The loaner was solid, clean, fast. A ten-year-old Crown Vic Interceptor that Wabash had picked up at the Minneapolis PD auction and painted all black, but even so when you were behind the wheel you had the feeling that everyone who saw you coming saw the black-and-white and they slowed way, way down or they hit the turn signal and turned off the road you were on, because a certain kind of man knew the shape of the Crown Vic whatever the paint job and did not like having that shape in his rearview one bit.
Gordon drove the car slowly through town, but when he hit Old Highway 20 he opened her up and let her run. Clear, cold winter day with no snow or ice on the road, the car soaking up the sun, heat pouring from its vents, and he did not ease off the gas until he hit the narrow bridges that crossed over the Upper Black Root as it snaked its way south toward the state line and its new name, the Lower Black Root… upper, lower, all the same river as far as the Indians were concerned, back in the way-back days before highways and bridges and Crown Vics.
Not Indians, Daddy: Native Americans.
Twelve years old and her eyes bright with knowledge. With education—with wonder at his lack of it.
Do you think the Sioux, or the Crow, or the Cheyenne changed the name of the river at the Iowa border? she wanted to know.
Sure, he said, teasing—such seriousness, such big eyes! Why not?
Daddy—do you think they had borders at all? A line that said ‘America’ on one side and ‘Canada’ on the other? No, they didn’t. It was all one land, all one river, all part of the big open everything. Until we came along. Lying to them, cheating them, killing them but keeping their names, Minnesota, Iowa, Dakota—ticking these off on pink, serious fingers—Mississippi, Miami…
We, she’d said. The bloody old work of her own granddad’s granddads: kill off the people, kill off their buffalo, kill off their songs and their stories but keep their names.
That young girl gone now too, lost to the river that was the same river whatever you called it and that emptied into a greater river that once had no name and that emptied into an ocean that once had no name, and that ocean evaporating into the sky and coming back down in water that ran over the land whatever you called it and found the creeks, and the creeks found the rivers once again… and so ran his thoughts, winding north through Sioux country in a machine that spewed from its backside the smoke of creatures that lived and died a million years before any man, Sioux or otherwise, took his first breath, until he reached the sign that warned him of a reduced speed limit and he slowed the Crown Vic and drove lawfully into the little town, and stopped at the one light and then sat there after it had gone green, no one behind him, no one anywhere that he could see, and after the light turned red he drove through it and no alarms sounded, no sirens wailed, and he drove on.
Fields buried in snow, windbreaks of black winter cottonwoods and then the old farmhouse rising out of the land just as he remembered it—twelve, thirteen years ago that would’ve been. Anyway it was before she moved out here and before her father passed, because she’d asked him to come out and talk to the old man, who seemed to think there was something wrong with the septic—he was smelling it all the time now, and no wonder because he hadn’t had the thing pumped in three years, and there was a broken pipe, and it was high summer and by the end of the day Gordon was so covered in filth and flies she’d turned the hose on him like a dog, the two of them laughing like they hadn’t laughed in a long time. Since before Roger died. Since before Meredith left.
Thin line of smoke rising now from the chimney and that could mean she was home or not home, but then he saw her green wagon in the drive and the sight of it did something funny to his guts, to his heart, and he almost drove on; she might recognize the Crown Vic as Wabash’s loaner but she would not put it together with him.
Unless the boy told her so, when she picked him up later in the day; unless the boy told her Mr. Burke had been at the garage that morning and had driven off with the Crown Vic, and then she’d know it was him who’d driven by, who’d slowed down but hadn’t turned in, and he said, “Just to hell with everything,” and braked and made the turn in time, fishtailing a little in the packed snow of the drive.
He parked behind the wagon and stepped from the Crown Vic and shut the door and looked for her to come to one of the windows so he wouldn’t have to stand on that porch waiting for her to answer the door. But she didn’t come to any window and he was making his way to the porch when he heard something off to his right, toward the back of the property, out of view, and he stopped where he was, ear-cocked, until he heard it again: a muted, earthy thunk. Like something pounding at slow intervals on the stony ground.
He turned back and trudged through the snow alongside the house, making his way to the backyard, where the sound was louder—hard metal and hard earth and also the breaths, the grunts, of human exertion—and as he came around the corner he saw the figure in the middle of the yard, standing beside the T of the iron clothesline bar. A man’s canvas workcoat, his watchman’s cap, his rawhide gloves. The man standing knee-deep in the snow and not moving, taking a moment, gathering his strength and his breath before he raised the pickax shoulder-high and swung once more at the frozen earth, dull ring of iron, sharp grunt of effort in a high register. Not a man, of course. A woman. Rachel Young, dudded up in her dad’s old workgear.
Somehow—maybe her exertions, maybe the noise of the pickax—she didn’t hear him until he was nearly at her shoulder, and then she turned abruptly and faced him, the pickax held crossways to her body, smoke huffing from her mouth and nose, her eyes pink-veined and wet, and there she stood, trying to make sense of him. Gordon trying to make sense of her, the pickax, the rough box of space she’d cleared in the snow down to the turf, big enough for her to stand in and to swing at with the tool. And only then, after he’d taken all this in, did he understand that the darkness in the snow to her left, that dark bundle, was the old dog, Wyatt, wrapped in an old blanket.
She held the pickax as if to stop him, as if to meet him in battle—seeing him, not seeing him, seeing God knows what in those raw eyes, but when he said her name, “Rachel. Rachel…” and reached for the pickax, she lowered it. Or the pickax lowered itself, by its own weight. Like something she never could have lifted in the first place.
He took one step forward into the space she’d cleared and took the pickax from her and held it one-handed at his side as she fell sobbing to his chest.
23
IT WAS JUST dark when they began coming out of the garage. A light snow falling through the headlights of their cars and trucks as they started them up and pulled out of the lot one by one and onto the street, some going left, some right.
Sutter tailed the two-tone pickup as it crossed through town, as it passed under an old railroad overpass, as it drove another half mile down industrial streets before turning, finally, into the lot of a small bar with the name jack’s in failing red neon over the door. He watched Radner park and get out of the truck, wearing a billed cap now, and cross the lot toward the gray metal door and pull the door open and step inside. Then he parked his own car and gapped the window and killed the engine. He lit a cigarette and sat watching the gray door, the few other cars and trucks in the lot. It was Friday, a quarter past five, and as he sat there another truck, a black Ford, pulled into the lot and two men got out and slammed the doors and walked toward the gray door and opened it and went inside.