Julius Winsome

by Gerard Donovan

  What time is it? I said.

  He looked at his wrist. After four.

  Now we’ll go home, I said. Put it back on, and turn your friend’s key for him.

  Wondering what the trick was, when and where the bullet would tear into him, he scrambled up and got into the jacket before pulling the white scarf off his whiter neck. After he turned his confederate’s truck off, he had another question for me.

  Where’s home? he said.

  Second star to the right, I said.

  What?

  Follow me but by being in front. Home is ahead, and no more banter from you.

  We walked back to the cabin under the rising moon and the faint glow of snow, two men and their footsteps, one holding a rifle to the other’s back, the oldest arrangement of power.

  46

  I WAS IN NO HURRY TO SAY ANYTHING, ONLY TO REACH the house before complete darkness. That was some garboil in the woods, I said.

  I don’t understand, he said.

  I meant disorder in the woods. You and your distraction of gallowglass.

  Gallows?

  The loose infantry of all of you in there, I said.

  We passed the heavier trees, the deep middle woods.

  You must have taken me for a right geck with that truck blasting through the woods at me, I said. Did you think I would run and then you shoot me?

  That was the plan, he said.

  You were with them, then. You were the flanker.

  We came together. I was to wait for the shot, the truck was to shake you out of the woods.

  And the first man?

  What’s a geck, he said.

  A fool. The first man?

  He didn’t know that we were out to trap you and believed we were hunting for the afternoon. Told him he could shoot all the deer he wanted to because I’m the law. He was the decoy. I thought we would have you before you shot. Yes, I was on the flank.

  You see, you understand if you listen, I said. And you should have told him your plan and not let him stand alone. That could be construed as reckless in some quarters.

  We walked then in silence for twenty minutes until I saw the porch light gleam through the gallimaufry of trees—every sort of tree—if I’d been explaining things to him. I was happy to be at the cabin, tired of this man and his urgency, his importance.

  Stand over there, I said, and he walked to the flowerbed, looking around him, checking for an out, a dash into the woods, the place in the play that says Exeunt. A good place for him to leave the stage, I thought, there beside Hobbes, Hobbes the groundling.

  Would you like a sherry, I said, standing in the doorway. I could see him itching to run, wondering whether I’d miss, knowing I would not.

  I don’t drink, he said.

  Fair enough. What time is it?

  He looked: Five.

  I kept the rifle on him. Now tell me you did not shoot the dog.

  I had nothing to do with it.

  Say it again.

  I did not shoot the dog. It ran at me along the trail but was only barking at me.

  Tiredness and stress must have brought him off his guard. I saw the turmoil in him as he tried to take back what he’d just said. A policeman should know more than to open his mouth unless he knows what’s coming out of it. All the men who march themselves off to prison with their own mouths.

  What do you mean, I said, that he was only barking?

  He pursed his lips, sullen, and lifted low and murderous eyes to me that met the Enfield staring back.

  Answer me that question, I said. Answer it now.

  47

  IF A MAN WHISPERS SOMETHING TO YOU IN GERMAN, and you don’t speak that language, you won’t understand a word of it: he could be talking philosophy or cursing your parents. If he shouts the same thing or different German words at you, you still won’t understand a thing. When a dog lifts his head and howls while keeping his eyes on you, slightly from the side, it means he’s playful but knows you’re putting one over on him. If he puts his head back and barks at you full on, down from the stomach, he wants to play. If he growls from the stomach when you grab him and looks sideways at you, it’s pure affection, but if he growls straight ahead and shallow from the teeth, it’s a one-second warning. If you don’t understand his language, it’s all noise. Those men abroad in the woods did not, I think, understand my Shakespeare, though every word of it was English and I spoke carefully. I may as well have been barking at them. Time makes dogs of us.

  48

  IT WAS ALMOST DARK, AND TROY STOOD WHERE THE flowers had perfumed the entire clearing and my bedroom in the mornings, he stood where the light of the porch reached now to cover us.

  He said, It was another time, over a year ago. I came up here to the woods, to see where you lived. I was tired of Claire talking about you; she had mentioned your name twice in four years, and so I had to see what was going on, to understand the competition I was dealing with. I walked along the woods out there meaning to check out the cabin, and your dog heard me, ran through the woods at me. I got into the truck and drove away.

  You said he was barking.

  He barked, that’s all he did. Why would a man shoot a barking dog?

  I lowered the rifle. So Hobbes had stood his ground. Either that or this was an incident with the dog that this man had time to fancy up on the long silent walk back. No, maybe poor Hobbes was competition for Troy too, had she really talked about Hobbes to him? I thought I asked out loud, but Troy did not move to speak.

  Then, as a white flurry blended through the trees and the last leaves tore from the branches, I remembered Claire wearing no clothes and standing in the warm kitchen a few weeks after her first visit, holding a copy of The Winter’s Tale to her breast.

