John Wildstrand’s guts went ice-cold and he phoned Billy as soon as he returned to the bank. Sure enough, Billy had been in the previous summer’s production put on by the town drama club. He’d been one of the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors. Wildstrand put the phone down and stared at it. Neve was at the town library at that very moment looking through archived town newspapers. This was how it happened all of a sudden that instead of taking college courses, Billy bolted and joined the army, after all. Wildstrand hadn’t thought that they would take him because he was underweight, but the army didn’t care. Now he was terrified that Maggie’s grief would affect the baby, for she was heartbroken and cried day and night when Billy was shipped off for basic training. She said that she couldn’t feel things anymore, and turned away from Wildstrand when he visited and would not let him touch her. After six weeks, Billy sent a photograph of himself in military gear. He didn’t look to have bulked up much. The helmet seemed to balance on his head, shadowing his unreadable eyes. His neck was still skinny and graceful. He looked about twelve years old.
One afternoon, Wildstrand drove home after having visited Maggie, and all the way down the highway the little face beneath the helmet was in his mind. When he entered his house he saw that Neve was working on another afghan. She raised her clear, blue eyes to his.
“I am leaving now,” said Wildstrand. He put the car keys on the coffee table. “You keep everything. I have clothes. I have shoes. I’ll make myself a sandwich and be going now.”
John Wildstrand walked into the kitchen and made the sandwich and wrapped it in waxed paper. He walked out into the living room and stood in the center of the carpet. Neve just looked at him. Light blazed white across her face. She raised her hand, swept it to the side, then dropped it. The gesture seemed to hang in the air, as if her arm left a trail. Wildstrand turned and walked out the door, across town, and started hitchhiking back to Maggie along the highway. There was only a slight wind and the temperature was about sixty-five degrees. The fields were full of standing water and ducks and geese swam in the ditches. All through the afternoon, as he walked along, the horizon appeared and disappeared. He didn’t take a ride until the sky darkened.
The Lions
SHORTLY AFTER JOHN Wildstrand moved into the house with Maggie, the baby boy was born. In those dazzling moments after the birth, he had a vision. The baby looked like Billy. Stage Billy, tall Billy with no ass to speak of, Billy with big feet, who looked like he could hardly lift a water canteen. Billy’s heart was pierced by thorns. Was there anyone more magnificent than Billy? John Wildstrand saw that Billy Peace was a kind of Christ figure, or a martyr like those in the New Testament. Only he was thrown to the lions in the cause of their happiness. Wildstrand had thought that, in his new life, Billy might grow in strength and valor and be exactly the person who Neve believed had abducted her. Now he saw that Billy already was that person and Neve had known. He also saw that Billy had told his sister about the kidnapping. All of this was depicted in the face of the tiny new infant. Wildstrand looked closer, and tried to see whether Billy would live or die. But before that picture came clear, the baby opened up its mouth and bawled. Wildstrand put the baby to Maggie’s breast and when it latched on, he tried to touch the baby’s hair. Maggie pushed away his hand with the same gesture that his wife had used to say good-bye, and he sank back into the hospital chair. He was dizzy with spent adrenaline. For a long time, he watched them from across the room.
The Garage
ONLY TWICE DID John Wildstrand visit Pluto. The first time, he brought a trailer and loaded into it all that Neve had not disposed of—she’d thrown a lot of things away. But physical objects had ceased to matter to Wildstrand. He was sleeping out in Maggie’s garage, by then, in a sleeping bag spread out on a little camp cot. He cuddled up next to the used car he’d bought. Maggie argued with him every day about going to the police, turning him in for the kidnapping.
“You’ll lose everything”—Wildstrand waved his arm—“this house. And Billy will go to jail. Would you like that? You’ll be out on the street. And what about little Corwin?”
Maggie had named the baby after her brother’s best buddy in boot camp. He was now in Korea, stationed close to the DMZ. Billy was in danger and wrote weekly letters about his visions. Apparently, he was being contacted by powerful spirits who saved him time after time, and who promised to direct his life.
