He saw a scene from dating his wife that blurred into moments from her pregnancy with his daughter Rachel. There was a vivid flash of her birth, of waiting at the hospital with his wife's family while his daughter came into the world. There was a vignette of taking Rachel to school on the first day and how he’d laughed at his wife for becoming emotional over that milestone, and then he was overtaken by tears after walking her to class. He saw a picture she had drawn when she was only four years old. It still hung on his refrigerator. He watched her sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of milk, eating Oreos, and drawing that picture. He remembered taking her fishing for bluegills at a local lake and their mutual surprise when she reeled in a long, toothy Northern Pike.
Buddy's chest constricted and he forced himself to suck in a deep breath, then slowly let it out. It felt like more escaped him than his exhalation, like a piece of his spirit left to join Rachel, unable to wait on him to die. Every time he visited her it affected him differently. After she died last summer, he hadn’t really cared if he lived or died. Then the world went to shit. He hadn't really expected to make it this long but he had. In some ways that disappointed him. He did not relish the fact that he was here alive, alone, and still feeling this pain of her loss like it was yesterday.
His horse stopped and Buddy looked at it curiously, then looked up to notice he was at the cemetery gate already. His horse was waiting as if confirming this was indeed their destination. Buddy was not certain how long he’d been standing before those gates or even how long it had taken to get there. He could not recall the trip, only the somber streaming recollections of his old life.
He knew it was unsafe to travel in such an inattentive state but it was too late to do anything about it now that they were there at the iron gates. Had Buddy been more vigilant he might have seen that his ride into town had not gone unnoticed. In riding past the short block of identical rental houses he’d drawn the attention of a young man sitting on a front porch mulling over his frustrations. They were a multitude and of much greater consequence than the decisions he’d previously faced in his life. He was concerned about where his next meal was coming from. He was concerned how he was going to keep his grandmother alive.
The kid was seventeen years old and had been raised by his grandmother ever since the courts took him from his mother. He’d never met his dad and could never really get a straight answer on who or where he was. He’d stayed with his grandmother for periods throughout his childhood, but the last time his mother overdosed, she ended up in jail. The courts decided enough was enough and they gave his grandmother permanent custody. She’d done her best to raise him but making her single fixed income cover two people was a struggle.
With the snow muffling sound and the lack of vehicle traffic, the town was silent on this day. The boy hadn't even heard the rider, just noticed him as a movement in the periphery of his vision, a flicker of movement like a squirrel jumping in the shadows. The boy’s eyes locked onto Buddy and he intently watched him ride by. He didn’t move and was fairly certain the rider had not seen him.
When the man paused at the cemetery gate, the boy rose and quietly entered the house. His grandmother had pulled their electric stove into the living room with the boy’s help. Using an axe they chopped a hole in the back of the stove of adequate size to receive a section of stovepipe. The old rental house had a chimney that had not been used in decades but the grandmother, who'd grown up with wood heat, had checked the chimney out. She determined it was sound and functional.
They used pieces of aluminum foil to close the gaps between the back of the stove and the stovepipe, shoving them in like chinking between logs in a cabin. The grandmother removed the wire baking racks from the oven and replaced them with an old car wheel set on the bottom element. She used this as a base for her fires. The stove was smoky and far from ideal but it kept them alive. They burned everything they could find.
While they had heat, food was getting scarce. They were never able to get ahead, so the pantry was always sparse. Over the winter, the other inhabitants of the town determined which houses were vacant and those had already been looted of any remaining food. Grocery stores and the convenience stores had been cleaned out. Finding food was purely a matter of resourcefulness and determination at this point. Searching cars for any leftover snacks, looking under the shelves in ransacked grocery stores, and looking in desk drawers in empty offices. Even those resources were producing less and less bounty. In the last week the only thing they managed to eat were a few squirrels that they'd caught on glue traps designed for rats.
