The Land Read online

  Also by the Author

  The Night Birds

  Little Wolves

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Maltman

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maltman, Thomas James, 1971– author.

  The land / Thomas Maltman.

  I. Title.

  ISBN 978-1-64129-220-7

  eISBN 978-1-64129-221-4

  PS3613.A524 L36 2020 813’.6—dc23 2020015486

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my family, who first took me to The Land

  In the midst of winter, I found there was,

  within me, an invincible summer.

  —Albert Camus

  A Dead Man Casts His Shadow

  Above all, Mr. Kroll told me, take care of the dog. We were standing together in the foyer, next to the last suitcases Mr. Kroll needed to lug to his Audi, and he lingered here as if he had something else important to tell me. Mrs. Kroll already had the Audi running in the driveway, where it huffed clouds of exhaust in the icy November air as she sat rigid, her arms crossed and her body tilted forward in the seatbelt of the passenger side, the posture of a snowbird who might grow wings and fly to South Padre Island for the winter by herself if he didn’t hurry. When she gave a toot on the horn, Mr. Kroll grimaced. “Just between you and me, Lucien, I don’t put much stock in this Y2K business,” he said, “but if the world really does go to hell, I don’t want to be stuck someplace cold.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t have disagreed more. If the world ended at the turn of the millennium, the last place I wanted to be was surrounded by busloads of old folks greased up in Coppertone and singing along to Jimmy Buffett. I couldn’t wait to be alone, longed for what I hoped would be a winter of solitude.

  Mr. Kroll handed me a schedule with his tight, military printing listing watering days for the ferns and spider plants, the exact temperature to set the thermostat (62 degrees), and a food and exercise program for a geriatric German shepherd named Kaiser.

  “No parties,” he said, taking hold of my other hand.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “You will clear the driveway of snow, just in case.”

  He didn’t explain what he meant. His palm felt scaly and lizard-like. He tugged me closer to him as though he were about to confide a secret. “Harry said you were good. He said he was sorry he had to let you go.”

  If it wasn’t for Harry Larkin, I’d be homeless as well as jobless. The Krolls were longtime customers at Bay City Mutual where I had worked before the accident. The place they were leaving behind was called “The Gingerbread House” by locals—a stone house set back in the pines with a red-tiled roof that curved like an elf’s shoe, twin turrets on either side, and topiary bearding the lower windows—like some vision from the Brothers Grimm. The property sprawled over eighty acres of boreal forest above a deep canyon carved by the Wind River, which ran swift and silver far below, spilling down to Cauldron Falls before pouring into Aurora Bay, miles and miles away, where I attended Northern Minnesota State University. The Krolls needed someone to maintain the property and I needed a place to stay. Get some rest, Harry Larkin had advised me before explaining the arrangement, then get your shit together.

  I told friends and family that I planned to use the time to finish coding an open-ended computer game called The Land, a post-apocalyptic fantasy world I’d been programming since my freshman year with the little free time I had between work and school. I planned to release the game as shareware and dreamed of it becoming a cult classic. Already on academic probation, I was about to be thrown out of college, so I hoped the game might get me in the door at some place like BioWare up in Canada, where I could work on the next Baldur’s Gate.

  Mr. Kroll had a thin crop of oily hair, nicotine-stained teeth, his breath smelling of ashes and Listerine. “Do you know your way around guns?” He asked this in the same tone as someone might say, Do you know the Lord?

  “Guns?” I was the only child of two overly protective parents who hadn’t even let me own a toy gun as a boy.

  “I keep a .30-06 fully loaded in the gun cabinet. You have the keys. We’ve discussed the things that are not yours to touch, but the rifle you may use when the situation calls for it. If wolves come around—and they will—let them have it.”

  “You want me to give them the gun, sir?”

