by Jamie Mason
Imagining Bart’s influence was nearly as good as having it, and Boyd considered his other cheek. He was a good man after all, only ever drinking on Fridays and Saturdays and the Fourth of Ju-ly, whatever day it fell on. He had, hand to God, slapped Katielynn exactly once, and even she would have admitted that she’d deserved it. He knew what he should do. He imagined how sorry Kate would be, how pretty she looked after a good cry. . . .
Katielynn’s bright laugh cut loose the pull of his conscience, and his rage sprang back twice as hot. The rifle lay ready in his hands before the laughter’s sparkly echoes cleared his ears. Any reconsideration he’d wrangled died at the sight of the other man’s naked butt shining full at him from alongside the bed, Boyd’s own bed, pants pushed down around his ankles. His shirt had been tossed, teasingly, all the way to where Boyd now stood. Katielynn saw the movement in the doorway and jerked up from her sashay down the son of a whore’s body, and Boyd pulled the trigger before he knew he meant to.
The one bullet took them both, the young man from back to front, a neat hole pouring red through his middle as he staggered over his denim-bound feet. Katielynn had risen high enough to take her shot under the collarbone. Her eyes went wide as she clutched and swatted at the blooming, hot stain on her chest.
“Boyd!” she screamed. “Boyd! What the fuck did you do?”
The profanity stung. She would never speak to him like that. She knew better. That boy must be some no-account, pothead bastard, making her talk like that. She knew what he thought of foulmouthed sluts.
“Reid! Oh my God! Reid!” She was reaching for the kid—he looked so young—and his name rang off the walls, Boyd’s own walls, as she wailed for him, so Boyd shot him again. The slug, more by accident than by aim, almost overlaid the first shot, but the boy, Reid, jerked rigid this time and crumpled, arms flung out pleading toward Katielynn.
“Boyd, no! Oh, fuck! What have you done! Reid! Oh, God! Boyd, help me, you son of a bitch!” She crab-crawled away while at the same time begging Boyd for help, her lame left side dragging her in a small circle, until he found himself standing over her.
“You’re crazy. You’re crazy,” she panted. She’d gone pale and they’d stared each other down while at the corner of their vision her bare-butted Casanova pulled at the carpet and gasped like a landed bass.
Whatever life passes before your eyes as you die, Boyd could only attest to the shared life that plays out at light speed before someone you knew dies at your hand. All that Katielynn had promised to and simpered for flared up as pictures in his mind. And it was all a great burning lie. She’d made a joke of their vows in their own bed. No matter what anyone could or would have to say about it, he had loved her truly, albeit jealously. But jealousy is hardly a crime. She’d known his mind on that score, too, and had flown right in the face of it, which could hardly be his fault. She was suffering something terrible down there on the carpet, fire in her eyes and blood drenched clear down to the waistband of her white panties.
“Fuck you, Boyd” were her last words. He put the skinny barrel of the rifle against her chest and pulled back on the trigger one more time. The dogs barked insanely in their pen until Boyd ran out and shushed them, rubbing their ears while straining his own for any neighborly commotion. There was none. Sunday services in town would have swallowed everyone who was near enough to be bothered by close gunfire, and anyway, weekend target practice rang through these woods often enough so that no one minded as long as you didn’t start too early or finish too late.
He wasn’t proud of the whole business, but he wasn’t exactly sorry either. No one could expect a man to be spit on and not wipe it off. Laws and commandments were fine things, and criminals who disregarded them were worse than rabid animals. But when it wasn’t planned and you mostly did good, and you still got shameless insult shoved up your nose while your wife sat there in her Skivvies cursing you for shooting a trespasser, well, that wasn’t quite the same thing, now was it? He’d be damned, yes damned, if he’d let faithless wives and soulless pretty boys steal the heat from his blood.
Boyd waltzed with his righteous indignation while he sorted out the particulars of cleaning up the mess and hiding the filthy punk’s car. His blameless logic watered him up like church hymns and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He hadn’t meant to do it. Would have sworn that he wasn’t the sort, until it happened. And he wasn’t about to be kenneled with thugs and thieves for the rest of his days over it.
