WHY THAT CRAZY OLD LADY GOES UP THE MOUNTAIN

by Michael Libling

When asked about this story, Michael Libling said, “I continue to be amazed at how often the setting and characters in so much of my writing can be traced to the first 14 years of my life, living in a small town (Trenton, Ontario), hanging out in my parents’ tiny café, talking with the regulars.... ‘Crazy Old Lady’ is no exception. These are people I know, doing stuff they never did.”

She’s Jimmy Alvin’s cousin from Connecticut and she’s come to Gideon for a spell because her dad got caught dipping into somebody else’s money and somebody else’s wife, and went home and put a bullet through his head. And then her mom up and did something pretty awful to herself too; she isn’t dead, though everybody says she might as well be.

Sara Marie Sands, a fist over five feet, that’s all she is, with brown hair and browner eyes and a quiet sense of self folks can’t help but admire, considering the soap she’s been living. No tears. No whining. No making a mopey display of herself the way some almost orphaned are wont to do.

Gumption. That’s what they call it. And the kid has more of it than the whole junior class put together. She can do handstands, handsprings, and hit a jump shot or climb a rope as good as any of the guys, most of whom have been laying it on thick since the moment she arrived. (Think buttercream icing on vanilla cupcake.) The teachers love her too, and not only Mrs. Laroche in gym; Sara has spent time in Europe, speaks French, some Gaelic, reads books she doesn’t need to, and never gives them any backtalk. The girls, of course, they recognize the threat she poses. When Sara first turned up after Christmas break, suspicion and envy rolled through Gideon High like a West Quoddy fog. Hell, you could smell the stuff. But Sara’s dark past also made her a trophy of sorts in the friends department, and most conceded she’d paid her dues. A dead dad and vegetable mom are worth a few brownie points, after all.

But the boys, they won’t let up. More than a few claim they’ve seen her in some video on MTV2. Fall Out Boy or The Killers, maybe. Or some girl who looks a heck of a lot like her, anyhow. She can’t help but smile at some of the stuff she hears, the antics to impress, but keeps her reactions low-key, mindful not to lead any of them on. Most understand. Or pretend to. Mourning and mating aren’t the best of mixes at the best of times.

Kevin Akers. He hasn’t managed two words to her in the whole time she’s been in town. Not that he hasn’t wanted to. He just doesn’t know what he could say to a girl like Sara. Or what a girl like Sara might want to say to him. Fact is, had folks been keeping a tally of likely suitors, this boy would have been at the bottom of their list, had they given any thought to him in the first place, of course.

Judged by size alone, Kev isn’t anybody you’d want to tussle with, but the few who know him know different. David in Goliath’s body is how his mom used to put it. If he has a temper, nobody has seen it. If he has a voice, few have heard it. Kev has never raised a hand in class, let alone volunteered an answer. The boy isn’t soft-spoken; he’s unspoken. And that mouth of his, does it ever register anything outside of glum?

When his size does work for him, it is rarely a result of his own doing. Take Kev’s sophomore year when Coach Hackles shanghais him for the Bobcats. Varsity team, yet. Collars him in the cafeteria, yanks him right out of the lunch line, his lime Jell-O left quaking in its dish. Plants him front and center, Coach does. Nose guard. And still the kid remains invisible. Out of uniform, not even the cheerleaders give him the time of day, and not because of any snootiness or malice, though there is plenty of both to go around. Nope, it just never clicks he’s on the team. “Killer instinct, Akers, there’s your problem. You don’t have any.” Once Hackles has you pegged, rightly or wrongly, there is no shaking the rep. But the Gideon Bobcats are historically short on heft, and Kev sticks.

The boy has his reasons, of course, for being the way he is. Damned if he’s going to broadcast so much as a peep. “Only safe trap is a shut trap,” his grandpa used to tell him, before hammering the message home with horror stories of locals who failed to pay heed. Grandpa ran with a sorry lot, so it seems at times to Kev, the old man’s ultimate demise but one more crack in his oddball fraternity’s pot.

There were the twin brothers who worked at the Dobbin-Henry mill up Kersey way, fine, upstanding family men, their carousing days long behind them, who babbled on of flashing lights and wondrous rays and joyrides through the stratosphere with sentient pecans in titanium knickers.

The spinster-lady bank teller who, while perusing the pages of an unnamed James M. Cain novel in the gazebo on the village green, proclaimed she’d been visited by the Prophet Ezekiel, who not only torched her book with a sidelong sigh, but delegated her to spread word the end was nigh.

The lobsterman, a pal from Grandpa’s days in the Merchant Marine, who prattled on of mermaids at sea, ape-men on land, and the living dead on the Katakani. Your standard issue Lazarus, no doubt, so snickered a Gazette editorial of the day.

Taken at face they were, but never for long and never by all. And though each swore up and down on their respective stacks of Bibles they were speaking the cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die-God’s-honest-truth, and well they may have been, their mouthing-off wrought only shame, disgrace, mockery, their lives marginalized or turned downright topsy-turvy.

“Yeah, damned forever loony,” Grandpa put it. “But I’m telling you, Kevvy, what happened to them is nothing to what’ll happen to you. To us. We’ll be crucified, we will.”

Kev keeps his trap shut tight. But his ears and moony eyes, he keeps them wide open.

Any fool can see Sara is out of his league. Anytime he contemplates otherwise, the guys are quick to set him straight. Randy Gullickson scores the best line hands-down. “Wait for her yearbook photos, man, ‘cause that’s the only piece of her you’re ever gonna get.” They all crack up over that one. But Kev, he just slips away.

Sara, nothing gets by that girl. Last week of junior year, she marches right up to him as he’s clearing out his locker. “You’re Kevin Akers, right?”

Best he can do is swallow, nod. God, she is even prettier up close. But then he sees something in her he hasn’t seen before. An emptiness. A void so vast, he grips the locker for fear of slipping in.

She asks, “Is there something you wanted to say to me?”

He checks behind, makes sure she isn’t talking to someone more significant.

“Because if there is, I wish you’d tell me instead of staring. You’re making me feel awfully uncomfortable, Kevin. And I don’t want to come back to school in the fall and see you in every class doing the same all over again.” There is nothing nasty in her tone. If anything, she comes off like that guidance counselor lady, Miss Kimbrough—eyelids crinkled with patience and understanding, empathetic tut-tuts tagged to the tail of every breath. “So, what do you say we start over, do this right?” She offers her hand, smiles that great smile of hers. “Hi, I’m Sara.”

He can’t believe she’s talking to him, wanting to get to know him yet. Can’t believe he’s holding her hand. Most of all, Kev can’t believe the stupid words spilling out of his stupid head, his stupid trap. “I know about God.”

“Pardon me?”

“I can show you....”

Her eyes narrow, her smile flatlines.

“I mean, bring you to Him, sort of.”

She wonders if maybe the boy has a screwy sense of humor. But the way he’d said it, the way he stands there. It’s as if he’s been waiting forever to share this glorious news. No, there isn’t anything funny about it. About him.

Kev tries to backtrack, come off a shade closer to sane. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said....”

