He decides to make his move. His right arm is dangling uselessly, and dripping blood onto the wooden floor of the shack. As soon as he gets out of here, he will have to do something about the arm. But meanwhile, he has to get out of here. He has already tangled with old Sam Hollip, blue-eyed Death himself, and with the wiry, hairy woman who is either his sister or his wife — Colley would not be at all surprised if she’s his sister, and he’s humping her nightly here in the middle of the woods; ladies who can’t stand the word “fuck” are sometimes ladies who are not too terribly shocked by incest. Either way, husband and wife or brother and sister, they are tough customers and he is not eager to come up against either one of them ever again. Which leaves fat Will Hollip, brother to Sam, perhaps brother or at least brother-in-law to Myra, fat Will Hollip of the tight khakis and flowered shirt. How do I get to you, Will? How do I use you to get out of this dumb situation that can cost me my life?
He does not know.
The shotgun is looking him in the eye, but he has got to make his move because the next thing that will happen is he’ll be taken out to a car or a truck and driven to the state-trooper station. Or else he’ll be marched through the woods to the highway and then to the trooper station, but either way he is going to be in the hands of the cops, and this time it will be forever. There is no way he can possibly explain to a judge and jury that he was returning fire in self-defense in that liquor store. They will say that’s very nice to hear, Mr. Donato, but you shouldn’t have been inside that liquor store committing a felony in the first place, next case.
He decides to faint. All he wants to do is get his hands on that shotgun. He’s got only one good arm, and that’s enough to hold a shotgun and fire it, provided it’s been cocked — he suddenly wonders if the shotgun has been cocked. He is not as familiar with shotguns or rifles as he is with handguns, but this one looks like a slide-action repeater, and he wonders if the slide has been pulled back, cocking the gun. With only one good arm he will not be able to fiddle around with the slide and then get the gun in position again after he has it in his possession. He hopes it is cocked. He is about to give an Academy Award-winning performance, and the Oscar is the shotgun and he doesn’t want it to turn out to be brass instead of gold.
“Look, Mr. Hollip,” he says to Will, “that dog really did try to...” and he stops talking and puts his hand to his forehead, and then sways slightly, and then says “Uh, uh, uh,” like that, and leans in against Will and collapses against him. Will doesn’t know whether to grab him or what, he doesn’t want to get blood on his nice Hawaiian shirt. He keeps backing away and flapping his hands until it’s obvious he either has to catch Colley or let him fall flat on his face to the floor. He decides that’s what he wants to do, let Colley fall flat on his face, so he opens his arms wide and takes a very quick step backward, and Colley tumbles forward as realistically as he can without getting splinters in his face. Sam still has the shotgun. Twenty-gauge. Put a nice hole in a man if it’s fired up close.
“He’s out like a light,” Sam says.
“What you want to do with him?” Will asks.
“Give me a hand, we’ll drag him over in the corner again.”
Colley listens. He is listening for the sound of the shotgun being placed against the wall, the wooden stock hitting the wooden floor, or else being put on the table, the sound of metal scraping against wood or enamel. He is listening but he does not hear anything he hopes to hear. He wonders if he has made the wrong move, and then he begins to think Sam has simply handed the shotgun to his sister or his wife or whoever she is, the way he did earlier when he went out to bury the dog and fetch old brother Will. They are dragging Colley into the corner of the room. They are hurting him the way they are holding him, but he cannot scream or even wince, he is supposed to be unconscious. He has pulled this big fainting routine because he wants to get his hands — his hand actually, his one good hand, his left hand — on that shotgun, and now he doesn’t know where it is or who has it and he hears Sam telling Will they’ll need some rope, they’ll have to tie this sumbitch up.
It is getting worse, it is only getting worse. He did not make his move when he was supposed to make it, whenever that might have been, and now it is about to get worse, they are going to tie him up and leave him to bleed to death in the corner. Their voices retreat just a little way from him, they are going to look for rope to tie up the city slicker. He opens his eyes. He can see Myra’s hairy legs across the room level with his line of vision, laceless white sneakers, and he can see just a little past them to where Sam is standing, can see the blue overall bottoms rolled up over the high tops of his brown workshoes, but he cannot see Will Hollip nor can he see the shotgun.
“Let me get a stool for you,” Myra says, and suddenly the stock of the shotgun appears magically beside one sneakered foot. She is resting the shotgun on the floor, leaning it against something, a cupboard or a table or a chair, he doesn’t care what — it is there on the floor some fifteen feet from where he is lying in the corner. Myra leaves his frame of vision. He sees only Sam’s big shoes pointed in his direction now. Sam is waiting for Myra to get a stool. Rope has to be on a shelf someplace Sam can’t reach, loving wife or sister is making it easy for him. Sneakered feet again coming back into the frame, Myra puts down the stool. Sam climbs up on the stool, Colley sees only the backs of his high-topped shoes now. That means Sam’s back is to him, Will is Christ only knows where, and the shotgun is still leaning against something, its stock on the floor.
Colley makes his move all at once. No slow and steady crawling across the floor, no sneaky tactics, he gets to his feet in a crouch, like a track star about to break from the starting line, and he’s off in the same instant, sprinting across the wooden floor toward the shotgun. The gun is leaning against a square table, he can see the table now, and he can see the gun, and he only hopes the thing has been cocked, because otherwise he is dead. Myra has turned from watching Sam, who is fishing in a cabinet high up on the wall. She sees Colley crossing the room, and she knows just what he’s heading for, and she grabs the shotgun by the barrel just below the sight, and is bringing it up with her left hand, her right hand reaching for the stock when Colley gets to her. He doesn’t bother making a grab for the gun. Instead he punches her in the stomach, as hard as he can with his left hand, and she lets out a grunt and drops the gun, and staggers back against the counter. Sam has turned at the sound of the running and the scuffling, and he’s about to step down off the stool when he sees that Colley has picked up the shotgun and is holding it in just one hand, forward of the stock, his left index finger inside the trigger guard and on the trigger.
“Hold it,” Colley says.
Fat Will is at the sink on Colley’s left. He has been watching all this with some interest and much trepidation. He has probably never liked his brother’s vicious dog, nor his brother’s hairy wife or sister as the case may be, and he likes even less the notion of having a big shotgun hole put in him by a man who is bleeding and probably desperate. He just stays there at the sink, watching. His eyes tell Colley he hardly knows these two people, even though he is certainly related by blood to one of them and probably to both. On the stool, Sam says, “Easy now, boy.”