Pettijohn wasn’t sure he wanted to see, but he went anyway. It seemed to be required; new rules seemed to apply here. All these official comings and goings had padded out a trail through the sodden leaves. He went through a tangle of winter huckleberry bushes. They entered a shadowed glade. The light flitted about, fixed on a dead beech tree the winds had taken, and abruptly the woods altered, became somber, like an abandoned graveyard, like a church where the religion has no name.
What I think he done was set on that beech yonder and study about it a long time. We found a Marlboro pack and seventeen cigarette butts, all Marlboros. He was doing some serious studying. That black spot’s where he was, where the torso was. The head was over yonder where that smaller round spot is. I reckon dogs or something drug it there.
The light moved. Pettijohn’s eyes followed it.
He had one boot on and one boot off. That TBI man said that’s how he pulled the trigger.
A dull anger ached in Pettijohn. He’d loved these woods. He could walk in summer dusk, watch silent winter snowfalls. Now they had a quality of unease. Perhaps they were not even his woods anymore. Possession seemed to have shifted subtly to the dead man. They felt defiled.
I need to get back to the house, Pettijohn said.
Well, if anything comes up, I guess I know where you live.
I won’t know any more then than I do now.
Halfway across the field, he noticed day was coming. Shapes accruing bleakly out of the gray, rainy dawn. After a while, he could see the green roof of his house. The black truck he drove to work and the blue Ford he’d bought Carlene last year. They seemed commonplace, no part of the woods he’d been in, and there was something vaguely reassuring about them.
SHE OFFERED BREAKFAST, but he wanted no part of it. All he could handle was coffee. The woods were too much with him.
He’s ruined the damned woods, he said. There’s something different about them. Something … I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it. Just different.
She ate unperturbed. She dipped a triangle of toast delicately into egg yolk. You’re just too sensitive, she told him. She put the toast in her mouth and began to chew. He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.
Well, he said, I was back there, you weren’t. What I can’t figure is why he picked our woods to blow himself away. Those woods run all the way to Deerlick Creek. Why couldn’t he do it there?
You see everything from your own selfish perspective, she said. I’m sure that while he was thinking about shooting himself he didn’t stop to consider whether it was an inconvenience to you.
Inconvenience? That’s not what I mean and you know it.
I never know what you mean anymore. Sometimes I wonder if I ever did.
What I want to know is why he did it and why he did it there.
You never know when to leave a thing alone. Maybe he was hunting there when the impulse or whatever hit him. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he was on drugs. Besides, it’s none of our business. Let it go, Bobby.
It was Sunday and he didn’t have to go to work. After noon the rain ceased and the sun broke through and burnt away the clouds. The sky was marvelously blue and it held an autumnal look of distances. A warm wind looping up from the south brought them distant voices and children’s laughter. They went out to see. Across the field, the edge of the woods thronged with people. A family strung out across the field like miswandered carnival folk. Young girls in Sunday dresses bright as cut flowers.
Why, goddamn, he said. I wish you’d look at those morbid freaks. All I need is a roll of tickets.
She didn’t answer.
HE DROVE THROUGH THE GATE in the chain-link fence at the hose factory where he worked and parked in the lot and cut the switch and pocketed the keys. He dreaded going in. He always did. He told himself if he could make it another year he would have enough money saved to buy a few horses and he was going to say to hell with industrial hose and try to make it raising horses and farming. Live simple. Just him and Carlene and the farm. The world seemed to have gone volatile and unpredictable, but there was something timeless and reassuring about horses. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel and thought about horses for a while and then got out of the truck and walked toward the brick factory. It looked like a prison. A dull hammering emanated from it. Ceaseless, rhythmic. Here the machinery ground metal on metal twenty-four hours a day. He showed his pass at the guardhouse and went through gray steel doors into the din and clocked in and went to the break room.
Reuben and Stayrook were already sitting at a red Formica table, drinking coffee from paper cups. The three of them formed the crew that operated the number three press. Reuben was an enormous, gentle man shaped like a round-shouldered mountain, and winter and summer he wore overalls and long-sleeve khaki shirts that were perpetually sweated through.
There he is, Stayrook sang out. There’s the infamous shotgunner of meter readers. And we didn’t even know they had a bounty on them.
Pettijohn put coins in a Coke machine, then sat down at the table across from Reuben and Stayrook. What the hell are you talking about?
That Waters feller they found in the woods behind your house worked for the power company. Went round readin folks’ meters, how much electricity they used. Did you not know him? Pettijohn was making interlocking circles with the wet bottom of the Coke can. No, he said. Anyway, it wasn’t all that close.
Not that close? What I heard, you could of stood on your back doorstep and pissed on him.
Reuben glanced at the clock and took out a package of Bugler smoking tobacco and a packet of papers and began to build himself a cigarette. I guess you know them woods is haunted now.
What?
They’re ruined. Something happening like that ruins a place. He’ll be tied to wherever he done it and you won’t never be able to look at them woods without thinking of Waters.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Give me a break, Reuben.
Say, Pettijohn, Stayrook said. When’re we going out to Goblin’s Knob and drink a few cold ones? Get out amongst em and run some wild women?
Pettijohn studied him. His last friend out of the wild lost years. Beneath the flesh of tHe man Stayrook had become, Pettijohn could see the face of the child he’d been and in some curious way the old man he’d be if he was lucky enough to live that long.
I quit all that.
Yeah. I had a wife looked like Carlene I might stay home with her, too. Keep a eye on her. I ever marry I aim to marry some old gal so ugly nobody else’d ever try to take her away from me. That way I could rest easy and she’d be grateful for any passin kindness I might offer.
Reuben glanced at the clock. About time to get it, he said.
We had some wild times though, didn’t we? Stayrook asked.
Pettijohn nodded, but he didn’t think about all that much anymore. The high times were blurred in mist, sharp edges already rounded off by time. Wild times had come and gone like telephone poles veering up drunkenly in speeding headlights, but they seemed to have little to do with this new and improved Pettijohn.
As they rose from the table, Stayrook punched him in the ribs and grinned. Tell Reuben about that time in Chicago when we saw that drunk Indian throw that piano down the stairs.
Pettijohn, try though he might, could call no such incident to mind, and there was something mildly disquieting about it. You ought to remember a thing like that. Maybe he’d seen one too many drunk Indians throw one too many pianos down one too many stairways and it was time to get on to something else.
He just smiled his noncommittal smile, taking no position at all, and Stayrook shook his head. You ain’t been no fun since you got married, he said.