“But you did, didn’t you?” Back home in Connecticut, when news broke about her folks, do-gooders were over her like maggots kissing carcass. Knocking at the door. Calling on the phone. Dropping leaflets and amulets and spiritual whatnots onto her lap—crucifixes, beads, prayer cards with full-color renderings of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and other mystical kith and kin. Preying at her dad’s funeral. Preying outside her mom’s hospital room. Open your heart to the love and grace of the Lord. And, fact was, since coming to Gideon, little had changed, save perhaps the subtleties and stratagems. It was all over town how Jimmy Alvin’s mom, her Aunt Penny, had been pleading with Sara to turn to the Lord or, at the very least, have a sit-down with Reverend Himner who, by all accounts, was a fair and decent man with a post-graduate degree in post-traumatic stress.

Sara steps back before stepping closer. “I don’t need your god or anyone else’s, thank you very much.”

He wants to grab her, hold her. Explain for God’s sake. Sticks his hands in his pockets instead. “My Mom, she died of the cancer too. Not that yours did, I mean...I’m just saying, I know what it’s like, kind of....”

She turns, does not glance back. More holy claptrap to explain away the wholly explainable. Serves her right for dropping her guard.

Forty-six words. Most the boy has spoken to anyone since, well, God knows how long. And he’d trade most anything to take every syllable back.

Kev braces for fallout, certain he’ll hear from Jimmy or Gully or the other guys about how he messed with the poor girl’s head. “There’s a time and place for pushing God, Akers, and that damn well wasn’t it, dumb ass.” And just like that he’ll join the long line of Gideon idiots. Gidiots, his grandpa called them. The twin brothers, the spinster-lady bank teller, the lobsterman, and all the other loose-lipped losers.

Whole summer long the boy agonizes, replays the conversation endlessly, every waking hour devoted to beating up on himself. Why, after keeping it bottled up for so many years, did he choose that moment to let it out? And why to, of all people, her? Had he hoped to spook her, frighten her off? Or did he want to help her by sharing the only thing he had going for him nobody else in Gideon could lay claim to? Heck, nobody else living on the whole damn planet, best he knew. Not that he read the papers or watched CNN. But surely others would have talked. Not everyone would be like him and his grandpa, him and his dad. Not everyone would keep their traps shut. No way.

He mulls heading over to the Seavue Estates, banging on the Alvins’ door, asking for her, apologizing, but knows he’ll only dig himself in deeper. Thinks maybe he’ll drop her a note to explain. Tears a page from a notebook. Manages a couple of lines before giving up.

That’s pretty much the way it goes until one afternoon toward the end of July, when Sara shows up at Leith’s with her aunt, Mrs. Alvin. Third summer in a row Kev has worked at the lobster pound. Bette Leith had been friends with his mom and she makes it her business to look out for the boy best she can.

Kev is scrubbing the lobster tank, fighting every instinct, struggling to keep his eyes averted and his head down, to pretend Sara isn’t ten feet from him and that he has not noticed her. Later, after she’s gone, Bette says, “That girl must have thought you were God’s gift, Kevvy. Didn’t take her eyes off you the whole time.” Kevvy is what his mother had called him. His grandpa too.

Come fall and senior year, he works hard to respect Sara’s wishes. Tries his darnedest not to look her way, not to creep her out. But every now and then she catches him. Odd thing is, more often than not, Kev catches Sara looking first.

Just before finals, on a Saturday morning in May, Jimmy Alvin’s red Toyota pickup lurches into Kev’s yard, stirring up the rust on his dad’s crippled Ford.

But it isn’t Jimmy behind the wheel.

All told, Sara has been in Gideon a year and a half. By Kev’s count, eighteen straight months of yearning.

The boy leaps into his jeans and bounds onto the porch before Sara’s toe taps the bottom step. Last thing he wants is her poking about inside. After his mom’s passing, Bette Leith had come by to check in on Kev and his dad. She wondered aloud about what had struck first, the hurricane or the tornado. In the years since, had his dad not threatened Bette and had she continued to visit, she might’ve noted how they’d been hit by an earthquake too. The mess is bad enough; mostly, though, Kev doesn’t want Sara seeing his dad sleeping it off on the couch behind the stockade of empties.

He knows why she’s come right off. The dead-mama face is a dead giveaway. Eyes that should be crying but aren’t. Voice that should be cracking but isn’t. Grief waylaid by anger and guilt. “Show me,” she says.

He plays dumb.

“You said you know where God is. Show me.”

“I was kidding—”

“I’ve watched you, Kevin. I’ve asked about you. You don’t kid about anything. And you’re no Born-againer. Jimmy’s never even seen you in church.”

“It was a joke.” He can’t bear to look at her. Can’t bear not to.

“Was it a vision? Like the miracle of Fatima? Did God speak to you like the Virgin Mary spoke to them?”

“It’s not like that.” He’s never heard of any Fat Emma, but figures it can’t be a bigger deal than his own.

“And He told you—told you He was God?”

“My grandpa said so.”

“Then it’s not only you...?”

“Nah. Grandpa passed on just after my mom.”

“I’m alone now too,” she says, antipathy giving way to empathy. “My mother. Last night.” She keeps it simple, so she won’t choke up. Not that she expects to; she just never knows for certain when emotion might get the better of her. She’d mourned her mother when she was mostly dead and has no intention of going through the same now that she is fully dead.

Kev shuffles his feet, makes sure not to look her in the face, mumbles what he hopes sounds like condolences.

“Look, I’ve never been a believer, but after seeing what’s happened to my family, maybe my mom and dad had it wrong. I mean, not believing didn’t do them or me any good; no harm in seeing what believing might do. Right?” She lifts her chin, moves her lips so near his mouth, Kev puckers by reflex.

“But it’s not....” He swallows. “It’s not what you think.”

“You don’t have a clue what I think.”

Sara waits on the porch while he throws together some gear. Backpacks. Plastic ponchos. Hoodies. DEET. Sleeping bags (not that he figures they’ll be doing much sleeping). Stuff to eat, drink.

He’s at the door when he turns to the snoring on the couch. “I’m taking that girl, the one I told you about. She needs it, Dad, she really does. She’s strong too. She can handle it. I know she can.” He speaks as if it matters. As if his dad were awake and sober.

* * * *

Gil Boucher is having his usual at the diner when Fritshaw comes to fetch him. The deputy is all arms, legs, and excitement. In his seventeen years as Gideon Chief of Police, Gil has had his lunch interrupted only once before: Somebody had seen somebody over at the Ace Hardware who looked like somebody they’d seen on America’s Most Wanted, though it turned out to be nobody. He polishes off his clam roll in two big bites, plucks up the remaining onion rings, and orders his Indian pudding to go. “No ice cream today, Mollie. Not sure when I’ll get to it.”

Story is, that cutie-pie from Connecticut who’s living with the Alvins has taken off in Jimmy’s truck. While Jimmy is royally pissed and vowing vengeance if he finds so much as a scratch, Penny Alvin worries something more sinister is afoot. “I wouldn’t normally bother you, Gil,” she says, “but my niece’s mother, my sister-in-law, you understand, she passed away last night, God rest her tortured soul, and well, I’m afraid Sara might do something regrettable. That whole side of my husband’s family, you need to know, they’re a terribly self-destructive lot.”

