Authors: Ben H. Winters
After a quarter mile winding through rows of corn the byroad narrows into a path, and when it narrows more it becomes impassable for the wagon, so I dig out the Swiss Army knife and use the Allen wrench to uncouple it, and then I leave the wagon behind and keep riding, deeper into the fields. After ten or fifteen minutes the clouds open and begin to spill rain across my forehead. The bike wheels get slick and wobbly on the wet path. I squint and wipe my eyes, wipe them again, pedal more carefully, slow down. The narrow path winds through the corn until I am confronted by a crossroads, and then another. Arbitrarily I choose my route, feeling after more time has passed that I am lost in a tangle of dirt passages, the rain now pouring steadily, confusing my way. I stand up on the pedals and angle forward a little bit, trying to cover Houdini with my body—Houdini who has somehow managed to fall asleep. Deeper I go, down this gravelly one-lane path, and it’s harder going, the rain really coming down now, pouring down through my eyebrows and soaking my cheeks,
and I look away for a minute at the sodden patches of corn, and when I turn my eyes back to the path there is a tall wide man in a black hat, seated on a horse, right in the center of the path just a few feet away, sheets of rain parting across his face, a hunting rifle raised and aimed.
“Hey,” I start, and he fires the rifle in the air.
My face jerks back from the noise and I pull the handlebars hard to the right, wheeling and angling the bike sharply and careening off the road and smashing into the bent cornstalks. I tumble off the bike, watch Houdini bounce out of the basket. I scrabble for cover with my hands over my head. Two more shots. Each of them a loud, distinct
kaboom
, like he’s shooting at me with a cannon.
“Hold on now,” I call out from the ground, clutching the sides of my head, shouting. “Please.” Crawling among the stalks and the sheets of rain. Heart pounding. The dog raises himself unsteadily, soaked by rain, looks around and barks.
The shooting has stopped. I’m on the ground. I’m unhit, unharmed, getting rained on, half hidden among the rows. I can see the horse hooves clopping toward me, splashing into puddles.
“Go,” calls the stranger.
“Wait,” I say.
“Go now.” I grab the white T-shirt the dog had been sitting on, pull it from the basket and wave it, signaling surrender, peace, hang on a damn second. The hooves are still coming toward me, faster, cutting through the rows—Houdini barks at the wondrous size of the horse.
“Wait—” I say again, and throw my hands up before my face
as I realize what’s happening, but it’s too late—horse and rider are directly above me, and the huge front hoof arcs across the sky and slams into the side of my chest like an iron. For a second or two I feel nothing, and then suddenly everything, my whole body detonates with furious sparking pain, and I am in motion, flipping over like a pancake, rolling over fast, front to back.
My forehead lands in the dirt, facedown, like the girl in the clearing, that dead girl we found who turned out not to be dead.
What was her name? Lily. Her name was Lily. No—it—wait—what was it—it’s dark out here. I taste dirt in my mouth. I’m losing consciousness. I can feel it. I grit my teeth and push back against darkness. I hear the dog barking, shouting, the rain splashing in sheets all around us.
The pain seizes me again and I scream, but the man on the horse can’t hear me—he’s way up there, Zeus in the saddle, and me all the way down here, my head all gummed up, one thick pulse of pain. I flip myself over, blink up at the dark storm-filled sky. The man with the black hat, he’s got the rifle in one hand, the horse’s reins in the other hand, he’s like a painting from a battle scene, cavalry charge, avenging horsemen. “My name is Palace,” I try to say, just moving my mouth, my tongue lolling free, and rain falls into my mouth and I think about those turkeys you hear of that die from drowning, staring idiotically, open-mouthed, up into the rain. The horse shuffles agitatedly to and fro, the man steadies him with the reins. My dog is dodging confusedly around the feet of the larger animal. Wild pinpricks of light are exploding across the black horizon of my vision, and my mouth gapes open, rain pouring in.
I fumble again for words and fail, can’t speak.
My assailant, the Amish man in the black hat, is saying “easy, girl, easy” to his horse, and then he slides down off the saddle and his boots land in front of my eyes in the dirt. I am staring at his boots. Feeling new tenderness in my side. A broken rib. Maybe a number of them.
“You must leave,” says the man, crouching down, his face filling my vision. Big eyes, thick black chinstrap beard streaked with gray.
