Pete kept an ear to the ground for the Pearls, but heard only rumors. He called the pawnbroker from time to time, but Pearl had not been by, and the pawnbroker said he didn’t expect him. Nevertheless, Pete asked around in truck stops and cafes, and nearly always someone knew who Pearl was or something about his coins, but of the man’s whereabouts, nothing. There were rumors and apocrypha. He was dead. He lived with a band of Métis Indians in Canada. The government had disappeared him. But never an eyeball on the man personally, save the dope farmers and the pawnbroker.
A bitterly cold day with two new calls, one in Trego and the other up someplace called Thirsty Creek. There was no one at the former and he couldn’t locate the latter. When he returned to his office, there was a message from a logger by the name of Vandine. The man had had an encounter with a boy and his father up at a place called Freckle Creek or Tinkle Creek or some such. Pearl. Pete rang up the man at home, and learning that he lived in Libby, asked if he could come down.
Vandine was slick to the elbows in engine grease and he apologized, said he was just about done lubing his self-loader, would Pete mind waiting inside, his old lady’d put some coffee on. Pete went through the crooked picket gate to the house and no one answered the door, so he smoked on the two-by-four stoop in front of the trailer until Vandine was finished. When Vandine saw him still there and coffeeless, he grinned succinctly, stepped inside, and shouted at his wife for not fixing Pete anything, for not answering the goddamned door goddamnit. Pete waited among the motor parts the man had set on newspapers for later tinkering. Vandine beckoned him into the kitchen and scrubbed his hands at the sink, a five-minute job with gritty pink soap that dripped from his elbows as he looked about in increasing irritation for a towel. He yelled for his old lady, and Pete stood against the wall as they argued again.
The man wiped down his thick and poorly inked arms and went out, and Pete followed him down a trail to a shed where a box of cold Rainiers sat in the dark. Vandine turned over two buckets in the doorway and handed Pete a beer unbidden. He cracked his own, threw the tab in a jar of them, and sucked down half of it before Pete had even situated himself on the bucket.
He said cheers and tapped Pete’s freshly opened beer with his own, and began to explain that the pawnbroker over in Columbia Falls was an in-law, and that they’d had supper the other week. When Vandine and the in-law got to talking about what happened, the pawnbroker said there was a social worker who would be plenty interested in what he, Vandine, had to say.
“About what exactly?” Pete asked.
Vandine placed his hands on his knees and looked between them a moment. He eventually made a small preamble about how he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be sharing this story with Pete, because it didn’t reflect well on him. He looked up and said that there were legal ramifications.
“You ain’t a police officer or anything right?”
“No.”
“Do we have confidentiality?”
“Yes.”
“Gene says you folks’ll take information anonymous.”
“Absolutely.”
Vandine ran his hand through his black and white hair deciding.
“Truly,” Pete said, “if the police need to get involved I will say I got an anonymous call.”
Vandine scowled like someone fresh out of choices. He dangled the beer can between his legs.
“We was going through a rough patch last spring. Financially. I have to tell you this because it’s why I didn’t go to the cops about it.”
He took a long draft on his beer, observing that Pete did not sip his own. Pete drank then.
“Tell me what happened, Mr. Vandine.”
“I’s up on Tickle Crick, where Champion was cutting a new logging road,” he said. “Maybe I was up there making off with the right-of-way logs.”
“Right-of-way?”
“The ones they cut down to make the road. They leave them alongside of the road there. You seen my self-loader.”
“Right.”
Just then Vandine’s wife called out to him, and he hunched his shoulders at the incoming artillery of her voice. She shouted his name some more, and when they heard the wooden screen door clap shut, he sat upright again.
“So it’s May eighteenth I’m up there. You remember what happened last May eighteenth?”
“Mount Saint Helens.”
“Exactly. Ash falling on Tickle Crick and I had no idea what it was. This weird gray snow coming down. You remember.
