Wingshooters (19 page)

And so I stood helplessly, watching my dog across that impassable distance, which could not have been more than eight or ten feet but which felt like the width of the world. Brett opened his mouth and wailed now, a long, anguished cry that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before or have ever heard since, and that sound entered through my ears and settled into my heart, where I hear its echoes still. I knew there was no saving him. He was panting hard and he couldn’t move his front legs anymore, and his back legs began to jerk uselessly. What was coming out of the wound in his chest was darker and thicker. He looked at me with an expression of such confusion and pain that I thought I was going to die of it. “I love you! Goddamn it, Brett, stay with me!” I cried. And then he shuddered violently and his body went slack and my dog, my best friend, lay still.

I cried, “No!” and ran toward him, and now I forgot about Earl or was so upset I didn’t care what he did. He did not pull the trigger again. And so I went to my dog and knelt beside him, still crying, “No, no!” I ran my hands over his back and along his sides, feeling the warmth still in him. I lifted his great head in my hands and pressed my face to it, my nose and mouth resting against the length of his snout, my forehead pressed to his forehead, trying to imprint the details of his face and his smell so I’d remember them forever. And that’s how we were positioned—me kneeling with Brett’s head in my hands, Earl standing with his gun now lowered—when my grandfather burst into the clearing.

I don’t know if he had already been in that part of the woods, or if he’d come from the other direction. I don’t know whether the distance he’d covered was large or small, but however far he came, he got there fast, and even though I was still in the presence of a dangerous man, I felt safe, or at least less threatened, because my grandfather had come, and I knew he had come for me.

He was out of breath—I’d never seen him out of breath before—but it took him only a second to gather himself. He stepped in from the edge of the woods with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, which he held a little away from him, as if it would burn his leg. Charlie stayed a distance of maybe fifteen feet from Earl, and I was twenty feet away to his left, the three of us forming a lopsided triangle. I watched as Charlie made sense of the scene in front of him—his granddaughter kneeling on the ground, his dog lying dead in her arms, his best friend standing a few feet away and holding a lowered gun. He looked from me to Earl and then back again.

“I heard Mike …” he began, and it was only then that I realized Earl’s gun hadn’t made much sound when it fired; that Earl had used something to silence it. Charlie didn’t finish his thought and asked, “What happened here?”

Earl looked him straight in the face. “He started to come after me, Charlie.”

Charlie’s gaze traveled the distance between Brett’s body and Earl’s feet. “It doesn’t look like he got very far.”

Earl leaned forward a bit, as if to put some weight behind his answer. “He’s aggressive. Always has been.
You
know that, Charlie.”

My grandfather turned to me now and searched my face—not gently, not lovingly, but in a cold, detached way that made it clear he was seeking information. And he saw from my face that his friend was lying.

But he didn’t have time to confront him about it, because just then Uncle Pete stumbled out of the woods, late again for an important occasion. He came to a stop beside Charlie and put his hands on his knees, almost dropping the gun he was carrying. “Sorry, I couldn’t keep up with you,” he managed between gasps for air. But then he saw Earl’s gun, and Brett on the ground, and he pulled himself up straight.

My grandfather hadn’t even turned to look at Pete, but he seemed shored up with his brother-in-law beside him. He lifted his gun, a long-barreled revolver, almost imperceptibly. “Where’s the woman, Earl?”

Earl looked at him. “The woman? Oh, you mean that nigger nurse?”

“You know what I mean. Where is she?”

Earl shrugged, palms up, gun pointing sideways into the woods. “She’s not with me, Charlie. You see anybody with me?”

“That’s bullshit. People saw you tonight. People saw you take her.”

“She’s not with me. Or should I say, she’s not
with us
, anymore.” He laughed, a sickening, humorless laugh, and I caught sight of his eyes, which were flat and cold.

My grandfather raised his gun a little more. “What did you do to her, Earl?”

Now Earl snapped back to himself. “Do to
her
? Do to her? What about what she did to
me
? I walk into town and I don’t know but that people aren’t looking at me like a criminal. My son’s been taken away, and tonight my wife said she was leaving me. My wife! She’s leaving me, Charlie. She’s going back up to Wausau. And it’s all on account of
this
shit.” His voice was shaking and he paused for a moment. But when he spoke again, he’d regained control of it. “Whatever happened to that black bitch she had coming, Charlie, because of what she did to
me
.”

