Killshot

1

THE BLACKBIRD TOLD HIMSELF he was drinking too much because he lived in this hotel and the Silver Dollar was close by, right downstairs. Try to walk out the door past it. Try to come along Spadina Avenue, see that goddamn Silver Dollar sign, hundreds of light bulbs in your face, and not be drawn in there. Have a few drinks before coming up to this room with a ceiling that looked like a road map, all the cracks in it. Or it was the people in the Silver Dollar talking about the Blue Jays all the time that made him drink too much. He didn’t give a shit about the Blue Jays. He believed it was time to get away from here, leave Toronto and the Waverley Hotel for good and he wouldn’t drink so much and be sick in the morning. Follow one of those cracks in the ceiling.

The phone rang. He listened to several rings before picking up the receiver, wanting it to be a sign. He liked signs. The Blackbird said, “Yes?” and a voice he recognized asked would he like to go to Detroit. See a man at a hotel Friday morning. It would take him maybe two minutes.

In the moment the voice on the phone said “Detroi-it” the Blackbird thought of his grandmother, who lived near there, and began to see himself and his brothers with her when they were young boys and thought, This could be a sign. The voice on the phone said, “What do you say, Chief?”

“How much?”

“Out of town, I’ll go fifteen.”

The Blackbird lay in his bed staring at the ceiling, at the cracks making highways and rivers. The stains were lakes, big ones.

“I can’t hear you, Chief.”

“I’m thinking you’re low.”

“All right, gimme a number.”

“I like twenty thousand.”

“You’re drunk. I’ll call you back.”

“I’m thinking this guy staying at a hotel, he’s from here, no?”

“What difference is it where he’s from?”

“You mean what difference is it to me. I think it’s somebody you don’t want to look in the face.”

The voice on the phone said, “Hey, Chief? Fuck you. I’ll get somebody else.”

This guy was a punk, he had to talk like that. It was okay. The Blackbird knew what this guy and his people thought of him. Half-breed tough guy one time from Montreal, maybe a little crazy, they gave the dirty jobs to. If you took the jobs, you took the way they spoke to you. You spoke back if you could get away with it, if they needed you. It wasn’t social, it was business.

He said, “You don’t have no somebody else. You call me when your people won’t do it. I’m thinking that tells me the guy in the hotel—I wonder if it’s the old guy you line up to kiss his hand. Guy past his time, he don’t like how you do things.”

There was a silence on the line before the voice said, “Forget it. We never had this conversation.”

See? He was a punk. The Blackbird said, “I never kiss his hand or any part of him. What do I care?”

“So, you want it?”

“I’m thinking,” the Blackbird said, staring at the ceiling, “you have a Cadillac, that blue one.” It was the same vivid light-blue color as his grandmother’s cottage on Walpole Island. “What is it, about a year old?”

“About that.”

So it was two years old, or three. That was okay, it looked good and it was the right color.

“All right, you give me that car, we have a deal.”

“Plus the twenty?”

“Keep it. Just the car.”

This guy would be telling his people, see, he’s crazy. You can give him trading beads, a Mickey Mouse watch. But said over the phone, “If that’s what you want, Chief.” The voice gave him the name of the hotel in Detroit and the room number, a suite on the sixty-fourth floor, and told him it would have to be done the day after tomorrow, Friday around nine-thirty, give or take a few minutes. The old man would be getting dressed or reading the sports, he was in town for the ball game, Jays and the Tigers. Walk in and walk out.

“I know how to walk out. How do I get in?”

“He has a girl with him, the one he sees when he’s there. It’s arranged for her to let you in.”

“Yeah? What do I do with her?”

The voice on the phone said, “Whatever your custom allows, Chief.” Confident now; listen to him. “What else can I tell you?”

The Blackbird hung up the phone and stared at the ceiling again, picking out a crack that could be the Detroit River among stains he narrowed his eyes to see as the Great Lakes. Ontario, Erie, Lake Huron . . .

His name was Armand Degas, born in Montreal. His mother was Ojibway, his father he didn’t remember, French-Canadian. Both were dead. Until eight years ago he had lived and worked with his two brothers. The younger one was dead and the older one was in prison forever. Armand Degas was fifty years old. He had lived in Toronto most of his life, but didn’t know if he should stay here. He could go downstairs to the Silver Dollar and after a while feel pretty good. There was a bunch of Ojibway that hung out there. Maybe he looked like some of them with his thick body and his thick black hair lacquered back hard with hair spray. They’d talk, but he could tell they were afraid of him. Also there were more punks coming in there, crazy ones who colored their hair pink and green; he didn’t like the way they called him the Blackbird, the way they said it. The Italians, most of the time, called him Chief. It was like they could call him anything they wanted, the guineas posing in their expensive clothes, talking with their hands. Even if they said he could be a made guy, one of them, he wouldn’t ever belong to them. When the phone rang he had been trying to figure out why he drank so much. He was thinking now, as he began to picture a young girl in the the hotel room in Detroit, he drank because he needed to drink.

The girl would be young and very pretty. It was the kind they found for the old man. She’d be scared. Even if they told her, you open the door, that’s all you have to do, and gave her some money, she’d be scared to death. He wondered if the old man would notice it. You didn’t become old in his business missing signs. He wondered if he should wear his suit to go into that hotel. It was tight on him when he buttoned the coat. He’d drive to Detroit in the Cadillac ... and began to think about his grandmother, trying to picture her now, older than the old man he was going to see. They called him Papa, a guy who’d had his way a long time, but no more. The Blackbird saw himself drive up to the blue cottage in the matching Cadillac and saw his grandmother come out ... Then saw a young girl in a hotel room again, scared to death.

But when the girl opened the door she didn’t seem scared at all. She was about eighteen maybe, wearing a robe, with long blond hair down over her shoulders like a little girl. Except her expression wasn’t a little girl’s. She looked him over and walked away and was going into the bedroom as he entered the suite and saw the room-service table and what was left of breakfast. The bedroom door was open. He could hear her voice saying something— that nice-looking young girl, not the kind he had expected. The Blackbird glanced at the bedroom but didn’t see either of them. He walked past the room-service table to the room’s wide expanse of windows filled with an overcast sky. Now he was looking at Canada from six hundred feet in the air; Windsor, Ontario, across the river, Toronto two hundred and fifty miles beyond. Not straight across but more east, that way, where the Detroit River turned into Lake St. Clair. Keep going and you come to Walpole Island. Staring in that direction he squinted into the distance. A sound behind him made him turn.

The old man they called Papa, head bent, showing the straight part in his white hair combed flat, was pouring himself a cup of coffee. He stood at the room-service table with a bath towel wrapped high around his waist, white against tan skin, almost to his chest: this man who always dressed in style, a gold pin fixed to his shirt collar, always with a tan. But look how frail he was, dried up, aged in the sun. A bird could perch on his shoulder blades, hop to his collarbone.

Now a shower was turned on. In there beyond the open bedroom door. The girl giving him privacy.

“Papa?”

The old man looked up. Surprised and then frowning with the windows in his eyes: the same way he had looked when a government commission, the one investigating organized crime in Canada, asked him what he did for a living and the old man said he was in the pepperoni business, he sold it to places they made pizza.

He said with his heavy accent and a note of hope, “You got something for me?”

“From your son-in-law.”

The old man’s hope left him as he said, “Oh, Christ,” sounding tired. He looked down at the room-service table but seemed to have forgotten what he wanted. He stared for several moments before looking up. “I told my daughter don’t marry that guy, he’s a punk. She don’t listen. I’ll give him six months, they gonna be another funeral.”

The Blackbird said, “You want him done sooner than that, tell me.” He saw the old man staring at him, frowning again, and he said, “You don’t know who I am?”

“I can’t see you,” the old man said, coming around the table, one hand gripping the towel, the fingers of his other hand touching the edge of the table. He seemed so small, his bones showing, his eyes, as they looked up, tired and moist. He said, “Yes, of course,” and seemed to shrug as he moved close to the window.

The Blackbird watched the old man staring at the beginning of Ontario reaching out beyond the city and across open land to the sky.

“You know Walpole Island, Papa?” The Blackbird pointed upriver. “It’s that way past the lake, on the Canadian side of the channel. The big ships go by there, up the St. Clair River to Lake Huron and around through Lake Superior, go to places over there, and back again till the ice comes. Walpole Island, it’s an Indian reserve where my grandmother lives.”

The old man took his time to look up at him, patient, not going anywhere, making these moments last.

“She’s Ojibway, same as me. You know what else? She’s a medicine woman. She was going to turn me into an owl one time, I said to her, ‘I don’t want to be no owl, I want to be a blackbird,’ and that’s how I got this name. From my brothers, when we were boys and we visited there.”

The old man was staring out again and seemed off in his mind.

“You remember us, the Degas brothers? One dead working for you, shot dead by the police. One in Kingston doing life for you. Papa, you listening to me? And I’m here.”

“Can she do that,” the old man said, “turn you into an owl?”

“If she wants to. Listen, when we went there in the summer when we were boys, we had a twenty-two rifle, a single-shot we used, go in the marsh and hunt for muskrats. See, but we hardly ever found any, so on the way home to her house we’d shoot at dogs, you know, cats, birds. Man, it got people mad, but they wouldn’t say nothing. You know why? They were afraid the grandmother would do something to them.”

The old man was listening. He said, “Turn them into something they don’t want. How does she do that?”

“She has a drum she beats on and sings in Ojibway, so I don’t know what she saying,” the Blackbird said. “Imagine a day you don’t even see the trees move. She beats on the drum and sings and a wind comes in under the door and stirs the fire in the fireplace. She wants to, she can burn a house down. Or like if you do something to her and she gets mad? She can get a bird to shit on your car. She does it best with seagulls. A seagull flies over, she beats on the drum, points to the car. That one. The seagull shits on the hood, on the windshield. Or she can get a whole flock of them to do it, all over the car. I’m going to go see her. Drive up there, you take the ferry over from Algonac, a half-mile across the St. Clair River from the U.S. side to Walpole Island.”

The old man’s head was nodding as he thought of something and said, “I could use a woman like that. Have her turn me into a blue jay.” He smiled, showing his perfect dentures. “Those fucking Jays, they gonna do it this year, go all the way to the World Series. I’ll give you five to three. I don’t care who they play. We going tonight, see them beat the Tigers.” The old man paused. He turned and looked up with his tired eyes. “No, I’m gonna go in there, put on my robe . . .” He paused again. “No, I think I like to be dressed. Is that okay with you?”

“Whatever you want.”

The old man walked toward the bedroom saying, “That fucking son-in-law, I never like that guy.”

The Blackbird gave him time. He stepped to the room-service table and poured a cup of coffee. It was barely warm. He ate a croissant with it and two strips of cold bacon he believed the girl had ordered and didn’t eat. What did she care, she wasn’t paying for it. She had taken one bite out of each half piece of toast. He could hear the shower running. There was a Coca-Cola bottle on the table and a glass half full she had left, wasting it, not caring.

It was warm in here and he was uncomfortable in his wool suit, a black one, double-breasted, he wore with a white shirt and green-blue tie that had little green fish on it. A Browning 380 automatic, stuck in his waist at the small of his back, dug into his spine. It was a relief to pull it out. The Blackbird worked the slide to rack a cartridge into the chamber. The pistol was ready to fire and he believed he was ready. But now his pants felt loose and he had to adjust them to stick his shirt in good and straighten his tie and button his coat before going into the bedroom. He had to feel presentable. It was something he did for himself; no one else would think about how he looked, notice the suit was too tight for him and needed to be pressed. The old man wouldn’t care.

The old man wouldn’t even see him. He was lying on the unmade bed in a starched white shirt and tan trousers, brown shoes and socks, hands folded on his chest, his eyes closed.

The shower was running in the bathroom, the door open a few inches.

The Blackbird brought the sheet up over the old man’s body all the way, covering his face. Now he was looking at the outline of the face and saw the sheet move as the old man breathed in, sucking the white cloth flat against his mouth. That was where the Blackbird placed the muzzle of the Browning and shot him. He fired once. The sound filled the room and maybe it was heard on the other side of the wall in another room, or maybe not. It was sudden; if anyone heard it and said what was that and stopped to listen, there was nothing else to hear.

Only the shower running in the bathroom.

When he pulled the shower curtain aside the girl with long blond hair, the hair darker now, her face and body glistening wet, looked at him and said, “Are you through?”

The Blackbird said, “Not yet,” raising the pistol, and watched the girl’s expression finally change.

***

The last time he came to Walpole Island was nine years ago, with his two brothers. They had finished some business in Sarnia for the Italians and drove down through Wallaceburg and across the bridge. That way, it wasn’t like coming to an island.

This time he came from Algonac, Michigan, on the U.S. side, drove over the metal plates from the nine-car ferry to the dock and pulled up in the Cadillac to tell the customs guy he used to live here when he was a boy and had come back. He followed the road south along the ship channel where he and his brothers used to throw stones at the freighters going by. They had seemed so close in the channel, those ore carriers sliding past forever without a sound. This was when their mother would send them here from Toronto, in the summer. Once they swam the channel to Harsens Island on the U.S. side, maybe a quarter of a mile, and his brother now in Kingston for life had almost drowned.

Then he and his brothers didn’t come again till they were grown men: came to visit because they were nearby, that time in Sarnia, and stayed to repaint the blue cottage and fix some leaks in the roof. The cottage was damp and smelled, full of mice the Degas brothers caught in glue traps they got at the A & P in Algonac. The traps held the mice by their feet in a sticky substance; or sometimes the mouse’s face would be stuck in it. The brothers would carry the traps outside, the mice still alive, and shoot them with their high-caliber pistols. Bam, that mouse would be gone, disappear, and the Degas brothers would look at each other and grin like they were young boys again shooting at dogs and cats. The grandmother, getting old, had watched them but didn’t say much or work any kind of medicine.

