I knew that one of the Goslants had done this, no doubt Johnnie.
You must understand that I bore the Goslants no ill will. I saw them as victims of institutions and history, and if they were hungry a quest for protein was entirely justified. But Brassard said Homer, the patriarch, had worked for decades on the state road crew, making decent money. Johnnie’s pickup truck was almost new and customized with fat chrome exhaust pipes, pin-striping, and spring-mounted double antennas. Several of the family were seriously obese; they weren’t hurting for calories.
I marched down the hill, furious and heart-wounded. The first person I encountered was Will, camera nearby as always, weeding the hills and trimming the bottom leaves from the bines. I was breathing hard and my face burned and it must have shown, because he said, “Jesus! What happened?”
I told him about the guts but didn’t mention my fear for the bears. He sat on the ground and signaled me to do likewise. My state alarmed him, and I knew that the idea of a confrontation with Johnnie frightened him.
“This is exactly the kind of thing we don’t need,” he said. “The others are just PPP, not so bad, but Johnnie’s a loose cannon. He’s got some bad-apple buddies, too. Best thing would be to call the Fish and Wildlife Department and have a state warden talk to him. But I doubt you could prove he did it.”
“What should I do? I can’t just let the little shit-ass fucker do this—”
“Let me go up to the Goslants’. I was born here, they’ll accept it from me better than you, some flatlander getting in their faces.” He cleared his throat and glanced away. “And I’m not a woman. And I don’t sleep out in the woods by myself up there.”
He turned to look at me, making sure I got his meaning: He would not be as easy a target for retaliation after a confrontation.
My fists clenched white on my thighs. Will saw them and put his hands over them, gripping lightly. “Annie. You gotta calm down a little, okay? Please? I’ll go up there. I’ll talk to Johnnie. We’ll sort it out.”
I declined his offer of intervention but thanked him and told him he was right, I should think about it and get a handle on myself. I left him to the hops and went back to the farm.
I found Erik sitting on the front step of the worker’s dorm, a rare moment of repose. He had been making phone calls to equipment suppliers and was taking a break. His restless hands whittled a stick with impatient strokes of his sheath knife. He nodded as I told him.
“Want me to go kill him for you?” he asked indifferently.
“Erik, come on!” Meaning take this seriously. Actually, he frightened me. He wore a denim jacket cut off at the armpits, biker-style, fabric frilled around the cut edges, his arms cording as he shaved off curls of wood. His forearm tattoo, if you didn’t know what it said, looked sinister.
“Relax, I was kidding. Well, exaggerating,” he said with no irony, glancing up at me, dead-eyed.
I saw an edge in him, maybe forged in defending his drug turf and surviving seven years in a penitentiary, and I realized I didn’t really know what my brother was capable of.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t do anything. I mean it. It’s my land. It’s my problem. Do you hear me?”
“Okay!” He looked up at me with irritation, then softened. “Okay.” He whittled some more. “But if they ever mess with you personally?” His jaw muscles striated and his knife flashed as he hacked a big chip off his stick. “Whole nother story.”
Just then Earnest came out of the barn, and when he saw us together he walked over.
“What obtains?” he asked.
I told him about the guts and said that Will had offered to go up and talk to Johnnie. I wondered whether Earnest would volunteer, too. Of the three of them, he’d be the last person Johnnie would want to see on his doorstep.
“I’m afraid it might be one of my bears,” I blurted. The thought made my eyes tear despite my fury.
“Your bears?”
“I have a couple of bears that come around,” I hedged. “I … like having them there.” I couldn’t formulate words that would carry the enormity of my feeling. “They’re my … they matter a lot to me. They really matter to me!”
They absorbed my stumbling explanation and vehemence without comment.
Earnest blew out a long breath, then bit his lips as he thought about it. He looked at me as if weighing a decision, glanced over at Erik, brought his eyes back to me.
“Yeah, you should definitely go up there,” he said at last. “I mean you. On your own.”
I was shocked. He wasn’t trying to be funny. But I was terrified of Johnnie, of guns, of what might have happened to the minds of people like him, living in such financial and cultural poverty, envying the world they saw on their satellite TV and resenting that world for shoving them aside in every way unless they showed a willingness to violence.
“Yeah, right,” I said.
Earnest came up to me, looked me up and down, squeezed my biceps experimentally, finished by stroking my hair out of my face and staring into my eyes in a purely analytical way. “What d’you think, Erik?”
My brother caught Earnest’s eyes uncertainly. But he stood up and came over to feel my arms and then my shoulders, like a boxing coach checking his fighter’s readiness. He finished by bringing his hand down my back and, clowning, to my rear end. I swatted his hand. Earnest smiled grimly.
“Strong as a house,” Erik proclaimed.
Earnest nodded and rolled his head to work a kink out of his neck. “Go for it, Pilgrim,” he said carelessly. He walked into the house. Also feigning indifference, Erik stood, stretched like a cat, and headed back to the hop yard.
I
