“In jail?”
Boucicaut’s forehead knotted. “Not her, man. Down in Portland. This was before.”
He climbed into the car, wheeled it around as though he’d been driving it for years, and sped off, spewing mud. His whoop of pleasure hung in the air, or else Gil imagined it.
Gil went back inside, closed the door. It was cold. He lit the stove, had another beer, looked around. He found nothing interesting-unless guns and ammo were interesting; plenty of guns, plenty of ammo-until, on the floor at the back of the only closet, he came across two baseball gloves, both buried in dust balls. One was a fielder’s glove, the other a catcher’s mitt. A black Rawlings. Gil recognized it. He put it on, pounded his fist in it a few times; then he took it off, sniffed inside, and set it on the table beside the trophy.
He lay down on the bed, got a hard-on. Boucicaut’s old lady was a whore. That meant she’d sleep with him if he paid. He toyed with the idea of sleeping with Boucicaut’s old lady, decided he wouldn’t do it. But what if she walked in the door that very minute? He watched the door for a while. Then he closed his eyes.
When he opened them the trailer was cold and full of shadows, and the objects he saw-trophy, mitt, beer bottles-had fuzzy edges. He checked his watch: six-thirty. He’d slept all day. Gil rose, opened the door, went outside. No car. Sicotte’s, as he recalled, was about fifteen minutes away. The mongrel trotted past, toward the woods.
“Here, boy.”
The dog growled and kept going.
Gil took a piss, watching the lane, listening for the sound of an approaching car. He heard no cars, heard nothing at all. The temperature fell, the silence grew, like a living thing. Gil felt the woods all around. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket for warmth, for comfort.
And felt something crumpled up in one of them. He withdrew it, smoothed it out: a long, sealed white envelope, addressed to him. He opened it.
Inside was a legal document he could make no sense of at first. Words and phrases from various parts of the page leapt out at him: “Defendant’s DOB,” “Probate and Family Court,” “Plaintiff.”
“Hold it,” he said aloud, “just hold it.”
The mongrel reappeared, wagging its ragged tail, brushing Gil’s leg. Gil kicked it away.
He forced himself to begin at the top, read word by word. Ellen’s name was typed in the box labeled PLAINTIFF. His appeared in the box beneath: DEFENDANT. For a moment he thought he was the good guy; the plaintiff was a complainer, right? Then he read on:
THE COURT HAS ISSUED THE FOLLOWING ORDERS TO THE DEFENDANT (only items checked shall apply):
There followed nine numbered lines, preceded by little boxes. X s appeared in two of them:
YOU ARE ORDERED NOT TO ABUSE THE PLAINTIFF by harming or attempting to harm the plaintiff physically, or by placing the plaintiff in fear of imminent serious physical harm, or by using force, threats, or duress.
YOU ARE ORDERED NOT TO CONTACT THE PLAINTIFF or any child(ren) listed below, either in person, by telephone, in writing, or otherwise, and to stay at least 100 yards away from them, unless you receive written permission from the Court to do otherwise.
CHILD(REN): Richard G. Renard II.
Gil’s first thought was a crazy one: someone had slipped into the trailer while he slept and stuck the envelope in his pocket. Then came a dim recollection, dim not because of a long passage of time, but because it was such a cool bland memory in a hot sea of them: red-faced Bridgid in tears, Garrity’s pink and snappable leg, shaking Figgy’s Judas hand. A cool bland memory of a man in a windbreaker rising from a chair in the office waiting room, polite and smiling. “Mr. Renard?” Then the long white envelope. And: “Have a nice day.”
A cool bland process server. Ellen had hit him when he was down. Every muscle in his body went tense, frozen between need for action and ignorance of what that action might be. Gil stood in the mud outside Boucicaut’s trailer, with the pressure building and building inside, until he thought he might just die there, and it would be a good thing; and then he remembered the thrower, strapped to his leg.
The next moment he had it in his hand, a work of art, but also an ugly little bugger, as Mr. Hale had said. Gil flung it at a tree across the yard, ten yards away, perhaps farther. The knife missed the trunk completely, flashing into the woods and out of sight.
Gil went after it, found it lying on a wet pile of leaves, returned to the tree he had missed. A red maple; he could tell by the few dead leaves that had held onto its branches all winter. Gil inscribed a circle at chest height, the size of the deer heart Boucicaut had cut out, or a little bigger. He measured fifteen paces across the yard, hefted the knife. Perfectly balanced to rotate around its midpoint, maximum effective distance for a one-and-a-half-turn, handle-to-point throw forty-two to forty-eight feet, taking into account the extent of the sticking range. Front foot forward, leg flexed, elbow bent, wrist locked, knife behind the head.
Gil let go, careful to keep his wrist still until the follow-through, careful to aim high, allowing for gravity. The knife spun through the air one and a half times and stuck in the trunk, two or three inches to the right of the circle, blade pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle. Gil retrieved it and tried again, monitoring the movements of his arm more closely this time.
Stick: on the outside of the circle, blade pointing down at about thirty degrees.
And again: Dead center, blade at a right angle.
And once more: Dead center, blade at a right angle.
For Ellen: Same.
And Tim: Same.
And Figgy: Same.
And Bridgid: Same.
And the busybody old lady in the Harvard cap: Same.
And who else?
Bobby Rayburn: Missed.
Bobby Rayburn: Missed.
Gil cried out, alone in the clearing, night falling around him, no words, just a noise tearing up from his chest, through his throat, out his mouth.
Bobby Rayburn, who had humiliated him in front of his kid, face it, face it, face it: Bull’s-eye.
Bobby Rayburn: Bull’s-eye.
Bobby Rayburn, Bobby Rayburn, Bobby Rayburn: harder, harder, harder: same, same, same.
It was springtime. Sap ran down the trunk of the red maple like blood.
13
Boucicaut came back in a good mood, bursting into the trailer with Gil’s car keys in one hand and a pint of something in the other. It was raining hard now, pounding on the flat roof, and Gil hadn’t heard him drive up. He slipped off the catcher’s mitt and set it on the table.
“Nice wheels, old buddy,” said Boucicaut, flipping him the keys. He glanced around. “You didn’t light the stove?” Boucicaut knelt, opened the blackened stove door, tossed in sticks of wood and scraps of paper, struck a match. “Don’t tell me you’re turning into a city boy.” Flames shot up inside the stove.
“I wasn’t cold,” Gil said.
“Tough guy, I forgot,” said Boucicaut. “Good thing.”
“Good thing?”
“ ’Cause we’ll be spending time outside tonight. If you can lend me a hand, that is.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing much.” Boucicaut took a hit from the pint bottle, passed it to Gil.
Canadian. Gil didn’t like Canadian. He drank some anyway. Sour and harsh, compared to Mr. Hale’s Scotch, but it felt good going down. He realized that he was indeed cold, and had some more.
“Know your muffler was gone?” asked Boucicaut.
