Cold Night

'Give me one minute,' Jack said, sitting on a stump. 'I wanted to ask you about Dad.'

'What's to say?'

'He looked like shit when I saw him yesterday down at the house. Doesn't he do anything?'

Tom made himself busy packing the chain saw and its gas. 'No.'

'Does he give you any trouble?'

'He sits and watches TV, or stares at the walls.'

'What the hell did they do to him in that place?'

His brother looked at him with annoyance. 'Haven't you ever thought about it? What do you think they did to him? They kept him in there. All his problems are in his own head. That's what the trouble is.' He turned back to the chain saw, snapped it into its case.

'I think about him all the time,' Jack said.

'He talks about you. You're all he talks about.'

'What does he say?'

'What do you fucking think he says? He talks about what happened to you. He talks about what he did.'

'Isn't there any way to make him forget?'

'How? He shot his own fucking brother in the head-and he thinks you hate him for it. How are you going to make him forget that? Did you forget it?'

They walked back to the house. They stacked some wood against the wall and went in.

The phone rang, and Jack picked it up.

'Jack,' his father said. It was a stranger's voice. It was as if pain itself was talking, using the old man's voice. 'Dad, what is it?'

'I'm going,' his father said.

'Da-'

'Mizar and Alcor, Mizar and Alcor in the handle of the Big Dipper. Two stars, Jack. Brother and brother.'

'Dad, what the hell's wrong?'

'Forgive me, Jack. Love your own brother. Oh, Jesus-'

There was a sound over the phone that was louder than anything he had ever heard. His mind went on fire. For a moment he thought the phone had exploded in his hand. Then he knew what the sound was-he had heard it in the Army. He had heard it that day in the police station, when his father had raised his hand-

He screamed 'No!' into the phone, and then he kept on screaming.

'Oh, Jesus.'

He sat up on the couch. He had sweated right through his shirt and jacket. There was a dull ache behind his eyes; it was as if the projector was still on and the pictures he had seen were still there after the lights had gone up. His palms were wet.

He rose and went to the window. It was still midday. There was some sun but mostly there was just gray where he looked down toward the street. Gray sunlight.

He wished he had Rebecca Meyer with him. But the thought turned sour in him immediately. He was glad she wasn't with him.

Gray sun. The day would go on and then the world would darken to gray night. Tomorrow the sun would come up and the world would be gray again.

He went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. It went down his throat like bile, sticking to the roof of his mouth instead of washing down the bile that was already there. He nearly threw the glass but instead placed it very gently on the counter. He walked to the bedroom.

The closet was still open. He saw that there was a dress that Ginny had left. It was white and black, white with large black dots on it. He didn't recognize it. He could not remember ever seeing her in it. Had he ever really looked at her in anything? He couldn't remember. There was that one sweater, the one a little like the one that girl on the bus was wearing, a shade of rose that was neither red nor pink. It was the first time he had looked at Ginny's breasts. The sweater wasn't tight but still it showed her breasts off through the wool. That was the second time he had seen her. What had she worn the first time? He didn't know.

He turned from the closet and sat on the bed for a moment, his hands heavy on his knees. Then he moved one hand to the small table beside the bed. There was a long drawer, and he slid it open, pulling it all the way out until the weight of what was in it started to push the drawer down and threatened to pull it out of the table.

There was only one thing in the drawer. He took the gun out and let it sit in his hand. It had the weight of a dead bird. It was cold and blue, the blue of metal. He closed his eyes and it still felt like a bird in his hand.

He remembered a time when he was drunk, before he had given up drinking. He had been at it all night, had started after getting off duty. This night it had done nothing but sharpen what was in his head. He had taken in so much Scotch that it meant nothing to his body. The one part of his mind that he wanted the liquor to kill had become sharp and bright as lightning. Bobby Petty had driven him home and then left. He knew that Petty hadn't been drunk because Petty never got drunk, and because he had started to get on him for drinking so much.

After Petty left, he sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the lightning in his head to go away. It stayed bright. He sat there for a long time. Then he looked down and his gun was in his hand. There were bullets scattered over the kitchen table. He had taken the bullets out of the gun, but there was still one in it.

It was then that he closed the cylinder and spun it, and put the gun to his temple. He felt nothing. Suddenly the lightning in his head flashed out and all he could feel was his finger on the trigger of the gun. No other part of him was alive. He felt the pressure on his finger, nothing else. His finger was alive, filled with electricity; the rest of him was dead storm. He felt the pressure against the finger grow. The finger was living for him, a lightning bolt, doing everything for him. No other part of him had to think, or eat, or breathe.

Then something (his finger?) made him look up. Ginny was standing in the doorway to the kitchen in her bathrobe. Her eyes were not wide because he had caught her at the exact moment when her eyes first made contact with him. None of the things that should be were in her eyes, the disbelief, the screams, the pleading for him to stop. Nothing was there but her first pure reaction, which was-get it over with. There was relief in her eyes in that unadulterated, frozen moment-relief that it would happen now and not some other night, or day, not while he was on duty or in a bar or by himself in a hotel room with a razor in front of a fogged mirror, with only silver and white the colors of the world, the white and silver of the bathroom and the white of his undershirt and underwear, staring at his own face while the silver razor did the job, and she would have to go somewhere to look at his body with all that blood on it. They wouldn't clean the blood off, and his undershirt would be caked with it, and his face would have the lusterless pallor of a stranger. Let it happen now, her eyes said. Get it over with.

In that moment he knew he didn't love her, if ever he had. There was no possibility of loving her because she did not love him.

Then suddenly his finger gave up its life to him. The storm ended. He felt everything again.

She walked to him and put her hand on the gun and pressed it to the kitchen table. She held it against the Formica. 'I'll get you a cup of coffee,' she said.

She made coffee, and he drank some, and while she was putting the cups in the sink he opened the cylinder of the.38 and saw the single bullet stare up at him from the chamber that would have fired.

He sat on the bed in the gray afternoon and looked at the gun in his hand now. There was no more alcohol and no more Ginny. But the same numbness was there that was always there, without the alcohol or with it. It had never gone away. That was what had put the gun in his hand, not the beer or scotch, or the fact that his wife didn't love him, or that his father had killed himself. There was still the fact that it was his own choice. When his finger was doing the job that night, the finger was him. His mind could produce all the metaphors it wanted, confuse them, change them around, but it would still be him. He knew that. But it made no difference because the numbness was still there.

He felt the weight of the gun in his hand. He slipped his fingers around the butt in a smooth motion and put his finger onto the trigger, feeling where it should go. Then he put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.

'Bang,' he said.

The gun said click.