The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

James Lee Burke A Season of Regret

From Shenandoah

Albert Hollister likes the heft of it, the coldness of the steel, the way his hand fits inside the lever action. Even though the Winchester is brand-new, just out of the box from Wal-Mart, he ticks a chain of tiny drops from a can of 3-in-One on all the moving parts, cocks and recocks the hammer, and rubs a clean rag over the metal and stock. The directions tell him to run a lubricated bore brush down the barrel, although the weapon has never been fired. After he does so, he slips a piece of white paper behind the chamber and squints down the muzzle with one eye. The oily spiral of light that spins at him through the rifling has an otherworldly quality about it.

He presses a half-dozen.30–30 shells into the tubular magazine with his thumb, then ejects them one by one on his bedspread. His wife has gone to town with the nurse’s aide for her doctor’s appointment and the house is quiet. The fir trees and Ponderosa pine on the hillside are full of wind and a cloud of yellow dust rises off the canopy and sucks away over his barn and pasture. He picks up the shells and fits them back in the cartridge box, then puts the rifle and the shells in his closet, closes the door on them, and drinks a glass of iced tea on the front porch.

Down the canyon he can see the long roll of the Bitterroot Mountains, the moon still visible against the pale blueness of the sky, like a sliver of dry ice. He drains his glass and feels a terrible sense of fatigue and hopelessness wash through his body. If age brings wisdom, he has yet to see it in his own life. Across the driveway, in his north pasture, a large sorrel-colored hump lies in the bunch grass. A pair of magpies descend on top of it, their beaks dipping into their bloody work. Albert looks at the scene with great sorrow on his face, gathers up a pick and a shovel from the garage, and walks down the hillside into the pasture. A yellow Labrador retriever bounds along behind him.

“Go back to the house, Buddy,” Albert says.

The wind makes a sound like water when it sharks through the grass.

Albert had seen the bikers for the first time only last week. Three of them had ridden up the dirt road that splits his ranch in half, ignoring the PRIVATE ROAD sign nailed to the railed fence that encloses his lower pasture. They turned around when they hit the dead end two hundred yards north of Albert’s barn, then cruised back through Albert’s property toward the paved highway. They were big men, the sleeves of their denim jackets scissored off at the armpits, their skin wrapped with tattoos. They sat their motorcycles as though they absorbed the throttled-down power of the engine through their thighs and forearms. The man in the lead had red hair and a wild beard and sweat rings under his arms. He seemed to nod when Albert lifted his hand in greeting.

Albert caught the tag number of the red-haired man’s motorcycle and wrote it down on a scrap of paper that he put away in his wallet.

A half hour later he saw them again, this time in front of the grocery store in Lolo, the little service town two miles down the creek from his ranch. They had loaded up with canned goods and picnic supplies and sweating six-packs of beer and were stuffing them into the saddlebags on their motorcycles. He passed within three feet of them, close enough to smell the odor of leather, unwashed hair, engine grease, and woodsmoke in their clothes. One of them gargled with his beer before he swallowed it, then grinned broadly at Albert. He wore black glasses, as a welder might. Three blue teardrops were tattooed at the corner of his left eye.

“What’s happening, old-timer?” he said.

“Not much outside of general societal decay, I’d say,” Albert replied.

The biker gave him a look.

Five days later, Albert drove his truck to the Express Lube and took a walk down toward the intersection while he waited for his truck to be serviced. It was sunset and the sky was a chemical green, backdropped by the purple shapes of the Bitterroot Mountains. The day was cooling rapidly and Albert could smell the cold odor of the creek that wound under the highway. It was a fine evening, one augmented by families enjoying themselves at the Dairy Queen, blue-collar people eating in the Mexican restaurant, an eighteen-wheeler shifting down for the long pull over Lolo Pass. But the voices he heard on the periphery of his vision were like a dirty smudge on a perfect moment in time. The three bikers who had trespassed on his private road had blundered onto a young woman who had just gotten out of her car next to the town’s only saloon.

