Cotton Crossing

  Lee stopped short. He heard Juju climb out of the four-by and crunch up behind him, and the urge to rub his eyes as if he was dreaming was damn near overpowering.

  “Well shit,” Juju said quietly. “I never thought I’d see someone that dog wouldn’t try to eat.”

  “Me either.” But that wasn’t what was disturbing him. “Where’s Horace?”

  Juju, solemn, eyed the front of Slipot’s house. “I was just wonderin that.”

  “Lee?” Ginny craned her neck while Ol Bastard threw himself down in the snow and almost begged for a bellyrub. “He’s hungry, and he’s wet all over. Who would leave a dog out like this?”

  “That’s the trouble,” Lee said. “Horace never would.”

  They found the power off and the back door half-open. Old Man Slipot was nowhere in sight.

  Wolf

  Horace Slipot never knew the world had ended, because of a squirrel.

  It was a mangy one, probably diseased, or so he thought when he saw it hopping through falling snow near dusk, its wiry bottlebrush tail mottled with lost fur and its sides scabbed. Still, it leaped between fat falling flakes, pausing at the apex of every jump like it had some special dispensation from ordinary gravity. They looked light as feathers, but Horace wasn’t fooled—those little fuckers were muscle-packed and mean. You got close enough and you could see their claws, meant for digging into bark and keeping the tiny bastards from falling to their doom.

  Sometimes he even thought about putting one of them in a stump, but the time wasn’t right yet. You had to know the animal before you could carve it. The chainsaw didn’t forgive halfass measures, and though Horace would never have articulated it in quite such a way, he understood, and that was good enough.

  He would have laughed himself into a fit if anyone called him an artist, but he was one all the same.

  Ol Bastard, his nose at Horace’s knee just like usual, could tell something had caught his owner’s attention. The hound made a little throaty sound, weirdly modulated at the end. They were talkative beasts, and truth be told, ever since Wanda had passed on, he liked hearing the dog’s narration of his day. From the state of his breakfast bowl to his hankering after a long walk full of smells, Ol Bastard was determined to tell Horace every last thing that was what.

  Just like Wanda used to.

  “Well, boy,” Horace said heavily, “it looks like there’s a little fellow out back.”

  Ol Bastard—Wanda had named him Kenneth, but Horace thought that was a damn fruity name for a dog—knew that tone in his master’s voice, and wagged his hind end so hard it threatened to come off. His fringed tail whapped back and forth, and he crooned his oh yes yes let’s go outside song with gusto. During Wanda’s last illness, Old Bastard had been all but inconsolable, only quieting down when Horace brought his wife home for her final days. They’d tried to talk him out of it, all those young doctors and starched nurses, but ol Doc Willoughby had come down on Horace’s side of things, and that helped. Wanda had settled into their marriage bed with a sigh, and had not left it until she was cold.

  And oh, hadn’t the dog howled when she came home! He’d leapt on the bed as soon as she was settled, and curled into her side, staring into her wan, parchment-paper face adoringly. Oh, Kenny, she’d told him. You’ll have to look after Horace when I’m gone.

  “Don’t say that,” Horace murmured, the past bending over into the present in Chinese fan-folds. He set his half-full coffee cup on the counter and stared, unseeing, out the kitchen window. “You just don’t say that, honey. You gonna shake this off.”

  Sometimes he wished he hadn’t insisted on that. Maybe it would have been easier if he hadn’t been so determined to see her pull through. Not on him, because there was no easy way when your wife’s cancer roared through her body and ate everything in the cupboard before gnawing at the walls and foundation to boot. But…on her. Horace would have liked it to be a little easier on Wanda, and sometimes at night he thought about it long and hard while Ol Bastard snored at the foot of his empty twin bed, stuck in the spare bedroom they’d never had a child for.

  He didn’t sleep in the bigger bedroom anymore. It just felt wrong.

