A Simple Plan (28 page)

Jacob, when he saw me glance down at the dog, quickly raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. It made a clicking sound. The chamber was empty. There’d only been the one bullet in it, the bullet he’d loaded back on New Year’s Eve, at the very beginning of all this, when we’d set off into the woods after the fox. My brother’s face settled into a rueful smile. He seemed almost, but not quite, to shrug.

I fired the gun into his chest.

B
EFORE
calling the police, I went inside to pee. The bathroom floor was covered with water. It dripped through the ceiling now at several points, like a miniature rain shower. The plaster was stained a light brown from it.

I picked up Sonny’s clothes from the porch and carried them to the bedroom. I dropped them into the water beside the bed, then retrieved the pistol, dried it off with my jacket, and returned it to its drawer.

Downstairs again, I took the leftover shells and stuck them into Lou’s pocket. I laid his gun on the floor beside his shoulder. His expression hadn’t changed. The puddle of blood had spread to the edge of the living room and was dripping quietly onto its shag carpet.

Sonny had left his lights on, so I had to drive over there quickly and turn them out. While I was there, I hung Nancy’s robe in the trailer’s bedroom closet and set her tube of lipstick on the sink in the bathroom.

As I drove back to Lou’s, I looked for the dog, but he’d disappeared, scared off by the sound of the shotgun.

I called the police from Lou’s driveway. I was brief on the radio, trying to sound panicked. I gave the address, said there’d been a shooting. I didn’t answer the dispatcher’s questions. “My brother,” I said, forcing a sob into my voice. Then I clicked off the radio. I sounded good, I knew, convincing, and I felt a sudden infusion of confidence.

It’s believable, I said to myself, it’s going to work.

I took the tape recorder from my shirt pocket and played it one last time. It was eerie, sitting in the cab of the truck like that, listening to their voices go back and forth, and knowing they were dead. I stopped it before it was through, erased the whole thing, and hid the machine beneath the seat.

I waited in the truck for a while, then climbed out and went up the walk. I wanted to be by my brother when the ambulance arrived, crouching there, holding him in my arms.

I tried calling Mary Beth, but he didn’t come. I stood on the walk for several minutes, shivering in the cold, listening for the sound of the dog’s tags. I’d hidden my gloves with the tape recorder and was hoping that the wind would air the smell of gun smoke from my jacket.

I could just make out the ambulance’s lights, far away across the fields but coming fast, flickering red and white off the horizon, when Jacob reached out and grabbed my ankle. His grip was tight, violent. I had to yank my leg twice to get it free.

A gurgling sound came out of his chest, very faint. As soon as I heard it, I realized that it had been going on for some time.

I stooped down beside him, just out of reach. His jacket was torn and soaked through with blood. I could see the lights coming closer. There were three sets of them—silent, no sirens, converging on Lou’s house, two approaching from the east, still far away, and one from the south, which was closer.

Jacob tried to lift his head but couldn’t. His eyes took a moment to find me; then they focused a little, faded, and focused again. His glasses were lying beside him on the walk.

I could hear the ambulance’s engine now, racing.

“Help me,” Jacob gasped.

He said it twice.

Then he lost consciousness.

7

T
HE NEXT
morning, just after eight, I was sitting in an empty room on the second floor of the Delphia Municipal Hospital, watching myself on TV. First an announcer talked from the studio, reading something off a sheet of paper. The television was broken, so I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I knew that it was about what had happened the previous night because from the studio they cut to a shot of me, just a short one, perhaps five seconds, as I walked from a police car into the hospital. I was hunched over, hurrying, head down. I didn’t look like myself, and this reassured me. I looked shaken, shocked, like I belonged there, on the news.

Next there was a reporter, a woman, talking into a microphone in front of Lou’s house. She had on a heavy down jacket and thick yellow ski gloves. As she spoke, her long brown hair lifted itself an inch or so from her shoulders, trembling in the wind. Several police cars were parked behind her in the driveway. The yard was crisscrossed with tire tracks. Lou’s front door was wide open, and I could see two men crouched inside the entranceway, taking pictures.

The woman talked for a bit, her face serious, grief-stricken. The announcer reappeared when she finished, and he seemed to say something consoling to her. Then the newsbreak was over.

