Chapter 2
The two men glanced at each other through the haze of cigarette smoke. It was dark, and they had just pulled into a driveway etched into the endless expanse of spruce and alders. At the end of the drive was a trailer house, flanked by a dozen cars. The girls, huddled in the middle of the Crown Vic’s backseat, leaned forward to inspect themselves in the rearview mirror, one set of lips painted a deep crimson, the other a shiny black. Vanessa and Sharon, local girls, the kind who truly appreciated a free drink at the Caboose back in town. The kind who wanted to pahhhty.
Dragon girls, Byron thought. He turned back to the double-wide. And yonder’s their lair.
The house was three miles north of Highbanks. In the Crown Vic’s headlights they could see the siding streaked with rust below the window frames. The driveway was not much more than a wide spot in a weedy yard, lined with pickups and the same sort of long old cars they were in. It was Vanessa’s car, but neither girl could drive tonight—the local constable had walked right into the Caboose, done a quick assessment, and told them as much. Byron and David had agreed to drive them home. Gentlemen of the first order, knights among men. It was their first night back in the village, and the girls had been in the bar when they’d walked in.
“Screw bear hunting,” David had said after his sixth or seventh drink, watching the two girls dancing to an old Shania Twain song. “Tonight I’m hunting local.”
“I hear they don’t shave this far north,” Byron replied, his eyes tracking the girls as they sashayed across the grimy wood floor, leaving little pieces of peanut shell and popcorn in their wake. They weren’t bad looking.
“I been in the bush for seven days,” David said. “I ain’t scared of one more night. And that one on the left, she looks like she’d be . . . adventurous.”
That was four hours ago, and the girls were drunker now, and he and David were plenty buzzed, too, but not so drunk as to miss what looked like a bloody tissue plastered against the windowpane set into the screen door, illuminated by a bare yellow porch light. Several fading yard toys were parked between the weeds, and from somewhere behind the house a dog was barking. They could hear the music through the vinyl siding, a steady thumping. David listened for a moment to see if the woofs followed the rhythm, maybe a woof every four beats, but they didn’t.
“Pull up through them trucks,” the girl with black lips said. “Weasel and Garny always leave an open spot for us.”
“Weasel and Garny,” David said. He took a sip from the Labatt’s nestled between his legs. “Tell you what. Byron and I’ll go borrow a truck from camp, drop your car off back here.” They had been driven to the Caboose by their guide, Jimmy, who had promised to retrieve them at midnight.
“Oooh, Van, I think the city boys are scay-ered,” Sharon said. “Way out in the country, who knows what’ll happen?”
“You ain’t driving off with my car,” Vanessa said, checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror. She opened her lips, then rubbed at the smudge of black on her front tooth with the corner of her shirt. “Come on, have a drink, say hi. They’re harmless.”
David rolled the Crown Vic up through the parked vehicles, the headlights illuminating a mixture of Ontario, Manitoba, and First Nation license plates. There was indeed an open spot near the porch, and David pulled onto a patch of weedy gravel and killed the motor. The dome light came on as the girls got out.
David took the keys out, considered them for a moment, then tucked them in his pants pocket. “Don’t give me that look,” he said to Byron. “You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, didja? Come home to an empty trailer house, you banging away in one end, me in the other?” He grinned. “See if we could get it to rock back and forth on the cinder blocks, like a teeter-totter? We might get a chance yet.”
Byron scratched behind his ear. “I’m not that fired up about it anymore, tell you the truth.”
David nodded. “You got that reluctant, I’m-thinking-about-my-baby’s-momma look to you, all right. But we can’t sit out here in the car.”
They opened the screen door, and Byron saw that the bloody tissue was actually some sort of homemade flyer, advertising an upcoming powwow and a First Dance, whatever that was. There was a keg just inside the door, and next to it a plastic pitcher filled with an assortment of Canadian bills and loonies and toonies, one- and two-dollar coins. David threw in an American ten-dollar bill and plucked two red Solo cups off the stack. They stood to the side of the keg, sipping the beer and looking out over the small living room to their left, the kitchen to their right. Not quite wall-to-wall with people but close enough, the air thick with tobacco and marijuana smoke, the music thudding. It was too loud to talk, so they communicated by glances and expressions, same as they did on the job, knowing which parts of the day were going to be shitty, which apprentice wasn’t going to cut it.