  Horace rubbed absently at his aching left shoulder as he headed for the back door. Ol Bastard pranced behind him, his singing modulating into the oh yes I’m gonna go outside song. The dog almost managed to get his head between Horace’s worn-out knees in his haste to worm his way out into the snow, but as soon as he stepped onto rickety stairs outside the back of the doublewide, he actually paused and looked back at Horace, his mild dark eyes wide with astonishment.

  Each damn time, the dog acted like he’d never seen snow before.

  “Well, go on,” Horace said, glancing toward the sparse treeline. The squirrel was still there, sitting up straight and tall on top of a chunk of maple Horace was intending to turn into some company. He didn’t know what was sleeping inside the wood yet. When he did he’d fire up the chainsaw and set about hacking it loose.

  But Ol Bastard stopped, every line of him quivering. He almost vibrated in place, craning his loose, flexible doggy neck so he could stare up at Horace.

  “What, you afraid of it?” Horace stumped down the steps, not realizing he was still in his house slippers until he was a few strides away from the tiny porch he’d built so Wanda could drink her coffee and look at the back yard in the summer. Her garden boxes were full of weeds now, he didn’t have the heart to yank or cut them down. Some of the company—the stag lifting its mouth to the sky, the second bear he’d ever carved—were set in the boxes. She’d grown vegetables, he grew dumb statues. “Oh, hell.” His socks were going to get wet, but he was out here now, and while he was he could take a look at that chunk of maple.

  Might as well see if it felt like talking yet.

  Ol Bastard, his indecision vanished, rocketed off the porch for the squirrel. Thin spatters of snow sprayed, the dog skidded, and Horace began to laugh. He couldn’t help it—Ol Bastard looked so surprised, and the squirrel bolted for the treeline. Ol Bastard gallumphed after it, his ears flopping madly, and there was definitely something wrong with the squirrel. It was too slow, and if the damn dog caught it, he’d probably chow down before Horace could make him drop the corpse.

  Harold sped up, stepping high and wishing he hadn’t opened the door. He made it to the huge chunk of maple and wheezed, leaning against it. His stomach was unhappy, and his left shoulder now hurt like a motherfuck. “God damn it, come back!” he yelled, but Ol Bastard was closing in for the kill.

  At least it was swift. The old man sagged against the maple trunk, his eyes rolling back. The double shock of sudden cold and activity squeezed at his chest with a bony fist, and his last thought was it’s a wolf of course it’s a wolf before the world narrowed to a pinprick.

  The squirrel reached a young trashwood fir and clawed desperately up the trunk. Ol Bastard leapt, pranced, and howled in fury until it occurred to him his master wasn’t offering encouragement or displeasure. When that thought worked its way through his agile canine brain, he trotted back for the house, calling out to help the poor benighted human—he grasped, dimly, that they did not smell a fraction of the glory of the world that poured in through his own nose—find him.

  His master, curled around the bottom of a large chunk of dead tree Ol Bastard had already marked several times as his own, was already dusted heavily with quick-falling snow.

  Second to a Bottle

  “Rick, for God’s sake.” Margie Mayburn put her hands on her hips. “Nothin’s gonna happen to me.”

  “Pardon me if I think different, Margie.” Rooster Clane leaned against the door, all five-foot-five of him, and glared at her. The broken veins on his nose glared too, and it might have been funny, except Margie liked her privacy. He was allowed to come over when she said, and stay when she said, and if he made a fuss about leaving, there was always provoking him until he flew out the door.

  So far, though, provoking wasn’t working.
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  “You’ll be more comfortable drinkin at home,” she sallied, wishing she could take her earrings out and shimmy into her sweatpants. There was some ice cream in the fridge, and Christ if the power was going to stay on, she figured she might as well eat the pistachio while the gettin’ was good, so to speak. There wasn’t anything on the news that told her anything otherwise would be a good idea.

  “Ain’t drinkin while we’re under fire.” Rooster shook his head, the bristle at the back of his skull scraping her kitchen door, along the pretty beveled glass panes on the top half.

  She had her own little house on Mulberry Street, a tidy frame number, and if sometimes the mortgage took her down to pennies because the diner was in the red that month too, well, that was her business. Ever since she’d moved back to Cotton Crossing, she kept a line between her business and the whole parade of town business that came trompsing through the diner door.

