Cotton Crossing

  “Mooooom!” Bart appeared in the living room doorway, a sodden dishtowel hanging from his fist. “Why can’t I watch teevee?” He was thirteen, his springy hair bowl-cut and his face a galaxy of acne. The poor kid looked like he was put together wrong, his big hands and small feet not matching, his chest sunken but his legs thick. In a little while every bit of him would catch up, probably when he hit steroids for high school football—the only rival for religion in places like this.

  “—Terrorist attack,” the announcer repeated. “In addition, more attacks have been reported in San Francisco, Houston, and Seattle.”

  The sound cut out for a moment. The ensuing silence was broken by Harry McCoy. “Oh my good Lord,” he said. “Terrorists.”

  Amy pressed her fingertips to her mouth, hard. Bart dropped the towel, and Harry Jr let out a soft, shocked “Goddamn,” that neither of his parents took him to task for.

  Ginny found her own hands knotted together. “But…” Breathless, and her heart pounding so fast. But New York. “It’s the whole…a whole state.”

  None of them heard her, because it was only her lips that moved. She didn’t even hear herself, because a rushing had filled her head.

  Hard to Find

  The privacy-tinted Crown Vic vanished as soon as he hit the highway, but that didn’t mean much. So Lee swung out toward Lewiston, taking his time, annoyed at using the extra gas but needing to do some thinking.

  Unfortunately, the thing he was thinking most about wasn’t someone behind privacy glass following him. It was the library girl, and the shadows under her eyes. Looked like she wasn’t sleeping. Why would that be? He didn’t hear that she was sweet on anyone, but then again, librarians weren’t a high-value topic in the Crossing. Not like hunting, or strange things in the woods. He would’ve had more luck hearing all about her before he enlisted, back when the Crossing was smaller and everyone’s business was everyone else’s.

  Of course, then it would have been all over town that Little Lee was head-turned by an outsider. Whole lotta outsiders in town nowadays. The world had grown a little smaller, and Lewiston had gotten bigger, sending its tentacles in every direction.

  His Chevy hummed along. He swung out on Dory’s Loop, climbing halfway up Pearson Mountain—really, just a hill with pretensions, but a wide one. Which meant he could take the old logging road higher up and drop to approach his place from the opposite direction, something he did randomly at least a few times a month. You didn’t want to wear too deep a rut, that was a good way to get ambushed. The wind rushed by his window, the milk in his Landy’s bags occasionally clinking against a beer bottle. It would be warmish by the time he got home, goddammit, and he kept thinking about those circles under her eyes. Those jeans—it was indecent, how good a woman looked in Levi’s. Or maybe just that particular woman. It couldn’t be that hard, working at a library, right? So that left something else bothering her. Family trouble? He didn’t know.

  It irked him. He wanted to know, couldn’t suss out a way to find out short of asking her, and that was no kind of option. He’d barely even said hello.

  She’d been the one to talk to him. Maybe he hadn’t done too badly, though. She noticed the books he was taking. What did that mean? Anything? Well, a librarian probably noticed everyone’s books. Did they notice and remember them, though?

  Nothing in his driveway. He cut the engine, his window cracked a bit, and listened. Dusk had already filled the hollers, and it was clear enough to freeze tonight. A frost-on-the-punkin night, Nonna Quartine would have called it. Nothing out of the ordinary in the trees. Birds and critters bedding down or waking up, all the fine hairs on Lee settling where they should be. Of course, maybe he was all tied in a knot over her actually speaking to him, and missing something critical.

  Or he was being ridiculous. They wouldn’t send out a squad to drag him in to talk to Grandon. This was America, for God’s sake. Or at least, it used to be.

  Well, that was an unpleasant way for his thoughts to be tending. He took his time getting out, getting the groceries situated. No, they wouldn’t send a squad to drag him somewheres. But the light in his living room was on, and he hadn’t left it that way when he started out.

  Someone was in his freshly painted manufactured home. And Lee Quartine, dammit, had a good idea who it was.

