The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

Sam Shaw Reconstruction

From Story Quarterly

on A brisk, beautiful autumn day, Guinevere accidentally killed my neighbor, Len Haynes. We were sniping chipmunks from a blind I’d constructed out of scrap tin when his head appeared over the crest of a hill. As if compelled by an innate marksman’s instinct, she squeezed the trigger, and he vanished with a little spray of blood and what must have been brain matter. A cry escaped Guinevere’s mouth.

“What,” I said. “What did you do?”

“Oof,” she said.

We were out of the blind and running across the field.

Haynes lay on the blond grass in the strangest position, arms and legs splayed like he had been interrupted in the performance of a dance. A cardboard box rested nearby, and objects that might have been hailstones had spilled from its mouth. Gwen licked one and said, wonderingly, “Mothballs.”

I’d never seen a dead man before, not even Sid, whose ashes my brother and I had strewn in the fourth-hole water hazard at his beloved Pasquaney Club. Haynes looked almost serene, but blood of a startling red color streamed out of an opening an inch above his right eye. I dabbed his brow with the cuff of my shirt.

“Hey,” I said to Haynes. “Hey, pal.”

Haynes was not a good neighbor — often he left trash bags outside his door, and animals littered my yard with their contents — but I saw at that moment with perfect clarity that our fates were linked.

“It’s OK,” Guinevere said. “His eyes are moving.”

But they weren’t. Wide and glassy, they gaped at the cold expanse of the sky. I bent down, took his wrist in my hands and shook it.

At that moment, we heard what we took for a second shot, a screen door banging shut, and Guinevere and I both bucked upright. Haynes lived with his very large wife and a menagerie of desperate-looking cats and dogs in a green house some hundred feet from my own. Mrs. Haynes stood on the porch, holding a silver colander in her hands. It glinted terribly in the sun.

“You sonofabitch,” she cried, in her grim baritone. To which, for reasons I still can’t fathom, Guinevere lifted the rifle she had somehow neglected to drop, drew a bead on the woman, thought better of this, and fired a shot in the air. Mrs. Haynes loosed the colander and darted into her house.

We drove first to Guinevere’s trailer, to collect some personal items and to think. As soon as we passed into its beery gloom, she thrust a stack of hardcover library books into my arms. The volume on top was called Parrots of the World. It must have weighed five pounds.

“I’m keeping these,” she said. “It’s wrong, I know, but I am.”

I set the books by the door, then sat in the kitchen on the scuffed Formica counter while she filled a suitcase with clothes. Her faucet was busted, and a weak stream of water murmured in the sink. It was the bleakest sound I’d ever heard.

“What are we doing?” I asked her.

Through a half-opened door, I could see her standing over the suitcase. She held a sheer yellow blouse at arm’s length as though contemplating a purchase. I took this opportunity to finish a roach I’d stowed in my wallet.

“Gwen? What are we doing, really?”

“I’m packing,” she said, breathless, “and you’re — I don’t know what. Panicking.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Listen, you and I both know what happens next. We drive into town and straighten this thing out. Think for a second and you’ll see I’m right.”

“Getty, don’t,” she said.

“We’ve done nothing wrong, when you get down to it,” I said, exhaling blue smoke.

She gave me a long, incredulous look. “See what you can find in the fridge,” she said. “We’re driving to Mexico.”

Or rather I was driving — Gwen was unlicensed. What can be said about this plan? It sounded reasonable at the time. We piled into my Volvo, the two of us plus the bird.

Guinevere had acquired Cheyenne the prior Christmas from a war veteran in Sausalito. She was a cockatoo, an enormous creature with glistening feathers and imperious black eyes and an unsettling habit of turning her head 180 degrees to regard you over her shoulder — if a bird can be said to have shoulders. It was bad judgment, I thought. Exotic pets attract attention, and a getaway car ought properly to blend in. And there was the border crossing to consider: certainly the bird would not be welcome in Mexico.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” Guinevere said. “I’ll let her go if I have to. Who knows — could be she’ll find us on the other side.”

“She’ll die,” I said, and immediately I regretted this.