“Well, my partner—the son of a bitch shall remain nameless—jumps on the CB and all the truckers are saying get indoors and don’t breathe it, it’s toxic. And don’t run your vehicles in the stuff, the air filters can’t take it. They’re saying to wait until it’s all done falling. Well we don’t want to get waylaid, not up there, so we decide to park, hump it down to his pickup, and leave my logging truck for when it all blows itself over.”
Vandine swirled the dregs of his beer in the can.
“Next day everything’s covered in ash, and I got a truck up Tickle Crick where it ain’t supposed to be. Day after that they’re still saying don’t drive if you don’t need to. It’s the next next day and I’m still up there with my dick hangin out. So by now I figure I better haul ass and get my truck down before Champion sends someone up there to check on the Cat and skidder they got up there. If they ain’t already. If they ain’t got my license plate and calling the cops already. You couldn’t be more red-handed than we was. But my alleged partner won’t go because they’re saying we ain’t supposed to be driving except for emergencies. I says it is a emergency. Not to me it ain’t he says. I says I get in trouble so do he, I says. That got him moving. So next day we get up early and head out.”
Vandine polished off his beer and fetched another one. He was slow to getting back into the story. As though he were sorting through the events.
“What happened?”
“My brother-in-law says you’re looking for this guy, name of Pearl?”
“Him and his son, yes.”
“The boy,” Vandine said, shaking his head.
“Yes. You saw them?”
“Matched my brother-in-law’s description in every detail.”
“Where?”
VANDINE SAT UP and explained what happened. The timber country all around coated gray and otherworldly and looking like a tintype or a still from an old western. Feels like you’re smack dab in a John Ford movie. And Vandine’s on a long dirt road straightaway and nearly misses in his rearview the waving hand in the truck’s wake of ash. He just sees an arm swallowed in a cloud the color of cigarette smoke. He says, Didja see that? Partner says, See what? Vandine stops the truck. Somebody come out of the woods, Vandine says.
Vandine pulls over, gets out. The kicked-up ash a red fog in his brake lights and out of it emerges somebody, this boy, bandana over his face, coughing. Vandine reaches in the cab and kills the engine and as the truck dies, he hears the click of a cocked gun right behind his left ear. A voice tells him, Don’t fuckin move. He glances over at the passenger seat and his partner’s eyes wide as dollar coins at whoever’s there behind him. The voice says for Vandine to move over and put his hands on the hood of the pickup and for the partner to get out and come around front of the truck or Vandine gets it in the back of the head.
The partner slides out real slow. Vandine can tell he’s thinking of running. Don’t do it, Vandine says.
The partner ducks behind the open door and runs low and into the dust cloud, and then over the lip of the road, you can hear the sumbitch crashing through the ashy brush. You can hear the sumbitch coughing.
Don’t kill me because of that idiot, Vandine says. He’s miles from anything. He can’t hurt you.
The boy comes up, he’s coated in ash, except for his eyes, which gleam red like open sores. He’s about as jumpy as a fart on a skillet, and the voice behind him tells him not to worry about the other one. The kid hops in the truck and gets to ransacking. Efficient at it. As the man pats him down, Vandine says there’s a thermos of soup and a can of Coke. That they’re welcome to them.
The man says for him to put his hands behind his back and take three steps backward slow and then sit down.
Something tells Vandine he does this, he’s a dead man. Something else in him has the courage to say, Fuck that I ain’t moving from my truck.
Now the kid’s eyes are the ones wide as dollar coins—whether it’s that the man is about to shoot him or the kid is just scared of what Vandine might try—and it wilts Vandine’s courage, the boy does, and Vandine says, All right all right, I’m a do what you say.
The man comes around front of Vandine, pistol trained on him. Vandine gets a good look at him. Hair that’s been hacked away to see by, but otherwise long like gray stalks of straw. A blue bandana gone to black from moisture and ash mixing into a thin wet layer of concrete over his nose and mouth, a bushy beard under it. Same red eyes as the kid, same ashy, tattered clothes. The man stifles a cough. Chokes it back.