Her car was a rust-eaten piece of junk, a piece of cardboard taped across the passenger window, the tires bald, a child’s stuffed animal inside the back window. The woman had white-gold hair that was cut short like a boy’s, tapered on the sides and shaved on the neck. Her hips looked narrow and hard inside her pressed jeans, her breasts firm against her tight-fitting T-shirt. She was trapped between her car and the three bikers, who behaved as though they had just run into an old friend and only wanted to offer her a beer. But it was obvious they were not moving, at least not without a token to take with them. A pinch on the butt or the inside of her thigh would probably do.

She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at an upward angle, not responding, waiting for their energies to run down.

“How about a steak when you get off?” the man with the red beard asked.

“Sorry, I got to go home and wash out my old man’s underwear,” she said.

“Your old man, huh? Wonder why he didn’t buy you a ring,” the man with the beard replied. When he got no response, he tried again. “You a gymnast? ’Cause that’s what you look like. Except for that beautiful pair of ta-ta’s, you’re built like a man. That’s meant as a compliment.”

Don’t mix in it. It’s not your grief, Albert told himself.

“Hey, fellows,” he said.

The bikers turned and looked at him, like men upon whom a flashbulb had just popped.

“I think she’s late for work,” Albert said.

“She sent you a kite on that?” the red-bearded man said, smiling.

Albert looked into space. “Y’all on your way to Sturgis?”

The third biker, who so far had not spoken, stuck an unfiltered cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a Zippo that flared on his face. His skin looked like dirty tallow in the evening light, his dark hair hanging in long strands on his cheeks. “She your daughter? Or your wife? Or your squeeze on the side?” he said. He studied Albert. “No, I can see that’s probably not the case. Well, that means you should butt out. Maybe go buy yourself a tamale up at the café. A big, fat one, lot of juice running down it.”

The bikers grinned into space simultaneously, as though the image conjured up shared meaning that only they understood.

Walk away, the voice inside Albert said.

“What’s wrong with you fellows?” he asked.

“What?” the bearded man said.

“You have to bully a young woman to know who you are? What the hell is the matter with you?” Albert said.

The three bikers looked at one another, then laughed. “I remember where I saw you. On that ranch, up the creek a couple of miles. You walk up and down the road a lot, telling other people what to do?” the bearded man said.

The young woman dropped her cigarette to the ground and used the distraction to walk between the bikers, onto the wood porch of the saloon.

“Hey, come on back, sweet thing. You got a sore place, I’ll kiss it and make it well,” the biker with black glasses said.

She shot him the finger over her shoulder.

“Show time is over,” the bearded man said.

“No harm intended,” Albert said.

“You got a church hereabouts?” the man with the black glasses said.

“There’s a couple up the road,” Albert said.

The three bikers looked at one another again, amused, shaking their heads.

“You’re sure slow on the uptake,” the bearded man said. “If you go to one of those churches next Sunday, drop a little extra in the plate. Thank the Man Upstairs he’s taking care of you. It’s the right thing to do.” He winked at Albert.

But the evening was not over. Fifteen minutes later, after Albert picked up his truck at the Express Lube, he passed by the saloon and saw the three men by the young woman’s car. They had pulled the taped cardboard from the passenger-side window and opened the door. The biker with the beard stood with his feet spread, his thighs flexed, his enormous phallus cupped in his palm, urinating all over the dashboard and the seat.

Albert drove down the state highway toward the turnoff and the dirt road that led to his ranch. The hills were dark green against the sunset, the sharp outline of Lolo Peak capped with snow, the creek that paralleled the road sliding through shadows the trees made on the water’s surface. He braked his truck, backed it around, and floored the accelerator, the gearshift vibrating in his palm. The note he left under the young woman’s windshield wiper was simple: The Idaho tag number of the red-haired man who vandalized your car is— He copied onto the note the number he had placed in his wallet the day the bikers had driven through his property. Then he added: I’m sorry you had this trouble. You did nothing to deserve it.

He walked back toward his truck, wondering if the anonymity of his note was not a form of moral failure in itself. He returned to the woman’s car and signed his name and added his phone number at the bottom.