  Rooster had his own place over the Happy Cow feedstore, a tiny space with a cot, a commode, a hotplate, and not much else. He said he didn’t need more, the Navy taught him to live small, and she was pretty sure that wasn’t all it taught him. There was cooking, of course, but that could’ve been picked up anywhere.

  When he’d shown up that afternoon, blue tattoos all over his arms and his cocky stride shouting temper problem, she hadn’t been impressed. But the man could cook, and she’d been able to get rid of Sal Shellack, who had always been a troublemaker and stole freight to boot. Sal was over in Colville Correctional, and she wondered how the prisons were keeping things going. They had to have gennies, right? And overseas, her boy, her little Eddie, overseas…

  Best to just leave that be. Her boys were gone, and the emptiness inside her when she dared to think about either of them was too big to bear up under.

  Margie was a big believer in bearing up. You did your duty, by God, and you kept your mouth shut. Being married to Harvey had taught her that much, at least, and getting prepared to divorce him had taught her other things. If he hadn’t gone drunk as a skunk off that bridge, she might have shot him instead and been closed up in a jail herself, and where would her boys be then?

  Don’t jine the Army, she’d told them. That’s what did for your Daddy. Neither of them listened.

  Men never did, and Rooster was looking to fix that principle in solid stone yet again.

  Margie took a hold on her temper. “I have my .45, and I have my deadbolts, and I have my teevee, Clane. And you need to get home and tend to your own knittin’.” She put her right hand down on the kitchen counter next to the stove. “You have your dinner packed, so you go on now. It ain’t your night.”

  “Margie, for God’s sake, there are things out there. You saw ‘em, the Army’s shootin’ em, there’s riots and—”

  “Yes. Exactly, but there ain’t no riots in the Crossing, and the Army ain’t gonna come down my street, so you just get along, now.” She patted the tile—it was bright pink, and Lord she loved it. Harvey would have hated her kitchen, but praise be, he had never seen it. It was a far cry from the shitty little apartment in Chi-town he’d drank them both into. In fact, the kitchen was the exact shade of pink that a certain bathroom in a certain Chinese restaurant in Chicago, and wild horses wouldn’t drag out of her that she had it because it was exactly the same shade as her private parts, too.

  Nobody needed to know that, and any who could guess kept their mouth shut.

  For a moment, she wondered if she would have liked Rooster better if he didn’t go on his tears. A woman could only stand being second to a bottle for so long, and God knew Margie was more patient than most, but still. Most nights nothing happened, they just watched the teevee and made bad comments about the characters. There was one particular show with a mother and a daughter, both wisecracking rich kids, and they both liked how the talkin went so fast most couldn’t catch it.

  But then, there would be the moment at the end, when she’d have to make the decision: let him stay or not? And he never made any fuss one way or the other.

  “Margie.” He scooted himself even further against her back door. Coming in the front was for company, he said, but she knew it was because there were fences and he could at least make an attempt to keep everyone out of her business. That was to be appreciated in a man. “I know this feelin. It’s a bad one. I’ll sleep on the couch, but I ain’t leavin.”

  “For Chrissake.” If she picked up something and heaved it at him, he’d probably duck. He’d be a nigh-on perfect man, would Rick Clane, if he didn’t drink. “What do you think is gonna happen?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is this ain’t right, and if’n somethin happens I’d rather be here than above the Happy fuckin’ Cow, Margie. I drink so much as a drop, you throw me out inta the snow, I won’t make a peep.”

  “Oh, Lord.” She threw her hands up. “I promise, right? I promise I won’t touch a drop, I won’t hurtcha Margie, I heard all that before. I feel damn sorry for you, Rooster, but a man drinks once, he’ll do it again, and when he does there’s his fists. I ain’t got nothin but the cookin wine here, anyway. Unless you gonna drink my Listerine.”

  He stared at her for a few moments, his pupils dilating, and the pit of Margie’s stomach turned into a red-hot dollop of melted metal. If you kept pushing, sooner or later every man would get the knuckles ready, and he was no exception.

