The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

The Indian by Randall Silvis

FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

HARVEY SHOVES OPEN the door of the bar and comes striding in the way he always does, walking fast, angry, lips moving as he mutters to himself. His brother Will, who owns the bar and at forty-one is two years younger than Harvey, reaches for an icy Schlitz at the bottom of the cooler, gives it a wipe with the bar towel, twists off the cap, and sets the bottle on the bar just as Harvey gets there. Harvey doesn’t reach for the bottle right away because he’s too angry to drink, too angry to do anything but stand there gripping the curved edge of the cool wooden counter. His fingers knead the scarred mahogany.

“I swear to God I am going to kill that pasty-faced weasel once and for all,” he says.

Will has been standing behind the bar with nothing much to do and thinking about Portugal. In his mind he has been standing on a bluff overlooking the glittering Atlantic, while behind him on a sun-bleached plateau lies a small, well-ordered city with wide clean streets and whitewashed buildings and the dome of a mosque glowing golden in the sun.

It takes Will a moment to adjust to this sudden migration back to his bar and the heat of his brother’s anger. Then Howard down at the end of the bar clears his throat. Will takes a frosted glass out of the other cooler and fills it from the plastic jug of daiquiri mix he makes just for Howard, who comes in four nights a week and sits primly at the far end of the bar. Between six and eight each night he drinks four lime daiquiris without uttering a word unless another customer or Will addresses him directly. He is a small man who, according to Will’s wife, Lacy, looks the way Tennessee Williams might have looked had he lived to be seventy-eight instead of choking on the bottle cap from a bottle of eye drops. For thirty-seven years he worked at the local driver’s license center, where he failed both Harvey and Will upon their first attempts many years ago, Harvey for roll-stopping at an intersection and Will for bumping the curb while parallel parking.

Tonight is a steamy Tuesday in baseball season, but the Pirates are off until Thursday, so the only other customers are four golfers, who came in for burgers and beer. Will is grateful for the golfers because on nights when there isn’t a televised sporting event he doesn’t sell enough alcohol to cover his electric bill. The big-screen TV at the rear of the room is only two years old, but unfortunately it hasn’t helped him to compete with the motel bars out by the interstate. He can’t compete with the live bands and free munchies and the college girls in their short skirts. All he has to offer is a clean, quiet place to spend an hour or so with friends without having to shout to be heard, a place where for $14 you can quietly submerge yourself in enough lime juice and rum to soften the edges on some undisclosed misery.

Will looks toward the golfers now and asks with a lift of his eyebrows if they are ready for another pitcher. “We’re good,” a golfer says. The TV is tuned to CNN Headline News but nobody is paying any attention to it. The air conditioner is working hard to counteract the sticky August heat. There is something loose inside the air conditioner, and every once in a while Will can hear it rattling around in there.

Harvey wraps both hands around his beer bottle but doesn’t take a sip. “I mean it,” he says, only loud enough for Will to hear. “So I need to borrow your.357 for a while.”

Will fills a small wooden bowl with salted peanuts and sets it on the counter. “Stevie’s upstairs watching TV with Lacy,” he says. “Go ahead and go on up if you want.”

“I mean it, Will. I am seriously going to do it this time.”

Will would say something if he knew what to say. He isn’t exactly sure what his brother’s troubles are, and he suspects that Harvey isn’t sure either. All Will knows is that even in Harvey’s lighter moods there seems to be something eating away at him, some worm of bitterness gnawing at his gut. It might have to do with his job as a truck driver for Jimmy Dean Sausage, but Will doubts it. There can’t be much stress involved in humping sausage around to regular customers on a regular route. It might have to do with Harvey’s marriage, but Will doubts that, too. Harvey and Jennilee have been married for seven years, and Will knows for a fact that his brother is still madly, even desperately, in love with Jennilee.

“I’m going to need that.357,” Harvey says again. Will flinches a little and looks toward Howard. Howard stares straight ahead at the bottles on the shelves, he sips his daiquiri, and he waits without complaint for a streetcar that will never arrive.

Will tells his brother, “Hold on a minute.” He goes to the kitchen, checks the deep fryer, lifts out a basket of wings and another of fries, drains them, dumps each into a separate wicker basket lined with napkins, sprinkles them with salt. He carries these to the bar and hands them to Harvey. “Take these upstairs to Stevie, will you? I’ll be right behind soon as I check on those golfers. Lacy and me are splitting a pizza. You want anything?”

Harvey says, “I’m not kidding this time. You might think I am, but I’m not.”

“I’ll be up in a minute,” Will says.

In the kitchen he tries to get back to Portugal, but Portugal has been burned away in the sizzle and stink of the deep fryer’s fat.

At the top of the stairs Harvey kicks the door a couple of times. Five seconds later Stevie, his youngest brother, yanks open the door, reaches for the wings and fries, and says, “About time. I’m starvin’ to death here.” To Lacy he says, “Look who the delivery boy is tonight.”

Lacy, seated on the sofa in the middle of the living room, looks over her shoulder. “Hey, Harvey, how ya doin’? Jennilee come with you?”

Harvey doesn’t answer. There is a movie on the television, something with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, and Lacy’s police scanner on the mantel is crackling with static-filled voices. A floor fan in the corner of the room makes a constant clicking whir. After a moment Harvey asks, “Molly around?”

“At the library with some friends. Library closes at seven, so she’ll be home before long. Why do you ask?”

Instead of explaining, Harvey glares at the TV. Even with all the windows open and the fan on high, the room pulses with damp heat. “It’s like trying to breathe through a wet towel in here,” he says.

Lacy smiles up at him. “What has you so agitated?”

“How do you guys even sleep at night? I can’t breathe in here.”

“We take the fan into the bedroom. Molly’s got a little one of her own.”

“Make Will buy you an air conditioner, for chrissakes.”

Lacy blushes and looks away. “The heat only lasts a couple of weeks.”

Stevie says, “I’d still like to know who you’re so pissed at.”

“Wait for Will. I’m not telling this story twice.”

“Whatever,” Stevie says.

Harvey stands there beside the sofa and watches the color in Lacy’s cheeks, sees the way the rubied glow spreads down her neck when she blushes. What kind of life is this, Harvey wonders, when a man who works as hard as Will can’t even afford an air conditioner for his wife.

Then Stevie says, “You ask around for me yet over at Jimmy Dean?”

“I already told you. Nobody is ever going to hire you as a driver. Not with your record, they’re not.”

Unlike his brothers, Stevie passed his driver’s exam on the first attempt and was even graced with a handshake from Howard afterward. But in the twenty years since that accomplishment Stevie has amassed several thousands of dollars in fines for various driving violations. He has twice had his license revoked, for three months each time. One more violation and he will lose his license for a year.

For most of his adult life Stevie has made his living as the town’s handyman, shoveling snow in winter, mowing lawns in the summer, tilling gardens in the spring, raking leaves in the fall. During all seasons he digs graves for the Cemetery Association, hauls away garbage the trash contractor won’t accept, paints an occasional house, cleans out an occasional garage. He would like to have a girlfriend, but he is not anybody’s idea of an eligible bachelor, even by local standards.

“I don’t see where it would hurt to ask,” Stevie continues. “I’d even work in Packing, I don’t care.”

Harvey crosses to the police scanner and turns it down. “How can you even hear the TV with this thing blaring all the time?”

“Harvey, please,” Lacy says. “If you don’t mind.”

“I can’t even hear myself think.”

“Well, how am I supposed to hear if there’s a fire or a car wreck or something?”

“You’ll hear the siren, same as everybody else in town.”

“But I need to get there with my camera before everybody else in town. So if you don’t mind…”

To placate her, Harvey pretends to turn the volume up. He returns to flop on the chair by the window. Lacy gets up and crosses to the scanner and turns it to its original volume.

Though nearly forty, Lacy is small and still as lithe as a gymnast. Stevie has to deliberately avoid looking at her ass when she stands up. Later, when he is back home at his trailer, he will think about her ass and probably about Jennilee’s, too, which is even better. He knows that afterward he will feel guilty and lonely, but he is seldom able to control his thoughts once they begin.

Harvey stares at the TV. Nicolas Cage is standing at the top of a high building, the wings of his trench coat flaring as he peers down at the street far below. Jump, Harvey thinks. Go ahead and jump, you idiot.

Lacy says, “So where’s Jennilee tonight?”

Harvey squints hard and stares at the television.

Stevie says, “I guess that’s another story he doesn’t want to have to tell twice.”

Will enters his apartment carrying a pizza and a six-pack and a handful of napkins. He deposits them all on the coffee table and sits beside his wife. They open beers and steal glances at Harvey.

Lacy says, “Have some pizza, Harvey.”

Harvey remains motionless.

After a while Will says, “Is this the movie where Nicolas Cage is an angel?”

And Harvey says, “So are you going to lend me that.357 or not?”

“Tell me how that would be in either of our best interests.”

Stevie grins and asks, “Who are you going to shoot?”

Harvey says nothing.

Will says, “I only know of one person who can make him grind his teeth like that.”

Stevie keeps grinning. “Kenny got your goat again, brother?”

Jennilee’s brother Kenny used to be Harvey’s best friend in high school and every bit as carefree and wild as Harvey had been until, at the age of twenty, Kenny decided to sell his half of the modified Chevy to Harvey and to quit painting houses for a living, thereby dissolving what Harvey had thought of as their partnership. Six years later, Harvey was still churning up dust clouds on the local track and still scraping paint, but Kenny with his brand-new master’s degree was hired as the assistant principal at the junior-senior high school from which they had all graduated. By the time he was thirty he was the principal, and eight years later he was made the superintendent of schools.

It was Kenny who had talked his sister Jennilee, by then a third-grade teacher, into going out on a date with Harvey, who, from skinned knees to sausage truck driver, had been reduced to a shivering puppy whenever in the presence of Kenny’s little sister. And against what Harvey thought of as all the laws of probability, she then went out with him a second, a third, and a fourth time, went out with him so many times that he finally asked her to marry him, and when she said yes he had to get away from her as quickly as possible so she would not see him quivering again, this time from the utter wonderment and thrilling mystery of life.

Initially Kenny had been slated to be Harvey’s best man, but one day not long before the event Harvey asked Will to be his best man instead.

Now Harvey sits forward in Will’s easy chair. “You think I’m kidding here? I am not freakin’ kidding. I am without a doubt going to blow that, that…”

And Lacy tells him, “You can say asshole. If it’s Kenny you’re talking about, feel free to say it.”

“I am going to blow that asshole to kingdom come.”

Will turns to his wife. “Since when don’t you like Kenny Fulton?”

“He’s all right. But he’s an asshole all the same.”

To Harvey, Will says, “Have some pizza, why don’t you?”

Harvey stands. “Fine. All I’ve got are deer rifles and shotguns at home, but don’t you worry about it a bit, little brother. Don’t worry about me at all. Just because I’m your older brother and by all the laws of the universe you should cut me some slack here, fine, who gives a shit? I’ll strangle him with my bare hands if I have to!”

With that Harvey strides to the door, yanks it open, strides out, and slams the door shut. His footsteps pound down the stairway.

Lacy and Stevie look at Will and wait.

Will wipes his mouth on a paper napkin, drops it crumpled onto the coffee table, and follows Harvey.

A while later, during a Visa commercial, Stevie asks, “You got any of those little hot peppers left you had last time I was here?”

“In the refrigerator. Side shelf.”

And she tries not to wonder about this life she has married into, these brothers and the secrets they share. She wonders instead how many car accidents and other tragedies she will have to photograph before she can afford an air conditioner.

