they won’t kill me.” He sweeps out from beneath the table, along with several small chunks of glass, a fist-sized stone that is wrapped in yellow paper and circled by a rubber band. John kneels down, picks up the stone, and removes the paper. Ink writing appears on one side. John smooths it out on the floor and reads:
Two eyes fer an eye. Two teeth fer a tooth. We gut your wife, murdrer. We gut your kid. Git the package the Hen. Or Bang! Bang!
P.S. Why don’t ya call the law? Hah. Hah.
Suddenly he is aware of his own mental denseness, of his intellectual shortcomings. His stupidity looms like a brick wall between uncentered anger and thought. He tries to remember ever getting an A in school for anything but gym, and can’t. The unfairness of the world hangs before his unconscious gaze like a grotesque masterpiece.
Beneath him at the kitchen table, his legs hop up and down. His hands shake. His vision is marred by floating cells. Adrenaline courses like a drug through him. He can’t sit still, yet his energy is unfocused. He jumps up, runs over to the gun rack, removes every weapon and shell box, then sits down on the living-room floor, tests the mechanism of each gun, looks down its barrel to see that it’s clean, then loads it. He cocks the Winchester thirty- aught-six and returns it to the rack. Then he puts the .45 in his belt, the 12-gauge in a cabinet next to the refrigerator, the .22 pistol behind the bathroom toilet, the .30-30 Greener beneath his bed, and the 16-gauge behind the basement freezer.
He runs back upstairs and dials Moira’s number. The sky out the kitchen window is gray. What wind there was has died down. It will take most of the day for the fog to move. The phone rings four times. Five. The air through the screens is warm and filled with birdcalls. Seven rings. Eight. John rubs his eyes, removes his hand, and waits for his vision to clear. The phone is picked up. A man says, “Hello?”
“Let me talk my son,” says John.
“What?”
“Put him on.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number.”
“He better be there, you bastard.”
“The only child here, friend, has a vocabulary of less than half-a-dozen words.”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“You didn’t tell me where to leave the money.”
The phone clicks dead.
He sits naked in the unstoppered bathtub beneath the shower’s hard stream of cold water, unconsciously reflecting on how the world’s lee and sway is as paralyzing to him as it had been to his father. He remembers his father pacing back and forth in the kitchen at night, loudly cursing while blindly punching and kicking appliances as if the machines were his creditors and cancer, “The bastards! The dirty, fucking bastards!”
When he steps from the tub, he is beet-red. He rebandages his foot and shoulder, then puts on a clean pair of jeans and T-shirt. The dull light of the heavily fog-shrouded morning comes through the bedroom window. “Nothing off this mountain is real,” he thinks. “If I sit here and do nothing, nothing will be lost.” Then he looks at Moira’s and Nolan’s pictures on the headboard and knows it’s not so. In the living room, he calls their apartment again. This time there is no answer. He redials, lets the phone ring twenty times, then hangs up. He has no idea what to do. He wishes the whole world were as easy as tracking something down and shooting it. He goes down-cellar.
He opens the freezer, takes out a couple of venison steaks, and stares at one side of the girl’s made-up face with its wide-open eye. The smell has dissipated. “I’m trying to figure things out,” he says, “but I got no fuckin’ idea.” He puts the steaks back, closes the freezer, and locks it. He runs around collecting the guns that he had hidden, then starts rehiding them in different places. He is on his way out to the woodshed with the 16-gauge when the phone rings. He goes back and answers it.
“How’s John Moon getting on?”
“You ain’t said your name.”
“Sorry, John. Daggard Pitt. Thought you recognized my voice.”
“What d’you want?”
“I have those papers ready for you to sign.”
“Did we talk ’bout this?”
“You’re not agreeing to anything. We’re just protecting your rights. Remember?”
John’s not sure if he hears an engine’s whine down the road. He can’t see through the fog beyond a hundred yards.
“Is it convenient for you to stop in this afternoon, John?”
“It ain’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“I can’t make it.”
“Maybe you’ve got another matter you want to discuss?”
“What?”
“Other than the divorce, I mean.”
“What matter?”
“I hope I’m not stepping over the line, John. It’s just that I know lately you’ve been under a lot of pressure and, well—I hear things.” The lawyer pants breathily. “I’d hate to see your whole life get ruined because of a mistake or two.” Suddenly John’s pulse goes ballistic. He feels it rapping like a snare drum against his temple. “And it wouldn’t be just your life, John.”
“What?”
“There’s the boy to think of. Nolan…”
“He ain’t in this!”
“Of course he’s in it, John. He’s your son.”
“You leave my family out of it!”
“I’m sorry I’ve angered you, John, but I’d be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that, for me, your family has always been very much in it. Very much so.” Pitt coughs anemically. Down the road, the whine gets louder. The phone is trembling in John’s hand. “Most problems aren’t as big as they first seem, John. The thing is to deal with them before people get backed into corners.”
“What people?”
The lawyer exhales doggily. “Well, the law for one…”
“The law!”
“I’d hate to think…”
“Who are you whoring for now, Pitt?”
“John?”
“Tell the bastards stay way from my wife and kid or they’ll never get what they want!”
John slams down the phone. Down the road, above the engine’s increased drone, the fog radiates yellow. A vehicle slowly takes shape in the thinning mist, then, two hundred feet below the trailer, a black-and-white county sheriff’s car emerges above the treeline.
Dolan’s wearing mirrored sunglasses, though there’s no sun. He spits on the grass driveway, where John has met him, then strides forward and slaps a folded paper into his hand. “You been legal served.”
John glances down at the paper without reading it.
“The judge don’t want ya around her no more. Your kid, neither. First time I hear of it, I’ll slap the cuffs on ya.”
John starts tapping the paper rapidly against his forehead. He can’t think quick enough to keep up with the images in his head. His thoughts swim in a consciousness dark as mud. Dolan points at the .45 in his belt.
“You got a license for that, Moon?”
John steps toward him. “She’s loaded too, Ralph.”
“Is that some kind of threat?”
“You just come from there?”
“Where?”
