The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Kent Meyers Rodney Valen’s Second Life

From The Georgia Review

We always knew the crazy sonofabitch was out there. Don’t know how many times people told me of waking at night to the sound of his rifle. Hell of a way to be jerked out of dreaming. Shane Valen was a weird son of a bitch from a long line of weird sonsabitches. Not that anyone ever went out and caught him in their headlights bending over an antelope or mulie he’d just poached. Just guts stinking and shining in a cloud of flies some hot, bright afternoon. We all knew who’d done it. Goddamn it, Greggy, they’d say to me, can’t you do something about that goofy bastard?

Tried once. Turned on my rack and pulled the sonofabitch over — this was in the middle of the afternoon — just for a friendly chat. Shane, I said, I been hearing reports you’re driving at night without headlights. Reports you’re trespassing on land all over the county. Lot of people complaining, Shane.

He stared out his windshield so long I wondered was he deaf. So long I wondered if I’d really spoke. Finally he says, Anyone cut me?

Cut you? I asked.

Trespassin’? Anyone cut me trespassin’?

Hell, wasn’t nobody in the goddamn county hadn’t come across Shane’s pickup parked along some back road at night with Shane behind the wheel and his rifle across his chest. Crazy bastard’d stare right into your headlights, never look away, so your lights’d bounce up and down on washboards, say, and his eyes’d be going on and off red, like a snapshot from a cheap camera. Spooky as hell. And you knew damn well he’d been creeping along, poaching, and saw your headlights from miles away, so he pulled off the road like that. A piece of the darkness. You knew damn well, too, if you’d go over the next hill and cut your own lights and come back, you’d find that sonofabitch moving along slow, feeling the edges of the road in the dark like one of his goddamned snakes, and seeing things out there in the night no one else can see.

Well, Shane, I said, they ain’t so much caught you, but—

You cut me?

No, I ain’t caught you either. Point is, though, you got neighbors, and—

You ketch me, we kin speak agin. I’m goin’ now.

And he did. Put his pickup in gear and left me standing there — the only person ever did that. And hell, I let’m go. I hadn’t cut Shane doing anything. Couldn’t even catch the sonofabitch actually driving at night without headlights. He always saw me first.

Wish I could’ve caught him, though. Maybe this last mess wouldn’t have happened. Thai’s the trouble with being a peace officer — you’re always after-the-fact.

Everyone figured Rodney, Shane’s father, would end the Valen line. How the hell Rodney managed to find a wife’s beyond anyone. Blame the freeway. Couple years after they finished it, Rodney got on it and ended up in Minneapolis, comes back telling about a woman he met in a bar. Dream on, broomstick cowboy. But two weeks later a car with Minnesota plates shows up here, and not some hippie girl looking for a sweat lodge. Of course, this is all before my time. I’m just telling what I been told, filling in the story that makes the rest of it make sense — if any of it makes sense at all.

In the car is Sarah Cornwall from Minneapolis, asking directions to the Valen ranch. And — no one could believe it — she marries Rodney and takes eight years to figure out what everyone else already knew, then gets back in her car and returns to Minneapolis, leaving seven-year-old Shane to Rodney’s care — in other words, not much care at all.

I was a few years older than Shane, and what I remember most about him is how little there is to remember. Never knew if he was going to be in school or not, it was all haphazard with him, so I remember him more by his absence than his presence. Even then, stories were, he was out prowling. Spent more time with animals than with people, slept outside more than he slept in. Those stories about rattlesnakes crawling into sleeping bags for warmth? Shane maybe had that happen enough he figured it was normal. And maybe the snakes did, too.

Not too surprising he’d grow up and decide on a career in poaching, even if we can’t prove that’s what he did. But his letter writing — no one knew a goddamn thing about that until his mother returned and the whole business burst out of that ramshackle house of his into the light of day. Crazy thing. You think you know a man, but it turns out what you think’s his secret’s just keeping anyone from thinking he’s got others. Like a black hole. So goddamn invisible it’s gone right through to being visible again. To where everything is pointing to it, things warping around it, deforming. But unless you got a notion of what a black hole is, a theory of why, you just think, hell, ain’t that an odd region of space.

Shane always had his pickup lights off and his house lights on. You could see the damn thing lit up, every room, off the Red Medicine Creek road. Didn’t matter what time of night. Didn’t matter if Shane’s pickup was there or not. Lights were always on. So what the hell was the crazy sonofabitch doing?