After a while, Vanessa appeared out of the crowd and latched onto David’s arm. “There you are,” she said, nudging the toe of his Danner hunting boots. “You better be able to dance in these shitkickers.”
They moved off into a small cluster of people in the center of the living room, weaving to a song Byron remembered hearing at the construction site a few months ago. He studied the wall, looked at his phone. Another song came on and David and Vanessa stayed where they were, bumping into another couple. David said something to them, all of them laughing, Vanessa slapping David’s chest and throwing her head back.
Byron drained the last of his beer and refilled his cup. When he turned around, there was a man wearing a camo shirt and a headband waiting in line, a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. He was in his mid-twenties, a few inches taller than Byron, and rangy. He had a tattoo on his left forearm, Okit-something, the rest of the word disappearing up under his sleeve.
He said, “You leave any for me?”
Byron stepped out of the way. When the man finished filling his cup, he motioned Byron toward the door. Byron glanced at David, then followed the man out onto the porch and into the yard. The only other people outside were a couple making out against the side of the trailer house, the girl with one leg wrapped over the guy’s hip.
The man leaned against a truck. “You get your bear?”
Byron cocked his head. It wasn’t the question he’d expected; then he realized there was probably only one reason an American in camo would be out here, at this trailer house, in these clothes. “I missed.”
“With a rifle?” Eyebrow arched—just how the fuck you miss a bear with a scoped rifle?
“No, with my bow. Twenty yards, broadside. It came in right at dusk and my arrow hit a twig, or something I couldn’t see. It ran off.”
“Big?”
“Yeah.” He took a drink. “I don’t know, seemed big to me. Two-fifty, three hundred? Seeing it that close, I’m probably overestimating.”
“You’re good with a bow to hunt bear, you got good eyes. Probably know exactly how big it was.”
“Well, it’s still just as big,” Byron motioned toward the darkness of the woods, “somewhere out there.”
They both stared off into the woods, blackness broken only by the occasional flicker of a late-season firefly. The man turned back to Byron. “You hunted the same bait after that?”
Byron nodded. “Five more nights. Nothing but skeeters.”
“You with that Davis bunch, then? Hunting up north of the Little Glutton River?”
“How’d you know that?”
The man smiled. “Jimmy Davis is the laziest guide around. He don’t know how to set his baits up right for bowhunters, or don’t care, I guess.” He glanced up at the night sky, where faint aurora shafts danced. “There’s so many bear around here, his guys sit there and shoot ’em off the pile like dogs coming in to their bowls. With rifles, you know? Archery hunters, they might get one chance, but Jimmy ain’t got enough stations lined up to set you up with one that’s got the right wind.” He held out his pack of Marlboros. “I’m Billy.”
“Byron.” He took a cigarette. “You a guide?”
“Nah. I don’t like bear; too greasy. Most of the time guys who come up to hunt ’em are greasy, too.”
“Yeah, well, there’s some doozies at camp. There’s one guy, from Texas I think, he—”
“You come here with them Fineday girls?”
Byron nodded, suddenly cautious. The guy couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and his northwoods accent and relaxed manner had lulled Byron into bullshitting mode. And this guy, Billy, he was still relaxed, leaning against the rusty quarter panel of the Ford F-150, his cigarette held lightly between his index and middle fingers. Relaxed, but getting to the point.
“Sharon and Vanessa?” Byron said. “Yeah, we ran into them down at the bar. The Caboose?”
“You ran into them? So you already know them, eh?”
“Met them, I mean. If they’re with you—”
Billy held up a hand. “Hey man, I don’t care. They’re kinda wild, you know? Always cadging drinks, and when there’s new guys in town they like to party. We don’t get much of a chance to get out of Highbanks. Everyone knows their game, it’s usually not a big deal. Just, you know. Be nice to them.”
