Pickard County Atlas

by Chris Harding Thornton

  Harley pictured Doris leaned back against the Mercury, evaporating. The sight of her foot at the bottom of the stairs. There was a lot to tell Glenn, but right now he needed defusing. “Hell, Glenn. I don’t know.”

  Glenn gave a muted, airy burp, and the words that followed were windy. “We get another fire call, find another empty farmhouse burnt, this time Doris Luschen’s clothes—weirder it is, worse it winds up. I don’t need to tell you. Look at that thing down in Junco.”

  “You got some stuff—” Harley gestured with a finger, let Glenn know about the Mylanta.

  Glenn’s eyes roved the office like some corner might hold a pile of Doris Luschen’s underwear. He opened the pen drawer of his desk, pulled out a napkin, and dabbed it with his tongue. He worked it around his mouth. The paper blew up in little gusts like a bird’s broken wing. “This is the kind of thing escalates. Like that thing down in Junco. Starts out somebody breaks in places, paints public stalls with his stool, ends with somebody drowned in manure.” He looked like he was on the verge of a cardiac arrest.

  “Before you get any more worked up, remember that’s Junco. This is Madson.”

  Glenn took a pause for breath and considered it. “I guess,” he admitted. “Guess a few more branches on the family tree down there would help.”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Harley took a sip of weak coffee, contemplating what was next. “You already been down there? Doris’s place?”

  “Couldn’t have dusted for prints, for all the good it’d do. Would’ve been all smudged up by that damned daughter-in-law. Just into everything.” He made the low, airy burp again, put his stubby fingers to his sternum, and rubbed. “You’ve got to feel for Doris’s boy. Married to a woman like that.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, HARLEY’S attention never strayed far from the rearview as he drove through town. He patrolled north to south, then east to west. As it happened, that left Virginia Reddick’s place for last. No sign of her son’s truck.

  Outside Madson, he made the rounds of the empty homesteads. The Schneider place was quiet. The Rasmussen house, quiet. The old Carberry farmstead, quiet.

  Harley walked around the Knudsen place again. The front door was still locked, same with the brooder house. The horse barn held only the moldy bales and generator. The hay barn with the old Plymouth and discarded window screens looked no different than before.

  All that left was the home place, which was the last place he needed to be. He’d try to get in and get out before she showed.

  But when he turned down the drive, it was already too late. He saw the shine off the back bumper and the angle of her legs, not hidden deep enough in the grass.

  20

  PAM PERCHED ON THE TRUNK OF THE CAR, her once-cold beer now only cool. The can sweated where her thighs pursed to hold it. As she’d sat here, hovered above the brush, time stopped, then slowly ticked on again.

  At first, each creak of a tree limb, each flutter of a leaf, seized her muscles and made her nearly dart across the highway. But she’d forced herself to stay put, like stoners in high school trying to outdo each other, seeing how long they could hold a palm to a lighter flame. Then, at some point, she sank in. She sat and listened to the crickets, the soughing of grass and leaves whenever the air moved, the occasional moan of the house’s boards bending against each other.

  The air was warm but not hot, and a brief, wet breeze lifted off the nearby corn and grass. Above, the sky was so clear and the stars so many they looked like lit-up gauze, the Milky Way a fold where the tossed-down fabric doubled over on itself. If life were only this, Pam thought, it could’ve been halfway livable.

  Maybe fifteen more years could be like that. A matter of sinking in. Maybe she’d sink in and naturally stop trying to dart off. All she had to do was hold her palm to a flame for fifteen years.

  A car slowed on the highway and blood thrummed in her ears. Stars sparked off the unlit cherries on the cruiser’s roof. Her chest ached. She didn’t know if it was fear or dread or what. Just a burning kind of ache.

  He turned in the drive and stopped, headlights blinding. When he rolled past, he swung into the space closer to the house. The gear shifted into park and the engine cut to silence.

  “You’re not why I’m here,” he called from his window.

  She could feel the beer. She wasn’t drunk, just a little bold. “Thought you’d have a thing or three to say to me.”