“The girl is high-strung, is she?” Gil inquires.

“Oh, I pray to God not yet,” Penny Alvin replies.

As luck would have it, the first break isn’t long in coming. Randy Gullickson spots the pickup in the Akers’ yard, plain as day. “Like I never come down over this way you know, but traffic was backed up on Nine like because of the new overpass they’re building, and Jesus, like I’d know Jimmy’s wheels anywhere.”

Gil raps on the Akers’ door, spies Kevin’s dad strung out on the sofa. He pinches a Stim-U-Dent from his shirt pocket, massages his gums some before letting himself in. He prods the guy awake, props him between sofa cushions. “Jesus, Carl, these benders of yours, man, you trying to kill yourself? Your old man, at least, he ended it clean.”

When you’re the Law in a town like Gideon, you might not know a lot, but you sure as hell know drunks. Rare is the crime not predicated on booze. Neighborly cop. Tough cop. Good cop/bad cop. None of these cut it here. Only patient cop. And though the Chief does his level best, his questions yield only squalls of cesspit breath (incentive enough to cut the interrogation short) and a garbled non-sequitur that skips from Jim Beam to Jack Daniel’s to meeting your Maker’s Mark on the Katakani. “Pray to God, Carl, your boy hasn’t decided to follow in your esteemed footsteps.”

Kevin’s room is an oddity. Precious little to sift through. What kind of teenage freak is he dealing with here? No clothes or junk on the floor. No druggie paraphernalia. Books. School stuff. Reader’s Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained. (Same book Gil Jr. got a dozen Christmases ago.) Yellowed paperbacks. The Book of the Damned. Strange As It Seems. Something written by some doctor—a Kübler-Ross. Thinks his wife might have read it. Walls mostly bare. A SpongeBob calendar four years out of date. Photos. The kid and his mom. The kid, his mom and dad. His grandfather seated in a skiff, the pier at Hurley’s Basin over his left shoulder.

Previous April, Gil had attended a forensics seminar in Philadelphia, so he is up on the techie stuff like email and how it can offer up all kinds of insight on a suspect’s psyche. Trouble is, there is no computer. What kid doesn’t have a computer these days? Closest he comes is one of the souvenir pocket calculators Ballston Lumber had given out in celebration of their 25th. Even so, the Chief manages to find all the evidence he needs. Sitting in a drawer, it is. Short, sweet, and telling, written in an earnest backhand on a page torn from a wirebound notepad:

* * * *

Dear Sara,

I am sorry I made you mad.

I said stuff I shouldn’t.

* * * *

The slope is gentle, but the going slow, the air rife with the stink of skunk spruce.

Kev and Sara stick with the trail until there isn’t much of anything to follow. Given the chance, stuff grows like crazy on the Katakani. Trails blazed on the up gone by the down. And the trees, damn! So green, so tall, so full of themselves, the sun never has much choice but to slash and stab.

Birds chirp. Peckers peck. Chipmunks fuss. Sara plows ahead as if the chorus is meant for her, resolute and single-minded, her disbelief on pause.

Kev slogs behind, calling out the way. Left. Right. Here. There.

Through weeds, wildflowers, and arboreal upchuck. Through God-awful muck that slurps on their toes, sucks on their soles and gags up their heels. Through ancient crud that crunches and snaps and drives shivers up their legs, their spines, their throats, their jaws, their thoughts.

* * * *

Word of the girl’s disappearance is quick to get around. Pitching in in times of crises comes naturally to most in town. Tragedy provides a nice break from the routine, some might say, though not necessarily aloud.

Gil pushes through the crowd, his bad feelings about the whole episode only getting worse. Just something about it. A little voice inside his head warning all may not be what it seems. Then too, he knows stuff about the girl most others don’t.

Meanwhile, the volunteers from Gideon High, they are quick to set him straight on how that Akers boy has had a thing for that poor girl from the second she showed her face. “The asshole wouldn’t leave her alone,” Jimmy Alvin says. “I warned her. Me and Gully, we would’ve put that loser in his place for good, if she’d let us. But she never cared about anything we had to say. Like we were stupid or something.”

Coach Hackles knows the kid better than most. “He’s got this killer instinct, Gil, like I’ve never seen. He scared me, I tell you. A couple, three games there, I thought for sure he’d kill somebody.”

The two cheerleaders in attendance go along with the coach. “We didn’t know him like to talk to or anything like,” the blonder blonde says. “But he scared us too. Right, Stacy?”

“I think so,” the other cheerleader says, before asking to have another look at the boy’s photo.

Miss Eggleton, the English teacher, comes brandishing what she calls the smoking gun—a dog-eared wad of Kevin Akers’s compositions, all red Cs, Ds, and Fs. “Perverse. Beyond the pale. A gloomy, gloomy Gus.”

Only Bette Leith steps forward in defense of the kid. “Kevvy wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she tells him, then bites a trembling lip. “But one time, when that girl came into the pound, I hate to say it, Gil, she was kind of wary maybe. Didn’t take her eyes off him the whole time.”

* * * *

Your Rand-McNally and your Triple A, they’ll tell you: On the Katakani, the forest does not thin at the ocean, does not gradually succumb to shrubbery and grass. Rather, it bullies its way to the edge of the bluff, as dense and deep as its dark green heart. In places, it sprawls right onto the face, bushy brows and muttonchops defying gravity and granite. Given half the chance, some say, the Katakani would put down roots in the sky itself. Pilot’s Thumb is a rare exception, a weathered outcrop of black and gray stone that breaks from under the forest before giving up halfway to sea and sky.

Kev and Sara teeter at the brink, taking in the ocean, the breakers dying amid the rocks and shallows below.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. She’s got that melancholy in her voice folk tend to reserve for God’s best work.

“Yeah. I guess.” He’s nonchalant about a view he figures he’s seen a million times, at least.

“Almost makes you want to jump, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

She takes his hand, squeezes. “C’mon, what do we have to lose?” The glint in her eye, hell, this girl is packed and ready to go. All she needs is his okay.

Kev drops back from the edge. “The wind up here, it gets real strong....” He tugs at her hand. She gives no ground.

“You don’t have a sense of humor, do you? You really don’t.”

He gestures toward the beach, his expression glum as gravel. “My grandpa, that’s where they found him, okay? His body. Right down there, okay?”

“You serious?”

“C’mon. Please.”

“He jumped?” She’s skeptical, yet he’s made her feel like crap. When it comes to personal drama, she wonders if perhaps this boy doesn’t have even her beat. If he is telling the truth, that is. Nope, no way she’ll budge till she is good and ready.

And then he hits her with a doozy: “You don’t want to die, Sara. You don’t ever want to die. Not now. Not ever.”

“What are you talking about? Everybody dies, Kevin.”