We didn’t speak until we’d reached the highway. Everywhere, billboards. She put her hand on my leg, kneaded my thigh, and suddenly, exuberantly, I was erect.

“Look who’s awake,” she said.

Gwen had a special animal confidence, like she’d invented the concept of sex. We kissed there in the car, at eighty miles an hour, under a hemorrhaging sky.

I’d been stuck in a kind of emotional holding pattern for going on seven years. Not that things were desperate. I wasn’t about to do myself in, for example, though I’d threatened it once in a letter to Sid. But I was looking down the barrel of turning thirty and there were days when I never put on pants, and nearly everything I ate emerged futile and gray from the maw of a George Foreman Grill. I’d moved to Port Wescott in ‘97, with the project of ruining my life. The place fairly reeked of disappointment. Everyone you met wore the same dazed look, as if the shovel of life had caught them square in the face. They were all former somethings: grounded pilots and injured farm-league phenoms, failed actors and businessmen, the disbarred, displaced, and dispossessed. As for me, I was a former son, doing everything I could think of to avoid becoming Sid. He’d built a pharmaceutical empire by the age of thirty-five; I look potshots at rodents from a half-collapsed porch. I was ready for a change.

One thing about flight: the sex is incredible. I’ve done breakup sex and makeup sex, sex with strangers, sex with old friends, sex in public, sex in closets, sex with several partners, sex with none; believe me when I tell you that there is nothing in the world like fugitive-from-justice sex.

We stopped for the night at a motel designed to resemble an African village: stucco office, empty kidney-shaped pool, and a corridor of suites with artificial thatching on the roof. I gave a false name and plate number to the desk attendant, a squirrelly Asian guy who might himself have been a wanted man. I was tense and depleted, and Guinevere fell on me as soon as we’d reached the room.

We screwed intermittently throughout the night. She pulled at my hair, bit my ear, cried and cursed, came like thunder. At dawn, swaddled in bedclothes, I told her that I loved her. She held me in a kind of wrestling lock with her legs and kissed my neck. I had said the words before. To Astrud Faison, dressed in her whites and smelling of tennis; to that French lifeguard, 1989; to Colleen, the night I left Antioch, not to return. Things have a way of ending.

“Have you been to Central America?” Gwen asked.

“No,” I lied.

I lit a joint. The rotors of the ceiling fan did interesting things with the smoke.

“There are mangoes you eat right off the tree,” she said. “And birds that you wouldn’t believe. Serious birds. Everybody freaks over raptors, like the bald eagle is the greatest thing since bread. Try the resplendent quetzal. Emerald green with a three-foot tail.”

As it happened, I had seen one in the wild. Guatemala, with Sid and Phyllis — or Syphilis, as I called my parents even then. As usual, they had spent the week indoors, shellacked on rum and cokes. I’d spotted the bird on an afternoon hike. The half-dozen tourists in our group, whose T-shirts attested to other vacations they’d enjoyed (“Pura Vida Costa Rica,” “Oahu Nights”) all clutched at their chests and swooned. Perched on a high branch, the resplendent quetzal looked to me like something you’d use to dust a chandelier.

‘“What I meant is, I love this,” I said.

“I know,” said Gwen.

She stood up and walked to the bathroom, perfectly naked and unashamed, urinated with the door open, then climbed back into bed.

“What’s that?” I said.

“What?”

“On your back. ESP.” I traced the letters with my finger.

“Extrasensory perception,” she said. “I’ve got it like crazy. Think of a number between one and fifty.”

“The E is darker,” I said.

She put my hand on her breast.

“Because it’s new.”

I thought about this.

“Who’s SP?”

“Just someone,” she said.

She was undoubtedly the most beautiful person I ever knew.

“Guess where I’m heading once we get down south,” she said. “Veracruz. Guess why.”

“Have a swim?”

“I’m going to get my degree and become an ornithologist. They’ve got a very good program. Maybe the best.”

“Hey. Hey.” My finger was in her mouth. “We really killed that guy.”

She laid my hand on the bed and sat upright.

