Exactly what we need.
I glide the truck to a stop and we get out. Yanking a crowbar from the back, we make our way up a hill to the old home. The cabin looks abandoned, as I knew it would be, but I look for signs of life anyway: a car parked in back, dark shadows through the windows. There’s nothing.
She stands motionless beside the truck. “Let’s go,” I say. Finally she climbs up the dozen or so steps to the deck. She stops to catch her breath. “Hurry up,” I say. For all I know, we’re being watched. I knock on the door first, just to make sure that we’re alone. And then I tell the girl to shut up and I listen. It’s silent.
I use the crowbar to jimmy the door open. I break the door. I tell her I’ll fix it later. I slide an end table before the door to keep it closed. The girl stands with her back pressed to a wall made of red pine logs. She looks around. The room is small. There’s a saggy blue couch and ugly plastic red chair and a wood-burning stove in the corner that doesn’t give off an ounce of heat. There are photos of the cabin when it was being built, old black-and-whites shot with a box camera, and I remember being told by the guy about it when I was a kid, about how the people who built the home a hundred years ago picked this location not for the view, but for the row of pine trees just east of the cabin that shield it from the driving winds. As if he had any way of knowing what thoughts ran through their minds, those people, dead by now, who built the home. I remember, even back then, staring at his greasy receding hairline and pockmarked skin and thinking he’s full of crap.
There’s the kitchen with mustard-colored appliances and linoleum floors and a table covered in a plastic tablecloth. Dust covers everything in sight. There are spiderwebs and a layer of dead Asian beetles on the windowsills. It smells.
“Get used to it,” I say. I see the disgust in her eyes. I’m sure the judge’s house would never look like this.
I flip the light switch and test the water. Nothing. The cabin was winterized before he took off for the winter. It’s not like we talk anymore, but I keep tabs on him anyway. I know his marriage fell through, again, know he got arrested a year or so ago for a DUI. I know that a couple weeks ago, as he does every fall, he packed his shit and left, back to Winona, where he works for the D.O.T., clearing ice and snow off the roads.
I yank a phone from a phone jack and, finding a pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer, cut the wire. I glance at the girl, who hasn’t moved from the door. Her eyes are fixed on the plaid tablecloth. It’s ugly, I know. I step outside to pee. A minute later I return. She’s still staring at that damn tablecloth.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and start a fire,” I say.
She puts her hands on her hips and stares at me, with that god-awful sweatshirt from the gas station. “Why don’t you?” she says, but her voice shakes, her hands shake, and I know she’s not as fearless as she wants me to think.
I stomp outside and bring in three logs of firewood and drop them to the ground beside her feet. She jumps. I hand her some matches, which she lets drop to the floor, the carton opening and matches falling out. I tell her to pick them up. She ignores me.
She needs to understand that I’m the one in the driver’s seat. Not her. She’s along for the ride, so long as she keeps her mouth shut and does what I say. I yank the gun from a pocket and attach the magazine. And I point it at her. At those pretty blue eyes that go from sure to not-so-sure as she whispers to me, “You’ve got this all wrong,” and as I cock the hammer, I tell her to pick up the matches and start a fire. And I’m wondering if this was a mistake, if I should’ve just handed her over to Dalmar. I don’t know what I expected from the girl, but this sure as hell isn’t it. I never figured I’d end up with an ingrate. She’s staring at me. A challenge. Seeing if I have it in me to kill her.
I take a step closer and hold the gun to her head.
And then she caves. She drops to the floor and with those shaking hands, picks up the matches. One by one. And drops them in the cardboard box.
And I stand there with the gun pointed at her while she scrapes one match and then another against the striking surface. The flame burns her fingers before she can start a fire. She sucks on her finger and then tries again. And again. And again. She knows I’m watching her. By now, her hands are shaking so much she can’t light the damn match.