Downstairs, Harvey stands behind the bar, staring down into the beer cooler but otherwise not moving. He can feel his insides quivering, but he thinks that if he stands motionless he can keep his hands from shaking.

Will comes up behind him, picks a glass off the rack, and draws himself a draft and takes a long swallow. He glances around the bar. Howard sits primly at the end of the bar, but the golfers have departed, leaving several bills beneath an empty glass on their table.

And Harvey says, still staring into the beer cooler, into the cold deep bottom, “I feel like I’m going under, Will.”

Will is startled by the intimacy of this confession, its unexpected nakedness.

As is Harvey, who adds with a soft laugh, feeling a fool, “Whatever the hell that means.”

Will doesn’t want the unexpected intimacy of the moment to slip away. He says, “What do you say we get ourselves a little air.”

Will touches Harvey’s arm, then turns away and goes into the kitchen and outside through the rear door. He stands there in the middle of the alleyway, breathing the dusky air. He used to love this kind of sultry evening and wonders when the heat started bothering him so much, wonders when it became such a chore just to take another breath, the way the atmosphere pulses with heat like a boiler about to blow. He used to love these summer evenings because they smelled like baseball. All through Little League and Pony League and American Legion ball, that was how every summer night smelled to him. The soft leather of his glove. The cool dirt of the infield. From his position six feet off third base he would watch between batters as the moths flung themselves at the powerful sodium lights, and their passion mirrored what he felt inside himself but never showed, an exuberance aching to burst free.

These days the town’s Little League program cannot field nine players and has been forced to merge with a team fifteen miles away. The Pony League and American Legion divisions have disbanded. Scrub grass grows on the local infield now. People in passing cars toss bottles at the backstop.

Will stands there in his alleyway and tries to see some stars in the narrow space between the buildings and thinks again about how nice it would be to have a house with a yard and a real piece of the sky overhead. He wonders again, as he has been doing more and more lately, each time he looks at Molly and thinks how tall she’s getting, how quickly she is growing up, he wonders again if maybe he should sell the bar and go back to running a dragline. He could work weekdays in West Virginia and come home on weekends. He likes having the bar and having nobody to answer to, but even with Lacy working as a photographer for the local paper they can barely keep their heads above water.

Then the door pops open behind him and he remembers why he is standing in the alleyway. He doesn’t turn around. The door thuds shut. Then Will asks, not loud, “So what’s this all about?’

Harvey comes forward to stand beside his brother. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Will waits and says nothing.

Harvey lets half a minute pass. “You remember that Indian Jennilee’s father used to ride?”

“Sure. The one you and him restored.”

“For two years we worked on it. Turned it into something beautiful again. Then he had that stroke.”

“That bike must be, what-thirty, forty years old by now?”

“It’s a nineteen fifty-nine. Sweeping fenders front and back, studded leather seat…”

Will knows to wait now, knows to allow his brother to warm to the subject.

“I’m the one scrounged the one fender plus the leather for the seat. I’m the one sanded everything down and laid the five coats of paint on it.”

“I remember,” Will says.

“And when they put him in the nursing home, he promised that bike to me. Said he’d put it in his will. Said it would be mine the day he died.”

“Who knew he’d live another dozen years or so?”

“Actually, I wish the old guy had lived forever. The bike was always safe in storage, always kept covered up except when I went to look at it. I knew where it was.”

“But now Kenny won’t let you have it?”

“Turns out it wasn’t in the will after all. So Kenny’s saying, how is he supposed to know whether his dad promised it to me or not?”

“Like that’s something you would lie about.”

“Exactly.”

“What’s Jennilee have to say about all this?”

“According to her, it’s up to her mother. And what Pauline says is that since Kenny’s the oldest child and the only son and all…”

“That’s bullshit,” Will says.

Harvey grunts, an animal sound rich with contempt.

“He never even drove that Chevy you two used to own, did he?”

“Never drove it, never worked on it. All Kenny wanted was to brag about how he owned half of it.”

“So maybe he’ll sell that bike to you.”

“Oh, he’ll sell it, all right. Didn’t you see the ad in the paper?”

“I don’t read the classifieds unless there’s something I need.”

“Ad says six thousand, five hundred. Right there in black and white. So okay, that’s a fair price, and I go on over, checkbook in hand, trying to be civilized about the whole thing.”

Will wonders what it would be like to have that much money in his checking account. “But the bike’s already sold?”

“Hell no. Because now he says he wants twelve thousand for it. Said he did some research, found out it’s worth a lot more than he thought. Twelve thousand freaking dollars for a bike I practically built myself!”

“You think he raised the price just to keep you from getting it?”

“He doesn’t care whether I have the bike or not. He just wants to screw me one way or the other. Anybody else shows up, offers him sixty-two, sixty-three hundred for it, you think he’s not going to take it? Little pasty-faced weasel. No way I’m going to let this one pass.”

This one, Will hears. Will studies the tension in his brother’s face, the hard line of his jaw. “So what is it about you two, anyway? He was supposed to be best man at your wedding, for chrissakes.”

Harvey raises his finger in the air, is about to speak, make an important point, but then he backs off, shakes his head, bites back his words.

“Okay, so he’s a prick,” Will says. “Fine. But you’re not going to kill him over a motorcycle.”

“What’d I tell you already? This thing with the bike is just the last in a long line of things.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Like none of your business, okay?”

“Fine. Whatever. That still doesn’t mean I’m going to help you murder him for it.”

“Then don’t,” Harvey says. “Go on back upstairs to your freaking little sauna and eat your pizza and watch your TV. I don’t need your help or anybody else’s.”

The men stand side by side but do not look at each other. Will can feel the night simmering. He can smell the stale compressed heat in the long narrow box of the alleyway. Finally he says, “How about if we steal the bike?”

“And do what with it? I couldn’t ride it anywhere. Besides, he’ll just turn it in on his insurance. Probably end up with twenty thousand dollars, for all I know.”

“So we keep thinking until we come up with something. Something equal to what he’s done to you.”

“You have no idea what he’s done to me.”

“I’m still listening, though.” He waits half a minute. Harvey says nothing more.

“Fine,” Will says. “But I’ll tell you what. I don’t like him much either. Never did.”

Harvey cuts a sideways look at his brother.

“So if you want to teach him a little lesson about fairness and such, then okay, I’m with you all the way. Mainly because I don’t think you have the brains to pull it off on your own without getting caught.”

“You never liked him either?”

“What’s to like? Back when you two were in school together, you’re this big football star, right? And what’s he? He’s in the band! Plays the piccolo or some such thing.”

“Freakin’ flute.”

“Same difference. You’re the one set the All-Conference rushing record. And who gets elected class president? Who gets voted Homecoming King? I was only in ninth grade, but, I don’t know, that really pissed me off for some reason. What I could never figure out was why you even wanted him as a friend.”

A thought occurs to Harvey then, as perfect as a blow to his chest, that Will has been harboring a jealousy of Kenny all these years, quiet Will, so soft-spoken and patient-a resentment because Will had wanted to be Harvey’s best friend back then, but of course was not; he was the younger brother, a nuisance to be tormented or ignored. And Harvey is suddenly ashamed of his youth, all those wasted years. But how to encapsulate his regret in an apology? He can’t.

Harvey says, his voice huskier now, “Jennilee thinks he’s like the perfect man or something.”

“Yeah, well, she’s his sister. That’s just loyalty talking.”

Harvey nods, his jaw tight.

Will says, “What’s he make as the superintendent of schools-fifty, sixty thousand?”

“Probably more like eighty.”

“I used to watch him when you two were painting houses together. You were the one did all the hard work, all the scraping and patching. What did he ever do?”

“Slapped on a little paint and collected the check.”

“Then why in God’s name was he your friend?”

Harvey has no idea how to justify the choices he made a quarter century ago. He had admired Kenny’s easy way with women, that was one thing. He admired his nonchalance, his nice clothes. But mostly it was the women. Even in high school, Kenny had bragged that he was getting laid on a regular basis, and Harvey had to admit that it was probably true. There was something about Kenny that girls seemed to like. He was a smooth talker, generous with compliments. And he had been generous with Harvey, too, had made him feel, almost, like a member of the family.

But in recent years the very things Harvey had admired about his brother-in-law had begun to irritate him. Things that had once seemed like virtues in Kenny began to feel, to Harvey, like mere sheen. Like high-gloss paint over a wall full of termites.

Will and Harvey stand there in the gathering dark. It pleases Harvey that his brother has gotten angry now, too. He doesn’t know why Will’s anger should please him, except that it is such a rare thing. He says, “So what are we going to do about him?”

“Give me a day or so,” Will says. “I’ll think of something.”

“This better not be a trick of some kind just to get me to cool off.”

“No, I want to do this,” Will says, and even in the stink and gloom of the alley, Harvey thinks he detects a sinister turn to his brother’s smile. “Seriously. I could use a little fun in my life.”

When Harvey returns home that evening, after he unlaces his work boots just inside the back door, Jennilee comes toward him through the kitchen, smiling. She is wearing tight blue jeans and a white silk shirt-still, in his opinion, the prettiest woman in town, still slender and naturally blond and as graceful as a breeze. He can see her bra through the sheer blouse, and something catches in his chest at the sight of her.

“Hi, baby,” she says, and then tells him that she is going across town to the ten-room Victorian Kenny has lived in all his life. It bothers Harvey that his wife always says she is “having dinner over home” instead of “over at Mom’s.”

He says, “How about staying here for a change and having dinner with me?”

“I had dinner with you last night, didn’t I?”

“Most people, you know, when they get to be adults, they’re happy not to have to be spending four or five nights a week with their mother and brother.”

“You see your brothers practically every day, don’t you?” She asks this with a smile, sweetly. She leans close to him, her hand on his waist. He feels the warmth of her hand through his shirt. Even after seven years of marriage, her touch still dizzies him.

She says, “You know, when we lost Daddy last month, the thing I regretted most was not spending enough time with him. And now Mom’s getting up there, too, and-”

“She’s barely seventy years old.”

“How old was Daddy? Seventy-six. And how old were your parents? It can happen at any moment, just like that.”

He takes a deep breath to steady his voice, doesn’t want to sound whiny. “My point, Jennilee-”

She snuggles against him. “I know what your point is, sweetie, and I agree with you. Now you take that casserole out of the oven in about ten minutes, okay? And enjoy a nice quiet dinner by yourself. I’ll be home about eight-thirty or so and we can make some popcorn and watch TV together.”

He knows that the way she holds him now, both hands rubbing up and down his back, one knee between his legs, he knows it is a ploy she uses, a way to defuse him because she does not like confrontation, does not like voices raised in anger, and she especially does not like to be circumvented in any of her choices. He knows all this, yet he cannot resist the smell of her, the vagueness of apricot in her hair, still as blond as a teenager’s, still cornsilk-soft. And he cannot resist either the subtlety of Obsession in the nape of her neck, the heat of her breasts pressed against him. He breathes her in and feels his arms closing around her, hands pulling at the tail of her blouse and then sliding underneath, fingers finding the cool smooth wonder of her waist.

“Baby, I’m going to be late,” she says, but as he leans down to lay his mouth against the side of her throat she tilts her head back and exposes her neck to him. Gratitude swells in his chest, but he cannot ignore the swift surge of fear that washes through him, too, a heat racing up the sides of his face and into his temples, this fear for the loss of her, this only woman he has ever needed, as essential to him as air, a compulsion as inexplicable as death.