  Mr. Kroll had finally let go of my hand. “Lucien,” he said, his mouth crimping at the corners, as though speaking my name aloud a second time pained him. I regretted my attempt at humor, just a little, knowing how much these old-timers hated a wiseass. When Mr. Kroll had visited the bank on business he preferred to be waited on by the pretty, young female tellers, especially Maura. Maura had been everyone’s favorite. “Harry said you were smart before your time in the hospital, so I think you know what I mean.” How much had Harry told him? And surely he knew that wolves were on the endangered species list. Mr. Kroll lowered his voice, though it was just the two of us in the foyer. “Wolves are vermin and you are on private property. Won’t anyone know what you do out here. Got it? Also, it’s okay if some of my wife’s plants die, but not the dog.”

  After they left, I spent hours wandering the maze of rooms, at first careful of the old couple’s privacy. My bare feet sank into lush, Berber carpets the color of burgundy, and the floors seemed to slope downhill, as if this entire house was drifting toward the volcanic ridge above the river, a quarter mile away. A spiral staircase led to a walkout on the lower level. Here a bearskin rug splayed before a towering stone fireplace. Bay windows looked out over a grove of birches already filling up with snow. In November of 1999, a wolfish cold had settled early over the woods, shaggy with snow. It was so quiet I swore I could hear the hush of each flake touching the ground. I could hear the thump of my heart in my ears, strong and insistent and traitorous. I only wanted to be alone, but I could feel something padding toward me in the snow, and I knew I would have to go out to meet it. I didn’t know enough to be afraid yet.

  My mother had campaigned for me to come home to Chicago and enroll in Oakton Community College for the spring semester instead of housesitting this place over the winter. “You’ll be so far from everything,” she said over the phone.

  “That’s the whole point.”

  “But how will you keep up with your classes?”

  “It’s not a bad commute. Now that I’m not working thirty hours a week, I can focus better.” I paused, mentally counting how many lies I’d packed in those sentences. My focus had been shattered. I missed two weeks of classes in the hospital and I should have withdrawn rather than take Fs, but I let the deadline pass without doing anything. Yet, I still attended. Some days I went to classes I hadn’t even enrolled in, choosing random lectures on meteorology, the philosophy of Eastern religions, or astronomy, and sitting in the back taking notes. Once the registrar’s office caught up with me, my time at Northern was done, but I couldn’t wrap my head around why any of it was supposed to matter anymore.

  “You are coming home for Thanksgiving.”

  Home? I wasn’t sure where that was anymore since my parents had divorced. “We’ll see, Mom.”

  I heard her swallow on
the other end of the phone line. I hated talking on the phone, the way disembodied voices floated out of the ether. She knew I wasn’t coming home. I couldn’t. Not yet. There was something I had to do first. I was afraid she was going to start crying again. “I gotta go, Mom.”

  The first day of the storm I took Kaiser out for a walk, trussing my hiking boots in antique snowshoes I’d found hanging beside the French doors in the lower level and grabbing a set of poles from an umbrella stand. I didn’t bother with a leash, knowing the old dog would stay close. In the sandy, acidic soil of the property, the white pines grew immense, their trunks gnarled and gigantic, the upper reaches soughing in the wind. Grandfather trees with white frock coats and mossy, dripping beards.

  Kaiser ambled along beside me. Released from his side yard pen, the dog appeared ready to bound through the snow, if only his body would allow it. He wheezed and struggled in the deeper drifts, his back legs stiff and arthritic. Balanced on my balsa wood poles, I commiserated. Under my skin I could sense the alien piece of ceramic prosthetic the surgeon had grafted to my hip bone.