On the way home the wind buffeted his truck, powdering the road with pine needles, fanning geysers of sparks out of a slash pile in a field. In the distance he saw a solitary bolt of lightning strike the ridgeline and quiver whitely against the sky. The air smelled of ozone and rain, but it brought him no relief from the sense of apprehension that seized his chest. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, like copper pennies, like blood, a taste that reminded him of his misspent youth.

It takes him most of the afternoon to hand-dig a hole in the pasture in order to bury the sorrel mare. The vinyl draw-string bag someone had wrapped over her head and cinched tight around her neck lies crumpled and streaked with ropes of dried saliva and mucus in the bunch grass. The under sheriff, Joe Bim Higgins, watches Albert fling the dirt off the shovel blade onto the horse’s flank and stomach and tail.

“I checked them out. You picked quite a threesome to get into it with,” Joe Bim says.

“Wasn’t of my choosing,” Albert replies.

“Others might argue that.”

Albert wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his forearm. The wind is up, channeling through the grass, bending the fir trees that dot the slopes of the hills that border both sides of his ranch. The sun is bright on the hills and the shadow of a hawk races across the pasture and breaks apart at the fence line. “Say again?”

“In the last year you filed a complaint because some kids fired bottle rockets on your property. You pissed off the developers trying to build a subdivision down on the creek. You called the president a draft-dodging moron in print. Some might say you have adversarial tendencies.”

Albert thought about it. “Yes, I guess I do, Joe Bim. Particularly when a lawman stands beside my dead horse and tells me the problem is me, not the sons of bitches who ran her heart out.”

But Joe Bim is not a bad man. He removes a shovel from his departmental SUV and helps Albert bury the animal, wheezing down in his chest, his stomach hanging against his shirt like a water-filled balloon. “All three of those boys been in the pen,” he says. “The one who hosed down the girl’s car is a special piece of work. His child was taken away from him and his wife for its own protection.”

Then Joe Bim tells Albert what the biker or his wife or both of them did to a four-month-old infant. Albert’s eyes film. His clears his throat and spits into the grass. “Why aren’t they in jail?” he says.

“Why do we have crack and meth in middle schools? The goddamn courts, that’s why. But it ain’t gonna change because you get into it with a bunch of psychopaths.”

Albert packs down the dirt on top of his horse and lays a row of large, flat stones on top of the dirt. He cannot rid himself of the images Joe Bim’s story has created in his mind. Joe Bim looks at him for a long time.

“How’s the wife?” he asks.

“Parkinson’s is Parkinson’s. Some days are better than others,” Albert says.

“You’re a gentle man. Don’t mess in stuff like this,” Joe Bim says. “I’ll get them out of town. They’re con-wise. They know the hurt we can put on them.”

You have no idea what you’re talking about, Albert says to himself.

“What’s that?” Joe Bim asks.

“Nothing. Thanks for coming out. Listen to that wind blow,” Albert says.

Before his retirement he had taught at the state university in Missoula although he did not have a Ph.D. and had managed to publish several novels that had enjoyed a fair degree of commercial success. Early on he had learned the secret of survival among academics, and that was to avoid showing any sign of disrespect for what they did. But in actuality the latter had never been a problem for him. He not only respected his colleagues but thought their qualifications and background superior to his own. His humility and southern manners and publications earned him a tenured position and in an odd way gave him a form of invisibility. In the aftermath of the most bitter faculty meetings, no one could remember if Albert had attended the meeting or not.

In truth, Albert’s former colleagues, as well as his current friends, including Joe Bim Higgins, have no idea who he really is.

He never speaks of the road gang he served time on as a teenager, or the jails and oil-town flophouses he slept in from Mobile to Corpus Christi. In fact, he considers most of his youthful experience of little consequence.

Except for one event that forever shaped his thinking about the darkness that can live in the human breast.

It was the summer of 1955, and he had been sentenced to seven days in a parish prison after a bloody, nose-breaking brawl outside a bar on the Texas-Louisiana line. The male lockdown unit was an enormous iron tank, perforated with square holes, on the third floor of the building. Most of the inmates were check writers, drunks, wife beaters, and petty thieves. A handful of more serious criminals were awaiting transfer to the state prison farm at Angola. The inmates were let out of the tank at seven A.M. each day and allowed the use of the bull run and the shower until five P.M., when they went back into lockdown until the next morning. By six P.M. the tank was sweltering, the smoke from cigarettes trapped against the iron ceiling, the toilets often clogged and reeking.

