BUD’S LIFE HAS BEEN such that he hasn’t witnessed the beauty of dawn in some time. And yet, now, peering out at it from the hole in the mummy bag, how disappointing. Everything grainy and unformed. A new damp chill in the air, and the low sky the color of cold bacon grease.
A fat granddaddy bear, not yet settled into his winter den, waddles from the trees and begins rooting around in the knapsack. He’s scarred around the head from various fights in the past and sort of dusty-looking under the long glossy black hairs of his outer coat. Very casual. A pro. A few motions of the wide forepaws, with their long curved claws, and the knapsack and tent become ribbons and Bud’s stuff is scattered all over the ground.
The bear is first drawn to the wieners, which scent the air for hundreds of yards into the woods. In three bites, he eats a full loaf of bread, including the cellophane wrapper. The bear sits up on his round ass and sucks down all Bud’s uncanned food like a cartoon glutton. Then he gets interested in anything else falling even vaguely into the category of edible. Such as Bud’s suede gloves with the sheepskin linings.
Bud, with just his face from eyebrow to lower lip out the hole of his bag, watches and figures maybe he’s next. He tries to sit up and find the zipper at the same time, but his fingers jitter. The inside pull eludes him, and he can’t squeeze his hand out the face hole to get to it from the other side. He jerks himself vertical and tries to hop away from the bear, but he falls onto his side. Breath won’t draw right, and his diaphragm burns. The bear walks near, sniffs and blinks tiny brown eyes, huffs from deep in his chest, the breath steaming in the cold air. He shies away and disappears into a laurel thicket.
After a while of calming himself and fiddling with the zipper, Bud squirms out of the bag like an extrusion, then eats some of the canned stuff leftover from the bear’s breakfast. Anchovies and Vienna sausages and Red Devil potted meat. His campsite looks like a plane crash.
Before he starts walking, he has to decide which way to go. He wants to turn around and go home, and has to give himself a pep talk about going forward and doing the necessary. Get it over. Put the past where it belongs and start the new.
He squats beside the creek and scrubs the rust from the machete with glittery grit from the water’s edge. He tries to sharpen it on a smooth creek rock, spitting on the rock and then stroking the long edge back and forth in the lubrication. Spitting again and swapping sides. All he knows about knife sharpening is that you hold the blade at such angle as to mimic taking a thin slice out of the stone. He rubs and rubs, and his breath clouds around his head. Thinking, when I’m done up here, I’ll bury this son-of-a-bitch deep deep in the ground and it will rust away year by year. When I’m an old man, it probably won’t be anything but a reddish stain in the soil.
A BUNCH OF MIDDLE-AGED MEN in the cold light of morning, all bleary-eyed and uneager to get moving and continue the search. Happy to keep stoking the fire and spiking their mugs of coffee with Wild Turkey and Black Jack that they mostly either bought direct from Bud or at one remove. One of the men looks at the sky and sniffs. Says the air smells like snow.
The sheriff looks especially busted up by his few hours of sleep on the ground. But voters have a way of holding it against you if you go home instead of sacrificing a night in bed to find two lost kids. Now his hair hurts when he tries to smooth it down. He keeps taking his hat off and rubbing his head and looking into the hat like the band is what’s causing his trouble.
They’ve not made it into the woods more than shouting distance from where their vehicles are parked along the lake’s back road. Partly out of laziness, and also because they cannot imagine two children, even if they are riding a worn-out mare, going far before they give out. Like when they, themselves, go hunting in November. And also, the mountain gets weird and dangerous and scary when you climb way up on it, especially if you’re the manager of the grocery or the guy that works the recap machine at the tire store.
The sheriff finally says maybe everybody ought to get off their asses and start finding the poor kids. And then he and his number one suckass, Carl, bid the others adios and head back to their black-and-white. Can’t everybody be out in the woods at the same time.
The sheriff and Carl ride around in the patrol car. Stopping at houses at the edge of the deep woods. Carl sits in the car listening to the radio while the sheriff knocks on doors, takes his hat off, walks in, and asks, Seen two retarded kids wandering loose? Might have a horse with them?