We were back on the highway, then, traveling south. The car was a wreck, bird shit on the seats, snags and holes pecked in the dash-board upholstery. It was exhilarating in a way: we rode with the windows down, air howling in our ears so that we had to shout to make ourselves heard; Gwen held Cheyenne in her lap, smoothed her leathered head; I played the radio like an instrument, tuning gospel and swing and roiling Spanish talk.

It was a mistake, I knew, but I couldn’t help worrying over Haynes. Probably laid out on a gurney somewhere on a paper sheet, and cruisers parked outside the house, hounds pursuing odors through the grass. I hadn’t packed. So many objects I would never see again: my brother Antietam’s trophy from the state geography bee, my journals, a Fender telecaster that had once belonged to Jeff Beck. And the eye, prized from the stony head of a bobcat at Pasquaney, when I was fourteen. Sid had shot the thing himself and presented it to the club as a monument. It was worthless, as far as I could tell. But of all his many treasures — all the asinine curios he’d found to throw his fortune at — the bobcat stood closest to his heart. Whenever he saw it he stopped and raised his glass as if toasting the honor of some great storied rival he had smote on the fields of war. I’d replaced the milky ball with a backgammon chip. Five minutes with a penknife while my parents drank cordials in the trophy room.

In spite of all that, it was good to be driving. From time to time, I would look over at Gwen and see the way she tended to her bird, and I’d want to pull over and stretch out in the back seat — not to make love, even, but to hold her and to feel the shockwave of passing trucks. It was as if I’d been granted a second chance. Now that Haynes was dead, I felt duty-bound to love and be loved, to build something real and true from the pieces of our three wrecked lives.

We lunched at a truck stop, in a fast-food place flanked by gray, skeletal hedges. I waited in a line of bedraggled kids and parents while Gwen made calls in the lot. Behind the counter, women in striped shirts dispensed hamburgers and vapid, lipsticked smiles. Unplugged pinball and arcade machines lined the wall like monuments in an antebellum graveyard. I was contemplating the plate glass windows when a hand touched my leg. It was attached to a boy in flannel pajamas.

“You’re in the water,” he said.

The floor was a vastness of blue tiles breached at intervals by islands of white. He leaped from one to the next, arms extended comically.

“I like a swim,” I told him.

“There are sharks,” he said soberly, and a woman seized his arm and dragged him off.

Gwen returned, dug her hand into my back pocket, and kissed my cheek.

“Everything all right?” I asked. She frowned in a way that suggested my question had endangered us both. All at once, I felt very anxious and not at all hungry. We ate without pleasure in a narrow booth.

Outside, she said, ‘We stop tonight in Arizona. Truck is going to meet us with money and a fresh car.”

‘Wait,” I said. “What happened to Mexico?”

“Nothing happened,” she said. “Except they’ll be looking for your plates. And as far as money, Truck’s got two thousand dollars, maybe more. We need every dollar we can get.”

“I have money. I can get us — I don’t know — five or six hundred, plus another thousand on the first of the month.” Those were the provisions of my trust fund — a slow intravenous drip, interest from a principal I couldn’t touch.

“Not enough,” she said, and shook her head disgustedly.

“Enough for what, sunscreen? The whole point of Mexico is it’s cheap.”

“It’s called tuition,” she said. “Ornithology, remember?”

“The thing about grad school, you don’t just drive up at orientation with a suitcase full of cash. There are tests. You need transcripts and letters.”

We got back in the car. Cheyenne cried out in salutation or complaint.

“And who or what is Truck?”

“Truck’s my cousin,” she said. “He’s a genius at getaways. An escape artist practically.”

Gwen was fishing in her bag, laying makeup compacts and emery hoards on the dash. There was something else in there, among her women’s things — a little revolver with a pearl handle.

“What’s that for?” I said.

“In case something happens.”

“In case what happens, exactly?”

She weighed it on her palm. “Something unforeseeable.”

“If it’s unforeseeable, you can’t plan for it.”

“Later,” she said, “you may thank me.”

It was dark when we left the highway. We drove a while on desolate back roads before reaching our destination, a whitewashed motel on the rubbled lunar plain. Our headlights caught the fender of a station wagon, and Gwen shot upright in her seat.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s Truck’s car.”

