The Auger and the Paddock

Britney Robbins was forty-four years old and had been a hairdresser for twenty-two years, and in all that time she had learned that when a man calls you at eleven at night and says come now and don't ask, you bring your coat and you don't ask. She had married Shawn when she was twenty-seven and he was twenty-five, and in seventeen years of marriage he had called her maybe three times sounding like that, and every one of those times had ended with her sitting in a parking lot holding his hand while he talked himself back down. This one was different. This one he had called from a number she didn't recognize, and his voice had that flat sound that scared her worse than shouting would have, and all he said was the paddock, Deb's paddock, off the old dike road, and bring nothing, just come.

So she came. She took their truck because the Sentra had that shimmy in the wheel again, and she drove out past the last of the streetlights with the windows cracked because the heater made a noise she couldn't stand, and the whole way she made bargains with herself about what she was and wasn't willing to do tonight. The bargains didn't hold. They never did with Shawn.

The paddock sat behind the chain-link fence like something somebody had tried to hide and failed, a grid of raised beds full of nopal cactus that Deb Vogel grew and pretended she didn't grow, because heaven knew what the HOA would say if anybody looked too close at what a woman can do with a hundred square meters of cactus and a fertilizer bill. The security lamp on its pole buzzed and threw a circle of yellow light on the gravel near the gate, and under that light sat a rental car with its hood up, and standing next to it was Shawn, and next to Shawn, flat on the gravel with his legs half under the fence line, was Rashid Tillman, who was their neighbor and a HOA board member and, as far as Britney knew that morning, still alive, but now lay dead on the gravel.

Shawn had something in his hand. It took her a second to make sense of it because it didn't belong in anybody's hand, a long steel blade with a spiral edge, a hand-forged ice auger blade he had made out in the shed over the winter and swore nobody knew about, which was supposed to stay that way because the forge itself wasn't exactly legal out here. He was holding it down at his side like he'd forgotten it was there, and there was blood on his knuckles, and Rashid wasn't moving at all.

She stopped the truck and sat there for a second with the engine running, and she thought about all the sensible things, calling somebody, turning around, driving straight to her sister's place in Kampen and pretending this night never happened. Then she got out.

"Shawn," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "What did you do."

He turned and looked at her and his face just came apart, all the holding-it-together gone at once, and he came over the gravel fast and grabbed her by the shoulders like he had to check she was real. "Britney. Oh God, Britney, you came!"

"Of course I came, you told me to come, what else was I gonna do." She looked past him at Rashid, who lay on his back with his eyes half open and his jacket twisted up under him, and she looked at the auger blade, and she looked at the blood on Shawn's shirt, which was a lot of blood. "Is he."

"Yeah." He said it small. "He is."

"How."

"He came at me." Shawn's hands were shaking and he kept wiping them on his jeans like that would do anything. "I was out here because of him, Britney, he called me tonight, he said we needed to settle the landscaping thing tonight or he was going to tell the board about the auger, about the forge, everything, and he named a number, four thousand, four thousand for a fence job he himself screwed up, and I came out here to talk. I brought nothing. I swear on you I brought nothing."

"And then."

"And then he swung first." He was crying a little now and not bothering to hide it, which somehow made it worse. "He had a tire iron in the rental car, he walked at me with it and he said I had till the count of three, and Britney, I had the blade in my coat, I'd been sharpening it all afternoon and I walked out with it without thinking, I grabbed it before I even thought, and he swung and I swung and he went down and he hit his head on the gravel and he didn't get up. I checked. I checked for so long. He didn't get up."

Britney breathed out through her nose, slow, the way she did when a client cried in her chair, because that was the only kind of calm she actually knew how to do on purpose. "Okay. Okay. We need to call somebody, the ambulance at least, maybe he's."

"I checked, Britney. He's gone. I checked."

"Then we call the police and we tell them exactly that, he came at you, you defended yourself, it's not even a lie, Shawn, it's the truth."

"And the blade?" He held it up, the spiral edge catching the lamp light, and it was a strange and beautiful thing and it was the worst thing she had ever seen him hold. "An illegal forged blade in a dead man's reach, and Rashid already texted himself everything, Britney, he sent it to his own email, the photos, the notes about the forge. If the police come, the auger comes out, and then the forge, and then they ask about who else knows, and it all unravels, and we lose everything. The house. Everything."

She stood there in the cold with her hands in her coat pockets and she thought about the mortgage and the little shop and seventeen years of being the sensible one, and then she thought about Rashid Tillman swinging a tire iron at her husband in the dark, and the sensible thing just kind of folded up and walked away.

"Whose rental car is that," she said.

"His. He drove it out here. Battery's dead, it won't even click, it just sits there." He kicked the tire gently, like apologizing to it. "I thought about jumping it but I walked out here and I don't own cables anyway, I just, I panicked, I thought if I could move the car off the road nobody would come looking, but I can't even start it."

"So there's no jumper cables!"

"No jumper cables!"

"You told me to bring nothing."

"I told you to bring nothing because I didn't want you involved, and look how that went." He laughed, one dry broken sound, and then stopped laughing fast. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You can still drive away, Britney. I mean it. You can go right now and I will never, I would never say one word against you."

Britney looked at him for a while. He was forty-two years old and he was standing in a cactus paddock holding a murder weapon and offering her an exit, and she realized she had never once in her whole life seen him so honest.

"Get up off your knees, you'll freeze out here," she said. "We're not leaving you. But we're not standing in the light either." She looked at the fence, at the beds of spiny pads running back into the dark in their neat grid, and at the rusted tool shed at the far corner with its door hanging crooked. "Does Deb come out here at night?"