His mouth is on hers then and his hands fumbling with the snap of her jeans, fingers so thick with dumb desire that she has to take over finally, guiding him into the living room and onto the sofa. And this is the thing that keeps him from crying out in the anguish of his desire, that she has never told him no, never pushed him away with a damning look or excuse, has never once denied him. This is what he clings to, how he gauges the truth of her love.

But it is always a temporary affirmation, and afterward, as always, he is left to deal with his fear and gratitude alone, as weak-legged and hollow as ever while Jennilee tucks her blouse in and makes her exit through the kitchen, her face as bright and cheerful as ever, her body as graceful as a breeze, untouched.

As she heads for the door he calls out to her, “Tell your brother for me that what goes around comes around.”

A pause; he can picture the way she cocks her head now, smiles in confusion. “Excuse me?”

“Just tell him,” he says.

Now he envisions the way she rolls her eyes before answering. “If you say so.”

Then she slips away and leaves him standing there in the living room hollowed out and weak and alone.

Harvey watches television with the casserole dish on his lap, bleeding its heat into his skin. He keeps the volume low on the TV, wishes there were other sounds to hear, something flesh and blood and real. He wishes they would have children, that an accident would occur. He had himself tested a couple of years ago without telling Jennilee he was going to, then was surprised by her reaction when he told her that everything had checked out okay with him. “Why would you do such a thing?” she had demanded, then immediately turned and stormed into the bedroom and locked the door. Later she explained that she wasn’t really angry with him. “It’s just that it means it must be me,” she said.

A few months later he found the birth control pills. He had called in sick that day, a Tuesday, nausea and a pulsing headache. By noon the sickness passed, and, thinking it would please her, he had seared a sirloin tip roast and put it in the oven to slow-bake through the afternoon. Then he washed two loads of laundry, everything in the hamper. Dried and folded all the clothes and put them away in their drawers. And that was when he found the disk of tiny pills, wrapped inside a camisole too delicate to be crushed beneath the cotton pajamas he was putting away. A disk meant to hold thirty pink pills, twelve spaces empty.

He was in bed when she came home at three-thirty.

“Still feeling bad?” she asked, and brought him a glass of ginger ale, and took his temperature, and looked sincerely pained by his discomfort.

She’s a good person, he had told himself. Just doesn’t want to be a mother.

He never mentioned the pills.

And now sometimes he watches TV alone and wishes the house did not feel so empty. He wishes he could awake some morning and stumble over toys scattered underfoot, a tricycle in the yard. He knows that when he and Jennilee are older, her deceit might grate on him and make him like some of the older men in town, silent brooders, never smiling. Or maybe he will gravitate back to the bottle and his earlier ways, drinking his way to self-destruction, having conceded at last that love was not his salvation but his undoing.

“You mind if I turn this thing off?” Will asks after he has come into the bedroom. Some kind of music is emanating from the little TV atop the dresser, a repetitious bass thump that he feels against the back of his tired eyes.

Lacy peers over the paperback she holds open on her chest, a Ludlum thriller. “I didn’t even know it was on.”

He stands before the TV for a few moments, remote in hand. Two black men in baggy clothes are striding vehemently back and forth across a stage, jabbing their hands at the air, chanting a mostly indecipherable rhyme. “MTV?” he says.

“Molly was watching it.”

He turns at the neck, cocks an eyebrow.

“She was in bed by ten, don’t worry. So you can just quit looking at me like that.”

And with her smile he feels some of the heaviness lift away, feels the weariness lighten just a bit, as if her smile, like the fan in the corner, is blowing the day’s chaff off his skin. He comes to the bed and sits on his side, removes his shoes, pulls off his socks and then his shirt. Stands again to unbuckle his belt. Hopefully he asks, “You want maybe I should lock the door?”

“Well,” she says, and lays the book flat on her stomach, “I’ve been staying awake in hopes that Mel Gibson might show up, but he’s usually here by eleven if he’s coming. So I guess it’s your lucky night, big boy.”

He lets his trousers slide to the floor. “You want me to get a shower first?”

“How much beer did you spill on yourself tonight?”

“Not a drop, surprisingly. But I fried several baskets of wings.”

“So lock the door, chickie boy, and get yourself on down here.”

She is wearing the short pajamas and sleeveless top he likes, the powder-blue set he gave her for Christmas last year, and when he touches her he is as grateful as he was the first time so many years ago. No woman has ever smelled and tasted as good to him as Lacy does, and he knows he will never need any more than this, never want another woman.

Afterward, he feels that he has fallen from a great height. He has landed softly and without injury, but the feeling of having fallen is there nonetheless. She lies curled against him, her head on his chest, her knees nudging his.

“We’re still pretty good together, aren’t we?” he asks.

“I think it’s better than it ever was.”

He runs a hand up and down her spine, feels the ridges beneath his fingers, the lovely fragile stem beneath her skin, this flower in his hands.

“I mean more than just the sex, though,” he tells her. “I mean everything. We work pretty good together, don’t we?”

“Mmmm,” she says. “Fourteen years and going strong.”

He winces at the mention of fourteen years, a tightening at the back of his skull. “I wish I could do better for you and Molly, though. I wish the bar did better.”

“It will pick up again,” she says.

But he does not believe it. He is not certain when he stopped believing it, but he believes it no longer. People drink when times are good, the previous owner had told him, and when times are bad they drink even more! But the previous owner had failed to mention that nearly all those people would soon do their drinking somewhere else.

“Anyway,” Lacy tells him, “we’re getting by okay.”

“After fourteen years, I’d like to be doing more for us than just getting by.”

“For instance?”

And he says, “Portugal.”

She laughs softly and rubs his chest. “Not me, baby. No hablo Portuguese.”

But he remembers the way she looked that night when they had eaten spaghetti in front of the big-screen TV downstairs. His rule is that Molly cannot watch TV during dinner unless it is an educational program, so they found a travel series on PBS. In this show, the host, a lanky New Englander with a mop of blond hair, was visiting the Iberian Peninsula. Molly nearly swooned at the sight of the white beaches.

“Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could go there?” she asked. “Mommy, wouldn’t you like to go there?”

“Mmm,” Lacy had said, and then, “It would be awfully expensive, I’ll bet.”

Will had felt a heaviness in his chest that night, and now, in bed with the woman he adores, as he inhales the scent of her hair and absorbs the heat of her skin, the heaviness comes back to him.

It is still there long after she has fallen asleep. After a while he rises and pulls on his boxers. He sits by the open window looking out through the screen. He sits there a long time, wondering what he can do to make things better. The night is too warm and smells of the street, of road oil and dirt, of other people in transit.

We can’t steal the bike, he thinks after a while. We can’t beat Kenny up. We don’t want to do anything that might give Kenny’s mother a heart attack. Or anything that Jennilee will divorce Harvey over. I have to be clever about this, he thinks. This is my role in things. I am not bold or fearless, but I can think things through. I’m nobody’s genius, but I can figure this out.

He turns away from the window to look at his wife asleep. She lies facing him, left hand flat beneath her cheek. She is still naked, and he can feel himself wanting her again, the touch of her flesh against his. And this desire somehow conjoins with his desire to help Harvey and his own desire to ease the pressure that has been squeezing at the base of his scalp all day. Maybe he can be bold, after all, if that is what the situation calls for. Maybe, after all, there exists in him a seed of fearlessness and its potential for change.

It is not yet 7 A.M. when Will pulls his car up to the loading dock beside a Jimmy Dean Sausage delivery truck. Harvey, using a dolly, is loading boxes of refrigerated sausage into the rear of the truck. Will shuts off the engine and leans his head out the open window.

Harvey asks, “What are you doing out of bed so early?”

“Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Harvey comes to the edge of the loading dock. “I hope it was because of Lacy and not that pizza you had.”

Will spots a couple of men several yards behind Harvey in the cave of the warehouse, one running a forklift and the other scanning boxes with his hand scanner. The forklift driver is wearing a set of headphones, and the other man is working beneath the softly whirring blades of two warehouse fans.

And Will asks in a voice barely loud enough for his brother to hear, “You still set on doing this thing?”

“Which thing you talking about?”

“You know which thing.”

Harvey looks off into the distance for a moment, his body very still, as if he might be watching a bird soaring off, watching something beautiful fly away from him. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “I might’ve cooled off a little.” But the longer he gazes into the distance and the longer he stands there with the smell of the delivery truck in his nostrils, the coolness of the refrigerated boxes spreading a numbness to his hands, the more the old tension comes back to him. “Even so… yeah. Yeah. I guess I still think something needs to be done.”

“You guess or you’re sure?” Will asks.

“What’d I just say?”

“Because this is no little thing we’re contemplating here.”

“So you came up with a plan?”

“The only thing that concerns me is that it might be a little too severe.”

“Naw, severe is okay. Severe is good.”

With that, Harvey jumps down off the loading dock. He bends close to Will’s window, hand to the door. “So what is it we’re doing?”

“You want rid of him, right? You want him out of your life?”

“I’d say that’s pretty much dead-on, yeah.”

“He might take the motorcycle with him when he goes. Might sell it to somebody else, I really don’t know.”

“Screw the motorcycle.”

“Good. Because this isn’t about the motorcycle anymore.”

“It never was.”

Will nods. “It might be good then if I was to, you know, get some of the specifics about what this really is about.”

Harvey says without inflection, “You don’t need any specifics.”

Will studies his brother for a moment. Then, “So okay then. How’s tonight work for you?”

“It just so happens I’m free tonight.”

“Can you meet me behind the bar at eleven without Jennilee knowing?”

“Eleven o’clock at night? I’ll be in bed by then! Jeezus, Will, I have to get up at five-thirty, you know.”

“Sorry. I guess I overestimated your resolve in this matter.”

“Hey, my resolve is set in concrete. It’s just that… can’t we do this a little earlier?”

“Sure we can. You want to go get some breakfast and then break into Kenny’s office? That would be, what-right around nine? Maybe we should take Kenny a coffee while we’re at it. I can’t guarantee we’ll be all that effective with him watching us, but hey, at least you’ll be awake for it.”

“That’s what we’re going to do? Break into his office?”

“You wanted a plan, I came up with a plan.”

“I hope there’s a little more to it than that.”

Will blows out a breath. “You going to meet us or not?”

“Us? Who the hell is us?”

“Stevie’s in on it, too.”

“Ah, jeezus. Now I know we’ll get caught.”

“I had to use him to get something we need, and he wouldn’t agree to do it unless he could come along.”

“Jeezus. We’re all going to end up in jail.”

“You know, this is the way it’s always been with us, hasn’t it? You get some wild hair up your ass and come running to me about it, I lie awake all night trying to figure out how to help you out with it, and next day you’re like, ‘Oh, I guess it’s not so bad after all.’”

“Did I say that?”

“I don’t know; did you? Truth is, I don’t think you even know what you’re saying half the time.”

“I can still beat the shit out of you.”

“Still? You never could. Not since I was sixteen, anyway.”

Harvey tries without success to suppress a smile. He remembers well the time Will first took a swing at him, how after all those years of torment from his big brother, all those knuckle-thumps and punches on the arm, Will, instead of running away this time, threw a short, unexpected punch that bloodied Harvey’s lip, then stood there waiting for the rest of the fight, stood his ground like a man, ready to take another beating if necessary. Harvey should have told him then that he was proud of his little brother, glad to see that the boy’s balls had finally dropped. But he hadn’t. He had sneered, as if the blow stung no worse than a mosquito bite. And then had walked away wordless, still seeing stars.

“Eleven o’clock tonight?” Harvey says.

