Then he looks at me, and he speaks very very softly, and he says, “You get on back now, Bobby. And you call Mr. Sayre, the lawyer, he’ll know what to do.”
“Is Uncle Mike dead?”
“Yes, he is, Bobby.”
“How come you shot him, Dad?”
“I’m not sure why, Bobby. I’m not sure why at all. I just wish I hadn’t.”
I wanted to say something but I was afraid I would start crying again.
And Dad was already looking back toward the cabin.
“You go on back to the farm now, Bobby, and you call Mr. Sayre.”
I reach out gently for his .45 but he pulls it back. “Maybe I should take that from you, Dad.”
“You just go on, Bobby.”
“I’m scared, Dad, you havin’ that forty-five and all.”
“You just go on. You just hurry and call Mr. Sayre.”
“I’m scared, Dad.”
“I know you are, Bobby. And I’m scared, too.” He nods to the woods and says, very final now, “Git, boy. Git and git fast. You understand?”
“Yessir.”
“You run till you get to the farm and then you call Mr. Sayre. You understand?”
“Yessir.”
And that is all.
He turns away from me, his face lost in moonshadow, and he goes on back to the cabin.
I know better than to argue or disobey.
I start walking slowly toward the woods again and by the time I reach the front stand of trees, the shot rings out just as I thought it would, and I try to imagine what it must look like, their two bodies there inside the cabin, blood and flies and stink the way it is when any kind of animal is dead like that, and then I get scared, real scared, and I start crying.
I want my dad to hold me again the way he did just a few minutes ago, the way my mom used to hold me anytime I asked her. I want somebody to hold me, and hold me tight, and hold me for a long long time because the night is coming full now, and there is a beast in these woods, just the way the Indians always said, a beast in the dark dark woods.
One of Those Days, One of Those Nights
The thing you have to understand is that I found it by accident. I was looking for a place to hide the birthday gift I’d bought Laura — a string of pearls she’d been wanting to wear with the new black dress she’d bought for herself — and all I was going to do was lay the gift-wrapped box in the second drawer of her bureau...
...and there it was.
A plain number ten envelope with her name written across the middle in a big manly scrawl and a canceled Elvis Presley stamp up in the corner. Postmarked two days ago.
Just as I spotted it, Laura called from the living room, “Bye, honey, see you at six.” The last two years we’ve been saving to buy a house so we have only the one car. Laura goes an hour earlier than I do, so she rides with a woman who lives a few blocks over. Then I pick her up at six after somebody relieves me at the computer store where I work. For what it’s worth, I have an M.A. in English Literature but with the economy being what it is, it hasn’t done me much good.
I saw a sci-fi movie once where a guy could set something on fire simply by staring at it intently enough. That’s what I was trying to do with this letter my wife got. Burn it so that I wouldn’t have to read what it said inside and get my heart broken.
I closed the drawer.
Could be completely harmless. Her fifteenth high school reunion was coming up this spring. Maybe it was from one of her old classmates. And maybe the manly scrawl wasn’t so manly after all. Maybe it was from a woman who wrote in a rolling dramatic hand.
Laura always said that I was the jealous type and this was certainly proof. A harmless letter tucked harmlessly in a bureau drawer. And here my heart was pounding, and fine cold sweat slicked my face, and my fingers were trembling.
God, wasn’t I a pitiful guy? Shouldn’t I be ashamed of myself?
I went into the bathroom and lathered up and did my usual relentless fifteen-minute morning regimen of shaving, showering and shining up my apple-cheeked Irish face and my thinning Irish hair, if hair follicles can have a nationality, that is.
Then I went back into our bedroom and took down a white shirt, blue necktie, navy blazer and tan slacks. All dressed, I looked just like seventy or eighty million other men getting ready for work this particular sunny April morning.
Then I stood very still in the middle of the bedroom and stared at Laura’s bureau. Maybe I wasn’t simply going to set the letter on fire. Maybe I was going to ignite the entire bureau.
The grandfather clock in the living room tolled eight-thirty. If I didn’t leave now I would be late, and if you were late you inevitably got a chewing out from Ms. Sandstrom, the boss. Anybody who believes that women would run a more benign world than men needs only to spend five minutes with Ms. Sandstrom. Hitler would have used her as a pin-up girl.
The bureau. The letter. The manly scrawl.
What was I going to do?
Only one thing I could think of, since I hadn’t made a decision about reading the letter or not. I’d simply take it with me to work. If I decided to read it, I’d give it a quick scan over my lunch hour.
But probably I wouldn’t read it at all. I had a lot of faith where Laura was concerned. And I didn’t like to think of myself as the sort of possessive guy who snuck around reading his wife’s mail.
I reached into the bureau drawer.
My fingers touched the letter.
I was almost certain I wasn’t going to read it. Hell, I’d probably get so busy at work that I’d forget all about it.
But just in case I decided to...
I grabbed the letter and stuffed it into my blazer pocket, and closed the drawer. In the kitchen I had a final cup of coffee and read my newspaper horoscope. Bad news, as always. I should never read the damn things... Then I hurried out of the apartment to the little Toyota parked at the curb.
Six blocks away, it stalled. Our friendly mechanic said that moisture seemed to get in the fuel pump a lot. He’s not sure why. We’ve run it in three times but it still stalls several times a week.
Around ten o’clock, hurrying into a sales meeting that Ms. Sandstrom had decided to call, I dropped my pen. And when I bent over to pick it up, my glasses fell out of my pocket and when I moved to pick them up, I took one step too many and put all 175 pounds of my body directly onto them. I heard something snap.
By the time I retrieved both pen and glasses, Ms. Sandstrom was closing the door and calling the meeting to order. I hurried down the hall trying to see how much damage I’d done. I held the glasses up to the light. A major fissure snaked down the center of the right lens. I slipped them on. The crack was even more difficult to see through than I’d thought.
Ms. Sandstrom, a very attractive fiftyish woman given to sleek gray suits and burning blue gazes, warned us as usual that if sales of our computers didn’t pick up, two or three people in this room would likely be looking for jobs. Soon. And just as she finished saying this, her eyes met mine. “For instance, Donaldson, what kind of month are you having?”
“What kind of month am I having?”
“Do I hear a parrot in here?” Ms. Sandstrom said, and several of the salespeople laughed.
“I’m not having too bad a month.”
Ms. Sandstrom nodded wearily and looked around the room. “Do we have to ask Donaldson here any more questions? Isn’t he telling us everything we need to know when he says ‘I’m not having too bad a month?’ What’re we hearing when Donaldson says that?”
I hadn’t noticed till this morning how much Ms. Sandstrom reminded me of Miss Hutchison, my fourth grade teacher. Her favorite weapon had also been humiliation.
Dick Weybright raised his hand. Dick Weybright always raises his hand, especially when he gets to help Ms. Sandstrom humiliate somebody.