A crow descended from a nearby pine. Small thing, not full-grown, with a red piece of yarn tied to its leg. Hovered near my face, like a gnat or a mosquito. Fluttering its wings, trying to provoke me. I swatted it and Scotland clucked and the thing flew to his shoulder. He pulled a crumb of bread from his shirt pocket and the crow plucked it from his hand, no lie. “This is Crow,” he said. “That’s his way of letting you know he doesn’t like you.”
He slid the AK over his head and placed it on the ground. He wasn’t that tall, not as tall as me, and he was skinny, but he looked fast and wiry and strong, the veins in his arms thick and pronounced. He was older than me, maybe twenty years, maybe ten. Hard to say because he had the look of someone who lived hard and it showed. On his right arm he had a large tattoo of a girl with blond hair, the details of her face rendered in great detail: eyes, nose, mouth, everything in color. Another face on the other arm, a woman, and then a USMC tattoo farther down, on his forearm. He was military, too.
He kneeled down next to Finch on the blanket and reached out his dirty hand and took his pointer finger and ran it under her chin. “Pretty little thing,” he said, and then he turned to me. “‘Children are a heritage from the Lord.’ Psalm 127:3. Especially girls.” He paused and lifted his head to the trees and a breeze swept in, and the leaves, heavy and green, shivered overhead. “The Bible doesn’t have that part about girls. I added that myself.”
I’ll be honest here. I thought about killing him right on the spot. I could keep the AK and we would never see Scotland again. I was vicious with grief then, a rabid beast, with Cindy just gone and Finch and me hunkered down in our little tent and here was someone that didn’t belong in the picture, who stood to threaten the tenuous ground on which we stood, and it just about sent me over the edge.
Settle, Kenny. Cooper. Settle.
I told myself if this were at the grocery store, at a coffee shop, if me and Finch were just a father and daughter out for a morning stroll, and a stranger came up and said she was pretty, there would be nothing abnormal about it. Finch was beautiful and people commented on beautiful babies. It meant nothing. Quit assuming the worst in people. Quit being so paranoid. I could almost hear Cindy saying it.
Scotland stood and sauntered over to the porch and looked at the wood stacked against the front. I’d been working at it, here and there, chopping firewood. “This isn’t near enough,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re planning to be here awhile,” he said: a fact, not a question. “You’re gonna need a whole lot more than what you’ve got.”
“Needed a change of scenery.”
Scotland made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a grunt, and I interpreted this to mean he didn’t buy it. He shielded his eyes and looked at the rooftop, the chimney, assessing every detail. He wandered over to the small orchard and inspected the branches, leaning close and looking at the tiny balls that didn’t quite look like apples just yet. “You been here six weeks already.”
He’d been watching us. Keeping track. I thought again of the Ruger. Disturbed by the fact that the idea of killing him swam to me so easily, that it felt like a natural solution. This is what has happened to you, I thought to myself. This is who you are now. There was a time when you would cringe at Aunt Lincoln skinning a deer. Blood, muscle, fascia, bone: you couldn’t stand the sight of it. You would position yourself to the side and turn your head. Not anymore.
My mind flickered to Cindy then and I saw her laughing in the dusk, hair in her teeth. When I came home from Kabul, there were times, moments like sun on water that glimmered and burned and I thought, with Cindy, I could be the man I was before. It would take time, but I could get there, with her love, with a certain pace of life, with grace. I could go back to being a person who had to turn their head from death, who would look away.
Scotland bent over his backpack and opened the flap.
I put my hand on the Ruger.
He reached in and what was he grabbing—
I pulled the gun and pointed it because we had not come this far to be gunned down by a lunatic in the woods.
Crow lifted from Scotland’s shoulder and squawked, flapping his wings.
“Here,” Scotland said, turning to me. He didn’t even look at the gun, just right at me, right in my eyes, gaze steady. Not troubled by the gun pointing at him, not afraid, not even surprised. He wasn’t smiling but there was a glint in his eye that suggested maybe he was amused. “Here,” he said again, his hand outstretched.