Page 18 of So Far Gone

“Well, no,” Chuck said. “These guys forcibly abducted two kids and assaulted their poor grandfather.” Chuck turned to Kinnick.

“Show him your face.”

Kinnick flinched at poor grandfather , but he turned so the sheriff could see the full damage.

“Doesn’t look too bad to me. Black eye, swollen cheek. Have you iced it?”

“It’s a broken zygomatic arch,” Kinnick said.

“I don’t know what that is,” Sheriff Glen said.

“It’s the cheekbone,” Kinnick said. “I’ll have to have surgery to repair it.”

“Well, if you were assaulted in Spokane, you really have to take that up with the Spokane police. It’s got nothing to do with me.

You can take your story and your broken zygowhatever and go have them file assault charges.

As for this other thing, with your grandkids, the way I see it, it’s still just a custody issue. You

can take that up in family court. Nothing I can do about it, I’m afraid.” Then Sheriff Glen turned to Chuck, his splotchy neck reddening.

“Look, I appreciate that you’re Dunham’s friend. But there’s no way he told you this was a good idea, bringing me this half-assed

custody bullshit.”

Kinnick leaned forward. “With all due respect, Sheriff, this is about more than custody. My grandchildren were taken away

from me and hauled off to a militia camp. They might be in danger up there.”

“What makes you think they’re in danger?”

“Well—” Kinnick pointed to his own black eye. “There’s this.”

“ You say they’re in danger, and you say the kids’ mother asked you to watch them, and you say these guys hit you out of the blue. What do you think these fellas are gonna tell me when I go up there? They’re gonna

say the kids’ father asked them to watch the kids. Maybe they’ll even say you got hostile with them .”

Kinnick reached into his pocket. “I have a note from their mother—”

The sheriff held up his hands. “Good. A note from Mommy. And tell me—what’s their father gonna say when I ask him, Mr. Kinnick?

Is he going to tell me that you’re the dangerous one?”

He looked at Chuck. “What is this?”

Chuck’s entire body language had changed. He was leaning back in his chair, eyes narrowed, staring hard at the sheriff. “You

do know who we’re talking about,” Chuck said. “Those goose-stepping Army of the Lord nutjobs.”

The red went from the sheriff’s neck up over his face, even as he offered a wide, calming smile.

“Sure, I know them. I know Pastor Gallen. He’s a good man.

A veteran. I know Dean Burris, too. And yes, I know the Rampart.

I know that every time I go up there—because a neighbor complains about gunfire, or there’s a dispute over them training in the woods—what I find is a bunch of God-fearing, law-abiding members of my community, who, while they might question the federal government, happen to respect the hell out of the role a sheriff plays

in a place like this, a sheriff, I might add, who won his Republican primary by a mere sixteen votes against a man with no

law enforcement experience at all, a man who openly called for armed rebellion. So, if you want me to be even clearer about

it, I will just say that these ‘nutjobs’ are a powerful constituency in this county. Which, if I may be blunt, you and Broken

Cheekbone here are not.”

Chuck continued staring hard at Sheriff Glen Campbell.

“Now. If there’s nothing else.” The sheriff gestured at his empty desk. “I have a lot of work to do.”

As they left the sheriff’s office, a smiling receptionist said, “Y’all have a good day, now!”

They were quiet as they walked to the truck, Littlefield stewing. “What a fucking coward,” he finally said. “Indulging those

paranoid dipshits marching around the woods with their semiautos. Guy thinks he can make pets out of rattlesnakes.”

They climbed back in the pickup. “So, now what?” Kinnick asked.

Chuck was chewing his cheek and breathing heavily, as if stumped by a math problem. He looked over. “Can I ask you something,

Rhys?”

“Sure,” Kinnick said.

Chuck pulled out his key ring, reached across Kinnick’s lap, and used a key to unlock the glove box. He pulled out a small

black case, spun three numbers on the lock, and then removed a black handgun. “You ever use one of these?”

***

His first day in the woods, January 28, 2017, Kinnick carried two bundles of firewood into the house.

He’d bought them at a grocery store on his way out of town, along with what felt like a month’s worth of provisions.

Inside the house, he balled up newspaper and stuffed it through the wrought iron door of the old woodstove, stacked a few pieces of kindling inside, and lit a match.

The temperature, outside and in, was 12 degrees Fahrenheit.