It had been so dry that the weedy flower beds by the house were the only ground soft enough to dig up. Boyd had always had uncanny night vision, so half a moon was more light than he’d needed, and more than he had liked for privacy’s sake, but the dogs patrolled the perimeter for him and he’d have known well in advance should anyone come close. The neighbors never did, though. It seemed as if the entire stretch of road was mostly dotted with people he never saw, just their colorful outlines caught every now and again, quick and rare in a distant glimpse, as they were closing their doors behind them or maybe mowing their grass as he drove by.
He buried her first, sobbing and cradling her head onto a little, crocheted pillow he’d snatched from the sofa. Her baby pillow, made by her granny, the one she’d always wrung during scary or sad movies or after a quarrel. The guy went in on the other side of the house as a necessary afterthought, hastily dumped in with the packages he’d had with him. Boyd had strewn fresh mulch and said a little prayer for Katielynn, but he had spit on the fellow’s, that Reid’s, dirt blanket. Then, he had abandoned his temperance and stayed blind drunk for four days. In his soppiest moments, he took to stashing those possessions of Katielynn’s that he couldn’t bear to part with in hidey-holes throughout the house with a mind to take them out from time to time in her memory. The rest of her things he’d stuffed into a suitcase, then into the trunk of the rotten little runt’s car and, once he’d sobered up enough, drove it to a seldom-used gravel track at the edge of the big woods and burned it in enough kerosene to melt the ice caps.
Boyd hadn’t handled the emptiness of his house as well as he could have. Strangely, he slept fine in the bedroom where it had all happened. The drab carpet cleaned well enough with some weak soap and the wet vac, and somehow not even a drop of blood had made it onto the bed. The foreplay-defiled comforter had gone into the car to burn with everything else that reminded him of the scene, but he had plenty of other blankets so he hardly missed it.
It was the living room that felt haunted. The front room kept a chill that wasn’t seasonal, and after that day, the gun case next to the mantel never seemed to want to stay closed. But it wasn’t fear that seethed in that room. It got so that he only had to pass the doorway and his hands buckled into fists all on their own and the breath whistled through him as if he were sucking it through a straw. It made sense, sort of. In that room, he could still hear her laughing, as clear in his head as it had been on the day he stood there trying to talk himself out of violence.
Boyd never quite got beyond the notion that the front room had soaked up something from him that day and held it like a pitcher, ready to pour it back over him if he ever lingered in there too long.
Depression had driven him to sell the house in a haze of booze, spearmint chewing gum, and little beige OxyContins scored from Phil next door. Phil the pharmacist led a mostly benign double life, the obvious joke being that he’d “phil” any prescription and ignore that it was written on photocopied doctor’s stationery, as long as it skimmed across the counter on a little pad of extra green. He was mostly harmless and minded his patients, as he liked to think of them, by doling out Valium or Xanax or painkillers in friendly little quantities, keeping people, as he saw it, off the streets and away from the hard stuff.
Phil believed very much in people’s taking the edge off hard times or bad days without the grand hassle of copayments, but he didn’t partake himself, and because he cared, he kept a sharp eye trained for people dipping dangerously often into his charitable sensibilities. And
he made all of his customers swear an oath on whatever was precious to them not to let his wife find out. He loved her, and their gaggle of plump children, in a sappy way that had made Boyd want mostly just to punch him in the face.
Phil’s sentimentality had, though, been Boyd’s inspiration for the sob story of Katielynn’s leaving him for another man. The lie’s (and alibi’s) father was a pill to help him sleep; its mother, a shameless Tuesday six-pack of beer. And the bull-crap story grew to maturity on Phil’s front porch before being abandoned by Boyd when he left town altogether a few months later with his dogs, their pen, and all the hidden memorabilia of his marriage that he could call to mind.
Stillwater drew him back eventually. It was easy there. When he’d hightailed it across country from what he’d done, he’d found El Paso too hot and too full of spics. And though Boyd didn’t see himself as a man to shy away from a hard day’s work, he didn’t see any harm in getting by with a little less effort than all that, especially if that’s what it took to let him keep himself to himself. All things considered, he knew on some deep level that it was probably best for everyone that way.
If he could steer clear of a rent payment, a decade-old workman’s disability claim kept him in checks big enough to feed himself and his dogs, with enough left over to dampen his sorrows, now that he’d found his way around a whiskey buzz and had grown attached to the comfort he found there. His brother, Bart, had seen to it that his boyhood bedroom lay ready for him at the old family homestead. His brother took him in, and the dogs as well. Then Boyd faded into a ghost of himself and lost track of Fridays and Saturdays, so that he sometimes drank and blurred the calendar until every day felt the same.
