hand drill. John wonders if they are burglar’s tools. Then he remembers Simon’s penchant for carrying tools, large and small, in his vehicles. Tools are an obsession with him. For lack of the proper tool, he once told John, a man might be stranded in a snowstorm, bleed to death, suffocate in an airless, locked room. John finds wrapped in a T- shirt and cushioned by a leather sheath a large hunting knife. He removes the sheath. The knife’s blade is shiny and sharp. John remembers when Simon purchased the knife at a sporting-goods store in Ralston and how, after using it for anything—even to open an envelope—he meticulously cleans and polishes its blade and handle with a damp rag. Even if the knife had slashed Obadiah Cornish’s throat, thinks John, the Hen’s blood would not be on it.
He slides the knife back into the sheath, drops it in the gym bag, then pushes the bag toward the passenger door. On the vacated patch of seat lies a torn scrap of brown-and-blue computer paper that John recognizes as part of a monthly telephone bill, marred by someone’s ink-scribbled words. He picks the paper up and studies it in the faltering dome light. Halfway down the page, beneath Simon’s typed name, address, and phone number, is written: “Oaks—room 229.” John exhales a deep breath he isn’t aware he’d been holding. He tries to fit this piece of Simon as torturer and murderer into the whole puzzle of the man. The piece fits only in a hollow, coreless world. A world lacking substance or a center. A world where images adhere more solidly than words to the mind. John drops the paper and backs out of the car.
Treading the grass-flattened path toward the back door of the cabin, he can taste the mist, a pollen- sweetened dew like the aftermath of a syrupy drink. He is fleshless in this soup, like the two shadowed animals— taller than the pigs and rangier—that, in the midst of John’s approach, float like bearded specters through the half- open doorway before vanishing to his left into the darkened, fog-cloaked grass. John reaches down to his belt, yanks out the .45, and thinks, “Goddamn goats now. Sam Hell’s left in the barn?”
Past the two-foot space between the edge of the screen door and the outer wall, he tentatively places a foot into the darkened house, which smells like the molasses earlier flavoring his fingers, varied manures, and gunpowder’s pungent smoke. Though he can’t see much of it, the room has the eerie sense of being alive. John can actually hear it breathing, or imagines he can, and feels its pulse steadily beating in the far corner to his left. His hunter’s sixth sense tells him to back out of the house, as he didn’t in the quarry, but a feeling even stronger assures him he is on fate’s course.
He puts his other foot in front of the first one, and, holding the pistol out in front of him, starts to walk slowly. Suddenly he feels himself sliding, then, as if his feet have been grabbed by invisible hands, he’s skating unrestrainedly across the floor toward a large, ominously rocking shadow fronting an even bigger one. Halfway there, he goes down and slides the rest of the way on his backside. He hears what he thinks is a moo. A half second later, he collides with the source of the sound.
For a moment he lies, panting, entangled in four muscular legs. He is close enough to see that he is beneath an emasculated bull. It swishes its tail, then restlessly shifts its stance. John carefully rolls out from under it. He’s covered with molasses, manure, and whatever else is on the floor. He grabs onto the steer’s tail for support and pulls himself to his feet. The animal lows and shakes its head, the motion creating a clanking sound in the small room. “Shhhh!” whispers John, reaching for its neck to cease the sway and finding the neck encircled by a chain. The chain is looped around and padlocked to the refrigerator before which the animal stands. In the center of the refrigerator, which is leaking water, are two circular, rough-edged holes that John guesses were made by shotgun blasts.
Leaning against the steer, John gazes in wonderment around the kitchen, his eyes now enough adjusted to the dark to see that the stove next to the refrigerator is also shot and that, above it, the food cabinets have been blasted or their doors torn open and the food that was inside thrown onto the floor for the pigs, goats, and whatever else to pick at. The oddity of this scene has an almost calming effect on John, as if he is in a dream in which the worst possible thing that could result is for him to wake up screaming. On the left flank of the cow is what looks to be a glistening wound or a large, glossy strip of paper. John looks closer and sees that a color photograph has been taped to the steer’s hide. He pulls off the picture and holds it inches from his eyes, but can make out only the dark outlines of two people side by side and a smaller person or an animal crouched or lying between them.