  He was quiet, like he had to think about it. “Cute kid. Where’s your brother-in-law?”

  “They’re out in Thedford. Should be a few days.” She’d heard Paul in the background earlier telling Rick to get some fucking sleep. Rick called from the motel. She didn’t bother saying motel phones cost as much as the rooms. She was still too relieved he was there and she was here.

  Harley’s door opened with its loud pop. His footsteps raked the grass as they passed toward the house.

  He asked how long she’d been here. About two beers, she said. And she hadn’t seen anybody? Heard anything unusual?

  “Wouldn’t still be here if I had.”

  “Well, you got that much sense.”

  He checked the barn, then ran his lamp across the windows of the house. He disappeared around the side. When he’d made a full circle, he walked to the porch. He hesitated, then went up the steps, skipping the third. He opened the door, and his flashlight wavered through the room they’d been in the other night.

  When he came down the steps again, he stood with his back to her, facing the house. “Not sure what you think can happen here.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to find out like that.” God. It sounded like a line straight out of As the World Turns.

  “You meant for me to find out?” The Zippo lid clanked and the barrel rasped.

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” She wished he’d turn around and offer her a cigarette. “I was young,” she said. “When I got married.”

  “Was, huh?”

  He was calling her dumb and naïve. But he also had a point. She was only twenty-four. For a second, she pictured what she’d do if she could tweeze herself out of the life she’d slivered herself into. She’d get a job, her own money. An apartment in town. The one above the laundromat next to Ohrt’s Bar & Grill. Once a week she’d order a takeout burger and fries. She’d have her own place, quiet at night and clean, smelling like detergent and Downy. Maybe some nights he’d show up, slip in when he was supposed to be on patrol, then leave. She’d sleep till morning glowed through the curtains and woke her.

  “I’m sure there was a little more to it. At some point, anyway,” he said.

  There had been. There’d been a time when everything about Rick she now couldn’t see or stand drew her in. That look of his that wrung her out—yearning and sadness all tangled together. It had a mystique, she guessed. About five months into being pregnant, she remembered where she’d seen that look. In a cat out at her folks’ barn who’d gotten into some antifreeze.

  “You ever married?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, tried it.” He used a thumb to scratch his eyebrow.

  “What happened?”

  “Wasn’t exactly one event,” he said. “Know how I asked you down here that night, to keep me from reacting?”

  She said she did.

  “That kind of disposition doesn’t make for a great spouse.”

  She wondered if they’d had kids. The thought stilled her so she scarcely breathed. She rethought Helen Nelson’s tendency to run her mouth. There must’ve been something illegal about leaving Anna in a store and driving away. Endangerment. Abandonment. Pam had left her back at the trailer again. That must’ve been something. Neglect. If he asked, she’d say Anna was at Pam’s parents’ for the night.

  “I don’t feel bad about it, you know,” she said. “What happened.”

  “Not much happened to speak of.” He quit staring at the house and turned around, coming closer. Her stomach throbbed with his steps. They stopped at his trunk. H
e leaned back, propped a heel on his bumper, and looked out the same direction she did, at the vacant highway. “Think Paul said anything yet?”

  “I don’t know.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. She’d wondered all day. She’d wondered what it would mean if he had. But she hadn’t connected any dots. She asked Harley for a cigarette. He held one out without looking and passed her the lighter. “What’s the grudge between you and Paul, anyway?”

  “Mainly? He’s headed to the pen or worse.”

  “Pretty sure we’re all headed for worse.” She lit the cigarette.

  “True enough,” he said. The burning paper of his cigarette gave a quiet hiss. He exhaled blue. “Imagine most of it goes back to his brother’s body we never found.”

  The mention of Dell Junior made her drag a hand through her hair and scrape her nails against the scalp. For being dead almost twenty years, that kid had a way of being everywhere, all the time. The ever-present reason Pam was supposed to be grateful. The reason she wasn’t supposed to get upset about putting butter back at the store or not being able to replace a crappy pair of shoes Anna wore out in a month. No, Dell Junior was always there to remind Pam she should have a goddamn party because none of them was dead yet. “Think people give that kid a little too much credit,” she said. “Paul wasn’t even old enough to remember him.”

