His gun jammed or something, Haze mumbled. What makes you think I’d start walking?
The fact that I’m saying it makes me think you’ll do it, Hank said. The fact that I’ll shoot you now and bury you in the sand is another.
Rake owed me some cash, Haze said.
I’ve killed for the hell of it, but killing you would be for fun. Now, killing you because you mention cash, that would be priceless, but the only reason I’m not going to do it is because I don’t feel like digging a hole and I’d rather watch you walk away from me with that good eye working. I’d rather watch you make a run for it, but you’d better be quick because believe you me every single fucking man who was betrayed by Rake will be after you as soon as the word slips out that he’s dead. You understand me? They’ll start tracking you because they’ve built up in their minds that he’s some kind of figure in history and that’s part of the price you pay as his sidekick. Rake’s a mythic figure out there and so are you, my friend.
Haze staggered away down the beach. They watched him until he was out of sight.
Now’s the hard part, Hank said, holding Meg. Now we have to go into whatever strength we still have and use that part of ourselves that we’d rather not use to burn him and take him downstate. We’ll go to the house and get the wheelbarrow and we’ll put him in it and then I’ll build the fire and I’ll put him in while you stay inside and pretend it’s not happening. I’m sorry you even had to see this. I’m sorry it had to be done this way.
That night, after the fire — he put the body on it, leaving it to burn — it began to rain and they lay in bed listening.
I’m tired of this, she said.
I’ll leave in a few hours. You stay here and take care of MomMom. Nobody will know until the Corps sends someone up here, or word gets here from Flint. They’ll see his body and report it and then it’ll have to go through a vast network of bureaucratic bullshit before they identify. They’ll see what they want to see.
Out in the yard, a few hot coals still hissed. He went down to check it, casting the flashlight beam onto Rake’s face. His mouth curled back into a leathery smirk. The rain had passed and clouds scuttled across the moon. He caught the scent of honeysuckle and trees happy in the rain. The body seemed almost weightless as he moved it onto a blanket. He went back to the fire and put the dog tag into the coals and let it sit there for a while. Then he rubbed it with ash and, lifting Rake’s head, drew it around his neck. He patted it once, gently. He carried the body to the car, put it in the trunk, and went back to the house for his bag: a gun, some food, a grenade just in case. When he left around three, the trees hung with wetness. Tendrils of fog threaded across the road and through his headlights. He had the radio on, and when the state forest signal came in he scanned for music and, finding none, settled for a talk show out of Canada. They spoke of the spillover riots that had somehow crossed the Freedom Bridge to Sarnia before subsiding into a tense peace. A caller spoke of the potential for long-term peace. There was hope in the air, she said. She had a wonderful Canadian tartness to her voice that reminded Hank of his mother before she had gone mad.
He got to the bridge before dawn and pulled over to scan with his binoculars. The bridge lights were out and in the twenty minutes he sat looking only two sets of headlights went over, both heading from south to north. The water in Lake Michigan sat leaden. He resisted the familiar urge to go down and take a swim. Instead, he thought of Meg lying in bed, her hair pooled around her face. Her beauty seemed to him the only thing that could save him from himself. His mother would be asleep, too, snoring and then snorting and settling into that breathless silence that was near death. The weakness apparent by day in her weirdly unfocused eyes was even more apparent in those silences. He took a deep breath and shook his head and listened to the tense fuzzy hum of blood against the thin membrane of his eardrums.
* * *
He crossed the bridge and found the side street leading to Fort Michilimackinac. The body in the trunk, charred to feathery lightness, bones and shrunken skin and the grimace of teeth, shifted slightly, curled fetal in the blanket. He imagined he could feel it.
At the fort he parked on the far side of the lot and scanned with his field glasses. A man was asleep in a folding chair, a glint of badge silver on chest. His head rested against the log wall of the fort, which was a fake, a reconstruction for tourists, but in the predawn darkness looked real. Hank got out of the car, lifted the bundle of blankets from the trunk, and dragged it to the curb. An old oak had been violently pruned away from the entrance driveway. It had a long scab, a scrape on its trunk bleeding down to the roots. He touched the sap and took a sniff. Then he unfolded the blanket.
You’re dead now, he said to the corpse. You’ll be dead in five years, he said to the tree.
He lifted the body, again noting its lightness, and set it down carefully into a crook at the base of the tree. He silently thanked the tree for providing a nifty seatlike structure. For years the roots had clutched and changed direction, piling up against the concrete curb, bulging and pushing to form what he needed, a place to enshrine the body of a man who had done the same thing in his own way, struggling against forces invisible to him, responding instinctually, cell by cell, seeking nourishment in poor substrate. He adjusted the dog tag, pulling the chain straight, and wiped ash from his hands on his jeans.
The bridge was empty when he headed back. The hanger cables thrummed in the wind above the brutal currents, the contending forces from two huge bodies.
Hours later, back at the house, he found Meg in the kitchen drinking coffee.
* * *
They spent the next few days cleaning out the house, getting rid of reminders of Rake and reestablishing a sense of ownership. They built a fire and burned Rake’s junk. They hiked down to the river and he taught her how to line-cast in a clearing he knew about — the only one, really, where you wouldn’t get snagged. The word eventually would get out that Rake was dead, and then they’d have to make a move. For now they’d bide their time and take care of MomMom.
* * *
Those were sweet days, and nights. Hank took her down to the river each afternoon. She caught on quickly, wading bare-legged into the icy water, finding her footing on the slippery stones. He spent evenings studying forestry survey maps and making plans. MomMom was growing weak. When she threw a fit, she did it quietly. He held her and tried to read her eyes, to see something of the past, but it was all gone.
News of the assassination came on the radio one morning while they were sitting at the kitchen table. They listened and wept together.
Kennedy pushed his luck as far as he could and I respect him for that, Hank said. We did the same thing but were luckier.
The trees were just beginning to change, not in color but in the tenseness of the leaves, a loosening at the stems. Late summer weeds had bloomed and dried in the sun and were filling the afternoon air with chaff. Hank went out and chopped some wood and at night, when it got cold, he blessed it and fed a fire in the living room and they listened to the Stones and the Beatles and lay together on the couch. He had a loaded gun he kept on the table in case word leaked out about Rake. But the road to the house stayed quiet.
Several days after the assassination, the news reports were of the funeral train transporting the president’s body back to Washington, reversing the route of Lincoln’s body a century ago, across Ohio and through upstate New York. That night he built another fire and went outside, the grass crunching frost, and saw the northern lights through the trees. He went inside to get Meg and took her down to the beach to look at the long furls of electromagnetic radiation. He sniffed the air and said he was catching something new from the north, way, way up. He said they’d go there as soon as they didn’t have to fear being followed by gangs of agents.