It was an old model Chevy, taupe-colored with polyps of rust on the side and cardboard in lieu of a window. The night air had a vague chemical taste, and it was clear that I had made a serious mistake.

I parked behind a Dumpster, then followed Gwen across the lot toward a half-opened door. All I could see of the room was the corner of a bed and a pair of large, vegetably feet. My stomach was doing a particular stock car maneuver I remembered from my glory days on the junior tennis circuit. Once, on a grass court in Flagstaff, I’d rallied with Ilie Nastase. It was a pristine day: high wind, and planes crossing overhead, contrails etched against a soft blue sky. The careering in my gut was such that I could barely execute a serve. Now with every step I took, the idea of return seemed more remote. As if sensing my doubt, Gwen hooked a finger in my belt loop and gave it a tug.

Truck wore a hunting cap and a suede jacket with tassled arms, and his eyes never strayed from the television screen, not even when you asked him a question. For the most part, he spoke to me through Gwen, as if I were immaterial, a phantom she alone could see. As for Gwen herself, she seemed positively enraptured by his company. She took off her shoes, sat on the dusty carpet, and laughed at all his comments, none of which were funny in the least. When she asked me to pick up whiskey, sandwiches, and corn nuts (“for baby Cheyenne”), I felt something close to gratitude.

It was twenty minutes to the store and back, and the bird flapped plaintively all the way.

Truck took so long with the door that I wondered momentarily if I’d knocked at the wrong room. I could hear the shower running in the bathroom, and Gwen’s things were piled on a chair. Truck lay across the bed. On TV a couple of old-fashioned pugilists boxed primly in black and white.

“Getty,” Truck said to the screen, testing the sound of it. “What kind of a name is Getty anyway?”

“You’d have to take it up with my father,” I said.

“I don’t like it much.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I told him. Why was I defending myself to a person called “Truck”?

After a while, I said, “That’s an interesting car you’ve got.”

“You expected a PT Cruiser?” he asked.

I said that I hadn’t. Still, his Chevy wasn’t worth the speakers in my Volvo, and I told him so. He frowned at me and looked away. His fists were balled, and he tensed now and then as if to deflect televised blows.

“Actually, you’re a help,” I said. “Otherwise we’d have to steal something. And I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

“Thought you were outlaws,” Truck said, glancing vaguely in my direction.

“That’s Gwen’s thing,” I said. “Honestly, I’m not built for it.”

“You said it, not me,” Truck said, and snorted.

The bathroom door opened, loosing generous clouds of steam. Gwen appeared, her hair wrapped in an elegant nautilus-curl of towel, and briefly the room was an alpine spa. She had changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, which read: IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING, SET IT FREE. IF IT DOESN’T COME BACK, HUNT IT DOWN AND KILL IT.

We ate our sandwiches on the double bed, with a fresh towel for a picnic blanket. Truck took the whiskey bottle and poured tall drinks into plastic cups provided gratis by the motel staff. I held mine for a minute or two, then set it down on the floor. Truck regarded me warily.

“I don’t drink,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Gwen, as if I’d answered a question that had plagued her all week.

I rolled and lit a joint. Truck watched it hungrily as I smoked, but he never asked and I didn’t offer. We all lay down on the bed, Gwen in the middle. The two of them drank and talked about old friends who had come into money or disappeared or suffered unexpected injury. As far as I could tell, half their friends were either locked in jail or on their way. It was all surprise and reversal. Presumably there were others, friends who persisted stubbornly in their same dull orbits, but Gwen and Truck neglected to mention them. Time passed and the two of them grew louder and happier.

I suggested that we get on the road.

“The room’s paid,” Gwen said.

“That may be true,” I said. “Still, I’ll be tired in the morning.”

“Then Truck can drive.”

She leaned over as if to embrace me. Instead she collected my cup from the floor and passed it to Truck.

“Tell Smokey to relax,” he said. And then, buoyant, “Relax, Smokey.”

I told Gwen I had to speak with her privately, and we left the room and walked to the rear of the motel. Overhead a harsh yellow bulb flashed to life, and suddenly we were exposed among beer runs and other flotsam.

