them—Mutt, Moira, and John—lying together in front of a fire on cold winter nights. He says a short prayer. He asks God to let Mutt fight in heaven.
He sits in the kitchen, listening to crazed bugs battering the screens. It’s dark down the hill. Frogs croak. They sound like giant frogs. Monstrous frogs. The Night of the Frogs.
He turns on the television set, tunes it to the one station he gets. Something’s wrong with the horizontal hold. He switches the set off. He’s aware of the bugs again. Then the frogs. He plays a game of quarters against himself. He wonders how, in this world, he could ever have thought his luck would be good enough to allow him to walk away unscathed with a case full of cash. The phone rings. He answers after the third one. On the other end, someone hangs up.
Five minutes later, it happens again. Beyond the lighted window, darkness cresting in a watery black wave. Minutes that feel like hours. Hours that feel like days.
He brings the radio over to the kitchen table, sits down, tunes the radio to country music. He listens to three songs. Four. His feet and armpits start to sweat. He kicks off his sneakers, pulls off his T-shirt. A commercial for Delco batteries plays. The phone rings once more. He picks it up. A man’s voice says, “The dog got in the way.”
“Who is this?”
“You know, right?”
“What?”
“How things get in the way.”
“What things?”
The phone clicks dead.
A set of headlights slowly serpentine their way up the hollow. They turn onto Nobies’ road, then continue on up the hill. Sitting on the deck, drinking the last beer in a six-pack, John is too tired and drunk to stand. He reaches down, picks up the .45 from beneath his chair, and flicks off the safety.
The vehicle lurches before skidding to an uncertain stop adjacent to the trailer. It backfires once, then stops running. A loud fart from inside. Raucous laughter. A female voice baying, “Gawd!”
Doors open to a loud creak. Another fart. “Je-zus!”
Simon Breedlove and two naked women exit Simon’s beat-up old Cadillac. “Pool open, John?”
John waveringly sticks his arm holding the pistol straight up into the air and squeezes the trigger. In the still night air, the report is deafening. “He’s worse than you, Simun!”
More laughter.
“I’ll get the lights,” says Simon.
John fires again.
Their loose flesh glabrous and silvery in the moonlight, the women charge hell-bent for the water.
“You must remember big Colette,” Simon insists from the pond’s grassy banks, where they watch the women, yipping and laughing, frolic in the water like overfed seals. “Is married to Ralph Gans.”
“She ain’t familiar.”
“Colette Gans! Ralph’s missus?”
Watching them water-wrestle beneath Simon’s jerry-rigged lights, John has the feeling that this day and night are an eternal hell to which he is doomed. “Don’t know him, either.”
“Sure you do! He’s got that scrap-metal yard outside Blenham. Three, four years ago we hauled a couple demo wrecks over there—was right after the Fair. Bunch of us tied one on after with Gans. I know you remember. Ralph Gans? Had that half ear?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember that set a’ inner tubes she’s carrying? Christ, you got to! She comes sashaying into Gans’s living room ’round midnight wearing this little-bitty nightshirt could see right through and says, ‘Raaaa-lph, these boys gotta go home now! Colette needs tendin’ to!’ Christ, we ’bout died. Who even knew the man was married? Don’t you remember? Said it just like that—Raaaaalph!—funny thing is come to find out that’s how she really talks—takes her ’bout an hour to get a sentence out.”
“Nuh-uh,” says John.
“You’re bullshitting me, right?”
“I don’t remember.”
“The hell you say!”
John shrugs.
“I ran into her earlier this evening at Benders with this other one who’s her cousin and a daughter to Beano Dixon, the mechanic down to the Chevron station? I didn’t even know Beano had a daughter, but turns out he’s got three he’s been sendin’ regular support to all these years up in Red Hook and this one here’s the oldest. She’s got a mountain lion tattooed to her ass. Got its teeth bared and its claws open. She gets out and shakes herself dry, you’ll see.” Simon caps the gin bottle he’s been drinking from and tosses it into John’s lap. “Figured I’d roust ya. Shape I’m in, don’t know as I’d been able to handle the pair of ’em.” Smiling broadly, he places his elbows into the bank and leans back. “What happened your arm, Johnno?”
“Buck gored me.”
“No shit?”
“Dry-gulched me after I wounded it, then chased it for miles. Keep it yourself.”
Simon grunts. “When haven’t I?”
“I mean, don’t even breathe it.”
“You thinking it’s like a vampire buck or what?”
John flicks his eyes at him.
“It’s the middle of the night, Johnno.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sitting here shit-faced with a loaded pistol.”
“And you’re sitting next to me.” John plucks a piece of hay from the field and starts chewing on it.
“I guess Moira ain’t changed her mind?”
“She’s educating herself. Worries about missing classes.”
“That ain’t so bad. Wished I’d had a little more.”
“Why didn’t ya?”
“Vietnam come along fucked with my aspiration. I was gonna be a nuclear fizzy—you know like Einstein was?”
“I think she’s got a boyfriend.”
“That ain’t the end of nobody’s world neither. The end of the world’s when your heart stops beating.”
“Yeah,” says John. He thinks of the dead girl, the end of her world a 12-gauge slug. He remembers Simon, thirteen years older than John, once saying that the world is divided into those who’ve killed someone and those who haven’t and that the second group doesn’t know how lucky it is or about the danger it’s in. That was the closest he’d ever come to discussing the war with John. “You ever heard of a guy named Obadiah Cornish?”
Simon raises his eyes at John. “I don’t brag on it. Why?”
“He pulled a gun on me last night over to Moira’s.”
“You don’t mean to say, Moira…?”
John waves dismissively. “Cornish was over there balling the babysitter. He seemed to know a lot about me. I don’t know diddly ’bout him.”
“Last I heard, he was upstate, though that was a lot of years ago.”
“How come I can’t place him and he can place me?”
“He ain’t much to place is why you can’t him. Probably why he can you is ’cause he was foster kid one summer to Old Ira Hollenbach. This was back ’fore the killings—when Ira had the stone quarry. Cornish I guess got sent to Ira’s after he wore out ’bout every other family in the county. Reason I know is I used to work for Ira. I was there when this psycho Obadiah stabs one Ira’s cows to death.”
“A cow?”
