I lay back and shut my eyes. Some time later — I do not know how long, perhaps ten minutes — I opened my eyes and saw that Jeff was sitting on the other side of Stella. His long hard legs were brown, and the curled hair on them was bleached white. He sat looking out at the Gulf and I saw the knob of muscle stand out at the corner of his jaw as he clenched his teeth. I wondered what he was thinking.
It was still morning and the sun was high, though slightly in the east. A shadow fell across me. I looked down and saw the long thin shadow of the rifle barrel, the bulkier shadow of Linda. I looked back at her. She was standing behind me. She had the rifle to her shoulder and she was aiming it carefully at Stella’s head. I believe that what I started to say was something to the effect that you shouldn’t aim a gun at anybody, even as a macabre joke. I said half a word before Linda pulled the trigger. As the muzzle was about three feet from my face, the sound of the shot was much louder than any that had gone before.
It has been verified that the small leaden pellet struck approximately an inch above Stella Jeffries’ hairline and ranged down through her skull, hydrostatic pressure of the pellet against the brain fluid bulging her face grotesquely. The pellet lodged in her throat after smashing a major artery. The immediate brain damage imparted a stimulus to the central nervous system so that her body bowed upward, resting only on her heels and the nape of her neck, rigid as iron for what seemed to me to be seconds on end, then collapsed suddenly and utterly with a small wet coughing noise that smeared suit, throat, shoulders and big towel with bright red blood.
If you have never seen an equivalent moment of bright violence, it will be impossible for you to understand the mental and emotional results of the shock. For one thing, the actual moment itself is stamped into your mind as though hammered there by a great steel die. Imagine that each of your areas of thought is a sheet of paper, and these sheets of paper are carefully stacked, and the impact of the die embosses the picture of violence all the way down through the stack, sharply and clearly. So that later, should you think of chess or spinach, ashtrays or beef cattle, even the texture of that area of thought bears the clear-edged memory of sun and sand, of the way the long muscles of her legs pulled rigid as she bowed her body, of the way the single eye you could see, far open in the instant of death, showed white all the way around the blinded iris and pupil, of the way the hand nearest you, after the collapse and gout of blood, made one last movement, a tremor of thin fingers so slight that perhaps you didn’t see it at all.
The second aspect, more difficult to describe, is the way shock makes subsequent though processes unreliable. It is as though the brain makes such a convulsive effort to take in every tiny aspect of the moment of violence that it exhausts itself and, thereafter, functions only intermittently, absorbing varied memories but interspersing them with periods of blankness impossible to recall.
When I looked, stupefied, at Linda, I saw the muzzle of the rifle swing slowly toward Jeff. She worked the bolt expertly. A tiny gleaming cartridge case arced out onto the sand.
Jeff gave a great hoarse cry of panic. I believe I shouted something at the same moment. What it was, I do not know. I tried to grab at Linda, but she moved quickly away from me. Jeff had bounded to his feet and he ran hard, ran in a straight line away from us. The rifle snapped and he plunged forward, turning his right shoulder down as he fell, rolling over twice to lie still on his face. Linda fired again with great care a fraction of a second before I grabbed the gun and twisted it out of her hands. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jeff’s body twitch as she fired.
I had the gun. She looked at me. Her eyes were like frosted glass. The lower half of her face was slack. Her underlip had fallen away from her teeth. I remember that there was a fleck of brown tobacco on one of her lower teeth and that I had the insane impulse to reach out with my finger and remove it. I do not know what was said, if anything, because at that point there came one of those blind spots in memory.
I remember standing there with the rifle in my hands. Linda had apparently walked up the beach some hundred feet. She was standing in the water, in shallow water, bending awkwardly forward and being sick. I could not look at the body of Stella or the body of Jeff. I have always been that way. Linda laughed at me one time a few years ago. During the night a cat had died in our yard. I don’t know what had killed it. I could not touch it. I could not stand looking at it. I dug the hole for it and went in the house. Linda put it in the hole and covered it up.
As I walked up to Linda she reached down and brought up sea water in her cupped hands and rubbed her mouth vigorously. She looked at me and her face was the same as before. “Go... report it!” she said in a thickened voice.
“Come with me,” I demanded.
“No.”
I took her by the wrist and tugged her toward the cottages, toward the car. Partway up the beach she let herself go limp. She lay there on the sand, her eyes closed. “Come with me. You’re sick,” I said.
“No.”
Again there was a gap in memory. I remember next getting into the car. There was something that impeded me and irritated me, and I did not realize what it was. I brought my attention to focus and found that I was sitting behind the wheel with my left hand still grasping the rifle, my fingers holding it so tightly that they were cramped. I could not shut the car door without either releasing it or bringing it inside. It was very like the infuriating obstacles which confront you when you are very drunk. I put the rifle on the back seat. I remember no aspect of the trip to Hooker. I was not thinking constructively about what should be done. Linda was sick and had committed senseless violence. Her violent temper had taken that one last step over the borderline into insanity. It was a hideous mess, and I realized vaguely that there would be no end of confusion and heartbreak. I believe that on that short drive I resolved to stand by her and convinced myself that her curious actions of the previous two weeks had been, had I only known it, the danger signal.
I parked in front of the market. The Jethro woman has given a description of the way I acted when I came in. “He come in here breathing hard and looking sort of wild. He stood looking at me and licking his lips and I asked him twice what the trouble was, and then he said his wife had shot and killed the couple in the next cottage, the other Dooley cottage. People like them, they come down here and drink and carry on and half the time they don’t know what they’re doing. He was in his swimming pants and it was hot in the store, but he was all over goose lumps and shivering.
“Buford Rancey was in buying bread and they got this Cowley over in a chair in the back while I phoned over to Bosworth, to the sheriff’s office. They said one car was on road patrol over on the Trail, and they’d be along in maybe five minutes after they told them over the radio. This Cowley sat in the chair with his eyes shut, still shaking, still licking his mouth every once in a while. Buford Rancey gave him a cigarette and he shook so bad I thought he’d miss his mouth with it.
“The road car came roaring up in front and there was just that Dike Matthews in it. That Cowley acted a little better. Dike said as how Sheriff Vernon and some folks were on their way from the county seat, and somebody better be at the market to guide them on out. Buford said as how he would do that, so then Cowley got in the big car and Dike followed him on out. People had come in the market knowing somehow there was some kind of trouble, so there were two more cars that followed along. I’d say that twenty minutes later, after Buford had just left to ride out with Sheriff Vernon, half the town of Hooker had gone on out to Verano Key to stand around with their fool mouths open.”