He shoves his pistol into his belt, then reaches into his pocket, withdraws a packet of restaurant matches, and, holding the photograph between his teeth, lights a match. In the flame’s dancing cone of light, he again looks at the picture. This time he sees a man and a woman sitting on a couch with their arms around each other and jointly holding a small child. The man is small and wiry, has a jack-o’-lantern’s smile and something a little off with the left side of his head, as if maybe it’s been stove in or he’s missing something there. The woman is big-boned, pretty, taller than the man, and, like him, vaguely familiar to John, but more so. He can’t fathom their pictures—or anyone’s—being taped to a cow’s ass in Simon Breedlove’s kitchen.
John thinks the steer might be asleep. Its head rests almost on the floor and its only movement is a slow, steady, side-to-side list like that of an anchored ship. He tapes the picture back where he found it, then tiptoes past the refrigerator, careful not to slip again, and enters a wood-floored hallway where the molasses stops, but the boards creak beneath his feet. He remembers the hallway leads to a big catch-all room where, John had the impression, Simon does about everything but cook and sleep. He walks around a rounded corner and sees at the corridor’s end a dull, steady light. He pulls out the .45 and tries to make less noise as he walks, though he’s sure anyone in the house can hear his rapid breathing. He’s a step from the doorway when through it rushes, in a mishmash of clucks and feathers, a large chicken.
“Jesus!” hisses John, flattening himself against the wall as the red-and-white pullet sissy steps its way down the hallway toward the kitchen. In the unblinking light falling from the room, the bird’s flaming tuft reminds John, pressed against the oak-log partition abutting the doorway, of the crested hairdo on the woman he’s just seen. As the fowl prissily trots around the corner and disappears, he suddenly remembers who she is. He wonders how Colette Gans’s picture ended up taped to a beef cow’s flank. Or why. Sweat oozes from every pore on his body. More clucking sounds come from the room.
He pokes his head around the corner of the doorway and sees, ten feet in front of a recliner facing it, a television noiselessly playing an off-air signal and illuminating two more pullets absently picking at what look to be kernels of hard corn scattered on the floor. Several open beer cans and an empty gin bottle lie on a throw rug near the chair. Resting atop the recliner’s back, slightly tilted to one side, is the back of a human head.
Purged now of all conscious thought, John’s mind fills with a single image of fate’s darkened corridor whose light-flickering end might be a candle or a muzzle flash; in this narrow, one-way tunnel the sum of his earthly knowledge becomes the floating, transparent cells marring his vision. He slips into the room and, holding the pistol out in front of him in one hand, silently stalks the chair. He is less than five feet from it when a torturous moan sounds from the recliner and the head slowly lolls. John rushes forward and places the gun’s barrel against the base of the head. It moans again, loosely bobs, then rolls back to where it had originally been resting.
“Who’s it?” whispers John.
The chair’s occupant groans. John pushes against the recliner’s back so that it springs forward, then snaps to a stop, throwing its contents onto the floor. Loudly clucking, the chickens dance away from the body. It scrambles to get to its feet. “Don’t try nothin’,” says John.
A man laboriously gets to his knees, then slowly turns around. “Jesus, Johnno.”
John points the gun at him.
“What the hell? Where—you? Son of a bitch, John.”
“What?”
“Put the goddamn gun away. The bad guy’s gone.”
“Huh?”
“Bastard moved ’bout my whole stock in here.” Simon lashes out at one of the chickens, which rises up, squawking. “You seen what he done my kitchen?”
John doesn’t say.
“Plugged it eight times I counted. Mighta been more on’y drunk as I was, I c’udn’t hardly see straight.” He pushes himself with his hands into a semistanding position. John backs off half a step, aiming the gun at him. “What the hell, Johnno? I ought to kick your ass. Why you here?”
John waves the .45 at the couch. “Sit down yonder there,” he says.
“What?”
“Got some questions for ya.”
