You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause

so, five feet eight he guessed, medium brown hair, dark blue eyes, a sort of sandy and freckled look, and he, Leonard, trying to see the mark of a killer on that face, could see nothing, realizing once again that you could not tell anything from the face of a person, nothing at all, from the eyes perhaps, but from the face, nothing, no more than you could tell the character of a cow by the hair on its ears.
    “This is your land, I guess?” he asked.
    “My brother’s,” Leonard said.
    “I don’t suppose he’d like me taking down the gate and driving here in the pasture?”
    “No, I don’t suppose he would,” Leonard said.
    “Well you know I saw the lane coming down here and the trees and I just figured there was a crick along here. I remembered how nice it was to stop and rest beside a stream like this when I was a kid and my old man and I went up to Minnesota, and I just couldn’t resist it. No damage done.”
    Leonard said nothing. He studied the car, a Chevrolet about ten years old, with a ’71 Iowa license. That would be O’Brien County, he thought, remembering that trivia from his high school days. “You from up around Sheldon?” he asked.
    The other’s face tightened a little. He was turning wary. “Sure am,” he said after a moment. “Sibley.”
    “We used to play Sibley in football. In my time.”
    “Still do, I guess. I never played football. Played baseball a little.”
    “Maybe you know my younger brother. He’s about your age. Played baseball too.” Knowing somehow that the other had not played baseball either.
    “Oh I never played much,” he said. “Might have seen him though.”
    Leonard thought of it, the young man from Sibley, wiped out the family not ten miles away, hardly possible. Always the serious evil should come from farther away than Sibley, from Chicago or Memphis or some other such distant place; oh, he knew well enough of the petty offenses, chicken or hay thieves who were either young punks or the old town derelicts, but he could scarcely accept the possibility that anyone who could commit serious and terrible offense could be someone truly close, a neighbor almost, a person from his own state, so near they were almost known to each other. Somberly he remembered that the penitentiary at Fort Madson was filled with good young men of his native state.
    The young man fidgeted, squatting there on his haunches. “Yeh,I sure enjoyed that snooze. Tell your brother thanks.” He found a pack of cigarettes, took out a bent one. “I’ll get out of here soon’s I finish a cigarette. Wake me up you know.” He looked at Leonard. “Care for one?” he asked, rising and coming to the side of the creek. The young man moved easily, nothing strange, nothing warped about him. “Pretty steep bank along here.”
    The young man put a stone in the cigarette pack and threw it across, the pack landing near Leonard’s feet. He went to it carefully, keeping his eye on the other, not turning his back on him. He got the pack and holding his rifle with pretended carelessness, the tip pointing about ten feet to the left of the young man’s head, he lit the one cigarette.
    “Last one, huh?”
    “Oh there’s more in the car,” the young man said, starting that way.
    “No, don’t go,” Leonard said with sudden sharpness, his hand automatically fastening hard on the stock of the rifle.
    The other looked at him, turning back calmly. It was then that Leonard saw the blotches on the other’s pant leg, dark, almost the color of an oil stain or old blood. The other saw him looking, noticed it too, and when he sat down he kept the leg behind him. “You just give the word if you want another cigarette,” he said.
    “Sure,” Leonard said.
    “Got a bandage, I see,” the other said, pointing at his own neck to where the bandage was on Leonard’s.
    “A little operation I had just a little while ago,” Leonard said.
    “What for? You know, I had an operation once, but that was some years ago,