He shakes his head in exasperation, and with a move as deft as any big-screen hero, he swoops in low, lays his hands about her waist, and tosses her over his shoulder. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or yell, to punch him or hug him, so she gives him a taste of all four. Kev, for his part, can’t believe what he’s done. By far, the coolest move of his entire life. Does his best to hide his stupid grin.

They are almost to the treeline before he sets her on the ground. She glares at him. Shoves him in the chest. Fumes. Shoves him harder. Stands toe to toe with him, wrists bent, fists pressed to her hips. Doing all she can not to grab him by the hair and crush her mouth down on his. What’s up with her, anyhow? A guy like this? A refugee from the pages of Of Mice and Men, that’s what he is, for God’s sake. Okay, maybe not to the George extreme, but gee....

She retreats a few paces. “I didn’t come all this way to fight with you, all right? Just tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for. A burning bush? What?”

Well, the way he looks at her, you’d think she’d just said the most outlandish thing he’d ever heard, as if Bible tales were right up there with your Eyewitness News at 6 on 6. He stomps off so abruptly, she’s sure he’s trying to ditch her.

Up toward the Thumb he jogs and then down along the rim, two hundred yards or thereabouts. He glances behind to see if she’s keeping up, tries not to make it too obvious. He waits for her before descending once more into the thick of the forest. And thick it is.

You don’t walk between the trees here, you squeeze between, a trail blazed by bruise and blood. It isn’t hiking, it’s intruding, and it gives you the feeling this is a place you aren’t supposed to be. She suspects he might be stalling, leading her in circles, putting off the inevitable admission he has nothing to show. She’s ready to call him on it when, all at once, the forest gives up, as if Mother Nature has run out of ideas.

Kev crosses to the middle of the clearing and the whaleback of rock. He stops, stoops, gets right to it: “Here, Sara. He’s here.”

She looks about. Takes it all in. The wildflowers. The silo of trees towering about them. The circle of blue above. “Wait a sec! Just wait. You’re not about to give me that sappy line, are you—about God being everywhere, in the sky and trees and wind? Because if that’s what this is about, I swear, Kevin—”

He unsheathes his knife. All she can do is stare. So this is how she will die. He really is the psycho her idiot cousin Jimmy claims he is....

Kev scrapes a ragged X in the dirt at the base of the stone. Shame displaces her fear. “He’s not everywhere, Sara. Just here.” She doesn’t get it. “It’s where He’s buried.”

It isn’t that she can’t speak, she has nothing to say.

“It’s why the bad stuff happens.”

“God is under the rock?”

“It’s his grave.”

She laughs right out loud. Can’t help it. His God-is-dead approach is certainly fresh in its faithlessness, she’ll give him that. Still, it comes down to more of the same. The Gospel According to Nutbar. “Who buried him, you?” She makes no effort to conceal her disdain.

“My grandfather.”

“Really? And when did he happen to do this, before or after he jumped off the cliff?”

“Before.” His voice treads on a whisper. “And after.”

“I knew this was crazy, but to follow you up here, to let myself believe for one second...Oh, God....”

“I guess I should’ve kept my trap shut.”

“Do you think? Do you think?” She draws a hand across her eyes as if to erase him and with a flip of her ponytail bee-lines it through the clearing for the apparent downhill. Elbows flying. Fists flying. Skechers flying. Lady’s slippers and bunchberries, trilliums and oxeye daisies, all bending backward to avoid her wrath. If only the damn trees ahead would do the same.

He shouts after her. “It’ll be dark in an hour. You can’t....”

“I don’t care.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Tough.”

“You don’t want to be out here alone.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“I know.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You’ll get lost.”

“I don’t care.”

“That’s not the way.”

“I don’t care.”

“Stay. Please. I’ll take you back first thing, I promise. I won’t talk to you, if that’s what you want. I won’t say another word about anything, swear to God.”

“God? You swear to God? Now that is funny.” She slows, tilts her head just so. “Should I be afraid of you, Kevin Akers?”

He thinks for a moment. “Should I be afraid of you?”

* * * *

Chief Boucher culls the herd. Not a chance he’ll take this mob up the mountain. He offers up nonexistent leads. Sends teams off to search in places he least expects the boy and girl to be. Wal-Mart. Ames. Playgrounds. The cul-de-sac where the willows grow at the end of Coney Road. Last thing Chief wants is to get stuck searching for searchers on the Katakani. Daylight is worrisome enough; after dark, you got to be crazy. He isn’t what you’d call keen about his own prospects up there, but fears if he waits till dawn and the girl turns up dead, he’ll second-guess himself the rest of his life. Along with everyone else in town. Gideon is flush on the giving side, not so much on the forgiving. And should it be the boy who turns up dead? Well, that’ll be a whole different set of hand-wringing and told-you-so’s.

He keeps it manageable: Deputy Fritshaw and that dog handler from Bar Harbor—Artie D’Angelo with his yellow labs, Osso and Buco. Search-and-rescue trained, they are. Osso alone is said to have rescued more toddlers from the bottoms of abandoned wells and mineshafts than Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, and Scooby-Doo combined.

Not thirty minutes into the search, it’s clear the dogs are hellbent for Pilot’s Thumb and Gil is troubled plenty by the ramifications—namely, all the lovers who had made the leap over the years. Of course, he does not know as yet whether he has your Romeo & Juliet here, your budding Ted Bundy, or your full-fledged Lizzie Borden. Most distressing, the boy’s grandpa looms large. Gets word he’s dying of the cancer, the old coot does, and goes off the deep end. For real. Splat. Nope, Gil does not cotton to any of the scenarios. He urges Fritshaw and D’Angelo to pick it up some.

“G’boys! G’boys!” Artie cries, and lickety-split that lunatic Buco pulls a u-turn, hauls off down the way they came, Osso yapping frenzy at his tail. They are onto something, alrighty. Not fifty strides downslope.

Gil levels his Remington 870 at the suspect bushes. Artie reins in his dogs. No taking chances, no sir. Wouldn’t put anything past these kids. Going out in a blaze of misguided glory could well be the modus operandi of either.

Fritshaw flushes out the quarry, his Downeast twang loping into a Texas drawl. “Put your hands behind your head and come out real slow-like. No funny business, you hear?”

Jesus, wouldn’t you know? Jimmy Alvin and Randy Gullickson.

Gil could kill the little pricks. The precious daylight they’ve cost him. “Didn’t I send you boys off elsewhere? Didn’t I?” He’s a good half-foot shorter than each, but towers over them, he’s so damn pissed.

Jimmy wisely addresses the barrel of the gun rather than Gil. “She’s like a sister to me, sir. I should be here for her, sir.” The boy is as contrite as can be, hands clasped ever so respectfully behind his back.