She brought the letters back with her. I found them inside her car, tied up in a ribbon. Trying to figure it out, you don’t know how far back to go. Maybe back to when Sarah up and left Shane. Or maybe to whatever the hell in Rodney appealed to her that got her here from Minneapolis. Or maybe you got to go clear back down the Valen line, to when Rodney’s great-grandfather came out here and managed to wrest that patch of land away from the Indians and the government and claim it as his own. There’s a sonofabitch still being talked about. Story is, he once whipped his wife with barb-wire for not having a meal ready on time. And you look at the old records, it’s goddamn odd how many kids in that family died young. All over that Valen ranch, kids buried. Little bundles of baby planted. Like saplings dead in a dry wind. You go out there, you wonder what you’re stepping on.

It wasn’t just Shane himself spooked people, wasn’t just those red eyes behind that windshield. It was his whole family history — like that old ancestor never had been wholly buried. It ain’t pretty, thinking of a woman whipped with wire. There’s stories she’s still seen, with children following her, none of them speaking a word. I can’t afford to put much stock in them stories. That’s in the past. Had nothing to do with Shane. Maybe. Just ghosts in the night, maybe. Bleeding mothers and dead children and an old man who finally got his hot meal, by God. I don’t know. All I’ve really got are the letters.

Here’s the first one:

A few things about that letter could intrigue you. For instance, the year: Shane was only eight years old when he wrote it — his first birthday after she left. She sends him money. She can’t even imagine something he’d like.

And then the month: grouse season don’t open till October. No sense waiting till you’re grown to get started on your career, I guess.

But what gets me is how, even way back then, he’s got that “Dad to.”

Story is, on Shane’s seventh birthday, Rodney handed him a loaded 12-gauge, and his mother left. Rodney wasn’t what you’d call eloquent, but he had a couple guys he used to drink with, so we got these bits of quadruple-drunk story: Rodney drunk when he told it, his friends drunk when they heard, then drunk again when they retold it to a bunch of drunks. So Rodney gave Shane that 12-gauge, and you can imagine Sarah watching from the window, though that detail’s not supplied. Been watching for eight years. All that hope she loaded into her car in Minneapolis is about to crumble into dust. The last straw’s about to get loaded onto that goddamn overworked camel’s back. She sees her son lift that shotgun, taller than he is, while her husband shows him the features. Points to the pump, crooks and uncrooks his elbow, imitating how it works. Points to the bead on the end of the barrel. To the trigger. Then stands back, looks around, shrugs his shoulders, opens his hands. I can just see it: Whatever the hell you can find, son. Whatever the hell you can find.

Shane’s skinny arm straightens, works the pump. She’s watching. Her little boy. Then the gun swings up and the barrel sweeps toward her, there’s that sickening moment when its black dot is winking right at her and she’s not sure what he’s finding to shoot at, doesn’t even know if he knows she’s behind the window, and then it’s gone up and by and then BOOM! She jumps and crams her fist in her mouth to tamp her scream down; she’s afraid if she lets it out she’ll never stop, she’ll become the kind of thing they put on display at Wall Drug for tourists to see, the Screaming Woman, right next to that piano-playing gorilla with the grody knuckles, him playing and her screaming, a real duet. The weathervane on top of the barn — one of them old rooster things, half rusted-out and pointing the same way for as long as she’s been Rodney’s wife, don’t matter how strong a different wind’s blowing — she sees it rise off the roof. For just a moment it looks like that metal rooster’s going to fly right up and away. But then it tumbles and falls, and clanks down the shingles on the other side, where I found the damn thing still laying in a patch of leafy spurge forty years later.

And her seven-year-old — she’s just seen him stagger and damn near fall down, she can’t imagine he isn’t somehow wounded — he cries out, Wow, Dad! Can I shoot it again?

And you can just hear Rodney: Good shoot in’ son. Damn good. Now you know how, you shoot that gun anytime you want. Shells’re in the broom closet.

She leaves that afternoon. Just gets in her car and leaves. Shane’s prowling the pastures looking for nonmetal birds to shoot, and Rodney’s she doesn’t know where. She throws a suitcase of clothes in her car, the same one she drove out here eight years earlier. Takes nothing that wasn’t hers when she came, including her son.

