Bill said to Mr. Timms, “Get into your car. Go home.” He motioned to the Olds ’98 with the barrel of his twelve-gauge. “You’ve got a daughter,” he said. “Can’t you try to be a decent man for her sake? Go on now. This is over. Annie’s coming with us.”
“Bill, calm down,” my mother said. “You should take care.”
“Don’t tell me that,” said Bill. “Not you. Not the way you’ve been whoring around. R.T. might not know how to handle you, but by God I think I do.”
My father was moving then, his long legs striding quickly through the woods to the lease road. I remembered that winter night when he’d put his hand on my shoulder and we’d watched the snow come down. The beauty of it all amazed him. It’s like we’re in a picture, he said. I knew he wasn’t made for such ugliness as was upon him now, and I couldn’t bear to see him walking toward it. I didn’t know anything to do but to follow him.
“Bill, let’s go.” He rested his hand on my uncle’s shoulder just the way he had mine that winter night. “Put that shotgun down.” He was talking in a quiet voice, but I could hear the fear in it. “I mean it, Bill. We need to go.”
My mother looked at me then, and she was ashamed. “Oh, Roger,” she said. “You hadn’t ought to be here.”
I thought my father would tell me again to go back to the car, but he was intent on dealing with Bill, who still had that twelve-gauge trained on Mr. Timms.
“Bill,” my father said, “listen to me.”
“Better do what he says, Jordan.” Mr. Timms had his hands in the pockets of his blue-and-red-plaid golf pants, standing there in a way that told me he felt positive my uncle was bluffing. “I can make things plenty rough for you,” he said. “I can see to it you lose your job.”
“I’ve put up with enough shit from you, Harold.” Bill shook free from my father’s hand. “I’m not going to put up with any more of it.”
That’s when Mr. Timms said to my mother, “Annie, tell him. Tell R.T. what’s what.”
My mother couldn’t speak. She looked at Mr. Timms, and then at my father. From where I stood beside him, I could see that she was afraid. Her eyes were wet, and there was just the slightest tremor at the corner of her mouth.
“Annie?” my father said.
“Go on, Annie,” said Mr. Timms. “Tell him what we’ve decided.”
Bill stepped up closer to him. He pressed the barrel of the twelve-gauge into the soft spot beneath his chin, and Mr. Timms tilted his head, trying to get free from the nick of the raised bead sight.
“You’re not deciding anything.” Bill kept up the pressure with that gun barrel, and he walked Mr. Timms backward, away from my mother along the driver’s side of the Olds until they were out of the lease road and off in the woods opposite us. “If anyone’s running this show, it’s me.”
I should tell you that Bill was a violent man, but I can’t, because the truth was, prior to that moment in the woods, he wasn’t. He was my uncle, my father’s younger brother, who had done his stint as a grunt in Vietnam and come home, seemingly no worse for the experience. He had his job with the railroad and that little box house on South Street not far from the Uptown Cafe, where he ate breakfast every morning before heading out to work. He kept a pot of wave petunias on each side of the front steps of his house. Some evenings I’d go driving by, and he’d be outside with his watering can. He’d have on a pair of khaki shorts and his old army shirt with the sleeves cut out. He’d throw up his arm, his fingers in the V of a peace sign, and I’d think, There he is, the happiest man alive.
What did I know about him except that? Whatever he carried inside him was a secret to me.
“I don’t know what got into him,” my father would say time and time again as the years went on. “I guess it was like he said. He’d just had enough.”
Enough of Harold Timms and the way he shoved him around on the job. Enough of the fact that Mr. Timms thought he could take another man’s wife and not have to answer for it. Enough of his gold Ban-Lon shirt that Sunday in the woods, and his flashy plaid golf pants, and that Olds ’98. Enough of things we had no way of knowing about as he tried his best to live a regular life in the aftermath of whatever he’d gone through in Vietnam. Enough.
So when Mr. Timms said what he did — “I’m going to tell you something, Jordan. And R.T., I want you to listen to this too” — Bill pulled back on the hammer of that twelve-gauge.
“Don’t talk,” he said to Mr. Timms. “Don’t say another word.”
The squirrels were chattering high up in the hickory trees, the sun was splintering through the branches, a mourning dove was off in the distance calling for rain. A little wind had come up, and it was cooler there in the woods. I thought for a moment that everything would be all right. Bill backed away from Mr. Timms, and he let his arms relax, the twelve-gauge now held crosswise at his waist. He came back to the lease road, walking backward until he cleared the Olds and was standing a couple of feet away from its rear end.
Mr. Timms followed him, stopping finally about midway down the side of the car. I could see his head and shoulders above the roof. He said, “R.T., Annie doesn’t love you. She loves me, and we aim to have a life together.”
“I told you to shut up.” Bill’s voice was loud and shaking. “I gave you fair warning.”
But Mr. Timms went on. “She hasn’t loved you in a long time. She’s just stayed with you for the sake of the boy.” Here he pointed his finger at me. “And I know what you’ve been doing with my Connie. I saw you... we saw you, your mother and me... Saturday night, two lovebirds on a blanket over there at your grandparents’ farm. I want you to leave Connie alone. She’s told you, hasn’t she? She’s only fifteen, for Christ’s sake. She’s too young to be laying in the dark with a boy.”
“I love her,” I said, and though I said it in a quiet voice, I could tell right away I’d spoken with force.
I knew that because for a good while no one said a thing. They were stunned — struck dumb because in the midst of all this ugliness, a boy had spoken his heart and reminded them all of what it was to be young and smitten with the first stirrings of something sweet and pure.
Then my mother said, “Oh, honey.”
And my father said, “We should all just leave now before this gets out of hand.”
“Hell,” said Mr. Timms. He laughed, throwing back his head, his mouth open so wide I could see a single gold molar. “You love her?” he said to me. “You don’t know what love is. You just love your pecker.”
He took a few steps toward us, and Bill shouldered that twelve-gauge again and said, “You better stop. I swear, Harold. I won’t let you drag Roger into this.”
“Oh, he’s in it all right.” Mr. Timms took two more steps — he was at the rear of the Olds now, about to step out into the open. He stopped walking and rested his hand on the trunk. “Well, at least there’s one man in your family.” He laughed again, only this time there was no joy in it. “Ha, ha,” he said. “Ha, ha.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he said, “Son, you must have inherited your mother’s hot blood.”
The blast from the twelve-gauge was sudden and explosive. The back glass of the Olds shattered, blown backward onto the bench seat. For a moment that’s all I could take in — how there was a loud crack and then the glass came apart in more little pieces than anyone would ever be able to count.
Then my mother called Mr. Timms’s name. “Harold.” She was moving past me, toward the Olds. “Harold. Oh, God.”
It all came into focus for me then, the entire picture. Mr. Timms was on the ground, his torso hidden alongside the Olds. I could see his shoes — a pair of white leather loafers with gold buckles — and I understood that Bill had shot him.