“That’s not what your mother tells me, Alvin,” Gil says, though Penny has mentioned nothing of the sort. “She says you and the girl don’t see eye to eye on much.” If the chief could have his way, he’d take the gunstock upside both their heads. For all he knows, the pair are complicit in the disappearance, like those Leopold and Loeb fellows he’d seen on Biography. Way back in the ‘20s, these sickos had killed this Bobby Franks kid just for the thrill of it. A copycat crime wouldn’t be beyond these two, no sir. Athletes. Popular. Bright enough on the learning side. No shortage of bucks. Admired by just about everyone, save for the handful who didn’t count. By Gil’s standards, the more you had going for you, the more you had to hide. He looked no further than himself. Well liked. Respected. A half-decent halfback more than a few remembered from his playing days with the Bobcats. Yet, the skeletons in his closet were crammed hipbone to hipbone. Spiteful stuff mostly. Mean. Petty. Atoning was the reason he’d become a cop. Until he came to understand the job was also license to wreak more of the same.

“Chief? Chief?” Deputy Fritshaw weighs his hand upon the barrel, eases the shotgun away from the boys. “C’mon, boss,” Fritshaw says.

Gil grins, leaves no doubt he sees right through the lying little shits.

Too dark to send them packing now. Just wouldn’t be the responsible thing.

* * * *

Kev and Sara make the most of the failing light. Gather wood, twigs. Get a decent fire going. Roll out the sleeping bags.

“Won’t God mind us camping on his grave?” Sara asks. It’s too soon to let him off the hook.

Kev hides a half-hearted smile behind his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Licks some sticky purple from his thumb. Fixes his eyes on the stars, the scratch of moonlight—what his mom used to call a lemon-peel moon. And just like that, out of nowhere, the boy feels soggy inside. Homesick for a home he isn’t sure he ever had.

Sara has never thought of sadness as anything near contagious, but she can feel his achiness slipping under her skin. Before long, she finds herself asking about his mom and dad, and though he hardly tells her anything about anybody, she opens up about her family.

Her mom had been a swimmer. Almost went to the Olympics one year. Didn’t cook much, but when she did.... She was funny too. Real funny. “You would have loved her, Kevin.”

Her dad had something to do with hedge funds; she isn’t clear on what. Or, when it comes down to it, what the heck hedge funds are.

“It was me who found him. I didn’t even know we owned a gun. He was in the kitchen. Then my mother. Upstairs. I thought she was napping. You’re with your parents every day, you think you know them....”

Kev wants to say something meaningful. His brain stalls at “Yeah.” What was it about the dark and campfires that caused folk to bare their souls? Then again, up here, he almost laughs, souls don’t need much help.

“Right away, you know, people started talking, going on about me being the one who had done it. The police too; you wouldn’t believe their questions. The looks I got. It seems a lot of kids kill their parents in Connecticut.”

Kev has never been to Connecticut. New Brunswick once. New Hampshire a bunch of times for ball games. A couple of school trips to Boston. The Aquarium. IMAX.

“What about your grandfather?” she asks. “Is it true, what you said?”

“He’d always wanted to die up here, you know, since it was good enough for...well....”

“God?”

He shrugs.

“My dad’s dad—I never knew him—he killed himself too. I didn’t know until I came to Gideon. Aunt Penny told me. I think she thought knowing would make me feel better. Like suicide is a family tradition. You know, like gift-giving on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day?”

He pokes at the fire. “Do you ever feel guilty about stuff you had nothing to do with?”

“Sure,” she says, relieved the boy has finally generated conversation. His tall, dark, and silent routine was wearing thin. “Sometimes more than the stuff I had lots to do with.”

He reaches for an Oreo. Twists the cookie into opposing halves.

“You know, Kevin, you didn’t have to try so hard. I liked you the first time I saw you. You could have just asked me out. It’s why I came over to you that day. All I wanted was for you to say something to me. Anything. And then, well, telling a girl you know where God is, it’s not the best pickup line ever.” She realizes the irony. “Not that it didn’t work, I guess.”

She gathers the sleeping bag from her legs and drapes it over their shoulders, snuggles under beside him. His arm has nowhere to go but around her.

He wrestles with the dilemma. Is it okay to kiss a girl whose mother is not yet twenty-four hours dead? Or are there rules about such things? Like is forty-eight hours all right? Or seventy-two? Or does there need to be a funeral first? And is there one set of rules for kissing and another for feeling-up?

Sara answers for him.

The girl knows how to kiss. And where. Boy, does she ever. His earlobes. His neck. Kev follows her lead, doing to her whatever she does to him. And he is getting the hang of it real quick too. He’s a natural, by golly. Of course, it isn’t like he’d never picked up a Maxim or, when given the opportunity, surfed for porn. And how many times has he experienced the same through others’ eyes? Too many to count, for sure. Yeah, he’s seen more than his fair share of just about everything and anything. Including a goodly amount he wishes to hell would fade from memory.

Sometimes you go looking for stuff. Sometimes stuff comes looking for you. A Katakani cry in the night, that’s what it is. Not loud. Just loud enough. An owl scooping up a shrew. Or your rock-a-bye baby cut loose from a treetop. Mindset means everything.

Sara raises her head. He wagers she’ll guess wind, though crickets, bobcat, or raccoon are possibilities. Right on cue, she ventures softly, “Wind?”

“Yeah,” he says, primed to return to the business at hand. But what comes next is plain on her face and he knows full well there’ll be no stopping the aural onslaught.

A busted siren of a wail, it is, overdubbed in no less than six-part harmony. Twenty miles offshore one instant, filling your head cheek to cheek and chin to scalp the next. Oscillating like late-night radio from Fort Wayne or Corpus Christi or Onlygodknowswhere, as it scores the chalkboard of your brain.

So many times before he’d heard it. After his mother died, when his grandfather had spilled the beans on God, showed him the grave and told him the story, and drilled him hard on the merits of keeping his big trap shut. After his grandfather died and he came alone. And while Miss Eggleton of English Composition (and abuse) has oft decried the boy’s severely limited imagination, Kev’s reality more than compensates. Nope, there is nothing limited about the images and sounds kicking round his head. He shouldn’t have stalled. Should’ve filled her in right off, no matter how whacked the story would’ve sounded. Wiser yet, all he had to do was pitch camp beyond the graveside. Back up near the Thumb, for instance. But this. Them just sitting here. Doing nothing. He knew better. Way better. The Dead don’t take kindly to teasing.

Sara, on the other hand, is intimate with similes and metaphors, knows how to spell onomatopoeia and hyperbole. To top it off, she’d spent the better part of two summers with her mom in Galway. Plainly, it is nighttime and the banshees have come out to play.

A mawkish mewling picks up as the wailing recedes. An otherworldly caterwaul that overlaps then overpowers, dull blade dissecting skull, before it too diminishes, one more disembodied chorus to serenade the dead of night.

The crackle of their fire.

The ocean beyond and below.

Mosquitoes. Black flies. Crickets.

A rustle of this. A skitter of that.

And just when you think the curtain is coming down, a phantom soloist takes to the mike, soprano no less, tone deaf and hopelessly asthmatic. Three bars in, scrabbling for the melody of what Kev assumes to be Toora Loora Loora or perhaps Suo Gan, clear favorites of the dearly departed, she gets the hook. God, they love their lullabies, they do!

“Feral cats, they’re everywhere up here,” Kev suggests, giving voice to the least threatening scenario.

She rolls her eyes. For a country boy, his guess is lame, no matter how hot and horny he surely is. She rises to her knees, scopes out the dark, seeking a glimpse of whatever is out there. “I’ve seen this movie,” she says.

