Lone Creek

62

The next day was another of those autumn beauties, with the air clear and crisp and the sky almost shockingly blue. There wouldn't be many more of them this year. In the afternoon, after making sure nobody was keeping tabs on me, I fired up the Victor and rode into the Belts behind my place.

I had slept in a near coma from yesterday evening until this morning, getting up once to stumble outside and take a leak, then collapsing again. For the first few hours after waking, I'd wandered around in a stupor. But finally my mind had cleared and I'd started thinking about practicalities, like the scrutiny I'd soon be facing. Top priority was to make sure that Kirk's interment was as hidden as I thought. Hunting season would be starting soon, and somebody just might go wandering by there.

The place where Madbird and I had stashed him was about three miles away as the crow flew, and a shorter trip overland than going down to the highway and looping up again. I took the familiar back trails through the woods and rock formations of my childhood sanctuary. That part of what I'd told Gary Varna was true. I left the bike at the logging road and hiked the last stretch through the brush.

The news was fine about the job we'd done. The site appeared perfectly natural-a passerby would never give it a second glance.

But I could almost imagine that I saw a hint of Kirk's outline behind the facade of earth and stone, and that there was a sort of grim satisfaction in his posture. It looked good on him. He had never amounted to much in his father's eyes, but he'd finally brought Reuben a kind of peace in a Byzantine way. Maybe that was another canceled debt, like the one between Reuben and me. I recalled thinking of Reuben in Shakespearean terms, as a kind of colossus. Now, with Kirk, another line from Shakespeare appeared in my mind.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

I knelt down for a minute-not to pray, exactly, but to tell Kirk that although he'd given me no choice, I was bitterly sorry. Then I got back on the bike and started home.

My imaginings about Kirk were really for my own benefit, not his. I didn't know what to believe about an afterlife-whether the dead knew or cared what happened here on earth, or if anything that the living did could help them rest, or even if they continued to exist in any way we could conceive of.

But I did believe in an immense, mysterious machine of fate that ultimately exacted true final justice, that couldn't be swayed by influence peddling and didn't accept get-out-of-jail-free cards, and that kept track of who owed what right down to the molecule.

I had to think that everybody involved in these events had undergone a serious shake-up of their bank balances, for better or worse.