“They’re not your sisters or something, are they?”
Billy laughed. “No, I’m a Martineau. You ready for another beer?”
As they went back into the house, Byron reached forward and tapped Billy on the shoulder. Billy turned. “What do you mean, it’s usually not a big deal?”
Billy shook his head, still smiling. “Man, you better have a shot with that beer—relax a little. You’re on vacation, ain’t you?”
* * *
It was after three in the morning, and the party had changed, the pace becoming frenetic and then slowing, picking up again and now almost dead. The people had changed, too, some leaving, others slipping off to one of the small bedrooms down the hall, several more passing out on the stained carpet or the shiny vinyl couch. A few others had come in, more sober than the rest of the party, four serious-looking guys, each one holding bottles of Budweiser. It was the only American beer Byron had seen in this land of Labatts and Molsons.
Byron stared blearily at his cards. They were playing a game called smiley, and the lowest hand won the pot, which was now just under twenty dollars, Canadian. He had a pretty good hand, but he couldn’t remember what the other guys had in their hands, even though they’d shown each other after the last round of betting, per the rules. He couldn’t remember what was in the dummy hand, either—stinky, they called it—and when he closed his eyes for a moment, he couldn’t remember what he was holding in his own hand.
“Eh, lookit Sleepy over dere,” someone—maybe Weasel?—said. The accents got thicker as the night went on, and Byron himself seemed to have lost control of his mouth. Not what he said, just how he said it. A grin and a slur. “C’mon, Sleepy, your turn.”
“In and good,” he said, slapping his cards down. Inanngoo. If he won he would take the pot; if he lost he would pay the pot. Someone handed him the bottle of cinnamon whiskey. He held it up to the kitchen light, sloshed it back and forth, took a drink. He wondered if they were trying to get him drunk so they could take his money, but he didn’t think so. They’d already taken plenty of his money earlier in the game; if anything, he was getting better at this smiley game the drunker he got.
“In and good,” Weasel chirped. He was small and thin, so white as to be albino-ish, except for his dark eyes. “Doesn’t even look at his cards and he’s in and good! Moose nuts on this one.”
“Mooose nuts,” Billy said, drinking down the last of the cinnamon whiskey. “I’ll take a card.”
Byron blinked several times. They were looking at him, heads cocked. For a moment he wondered what he’d done wrong, and then they started laughing and he realized he’d fallen asleep.
“Turn your cards over, Sleepynuts,” Weasel said. Byron flipped them over, saw with relief he had lost to Billy—he couldn’t quit after winning the biggest pot of the night, but he could quit honorably after losing—and dropped a twenty on the pile. One way or another, he was going to find a ride back to town; let David figure out his own logistics. He was pushing himself up to a standing position when someone screamed from the back bedroom.
The door flew open and a bottle careened through it a second later, shattering against the thin wallboard and knocking a framed picture to the carpet. David stumbled backward out of the bedroom in his underwear, arms covering his head. A glass ashtray shot out of the doorway next, striking him in the forearm. He swore and stumbled away, this time avoiding a throw pillow.
“Piece of shit perverted motherfuck!”
Vanessa charged out of the room in her bra and panties, eyes wide open with fury, and swung a roundhouse punch that connected with David’s ear. He tripped over the pillow, one hand slipping along the wall as he tried to keep from falling. Vanessa swung again, reaching way back, and hit him high on the head. One breast had fallen out of her bra with the last punch, and Byron could see there were red welts on her chest. Not scratch marks—more like hickeys, or burn marks.
David uncovered his head and looked up. “Hey, listen—”
Her left fist caught him in the mouth. As Vanessa reared back for another punch, David reached out, his hand flat against her sternum, and shoved. She flew backward, her feet skimming across the short pile carpet, her shoulders smacking into the wall. Her head snapped back after her shoulders hit, and she fell to the ground, a dish-sized indentation in the wallboard. Then the trailer house was silent.
Shit, Byron thought, and burped up foul-tasting cinnamon breath.