Hell, Kev has seen the movie too. Knows the script by heart. Kiss, kiss. Scream, scream. Slash, slash. Kiss, kiss. So why wasn’t the girl huddled in his arms by now, all terrorized and tender? “You know what they say, if you leave things alone, things’ll leave you alone.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Sara shoots back, and before he can catch her, she springs to her feet, tears from the firelight, and scrambles to the top of God’s tombstone. “Jimmy, Gully,” she calls out, “if that’s you, you bastards—”

Kev charges after her. Seven, eight, nine strides. And Sara slams right back into him. Collapses against him. Grabs on, holds on. Breathless. Shaken. “Que raio é que aconteceu?” she cries. “What the hell was that?”

He can spell it out or cop out. “What do you think it was?”

“I’m speaking Portuguese, for God’s sake. I don’t speak Portuguese. Não falo português.”

On the upside, she is finally in his arms. He pulls her closer, inhales the florals of her hair. Jesus, talk about your one-track mind! Life, the universe, and God stripped naked before them, and his hormones are still running the show.

“À quanto tempo não estou cá? Tell me that. Please. How long was I gone?”

“Not as long as you think,” he says.

* * * *

Best they can tell from the trajectory of Artie D’Angelo’s flashlight, his head has ricocheted off a tree. The moon may be fulsome and bright somewhere over the Katakani, but down on the forest floor, you might as well be in a root cellar.

Just what Gil needs. Great. Just great. Hell, the guy knew better than to chase after his dogs. He wasn’t at ease with this nighttime business from the outset. “We’re blind men out here,” he’d said so many times, Gil finally had to tell him to shut the hell up.

Deputy Fritshaw is five weeks up on an eight-week First Response certificate. He’s been begging for on-the-job experience. Now he’s got Artie.

The Gullickson kid steadies the beam while the deputy examines the dog handler. His nose is busted, that much is evident. The blood soaking Artie’s shirt and pants is another matter; Fritshaw can’t say where the heck it’s all coming from.

“Is he dead?” Gil asks.

“Don’t think so, Chief.” Fritshaw gropes for a pulse. “I’m thinking maybe I should tie a tourniquet or two.”

Gil grunts, sizes up Jimmy and Gully, his lantern swaying at their noses. He backs the pair against the tree that took out D’Angelo. “Looks like it’s down to us,” he says, discarding what remains of his better judgment. “You’re my deputies now. But don’t let it go to your head. You step out of line, you or you, and there’s going to be a real tragic shooting mishap on the mountain tonight.”

* * * *

Sara’s tongue has run away with her brain. Can hardly believe the voice is her own. She’s never been the sort to chatter. Has no patience for those who do. But chattering she is. Cannot stop. The memories are too fresh, too vivid. And Kevin, too invested. All ears, all empathy, he sits by the fire as she recounts the details of a life as if it were her own. From her birth in Salema in 1922 to her death in Salema in 1933. From what? Diarrhea. “I’m playing on the beach one second and can’t stay on my feet the next. I’m yelling at me, ‘Get up! Get up!’ But I can’t hear me. I can’t save me. A bad stomach and I’m dead? Who dies like that?”

“Cholera.”

“Cholera? You know about cholera?”

“Nothing you could have done. You can’t change a life already lived.”

“I was there. Every moment. My mother. My father. My brothers. I had four brothers, Kevin. It was my life, it was.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Onze anos. Ela tinha apenas onze anos de idade. Eleven years old, that’s all I was.”

“And your name? Tell me that.”

She begins to answer. Tries again. An M. It started with an M. Or was it an N? Thinks she is going to be sick. Not as sick as she’d been on the beach at Sa—Sa—Sa—Salema. Jesus, she’d almost lost the name of her village too. She wraps her arms about her knees and presses them to her belly. “I can’t believe this.” She did not cry. She would not start now.

“The names fade first,” he says.

She raises her fists, throws herself at him. “What did you give me?” she shouts, tears breaking. “X? Crank? What, you bastard?”

He holds her wrists, talks her down. Strokes her hair, her cheeks. “That girl, Sara, she’s you right now, but not for long. You’re already losing her. Soon, you won’t even know she’s gone. Except every now and then, she’ll surprise you, come back in unexpected ways. Something she did or said. The house she lived in. A face she knew. A few words in a language you’re not supposed to know. You’ll smile or feel sad maybe. It can be the worst sort of feeling, a longing for something you can’t quite place. It’s there and then it’s not.”

“It felt so real, but now....”

“Yeah. Like a dream.”

“You wake up, remember every detail, and by breakfast not a thing.”

“Unless. Unless you dream it again and again. You take on the same soul, three, four times, you hang on to a whole lot. Ask me about the Merchant Marine and the war and I can tell you more than you’d ever want to know. And Woody Guthrie, I can sing you songs no one’s heard for seventy years. My grandpa, he served with him. Bunkmates.”

She lies warm against him, her heart racing, wondering if any of this day and this night are real and she isn’t lying in a hospital bed in Portland or Darien thrashing through drugs and coma. “You don’t even sound like you anymore. Cholera. The Marines. I mean, you’re the boy who couldn’t string two words together....”

“I never had anybody to share the words with, I guess. You and your Portuguese—if you tried learning the language right now, you’d pick it up so fast it wouldn’t even be funny. You end up knowing stuff you don’t even know you know. Stuff comes up all the time and suddenly you’re this brainiac.”

“It’s reincarnation then?”

“It’s about past lives. Just not ours.”

“I was there, Kevin. I was that little girl.”

“Look, you turn around right now, go up on the rock, I promise, you’ll be back here in a flash, dead certain you’ve been gone another lifetime. And maybe you’ll be speaking Arab or German or Chinese next. And maybe you’ll be babbling on about your mother and father and brothers and sisters. Heck, your husband and kids too. Your grandkids. You’ll even know what you had for breakfast on the day you died, Sara, but it won’t be your life you’ll be remembering. All that wailing and carrying on from before, it’ll be one of theirs.”

“Right. Of course.” She casts an eye to the dark and the vicinity of the rock. “Souls.”

“Spirits, ghosts, whatever you want. It’s all the same. And the noises they were making, well, it was just them trying to find our frequencies, get inside our heads so they could live their lives again. Once a soul hitches a ride inside your brain, you’ve got no choice but to go along. Tonight, some dead kid from Portugal got to you, next it could be your mom or dad or, I dunno, Heath Ledger, if you want. The Dead don’t have much else to do, God being dead now and all.”

“The god your grandfather buried?”

“Not the god, Sara. He buried God.” She’s a bright girl. Way brighter than any living soul he’s ever met. But stubborn, jeez! Why is this so hard for her? From the moment his grandpa told him and he’d climbed onto that rock and seen what he’d seen, he needed no convincing. But Sara, it isn’t so much she doesn’t trust him; she doesn’t trust herself. And where he’s headed now, he expects the notion will take an even bigger blow.

He wades in with what he thinks is caution. “The night before your dad...your mom.... They’d been arguing, right?”