  Except Rooster Clane’s hands were loose and slack at his sides. He just looked at her, and for a brief moment, Margie Mayburn, her maiden name thank you very much, thought maybe it was a shame she couldn’t let him stay. Not ever again, not after this. He thought he had to take care of her, which would have been fine, but a man who touched the bottle was not a man Margie wanted around permanent-like. They were all right for a casual thing, a friendship, because women at forty were at the high end of their hormones, she heard, and besides, he was funny. He laughed at the same things she did, and sometimes threw popcorn at the teevee when the daughter on that show made a Horrible Decision, like she always did.

  But he always picked up the popcorn afterward, too.

  “Margie…” Breathless, like all his air was gone. Like Margie had punched him.

  Then he straightened. His face slammed shut, and the Rooster-for-Richard Clane she knew—the man who sometimes had nightmares and always closed the door softly in the morning on his way out to open up the diner if it was his shift—retreated behind another man, the one he was in public. It was like seeing a city couple go out the door and knowing they’d only left a fifty-cent tip.

  Finally, he got his wind back. “You ent gotta feel sorry for me,” he said, and fumbled for the doorknob.

  She could have stopped him then. Rooster, I didn’t mean it. Or something similar, soft and apologetic. All part of the dance.

  Instead, Margie-for-Margaret watched him get the door open. Watched him step outside, slowly, the back of his head a knob atop a stiff, accusing bar of hurt. He closed it gently this time, too, and the metallic smell of snow and a deep freeze coming filled her pink kitchen, the heart of the safe, empty little space where she could eat pistachio ice cream and wait for the power to go out and things to get truly shitty, the way they always did.

  From outside, muffled by the storm, came a series of deep, racking coughs, fading as Rooster exited her back yard. He would drive home in the damn snow, and that would teach him, wouldn’t it?

  “Shit,” Margie said. Her forehead was uncomfortably damp, and her own throat tickled as well. If she came down with a cold, that would just be what she deserved.

  She shuffled across the pink linoleum, deliberately taking her time in case there was a knock and a shamefaced I can’t go, it’s too cold, and when she finally threw the deadbolt the little sound went straight through her.

  Argue With Grief

  Horace’s backyard was a wasteland of white humps and hillocks, with only Ol Bastard’s tracks showing how the dog had run hither and yon, wearing a circle around a couple stumps. Lee stood on the back porch, his
breath pluming in the cold, and thought about things.

  Inside, Juju and Ginny were getting the dog fed and dried off. Had Horace wandered off into the woods, foaming at the mouth and moving with that quick, eerie speed? Was it worth trying to track him? The house was cold with the power off and the day was more than half gone; how long ago had the old man stepped outside?

  None of the roads were plowed. The radio was full of shit that didn’t make sense, and according to Ginny the internet was too. This particular brand of not-making-sense was way worse than the usual serving of inconsequential babble. The world had slid off its axis and was heading for a deep-ass hole. He had to make a few decisions now about where he wanted to land.

  How widespread was this thing? The man on Ginny’s computer was up Pennsylvania way, and that was a bit of a walk. Was it moving west?

  Riots in San Diego, they said. Huh.

  Well, he’d get Ginny up to his house, where he was fairly sure any foam-mouthed sonofabitch showing up could be dealt with proper. There was the genny and the stove, too, so they wouldn’t freeze. He and Juju could chop enough wood for the winter, if it came to that. There would be ways of getting food, between hunting and sliding into town to look for canned, dry, toilet paper, and the like.

  The only problem with that plan was Ginny’s insistence on getting to her folks. There was also the thought that this might not be a temporary bump in the road. But that was ridiculous, right? In the cities, they had the infrastructure to deal with outbreaks. They had to. The Crossing was a little pissant town, so no wonder it got the short end of the stick…but if this terrorism, or sickness, or Act of God, whatever it was, reached all the way into the damn backwoods, what would it do to people crowded together in concrete anthills? Biting was an inefficient way of spreading something, sure—like rabies—but what if there was another way?