The treatment of the inmates was not deliberately cruel. The trusties ladled out black coffee, grits, sausage, and white bread for breakfast and spaghetti at noon. It was the kind of can where you did your time, stayed out of the shower when the wrong people were in there, never accepted favors from another inmate, and never, under any circumstances, sassed a hack. The seven days should have been a breeze. They weren’t.

On Albert’s fourth day, a trailer truck with two huge generators boomed down on the bed, pulled to a stop with a hiss of air brakes, and parked behind the prison.

“What’s that?” Albert asked.

“This is Lou’sana, boy. The executioner does it curb-side, no extra charge,” an inmate wiping his armpits with a ragged towel replied. His name was Deek. His skin was as white as a frog’s belly and he was doing consecutive one-year sentences for auto theft and jailbreak.

But Albert was staring down from the barred window at a beanpole of a man on the sidewalk and was not concentrating on Deek’s words. The man on the sidewalk was dressed western, complete with brim-coned hat, the bones of his shoulders almost piercing his snap-button shirt. He was supervising the unloading of a heavy rectangular object wrapped with canvas. “Say that again?” Albert said.

“They’re fixing to fry that poor sonofabitch across the hall,” Deek replied.

The clouds above the vast swampland to the west were the color of scorched iron, pulsing with electricity. Albert could smell an odor like dead fish on the wind.

“Some night for it, huh?” Deek said.

Without explanation, the jailer put the inmates into lockdown an hour early. The heat and collective stink inside the tank were almost unbearable. Albert thought he heard a man weeping across the hall. At eight P.M. the generators on the truck trailer began to hum, building in velocity and force until the sounds of the street, the juke joint on the corner, and even the electric storm bursting above the swamp were absorbed inside a grinding roar that made Albert press his palms against his ears.

He would have sworn he saw lightning leap from the bars on the window, then the generators died and he could smell rain blowing through the window and hear a jukebox playing in a bar across the street from the jail.

The next morning, the jailer ran a weapons search on the tank and also sprayed it for lice. The inmates from the tank were moved into the hall and the room in which the condemned man had died. The door to the perforated two-bunk iron box in which he had spent his last night on earth was open, the electric chair already loaded on the trailer truck down below. When Albert touched the concrete surface of the windowsill he thought he could feel the residue from the rubber-coated power cables that had been stretched through the bars. He also smelled an odor that was like food that had fallen from a skillet into a fire.

Then he saw the man in the coned hat and western clothes emerge from a café across the street with a masculine-looking woman and two uniformed sheriff’s deputies. They were laughing — perhaps at a joke or an incident that had just happened in the café. The man in the coned hat turned his face up into the light and seemed to look directly at Albert. His face was thin, the skin netted with lines, his eyes as bright and small as a serpent’s.

“You waving at free people?” a guard said. He was a lean, sun-browned man who had been a mounted gunbull at Angola before he had become a sheriff’s deputy and a guard at the parish prison. Even though the morning was still cool, his shirt was peppered with sweat, as though his body heat created its own environment.

“No, sir.”

“So get away from the window.”

“Yes, sir.” Then he asked the question that rose from his chest into his mouth before he could undo the impulse. “Was that fellow crying last night?”

The guard lifted his chin, his mouth downturned at the corners. “It ain’t none of your business what he was doing.”

Albert nodded and didn’t reply

“Food cart’s inside now. Go eat your breakfast,” the guard said.

“Don’t know if I can handle any more grits, boss. Why don’t you eat them for me?” Albert said.

The guard tightened the tuck of his shirt with his thumb, his expression thoughtful, his shoulders as square as a drill instructor’s. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils. “Let’s take a walk down to the second floor, get you a little better accommodated,” he said. “Fine morning, don’t you think?”