“I just need to ask you a couple of questions,” I say—try to say—I don’t know if I say it or not. I gurgle.
The man pulls back, stands up straight. Along with the gun he carries a pitchfork on a strap across his back. A long wooden handle with three pointed tines, a simple, brutal implement. He towers over me Satanlike: the beard, the pitchfork, the glare. I just need to ask him a couple of questions. I open my mouth and my mouth fills with blood. Blood is washing down my face; my forehead must have split on a stone on the path. This is bad. This is a problem. Blood on my face from a cut in my head, blood choking up to drown me from my insides. Blood on the knives and in the sink.
The man takes the pitchfork down off his back, jabs me in the chest with one curving prong, like a cop rousting a drunk. It’s definitely more than one rib. I can feel them, clawing my insides like spiny fingers.
“You must leave,” he says again.
“Wait, though,” I manage, heaving breath, peering up at him. “Wait. I need to ask you a couple of questions.”
“No.” His brows darken. Rain drips down around the brim of
his hat. “No.”
“I’m looking for a man or men who—”
“No. Stop.” He pushes at me again with the pitchfork, right in the chest, and the pain dances up my rib cage, into my brain, like a fork of lightning. I picture myself pinned to the road, wriggling, stuck into the ground like an insect. Still, I talk, I keep talking, I don’t know why.
“I’m looking for someone who did some concrete work.”
“You must leave.”
The man starts muttering to himself in a foreign language. Swedish? No. I try to remember what I know about Amish people. German? The man bows his head, clasps his hands together and keeps talking in the low, guttural stream of speech, and while he is doing that I struggle to my feet, get dizzy, fall down.
Blood covers my eyes now, and I wipe it away with my knuckles. I lean forward and heave awful breaths, my throat as dry as insulation, my stomach clenching and unclenching. I’m wondering where the Asian guys are, his employees or friends. I shake my head to try and clear it, and I am rewarded with a new pulse of pain and disorientation. “I’m looking for some men who did concrete work at a police station, up in Rotary.” I talk slowly, word by word, while blood dribbles out of the sides of my mouth, like I’m a monster who just ate something.
The Amish guy doesn’t answer, he keeps talking to his joined hands. He’s praying, or maybe he’s crazy, maybe he’s just talking to himself, channeling voices. He appears to be a man teetering on the edge of something. He’s tall and sturdily constructed, with a wide
chest that looks as if built with broad wood beams. Thick beard, thick gray hair beneath the hat. Wide, strong neck. A face stern and lined, the face of the underground king in a scary tale for children.
The rain comes down in billowing curtains, blowing hard across his face. The pitchfork trembles in his clenched fist.
“Please,” I say, but then the man lowers the pitchfork and raises the rifle instead.
“Forgive me,” he says. “Jesus Christ, forgive me.”
I bury my chin in my chest, wriggle my head away from the nose of gun. Still—still I am afraid to die. Even now. I smell it, the rank smell of my own terror, billowing up around me like a fog.
“Jesus Christ, forgive me,” he says again, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t asking me to forgive him, he’s not saying “Jesus Christ” for emphasis. He’s asking Jesus Christ to forgive him, for whatever he’s done, for what he’s about to do.
“Sir,” I say, as quickly and clearly as I can manage. “My sister is missing. I have to find her. That’s all. I have to find her before the end of the world.”
The old eyes widen, and he crouches and puts his face right down next to mine. Lays down the rifle and gingerly wipes blood from around my eyes with his fingertips. “You mustn’t say those words.”
I’m confused. I cough blood. I look around for Houdini, and my eyes find him a little space away in the corn, stumbling and rising, stumbling and rising, shaking raindrops from his dirty coat.
The big man walks to the saddlebag, unbuttons it and takes out a small sack. He dumps out the contents, charcoal briquettes, and
they fall with a series of horse-manure thuds onto the gravel path.
“Sir?”
He lifts the bag above me, and I flinch. It’s such an archaic word,
saddlebag
. When did I even learn that word? The world has become so strange.
“You mustn’t, mustn’t say those words,” he says, and then he pulls the bag down over my head and cinches it tight.
