his pain is over.
Old Wyatt, that old outlaw. Gone.
Whatever Holden was saying about his own childhood dog, he finished and fixed his eyes on Danny.
“I won’t ask you again to stay,” said Holden. “But I will say one thing since you’re going anyway, and just so you get the whole picture here.”
Danny waited. Billy snapped something hard into place.
“I did a check on you, Daniel Young from Minnesota. Not an all-out background check like I do on some guys. Hell, most guys. But you . . . you were kind of the opposite of most guys.”
Danny said nothing.
“I one time hired this guy, crackerjack framer, and six months later I find out he used to teach poetry at Princeton.”
Danny waited.
“So,” Holden said. “Before I hired you I got on the internet, and lo and behold.”
There was a rap on the door then and the door opened and the trailer rocked on its wheels and a man’s head appeared, but he did not enter. It was Jones, the foreman.
“Give us one more minute here, Vernon.”
“Sure thing, Ben.” Jones stepped back out and the door shut and the trailer rocked once more and settled.
“I was never charged,” Danny said.
“I know you weren’t. I can read.” Holden shrugged. “I just wanted you to know I knew, that’s all.” He sat forward and shifted his calculator to some better angle. “You go ahead and punch out and I’ll cut you a check.”
Danny stood where he was. He studied the inside of his cap. “I guess I just have one question,” he said.
“Why’d I hire you?”
He looked up. “Yes, sir.”
Holden sat staring at the old calculator. “My dad used to say a man can only prove himself once in this business, good or bad, and that’s while he’s your man. I’ve always tried to keep that in mind.”
Danny punched his time card and stood by as Holden entered the figures into the calculator and ripped the receipt from the machine, as he wrote out the check and ripped that from the book and handed it over.
“Stay outta trouble, Danny.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and he turned then and found Billy Ramos watching him, and he said, “See you around, Billy,” and Billy said in his rubbery voice, “See you around, Danny,” and Danny stepped from the office and nodded to Jones—who nodded back and stepped into the trailer while it was still rocking and shut the door behind him.
31
The old dead tamarack had been there long enough, stopped in its fall by the lower boughs of a balsam fir and doing the balsam no good either, so he gathered his gear and walked to the site just a few paces into the woods and broomed the snow from a crook in the branches of the tamarack and wedged the chainsaw there and broomed off the rest of the tree. Then he took up the snow shovel and cleared a path along the fall line, and when that was finished he fetched down the chainsaw again and stood studying the tree. Like a man saying last words, though saying nothing. No other sound but his own smoky breaths. Finally he looked up into the branches overhead for widow-makers and seeing none he pulled the choke and jerked the cord. The engine came to life and he worked the throttle trigger to keep it running. Cold gray Sunday morning and these woods his church. The revving saw the only sermon he cared to hear.
He lopped off the limbs, then dropped the tree into the path, and he’d begun bucking it into lengths when there was a flash of light in the corner of his vision and he stood to watch the white sedan pull into his drive and come to a stop. His heart pitching strangely because he knew the car—had seen it dozens of times around town, on the roads, in the time since Sutter had retired and gone civilian. The driver’s door opening now and a figure stepping out wearing Sutter’s sunglasses and Sutter’s canvas jacket, and where was this, where was he, was he dreaming? He removed the fogged safety glasses and looked again and as he did so Sutter turned his head and Gordon saw the dark ponytail and his heart swung back to its place and he shook his head at himself—old fool, what did you think?
He held still, watching her through the trees. She looked at the house and she looked at the outbuilding, and then she turned toward the woods and