Here’s the two that got me thinking:

Look at them two letters. I’m leafing through them in my patrol car about a week after the whole thing happened, passing the time while I keep an eye on the radar, and wondering what I should do with the things, when I come to those two, one after the other like that. I stop and read them again. I can see how Sarah, getting them a year apart, might not have noticed anything. But me, I’m reading along and I got thirteen letters where Shane hardly says a damn thing, and then all of a sudden, in 1974, Rodney’s all over the place — taking Shane to Rapid, flirting with the waitress, telling jokes, making pies. Where the hell’d this come from? Wasn’t the Rodney Valen I ever knew.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been reading them letters at all. There was nothing to investigate and no one to indict if there was. So those letters was private. On the other hand, there wasn’t nobody to protest or care. I was about to read the next one when it hit me: Rodney Valen died in 1973. Collapsed on the sawdust of the Ruination Bar. It was talked about for some time, the dust his body raised, a regular cloud some people said, that had the shape of an old-time woman. That’s drunk bullshit, of course. But that kind of story stays with you whether you believe it or not.

Only reason anyone called me was her car sat outside Shane’s house for two days with the door open. Her car and Shane’s pickup both. Shane’s neighbor down the road finally calls me, he keeps driving by and gets to wondering. The thing about weird sonsabitches is they stick to their weird. You can trust them. Normal people keep their weird hid, so if it ever gets out you have no idea where it’s going to go. But Shane Valen — I knew if he wasn’t crawling around the county in his pickup with his lights off, something was serious wrong.

I got out there and parked behind her car, which at the time I didn’t know was hers. Wasn’t a sound out there, and that house with its blank windows waiting. I opened my door, called out, Shane! It’s Greggy Longwell.

Wasn’t even an echo.

I didn’t think Shane’d actually shoot me, but no one I knew had ever actually drove up to his house, really tested his paranoia, so I got out of the car low but not so low I’d look like I was sneaking. In other words, I looked damn precisely like I was sneaking, and I made myself a good target besides, which shows how valuable compromise is.

I shouted, I’m coming up to the house, Shane!

Not a sound. But there wasn’t nothing to do now but do it, so I shut the car door and started walking forward slow, up past her car. And then… Jesus!

I’m standing by that open car door, looking at this old lady, and she’s got a big hole in her chest, and there’s blood spattered all over the far window and a big smear through it like she reached up with her hand and then gave up. She’s laying horizontal, her legs in the driver’s seat, her shoulders in the passenger’s. The shotgun blast must have lifted her right up and knocked her over. Her eyes, staring at the velour of the car roof, are blue and blank as marbles. But I can handle all that. Even the two-day stink I can handle. What froze my blood, what goddamn paralyzed me, was the goddamn snakes.

I mean, I know snakes will crawl into an open car for the warmth. Brock Morrison still talks about that time his wife drove fifty miles with a snake on her lap while he’s snoozing in the back seat. Damn thing crawled in the car when they stopped for a break and left the door open. But that was just one of the sonsabitches. I was looking at snakes everywhere, twisted around like some puzzle that wouldn’t never unravel. Snakes on the floorboards, the dash, slung over the backs of the goddamn seats, and that wasn’t the worst of it. There was snakes all over her body, twisted in figure eights around her almost-nothing breasts, snakelaces wrapped around her withered, rotting neck and snakelets around her bony ankles and wrists. Snakes in her hair, vined around her feet. Jesus! She was crowned and booted with snakes.

Wasn’t a soul in the county knew Shane well enough to confirm he actually had rattlesnakes living with him, even though talk was he let them curl around his feet while he drank his evening coffee before he went out poaching. But who the hell’d believe that kind of shit? Sure as hell not me. I got enough to do sorting out the bizarre from the just plain strange without adding in the implausible. But shit! Now I had to wonder just what was in that house. When I was finally able to move again I went toward it real slow, watching every goddamn grass blade and every goddamn shadow under every goddamn grass blade.

I stood on the cinder blocks Shane used for steps, wondering if there was snakes curled up inside them. I moved to the side of the door and turned the knob and pushed. The door swung in, but nothing else happened. Now I had me a hell of a fix. If I walked in slow, the crazy bastard might shoot me standing up, and if I barged in rolling on the floor like on some goddamn TV show, I might be rolling into a dozen rattlers. I eased away from the door and ducked under the kitchen window, then peered in sideways through it. It was so goddamn grimy and streaked and dotted with dirt I couldn’t hardly see a thing, and I didn’t want to get too close. So I’m peering and peeking at an angle, trying to see through that dirty glass, when my eyes adjust, and instead of seeing past the glass I look right at it. Them smears ain’t dirt blocking my view. They’re old blood turned dirt brown, and specks of dried-out tissue and little slivers of bone.