  Here’s flowers for you;

  Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram;

  The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun

  And with him rises weeping: these are flowers

  Of middle summer, and I think they are given

  To men of middle age.

  You are my own William now, she said to me.

  I found myself looking at the place where the flowers appeared, those which I had grown myself or that grew by themselves, pressing themselves above the hard ground for light.

  Such soft skin, such a hard memory.

  Troy stood at the flowerbed, sulking. Then a murder of crows, thousands of them, a rattle of black, flew mid way up through the trees, a trickling shrill band. They took five minutes to pass, and the noise ruled out any words between us in the meantime. Troy watched the rifle, and I watched the birds pass behind him.

  The trees are crowed, I said.

  He winced. They’re what? What are you saying?

  That word was of my own making, I said. My Shakespeare has run out for the moment.

  His sullen shrug, as if we had parted languages and he was staying behind. Defiancy, another new word, just for him. But I admired his focus, the strength and purpose of his will: he thought in a way that excluded everything from it that did not fit in, the way a moth stitches itself to the light bulb on the porch, a knitting circle, and sometimes its shadow bothered me and I switched off the light to free it into the night, since only silence sends people like Troy away, since if you say anything they must at once attach a reply.

  Do you want to come in, I said. The evening was settling in.

  He shook his head, eyes drifting to the cabin. I’m not going in there.

  As you like, I said. But they’ll be going down badly soon, the numbers.

  He must have thought I was talking about something else because he said, And you’ve shot a good number of people already, haven’t you?

  I took a drink, the temperature was mixing the sherry differently on my tongue. I nodded to give him that victory, since he deserved it:

  I said, There’s an idea abroad that men with guns can do as they wish, that it’s the natural order of things. I gave them a natural order.

  So you admit it
, here and now, he said.

  He was warming up to his plan to survive, whatever that was. I was past the point where it mattered to me, about myself, about anything. All I felt was an absence that had never been there before, that blanketed everything in me. Before this I knew the normal happiness in being alone disturbed suddenly by one absence: the sheer hardness of it, you become a stone, a wood, a splinter in the ground, wind with splinters in it. And as poisonous remedy, the flowers in all the grey, the touch of a hand on your arm, the sweet word from a smile, what cures and then leaves you worse. Some people think it is the mind that does it. If that were the case, whether Hobbes had ever been in my life, or I in his, mattered little to the world or anyone in it, only to me now. You attach yourself and suffer when you don’t have it anymore. But he made my days shorter when I had no one else, his friendship present even when no gain occurred.

  And you can admit something for me now, I said.

  I spoke deliberately, sure that I was speaking out loud and not to myself since living as I did sometimes blurred the two.

  Troy moved his legs to shoulder width. Admit what?

  That you sent a man out yesterday to check on me, the man on the road in the morning. I saw two men in the car afterwards.

  Troy began nodding before I was done. I sent a man out, dropped him off and picked him up after you drove through. You have some eyesight, I’ll give you that, he said.

  But you didn’t follow me, I said.

  You would have seen us. But I had a rifle on you the whole time he was questioning you.

  And now, I said, you are here today, you came with these men to the woods, neither of them a constable, and both of them working for you it seems, to get me out looking for you.

  Only one of them knew, not the first you killed. Anyway, I figured I could get you myself before any shooting started.

  And be the hero.

  Just doing my job.

  I doubt that, I said. Doing your job would not have had you employing another man to die today. I incarnadined your intelligencer.

  My Shakespeare had returned but skipped the H words. He seemed puzzled, so I translated the English into English: I bloodied your spy.

  That set him off.

  You’re mad because I took Claire away from you, he said. That’s it, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Not some damn dog.

  I could see the fear and defiance again stir in him like milk into tea. And when I arrived at his curse as I reviewed the order of his words, the curse placed before Hobbes, my blood went low in my body, down in cold parts under the veins. Claire was, I had to believe, as distant from all of this as could be, and bringing her into it was ill-advised on his part. But I owed him the respect of following his own logic:

  If that were so, if you are the instigator of everything that has happened, the man whose power I live under, then you would be the man equally to end it all by his death. If I am jealous, I said lifting the rifle, I can remedy that now.

  I aimed at his forehead. He grew whiter and faster than snow blizzards a windshield. I could tell he was thinking of running, the way he met my gaze down the barrel without flinching. His training told him to do that, not to betray his thinking with an unconscious glance around him for an escape route. To stare at me instead as if he were intent upon me only. Good for him, to have that resource of mind. I had underestimated him.

  I glanced to one side for him, to let him know.

  Unless you can become a tree I wouldn’t try to run, I said, thinking that he should elect to see the bullet rather than have it travel after him.

  He sensed the moment had come and stiffened against the shot he expected. I breathed out.

  You wouldn’t treat an animal like this, he said. Some pleading now.

  Does treat mean well or badly, I said.

  You know, he said.

  I must know what to do with you then, if that’s what you expect from that word. I would have thought treating like an animal meant well.