This time, when he came to the cottage, it seemed deeper in the trees, its blue paint faded and peeling, its plywood storm shutters down covering the windows, the yard overgrown with weeds.

The woman at Island Variety, across the road from the ferry dock, said yes, the grandmother was in the cemetery, buried last winter. The woman said the Band office didn’t know what to do about the house or the furniture, all the grandmother’s things. Armand Degas told her he’d take care of it and turned away, not wanting to talk to this woman in the noise of kids playing video games, Breakout and Zaxxon. There were other people too. Some duck hunters in the store were buying candy bars and potato chips, talking loud to each other. Their cars with Michigan plates were parked outside where Walpole guides waited smoking cigarettes. They had stopped talking as Armand walked by them, coming in. They knew who he was.

Pretty soon the duck hunters in their camouflage outfits and two-tone rubber boots, still talking loud and taking forever, moved out the door and Armand saw a guy he recognized, toward the back of the store.

Lionel something. Coming away from the cooler with two cans of Pepsi. Sure, Lionel, walking with that limp. He was a kid when the Degas brothers came here as kids. They beat him up the first time they met; Lionel came after them with a live snake and they got to be friends. Then nine years ago they saw him in the bar at Sans Souci on Harsens Island where the Indians went to get drunk and he was using a cane to walk. They had some beers and he told them how he fell off a building, “into the hole” as he called it, and broke his legs pretty good. He was an ironworker then. Lionel Adam, that was his name. He was still limping, swinging one leg way around, but didn’t have the cane— taking the Pepsis over to a guy leaning against the craft counter, where they sold handmade Indian stuff.

The guy was taller than Lionel, maybe younger, with light-colored hair. He wasn’t Indian. He was thin but looked strong. Now he straightened up, turning away from the counter as Lionel handed him a Pepsi, and Armand saw something written on the back of the guy’s blue jacket. In white letters it said ironworkers, and under it, smaller, build america. So he was another one of them, probably an old buddy of Lionel’s.

Armand went to the cooler and got himself a Pepsi. He popped it open edging closer to Lionel and the ironworker, looking at a poster that announced bingo tonight at the Sports Center. visit the canteen for all your refreshment needs! Lionel didn’t seem to notice him. They were talking about hunting whitetail.

It sounded strange, the ironworker telling the Indian he was going to make sure Lionel got a buck to hang on his meat pole. Saying he bought a salt lick to put out in the woods. Lionel was saying they should take a sweat bath and not eat any meat for a week. A whitetail could smell it if you had a hamburger and tell if you had mustard or ketchup on it. The ironworker said you had to take time beforehand to read the deer, think like them and you’d get your shot.

“Pretend you’re a buck,” Lionel said, “with a big rack.”

“Sixteen points,” the ironworker said.

“You see a doe, her tail standing up in the air waving at you,” Lionel said, “you won’t know whether to shoot it or hump it.”

“Or both, and then eat it,” the ironworker said. “I fill the freezer every November and it’s gone by May.”

They walked toward the door, Lionel telling the ironworker he could make it tomorrow afternoon about four o’clock. Armand came to the front of the store with his Pepsi. Through the window he saw them standing by a tan Dodge pickup. When the ironworker backed around and drove off toward the ferry dock, Armand saw a tool box in the pickup bed and a Michigan license plate. He waited for Lionel to come back into the store, but saw him walking away, limping past the window. Armand had to go after him.

“Hey, where’s your cane?”

Lionel stopped and half-turned to look back, standing behind Armand’s blue Cadillac. He said, “I thought maybe it was you,” sounding different than when he was talking to the ironworker, not much life in his voice now. “You go by the Band office?”

“For what?”

“About your grandmother. We been trying to get hold of somebody, a relative, find out what to do with her house.”

“I don’t know,” Armand said, “I been thinking, I could fix the place up.” His gaze moved to the trees along the road, then over to the tip of Russell Island, where the freighter channel joined the St. Clair River. He saw gulls out there, specks against the afternoon sky. Lionel was telling him he could sell the house the way it was. Why spend money on it?

“No, I mean fix it up and live there,” Armand said, turning enough to look down the river road. You couldn’t see any houses, only trees changing color. This island was all woods and marsh, and some cornfields. He couldn’t imagine staying here for more than a few weeks. Still, he wanted Lionel to say sure, that’s a good idea, live here, become part of it.

But Lionel said, “What would you do? You know, a guy use to living in the city. That place, all it has is a wood stove.”

Armand’s gaze returned to Lionel in his wool shirt and jeans, rubber hunting boots, Lionel still half-turned like he wanted this to be over and walk away.

“What are you, a guide for those big-shot duck hunters come here from the States? I could do that, be a guide,” Armand said. “I know how to shoot. In the winter trap muskrats.” He wanted Lionel to say sure, why not?

“We do it in the spring,” Lionel said, “burn off the marsh. You get all dirty out there, filthy. You wear a nice suit of clothes. ...You wouldn’t like it.”

Armand watched Lionel shift his weight from one leg to the other, careful about it, as though he might be in pain.

“How long were you an ironworker?”

Lionel shrugged. “Ten years.”

“Now you work for those big-shot hunters come here, think everything’s funny. You live here but have to go across the river to get drunk in a bar. Or you stay here and play bingo, visit the canteen for all your refreshment needs. But I can’t live here, ’ey? That what you telling me?”

Lionel stared back at him like he was getting up courage to answer and Armand looked away, giving him time, Armand’s gaze following the ferry on its way to Algonac, Michigan, another world over there. He heard Lionel say:

“There’s no life for you here. There’s nothing for you.”

Armand wanted to ask him, Then tell me where there is. But when he looked at Lionel again he said, “You ever ride in a Cadillac? Come on, we’ll drive over there, have some drinks.”

“You have some,” Lionel said. “I’m going home.”

He walked over to his pickup truck swinging one leg, leaving Armand standing there in his suit of clothes by his blue Cadillac.

2

RICHIE NIX BOUGHT A T-SHIRT at Henry’s restaurant in Algonac that had it’s nice to be nice written across the front. He changed in the men’s room: took off his old T-shirt and threw it away, put on the new one looking at himself in the mirror, but then didn’t know what to do with his gun. If he put his denim jacket back on to hide the nickel-plate .38 revolver stuck in his jeans, you couldn’t read the T-shirt. What he did was roll the .38 up inside the jacket and carried it into the dining area.

There was a big it’s nice to be nice wood-carved sign on the shellacked knotty-pine wall in the main room, over past the salad bar. It had been the restaurant’s slogan for fifty years. Most people who came to Henry’s liked a table by the front windows, so they could watch the freighters go by while they ate their dinner. Richie Nix took a table off to the side where he could look at freighters and ore carriers if he wanted, though he was more interested this evening in keeping an eye on the restaurant parking lot. He needed a car for a new business he was getting into.

The waitress brought him a beer. He looked up, taking a drink from the can, and there was a big goddamn ore carrier a thousand feet long passing from the river into the channel. Richie grinned at the sight. It was neat the way the boat looked like it was going right through the woods. It went by the point of Russell Island, a narrow neck of land, and you saw the boat through the trees without seeing the channel. It could be going to Ford Rouge or one of the mills downriver from Detroit.

For the past few weeks Richie had been staying with a woman he’d gotten to know at Huron Valley when he was doing time there a couple of years back and she was a corrections officer in charge of food services. Her name was Donna, Donna Mulry. She was retired now, actually forced out, after twenty-five years working in corrections, and didn’t like the way they’d treated her. Richie Nix believed she was close to fifty, old enough to be his foster mom (he never knew his real one), but she was a little thing with a nice shape, a big butt on her for her size and not too bad-looking. Donna had retired to Marine City, the next town up the river, and spent four hours a day driving a school bus for the East China Township system. She’d come home ready to play Yahtzee, which she loved, or watch TV, have some drinks. Donna introduced him to her favorite, Southern Comfort and 7-Up. It was pretty good. After a while she’d ask him what kind of Campbell soup and frozen gourmet dinner he wanted, Donna never having learned to prepare a meal for less than twelve hundred people at a time. She’d have on her sparkly cat-lady glasses and her orange hair a pile of curls trying to look young and sexy for him. She was always fussing over him. He let her pierce his ear and stick a little diamond in it. He let her wash his hair with a special conditioner to take out the oil and bring back its natural luster, but drew the line at letting her cut it. Long hair made you feel you could do what you wanted. Short hair was what you had entering prison life. She’d say, “Honey, don’t you want to look nice for your Donna?”

Richie knew he could do better than her and her frozen dinners. He was being nice to Donna in return for her being nice to him in the joint. Otherwise she was not in his class. Hell, he had an NCIC sheet that printed out of that national crime computer as tall as he was: six feet in his curl-toed cowboy boots with three inner soles inside. His ambition was to rob a bank in every state of the union—or maybe just forty-nine, fuck Alaska— which he believed would be some kind of record, get him in that book as the All-American Bank Robber. He had thirty-seven states to go but was young.

Right now Richie was considering a score he’d lined up that was way different than robbery. It was higher class and took some thought.

Meanwhile he spent his leisure time drinking Southern and Sevens and watching TV with Donna pawing him or listening to her tell him how, after devoting her life to corrections, they had treated her like dirt. Richie’s opinion was that if you liked corrections it meant you wanted to live with colored, because that’s what it amounted to. He’d tell her from experience. The first place he was sent, the Wayne County Youth Home, stuck in Unit Five North with twenty guys, all colored. In Georgia, when he got the six-to-eight for intent to rob and kidnap, he did three and a half at Reidsville, most of it stoop labor, all day in the pea fields with them. Hell, he’d been eligible to serve time in some of the most famous prisons of the south, Huntsville, Angola, Parchman, and Raiford, all of them full of colored, but had lucked out down there and only drew the conviction in Georgia. Okay, then the two years in the federal joint at Terre Haute, they were mostly white where he was. But then the transfer to Huron Valley put him back in with the colored again. How could she like living among guys, white or colored, that would tear your ass out for the least reason? Donna said, “Women are good for a prison. They have a calming effect on the inmates and make their life seem more normal.” Richie said, “Hey, Donna? Bull shit.”

He’d get tired of lying around and go for a drive in Donna’s little Honda kiddycar, go over to Harsens Island on the ferry and wonder about those summer homes boarded up, nobody in them. Stop at a bar on the island where retired guys in plaid shirts came in the afternoon to drink beer, waiting out their time. It was depressing. Donna told him to stay out of the bar at Sans Souci, Indians from Walpole Island drank there and got ugly. Oh, was that right? Richie dropped by one evening and glared for an hour at different ones and nobody made a move. Shit, Indians weren’t nothing to handle. Go in a colored joint and glare you’d bleed all the way to the hospital.

The score he had a line on had come about sort of by accident. One night bored to death listening to Donna and watching TV, Richie slipped out to hold up a store or a gas station and couldn’t find anything open that looked good. So he broke into a house, a big one all dark, on Anchor Bay; got inside and started creeping through rooms—shit, the place was empty. He hadn’t noticed the for sale sign in the front yard. It got Richie so mad he tore out light fixtures, pissed on the carpeting, stopped up the sink and turned the water on and was thinking what else he could do, break some windows, when the idea came to him all at once. He thought about it a few minutes there in the dark, went out and got the name and number off the for sale sign.

Nelson Davies Realty.

Richie had seen the company’s green-and-gold signs all over the Anchor Bay area from Mount Clemens to Algonac and had heard their radio ads in the car: sound effects like a gust of wind whistling by, gone, and a voice says, “Nelson Davies just sold another one!” He seemed to recall they had a new subdivision they were selling too, built on a marsh landfill they called Wildwood, a whole mess of cute homes, twenty or thirty of them.

Pretty soon after, while Donna was out driving her school bus, Richie called up Nelson Davies, got his cheerful voice on the line and said, “Them Wildwood homes are going fast, huh?” Nelson Davies said they sure were and began telling him why, listing features like your choice of decorator colors, till Richie cut him off saying, “I bet they’d go even faster if they caught fire.”

Nelson Davies asked who this was, no longer cheerful.

Richie said, “Accidents can happen in an empty house, can’t they?”

Nelson Davies kept asking who this was.

“I understand you already have one messed up,” Richie said. “It can happen anytime. Call the police, they’ll keep a lookout for a while, but how long? They get tired and quit it could happen again, huh? Or you can pay so it won’t, like insurance. You get ten thousand in cash ready and I’ll come pick it up sometime. If you don’t have it when I come, you’re dead. If I see police cruising around that subdivision you’re also dead. You understand? You get ready, ’cause you don’t know when I’m gonna walk in the door. Or which one that comes in I’m gonna be.” Richie paused to think about what he’d just said. He believed it made sense. “I’ll tell you something else. You remember a guy working in a Amoco station, one up in Port Huron, was shot dead last year during a holdup? Not last summer but the one before?”

The real estate man said he wasn’t sure, he might’ve read about it.

“Well, that was me. The guy had this big roll of bills in his pocket. I knew it was there, I saw it, but he didn’t want to take it out. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you three seconds.’ By the time he started to reach in his pocket I was at three and it was too late. So I blew him away. You understand? I won’t hesitate to blow you away you give me any trouble. Or I find out you have cops in your office pretending to be real estate salesmen. Shit, I know a cop when I see one. Look him in the eye I can tell in a minute. See, you won’t know me from any other home buyer that comes in, but I’ll know who you got there in the office and if any’re cops. If I see any I won’t do nothing then, I will later on, some other time. Say you come out of your house to go to work, I could hit you with a scope-sight rifle. You understand? There’s no way you can fuck with me. Ten thousand when I come to collect or you’re a dead real estate man.”

That was how he’d set it up four days ago.

