pack each day of the trip. It felt decadent. I was using Elias’s lighter, which they had given me in the hospital along with the rest of the personal effects from his pockets. Dodge had last used it to kindle the fire at breakfast and hadn’t given it back. After a quick hunt around the campsite, I found it sitting on a stump in a pile of things Dodge must have emptied out of the SUV before he left: a copy of
It was not Dodge’s gun; I could tell that right away. Dodge owned a 9 mm Glock. I knew that for a fact because I’d seen it a zillion times since we started shooting lessons months ago. This was an M9 Beretta, almost new, and I knew exactly where it had come from. It was Elias’s.
I picked it up and looked over the matte black metal. Dodge had cleaned it, wiped it down at least, thank God. I supposed he had intended to sell it to a dealer, which would explain why he had put it in his SUV and left the magazine in it. That made Dodge a scuzzbag, because he had no right to pawn Elias’s possessions—but then, for all I knew, he had run it past my father already. Both of them still thought I was basically an idiot when it came to guns and probably wouldn’t ask my opinion.
I sat on the fallen tree and turned it over in my hands. The sight of it took me back to that morning. The expanding triangle of light moving from the barn doorway across Elias’s sprawled legs. The way his body, heavy and dense as wet sand, had refused to be shaken back to consciousness, no matter how I tried. And all the blood, vast mucking quantities of blood that slicked my hands and shirt and just kept coming, a pornographic excess of the stuff that felt like a screaming confession of just how much Elias had inside him, how much life, how much of a god-awful mess.
The dark. The nervous animals who could smell death in their midst, looking at me above the stall doors with their oversize eyes. My own raw scream for Elias, and then for God, and then for Dodge, in order of their authority to fix this, and yet nobody could. The mistakes had already been made, turning Elias into a slowly ticking time bomb who had meant well and loved us all and then tucked himself away to detonate.
I rested my elbow against my knee and pressed the barrel against my right temple. The metal felt cool, like an ice pack. I pulled back and racked it, then returned it to the space above my ear. To obliterate oneself: mind and face all at once, smudged from the great class photo as though by a pencil eraser. I could take care of my miserable disappointing half-assed existence in one click.
But I had chosen to carry the standard. I had etched it into my arm. There was no point in having hauled it up from its falling place only to pick myself off a week later. The insignia was still raw around the edges, achy and itchy like a new thing still stretching into its nerves. I would not be Elias’s collateral damage. I would be my brother’s avenger.
I turned the gun around and looked for a target. At the peaked space above the open tent flaps was a white label with a flag in its center and words underneath: “PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA.” I sighted in on it, precisely on the field of stars, and fired.
My aim was off by half an inch, hitting the red and white bars, but it was still a respectable shot. For once.
I returned the Beretta to its place on the stump and, at long last, lit up my smoke.
Dodge returned about an hour later. He brought back a pair of cheesesteak sandwiches and a greasy bag of French fries, in addition to the beer.
“Got tired of eating all that campfire cooking,” Dodge explained. “Roughing it is good for a while, but it wears off.”
“Good call. It’s greasy as hell, though.”
“You’ve just stopped being used to it. You’re gonna be shitting in the woods all night.”
I laughed. I’d kicked up the fire while Dodge was gone, and we ate near it for the warmth. Once we were done, I rounded up all the trash and locked it in the truck to keep away bears, then lit a cigarette with an ember from the fire.
“You’re gettin’ to be as bad as Elias,” Dodge said. “Better slow it down or the little woman isn’t gonna be happy.”
“She’ll live.”
“Guess she doesn’t have much choice in the matter.”
As I cleaned up around the fire, Dodge picked up the pile of objects from the stump and began to move it toward the SUV. Suddenly he stopped, paused and set down everything but the Beretta. He ran a finger across the muzzle and held the hand near his face. I met his stare.
“What did you shoot?” asked Dodge.
“The tent.”
Dodge’s head swung slowly in the other direction. He looked at the tent for a long moment, his gaze locking on the hole in the label before he ducked to see the exit hole. Then he looked at me again.
“Why in the blue hell would you shoot the tent?”
I shrugged and exhaled loosely.
Dodge returned his gaze to the tent. Then he turned back toward me. Looked as if he was considering what to say. It took him a while.
“You know what,” he finally said, “everybody’s pissed about what happened to Elias. I know I am. But probably you most of all.”
“Maybe.”
For a long moment Dodge said nothing further. He looked at the SUV and then up at the trees, as if they might shed some light on the situation. It was dead quiet.
“I don’t know what they taught you down in Washington, D.C.” Dodge began. “I don’t know if they sold you all that Oprah crap about being in touch with your feelings. I know you went down there with the notion that they would all kiss your golden-boy ass because that’s what your mama told you—”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t ‘whatever’ me. You sure didn’t come back thinking any different, so I suppose they didn’t relieve you of that notion. But I’m gonna school you a little bit, Cade.” At the sound of my name, I looked up at him. “You need to man up. You might think I’m a redneck piece of shit, but I get by. Your brother, he was a good soul, but you won’t see me putting a bullet in
“Shut the fuck up,” I said, but it lacked any aggression. I was tired, and my stomach already hurt from the grease.
“And you sure as hell better not pull that stunt on my watch. You made that baby and you got that woman to put her trust in you. Don’t ever let it be said about you that you took the coward’s way out because life’s not fair and you were boo-hooing about your brother.”
I said nothing.
Dodge walked over to the tent and examined the bullet hole. “You better hope it doesn’t rain tonight, boy. If it does, I guarantee you you’ll be sleeping in the wet spot. And don’t think for a second I won’t tell the whole family exactly that.”
Dodge was right. I spent half the night shitting in the woods. Next morning we woke up and broke camp, and Dodge made a bunch of noise at me again about the tent. I didn’t care. On the drive home I put up with his country music station without saying a word. At the New Hampshire border we stopped to get lunch, and I caught sight of another shop I wanted to stop at in the strip mall.
“Not in any hurry, are we?” I asked Dodge.
“Not really, why?”
We stopped in at the pawnshop. In the glass case they had a lot of different wedding rings and engagement rings. I picked out a narrow gold band that would bottom out the last of my money until payday. Dodge said, “Your timing’s a little funny.”
“No time like the present.”
“You think she’ll go along with it?”
“Beats me. I got nothing to lose.”
He chuckled as if he wasn’t sure that was true.
“You know what,” I said slowly as the clerk wrapped up the box. “Yesterday I was one second away from