She stares him down. Incredulous. Violated. “What about it?” she says, her stomach turning.

“It was a terrible fight. Worst ever. And in the morning, your dad was at the kitchen table waiting for you. The gun, right in front of him.”

“You’re creeping me out. You’re some kind of stalker, you know that?”

“Then you tell me.”

“It’s none of your damn business.”

“You asked him what was going on—”

“Fine. You want to hear it from me? Fine. He told me he was going to blow his brains out. Okay? As soon as he finished his coffee, he was going to blow his brains out. Okay? Satisfied? Jesus, Kevin, how could you?”

“That day you came to my locker. There was something about you—”

“So you lived my—my father’s life?”

“Only enough times to remember. No more. Honest.”

“Then you know what I did.”

“You took the gun.”

“I was stupid. My fingerprints were all over it. Daddy didn’t even try to stop me. Didn’t even blink.”

“But then you went and handed it back. You looked him in the eye and handed it back. Like you were daring him.”

“He was always going on about killing himself. I never thought....”

“Then you took your lunch from the fridge, put your books in your pack, and walked out the door like it was nothing. Nothing.”

“And all the way to school, you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking how nice it would be if it were just Mom and me. So there. Now you know. I’m a horrible person, okay?” He moves to pull her closer, but she wants none of it.

“Your dad was pretty screwed up, Sara. He did some bad stuff. It’s not a life I’d go through again. When the guilt caught up with him—”

“You’re like some kind of ghoul. Listen to yourself. You check out friends by hanging out with their dead families—”

“Once you start,” he says quietly, “it’s hard to stop. Besides, we’re all they got now.”

“What about my mother? You trying her next?”

“The freshly dead have a tough time connecting with strangers. You could if you want, but it’ll be easier if you go with people you don’t know so well the first few tries.”

“Jesus, Kevin!”

“Yeah, I’ve tried to hook up with Him too. After Grandpa told me about God, I thought I’d switch my prayers to Him, thinking He took over Heaven same way Casey Bibber took over Bibber Ford after his dad got creamed by the F-150. But Casey could never make a go of it, and it wasn’t like I was ever much into praying anyhow.”

She smiles. Doesn’t want to. Can’t help herself. “You’ve got all the bases covered, don’t you?” One second, she’s hating him more than she’s hated anyone since, well, her dad, and next she’s ready to bear his firstborn.

“There’s nothing harder for people to believe than the truth,” he says, and she knows exactly where he’s coming from. Even after she’d fessed up to the cops about Dad, breakfast, and his gun and they’d let her go, she wasn’t off the hook. Even in Gideon. Jimmy had told her how, before she showed up, the Chief of Police himself had told her uncle to lock up his guns and her aunt to keep the Henckels out of reach. “Don’t mean to alarm you none, but who’s to say for certain what this girl has or hasn’t done?”

Kev stirs the fire, a beacon of hope perhaps for the souls queuing up. “Ecclesiastes 12:7. It’s the only verse of the Bible I know by heart.”

“You’re one up on me then,” she says, uneasy as to where this might be going. She doesn’t mind The Good Book so much, just the good folk compelled to quote it.

“ ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.’ That pretty much explains it, I think.”

“Aunt Penny, she’s always going on about going back to God. So this is it then?”

“Everybody who’s lived and died, they’re all here on the Katakani—the ones since God died, anyhow. I don’t know about the souls from before. But the rest.... And as long as people keep dying.... You and me too, some day.”

“Who would have guessed—Heaven a mountaintop in Maine?”

“Grandpa likened it to a bunch of planes stacked up over Logan. They never get the go-ahead to land and they don’t have enough fuel to fly someplace better.”

“But wait, if God is dead like you say, where do new souls come from? Yours. Mine. Who made us? That’s the flaw, don’t you see? Without God—”

“Thomas Edison is dead too. But they’re still making light bulbs.”

“And to think that bitch Eggleton said you had no imagination.”

“I don’t hold it against her. When she was a kid.... Her father was a real nasty piece of work. He makes your dad look like a 4-H’er.”

“Jesus, Kevin, how many lives have you lived?”

“I like to know why people are the way they are.”

“Was He just lying there or what?”

“Who?”

“God. When your grandfather found Him.”

“You could see for yourself, if you want. He’d be glad to show you.”

An ember pops. The fire flares. A brocade of cinders showboat skyward. She is hardly eager to lose it on a beach in Portugal again, but the thought of living another life.... Kev is right: the Dead do kind of grow on you.

* * * *

Gully casts the beam onto the breakers. Spots the rotting corpse.

“It’s kelp, you idiot,” the Chief barks.

“A big mess of kelp,” Jimmy adds. He looks to the Chief, takes his deputy role all serious now. “But, do you think maybe they jumped? Do you? My dad says the waters hypnotize folks into jumping, even if they don’t want to.”

The dogs have been racing to and fro between the Thumb and the treeline. Now Osso (or Buco for all they can tell) has gotten wind of something and the pair gallop off down along the bluff.

Gully whips the beam around to where the dogs had been. Shivers. “What if the prick just pushed her off, eh, Chief? And then hightailed it for the woods? Then it’s not a search, but a manhunt, right?”

“Who’s to say she didn’t push him over, huh? Ever think of that?”

“Like she’d do that? C’mon.” Gully snorts. “Really?”

* * * *

Grandpa. His soul fills her head as a rush of warm honey.

His name is Henry. He’s five and up to his ears in life preserver. They are tacking south, rounding Hurley’s Basin. Just him and his pa. Sweet kid. Sweet.

She goes again and he’s Grandpa now. And he’s standing with Kevvy atop Pilot’s Thumb. “They want me to go for tests over Bangor way,” he says. “For what, to cut me open?”

“But you climbed all the way up here, Grandpa. If you were sick—”

He hushes the boy up. Tells him he knows what he knows and he’s not going through the same hell the kid’s poor mom went through. “It’s not like I’m leaving without a plan for coming back now, am I?”

“No,” the boy agrees, his head down to hide his tears. “I’ll come up all the time. I promise. I won’t leave you.”

He gives the kid a hug, ruffles his hair. And he steps from the ledge like he’s stepping out for a smoke.

* * * *

“You didn’t try to stop him,” Sara says, all squeaky clean.

Kev goes right back at her. “I’d say that makes us kindred spirits, wouldn’t you?”

* * * *

Gil pauses. Sniffs. “We’re close. Smell that fire?” He pulls the Smith & Wesson from his belt, presses it into Jimmy’s hand. “You know how to use this, need be?”

“Wow,” Gully says with no small amount of envy.

* * * *

She’s dabbled in stuff, smoked weed, played with TM. Inviting the Dead into her head wins hands down.

They’re up on the Katakani. Henry, Pa, and his older brothers, Pete and Frank. Hiking. Hunting. Foraging. They’ve been at it a goodly while when the forest turns ugly quiet. Pa cuts a slow 360, looking to fix a bead on whatever might have a bead on them. “Sometimes you go looking for stuff,” he whispers. “Sometimes stuff comes looking for you.” Sure enough, there’s this crashing through the trees and they duck and they dive like it’s coming down on them. But it’s not.