“He’s never been religious,” Maggie wept, “in his whole life. Now look at this! Look at what you did!”
Wildstrand despaired. There was no getting away from Billy; he would always control the situation, no matter where he was. Billy, with his bristle-headed army cut and unknown eyes, with his army boots and rifle. Now that he was a soldier and visited by angels, there was no hope. Even if nothing happened to him. In the months after his son’s birth, Wildstrand had come to understand that he would never be forgiven for engineering the kidnap scheme, and he had lost Maggie’s love. She was icy-angry—she implied that he was just like his Indian-hating grandfather and now spent all day caring for the baby and cleaning the house. Every so often, she would thrust a shopping list at Wildstrand, or make him help with heavy lifting. Beyond that, she didn’t like him to get close to either her or the baby. He moved around the small house like a ghost, never knowing where to settle, never comfortable. He made a sorry den for himself in the basement, where he would go whenever it was too cold to sleep in the garage. Otherwise he stayed out there, listening to music, reading the newspaper. He’d found a job at the same insurance agency he’d always used, a low-level job assisting others in processing claims.
The Entryway
ONE DAY, A homeowner’s claim from his old address crossed his desk. Neve had filed a claim on everything that he had taken from the house, his own things, which she had pressured him to come and clear out. There were his expensive hand tools, each engraved with his name and an identification code, and records with their expensive record-playing equipment, even a brand-new television. Looking at the list, Wildstrand felt a glimmer of heat rise in his throat. His ears burned. He took his coat from the back of the office door, went back to the house that his and Neve’s retirement money had bought, and packed up everything he’d kept in the garage. He drove back to Pluto with a full car and parked in the driveway of his former house.
After a while, Neve came to the window. She looked at him as he got out of the car, and he looked at her, through the window, which was like the glass of a dim aquarium. When she vanished, he was not sure whether she would come to the door or be absorbed into the gloom. But she did open the door at last, and beckoned him inside. They stood in the entry, quite close. Her hair had gone from gray to silver-white. A pulse beat in her slender throat. Her arms were stick thin, but she seemed to generate an unusual light. Wildstrand could feel it, this odd radiance. It seemed to emanate from her translucent skin. It occurred to him that he would sink down at the feet of this beautiful, wronged woman and kiss the hem of the wide-skirted dress that she was wearing.
“You filed a claim on all my stuff. I’m bringing it back,” he said.
“No. I want the money. I need the money,” she told him.
“Why?”
“We’re sunk. They’re not going to buy the bank out. They’re opening a new one next to it.”
“What about your father’s accounts?”
“He’ll live to be a hundred,” said Neve. “John, he told me that you were seeing another woman all along.”
“I don’t know where he got that idea.”
Neve waited.
“All right. Yes.”
Her eyes filled with terrible tears and she began to shake. Before he knew it, Wildstrand was holding her. He shut the door. They made love in the entry, on the carpet where so many people paused, and then on the bench where visitors removed their boots and shoes. His remorse and shame was confusingly erotic. And her need for him was so powerful it seemed that they were going over a rushing waterfall together, fallin
g in a barrel, and at the bottom Wildstrand cracked open and told her everything.
He had to, because of Billy Peace. On the entryway floor next to the boot rack, Wildstrand realized with utter instinctive certainty that Billy had helped himself to his wife’s body when she was tied up and utterly helpless, kidnapped, on the mattress beside the junked pots and cast-off clothing. Wildstrand clung to Neve with the blackness washing over him, and talked and talked.
“I know he violated you,” Wildstrand said, after he’d spilled everything else.
“Who? That boy? He was just a twerp,” said Neve. “He never touched me. I said all of that stuff out of desperation, to try and make you jealous. Why, I do not know.” She sat up and eyed him with calm assessment. “Possibly, I thought you loved me way deep down. I think I believed there was something in you.”
