A Simple Plan (24 page)

“Give it to me, Hank,” Lou said. His voice came out sounding remarkably controlled, and this hint of composure, tiny as it was, momentarily reassured me.

“Why don’t we talk in the morning, Lou?” I said. “Everybody’ll be calmer then, and we’ll work things out.”

He shook his head. “You’re not going to leave until you give me the tape.”

“Hank?” Jacob called from the foot of the walk. “You okay?”

“Go wait in the truck, Jacob.”

Lou craned his neck to see outside, but I blocked his view. I stepped backward onto the porch, dragging the door shut behind me. I was trying to separate them, but Lou misinterpreted it. He thought I was running away, thought I was scared of him, and it gave him a burst of confidence. He took two quick steps forward, grabbed the edge of the door with his right hand, and yanked it open. He waved his gun in my face.

“I said you’re not going to—” he started.

“Leave him alone, Lou,” Jacob shouted.

Lou froze, startled, and we both turned to look. My brother was squinting down the barrel of his rifle, aiming it at Lou’s head.

“Stop it, Jacob,” I said. “Go back to the truck.” But he didn’t move. He was focused on Lou, and Lou was focused on him. I was being shoved off to the periphery, a prop in their drama.

“You gonna shoot me, Jake?” Lou asked, and then, together, they both began to yell, each trying to outshout the other: Jacob told him to leave me alone, to shut up, to put down the gun, that he didn’t want to hurt him; and Lou started in about their friendship, about being tricked in his own house, about how much he needed the money, and how he was going to shoot me if I didn’t give him the tape.

“Shhh,” I kept saying, pleading now, and ignored by everyone. “Shhh.”

In the midst of all this, I saw a light come on in one of the upstairs windows. I stared up at it, waiting for Nancy to appear, hoping that her voice, drifting down like an angel’s from the sky above our heads, might stop this insanity, might silence their shouts and make them put down their guns. She didn’t come to the window, though; she opened her bedroom door and ran down the hallway to the head of the stairs.

“Lou?” I heard her call. She was out of sight, but I could imagine how she looked from the sound of her voice—sleepy and bewildered, her hair tangled and matted, her face puffy around the eyes.

Instantly, Lou fell silent, and when he stopped yelling, my brother did, too. My ears were ringing from their shouting. The night seemed to settle around us, softly, in little pieces, like falling snow.

Nancy came down a few steps. I could see one of her feet now through the upper frame of the doorway. It was bare and very small. “What’s going on?” she asked.

Lou’s face was a brilliant red, his nostrils flared. He seemed to be having a hard time catching his breath. He was pointing his gun at the center of my chest, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Jacob. “You fucking piece of shit,” he said, very quietly. Then he glanced at me. “The two of you. Pretending to be my friends.” He raised the gun until it was pointing at my face. “I ought to blow your fucking brains out.”

“Come on, Lou,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm. “We can talk this out.” I didn’t think he was going to shoot me; I thought it was just bluster, like a dog barking. Nancy’s presence was a good thing; if we let her, I knew, she’d bring us out of this danger. Another few seconds and Lou would lower his gun. Then she’d take him inside, and it would all be over.

Nancy came down another step. I could see two feet and a shin now. “Put down the gun, baby,” she said, and the softness of her voice was like a balm to me. I felt myself relax beneath its touch.

But Lou shook his head. “Go back to bed,” he said. He pumped a shell into the shotgun’s chamber, adjusted his aim at my face. “I’m just going to shoot these two pieces of—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. There was an explosion behind me, a flash of blue light followed instantly by a sense of movement over my left shoulder. I ducked, shutting my eyes, and heard Lou’s gun clatter to the tiled floor.

When I lifted my head, he’d disappeared from the doorway.

There was perhaps a second’s worth of silence before Nancy began to scream. It was just long enough for me to make out the sound of the wind sighing though the branches of the trees above me, and then it was over, and there was only her voice. It filled the house, strained against the walls.

“Noooooo,” she screamed. She went on and on, until she ran out of air, and then she began again. “Noooooo.”

