LED them up in the dark toward the house. She regretted telling of the man who had given her the ride back from the highway and of how close he lived. Foolish to believe Wolf wouldn’t see the opportunity in that, what he would call the inevitability. She had been right, of course, to regret. When she protested, Wolf pulled her close to him and his mouth had been in her ear as he talked, more breath than words.
“Come on, Little Bit. You know we’ve got to do this. This isn’t a matter of wanting. This is a matter of surviving.”
Winter had tried to gentle the demand, to point out that no one would force her to do anything, but Rain realized the imperative. The world they lived in afforded no room for the convenience of conscience. The real way of nature was to self-preserve, and it was that course they had committed themselves to long before.
So she had conceded, kept them behind her in single file as they stayed out of the road and close to the tree line so they could drop to the other side if headlights appeared. With all their time on the roads and along trails they had mastered the ability to move quietly.
They stayed to the edge of the yard, gazed up at the lit windows for close to a quarter of an hour, saw nothing inside.
“His car’s here,” she said.
“He’s gone, I’m sure of it,” Wolf said.
He scooped his palm through some loose driveway gravel and cast it against the closest window. It clattered down but no one came to see what had caused the noise.
“Come on.”
They came around to the back and went up the porch steps, stepped farther in and looked through the windows there. Wolf tried pulling up on each frame, but they were locked. He went down into the yard and took a small pile of broken bricks to hand. Crashed one through and with another chunk tapped back the jagged edges before he reached his hand inside and unfixed the deadbolt. The door swung wide and bumped softly against the backstop.
“You say something,” he whispered to Rain. “Less likely to be nervous hearing a woman’s voice.”
She didn’t imagine the pitch of voice would make much difference following the sound of breaking glass, but didn’t bother to contradict him, calling up softly at first, then louder. Still, there were no sounds within. She was the first to step inside.
They passed through a mudroom with a coatrack wearing a rain jacket, a peacoat, and a pair of neoprene waders slung by black elastic suspenders. Past that was a high-ceilinged kitchen cluttered with several closed and taped cardboard boxes. The smell of fresh paint came from somewhere farther on like the scent of something newly slaughtered.
“What are we looking for?” Rain asked.
“We’ll know when we see it,” Wolf answered as he strode past and entered the darkened front room. Winter shrugged as she mounted the stairs and walked slowly up to see what could be found there. Rain remained alone in the kitchen, suppressed her impulse to rinse the dishes stacked in the double sink. The mess of it bit into her sense of trespass.
“My God, you’ve got to see these,” he called back, loud enough that she jumped. She hurried out to keep him from speaking again.
“Shouldn’t we try to be quiet?”
“Here, look.”
She followed the line of his finger to the far wall. Along it was an array of photographs. Almost all were portraits of some kind, though the eyes of the subjects were rarely fixed on the camera, abstracted within their own interior framework. Their faces, regardless of sex or age, shared some kind of similarity, not of feature or expression as much as exposure. They did not pose; their faces simply opened.
“Amazing stuff, huh? Your boyfriend looks like he knows what he’s doing.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“No? Don’t worry, I’m not jealous. Man’s got the gift.”
He went back toward the office, stuffed what valuables he could into his cloth bag as he moved through the hallway. His footsteps trod on the floor’s complaining bones. Rain did not follow him, let herself be drawn to the photographs instead. She took down her favorite, a picture of a young woman like herself, blond hair dreaded but loose around her face, watching something beyond the frame, something permanently unknowable. Rain held the picture and saw the glancing reflection of her own face overlaying this counterfeit. She slipped it into her backpack.
Wolf hooted and clumped back to show off a brace of whiskey bottles still sealed. The cloth bag swinging from his shoulder swelled as tight as a belly. Rain went to him to help relieve his burden.
They burst back into the quiet night with the whiskey at their mouths and a strain in their shoulders from all they could carry. It was a pleasure to counter the pain and the struggle as they walked up clouds of dust, marched the back wilderness and farm fronts as if they were native to them. What a thing to belong somewhere, to feel the place sink its teeth into your heart, when every step you took was another gentle worry and shake that cut in a bit deeper, made the good deep pain of being home do something big inside your chest.
That night, when they had returned to the homeplace, they filled it with what they’d stolen. Though it would all have to be quickly consumed or sold, that night was large enough to fill with whatever arrangements they could imagine. It began as a kind of play, moving the silverware and television, swapping the assorted jewelry and the Bose stereo, finding the different combinations of all these things that were supposed to matter and putting them in absurd new relationships to one another. But the longer she watched, the more Rain began to be sickened by it, not at the materials themselves, which were supposed to be the object of their mockery, but of the growing hysteria, drink fueled, that seemed to be descending on them, as if the trivia of plastic and metal wasn’t at stake as much as their own compliance and greed. She left Wolf and Winter to their game and went through the back-broken rooms to find a place to hang her picture of the girl.
She hung it in a small bedroom where the floor was still solid and a glassless window overlooked a rash of kudzu. She retrieved the hammer and drove one of the straightened hobnails into the clapboard. The wood split but held firm and when the hanging wire snugged itself in place you couldn’t see any tell of damage. She stood back and studied to make sure it ran a level line, which it did. Moonlight striped the top corner of the photograph, lent it a glimmer. She thought about talking to the picture, perhaps asking it a fortune or demanding a proverb, but that would have ruined what she really thought of the image and the girl inside it. So she just sat with it a while, let it reside.
HE CAME to her that night after Winter had fallen asleep, touched her on the shoulder wordlessly and led her to what had once been the family room. Her bare feet moved with caution over the spaced boards. Lantern light reached down and showed the stuttering filter of their shadows as they passed over the deeper shadows beneath. She liked this museum of a place, the dark below. She liked how it held her at the bottom of something she could not escape.
“I’ve missed my private time with you,” he told her. “I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten what I said.”
“That was a million years ago,” she said. “Promises don’t last that long.”
He took her by the shoulders, turned her into the gentle heat of him.
“Don’t say that, Little Bit. You know we’re the future. We see things