Late morning, the sheriff swings back by the Lodge to check if the kids have come home, see if there is any cooking going on. See how Luce acts.
Not like he hasn’t given it a passing thought that she and the boyfriend might be behind the children’s disappearance. He doesn’t believe it, but that’s where you look first, close to home. A wife disappears, you look to the husband. And maybe Luce inherited some of her father’s crazy streak. There isn’t a lawman rule book to learn this stuff from, and the sheriff hasn’t been to police school. Being an elected official means you don’t need any training or qualifications. Nor even common sense. All he really knows how to do is build roads on padded State contracts. Also how to make voters feel comfortable or uncomfortable, peaceful or excited, whichever is more useful at the moment.
After eating a big plate of Maddie’s pinto beans and cornbread and collards, the sheriff hasn’t come up with any clues. Luce seems genuinely broken up by the disappearance of the children, and the boyfriend isn’t any kind of killer. The sheriff tells them to be patient, let the professionals do their jobs. Everybody is doing everything they can to bring the children home safe. Stay by the phone.
Luce says the obvious: I don’t have one. So she gives Stubblefield’s number, and the one at the little store down the road.
—But we’re mostly going to be out hunting for them, Stubblefield says.
—I’ll be here, Maddie says.
WHEN THEY’RE ALONE, Stubblefield tries to convince Luce to come back to town with him to wait at his place, let the sheriff and his people work. All of which lasts about five seconds.
—It’s mainly a bunch of deer hunters looking for them, she says.
—Then they know the woods.
As they put on their jackets and head out across the lawn and along the lakeshore to search, Luce sets him straight, talking fast and bitter and distracted about deer hunters. Nothing but drunks with high-powered rifles and a two-dollar paper license issued by the State. Coon hunters are nocturnal, and bear hunters go deeper in the mountains. You hear their dogs baying miles away. But deer hunters, they’re the scary ones. Hiding in camouflage, mostly two by two in deer stands, little tree houses the size of a double bed, above spots they’ve been baiting with corn and salt blocks for weeks, about as sporting as shooting a hog with its head down in the trough. They huddle together, whispering to one another and sipping Jack and Coke all day, waiting for something to move. Late afternoon, half drunk and nothing to show for the day, they get twitchy. Pop a shot at falling leaves and cloud shadows moving on the ground. No court ever convicts them for a hunting accident. How could they have known that some woman walking through the woods alone was not a deer? But, Luce says, she never worries much once she’s at least a mile out from the nearest dirt road. They rarely get far from their trucks, because that’s where the beer cooler is. Which explains why jacklighting is so popular. That way, sometimes they don’t even have to get out of the truck, just roll down the window and pull the trigger. So what they know of the woods is nothing but a thin band stretching from the roadways only as far as they’d care to drag a field-dressed doe.
When she’s run her thoughts all the way to the end, Stubblefield says, I stand corrected. Luce makes a fist and swings it roundhouse, slow-motion, and glances his brow.
They spend both halves of the midday searching on foot again near the lake and along the old railroad bed. They go back to the Lodge and drive to Maddie’s to see if Sally might have come back, then down to the store to check for messages. Followed by hours of driving fire roads, stopping frequently to blow the horn and shout into the woods and listen for some response.
IT’S DEAD WINTER up on the ridges, all the bare sticks of trees like weather-beaten skeletons broken into forearms and hands, rib cages, shins and feet. Some resigned to horizontal death and some still trying to reach upward. They ride the cold ridges deeper and deeper into the mountains, but with less urgency now that they’re high above the world.
They stop often to rest and eat, and they light a fire each time. Break out their materials and use their skills. Sometimes, small cowboy campfires no bigger around than a pot lid. But also much larger blazes if the combustibles lie handy. On into the afternoon, a mist starting to hang in the air, they come upon a dead blown-down balsam, its needles dry and brown on the branches. Once a tree of majesty but now a giant brush pile.
