“Yeah,” he said and buried his face into her hand, “we’re all good people.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for up there,” she said.
Late that night, under the guise of preparing for his trip, Jonathan went to the basement, moved aside an old, cheap room divider and unlocked a dull green metal safe with a key. His rifles and a shotgun stood upright and dusty in the dark of that thin locker; the top shelf held two handguns. He hadn’t opened the safe in more than a year, and the smell of old oil and steel touched his nostrils. Staring at them after so long a time, Jonathan thought the firearms looked dull, inert, like a hammer forgotten at the bottom of a toolbox. For all the political mileage guns made for politicians, for all the anger and sorrow that surrounded them, they were underwhelming – pieces of metal and wood, narrow and devoid of the life given them. They leaned dumbly against the side of the safe and looked like toys. He took out his Remington .30-06 and felt its quiet heft. He slid open the bolt and checked the breach. Dust clung to oily remnants. The last time he’d held this rifle they’d buried a boy in the woods.
Jonathan took a long drink from a glass of whiskey and waited until the liquor dulled his brain. In the dim light of his concrete basement, he wiped down the barrel with an oil cloth. He shined the wood stock, wiped out the interior of the breech and ran a long, snakelike brush through the spiraled rifling of the bore. He sprayed new oil onto the bolt and action. He ran a couple of dry fires, the firing pin clicking home with each cycle. He took another drink and thought about Gene.
He took down the nine-millimeter handgun he carried for finishing off deer who were not yet dead but unable to run any farther. It happened more often than not. Even with a solidly placed kill shot, the deer still takes off running. They’re dead but still going, running deeper and deeper into the woods. Then you find it still hanging on, curled up in a bed of leaves, blood pumping from a hole in its side, tongue peeking from its black snout as the breath comes shorter and shallower. The nine millimeter puts them out of their misery.
Unlike humans – unlike Gene – an animal never admits death; they never quit. A deer could have its organs blown to bits and a hole the size of a human head in its side, excruciating pain strangling every breath, and still it would never conceive of ending its own existence. It was up to the hunter to ensure the animal ceased to live. It was the hunter who set it all in motion and who had to see it through to the end. Once the shot was fired the hunter and deer were wed, bound to each other until the end. Sometimes that marriage between hunter and hunted resembled a child’s game of hide-and-seek after the deer bounded into the forest; other times it was a quick, silent process. Once the shot is fired the game is set. You see yourself in their dark eyes and die just a little with the final shot.
It was a strange facet of human existence, he thought. Human consciousness is like a curse – a dull, never-ending pain that finally kills its host. An animal can endure any amount of physical pain and never conceive of death as the answer. People, on the other hand, look to it, seek it out. What physical pain cannot do – namely, drive a creature to desire its own death – human rationale can do over mere feelings spurred by memory, morality and society. It was not pain that pushed Gene toward death but anguish coupled with pure rationality. He just did an easy equation: history plus growing day-to-day misery with no chance of change equals death as the best option.
Gene had run like a gut-shot buck. They all had. Their injury wasn’t physical; the pain wasn’t from severed nerves or blunt-force trauma. The pain, the anguish, was invisible. The shot was fired; their lives and their minds were the exit wounds. Gene was both hunter and hunted – wed to his own death from the moment he squeezed the trigger. Like a decent hunter, he did the right thing and put himself out of his misery.
The liquor swirled in Jonathan’s mind. He turned the nine millimeter over in his hand. Somewhere upstairs Jacob screamed; his mind saw terrors the world couldn’t imagine.
Chapter Six
The days shortened and nights grew longer in the weeks between Gene’s wake and the trip. Time flew in a blur and crawled with maddening torpidity. The weather turned like leaves before a storm. Nights came early, and Jonathan found himself avoiding the dark, making sure he was indoors with the lights on and the curtains drawn. A strange, childlike fear drove him – some unknown chaos out there in the dark, in the trees. It was in the forest of the night that his life took its most chaotic lurch, and now he tried to hide from it – for now. He would be back in that place soon enough.
The boy in the box had festered in the back of Jonathan’s mind, but he hadn’t actively searched for answers for at least five years. Now he felt the need to search through the online lists of missing children again to find the answer, to place a name with that broken face, that ghost that haunted his life. He scrolled through the lists of names, the grainy, pixilated photos of lives that disappeared like a pair of yellow eyes blinking into nothingness. He began in the Adirondack area, Upstate New York and Vermont. One boy went missing four years ago, still unaccounted for, last seen playing outside his home in the town