The guy should have the money by now, ten thousand, a figure Richard had used in estimating how much he could make robbing a bank in every state of the union, a half million dollars minus Alaska. Except that robbing a bank by yourself you only had time to hit one teller and the most he’d ever scored was $2,720 from a bank in Nor-wood, Ohio. Another thing different about this one, besides the score, you had to look the part of who you were supposed to be, walk in that office as a young home buyer. The other day he’d swiped a sport coat at Sears, a gray herringbone, the sleeves a little too long but it was okay. Donna got excited and bought him some shirts and ties, thinking he was dressing to look for a job.

So here he was sitting in Henry’s drinking beer, wondering if he might go semicasual and wear the it’s nice to be nice T-shirt under the sport coat. Thinking of that but mostly thinking about getting a car for tomorrow. He couldn’t use Donna’s. Once he drove away from the real estate office with all that money he was gone. If somebody read the license number they could I.D. him through her. Or if he took her car Miss Corrections would turn him in for walking out on her. So he’d have to steal one. Go out in the parking lot after it got dark, see if any fool left their key in the car. People did that, rings of keys they didn’t want to carry— stick it under the seat. Otherwise, since he didn’t have a tool to punch out the ignition, he’d have to wait for people to come out after they finished their dinner and get in the car with them. Or him or her. That meant taking the person on a one-way trip in the country. But shit happens, if that’s the way it had to be. At least he could pick and choose.

He watched an ’86 Cadillac pull into the lot and park. Baby blue with an Ontario plate. Richie liked it right away. He watched the guy get out of the car, short and stocky, his hair slicked back, adjusting his coat, Jesus, getting ready to make his entrance. Richie waited. There he was, the hostess taking him to a table by the front windows. Shit, the guy looked like an Indian. Most likely got paid today. Got all dressed up in his suit and tie to come in here for the dinner.

Richie liked the car and liked the guy more and more the way he sat there all alone ordering one drink after another, still drinking as he ate his dinner and the river and the trees outside turned dark. The guy would look up at the running lights of a freighter going by or stare across toward Walpole Island where he probably lived—look at him—had a job up at the oil refinery for good money, got paid and came over here to spend it, the only Indian in the whole place. It’s nice to be nice, Richie thought, staring at the guy and working himself up to what he was going to do. But I got news for you . . .

Armand drank Canadian Club, doubles, good ones. He told himself it was to keep his mind alive, thoughts coming, as he had a conversation with himself and made some decisions. He asked himself, Why would you want to live here? Answered, I don’t. Asked himself, Why do you want Lionel or anybody to want you to live here? That one, facing it, was harder. He took a drink and answered, I don’t. I don’t care or want to live here or ever come back. He knew that but had to hear it. No more Ojibway, no more the Blackbird. He knew that too. What was he losing? Nothing. You can’t lose something you don’t know you have. What would he get out of being Ojibway? He watched a down-bound ocean freighter, its lights sliding through the trees, and thought, Learn to do the medicine and turn yourself into a fucking lion, man, or anything you want. That ship, tomorrow sometime it would be going by Toronto, then going by Kingston, and imagined his brother seeing the ship from a window in the prison. Armand had never visited his brother; he didn’t know if you could see the lake or the St. Lawrence River from the prison; but the ship had made him think of his brother and that life they were in, beginning from the time they were young tough guys and liked having people afraid of them. He raised his glass to the waitress for another drink and looked around at people eating, nobody alone, nobody afraid of him. There was one person alone over there, a guy with long hair staring at him, a guy making muscles, it looked like, the way his bare arms were on the table, something written on his shirt, a guy who’d be at home at the Silver Dollar. He’s trying to tell you something, Armand thought, and turned to look at the river again, through his own reflection on the glass, not interested in anything the guy had to tell him. The guy was a punk. The ship was gone, down in the channel now through the flats, all that marsh and wetlands for the big-shot duck hunters from Detroit. He could go back that way tonight, keep going fifteen hundred miles south and spend the winter in Miami, Florida. There were Italian guys there if he needed something to do for money. Finding work was easy. And thought in that moment, You didn’t get rid of the gun. Anxious to come here and see the grandmother. It was under the front seat as he came through the tunnel from Windsor to Detroit and told the customs guy he was visiting and got waved on. If the customs guy had wanted to look in the car for any reason and found the gun, it would have been a problem, yes, but the car was still registered to the son-in-law and the gun was registered to no one. The Browning with two shots fired. Throw it in the river when you leave. It was on his mind now to do that. Still, he took his time and had two more drinks with his deep-fried pickerel and ate every bite of the fish and French fries with a big plate of salad. It was good and he was feeling good as he left the restaurant, looking over at the punk’s table but the punk wasn’t there.

He was outside standing by the Cadillac, wearing a work jacket now over the T-shirt with the words on it. Waiting to give you some shit about Indians, Armand thought. But could he be that kind of punk? He wasn’t big enough. He said, “I’m looking for a ride.” Starting to grin.

“Good luck.”

“No, you say, ‘What way you going?’ And I say, ‘Any way I want.’ Look it here.” He held open his jacket to show the grip of a revolver sticking out of his pants. A checkered-wood grip on a nickelplate Armand believed was a .38 Special made by Smith & Wesson. He saw the gun and saw it’s nice to be nice on the guy’s T-shirt, beneath the jacket held open. The guy was older than he had appeared in the restaurant, maybe thirty years old or more, with that tough-guy stare and a diamond pinned to his ear, things that told you he was a punk. Armand walked past him to get in the car and the guy went around to the other side.

When they were both in the car and Armand looked at him again, the guy was holding the nickelplate on his thigh. It was a Model 27 Smith & Wesson with a four-inch barrel. Armand had used a blue-steel one like that one time and liked it, it was a good gun. The guy held it with his hand resting on his crotch. Armand dropped his left hand from the wheel to push a button. The front seat moved back with the hum of the electric motor and the guy said, “What’re you doing?”

Armand looked at him again as he turned on the ignition. “What’s the matter, you nervous? You gonna hold that thing pointing at me, I hope you not nervous. You want this car? Take it.”

The guy said, “I’ll tell you what I want. I’ll tell you my name too, in case you ever heard of me, Richie Nix, N-i-x, not like Stevie Nicks spells hers.”

Armand shook his head. He’d never heard of either one.

They drove through Algonac away from the river, the guy, Richie Nix, saying turn here, turn there, like he knew where he was going and maybe wasn’t so nervous, though he could still be a punk.

They passed lights in windows of houses, then pretty soon there were only trees, once in a while a house. They were going toward a road that would take them to the freeway. Armand began to think the guy wanted to go to Detroit. They’d get there and the guy would get out. That would be okay, it was the way you had to go to get to Florida. It was strange the way the guy said the word as Armand was thinking of it.

“I was driving up from Florida one time,” Richie said. “I picked up this hitchhiker coming onto Seventy-five from Valdosta. I’d spent the night there. The guy was kind of dark-skinned like you only he was Mexican, I think. You’re an Indian, right?”

Armand glanced at him. “No, I’m not Indian.”

“What are you then?”

“Quebecois,” Armand said, “French Canadien,” giving it an accent. Why not? Half of him was.

Richie said, “Don’t you wish. Anyway we’re driving along the interstate, this Mex tells me how he’s been picking oranges half the year and how he’s going up to Michigan to pick sugarbeets. We’re getting along pretty good, I bought him a Co’Cola we stopped for gas, so then pretty soon he’s telling me how much money he made picking oranges and how he saved a thousand bucks and is gonna send it home once he gets to Michigan and sees there’s work there. You believe it, telling a stranger he’s got all this money on him? Shit, I start looking for the next exit sign, get the guy off someplace on a back road. We’re moving along about eighty, I see this Georgia state trooper parked at the side of the road. Shit, it wasn’t even my car, I picked it up in West Palm ...a Buick Riviera, if I remember correctly. Anyway I go, ‘Hey, you want to drive?’ to the Mex, and got him to trade places with me while we’re moving, the guy laughing, having a good time. Till he looks at the rearview and goes, ‘Uh-oh,’ seeing that state trooper coming up on us with his gumballs flashing. We get pulled over, the guy tells the trooper it’s not his car, it’s mine. I go, ‘My car? This fella picked me up, Officer. I don’t even know him.’ It was funny there for a while and I almost made it, but we both got taken in. Shit, they find out there’s a detainer out on me and I’m fucked. Next thing, I get charged with attempted robbery and kidnapping. I go, ‘Kidnapping, you think I was gonna hold this fucking migrant for ransom?’ Here’s this Mex, he don’t even know what’s going on. Had no idea, or prob’ly even to this day, I was gonna take him out’n the woods and shoot a hole in him, it hadn’t been for that trooper sitting there at the side of the road. That’s what you call one lucky Mexican, huh?” Richie stared through the windshield and said, “This road coming up looks good. Take a left.”

So they weren’t going to Detroit, Armand decided. They turned onto a gravel road, white in the headlight beams, and could hear stones hitting under the car, no houses in sight. They’d be stopping pretty soon.

Armand said, “So you been to prison.”

“Three different ones,” Richie said. “After I got out of Reidsville they sent me back to Florida on the warrant, but I beat that one, an armed robbery, on account of they couldn’t locate any their witnesses. Then I got sent to a federal joint for one of the banks I did. That was where I killed a guy and then some guys tried to kill me, so I was put in this federal protection program where you change your name and was transferred to Huron Valley. But, shit, I still got made, even with a different name. Some guys I was working with in the kitchen tried to poison me to death, so I was taken out of the population till I got my release. That was about two years ago. ...Hey, this’s good. See? Where that road is, less it’s somebody’s drive. No, it’s an old wore-out dirt road. Pull in there a ways and stop.”

Armand slowed and made the turn, headlights sweeping the corner of a plowed field and coming

to rest in a tunnel of trees.

“Okay, now lemme have your wallet.”

Armand leaned against the steering wheel to dig it out of his hip pocket, brought the wallet along his thigh and let it drop on the floor. He reached for it with his head turned, seeing the guy past his shoulder. The guy wasn’t even looking. The guy was hunched over trying to get the glove compartment open.

“This thing locked?”

“Push the button,” Armand said, his hand finding the grip of the Browning automatic, right there with the seat pushed back. He brought the pistol up between his legs and was reaching down again when the guy looked at him.

“The hell you doing?”

“You want my wallet?” Armand came up with it. “Here.”

But Richie was holding the car registration in one hand and his revolver in the other. The glove compartment was open now, a light showing inside. He said, “Shit, this isn’t even your car. What’s L and M Distributing, Limited?”

“They sell pepperoni,” Armand said, “to places they make pizza.”

“Yeah? You work for them?”

“Sometimes, when I feel like it.”

“And they let you use this car?”

“They gave it to me. It’s mine.”

“Gave you a Cadillac, huh?”

Armand watched the guy take the wallet and try to open it with one hand. He watched the guy lay the revolver on his lap and hold the wallet with one hand and take the currency out with the other and then hunch over, holding the money close to the glove-compartment light, to look at it.

“What’s this, all Cannuck?”

“Most of it.”

“It’s pretty but, shit, what’s it worth?”

Armand laid both hands on his lap as he watched the guy riffle through the currency, counting numbers, getting an idea of how much was in the wad.

“Man, you got about a thousand here.”

“Same as that lucky Mexican, ’ey?”

The guy, still hunched over, said, “The hell you do they pay you this kind of dough?”

Armand felt himself changing back, no longer Armand Degas, dumb guy taken for a ride. He was the old pro again as he came up with the Browning auto and touched the muzzle to the side of the punk’s head.

“I shoot people,” the Blackbird said. “Sometimes for money, sometimes for nothing.”

Without moving his head or even his eyes, star

ing at that wad of cash, Richie Nix said, “Can I tell

you something?”

“What?”

“You’re just the guy I’m looking for.”

3

THE DAY THE REAL ESTATE SALESMAN showed the Col-sons the house, five years ago, he told them it was built in 1907 but was like new. It had vinyl siding you never had to paint covering the original tulip-wood. You had your own well, you had a Cyclone fence dog-run there, if the Colsons happened to have a dog.

Carmen Colson said, “No, but we have a car and a pickup truck and I don’t see a garage anywhere.”

They were standing on the side porch off the kitchen, toward the rear of the two-story Dutch Colonial. The real estate man said, well, it didn’t have a garage, but there was a marvelous old chickenhouse out there. See it? Carmen’s husband, Wayne, said, “Jesus, look at that!” Not meaning the chickenhouse. There was a whitetail doe standing way back against the tree line, off beyond a field growing wild. As soon as he said it Carmen knew they were going to buy the place. It didn’t matter the front hall was bigger than the sitting room, the closets were tiny and wasps were living upstairs in the bedrooms. There were deer on the property. Twenty acres counting the field that ran nearly a quarter of a mile from the house to the tree line and all the rest woods connecting to other woods the real estate man said, you bet, were full of deer.

Carmen said to her husband, after, “Hon, I was born in a house newer than that one.” At this time five years ago they’d been living in one a lot newer, too, a crackerbox ranch in Sterling Heights, ever since they got married.

Wayne said sure, it was old, but look at its possibilities. Knock out a wall here and there, do a little remodeling, the kind of work he could handle, no problem. Wayne said, “You sit in that back bedroom window upstairs. It’s like looking out a deer blind.”

Their only child, Matthew Colson, transferred to Algonac High, where he starred three years as a wide receiver, power forward and third baseman for the Muskrats, won nine varsity letters, graduated, joined the U.S. Navy and was now serving aboard a nuclear carrier, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, in the Pacific. The front hall was still bigger than the sitting room and the closets tiny; but the wasps were gone from upstairs, Carmen had removed all the paint from the woodwork and they now had a two-car garage. In one half of it was Wayne’s sixteen-foot aluminum fishing boat on a trailer. Their Oldsmobile Cutlass went in the other half, because Carmen got home from work a good hour before Wayne’s Dodge Ram pickup would pull into the drive. Wayne was an ironworker and ironworkers stopped to have a few once they came down off the structure.