David started to get up, saw men staring at him, and went to a knee next to Vanessa instead. “Hey, come on, I’m sorry,” he said, touching Vanessa’s shoulder. “Wake up.”
Vanessa’s hand waved feebly at him, pushing him away. Sharon emerged from the other bedroom, saw Vanessa on the floor, and immediately advanced on David, who reared backward, avoiding her nails by a fraction of an inch. Sharon paused, shooting David a murderous glance before dropping to the ground next to her friend. She started slapping Vanessa’s cheeks, first one side and then the other. “C’mon, honey,” she said. “You’re all right.”
Byron noted that her slaps were keeping time with the beat of the music. Finally got some harmony, he thought. Man, I wish I wasn’t so drunk.
Sharon looked up. “Get me some water, you limp-dicks.”
Someone pushed past Byron and filled a glass with cloudy water. Sharon dumped it over Vanessa’s face, and she spluttered and pushed herself up on her elbows. Sharon reached over and tucked Vanessa’s left breast back into her bra. From behind Byron, the screen door hissed as someone quietly left the house.
“Wha’tha fuck?” Vanessa said, one hand creeping around to touch the back of her head. Her palm came away sticky with blood.
“You okay, hon?”
Vanessa blinked twice, her eyes coming into focus. “Yeah, shit. I’m okay.”
David disappeared into the bedroom, and Byron could hear him rummaging for his clothes. The trailer house was still very quiet, and to Byron it felt like the air had been replaced, simultaneously charged and stale. The room was like an animal’s den, one he had stumbled into and one in which the denizens were just now becoming aware of his presence. Well, not his presence, not yet. Nobody was looking at him. They were waiting for David to reemerge from the bedroom. But there were two strange animals here, two things that were not like the others, as the song went.
One of the men got up from the couch, his shoulders sloped into powerful arms. He held a bottle of Budweiser by the longneck between his thumb and forefinger and swung it back and forth like a metronome, his eyes assessing the room. He was wearing fatigue pants with a wide utility belt, a knife strapped to one side and a phone on the other. He turned to look at the table, and Byron could see where the man’s nose had been broken, probably more than once, the line of cartilage zigging first to the left and then the right. There was a semicircular scar going through and above his right eyebrow, the scar tissue still pink.
“Billy?” the man said.
“Yeah, Darius.”
“How long it take you to put on your pants?”
“What do you mean—oh shit.”
Billy crashed through a couple men and threw the screen door open, while another man ran to the bedroom. The others were moving too, Weasel and Garney following Billy, the remaining men moving away from the kitchen table and toward Darius. Byron stood where he was, wishing David hadn’t run, wishing there was a way they could take their beating and be done with it. That he would be exempted never crossed his mind.
“Fuck!” someone shouted from inside the bedroom. “Window’s open!”
Darius waved his beer bottle at the rest of them. “Go on, help Billy-dog. He runs fast, but he ain’t a fighter.”
“Which way?”
“Use your goddamn ears,” Darius said. For the first time there was annoyance in the clipped voice: Youse your gott-dam ears. “Go!”
The men streamed down the porch steps and onto the weedy drive. There they paused, silent as attentive hounds, and from farther down the road came the sound of a man’s grunt. They raced down the driveway, the dark knot of men spreading out and disappearing from the rectangle of view afforded by the screen door.
Darius looked at the open door and back to Byron. He inclined his head slightly and cocked an eyebrow. Byron sat down.
Darius crossed over to the two women and conferred with them in a soft, almost paternal voice, kneeling next to Vanessa and taking her hug when she offered it. He stood and watched as the two girls went into the back bedroom, the lock clicking behind them, then walked over and sat opposite Byron.
They said nothing for a minute. Byron found he wasn’t scared, just disgusted that David’s little fetish—he’d heard rumors about his partner’s sexual bent through friends of his girlfriend, had caught some hints about it from David’s offhand remarks from time to time—had come out at this inopportune time. He didn’t know exactly what his fetish was—not exactly—but he’d also heard David didn’t always try to ease his partners into the concept. He’d chalked it up to different strokes for different folks, figured it was none of his business.