Albert never told anyone of what the guard did to him. But sometimes he smells the guard’s stink in his sleep, a combination of chewing tobacco and hair oil and testosterone and dried sweat that had been ironed with starch into the clothes. In the dream he also sees the upturned face of the executioner, his skin lit in the sunshine, his friends grinning at a joke they had brought with them from the café. Albert has always wanted to believe this emblematic moment in his life was regional in origin, born out of ignorance and fear and redneck cruelty, perhaps one even precipitated by his own recklessness, but he knows otherwise.

Albert has learned that certain injuries go deep into the soul, like a stone bruise, and that time does not eradicate them. He knows that the simian creature that lived in the guard and the executioner took root many years ago in his own breast. He knows that, under the right circumstances, Albert Hollister is capable of deeds no one would associate with the professor who taught creative writing at the university and whose presence at faculty meetings was so innocuous it was not even remembered.

To the east the fog is heavy and white and hangs in long strips on the hills bordering Albert’s ranch. When the early sun climbs above the crest, it seems to burst among the trees like a shattered red diamond. From the kitchen window, where he is drinking coffee and looking down the long slope of his southern pasture, he sees a rust-eaten car coming up the road, its headlights glowing against the shadows that cover the valley floor. One headlight is out of alignment and glitters oddly, like the eye of a man who has been injured in a fight. The passenger window is encased with cardboard and silver duct tape.

The girl from the saloon knocks at his front door, dressed in colorless jeans and a navy-blue corduroy coat. She wears a cute cap and her cheeks are red in the wind. She is obviously awed by the size of his home, the massive amounts of quarried stone that support the two top floors, the huge logs that could probably absorb a cannon shell. Through the rear window of her vehicle, he can see a small boy strapped in a child’s car seat.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about what happened to your horse,” she says.

“It’s not your fault,” Albert says.

Her eyes leave his, then come back again. He thinks he can smell an odor in her clothes and hair like damp leaves burning in the fall. He hears his wife call to him from the bedroom. “Come in,” he tells the girl. “I have to see to Mrs. Hollister. She’s been ill for some time now.”

Then he wonders to himself why he has just told the girl his personal business.

“We’re on our way to Idaho. I just wanted to thank you and to apologize.”

“That’s good of you. But it’s not necessary.”

She looks down the pasture at the frost on the barn roof and the wind blowing in the bunch grass. She sucks in her cheeks, as though her mouth has gone dry. “They got your name from me, not from the under sheriff.”

In the silence he can hear his wife getting up from the bed and walking toward the bathroom on her own. He feels torn between listening to the young woman and tending to his wife. “Run that by me again?” he says.

“One of them was my ex-husband’s cellmate in Deer Lodge. They wanted to know your name and if it was you who called the cops. They’re in the A.B. That’s why I’m going to Idaho. I’m not pressing charges,” she says.

“The Aryan Brotherhood?”

She sticks her hands in the pockets of her jacket and balls them into fists, all the time looking at the ground. Then Albert realizes she has not come to his home simply to apologize. He also realizes the smoke he smells on her clothes and person did not come from a pile of burning leaves.

“My boss is gonna send me a check in two weeks. At least that’s what he says. My boyfriend is trying to get one of those FEMA construction jobs in New Orleans. But his P.O. won’t give him permission to leave the state. I have enough money for gas to Idaho, Mr. Hollister, but I don’t have enough for a motel.”

“I see,” he replies, and wonders how a man of his age could be so dumb. “Will fifty dollars help? Because that’s all I have on me.”

She seems to think about it. “That’d be all right,” she says. She glances over her shoulder at the little boy strapped in the car seat. Her nails look bitten, the self-concern and design in her eyes undisguised. “The saloon will be open at ten.”

“I don’t follow you,” he said.

“I could take a check. They’ll cash it for me at the saloon.”

He lets her words slide off his face without reacting to them. When he removes the bills from his wallet and places them in her hand, she cups his fingers in her palm. “You’re a good man,” she says.

“When are they coming?” he asks.

“Sir?”

He shakes his head to indicate he has disengaged from the conversation and closes the door, then walks down the hallway and helps his wife back to her bed. “Was that someone from the church?” she asks.