A pyramid of dry sticks and the last cups of their kerosene, and the balsam soon lights up like a great torch throwing yellow flames thirty feet into the sky, roaring hoarse and sucking wind upward so that it pulls their hair forward into their faces. Dolores whoops in the manner of old warriors, whether Cherokee or Rebels at Gettysburg. Sally goes sideways a few steps and then settles. Frank walks forward with his arms straight ahead and his palms out until he can’t stand the heat. He backs up and presses them to his face, and then he does it all over again.
The fire dies as quickly as it kindled, leaving burnt branch tips. Hundreds of little flames like candles at an altar. Soon the flames die away entirely, and hundreds of smoke tendrils rise toward clouds of the same grey.
Dolores and Frank watch from start to finish, like it’s their favorite movie. Talking to each other the whole time, if that doesn’t have to mean constructing sentences out of generally agreed-upon vocabulary using approximate rules of grammar. Outside the world of people, a category they feel little allegiance to, they talk plenty.
THE TRAIL CLIMBS STEEP, following a creek bank, giving every impression of being a main thoroughfare. Thigh-clenching, ass-cramping climbing through lots of unexpected greenery, even in this dying season. Laurels and hemlocks and those kinds of plants that probably either never die or live a great long while. Like maybe the biggest of the hemlocks were sprouts when Jesus walked the earth. They go on and on the same every day, ignoring the pithy symbolic yearly circle of life and death. Being happy all the time. Happy, happy. Then, probably, one day they fall over dead. What a grand life plan that is compared to oaks and maples and all the other loser trees that die a thousand colorful deaths for our autumn enjoyment. Pleasers never get paid back a fraction commensurate with their effort. Which goes along with one of the main rules of life. Which, unfortunately, has two parts. The a is, You got to get paid. A fine idea if it stopped right there. But the cruel b part is, You got to pay.
Without his bear-shredded knapsack, Bud carries his remaining gear in the pockets of his pants and leather jacket and inside his sleeping bag, which he sometimes drapes over his shoulders like a fireman with a limp body and sometimes balls in his arms like a mama with her baby. After a long while of slogging upward, Bud’s feet hurt. Blisters bubble on the insides of both big toes, and skin peels off both heels in moist white petals. Underneath, weeping new flesh. A lot of good daylight gets spent sitting in the leaves with his boots and socks off, picking at his feet.
Hours into the climb, scenery loses its attraction. It’s nothing but ten feet of dirt and leaves in front of his aching feet. Bud is bored and thinking about violence, but trying not to, because violence is best accomplished spur-of-the-moment. Let it happen out of nowhere. Anything else, and you go from being a hothead manslaughterer to nothing but a cold first-degree murderer. Act with great purity—like there’s no past and no future, nothing but the red right now—and there’s a degree of innocence to it, no matter how heinous and bloody the outcome. And that’s not just Bud talking out his ass for his own convenience. The State itself draws the same distinction. Premeditate and they’ll fuck you over bad.
It’s a legal concept confusingly related to something the counselor in teenager prison liked to drag on about. Deferring gratification. Which you’d think would be a bad thing, or at least awfully dreary. The catch is, in the everyday crap of life, premeditation is a valuable skill. If you learn to do it, you step onto the path to success. Never ever do anything you really want to do at exactly the moment you really want to do it. Always stop to think about the consequences of your actions. Defer all the way to the grave, and you draw a ticket to heaven or something. Yet there’s this one amazing exclusion when it comes to rarefied moments of sudden violence. All bets are suddenly off, and there’s a happy and unexpected reward for jumping in with both feet and letting anger run bloody buck wild without any thought of future consequences. Who would have guessed?
On up the creek, two or three little branches of trail peel off ignorably. Then after a dazed while of not thinking at all, but just letting the drab repetition of the world overwhelm him, Bud finds himself standing on something that he can’t even say for sure is a trail. Everything brown or grey, bare trees as far as he can see, and rain starting to fall in earnest. Dead leaves cover the ground hock-deep like a bad snow. Untracked. Stand still, and all you can hear is rain in the leaves and your own breath.
