face in the mirror your barely recognized, wondering how all of it had happened. If that was really your life.