“I mean, I figured you should get it clean. That much you deserve.”
He raised the gun and leveled it at my chest. I waited for the blast. I wondered how it would feel. Or if I’d feel anything at all. I didn’t know how long I’d last, how many seconds my eyes would be open before it all went black. If I’d fall back down this little cliff, feeling the rocks on the way down or the cold water at the end.
He took dead aim at my heart. I could see the gun wavering in his hand. I stopped breathing.
“Fuck!” he said. He pulled the gun up until it was cocked next to his ear, stood there looking up at the trees. “Son of a whore! Look at me!”
He turned around, looked behind him, then up at the trees again, then back at me.
“Cap enjoys this shit,” he said. “He really does. What kind of a man enjoys this?”
He wheeled around one more time. He moved the gun slowly, down from his ear, back to the firing position.
“Maybe you don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“You’re not like Cap.”
Another breath. Seconds passing. The man with one eye shut now, holding the gun steady.
“Fuck’s sake,” he finally said. “Cover your ears.”
“What?”
“I said cover your ears!”
I covered them. He took a quick look behind him, then he pointed the gun straight up and fired it two times.
He shook his head like someone had just nailed him right on the chin. “God, that’s a loud one.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I can’t do this. I don’t know how I thought I could.”
“So what happens now?”
“What happens now is that you die. As far as Cap knows, as far as Mr. Gray knows, you’re dead and gone. You understand me? You go back home, you stay the fuck away from all of us. You keep your friend away, too.”
“If I do that, you’ve gotta stay away from the reservations.”
He shook his head. He almost smiled at me. “You’re talking like someone who’s in a position to bargain.”
“It has to work both ways.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be gone soon. I, for one, will never set foot in the Yoo fucking Pee again. You know summer’s supposed to be a little warmer than this, right?”
He looked down at the gun. He wiped it down with his shirttail, looking past me, out at the water. When he was done, he dropped it on the ground.
“Give us a while,” he said. “I don’t know if Cap’s gonna keep driving for a while, or turn around right here. Obviously, if he sees you on the road we both have a big problem.”
“I got it.”
“It’s like Mr. Gray said. I can’t do one fucking thing right.”
“Who is he?”
He was about to turn away from me. But that question stopped him in his tracks.
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “You don’t want to know, you don’t want to ask. And as of right now you don’t even exist to him anymore, remember? So forget you ever saw him up here.”
“He seems like a hard man to forget.”
Brucie shook his head. “You’re fucking right on that one. But do it anyway.”
Then he left. He walked to the road without looking back at me. A minute later, I heard the sound of the engine racing and then the tires spraying gravel. When that faded away there was nothing but the waves on the lake and rain falling softly on the leaves. I hadn’t even heard it start, had no awareness of the rain or the chill in the air or anything else until this very moment. Me alone with a gun lying in the dirt and my life somehow given back to me. Whatever life I had left.
I sat down on the little cliff overlooking the lake. I watched the sailboat make slow progress, going east. The rain filtered through the leaves and came down on me in a fine mist, in no hurry. I had nowhere to go and a good reason to sit tight, so I did just that.
At one point I took out my cell phone, looked at the display. There was no signal to be found here. Digital signal, analog roam signal, smoke signal. I was on my own again, story of my life. I had the gun in my right hand now. I had to resist the urge to throw both the cell phone and the gun into the water below.
I stayed there a long time, maybe longer than I had ever sat in one goddamned place before. I kept watching the sailboat until it was gone and then I watched the clouds moving by and the waves hitting the shore one after another. The rain kept up until I could feel the drops running down my face. I was getting cold, but I had felt a lot colder.
I didn’t want to move, because moving meant going back home. And going back home meant calling Natalie and telling her we were done.
I had seen it so clearly while I was waiting to die. Things hadn’t changed one bit just because I’d managed to live. I was holding on to her, trying to convince her that we could make this thing work across all this distance. This fantasy. This make-believe game between two very lonely people. Natalie working so hard to restart her career in a new city. Me back in Michigan, cleaning out my cabins, waiting by my phone…
Real couples wake up together and eat breakfast and make plans and get in each other’s way. They might be apart for a few hours at a time, but they always find each other again, every night. Natalie and I had never had a day like that. Not once, ever, and sitting there on that cliff getting soaked to the bone I realized that we probably never would.
How did you ever, ever think for a moment, Alex, that this thing would really work?
So I sat there on the cliff getting slowly soaked to the bone, maybe hoping I could make it come out differently. Or just hoping I could avoid it a little longer if I just kept sitting there. Eventually, I had to stand up. Every ache I’d ever had in my body came back to me, along with a few new ones.
I walked slowly down the path, back to the road. When I got there, I had a new problem, because now I was wet and cold and miles away from my truck, and standing on one of the emptiest highways in the state of Michigan.
I started walking west, with the gun tucked in my waistband. I walked for twenty minutes, maybe thirty before I finally heard a car. It was coming from behind me. I turned and saw a black vehicle, and for one second I was sure it was Cap’s Escalade and I was a dead man after all. But it turned out to be a Lincoln Navigator. I stood there and waited for it to slow to a stop beside me. I didn’t even have to stick my thumb out. It was the Upper Peninsula, after all. This is what people do.
The window rolled down. “Are you okay, sir?” It was a man in his seventies. I could see his wife sitting next to him.
“I could use a lift.”
“Hop on in.”
I got in the back seat. The woman turned around and looked at my wet clothes. “What did you do, fall in the lake?”
“Something like that.”
The man asked me where I was headed. I was thinking if I was smart I’d go back up to Leon’s house, have him take me back to my truck in the middle of the night. But I didn’t feel like explaining things to him yet, and being smart wasn’t usually an issue anyway. All I wanted to do was to get my own vehicle as soon as possible and to get the hell back home. So I asked him to drop me off in Hessel.
He didn’t have any problem with that. He drove and his wife smiled at me and asked me if I needed a towel. She could unpack one from the bag in the back if I needed one. I told her no, thank you. Then I asked her how long they had been married. She said fifty-one years, with three kids and five grandkids.