I knew what had happened: it was the absolute stillness behind me, and the utter horror which this stillness implied, that made it undeniable. My brother had shot Lou.

I stepped forward and up, across the porch and into the house, and found Lou lying on his back a few feet from the door. The bullet had hit him in the forehead, about an inch above his eyes. It had left a very small hole in front, but there was a large puddle of blood on the floor, working its way out across the entranceway, so I knew that the hole in back must be bigger. His face was absolutely expressionless, almost serene. His mouth was partly open, his teeth visible, his head tilted slightly back, so that it looked as if he were about to sneeze. His right hand was thrown flamboyantly out across the floor; his left was covering his heart. The shotgun was lying beside his shoulder.

He was dead, of course. There was no doubt about this: Jacob had killed him. And so, I thought to myself, just like that, in an instant, it was over—everything was going to be revealed now, all our secrets, all our crimes. We’d let things slip out of our control.

Nancy came down the stairs one step at a time. She was a big woman, larger than Lou. Her hair was shoulder length and dyed a peculiar, unabashedly artificial tint of orange. She was holding her hand over her mouth, her eyes locked on Lou’s body. I watched her approach, feeling as if I were in some sort of trance. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance, as though I were observing it from behind a sheet of glass.

“Oh my God,” she said, the words coming out at double speed, as if they’d been glued together. She kept repeating it, over and over again. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

She was wearing a Detroit Tigers T-shirt. It was extra-long, like a nightgown, and came down to her thighs. I could see her breasts moving beneath it, full and heavy, swinging a little each time she took a step.

I glanced back through the doorway at Jacob. He was still out on the walk, standing there like a statue, peering into the house. It seemed as if he were waiting for Lou to get up.

Nancy reached the bottom of the stairs, moved at a crouch across the entranceway, then stooped down beside Lou’s corpse. She didn’t touch him. She still had her hand over her mouth, and the sight of her like that sent a wave of pity through my body. I stepped forward, my arms held out to embrace her, but when she saw me coming, she jumped up and backed away toward the living room.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. Her legs were stocky beneath her T-shirt, pallid, like two marble pillars. She was beginning to cry a little; a pair of tears were moving in tandem down either side of her nose, as if in a race.

I tried to think of something soothing to say to her, but all I could come up with was a feeble lie. “It’s okay, Nancy,” I whispered.

She didn’t react to this. She was staring past me, toward the doorway, and when I turned to see what she was looking at, I found Jacob standing there, the rifle cradled in his arms like a baby, a blank, mannequinish look pasted on his face.

“Why?” Nancy asked.

He had to clear his throat before he spoke. “He was going to shoot Hank.”

The sound of my brother’s voice pulled me out of my trance. If we could act together, I realized, the thought fluttering upward into consciousness on a pair of panicky wings, we could still salvage something from this horror: we could still save the money. It would simply be a matter of our agreeing to look at things in a certain way.

“He wasn’t going to shoot anyone,” Nancy said. She was staring down at Lou’s body now. The puddle of blood was still growing, moving slowly out across the tiled floor.

“Nancy,” I said softly, “it’s going to be all right. We’re going to work this out.” I was trying to calm her down.

“You killed him,” she said, as if in disbelief. She pointed her finger at my brother. “You shot him.”

Jacob didn’t say anything. His rifle was clenched tightly against his chest.

I took two steps toward Nancy, edging my way around the puddle of blood. “We’re going to call the police,” I said. “And we’re going to tell them it was self-defense.”

She glanced toward me, but not at me. It didn’t seem like she understood.

“We’re going to tell them that Lou was about to shoot him, that he was drunk, that he’d gone berserk.”

“Lou wasn’t going to shoot anyone.”

“Nancy,” I said. “We can still save the money.”

She reacted to this statement as if it were a slap in the face. “You bastards,” she hissed. “You shot him for the money, didn’t you?”

“Shhh,” I said. I made a quieting motion with my hand, but she started toward me, her fists clenched, her face distorted with rage. I backed away from her.

