Colin

       Before

      There’s trees and a lot of them. Pine, spruce, fir. They hold on tight to their green needles. Around them, the leaves of oaks and elms wither and fall to the ground. It’s Wednesday. Night has come and gone. We exit the highway and speed along a two-lane road. She holds on to the seat with every turn. I could slow down but I don’t because I just want to get there. There’s hardly anyone on the road. Every now and then we pass another car, some tourist going below the speed limit to enjoy the view. There’s no gas stations. No 7-Elevens. Just your run-of-the-mill ma-and-pa shop. The girl stares out the window as we pass. I’m sure she thinks we’re in Timbuktu. She doesn’t bother to ask. Maybe she knows. Maybe she doesn’t care.

      We continue north into the deepest, darkest corners of Minnesota. The traffic continues to thin beyond Two Harbors where the truck is nearly engulfed in needles and leaves. The road is full of potholes. They send us flying into the air and I curse every single one of them. Last thing we need is a flat tire.

      I’ve been here before. I used to know the guy who owns the place, a crappy little cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s lost in the trees, the ground covered in a crunchy layer of dead leaves. The trees are little more than barren branches.

      I look at the cabin, and it’s just like I remember, just like when I was a kid. It’s a log home overlooking the lake. The lake looks cold. I’m sure it is. There’s plastic lawn chairs out on the deck and a tiny grill. The world is desolate, no one around for miles and miles.

      Exactly what we need.

      I glide the truck to a stop and we get out. Yanking a crowbar from the back, we make our way up a hill to the old home. The cabin looks abandoned, as I knew it would be, but I look for signs of life anyway: a car parked in back, dark shadows through the windows. There’s nothing.

      She stands motionless beside the truck. “Let’s go,” I say. Finally she climbs up the dozen or so steps to the deck. She stops to catch her breath. “Hurry up,” I say. For all I know, we’re being watched. I knock on the door first, just to make sure that we’re alone. And then I tell the girl to shut up and I listen. It’s silent.

      I use the crowbar to jimmy the door open. I break the door. I tell her I’ll fix it later. I slide an end table before the door to keep it closed. The girl stands with her back pressed to a wall made of red pine logs. She looks around. The room is small. There’s a saggy blue couch and ugly plastic red chair and a wood-burning stove in the corner that doesn’t give off an ounce of heat. There are photos of the cabin when it was being built, old black-and-whites shot with a box camera, and I remember being told by the guy about it when I was a kid, about how the people who built the home a hundred years ago picked this location not for the view, but for the row of pine trees just east of the cabin that shield it from the driving winds. As if he had any way of knowing what thoughts ran through their minds, those people, dead by now, who built the home. I remember, even back then, staring at his greasy receding hairline and pockmarked skin and thinking he’s full of crap.

      There’s the kitchen with mustard-colored appliances and linoleum floors and a table covered in a plastic tablecloth. Dust covers everything in sight. There are spiderwebs and a layer of dead Asian beetles on the windowsills. It smells.

      “Get used to it,” I say. I see the disgust in her eyes. I’m sure the judge’s house would never look like this.

      I flip the light switch and test the water. Nothing. The cabin was winterized before he took off for the winter. It’s not like we talk anymore, but I keep tabs on him anyway. I know his marriage fell through, again, know he got arrested a year or so ago for a DUI. I know that a couple weeks ago, as he does every fall, he packed his shit and left, back to Winona, where he works for the D.O.T., clearing ice and snow off the roads.

      I yank a phone from a phone jack and, finding a pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer, cut the wire. I glance at the girl, who hasn’t moved from the door. Her eyes are fixed on the plaid tablecloth. It’s ugly, I know. I step outside to pee. A minute later I return. She’s still staring at that damn tablecloth.

      “Why don’t you make yourself useful and start a fire,” I say.

      She puts her hands on her hips and stares at me, with that god-awful sweatshirt from the gas station. “Why don’t you?” she says, but her voice shakes, her hands shake, and I know she’s not as fearless as she wants me to think.

      I stomp outside and bring in three logs of firewood and drop them to the ground beside her feet. She jumps. I hand her some matches, which she lets drop to the floor, the carton opening and matches falling out. I tell her to pick them up. She ignores me.

      She needs to understand that I’m the one in the driver’s seat. Not her. She’s along for the ride, so long as she keeps her mouth shut and does what I say. I yank the gun from a pocket and attach the magazine. And I point it at her. At those pretty blue eyes that go from sure to not-so-sure as she whispers to me, “You’ve got this all wrong,” and as I cock the hammer, I tell her to pick up the matches and start a fire. And I’m wondering if this was a mistake, if I should’ve just handed her over to Dalmar. I don’t know what I expected from the girl, but this sure as hell isn’t it. I never figured I’d end up with an ingrate. She’s staring at me. A challenge. Seeing if I have it in me to kill her.

      I take a step closer and hold the gun to her head.

      And then she caves. She drops to the floor and with those shaking hands, picks up the matches. One by one. And drops them in the cardboard box.

      And I stand there with the gun pointed at her while she scrapes one match and then another against the striking surface. The flame burns her fingers before she can start a fire. She sucks on her finger and then tries again. And again. And again. She knows I’m watching her. By now, her hands are shaking so much she can’t light the damn match.

      “Let me do it,” I say as I come up quickly behind her. She flinches. I start a fire without any trouble and brush past the girl, into the kitchen, looking for food. There’s nothing, not even a box of stale crackers.

      “What now?” she asks but I ignore her. “What are we doing here?” I walk around the cabin, just to make sure. The water doesn’t work. Everything has been shut off for the winter. Not that I can’t fix it. It’s reassuring. When he winterized the house, he wasn’t planning on coming back until spring, the time of year he goes underground, lives like a hermit for six months of the year.

      I can hear her pacing about, waiting for someone or something to come barreling through the front door and kill her. I tell her to stop. I tell her to sit down. She stands there for a long time before she finally backs a plastic chair against the wall opposite the front door and drops down in the seat. She waits. It’s apocalyptic, watching her sit there, staring at the front door, waiting for the end to come.

      Night comes and goes. Neither of us sleeps.

      * * *

      The cabin will be cold by winter. It was never meant to be lived in beyond November 1. The only source of heat in the cabin is a wood-burning stove. There’s antifreeze in the john.

      The electricity had been shut off. That I fixed last night. I found the main breaker and flipped it back on. I literally heard the girl thank God for the 25 watts given off by an ugly table lamp. I made my way around the periphery of the cabin. I checked out a shed out back that’s filled with a bunch of crap nobody’d ever need, and a few things that might come in handy. Like a toolbox.

      Yesterday I told the girl she’d have to piss outside. I was too tired to deal with plumbing. I’d watched her walk down the stairs as if she was walking the plank. She hid herself behind a tree and slid down her pants. She squatted where she thought I couldn’t see, and then, because she wouldn’t dare touch her ass with a leaf, she opted to air dry. She only peed once.

      Today I find the main water valve and slowly let the water in. It sprays at first, then begins to flow normally. I flush the