Cold Quiet Country
Clayton Lindemuth
Language: English
Pages: 326
ISBN: 1849821666
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
revolver with a long barrel. The grips are white and the metal looks like silver bleu cheese or horsehair pottery. I search for a marking that will tell me which box contains the right bullets. CHAPTER ELEVEN Tree roots had lifted the sidewalk panels. Gwen kept her gaze to her feet as she and Liz Sunday walked past the sheriff’s station. Sunlight broke through the leaves and danced like butterflies on the grass and the cement sidewalk. Gwen kicked a bottle cap and watched it bounce over
eight years back. Every state’s got a gang of men with guns and tattered U.S. Constitutions stowed next to their dog-eared John Birch pamphlets. Bitching about government makes men happy, and in recent times, country folk have been fucking euphoric. Rumor was the boys in my neck of the woods were getting rowdy and ready to switch gears from talking to walking. I don’t mind ten men at a hunting camp chucking bottles and blasting away. Any fella dumb enough to get drunk around a crew with guns
leaping to one side and it’s fifty-fifty whether they guess right. Burt and I moved partway in a circle, only five feet apart. “You know there’s a special place in hell for men like you,” I said. He smiled. I swooped to a maple shaft sticking through the snow, the end of a branch cleaned from a limb, but it was frozen to the ground. Burt didn’t move, only grinned, and his eyes worked sideways. “I’m going to leave you for the wild dogs,” he said. “The coyotes.” I bolted into the woods. The
every few minutes an easy breeze came through the hollow and replaced the stink with pine and snow. I watched the moon from when it first appeared between tree limbs, sometimes no more than a flash of silver behind drooping branches dressed in icing, until it rose high into the sky. Sometimes I nodded off, but the dying fire always brought me back because my bare feet got cold until I threw on more wood. Eventually I slipped on my dry socks and toasty, but damp boots, and stretched the aches
the right. I stand beside the window and peer steeply to the ground. Thirty feet from the house, a man hides behind a tree. From the angle of his rifle, he’s the one who shot into the house. Ready to take my life when he doesn’t know what he knows? So self-sure he’s ready to kill? Wrong and all? Why doesn’t he call me out, if he intends to take me into custody? Fuck him. I cross the room, down the hall and slip into the last room. At the window, the angle gives me a clear field to the man’s