* * *
The big, thick-necked Amish man doesn’t kill me. I suffer a long terrible moment lying on the ground, my head encased in darkness inside the bag, waiting for him to kill me. Over the rush of the rain I hear him moving around, back and forth to his horse, boots on the road, muted clanks—he’s putting down his gun and pitchfork, he’s gathering things from the bags.
My arms are bound loosely behind me, wrist to wrist. His hands shove in under my armpits and lift me like a broken doll and set me on my feet. He pushes me in a direction, and we begin to walk. Through the rows, crunching over small slippery mounds of rotting husks, the brush of dead stalks against my legs and hands.
“Please,” says my captor, each time I slip or stumble, his strong hands shoving urgently at my back. “You will continue.”
I am trapped inside the thick stale odor of the briquettes, the canvas of the bag scratching at my face and scalp. The woven fabric is not enough to blind me completely. I get fleeting glimpses of the cornfield, flickers of moonlight peeking in through the material.
It might be the same man, the man that Sandy described, or it might not be. How many burly sixtysomething Amish men must there be, black beards flecked with gray, out here “down county,” guarding their farmsteads from strangers on the road? What are the odds that this is the right place—the right man—that he can answer my questions? What are the odds that he is about to shoot me and leave my body in an unsown field?
“Sir?” I begin, turning my head slightly, still walking. How even to ask? Where to begin?
But he makes a harsh Germanic shushing noise, like
ech
, repeats what he said before: “You will continue.”
I continue, I stumble forward through the cold rain in my mask of darkness.
I hear a sharp nervous yelp, just behind me at waist level. I hadn’t realized he was carrying the dog. I twist in my restraints, try to separate my wrists from each other inside the tight encircling rope.
“If—” I say, and my captor says, “Quiet.”
“If you shoot me,” I say, “then please—” I can’t say it. “Please take care of my dog. The dog is ill.”
He’s not listening. “Quiet,” he says. “You must be quiet.”
We walk for close to half an hour. I lose track of it. I am lost in the pain of my broken ribs, the pain of my cut forehead, lost in worry and darkness and confusion, tromping at gunpoint through the fields. I keep waiting for the Amish guy to stop walking and order me to kneel. I think of Nico, of Sandy and Billy, and then of McConnell and her kids back at Police House, working jigsaw puzzles, catching fish for dinner. I should have stayed with those guys. Should have
stayed with Cortez at the police station; stayed with Naomi Eddes at Mr. Chow’s, flirting over greasy lo mein. A million places I should have stayed.
* * *
“Sir?” At last we stop walking and I try again: “Sir?”
The man doesn’t answer. From where he’s now standing, a few yards away, a new noise, a rattling chain. I squint, make out dim shapes through the sack.
He’s taken us to a building—a house? I stand in the rain, shivering, waiting. Then the distinct creak of a rusted door being pulled open. A massive door. Not a house. A barn.
He grabs me again beneath my armpits, firm but not rough, and lifts my body and thrusts me forward through the doorway. The smell of it is immediate and unmistakable: horse manure and warm stale hay. He lays my wounded, exhausted body on the ground and binds my legs as he has my wrists.
“Sir?” I say, jerking my head around, looking for his face through the burlap. He’s moving again. Back to the door. “I don’t want to take your farm, I don’t want food. Do you hear me? I’m not that kind of person. Sir?”
“Forgive me,” he says, quietly, almost whispering, and it’s the same as before: he’s not talking to me. It’s not my forgiveness that interests him. I stumble around in a circle, a frightened animal, blind and bound. I start to cough, and I taste my own spittle and the heat of the inside of the bag.
“Don’t leave me here,” I say. “Please don’t do that.”
“I will bring you food,” says the man. “If I can. I may not be able to.”
Hot panic now, panic and fear and confusion: I feel like a man trapped in a cave, in the rubble of a building collapse. If the old man leaves me here, then that’s it, my investigation ends right now and never will I know what happened to my sister. The asteroid will careen into the earth and catch me wasting away, hooded and hungry in a dilapidated barn.
The man comes over and kneels beside me, and I flinch as I feel something press against my head. It’s a knife blade—he’s cutting the sack away from my scalp, peeling it off like a caul. The world is revealed, only marginally more visible than when I was hooded. A moonlit barn, dark and cobwebbed and warm. The smell of horses and horse shit. I take three long gasping breaths and find the man’s face and stare him in the eye.