  * * *

  He at least had the politeness not to be sitting down when Lee came through the door. Instead, the graying middle-aged man stood at ease at the back window, staring out at the strip Lee cleared religiously even if he didn’t want to take the ancient, wheezing riding mower to it. Clearing your firing lines was just good housekeeping.

  Best not to let anything sneak up on you.

  Grandon was in civvies, but his high-and-tight pretty much shouted armed forces, thank you and goodnight. He had a broad, set face, acne scars on cheeks and chin, and small piercing blue eyes that more than one person had called piggish. His gray suit was creased in all the right places, and it was probably even tailored. When you had to deal with the suits, it was a good idea to have one, and Grandon was, Lee supposed, the best you could hope for. At least he stopped shit from flowing downhill, as much as was possible. There was some shit even Nonna Quartine’s beloved Sonny Jesus couldn’t halt in its tracks. Grandon’s broad back was almost square—he’d put on some weight, probably from the drinking. Or just from paper-pushing and club sandwiches.

  Lee headed for the kitchen. He didn’t even pretend to be surprised. He also didn’t offer Grandon a beer. Even if the door was unlocked because he lived out past the limits, he didn’t like the idea of someone just walking in. Especially if that someone was a man he never wanted to see again, this side of the Last Judgment.

  When Lee had his groceries situated and the bag folded up proper, he stepped back in the living room. The Colonel had turned around, and settled at ease again with his back to the window, almost as if Lee was the ranking officer expecting a report.

  “Hello, Lee.” He looked much older. Great pouches of flesh sagged under his eyes and off his jawline. The bits under his eyes were so dark they looked bruised, and Lee shut away the thought of the library girl. It wouldn’t do him any good here.

  He’d made the old man speak first. When you didn’t particularly mind silence, you had an advantage over all kinds of folks. “Sir.” Brief and neutral.

  “I apologize for just stopping by.” A rich, fruity baritone. “You’re a hard man to visit.”

  Not so hard, if you found me. The VA’s got me on file, too. Lee leaned against the doorway from the short hall into the kitchen. The urge to straighten up and snap a salute died under the knowledge that he was no longer part of the command chain. Nope, he was out, honorably and fully out, and staying that way. He wouldn’t say a word about the killing floors and the dead men’s eyes, open wide and reproachful, the hoods and the blood. No, holding his mouth shut was a promise he’d made, and he was going to keep it.

  But not for this man. There was a difference between keeping a promise and keeping it to someone, and it had taken Lee some hard thinking to find that gap.

  “Lee, son…”

  Lee shook his head. Nope.

  “We need your help.”

  Oh, do you, now? Lee examined the man’s face. Yeah, it looked like the Colonel hadn’t been sleeping. Was it another ‘small war’, somewhere the sand swallowed blood and the heat laid a man flat before noon? Maybe somewhere deep in a steam-hot hell they called a “jungle” when what they meant was “something we want is in here”? Or was it just pulling a trigger, somewhere, on some poor shitbird some faceless suit in some nameless department had decided was a threat?

  “Jesus Christ, son.” Grandon’s faint frown was a thunderclap of irritation. “Haven’t you been watching the news? We’ve got a situation here, and I don’t have anyone else to send with the—”

  Lee turned around again. He headed back into the kitchen, opened one of the cabinets, and got down one of his grandmother’s glasses. S
he called them carnival glass, for the oilslick sheen on their cold, hard surfaces. He filled it from the faucet—the well water around here was good for whatever ailed you—and drank.

  When he came back out, Grandon was near the door. There was a manila envelope on the ancient split-bottom coffee table, and a package wrapped in brown paper, too big to be a cut of meat.

  “Watch the news, Lee.” Grandon delivered this over his shoulder. “Then call me. Number’s still good. Until it reaches this part of the country, that is.”

  Huh? But Lee didn’t bite at that, either. He also didn’t care if Grandon was hoofing it back to the road in his suit, or if someone was coming along to collect him. It wouldn’t be like the old man to leave a bomb on the coffee table.

  Not a physical one, anyway. And why would he call him Lee instead of, say, Lieutenant? Or even just Quart, for God’s sake?