Bud looks for an empty shape among trunks, a suggestion of a lane. Which all depends on which degree of the three-sixty he whirls to look. In leafless woods, the thousands of trunks stretching into the distance shape themselves to suggest a lane everywhere you look, when you’re looking for a lane.
—Fuck if I’m not fucked now, Bud says aloud.
The trouble is, the mountain encompasses so much more territory than Bud would have guessed, never having climbed one before. From town, looking at it way in the distance, flat against the sky, the mountain seemed simple and compact. Not really that big a deal to wander around and cross paths with the kids. On it, though, the mountain encompasses more space and is way more three-dimensional than Bud imagined. The confusing landscape goes every which way. Near-vertical pitches climbing to side ridges and falling into countless coves. Bud lifts his necklace into his mouth, sucks on the tooth, then licks the serrations until he tastes iron. Even an idiot knows that if you need to climb a mountain, the way is up.
Time passes, and Bud persists. At altitude, every kind of bad late-fall weather crosses the sky. Rain, and then freezing rain. Later in the afternoon, sleet hisses against the frozen rain in the trees and the dead icy leaves on the ground. Finally, heavy snow before dark. Big wet flakes falling straight down, an inch an hour.
With neither tent nor campcraft to get him through the night, Bud walks on in the dark, shawled in his wet sleeping bag. It hangs sodden and heavy across his shoulders, and the wet feathers stink. Might as well be carrying a dead body through the aftermath of a flooded henhouse. He casts it aside.
His gear has dwindled mainly to his leather jacket and one wet wool blanket, the machete, and the flashlight. He shivers uncontrollably, and admits to himself he’s flat lost. Snow lies ankle-deep and keeps coming.
With his batteries almost spent, Bud decides to walk in the dark five hundred steps, feeling the ground with his feet, wishing and hoping and praying that when he thumbs the flashlight switch he will have stumbled onto a path. He does it over and over, and each time, he stands stunned and confused to see in the beam only blank forest, except for his own receding footsteps rapidly filling with snow. Nothing but random oak and poplar trunks, no sign of track or trail or other mark to indicate way of passage.
Bud’s arms fall to his sides, and he stares bewildered at the circle of light puddling around his feet. The symmetry fascinates him, until he notices that the light, which had been white, has turned yellow, giving the snow a quaint look, like old-time photographs. He watches it dim and go dark. Rattling the flashlight does nothing.
One fuckup over the line. You could collapse dead, face in the snow, and nobody know it. Eventually, all that would be left would be some mossy scrag of spine and skull laid out nose down like a shot hog. Thinking this, Bud just hangs his head in the dark, wondering if he has strength left to keep going and find shelter, maybe a rock overhang. Sit huddled all night eating anchovies. Probably that’s nothing but hope, and he’ll be dead by dawn.
But when Bud looks up, he witnesses a miracle. Way up ahead, at the saddle of a ridge, a tiny spot of light glows through the woods. Thank you, Jesus.
MAKING FIRE FROM sparks is a lovely and fragile art. Of necessity, the early movements are delicate, the materials fine as hair and fingernail clippings, shreds of dry leaves. Whether by bow or flint and steel or even a scant few matches, the second you achieve a spark in tinder, you lean close to it and breathe on it from your throat like a sigh. If you purse your lips and blow, everything goes black.
Done carefully and with luck, maybe a flame no bigger than the tip of a finger lives for a few seconds. Then, when the tinder begins to catch, an old man with his long hair on fire, crumple a few more whole leaves and place twigs above the flame. Nervous as pick-up sticks in reverse. Judge wrong, the sticks collapse and snuff the flame. Do it right, and the flame grows, but still fragile. More twigs and then small broken branches. And when that layer starts to catch, that’s when you purse and blow. Do it on and on until, when you look up to the sky, everything is dark and grainy as soot with little silver sparkles dancing in your vision. From there, it’s easy. Nothing but the architecture of broken wood. Pick a shape and lay pieces in squares, triangles, cones. Place them close enough to burn one another but not so close as to shut out the air between.