  “Might be worse, never knowing anything halfway normal.”

  Pam pictured her dad under the dim lights of the kitchen, the hum of the cattle futures on the radio, the tall ceilings and sturdy block foundation of the house. “If all you ever know is miserable, maybe you don’t know it is.”

  “I suspect Paul’s got a pretty good idea.”

  “Ask me, they’ve milked it. Eighteen years. At a point, you move on.”

  Harley gave a short, curt breath. She couldn’t tell if it was agreement or a mean laugh.

  “Something funny?” she asked him.

  “Moving on.” When he said it, she felt his voice nearer. He was looking at her finally. “You get where we’re standing, right?”

  She did. And she knew then what drew her here to begin with. Harley had a mystique, too. It wasn’t a great omen, mystique. “Saying you never moved on?”

  “I left. Turned thirteen, took work as a farmhand south of Junco. Been through the place once since, when we searched for Dell Junior. But no, nobody moves on from something like that. Or anything else, probably. What’s happened is who you are.”

  “Yeah, well. At least you tried. The Reddicks didn’t. And they never let you forget it.”

  “You can bet nobody lets them forget it.”

  She took the last swig of her beer and slid down the trunk to round the side of the Nova. She wasn’t leaving, but if he thought she was, he made no move to stop her. She reached in and grabbed the third beer she’d brought, tossing the empty on the passenger floor before she walked back to her perch.

  In the moonlight, his shoulders were broad, nearly twice the width of her own.

  Half the times she’d seen him, Harley had his back turned to her. That was what was different about his mystique. Harley might’ve been a wreck in some way, but there was nothing he was trying to wring from her. What made Harley different, what made her still wish that thumb toward the divot of her hip bone, was there was no need in him.

  “You know much about their mother?” he asked.

  Pam wondered if she should tell him. About Virginia taking off. But even if Virginia was a liability to herself, part of Pam now rooted for her. Paul had at least one good point. Virginia had a right.

  Pam shrugged. “She’s pretty distant.”

  He dropped his cigarette in the dirt and ground it out. The house made a groan and shudder.

  His neck straightened and his arm bent, hand reaching near a dark mass she realized was his gun. He didn’t touch it. Finally, he moved. He headed for the steps.

  Pam thought to tell him it was all right. The place did that. She’d been hearing the same sounds since she’d come out here. She made a stride to tell him so, but he reached back a hand, fingers spread to say stay put. It was the same gesture he’d made the other night, when the animal in the grass had been Paul.

  He went up the stairs. His boots kept tight to the edge, near the railing, and again he skipped the third. When he crossed the porch, only one board made a short creak. Otherwise his steps were silent. The same way hers were when she’d walked down the hall of the trailer before coming out here. It was the kind of silence that came from knowing every spot too soft and weak to take weight without sighing. He opened the door and his back disappeared into the black space of the entryway.

  She waited for the movement of his lamp beam across the front room walls. It didn’t light.

  Time stopped again. A pathetic breeze, not cool, lifted the air. He was still in there, still with no light.

  She walked to the base of the steps. Then she slipped upward, skipping the third, and crossed the threshold.

  21

  RICK WATCHED PAUL SLEEP. He didn’t know how long he’d watched Paul sleep. They’d gotten a room with two full-sized beds at the Broken Wheel. Paul stayed out at the job for once, said he was too tired from laying carpet to drive back. Rick knew there was something more to it, but he didn’t know what. It was that something that was too big, too close to see.

  While they’d worked, Rick caught Paul staring at him. Watching him. He’d watched him all night, whenever Rick messed with the TV antenna, trying to stop the high-pitched whine. The set had whined through the news and through Richard Pryor on The Tonight Show. It’d whined through the national anthem, pitch rising each time the screen flooded white with one or another building in Washington. Like the marble buzzed with its own sound. Every time Rick got up to adjust the rabbit ears, he turned around to Paul staring. Watching. Paul wanted Rick to go to sleep. He’d kept saying it. Get some fucking sleep. So Rick pretended to. He’d pretended to sleep till Paul drifted off. Then he’d sat up. He clutched his knees at the edge of the full-sized mattress.

