These Silent Woods: A Novel(35)

“I don’t get down there much,” he says. He shimmies down from the roof and hands Finch the hammer. “That ought to do it, neighbor.”

I press my thumb and forefinger into Finch’s shoulder and she wrinkles her nose and bares her teeth. “What?” she hisses.

I’ve explained to her before that she doesn’t need to go sharing every detail of our life with him. That she can have a filter. What I haven’t told her is that he knows about the thing I did to keep us together, that he knows we’re hiding, that he’s had us in a vise all these years and there’s nothing I can do about it but be civil enough toward him and hope he doesn’t decide to make a phone call and end everything for us. He’s a neighbor, not a friend—there’s a difference. But of course I haven’t laid this out for her. She adores Scotland, trusts him. Which is precisely what makes me so uncomfortable. Precisely what makes him so dangerous.





SEVENTEEN




The next evening, as dusk folds in on the cabin, I slip into my coat and pull on my hat and boots, then step outside. The sky is low and light gray and ominous, like it’s holding snow and waiting, which is all right because we’re ready, the cabin is stocked with supplies, and besides that, a good snow would keep that girl from coming back, coming closer. I tilt my head to the sky as if to say, Go on, then. Let her rip.

Finch shuffles out, grinning, decked in her new camouflage gear. She points to the back of the house. “I need to check my traps.”

“It’ll be dark in a few minutes.”

“You know I have to check them. What if there’s an animal, suffering? That’s the first rule of trapping. Always check your traps. That’s what you taught me.”

“Take them down,” I tell her, nodding, and she scuttles off. “And hurry,” I call after her.

I pry the lid off the bucket of chicken feed, which makes the girls get extra wound up and pushy, wanting it. I toss three handfuls into the fenced-in area. At the well pump I fill a bucket for them and then dump it into their pan.

“The way I see it, as soon as the snow comes, we’re in the clear for a while,” I tell the chickens as they peck at the ground. “Me and Finch and Walt Whitman, we’ll hunker down here and just wait it out.” After they’ve had their fill, I get my stick and use it to encourage them up the ramp and into their coop. “Go on in now, ladies.”

I head up to the porch and decide to sit down for a few minutes, take a breather. Slide the Ruger out of my pocket and set it beside me. Sit with my back to the post and stretch out my legs. A junco darts into the feeder, then another. The woods are still and gray, no wind at all, and the birds are plain and lovely and reliably indifferent.

This place—it has made me whole. Well, as whole as I will ever be, after what I saw.

After what I did.



* * *



We were on our third tour when things really went south. Everything wrong from the start, beginning with trouble on the flight to Germany: something bad with the plane. We had to deplane and then we sat around for eleven hours. Waiting, playing solitaire, fielding questions. Some people playing games on their phones, anything to pass the time. There was something about that, thinking you’re leaving, and then not going, that was hard. You would get yourself into a certain mindset, shift gears, so to speak, and then you had to change back. Plus everyone knows that it’s right after leave that people get killed. You come home, you let your guard down, you die. Well, after sitting in the airport, we finally got rerouted and sent through Morocco of all places, then Anders got some kind of horrendous stomach bug that spread to the rest of us, so by the time we actually hit the ground in Kabul, we were dehydrated and jet-lagged and worn out. Four continents in three days and nobody had slept hardly at all, other than Jake, who could sleep anywhere, any time of day, God love him.

Anyhow. It would’ve been good for us to take a day or two to rest up, get a handle on ourselves, but no time for that. Five hours after we got there, they sent us out. We were reliable, we’d all been there before, they were counting on us, they needed us. That’s what we were told. So we juiced up on energy drinks and coffee and packed up our gear. By midnight we were heading west in a Humvee on a search-and-rescue. Two of our guys had lost contact the day before and we were supposed to find them.

Well. Find them, we did, but they were dead, strung up in the street and a sorry sight, an image that I will never shake off. We radioed it in. But meanwhile it was like the bodies were bait for us, like the insurgents had known we’d come for them. We were tucked in along a building and we needed to cross a wide street to get back to the Humvee, which was about a mile out. I said I’d go first and that’s when Jake stepped on the IED and then they knew where we were and everyone started shooting and the two of us got separated from the rest of our team.

I slung Jake over my shoulder and we ran for cover, hunkered down in a dark building. I set him on a table and took a look at him, and it was worse than I’d thought: he was in poor shape and bleeding bad. I dug in my pack, poured coagulate on the wounds, pulled out a shard of wood that was stuck in his armpit. Part of his face was gone, too. That was the hardest part, seeing his eye and part of his cheek ripped right off. I gave him some water and then held his hand and sat next to him.

After a while the skirmish died down and people were back on the streets, resuming their lives because that’s how it went. When things got heated, civilians would scoot off the streets, and real quick, it would be clear and quiet except for those of us who were fighting. But once things settled down, people were back out again, resuming their everyday business, which always struck me as strange, how they could live like that, though I guess they had no choice.