“You’re holdin’ a gun on me, John. And that’s after you broke in my house. I think I’ll jis’ go back to sleep. Try wakin’ up a whole ’nother way.”
“I seen what you done the Hen,” says John.
Simon straightens up the rest of the way. He runs a hand over his mouth. “Seen what?”
“Over to the Oaks.”
“You seen a piece a’ shit with his throat cut and figured I did it, that what you mean?”
“I seen what I seen. It looked a lot like what the cops said somebody done to Ira and Molly Hollenbach.”
Simon shrugs. “Go ’head shoot me, Johnno. Been workin’ up to doin’ it myself here last couple a’ days.”
Suddenly John’s hand holding the gun is shaking. He can feel his legs begin to quiver like fish flopping on a bank. He’s afraid he’s going to fall down. To prevent it, he puts his free hand on the back of the chair. “Why?” he asks.
“That ain’t never as complicated as people like to make it out, Johnno. Years ’fore I ever heard a’ Vietnam my daddy said I had the same wild hair’s got him dead younger than I am now, o’ny I got far ’nough in school to know wild hairs is called genes and get a damn sight wilder a man’s been drinkin’.” He backs up to the television set. “And like everybody’s mother always warns, I got in with some bad elements, baddest of which is that piece shit you found bleeding all over the Oaks’ rugs.”
“You worked for Ira. He treated you decent.”
“Most times.”
“Decent as my own daddy.”
“Gon’ turn off the set, Johnno.”
“Don’t!”
Simon abruptly reaches down and switches off the television. The room goes black. John hears a rapid movement. He tries to follow the sound with his gun. Simon chuckles. John says, “I know where you are!”
A dull light comes on behind him. “Boo!” says Simon.
John wheels around. Simon’s standing before the couch, aiming a shotgun at him. “Shit, Johnno, din’ you learn nothin’ ’bout what I taught you?”
John lowers the .45. He feels physically and cognitively depleted. “Ain’t like you,” he says.
“Huh?”
“Don’t shoot folks been good to me. Nor slit their throats neither.”
“Ira was s’posed to be to a fireman’s dance that night, ’cordin’ the Hen.” Simon points the shotgun at his own toes. He sits down on the couch. John’s not sure if he’s through covering him with the shotgun or is just taking a rest. “Him and Molly both. I run into Obadiah all growed-up over the Pink Lily in Raburn, this was maybe three, four years after Ira’d shit-canned ’im for skewerin’ that cow and a coupla weeks after he’d done the same to me for not showin’ up two mornings in a row, then wouldn’t pay me no back wages. Hen says he’d been holdin’ Ira’s safe combination all these years—all we’d have to do is walk in and open it.”
At a level deeper than conscious comprehension, John is thinking that the apparent palpability of words, acts, the whole process of human interchange, is a sham. He is mindful, though, only of his physical distress. His trembling extremities. His palpitating heart. “What I notice ’bout myself, Johnno, is the drunker I get, the more reasonable the most un-fucking-reasonable things seem.”
“Guess I’ll sit down,” John tells him, “ ’less’n you’ll shoot me for it.”
“Christ, John.”
“All right?”
Simon scowls.
John shoves the .45 into his belt. He takes a seat on the edge of the recliner, facing Simon. Simon sighs and says, “Them first coupla years after I got back I weren’t hardly never sober ’cept when I worked for your daddy, who wouldn’t tolerate it, but seems like the longer I’d go ’long his way, worse it’d be when I did let loose, and pretty soon a lost weekend ’id turn into a lost week or two or a whole damn month.” He flicks the barrel of the shotgun at one of the chickens that’s strayed too close to his foot. The chicken squawks and runs off. “Some mess, ain’t it, John?”
John’s not sure if he means his own or the cabin’s. Anyway, he doesn’t answer. It seems to him that Simon’s voice has lost its uniqueness. It sounds like a million other voices.