Kinnick had been preparing the place—sealing up windows, cleaning and bringing in furniture, lugging in books and pots and pans and clothes from the apartment he was giving up in Spokane.

And now, with this first fire, he was officially moving in.

The fire caught, and Kinnick got the flue open, but some enterprising swifts had built a nest in the chimney, and the old

sticks and brush started burning. Kinnick watched out the window as sparks rained down on the snowy fields surrounding the

house. He was glad the roof was made of tin, or it surely would have caught fire. But soon the smoke was drawing nicely out

the chimney, and the abandoned cinder block house began to heat up. Kinnick went outside, walked to the creek, broke through

the ice, and filled two milk jugs of creek water to carry back. He poured them into a pan on the woodstove, boiled it, and

was pleased to have drinking water. He planted a few perishable groceries in a snowbank outside—tied up in bags—and, when

the sun set, he rolled a sleeping bag out on the floor, turned on a battery-powered lantern, and set to reading Walden: Life in the Woods for the second time since dreaming up this unlikely escape from the world:

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a

house which I had built myself, on the shore ofWalden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor

of my hands only.

That’s when Kinnick realized that he had company.

He looked up. Claws were skittering somewhere upstairs.

He climbed the narrow staircase and shined a flashlight into the open attic bedroom and came face-to-face with a hard gang of dead-eyed raccoons that had apparently bunked down for the night.

Shit. Nothing worse than raccoons. He’d cleaned some scat around the house, but he hadn’t realized the raccoons thought they lived here.

Oh, well. He’d take care of it in the morning.

But they scurried around all night, fighting, screwing, snarling, laughing.

Then, just before dawn, Kinnick heard a noise outside and he went out to find his new roommates were already up and having breakfast, feasting on lunch meat, frozen potatoes, ground coffee—his groceries having been dug out of the snowbank and torn out of the bags from where he’d stupidly left them.

Kinnick clapped his hands. The masked assholes looked at him with sheer disinterest. Yeah. You got a problem? Kinnick ran at them, but they didn’t budge. He threw rocks, but they just kept munching. One raccoon with a gnawed ear didn’t

even look up; he was too busy trying to open a jar of dill pickles. Finally, Kinnick returned with a shovel and swung it at

the lead raccoon, who hissed and snarled, but slowly backed away, a package of sliced ham clenched in his greedy little fingers.

Kinnick swung the shovel again, this time connecting with the poor, one-eared raccoon holding the unbreachable pickle jar.

The wounded creature left the pickles and slalomed away in a daze, the others quickly retreating with him. This battle with

the raccoons had lasted about ten minutes, but when Kinnick surveyed the booty—food half-eaten, packages torn—he realized

that his provisions were almost all ruined. They’d even sampled his coffee (though, presumably, they preferred a lighter roast).

The pickles, some ketchup, a quart of orange juice—there wasn’t much to salvage. Well, at least he had the nonperishable food

inside the—

Shit.

Kinnick rushed back in, and found three other raccoons, already in the kitchen, again eating without him, chomping on his bread, his granola, his trail mix, even the box of pink Hostess Snoballs he’d thrown in his grocery cart at the last minute—a guilty pleasure since he was a kid.

He sat down on the floor and watched his thoughtless roommates finish the meal. They kept their beady eyes on his, their almost-human

little hands working over the pink sprinkles and cake. Two smaller raccoons hissed and fought over the last Snoball.

“Don’t worry,” Kinnick said. “I’ll buy more.”

He thought of his dad, Leonard, who’d proudly lived most of his adult life in Seattle—as a kind of rebuke to this very place.

After leaving the navy, Leonard Kinnick had married Rhys’s mom and taken a job managing apartment buildings in the city and,

later on, a golf course. Leonard had called his own father’s old house in the woods of Eastern Washington “the back door to

hell.” Rhys kind of wished his dad could see his predicament now; Leonard had a riotous, peeling laugh, and his son’s ineptitude

would no doubt bring a great guffaw. (“Reesy, what were you thinking?”) Leonard would have thought it was insane, moving into

his old man’s cinder block house on the Hunters highway. His father, Rhys’s grandpa Emrys, had moved the family up here from Oakland after losing his shipyard job after World War II.

His wife and his two sons, Leonard and Pete, weren’t happy in the remote woods of Eastern Washington, where Emrys set out

to build the kind of sheep ranch that had sustained generations of Kinnicks back in Scotland and Wales. Rhys’s father was