In the cave of a hollow tree, the children crowd together. Right at their feet, the fire they lit at dark needs constant attention. They judge their sticks and limbs to be skimpy for lasting the entire night, and they begin rationing early on. Still snowing hard enough to discourage them from leaving their tree to hunt more wood in the dark. They feed the fire only the least amount to keep it alive.
Close by the fire, Sally locks her knees and sleeps standing. The outer hair of her winter coat lies on her back like a thatched roof. Underneath, a thick layer like boiled wool, so snowmelt runs down her sides and drips off her belly without soaking through. In her time, she’s lived through many such nights. Miserable and shivering, icicles hanging in her mane and tail. But she’s always been standing come sunrise.
Same for the children. They are not tender babes. They have experienced considerable pain. Cold is more like discomfort, one more thing to take. Shut down, let your breath become shallow, and wait for it to be over. Then go on. No tears, no wishes.
They feed their little fire with twigs hardly bigger than pencils and lean against each other, not thinking forward or backward. Let the night play out, and go on in the morning. Keep running. But it isn’t the Lodge and Luce they’re running from. The Lodge was a fine weird place to live. And Luce was a little bit like Lily, what they still remember. But they don’t expect mama love. What they need is everything even and smooth. Not love or hate, pleasure or pain, hope or fear, safety or danger. Nobody kissing your cheek at bedtime till you tingle with pleasure in your stomach, and nobody making you bleed. Accept one and you have to accept the other, that’s the deal. You can’t control everything that happens. All you control is your mind. Make it like the lake on a still day. Don’t react any more than you can help, not to outsiders. Trust only the two of you all the way. Hoard up your love for each other and state your rage by way of things that want to burn.
And that had been working pretty well for them, until Bud erupted out of nowhere. Then they broke all the rules. Reacted big, let themselves get scared again. But not just scared. That was no big deal. Fear was every moment. Constant as breath, no matter how hard you tried to tamp it down. What they did was panic. And that was way outside the boundaries of the deal.
BUD FAILS TO ANNOUNCE his presence. Stumbles trembling straight into camp from the dark. Lucky not to get shot. Hunters have many stories of beasts and ghosts that haunt the woods at night, hungry for human blood. As it is, they are mostly too drunk to shoot. So when Bud arrives, one of them raises a toast with his jelly glass.
Nobody gets at all worried about Bud’s closeness to death, or even offers a dry blanket. Sit by the fire and take a cup of coffee or a drink of white liquor, is all the concern they muster.
Whereas Bud is convinced he is neck-deep in a life-or-death survival kind of night, here is this clutch of hoary men, on the same mountain in the same weather, yet occupying a whole different reality from his. They’re having a party. Cozy as hell in the killing weather. An enormous blaze from chain-sawed lengths of resinous fir and hickory and oak. A brown tarp stretched between tree trunks to keep them dry if the snow falls too heavy, but for now they sit out in the open, some of them in shirtsleeves, and let the heat of the big fire sizzle it away before it ever reaches them.
Around the fire, the world draws down to a small beautiful circle. Warmth and light, red coals in a deep bed on the ground, yellow flames leaping high. Sparks shooting up into the black sky, passing white snow falling into the light. An odor of pork cooking. The outer compass of their world marked by faintly lit columns of stout tree trunks gyring away to blackness.
Sleep is not a big part of the old boys’ plans. They haven’t slept for days except to nap briefly. Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead, or when you get home to the wife. Up on the mountain, they stay awake all night feeding the fire and drinking their handmade raw shine from the recent past, such as a couple of days ago. Telling hunting tales and ghost stories and imaginary stuff about the incredible pussy of yesteryear. Many timeless jokes about one another’s dicks and dogs, their equal lack of skill. How the baying of any dogs but the speaker’s own signifies nothing. Also, religious moments of silence and clarity listening to coondogs singing in the distance.