The loss of Bart was the unkindest blessing yet. Boyd had never quite considered that his brother had a life full of hopes and worries and disappointments of his own. He knew that Bart had been sad-sacking over something or another for a long while. He’d been grim over the drudgery of his day-in, day-out routine. Bart had always been unlucky in love, too, and he sighed about it a lot. It had seemed all the usual stuff to Boyd, not worth crying over, and he’d told Bart so dozens of times. When Boyd sped through the house at the sound of the rifle blast, his first thought had been for how cussed inconvenient this was going to be.
But after a good long think, Boyd had decided that sometimes the smartest thing was actually the simplest, and that if he kept things just as they were, except turn himself into Bart and quit Bart’s job for him, he’d be at least twice buffered from his deeds. It had been gnawing at him, in his more sober moments, that the bodies weren’t much more than rosebush deep and that the house had been sold to God only knew who. Bart could hardly mind. So Boyd burned the letter that Bart had left his good-byes in and wrote a new note over Bart’s blood on the phone bill and tucked it away for safekeeping, just in case. He was sad for the quietness of the house, but quite pleased with his own cleverness.
• • •
Boyd and Bart had mapped the woods together as boys, literally. The project started in the seventh grade after a geography assignment had ignited the idea. By graduation, the forests around Stillwater were drawn all to scale in a series of four three-ring binders, one for each compass point, and the Montgomery brothers could get into town over thicket and bramble faster than their mother could in her Honda, if she caught the light at Ledbetter and Route 10.
Traipsing through the woods for a day and a half, now under another fat moon, Boyd smoked at the ears over how stupid it was that a man who had never taken a dime of welfare would get anything more than a slap on the wrist for spending money the government had been more than willing to pay out. He had always expected to be told, if found out as “Bart,” to stop with the checks, if it ever came to that. But a felony? An arrest? What a mess.
The forfeit of the dogs was a pity. With nothing but time on his hands, and Bart no longer flinching every five seconds at their unruly play, Boyd had trained them into better companions than anything on two legs had ever been for him. They’d held a path for him to the back door, and he’d been more than a half mile away before one of the cops had risked a reach for his gun. Boyd had heard the shot, but was too far away to be sure he hadn’t heard a yelp.
For all he had lost, Boyd Montgomery was no closer to giving up than he had ever been. He hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours and his piss had already gone dark and scanty by the afternoon, but so far, his weakest moment was still years ago, flinching scared at his own reflection wavering in the glass of his living-room gun cabinet. If he’d given in to his conscience back then, yelled or even punched instead of shooting, things might be different, but that was far away and as done as done gets.
His hands hadn’t even shook when he’d spoon-fed that load of bunk to the first two policemen who had shown up. It would buy him some time before they’d turn from looking for Bart to guessing where Boyd might be. He would leave Stillwater and find his way elsewhere, first over thicket and bramble as he had already managed plenty of times, and tonight with more than enough light to show him the way. He’d hit the road after a visit to his old next-door neighbor Phil the pharmacist.
Phil collected cars. He sought out decrepit, old ones and restored them to functionality, if not to glory, and he could surely spare one in repayment of Boyd’s long silence. Boyd could find a way to ask nicely, but if that didn’t work, he knew where Phil kept the box of keys. He was owed a favor anyway because it wasn’t right, what Phil was up to at the pharmacy. And Boyd had only ever taken just a handful of those pills, after all.
15
Jason came back to himself by degrees. The sad fact was that a sliver of sense rekindled at the crest of the backswing. On primal autopilot, he’d seen only “intruder,” and the push of the shovel’s arc had dragged harder than the pull of maybe-I-shouldn’t. It was a blind impulse, the violence of it uncalibrated, but the split-second debate on what he was about to do weakened his commitment to the follow-through. He didn’t strike as hard as he might have, but still plenty hard enough.
His soul slammed back into its borders once the girl completed her graceless crash to the turf, but reason had gone AWOL in the shuffle. His place in time flickered in and out of focus, and the swerving of his mind felt just the tiniest bit on purpose. Something was wrong enough with the “now” that it wouldn’t seem to settle over his thoughts.