Shane! I called. You stupid sonofabitch, Shane, you get your ass out here, hear?

Nothing. Just a constant, swishing sound I’d been hearing awhile already, and right then I realized what it was. It was snakeskin moving against itself, so goddamn many of them sonsabitches in that house it sounded like wind in a forest in there.

Goddamn it, Shane! If you don’t get your ass out here, I’ll—

But I didn’t have any idea what I’d do. I looked at that dried blood on the windowpane and thought, There’s someone besides that woman dead here, and there ain’t but two vehicles, and one of them’s hers and the other’s Shane’s, so it don’t take no Dick Tracy to figure out whose blood’s on this window.

But I had a hell of a time steeling myself to walk slow into that dim kitchen where Shane Valen was perched on a ladder-back chair without his face, a 12-gauge on the floor next to him, the back of his head blown against the far wall and against that window, and the biggest goddamn rattlesnake I’d ever seen coiled in his lap, shaking its tail when I walked through the door.

Check the date on that letter. First, Shane’s writing more often. He ain’t just waiting for his birthday thank-you in July. Second, Rodney’s been dead fifteen years — and look at him, by God, still making pies but now he’s also traveling around the country, raising horses, entertaining guests, adding onto his goddamn house. He sure as hell started to live the good life after he died. And every single letter’s like that — Rodney rescuing people stranded in snowstorms, Rodney talking at public meetings, Rodney in one letter even learning to speak some goddamn Japanese. Jesus Christ, he couldn’t hardly speak English when he was alive.

Goddamn mess getting her out of that car, with them damn snakes everywhere. We opened the doors and poked at them with sticks. It was noisy as hell, all them rattles going off. But we finally got them out. It was just up to me, I’d have had guys with shovels smacking the damn things, but news of Shane and Sarah had made it to Rapid, and the county commissioners was afraid the Rapid City Journal would show up and report a rattlesnake massacre, and then who the hell knows what’d happen? Get them goddamn PETA freaks out here telling us rattlesnakes have rights, too. So I had orders: no bad press, just get them sonsabitches out of the car, and get this whole mess over with.

Which is just what I would have done if I hadn’t found them letters. We got her body out, and there on the passenger seat under where she’d fallen is that packet tied with a ribbon. By now I’ve got her ID and figured out Shane murdered his own mother. But them letters — they’re all in the original envelopes, all addressed to her, with Shane’s return address on them. I throw them in an evidence bag, but I ain’t thinking I’m going to have to produce them as evidence in any trial, unless Shane can resurrect himself — like I later found out he did his dad.

The whole thing’s at first so goddamn clear, not a shred of doubt what happened. And since there wasn’t going to be a trial, there didn’t really have to be a motive, and there wouldn’t have been if I’d just left them damn letters alone. But I read a few of them at random, just kind of officially perusing what I had, and they pissed me off just like when any dumbshit brags. Rodney Valen raising Arabian horses? Japanese businessmen sitting on his deck — which he didn’t have? It was too much, and I read some more just to find out what other bullshit Shane would invent, and then I couldn’t stop reading, and then I got to wondering why the hell she came back here anyway.

I mean, twist this sonofabitch around and look at it from her view. She might have believed every one of them letters. Years and years of bullshit piling up, but she doesn’t know it. Her memory of Rodney’s not strong enough, maybe, to fight off the Rodney that Shane’s inventing. So, when she comes back to visit, who’s she coming to see? Hell! — her little boy and her breeder-of-Arabian-horses and pie-maker husband. A goddamn dream, that’s what. A goddamn world that ain’t and a person who never was.

And then, Shane looks just like his father. Both got that stare like their old ancestor’s, you can see it in the county historical book. There the old guy is, staring out, dressed in his best clothes, surrounded by his wife and kids, them in white and him in black, like they’re froth floating up on the surface of something dark, though there’s no entry about him whipping his wife to shreds like cheese or the kids who ain’t in the picture. But all I’m getting at is Shane and Rodney look enough alike you could mistake one for the other if you forgot one was thirty years older.