Inside the house, the boy found his grandmother feeding the fire, shoving in a chunk from a rickety picnic table they’d busted up. The boy looked at the woodpile and saw it was getting slim. He’d found a stash of old pallets behind the tractor shed at the cemetery and figured he was going to have to drag a couple home. They were hard to bust up but they burned really well.
"I just saw a man on a horse," he said. He guessed it was a man, though it was hard to tell through the layers.
"A horse?" She let the stove door bang shut and watched the fire for a moment through the soot-covered glass.
"He stopped down at the cemetery. Looked like he was going up that way."
“Into the cemetery?” She fixed her ice blue eyes on him. They seemed young and vibrant despite being inset in a face crackled like old pottery. “Bad day for paying your respects.”
“I wish we had a horse,” he said. “We could search a lot more places for food. It would be easier to bring home wood. Or we could just decide to get out of this place and go somewhere else.”
“Where could we go?”
“We could find a cabin somewhere in the woods. A place we could fish, hunt, and raise a garden.”
“I growed up that way, boy. Ain’t an easy life.”
“This ain’t easy either,” the boy replied, gesturing around them.
The grandmother had been overweight most of her adult life and now was just fleshy, like an air mattress with a slow leak. Loose folds of wrinkled skin hung from her face and arms. She was missing all her teeth and no longer cared to wear her dentures. She looked away and thought, then back at the boy shortly, her eyes cutting. "There’s a lot of meat on a horse."
“Meat?" the boy asked. “On a horse?”
His granny nodded. "Horse eats the same things a cow eats. I haven’t ate one but it can't be a whole lot different. Right now I'd probably eat one even if it tasted like the south end of a northbound mule."
The boy looked concerned. Though he’d wanted the horse too, admittedly for a different reason, he hadn’t thought through actually taking the horse. Having grown up poor, his grandmother was more resourceful than him.
"How would we get that horse, Granny? We ain’t got anything to trade and I’m sure he ain’t going to give it up without a fight."
His granny pointed a withered, sun-damaged finger at a gun rack on the living room wall. "Yonder deer rifle should do it.”
The rifle was a thirty ought six that belonged to his grandfather. The boy didn't know much about it. In fact, he didn’t know much about his grandfather either, since he’d been a baby when he passed. All he knew was that his grandfather had killed many deer with it over the course of his life.
"I never shot that gun," the boy said.
"You’ve got a .22 just like it. Bolt-action, scope, and safety works the same, just kicks harder."
The boy looked at the rifle, mulling over the process, thinking out each step in his head. He examined the possibilities. "What if he shoots back?"
His grandmother dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand. "Aw, he ain’t going to fight back. You shoot that horse and he’ll think he’s next. He’ll run like his ass is on fire."
“I don’t know if I could kill a man if it came to that.”
His grandmother gave him a weary frown. “You don’t take that horse, you might be killing the two of us. How much longer you think we can live off squ
irrels, candy bars, and the odd can of vegetables?”
The boy understood she was right but also that this was a pivotal moment in his life. No matter what happened down the road—the power coming back on, him going back to school, him getting married and having children—he’d always have to live with the fact he’d killed a man to take his horse…for food.
The boy went to the gun rack and removed the rifle he’d been forbidden to touch up until this moment. It was heavy and solid. He drew the bolt back. The mechanism operated with a solid precision that his .22 rifle lacked. He opened one of the sliding doors on the bottom of the gun rack and removed a worn box of shells. The flaps were worn smooth, as if they had been carried into the woods many times without wasting any rounds.
The rifle’s box magazine loaded differently than anything the boy had ever used before and his grandmother helped him load it. He thumbed several rounds down through the open chamber, hoping he didn’t have to fire any of them at the man, hoping that he indeed fled as his grandmother assured him he would.
"Let me get my coat," his grandmother said. She disappeared into an adjoining room and returned in a few minutes in an old purple coat. The excess room inside it after she buttoned it up was indicative of just how they were wasting away. She had a large butcher knife in her hand.