“He your brother?” Darius said after a bit.
Byron shrugged. “Sure.”
“Like blood brother, I mean.”
Byron considered the question. “Tonight he is.”
“Yeah, okay.” Darius leaned back in his chair and looked at the yellowing ceiling, flecked with flyshit and laced with darker brown from leaks in the roof. “Hunters.”
“Hunters.”
“You didn’t come up here to check out the land, maybe buy a piece of property?”
“What?”
“You know,” Darius said. “Maybe invest in some property, see if it gets more valuable over time? Cree land, the stuff we own outright, ends not far from here. There’s plenty interest in Crown land lately, maybe you and your brother are like that. Hunt a little, prospect a little? There’s money in the ground, is what we hear. Something special.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, maybe not.” He leaned forward on the table and smiled, his eyes lighting up. “Hey, why you want to come up here, shoot one of our bears? You don’t got no bears where you’re from?”
“Not very many. What are you going to do with David?”
“That his name? David?” He leaned back in his chair. “Man, these bears up here, I feel bad for ’em. Dig around all summer for bugs and worms, maybe a few blueberries, always hungry and the food tastes mostly like shit, ’cept for the berries, and it’s goddamn hard to get full from berries. Then one day he smells something and be like, what the fuck? Someone left some goddamn doughnuts out in the woods? And what’s this—oatmeal and honey?” He laughed. “Holy shit, what’s the catch?”
Byron could hear the men outside, yelling encouragements at each other somewhere down near the end of the driveway. Another grunt, then a strangled call for something—help, mercy, maybe God’s intervention; Byron didn’t know. He closed his eyes, then flinched back when Darius flicked his earlobe.
“Sleepynuts,” Darius said. “Come on, you gotta stick with me. So these bears, man, they finally, finally, find something good, right? You know how it feels, a long day in the woods and you got a hollow belly, all shrunk up, even your mind a little messed up ’cause there’s not enough sugar in your blood? Bear be like that for four, five months and then all of a sudden, one day, boom! Manna from heaven.”
A burning trickle of acid was working its way up Byron’s throat. He fought to swallow it back down.
Darius took a swig from his bottle of beer. “They go on like that, up to the minute somebody blasts them. Okay, fine—there’s worse ways to go, right? But bears are smart, man, they know there’s a catch, they know it from day one. Maybe he ain’t a brother to man, but a bear’s different from a moose, different from lots of things. Smart and mean and sometimes silly. Even grown bears get silly.”
They were coming up the driveway now. He could hear feet dragging in the gravel, the panting of the men, one of them breathing wet and gurgley, like he was trying to hold in a mouthful of fluid.
Darius leaned forward. “See, that’s the part that’s hard to think on. It ain’t that they get baited like a dog and then shot like a dog. The bears know, they know that there’s a catch, but they keep coming back. They eat the little bit that’s given to them and they know it’s gotta end bad, but they still play the game. Can’t help themselves, you understand?”
The men dragged David inside and propped him against the wall next to the keg. Byron looked at his friend. One of David’s eyes was swollen shut, and his left earlobe was ripped and hanging from the side of his head. Blood streamed from his ear onto the collar of his shirt. His hands were pressed over his groin, and there were boot prints etched into the fabric over his ribs. David had made his own marks: Billy had a swollen cheekbone, and one of the others had a bloody lip. They were all looking at Darius, and Byron had a sense that if Darius had given a nod, the men would have fallen on both of them like a pack of wolves.
“And then,” Darius said, “one late summer night, some asshole with a thousand-dollar rifle knocks the doughnut outta his mouth mid-bite. And the bear knew it was coming, and when he dies, he’s embarrassed. That’s the sad part, friend. The part that makes me sad.”
David mumbled something.
“What’s that?” Darius said.
“He says they’re bowhunters,” Billy said.
Darius raised his eyebrow, and the pink scar stretched like a small mouth making a grimace. “Not tonight they’re not.”