Carmen’s dad, now retired and living in Florida, had been an ironworker. Her parents were divorced when she was seventeen, the same year she graduated from high school a straight-A student and her dad took her to the Ironworkers Local 25 picnic. This was where she met Wayne Colson, a young apprentice they called Cowboy, blond-haired and tan wearing just athletic shorts and work shoes, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. She watched him look over his bare shoulder at her as he put on his gloves, getting ready for the column-climbing contest. It was where they used just their hands and feet to go straight up a ten-inch flanged beam staked to the ground and held in place by a crane. Carmen watched Wayne Colson climb that thirty-five-foot beam like it was a stepladder and fell in love as he came sliding down the flange in seven seconds flat, muscles tensed in his arms and back, and looked over at her again.

That summer Carmen would borrow the car, drop her mom off at Michigan Bell, where she worked as a telephone operator, then drive forty miles to happen by the building site where Wayne was working. She could pick him out—standing up there on that skeleton of red iron, shirt off, hard hat on backward, God, maybe nine or ten stories in the air—because once he spotted the car he’d wave. Then he’d stand on one foot on that narrow beam, the other foot out behind him, his hand flat above his eyes in kind of an Indian pose and she’d just about have a heart attack. Sundays they’d go for a ride and he’d show her office buildings in Southfield he’d bolted up, Carmen imagining him climbing columns, walking beams, fooling around way up there in the air. Wasn’t he ever scared? Wayne told her there was no difference between being up forty feet or four hundred; go off from either height it would kill you. If you had to fall, he told her, try to do it inside the structure, because they decked in every other floor as they bolted up. But either way, falling inside or out, it was called “going in the hole.” Wayne let seventeen-year-old Carmen heft his tools, his spud wrench, his sleever bar, his bull pin, the sledge he called a beater they used for driving the bull pin to line up bolt holes that weren’t centered. He buckled his tool belt around her slim hips and she could barely move with the weight of it. He handed her a yo-yo, the thirty-five-pound impact wrench they used for bolting up, and Carmen had to tense her muscles to hold it. He told her, hey, she was pretty strong, and said, “Don’t ever get hit on the head with one of these, some Joe happens to drop it.” He told her a Joe was an ironworker who couldn’t hack it. If you were in the trade and your name was Joe you’d better change it. He told her an apprentice was referred to as a punk. If a journeyman called you that, it wasn’t anything to get uptight about. He told her she was the best-looking girl he’d ever met in his entire life. She smelled so good, he loved to stick his nose in her dark-brown hair. He’d tell her he wanted to marry her, the sooner the better, and Carmen would get goose bumps.

Her mom, Lenore, said, “You’re crazy to even think about marrying an ironworker.” Carmen said, well, you did. Her mom said, “And I got rid of him, too, soon as you were of age. Ironworkers drink. They don’t come home from work, they stop off. Don’t you remember anything growing up? Us two eating alone? Doesn’t Wayne drink? If he doesn’t, they’ll throw him out of the local.”

Wayne said to Carmen, “Well, sure ironworkers drink. So do painters, glaziers, electricians, any trade I know of the guys drink. What’s wrong with that?”

Lenore said, “You are a lovely young girl with your whole life ahead of you. You’re smart as a whip, you got all A’s in school. You could go on to college and become a computer programmer. You keep seeing that ironworker he’ll talk you into doing things you’ll be sorry for. You’ll get pregnant sure as hell and then you’ll have to get married.”

Wayne said, “I would never make you do anything you don’t want to,” giving Carmen a wink.

Lenore said, “A girl as attractive as you, with your cute figure, can do better than an ironworker, believe me. You know what’s going to happen? You’ll be stuck in a house full of babies while he’s out having a good time with the boys. Once you’re married you’ll never see him.”

Wayne said, “What do I do? I go fishing once in a while, deer hunting in November. I’m in a softball league but you come to the games, and I bowl, yeah, but that’s all. No more than what other guys do.”

Lenore said, “At least live in Port Huron, so I can be nearby when you need company, ’cause you’re gonna.”

Carmen had taken a course in handwriting analysis, A Guide to Character and Personality, at the Y when she was a senior in high school. One evening in a bar, just to double-check her own judgment, she asked Wayne to write something, for instance about the job he was working on, and she’d analyze it. He didn’t even hesitate. She watched as he wrote fairly fast with a moderate right-handed slant, forming large letters of uniform size. Carmen was relieved to tell him his writing showed he was reliable, enthusiastic and sociable—Wayne nodding—and that his big middle zone indicated the size of his ego, but was probably necessary for anyone who did structural work. She told him she liked his upper-zone dynamics, the way he crossed his t, putting the bar above the stem, pretty sure it meant he was witty in a satirical kind of way. The even pressure of his writing showed he had a strong will and that when he was told what to do it had better make sense. She said uneven pressure meant emotional instability. Wayne said, “Or your pen’s running out of ink.”

Carmen told her mom, see? He was not only reliable, he was funny. Lenore said, “How come I keep asking, but you never do my handwriting?” The reason was because Carmen knew her mom’s hand and had not seen anything good to say about it. Her uneven spaces and lack of style values showed indecision plus an inability to think clearly. She couldn’t tell her mom that, because her wide-spaced t stem showed she was easily hurt and would take offense.

Carmen and Wayne were married in Port Huron at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in May 1968. They moved into a two-bedroom ranch in Sterling Heights and Matthew was born the following March.

Within the next few years Carmen had a series of miscarriages due to what the doctor called endometriosis and finally had to have a hysterectomy. She was quiet for months, let her housework slip and watched TV thinking about the two boys and two girls she and Wayne had talked about having. Wayne told her Matthew was a handful and a half, that boy was plenty. Twice during her depression Wayne drove the three of them to Florida to see Carmen’s dad. Maybe getting out helped a little.

But Carmen brought herself back to life. She remembered her book on handwriting analysis saying that if you weren’t happy or lacked confidence in yourself you should examine your handwriting, paying particular attention to the way you wrote the personal pronoun I. As soon as Carmen got into it she said, “Holy shit.” Her handwriting was okay for the most part, but there was more of a backward slant to it now, it was light, weak, and look at the way she was making her I, like a small

2. That became the starting point, changing her capital I to a printed letter with no frills, like an l; that showed insight, an ability to analyze her own feelings. She devised a clear, straight up-and-down script, one that said she lived in the present, was self-reliant, somewhat reserved, a person whose intellect and reasoning power influenced emotions. It seemed so natural to write this way, making that I a bit taller as she practiced, keeping her letters squarely in the center of her Emotional Expression chart, that finally she had the confidence to write in her new script, “What are you moping around for? Get up off your butt and do something.”

Her mom retired from Michigan Bell but couldn’t stay away from the telephone. She’d call Carmen every day to give her recipes Carmen never used, or to talk about the weather in detail, the arrogance of doctors who made her wait knowing she was suffering excruciating back pain, eventually getting around to Wayne. “What time did the man of the house get home last night? If it was before seven you’re lucky, depending how you look at it. If you don’t mind that booze on his breath when he comes in and gives you a kiss then you’re different than I am, I won’t say another word.”

Wayne said, “You’d have to wire her jaw shut.”

He knew Lenore was talkative without ever having seen the way she left her vowels open at the top when she wrote. Her small d and g also.

Wayne would list different reasons why ironworkers stopped off after. It was too goddamn noisy to talk on the job and it sure wasn’t anyplace to get in an argument. Raising iron, it was best to extend a certain amount of courtesy to others and settle any differences you have on the ground. Also, structural work was stressful; you come down off a job you needed to unwind. Like walking a horse after a race.

Yeah, but why couldn’t he unwind at home? Carmen said she’d walk with him. Then sit down and have a beer and he could help Matthew with his homework for a change. Wayne said what was wrong with eating a little later? Carmen said yeah, eight or nine being the fashionable hour to dine in Sterling Heights.

She didn’t pout, whine or nag him. What Carmen did, once Matthew was in junior high, busy with sports after school, she got a job at Warren Truck Assembly on the chassis line. Wayne said if it was what she felt like doing, fine. What he said when she got home later than he did, Wayne in the kitchen frying hamburger for their starving boy, was, “What happened, you have car trouble?”

Carmen said, “I work a whole shift with that air wrench, eight hours bolting on drag links and steering arms in all that noise, I need to unwind after.”

Wayne said, “See? If you feel that way working on the line, imagine coming off a structure after ten hours.”

Carmen said, “I like to be with you.” She did, he was a nice guy and she loved him. What he drank never changed his personality, it made him horny if anything. “Isn’t there something we can do together?”

Wayne said, “Outside of visit your mom and pretend we’re as dumb as she is?”

“I mean some kind of work or business we could both get into,” Carmen said, “and be together more.”

“Wear matching outfits,” Wayne said, “and enter ballroom-dancing contests. Tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know, but it isn’t doing laundry and dusting and making pies. I don’t even know how to make pies.”

“I noticed that.”

“And I don’t care to learn, either.”

“You’re sorry now you didn’t become a computer programmer.”

“That must be it,” Carmen said. “I love machines that talk back to you, cars that tell you the door isn’t closed or you don’t have your seat belt on.”

“You want to be independent. Like me.”

Carmen said, “You guys are individualists all doing the same thing. Remember hippies? You’re like hippies only you work.” Wayne had to think about that one. She said, “I could stay at Warren Truck and work on the line. I think I can do anything I put my mind to. I could even go to apprentice school and become an ironworker.” She said, “You have women now—how does that sound to you?” knowing it would embarrass him, just the idea of it.

“We have one woman journeyman, I mean journey-person, and a half dozen apprentices out of twenty-two hundred in the local.” He told her you had to be a certain type to be an ironworker, man or woman. “You’re too sweet and nice and . . . girlish.”

She said, “Thanks a lot.”

They moved into the farmhouse and it kept her busy, Carmen doing more of the fixing up than Wayne, who was handier with a thirty-five-pound impact wrench than a hammer and saw. He borrowed a tractor with a brush-hog twice a year to keep the field cut and have a clear view of the tree line. Carmen, thinking of moneymaking ideas, got him to clean out the chickenhouse, believing someday it could be made into a bed-and-breakfast place; cater to duck hunters and boaters who came up from Detroit and got too smashed to drive home. Wayne said, “We’ll call it the Chickenshit Inn. I never seen so much chickenshit in my life as out there.” Carmen planted a vegetable garden in the backyard. Every spring Wayne put in a row of corn out by the woods and let the deer help themselves to it in August.

It wasn’t until Matthew left for the navy in January, their fifth year in the farmhouse, that Carmen took the real estate course at Macomb County Community College and went to work for Nelson Davies Realty. Wayne said if it made her happy, fine. She sold her first house in April. Wayne took her to Henry’s for dinner and listened to her tell how she’d closed the deal, Carmen glowing, excited, telling him what a wonderful feeling it was, like being your own boss. By June Carmen was offering the idea that real estate was the kind of thing they could maybe even do together, work as a team; it’d be fun. Wayne said he could see himself going back to school, Jesus. By August Carmen had him looking into the future, playing with the idea of eventually starting their own company. Wayne said, paperwork being so much fun. Now it was October and Carmen had Wayne at least agreeing to talk to Nelson Davies, a man who’d made millions in the business and wasn’t much older than Wayne. Wayne said he could hardly wait.

Carmen got home first and parked in the garage. A few minutes later, in the kitchen putting groceries away, she looked outside and saw Wayne’s pickup in the drive. It was half past six, getting dark. Wayne had been coming home earlier since Matthew left. Carmen went out to the porch. She was wearing her “closing suit,” a tailored navy; it was lightweight and she folded her arms against the evening chill in the air. Wayne was lifting fat paper sacks from the pickup bed, bringing four of them over to the porch steps.

“Sweet Feed,” Wayne said, looking up at Carmen on the porch. “It’s corn and oats, but that’s

what they call it.”

“I thought you meant me.”

“You’re tastier’n corn and oats. How’d it go?”

“I closed on a three-bedroom in Wildwood.”

“That’s the way.”

Wayne was wearing his ironworkers build america jacket. Carmen watched him turn to the truck, lift out a twenty-five-pound block of salt and place it on the grass next to the gravel drive. As Wayne straightened he said, “I saw Walter out on the road. He showed me whitetail tracks going all the way across his seeding to the state land.”

Walter, their neighbor, grew sod for suburban lawns. Carmen would think it was a strange way to make a living, watching grass grow.

Wayne came over to the steps with two more bags of Sweet Feed. “They love this stuff.”

“They think what a nice guy you are,” Carmen said. “Then you shoot them.”

“You don’t want to eat live venison,” Wayne said. “They’re hard to hold, and it’s not good for your digestion.” He stepped over to the truck, reached into the cab window and came out with paper sacks he handed up to Carmen. “This goes in the house.” She could tell from the weight what was inside. Boxes of 12-gauge hollow-point slugs.

“I don’t see how you can shoot them.”

“I can’t, less I get within fifty yards. Not with a slug barrel.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t see them as little Walt Disney creatures,” Wayne said, rolling up the cab window. “That’s the difference. You shoot some in the fall or they starve in the winter. Look at it that way.”

This was an annual exchange, Carmen giving her view without making a moral issue of it; Wayne seeing deer as meat, now and then citing a fact of ecology. Carmen raised her face as he came up on the porch. They kissed on the mouth, taking their time, and let their eyes hold a moment or so after. Twenty years and it was still good. She asked him how his job was going.

“I’m finished at Standard Federal. They want to put me on the detail gang, plumbing up, I said no way, I’m a connector, I’m not doing any tit work.”

“You didn’t.”

“I told ’em that—I want to take a few days off.”

“Good.”

“I’m gonna look at another job next week.” He told her there was a new basketball arena going up in Auburn Hills, fairly close by, except it was all precast, so he’d most likely go to work on the One-Fifty Jefferson project in Detroit, he believed was to be a hotel, thirty-two levels. He said he’d rather drive all the way downtown to a story job than work precast across the street. He said, “Lionel’s coming by tomorrow, we’re gonna look for antler scrapings.”