And those letters of Shane’s could make you forget. Hell, if anything. Rodney gets younger and younger after he dies — more and more who she must have wanted him to be in the first place. It’s like time stopped for her, maybe. She looked in the mirror every day and saw, sure enough, she was getting older, but them damn letters were making Rodney younger. Like in a goddamn fairy tale, damn near unbelievable — except people believe in fairy tales all the time as long as they ain’t written down and called that. So what’s she thinking, really, when she pulls up to that dry-rot house out there?

It ain’t nothing like the horse ranch she’s been imagining. Hell, it’s worse than when she left. But Rodney himself steps out the door, looking like she imagined him — maybe dirtier, but hell, he’s a working man. There he is, by God. Ever since she left she’s been half guilty and wondering what would’ve happened if she’d stayed. Wondering if Rodney would’ve been the man she imagined she married, the man them letters made him into. And now, there he is, real as life, walking out of the house holding a 12-gauge.

Wasn’t till I had to figure out who the place belonged to, though, that I put it all together. End of the Valen line, so where’s the land go now? How far do I have to go to find the uncles or cousins or whoever of the Valens who got as far from their past as they could but still got rights to the place? I knew something was up the moment I went in to see Orley Morgan. It ain’t like a high-class lawyer is going to come to Twisted Tree to advance his career, but Orley got even shiftier than usual when I asked him about the Valen estate. Oh, hell, Orley didn’t know a damn thing. Shit no! Jesus! That was so long ago when Rodney died, how the hell could Orley remember?

I ain’t said a word about Rodney, I pointed out. And I ain’t testing your memory. Just check your records. You keep records, I suppose?

Orley started babbling then. He’d been in charge of the Valen estate when Rodney died. And Rodney and Sarah hadn’t never actually got around to divorcing. One of those things just never got done, like cleaning behind the refrigerator. So they were still legally married when Rodney up and raised that dust in the Ruination Bar. And who do you suppose estate law gives damn near the entire estate to? The surviving spouse, that’s who.

Orley explains this to Shane. And ain’t it odd that every goddamn letter Orley writes to Sarah Cornwall Valen comes back addressee unknown? She musta moved agin, is what Shane tells Orley. Goddamn movingest mother I ever had. And then, shit, seems Sarah Cornwall Valen spends half her time outta the country. Ain’t no goddamn use writin to her now, she’s in Europe. She likes that kinda thing. Orley couldn’t keep track of all the places Sarah traveled. Every phone call he made, the number was disconnected or someone else answered the phone. Moved agin. Even the goddamned phone company can’t keep up with her. I can just hear Shane handing out this bullshit, and Orley just lazy enough to believe it. He ain’t gonna be able to buy that much Glenlivet anyway off what he’ll make handling the Valen estate.

Jesus Christ, Orley, I said. You never got suspicious he was feeding you a line?

Dammit, Greggy, he named cities in Europe. Named buildings. Described ’em, even, how they looked. Named people she was seein’. With foreign names.

Guess those are the same people came to visit Rodney later, I said. Orley just looks at me, don’t know what I’m talking about.

He says, It’s just.

He picks up this paperweight on his desk, one of them water and fake-snow things that are supposed to make you think there’s a whole other world in there. He looks at it like maybe there actually is, then gives it a shake and sets it back down.

Just, Shane didn’t have that kind of imagination. Did he? Orley asks.

Well, ain’t that the question right there? Shane never once let on he didn’t want Orley to find his mother. Just the reverse. Gave Orley so much help he wore him out. And pretty soon the Valen file gets covered up with other files, and then one day I suppose Orley come across it and just kind of put it in a cabinet to keep from being reminded about it, telling himself he’d get back to it when Sarah settled down, and with that decided, had himself a drink. And Shane was careful to make just enough money to pay the taxes on that ranch, and there you got it: he gets to go on living out there and no one the wiser.

Seems Shane had more imagination than about anyone else around here, and enough left over to keep us thinking he didn’t have none. And once he discovered he had it, he couldn’t put an end to it. He’s worried someone’s going to figure out what he done, and he gets more paranoid every year, imagining his mother out there somewhere, antennas up to sense Rodney’s dying so she can come back and snatch that land away, which is all he’s got. Without that land he’s nothing, don’t even have no friends. He’s imagining her, and that gets him to resuscitate his father and imagine him, a counter-imagination to keep his imagined mother at bay. Jesus Christ! And all that time alone, sitting in that truck, no one to interrupt his thoughts, bring him back to reality and tell him, Shane, the garbage is starting to stink. Hell, for all I know he might have started to believe his own bullshit, might’ve half thought his father was actually alive.