* * *
Now they were in the backseat of Vanessa’s Crown Vic again, he and David sandwiched in the middle of the back seat, the spruce and aspen rolling slowly past them in the spray of headlights. Weasel was on one side of them, Billy on the other, with Garney driving. Darius was in the front passenger seat, silent except for the occasional left or right. They had left the main road fifteen minutes earlier—if you could call a rutted two-track with a few sprinkles of class 5 gravel the main road—and the Vic was screeching and scraping its way over the rocky forest trail.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Byron said.
“Don’t puke in here,” Garney said. He was thickset and nearly bald, and Byron could see a patchwork of scars across the folds of skin at the base of his neck. “They puke in here and Vanessa’s gonna be pissed.”
“I can’t hold it,” Byron said. He could feel the bile building up in his throat again, the slow rolling of his stomach.
“Stop,” Darius said. “We’re close enough.”
Billy pushed the car door open and Byron stumbled after him, going to all fours on the rocky ground and arching his back, the hot churn boiling out and out and out. He crawled to the edge of the road and vomited again, his entire body convulsing, the smell of beer and cinnamon and inhaled smoke rolling out of him. He heaved until the convulsions stopped and he was spitting out bile. When he looked up he saw they had David pushed up against a tree on the other side of the road, his arms tied behind the trunk. He looked sick and weak, smaller than Byron had ever seen him.
Darius said something, and Billy and Garney walked over to Byron, crossing through the headlights and casting long-legged shadows on the road behind them. They pushed him against a poplar tree, seized his wrists, and yanked them behind his back. Something hard and thin was wound around his wrists and cinched cruelly tight. A second later Billy passed a loop of wire over his ankles and repeated the process. Then Billy wound a length of wire around Byron’s forehead, cinching it so his face was pointed directly at David. The wire cut into his brow, and a line of blood trickled down his nose and fell to the ground with a steady pattering. More blood soaked into his eyebrows, which Billy wiped away with the pads of his thumbs.
“Good,” Darius said. “Make sure he can see.”
There was a knife in his hand, Byron saw, a hunting knife with a five-inch stainless steel blade and a molded plastic handle. A practical knife, nothing showy. And in that instant everything Byron had told himself over the past hour, every assurance that the Budweiser men weren’t going to really hurt them, fled.
“Back the car up a few feet,” Darius said. “Light ’em up.”
“It’s good where it is,” Billy said. “They can see.”
Darius stared at him for a second, his expression flat, then walked over to David and pushed the knife into his right side, almost casually, sticking the blade in up to the hilt and then pulling it back out. David inhaled sharply, his eyes bugging out at the monstrous and sudden pain come alive inside him, and began to scream. His screams went on for a long time, eventually turning into a rapid mewling. The bottom of his shirt was drenched with blood, soaking into his jeans.
Darius handed the knife to Weasel.
The small man stalked around David, then poked the knife into David’s belly on the other side. This time David’s scream was higher, raspy, and went on for even longer. Byron closed his eyes and Billy slapped him. When he looked up again, Weasel was grinning at Darius and pantomiming a twisting motion with his hand and wrist, showing him the technique. Now Garney held the knife and he was prodding David with it, saying something Byron couldn’t hear. For a minute David’s pain-crazed eyes settled on Byron, and somewhere inside his blood-streaked face came that curious tilted expression, the look they had given each other for years, the look that made Byron love the man through all his faults. We doing things right?
No, Byron thought. We sure didn’t do things right on this one.
Then Garney stepped between them, and the night air filled with more screaming.
This time Byron didn’t open his eyes when Billy hit him. He kept them closed for a long time, but when he opened them he had to look, his eyes wouldn’t not look, and David was pressed against the tree like a bloody scarecrow held captive, his eyes glazed and staring off into the night forest. Denied even the ability to slump his head.
Then Darius was poking Byron in the belly with the point of the knife, not hard enough to draw blood but painful, like a hornet stinging him again and again. He was talking, and Byron knew he had to listen.
“Yeah, there you go,” Darius said. “You not feeling too good about your friend?”
Byron mumbled a reply.
