4

Cass pulled her hood up, tucked her gloveless hands into her hoodie pouch, and swiftly led them outside into the blustering backyard clearing. Gales roiled across the clearing floor. Fresh snow, ink-black as the night, covered everything, fell everywhere, soiled them absolutely. They high-stepped blindly, grasping for the forest line a hundred yards before them, tripping over brush, tumbling to their hands and knees, rising to trundle on.

Many images flitted through her mind. Of her brother’s fetal frame curled up beneath an improvised thatch of threaded limbs, convulsing as he retched away his cravings for the only medicine that could cure him. Of her mother’s carcass kinked grisly in the nameless Northwoods mire. Of the one clue to the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, a white apron bloodied at the gut, which Jack swore he’d once seen but which Cass hadn’t witnessed herself. And of her family’s original sin, the horse that her grandfather Walter murdered when he burned down his father’s barn in spite, so went the legend. It was said that the remains of the horse were never found.

Her greatest fear had always been that she, too, would become another of the universe’s endless victims, not by misfortune, not by her own undoing, but by the sheer anonymity that is the universe’s might, this planet a belligerent rock hurled from its own apostatic hand, without impetus, without end.

She vowed, then, that if she could not have her revenge against the world, she would have it against her cousins.

She exhorted them to hurry, reached the end of the clearing well before they did. As she poulticed snow to her burning forearm and head, she spotted them. They were dimensionless shapes, ether, vague huffs and wisps of exhaust authored by the eerie rumor of violence nearing. Though certain this would be her best chance to slip away, she stayed put. They reached her soggy and breathless, and before they could ask how much farther they needed to go, she turned to lead them into the forest, scampering from one tree to the next, the wind now a stammering vortex, the snowfall, broken only here and there by boughs, thick as quilts. She walked on, sensing in their flagging urgency that they were coming down a bit from their drunks and, so close to their prize, regretting what they’d been willing to do for it. Like so much they’d done in their lives, one alone would’ve quit, while together they persisted. Wheezing vicious lungfuls, they lumbered after her like two injured beasts whose last throes would spell their downfall.

The worsening storm disoriented her. She glanced up again and again in search of familiar shapes a shade beyond or before the black. An awkward limb, an odd grade, a patch of poison sumac. She at last reached the barbed wire fence along the Johnson property and led them north. When the wind quieted for a moment, the men slowed their pace, allowing Cass to distance herself, and she listened to them snipe at each other, panicked but thrilled. At one point she overheard them talking about a man whom she assumed was Vick.

“He’s gonna be pissed about Tilly,” Jesse said.

“Shut up.”

“I ain’t scared of him.”

“Shut up, Jesse.”

“I ain’t.”

“But he’s got the upper hand.”

“How, once we got the money?” Jesse said.

“Frost trusts him. That’s why we need him. For now.”

“I’m just saying—”

“You’re too stupid to start thinking, Jesse. Stick to the plan.”

Jesse bellowed for Cass to hear, “Why would the money be all the way out here?! Much farther and I’m gonna start on her again.”

“She ain’t lying, Jesse.”

“How do you know?”

“She knows where she’s going.”

“Might strangle her, anyway.”

The men slunk up behind her, and she instinctively hunched her shoulders again, buried her hands in her pocket, and gripped the steak knife, one hand on the wooden handle, the other on the serrations. Then she suddenly stopped, and they beside her. She sensed the abyss before her, the steep hill down to the swamp. Bordering the top of the slope were dozens of pines whose bottom bough-rungs were buried under snow.

“Is this it?” Jesse asked.

“It’ll all be over soon, Cass,” Danny said. “Just show us where.”

“It’s hard to see, but this is the place,” she replied. “We’re here. It’s close.”

She fell to her hands and knees beside the nearest pine, scraped away the snow, and crawled beneath the boughs. Clods of snow and sappy needles caked her hoodie as she began foraging around the broad trunk. She scratched her way through dirt and needles and cones and sap and rabbit shit, and as she worked her way around the trunk, the layout of the swamp and forest she knew so well revealed itself to her. She crawled back out empty-handed and the men looked at her. Before moving on to the next tree, she knelt and glanced around, exhaling heat into her cupped hands.