  Kaiser and I discovered a pond at the edge of the birch grove. Beneath the glazed surface of the ice, koi swam in sluggish circles, mottled blurs of flame. I cracked the ice with the hard plastic end of my pole and the koi squirmed away. Kaiser snorted beside me, a questioning bark, before using his paws to break more ice so he could slurp the cold water. Soon the small pond would freeze solid around those fish, leaving them trapped and breathless. Already a new skin of ice was forming around the holes we had made. The Krolls hadn’t left any instructions about tending the koi and I felt certain they were going to die but didn’t know how to save them. We were gazing down into their icy tomb, our shadows blocking out their light. Yet, it didn’t seem like a bad way to go, all things considered. “The parable of this world is like your shadow,” I told Kaiser, one of my notes from the religion class that got stuck in my head, though I couldn’t recall who said it. Kaiser sat on his haunches, slobbery icicles dangling from his muzzle. “If you stop, your shadow stands still. If you chase it, it distances itself from you.”

  Tomorrow was Sunday. I had a shadow to chase.

  Most of what I knew about Rose of Sharon, a church just outside Ursine Lake, was that Maura’s husband was a pastor there. The church sat in a valley between two round recently logged hills now humped with snow, the building a converted ranch house with a cross pinioned to the chimney. People parked on a flat plain just outside, no more than a dozen cars. A gated cemetery nestled in the crook of one hill.

  After maneuvering my Lincoln Continental into a tight space, I almost turned around. And I would have, except this ridiculous boat of a car made such simple tasks trouble. My dad had insisted I buy the Continental with the insurance money after he viewed the crushed remains of my Civic. What did I think I was doing here? Perhaps there was time to pull out, before anyone recognized me. Would Maura’s husband know who I was? I knew from Maura that her husband was named Elijah Winters and that he was a pastor who was mixed up in a movement similar to the apocalyptic, white supremacist stuff that got some members of Randy Weaver’s family killed halfway across the country in Idaho. I knew that Maura had been afraid of him.

  A tall man with a cadaverous face watched me from the front steps of the church, his hands on his hips. It was too late to turn around now. I had been spotted. I shut my engine down, got out of the car, and walked toward him.

  The bulletin board beside the man identified the church as Apostolic/Christian Identity. I had little idea what that meant. Holy Rollers, my dad would call them. My family was Easter-and-Christmas Presbyterians who attended a neighborhood church on holidays but otherwise didn’t think much about religion.

  I tried to disguise my limp under that man’s gaze, but my hip had stiffened during the long car ride, so crossing the icy gravel lot seemed to take an eternity, the man watching with that smile frozen on his face. “Welcome,” he said when I got close, extending one large, bony hand. “I’m Roland, one of the deacons here.”

  “Meshach,” I said, taking his hand. The false name just slipped out. I winced as he pumped my grip, in part because his hand felt strong enough to break every bone in my body, and also because if Maura ever had a son, she had vowed to name him Meshach, who had stood in the fire for his faith and was not harmed. Maura knew her Bible, though she had not been devout. A seeker like me. I couldn’t forget how lovely her singing voice had been. Those old-time hymns. She’d sung one for me once, late at night after the bank closed, her voice pitched with all the loneliness and longing in this broken world. There had been nothing between us then, but I was already in love with her. Surely her husband would know what she hoped to name a boy, if they were blessed with a second child. Already with the first words out of my mouth I had given myself away. Maybe that was okay. Maybe that was why I had come here. I had questions that needed answering.

  A muscle twitched in Roland’s long jaw. He had sunburnt, weathered features, his skin still deeply tanned in winter, permanently marked from a life spent working outdoors, even his hair burnt white as if scorched by frost and sunlight. “What brings you to our service this morning?” he asked, squinting at me.

  “I was out for a Sunday drive, saw people going inside. Thought maybe I should check it out.”

  That caught his curiosity at least. Let him think I was led here by the Spirit. It surprised me how easily I took to lying. “Well, it’s good to have you with us, Meshach,” he said, setting a hand on my shoulder and guiding me within.