  He was probably figuring on Lee being curious. But there was a great advantage in knowing when to stuff curiousity in a hole and nail a lid over it. While it might be all right to be curious about a certain honey-haired bigcity miss, it wasn’t healthy to be wonder about the cryptic comments of a man who, while he didn’t pull a trigger himself, was adept at getting enlisted schmucks to pull them over and over.

  The phone rang, and Lee almost, almost flinched. It was only Horace Slipot, though, telling him something about a community meeting at the library, and damn if Quartine shouldn’t be there because there was a lot of talk, and Horace wanted Lee’s opinion.

  Horace, more than likely, wanted to tell Lee what his opinion should be, but he’d been Lee Senior’s friend and one of the few men of that age Big Q respected, and this was also Horace’s way of saying he wanted a ride to the meeting because it would be dark driving home. Lee agreed, mostly because he was—useless to deny it—a little rattled.

  After he told Horace to settle himself and that he’d be driving, he scooped up the folder and the package, thought about it for a second, and carried them both to the broom closet, where he put them on the high shelf next to neatly stacked paper boxes of ammunition. And Lee further decided not to turn his ancient but still usable tee-vee on.

  Maybe it was time to crack one of the books he’d got from the library, instead.

  Ham's Hunting

  His given name was Samuel, but for some reason, everyone called the oldest Plotzee boy “Ham.” Stories ranged from it being the only way his sister Libby could say his name to it being his favorite meat, but he never told one way or the other. He was generally held to be the quietest of the Plotzees, almost as quiet as one of the Quartines, and a little “touched.” His two younger brothers were both married, but Ham never showed much interest in girls, even in high school. Nor did he follow any acceptable sport.

  He would have been suspected of queerdom if not for the one thing he did love: hunting. When you could get him to talk, Ham Plotzee could tell you the latest in compound-bow research—even though he used a rifle, and only a rifle thank you—and deer urine, how to eat snow to turn your breath invisible in winter, the time he found a stone in a doe’s guts. Doc Grampton called it a bee-zo-ar, but Ham just called it the lucky rock, and kept it in the pocket of his hunting jacket. He could tell you about deer blinds and gutting, the splash and slither of hot intestines, making your own bullets. Pressed to articulate just why he liked hunting, he’d look at you with his close-set, muddy eyes like you were asking him why the earth was round or the sun burned, or why he lived in that trailer on the back end of the old Plotzee property. It just was.

  Right now he stood, slightly pigeon-toed, his big soft shoulders slumped and his thick cheeks bristling with day-old stubble he scratched with thick fingers while he stared at the ground, his lips a little pursed. A tuneless noise, not quite a whistle, slid between them.

  Leaf mould and damp dirt, moss and rotting wood. Something heavy on the forefoot and fast had smudged through here, and the tracks were so bizarre he shifted from foot to foot while he studied them. He knew these woods, almost like the back of his hand. Other men went to the bar, or watched the tee-vee. Ham plodded out into the wilderness, sometimes even without his gun, just a K-bar and a canteen. He could not articulate the deep satisfaction it gave him, the burning secret knowledge that out here away from town he was close to a god.

  Not the God, the Lord God his gramma always talked about. Ham only went to church every other week, which was the bare minimum if he didn’t want gramma and his ma both climbing the side of his head. Sundays were good days to be hunting, because everyone else was in church except atheists.

  Ham was pretty sure atheists were also libruls who wouldn’t know what to do with a rifle if you paid ’em. Donnie Casabroac had been spouting off about something in the woods, and some of them at the diner believed he was onto something. Ham, of course, thought Donnie C was fulla shit, but these tracks were…strange. For a bare second the idea that someone was playing a big ol’ joke on the Crossing bubbled to the top of his brain, but he was in one of his Special Places in the woods, hard to get to unless you knew exactly how, and who would go to that trouble?