"Never. She does mornings, before anyone's up. She told me herself nobody's been past the gate after dark since her father died."

"Then we've got till morning." She pulled her sleeves up and took the phone out of her pocket and turned it off, and she watched him watch her do it, and she saw something in his face that was relief and shame all mixed up together, and she hated that she was giving him relief and she did it anyway. "Nobody's calling anybody tonight. We are going to move him. That's all we're doing, just moving him, and then we are going to sit down and figure out the rest like two adults with a plan and not two people standing in a paddock losing our minds."

"Britney."

"Shawn, I have spent seventeen years asking questions before I help you. Tonight I'm helping first. Get his feet."

They dragged him together, Shawn at the shoulders and Britney at the ankles, past the gate and down the rows, and the gravel gave way to the packed dirt between the beds, and the cactus pads caught the lamplight behind them like a crowd of flat green hands with too many fingers. He was heavier than he looked, Rashid, and one of his shoes came off and Britney picked it up and put it in her coat pocket without saying anything about it, and somewhere around the third row she stopped looking at his face and just looked at the dirt.

The shed was close to the back corner and its padlock was a joke, some old thing Shawn could probably have opened with a firm look, and inside there were shovels and a mattock and a bag of lime that had gone hard on one side, and Britney stood in the doorway breathing through her mouth and thought, well, at least Deb keeps her tools sharp.

"Britney," Shawn said from behind her, and his voice had gone small again. "I don't know how to do this part."

"I don't either," she said, and picked up a shovel. "But I dig every spring for the tomatoes, so I guess I'm the experienced one. Start on the other end. And Shawn."

"Yeah."

"Wherever we put him, we put the rental car story right too. That dead battery is going to make somebody curious come morning."

They stood in the doorway of the shed for a minute, neither one moving, the lamplight coming through the crooked door in a long thin stripe that fell across Rashid Tillman's still shape on the dirt floor, and then Britney set the shovel back down because her hands had started shaking and she didn't trust herself to hold anything heavy just yet.

"Sit down," she said, pointing at an overturned crate by the wall, and Shawn sat, and she sat on the edge of the workbench, and for a while the only sound was the wind coming through the fence and somewhere off toward the dike road a dog barking twice and then quitting.

"We can't dig here," Shawn said finally. "The beds go down two feet, there's irrigation line under everything, Deb would find him in a week."

"Then we dig between the rows, at the far end where nothing's planted, I saw bare ground back there when we dragged him past."

"It's still her land, Britney. Every inch of it."

"I know whose land it is, Shawn, I've lived next to Deb Vogel for seventeen years, she came to my Christmas party in 2019 and complained about the Hendersons' trash cans for forty minutes." Britney rubbed her face with both hands. "It's not ideal. Nothing about tonight is ideal. But a shallow grave between rows nine and ten is better than a body in a shed with a busted padlock and your knuckles the way they are."

He looked at his knuckles then, like he'd forgotten they were his, and the blood on them had gone dark and cracked in the cold, and he wiped his hand on his thigh and left a smear there and didn't seem to notice.

"There's something you should know before we go any further," he said. "About Rashid, about what he had on me, because if the police ever come to you, I need you to know the whole shape of it, not just the part I tell you in the kitchen."

"The auger blade," Britney said.

Shawn stopped. He actually stopped, mouth half open, and looked at her sitting there on the workbench in her good winter coat with his blood on her sleeve from the dragging.

"What did you say?"

"The auger blade, the spiral one you forged in the shed over the winter, the forge that isn't exactly legal, that you told me was a woodstove project." She said it flat and tired, the way she said things to customers who came in wanting to blame her for their own bad home perms. "I've known since February, Shawn. I did your laundry. You think I don't notice steel shavings and burn marks in a man's socks for four months?"

"You knew." His voice came out strange. "You knew and you never said anything?"

"I was waiting to see if you'd tell me." She shrugged, and the shrug cost her something, she could feel it cost her. "That's all. I figured if it was something bad you'd work up to it, and if it was something dumb you'd work up to that, and meanwhile I kept my mouth shut, which, by the way, is the only reason the HOA doesn't already know, because Deb asked me at the salon in March if I smelled smoke coming off our property on weeknights and I told her the Hendersons had a fire pit and she believed me because I've been cutting her hair for nine years and I know exactly how she takes her coffee during a blowout."

Shawn stared at her. "You covered for me. In March."

"Don't make a thing of it."

"You've known for months and you never once asked me, you just, you just carried it." He put his hand over his face and his shoulders did something that wasn't quite a sob but was in that neighborhood. "God, Britney, I've been sick about it, sick, lying awake thinking about how you'd look at me if you found out, and you found out in February."

"February or March. It was cold. I remember because the shavings kept static-ing to the dryer drum." She hopped off the bench and took his wrist and pulled the hand away from his face, and she didn't soften her voice because softening it would have been a lie. "Here's what I need you to understand, Shawn, and then we never talk about it again. I'm not angry that you forged a thing in a shed. I'm angry that Rashid Tillman, who I have made small talk with over a fence for nine years, thought he could sell you to the board for four thousand dollars, and I'm angry that you thought I was so fragile you couldn't just show me a blade. That is the entirety of the anger. It's finished now. Get up, we've got maybe six hours of dark."

* * *

The far end of the paddock was the dead corner, where Deb's father had let the ground go bare years back, and the dirt there was loose and dark and came up easy in a way that felt almost obscene under the circumstances. Shawn worked the auger blade into