  Organ music swelled and filled the small sanctuary where a congregation of around thirty or so people rose from metal folding chairs, and began to sing and sway. Roland insisted I sit next to him near the back, his tweed blazer falling open as he guided me to the row, revealing a holster and a big nickel-plated pistol strapped to his side. Roland passed me a red hymnal, showed me the right page for “As the Deer Pants for the Water.” He had a big enough voice for the two of us, which was good, because I only mumbled along, my throat strangely thick, my armpits and hands clammy with sweat, my hip aching.

  People think of the Deep South or someplace like Idaho when they think of the crazies. They forget that Randy Weaver was born and raised and radicalized in Iowa. They forget about the Posse Comitatus in North Dakota or the Aryan Republican Army robbing banks across the Midwest or rumors of Timothy McVeigh cooling his heels in Elohim City before committing his act of terrorism. What kind of man carried a holstered gun into worship? I thought that Roland had likely been chosen to receive visitors like me, make sure I wasn’t an ATF agent or spying on behalf of some other federal agency. Did I look like an agent? I had lost so much weight this last month, dropping to a hundred and fifteen pounds the last time I climbed on a scale, that I felt like my skeleton and brain were composed of tumbleweeds. Nonetheless, I was investigating a mystery. The mystery of Maura. Roland and his big horse pistol were here to remind me that I was an outsider and therefore under suspicion. I hoped this church at least served good coffee.

  After the hymn finished and we sat again, the preacher prowled the front. He was an athletic, lantern-jawed man dressed in blue jeans and plaid, his tan sports coat with leather patches on the elbows, a Bible hefted in one fist like a football he might heave to a lumbering tight end. This was my first glimpse of Maura’s husband. Black-haired, with a trim mustache and sideburns, and small gray eyes, the Reverend Elijah Winters looked more like a professor than a white supremacist who had done time in Stillwater. His gaze kept finding me, the lone stranger in the back.

  So far as I could tell there was no official order to the service, no usual rigmarole of a few hymns, announcements, and readings. They didn’t even print a bulletin, instead feeling the service out. Pastor Eli had a surprisingly deep voice for a thin man, a voice with a soothing timbre, rising and falling as the moment called for it. He opened by talking about a corpse, the body of a Buddhist that some “hippy�
�� claimed hadn’t rotted for a week after death, the congregation muttering and shaking their heads when he asked, “Is that some kind of wonder? One week before the devil’s own stench settles in? Does it even compare to what our God can do?”

  Then he read to us from the Book of Matthew about a little girl everyone writes off as dead before Jesus happens along and says, “She is not dead, only sleeping,” and the child revives and her parents rejoice. He paused after reading the passage. “What do you think I said to that hippy?” There was laughter now, along with scattered amens. “Do you think he had the eyes to see, the ears to hear? What do we tell the world with our own lives about what our God can do? What do we say to them?”

  He rocked on the balls of his feet to some music he heard inside himself. He had them now, leaning toward him, his voice lowering and softening. Hell, I was drawn in like the rest of them, even if I kept thinking of Maura. Here now, I could see why she had fallen for him. He was charismatic, handsome, hardened by the world in ways I couldn’t understand yet, his voice promising currents of wisdom. “Have you wondered what it feels like to be dead? To be laid out on the cold metal table of the undertaker? Each of us here knows that feeling. To be dead. To feel like inside you will never know warmth again.”

  Are you dead, Maura? Is your body somewhere at the bottom of Ursine Lake, naked and lashed to stones to keep you under the ice? Are you buried in an unmarked grave in this barren cemetery? Or have you only gone away?

  His gaze found me once more as he stalked among the rows, moving down the aisle, the Bible now tucked under one arm like a running back holding a pigskin so it would not be fumbled. Be calm, I reminded myself, he’s never met you before. He never visited the bank, never attended the office Christmas party. He doesn’t know what you’ve done. Yet, I couldn’t hold his gaze. “We know what it feels like to be dead inside. Empty. And all the world can give you is a week before the rot sets in. Like that’s something to crow about. That’s all the world has to offer. A week before you stink like a dead fish. Is that all you want?”