Chapter 11
SPARK
Cross walks me up the lane at my pace, and says nothing about the note.
Good. If he said anything kind right now I'd cry, and I am sick to death of crying on this farm.
So I look at the farm instead. That's what Wade taught me to do with a machine acting wrong. Quit cussing it. Stand back. Look.
Four bikes nose-out at the barn, parked to be counted. Cross's truck angled across the pinch in the lane. The prospect on the fence line, hands shoved in his cut. From the road you'd see them, the floodlight stands too, and know one true thing. This farm has men on it.
That's all you'd know.
I stop walking.
"That call Boulder took, right before he sent me to you," I say. "What was coming up the back track?"
"Two on foot in the tree line." Cross stops beside me. "Whiskey stepped out and they quit climbing. Never got inside a couple hundred yards. Why?"
"Could they see the yard from there? Where I was standing this morning?"
He gives it honest thought, no rush. "Barn face, maybe. Roofline. Not the yard. Equipment shed sits in the line from that side."
"Rider sat the crossroads last night too," Cross says. "Half a mile east, engine off, counting headlights."
"Headlights tell you men come and go. They don't tell you a barn's covered.
" I turn a slow circle, lane to barn to yard.
"Three sets of eyes on us since last night, and not one of them could see the whole of this.
And look at when that note landed. Those two were still in our trees when the sedan slowed at the box.
They were still running their test, and the man in that window already had us graded. Barn's well covered."
“And?”
"Somebody handed him the answer before he ever drove out here, Cross. Nobody turns in the report card in the middle of the test."
Cross has gone quiet, the listening kind of quiet.
"They didn't see all this from the road," I say.
"No," he says slowly. "They didn't."
I lift my eyes past the equipment shed, up where the timber climbs the ridge, to the bald notch near the top of it.
"Wade glassed the far fields from the old logging cut every November. Said you could count every deer between here and the creek without one of them knowing you were alive." The cut sits up there plain as a pulled tooth. "If I wanted to know how this farm works, hour by hour, that's where I’d go.”
Boots on gravel behind us, coming quick. Boulder, the note still folded in his fist.
"Tell him," Cross says.
I don't get halfway through it. Boulder's head comes around to the ridge before I'm done with the sedan, and nothing in his face is surprise.
"There's a deer stand on that cut." Flat as the note in his hand.
"Wade and me hung it the fall I turned twelve.
Fire road comes up the blind side, and you could park a truck in the laurel with nobody down here hearing a door shut.
" He looks at the notch a beat longer. "I hauled the lumber for that stand-up on a sled. "
Boulder makes two calls on the walk down to the equipment shed. Whiskey meets us behind it with his shotgun broke open over his arm. The prospect takes the gate with orders to see everything and touch nothing. Then it's the four of us through the old pasture gate and up.
The climb is steep and quiet. Cut timber, blackberry cane dragging at my jeans, the air colder the higher we get.
Boulder stays a half step behind me on the worst of the grade, his hand riding an inch off my back without ever landing.
He wants to put it there. I can hear how bad he wants to in how careful his breathing is.
He keeps it to himself. I keep my feet under me, and we climb.
The cut opens out near the top, a shelf of level ground where the logging road used to switch back before the county let it grow over. The deer stand is in a big white oak, gray as bone, one corner sagging.
Nobody's been up the tree. They didn't need to.
"There," Whiskey says.
Truck tracks, backed into the laurel off the fire road.
Deep, crisp at the edges, the outside of one tire chewed up like it's been run soft for months.
At the lip of the shelf, the grass lies flattened in a patch as long as a man.
Cigarette filters pressed into the dirt, four of them, and they aren't the same age.
Two weathered paper-white. Two still fresh.
"More than one visit," Cross says.
"More than one week," I say.
Then I make myself look at what he came up here to look at.
For one breath, it’s beautiful. The whole valley gone to rust and gold with October, the creek throwing light where it turns, our tin roof shining like a struck match in the middle of it. Wade used to climb up here every November just to look. For one breath I understand why.
Then I see what Warden sees, and the beauty curdles.
The whole farm, laid out like a bench drawing.
Barn, lane, yard, gate, the county road stitched along the bottom.
I can pick out the hay bale where I had Wade's parts book open this morning.
The gate post where I set the thermos. The exact patch of yard where I stood at sunup pouring Brick's coffee, out in the open.
HOW ABOUT THE GIRL wasn't a bluff. He wrote it looking at me.
Boulder's gone rigid beside me. He's seeing the same view I am, and he isn't looking at the barn.
I crouch by the tire tracks before he can start, because my hands need work to do. Where the truck sat idling there's a scatter of drops across the dead leaves, dark until I turn one leaf to the light.
Red.
I rub a drop between two fingers and sniff it.
Thin. Sharp. Cooked. "Power steering fluid.
Oil runs black by the first week you use it, and coolant smells sweet.
Trans fluid's red too, but these drops sit at the front corner, driver's side, right where the pump lives.
" I hold the leaf up to Cross. "His pump's been leaking a good while.
A leak like this, the wheel whines every time he turns it.
Somebody in Warden's crew drives a truck that squeals coming into a corner, likely with a bottle of fluid rolling around behind the seat. "
Cross crouches, looks a long moment, then takes the little log book out of his cut and writes. He folds one of the white filters into a square of paper and puts it away with the book, unhurried, a man building a case one page at a time.
"That I can use," he says.
"You're done out here." It comes out of Boulder too fast, half a beat ahead of thought. "Pack a bag tonight. You'll stay behind the compound walls until—" He stops himself, and stopping looks like work. "That came out as an order."
"It did."
"Spark. I'm looking at a man's bed on a hill over your head."
"I know what you're looking at." I stand, wipe my fingers on my jeans, and keep my voice level.
One of us shouting won't make either of us safer.
"I'm not asking you to leave me unguarded.
I'm asking you not to make me useless. There's a difference.
The club makes the same one for you every day of your life. "
For a long moment, he doesn't say anything. Wind moves in the oak over us. Whiskey finds a sudden interest in the fire road.
"Say I listen," Boulder says at last. "What would you do?"
"Nothing. To this spot, nothing at all. We rake it clean, he knows we found it, and his eyes move somewhere we haven't thought of yet.
Leave it be, and we know exactly where Warden's looking.
" The plan builds while I'm saying it, steadier with every piece.
"He's watching patterns. Shift times, headlights, me.
So we give him a pattern. Same rotations, same hours, same girl crossing the same yard with the same thermos until he'd bet money on tomorrow.
And the day it matters most, we break it. "
Whiskey huffs, half a laugh. "Feed the deer stand."
"Feed the deer stand."
Boulder hasn't moved.
"He thinks I'm the weak spot," I tell him, quiet now, only for him. "Fine. Let him watch me. Not alone. Never alone, I know that much. But let him think he knows where I'll be."
He stares down at the yard, at the ground he'd wall me off from if I let him. I can see him hating every piece of it except one. The one where I stay in the open, in reach of his hand. He'd trade the rest for it.
"Cross," he says finally. "New rotation on paper by dark. The believable kind." Then, lower, to me. "You're never out of sight of one of mine. Not for a minute. That's the price."
"That's the version where I don't go behind walls, Cole. I'll pay it."
Below us the farm goes on small and clear, every path across it known to me down to the fence staples. Warden bought himself the best seat in the county. He built it on Wade's ground, over his fields, to hunt the last family Wade had left.
Let him keep it. From here on, everything that seat shows him is exactly what we want him to see.