“Truck can drive?”

She blinked. “It’s his car.”

“You’re saying that Truck is coming with us. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? Jesus.”

“Hey,” she said, touching my chest.

“And for another thing, it’s clear he’s not your cousin.”

“Of course he’s my cousin,” she said. “He’s my favorite cousin, and the only one I’ve got.”

“If this gets strange, I’ll kill him,” I said, and let this sink in. “That’s what I am, a murderer, same as you.”

She moved in close and clasped her hands on my sides. Together, we managed a lurching backward dance step.

“Trust me,” she said.

She wore that beatific white smile of hers under which, ordinarily, I was defenseless as a fawn in a poacher’s beams. But some change in the timbre of the night — the dogfight of moths around our heads — cleared my mind of love and sex, and perhaps because I sensed that my anger could not possibly survive the ordeal of her holding me for even fifteen seconds more, I shook her off.

“This whole ornithology deal,” I heard myself say. “You know what it is, don’t you? It’s a joke. It’s fucked. First off, you don’t have a bachelor’s degree.”

Gwen didn’t flinch.

“I mean — let me ask you this. Did you finish high school even?”

“And you’re supposed to be some kind of role model? So the point of life is wearing your robe all day like a schizo patient. Well excuse me for trying to improve myself. There’s more to life than weed and Cinemax.”

Back in the room, Truck had removed his shirt. He was muscular in a Byzantine, plated way that made me think of lobsters in a tank. He spread out on the floor, with his pants and shoes on. Gwen gave him the bedspread and a pillow, and shut off the light. I undressed and inched carefully into bed, listening to the faint oceanic sounds we made. Gwen lay very still. I would have liked to hear her voice.

Some time later there was a cry of sirens in the distance, and cold fingers probed the flap of my shorts. All I could think of was Truck, three feet away. I turned over and fought my way to sleep.

In the morning sun fell on the lot in golden sheets. Gwen and Truck were sleeping, and I sat on the hood of my car.

Inside, the bird was dead. You could tell by the way she lay there on the seat, sideways like a tiny person, her wings askew. I didn’t care. I had a new plan, and I was silently mulling it.

If I was going to live in Mexico, which apparently I was, and with Guinevere, and also temporarily with Truck, I would need money. And something else, something more elusive, like authority. And both of these were readily available, not three hundred miles east.

We would drive to Prospect, to the Chateau Syphilis — where my mother lived alone, or with some callow tennis coach or gardener from the third world. In the master bedroom, there was a safe that contained, among antique coins and articles of jewelry, a stack of bonds as thick as a phone book. I would borrow against the trust that was rightfully mine. It wouldn’t be theft, only a form of accounting.

Gwen emerged from the room wearing her gauzy yellow blouse, through which her bosom showed clear as a Christmas present wrapped in cellophane. I was so transfixed that I forgot to prepare her for the spectacle waiting in the car. She held her stomach and bent as if she might be sick.

“Take it slow,” I said.

The doors were still locked, and when I offered her the keys she looked at me with such utter desolation you’d have thought it was her infant laid dead across a bier of accordion-fold state roadmaps. For a long minute, she didn’t move. She clambered across the seat and lay down awkwardly next to her bird. When she touched it, I half expected the thing to shudder into flight. She was talking, but not to me. It was the sort of voice TV parents adopt when they’re tucking their kids into bed. Then she climbed back out, and it was just as if the channel had been switched. She cradled Cheyenne in her arms and said some terrible things about God, the world, me and Truck, and also herself. “Human love is fucked,” she said, poisoned with self-centeredness, jealousy, and doubt. “But an innocent bird loves with its whole heart.” It struck me that the organ in question is roughly as large as a cashew, but I reserved this thought for myself. Truck stood shirtless in the doorway, looking lost. We were no comfort to Gwen in the least.

Truck drove with one hand and smoked with the other, and I watched through a gray window as houses reeled by and receded. It seemed incredible that each of these structures was someone’s home.

After an hour or so, I said to the horizon, “We’re going to make a detour not too far ahead. You’ll both have to trust me.”