“It’s one of these pines, I’m sure,” she said. “He didn’t have time enough to bury it. It’s just beneath the snow.”

Danny tossed her his gloves, and the men scrambled in search of their own pines, beside which they fell prostrate before burrowing their way toward the trunks. She stayed crouched in the snow-gagged boughs, listening to the men struggle. Danny cussed, Jesse grunted, both feverishly gouging out troughs of filth sodden as entrails, wildly exhuming the smut below them.

“Hurry!” she said. “The storm’s getting worse! We’re close! We’re close!”

“Is it in a suitcase, Cassie?!” Danny asked.

“Yes! But the case is in a plastic bag! I wish I could remember which pine. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The trunk of Jesse’s pine aligned with a table’s-edge plunge to the swamp below, and she could just make out its bare roots twisting downward like so many spinal columns bludgeoned and crudely fused back together. She watched him circle the trunk until he reached the void. Sliding downward, he quickly gripped the boughs and suspended himself above the swamp. His boots scuttled for traction on the wet wall for several seconds before finding a foothold on the roots. He pulled himself up.

When she heard the boughs of his pine swishing again, she yelled through fake sobs, “Promise me you won’t hurt Tilly no more. Promise me you’ll leave Jack alone after this. Just take the money and leave and don’t come back out here again. And forgive me for putting up such a fight, but I only wanted to do the right thing. I only ever try to do the right thing, and look what happens to me. It’s not fair. Please, please, please. I swear I’ll stay home and won’t help Jack do nothing no more.”

She prowled out from under the tree, drew the knife from her pocket, and grasped it in her numb hand as she backed away from the slope, into a skinny fox-trail that wove toward her cousins’ pines. She stood, her figure almost imperceptible in the passageway’s murky bruise-purple hue. She listened intently and strained her eyes, glimpsing the men first by the steam rising from their shoulders as they stood to brush needles off of their thighs. They neared, calling her name, and ten feet from her, they froze, both noticing the glimmering knife in her hand.

“Cassie!” Jesse shouted. He stepped forward but Danny grabbed his arm.

When she lunged to the right, Jesse mirrored her. His boot punctured the snow and clanked against the metallic ground beneath it, and they halted, immobilized by a shared presentiment of pending disaster. The six-inch steel trap she’d set some months ago snapped, the jaws pierced the ankle of his leather boot, and he hollered and fell. He dove for her legs, dragging his trapped foot behind him, pulling taut the chain anchored to the soil with a three-foot spike, then falling. She ran and Danny quickly closed on her and she spun and swung the knife toward his face. He yanked his head back to dodge the course of the blade, but it struck his right shoulder and the steel threaded itself inside him and broke from the handle. He yelped as he twisted to the ground.

She sprinted back along the fence and into the forest, through gauntlets of branches. She tripped over a fallen elm, nosedived into a mound of snow, scrambled to her feet, and continued running. Not until she reached the clearing did she jog, and not until halfway across the field, did she march, looking back over her shoulder often. Amid a brief reprieve in the wind and snow, beneath a sky that was in turns sibilant and asthmatic, she crossed the clearing.

When she reached the house, she shut off all the lights and locked the doors. Her colorless face was unctuous from dried sweat and tears and snow. Long after catching her breath, her lips remained parted. Tilly was in her room, holding the rifle just as she had when Cass left. She was shaking her head and talking without pause about how her Vicky broke his ankle falling out of a tree as a boy. She stared at Cass but continued her story.

Finally, she crinkled her nose and asked, “Why are you so dirty. And wet?”

Taking the empty rifle from Tilly, Cass realized she was still clenching the knife handle in her hand, her flexed fingers an ashen yellow. She put the handle in her hoodie pouch, then helped Tilly up into bed. Tilly was still talking to herself when Cass returned from the basement, where she’d hastily reloaded the rifle and filled the stove. She leaned the rifle outside the bathroom when she washed up, then crept into bed next to Tilly with the gun resting behind her on the comforter.

They faced each other. Though silent now, Tilly lay awake, apoplectic, eyeing Cass, who brushed her hair out of her face, behind her ear.

