Peter Geye - Wintering

“I was thinking,” Charlie said, “sitting here listening to you and your old man jabbering, that I actually admire your moxie, Gus. Getting your hate out like that? I approve. I get a brotherly feeling with you. Yes, I do.”

“You’re nobody’s brother.”

“Sadly.” He took a puff on his cigar. “I suppose your old man’s been filling your head on that subject. Don’t believe everything you hear, son.”

“Don’t call me son.”

“I’ll call you whatever I goddamn please.” He had a couple more puffs. “You don’t even know where you are, do you? That fucking bungler took you all this way and you don’t have a goddamn clue.”

“I know right where I am.”

“You don’t know your ass from a tea kettle. Shut your goddamn mouth.”

Charlie walked a few steps closer, and now Gus could see the gray in his whiskers. The shine in his eyes and the rifle barrel poking over his shoulder.

“I’m gonna tell you what your problem is. What your old man’s problem is, anyway, and since it’s his I presume it’s yours. It ain’t that you’re up here playing voyageur. Hell, we’ve all got our heroes. The problem is, you’ve picked the wrong goddamn heroes. Who wants to be the asshole trapping the beaver? The right man wants to be the guy wearing the beaver-skin hat. That would be me, wearing that fucking hat. Do you understand?”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’m the sanest man you ever laid eyes on. Know why? I got everything I ever wanted. You should judge a man by what he wants — and what I want, I got. Including you in my crosshairs.” He puffed the cigar. “It’s a sad sack of shit I see over there, too.” Charlie cocked his head and stared at him for a long time. “How does it feel, all of this nonsense coming to an end like this? Think of the effort it took you to get here. All those portages lugging your gear through the woods. All those times you wanted to spit in your daddy’s face. All the fear you felt. All the times you just wanted to curl up on your mama’s lap.” He smiled ghoulishly. “And who was there with her? Not you. Not your daddy. Me, in this beaver-skin hat. I was in her lap and up her ass and everything else.”

He pointed his cigar at Gus. “Now you got that want-my-mama look. All you Eide boys, loving your mommies. But where is she? Where’s your daddy’s mama?” Charlie cleared his nose and throat and spit yellow sputum onto the snow. “You could go back to the first Eide mama that ever lived and she still wouldn’t be there. Probably because she was out in the barn with the guy in the fucking beaver-skin hat.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know everything, boy. I know what’s mine and what will be. I already told you, I’m the czar of this world and what I say goes. I could tell this snow to stop and it would obey before the next goddamn flake.” He stepped out from behind the tree and started walking sideways toward Gus. “I know Daddy-Boy left you sitting here because he was scared shitless of the czar. I know you’ve got a sleeping bag full of piss over there.” He stopped twenty paces in front of Gus, nothing between them but a bare stretch of frozen, snow-covered ground. “And I know you’re dead. It doesn’t even give me a minute’s pause to say it. You’re as dead as goddamn Kennedy. And your head’s about to look the same as his, too.”

“Gus was right. You don’t know anything.”

Then they both looked toward the oaks, where Harry was no more than ten yards away, crouched on one knee, with the Remington rock-solid in his hands.

Charlie took a last puff from his cigar and dropped it into the snow, eyes jumping between the Eides — quickly, but not in a panic — before he settled them on Harry. He kept the.38 Special aimed at Gus.

“Gus, listen to me,” Harry said. “I want you to close your eyes. Close your eyes and don’t open them until I tell you to.”

“You say one more word and I’ll shoot your worthless fucking son.”

“You be quiet,” Harry said. Then, to Gus, “Close your eyes. None of this is happening, bud. None of it ever happened.”

“Lying right up to the end, huh?”

Gus closed his eyes.

“You’ve upset your boy, Harry.”

“Don’t mention him again.”

“This is a hell of a knot here,” Charlie said. “I can’t say I saw this coming.”

“I did,” Harry said. “Now put the gun down, Charlie.”

“I don’t think so. I was just telling Gus what I was about to do with this here gun. How his head’s about to look like our former president’s. And you, asshole, are next in line.”

“Why the hell do you keep talking about the president?” Harry said.

“See?” Charlie said. “You come up here and live like hermits while the world passes you by. President Kennedy was assassinated, you dipshits. The world ain’t what it was before. It never was. And you just never saw it, did you, Harry?”

“I saw plenty, Charlie. What I didn’t see, I know that, too. I know you killed your brother. I know there’s only one way of stopping you, sad as I am to say it.”

Charlie laughed uproariously. “You think you’re up for this? With your little boy crouched in the snow over there? My money’s on no. I don’t think you got the sand to see this through.” He held the Colt on Gus and swept his gaze to Harry.

Gus closed his eyes so tight it hurt.

“I won’t ask you to put that gun down again,” Harry said.

“Tell me one thing,” Charlie said. “How do you think your wife’ll feel about all this? You think you’ve got troubles now? Just wait on that.”

“Gus, are your eyes closed? We’re not here, buddy. We never were.”

“You can keep your fucking eyes closed, boy, but that don’t mean you ain’t here. You sure as shit are.”

“Do not open your eyes, Gus. Sing to yourself.”

“There’s only one song for this rat fuck,” Charlie said. “And it can’t be sung without a church choir and an organ playing alongside.”

“Shut your goddamn mouth, Charlie Aas. Shut your mouth and put that gun on the ground. This is the last time—” But there were no more words, just two shots, fired practically the same moment, two claps of thunder in the woods— Boom! Boom! — and then a silence as profound as a corpse.

—

“One of the last things my father ever said to me, or one of the last things before he started to lose it, was about those gunshots. Christ, Berit, I can hear them still, honest to God. And not just figuratively. That sound’s in me yet, like a scar from some childhood pox.”

Gus’s voice was barely louder than the snowfall coming down outside the apothecary.

“He said he was an ugly man, and that ugliness first found him when he shot Charlie Aas. He said it wasn’t the only ugly thing he’d ever done, that there was plenty of ugly to go around. But he also said that all of his ugliness and failures, all of the things he’d done wrong and regretted, they were all worth it because of how beautiful Signe and I were. He said that the beauty of our lives made the ugliness of his worth it. Even our time up on the borderlands, horrible and wrong as it was, turned out to have its own benefit — in his life and mine, he thought — because it proved to him how deep his love truly was. Despite those gunshots.

“You knew him, Berit. Probably you knew him better than I did myself in his later years. So you know I never could’ve doubted his love. It was as unequivocal as Lake Superior, and I took it just as much for granted. But to have heard him say that? About our time up there, after all these years? I don’t really know, Berit.”

He looked out at the snow and studied it.

“There’ve been many days in my life when I might’ve sworn it never happened. The whole adventure, but especially that morning. I actually swore once — with my hand on a Bible in the Arrowhead County Courthouse — that it never did happen. And that’s how it often felt. Except for those two gunshots and their echoes through me all these years.”