Cold Quiet Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

Guinevere’s and held them. As if to say something. As if to throw her down on the hot car hood and wrap his fingers around her throat, to stifle her voice and drive himself inside her again. His eyes held an appetite, and worst of all, unlike the boys that noticed her sprouting breasts and rounding derriére at school, her father had the courage to hold her eyes as long as he wanted.
    “Dad! Look!” Gwen screamed.
    Burt swerved. Tires squealed. The car shook left and right.
    In the approaching lane, a tractor-trailer barreled through a downhill turn, and in their path, a muscle car with a block on the hood attempted to pass. Burt split the distance between them. The truck roared by, inches outside their windows. The car passed to their right and kicked a plume of dirt from the shoulder and fishtailed back onto the pavement.
    Burt pounded the ball of his fist to the steering wheel, and the car rocked. “God
damn
!” He punched the dash above the radio. “God
fuckin’
damn!”
    “Burt…” her mother said, one hand on her chest, the other braced on the dash.
    “Fuck!” Burt swerved to the side of the road at the top of the hill and three-point-turned. He sped after the muscle car.
    Her mother’s voice lifted in pitch. “We’re going to be late for the funeral, Burt.”
    They raced down the hill.
    “Burt? For so long I’ve wanted—don’t do this to me, please? Burt?”

CHAPTER FOUR
    I fetch field glasses from the Bronco’s glove box, wipe the object lens with a flap of cloth from the seat cover. Climb out. A pair of tracks wander across the field. I can make them out for two hundred yards, then they fade into drifts and cornstalks. Somewhere beyond the fuzzy white, those tracks lead into the forest. I’ve hunted turkey in that stretch.
    Hunted buck, too. Me and Doctor Coates, rest in peace, used to meet at the far corner of the field where a tractor trail divides Haudesert and Sunday land. Coates died last month of cancer. He was dying for years and never let on. We hunted turkey in the spring, when the morning grass looked like green knives and the sky was so crisp a sneeze might break it. The only thing he said about the cancer was he’d sell his soul to see next spring’s blue skies.
    We hunted buck in the fall. We stood jawin’ at the near side of the stream.
    “I’ll find a perch up the hill,” he said.
    He liked to wait on deer to wander by. I said I’d follow the crick a few hundred yards into the Sunday side and circle back, driving anything in front of me his direction. I reached for my tobacco and stopped. Three deer crashed through a wall of brush twenty yards off. They weren’t ball-flappin’ scared, but something got them moving fast enough to quit paying attention. Coates was closer, and I had to drop my rifle barrel to swing clear of him. Saw antlers flash against a backdrop of scrub. Aimed on the lead animal.
    Out the corner of my eye I saw Doctor Coates wince. His ear was close to the muzzle. He gave a slight nod, and I fired.
    “Hell!” he said, and pressed his hand to the side of his head. “Damn!”
    “Got him.” The buck stepped forward; his head swiveled to me and he fell.
    “Shit!” Coates said.
    He moved a few yards and stared at my rifle, as if to give it hell, and I said, “You coulda plugged your ear. I’d a waited.”
    “Mother of Christ, I’m deaf,” he said.
    “It’ll come back. Let’s take a look.”
    He lowered his hand and I slipped over the stream bank and followed a path of flat rocks to the opposite side. He shambled after me, grunting how he’d never hear again and if I wasn’t the sheriff he’d murder me in cold blood. We’d been boon companions since the age of ten, and this little incident wouldn’t change his estimation of me, whatever it was.
    He’s dead now, so any harm didn’t last.
    We stood at my kill and first thing I noticed was the missing antler. This buck was a spike, and not two inches at that.
    “You shot a doe,” he