Jack pointed to his left, downhill through the scrub. “About a half mile in, along the old lumber road, down there where it looks out over the lake.”
“You bring him up yourself? That’s a steep climb.”
“No, no. The ambulance guys, they lugged him up.”
“He was dead right away?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Jack turned to him and smiled. “What’re you doing, playing cop?”
“No. I got to make a report to Fish and Game, of course, but I was just wondering, that’s all. What’d he do, to shoot himself, I mean.”
“I don’t know. Fuck, I was watching a fat old buck with a rack like a fucking elk or something stroll past. I guess Twombley slipped on the snow or something, fell over a rock. Who the fuck knows? It’s rough ground down there, and he wasn’t used to the woods. With the snow and all, he could slip easy. Who knows? I just heard the gun go off. Bang! Like that, and he was gone, blown away.” Jack flipped his cigarette butt into the snow a few yards in front of him.
The light breeze had shifted and was blowing into their faces. Now there was a pair of crows calling to each other, and Wade could see one of them, glossy purple-black and nervous, perched near the top of a red pine to the left of LaRiviere’s cabin.
Wade said, “I’ve never seen a man shot and killed before. Not even in the service. It must be something. I saw plenty who’d already been shot, you know, shot dead or wounded, all fucked up in all kinds of ways. When I was an MP, mostly. Same as when I come back here. Even here I’ve seen a couple guys after they’d already been shot, but I never actually saw it. You know? It must be something, to see a man shoot himself.”
“Well … I didn’t actually see him do it. Like I said.”
“Sure you did.”
“What?”
“Saw him do it.” Wade studied the crow as it leapt from branch to branch of the scraggly red pine. “Of course you did.” Wade put himself behind Jack’s eyes and turned from the sight of the huge buck in the draw below to look along the ridge at Evan Twombley twenty feet away, just to make sure, like a good guide, that Twombley could see the buck, too, and was ready to shoot it; he saw Twombley take a tentative step toward the edge of the drop-off, saw him flip off the safety of his.30/30 with his thumb; he saw him slip on a small rock or stick hidden under the snow, toss one hand, the hand with the gun in it, damn it, out to break his fall, twisting the rifle as he went down, his fingers somehow tangled around the trigger guard or even brushing the trigger as he tried both to keep himself from falling and to protect the rifle, and before he hit the ground, the gun went off, and the force of the bullet exploding into his chest sent him flying into the air backward and down into the draw — a rich and powerful fat man blown clean off the earth.
“What the fuck are you telling me, Wade? I never seen the guy get shot. I told you that.”
Wade watched again as Twombley caught sight of the deer below, stumbled and turned his back in the direction of his fall; this time he fell with both hands shoving the fancy new rifle away from his chest, to keep it from being damaged or covered with snow, turning it somehow so that the tip of the barrel passed over his chest — when it fired straight into his chest, smashing his lungs and heart and backbone, splashing blood and bits of flesh over the snow and sending the body of the man tumbling this time, like a broken dummy, like trash, into the gully below.
“You must’ve seen him get shot,” Wade said in a low voice. “I know you did.”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jack said. “You’re not making sense, man. This whole thing has got me rattled anyhow.” He passed in front of Wade and climbed into the truck, slammed the door as if angry and started the engine.
Wade watched Twombley die a third time.
First, from behind Jack’s eyes, he saw the huge buck emerge from its hiding place in the birch copse at the left side of the draw and walk slowly along the draw directly into his and Evan Twombley’s line of sight. Now Twombley could see the animal too, and suddenly excited, he patted the younger man on the shoulder, demanding, with gestures, his rifle back, for he had been unable to walk through the snow with it and had already dropped it once, and finally he had made his guide carry it for him. Wade brought the tip of the barrel up, shoved the stock against his right shoulder, aimed through the scope so that the bullet would hit the meat of the right shoulder from above, pass through the chest and exit from the left side of the animal’s belly, killing it instantly and very cleanly with one shot. Twombley, mad with greed for the shot and the sudden knowledge that he was not going to get it, that his guide was taking it himself, grabbed the rifle with both hands and tried to tear it free, and the tip of the barrel swung around, and the gun went off. Twombley was tossed backward and over the precipice, his already dead body tumbling over the rocks and snow to the bottom, where it lay with its legs and arms splayed, as if it had been hurled from the sky, gushing blood into the snow. The echo of the gunshot died, and then the sounds of the huge buck leaping through the dense tangle of brush farther down drifted back, the clatter and crash of flight growing fainter and fainter, until the woods were silent again, except for the sigh of the wind through the trees and the mocking call of a crow somewhere above and behind, up by LaRiviere’s cabin and the road.
Wade was startled by the blat of Jack’s horn from the truck. He had already turned the vehicle around and was waving angrily for Wade to get in.
Slowly, Wade walked over to the truck and climbed up into the passenger’s seat. He pointed at the three rifles in the rack attached to the window behind him. “Those’re yours, right?”
“Yeah.”
“One of them must be Twombley’s, though.”
Jack didn’t answer.
“That there’s your old twenty-gauge,” Wade went on, laying his hand on the shotgun, “and that there’s the new Browning you was showing off last night at the town hall.” Then he placed his hand on the barrel of the third gun and held it tightly, as if he had captured it. “This must be Twombley’s gun. Brand-new, almost. Very fancy tooling,” he murmured. “Thirty-thirty, and only been fired one time,” he said. “It’s a beautiful piece of work, Twombley’s gun. But what the hell, Jack, I guess you deserve it. Right’s right.”
Jack said, “Yeah, right’s right,” and started to drive slowly downhill, following in the tracks left by the police cruisers and LaRiviere’s truck and before them the ambulance carrying Twombley’s body to Littleton.
“Twombley sure as hell won’t be shooting it again, will he?” Wade said.
“No,” Jack said. “He sure as hell won’t.”
10
LATE THAT SAME NIGHT, Wade telephoned me to ask if the Boston TV stations had reported Evan Twombley’s death. Yes, I told him, they had, but I had barely noticed: the death by gunshot of someone about to testify about union connections to organized crime, even though disguised as a New Hampshire hunting accident, was a common enough news item and was sufficiently distant from my daily life not to attract my attention.
“There was something,” I said, “but I missed it. Why, did it happen up your way?”
“Yeah, and I know the guy. And the kid with him, Jack Hewitt. Who you probably know too, incidentally. He works for LaRiviere with me. That kid, he’s my best friend, Rolfe,” Wade said.
It was close to midnight, and Wade sounded slightly drunk, calling me, I imagined, from the phone booth at Toby’s Inn, although I could not hear the jukebox thumping as usual in the background. I was in bed reading a new history of mankind, and this was not a conversation I found enthralling.