“Hen drives out Route 9” it says, “and parks in the Conservancy so nobody’d see us comin’ up the hollow, then we hike the woods trail over to Ira’s, getting drunker as we go—I mean, I’m not even carryin’ a gun, Johnno, because to me it’s a sumbitchin’ lark. I figure there’s a safe at all, most’ll be in it is the couple weeks’ wages Ira owes me. We walk up the house whistling, through the front door, turn on a light, and go through the living room to Ira’s office, where the Hen gets to his knees and yanks up a piece a’ rug above where the safe is. He tries openin’ it with some goddamn numbers he’s got writ down but nothin’ happens so he curses and tries ’em a few more times with no more luck and me giving ’im the raspberry ’cause I don’t really give a shit and the Hen finally says fuck it he’ll go upstairs and take some a’ Molly’s jewels and then we’ll leave and though I’m not happy ’bout him ransackin’ the place I go in the kitchen and drink a beer while I wait and maybe he’s up there fifteen, twenty minutes tops and all I e’er heard, Johnno, was a little bangin’ round and once or twice the Hen curse.”
Simon stops talking and runs a hand back through his hair. He’s wearing the same clothes he was two days ago. John wonders if he’s slept in a bed or been less than half-drunk since then. “Look at this shit, Johnno.” He waves the shotgun around the room. “Here’s love makin’ a damn monster out a’ man. You think my homeowner’s ’ll cover what he done?”
John doesn’t say. He’s wondering who the monster is and how far wrong John had read Simon, what exactly his friend is capable of. Could it have been he who had shot Mutt and left the dead girl’s body in the trailer? Was it possible that he had been involved with the Hen in threatening John’s family? The belief that he might have been has on John’s already tortured mind the excruciating pain-followed-by-numbness effect of frigid water.
Balancing the shotgun on his thighs, Simon reaches down with one hand and snatches an open beer can from the floor. “Hair a’ the dog, Johnno,” he says before raising the can to his lips and draining it. Afterwards, he scowls, fixates on a spot on the ceiling above John’s head, and in a flat monotone says, “I hear Hen come back downstairs and I walk out and see ’im covered in blood with a look on his face like the devil’s rooted up and found a home there and in one hand he’s totin’ Ira’s bloody World War II bayonet and in the other his thirty-aught and when I ask ’im what the hell he’s gone and done he walks by me toward the study and says, ‘Ol’ Ira was up there straightenin’ me out on them numbers.’ I run upstairs, Johnno, and find a mess worse than most of what I seen in ’Nam, and Ira, half butchered like he is, moanin’ from Molly’s lap and oglin’ me out the one eye he’s got left and the look he give me, Johnno, ’ll follow me into the ground and a damn sight deeper, and I mumbled to him somethin’ like I was sorry for it, then I took out my huntin’ knife and done for ’im like I would for a wounded deer.”
Simon tosses the shotgun onto the cushion next to him. Particles of dust rise up and, in the dim light around and above his head, spin in a circular pattern monotonous as his words. “Was Hen carrying the aught-six,” he says, rubbing his temples, “so I din’ argue much when he turns it on me and says we ought to split up, with him headin’ with the money back over the Conservancy and me winding my way down the west fork the hollow where my pickup was stashed.”
John reaches down and squeezes his left calf where it’s cramped up. He wonders how long it would take Simon to grab the shotgun and aim it.
“We was gon’ get together in coupla days to see ’bout divvyin’ things up, but I figured from the start I’d seen the last of him and it ain’t but a week later I hear he’s pled to and been sentenced to a six-pack for a string a’ burglaries up in Raburn he was out on bail for at the time the Hollenbach thing and I guessed he musta planned all along to stash whatever we took somewhere till he got out.”
In the dark corners of the room, pieces of furniture silently sit like intrigued jurors. Sporadic clucks sound like the derisive barks of naysayers. “Coulda let the law in on it,” mumbles John.
“In their eyes I’m guilty as him.”
“You din’ have to take the money.”
Simon laughs contemptuously. “You know what a big pile cash does a poor man, don’t ya, John.”
John straightens up. He looks at Simon, trying to figure out if he’s making generalizations or knows that John, in many ways, had come to the same crossroads as Simon and, as John now guiltily realizes, taken the same wrong turn. “Makes ’im greedy,” says John.
“Like a rich man.”