“Wear dark clothes. And by the way, if you’re so much as three minutes late, don’t ever come to me again with one of your problems.”

“What makes you so eager all of a sudden?”

“Because if I do say so myself, this is a beautiful plan. I’ll derive a great deal of personal satisfaction from sitting back and watching all the pieces fall into place.”

“And what’s the end result going to be?”

“That wild hair up your ass is going to be extricated once and for all.”

“Oh yeah? Extricated, huh?”

“And I don’t mean just shaved either. I mean plucked. Pulled out by the roots.”

“That sounds like it ought to hurt, but I’m getting the feeling I might actually enjoy the experience.”

“I expect you will, big brother.”

Ten hours later Harvey ladles a plateful of pot roast out of the pressure cooker but doesn’t really want any of it. He has had no appetite for a good while now, can’t remember the last time he paid enough attention to a meal to actually enjoy it.

Before lifting the lid off the pressure cooker he barely glances at the note Jennilee left on his plate, Taking Mom to the mall. See you around 9. Love you. Now he sits in his chair in the living room, faces the TV, the plate balanced on his knees. He stares at his reflection for a while in the blackened screen.

Jennilee coming into the kitchen wakes Harvey out of a dream of hunting, a dream in which he has gotten separated from his father and brothers in the oak woods. He is awakened by a click that, in his dream, is the snapping of a twig, something crashing toward him from behind. He awakes with a start, looks around, momentarily disoriented. Then he sees the kitchen light on, hears Jennilee tearing off a strip of cellophane to stretch over the leftover pot roast, sliding the bowl into the refrigerator. He closes his eyes again before she comes into the living room; he doesn’t want to talk just yet, wants the smell of the woods a while longer.

Jennilee stands there looking down at him. Before she goes upstairs she lays an afghan across him, a knitted blanket of a dozen bright colors, one of many her mother made for them. It is an act of tenderness that almost brings his eyes open, almost causes him to look up at her and smile, except that he thinks she smells different now, the odors of food from another house, wine on her breath, and a vague, fleeting fragrance he can identify only as neither his nor her own.

Upstairs, she showers and brushes her teeth, changes into the satiny panties and matching teddy she likes, turns on the ceiling fan, climbs into bed, turns on the TV. He follows her through the sounds she makes, envisions her careful movements, always so feminine and precise. He feels something like hunger in his belly, but maybe it is the nausea again, that strange and hollow hunger.

At ten-forty he mounts the stairs as quietly as he can, wincing with each creaking step. He peeks around the doorjamb, sees her asleep, curled on her side, her back to the flickering images on the screen. The ceiling fan makes a barely audible thumping sound as it spins. By the time he turns away from her he has goose bumps on his arms.

Downstairs he leaves a note on the kitchen table: Went over to Will’s for a beer or two. Love you. He knows she will not call to check up on him. She never questions his whereabouts.

Harvey walks at a pace he recognizes as too slow to get him to the bar on time. The stifling darkness weighs him down, pulses in the ache of his bones. Here and there a window dully glows with the pale light from a flickering screen. He thinks to himself that when he was a boy, on a night like this the streets would be full of people. Kids chasing fireflies or playing kick the can. Adults scraping back and forth on their porch swings and gliders. Old folks rocking. These days everybody stays inside breathing air blown out of a box while they stare at another box until narcotized enough to sleep.

He ducks into the alley half expecting to find it deserted. They aren’t really going to do this thing anyway. They aren’t really going to hurt anybody. But then he sees the two silhouettes, odd shapes of gray against the darker gray of the dumpster. Will has unscrewed the 200-watt bulb over the bar’s side door, but Harvey can see well enough to distinguish the silhouettes as two men on lawn chairs, and that is when he thinks, We are really going to do it. Breaking and entering and who knows what else. And he pushes his sudden heave of disappointment away.

Will and Stevie sit side by side in front of the dumpster. Between them is a duffel bag with a Steelers logo on the side.

“You’re ten minutes late,” Stevie says, his voice too loud to Harvey’s ears, startling in the darkness.

Harvey asks, “What’s in the bag?”

Will shines a small flashlight on the duffel bag as Stevie zippers it open and lays out the contents on the pavement. Two cans of neon orange spray paint, a long-handled screwdriver, a loop of new nylon rope still in its plastic bag, three pairs of brown cotton work gloves, five magazines. Stevie spreads the magazines out in a fan and Will plays the beam over them long enough for Harvey to see the glossy photo of a half-naked child on each cover.

Then Will flicks off the flashlight. Stevie repacks the bag. “Let’s get in the truck,” Will says.

A minute later they crowd into the front seat, Will in the middle with the duffel bag on his lap. Nobody speaks as Stevie starts the engine and heads toward the school at the southern end of town. Then Harvey asks, “Child pornography?”

Stevie snickers. “I had to drive almost fifty miles to get those. Clear to that adult bookstore out by the truck stop on exit forty-one. I was so nervous I thought I was going to piss my pants before I could get back outside.”

Harvey looks at Will’s face, relaxed and smiling.

Harvey asks, “Who’s watching the bar for you?”

“Giffy,” Will says, naming one of the regulars, a retired steelworker. “There’s nobody in tonight except him and that cousin of his from Butler, the one they call Eight-Ball. I told them I wasn’t feeling well and had to get some air for a while. Told them they could draw a couple of free pitchers if they promised not to disturb me.”

“What about Lacy?”

“Sleeping the sleep of the innocent.”

Harvey nods. “Jennilee, too.” His mouth tastes chalky; his throat is tight.

The plan, as Will explains it, is “so simple it’s brilliant.” They will gain entry through one of the skylights over the cafeteria, then lower themselves the twenty feet by sliding down the rope. They will decorate the walls with sophomoric graffiti and plant the magazines in Kenny’s desk. Later, when Harvey is safely at home and Will is behind his bar, Stevie will place an anonymous call to the police, reporting suspicious activity and lights at the school. Will will make certain that his wife does not sleep through the report on the scanner. During the subsequent investigation by the police and Lacy’s relentless photo-taking, somebody will be sure to spot the magazines. Within twenty-four hours everyone in town will know about Kenny’s secret stash of magazines, the danger he poses to their children. Rumors will fly like scattershot on the first day of turkey season. No wonder Kenny has never married. No wonder he still lives with his mother. The school board will have no option but to hold an inquiry. Kenny will be run out of town on a rail-if he isn’t drawn and quartered beforehand.

The plan might be a simple one, but Harvey’s head is spinning. “How do we get back out of the school?”

“Same way we got in,” Will says.

Harvey shakes his head. “I know for a fact that Stevie can’t climb twenty feet up a rope.”

“Speak for yourself, fat-ass.”

“Okay, me, too. I doubt like hell I can do it.”

“Then we’ll find some other way out,” Will says. “We’ll open a window. They open from the inside, you know. Every classroom’s got them.”

“What about janitors?”

Stevie tells him, “Last summer when I helped them tar and gravel the roof, everybody went home by six, didn’t show up again until six the next morning. The place is empty for twelve hours.”

“You sure we can get in through a skylight?”

“We replaced all the flashing for the roof job, had to take the skylights off to do it. All it takes is a Phillips screwdriver.”

“What about security cameras?”

“Only place not covered is the rear wall of the boys’ locker room. Cause there aren’t any windows there.”

“And how are we supposed to climb that wall?” Harvey asks.

Stevie flashes him a grin. “Can’t you hear the ladder rattling in the bed?”

Harvey can think of nothing more to say. He wishes he could.

“Satisfied?” Will asks.

Harvey winds down the window and leans toward the rush of air. He says, “I’m not sure I remember the meaning of the word.”

Will is the first man down the rope, sliding into the coolness, the cafeteria a cavern. At the bottom he stands motionless, catching his breath. He can see reasonably well in the large room, one long wall lined with tall windows overlooking the practice field where, for three years as a boy, he ran wind sprints every August until he thought his lungs would explode.

The familiar smell is unmistakable, Meatloaf Thursday, and for a moment he hears the clamor of a hundred hungry kids all jabbering at once, the scrape of chairs, clack of plastic trays, clink of forks attacking plates.

“Hey!” Harvey whispers from above.

Will aims his flashlight at the heavens, flashes an all-clear.

Harvey comes down an inch at a time, grunting. He loses his grip while still five feet above the tile floor, drops with another grunt and the smack of his tennis shoes. The duffel bag thuds against the floor.

“For chrissakes,” Will says.

Harvey blows on his hands. “I forgot to put my gloves on. I got a rope burn.”

Stevie surprises both of them by coming down quickly, sliding in full control with one leg wrapped around the rope. Harvey asks him, “When did you get so agile?”

“You should see me on the climbing wall at the Y.”

“What the hell are you doing at the YMCA?”

“Tae bo classes every Tuesday night. Lots of tits and asses in spandex.”

“Any chance we can get on with this?” Will asks. He picks up the duffel bag and heads for the cafeteria exit. Out the wide doorway and into the hall, turn right past the trophy case, up the four steps, administrative offices on the left, faculty lounge, boys’ and girls’ restrooms on the right. The hallways are dark but navigable. His eyes have adjusted to the dimness; his memory is flooded with details.

The door to Kenny’s office is locked. The glass panel in the door is opaque, rippled and thick. Will says, “We’re going to have to pry the hinges off.”

But Harvey points to their brother at work four feet away, leaning close to the door that opens into the front office. Stevie has stuck a small suction cup to the clear glass and is now dragging a glass cutter around it in a slow circle.

“He’s just one surprise after another,” Will whispers.

Stevie smiles but says nothing. Finally he pockets the glass cutter, taps his knuckle around the circle he has cut, wiggles the suction cup until the circle of glass snaps free. Then he inches a gloved hand through the circle, feels for the door lock on the other side, gives it a twist. He swings the door open wide and says to Harvey, “Now will you ask around for me over at Jimmy Dean?”

And Harvey says, “I guess maybe I will.”

Just inside the front office he sets the duffel bag on the floor, zips it open, reaches inside for the spray paint. He hands one can to Will, extends the other toward Stevie.

“Gimme the magazines,” Stevie says. “I’m the one drove to Ohio to buy them, I’m the one should get to plant them.”

Harvey considers this for a few moments, then thinks, What the hell, and places the stack of magazines in his brother’s hands. “Not that it matters,” he says, “but why do you really want to go in there?”

Stevie grins. “That was Big-Ass Bole’s desk before it was Kenny’s, and I’ve been drinking water and saving up for this all day.” Harvey remembers Conrad Bole, too, the pear-shaped guidance counselor who told each of the brothers in turn to forget about college, don’t even consider it. He had recommended the army for Harvey, a two-year business school for Will. And he had recommended that Stevie, then in his junior year and a gifted portrait artist, a boy who had covered his bedroom walls with pen-and-ink likenesses of movie stars and famous singers but was too shy to show his work to anyone outside the family, Conrad Bole had recommended that Stevie drop out of school and fill the school’s new vacancy for a janitor.

“Have fun,” Harvey tells him. He and Will watch as Stevie crosses behind the front desk and makes his way toward the door in the rear of the room. There Stevie pauses, puts a hand on the doorknob, gives it a slow turn. The latch clicks. He swings the door open, turns back to his brothers, gives them a thumbs-up, and swaggers into Kenny’s office.

“Piece of cake,” Will says.

With their cans of paint he and Harvey scrawl neon orange epithets in three-foot letters on the corridor walls. Will writes Death To Teachers! and School Sucks! Harvey writes Fulton sucks dick! Both men giggle as they wield the cans in looping flourishes. Will paints in an evenhanded script, Harvey in thick, angry letters.