Carmen said, “Wayne?”

He moved past her and was holding the door open. “Let’s have a cold one. What do you say?”

“You promised you’d see Nelson tomorrow.”

“I did?”

“Come on, now don’t pull that.”

“I forgot, that’s all. What time?”

“Two o’clock.”

“That’s fine, Lionel’s not coming till four. He’s gonna take a look, see if there’s any white oak out there. I read that deer eat white-oak acorns like potato chips. They can’t stop eating them. I know there’s plenty of red oak.”

Carmen placed the sack of shells on the kitchen counter. Wayne got two cans of beer from the refrigerator, popped them open and handed her one. “You look nice. I’d buy a house off you even if I already had one.”

Carmen said, “You’re really going to talk to Nelson?”

“I can’t wait. You know how I love working for assholes.”

“Wayne, try. Okay?”

“You’re gonna be there, aren’t you?”

“I’ll be in the office. What’re you going to wear?”

“I don’t know—I have to get dressed up?”

“I think you should wear a suit.”

Wayne stepped to the counter, put his beer down and opened the sack. “I could. Or my sport coat.”

“And a tie?”

Wayne said, “I’ll wear a tie if you want,” taking the boxes of shotgun slugs from the sack. “I’m trying three-inch magnums this year. Lionel says they’ll ‘bull the brush,’ nothing like it out to fifty yards. Hit a buck you hear it slap home.”

Carmen said, “Wayne?”

“What?”

“How you look is important. The impression you make.”

He paused. She could see his mind still out in the woods for a moment. He took a sip of beer, the can almost hidden in his big hand, his wedding band, a speck of gold, catching light from the window. She would see him in the bathroom shaving, a pair of skimpy briefs low on his hard body and would think, My God, he’s mine. She wished she could take back what she’d said. He didn’t have to try to impress anybody.

“Wear what you want,” Carmen said, “be comfortable.”

“I wear my blue suit,” Wayne said, “and you wear yours, will that impress him?”

“Forget I said that, okay?”

Wayne sipped his beer, staring at her. He seemed to grin. “I like that short skirt on you. I bet Nelson does too.”

“If he does,” Carmen said, “it’s because when hemlines go up, so does the stock market. Nobody knows why. Then interest rates go down and we sell more homes.”

“Like the moon and the tides,” Wayne said, “is that it? Or the seasons of the year. Did you know hunting season comes when the does are in heat?” He reached into the sack again and took out a small plastic bottle fixed to a display card. “The bucks know it. They’re ready, so you use some of this. Foggy Mountain ‘Hot’ Doe Buck Lure.” He held it for Carmen to see, then read from the card. “‘A secret blend with pure urine collected from live doe deer during the hottest hours of the estrus cycle.’ ”

“You’re kidding,” Carmen said. “You put that on you?”

“You can, or sprinkle it around your blind. The buck smells it, he goes, ‘Man, I’m gonna get laid,’ and comes tearing through the woods. ...I was thinking,” Wayne said, “if we could invent something like this for the real estate business ...You know what I mean? Something you sprinkle on a house and all these buyers come running? What do you think?”

“I think you’re right,” Carmen said. “Wear the blue suit.”

“And my hard hat? It’s blue, it’d match nice.”

“Yeah, put it on backwards,” Carmen said.

“Just be myself, huh?”

“You can do whatever you want,” Carmen said, turning to look out the window at Wayne’s pickup and dead vines in the vegetable garden and the chickenhouse that would be a chickenhouse till it rotted and fell apart.

“What’re you mad at?”

“I’m not mad.”

“What are you, then?”

“I don’t know,” Carmen said. “If I find out I’ll tell you.”

4

IT WAS AFTER THEY CAME to Donna’s house in Marine City, Armand invited to spend the night, Richie started calling him the Bird. First, introducing him to this woman Donna as Mr. Blackbird, then right away saying, “Yeah, I ran into the Bird at Henry’s.” And a couple of minutes later, “Get me and the Bird a drink, will you?” Making it sound like they were old buddies and he’d always called him by that name. The funny thing was, Armand didn’t mind it.

The Bird. New name for the beginning of a new time in his life. Different, not so Indian-sounding as he played with it in his mind. Who are you? I’m the Bird. Not a blackbird or a seagull, but his own special kind. He liked the way Richie Nix said it, the guy sounding proud to know him, wanting to show him off. Donna came in from the kitchen with a dark drink in each hand. Richie said, “The Bird’s from Toronto,” and Donna said, “Oh? I was there one time, it’s real nice.”

Armand the Bird took a sip of the drink and wanted to spit it out. Jesus Christ, it was the worst thing he ever tasted. Richie said, “What’s wrong, Bird?”

The Bird becoming just Bird now.

“What is it?”

“That’s a Southern and Seven,” Donna said. “It’s our favorite.”

Armand, or whoever he was this moment, went out to the car, where he had four quarts of Canadian Club in the trunk, for the stay at his grandmother’s, and brought one of them inside. He said to Donna, “I don’t drink that. I only drink real whiskey.”

Once he made this known, Donna stuck close to Richie and didn’t say much, peering out through her big shiny glasses like some kind of bird herself, pointy face and a nest of red-gold curls sitting on her head. Hair fixed and face painted like she was going to the ball—except for her tennis shoes and the lint and hair all over her black sweater. Coming here after they’d stopped for drinks and had a talk, Richie Nix had said, “Wait till you meet Donna. She was a hack in the joint where I met her and got fired for fucking inmates, man, if you can believe it.”

The Bird didn’t care for what he saw of Donna, a woman who had to get it off convicts, or this dump she lived in, a little frame house he could tell in the dark coming here needed to be painted and was overgrown with bushes. He couldn’t see how two bedrooms would fit in here and how Richie Nix could sleep with that woman, if he did.

He didn’t care too much for Richie either, except the guy had nerve. With a gun against his head saying, “You’re just the guy I’m looking for.” To pull that off, get the Bird to believe it, took something that couldn’t be faked. Telling him, “No shit, I mean it. I’m glad this happened.” Telling him, “Man, you have to be somebody, drive a car like this, a piece under the seat.” Respect in his tone of voice. Then telling in detail about the deal he had going. The Bird listened and came to realize this punk actually had something, wasn’t making it up. It could even work. The Bird had seen enough variations of it in Toronto, all kinds of shakedowns and protection deals; he knew how to convince a slow pay to come up with what was owed. This one was different, a one-shot deal, but based on the same idea: scare the guy enough and he’ll pay every time.

There was one part of the deal that bothered him. He had to concentrate to think about it in this living room decorated with prison photographs on the walls: Donna in groups of officials and corrections officers; Donna with groups of inmates, one of them signed “To Donna ‘Big Red’ Mulry from the boys in E Block.” Pictures of Donna’s life behind walls, not wearing glasses in any of them. She and Richie were on the sofa watching television, a cop show with fast, expensive cars and Latin rock music. Richie saying now, “Look at that, Bird. I don’t believe it.” The Bird looked and didn’t believe it either, the cop acting emotional, broken up about something. Cops didn’t do that, they were cold fucking guys that never showed what they felt—if they felt anything. Here or across the river in Canada cops were the same. There were cops in Detroit right now investigating a homicide that happened this morning in a hotel and would not be broken up about the old guy or about the girl either. This guy Richie Nix, this punk, was grinning with a dreamy stupid look, the woman Donna moving her hand underneath his T-shirt that said it was nice to be nice. She had looked at it when they came in and said, “Oh, is that ever cute.” What was she trying to be, his mother or what? The Bird had asked what people called him and he said Richie, that was his name, Richie Nix. “Donna likes Dick,” he said, “if you know what I mean, but it isn’t my name.” There was an Elvis Presley doll in a white jumpsuit standing next to the stereo. There were stuffed animals on the sofa and chairs, little furry things, bears, a puppy dog, a kitty, there was a turtle, a Mr. Froggy ... This woman who used to be a hack, with her pile of hair and her glasses, was going to stuff Richie and use him as a pillow if she could. That was what it looked like.

The Bird got up out of his chair, walked over to the TV and turned it off. He heard the woman say, “Hey, what’re you doing?” When he looked at her she was sitting upright with her back arched, one leg underneath her.

“Time for you to go to bed.”

“I got news for you,” Donna said. “This is my house.”

“Yeah, and it’s a dump.”

She said, “Well, you certainly have your nerve.”

He said, “You want me to take you in there?”

Donna turned her head to look at Richie sitting next to her with his mouth open. Richie looked up at the Bird who waited, not saying anything. Now Donna was looking at him again. Still the Bird waited. After a moment she got up and walked out of the room. Richie called after her, “And close the door.” He grinned as they heard it slam.

“You phone the guy tomorrow morning,” the Bird said.

“What guy?”

The Bird moved to the sofa, taking his time, and sat down. “The real estate guy. You call him and say to bring the money out to one of the model homes, four o’clock in the afternoon. We’ll go out there before and take a look, decide which one.”

“Sounds good.”

“You know why we do it this way?”

“We’ll be out closer to the interstate.”

The Bird shook his head. “We do it because if there are cops, he tells them and that’s where they gonna be.”

Richie waited. “Yeah?”

“We go to his office before he leaves for the model home. Watch his place, we don’t see any cops around, or ones that could be cops, we go in. Say about two.”

5

NELSON DAVIES REALTY was in a big white Victorian home on St. Clair River Drive that Wayne thought looked like a funeral parlor. It must have belonged to somebody important at one time, probably a guy in shipping or lumber. Nelson Davies had added on a first-floor lobby in front with glass doors. But this house had so many wings and angles as it was, added on over the years, Wayne didn’t believe the modern front entrance made it look any worse.

Carmen had told him to park in back. Her car was there with two others. She seemed nervous the way she smiled, looking him over in his dark-blue suit, asking what happened to the handkerchief she’d put in the breast pocket. Nothing, he’d taken it out, that’s all. Then losing the smile as her gaze reached his tan scuffed work shoes.

She said, “Wayne . . .” disappointed, but that was all.

One of the things he liked most about Carmen— besides her brown eyes and the way she could give him a certain look after twenty years—was the fact she would never moan or wring her hands over something that couldn’t be changed. She might kick the lawnmower when it didn’t start; but something like this, she’d never go on about his work shoes. He followed her legs up the stairs, the skirt stretching around her neat fanny. Wayne loved Carmen’s legs in those skirts that came a few inches above her knees. He’d see her when he got home from work and have an urge to pull the skirt up around her hips. There were times he could tell she wanted him to and he did, the two of them alone in the house with Matthew gone.

Nelson Davies had the front office, a good size one. The first thing Wayne saw was the trophy-class buck mounted up on the striped wallpaper. Jesus, a twelve-point rack on it and the guy sold real estate.

“You never told me he was a hunter.”

“Nelson goes duck hunting,” Carmen said. “See the decoys?” There was an entire shelf of them behind the reddish-brown desk the size of a dining-room table. Mallards, greenheads, susies, one or two Wayne couldn’t identify right away. It didn’t matter, he was more interested in that trophy buck.

“He didn’t get that around here. He might’ve, but I doubt it.”

“He tells everybody he only went deer hunting that one time.”

“I bet he hit it with his car.”

Wayne looked around some more as Carmen told him Nelson was never late for his appointments and should be back any minute. Wayne asked how he would know what time it was from that thing. The clock on the wall didn’t have any numbers on it. Then saw another one between the ceramic lamp and the computer on the desk, a gold-plated alarm clock that looked like some kind of an award. Carmen told him to sit in Nelson’s chair, soft black leather with chrome trim, see what being the boss felt like. She left saying she’d get him a cup of coffee.

When she came back with it Wayne was sitting in the chair, his feet up on the desk, scuffed cowhide on polished teak.

“I think I like it.”

Carmen said, “See?” and left him there to go do some work.

Fool with papers, fill out different forms—what Wayne believed the real estate business was all about. Writing in numbers. There was a pile of forms on the desk. Escrow Closing Instructions. Seller’s Proceeds Net Out Work Sheet. Jesus. Mortgage Payoff/Assumption Request and Authorization. Wayne thinking, I can’t do it. He could read blueprints but not this shit. A Limited Service Agreement that was all fine print. A person could ruin their eyes selling real estate. Wayne looked at the computer, pressed a couple keys: it made clicking sounds but nothing happened. He got up and walked over to the big picture window, to sunlight and a clear blue sky, the river and the dark edge of Walpole Island over there. He thought of Lionel, coming to the house at four. He looked down at the roof of the lobby, with a little decorative slat fence around it, that stuck out a few feet below the window. What good was putting up that fence if there was no reason to go out on the roof? He would see this kind of bullshit ornamentation and be thankful he worked up on the iron.

A blue Cadillac pulled up to the house and parked on the street.

Wayne watched a guy come out of the car and toss his head, getting his hair out of his face as he looked up at the house; the guy wearing a sport coat that seemed too big for him in the shoulders, the sleeves too long. Another guy came around the back of the car buttoning his suit coat; this one older with a stocky build, his hair slicked back and shining in the sun. They reminded Wayne of the couple of guys who’d been given a bath and secondhand clothes at a street mission. As dressed up as they’d ever be. Not used to a residential neighborhood either, the way they looked up and down the street. Coming up the driveway they looked toward the back of the house, then turned into the walk and Wayne lost sight of them.

He returned to the desk, sat down and picked up a color brochure that described “Wildwood, modern living in a back-to-nature setting.” It showed model homes on a bare tract of land, some of it fill, some of it cleared, where they’d bulldozed out the existing trees. Why did they do that? Carmen said this way you could plant your own trees, sit out on the patio and watch them grow for the next fifty years. Saying it with a straight face. She’d do that and he’d have to think about how she meant it.

He looked up, hearing the door close.