Hard to find joy in the world so much of the time, but the old boys have found some here. It makes them feel young. A renewal of their powers, if only for the dark hours. Come dawn, a camp of hungover sleepless sixty-five-year-old men will look like a mummy convention. But that is for morning to worry about. Right now it is hardly midnight, and everybody seems magically like they did forty years ago.
Bud pours himself a cup of coffee and squats on his heels so close to the fire that, after a few breaths, he has to waddle back two steps to keep from singeing his eyebrows. No good way to conceal-carry a machete unless you’re wearing a long overcoat. Bud has his stuck through his belt, and it hangs below the waistband of his leather jacket and drags the ground as he squats.
One man points to the machete and says, Somebody’s been shopping at the Army-Navy and thinks they’re beating through the jungle in Borneo.
Then he starts right back where he had left off before Bud’s arrival, complaining about his wife’s housekeeping. Says, It’s so nasty most of the time at my place, I wouldn’t even eat a walnut that rolled across the floor.
Pretty soon, Bud’s clothes begin raising steam on his front side. He shucks his boots and sets them mouth-first to the heat. Sad little animals with their tongues out. His socks stick to his feet, bloody at heel and toe, and when he gets them off, his heels still peel away layer by layer and weep pink fluid. Little red threads net below the skin, pitiful capillaries ready to burst. Bud stretches his feet to the fire. The two big toenails already blue-black.
The smart-ass with the Borneo comment says, Take my word, those are going to fall off.
Bud finishes his coffee and pours his mug full of white liquor and begins trying to catch up.
Old Jones, the former bootlegger, sits a quarter way around the circle from Bud, keeping within himself, like he’s waiting to see if Bud will recognize him.
Which Bud already has, but he keeps cool about it. Not like Jones has much cause to hold a huge grudge. Probably doesn’t miss the long drives and the worry about the law. All that Thunder Road shit. And way too old to live through a stretch with the Feds. In general, life has probably been pretty good for him lately. Fair to partly cloudy since Bud appropriated his job. Semiregular payments, even though the real percentage is a lot smaller than the figure they agreed on back in the summer.
Yet, maybe, you have some sneering asswipe sit on your front porch lording over you, threatening you out of business, and then later, in a sweet twist of fate, that asswipe lands himself helpless in front of you as a test of your mercy. What do you do? Even Jesus, meek and mild, might give payback a passing thought.
And sure enough, before long, Jones says, Son, what the hell you doing up here?
Bud visors a hand to his brow, acts for the moment like all he sees is one more unknown face out of many in the fire glare.
—Got lost, he says. Nearly died.
Everybody laughs but Bud.
Jones says, No shit, Sherlock. Where were you headed? Making a run to Atlanta?
Everybody laughs again, and then Jones says, Some of you might not have got introduced. This is the new bootlegger.
Silence.
Bud studies the crowd and tips his forefinger to his brow.
Jones, talking to his cohorts, says, I’m wondering something. This mountain’s not a good place to sell bonded liquor. We’re making our own. So, same question. What the hell is he doing up here?
Bud had been too preoccupied with not freezing to death to have premeditated a good story. He starts riffing grammar however it links up in the moment.
—Seen a couple of kids? he says. Boy and a girl? Blond-headed? I’m part of the search party. The kids have been gone a day or two now. So, probably in this weather, we’re looking for bodies.
—Party? the old bootlegger says.
—Got separated from the others some while back. By the lake.
—And you kept on climbing by yourself? For what, six or eight hours?
—I really want to find those kids.
—Yeah, Jones says. That’s exactly how you struck me back in the summer sitting on my porch. The kind of fellow would give Jesus a run for his money when it comes to lost lambs.
But the tone Jones tries to set in regard to Bud won’t hold. This isn’t anything anyone is interested in. They drift back to the night they want.
And Bud is so happy to be suddenly not dying, that he doesn’t have room to be worried too much about anything. You fall from the brink of icy death into the warm lap of plenty, you lie back and enjoy.
