The Unquiet

Angel seemed to consider the question. “Well,” he said, “my back aches, I’m stuck in the boonies with a bunch of crackers with guns, and I’m not always sure that I’m with the right man.”

There was momentary confusion.

“What?” said the big man.

Angel mirrored his expression, then his face cleared. “Oh,” he said. “You mean, do I have a problem with you?” He made a dismissive gesture with his right hand. “I don’t have a problem with you at all,” he said. “But my friend behind you, on the other hand, I think he may have a big problem with you.”

The larger man turned around. His buddy had already backed away, giving Louis space at the bar.

“How you doin’?” said Louis, who had entered the bar shortly after me, and had spotted what was happening just as quickly as I had done. I was now standing alongside him, but it was clear that he was the main attraction.

The two men took in Louis and weighed up their options. None of them looked good. At least one of them involved a world of hurt. The alpha male made his choice, opting for the loss of a little dignity over something that might ultimately prove terminal.

“I’m doin’ good,” he said.

“Then we all happy,” said Louis.

“I guess so.”

“Looks like they about to serve up di

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“I guess you better be getting along. Wouldn’t want to miss your vittles.”

“Uh-huh.”

He tried to slip past Louis, but came up short against his fat friend, who hadn’t moved, and was forced to elbow him out of the way. His face was growing purple with humiliation. The friend risked one more look at Louis, then trotted along after the bald man.

“Looks like you picked a good place to stay,” I said to Angel. “A little heavy on the testosterone, maybe, and you could have some trouble filling your dance card, but it’s cute.”

“You took your fucking time getting up here,” said Angel. “You know, there’s not a whole lot to do once night falls, and it gets dark like someone just threw a switch. There isn’t even a TV in the room.”

We ordered hamburgers and fries, opting not to join the parties of hunters in the next room, and moved to a table beside the bar.

“You find out anything?” I asked Angel.

“I found out that nobody wants to talk about Gilead, is what I found out. Best I could get was from some old ladies tending the cemetery. According to them, what’s left of Gilead is now on private land. A guy named Caswell bought it about fifteen years ago, along with another fifty acres of woodland around it. He lives close by. Always has. Doesn’t entertain much. Not a Rotarian. I took a trip up there. There was a sign, and a locked gate. Apparently, he doesn’t like hunters, trespassers, or salesmen.”

“Has Merrick been here?”

“If he has, then nobody saw him.”

“Maybe Caswell did.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Yeah.”

I watched the hunters eating and picked out the two men who had targeted Angel. They were seated in a corner, ignoring the others around them. The bigger man’s face was still red. There were a lot of guns around the place, and a lot of machismo to go with them. It wasn’t a good situation.

“Your friends from the bar?” I said.

Angel nodded. “Phil and Steve. From Hoboken.”

“I think it might be a good idea to send them on their way.”

“It’ll be a pleasure,” said Angel.

“By the way, how’d you know their names?”

Angel slipped his hands into his jacket pockets. They emerged holding two wallets. “Old habits…”

The lodge was constructed around a hollow, with the bar and reception building on the higher ground by the road, and the rooms and cabins at the bottom of the slope beyond it. It wasn’t difficult to find out where the resident homophobes were staying, as each guest was forced to carry his key on a fob cut from the trunk of a small tree. The key had been lying in front of the two guys as they taunted Angel. They were in cabin number fourteen.

They left the table about fifteen minutes after their meal was over. By that time, Angel and Louis were gone. The two men didn’t look at me as they departed, but I could feel their anger simmering. They had drunk seven pints of beer between them during and after their meal, and it was only a matter of time before they decided to seek some form of retribution for being bested at the bar.

The temperature had dropped suddenly with nightfall. In the shaded places, that morning’s frost had not yet melted. The two men walked quickly back to their cabin, the bigger man leading, the small bearded man behind. They entered to find that their hunting rifles had been disassembled and now lay in pieces on the floor. Their bags were beside the guns, packed and locked.

To their immediate left stood Louis. Angel was seated at the table beside the stove. Phil and Steve from Hoboken took in the two men. Phil, the larger and more aggressive of the two, seemed about to say something when he saw the guns in the hands of the two visitors. He closed his mouth again.

“You know there isn’t a cabin number thirteen?” said Angel.

“What?” said Phil.

“I said, you know that there isn’t a cabin number thirteen in this place? The numbers jump from twelve to fourteen, on account of how nobody wants to be in number thirteen. But this is still the thirteenth cabin, so you’re really in number thirteen after all, which is how come you’re so unlucky.”

“Why are we unlucky?” Phil’s natural animosity was returning, beefed up with some of the Dutch courage from the bar. “All I see is two shitheads wandered into the wrong cabin and started to fuck with the wrong guys. You’re the unlucky ones. You have no idea who you’re screwing with here.”

Beside him, Steve shifted uneasily on his feet. Appearances to the contrary, he was smart enough, or sober enough, to realize that it wasn’t a good idea to rile two men with guns when you had no guns at all, at least none that could be reassembled in time to make them useful.

Angel took the wallets from his pocket and waved them at the two men.

“But we do,” he said. “We know just who you are. We know where you live, where you work. We know what your wife looks like, Steve, and we know that Phil seems to be separated from the mother of his children. Sad, Phil. Pictures of the kids, but no sign of Mommy. Still, you are kind of a prick, so it’s hard to blame her for giving you the bullet.

“You, on the other hand, know nothing about us other than the fact that we’re here now, and we got good reason to be aggrieved with you on account of your big mouths. So this is what we propose: you put your shit in your car, and you start heading south. Your buddy there can do the driving, Phil, ’cause I can tell you’ve had a few more than he has. When you’ve driven, oh, maybe a hundred miles, you stop and find yourselves a room. Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, you head back to Hoboken, and you’ll never see us again. Well, you’ll probably never see us again. You never know. We might feel the urge to visit someday. Maybe there’s a Sinatra tour we can take. Gives us an excuse to drop by and say ‘hi’ to you and Steve. Unless, of course, you’d like to give us a more pressing reason to follow you down there.”

Phil made one last play. His pigheadedness was almost admirable.

“We got friends in Jersey,” he said meaningfully.

Angel looked genuinely puzzled. His reply, when it came, could have come only from a New Yorker.

“Why would somebody boast about something like that?” he asked. “Who the fuck wants to visit Jersey anyway?”

“Man means,” said Louis, “that he got ‘friends’ in Jersey.”

“Oh,” said Angel. “Oh, I get it. Hey, we watch The Sopranos too. The bad news for you, Phil, is even if that were true, which I know it’s not, we are the kind of people that the friends in Jersey call, if you catch my drift. It’s easy to tell, if you look hard enough. You see, we have pistols. You have hunting rifles. You came here to hunt deer. We didn’t come here to hunt deer. You don’t hunt deer with a Glock. You hunt other things with a Glock, but not deer.”