And now my grandfather trained his flashlight on the pile of branches that were stacked behind his friend. It was this that Earl had been working on when I first spotted him through the trees. This he’d been adding onto and positioning. The moon was directly over us now, shining through the tops of the trees, and by its light I could just make out what looked like burlap hidden beneath the branches, the wrapped end of something long and substantial. My grandfather must have seen this too, because now he said, “What’s that you got on the burn pile?”

Earl looked at him—not with fear or concern, but with the defiant, sheepish, half-pleased look of someone who’d been caught doing something he isn’t ashamed of. “Just garbage, Charlie. Just garbage to burn up with the other garbage.”

My grandfather seemed to deflate. His shoulders slumped, his gun came to a rest on his thigh, and he lowered his head a little. “Goddamnit, Earl. Goddamnit to hell. Why’d you have to go and do that?”

Earl brought his arms together and covered the barrel of his gun with his hand, as if he was caressing it. “It’s only half done,” he answered. “Only the female half.” And then the awful laugh again. “She had one cooking, though, Charlie. She had one in the oven. She begged me not to kill her for the sake of the baby. So you see, I did pretty good here, don’t you think? Two for the price of one.” We all stood there in silence, taking in the horror of what he’d just told us. “I still have to find the buck, though,” he continued. “You fellows want to help me?”

I yearned to be close to Charlie, to be within reach of his arms, but I had not been able to move because I didn’t want to leave my dog. And I realized that something else was holding me back—I didn’t really know where Charlie stood. But he looked across the clearing at his friend and shook his head slowly. “It’s
all
done, Earl. It’s all done. And now you’ve got to come back to town with us and we’ve got to go see Ray.”

Earl let out what sounded like a half-strangled laugh. “Come on, Charlie. Don’t bullshit me here. I’ve still got to finish this off.”

My grandfather looked at him soberly. “I’m not bullshitting you, Earl. We have to go.”

Earl cocked his head slightly, genuinely bewil-dered. “Charlie, what are you talking about? What are you doing?”

My grandfather sighed and his cheeks looked hollow by the light of the moon, and I thought for the second time that he looked old. “There’s a body out here, Earl. You
killed
somebody. You think no one’s going to figure that out?”

Earl’s mouth fell open and he looked from Charlie to Pete and back again. “But I thought you …” he said incredulously. “I thought you were with me on this.”

“I
was
with you,” said Charlie. “You
know
I was with you.” He paused, and I could see the struggle in his face. “But you crossed the line, Earl. You shouldn’t have done this.”

“I had to get them to stop,” Earl said. “I had to make them stand to account.”

“I know. But you didn’t need to do it
this
way, Earl.”

Earl stared. “Well, what way did you think I was
gonna
do it, Charlie? Where did you think this was headed?”

My grandfather looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “We could have done it different, is all. We could have figured something out.”

“No, we couldn’t have, Charlie. They took my son, and I don’t know if I’ll get him back. And now my wife is leaving, too. Please.” He stepped forward and there was a beseeching quality in the way he held his arms. “Let me go, Charlie. All right, I won’t go after the buck. You don’t have to tell anyone what you saw here. Just let me get a head start out of town.”

Charlie shook his head. “I can’t, Earl. Come on, now. Don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

“Please don’t take me in.” He was pleading now. “I don’t want to go back to jail.”

Charlie’s shoulders were set and he looked resolute, as he often did when he had to complete an unpleasant but necessary task, like telling Ray Davis that one of his men had been caught stealing, or pulling out the finger I’d dislocated the previous summer. “You made some big mistakes here, but you got to face up to them, Earl. You got to meet them now head on.”

“I am. I did. Don’t do this to me, Charlie.”

“You know I have to, Earl.”

And then again, colder: “Don’t do this, Charlie. I will not go back to jail.” As he said this, he raised his gun and leveled it at my grandfather’s head. “You’re not going to take me in.”