Doesn’t take any time to learn that these old boys have all the shit in the world they need. Everything carried up by several packhorses, now standing at the edge of the circle, each one relaxing with a hind foot tipped. There’s food to last a couple of weeks, eating big. Sixteen-inch iron skillets, a refrigerator rack for a cooking grate, a Dutch oven for when biscuits and cornbread become necessary. A chain saw and a maul and splitting wedge to keep the fire fed. Much pork, especially in the form of bacon, but also wonderful sausages and smoked country hams. Syrup in gallon tins. Dozens of eggs sunk down in sacks of flour. Everybody wants pancakes at three in the morning, they’re set to go. Plenty of dried white beans to cook with ham hocks if anybody gets to craving vegetables.
Also, theoretically, all the coon and possum the dogs can raise. Except, sadly, little to show in that category of meat. Way deep in the outer reaches of firelight, pinch-waisted hounds shift about humpbacked with self-conscious looks on their faces. Talk of their failure swirls around the fire. Some dude lifting his head and saying something and then somebody else. Faces tipping up to the fire and catching the light and then nodding dark.
Somebody says, I never did confidence your blue tick much.
Jones says, Can we keep the local-color shit to a bare minimum?
And then he says to Bud, Whose kids would those be that you’re looking for?
—That Luce girl, Bud says. Trying to adjust his language to the audience.
—Lit’s girl, somebody says.
—Not hers. Her sister’s kids, somebody else says.
On the far side of the fire circle, a faint voice behind the roar and crackle says, Bad for one family to have so much trouble strike so close together. Lily and Lit and now this.
—Maybe we’ll find the kids tomorrow and maybe Lit’s gonna show up any day, Bud says, trying to get out ahead. Maybe Lit’s been to the beach with one of his women.
—Anyway, somebody says, the kids are retarded or something, so I guess they wandered off.
—Though you got to wonder, Bud says. Maybe she got tired of being substitute mama for messed-up kids. Probably they’ll never be found.
Some few of the drunk hunters who have known Luce since she was a child stick up for her, and some who hold Lit in low regard figure it’s possible. And then somebody brings up the school burning down when Luce walked out on her job, and they nearly all nod solemnly.
The talk swirls back around to shared memories and other useless bullshit. Baseball games back shortly after World War I, how somebody dropped a fly ball or hit a home run in the ninth inning. Ridicule and glory. Men who weren’t in those particular games doze off sitting up, then come back to consciousness. Deep in the night, the snow thins down to just a wet flake or two falling into the circle of light and melting away.
ONE IN THE MORNING and the weather bleak, Stubblefield drives the lakeshore until he hits pavement, then turns in the direction of town. Cold rain falls through the headlights, drizzling forty-weight viscous down the windshield, on the cusp of deciding to freeze.
Luce had been exhausted from lack of sleep and gainless searching, hardly able to speak from calling the children’s names into black woods. Both of them frazzled from many cups of Maddie’s bitter gritty coffee. At midnight, Stubblefield had led Luce to the settle and calmed her to sleep with her head in his lap. Saying meaningless phrases about how everything was going to be all right. Kneading her shoulders, smoothing his palm down her face from hairline to jaw, fingers through her hair from brow to crown, fingernails on her back under her shirt.
He eased her head onto a throw pillow and covered her with an afghan, put on his jacket with the .32–20 in the pocket, and walked into the kitchen. Maddie sat at the table with a cup of coffee, and she looked a question at him, and he had said, Sleeping.
It suddenly occurred to him that Maddie hadn’t been home since the kids disappeared. He said, Where did you stay last night?
Maddie said, Luce’s not got but about forty bedrooms and doesn’t use a one of them. I made do.
Stubblefield said, Thank you, and headed out the back door, grabbing the flashlight on the way.
Now he drives across the dam and along the shore to town like through a tunnel, a dark wall of woods rising to the left and the lake barely visible to the right, an emptiness behind the rain. Stubblefield is terrified of the next couple of hours, not at all expecting to find the kids and be the hero. But the night at the Roadhouse keeps coming back around. Bud dismissing him as no kind of threat, then slicing him open. Luce scared but glaring Bud straight in the face. The cut hand is still wrapped in windings of muslin bandage, dingy and unchanged for the past two frantic days. Underneath, a wide pink scar and a thin line of brown scab.
