He would test her in some way, Danny would, and then he’d fill her heart with love. He’d been taking classes at the college then—engineering! Bridges and dams!—and he could’ve moved out, he had a good job with Gordon Burke, but he was staying home to save money, he’d said, and that was fine. He could call it whatever he wanted; she knew it was for his brother. She knew he’d stayed home for Marky.
5
THERE WAS THE direct way home, across the new concrete bridge—or new fifteen years ago, when the county had finally rebuilt it—but Gordon drove past the turnoff and kept going south, to Old Highway 20, so he could get the engine heated all the way up; the cab was closed off from the back of the van and would warm up fast, but frost was climbing the inside of the windshield, and when he put his bare fingers to the vent the air was no warmer than his fingers.
He hit the Old Highway 20 bridge doing fifty and he would not think of the other bridge, the new concrete bridge, upriver. Although it wasn’t the bridge, it was the river that ran beneath it, which was the same river wherever you crossed it and wherever you looked at it and wherever you went into it.
From the county road you could see the light of his front porch, the sixty-watt bulb blinking a Morse code in the passing pinewoods, and he took the winding drive through the trees and pulled up to the outbuilding and put the van in park, then sat there with the engine running, the air blowing. The cab warmer now but not warm enough by far.
He hauled up the bay door and got back in the van and pulled in behind the old tractor plow and killed the engine, then he popped the hood and got out again and stood staring at the engine in the dark. He stood there a long time, no sound but the ticking of the engine block and his own breathing, before he dropped the hood and hauled down the bay door, booted home the side latches, and crossed the clearing to the house, his bootsoles on the shoveled path so loud in the cold, in the stillness of the woods.
He got his fire going, then clattered a frozen pizza into the oven and sat down at the kitchen table to go over his receipts and his appointments for the rest of the week, and he did not look up again until he smelled something burning—forgot to set the timer, Jesus Christ… and he carried the blackened pizza still smoking on the cookie sheet to the front porch and shucked it into the snow, where it hissed and steamed and went down slowly like a ship.
He found a beer at the back of the fridge and spiffed it open and took it into the living room and sat in his chair with his sockfeet up, drinking the beer and watching the fire play dimly in the dark face of the TV. He held the remote with his thumb over the button but did not push it. As to the question of a second vehicle, as to the question of possible foul play, no comment at this time.
There was a sound, a thump, and he looked to the ceiling. Her room up there, directly overhead. At her noisiest just before she went out again, hopping around to her music, chucking shoes into her closet… and then down she’d come, clock-clocking down the hardwood stairs as some girlfriend or more likely some boy pulled up the drive and whooshing by in perfume and too much leg, See you later, Dad. Don’t wait up, Dad. And there you’d sit all night watching for headlights, listening for the slam of a car door, for the sound of her heels on the porchsteps…
A log popped and whistled and settled onto its bed of coals. Small flames leaping for the flue and vanishing in midair, and he thought of Eileen Lindeman again and the story she’d told him—fifteen years old and getting out of that silver Buick and walking home. Just walking into the house like it was any other day. Going to school the next day. Going to college. Getting married. Getting divorced. Becoming a woman he himself would one day desire, and take to bed.
And the man—the driver of the Buick? Walking into his own house that night with terror in his heart at what he’d almost done, and were the police looking for him at that very second? Kiss the wife hello. Kiss the kids. Sit down to dinner thinking of the fifteen-year-old girl who believed in God. Thinking of what he’d almost done. Almost become. Did that man go back to work the next day, make his money, pay his bills, raise his kids, live his life? An old man now, or dead, and what became of his desire? Did it fade with time, with age? Or did the thing you fought inside yourself just grow bigger, hungrier, until it took you over?
He got up, intending to throw another log on the fire, but instead returned to the kitchen, and from there stepped into the utility room, flicking on the light, and squeezed himself between the washing machine and water heater, reaching back into the webby dark until his fingers touched what they felt for, until he could lift it free of the webs and lay it out before him on the washer. Canvas and leather, padded and heavy. The sound of a good zipper, then the smell of oiled lamb’s wool and metal and walnut rising from the opened case, and, more faintly, the cordite of the rounds that had been fired in the rifle’s chamber. Built into the case was a compartment with a Velcro flap. Just the one box? said the dealer. As if a single box of lethal bullets was not the norm, was strange even. Just the one, said Gordon.
He hit the light switch on his way out and he hit the kitchen switch and he hit the switch that killed the sixty-watt bulb on the porch and he opened the door and put the gun to his shoulder and steadied himself against the jamb. He put his eye to the scope and turned the focus ring until the trunks of the pines at the edge of the clearing stepped forward, weirdly lit by nothing but the light from the snow, and so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them. And with such power of vision he scoped, he searched, panning left, then right in great sweeps, though he moved the rifle itself barely at all. He scoped, expecting any second to see something in the lens other than trees—a shape, a face in the dark, staring back at him with eyes that had no idea what they were seeing, what the man held in his hands in the darkness of the house. That sudden flash of light.
The sound of the shot and the punch to his shoulder and the burst of white in the face of the tree and the great thrill in his heart were all instantaneous, and right away he lowered the rifle and looked for the casing where it had rung like a coin on the porch, picked it up still hot and put it his pocket and closed the door again.
He returned to the utility room and zipped the rifle back into the case and set the case far back in the corner again, and all this he did in the dark. And still in the dark he got into his boots, his jacket, and he stepped onto the porch and turned the deadbolt with his key and went down the porchsteps and crossed the clearing to the outbuilding, and five minutes later he was on the 52 North, and fifteen minutes after that he pulled over to scrape the frost from the inside of the windshield, and “Just what in the hell,” he said, but not to the frost or to the van. “Why don’t you just mind your own business?” And after he’d scraped off enough frost, the frost falling like snow inside the cab, he put the van in gear again and drove on.
6