And just like that, both Charlie and Pete whipped their guns up and aimed them at Earl. I had never seen either of them move so fast. I remember feeling paralyzed, unable to move, not because I was scared—by this point, my fear had boiled down to numbness—but because time seemed to stop completely and suspend us in that tableau: Earl pointing his gun at my grandfather, Charlie and Pete pointing theirs at him, none of them speaking or moving. But finally Charlie broke the silence with his low command. “You better put that gun down, Earl. The numbers are against you.”

Earl shook his head. “You’re going to have to let me go.”

“I’m not letting you go,” my grandfather answered, and both he and Pete dug in their heels.

“Well, I’m not going,” Earl said again, and now he turned in my direction. What I remember from his expression was that he didn’t seem to see me. I was not a person to him, not a living thing, and I knew that he would kill me with as little concern as he’d shown for Brett and Mrs. Garrett. None of us were real to him. What
was
real to Earl? Was Earl even real to himself?

“Put the gun down, Earl. Don’t do this,” Charlie said.

“No,” Earl said. “No way.” Then he turned and aimed his gun at me and tensed his arm to fire, and Charlie and Uncle Pete both pulled their triggers. They fired in quick succession, one bullet catching Earl in the shoulder and spinning him around, the other going in through his side. Earl’s gun was thrown by the impact and he hit the ground with a thud. He landed on his side and groped at the dirt with his arms, trying to pull himself to safety. “Charlie, Pete, I can’t believe …” he gasped. Dark red blood began to pour from his wounds and I thought I saw the heat rise off of it. He tried to plug the holes with his right hand—his left arm was useless—and his breathing was shallow and rapid. Then Charlie stepped toward him, turned him onto his back, and shot him through the heart.

Later, what I’d think of was the silence. After the echoes of gunfire were absorbed into the woods, there was a silence that wasn’t just the absence of sound but the presence of a heavy new truth. Nobody moved for several moments. And in that space of time I remember thinking that my life had just changed forever, in ways I couldn’t begin to fathom; and that this silence was the interlude between my past and my future, between who I’d been and whoever I was going to be.

I didn’t say a word, and neither did Pete. But after a few minutes, Charlie sank to his knees and slowly crossed himself. He touched his friend’s forehead like he was taking his temperature, then he gathered him up in his arms. He rocked the body gently and his shoulders began to shake, and I realized with shock that he was crying. “Oh, God, help us,” he said, and it was as if he didn’t know that Pete and I were there. “Damnit, Earl. Why’d you have to do this?” he cried. “It wasn’t worth it. Why’d you ever have to let it get this far? Why’d you give up everything, for
this
?”

Uncle Pete and I both lowered our heads and turned the other way; we knew better than to say anything. But finally my grandfather looked up at us, and though the expression on his face was anguished, his voice held firm. “Pete, take Mikey and go back into town,” he said. “Get Ray. Get Alice. Just go and
get
people, damnit, and leave me alone here with Earl.”

Pete slipped his gun back into his waistband and walked over to me. He placed his hand on my shoulder gently and said, “Okay, kiddo. Let’s get ourselves to town.” When I looked down behind me reluctantly, he sighed and said, “We’ll take your dog back, too.”

And so Pete crouched down and picked Brett up and carried him back to the car. If I’d been in a clearer state of mind I might have been grateful; I might have appreciated that it isn’t easy to carry fifty pounds of dead weight half a mile through the woods in the dark. I might have noticed that he put no barrier between Brett’s body and his clothes, so that his jacket and pants got soaked with blood.

When we reached the car, I slid all the way across the backseat and Pete placed Brett in after me. He was careful not to hit Brett’s legs on the doorframe even though the dog could no longer feel it. Brett’s body was already cool to the touch and the blood was getting sticky and stiff; I shut his eyes, which were now dull and lifeless. I pulled his upper body close so that his head was resting on my lap, just like it had so many times before. And as we drove back to town I buried my face in his fur and felt my heart crack open—for Brett, for Mrs. Garrett, for the lives that awaited the rest of us, lives that we could not yet imagine. And for my grandfather too, for what he had done—to his friend, and to himself.