It was still dark when he arrived. He rang the front doorbell and knocked on the door. Stepping back, he saw upstairs lights go on. Fucking outrage, he thought. His house.
Inside, Kristin and Norman Cevic were screaming at each other. The light went out, the front door swung open. In the light from the door he could see Norman crouched on the stairs.
"Get the fuck out of here, Michael. You get the fuck out of here. I called the police. I have a gun and so has Kristin." He did seem to have one, across the knees of his pajama bottoms. What Michael could see of him was fearsome: he was bare-chested, hairy, altogether enraged.
"Great Scott," said Michael. "Kristin too? What about Paul?"
Kristin and Cevic tried to shout each other down again. "You crazy fuck!" Cevic shouted at Michael. "You stupid drunken asshole. I'm gonna kill you if you don't piss off."
"Well," Michael said, "that would just be murder, buddy, because I don't have a gun. I mean, I have a shotgun in the car but I'm not out here waving a gun around."
"Dad?"
Paul was standing at the corner of the house, visible in the porch light. He was wearing a Vikings jacket over pajamas. Both Cevic and his mother were shouting his name.
"Hey, Paul," Michael said. "I thought you might want to go hunting. I mean, it's kind of improvised, the time and so on. You remember I mentioned it."
"Yeah," Paul said. "But I don't really want to. I might another time."
"Right," Michael said. "You remember last year? We were talking about… What was it? The religious aspects of hunting. The ethical dimension."
"Right," Paul said. "Dominion and stuff."
Kristin came to the front door and looked at him. He stared at her for a moment and turned to his son.
"Say, Paul," he said. "Come and kiss me."
Paul looked to his mother and then came forward and kissed Michael deliberately on the cheek. The boy he had taught that there was a right way of doing everything, and he was trying to be careful not to do it wrong.
"My blessing isn't worth anything," Michael said to him, "but you have it." He spoke to Kristin in the front doorway.
"I don't suppose you want to kiss me?"
"No," she said. "The cops are coming."
"That's a good reason," Michael said. "How about your boyfriend. Hey Norman," he called softly. "Want to kiss me?"
"He doesn't want to kiss you," she said. A little runic Gioconda smile there. "Go home and go to bed."
Christ, she's smiling, Michael thought. What a hardass. But when he looked again he saw her eyes were full of tears. Maybe a moment's forgiveness, a new love maybe stoking the ashes of the old. He thought of Erzule's power. Anything was possible.
Let's go upstairs to bed, kid. He thought he should say that to her. But he did not say it. Officer Vandervliet had arrived. The young cop climbed out and stood in the welter of light spun by his own blue and red patrol beams. He bore himself with the caution appropriate to domestic dispute calls.
"Hey, Professor Ahearn! Hey, Miz Ahearn!" Michael saw that Kristin was still in the doorway. "Hey, Professor Ahearn, put your gun down on the road."
"I don't have a gun," Michael said. "It's in my car."
"Nobody got a gun here?"
They let him see for himself. Michael thought with some satisfaction of Cevic crouched in the darkness like a sniper, trying to move his shotgun out of the shadows.
"Well now," said Vandervliet, "we were told there was a gun on the scene."
Vandervliet wanted to talk about it. Michael obliged him, letting the lusty couple return to their quarrelsome bed. In a few minutes he was able to demonstrate that no crime had been committed.
"Thought you had an old dog out here," the cop said. "Didn'ja?"
"Gone," Michael said, "that dog."
Under the gray bones of a mackerel sky, he drove west in the direction of the wooded swamp where he had hunted the year before. The day grew cold and it was windy. A few icy flakes rattled against his windshield but there was no snow on the ground as there had been then. Fields of dead corn, the stalks butchered to stumps, bent to the weather. A few miles on he passed Ehrlich's wholesome bierstube. Half a dozen pickups had already gathered outside it with carcasses to display. A sign on the roof of the place promised music that evening.
In the next county, there were hardscrabble fields broken up by glacial rock and stands of poplar. Derelict barns sagged into the long grass. Every other mile a trailer stood half hidden in the scrubby woods, exposed to the road this time of year by the trees' bare limbs. A few of the trailers showed smoke at their chimney pipes. Most had one or two beat-up old cars beside them.
When he reached the Hunter's Supper Club, he turned into its lot and parked his car beside a brand-new Lincoln Blackwood. The Blackwood was quite a spectacle, with its brushed aluminum sides and fake exotic wood. It looked enormous and expensive among the heaps in front of the Hunter's. Lined up with it were a battered Buick Century, a Sierra, a couple of Harleys.
The bar of the Hunter's was darker than he had remembered it, more of a refuge from the wide cold sky outside. Ahearn forgot his annoyance with the vehicle outside. He was looking for Megan, the barmaid. He asked the old man behind the bar about her.
"She been sick," the old man said.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"You a friend of hers?"
"I used to come by, deer season."
The old man, who had watery eyes the color of Megan's, looked at him without fellowship.
"Season got her started on the wrong road."
"I used to get a bottle of Irish here," Ahearn said. "Willoughby's." He had no idea what the old man meant about the wrong road. "I wondered if you had it."
There were other customers. Two youngish couples at a rear table had turned to look drunkenly at Ahearn. He noticed a slight smell of stale marijuana from the booths.
For a moment the old bartender stood where he was, staring at them.
"I got to get it out," he said grumpily.
Michael glanced toward the bar, which the old man had left unattended. A woman in a wheelchair came forward out of the dark spaces in the back. She was thin and grinning. Her neck was supported in a brace that was part of the wheelchair. Her jeans and shirt were far too large.
The bartender came back with the whiskey and said, "This is Megan here. Hey Megan, you remember this guy here?"
What she tried to say might have meant anything. She could not look at him directly. Bending to shake her hand, Ahearn smelled tobacco and marijuana in her hair, along with other things. One of the middle-aged male customers came up without speaking and helped her wheel her chair away.
"Encephalitis, what it was," the bartender said. "Her there."
"I'm really sorry."
The old man leaned forward and looked slyly in the direction she had gone.
"Some say it wasn't that. Some say she went to the city and got a drug OD."
The sky was darkening, stormy blue-gray. He drove the two-lane through the battered fields for a while and then turned off on a dirt road. The road approached a tree line and he thought it must be heading for a creek. Instead it turned off to the left, and on the far side of a treeless rise, it intersected another road at right angles. The intersecting right angles were particularly sharp. Conforming to something, he thought, but who could say to what?
He pulled over and opened the bottle of whiskey. The liquor made him sweat in spite of the chill. He grew dizzy and leaned against the car window. He thought he might be hearing drums over the horizon. The fever swelled behind his eyes; he closed them.