“No,” Darius said, and his voice was sad. “We aren’t the fuckers, By-ron. You and your buddy are the fuckers. You think I don’t know?” He stepped closer, his features largely lost in the shadows, the lights from the car backlighting his head. “I see the truth.” Behind him, Byron saw three heads bob up and down in agreement.
“You want to know the truth?” Darius said. “You knew, like the bear knows. Knew there was something wrong with him.” The pressure from the tip of the knife eased. “Knew it for years.”
Byron’s eyes opened wider, and Darius smiled, his stained teeth yellow in the headlights. “I see far and I see deep, By-ron. All of you guys want to come up here, sample what we have. Shoot our bear, mess with the women, okay? Take what’s in the woods, in the ground. Okay. But you don’t got no respect; I see that too. This land just something you visit, the people just jackpine savages, eh? It’s only interesting ’cause you wanna take something from it.”
The knife pressure was back, just below his belly button, light but constant pressure. “Tell me it’s true.”
Byron wondered where his inner steel was, why it didn’t rise up, tell this guy to kiss his ass. There was nothing inside of him except for terror and a deep, inconsolable sadness.
“Fine,” he said. “It’s true.”
Darius’s eyes squinted shut. “Oh man, that’s the wrong answer. You shoulda said it was true, that now you learned better. You can’t learn, can you? Like a goddamn puppy so retarded it pisses in its bowl, then drinks it.” Behind them, one of the men giggled. It sounded like Weasel, the man who an hour earlier had given Byron a nickname, had passed him a bottle of whiskey to share. Darius motioned behind him, jabbing at the night air with his knife. “Your friend’s dead, Byron.”
“I know.”
“You gonna die, too, Byron.”
Spit in his face. Come up with something to say. Try to get his face a little closer, then bite off his nose. These thoughts came and went, and in the end he simply said, “I don’t want to.”
Then the knife pressure was back, scalding his belly. “Man,” Darius said, “I wish I don’t want to meant something in this world.”
* * *
By the time Byron’s screams had faded and they had finished the rest of the beer, the eastern horizon had turned gray. They took turns standing or sitting on the trunk, occasionally looking at the two bodies wired to the trees. Weasel wanted to take pictures with his phone, but Darius wouldn’t let him, not because he was worried about evidence, but because he felt a picture wouldn’t be as powerful an image as the memory of this sight that they would keep in their heads. When the sun had nearly broken the horizon Darius deemed it light enough to work, and they cut the wires and lowered the bodies to the ground. Garney looped short sections of rope around the bodies’ ankles, leaving ten feet of slack and then tying the other end to a stout dead limb Billy salvaged from a blowdown. Then, with one man on each side of the limb, they began to drag.
They stopped several hundred yards from the car, where the flinty ground dipped into a spruce bog. The trees were mostly dead, but the ground was a deep and vibrant green, covered with a thick layer of moss and Labrador tea. Weasel and Garney cut through the moss with a spade from the trunk of the car, severing the green carpet and the thin roots underneath, carving out large sections to expose the dark and acidic soil underneath. The openings immediately filled with brown water. Darius and Billy dragged the bodies into the carved-out graves and heaped the moss over them, the resulting bulges no different in appearance than the hundred other moss-covered hummocks in sight.
“Man,” Garney said when they were done, wiping sweat from his brow. “All this work—shit, and for what?”
“Because,” Darius said, resting a hand on his shoulder and gesturing around them with his other hand. “They’re coming, Garney. Like we always knew they would. Coming for what we have.” He paused, surveying his bloody hands, then dropped to his knees and scraped up a bit of the dark loam. He rubbed the dirt in to his stained hands, rolling it back and forth, then let it drop back down to the pine needles. “They might take it,” he said. “I know that. But when they do, they’ll pay full price.”
Garney looked at him. He nodded, slowly at first and then with more emphasis, and Weasel and then Billy followed suit, the three of them nodding at Darius as the sun broke over the horizon, their long shadows stretching out to the west, to the swamp where the acidic waters had already begun the long, slow decomposition of the two corpses.