“You think I’m going to let you keep the money?” she said. “You fucking—”

I retreated all the way across the entranceway, past Lou’s body, toward the door and my brother. She kept coming at me, yelling now, calling me names, shouting about the money. As she passed Lou’s body, she stumbled against the shotgun, kicking it with one of her bare feet. It made a loud metallic noise as it slid across the tiles, and we all stared down at it.

There was a pause, while Nancy seemed to consider. Then she was bending to pick it up.

I stepped forward to grab it first, not to threaten her, only to keep her from getting it. We both got ahold of it, and there was a brief struggle. The gun was black and oily, and surprisingly heavy. I pushed, then pulled, then pushed again, and Nancy lost her grip. She stumbled back toward the stairs, fell against them, and, shrieking, lifted her arms to protect her head.

I realized with a shock that she thought I was going to shoot her.

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. I crouched down, began to lay the gun on the floor. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She started to back up the stairs.

“Wait, Nancy,” I said. “Please.”

She kept moving away, one step at a time, higher and higher, and I came after her, the gun in my hands.

“No,” she said. “Don’t.”

“It’s okay. I just want to talk.”

When she got to the top of the stairs, she turned to the right and broke into a run. I sprinted after her, up the last few steps and then down the hallway. Her bedroom was at the very end. Its door was open, and there was a light on inside. I could see the foot of the bed.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I yelled.

She reached the door and tried to slam it shut, but I was right behind her. I caught it with my arm, forced it open. She backed away from me. The room was larger than I’d expected. There was a king-size water bed directly in front of us, pushed up against the wall. To the left was a little sitting area—two chairs and a table with a TV on it. There was a door behind the chairs, shut, which I assumed must’ve led to the bathroom. To the right, pressed up against the house’s front wall, were two huge bureaus and a dressing table. There was a doorway there, too. It was open and led to a walk-in closet. I could see some of Nancy’s dresses hanging inside.

“I just want to talk,” I said. “Okay?”

Nancy fell backward against the bed and started crawling, crablike, across it. A sloshing sound came from the mattress, and the covers rose and fell with the rolling of the water beneath them.

I realized that I was pointing the shotgun at her. I took it in my left hand and held it out, away from my body, to show her that I wasn’t going to use it. “Nancy—”

“Leave me alone,” she cried. She reached the headboard and stopped, trapped. Her face was smeared with tears. She wiped at it with her hand.

“I promise I won’t hurt you. I just want to—”

“Get out,” she sobbed.

“We have to think about what we’re doing. We have to calm down and—”

Her right hand shot out suddenly, reaching for the night table. At first I thought she was going to pick up the phone and call the police, so I stepped forward to snatch it away. Her hand wasn’t moving toward the phone, though; it was moving toward the night table’s drawer. She pulled it open, reached inside, fumbling blindly, in a panic, her eyes locked on me and the gun. A box of tissues fell out, landing on the floor with a hollow thump, and then, right behind it, came her hand. It was holding a small black pistol. She had it by the barrel.

“No,” I said. I retreated toward the door. “Don’t, Nancy.”

She pulled the pistol toward her, worked her hand around to the grip. Then she raised it and aimed it at my stomach.

My mind was sending out a jumbled stream of contradictory orders, screaming at my body, telling it to leap forward and grab the pistol, to run away, to duck, to hide behind the door, but my body refused to listen. It acted on its own. My arms lifted the shotgun, and then my finger found the trigger, found its cold metal tongue, and pulled it backward.

The gun fired. Nancy’s body was flung back against the headboard, and a tiny fountain of water sprang up at her side.

I stood there in shock. The spray of water made a sound like someone urinating when it landed on the bedspread. Nancy’s body slumped over to the right, balanced for a second on the edge of the bed, then slipped with a thud to the floor. There was blood everywhere—on the sheets, the pillows, the headboard, the wall, the floor.

“Hank?” Jacob called. His voice sounded scared, shaky.

I didn’t answer him. I was trying to absorb what had just happened. I took a step into the room, crouched down, set the gun on the floor.

“Nancy,” I said. I knew she was dead, could tell just by the way she’d fallen from the bed, but the desire for this not to be true was overwhelming. I waited for her to answer me; the whole thing seemed like an accident, and I wanted to explain this to her.