Daggard Pitt’s face abruptly turns several shades paler than its normal blanched white. He picks up his coffee cup and jerkily gulps at the whiskey left inside, splashing most of it down his front.
“Call Waylon,” says John. “Tell him you got the money.”
Pitt pants breathily. John can see he’s in shock and that’s why he’s not more frightened. “Not my client, John.”
“How deep you in this, Pitt?”
“I, I… Obadiah, poor boy… odd, ugly duck… he…”
In front of John’s eyes, the room starts to tilt again, like it did at the Oaks. An anticipatory feeling of awe comes over him, as when he was a kid and standing with his father at the Syracuse Airport, waiting to see, for the first time, an airplane take off. And he’s scared too, as he was then, that his self might jump out of his body and take off with it. “You better call somebody, lawyer.”
“… the only one I represent, John.”
“What?”
“… there’s nobody else…”
John shakes his head, but can’t rid himself of the feeling, now almost a certainty, that he’s standing next to his father again and that John’s words and actions are no longer his own, but Robert Moon’s. He places the pillow firmly over the lawyer’s face. He imagines a switch blinking off, leaving an entire chamber dark and stone-still and its contents irretrievable. “You should’ve helped us, Pitt,” he says, pushing the barrel of the .45 into the pillow.
“… ohhhn?”
John places his finger on the trigger.
“… ohnnn!”
The voice trying to transcend the pillow is muffled and strained, like an underwater shout. From its weightless haven, John’s mind recognizes his own name, one syllable giving birth to a world of subconscious connotations. You are John Moon, whispers a voice. Farmer without a farm in a world that is as it was and always will be. The year is 199–. Two futures pulse in the muscles of your finger. Aloud, it says, “You ever see him cry?”
“Uhhh?” says the muffled voice.
“Robert Moon?”
There is no sound from the other side of the pillow, only the ripe pungent smell of the lawyer’s feces. “Not me,” says John. “Nor beg neither. I wished I had.”
The weight behind the pillow goes limp.
Suddenly John realizes he is shaking. He looks at his hand and arm holding the pillow and sees they are tense with exertion. He pulls his finger from the gun’s trigger, then jerks back the pillow. The face behind it is tinged blue. The head drops to one side of its neck. John’s not sure how much time has elapsed. “Pitt?”
The lawyer doesn’t answer.
“Who with, Pitt?”
The head lolls.
John slaps it.
The lawyer groans. His eyes flutter open. He takes several shallow breaths. Then deeper ones. Spittle rolls from the corner of his disfigured lips. His face looks like it’s been pulled from a vise. “Who with in the Thousand Islands, Pitt? Who took them!”
“She… they… he—boyfriend…”
“Whose boyfriend?”
“I’m awfully sorry, John…”
“Huh?”
“Love’s unraveling—so painful…”
John slaps him again.
“… they know nothing about”—Pitt’s crippled hand flutters in front of his face like a defective parachute —“this…”
“They ain’t kidnapped?”
“Kidnapped? No… ah, the note… Obadiah—bad child…”
“What?”
“… she ought to have told you, John.” He starts panting faster again, as if suddenly remembering the nearness of his own death.
“… he, uh—boyfriend—apparently… on the water—a small camp?—you know, uh—for vacation?”
His small, simple world has turned ambiguously sinister. Heads have two faces, one visible, one not. Words, though spoken in proper linguistic form, don’t mean what they ought to. From one moment to the next, nothing in this upside-down world is static. Even voices dichotomize, their bifurcating sounds clouding his thoughts, sending his mind reeling first down one path, then down another. Who can be trusted in this world? Humanity itself—the whole great mass—is mutable. John feels ill equipped to deal with it.
Avoiding eye contact with everyone he passes, he walks the three blocks back to the municipal parking lot, dangling the heavy money sack over one shoulder. The smell of hot tar fills the air. At the east end of the lot, his old crew works. As Cole Howard drives his roller over the freshly laid, steam-breathing tar, Levi Dean, his fat, sun-pink torso supported by a shovel, talks to a bald string bean who John guesses might be Gumby Talon. They strike John as three creatures out of a past life from which he has been catapulted like a small stone. He tosses the sack into the passenger seat, then, after ducking into the pickup, quickly pulls out of the west end of the lot.
He takes the less-traveled back river road out of town, passing by the old feed mill, closed nearly a decade now, where once a week he used to come with his father in their old flatbed truck. John remembers Robert Moon always opening each sack of grain, sniffing and running his fingers through the cool, sweet-smelling oat and barley mix to make sure he was getting what he paid for, and the prideful feeling when one day that task was turned over to John. He thinks of the dozens of farmers they used to meet and converse with at the mill, most of whom, like him and his father, now aren’t, and suddenly John understands that whoever is to be blamed for his pitiful state, it is not his father.
Staring to his left at the serpentine course of the river wandering through mostly abandoned pastureland and virgin forest, he thinks of his wife and son, as far away from him as the rest of the life he lived before the dead girl, though he is thankful they are safe. He is not surprised—nor even really angry—that Moira has a boyfriend, though his heart aches with his own failure to be what she had wanted him to be and with the knowledge that she believes his very presence would be poisonous to their son. An odd, ugly duck Daggard Pitt had called him, as if John were the same as Obadiah Cornish or the rest of his down-and-out clients. He shivers at the memory of how he had nearly killed the lawyer—who maybe deserved it. He hadn’t, though, and that’s a thought worth holding on to.
But who had killed Obadiah Cornish? Waylon, maybe, after having discovered that Cornish—with his kidnapping bluff—was trying to recover the money without him? Or was it Simon Breedlove? But why? What was his connection with the other two? And where had the money come from? John remembers how Ira and Molly Hollenbach had been cut up and their throats slit, just as the Hen had been. Too many bad people in the world. Too many unanswerable questions.
He takes out the dead girl’s picture and, driving with one hand, unfolds it on the steering wheel. She is five feet six inches tall, weighs one hundred eighteen pounds, likes motorcycle riding, outdoor sports, and is daughter to Bob and Melanie Banes, whose address and phone number appear beneath the words “Please help us find our daughter.” The picture, he thinks, doesn’t do her justice. She looks better with her hair behind her ears and wearing a little makeup, as in the Polaroids he took. He folds the poster and puts it in his pocket again, then abruptly pulls the truck off the road. He drives several hundred yards into an overgrown pasture of goldenrod and hawkweed and parks behind an abandoned bridge stanchion fifty feet above the river.
When he gets out, his limbs are rubbery and soft. To keep from falling over, he leans back against the crumbling concrete stanchion, then slowly sits down. The rest of the bridge, except for a similarly decrepit abutment on the far side of the water, is missing. The field before him is hip-high. Past it, the water is low and barely moving. A blue heron stands statuesquely at its edge. Where it still peeks above the horizon, the sun is blood red. Two hawks circle beneath it. John closes his eyes. His brain feels like mush sprinkled with raisins, in an
