“They shot him twice is what I hear and left him there to die. That was night before last so there’s no telling how long he suffered. And then”—he hesitated, his eyes jumping in their sockets—“the animals got to him. After he was dead, I mean. Or I think. I hope.”
There was nothing to say but he had to say something so he said, “All right,” and what that meant—I’ve heard enough or I feel your outrage or The tank’s full—he couldn’t have said himself.
Art said, “We’ve got to do something.”
“Yeah,” Sten said, or heard himself say because he wasn’t all there yet, “definitely. Definitely we have to do something.”
“You have a gun?” Art’s tone was nasal but elevated with emotion, and he might have been reading out a line from David Mamet or Arthur Miller to his drama class. You have a gun?
Sten didn’t answer him, or not directly, because he didn’t want to go down that road because that road led to people getting shot in the woods, led to poor Carey with his hot head and thumping knee getting it not once but twice until he was dead, dead, dead. Take Back Our Forests. Fine. Sure. But not that way. “They ought to call out the National Guard,” he said. “Sweep the whole fucking forest.”
“That’s an idea. Really. That’s what they ought to do.” A pause, a look, direct, eyeball to eyeball. “But Carey’s dead. And they’re still out there. Right now. Laughing, probably laughing about it.”
Sten got his receipt out of the metal slot, tucked it in his wallet, swung open the door and settled into the seat. “We’ll talk,” he said before slamming the door, starting up the engine and edging out onto the highway. A quick glance for Art in the rearview, and there he was, looking small and lost, the big red truck looming over him. Somebody waved from a passing car, somebody who looked familiar, though he couldn’t place him, and he actually started toward the harbor, driving along like anybody else on the way to a morning’s fishing on a day of precious sunshine under a sky lit bright and without a cloud to cast a shadow, before he put on his blinker, swung round and headed back home. The fish would be relieved, at least there was that.
Carolee was in her nightgown still, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the crossword puzzle out of the Chronicle, and she barely glanced up when he came in. “Back so soon?” she murmured. She was wearing her glasses and staring intently at the page before her, trying to break the code, and this was her way of staving off the boredom and filling the hours when she wasn’t enjoying world-class indulgence aboard a cruise ship in the sunny crystalline waters of the Caribbean. Her hair shone in the light through the picture window, outside of which, in the intermediate view, birds flapped and clustered at the feeder, while in the longer view the sea sparked distantly under the sun. She was barefoot. The flesh bunched at her chin as she compressed the muscles there in concentration. “What’s a seven-letter word for earthworm?”
The answer—annelid—sprang into his head, cribbed from a mimeographed sheet of multiple-choice questions in Bio 101 a thousand years ago, but he didn’t give it to her, didn’t say anything in fact. He just stood there, shaken more than he cared to admit — and now he was seeing Carey’s face, the excitable face, the anxious one, the face he’d worn on the day they’d chased the Mexicans halfway across the county. He tried to picture him dead, but he drew a blank. Hard to picture anyone dead because there was a spirit there, a soul, the animating principle, whether you believed in God the Father and all the ministering angels or not, and that spirit was more specific even than the body that contained it. Carey was dead. There’d be a funeral. The community would come unglued. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Maybe so. But not this time.
“Sten?” Looking up now, the glasses at half-mast on the flange of her nose. “Did you hear me?”
What he said was, “They got Carey.”
She gave him a numb look, her pale wondering eyes riding up above the frames.
“Carey Bachman. The Mexicans. They shot him.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying he’s dead, what do you think? He’s dead. Carey’s dead.”
She wasn’t indifferent, or not exactly — he could see the alarm germinating in her eyes and unfolding its petals across her face, color there, blossoming — but she didn’t jump up from the table and tear out her hair or set up a wail of grief or even, and he couldn’t help noticing this smallest detail, let go of the pencil gripped neatly between her thumb and first two fingers. The requisite questions dropped from her lips—How? When? Where? How had he found out? Had they caught the killers? Was there no place safe anymore? — and yet there was no shock in her tone, no outrage, no engagement. And why was that? He knew why. Adam. Adam was why.
She’d spent the previous afternoon at the Burnsides’, helping Cindy and Gentian with the animals and the tours they gave daily. But it wasn’t only Cindy and Gentian: Sara had been there. She came down on a regular basis, every six weeks or so, to shoe Cindy’s horses and file their teeth, and there she was, in her boots, jeans and a no-nonsense T-shirt, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her hands roughened by the work. Carolee had said hi, uneasy, maybe a little embarrassed because of the scene out front of the house the last time they’d seen each other, Adam attacking his own father and his own father down there on the ground, but she was aching for news of Adam and here was her chance to get it.
Cindy, always the gracious hostess, had set out a platter of tuna- and egg-salad sandwiches for them, late lunch, with a scoop of homemade potato salad and carrot sticks and a drink of her own concoction, two parts cranberry, one part each of sparkling water and diet 7Up. Nice. A nice lunch. Cindy was always going out of her way like that. They were sitting there, she and Cindy, talking about the antelope and Cindy’s hope for a mating pair of giraffes one of the zoos was offering them, when Sara came out of the bathroom where she’d been cleaning up. She looked good. She’d combed out her hair and put on some makeup and if she was forty she didn’t look it. More like thirty.
There was some business talk — the horses, the antelope, the fact that the vet was doing the hooves on the zebras, sable and kudu now and Cindy hoped Sara didn’t mind but it was just easier that way since he had to be there to dart the animals in any case — and then Cindy excused herself to go to the kitchen and put on the water for tea and Carolee and Sara had a moment to themselves. “How are you?” Carolee asked. “Everything okay?”
The other woman tugged at her fingers for a minute as if to loosen the joints — she worked hard and had the calluses to prove it — then gave a smile so fleeting it was dead on arrival. “I’m not getting laid, if that’s what you mean.” She picked up her glass, rattled the ice cubes, drained what was left in the bottom. “So things could be better, yeah. A whole lot better.”
Carolee was puzzled. And maybe a bit offended too — she’d never been a fan of that kind of talk — but she forged on because she had no choice and if this woman with the flaring eyes and low habits and mad theories was going to wind up with Adam she needed to be understanding, needed to give her the benefit of the doubt, needed, above all else, to pump her for information. “But what about Adam? How’s he doing? Is he helping out, is he okay?”
“Adam? I haven’t seen Adam since that night, that time, I mean — at the house?”
This information came down on Carolee like a rockslide, just buried her, the way she told it. They’d both assumed he was with her, and the news came down hard on him too — if he thought he’d washed his hands of his son he was fooling himself. Adam was there, always there, as persistent as a drumbeat in the back of your mind, the rhythm you can’t shake, the tune you can’t stop humming — he was his father, still and forever, and he’d tried to be as good a father as he could through all these years no matter how hard he rubbed up against Adam’s will and his delusions and his pranks, if you could call them that. He was Adam’s father. He loved him. And here he’d been entertaining his own delusion of Adam living in a kind of half-cracked (which meant half-sane) parity with this woman, Sara, who at least dwelled on Mother Earth and had a job and could cook for him and feed him and be his mother and lover rolled in one. I fucked her. Isn’t that right, Sara? Didn’t I fuck you? It was like throwing coins in a wishing well. He’d made his silent wish, the wish he couldn’t say aloud because then it wouldn’t come true. And what was it? That Adam was somebody else’s problem now.