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 who 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.