“There is, there is,” Wildstrand said to her, strangling on a surge of hope, touching her ankles as she got to her feet.
“When the snow was covering me, out in the ditch, I saw your face. Real as real. You bent over me and pulled me out. It wasn’t the farmer, it was you.”
“It was me,” said Wildstrand, lifting his arms. “I must have always loved you.”
She looked down at him for a long time, contemplating this amazing fact. Then she went upstairs and called the police.
A Shiver of Possibility
IN THE YEARS after he was caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced, Wildstrand was sometimes asked by friends he made behind bars, and other lawyers (of course, I asked him myself ), what had caused him to admit what he had done. What caused him to tell Neve and, to boot, assume all responsibility? Sometimes he couldn’t think of a good reason. Other times, he said that he guessed that it would never end; he saw that he’d be kicked from one woman to the other until the end of time. But after he gave his answer, he always came back to that moment he had opened his door to Billy Peace, and thought of how, when he saw the boy standing in the shining porch light, in the snow, with the dull gun and the sad face, he felt a shiver of possibility, and said, “Come in.”
Marn Wolde
Satan: Hijacker of a Planet
IT WAS A drought-dry summer when I met Billy Peace, and in the suspension of rain everything seemed to flex. The growthless spruce had dropped their bud-soft needles. Our popples stretched their full lengths, each heart-lobed leaf still and open. The great oak across the field reared out, its roots sucking water from the bottom of the world. On an afternoon when rain was promised, we sat on the deck and watched the sky pitch over reservation land. I could almost feel the timbers shake under my feet, as its great searching taproots trembled. Still, the rain held off. I left my mother sitting in her chair and went to the old field by the house, up a low rise. There, the storm seemed likelier. The wind came off the dense-grassed slough, smelling like wet hair, and the hot ditch grass reached for it, butter yellow, its life concentrated in its fiber mat, each stalk so dry it gave off a puff of smoke when snapped. Grass-hoppers sprang from each step, tripped off my arms, legs, eyebrows. There was a small pile of stones halfway up the hill. Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old.
I was watching the wash of ink, rain on the horizon, when his white car pulled into our yard. A tall man, thin and tense, but with a shy and open smile. His eyes were brown and melting, rich as sweet milk caramel. I would find out later that they could freeze black or turn any color under the sun. He was dressed very neatly, wearing a tie and a shirt that was not sweat through, still ironed crisp. I noticed this as I was walking back down to the yard. I was starting to notice these things about men, the way their hips moved when they hauled feed, checked fence lines, the way their forearms looked so tanned and hard when they rolled up their white sleeves. I was looking at men, not with intentions, because I didn’t know what I would have done with one yet if I got him, but with a studious mind.
I was looking at them just to figure, for pure survival, the way a girl does. It is like a farmer, which my dad is, gets to know the lay of the land. He loves his land so he has got to figure how to cultivate it. What it needs in each season, how much abuse it will sustain, what in the end it will yield to him.
And I, too, in order to increase my yield and use myself right was taking my lessons. I never tried out my information, though, until Billy Peace arrived. He looked at me where I stood in the shade of my mother’s butterfly bush. I’m not saying that I flirted right off. I still didn’t know how to. I walked into the sunlight and stared him in the eye.
“What are you selling?” I smiled, and told him that my mother would probably buy it since she bought all sorts of things—a pruning saw you could use from the ground, a cherry pitter, a mechanical apple peeler that also removed the seeds and core, a sewing machine that remembered all the stitches it had sewed. He smiled back at me, walked with me to the steps of the house.
“You’re a bright young lady,” he said, though he was young himself. “Stand close. You’ll see what I’m selling by looking into the middle of my eyes.”
He pointed his finger between his eyebrows.
“I don’t see a thing.”