Harvey has finished his first composition and is contemplating his second, trying to envision Fulton is a pervert! emblazoned across the tile floor, when he hears Stevie’s hoarse whisper. “Hey, Harve! Harvey! You might want to come have a look at this!”

Harvey looks over his shoulder and sees Stevie leaning out the door to Kenny’s office. Will asks, “What’s wrong?”

And Stevie says, “You’re not gonna believe this.”

Will is closest to Kenny’s office and disappears inside. By the time Harvey crosses the threshold, Will is already coming toward him, hands outstretched to stop Harvey’s progress, nearly shouting over his shoulder at Stevie, “Get that shit off there!”

But Stevie, standing behind Kenny’s desk, unsure of what to do, looks from the glowing computer monitor to Harvey, and Harvey knows in an instant that he cannot let Will keep him out, and he shoves his brother hard, pushes past him, all but lunges toward the desk.

“I was just going through the drawers,” Stevie tells him, his words spilling out in a nervous torrent of self-acquittal, “when I came across one that was locked, and I figured if it was locked there must be something good in there, so I jimmied it open and I noticed this CD stuck clear in the back and I was just curious, you know? I swear I had no idea what was on it till I booted it up.”

Harvey grips the back of Kenny’s leather chair. All the air has gone out of his lungs. He is aware of nothing Stevie tells him, aware of no natural sounds whatsoever. The air is dead but for a buzzing growing louder and louder in his ears, burrowing deeper, a drill inside his brain.

Tiled across the monitor are the photo files Stevie found on the CD, pictures he opened one by one and arranged neatly, working in a kind of stunned amazement until horror set in, four photos on top and four underneath, all of Harvey’s wife, Jennilee, gorgeous but appalling.

It is Will’s hand on Harvey’s shoulder that starts the fulmination in Harvey’s brain. Harvey jerks away and shoves the chair with such force that Kenny’s heavy desk is jarred several inches across the thick carpet. The monitor wobbles on its pedestal but doesn’t fall, so Harvey seizes it in both hands and rips it into the air, only to have the cable jerk it out of his hands again. It falls onto the edge of the desk, then capsizes to the floor, the glass and plastic housing shattering. The screen crackles and goes black.

Then Harvey seizes the desk itself and, driving hard, he shoves it across the floor, slides it crashing into a wall. Will grabs him by the arm, but again Harvey jerks away, lunges for the door, arms swinging blindly at everything in his way.

Will turns to Stevie now, who has retreated against a wall, eyes wide. “You get that CD,” Will tells him, “and everything we brought with us. And I mean everything! And then you get the hell out of here.”

Stevie nods in response, but Will doesn’t see it, he is already in pursuit of his brother.

A shattering of glass-a trash can hurled into the trophy case. Trophies heaved one by one against the cement-block wall. This time Will does not merely take hold of his brother’s arm or lay a hand upon his shoulder. This time Will runs at Harvey and tackles him around the waist, drives him well away from the broken glass and ringing metal, slams him against a wall.

“Listen to me!” Will shouts, his face two inches from his brother’s. “We have to get out of here, you understand? First we get out, and then we kill the son of a bitch!”

Now Harvey faces him, eyes flooded with furious tears. “She told me she got rid of those.”

At this Will draws back an inch, puzzled, unsure of what he has heard. Harvey shoves him aside and turns down the hallway, strides furiously toward a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.

Will races after him, shouts “No! Come this way!” But Harvey continues on, and when he is close to the exit he kicks the lever bar running across the middle of it and the door pops open and the fire alarm shrieks. Will catches his brother on the run two steps outside the door, grips Harvey’s arm just above the elbow, and pulls him along despite Harvey’s wriggling to free himself.

But Will cannot let go, cannot surrender his brother to rage. “Run, damn it!” he shouts while the alarm shrieks and echoes down the empty hallways. “Goddammit, Harvey… Run!”

They cut across the practice field and through the yard behind an abandoned house. Stevie’s pickup is parked on the unlighted street in front of this house, a street lined with small homes in disrepair. They lean against the tailgate, Harvey bent forward toward the bed of the truck, Will watching in the opposite direction. After a few moments Will says, “Listen,” and they hold their breaths. In the distance a soft clanking noise, as rhythmic as footsteps. “Go ahead and get in the truck,” Will says. “I’ll be right back.” And he disappears into the darkness.

Will meets Stevie coming across the practice field, the extension ladder hung over one shoulder and clanking with each step. Will snatches the duffel bag from his brother’s hand. “I got everything but the rope,” Stevie tells him.

“Forget the rope.”

“Harvey didn’t have his gloves on when he came down it.”

“They can’t get fingerprints off a freaking rope,” Will says. “I’m pretty sure they can’t. How could they?”

On the other side of the field, the alarm whines inside the school. Will calculates that the police won’t arrive for another three or four minutes. Only one deputy is on duty this late at night, either Ronnie Walters, all two hundred pounds of him and as lugubrious as a black bear in January, or his polar opposite, skinny Chris Landers, the one folks call Barney Fife because he is always patting his pockets, checking for his keys, a nervous talker always fiddling with his tie. In either case the deputy at this hour will be watching TV at the fire station, maybe playing euchre with a couple of volunteers who prefer to spend their nights away from home. Too far from the school to actually hear the siren, they won’t be alerted to the break-in until called by the county dispatcher.

They’re probably getting the call right now, Will thinks as he and Stevie slide the extension ladder onto the truck bed. “We’ll be fine,” Will says aloud, and Stevie answers as he heads for the driver’s door, “We will if we get the hell out of here.”

Four minutes later, Stevie slows to make the turn into the alley beside Will’s bar, but Will tells him, “Don’t. Just pull over and let us out.”

Stevie pulls close to the curb, keeps his foot on the brake. Will slides out and holds the door wide for Harvey, who without a word heads into the alley. “You sure you got everything?” Will asks his younger brother, and Stevie tells him again, “Everything but the rope.”

“I’ll call you sometime tomorrow,” Will says, closes the door as softly as he can, and turns away.

The moment the truck disappears around the corner Will can hear Harvey retching at the end of the alley. Harvey is on his knees beside the dumpster, his face to the wall. Will stands over him, a hand on his brother’s back. He can feel the rigidity of Harvey’s spine, the way his shoulder blades quiver. Will has never before felt so helpless. Every breath is redolent with dumpster stink.

Harvey climbs to his feet finally, shaking, and allows himself to be steadied by his brother’s hand. Will says, “We better get back inside.”

Harvey wipes his mouth and nods.

“Wait here by the door. I’ll check things out first.”

Will walks softly through the kitchen, peeks out behind the bar. Giffy and Eight-Ball are seated at a table facing the big-screen TV, watching a boxing match on ESPN, two Hispanic featherweights slamming away at each other. A pitcher of beer, nearly empty, sits in the middle of the table, accompanied by a couple of bags of potato chips.

Will tiptoes back to the door and ushers Harvey inside. Harvey sneaks around to the front of the bar, slides onto a stool while Will silently lifts two bottles of Schlitz from the cooler, twists off the caps, and hands a bottle to his brother. They settle into position as if they have been there all night.

Overhead, footsteps hurry back and forth. Will knows that Lacy has been awakened from her sleep either by the police scanner or by a telephone call. Now she is throwing on a pair of jeans and a shirt, making sure she has fresh batteries for her digital camera, sitting on the bed to tie her shoelaces. It isn’t long before Will hears the quick patter of her footsteps on the back steps, then coming through the kitchen. When she appears on the threshold to the bar, Will asks, “Where’s the fire tonight?”

She digs around in a cooler for the coldest bottle of Coke. “Break-in over at the high school.”

“Kids,” Will says, and shakes his head. “They bitch about having to be there, and then what do they do but break back in over summer vacation.”

Harvey stares at the bottle in his hand.

“Molly still asleep?” Will asks.

“She was thirty seconds ago.” Lacy gives him a peck on the cheek. “I shouldn’t be long.”

“Take a lot of pictures,” Will says.

“I always do.”

“And hey.”

She turns at the door. He points to the front of her blouse, sleeveless yellow cotton with a rounded collar. She looks down, sees that it is buttoned incorrectly, one side of the shirt higher than the other.

“Geez,” she mutters as she yanks open the door, unbuttoning on the run.

Now Will notices that Giffy is looking his way. Will says, “Anything you fellas need back there?”

“Where the hell did you two come from?”

“Been here quite a while, Giff. Not that you two would’ve noticed, drinking up all my profits the way you’ve been doing.”

Giffy grins. “These two little Cuban guys are pretty good. They’re pounding the shit out of each other.”

“We’ve been watching,” Will tells him. “My money’s on the one in red trunks.”

At that moment the boxer in red trunks, Morales, having driven his opponent into a corner, delivers a mad flurry of punches to the midsection, then caps it with an unexpected hook to the head. The referee shoves the two boxers apart and gets in between them, pushing Morales back. His opponent collapses against the ropes just as the bell signals the end of round seven.

“I don’t think I’m going to take that bet,” Giffy says.

Twenty minutes later, Will and Harvey are alone inside the bar. Will thinks of Molly asleep upstairs, dreaming sweet dreams. Dreaming of bright possibilities. He wishes he could hand them to her on a platter, pave her path with the softest of carpets, remove every thorn from every rose she will ever pluck. He feels very tired suddenly with the knowledge that he can do none of that for her, can never shield her from disappointments or failure, can offer her nothing more than his own helpless love.

He gazes down at Harvey then, only forty-three years old. He looks ancient sitting there. He looks beaten.

“What can I get for you?” Will asks.

“We should have taken that CD.”

“I’m pretty sure Stevie grabbed it.”

“You think he did?”

“I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

Will leans back against the cash register, the hard metal edge across his spine. The beer tastes bitter this late at night, it sours in his stomach. He thinks he can hear a police siren across town, but he isn’t certain, it might be nothing more than the residue of the school’s alarm still ringing in his brain. He thinks about locking the front door but knows that nobody will be coming in anyway. He thinks of several things he might say to his brother, but he doesn’t say any of them because what good would they do, clumsy phrases, useless; there is no magic in words.

It is Harvey who breaks the silence. “The two of us were over at the Ramada one night,” he says. He picks at the label on his beer bottle, tears off tiny pieces and leaves them lying on the bar. He speaks haltingly, in no hurry to hear this or to be heard.

“This was just a month or so after we’d gotten engaged. We were dancing, drinking, having fun. And then this band-geek friend of Kenny’s, he comes over and keeps trying to drag Jennilee out on the dance floor. He’s so shitfaced he can barely stand up. She sees I’m getting kind of hot about it so she excuses herself and goes off to the ladies’ room. But the guy still won’t leave. Suddenly I’m his best buddy in the whole damn world and he’s telling me how she’s got the nicest body he’s ever laid eyes on, all that kind of crap. I’m just about ready to deck the guy when he up and asks me if Kenny’s still got those nude photos of her he had in college.”

“Jeezus,” Will says.

“I just went cold.”

“So… what happened then?”

“Soon as Jennilee came back, I dragged her outside. We sat in the car and…” He tears the last of his label free. Scratches a fingernail over the rough smear of glue.

“At first she denied it,” he says. “Claimed she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. So I threatened to haul that geek in the bar outside there with us and beat the truth out of him. Funny, but she didn’t seem to mind that idea. So then I said, ‘No, no, on second thought I think there’s somebody else who needs it even more.’ So I started the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. I must’ve laid rubber for fifty yards down the road, I was so pissed.”