“Where was it, after all?” Tilly asked.

“Where was what?”

“Cassandra, knock it off.”

“There ain’t nothing out there but them two boys I left bleeding.”

Tilly grinned, the corners of her mouth upturned devilishly. “You think you’re clever.”

“Vick sent them.”

Her grin disappeared as she yawned. “My Vicky did not.”

“Except he did. Whatever went on with that robbery, Vick was involved.”

“Who told you that, those boys? They just wanna blame somebody else for what they got into. Are they coming back?”

“Not tonight, I doubt.”

Tilly sighed. After a minute of silence, she said, “Things have really changed here, Cassandra.”

Cass kissed her forehead and soon Tilly slept.

But Cass could not.

Ten minutes later, when her cousin’s truck started up, she snuck out of bed, shouldered the rifle, and tiptoed into the kitchen. Footsteps approached the house, then ventured onto the stoop. She aimed for the center of the door.

“That you, Cassie?” Danny asked, talking into the crack as he had early in the night, his voice again measured. He dropped the trap on the top step. “We’re leaving. But we’re coming back tomorrow and we’re gonna get what we come for, I promise you that.”

She lowered the rifle to her hips, and after a minute, he went to his truck and drove his brother home.

Cass sat against the door for some time before she rose and turned the kitchen light on and placed the rifle on the table and stood rubbing the back of her neck with both hands. Then, dragging a chair in front of the fridge, she began to rummage through the cupboard above it in search of the shoebox of family pictures. When she found it, she returned to the table, removed the dusty shoebox cover, and looked over the photos.

She didn’t glance up when Tilly approached. The old woman’s insatiable thirst for intrigue had given her the strength to shamble out of her room and extend her discolored neck around the corner of the kitchen to peak in on her granddaughter. Tilly’s asquint eyes slinked from side to side, her jaw still mulling as though full of tobacco. But she said nothing and soon returned to bed, leaving Cass alone.

Cass’s favorite photo of Suzanne, the image that closest resembled those of her memories, she put on the fridge beneath a magnet.

***

She slept, woke three hours later. The house was silent. The wind had quit and the sky had cleared completely. The ice cubes in the plastic bag atop her arm had melted, seeping into Tilly’s sheets. After staring at the ceiling for a while, tonguing the ridged gap in her molars, she cursed. She’d told Tilly that she’d prepared the rifle for a hunt. It did not occur to her to use the assault as an excuse to stay home, to rest and forget about her pledge to kill the doe. She needed to clear her mind.

She duct-taped bath towels around her arm and put on her hoodie and jeans, her snowpants and boots and coat and orange stocking cap, and went looking for the buck knife Jack had stolen from Vick some years ago. In the far corner of the garage, in a small wooden crate stuffed with musty hats, gloves, mittens, and scarves, she found it sheathed in sleek caramel leather. After tucking it in the pocket of her coat, she took her rifle and a thermos of coffee and went out into the chilly predawn.

Blond asterisks filled the sky. Eight inches of snow bleached the landscape bleak. It would be several hours before the plow came, before Danny and Jesse or someone worse could return. She covered one nostril and blew out the other, and bloody snot speckled the snow. She slogged alongside the grove, toward the crescent moon nestled into the top of the forest across the road. She cut through a swath of raspberry bushes the thorny stems of which, bending under the oppressive snowfall, twinkled and pulsed like veins injected with pastel-gray moonlight. After trudging down a trail in places choked by overgrown brush and storm-severed limbs and diseased ash trees strewn about like all unloved things departing, she reached an oak to whose broad trunk she’d nailed a ladder of two-bys last summer. She slung the rifle around her shoulder and climbed the tree and sat on a red lifejacket strapped to two stout branches. Gripping her gun and drinking her coffee, she waited for daylight.

There it occurred to her that Grandpa Walter had died like this. He was aged and fat, senile and miserable from cirrhosis. Forgetting the rifle with which he intended to kill himself and perhaps too embarrassed or disoriented to retrieve it, he drank half a bottle of whiskey and simply waited for the cold to take him. Jack found him the next day.