  I brought the rifle back up as I had dropped it an inch to answer him and I wanted that breath to be the last thing he ever heard. A cold blast banged us both hard, a cloud moved off the yellow rising moon. It was all but dark, thirty minutes at most. The forest was showing its white hand, the sky closing its fist.

  I heard his next words at the second the trigger was at the pressure of firing.

  Claire, he said.

  I froze at the sights. What about Claire?

  He spoke again, his hands up from his sides: She’ll miss me.

  What has Claire to do with you and me, I said. Only in your head.

  But he sensed the hesitation, and the proof was that he was still alive. He did not waste time, mostly because lately he had less than a second of it to his name.

  He said, What about her, her feelings, what will she do?

  She’ll live, I said.

  How? I can give Claire a family, children, a family life. What could you have given her?

  That stopped me. It was a good question. I wanted to smoke a Turkish cigarette, drink strong coffee against the falling twilight, what I loved most about the day, that chink in the door. But there was Troy and given a moment he’d snap himself out of my sight.

  I said, I don’t know anymore. I’m not sure that people give anything to anyone as such.

  Well I can give her a family, a sense of values.

  I know what those words mean, I said, and let the rifle down. Enflields are heavy, even for a grown man, when you hold them up long enough.

  He said, Then you can put those words into practice.

  He was being earnest or else an actor in the first league. I had left the sherry on the porch railing, nothing to do but shoot the man or talk to him.

  I have an example, I said.

  Yes, he said. Go ahead. I’ll listen.

  I said, The guinea hens go into the bushes and sit on eggs and leave them only when it becomes a matter of life or death. I see the female walk scraggily out of the bush in the evening, and three males walk about her in a triangle protecting her as she goes to the feeding place.

  That’s a start, he said.

  I said, A chicken hawk once darkened the yard and most of the animals ran for the trees except the chickens. And the hawk swooped on one and lifted it. Hobbes was already at full stretch even when the hawk was still on the way down, and he leaped for the chicken in the hawk’s talons, jumped well up, and the hawk let go, and Hobbes fell to the ground with the fowl.

  Troy had no response for that, as if he had not heard or believed me. But I had seen it happen. The good policeman went to another page in his survivor’s manual.

  Make it easy on yourself. Give yourself up, he said.

  I was disappointed. There you go with your give again.

  Make it easy on yourself, he said.

  It’s already easy on me.

  I decided to be silent for a while, to let him make the next move. It chafed at him. He said something but the wind caught it and anyway I wasn’t answering him for the moment. And if he moved he was a dead man in that second.

  * * *

  When I was young I heard a visitor to the farm point to the ducks we kept and say to my father that they were being unnaturally protected against predators, that in the real world they fend for themselves, that the laws of nature favor the strong. The sun was shining that day and the ducks were in the water of the upturned basin lid they had crowded into, corded their necks together and slept. My father listened, nodded, offered him more tea, and they talked some more. Then he said,

  You don’t mind if after you’ve finished that tea—he pointed to it—that I go inside and get a shotgun and kill you with it?

  I don’t understand, the man said, shifting in his seat.

  Surely you must, my father said. Because I have a shotgun and you don’t, I’m stronger than you so I can shoot you, according to your philosophy. His voice had a lilt in it even though the matter was technically a threat, according to the visitor w
ho left shortly after that. The story went around town but it was put down to the war. At the end of the day my father had a rare twinkle: A war can be handy like that, he said. And then, the twinkle gone, he added, You cannot believe in survival of the fittest but want to decide first who is the fittest to survive.

  Survival of the fittest, I said.

  What? Troy whitened again. I had spoken aloud, spoken myself out of the past, people dead and gone. And that brought me back to the books, the book in my pocket.

  Troy followed where I was looking.

  A cup of tea would have been a miracle for me, but I knew that a second of lost attention would bring me around to the wrong end of my own rifle and that Troy would shoot me at once, not trusting himself to bring me all the way to the station ahead of him through the woods. He’d be right.

  I told him to take the book with the piece of paper I had slipped recently into it and stand at the flowerbeds. He grabbed the book and walked, step by slow step, his eyes flicking from the ground to the gun, judging the moment of a last desperate run he knew he could not finish. Yet that truth has never stopped anyone.

  The night was upon us now, with its own strange light, the light of the other side, smaller and in pieces but enchanting and a salve for those whose lives blossom under it. That same light carries voices better. His had fallen thinner, less confident, or maybe the light made it seem so:

  He said, What did she see in you anyway?

  His voice shook with a trace of something that didn’t have metal in the sentences, the way people talk who believe everything they believe. But perhaps I was the same myself, had my own cogs driving what I thought and said, full of my own belief. I was part of it all, that was for sure.

  You’d have to ask her that. She chose you.

  He looked down to what he was holding: What is this?

  Read the lines on the paper, I said.

  He opened the book to where the paper stuck out and lifted it, and covered the writing up and down with a glance, puzzled and panicked to be reading his last testament, and that not even in his own words.