My mother came around the corner holding a glass of iced tea in her hand. While they were talking, I didn’t look at Billy. I felt challenged, like I was supposed to make sense of what he did. At sixteen, I didn’t have perspective on the things men did. I’d never gotten a whiff of that odor, the scent of it that shears off them like an acid. Later, it would require just a certain look, a tone of voice, a word, no more than a variation in the way he drew breath. A dog gets tuned that way, sensitized to a razor degree, but it wasn’t that way in the beginning. I took orders from Billy like I was doing him a favor, the way, since I’d hit my growth, I took orders from my dad.
Except my dad only gave orders when he was tired. All other times, he did the things he wanted done by himself. My dad was not the man I should have studied, in the end, if I wanted to learn cold survival. He was too worn-out. All my life, my parents had been splitting up. I lived in a no-man’s-land between them and the ground was pitted, scarred with ruts. And yet, no matter how hard they fought each other they had stuck together. He could not get away from my mother somehow, nor she from him. So I couldn’t look to my father for information on what a man was. He was half her. And I couldn’t look at the old man they took care of, his uncle whose dad originally bought the farm, my uncle Warren, who would stare and stare at you like he was watching your blood move and your food digest. Warren’s face was a chopping block, his long arms hung heavy. He flew into disorderly rages and went missing, for days sometimes. We’d find him wandering the farm roads bewildered and spent of fury. I never saw Warren as the farmer that my dad was—you should have seen my father when he planted a tree.
“A ten-dollar hole for a two-bit seedling,” he said. That was the way he dug, so as not to crowd the roots. He kept the little tree in water while he pried out any rocks that might be there, though our land was just as good as the best Red River soil, dirt that went ten feet down—rich, black clods you felt like holding in your fist and biting. My father put the bare-root tree in and sifted the soil around the roots, rubbing it to fine crumbs between his fingers. He packed the dirt in, he watered until the water pooled. Looking into my father’s eyes you would see the knowledge, tender and offhand, of the ways roots took hold in the earth.
I believed, at first, that there was that sort of knowledge in Billy’s eyes. I watched him from behind my mother. I discovered what he had to sell.
“It’s Bibles, isn’t it,” I said.
“No fair.” He put his hand across his heart, grinned at the two of us. He had seen my eyes flicker to the little gold cross in his lapel.
“Something even better.”
“What?” My mother scof
fed.
“Spirit.”
My mother turned and walked away. She had no time for conversion attempts. I was only intermittently religious, but I suppose I felt that I had to make up for her rudeness, and so I stayed a moment longer. I was wearing very short cutoff jeans and a little brown T-shirt, tight, old clothes for dirty work. I was supposed to help my mom clean out her brooder house that afternoon, to set new straw in and wash down the galvanized feeders, to destroy the thick whorls of ground-spider cobwebs and shine the windows with vinegar and newspapers. All of this stuff was scattered behind me on the steps, rags and buckets. And as I said, I was never all that religious.
“There is a meeting tonight,” he said. “I’m going to tell you where.”
He always told in advance what he was going to say. That was the preaching habit in him, it made you wait and wonder in spite of yourself.
“Where?” I said finally.
He told me the directions, how to get where the tent was pitched. He spoke to me looking full on with sweetness of intensity. Eyes brown as burnt sugar. I realized I’d seen his picture before in my grandparents’ bedroom. Billy’s was the face of Jesus leaning his head forward just a little to listen for an answer as he knocked on a rustic door. I decided that I would go, without anyone else in my family, to the fairground field that evening. Just to study. Just to see.
THE RAIN DROPPED off the edge of the world. We got no more than a slash of moisture in the air that dried before it fell. After the storm veered off, I decided to go to town. I drove a small sledge and tractor at the age of eleven, and a car back and forth into Pluto with my mother in the passenger’s seat when I was fourteen years old. So it was not unusual that I went where I wanted to go.
As I walked over to the car, I passed Uncle Warren. He was sitting on a stump in the yard, looking at me, watching me, his gray hair tufted out, his chin white stubble, his eye on me, green and frozen.