They get to their feet. Brush themselves off. Dazed a tad, but unharmed. Pete, he can’t contain himself. “What if it’s a rocket ship from Mars?” He’s not so good in school, but give him Charles Fort or Jules Verne and he can quote you whole chapters. Frank pipes up that maybe a plane from Godfrey Field has come down. Now that’s something Pa can buy into. They race to the rescue, Pa leading the charge up and about to a circular sweep of busted trees not thirty feet across. “What on God’s green earth...?” Smack in the middle and flat on its back lies the cause of the devastation.

“It’s me,” Henry utters, not knowing what to make of what he sees. Frank, Pete, and Pa, they utter the same. This thing, it looks like whoever is looking at it. Like seeing your own self dead and gone and fixed to rot. “It’s God,” Pete says, with absolute conviction. “Like he dropped fresh out of Heaven.” Pa cannot deny the boy this time. No sir. Because each of them, they know right then and there, without a shred of doubt, what their whole life is going to be. How much happy and how much sad and how much of everything else in between. They want nothing more than to be with Him. To lie right down, curl up, and die. Henry, he starts to bawl. Frank, Pete and Pa, they struggle to hold it together. But they’re sniffling, all right. And their hearts, it’s like they’re coasting to shutdown. They are going to die. They are going to die. Then Pa, thank God, it’s like he hears this little voice inside his head, shakes off the funk, announces, “We need to bury him.”

He is plenty big, but when they turn Him this way and that, He is light as balsa. No reason He doesn’t blow right out to sea. They dig through the forest floor like it’s whipped potatoes, fallen trees and branches crumbling as spent charcoal. No sooner are they done, the burial mound turns stone hard as if they’d never touched the ground at all. As if this big black rock has been here since the Ice Age. Pa sinks to his knees and the brothers follow. Clasp their hands in prayer. “Our Father who art in Heaven,” Pa starts. Stops cold. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. “Pa?” Frank ventures. The boys grow fidgety, think maybe their dad has stroked out. “Pa?” Frank tries again. And Pa, he shoots to his feet, declares, “No sense praying when there’s nobody to pray to.”

They gather up their gear. Head down the Katakani. Pa warns them: “Not a word. Ever. You keep your traps shut. Believing in God, that’s faith, boys. But you tell folk the god they believe in is dead, that’s blasphemy. They’ll never let you be.”

* * * *

A grudging gray dawn seeps into the clearing.

Two blurs streak from the forest.

Kev can’t make heads or tails of it. Reaches behind, pulls his knife from the dirt. Too slow. The dogs’ noses are on him before he’s sprung from his crouch. Hell, they’re only yellow labs. Handsome buggers, too. They snuffle about his shoes and ankles, droopy tongues flinging laces of hot drool. “What’re you hunting for, boys?” Kev asks softly, but it’s the voice of Chief Boucher that comes in reply: “Drop the knife, son.”

The dogs pad off for the tombstone. So it’s Sara they’re after. Kev would follow, if it weren’t for the shotgun swinging aimlessly from the crook of the Chief’s arm.

Boucher says something more, but the dogs—hell!—they’ve turned tail and his words are lost in the ruckus. The pair, they howl past the boy, almost bowling him over. Their yelping, it’s pitiful, a snoutful of porcupine, a headful of Dead. Gil, he’s never heard nothing like it. And here they come, bearing down on him like they got the hydrophobia. He moves to dodge them, but only riles them more. The lead dog, he thunders through, kicks it up a might, as his jaw strikes the 870, drives the magazine into Gil’s knee. The cop, he’s going down (the guy’s in agony), but the rump of the second dog fishtails high and hard, sets him right, wrenching the shotgun up, behind, and under his jacket, the barrel jammed impossibly parallel to spine. Crunch, the Chief’s wrist. Snap, the chief’s arm. Pop at the elbow. Pop at the shoulder. And a brawny kablooie of exploding shell and bone at the head.

Boucher crumples belly-down in a stock-still heap and out of the woods and onto the carnage Jimmy Alvin barges. Jimmy friggin’ Alvin with gun in hand. Stunned and stumbling. What the hell is up with them dogs? Jesus H. Christ! What the hell happened here? He trips, sprawls face-first into the bloodied bowl that used to be Chief Boucher’s scalp, wrecks his chest against that oh-so-beautiful 870. Jimmy’s fists hit the dirt and the Smith & Wesson takes a crazy bounce.

Kev doesn’t hear the shot. He never does. He’s thinking if only Coach Hackles were here to see this. Jimmy Alvin, aka Jimmy The Grip, star tight end of the Gideon High Bobcats, has fumbled a big one.

Sara takes in the scene like she’s seen it all before.

“It was an accident,” Jimmy blubbers from his knees. He calls to Kevin. “I’m sorry, man, I swear to God, I didn’t mean it.” He spits, wipes his face. Jesus H. Christ! The bloody pulp, the hard bits in his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and on his hands—he’s gagging on Gil Boucher, dear God. Pukes. And pukes.

Randy Gullickson lumbers into the clearing. The last leg has taken its toll. All that squeezing through and scraping by. His chin is cut, his jacket torn, his breathing akin to an Evinrude on the fritz. And the look on his face, you’d think his brain has been erased. It’s like he can’t believe a thing he sees. The Chief. And Akers. Holy friggin’ cow.

Jimmy wretches apology upon apology, as Sara lifts Kevin’s head to her lap. West Side Story comes to mind. Never fails. Tony dying as Maria sings. Talk about your goofy cheesy. She’d played Maria in school back in Darien one year. Had to fight the giggles most every performance. But now.... She brushes the hair from his eyes. “So, here we are again,” she says.

“I told you, you can’t change a life already lived. Mom gets sick, Grandpa jumps, I bleed out.”

“But us. Here. This has changed.”

“It has?”

“We’re having this conversation, aren’t we?”

“Have we had it before?”

“Some of it, yes.”

“And me, how many times have you tried?”

“I’ve lost count.”

“What year is it? For you, I mean?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You need to let me be.”

“I’ve lived the Chief’s life too, you know? He isn’t a bad guy. Funny thing, right to the end, he’s never sure if it’s me or you he’s saving.”

“You can’t do this forever.”

“I’m thinking maybe we’ve been going about this wrong. Maybe it’s true, we can’t change a life already lived.”

“Yeah.”

“But what about a life that’s not yet done? What if I change me? What if I take the gun this time and don’t give it back? What if I listen to the voice inside my head? What if I put the gun in my pack and walk out the door?”

She plumps the sleeping bag into a pillow, gently places it beneath his head. She doesn’t kiss him this time. Doesn’t quite know why.

“I swear to God, it was an accident.” Jimmy, he’s like some broken record already. Gully gets his buddy’s anguish and all, sure, but there’s something more going on up here. “Clam up for a minute, will ya? Listen, man. You hear that—that freaky wailing?”

Sara, she retakes her place upon the tombstone.

And Kevvy, his trap shut tight, he slips away. Just slips away. But never without a plan for coming back.