Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Thirty-Two

I know I’m about to buy it. I think of the teardrop lake high up in the Missions where Ruby and I made our troth. I know it waits for me and eventually for her and maybe for Fannie Mae as well. I believe the world to be a cathedral shaped by a divine hand, and if this is true, I should fear death no more than I should fear returning to the home of my birth. As William Shakespeare said in Henry IV, “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.”

I wait for the blow that will shatter my skull and brain like a flowerpot. But it doesn’t happen. Kale is still clenching the bat, except in a defensive position, staring at the fog puffing off the Jocko. “What’s goin’ on here?” he says.

The fog thickens and rolls closer to the cottage. It’s steel gray, like curds of smoke from an industrial incinerator. Then a huge reddish-orange glow blooms inside it, and I see the major and his troopers and Fannie Mae gathered together, firelight flickering on their faces. All of the soldiers are in dress blues. The major has pulled his sword from its scabbard and is resting the blade on his shoulder.

Got yourself in a fix, Mr. Broussard?

“What are you doing with my daughter?”

Spoils of war?

“My ass,” I say.

How about a trade? I give you back your daughter and take this lovely bag of garbage off your hands.

“That’s it?”

Then you come along, too. We’ll make a frolic.

Jimmie Kale’s expression is like a bowl of porridge. “Deal me out,” he says.

I can see Fannie Mae clearly now. She mouths her words slowly. It’s a scam, Pops. Tell him to eat shit.

“Your record is a bit disturbing, Major,” I say. “I don’t think negotiations with you are a good idea.”

Have I ever lied to you?

“Not to my knowledge. But your pretense as a soldier simply carrying out orders doesn’t wash.”

You don’t think the Rebs were cruel? Sending the slaves to the auction block after Lee took Chambersburg, Jeb Stuart rounding them up outside Washington?

“Those were despicable acts,” I reply.

Let’s put things a little closer to home. You didn’t see your F-86s mow down Korean peasants trying to flee the bombing of their cities?

“Yes, I did.”

You liked that, did you?

“You make your case, Major, but you’re still the bloody instrument of an iniquitous cause.”

He thrusts his sword angrily back into the scabbard. What should I do with you, sir?

“Whatever you wish. My guess is you don’t have any power over me. Nor do you have power over my daughter.”

Fannie Mae smiles.

I’m vexed, Mr. Broussard. I’ve treated you with dignity and respect.

“You’re no different from Kale, Major. You have spread misery and death among innocent people. You forced them into freezing water and burned their tepees and blankets and clothes and food. Few, if any, ever visited more pain on the Blackfeet.”

His jaw is clenched, his face twitching as though each of my words is pricking his skin. I’ll be back. I promise a resolution of this. In the meantime I’ll put into abeyance your troubles with this pitiful peckerwood. I will also ensure your daughter’s safety.

“No,” I say. “You must release her, Major. She doesn’t belong with you.”

Mr. Broussard, it’s you who’s the problem. Your daughter extended her stay far beyond the time usually allotted for those in her situation. Pardon me for saying this, but you’re not the good father you think you are.

With the flick of a salute, the fog closes around him and his men and Fannie Mae, then recedes into a horizontal vortex two hundred yards up the Jocko. The baseball bat held by Kale is ripped from his hands by an invisible force and sails like a helicopter blade over the roofs of the cottages down below.

I pick up Grandfather’s pistol and wipe off the mud. Kale is in a stupor, hardly able to walk. “Check yourself into counseling and tell the therapist what happened today,” I say. “I bet he’ll get a laugh out of it.”

Then I get in my car and drive home, wondering if I will ever see my little girl again.

It’s late Thursday afternoon. The rain has been unrelenting. High winds have knocked down power lines all across the county. The fires on the res and up Lolo Pass have put Ruby on double shifts. I have screwed candles in bottle necks and placed them in saucers and lit them in the living room and kitchen. The room is alive with shadows, all of them somehow threatening. The beating I took from Kale has left its mark. My ribs and right arm and my back ache; a bruise the color of an eggplant has spread across my forehead and the bridge of my nose. I sit in front of the fireplace and wait, my loaded M1 propped against the couch, Grandfather’s pistol on the footstool.

For what or whom do I wait? My enemies. I know that’s a broad statement, and perhaps once again I’m being grandiose. But I know they will come, in the same way a soldier digging a hole with his e-tool knows he has entered into a contract he cannot rescind. Though the hole in the earth may be protective in intention, it is also a grave, and the soldier knows this, knows it is not natural, but accepts with each thrust into the dirt the commitment he has made to his country and to his enemy, one who will validate his side of the contract as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Previously I mentioned the bugles the Chinese blew in the hills to keep us awake. I welcomed them. If they wanted us awake, chances were they would not attack. Of course, sometimes they mixed up the signals to keep us confused. But silence on the firing line at night can be like fingernails screeching on a blackboard.

As the sun dies, I dial Ruby’s cell phone and leave another message. It’s my third. Her husband is a weak and angry man; he is also an addict and, I suspect, controlled by Jimmie Kale, and I fear what he may do to her. My call goes immediately to voicemail.