During the night he hears hail on the roof, then high winds that make a rushing sound, like water, through the trees on the hillsides. He dreams about a place in South Texas where he and his father bobber-fished in a chain of ponds that had been formed by sheets of twisted steel spinning out of the sky like helicopter blades when Texas City exploded in February of 1947. In the dream, wind is blowing through a piney woods that borders a saltwater bay hammered with light. His father speaks to him inside the wind, but Albert cannot make out the words or decipher the meaning they contain.

In the distance he hears motorized vehicles grinding up a grade, throttling back, then accelerating again, working their way higher and higher up the mountainside, with the relentlessness of chain saws.

He wakes and sits up in bed, not because of the engines but because they have stopped — somewhere above his house, inside the trees, perhaps on the ridgeline where an old log road traverses the length of the canyon.

He removes the rifle from his closet and loads it. He disarms the security system and steps out onto the gallery, in the moonlight and the sparkle of frost on the bunch grass. His hands and uncovered head and bare feet are cold. He levers a shell into the chamber but releases the hammer with his thumb so that it cannot drop by accident and strike the shell casing, discharging the round. The fir trees are black-green against the hillside, the arroyo behind his house empty. The air is clean and smells of pine and snow melting on the rocks and woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney down the canyon. In the whisper of the wind through the trees he wants to believe the engine sounds in his dream are just that — the stuff of dreams. Far up the hill he hears a glass bottle break on stone and a motorcycle roar to life.

Inside the topmost trees three separate fires burst alight and fill the woods with shadows. The sound of motorcycle engines multiplies and three balls of flame move in different directions down the ridgeline. Inside the house, he calls 911 and through the back window he sees the silhouette of one rider towing a fireball that caroms off the undergrowth, the points of ignition fanning down the slope in the wind.

“What’s the nature of your emergency?” the dispatcher asks.

“This is Albert Hollister, up Sleeman Gulch. At least three men on motorcycles are stringing fires down my ridgeline.”

“Which way are they headed?”

“Who cares where they’re headed? The wind is out of the southwest. I’ll have sparks on my roof in a half hour. Get the goddamn pump trucks up here.”

“Would you not swear, please?”

“These men are criminals. They’re burning my land.”

“Repeat, please. I cannot understand what you’re saying.”

His voice has wakened and frightened his wife. He comforts her in her bed, then goes outside again and watches a red glow spread across the top of the valley. The summer has been dry and the fire ripples through the soft patina of grass at the base of the trees and superheats the air trapped under the canopy. A sudden rush of cold wind through the timber hits the fire like an influx of pure oxygen. Flame balloons out of the canopy and in seconds turns fir trees into black scorches dripping with sparks. He can hear deer running across rocks and see hundreds of bats flying in and out of a sulfurous yellow cloud that has formed above the flames. He connects a hose to the faucet on the back of the house and sprays the bib of green grass on the slope, his heart racing, his mouth dry with fear.

By noon the next day the wind has died and inside the smell of ash is another odor, one that reminds him of the small room on the third floor of the parish prison where a man was strapped down in a wood chair and cooked to death with thousands of volts of electricity. Joe Bim Higgins stands next to Albert in the south pasture and stares up the hillside at the burned rocks and great stands of fir that are now rust-colored, as though stricken by blight.

Joe Bim blows his nose into a handkerchief and spits into the grass. “We found a sow and her cub inside a deadfall. The fire was probably crowning when they tried to outrun it,” he says.

“Where are they, Joe Bim?” Albert asks.

“Just up there where you see that outcropping.” He tries to pretend his misunderstanding of Albert’s question is sincere, then gives it up. “I had all three of them in a holding cell at seven this morning. But they got an alibi. Two people at their campground say they was at the campground all night.”

“You cut them loose?”

Joe Bim is not a weak man or one who has avoided paying dues. He was at Heartbreak Ridge and one side of his face is still marbled from the heat flash of a phosphorous shell that exploded ten feet from his foxhole. “I can’t chain-drag these guys down the Blackfoot highway because you don’t like them. Look, I’ve got two deputies assigned to watch them. One of them throws a cigarette butt on the sidewalk—”

“Go back to town,” Albert says.

