'You… Jesus Christ.' Carl stared at the old man.
Grandpa's voice turned to gravel: 'Take care of the woman.'
For a moment, everything balanced on a knife. The gun was now aiming at Grandpa's heart, and Carl took up the slack in the trigger.
'Don't think…'
They posed for another three seconds, then Carl suddenly turned, walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open. Grandpa heard the woman say, 'What?' and then three shots, a quick bap-bap, and then a finishing bap.
Carl wandered back into the living room, a dazed look on his face. Grandpa said, 'Are you all right?'
'Maybe.'
'Give me the gun.'
Carl handed it over. 'Are you going to kill me someday?'
Grandpa was neither startled nor disturbed by the question. 'No.' He put the gun in his pocket and took out two black oversized garbage bags. 'Help me get Roger in these things. I don't want blood in the trunk of the car.'
'What's going on?' Carl asked, a pleading note in his voice.
'The cops were breaking us down-they're going to break us down. Unless we give them the shooter. We're giving them Roger.'
'Why would… this is crazy.'
'No. I can't tell you all of it. I can tell you this: from now on, you have to be a kid. You told me about maybe asking this girl to the home-coming. Tomorrow you've got to do it. You have to borrow some money from me for a sport coat and slacks, and you have to go buy them.'
'What…?' Crazier and crazier.
Grandpa touched Carl on the shoulder, looked straight into his eyes. 'There's more on this to do… But listen to me now. You are the last one of us. You have to go underground, and for you, that means that you have to go back to being a kid. A child. You're an adult now, and it'll be hard, but it's critical, Carl. You have to remember what you are, but you have to play at being a high-school boy. Can you do that?'
Carl shrugged, and said, 'I suppose,' and a flock of tears trickled down his cheek. He didn't notice.
Grandpa pointed at Roger's body, and Carl, stunned, helped roll the body into the two bags. When they were done, there was a small blood puddle on the floor, and Grandpa cleaned it up with paper towels and water and found that he'd left a clean spot on a dirty floor.
They fixed that by dragging a welcome mat across it a few times, until it had blended. That done, Grandpa went in to look at the woman: she was dead, all right. Carl had walked the gun up her body, shooting her first in the stomach and then in the chest, with a final shot in her forehead.
Okay.
'Let's get him out to the car.'
The worst of it, Carl thought, was that Roger was still warm. He could still feel his father's body, all the heat, all the still-living cells, that hadn't yet gotten the message from his father's brain, as he staggered out into the rain and put him in the back of the car. The warmth reminded him of the day he'd killed the little dog…
Inside, Grandpa picked up the first of the nine-millimeter shells, the one he'd used to kill Roger; the others he left. And before walking out of the house, he took a single orange hunter's glove from his jacket pocket, and threw it in a closet.
'That's like…' Carl started. He looked at Grandpa. 'Oh, Jesus, you knew way back when I went after the Russian.'
'I was ready if we needed it,' Grandpa said. 'Come on. We need to go through the house and find what Roger would have taken with him, running. One suitcase. One duffel bag.'
They actually found a hockey duffel in a closet, and threw everything into it that Roger might have taken-his shaving gear and miscellaneous clean-up stuff, like tweezers, Band-Aids, fingernail clippers, a brush, and comb. They took the best clothes and shoes they could find; they took photographs, including a photo of Carl as a five- year-old, on a park swing being pushed by his mother, both of them laughing; they took cigarettes and a jar of quarters and some cheap jewelry and they dumped the woman's purse and took the money out, seven dollars.
They did it all hastily, throwing the stuff into the duffel; except for the photograph of Carl and his mother, which Carl put in his pocket.
When they were done, they turned off the lights and tramped back out through the rain and got in the car. 'Drive that way,' Grandpa said.
Carl followed the instructions, turning this way and that. At some point, he began to cry, clutching the steering wheel in both hands, trying to stay in the middle of a narrow gravel road track while looking through both tears and the rain.
'Turn left, right after this tree,' Grandpa said.
'Where are we?'
'They were logging here last summer. Starts a hundred feet back or so.'
They followed a rough dirt track through the trees, down a gentle slope, around a stump; a hundred feet in, as promised, the forest suddenly ended and the headlights punched into featureless darkness. All the trees were gone. In the near foreground, Carl could see dirt chewed up by bulldozers.
Grandpa got out of the car, walked around to the trunk. 'You'll have to dig,' he told Carl.
Carl dug, in the light of a flashlight; Grandpa was afraid to use the headlights. They found a low spot without any nearby tree wreckage, and cut down through the sandy ground, Grandpa urging him to work faster, Carl working as fast as he could, throwing dirt, fighting through the occasional root. When he was finished, he was covered with mud.
Together, they lifted the body from the back of the car and dropped it in the hole, and threw the duffel bag on top of it. They stood there for a minute, then Grandpa pulled the pistol out of his pocket and dropped it in the hole. Grandpa shifted the light away, and said, 'Fill it.'
Filling the hole took only five minutes. When it was done, they stomped around on top of it, and finally dragged a shredded aspen over the raw dirt. They'd been lucky with the rain, Grandpa said; the rain would take care of the rest of it. By morning, the grave site would be invisible.
The ride home was long, but not silent. Grandpa said, 'This is the worst. This is the worst night of your life, so you never have to worry about that anymore. This is one of the worst of my life, after the death of my son. But I tell you: this is the critical step that we needed to protect the families. And your father… your father was a ruined man, no good for anybody. No good for your mother, no good for you. He was a ruin. His life was already over.'
Carl started crying again, and said, 'But he was my dad.'
'I know, I know…'
And it went like that.
At Grandpa's, they both stripped down and threw their clothing into the washing machine, and Grandpa washed their shoes in the kitchen sink and patted them dry with kitchen towels and newspapers. 'They'll be fine by morning,' he said. They took their clothes out of the washer and put them in the dryer, and then Carl made a bed on the couch and Grandpa gave him two of Grandma's sleeping pills.
'You need the sleep before school,' Grandpa said. 'These are strong and will take you down for five hours. Try to sleep.'
Carl took the pills, and immediately on swallowing, was struck by the suspicion that he shouldn't have; was he part of Grandpa's plan? But the old man had turned away from him, said, 'Try to sleep; try to empty your mind. Try not to cry, because if you do, your eyes will be red. And remember tomorrow, if I forget to tell you, you must ask the girl on the date to homecoming. That's important: you have to go back to being a kid.'
'Okay, Grandpa. We had to do it, didn't we?'
'We had to,' Grandpa said.
Grandpa hit the lights and said good night, and then Grandma's pills came on, pulling Carl straight down into a pit of darkness.
As for Grandpa, for Burt Walther, for Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov, he slept quite well.