Jason smiled down at her fondly. He knew she’d been tired. He’d been asking her all the time lately if everything was all right, and she kept saying nothing was wrong. She said she was just tired, but he couldn’t understand why his wife was sleeping in the grass. And why she was wearing a skirt—she’d worn a dress at their wedding and, reluctantly, at her sister’s. Otherwise it was strictly slacks, jeans, or shorts. And her hair—his eyes slid away because something was definitely wrong with her hair.
“Patty, get up, silly.” The shrillness played in his ears a little too much like begging. He cleared his throat. “Come on, honey. It’s late.” (Why in the hell is she sleeping in the grass?) His eyes rolled like loose ball bearings on a lazy Susan—most reluctant to light on any one thing because, each time they did, his stomach vaulted a little hillock of terror in his midsection. His gaze could skitter and dance at will, but his hands, weighed down as they were, could not. The shovel kept announcing itself, a clumsy anchor looking to tilt out of his grasp. He didn’t want it to slip and hit Patty by mistake, so he gripped the handle until his knuckles went pale.
A voice, his own—but whether inside him or out loud he didn’t know—proclaimed, “It was an accident. It doesn’t count.” Try as he might to avoid it, his glance kept roving back to her hair. It kept nagging for an explanation. Patty had faithfully dyed her short, dark hair a deep auburn, but the red here was a bright delta, vivid enough to make even the grass lush with ruby highlights. Tendrils lay heavy and glistening on her cheek. Not unlike the mark Harris just left on—Jason shook his head and the horror spread through him on pace with the widening funnel
of blood through the long, honey-brown hair of the girl at his feet—the girl who looked not one thing like his late wife.
“Oh, God.” He planted the shovel blade in the ground and bent double, hands on knees, trying to breathe through the panic stacking up like wet bricks in his throat. He raked his hands, twice-gloved in filth and sunny yellow latex, down his face. “No, no, no, no. I didn’t do that on purpose. It was an accident.”
He straightened and craned his head back to take in the sky, all sapphire and cobalt and white stars fading into the fringe of a blazing moon. His arms fell limp at his sides. All the way to his bones, he ached in maudlin appreciation of what he stood to lose. And it was not much, but it was absolutely everything. A tremor racked him, and also the notion that the ripples from some events never stopped curling over your life. It wasn’t fair. That sulking sense of injustice was just enough to prompt a rejection of the facts at hand and wrap logic, once again, in a gauzy cocoon.
Since he’d mostly forgotten to breathe, or feared that maybe he wasn’t allowed to anymore, light-headedness pulled another swoon over his rationalizations. Jason cocked his dizzy head, face blank, at the heap at his feet. He saw white and red and golden brown, a vague oval, a patterned cloth, some leather, a glint of metal. But the equation wouldn’t complete. His head felt full of cotton wool, and his ears strained to hear against a pressure as if there were cups clapped over them. His vision swam. His lips trembled.
Salvation was a sudden, scolding reminder that shook him back to his purpose. An unpleasant chore still needed doing, and it was better than falling apart—again. He didn’t know what was going on in general, but he knew a job was left unfinished. The other matter would have to be an improvisation. It wasn’t fair. It didn’t count.
Harris came up easily this time, loose and heavy, but as cooperative as could be expected from a guy in his condition. Jason snatched the tarp closed over its now doubled load with only enough visual accounting to assure himself that no stray appendages were sticking out to snag on anything. He balled the edges of it in his fists, finding that although the kitchen gloves had failed to make the task any less disgusting, they at least guaranteed a decent grip against the plastic-coated nylon. Bent low, he locked his arms and threw his weight back through his hips, his feet staggering to stay beneath him. He hadn’t banked on it being so heavy, but nothing was as it ought to have been and Jason was exhausted, body and soul. Momentum was bought at some expense to his shoulders, each hitching stutter-step pulling his arms hard in their sockets and sending shocks into his elbows. Scooching became gliding as he gained several steps without a stumble. The long grass bent, glazing the way toward the bricked-in carport and the car. He’d lined the trunk with another waterproof tarp and an excessive layering, even by these dire standards, of old towels. If he could manage the heap even that far, there was going to be barely enough room left for Harris, much less anything else.
