Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Nine

At two a.m. I hear the wind, and pine needles sifting off the roof, and the clicking of tiny pieces of snow against the windowpanes in my upstairs bedroom. I stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep, wondering if I have given myself over to a bizarre frame of reference for those who cannot contend with the realities of ordinary life. I lay my forearm across my eyes and try to keep my mind empty and am almost on the edge of sleep when I hear a clinking sound in the yard. Then I hear it again, this time louder.

I put on my slippers and go to the window. The moon is bright, the remaining leaves on the maples stiff with frost, the ground frozen and definable, empty of movement. Then I see a wood rabbit hop through the yard and disappear in the shadows. The wind begins to gust, strong enough to rattle my window and bounce a cardboard box across the yard, but there is no sound from the cans I strung between the trees. There’s a rail fence between the yard and the barn. I tied the trip string to one of the posts. The string is broken, and the cans and string lie on the ground like a broken worm.

I move to the edge of the window so I don’t silhouette. Two men are standing by the chicken house in the moonlight, evidently undecided about their next move. They seem out of context, inadequately dressed in hoodies and tennis shoes and thin khakis that flatten against their legs in the wind.

I have no telephone on the second floor. I go downstairs and take my .45 from the stuffed chair and go into the kitchen. Through the glass in the back door, I can see them crossing the yard, one gripping a chromed semi-automatic with two hands, the other carrying a hammer whose head is wrapped in cloth, a roll of duct tape, and a handgun with the squat ugly lines and extended magazine of an Uzi. Both men are thin, young, with narrow, pale faces and dark hair that bunches up inside their hoodies.

I can call 911 and report what is happening at my house while I lose the visual advantage over the intruders. I dial the emergency number, leave the phone off the hook on the drainboard, and go into my office, which gives me a side view of the men as they approach the kitchen door.

The moon slips behind a bank of snow clouds and drops the backyard into darkness. I pull back the slide on the .45 and ease a round in the chamber. My adrenaline has kicked into overdrive; a brass band is playing in my head; my saliva tastes like WD-40.

In one way or another, all the things I love are within my touch: photographs of my daughter and my parents, at least a thousand books on the shelves, my first editions and those of friends in a glass case, my Gibson acoustic guitar, my Fenwick fly rod, my father’s baseball glove from his time in the Texas bush league, my boyhood collection of baseball cards and arrowheads and coins and Civil War bullets, all symbols of the America I grew up in, whether Norman Rockwell invented it or not.

Only a few feet and a wall separate me from the young men in the yard. But the difference in our worlds and cultural experience is enormous. In my teens I was on a road gang with a dozen boys my age, slinging gravel from cain’t-see to cain’t-see behind a truck that sprayed tar in our faces, oversight courtesy of a mounted gunbull like a black cutout pasted against a molten-red sun, our reflections shrunken inside his mirrored sunglasses. The boys I stacked time with were inured to pain and abuse and tougher than I, but I was spared, and most of them probably fell by the wayside. Perhaps the young men on the other side of my wall are like those boys of years ago. Did their parents love them? What a laugh. What kind of orphanage were they in, one that made them polish the floors by wrapping rags around their knees? A tiny tick of a dial in the back of their heads could have made all the difference. Am I willing to take their lives? By the same token, am I willing to let them take mine?

One of them begins taping the window on the kitchen door, preparing to break it with the cloth-wrapped hammer and ease the shards out of the frame. I put on a battered Stetson and a canvas coat that hangs on the back of my desk chair, unbolt my office door, and step out on the flagstones.

“How you doin’, fellows? I’m the owner of this house, and I have an army .45 pointed at your backs. It is my belief that you are breaking into my home with the intention of doing me harm. That means I can blow you all over the yard and go back to sleep and in the morning hose you off the walk, and the authorities will yawn when I call in the 911. Very gently set down the hammer and tape and the chrome job and the Uzi. Do it all at once.”

Both of them are motionless, their eyes on each other.

“You have two seconds, then I’ll shoot both of you,” I say.

They half-squat, putting down their weapons with the care of two aerialists balancing themselves on a high-wire.

“Now step backward, please.”

“No problem,” one of them says.

“Now get on your knees and pull out your wallets and place them on the ground.”

Again they obey.

“Are you the guys who have been terrorizing Lolo?”

No reply.

“Let’s see your ink.”

They look at each other.

“Want me to say it again?” I ask.

One is a little taller and older than the other. “It’s cold,” he says.

“It’s a lot colder when you’re six feet down,” I say.

They pull off their hoodies and roll up their shirtsleeves. The moon has broken free from the clouds. Both boys are unnaturally pale and have pits in their cheeks. Their arms are like pipe stems, their skin almost luminescent, twined with blue serpents and sprinkled with SS lightning bolts and small death’s-heads.

“Did anyone ever tell you the Nazis lost the war?”

My words seem to bounce off them. I doubt they could find Germany on a map.

“You look like brothers.”

No response.

“Who sent y’all?”

“Nobody,” the taller boy replies.

“I got it. Just passing by,” I say. “Put your jackets on. We’re going to go inside the barn, and you’re going to tell me what I want to know. If you don’t, I’m going to bury you up to your necks in my compost pile. Lace your fingers on top of your heads.”