“Maybe you don’t know who your real friends are.”

“Yeah, my wife and my yellow Lab, Buddy. I’d include my sorrel, except the two of us buried her.”

“You’re like me, Albert. You’re an old man and you can’t accept the fact you can’t have your way with everything. Grow up and stop making life hard for yourself and others.”

Albert walks away without replying. Later, he spreads lime on the carcasses of the bears that died in the fire and tries not to think the thoughts he is thinking.

That night, during a raging electric storm, Albert leaves his wife in the care of the nurse’s aide and drives in his pickup to the only twenty-four-hour public campground on the Blackfoot River in Missoula County, his lever-action rifle jittering in the rack behind his head. It’s not hard to find the three bikers. Their sky-blue polyethylene tent is huge, brightly lit from the inside, the extension flaps propped up on poles to shelter their motorcycles. Lightning flickers on the hillside across the river, limning the trees, turning the current in the river an even deeper black. The smell of ozone in the air makes Albert think of the Gulf Coast and his youth and the way rain smelled when it blew across the wetlands in the fall. He thinks of his father, who died while returning from a duck-hunting camp in Anahuac, Texas, leaving Albert to fend for himself. He wonders if this is the way dementia and death eventually steal upon a man’s soul.

Down the road he parks his truck inside a grove of Douglas fir trees that are shaggy with moss and climbs up the hill into boulders that look like the shells of giant gray turtles. He works his way across the slope until he can look down upon the bikers’ campsite. In the background the river is like black satin, the canyon roaring with the sounds of high water and reverberated thunder. The flap of the bikers’ tent is open and Albert can see three men inside, eating from GI mess kits, a bottle of stoppered booze resting against a rolled sleeping bag. They look like workingmen on a summer vacation, enjoying a meal together, perhaps talking about the fish they caught that day. But Albert knows their present circumstances and appearance and behavior have nothing to do with who they really are.

They could as easily wear starched uniforms as they do jailhouse tats. Their identity lies in their misogyny and violence and cruelty to animals and children, not the blue teardrops at the corner of the eyes or the greasy jeans or the fog of testosterone and dried beer sweat on their bodies. These are the same men who operated Robespierre’s torture chambers. They’re the burners of the Alexandrian Library, the brownshirts who pumped chlorine gas into shower rooms. They use religions and flags that allow them to peel civilizations off the face of the earth. There is no difference, Albert tells himself, between these men and a screw in a parish prison on the Louisiana-Texas border where a guard frog-walked a kid in cuffs down to an isolation area, shoved him to his knees, and closed the door on the outside world.

The rain looks like spun glass blowing in front of the open tent flap. The biker with the red beard emerges from the opening, fills his lungs with air, and checks his motorcycle. He wipes off the frame and handlebars with a clean rag and admires the perfection of his machine. Albert levers a round into the chamber and steadies his rifle across the top of a large rock. The notch of the steel sight moves across the man’s mouth and throat, the broad expanse of his chest, the hair blossoming from his shirt, then down his stomach and scrotum and jeans that are stiff with road grime and engine grease and glandular fluids.

In his mind’s eye Albert sees all the years of his youth reduced to typewritten lines written on a sheet of low-grade paper. He sees the paper consumed by a white-hot light that burns a hole through the pulp, curling through the typed words, releasing images that he thought he had dealt with years ago but in reality has not. In the smoke and flame he sees a stretch of rain-swept black road and his father’s car embedded under the frame of a tractor-trailer rig; he sees the naked, hair-covered thighs of a former Angola gun bull looming above him; he sees the ax-bladed face of a state executioner, a toothpick in his mouth, his eyes staring whimsically at Albert, as though it is Albert who is out of sync with the world and not the man who cinches the leather straps tightly to the wrists and calves of the condemned. Albert raises the rifle sight to the red-bearded man’s chest and, just as a bolt of lightning splits a towering Ponderosa pine in half, he squeezes the trigger.