“The somebody else meaning Kenny.”

“She made it sound like it was all so innocent, you know? Like something brothers and sisters do all the time. Just fooling around, she called it. She’d let him take pictures and maybe touch her once in a while, but she swore up and down that it never went any further than that.” He looks at his bottle as if he is considering taking a drink, then changes his mind, too weary to raise it to his lips.

“So I drove her over to Kenny’s and told her either she went in and got those pictures or I did. And if it was me, I was more than likely to turn her into an only child.”

Will waits for the rest.

“She used the cigarette lighter from the car and burned them right there along the curb. Then she used her bare hand to sweep the ashes down into the sewer drain.”

And you probably thought that was touching, didn’t you? Will thinks. Jennilee’s beautiful, perfect hand sweeping away the ashes. You poor helpless son of a bitch.

Will says nothing for a while. Then, “So now what?”

“Now?” Harvey asks, and looks up finally, his eyes as fierce as embers. “Now I kill him whether she wants me to or not. And this time nobody is going to stop me.”

“Hell, brother,” Will tells him. “I’m not going to stop you. I’m going to load the revolver and drive the getaway car.”

Harvey smiles, though there is not a trace of happiness in his expression. He holds out a hand to Will. Will takes it, grips it hard.

“But first we wait,” Will says.

Harvey jerks his hand away. “Wait? Wait for what?”

We wait for you to cool down, Will thinks. He says, “News gets out about those magazines in Kenny’s drawer, a lot of people around here are going to want his hide.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So in the meantime, you don’t say a word about any of this to Jennilee. We can’t say a word to anybody. You think you can do that?”

“The same goes for you and Stevie, you know.”

“It goes for all of us. What we have to do is just stand back and let the shit fly on its own. Hell, we might wait a year before we do anything. Because by then, at the least Kenny will have lost his job and be living somewhere else. Us, we’re just going on with our lives same as always. Until that one night, a long time from now, when we pay Kenny a long overdue visit.”

Harvey nurses his beer, turns the bottle slowly in his hands. The glass is warm now, sticky against his skin.

Will wishes his brother would say something more, offer his hand again, some affirmation. Instead, Harvey sets his bottle down. He slides his stool away from the bar. He stands.

Will asks him, “Where you going?”

“I’m not feeling so hot. I think I’ll call it a night.”

“Have a ginger ale. It’ll settle your stomach.”

“I guess not.”

“At least stay until Lacy gets back. We can quiz her on how things went.”

But Harvey is already headed for the door. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he says.

Out on the street, halfway through town, Harvey hears a dog barking somewhere. A dog on a chain, he thinks. Poor bastard, what a life that must be, even for a dog. Chained up and howling at distant sounds, wanting to chase after them, snap his tether, revert to the dog he should have been, a hunter, meat-eater, not some neutered pseudo-dog grateful for an occasional pat on the head and a bowl of dry kibble.

This heat, he thinks, is something strange. It’s like a steam bath out here. Every breath is a heavy one, a soggy lump of air.

Yet he feels chilled at his core. Every now and then a shiver wracks through him, a quick icy rattle up and down his spine. His body aches with the hot, heavy drag of the heat, but he can’t stop the chills from rattling through him.

He approaches the high school from the long front drive, walks toward the white illumination of the lights in the windows, the lobby lit up like a jack-o’-lantern, a big brick Halloween pumpkin on a steamy August night. He counts four vehicles lined up around the circular drive. A patrol car, Lacy’s Subaru, Kenny’s Sebring, and a red Jeep Wrangler. Must be the janitor’s, he thinks.

He cuts across the circle of grass in front of the school, drags a hand over the flagpole. The metal is cold, flaked with rust. No flag flapping in the breeze, not the slightest breath of wind. He pauses there beside the flagpole and looks at the front entrance, can almost hear the sounds the kids make piling out of the buses every morning, the yips and laughs and moans like the ones he used to make.

If I had any kids, he wonders, would they be happy here? Would they be popular and smart?

I was never smart, he tells himself. I got passing grades, but I was never very smart.

From twenty yards away he can see through the window of Kenny’s office, can see Lacy with her back to him in there, bent toward something with her camera in hand. Kenny is there beside her, standing in profile, watching. Half a minute later, Deputy Walters comes into the room, stands close to Kenny and tells him something, finger pointing toward the hall.

Harvey watches it all as if it is a television show with the sound turned off. They are just characters in a show, nothing more. Superintendent Fulton, good-looking and well dressed even at midnight, khakis and a red polo shirt, every hair in place. Lacy the photographer, the girl next door, cute as Doris Day. And Deputy Walters, not the sharpest tool in the shed but wholly likable, self-deprecating, constantly trying to lose a few pounds but never able to resist just one more Big Mac, one more order of fries.

The show leaves Harvey cold and he tires of watching it. No drama, no comedy. He is not involved in any of it but feels as distant from it as a chained dog must feel when it howls at the moon. He turns his back to the school and starts down the long drive, past the darkened homes of people he knows, the lives he has no involvement in, the secrets they hide.

He has been standing at the corner for maybe fifteen minutes, maybe more, when the lawn directly across the street is lit up by a car’s headlights. The car comes up behind him, slows, stops. Lacy leans toward the open passenger window and asks, “You lost?”

Harvey turns to look at her. He smiles. Wonders if she can see his coldness inside, if she can feel it radiating off his flesh, the chill off refrigerated meat. “Just thought I’d walk over before heading home, see what all the fuss is about.”

“Some kids broke in and trashed the place. Spray-painted the walls, tore up Kenny’s office pretty good.”

Harvey makes a sound that is supposed to be a laugh. “Maybe Kenny did it himself. You know how he loves to redecorate.”

Lacy slips the gearshift into park, then slides the whole way across the seat. “You still pissed at him?” she asks. “I mean, earlier, you were mad enough to kill him, you said.”

“Yeah, well, you know how I get. Lucky for me, Will talked me out of it. Even so… I can’t honestly say I’m sorry for any trouble that comes Kenny’s way.”

She nods. “I can see why a person wouldn’t like him.”

“Oh yeah? You mean you’re somehow able to resist his legendary charm?”

“He gives me the creeps,” she says. “He’s one of those touchy-feely guys, you know? Always has to have his hand on you during a conversation. Ten minutes with him and I feel like I’ve been licked all over with a long, wet tongue.”

Harvey smiles, pleased with her analogy. “So,” he asks, “you find anything interesting?”

“On the kids, you mean? No, nothing. I think Ronnie Walters was kind of hoping they had autographed their graffiti, but no such luck.”

Harvey wonders how deeply he should probe, whether any of it matters anyway.

“Apparently we’re not the only ones Kenny rubs the wrong way,” she tells him.

“How’s that?”

“Those kids planted a stack of porno magazines in Kenny’s desk. Kiddie porn.”

“Seriously?”

“Whoever they are, those kids must really have it out for him.”

“I guess so.” Harvey stands there looking in at Lacy. He feels so much affection for her, his brother’s wife. He wishes he could climb in beside her and sit with her and tell her everything. Wishes he had had the good sense to marry a woman like Lacy, wishes he could fall asleep every night with a woman like Lacy in his arms. Knows it would change everything. Knows he would be a different man.

“So who’s to say those aren’t really Kenny’s magazines?” he asks. “What I mean is, how do you know for sure the kids put them there?”

“It was just too obvious, is all. They even left the drawer hanging open so we’d be able to see inside. They just weren’t very smart about it. I mean, if they were, they never would have broken in in the first place, am I right?”

“I’ve never known you to be wrong,” he tells her. He would like to throw up again, would welcome the relief, but he knows he is too empty for that now, there is nothing left inside.

“You get some pictures of them, too?” he asks, trying to sound offhanded about it. “The magazines, I mean.”

“And give the kids what they want? Naw, Ronnie confiscated them. Said there might be some way to track them down, find out who put them there.”

Harvey nods, a vague smile on his lips, a twist of gathering pain.

“So you want a ride home or what?” Lacy asks.

“Thanks anyway,” he tells her, and pulls back from the window. “I had a couple beers with Will and now I feel half sick to my stomach. I’m going to try to walk it off.”

“It’s a good night for walking, I guess. Better than for sleeping, anyway.”

“That’s what I figure,” he says.

When she pulls away he feels like crying, though he isn’t sure why. Something about the way the red taillights look as they shrink smaller and smaller. Something about the vast darkness ahead.

Will sits alone in the darkened bar with the doors locked and the television off. He is ashamed of his stupidity and ashamed that he has involved Stevie and Harvey in it. Ashamed of wanting something that could never be his. He would settle now for having things the way they used to be, back when his mother and father were still alive. Back in the innocent times. The first day of buck season, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, one of the holiest of days.

Because hunting had never been about violence, not as far as Will was concerned. It had been about the tenderness of the woods and of walking tenderly through them with his brothers and father, the way the sun rose on naked trees limned with ice or hoary with frost, of black branches looking diamond-encrusted, the sunlight as soft as candlelight, the woods as hushed as a murmured prayer. And it had been about that almost sacred moment of coming upon a magnificent animal in the heart of those woods bathed in shafted sunlight and shadow, the breathless stillness of seeing one another in that sudden sanctified moment, hunter and hunted, the two connected by the invisible thread of the bullet about to fly.

Nor had he ever felt violence in the ritual of gutting and skinning, nor later around the camp stove with their bellies full, mouths pleasantly numbed by the whiskey they sipped. All this had never seemed violent to him but an ancestral ceremony that strengthened and cleansed him for the other part of his life, the tedium and labor.

But to Will all that seems a long time ago now. The woods are smaller now, and there are more hunters in them. Even deep in the woods, eighteen-wheelers rumbling along the highway can be heard. The stillness and the tenderness are gone now, Will thinks. The world is not a tender place.

Harvey has to pound on the door of his brother’s trailer for three solid minutes before Stevie finally appears behind a curtained window, peeking out. Then the door comes open and Stevie whispers, “Jeezus. I thought you were the police.”

Harvey pushes past him and goes inside. The place looks fairly clean for a change, not the way it usually looks, as if a couple of suitcases and a refrigerator had exploded. Harvey goes straight to the computer on the kitchen table, says before he gets there, “I want that CD you have.”

“It’s in here,” Stevie tells him, and opens the hallway closet, bends down, reaches inside one of his work boots. He takes the disk in its jewel case to Harvey, who is seated at the kitchen table now, facing Stevie’s computer, a six-year-old IBM he bought at a yard sale for $75.

Harvey sits there staring at the jewel case for half a minute. Then he hands it back to his brother. “Plug this thing in for me.”

“Ahh, I don’t know if I oughta be looking at those again-”

“Who asked you to look at them in the first place? Just plug it in and get it started for me.”

Stevie inserts the disk and opens the untitled folder. Icons for fourteen consecutively numbered files appear. Stevie explains how to open each of the files separately, how to line them up like playing cards across the screen.

Then he turns toward the living room before Harvey can open the first file, and he stands there at the window, looking out into the darkness. Harvey knows that this modesty is a farce, that Stevie has certainly looked at each of the photos already, has probably made a secret copy of the CD for himself. Harvey knows all this, but he doesn’t care. He is very nearly beyond all caring now, except for one last thing.

Harvey opens a half-dozen files in a row, studies each one carefully. He tells himself that he is cold to them, he doesn’t care anymore. He gazes more intently at one photo in particular, leans closer to the screen. He asks, “Is there any way to make this picture bigger?”

Stevie wants to turn away from the window but doesn’t. “You mean the whole thing?”