With daybreak came a breeze that swept grains of snow from the branches above her, prickling her face. Squirrels chittered in the surrounding brush. The rising sun behind her lit the forest on the horizon and lustered the snow at the far edge of the valley, and the light gradually crept down the slope, painting the base of the valley bowl white. Though she grew cold when she ran out of coffee, she didn’t have to wait long before a doe ambled out of the distant forest, just under three hundred yards out. Sighting it with her scope, she watched it sniff pine boughs and nibble sprigs and buds as it approached. When she was sure it was the doe she’d seen in the grove the night before, she turned off the safety. Before it ventured too far into the valley, out of which she’d have to drag it, it turned, exposing its flank. She aimed for its heart and took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.

It galloped down the valley toward her then abruptly reversed direction, darting behind trees, in and out of her vision. Soon after reentering the forest, its front legs gave out and it fell. She sighted it, waiting to see if it would rise, but it lay on its side with its hind legs twitching as if it were dreaming of escape. She exhaled.

By the time she got to it, it was motionless, eyes open, ireful. “You ain’t so small up close,” she said. She leaned her rifle against a tree and parted the doe’s legs with her knees and unsheathed the buck knife, which she eased into its gut and ran in a shallow slice up to its throat. She opened its ribcage and reached into its neck for a sturdy grip of its windpipe and, digging her heels into the snow on either side of it, pulled the innards out, the heart and lungs, the stomach and intestines. She dragged them aside. Blood pooled crimson in its gaping chest. She rolled it over and spread its legs again, and the snow melted beneath its magmatic carnage, the steam-plume a long sarcastic sigh, a joke at the expense of the living.

On the way to the house, she noticed that the plow had come. She returned with rope and a green plastic sled. She tied one end of the rope to a hole in the top of the sled, the other end around her waist, and lugged the doe home.

She’d just finished hanging it by its neck from the rafters of the small tin shed behind the house when a vehicle came down the driveway.

She tore off her coat and pushed the sleeves of her hoodie, damp with cool blood, up to her elbows and rinsed her viscera-soiled fingers in the snow and dried them on her undershirt. Then she grabbed the rifle she’d left leaning against the outer wall of the shed and loaded two cartridges and slid the bolt forward and shouldered the weapon. As she snuck toward the back entrance to the garage, someone inside whispered, scratching around, it seemed, in search of something. She knew the back door would be iced shut, that she’d have to kick it to jar it loose. She crouched and pressed her ear to the door. Footsteps neared on the other side. Someone jiggled the handle. She stepped back, aimed up into the center of the doorframe, and put her finger on the trigger.

She was about to yell a warning when someone came running through the snow on the far side of the garage, toward the backyard. She took another step away from the door and dropped to her stomach and aimed where the figure would emerge. When a little boy jumped out, she gasped and knelt and stabbed the butt into the snow beside her.

She pulled the bolt back and emptied the chamber just in time for Bradley, the son of Delilah’s brother, Will, to jump into her arms. She stood, holding him in one arm, the rifle in the other. Strawberry-blond hair curled out from beneath his red cap, a fluffy white ball on top. He hung on her neck and tried to bite her cheek as she repeatedly jerked her head away. She walked around the house and met Delilah out front. There, he leapt from her arms and ran to his aunt, who, standing by her open car door, grabbed him and propped him up on her hip.

The women stared at each other, Cass with a sudden shame which was to her inexplicable, Delilah with pity. With her long legs and short torso, her belly drooping a bit over the elastic lip of her forest green sweatpants, and her plump winter coat splayed in the breeze, Delilah was ostrich-like. She had prominent lips and large, narrow-set, probing blue eyes that always made her appear to Cass clever, even wise. Two years older than Jack, she seduced him as a teenager by telling him about all the sex and religious experiences she’d had, the stories mostly lies. She’d always been somewhat of a big sister to Cass.

“I’m so sorry this happened to you, Cassie,” Delilah crooned, pouting.

“How come?” Cass shot back.

Delilah winced, hurt by the question and by Cass’s tone, but Cass thought better of explaining her meaning at the moment. There would be time to find out whether and why Delilah had endangered Cass by giving Jack away.