  So Ham kept his rifle ready, and moved through the shaken-naked trees, uphill. The tracks were cutting across and up, almost like a dog’s, but no dog would move sideways like this. No pawprints, just those smears. After a little while, he crouched carefully, a twig breaking under his right foot—sloppy, he told himself, he knew better, but the marks were just so interesting. He couldn’t for the life of him figger out…

  Aha. He put his free hand down, holding the rifle well clear. Touched the edge of one of the smears with the pinkie side, and imagined scraping down and sideways. That was the movement. The thing was going fast, and its back legs were bigger than its front, so it went cockeyed. Which intrigued him all the more, because—

  A low, hissing, rumbling growl brought him upright-kneeling in a hurry, scanning the trunks and trash-brush around him. Undergrowth pressed thick through shortleaf pines. Downhill and east there would be hickories and scrub oak; there had been some clearcutting around here in the long-ago. He lifted the rifle, cautiously, finger well clear of the trigger and all his hairs standing up. His mouth filled with the sweet taste of danger, and anyone from town might have had a hard time recognizing Ham Plotzee, because he looked downright radiant. His eyes cleared up, blazing hazel-gold, and his face was no longer stolid and sullen but alive and flushed, a small childlike smile pulling back his thick lips and letting little corncob teeth peep out.

  His ears all but twitched, his breathing turning slow and soft, heart galloping with the excitement that was better than anything—holding a girl’s hand, drinking the whiskey that made his head hurt and his hands all dumb, even the approval on Plotzee Senior’s face when Ham came home with good venison or raccoon fur.

  The bushes to his right shook. Ham tracked smoothly, bracing the rifle, his knee digging into wet earth, grinding in mud and pine needles. There was no glare of orange in the thicket, and it was a big critter, the branches whipping back and forth. Ham slid his finger over the trigger, every thorn, every autumn-ravaged leaf, every stick standing out in sharp clear detail as the best part of hunting filled him from top to toe with singing joy.

  It boiled out of the thicket, and to Ham’s credit, his shot took it in the throat—well, mostly because the realization oh shit it’s a person skewed his aim. He only had time for that horrified thought before it was on him, a haggard flopping scarecrow of what had once been a heavyset older woman, her clothing in rags except for a blue polyester apron, her strawlike red-dyed hair now slimed to her skull with wet mud. Her teeth worried at the coat-cloth over his shoulder as Ham fell over backward, and he batted ineffectually at her while she nuzzled, her cheek worming in a parody of tenderness, until those working, clacking jaws found his throat.

  Mixed Nuts

  The world was a ridiculous movie playing on a screen in front of her, and Ginny moved through it with the utter calm of desperation.

  No call from he
r mother, or from her father, or from Florence. Ginny called several times a day, every number she could think of. Mrs Hurtzinger down the street from her parents’ house. Flo’s soon-to-be-ex-husband. The Caprasans, whose daughter Selina had been Ginny’s best friend in high school. Selina herself was no longer friendly—college had taken care of that—but as far as her parents were concerned, Ginny was the Good One. She’d even dug in a box that hadn’t been opened since she moved, resurrecting her old college address book. Back before smartphones and Google, it had been religiously updated. A Mills girl did not forget birthdays, anniversaries, or who had insulted whom at the last family or country club get-together and needed to be separated like toddlers.

  Did you hear? Everyone in the Crossing, or at work, asked her. You have people in New York, right? Or the old famous standby, are you okay?

  No. She was not okay. No airplane tickets, because the airports were shut down. Buses and trains both a no-go. She could drive, but the National Guard had roadblocks up. The internet was ablaze with news, dire prognostications, grainy pictures of the roadblocks and the straight-faced young men nervously guarding them. Armed young men, cradling ugly guns Ginny didn’t know the names of.

  She kept dialing, it kept ringing. Every break from work, every stoplight, every—

  “Fruit punch?” She smiled, her cheeks aching. The community meeting was well underway, Ginny was what library employees called the Refreshments Gnome, and it was probably for the best. All she had to do was smile and keep the Hydrox cookies and cheapass punch flowing. Anything else, Christie could handle.

  Funny, how Ginny had dreaded the thought of the next call from her mother. Funny, how she sometimes looked at the ringing phone and her stomach would fall with a sickening thump. Or a text from Flo would land, full of passive-aggressive sweetness, and she would grit her teeth.