When the boy’s eyes landed on the knife, they went wide. "You going to stab that man?”
His grandmother looked at him like it was the dumbest question she’d heard all day. "That horse ain’t going to cut itself up. We have to butcher it and haul the pieces home.”
The boy nodded but still looked at the knife uncertainly. He’d never butchered game before the world fell apart. In fact, had only seen meat for most of his life shrink-wrapped in foam trays at the store. Since last summer he’d learned to butcher squirrels, chipmunks, possums, raccoons, and even cats, but he'd never done anything as large as a horse. He couldn't imagine it.
“You know how to do that?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’ve done cows, hogs, and deer. Ain’t much difference betwixt them.”
The grandmother, understanding her grandson was a little apprehensive about the situation, did not want to give him too much time to think about it. With her eyes, it was unlikely she could hit the horse with the scoped weapon. With her lungs, damaged from sixty years of cigarette smoking, it would take her too long to get down there. The rider may be gone by the time she made it. If he could get down there and fell the animal, she would come along in time to process it.
They exited the front door, and from the yard could see the rider was no longer at the cemetery gates. The cemetery had seen little traffic since the snow fell and there was no broken trail to the interior roads.
The grandmother shaded her eyes with her gnarled and wrinkled hand. "Whereabouts do you think he is? Can you spy him?"
The boy had already caught sight of Buddy. He pointed. "He’s about halfway between the gate and the mausoleum. Straight up the hill."
The grandmother squinted, but with distance and the glare off the snow she couldn’t make out anything. "That's why I need you, boy. I can’t see nothing anymore. Just an old broken down woman."
They plodded through the snow, high-stepping it to Main Street where a beaten trail awaited them. When the boy slowed to wait on her, the old lady urged him forward.
“You ain’t gonna get anywhere waiting on me. You keep going. I’ll get there when I get there.”
The boy nodded somberly, understanding the weight of this lay on his shoulders now. Their fate, their future, their survival—all of it was on him and his actions. He couldn’t separate this decision from what his grandmother had done for him when he was a child. She couldn’t afford him. She didn’t have the means to provide for him, and didn’t know how she was going to be able to do it. But she had. Now a decision of the same gravity lay before him.
When the boy got nearer to the cemetery, he came to a group of tall pines that shielded the cemetery from the road. He lost sight of the distant rider. He angled off the road and cut up a steep bank. In the wet snow, he ended up having to crawl, pushing the rifle ahead of him. He wished he’d thought to make a sling for it like his .22 rifle had.
He stopped at the top of the bank and looked back for his grandmother. She was still chugging along, puffing hard, and trying to catch her breath. Even following in his footsteps, it was hard going for her. When she looked ahead and caught him waiting, she gestured for him to keep moving. He conceded and disappeared through the wall of pines.
This cemetery didn’t use raised markers. Everything was flat to the ground, offering no cover whatsoever. There were a few trees and he decided that keeping a tree between him and the rider at all times might make him less noticeable.
Buddy reached Rachel’s grave and slid off his horse, dropping the reins. The horse pawed at the ground, tried to nudge snow away with its nose, and found nothing of interest. It snorted loudly, exhaling clouds of mist. Buddy didn’t notice the horse’s effort. He was lost in reverie. In his mind, he saw his daughter. Her old bed was set up here in the snow and she lay on it beneath a thick layer of blankets. Her eyes were closed and she looked like she had when he last saw her. It was to this girl that he spoke, not the girl beneath the ground, not the child in his memory. He saw and felt her. In his head, he was kneeling at her bedside, speaking to her sleeping form.
“I’m sorry it’s been so long since I came to visit you,” he said. “Times have been hard.”
He waited for a reaction on the face he saw but there was none.
“I’ve struggled, sweetie, but there have been good people around me. There’s a man named Lloyd living at the house with me and he’s a crackerjack. You would think he’s hilarious.” Buddy sighed heavily and imagined his daughter living back at the house, interacting with Lloyd.