Here’s my favorite:

Ain’t that something else? It’s not just Rodney’s a goddamn expert on ferrets, and it’s not just Shane’s making up letters he didn’t goddamn write — hell, he never once before so much as mentioned ferrets, or railroads either for that matter — but now he’s even inventing what Rodney thinks and then, Jesus Christ! arguing with him. It’s just layers and layers of bullshit. It’s bullshit about bullshit! And Sarah’s getting this stuff year after year, and I don’t know a damn thing about her, but she couldn’t have been all that much in touch with reality if she came out here to marry Rodney in the first place, and she’s probably guilty about leaving her little Shaney — wouldn’t even occur to her that her little boy could lie, so hell yes she believes this stuff, maybe she even gets her memories mixed up with the letters, starts thinking she actually remembers Rodney being the kind of guy Shane’s bullshit’s making him into. So she ties those letters up and forgets what’s in them, except not really — she remembers it as memory. Jesus Christ! That’s the kind of mumbo jumbo Shane’s got me talking. Remembers it as memory — what kind of bullshit is that? All I’m trying to get at is, I’m thinking Sarah got to where she couldn’t tell the difference between what she remembered and what she read.

Like I said, to come out here and marry Rodney after meeting him in a goddamn bar, if Rodney was telling the truth about that, she had to be one of those women believes love’s a goddamn abracadabra that whooshes the past away to some never-been and leaves only the goddamn shining future, unattached, like some Santa Claus gift. And who the hell’s going to tell her she’s stepping onto pockmarked land and into a family strange as a three-dollar bill? Love’s a magic act all right, but that kind of thing don’t finger snap away. It’s like the elephant that disappears: only a goddamn idiot actually believes it went anywhere.

So one day her son blasts a wind-vane rooster off the barn, and she sees eight years of elephant dung she’s been refusing to notice. Poof. She’s gone. But that doesn’t erase anything any more than love did. Elephant just goes on eating and crapping. And then in Shane’s letters, by God, the Rodney she met in that bar in Minneapolis starts to come back to life: the Rodney she come out here to marry, the cowboy who’d take her away from whatever she didn’t like about her life or herself, the Rodney who’s going to give her everything pure, green grass and big skies and horse rides in the sunset — and none of that goddamn city pollution and traffic and dealing with people who don’t want to deal with you. It ain’t like Shane creates someone new for her. Hell no! He justifies her falling in love with Rodney in the first place. Anti how guilty does that make her feel? Without Rodney’s surly-turtle real self around to remind her, she convinces herself she actually remembers the Rodney Shane’s inventing for her. The man of her dreams, and her baby boy. She has to go back. Has to make amends before she dies.

And Shane never saw her coming. The only person ever he didn’t see coming. Only one ever caught him by surprise. His own stories were making too goddamn much light around him, so he couldn’t see past them. He thought it was Rodney’s dying would bring her back, never thought it was his getting more alive would. I don’t know what Shane thought she’d do if she owned the land — sell it out from under him I guess. And there he’d be — no house, no land, no grass, no snakes. It’s goddamn pathetic thinking how little that sonofabitch had and how desperate he was to keep it.

He writes in one letter about this murder out here made the national news — this is part of his technique of putting in some true stuff along with all the bullshit. You probably heard on the news about that girl out here got picked up and murdered. Dad says that must be about the loneliest you can ever be, in a car with someone like that and knowing where that cars going. Dad says that girl must have been thinking keep going car keep going. Because when it stops. Dad thinks about those kinds of things her thinking about that car when it stops.

It ain’t hard to figure out Shane’s not just talking about that girl, he’s talking about himself. He was one pure lonely sonofabitch. I found dozens of them stick pens all over the house. Empty, not a drop of ink in them. Scattered around. Husks of dreams ripened into letters. I can see it — Shane rolling into his place at two or three in the morning, no headlights, rolling in by feel with some new-dressed deer or antelope in the back of his pickup, and pulling into that shed that I can’t figure how it managed to stand, and hoisting that animal out of the pickup with the come-along he had hooked to the rafters, and then walking out of the shed with those dead eyes swiveling behind him, groundward-facing, the come-along creaking in the beams. But Shane’s already gone, he’s been inventing his father for his invented mother the whole goddamn night, and now he walks into the light leaking from that shot-through house carpeted with snakes, stepping between them, his clothes all bloodstained from his work, sits down at that kitchen table that the varnish’s been wore off for years, and maybe he’s got to shoo a snake off the chair, and he picks up one of them stick pens and licks the end and grips that sonofabitch like it was a chisel, and he starts digging words into a notebook like the pen was a goddamn shovel, pressing some of them letters so hard I could see imprints of the previous ones in the paper and maybe the ones previous to that, too. Maybe the last letter has the whole goddamn dreaming pressed into it, and you could get the entire story out of that one page if you knew how to read it.

