In Western Counties by Nickolas Butler Page A

thick rope of brown hair. Her skin otherwise alabaster, perfect. Aida could see how quickly the bravery came and went in her face, how the strength was braided together with rage, and how Bethany was most cogent when the memory of her attack resurfaced and she needed to strike out and
be
her anger. All the violence that had preceded her mauling.
    â€œYou know what I want you to do?” Bethany said. “I want you to get him. And I don’t care what you do as long as you understand that I want my revenge. You look at my face if you need a reminder of what I want you to do. And don’t take him to your friends in the police either. ’Cause we already know that ain’t going to help.” Her voice quaked. Aida squinted behind the smoke and dimly remembered that her old colleagues would not be of any assistance. She felt something in her chest like remorse, the knowledge that she had failed this woman, Bethany, before.
Bethany, Bethany, Bethany
.
    â€œIs it he out there?” Aida asked. “On that farm?”
    Bethany seemed to shake her head just slightly, as if she could not understand how Aida had forgotten some crucial detail. It was a politely confounded expression she had seen on more and more faces of late, and it frustrated her. It had been her job to look strong, to appear inscrutable.
    â€œDo you need to write this stuff down?” Bethany asked.
    â€œI’ll take care of it,” Aida said, breathing out smoke. “No, I’ll take care of it. But you need to leave town for a while. I’ll take you to the Greyhound station and then you have to go away. I don’t care where.”
    The hail hit miles away from the bus station, and they pulled over under a bridge crumbling and rusted. Swallows swooping in and out of their nests. They watched the hail bounce off the asphalt. Ping-pong balls of ice out on the road. They rolled down the windows and felt the cold in the air. Aida opened up her door and slid out, stood underneath the last vestige of protection that the bridge provided. She collected a stone of hail from the ground and held it in her palm, then watched as it melted away. She drank the remaining water. Far away she saw a conical cloud lower toward the ground, but it never did touch and after a while it seemed to lose steam, retreating back up into the heavens. Then the sun reappeared, and a rainbow broke extravagantly across the sky, deep-toned and immense.
    They drove over the hail-strewn road toward the city of Albert Lea and the Greyhound depot, nothing more than a glass room attached to a Shell gas station. There were old magazines on tables near the big windows and a view of the prairie and passing eighteen-wheelers. Two children were pounding the Plexiglas of a vending machine where a candy bar hung on a thin spiral of aluminum. Their little fists and bodies unable to shake the machine adequately. Bethany punched the squat rectangle once and the chocolate bar fell into an awaiting trough. The children snatched the bar and then looked up into her face, as if to thank her, but their own diminutive faces fell apart and they ran away, outside the waiting room. Aida watched as they ran across the parking lot to a woman—their mother, she guessed—and pointed back at the stranger with the hideous face.
    In front of the idling bus Aida handed Bethany the envelope of money. “You hold on to this until I’m done,” she said. “Better you pay me when I finish things up.”
I’ve been losing so many things
.
    Bethany nodded, clutched the money, shoved it back into her purse, and boarded the bus. A few minutes later, the bus driver rolled a placard in the window to DULUTH and drove off. Bethany’s mutilated face in the window, looking out, her hand pressed to the glass.
    * * *
    He fought dogs in an old barn out on the prairie. Had stolen the land from a widow. He came to her house before dusk, smiling in the glow of the porch light,