The two guys from the Cadillac were standing in the office: the older, stocky one turning from the door as the skinny one, wearing sunglasses now, brushed his hair out of his face and looked around coming over to the desk. He opened his loose sport coat and put his hands on his hips. Now the older one was looking around the office. Both of them right at home. The skinny one grinned at Wayne as he said, “I told you you wouldn’t know which one I’m gonna be when I come in? Remember? Well, here I am.”

Wayne said, “What?”

“On the phone. Four days ago.”

“I think you want to talk to somebody downstairs,” Wayne said. “They’ll help you.”

The skinny one looked over at the older guy, who was studying the trophy buck now and didn’t seem to be paying attention. “You hear that? He’s playing dumb.”

“He’s fucking with you,” the stocky older guy said, still looking at the buck.

It caught Wayne by surprise. He eased up a little straighter in the leather chair, already feeling irritated, not caring much for their attitude. Now he was curious as well as irritated; but careful. He watched the skinny one come over and plant his hands on the desk to hunch in closer and stare at him through his sunglasses.

“Are you gonna give me a hard time? You know what I want. Where’s it at?”

He had a little diamond stuck to his ear.

Wayne said, “Where’s what at?” Staring back at the guy, barely able to see his eyes behind the glasses. Wayne wondered if the idea was not to be the first one to blink, then wondered if the guy had some kind of disease. He looked sickly, hardly any color in his face.

“You gonna try and tell me I never spoke to you?”

“No, I think what he saying,” the older guy said, coming over to the desk, “he don’t believe what you told him on the telephone. What could happen to him. So he’s fucking with you.”

The guy was Indian.

Wayne realized it for the first time. At least he was pretty sure, looking at the guy’s face now, close, the hair, the thick body in the tight suit. Indian or part Indian and something else familiar about him that made Wayne think of Walpole Island right away and Lionel, though Lionel didn’t sound like this guy. This guy had just the trace of an accent. Wayne didn’t know what kind, maybe French-Canadian. He began to see the Indian as the one to watch, though the skinny guy irritated him more.

“Show him you mean it,” the Indian said, standing close to the desk now, “how you can hurt his business.” He reached out, still looking at Wayne, and brushed the coffee mug with the back of his hand, tipping it over on Nelson Davies’s real estate papers. “Like a sign, ’ey? What can happen.”

The skinny one said, “Hey, yeah,” coming alive.

Wayne watched him grab the gold-plated alarm clock from the desk, look around for a target and throw it at the numberless clock on the wall. He missed, said, “Goddamn it,” picked up the coffee mug, threw it and missed again. He said, “Shit,” and now he looked mad, picked up the ceramic lamp and shattered it against the wall. It seemed to make him feel better. Now he was looking around for something else, the Indian patient, watching.

Wayne thought about getting up and walking out. What would they do? But he sat there, watching now as the skinny guy went over to the trophy buck, tossing his hair as he looked up at it, then jumped, grabbing hold of the antlers. He hung up there for a moment struggling with it, kicking against the wall, came down all of a sudden with the deer head, that beautiful twelve-point rack, and threw it across the room. Wayne saw him breathing hard, out of shape for a young guy, looking around for something else. Maybe the decoys, all of Nelson’s wooden ducks in a row. These guys could mess up the office, but there weren’t enough things to break. Unless they threw the decoys through that big picture window. Wayne thinking he could put the skinny one through it, no problem. The Indian might be more to handle.

The skinny one said to Wayne, “Am I making my point?”

The Indian shook his head. “You wasting your time.”

“Well, he’s gonna be a dead fucking real estate man he don’t give us the cash, I already promised him that.”

“Yeah, but he don’t believe you.”

“Then I’m gonna show him.”

Wayne said, “Okay, you win,” and pushed up from the chair. “I’ll get it for you. It’s downstairs.” He walked around the desk and the Indian stepped in front of him.

“I’ve seen you someplace.”

They were close enough that Wayne could see the guy’s eyes, a deep dark brown, calm but worn out, bloodshot. He smelled of after-shave. Wayne couldn’t name the brand, something cheap. For some reason it helped him remember where he had seen the Indian, the same place the Indian had seen him.Yesterday, in the variety store on Walpole Island.

“Where was that I saw you?”

There was the trace of an accent. Where was dat ...Wayne shrugged. He heard the skinny one say, “Let him by. I want to show him something.”

The Indian kept staring at him. He was a few inches shorter than Wayne but a good thirty pounds heavier. The skinny one was saying it again, “Will you let him by?” The Indian took his time, none of his moves hurried, and the skinny one was waiting, anxious to have his turn. He moved in to stand even closer than the Indian, his sunglasses about level with Wayne’s eyes, right there, like he was a big-league manager and Wayne was an umpire about to get chewed out.

The skinny guy said, “Remember me telling you I’ve killed people? I want to be sure you believe it.”

Wayne didn’t. Not from what he saw of this skinny guy’s face, imperfections all over it, lack of character hiding behind the sunglasses. Even if he’d been told, he wouldn’t believe it. Till the guy’s hand came up from somewhere with a big nickelplate revolver and stuck the barrel under Wayne’s nose, giving it a nudge. Wayne tried to raise his head believing now, yes, it was possible.

Very gently he pushed aside the gun barrel with the tips of his fingers, still looking at the guy’s sunglasses, and said, “I never doubted for a minute.”

“I want you to be sure,” the skinny guy said to him. “So you know what can happen to you.”

Wayne felt himself shoved from behind, the Indian saying, “He believes you, okay? Let’s go.”

They went downstairs, Wayne leading. He paused in the foyer to say, “It’s this way,” and took them along the remodeled hall past rows of office cubicles partitioned in panels of knotty pine and frosted glass, most of them empty. Carmen’s desk was at the end of the row, on the right. He didn’t want her to be there. But she was, talking on the phone. Wayne saw her look up, saw her eyes, her surprised expression, as they walked past and came to a glass door in the rear of the house. Wayne was pulling the door open when the Indian placed his hand against the glass. He held it, looking out at the gravel parking area in the backyard.

“It’s in your car?”

The skinny one, anxious, said, “Where else would it be? He’s taking it out to that house I told him.”

The Indian said, “Okay, let’s go.”

Wayne pulled the door open. He was stepping outside when he heard Carmen’s voice behind him, raised, coming from the hall, “Wayne?” but didn’t turn or even pause. He kept going, hearing the Indian say, “Who’s Wayne?” and the skinny one, closer to him, say, “Who cares? Somebody works there.” Then saying, “You drive a truck?” as Wayne approached the side of the pickup bed and reached over to work the combination on the metal tool box. Wayne said, “When I go out on the job, yeah,” slipping the lock off, lifting the lid and reaching in with his right hand. He heard the Indian say, “There’s a woman there, watching us,” Wayne’s hand touching cold metal now, a spud wrench, a bull pin next to it—too short—his hand groping until it found the sleever bar, thirty slender inches of solid metal, about three pounds worth, one end flat for prying. Wayne gripped it hearing the skinny guy say, “What’re you doing?” The Indian saying, “She still watching us.” The skinny one, closer to him, saying, “Come on, will you?” His hand still in the tool box, Wayne turned his head enough to see the skinny one right there and the Indian a few feet behind him, looking toward the office.

“I found it.”

The skinny one said, “Well, gimme it.”

And Wayne said, “Here.”

***

Carmen saw it through the glass door, the heavyset man in the way at first because he was watching her and looked as though he might come back inside.

She saw Wayne come around from the truck with the sleever bar a flash of metal, knew what it was and saw the one with the hair twisting away, sunglasses flying and the metal bar raking him across the shoulders. He stumbled, yelling at Wayne, but didn’t fall down, not that time, not until Wayne swung at his legs, going for his knees. The guy was jumping back as Wayne connected, hitting him low in the thighs, and his legs went out from under him. Carmen saw the heavyset man hurrying to get his suit coat unbuttoned, Wayne after him now, raising the bar to swing it at him, the heavyset man reaching into his coat, but had to bring his hands out fast to protect himself, hunching, and Wayne hit him twice across the arms, high, around the shoulders, the man trying to cover his head, and that was when Wayne swung the metal bar with both hands, like a baseball bat, and slammed it into the man’s stomach, hard. The man doubled over, bringing his arms down, and Wayne hit him across the back two-handed, coming down with the bar, twice, and the man dropped to his hands and knees in the gravel, then onto his elbows and knees, covering his head again with his big hands. But it wasn’t finished. Carmen saw the other one, the one with the hair, getting to his feet with his head down, trying, it looked like, to get his belt undone and shove one hand into his pants. She saw him look up as Wayne came at him swinging and this time he dodged out of the way and went into a crouch facing Wayne, Wayne circling him, it looked as though to keep him in the yard, backing him this way toward the house, Wayne stalking him with the sleever bar. It amazed her, she had never seen that cold, intent look on her husband’s face before. She saw the heavyset man still on the ground. Then got a shock to see the one with the hair coming right to the door, one hand holding his groin, his face close for a moment through the glass, white and drawn, then ugly, turning into some kind of wildman, as he banged against the door. She tried to hold it shut but he pushed through, knocking her against the wall and ran past her toward the front. Carmen hung on to the door, holding it open for Wayne, and yelled after him running up the hall, “Wayne, he’s got a gun!” Wayne yelled something back over his shoulder but she didn’t know what it was he said, he was moving away from her fast, intent on getting the one with the hair.

***

Carmen would tell later that she saw the gun, or what she thought was a gun, when Wayne came downstairs and walked by her office followed by the two men and the one with the hair had hesitated for a moment to look at her. She saw what she believed was a gun in his belt. When Wayne hit him the gun must’ve slipped down and he was holding it against his groin as he ran into the office, so it wouldn’t fall down his pants leg. Carmen said she didn’t find out until later that what Wayne had yelled at her was to call the police.

What she did was run after them, up the hall and the stairs to the second floor, where she saw Wayne going into Nelson’s office. By the time she got there...

Carmen would tell what happened next in a quiet voice, looking off, separating it step by step in her mind, seeing it, she said, almost in slow motion.

“I saw Wayne from behind. He was in the middle of the room. The one with the hair was by the window, with his pants open in front. He was wearing cowboy boots. As Wayne moved toward him he pulled the gun—it had a bright metal finish—out of his pants. He was raising it when Wayne threw the sleever bar at him. But it missed. The man ducked, twisting around, and the sleever bar went through that big window in front, smashing the glass. But because the man turned away as he ducked, it gave Wayne time to grab him. That was when the gun fired. It fired again, it fired three times altogether. Wayne had hold of his arm with one hand and his clothes, the front of his coat, with the other and was shoving him toward the window. Somehow Wayne had a good enough grip to pick him up, not much but I saw the cowboy boots off the floor, his legs kicking as Wayne gave him a shove and he went out through the broken window. I ran into the room thinking for sure Wayne had been shot, but he was all right, he was looking out the window as I reached him and looked out, expecting to see the man lying on the roof that was just below the window, but he wasn’t. It was all covered with broken glass. Then I noticed the little fence around the roof was broken off and hanging down where he had fallen through it to land on the ground. I didn’t see him though. That is, not right away. The one I saw first was the heavyset older man, going toward a car parked on the street and looking this way. Not at us, he was looking at the other one, with the hair. We both saw him then, running across the front lawn away from the office, running but limping. When he got to the car he turned around and fired his gun twice, but I don’t think he hit the house even. The heavyset one pushed him and it looked like they started to argue with each other, the younger one pointing this way. I think there was blood on his face and the front of his jacket. The heavyset one gave him another shove and got him in the car. Then he went around to the driver’s side and got in. They made a U-turn and drove away, north.”

Carmen noticed the police called her Carmen and Wayne Wayne, but they called Nelson Davies Mr. Davies. He had arrived with the police, Nelson wearing a suit and tie as always, a matching hanky in the breast pocket.

The questioning was done in the office lobby, Carmen telling her story several times: to the local Algonac officers, both of them who were on duty, to investigators from the Michigan State Police, an officer from the Township Police and four deputies from the St. Clair County Sheriff’s office. All those different uniforms. She could see Wayne was irritated. First, because he was supposed to meet Lionel and had to stay here and second, because of the way they asked him questions, almost as though what happened was his fault. Beginning with, What was he doing in Mr. Davies’s office?

Did he tell the two guys he was Mr. Davies?

Did he let them think it?

Did he try to get tough, antagonize them?

Did he realize he could have endangered the lives of the other people in the office?

Wayne said that was why he got the two guys out of there. They were so sure he had the money, he didn’t see any choice but let them think it.

They wanted to know if he was trying to kill them with that crowbar.

Wayne said it was a sleever bar, or some guys called it a connecting bar or rod, they used it in their work to pry the ends of iron beams, get them to fit snug. He said if his intention was to kill those two guys he would’ve gone for their heads. He said, “What I don’t understand, why don’t you go over to Walpole and find out who drives an ’86 Cadillac? That shouldn’t be too hard.”

Some of the police didn’t care for this kind of talk. One of the sheriff’s deputies asked Wayne if he had an attitude problem. Wayne, who’d walk off a job if the raising-gang foreman showed poor judgment, said, “No, sir, I’m just curious why you’re sitting around here with your finger up your butt.”

Carmen didn’t blame him for being arrogant. Especially when the deputy told Wayne if the guy he’d thrown out the window was seriously injured, the guy could take him to court. Wayne said, “It might be the only way you’ll ever see him.”

They were the ones with the attitude. Carmen saw them as either very serious and impersonal, not showing any kind of sympathy except to Nelson, or they were condescending and treated her like a child. “Now, Carmen, you think you can tell us again exactly what you saw?” And she’d hear Wayne say, “Jesus Christ.” At one point Nelson asked her to make a fresh pot of coffee for the officers. She didn’t dare look at Wayne.

He showed his irritation while she managed to keep hers inside. Until, listening to Nelson and the police talking, it sounded as though they’d known about the two guys all along. When Carmen asked Nelson about it he said, “Well, of course. One of them called me.”

“But you didn’t tell anybody,” Carmen said.

“I told the police.”