Truck whistled. “He’s your mess,” he said to Gwen. “You clean it up.”

When I turned and looked, her eyes were red from crying.

“Whatever he says,” she told Truck. “Getty and me are in it together.”

When the highway split, we proceeded east, toward Prospect and a house I hadn’t seen in seven years.

When you’re wanted for murder, and you’re high on Humboldt Gold, even teenage girls in Saturns look like undercover cops. We were nearly home. Truck lay sprawled across the back seat, asleep with a hand thrust down his pants. He looked almost childlike, except for the lightning bolt tattooed across his neck.

Hours had passed since Guinevere had opened her mouth. She just sat there pulling loose hairs from her scalp and holding them up to the light. My brain ran hot and dry imagining the many trials ahead. As if conjured out of thin air by my dread, a convoy of sleek, malignant eighteen-wheelers bloomed in the rearview and overtook us. The trucks were full of cattie — lean, pathetic things. They crowded at a line of portholes, angling their noses like dogs on a Sunday pleasure drive. Did they know, in their dusky bovine skulls, about the holocaust to come? It seemed a glimpse into my own future. A road sign promised gas and food in half a mile; there were sure to be police. Nothing would be simpler than to turn myself in. But to do so would mean parting ways with Gwen. In spite of everything, she filled me with the kind of grievous longing I hadn’t felt since seventh grade. She was all I had left.

“Look,” I said. “Cows.”

She unbuckled her seatbelt and hugged her knees to her chest.

“I wish I hadn’t done it,” she said. There was a perfect freckle at the corner of her mouth. The sight of it gave me a feeling of hope.

“It’s plain shoddy luck is all,” I said. “One of those wrong time wrong place deals. Think of it this way. The night you were conceived, if your parents had gone to see Rocky instead, or if they’d ordered in Chinese. If your father wore a different pair of slacks, whatever, you could be skiing down the Alps right now. You could be a world-famous tennis champ. You could be chauffeuring those cows around. Blame the stars.” I took her hand in mine. It was utterly dead in my grip. “Accidents happen,” I said. “Everyone’s a victim in this thing.”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t though. Not really I just — wondered if I could.”

I looked straight ahead through the windshield. The sky was a rusty wash. Through an aperture the size of a volleyball, two gaunt Herefords peered back at me. One opened its mouth, disclosing a pink slab of tongue. Eventually I risked a glance at Gwen. She looked like somebody’s daughter, perched there in the passenger seat. I gave her fingers an exploratory squeeze.

“OK, but my point is, you regret it, right?”

She squeezed back then, twice, as if signaling in code. A giddy warmth settled over me.

“We’ll make up for it in Mexico,” I said. “Plant a tree or something. It’s going to be a whole different deal down there.” I meant it. I could see the whole thing, with the vividness of recollection: sand in the sleeping bags and afternoon dips and the tang of grilling fish on the air.

“I wish I could take it back,” she said.

“So do I,” I told her. And as soon as I’d said it, I knew it was a lie.

We waited until nightfall, then made for the house. It stood atop a low ridge, a grand stone structure with wings that embraced the sculpted grounds, though coldly. We stopped at the gate. I directed my instructions to Truck. Kill the radio and headlights. Relax for a while. Then I got out and eased the door shut.

The night was electric with that wide-open amphitheater sound of insects chirring in grass. Right then, I knew that Gwen and Truck would be gone when I returned to the car. I stopped and held both hands open in the air. Ten minutes. The red point of Truck’s cigarette bobbed a little, but if either of them waved I couldn’t tell. The chalky driveway shone like a river in the dark. There was a wind, and I could hear the knell of cords lashing the flagpole in the yard.