If he finds Bud home alone, it probably means the kids are dead. Then what? Stubblefield’s first fallout with Bud went poorly, and the terror of that moment still grabs at his breath. But a saying of his grandfather’s loops in Stubblefield’s head. Ride to the sound of guns. A stirring sentiment, except his grandfather never spent a day in anybody’s army, which could serve as an excuse to make a three-point turn and head back toward the Lodge. Yet Stubblefield keeps on aiming the Hawk forward.
For a short while around the black lake, he succeeds in holding a bright image in his mind, a pinpoint of diamond light. Convinced that hope rules us, not fear. But at the city limits sign, the light blinks out. In its place, the blood and darkness he saw down inside his cut hand. Still, he drives on into town and parks. Walks two blocks in the rain. Wet dead leaves on the pavement and windows dark in the bungalows. Bright rings misting around the scallop-shaded streetlamps.
At Bud’s place, no light shines. But the green pickup in the driveway casts fresh waves of fear. Stubblefield draws the .32–20 from his coat pocket and goes through the side yard to the back door. Gives the knob a slow twist, to no effect. The lock is nothing much, though, and he’s brought a stout wood-handled screwdriver from the Lodge. One yank outward, and the door pops open with a screech of old wood shredding. Stubblefield presses his back to the clapboards of the outside wall and waits. He listens on and on. But nothing. No sound of children, no Bud coming with his knife to check out the noise.
Stubblefield steps inside and switches on the flashlight in quick bursts to orient himself. In the kitchen, dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter. In the living room, a dirty white T-shirt on the floor, a pair of white socks with two red bands around the top. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet contains one bottle of aspirin.
He enters the bedroom carefully, in case Bud is in there asleep. But only an unmade bed and more dirty clothes. No books, no records. Nothing anywhere to indicate personality or taste, nobody to point his pistol at. The closet is empty except for a pair of new palomino loafers. He begins opening drawers. Not enough clothes to fill a suitcase. But, in a bureau drawer, he finds a rubber-banded roll of bills. And then, in the nightstand drawers and under the mattress, identical rolls. Also a little brown leather pocket notebook.
He takes them into the living room and sits on the sofa and places the rolls upright on the coffee table. Muffles the flashlight with an amber glass ashtray and studies the notebook. Page after page, phone numbers and matching liquor orders. He unbands a roll and counts. Five hundred exactly. He doesn’t bother to reband the money or to count the other rolls. Together, the meaning of the book and the cash is simple. Whatever Bud has done the past couple of days, he hasn’t run far.
Stubblefield sits in the dark and waits, pistol in hand, trying to bring the diamond light back. If Bud shows up, point the pistol at him and ask some questions. See what happens next.
After two hours, Stubblefield unwinds the dirty bandage and drapes it over the money and the little book displayed on the coffee table. A message. He walks through the front door, and outside, big flakes of wet snow fall and immediately melt everywhere but in the grass. By the time he reaches the dam, snow falls much harder, brilliant and dizzying in the headlights.
At the Lodge, when he steps out of the car, snow falls on his hair, his shoulders, catches in his eyebrows. The lawn is white, and dawn is not even a faint luminosity in the clouds above the eastern ridges. In the kitchen, Maddie still sits at the table, drinking coffee. A pan of biscuits nearby, ready for the oven. She doesn’t wait for his question. Says, She’s still asleep. She needed it, but probably she’ll be mad if you don’t wake her up now.
Hoping to replace the pillow under Luce’s head with his leg before he wakes her, Stubblefield eases in. But his weight on the settle cushion does the job, and she reaches a hand to touch his knee and then sits up and finger-combs her hair. Gives him a glancing cheekbone kiss.
—Where have you been?
—What?
—You smell like outside.
—Out looking. But nothing.
She touches his hair, the drops of water.
—Rain?
—Snow.
She turns her palms up and looks at them a long time.
Stubblefield says, Yeah, bad night. Let’s eat and get back out.