  Full. The bed felt empty as hell. Rick stared and waited, like Paul might talk in his sleep. He didn’t. He just lay there and snored, all ropy and golden. His skin looked painted on. Shiny like brass. Probably the light from the parking lot lamppost.

  The phone sat on the nightstand. Next to a rubber Snoopy soap holder. It’d been in the bathroom of the dead-cowboy trailer. Rick didn’t know why. He didn’t know why some ranch hand had a rubber Snoopy soap holder. But there it was.

  He wanted to call her again. He wouldn’t. He’d spent four dollars and seventy-five cents between all the calls earlier. Pam would likely waste the call fighting about how much it cost.

  The van’s tank was near-empty. No place would be open to fill it. He’d be running on fumes by Halsey. The pickup’s tank was full, though. Paul had filled it on the way to the motel.

  Paul’s keys sat on the nightstand beside Rick’s. Rick would leave his own. He had a spare key to the trailer in his wallet anyway. He picked up Paul’s keys slowly, so they didn’t jingle. He grabbed Snoopy.

  Two hours in, the pickup’s headlights made a hole of yellow light above the pavement. The road was even thinner than it’d been on the way out. Tighter fit. The pickup couldn’t fit between the lines. There was no way in hell the road was up to code.

  Something streaked past him. A pair of bright white legs, it looked like, walking in the knee-deep brush. He let off the gas. He leaned forward and watched the passenger-side mirror. No legs. He braked and checked the mirror again. Still no legs. He threw the gearshift in park.

  It could’ve been somebody who needed help. Shit. It could’ve been Mom out wandering, combing the ditches. Then again, it could’ve been somebody up to no good.

  He’d play it safe. He lifted the shotgun from the rack, opened the door, and hopped down into a squat. He waddled the length of the bed to the tailgate. His heart pumped hard. The pump made his arms shake. He slid the barrel out first, then looked, q
uick, around the bumper. The road and grass lit red in the taillights. There was nobody. Nobody he could see, anyway.

  He put his back to the pickup bed’s side and stayed low. “Mom?” he yelled out.

  Nothing.

  “Mom, that you?”

  No answer. Not even the sound of legs swishing in the grass. Whoever it was had hunkered down to wait him out. That, or nobody was there.

  He rose just high enough his head was still hidden by the pickup bed. He ran back to the door. He jumped in and put the gun in the rack. He breathed out the shakes. Then he squealed the tires against the pavement.

  22

  IN THE DARK FRONT ROOM, the blue glow of moonlight from the kitchen entryway burned at Harley’s side. There was still no one here he could sense. Surely no chain-smoker. What he’d heard was settling. The settling of a place grown old and tired, turning to dust. It was the sound of a house doing all somebody had opted out of doing with a shotgun shell, not twenty feet from where he stood. He wished the house would go on and get the lead out. Collapse. Let the grass claim it.

  He heard the pats of Pam’s feet cross the boards of the porch. When she stood behind him, he could feel her. The presence of a person with blood coursing through veins. A body with thin electric signals firing inside.

  “It’s just the house,” she whispered. “The sound. It’s been doing it all night.”

  “Get outside anyway. Get in your car and drive home.” He waited. She didn’t move. “Nobody’s here,” he told her. “Still need to do a walk-through.”

  She made no move to leave. She’d go with him, she said. There was a finality in the way she said it.

  He felt for her wrist. He gripped it. Where he could feel between the blank spots of his calluses, her skin was warm and dry.

  The number of paces from one wall’s edge to the next seemed fewer, as though the house had shrunk. At the kitchen entry he made a hard left so all he saw of the room was the back door. The filmy panes that looked out on the yard were dull in the moonlight. He made three paces he was sure were once five. He took another hard left into the narrow, steep stairway and felt a pull from her. Not hard, not meant to keep him from moving forward. The resistance was slight. She was dwelling on the space at his back.