In the 1980s, Sid had hosted lavish dinners at the house, big raucous affairs attended by some of Arizona’s wealthiest and most influential drunks, people who filled our house with cigarette smoke and braying laughter. Those evenings followed a time-honored protocol: after an hour of cocktails in the foyer, the peal of an antique bell summoned all present to the dining room where, through the addition of leaves, a table would be set for as many as thirty guests. An hour later Sid would charge his glass and deliver an interminable toast, thanking Phyllis and God and the GOP. Then he’d call out to his children. We came in from the hall. Antietam led the way, beating a slow somber march on a drum, and under die rheumy watch of my parents’ guests, I would sing all five verses of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” On a good night I was allowed to leave without fanfare. Usually, though, there were compulsory handshakes and kisses, and occasionally I had to sing it twice. Then in junior high, a girl I knew vaguely from school accompanied her parents to one of Sid’s soirees, and the sight of her leering through the bit about “the beauty of the lilies” so riled me that afterward I kicked a six-inch hole in my bedroom wall. It was the first shot fired in a war I’d been fighting ever since.

There were no cars at the house, and no lighted windows, which came as a relief but no surprise. My mother lived her life on an outpatient basis, dividing time between bridge, church, and her philanthropies. Often she was gone for weeks at a time, to places like Antigua or Palm Springs, for symposiums, concerts, or luncheons. Anything to save her from the house and its photographic memory, its clutter and familiar smells.

I found the front door locked, so I stole back to the greenhouse where we’d kept a key in a rusted watering can. To my great satisfaction, I found it with ease. I walked back to the door and unlocked it and stood for a minute, breathing. Then I crossed the threshold and shut the door behind me.

The house was mausoleum still. You could almost hear dust motes falling. I moved across the floor in small, uncertain steps, hands extended as if I were blind — which, temporarily, I was.

On the second floor, tall windows surveyed the grounds. My mother’s topiary, once a skyline of Platonic forms, had assumed a kind of gothic disarray. Moonlight skipped across the parquet floor. I crossed the threshold into my father’s office. The room was crowded with furniture under painter’s tarps, so that it appeared as if I were standing among the ghosts of tables, chairs, and lamps. I sat down on a long sofa. Time passed, and I spread out so that my face touched the plastic sheet.

Then the lights were on, and I lay there stiffly.

“Don’t even breathe,” came a voice from behind me. “I’m heavily armed.” Unmistakably, this was Antietam, my brother.

There was the sound of a lamp overturned.

“Hey,” I said from the sofa. “Ant, it’s Getty. It’s me.”

“The hell it is,” he said. And there he was, white and disheveled, his hair so long and unruly that I took it, at first, for a wig. He wore a jersey with a picture of Che Guevara on it, and his arms were full of what appeared to be a Confederate infantry rifle, complete with bayonet.

“Unbelievable,” he said, with something like a smile on his face, but he didn’t lower the gun. “You’re the spitting image of Sid, do you know that?”

“That’s very funny,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”

“Hung up the gloves. Same as you.”

“Same nothing,” I said. “I was twenty. You’re what, seventeen?”

“I’m a regular prodigy,” he said.

I thought if I moved to embrace him he might be inclined to put down the rifle; instead, I found myself holding its barrel, the bayonet’s point grazing my chest. What ensued was a kind of reverse tug of war, with each of us gently thrusting the weapon toward the other. This exercise was cut short by a clamor from the doorway.

“Drop it,” Truck said, presumably to my brother.

Antietam did as he was told, and so did I. The rifle met the floor with a regrettable crack. Truck picked it up and admired the stock while Gwen considered etchings on the walls. I made sheepish introductions.

“This is your place?” Truck wondered. “Who burgles his own damn house?”

“It’s not burglary,” I said. “I was going to leave a note.”

“Where’s your room?” Gwen asked me.

“He doesn’t have a room,” Antietam said. “Sid turned it into a den. Anyway, take what you like. I don’t give a shit.”

Feeling inexplicably tired, I sat back down on the shrouded sofa.

Gwen had discovered Sid’s collection. One by one, she lifted the plastic tarps, and the bounty took shape: threadbare Union flags, bugles and blue velvet petticoats, sabers, firearms, pulpy documents, medals, and daguerreotypes, all in somber glass vitrines.

“God,” she said. “What is all this?”

“Our father had a thing about the Civil War,” said Antietam.

Truck picked up a silk top hat and set it on his head. “What’s this shit worth, anyway?” he asked.

