“You make one move, Cushing, and I’m going to blow your fucking head off. You understand me?”
I thought I sounded pretty good for a guy with a mouthful of blood.
I moved into the kitchen fast, so that he could see that I held a gun on him.
Barney came in right behind me.
“Well,” Cushing said, smirking, “if it isn’t my two little girlfriends.”
“Get the money, Barney, and put it over in the sink.”
Mention of the money ended Cushing’s smirk.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He started to get up from his chair but I eased the hammer back on the pistol.
“I’m not real good with firearms, Cushing. I might just blow your head off by accident.”
He saw the wisdom of that.
Barney took the sack over to the big white sink. He unzipped the top of the sack and started filling the sink with small bundles of cash.
“What the hell’re you two doing?” Cushing said.
“Douse it, Barney,” I said.
Barney took the can of Zippo lighter fluid I’d given him and squirted clear fluid all over the money.
“You crazy bastard,” Cushing said to me, now that he’d figured out what we were going to do.
From my pocket I took Roy’s lighter and held it up for Cushing to see.
And then I set the money on fire.
It went up in this huge whoof of flame and smoke.
Cushing jumped up and tried to get past me at the money.
But he was already too late. Barney had done a good job of soaking all the bills.
“You stupid little bastard,” he said.
And that’s when he made his lunge for his gun and that’s when I shot him.
He screamed and dropped immediately to the floor, his gun falling away from his grasp.
I’d shot him somewhere in the shoulder, apparently in a place that was pretty painful judging by the way he kept rolling around and moaning.
“You little prick,” he said when he saw me walk around the table and stand over him. “All that money — wasted.”
“We better call somebody,” Barney said.
I nodded, looked down with great disgust at Cushing and then remembered what Barney had said the other night — about feeling sorry for him.
And I did, too, just then because his face was different now — instead of rage and arrogance, there was this terrible sorrow.
I thought of the hawk that day, and how the hunters had brought him down.
“You had it coming, Cushing. You killed Roy.”
I started to walk back to where Barney stood in the kitchen doorway, setting the gun down on the counter on my way.
I started to go call the chief but then Barney saw something behind me and shouted, “Watch out, Tom! He’s got his gun!”
Cushing had inched his fingers to his gun and had tightened his hand around it.
I looked over to the gun I’d just set on the counter. And realized that I’d never be able to reach it before Cushing killed us.
“The chief’s gonna know about you, Cushing,” I said. “He’s gonna know you killed us and know you killed Roy, too.”
And then something pretty strange happened. Cushing tried to pull himself to an upright position, the way Roy had right before he died... and when he did this, just for a second, he looked just like Roy. And even a little bit like Mitch.
And then something even stranger happened.
Cushing raised his gun and started to point it straight at my heart but then stopped and pointed it right at—
He was—
putting it—
tight against his—
forehead—
and pulling the—
trigger and—
And I heard Barney scream. And then I heard myself scream, too, and I heard the boom of the weapon discharging and heard the splat and splatter of his brains splash against the bottom of the wall like dishwater being emptied—
Then there was just this silence.
I’d only heard this silence one other time, those moments right after I realized Roy was dead and I was trying to call him back from eternity, shouting down this long dark endless corridor—
“God,” Barney said. “God.”
Because there really wasn’t anything else to say. There really wasn’t.
Here Roy hadn’t had nerve enough to kill himself and was killed by Cushing who, in the end, did have nerve enough—
I tried not to think of how Cushing’s folks had both been killed when Cushing was only ten. I didn’t want to be like Barney. I didn’t want to feel sorry for people I should hate...
v
Well, it took several long weeks to learn what the county attorney had in mind, but finally he told Clarence that he wasn’t going to press any charges after all, and that given how it had all ended, we’d probably learned our lessons, Barney and I.
We were celebrities of sorts at school again. The new girl even asked if she could interview me for the school paper. Of course when I asked her if she’d like to stop at Hamblin’s some time for a soda, she said, (very politely) No Thank You.
In the spring, Barney’s mom did finally divorce George, and then Barney and all of his family except George moved to Pennsylvania. For the first two months, he wrote every other week. Then I didn’t hear much from him anymore until, eight years later, he was killed in fighting in Vietnam. His wife, a very nice woman named Diedre, called to tell me how much I’d meant to him and to say that she hoped we’d meet some day. Four years after that, Clarence died of liver cancer. Mom went to move in with Debbie, whose husband was a professor at the state university where Debbie was a junior. The professor had left his wife and two daughters for Debbie and Mom wasn’t exactly what you called thrilled about it all.
I was the only one to stay in Somerton. I became Clarence’s business partner in the haberdashery and when he died, I took over completely. I have one son who was born with spina bifida and another son who, I am happy to say, was born in perfect health. My wife, Myrna, is the sweetest, most gentle person I have ever known.
About every five or six years, whenever there’s turnover at the local paper, some twenty-four-year-old reporter comes over to the store and says he’d like to talk to me about the Roy Danton incident. The folks of Somerton never seem to tire of hearing about it. I always agree. My sons, who always like to hear about it, too, would give me hell if I didn’t.
On those occasions when I go to the cemetery to speak with my dead father and my dead friend Barney, I sometimes stop and look at the grave of Stephen B. Cushing. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I’ve never quite been able to forget how Barney felt sorry for him — and how I, too, felt sorry for him right there at the very end — this man I so despised.
I see his desperate eyes right there at the last — and hear the lone gunshot...
It’s a lot less trouble sometimes, when you just plain and simple hate somebody.
I still go for walks along the tracks sometimes, out where the warehouse is now a small manufacturing plant, and I think of that long-ago summer and it is like a dream somehow — lived out by somebody who was not exactly me, not the me in the mirror today anyway...
And I think of Roy, too, of course. But it’s funny, you know. A few years ago I saw an old Robert Mitchum picture on the tube... and the truth is, Roy hadn’t looked a damn thing like him. Not a damn thing like him at all...
Turn Away
On Thursday she was there again. (This was on a soap opera he’d picked up by accident looking for a western movie to watch since he was all caught up on his work.) Parnell had seen her Monday but not Tuesday then not Wednesday either. But Thursday she was there again. He didn’t know her name, hell it didn’t matter, she was just this maybe twenty-two twenty-three-year-old who looked a lot like a nurse from Enid, Oklahoma, he’d dated a couple of times (Les Elgart had been playing on the Loop) six seven months after returning from WWII.