“Ma’am?”
“I said I don’t need no babysitter.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He took another sip of coffee. “I like your coffee. And where’s the clip?”
“I took it out,” she said.
“Do you have any other guns?”
“No. That’s the only gun I have.” She coughed.
“I can take only this gun because you discharged it,” Ogden told her. “But, personally, I’d like to know if you have another. In case I get a call late some night.”
“That’s the only gun in the house.”
“Okay. I’m still going to need that clip. I’m not expected to round up every stray bullet, but I will need that clip.”
She got up and walked back to the same room. She came back and handed him the magazine. The clip was full, not missing a single shell. Ogden slipped it into his jacket pocket.
“Thank you.” He stood and again felt the cold air. “How about I bring in some wood for you? It’s a little chilly in here.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I insist. Maybe I’ll see your cat while I’m out there.” Before she could protest again he was at the door. He stepped out and made the only set of prints in the fresh snow. Ogden had a bad feeling about something but he couldn’t nail it down. As he loaded his arms with wood he looked back at the house, at the windows of the kitchen and the room she’d gone into for the pistol. That shade was drawn. He guessed that it was her bedroom. And where was her cat? Maybe she was acting strange simply because she was strange, because she had never liked Ogden’s skin color, though she had never said as much. But he knew. Anyway, something wasn’t right. A full clip? Why would she have replaced the missing bullets so quickly? A chambered round?
Back on the stoop, he stomped his boots free of snow and then stepped inside. Mrs. Bickers stayed close to him all the way to the front room where he set down his load next to the stove.
“I can take it from here,” the old woman said.
“You want me to open your bedroom door and let it warm up?” he said and looked for a reaction.
“Oh, I will, I promise.”
Her agreeable response rang strangely. Ogden had imagined her biting his head off, telling him that she’d lived alone long enough to know how to take care of herself and that she didn’t need some half-brained deputy telling her how to heat a house.
Ogden smiled at the woman and walked to the front door. “You know, it’d be no trouble for me stroll around awhile and look for your cat. What, did she just scoot out when you had the door open, something like that?”
“He’ll be home soon.”
Ogden was out of the house and walking, almost to his car, when he turned around and looked. As he was about to fall in behind the wheel he saw Mr. Garcia standing at his door. Ogden walked toward him.
“Buenos días, again,” Ogden said. He kicked at the snow in the corners of the steps and looked up at Garcia, now on his porch.
“Everything straightened out?” the man asked. He held an unlit cigarette between his lips.
The deputy shrugged. “Seems under control.” He stepped onto the porch and stood next to the shorter man and together they looked across the street at the old woman’s house. “Report says you heard shots last night. I know you didn’t see anybody, but is there anything else you remember? Even before the shots?”
Garcia blew into his hands and then shoved them into the pockets of his thick sweater. “Like what?”
“Anything at all. Anybody suspicious hanging around the last few days? Ever, for that matter. Strange cars. Spaceships landing in her backyard.”
“The spaceship was a couple of weeks ago.”
“You don’t like Mrs. Bickers much, do you?” Ogden asked.
“Do you?” he asked.
Ogden looked at the gray sky. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Garcia.”
Ogden walked to his rig and got in this time, started the engine, and drove away. He stopped when he was sure his car couldn’t be seen from Mrs. Bickers’s house. He sat there behind the wheel for some minutes, nibbling from a bag of chips he’d bought the night before, trying to figure out what to do, trying to think of what was bothering him about the situation, if there was a situation.
He watched the postman drive down the road, depositing mail in the boxes. He could see the old lady’s box, but she didn’t come out to get her mail. The old people around there were paranoid about letting their mail sit in the box; too many checks had been stolen. Ogden had even seen Mrs. Bickers on occasion meet the postman at the roadside.
He got out and climbed a fence and made his way through the backyards to the old woman’s house. He slipped through the barbed wire that kept a fat calf in the neighbor’s yard and moved low until he was seeing the old woman’s house from behind the woodpile. The calf came to the place where he had crossed the fence and stared at him, lowed a complaint. Ogden stared back at the house. His heart was racing now and he focused on breathing more slowly.
He would have felt like a fool trying to dash across the yard unseen. With winter, all the shrubs were bare and there was no hiding. So he walked to the house casually, but quickly. He was glad he had taken the old woman’s pistol. When he had returned to the house with the wood, he had been the one to close the door. He hadn’t locked it and maybe it was still unlocked. He ducked and passed beneath the bedroom window and stepped up to the door. He gripped the knob gently, but surely, and gave it a slow twist. It was open. He heard nothing, nothing at all. If there was nothing wrong he was going to have a hell of a time explaining himself. He could tell the truth, that she had been acting strange and he was worried that something was wrong and then he would lie, saying he’d knocked on the back door and when there was no answer he became more concerned. The only lie was the part about knocking.
He was in the kitchen now, his boots weighing on the buckled linoleum. He knew there was no way to walk across the floor unheard, so he stepped quickly. He slipped a little on the ice he had brought in on his boots. He stopped at the closed bedroom door, looked up the hallway toward the front door, and unsnapped the trigger guard on his holster. If he opened the door and found the old lady in her altogether, she wouldn’t need a gun, he’d shoot himself. He did open the door and there was no one there. He moved quickly through the rest of the house, the parlor, the spare bedroom where the old woman had apparently watched television, the bathroom. Then he opened the front door. No one. The only prints in the snow were his, one set in and one set away.
Ogden went again into the bedroom and looked around, fingered through the papers on the nightstand, mostly receipts for prescriptions. He called out the woman’s name. He paused at the door, a little dizzy. He was about to leave the room when he stopped. He dropped down to look under the bed. The little white cat looked like a rag. Ogden pulled him out, the cat falling limp over his palm. He thought that maybe the animal had been squeezed to death, his eyes blood-burst and erased of all sign of life. He called out the woman’s name again.
~ ~ ~
Ogden’s father would never have approved of his son’s job with the sheriff’s office. He wouldn’t have said it outright, that had never been his way except in Ogden’s dreams, but he would have made it clear that he believed Ogden to somehow be a traitor. A traitor to what would have remained forever unclear, but it would have been tinged with the language of race and social indignation. Ogden never did much like the uniform. He disliked it as much as he had disliked the one he’d worn in the army. His father had been alive for that uniform. It wasn’t that the man hated the idea of his son being a soldier; he hated the idea of his being an American soldier. He’d moved to New Mexico from Maryland because there were fewer people and so, necessarily, fewer white people. He hated white people, but not enough to refrain from marrying one, Ogden’s mother. Ogden’s mother never flinched and always laughed off her husband’s tirades as silly, which they no doubt were, but it was hard for a son to think that his father hated half of him. Perhaps this was why he was willing to care enough about the bigoted white woman who was now missing.