The rifle barrel flares into the darkness and he already imagines the bullet on its way to the red-bearded man’s chest. The round is copper-jacketed, soft-nosed, and when it strikes the man’s sternum, it will flatten and topple slightly and core through the lungs and leave an exit wound the size of Albert’s thumb.

My God, what has he done?

Albert stands up from behind the boulder and stares down the hillside. The bearded man has taken a candy bar from his pocket and is eating it while he watches the rain blowing in the light from the tent flap.

He missed, thanks either to the Lord or to the constriction in his chest that caused his hand to jerk or maybe just to the fact he’s not cut out of the same cloth as the man he has tried to kill.

Albert grasps the rifle by the barrel and swings it against a boulder and sees the butt plate and screws burst loose from the stock. He swings the rifle again, harder, and still breaks nothing of consequence loose from either the wood or the steel frame. He flings the rifle like a pinwheel into the darkness, the sight on the barrel’s tip ripping the heel of his hand.

He cannot believe what happens next. The rifle bounces muzzle-down off the roof of a passing SUV, arcing back into the air with new life, and lands right in front of the bikers’ tent.

He drives farther down the dirt road, away from the bikers’ camp, his headlights off, rocks skidding from his tires into the canyon below.

When he gets back home, he strips off his wet clothes and sits in the bottom of the shower stall until he drains all the hot water out of the tank. His hands will not stop shaking.

The rains are heavy the following spring and in May the bunch grass in Albert’s pastures is tall and green, as thick as Kansas wheat, and the hillsides are sprinkled with wildflowers. In the evening whitetail and mule deer drift out of the trees and graze along the edge of the irrigation canal he has dug from a spring at the base of the burned area behind his house. He would like to tell himself that the land will continue to mend, that a good man has nothing to fear from the world and that he has put aside the evil done to him by the bikers. But he has finally learned that lying to oneself is an offense for which human beings seldom grant themselves absolution.

He comes to believe that acceptance of a wintry place in the soul and a refusal to speak about it to others is as much consolation as a man gets, and for some odd reason that thought seems to bring him peace. He is thinking these thoughts as he returns home from his wife’s funeral in June. Joe Bim Higgins is sitting on the front steps of his gallery, the trousers of his dress suit stuffed inside his cowboy boots, a Stetson hat balanced on his knee, a cigarette almost burned down to a hot stub between two fingers. A pallbearer’s ribbon is still in his lapel.

“The old woman wants me to invite you to dinner tonight,” Joe Bim says.

“I appreciate it,” Albert replies.

“You never heard no more from those bikers, huh?”

“Why would I?”

Joe Bim pinches out the end of his cigarette, field-strips the paper, and watches the tobacco blow away in the wind. “Got a call two days ago from Sand Point. The one with the red beard killed the other two, and an Indian woman for good measure. The three of them was drunk and fighting over the woman.”

“I’m not interested.”

“The killing got done with an 1894-model Winchester. Guess who it’s registered to? How’d they end up with your rifle, Albert?”

“Maybe they found it somewhere.”

“I think they stole it out of your house and you didn’t know about it. That’s why you didn’t report it stolen.” Joe Bim folds his hands and gazes at the hillside across the road and the wildflowers ruffling in the wind.

“They killed an innocent person with it?” Albert asks.

“If she was hanging with that bunch, she bought her own ticket. Show some humility for a change. You didn’t invent original sin.”

Albert starts to tell Joe Bim all of it — the attempt he made on the biker’s life, the deed the sheriff’s deputy had done to him when he was eighteen, the accidental death of his father, the incipient rage that has lived in his breast all his adult life — but the words break apart in his throat before he can speak them. In the silence he can hear the wind coursing through the trees and grass, just like the sound of rushing water, and he wonders if it is blowing through the canyon where he lives or through his own soul. He wonders if his reticence with Joe Bim is not indeed the moment of absolution that has always eluded him. He waits for Joe Bim to speak again but realizes his friend’s crooked smile is one of puzzlement, not omniscience, that the puckered skin on the side of his face is a reminder that the good people of the world each carry their own burden.

Albert feeds his dog and says a prayer for his wife. Then he drives down the dirt road with Joe Bim in a sunset that makes him think of gold pollen floating above the fields.