The boy sacks the soup and the Coke.
Vandine volunteers he’s got some paper filter masks there under the bench seat, the kid’s probably seen ’em, they can have ’em. The man says to shut up. The kid’s watching the father, the pistol in his hand.
The man asks, How many are left?
Vandine says the box hasn’t been opened yet.
I asked you how many are left goddamnit.
Vandine shook his head, ran his finger around the lip of his beer can.
“How many what?” Pete asked.
Vandine wiped his nose with his sleeve and said, “People. He’s asking how many people. He thinks there’s been a nuclear war.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I wish I was, because he didn’t believe me. He asks why I’m up there. I tell him to get a logging truck, he says, Bullshit, he says, you got a bug-out place up here. Says things about martial law and where are the tanks and troop transports.”
“Jesus,” Pete said.
“I remember there’s a newspaper on the seat. I tell him to have a look for himself.”
Vandine polished off his second can of beer, stood, and crushed it with his logging boot.
“What’d he say when he saw?”
“He didn’t see. My partner shoved the paper under the seat and they didn’t see it and wouldn’t look for it.” Vandine was at the hard part. He toed the can on the ground in front of him. “So then he gave his pistol to the kid.” He looked Pete in the eye. “He told him to shoot me.” Pete looked Vandine up and down, as though a gunshot wound would still be in evidence.
Vandine gazed off into the woods at a rusted trailer and broken sawhorses overgrown with lichen. A metal garbage can lid nailed to a tree and rusted and shot to hell.
“The kid come out of the truck and he’s shaking and pointing the gun at me. And I’m saying to his old man, Come on now, you don’t need to do this, he’s just a boy. . . . Things of that nature.
“The boy, he was shivering—he’s scared shitless like me—and I’m thinking maybe I got a chance to, you know, close on him and, I dunno, take the gun . . . but the old man has him nearby and I see he’s got his hand on his other holster too.”
Vandine squatted down on his haunches and began to draw idly in the dirt with the side of the can.
“A person can imagine begging for his life. And beg, I fucking did. And I’ll allow that I was pretty cowardly in some of the things I said to this man and his son.”
“You weren’t a coward,” Pete said. “You were trying to stay alive.”
“It wasn’t any pleasure to discover that I would behave this way.” Vandine pitched the can spinning like a saucer into the woods. “In any case,” he said, “that’s not why I called you. I called you because of the boy. I’m a fuckup. But . . . I can’t imagine a man making his boy kill someone for nothing.”
Vandine reached for another beer, closed his hand around it. Again Pete waited for him to continue. But he did not. It occurred to Pete that Vandine and the boy had both been thrust into this horrible situation of Pearl’s making. How there was nothing either one of them could do about it.
“So the kid, did he—”
“He shot at me.”
“He missed.”
“From ten feet. I don’t know if it was on purpose or it was too much gun for him or the good Lord or what. But I didn’t get killed.”
“What about Pearl, didn’t he—?”
Vandine held up his hand for Pete to quiet down.
“Next thing I know I’m half-deaf and throwing up, and when I finally get my head together, I see the old man and the kid running off into the woods.”
Vandine stood, pitched his freshly empty can aside, and sat on the bucket.
“It was like some goddamned test. I wonder if the point wasn’t even to kill me. Like that Old Testament story, the father who has to kill his son—”
“Abraham.”
“Yup, Abraham.”
Vandine opened the beer and squeezed the pull tab in his fist. He regarded the cut the pull tab had put into his skin, and smiled dimly.
“Do you know where they are?” Pete asked.
“I was going to ask you that.”
“This was up Tickle Crick.” Vandine drank and nodded and snorted at some amusing thought.
“What?”
“You sure you want to go mess with this guy?” he asked.
Pete leaned back against the jamb of the shed and ran his hands over his face.
“No, I’m not sure of that. I’m not sure of that at all.”