“I mean any of us, my husband.”

“Because the guy called again and changed the arrangement,” Nelson said. “If he was coming to Wildwood then we had to, well, the police had to set up a surveillance. We had to think of the safety of the homeowners out there.”

Carmen listened to Nelson saying he wished the two guys had come out to Wildwood. They sure would never have suspected those people raking leaves were police officers.

“You could’ve called Wayne, told him not to come.”

Nelson said, “What?” He said, “To tell you the truth I didn’t think he was coming anyway. Or if he did it would only be, well, as a courtesy.”

“To humor me?” Carmen said.

Nelson grinned. “You said it, I didn’t.” He looked over at Wayne. “Am I right? Don’t answer if it’ll get you in trouble.”

Wayne said, “Are we through?”

It was after six by the time they got home. Wayne popped open beers. He handed one to Carmen sitting at the kitchen counter. She took a sip and looked up at him.

“When Nelson mentioned the cops out at Wildwood raking leaves, I thought of saying, ‘You must’ve had leaves hauled in, ’cause there sure aren’t any trees out there.’ ”

“You should’ve.”

After a minute Carmen said, “All those guys acted so ... sure of themselves.”

“Like they know what they’re doing.”

After another minute she said, “What an ass-hole.”

“Which one?”

“Nelson, who else? I should’ve figured him out before this, just from the way he makes his lower loops.”

Wayne said, “His lower loops, uh?”

“In his writing. The way he makes them, you know, very elaborate, ornate, it means he’s pre

occupied with himself. His upper loops are okay, they show mental alertness.” “What’s that prove?” Wayne said. “You have to be mentally alert to be a good bullshitter?” “Well, I know one thing,” Carmen said, “I’m

not gonna work for that jerk anymore.” Wayne raised his beer can to her. “Some good has come of this after all.”

6

ARMAND HAD THOUGHT he liked being called Bird, but now he wasn’t so sure. Not the way Richie, bleeding all over himself, kept moaning, saying to him, “Bird, you have a hanky? Man, I’m cut bad. Bird, get me to Donna’s.” Saying Donna knew first aid. Richie had a cut on his chin where he went through the window and landed on the broken glass. That’s all was wrong with him, a cut and sore knees he kept rubbing, getting blood on his pants. Armand had a sore back and ribs where the guy had worked him over with the iron bar, a tough guy. They had to run into one of those, not only a tough guy but the wrong guy. Armand believed the blood on Richie made the injury look worse than it was.

He said, “Let me see,” and looked over as Richie raised his chin. “You could use a few stitches, that’s all.”

They drove through Marine City, passed the street that went to Donna’s street and Richie got

excited. “Stop. Where you going?”

“Over to Sarnia.”

“That’s in Canada.”

“We can’t drive around in this car,” Armand said. “The guy saw it.”

The guy who was no real estate man and also the woman. They had both gotten a good look at the car. Armand remembered who the guy was now, with that same pickup truck as yesterday. The guy with ironworkers on the back of his jacket talking to Lionel Adam in Island Variety.

He was pretty sure the woman worked at the real estate office. He could see her now, looking out the back door at them, getting a good look. She was the one that had called out a guy’s name, probably the ironworker’s, but Armand couldn’t think of it now.

He was too busy seeing what could happen to him. If he was picked up, the ironworker and the real estate woman would say, yeah, he’s the guy. Pretty soon the police would find out where he’s from and that he’s driving a car owned by the son-in-law of a guy, also from Toronto, who was shot and killed yesterday in Detroit. Armand knew one thing for sure: he couldn’t let this get to where they looked him up on their computer machine.

Now Richie was saying that he was going to get the son of a bitch. “I promised him and I will.”

“Which son of a bitch?” Armand asked him.

“The real estate guy. Why didn’t you shoot? They’re standing right there in the window, Bird. There’s the guy big as life. Why didn’t you fucking shoot?”

“That’s the guy you want, ’ey?”

“Man, you had him.”

There was so much this punk didn’t know.

“Let me tell you something, okay?”

“What?”

“That wasn’t the real estate guy.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I’ll explain it to you sometime. What I want to tell you now, the only time you take out your gun and aim at somebody is when you gonna kill them.”

“You could’ve back there.”

“No, no could’ve. Only when you know you can do it. Then all it takes is one shot. It’s the same as with a hunter, a guy that knows what he’s doing. He don’t take the shot if he thinks he could miss, or might only wound it. See, then he has to go find the animal to finish it. Okay, what if it’s a kind of animal that could eat him up? Like a lion that’s mad now ’cause it’s shot and waits to jump out at the guy. You understand? That’s why you always make sure. One shot, one kill.”

“Man, I’m bleeding something fierce.”

“Don’t get it on the seat. What I’m saying, you don’t want to have to shoot anything more than once.”

“I’m in fucking pain.”

This guy was not only a punk, he was a baby.

“We gonna take you to a hospital,” Armand said.

“In Sarnia?”

“I think it’s St. Joseph’s. I’ll know it when I see it. Me and my brothers went there one time to kill a guy.”

Richie said, “No shit,” quieter.

This was how you got his attention, tell him how the big boys did it.

“None of that bullshit,” Armand said, “like in the movie you see the guy who’s gonna do it come in the hospital? Then you see him go in a room and close the door. He comes out, he has a white coat on and everybody’s suppose to think he’s a doctor. This guy nobody in the hospital ever saw before.”

“Or the janitor,” Richie said. “I’ve seen it where the guy’s suppose to be a janitor. With a mop, you know, and a bucket? Yeah, nobody says, ‘Hey, who the fuck are you?’ ”

“Listen, okay? You want to learn something?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“We get to the floor, one of my brothers holds the elevator. My other brother, this kind of setup, watches for anybody that might come along.” Armand thinking, Like a nurse. But didn’t say it. He paused, still thinking of a nurse and what happened after, months later . . .

Until Richie said, “This’s at night?”

It brought Armand back. “Yes, it’s at night. I go in the room where the sick guy is—I think he had a heart attack. I mean why he was there. I pull the sheet up over his face and pop him. Once.” Armand took his hand from the steering wheel and pointed to his mouth. “Right here. One shot.”

“One shot, one kill,” Richie said. “What’d the guy do?”

“He died.”

“I mean what’d he do you had to blow him away?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not any of my business, it was a job.”

“You blow a guy away, it’s none of your business?”

“Whatever he did isn’t, no.”

“Were you pissed off at him?”

“I didn’t know him. Don’t you understand nothing?”

“To me, that doesn’t make sense,” Richie said. “Me, I have to be pissed off at the guy. Like you know, he doesn’t do what I tell him.”

Driving along the river road toward Port Huron Armand turned to look at Richie, blood all over him, holding the bloody handkerchief to his chin. Some things maybe you couldn’t explain to a guy like this.

They crossed into Canada over the Blue Water Bridge. It was midafternoon. The customs officer in his uniform checked the Ontario license plate and asked where they lived. Armand said, Toronto; they were here looking for work at the oil refinery. The customs officer hunched over to stare through the window at Richie, at the dark stains on his coat. He asked where they’d been. Armand said they went to Port Huron, to fool around, and his friend cut himself trying to open a beer bottle with his mouth. The customs officer said, “That’s kind of stupid, isn’t it?” Armand told him his friend was a stupid guy. It was the only thing he said that was true. The customs man shook his head and waved them on.

Armand parked by the hospital emergency entrance. He let Richie go in alone and waited in the car so he could take this time to think, plan ahead.

They would return south along the Canadian side of the river. Take Vidal Street out of Sarnia, he remembered that from nine years ago with his brothers. Go down past miles of petroleum and chemical works, Ontario Hydro, another name he remembered. Go all the way to Wallaceburg, yeah, and then cross that swing bridge over the Snye River and you were on Walpole Island. Like coming in the back door.

He didn’t believe Richie had ever killed anybody. Okay, maybe with a shiv one time in prison. But he would be surprised if Richie had ever used a gun, as he said to blow a guy away. That was something he picked up at the movies, that blowing away. Armand tried to think how his brothers used to say it. They would say they were going to do a guy. Or they might say so-and-so got popped. Maybe because when you used a suppressor it made a popping sound, like an air rifle. The old man’s son-in-law would ask if he’d go see somebody. Go see a guy. No one Armand could think of ever used the word kill. Maybe because it was a mortal sin.

Wait a minute. Armand remembered now that Richie had used the word kill....No, that was when he was in prison and killed a guy and some other guys had tried to kill him. The migrant worker, the hitchhiker he picked up, he said he would have robbed the guy and shot a hole in him if the cop hadn’t been there. But that one, and Richie saying he had blown people away during holdups, robbing a store one time and a gas station, didn’t make sense. Killing a person without a good reason. Or, as he said, because he was pissed off. That was how a punk would imagine it and make up a story.

He did shoot at the guy in the real estate office.

Yeah, because he was scared to death. He had to.

One thing for sure, if Richie had never shot anybody he was anxious to try it. See what it was like to use a gun.

Armand thinking, Yes, you could help him out there. Show him where to point it. This guy had to be good for something.

The ten stitches in his chin didn’t keep Richie from talking. Only now he barely opened his mouth when he spoke and was hard to understand. Armand was getting tired of saying “What?” every time Richie asked him something. Now he wanted to know where they were going. Wasn’t that the guy Lionel’s house they went by?

“That’s right,” Armand said, “and his wife was there. We got enough people already have seen this car.”

“I told you, take it to Detroit and let it get stolen,” Richie said. “Now where we going?”

They were crossing a short span of bridge over one of the many channels in these flats. “Now we’re on Squirrel Island,” Armand said. “It’s like part of Walpole. I want to see if it’s a good place.”

“I think down in the marsh is better,” Richie said.

He was probably right. Armand, letting the Cadillac coast to a stop in the dirt road, remembered this island green with corn in the summer. Now it was all dead, rows of withered stalks as far as you could see, reaching way over to that freighter in the ship channel. It got Richie excited.

“Look at that. Like it’s going through the cornfield. Over at Henry’s you see them, it’s like they’re in the woods. Now where we going?”

“Back,” Armand said.

Back across Walpole, following roads through deep woods to the other side, to Lionel’s house on the Snye River. Richie saying, “Now let me get this straight. This guy’s Indian, but used to be an ironworker. Same as the guy you’re trying to tell me isn’t the real estate man.”

“Believe me,” Armand said.

“Well, what was he doing there?”

“I don’t care,” Armand said, “long as you know what we have to do. There’s the house. Good, his wife’s gone.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s right there—you see him? And the truck’s gone that was there.”

“That’s him, huh? Not a bad-looking house—I mean for an Indian. Shit. What’s he doing?”

It was a little white-frame place set among willows: a window, a door, a window. A bike in the yard. Lionel was on the front stoop, taking the screen out of the aluminum door and putting in the storm pane for winter. Armand didn’t see anyone else around. Lionel had a couple of grown kids, gone, and one that was a baby when Armand was here last. He turned into the worn tire tracks that extended past the house to a shed where Lionel kept his muskrat traps and decoys, fishnets hanging from the roof. Lionel was looking this way now. Hands on his hips, not very anxious to see company. Beyond the house was the wooden dock on the river, where Lionel’s outboard was tied. Lionel was coming across the yard now, swinging his leg.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Get him to tell you.”

“He looks more Indian than you, Bird.”

They got out of the car. Armand said, “Lionel, this guy wants to do some duck hunting.” He didn’t bother to introduce them. Lionel had stopped, hands beneath his folded arms in a sweat shirt, not ready to shake hands anyway. Not too happy to see them.

Though he said, “Wants to knock down some ducks, ’ey?”

Armand said, “You see this guy’s chin? He was putting up his storm windows and fell off the ladder, cut himself up so he can’t work. I said, ‘Well, let’s go duck hunting.’ How does it look? You free tomorrow?”

Lionel acted as if he had to think about it. “I don’t know, maybe. I can go out later, see if it’s gonna be any good, any ducks landing.”

“Where, down the marsh?”

Lionel turned, looking off at layers of clouds with dark undersides. “I go down by St. Anne’s, see how it is. Maybe, I don’t know.”

“We could go now,” Armand said, “take a ride in your boat. Richie hasn’t ever seen a marsh.”

“I’ve seen one. Shit, I’ve even seen this one.” Armand gave him a look, staring hard, and Richie said, “But I’ve never been like in one. In a boat.”

“You guys,” Lionel said, smiling a little, “you want to go like that?”

Armand buttoned his suit coat and held his hands out. “What’s the matter? I always wear this when I go duck hunting. How about him?” Armand hooked a thumb at Richie, blood all over his sport coat. “Couple of dudes, ’ey?” He moved toward Lionel saying, “Come on, let’s go,” extending his hand to touch Lionel’s arm. Lionel turned away, swinging his leg out to walk off. Following him around back and along a path to the river, Armand said, “Tell this guy—Lionel? Tell him how you fell and hurt yourself.”

“That’s what happened,” Lionel said.

“Tell him how high up you were.”

“Seventy feet.”

Richie, following Armand, said, “Shit, and it didn’t kill him?”

“Tell him what you landed on. What do you call those things? They stick out of concrete.”

“Retaining rods,” Lionel said.

“Retaining rods,” Armand said over his shoulder, “they put in concrete. He landed on one of those things, sticking straight up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Richie said.

“Like he sat down in it.”

“Jesus Christ—it went up his ass?”

“It hit him under his butt,” Armand said over his shoulder as they came to the boat dock: a plank walk that extended out into the river, Lionel’s aluminum boat with its forty-horse Johnson tied alongside.

Lionel turned to them, saying, “The rod went through me and came out my back here, at my kidney. Where it used to be.”

“Jesus Christ,” Richie said.

“He only has one kidney,” Armand said.

“I lost the kidney, I broke both my feet and my legs and had to get a new plastic kneecap, this one,” Lionel said. “But I was lucky, ’cause if I didn’t land on that retaining rod I’d be dead. It slowed me down.” He moved toward the boat saying, “What else you want to know?” and began to free the line.