“The whole thing, parts of it, I don’t care. I just need it bigger.”

“There’s a little icon up in the toolbar, up along the top of the screen, looks like a magnifying glass. You see it?”

“Okay. Now what?”

“Click on that once. Now go down to the picture and click on it.”

Harvey clicks on Jennilee’s hand. He clicks a second time, makes the image larger still. Finally he can see her wedding band in the enlargement, not just a golden glow on her finger anymore, not a trick of the light.

Calmly, too calmly, he asks, “How do I turn this thing off?”

“Just click on the little X in the corner of each picture.”

Harvey closes each picture. His hands are off the mouse now, palms flat on his knees. He knows that if he lets his eyes close now, as they want to, he could drift away on the emptiness he feels, undulate down into the center of it like a leaf falling from a high branch, a leaf yellow and dead, a wasted thing.

Stevie comes over to the computer and ejects the disk. Quietly he places it in the jewel case and quietly closes the lid. Harvey looks up at him and holds out his hand.

Harvey comes quietly into his bedroom. It is at once familiar and foreign to him, as if he has been away a very long time. The room seems smaller than he remembers it, and parts of it are ugly now. Jennilee has fallen asleep with the reading light on, a magazine face-down on the bedspread, the television on with the volume turned low. A part of him wonders what magazine it is, what she might have chosen to divert her thoughts at a time like this. On the back cover is an advertisement for Absolut vodka. He thinks about coming forward off the threshold and turning the magazine over, but he does not move.

Jennilee sleeps on her side, her knees drawn up. She is wearing only panties and a matching teddy, eggshell white. The ceiling fan turns. He can feel the slightest of breezes across his face. He can smell the refrigerated air from the vents in the walls.

She awakes with a start, though he has made not a sound. Her head jerks up off the pillow, legs straighten. For a moment she lies there blinking at the wall. Then she turns her head slightly, sees him there in the doorway. She says nothing. She tries out a smile.

Harvey tells her, “There was a break-in at the school tonight.”

She tries to make her voice sound sleepy, though she is wide awake. “I know, Kenny called me. A bunch of kids, apparently.”

“He sure didn’t waste any time letting you know.”

She isn’t sure how to respond to this, decides that the best answer is none at all. She reaches for the sheet, draws a corner of it over her thighs.

He says, “If you’re cold, why do you have the fan and air conditioning on?”

She rubs a hand over the goose bumps on her arm. “I’m just keyed up, is all. Kenny was all worked up when he called and, I don’t know…”

“Like brother, like sister,” Harvey says, and he immediately regrets it, regrets that the emptiness he had felt is slipping away with those words, regrets that silence as he now understands it is impossible, the silence of not thinking or feeling, of not doing or being.

Jennilee lays a hand on the empty side of the bed. “You could come join me and help me get my mind off things. We could just lie here and talk a while. Remember when we used to do that?”

“I don’t remember when you ever had the time to. Not with me, anyway.” The emptiness has left him quickly, rushed out of him like blood from a gaping wound.

“Come on,” she says, a supplicant now, seductively pleading. “Come get me warm.”

He puts a hand to the wall switch and shuts off the ceiling fan. Looks at her a last time before turning away.

She calls to him. “You want me to come down and watch TV with you a while?”

He squeezes his eyes shut, goes down the stairs with eyes closed, wanting blindness but shutting out nothing, all images clear inside his head as his fingers slide down the polished rail.

Harvey clings to the shadows as he walks close to the side of Kenny’s house. He peers into one window after another, all rooms dark. He wonders which of the rooms belongs to Kenny, which to Kenny’s mother. He acknowledges a kind of affection for Kenny’s mother, Pauline, though he hasn’t spoken to her for several months now, not since the homecoming game last fall when he and Jennilee sat with her in the bleachers. He has always liked Pauline, thought her very attractive when he was a boy, though she was always on the plump side and even more so now. He remembers all the late nights when he and Kenny had stumbled in, trying without success to conceal their drunkenness, and she would come padding into the kitchen in robe and slippers, chide them for their behavior even as she was pouring out a glass of wine for herself, and soon she would have a skillet full of eggs and sausages ready, a mountain of toast. On the other hand, he remembers, too, the disappointment on Pauline’s face when he and Jennilee turned away from the minister at the front of the church, turned to face friends and family for the first time as husband and wife. Pauline’s frown was fleeting, yes, a small pout of her lips. But Harvey had noticed it. He never resented her for it, though. He understood her disappointment. Understood that she wanted and deserved someone better for her daughter, her perfect flower of a child.

Eventually Harvey crosses to the rear of the house, and there he sees a soft light glowing at ground level, bends low and peers through the small window and into the basement game room. Kenny is sitting on the edge of the brown leather sofa, a drink in hand, the television on. With his free hand Kenny is bouncing a small blue ball, a racquetball, bouncing it up and down on the parquet tile floor. Too anxious to sit still. Haunted by possibilities. He takes a drink and then bounces the ball four or five times in a row, a few seconds between each bounce. Then another drink. Meanwhile he stares at the television.

Harvey lets himself into the house using the key from Jennilee’s purse. The key doesn’t work on the front door, but it works on the back. He enters into the pantry. Then three paces to the kitchen. Every creaking step makes him wince. He spots the knife block atop the refrigerator, is stopped by the sight of it, nine blades within easy reach. He thinks about wrapping his fingers around one of those black handles. It would be easy, just like a hunting knife. Though not the same at all.

Then Kenny’s voice calls up through the open basement door. “I thought you were asleep already! You want me to get you something?”

Kenny waits for an answer, hears nothing. He takes another sip from his drink, half a glass of scotch and a few ice cubes that have nearly melted, but still the scotch burns pleasantly going down, single malt, the good stuff, he only drinks the good stuff.

He calls out again. “You looking for a Valium or what, Mom?”

A moment later Harvey comes down the last step and appears around the corner. Kenny sucks in a sudden breath at the sight of him, jerks back so abruptly that some of his drink splashes onto his slacks.

Harvey says, “Looks like maybe you’re the one could use the Valium.”

“Harvey, geez, I thought you were…”

Harvey approaches him slowly. “You thought I was what-your friend? Is that what you thought?”

Kenny’s smile is pale and thin. Even as he sits there smiling, he is casting about with his eyes, looking for something with which to defend himself. Harvey has the only exit blocked and Harvey is a strong man, a man who has used his muscles all his life, not like Kenny, who, though he has managed to keep his weight down, is soft inside and out, has always been soft, always needed somebody else to take the first risk, always needed to feed off somebody else’s boldness and daring, a weak man on his own-this he knows about himself.

Harvey has the only exit blocked, and the billiard table to Kenny’s right is too far away, the rack of cues on the farthest wall. To Kenny’s left, just a yard away, is the fireplace with its andirons and tools, the poker and the shovel and the fireplace brush, none ever used, never dirtied by ashes because the logs in the fireplace are made of ceramic, they glow but never burn. And the mantel is lined with Kenny’s and Jennilee’s trophies, hers for tennis, his for debate and State Band. He needs to work his way over there, he thinks. Needs to get something in his hands.

Kenny lets the rubber ball drop. It bounces three times, rolls across the floor. He holds up his empty hand, palm out, a gesture of surrender as he slowly rises to his feet. “If this were the middle of the day, Harvey, I wouldn’t mind you coming into my house without knocking. But seeing as how it’s, what, nearly twenty minutes after one in the morning-”

“Stand still,” Harvey tells him.

Kenny forces a smile. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I saw that same smile on Jennilee not long ago.” And with that Harvey reaches toward his back pocket.

Kenny doesn’t wait to see what kind of weapon Harvey will produce, revolver or knife. He knows Harvey’s anger well, has in fact been waiting for it all these years, has somehow known it would come to this. Kenny doesn’t wait but lunges in a ducking sidestep toward the fireplace, tossing his drink at Harvey so that he can seize the set of fireplace tools in both hands, can pivot and swing them in a heaving arc at Harvey’s face. Kenny holds on to only the gold-handled shovel, letting everything else fly.

Harvey spins away, covers his face. The tools sail past him to bang against the wall, but the heavy metal base of the holder catches him in the chest, a sharp corner stabbing in hard, knocking him breathless. The thing he had been holding in his hand, the weapon he had reached for earlier, now falls clattering to the floor. A plastic jewel case with a disk inside. The jewel case pops open, the lid breaks off.

A part of Kenny recognizes the object on the floor, but he is already in motion and cannot stop himself, cannot freeze the movement of the shovel in his hand, cannot stop its momentum. The flat side of the shovel slams against the side of Harvey’s head.

Harvey staggers and goes down on one knee, everything black and filled with streaking white sparks. With one arm twisted over his head he waits for another blow, but it does not come. He hears Kenny’s huffing breath, turns his head just enough to look at him, sees him standing there with the little shovel raised like a baseball bat, Kenny poised like a boy ready to step out of the batter’s box, afraid of the speeding pitch, too timid to swing.

And in that moment when Harvey turns his dazed eyes on Kenny, in that moment when the clouds in Harvey’s eyes seem suddenly to ignite, that moment when his face goes scarlet with rage, in that moment Kenny suddenly understands the error of his fear and puts his arms in motion again.

But Harvey dives in under the swing and drives forward, plunges forward with all his might. Together he and Kenny go back over the arm of the leather sofa, twisting as they fall. With Harvey beneath him, Kenny attempts to lift himself high enough that he can take another swing with the shovel, but Harvey seizes him by the wrist, yanks the shovel free, and, holding it close to the blade, slams it against the back of Kenny’s skull.

Kenny falls away from him, falls onto his hands and knees and crawls toward the doorway. But Harvey stands over him now and brings the shovel down again. Long after Kenny’s arms have collapsed beneath him and his body is still, Harvey continues to swing. Until finally the blade breaks off and Harvey is left holding only the handle itself, gold-plated and shining wet with blood, slippery in his hands.

Harvey stands over him and does not understand what has happened here. The room is suffocatingly warm and his lungs burn with every breath. His pulse is a hammer inside his head and his heart hammers at his chest. In the distance he hears the television playing, a late-night talk show, canned laughter and a strain of music.

Harvey drops to his knees beside Kenny and he thinks he hears a woman screaming in the distance, thinks he hears a dog barking. He thinks he would like to turn that God-awful television off once and for all, would like to put his fist through the screen. He thinks about Will and wishes Will were here to explain all of this to him, wishes he had the strength to find a telephone and to dial the numbers.

Even when he looks up and sees Kenny’s mother coming toward him, sees at once the horror in her eyes and the small dog yipping behind her, cowering at her heels, even as he sees her stoop to pick up the fireplace poker, he is moving away from all this, he is walking away in his own mind, walking down the street in front of Will’s place, heading for the front door, going inside to have a beer with his brother.

And everything else that happens is the work of somebody else, a man he does not know. Harvey watches it all as if from across the street, as if watching a television screen through a shop window. While now and then a pleasant scent drifts by. The smell of the bakery across the street from Will’s place, of doughnuts and fresh bread. He is able to enjoy the fragrance in a detached kind of way, the way a man who doesn’t eat might enjoy it, with longing and regret, man who has never tasted sweetness because he has no mouth, no tongue, no stomach for this life.

And when Harvey leaves Kenny’s house a quarter of an hour later, the woman is no longer screaming and the dog has stopped barking. He has turned the television off. A bone is broken just below his left wrist where he raised it to block the poker that the woman was swinging at his face, and the flesh is swollen and pulsing, the splintered bone is pulsing, too. Otherwise, as he walks back through town, he is as still inside as the night itself, and the only thought he will permit himself is that he wishes Will’s place were still open, he could really use a cold one now.