I suspect neither of them is over twenty. Their tats represent the symbology of the dumbest people on earth. Their histories never change: petty theft, joyriding, possession, intent to sell, probation, juvie, reform school, then an adult facility where they are either raped or they rape others. We cross the yard into the barn. I jerk the chain on a bare bulb that hangs from the ceiling.

“Sit on the floor.”

“Yes, sir,” the taller boy says.

They slide down the wall and pull up their knees. I stick the .45 in the back of my belt. The safety is on. The eyes of the boys are like glass. “We weren’t gonna hurt anybody,” the taller one says. He tries to smile. “We thought maybe we’d get some food.”

“With an Uzi and a cannon?” I say.

“It’s just to scare,” he says. “The Uzi is semiauto. I mean, it’s legal. Right?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Boosted it,” he says.

“Where?”

“A pawnshop in Idaho.”

“You guys just attempted an armed robbery,” I say. “That can get you twenty years. You’re willing to risk twenty years for some food?”

They stare at the lightbulb, the pupils of their eyes dilated to the size of dimes.

“Did you fellows see that news story about somebody putting swastikas on the Anne Frank memorial in Boise a couple of days ago?”

“The what memorial?” the younger boy says.

“Y’all didn’t stick a little meth up your nose, did you?” I say.

Their eyes travel all over the barn, as if the conversation is of no more interest. Their trousers are smeared with hay and chicken excrement. They smell like urine and look like they might fall asleep.

“You know a woman named Virginia Stokes or a man by the name of John Fenimore Culpepper?”

They shake their heads as though they have just searched their souls and cannot say, to save their lives, they have ever heard those names before.

“I bet Ms. Stokes has an interesting background,” I say.

“We don’t know anybody by that name,” the smaller boy says.

“You’re both lying, but I suspect you’ve been doing that all your lives,” I say. “Here’s my problem, fellows. I don’t want to turn you over to the police. I’d rather shoot you and dump you up in the high country and let the griz have a picnic. Know why that is?”

They shake their heads, this time in earnest.

“I had a daughter named Fannie Mae Broussard. She got hurt by some bad people, but they skated. So I’ve got a bias about the system.”

They look at each other. The younger boy lifts his eyes to mine. “Fannie Mae was your daughter?”

“You knew her?”

“Just around. Concerts at Caras Park and shit,” the older boy says. “She was big on animals. She’d bring her pups to the concert and feed them Popsicles.”

I stare at them a long time. “If you guys feel that way toward her, why are you robbing and terrifying people?”

They drop their eyes.

“It’s not a difficult question,” I say.

The older boy picks at his nails; both of them are sullen, as are all recidivists when forced to examine the vacuity of their lives. I kick the older boy in the foot. He flinches. “You’re here to pop me, aren’t you?” I say.

“No, sir,” he replies. “We don’t hurt people.”

I kick the other boy in the foot. “How about you? You think it’s manly to kill people?” He doesn’t answer, and I kick him again. “You want me to submerge you in the stock tank?”

He looks up, his face pinched. The thinness of his voice makes me think of a stiletto: “Then do it, you arrogant son of a bitch.”

I step back. He wipes his nose on his sleeve. The older boy tilts his head forward and spits a long stream of tobacco juice between his legs.

“Tell you what,” I say. I open the tack-room door and click on the light and gaze at the bridles and halters and coiled ropes and saddle blankets hung in a row on wood pegs, and also at the snow shovels and garden rakes and pickaxes and posthole diggers and hayforks propped against the wall. The two boys can see me through the door. I pick up a hayfork and touch the tips of the tines, ground into conical points. I lean the hayfork against a snowblower and reach into the shadows and remove a broom from a steel hook.

I step back outside the tack room and close the door behind me. “Get up and lean against the wall,” I say.

“What are you gonna do?” the older boy says.

“You’re about to find out.”

“Look, man—” he begins.

“Don’t address me as ‘man.’ ”

The younger boy says nothing. His eyes are fixed on mine, liquid and brimming with malevolence. With my left hand, I pull the .45 from the back of my belt.

They get to their feet and prop their arms against the wall.

“Spread your feet,” I say.

“Sir, what are you doing?” the older boy asks.

“Shut up,” I say.

The younger boy hangs his head as though he’s nodded off or is long inured to abuse. The older boy twists his neck and tries to see what I’m doing. He starts to cry.

“Who sent you?” I ask.

“Santa Claus, asshole,” the younger boy says. “Do whatever you’re gonna do. And fuck yourself while you’re at it, you cocksucker.”

“You might regret that,” I say. “But look at things another way. If you’re stand-up, why take somebody else’s fall?”

“Oh, you’re con-wise,” the younger boy says. “We’re really impressed.”

“You guys are a lot of laughs,” I say.

I sweep their clothes clean of hay and chicken manure, from their shoulders down to their heels, slamming them against the wall when they resist, jabbing the broom end into their necks and faces. Both of them roll up in balls.

I blow out my breath. “That’s it, fellows,” I say. “You just got reborn.”

“Reborn?” the younger boy repeats.

“You got it, partner. Your weapons and your hammer and tape and your wallets stay here. You’re free. The next time you’re in church, burn a candle for Fannie Mae.”

“What’s the catch?” the older boy says.

“You’ll figure it out,” I say.

I walk back into the house and bolt the door and leave them stupefied in the yard. The cops come by later, but I tell them my 911 was a false alarm and apologize for bothering them.