“More than me and Getty,” my brother said, and coughed up a single dry laugh. “Probably more than the house, but a bitch and a half to sell. Anyway, I’ve got a lady guest upstairs. Try to keep it down.” And he left us to manage on our own. 1 invited Gwen and Truck to make themselves at home while I conducted some business downstairs.

The master bedroom was on the ground floor — cloistered like a bomb shelter two stories below Antietam’s and my own. I had some trouble opening the safe (was Sumter 1860? ‘62?), and when finally its tumblers fell with a satisfying clap, I found it empty. Or not quite: there was a lowball glass — with a desiccated lime in it, and lipstick on the rim — which I opted not to take. It was the sort of night that makes you want to crawl in bed and sleep for several years.

When I came upstairs, the front door hung open. Truck was loading objects through the smashed side window of the car, which he’d backed against the steps. Gwen’s arms were full of antique guns.

“Look at him,” Truck said after a while. “It’s like he’s foreman or something.” And as they passed me on their way back upstairs, he nodded and called me “Sir.”

I walked outside and peered into the car. It had become a traveling museum, full of glinting metal shapes, field maps and military drums, a faded Choctaw headdress, a portrait of Ulysses Grant. Truck installed a couple of globes in the trunk and emerged with a can of beer, which he cracked and sipped and then emptied on the grass. Gwen came out with an object clasped like a baby at her breast.

“Jesus H.,” Truck said. “I could sell snow to a Puerto Rican. But no way in hell is anybody paying us for that thing.” It was my father’s prized bobcat. Gwen set it on the gravel drive and the two of them plunged back into the light of the house.

What a strange and sad reunion. I touched the hole I’d gouged thirteen years earlier. It was rough and dry. Had the club returned the trophy after Sid’s death? As always, the animal was frozen in attack, tongue curled between painted teeth, fusty paw outstretched. A taxidermist’s lie. Sid had shot it at a game park, in a pen; for all I knew the cat had been asleep. The miserable thing never stood a chance. I felt a wave of pity — for the bobcat, for Antietam, and even for Sid. He’d been a drunk and a tyrant, but also a man, and a father of sons who had failed him.

Truck urged me out of the way. Apparently, he’d tired of antiques: there was a widescreen television in his arms, and Gwen stood behind him, clutching the cord as if it were a wedding train. I watched him struggle to fit it in the car.

“Hang on a second,” I said.

Truck set the TV on the ground and began hastily to unload the back seat, handing objects to Gwen more quickly than she could take them. She stacked Sid’s life on the roof of the car.

“We need to put it all back,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve made a mistake.”

Truck had hefted the television onto his knees, and he labored under its weight.

“Move that puma,” he said to Gwen. She slid the bobcat out of his way.

The week I’d left school, Sid rewarded me with dinner at his club. He maintained an eerie poise through three courses and dessert. Afterward, through a curtain of smoke, he told me, “Rest assured, I saw it coming long before you did.” This wasn’t quite true: since boyhood. I’d felt failure in my bones, a dull, constant ache. I had always been predictable, above all to myself. It came as a surprise, though, when I saw Gwen’s bag on the passenger seat, reached in, and took her gun. I leveled it at Truck.

“Put it back,” I said. “All of it.”

“Oh, honey,” said Gwen.

Truck watched me for a long moment. Slowly, he bent and put down the television. He squinted, as though performing long division in his head. Then he nodded and spread his arms, palms open, inviting me to shoot.

“I’ll do it,” I said. And I wanted to. My hand wavered. We stood there talking with our eyes.

Truck moved carefully toward me, and took the weapon from my hand. He lowered it and fired. There was a barking sound and a fierce blazing pressure in my thigh. Tears rushed to my eyes and I folded, almost gracefully, to an Indian position on the ground.

“Get in the car,” Truck ordered Gwen.

She looked into my eyes with a lovely mournful calm. She had killed a man, and her bird was dead. She kissed my head and opened the passenger door.

The car tore away in a storm of Union relics, and I sat there in the inky silence, bleeding. The bobcat stared with its one good eye. Soon enough, I would limp inside and find a phone. For the moment, though, I held my leg and counted — breaths and heartbeats, birches, aircraft in the sky. They would get at least a small head start.