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.
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 wilclass="underline" 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.