“I’ve tried to help people. I’ve tried to be a good man, but I’ve lost too much. I’m frozen to the core with pain and grief. I understand now it will never thaw. There’s nothing in this world, nor will there ever be again, that will produce enough warmth to reach the core of me.” Buddy reached out and stroked her head, feeling the cool skin, the cool hair.
The boy was within seventy yards now. He watched with confusion as the kneeling man reached before him and moved his hand in the air. Although he couldn’t see anything, it appeared as if the man did. Was he seeing a ghost? Perhaps he’d gone mad, driven insane by the random cruelty and endless suffering.
The boy noticed the horse sniffing the air and was concerned about being detected. He was here now and had to follow this through. There was no way to back out without having to face another night of hunger. He could not disappoint his grandmother. He could not be the cause of her suffering. He dropped to his knee and put the crosshairs of the scope on the horse. He didn’t understand the anatomy enough to know exactly where the heart was but he assumed it had to be somewhere in the region of where the shoulder joined the body. That was where he aimed, trying to calm his surging heart and wavering barrel.
He flipped the safety off, put a finger on the trigger. He tried not to think about the crazy man touching things that couldn’t be seen. The horse filled his scope as it filled his mind. He pulled the trigger.
The rifle boomed and the recoil startled him. He nearly fell over, having failed to brace himself against it. In his gyrations, he lost sight of the horse in the scope and lowered the rifle. In the distance he saw the horse stagger and drop. He looked for the old man and found him raising a rifle to his shoulder. It was aimed directly at him. The boy screamed and lunged forward, dropping himself flat on his belly in the snow.
The old man’s rifle boomed and the boy yelled out again, hearing a round whizz by him. He heard a different voice screaming, not his own this time, and looked down the hill. His grandmother was cursing at the man and trying to run toward them. The old man turned toward her now, raising his rifle.
The boy panicked. Was the old man really going to shoot her?
He couldn’t let that happen. He worked the bolt and chambered another of the long rounds. He dropped an eye to the scope and fought to get the crosshairs on the old man. He jerked the trigger, more interested in scaring him than in getting a perfect hit. He didn’t care if he hit the old man or not, he just wanted to distract him from firing at his grandmother
But the round found its target.
Buddy spun as if hit by a sledgehammer. The round caught him high on the shoulder and blood sprayed onto his face. He dropped into the snow.
The boy got to his feet and looked toward his grandmother. She’d fallen onto all fours but was looking in his direction, uncertain if that first round had hit him. The boy was concerned and started downhill toward his grandmother.
“No!” she bellowed. “Check him!” The cry took all the wind she had and she sagged back down. She coughed, trying to catch her breath.
The boy had forgotten about the old man. He jacked another round into the rifle and staggered toward where the old man fell. He found the man face down on the ground, blood pouring from a vast open wound on what used to be a shoulder. The man’s left arm hung crooked and useless, barely attached. It was a gory sight and the boy fought the urge to throw up. It wasn’t just the nature of the wounds but the fact that he was responsible for them. He had done this.
He couldn’t tell if the old man was breathing through his thick layers. The boy approached him and kicked Buddy in the leg. In a flash, Buddy rolled over and raised his .45 Colt automatic. The boy was staring straight down the barrel. The gun was less than four feet from his face. Buddy knew he was going to die and he planned on taking on his attackers with him. He didn’t pull the trigger though.
“Just a boy,” he gasped.
That hesitation, that merciful instinct to spare a child’s life, cost him his own. It gave the boy just enough time to level his own rifle at the hip and pull the trigger. The round caught Buddy just below the sternum. He arched and sucked in air, dropping his Colt. Buddy kicked once and tried to crawl away, his bloodied arms creating a crimson snow angel, a bloody angel of death.
Switched On: Book Six in The Borrowed World Series Page 8