I don’t know. It could be I’m bullshitting myself, and all that really happened is Shane was one paranoid son of a bitch, and when someone he don’t know shows up at his place he blasts away without thinking or asking questions. I could be a bigger bullshitter than Shane. But I keep seeing him in that house, snakes sleeping around him or hunting in the walls where mice claws are clicking, and he’s inventing Rodney’s life. For her. For himself. And maybe both of them started believing it, memory and bullshit so mixed up that years back and now were the same damn thing, and little things like time and dying just didn’t matter.

So she comes back to surprise them, her husband and her son. She doesn’t call first. They might refuse to see her. So she pulls into that driveway, and even though she’s old herself, in her mind Rodney hasn’t changed and Shaney’s still her little boy. But some serious confusion surely went on when she looked at that house, which isn’t no Arabian horse ranch where foreigners from New York sit on the deck and sip bourbon. This is the place she left years ago, this is her real memory trying to get back inside her head. But she ain’t got room for it, her head’s so full of Shane’s imaginings.

Before she can even get out of the car, who’s she see walking out but Rodney. Her cowboy. Hasn’t aged a bit, walking out with a shotgun in his hands, squinting through the glare off the windshield, trying to figure out what this car is doing in his yard. She’s not seeing the blades of grass moving all around him. Christ! It gives me the willies. Here he comes. She’s got her window open, thinks she’s hearing wind.

Rodney? she says. She almost recognizes something’s wrong, but she can’t unlock it. Rodney. It’s me. Sarah?Remember? She opens her door.

Then she sees his eyes widen, recognition blooming like a goddamn flower. But what her husband says doesn’t make any sense.

Mom? he says.

And even as the shotgun’s sweeping up, everything’s collapsing. The house of cards that’s her life is falling down around her, winds are blowing it over, and she’s a goddamn weathervane that in spite of those winds ain’t never turned any direction but one, never pointed anywhere but where she’s at right now. She’s knocked backward by the blast, lifted clear off the seat and into the passenger side onto that packet of letters she preserved and carried with her. Time ain’t never passed. She’s right back in the moment she left, her baby swinging that gun up past her face, the black hole of that barrel turned toward her.

Shane stares at her. He had to kill her. Wasn’t no reason she’d come back but she’d found out the truth and wanted the ranch. Never mind that to anyone but him that ranch would be a goddamn albatross around your neck. And Jesus, Shane couldn’t never live in town, with a street out his window and a lawn needs watering. It was his land, goddamn it. His great-great-grandfather fought for it and took it, and wasn’t no woman, not even a mother, going to take it away.

He turns back to the house and goes in, sits in that chair and pumps the action of the shotgun. The spent shell goes somersaulting through the air and clucks onto the floor against the baseboard where I found it, and he knocks the pump forward and sticks the barrel in his mouth and puts the stock on the floor and leans for the trigger. He’s been cut, cut bad, and there’s only one way out. And then there’s nothing in that house but rattle and alarm and hazard, the singing of a hundred snakes in a concert you’d never want to hear.

I’m tempted to go out some night with a can of gasoline and burn that sonofabitching house down, just thinking of them rattlesnakes out there — Shane s family they were, sprawled on the floors at night, coiled on the floors in the day waiting for mice to wander by, or slithering out under the doors, through various cracks, coming and going. He might actually have felt something for them, but I know goddamn well they didn’t feel a damn thing for him. Ain’t nothing but a den to them. Go out there and burn it down, all of them, and throw that damn pack of letters in and walk away.

But the letters got a grip on me. I can’t stop reading them. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday I’ll be looking into my headlights, and the Valen women will parade across in front of me, one cut up and with children clinging, and the other with a hole in her chest and snakes swirling up and down her, looking at her empty hands, trying to read the letters I’m reading and not knowing where they’ve gone.