Raft of Stars

him. All three of them did. Bread was on his knees and looking back at his friend. His face was bright red. His eyes were wild with horror and his face was tear-stained. Fish knew it happened, but he’d never seen it, not like this. His friend was so helpless in the blackened hands of his father. Bread looked incredibly small, his father so unbelievably large. Fish’s head thrummed. Everything in that kitchen seemed unreal and washed out, the way colors in dreams seem scrubbed over. Fish remembered Bread’s dad saying only one word—Who?—which seemed to carry all the accusation of hell inside its single syllable. He had awful eyes, which made Fish turn away toward the kitchen counter, where the revolver lay. The next few seconds moved so slowly, so automatically, the way Fish’s hand closed on the grip of the revolver, the way Bread drifted noiselessly to the floor, his father floating across the kitchen, the weightlessness as Fish lifted the stainless barrel into the quiet, yellow light. Fish remembered frogs chirping outside the open window. He remembered smelling lilacs, and then he drew back the hammer and fired.

Bread stopped running. “Fish, there’s a light coming!” he said in a frantic whisper. From the far side of the field, a spotlight shone from a truck parked in the driveway of Blind Burt Akinson’s place. It swept along the fence line to the boys’ right, casting shadows across dirt clods. The truck was well over three hundred yards from where they stood.

They’re already coming for us, thought Fish, his breath blocking his throat. Soon there would be dogs. Sheriffs. Helicopters. Channel 13. Fish felt a deep pang of shame as he pictured his grandfather in his TV chair, his ball game interrupted by a special announcement, his grandson Fischer lit up by floodlights, lifting his hands to shield his eyes from the glare.

The spotlight by Akinson’s place swept closer. The beam froze when it reached them. Bread, standing in front of Fish, became a silhouette.

I didn’t have a choice, Fish would tell them. He stared into the light, wondering if his eyes looked like that coyote’s—guilty, murdering, frightened. Bread tried to step free of the light and stumbled over his bike. Fish moved forward to pick him up, along with the sack holding the gun. He could see the spotlight quivering as it held on them. Anger rose in Fish’s heart. Cowards, he would tell them. You are all cowards! And then he felt like crying. He thought again of the way that Magnum filled the kitchen so full of noise, and then silence. How Bread’s father fell forward, midstride, in so unnatural a way. He fell facedown on top of his own arms, and he didn’t stir from the discomfort of lying there like that.

Fish raised his hands in the spotlight, that Magnum in its sack. He began to cry, and stepped forward. And then a rifle shot rang out in the dark. The round ripped through the air overhead. Fish heard it impact the tree line behind him. Another shot rang out, another round zipped past them. And another.

The boys bolted, and moments later were panting on their stomachs, forehead to forehead in the tall brown grass of a drainage ditch. Bread stared at Fish with wild eyes. He was shaking the way he did sometimes, trying to swallow between breaths. A memory came to Fish, at that very moment. It was a memory of his mother, staring at him with wild red eyes on the worst night of Fish’s life, three years ago, late spring of the first year he started going out to his grandfather’s farm. His mother sat on her legs in the kitchen, trying to breathe with the cord of the phone wrapped in her fists.

He is not coming back, she said.

Three

SHERIFF CAL KNOCKED ON THE ALUMINUM SCREEN DOOR OF THE Breadwin home. The door had been left ajar. Not much of a place, he knew. He’d been here before. Jack Breadwin was known around Claypot for being good with his hands. He was a natural mechanic when he was sober, and a natural fistfighter when he wasn’t. Sheriff Cal had dragged Jack home from bars enough times to know Jack was a lone father. His wife died years before. Some folks said he was mean to that boy, and Cal made it a point to keep a closer eye on things, but he knew the boy spent the majority of his summers out at the Branson farm, and Teddy Branson was a good man, grandfather to that boy Fischer. Those boys seemed happy enough, tearing all over town on their Huffys.

Cal knew from experience it was no good for a cop to push too far into other people’s business. You get too wrapped up, too tangled, and things fall apart. Familiarity destroys authority. People don’t fear a friend. These were the sorts of things his chief in Houston had tried to teach him. And while Cal had no desire to be feared—it wasn’t who he was—he did appreciate the need to have a presence and bearing that made people move, or get back inside, or sit down and shut up at his word. He was the one who needed to be able to silence a tavern with his presence. A cop had to be in the world, but not of it. That’s what his chief in Houston had told him, said it was in the King James, someplace.

“Anybody home?” Cal rapped his knuckles on the door once more and peered inside. “Sheriff’s department. Jack, you home?” The kitchen light was on, and Cal noticed an overturned chair on the kitchen floor. Then he saw a pair of boots sticking out from behind the counter. Cal’s immediate thought was Drunken fool, but as he pushed his way in the door, a coppery smell lingered in the air. He smelled blood, clear as the lilacs.

With one hand on the door, he unsnapped