Armand said, “Ten, twelve years ago, ’ey?”

“More than that. It was when we were building the Renaissance Center, over in Detroit. More like fourteen years now.” He was holding the boat for them, offering a hand. Armand, stepping aboard, gripped Lionel’s hand. Richie ignored it.

“You were talking to a guy yesterday,” Armand said, “I notice was an ironworker.”

“Yeah, he was on that job too,” Lionel said. “I think it was the first time I met him. He was a punk then.”

“But not now, ’ey?”

“A punk,” Lionel said, coiling the line, “is what ironworkers call an apprentice. No, believe me, he’s no punk now.”

“What’s his name?”

Armand waited. Lionel was looking toward the house and was thinking about something or maybe didn’t hear him.

“I should have left my wife a note,” Lionel said. “She drove our girl to go ice-skating, over the sports arena.”

Armand looked toward the house, then up at Lionel on the dock. “This won’t take long.”

A lake freighter appeared, a small one but towering over them as it passed, Lionel saying it was going up to Hazzard Grain in Wallaceburg, Lionel now telling them things without being asked.

At first it was like any river with land on both sides, tree lines and thickets Lionel called “the bush.” But as they moved south the banks of the Snye changed to marshland, reeds and cattails as far as Armand could see from low in the boat. Now it was like a river that ran through weeds growing out of the water. He said, “Where’s the land? There’s no place you can get out.”

Lionel seemed to smile. He was not so serious now guiding his boat, the forty-horse Johnson grumbling in the water. Pointing then to an opening in the marsh bank he said, “That swale there— when the water’s up you punch your boat through there, find some muskrat.”

Richie, in the bow, said, “Where? I don’t see any muskrats.”

“They seen you first,” Lionel said. “I had a trap I’d stick it in there. That’s where they crawl up.”

“You eat ’em?”

“If you want,” Lionel said. “You can barbecue muskrat, the way I like it, or make a stew. See, but they’re bottom feeders so a lot of people won’t eat them, afraid they gonna get some toxic-waste dressing in their meat.”

Richie said, then what good were they? Lionel told him a nice pelt was worth six-fifty and Richie said, shit, was that all?

“Watch the sky,” Lionel said. “You want ducks, we have to see where they land.”

“My jaw hurts,” Richie said, “and I’m cold.”

It made Armand think of summer, being here a long time ago when it was hot. “It looks different— all this water.”

“Maybe you never came down this far,” Lionel said, “you and your brothers. There aren’t no cats or dogs here to shoot.”

“Keep talking like that,” Armand said, “I’ll turn you into a muskrat.” He looked over his shoulder at Lionel in the stern. “I learned how to work medicine from my grandmother. She was gonna turn me into an owl one time.”

“Too bad she didn’t,” Lionel said.

Armand had to twist around to look at him again. “What do you mean by that?”

“An owl knows things gonna happen.” Lionel smiled then a little and said, “You gonna turn me into one of these rats, wait till spring when they come in heat. I’ll have some fun.”

“That’s what you already are now,” Armand said, “live in a place like this.” He was cold and wanted this trip to hurry up and be over. Turning around on the seat, so the wind hit his back, didn’t help much. All Lionel had on was the sweatshirt, but didn’t appear cold. He wore jeans and dirty sneakers—no, they were running shoes. Look at him. He liked it here and there was no way to insult him. Armand watched Lionel’s eyes raise to read the clouds or the wind or some goddamn Indian thing he did.

“How much to take us out tomorrow?”

“A hundred each.”

“No special price, ’ey? For an old friend?”

Lionel didn’t answer that one, but he said, “You need a twelve-gauge I can let you have one. You buy the shells.”

Armand said, “How about that ironworker? You take him out? The one yesterday?”

“Not too much. He’s a kind of guy, he don’t eat it, he won’t shoot it. I think it’s more he don’t like to clean ’em. My wife does it for hunters. She’s what you call a duck-plucker.” Lionel grinned. “A buck a duck.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“What guy?”

“Your friend, the ironworker.”

“It’s Wayne.”

Yeah, it was the name the woman in the real estate office had called. Wayne.

“You go deer hunting with him, ’ey?”

“Yeah, he’s got a private woods there, on his property.”

“He seem like a nice guy,” Armand said. “What’s his name, Wayne?”

“Wayne Colson.”

“Where’s he live? Around here?”

“Over by Algonac.”

“He seem like a nice guy.”

“Yeah, I go over there,” Lionel said. “Sometimes me an my wife, my little girl, Debbie. His wife says, when we go over there, she wishes they had a little girl. She tells Debbie that.”

“So he’s married, ’ey?”

“Yeah, his wife sells real estate.”

Armand said, “You kidding me.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It seems funny, that’s all, an ironworker married to a woman sells real estate.”

Lionel shrugged. He said, “They have a grown son, in the U.S. Navy,” and looked off at his sky again.

After a while Armand heard Richie yell out, “There’s some!” and turned to see land and a flock of birds Armand recognized rising out of an old willow on the bank. Blackbirds.

“I see I’m gonna have trouble with him,” Lionel said, grinning. “He’ll be shooting at coots thinking they’re mallards.”

Richie was turned around in the bow.

“What’s wrong?”

“Ducks don’t land in trees,” Lionel said. “Birds, yeah, but not any ducks I know of. That’s the first thing you have to learn.”

Armand saw the way Richie was looking past him at Lionel. He said, “Let’s go over there and stretch our legs.”

“If you want to,” Lionel said.

He brought them to the bank where the willow stood empty now and cut the motor. Richie grabbed the tall weeds, stepped out of the boat and both feet sank into mud and water. Armand saw what not to do and jumped past the soft edge of the bank, landed okay, but felt the ground mushy beneath him, weeds up to his waist. He looked around at Lionel, still in the boat.

“You coming?”

“I don’t need to stretch any.”

Armand said to Richie, “Do him,” and expected to hear some excuse. Out here? It’s too open. Something like that.

No—he reached under his coat behind him, brought out that nickelplate, cocked it, aimed with two hands like in the movies and shot Lionel three times as he was trying to get out of the boat, that third shot punching him out to drop in the water. They were quick shots too, no hesitation. Loud, but flat out here in the open, the sound just now fading.

“Well, you took more than one,” Armand said, “but you knocked him down.”

Richie was looking at Lionel facedown in the water, one arm hooked over the side of the boat.

“That pissed me off,” Richie said, “telling me ducks don’t land in trees. I know ducks don’t land in trees.”

Back at Lionel’s, before they got in the Cadillac and drove off, Armand went in the house and came out with two Remington pump-action shotguns and a couple of camouflaged duck-hunting coats and hats. Richie said, “What’s all that for?” Armand told him he’d see. Then, when Armand left the island by way of the swing bridge, heading for Wallaceburg, Richie said, “Aren’t we going home? Man I have to get cleaned up.” Armand told him to put on one of the duck-hunting coats, they were going to Windsor. They’d leave the car at the airport in long-term parking and pick out another one for the time being. “Then come home?” Richie said. Then cross back at Detroit through customs, Armand said, couple of duck hunters on their way to Algonac. And find out where the ironworker lived.

“What’s the big hurry?” Richie said. “If he lives there, he’s gonna be there.”

“You want to do something else?”

“Well, have a few beers, anyway. Watch some TV.”

“After we find their house, take a look at it. You hear Lionel? I’m pretty sure that real estate woman’s his wife. The one saw us.”

“The one was with him?” Richie sounded surprised. “She didn’t do nothing. Was the guy hit us.”

Armand turned his headlights on the blacktop moving through farmland, getting dark out there. “I forgot you have to be pissed off,” Armand said. “All this blowing away you did, you never blew away a woman, ’ey?”

“I never felt a need to.”

“Well, you better feel one now.”

Richie was silent. Armand wondered if maybe it was the first time in his life the guy had stopped to think before opening his mouth. Armand waited another few moments before saying, “Let me tell you something. You don’t ever leave things undone. You don’t ever think somebody’s not gonna remember you. Me and my brothers went in that hospital in Sarnia—”

“You already told me about it.”

There, he was talking again without thinking.

“Listen to me. My younger brother, Jackie, is holding the elevator. My older brother, Gerard, is watching so nobody comes in the room. He’s standing inside by the door, has it open a little bit. A nurse comes down the hall. She don’t go by, she opens the door and there’s my brother right in front of her, face-to-face, close. He takes her quick into the bathroom, turns out the light and tells her don’t make a sound.”

“I’d have coldcocked her,” Richie said.

“I finish with the guy and say to my brother, ‘What about her in there?’ In the bathroom, the door’s closed. He says, ‘I don’t think she saw me good.’ I say to him, ‘What are you telling me? You don’t think she saw you?’ He says, ‘No, she didn’t see me good.’ It was seven months later the police come to the Waverley Hotel—”

Richie said, “The Royal Canadian Mounties?”

“The Toronto Police, that’s enough. They come to the hotel where we stay there looking for the Degas brothers. This time they find only Gerard, take him in and that nurse points to him in the lineup. Yes, he was in the room when the man was killed. They find my brother Jackie and shoot him down, they say resisting arrest. That could be true. They find me, the nurse takes a look; no, she never saw me. They have to let me go. See, but I lost my two brothers—one dead, one in prison for life, because Gerard says she didn’t see him good. That one time ... Why did he say that? I don’t know, maybe he looked at her. Maybe he liked her face, I don’t know. I’m never gonna figure that out.”

Richie said, “Well, did you ask him?”

“Sure, I asked him. He don’t know either. Now he’s at Kingston trying to figure it out.”

They drove through the dusk in silence.

Until Richie said, “Well, I don’t see there’d be much difference anyway, whether it’s a man or a woman. . . . Is there?”

“Not if you don’t think about it,” Armand said.

7

LATE AFTERNOON, cool and clear outside, three days since the excitement at the real estate office, the phone rang. It was on the wall next to the window over the kitchen sink.

Carmen knew it was Lenore because she had her hands in meat loaf, working a raw egg, onions and bread crumbs into the ground beef and pork, and her mom only called when she was in the middle of something or in the bathroom. If Carmen called her mom, Lenore would answer, “Who is this?” in case it might be an obscene phone call. She had worked at one time in the telephone company’s Annoyance Call Bureau and knew all about dirty-mouth pervert callers. Just last month she had changed her number after twice answering the ring and the caller hung up without saying a word. She told Carmen, “That’s how they find out if you’re home, so they can come in and rape you.” Wayne said to Carmen, “Tell her don’t worry, once the guy got a look at her she’d be safe.”

Carmen turned to the sink, rinsed her hands and dried them on a dish towel, the phone still ringing. Sometimes she’d pick it up and say, “Hi, Mom.”

But not today. Carmen looked out the window as she lifted the receiver from the hook and didn’t say a word.

She saw something move in the woods. Not the far deep woods, where Wayne grew his row of corn along the edge and had placed the salt lick, but in the thicket beyond the chickenhouse, where a section of woods came down close to the backyard. She was pretty sure a man was standing in there, in the tangle of dense branches; not at the edge but back in the gloom, his form blending, most of him concealed. Lenore’s voice was saying, “Carmen?” Repeating it. “Carmen, what are you doing?”

Whoever it was just stood there, not moving.

Carmen said, “Hi, Mom.”

She didn’t say anything about it to Wayne, not right away. He came home—it was on her mind as she got dinner ready and Wayne opened beers for them and phoned Lionel. No answer. Two days now, no one home. Carmen said didn’t they have relatives in Ohio they went to visit? Wayne said, “In duck season?”

During the week Carmen would turn on the TV in the kitchen and they’d watch Jeopardy while they ate dinner, sitting at the counter. Wayne was good at state capitals, country music, some history, because it was all he read outside of hunting magazines, and wars. His favorite was the Civil War. Carmen was good at popular music and groups, movie stars who had won Academy Awards and biology. Carmen would get more right than Wayne. Jeopardy was on now. Some of the categories were Art, Bowling, Four-letter Words and Kings Named Ed. But they weren’t paying much attention to it. Carmen listened to Wayne saying he wondered if he should go over to Walpole, check up on Lionel.

Wayne saying he liked the One-Fifty Jefferson project, he knew most of the guys on the raising gang and the walking boss was an old buddy. One of the connectors got a bunch of flowers with a card signed by five women who’d been watching him from an office building. Wayne saying he was bolting up and doing some welding, but that was okay, it was the kind of story job he liked, put it straight up in the air three hundred feet and go on to the next one. Wayne saying the meat loaf was the best he’d ever tasted. Then going on to say he could never understand why Matthew didn’t like it. How could you not like meat loaf?

Carmen, waking up, said, “Oh, we got a letter today.”

Wayne gave her a funny look, because a rare letter from Matthew would be sitting right here on the counter. Carmen had to find it, over in a drawer where she filed letters and bills.

Wayne began to read the letter from their son. Carmen took a bite of meat loaf—it was okay but she’d made better—played with her peas and carrots, looked up at the window and saw the kitchen reflected on the glass, the portable TV screen a bright spot. One of the Jeopardy contestants had picked the Kings Named Ed category. Something about one of them being a saint and the contestant, a woman, said, “Who was Edward the Confessor?”

Just as Wayne said, “Everything’s initials with him now. The A-7Es, the AE-6Bs. He isn’t on a carrier, he’s on a CVN. Here, he says, ‘My new job is to make sure the nosegear towbar engages the catapult shuttle and then stand clear. You don’t want to get caught between the aircraft and the JBD.’ What’s the JBD?”

“The jet blast deflector,” Carmen said.

“Well, what’s FOD? He says, ‘We police the flight deck for anything lying around that might cause an aircraft to FOD-out.’ ”

“Foreign object damage,” Carmen said. “I guess something that might get sucked into the jet engine.”

It seemed to irritate Wayne.

“How do you know that?” “It was in the book he sent, Supercarriers in