By seven p.m. the sky is completely dark, the candles guttering when the wind steals under the doors. I am certain my visitors will call upon me before sunrise. Am I prescient? Not at all. The enemies I have described to you are of a particularly predictable kind. At some point in their lives they turned off the light in their souls. From then on they stopped keeping score. But each knows when his time is up. They form symbiotic relationships with their own ilk and seek a host that is already purulent. You’ve met them, either individually or as a group. Tell me, when you looked into their eyes, did your blood freeze, did your throat go dry? It’s a frightening moment.

Other than Ruby, the array of people who have come to my house from the vandalization of my barn door to the present had a self-serving reason. However, I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s simply greed or celebriphilia. Perhaps I’m simply an adverb in their lives.

The swastika on my barn was the childish exercise of xenophobes. The attempted break-in of my house by Jack and Clayton Wetzel was obviously more complex and contradictory in purpose. I’m sure they were the same pair caught on surveillance cameras burglarizing small businesses in Lolo. They seem to have the standards of petty thieves. Except their weapons were sophisticated and murderous in capability and automatically exposed them to far more time in prison should they be caught.

The Wetzels told me they only wanted to steal food. Just as Jimmie Kale only wanted to buy my ranch. Just as Ginny Stokes only wanted to be the film producer of my books. But I remember a particular detail now that seemed unimportant at the time. When I knocked the Wetzels around with a broom in the barn, they had hay and chicken manure smeared all over their clothes. But did they acquire it before I took them into the barn or afterward? I can’t remember. I put another log on the fire and wonder who else might be outside, perhaps parked by the river, perhaps walking through the puddles in the side yard. Ray Bronson? Ginny Stokes? Jack Wetzel? Jimmie the Digger? Sister Ginny’s badass bikers? Or John Fenimore Culpepper?

I feel myself drifting off to sleep. Do you have those moments when you surrender your worries and let go of the earth and float away to a place where the stars look like a highway of crushed ice? It’s a safe place, in all probability the womb, surrounded by the humming of your mother’s blood, a cloak that is invulnerable. That’s where I find myself now.

I feel the warmth of the fireplace in my sleep and a song playing on a radio. The song is “Dear One,” sung by Larry Finnegan. It was released in ’61, but it was really a memorial to the previous decade. In it, the mailman comes to the singer’s door, as one might deliver a draft notice. But the mailman gives the singer the last letter his girlfriend will ever write to him. She has given her heart to another, but the singer accepts what she has done and does not condemn her for it. The sense of loss in the song is enormous. But the loss is not about the girl; it’s about an era.

I wake up suddenly and expect the song to disappear in the cold and mundane reality of the room. Instead it continues to play; in fact, the driving beat of the song rises in volume. The logs in the fireplace have turned to ash, the candles I lit now piles of beaded wax. The back door is open and the rain is blowing inside the house. I get up from the chair and put on my coat and pick up Grandfather’s pistol from the footstool. A red Ford truck is parked in front, high beams tunneling through the rain, radio blaring, windshield wipers slapping time.

I open the front door, squinting, trying to see past the glare of the headlights. The driver’s door opens, and the little blond girl who called herself Mary is standing in the rain, smiling.

“I’ll shoot you,” I say.

No you won’t, she says. You’re a fraidy-cat.

I cock the Peacemaker and fire. The bullet blows out the glass in the driver’s door. She laughs in my face and disappears.

Now I remember exactly where she was standing in the backyard. In front of the chicken house after its interior had been destroyed and the chickens torn apart and the floor and walls soaked with a stench I associated with a ditch in Louisiana where the whores poured out their waste buckets. The same place Jack Wetzel wanted to put new shingles on.

Ginny Stokes called me dumb? That was kind.

“Dear One” is still blaring through the speakers in the Ford. The passenger door opens and a man gets out. A leather belt is cinched around his throat and hangs on his chest like a necktie. They fucked us, Aaron, he says. Can you get us out of this?

It’s Jeremiah McNally, named for a prophet and now wearing a symbol that could have been the top half of a shepherd’s hook. “How can I do that?” I ask.

Let the Old People go.

“From Ruby’s cellar?”

It’s only right. They’ve paid for their bad deeds. You’re a kind man. Don’t stop being who you are.

“Are you really Jeremiah?”

Sure as you’re talking to me.

“You eviscerated the waitress?”

Only after she was dead. I wanted to hook up her passing with the murders on the res. We’d had a flat, and she wouldn’t shut up while I was changing the tire, just kept talking about her pregnancy, and finally I got up and hit her. Don’t look at me like that. Nice woman, but my ears were throbbing.

“You hit her with the jack?”

I wasn’t thinking clear. Shit happens. How about doing a solid for the Old People? Baker will give you back your daughter.

“Why is it I don’t believe anything you’re saying?”

You’re not going to help me?

“No. I don’t believe you’re Jeremiah McNally.”

People grow into who they always were. I got it on with Spotted Horse. It was quite a ride.

“You’re a liar.”

She was asleep. I made her come. That’s what an incubus does. Ask her.

I step backward and close and bolt the door, then go down to the basement and open a burlap bag and drop a big-battery flashlight and four emergency flares in it, and pick up a mattock and a two-gallon plastic container of gasoline, and head out the back door.