He requires no lights in order to see his dark rooms clearly; the details are emblazoned on his mind. The kitchen with its painted cupboards, the noisy icemaker in the refrigerator. The living room with the rose-colored sofa Jennilee begged him to let her buy, nearly $2,000, he does not regret the expense anymore, regrets nothing. His recliner facing the television set, the gun cabinet against the rear wall, all those seasons of hunting deer and turkey with his father and brothers, and then just his brothers. Even as he eases himself onto his recliner he can recall the scent of autumn leaves kicked up beneath his boots, can recall the fragrance of pine woods in those minutes before dawn when the fog is lifting and the air is chill. It all comes back to him now, all the happy moments unfettered by desire, because he knows it is all he has left now, and that it is all slipping away from him this night, it is nearly out of reach already.

He is not startled when the light flares on overhead. There is an inevitability to revelation, too. Just as there is to Jennilee’s sharp intake of breath at the sight of him. He can only imagine how he must look to her, as if he has dipped his head in blood, his torn shirt splattered with it and sticking to his chest. He smiles to tell her it’s not as bad as it looks. The pain is there but far away.

“My God!” she says, and comes as near as the television set, no closer. “What happened to you?”

He lifts up the compact disk he has been holding, shows it to her. Then, with a tired flick of his wrist, he sails it toward her feet. She stares down at it, a perfect roundness, chromium-bright, smeared with bloody fingerprints. Tears slide down her cheeks. She shakes her head, wanting to push away the inevitable, deny the obvious.

Her voice is hoarse and weak. He is surprised by its plaintiveness. “Did you hurt him?” she wants to know. “Harvey, please, please. Please tell me you didn’t hurt him.”

He has no desire to move, to say anything. But he knows she will keep talking if he does not speak. And so he tells her, “He isn’t hurt anymore.”

Her response is an explosion, too loud, he feels it deep inside his head. “What did you do to him?” she screams. “What did you do?”

His voice in comparison is as placid as sleep. “What would any man do?”

Her knees buckle, she drops to her knees, she clings to the side of the television cabinet. Her sobs are wails as sharp as glass.

Only now does it dawn on him that she is still wearing only her panties and teddy, that she looks so inelegant there, naked knees spread apart. The soles of her feet are dirty.

She sobs, hyperventilating, forehead against the cabinet, until a thought occurs to her, and she climbs to her feet, drags herself up, and then crosses to the telephone on the end table beside the sofa, punches in the seven numbers, listens to the repetitious ring.

He can hear the ringing too, hollow and distant. How long is she going to stand there listening?

“There’s nobody to answer it,” he tells her. He is about to say, Not even the dog, but she responds with a prolonged scream of “Nooo!” and flings herself at him, pulling the phone off the end table. She swings the receiver at him again and again, screaming all the while. He sits with arms wrapped around his head but does nothing else to defend himself, only feels the distant blows and the distant pain and thinks, as if he is watching from far away, You’re just like your mother.

She stops screaming finally, is too breathless to continue, and leans away from him, moaning, a kind of whimpering sound he has never before heard.

He lifts his eyes to hers, can scarcely recognize her now. His voice is whisper-soft. “Tell me the truth, Jennilee. It was never just the pictures, was it?”

She is as quick as a snake, lunges forward and spits in his face, three times before his hand comes up and slaps her hard, dropping her to the floor, where she curls into a fetal position and again begins to sob. He had not known he was going to slap her, never intended to do so.

Ten or fifteen seconds pass, neither knows how long. Harvey has his eyes closed now, has settled back in his chair. Jennilee climbs to her feet slowly, and with cautious glances to see if he is watching, she makes her way to the gun cabinet. She expects him to jump up and stop her as she feels for the key atop the cabinet, but he never stirs. Eventually she finds the key, inserts it in the lock, pulls open the door.

She moves more quickly now, in a hurry before he looks her way. She pulls a shotgun off the wooden rack, reaches into a box of shells, knocks the box over, fumbles for a shell, tries to break the shotgun open so as to insert the shell the way Harvey taught her the one time he took her turkey hunting, the time she thought it might be fun that year they were married, except it wasn’t fun, it was boring, and after an hour he drove her home and she never accepted his invitation again.

But this shotgun will not break open the way the other one did and she turns it in her hands, wild with fear because Harvey has opened his eyes and is watching her now, he is staring at her reflection on the TV’s black screen.

And now he is rising from his chair, pushing himself up and coming toward her, moving as if under water, thick and warm and heavy.

When he is a step away, she turns the shotgun around and, holding it by the barrel, swings the heavy stock at his head, but he catches it easily and with one pull wrenches the shotgun from her hands.

He reaches toward the spilled shells and picks up three. Slides one into the magazine, and then a second. “This is a twelve-gauge Winchester,” he tells her. Snaps open the breech and slides a third shell directly into the barrel. “It loads like this.” He pushes a tiny lever and the breech door snaps shut.

He holds the shotgun in both hands now, looks at her as she shrinks away from him. “The safety is off,” he tells her, and hands the weapon to her. For a moment she does not comprehend. Then she reaches out, jerks the shotgun from his hands. He returns to his chair and eases himself down.

He would like to close his eyes now, but he has one more thing to say. And soon she crosses to stand in front of him. She holds the shotgun’s stock tight against her shoulder, the way he taught her. He does not look at her but at her reflection on the television screen, Jennilee in miniature, shrunken by the truth.

“It’s nice,” he says, and she says, “What is?”

“That I don’t want you anymore.” He looks up at her and smiles.

She thinks the gunshot is the loudest sound she has ever heard.

And after a while she lays the shotgun across the arms of his chair. She goes to the kitchen, trembling; the entire house is trembling, a frozen place, so cold. And soon she returns, dragging a kitchen chair, which she pulls in front of his. She sits facing him with her bare feet straddling his legs, their knees touching. She leans forward and picks up the shotgun, ejects the empty shell, rams another one home. Then she wedges the shotgun’s stock into Harvey’s crotch, rests the barrel between her breasts, holds it there with her left hand. Now she leans toward Harvey, bends toward him as the barrel pushes hard against her chest and her right hand reaches out, hand and fingers stretching. Finally she finds the trigger, that scimitar moon of metal. And this time she hears no sound at all.

A week, two weeks, sixteen days later, or so Will has been told. Long enough that life has resumed much of its routine. But soon enough that even routine seems unreal. It is a morning in September, the streets are quiet, the rumbling school buses have completed their routes. Will has kissed Molly and Lacy and has watched them go and now he is standing in the bar’s open doorway, a broom in hand. He can smell the bakery across the street, a sweetness in the air, leaden in his stomach.

He has swept out the two wide rooms of his bar, and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. All the glasses are washed and all the shelves are stocked. The bar will not open for business for another hour and a half, and Will can think of nothing left to do until that time. So he stands there in the open doorway with a broom in his hand. He thinks about sweeping the sidewalk in front of his bar. It is an exercise in futility, he knows. But sometimes that is all a man is given.

He has been sweeping for ten minutes or so when he hears the low growl of a motorcycle, sees it coming toward him down the street. He does not recognize Deputy Landers until the man is just a block away; he looks too tall for the machine, all elbows and knees. A few seconds later the deputy pulls to the curb in front of Will, he shuts off the motorcycle, he takes the key from the ignition. He climbs off finally, nods to himself, crosses to Will, holds out the key.

“Sheriff thought it would be safer here with you than in Kenny’s garage. Somebody broke a window out of the house last night. Kids, probably.”

Will stares at the key.

“I know it’s only been a couple of weeks, but… sheriff asked me to remind you that you need to hire somebody to get your brother’s place cleaned up. And he says he hopes you don’t mind, but you oughta take care of Kenny’s place, too. The way the sheriff figures it, you’re going to end up with both places more than likely. Jennilee being the beneficiary, and her married to your brother and all. It’s all fairly convoluted from what I hear, but the lawyers will straighten it out, I wouldn’t worry if I was you. You’re going to end up with Kenny’s place, too, when it’s all said and done, just you wait and see. One house for you and one for Stevie, that’s the way I figure it. Get him out of that trailer of his finally. I’ll bet he won’t be complaining about that.”

The deputy continues on like this for a while, none of it registering with Will except as a kind of buzzing drone, a drill in his ear. This is the deputy who never shuts up, he tells himself. The other one… who’s the other one? What’s his name? It’s Ronnie Walters, he reminds himself, though he has known both men all their lives. Ronnie Walters. A man as close-mouthed as God himself.

Finally Deputy Landers starts to walk away. But as he does so he crosses once more to the motorcycle, runs his hand over the gas tank, trails his hand over the leather seat. “Somebody sure did a great job of restoring this beauty,” he says. “Still rides good, too. Be sure and let me know if you decide to sell it.”

Will isn’t aware of when the deputy stops talking and moves away. His next awareness of the deputy is when Will looks up and sees him walking briskly toward the center of town, already maybe fifty feet away, as if time has moved in a fragmented leap, lurching over moments irretrievable.

This is what it’s like, Will tells himself, when everything is broken.

He feels the key in one hand and the broom handle in the other. He doesn’t know what to do with either one of them. He should go inside, maybe. Except that he doesn’t want to go inside. He doesn’t want to go or be anywhere.

He looks at the motorcycle parked at the curb, its chrome and painted surfaces waxed and buffed to a glassy sheen, and reflected on the side of the shiny gas tank is the image of an odd-looking man looking back at Will, a man reduced to the size of a bird, his body bent to fit the curve of the tank, warped and shrunken and compacted by the weight of his own weariness, a weariness that glitters in his eyes like splinters of chrome, eyes that are asking for something, forgiveness maybe, redemption, or maybe just begging for an answer now and then, each man pleading to the other but neither having anything to offer, nothing but a key clutched invisibly in the fist, and in the other hand a broom good for cleaning nothing for very long, man and broom alike no bigger than a toothpick in the face of life’s storm.

And because Will does not want to think of all that, because as long as he has a daughter or wife or brother he cannot allow himself to be crushed by what he knows, cannot grant himself the gift of oblivion, he lifts his eyes to the horizon and thinks of autumn coming and of what it will be like in the woods this year. He thinks maybe he will not hunt anymore, because nothing will ever be the same. The fine powdered snow on the dry leaves will not be the same, and neither will the wind through bare branches or the shafted sunlight or the sharp crackling of ice-encrusted limbs. But Molly is old enough to go into the woods this year, and he does not want to disappoint her. Stevie will be looking forward to it, too. So maybe even though nothing will be the same, Will should take them hunting after all. But no, nothing will ever be the same. Nothing ever is.

And with this thought Will pauses for a moment in his sweeping. Only then does he realize that without even knowing when he started again, he has swept thirty feet of the sidewalk clean. The motorcycle key is still in his hand, pressed against the broom handle now and biting into his palm, leaving an impression on his skin. But it is Harvey’s key, and Will grips it tightly as he resumes his sweeping. The bristles make a rhythmic sound as they scrape the concrete, chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh, chhhhh. And before long he is thinking of Portugal again, that fantasy impossibly serene. Maybe Molly will get there someday. Maybe now she can.

As for me, he tells himself, you weren’t made for traveling, you weren’t made for big ideas. You were made for sweeping. For frying wings and making daiquiris. For opening bottles of beer. For keeping a room clean and relatively quiet and as dim as an old cathedral. For maintaining the coward’s refuge from a sun-bruised sky.