There was a commercial next, and after that a cartoon. Elmer Fudd chasing Daffy Duck. I turned away from the screen. I was sitting with Sarah and Amanda in what was once a two-bed, semiprivate room. For some reason it had been emptied of furniture. The beds were gone, the night tables, everything. Except for the two folding chairs Sarah and I sat in, the room was barren. The floor was light blue. I could see where the beds had stood; the tiles were a little darker there, two perfect rectangles against the wall, like shadows. There was a single small window, a slit in the side of the building, the same size and shape as the ones they used to have in castles, to shoot arrows through. It looked out onto the hospital’s parking lot.

The television set hung on a bracket hooked into the ceiling. Though it gave me a sick feeling to look at it, I found it hard not to watch. It was the only thing in the room besides Sarah, and I didn’t want to look at her. If I looked at her, I knew I’d start talking, and I didn’t feel safe talking there.

We’d been put in the room as a courtesy, for our privacy. There were reporters down in the regular waiting room. I’d been up all night, had not eaten since the previous day. I was unshaven, dirty, shaky.

The FBI hadn’t been called in. It was just the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department. I’d spent two hours talking with them, and it had been fine. They were normal people, like Carl Jenkins, and they saw things exactly as Sarah and I had anticipated they would: Lou coming home drunk, finding Sonny and Nancy in bed together, getting his gun and shooting them; Jacob and I hearing the shots as we pulled away, Jacob running up to the house with his rifle, Lou opening the door, pointing his shotgun, two explosions ripping through the night.

The sheriff’s deputies had treated me with great care and courtesy, like a victim rather than a suspect, mistaking my unconcealable distress over the possibility of Jacob’s regaining consciousness for a brother’s heartfelt grief.

Jacob was in his third hour of surgery.

Sarah and I sat in the room and waited.

Neither of us seemed to want to talk. Sarah tended Amanda. She nursed her, whispered to her, played little games with her. When the baby slept, Sarah closed her eyes, too, slouching forward in her folding chair. I watched the silent TV—cartoons, a game show, a rerun of “The Odd Couple.” During commercials I went over to the window and stared down at the parking lot. It was a big lot, like a field of asphalt. The cars clustered around the building, leaving the far edge empty and forlorn looking. Beyond the parking lot was a real field, buried in snow. When the wind came up, it carried grains of this snow across the asphalt in little semitransparent waves and threw them up against the hospital.

Sarah and I waited and waited. Doctors and nurses and policemen walked by outside the door, the clicking of their shoes echoing up and down the tiled hallway, drawing our eyes to their passing, but no one stopped to tell us anything.

Whenever the baby started to cry, Sarah hummed a little song to her, and she quieted down. After a while, I recognized the tune. It was “Frère Jacques.” Listening to Sarah, I got it in my head, and then I couldn’t get it out, even when she stopped.

Just after eleven, a sheriff’s deputy came into the room. I was sitting in my chair, and I stood up to shake his hand. Sarah smiled and nodded, her arms wrapped around the baby.

“I don’t want to impose at a time like this,” the deputy began. Then he paused, as if he’d forgotten what he’d come to say. He stared up at the television, a Toyota commercial, and frowned. He wasn’t one of the men I’d spoken to earlier. He looked too young to be a policeman, looked like a kid dressing up. His uniform was a little too big, his black shoes a little too shiny, the crease in his trooper’s hat a little too perfect. When he frowned up at the TV, his whole face frowned, even his eyes. It was a perfectly round face, lightly freckled, a farm boy’s face, flat and pale and moonlike.

“I’m real sorry about your brother,” he started again. He glanced shyly at Sarah, taking in the baby in one swift glance, then turned back to the TV.

I waited, guarded.

“We have his dog,” he said. “We found it at the crime site.” He cleared his throat, pulled his eyes away from the TV, and gave me a hesitant look. “We were wondering if you wanted to look after it yourself.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His shiny black shoes made a creaking noise.

“If you didn’t,” he said quickly, “if it’s too much to think of right now, we can put it in the pound for a while.” He glanced at Sarah. “Until things settle down.”

I looked toward Sarah, too. She nodded at me.

“No,” I said. “We’ll take care of him.”

The deputy smiled. He seemed relieved. “I’ll drop him off at your house then,” he said.

He shook my hand again before he left.

F
ORTY
minutes later a doctor came in to tell us that Jacob was out of surgery. He’d been moved to the intensive care unit and was listed in critical condition. The doctor told us that the blast from the shotgun had damaged both of Jacob’s lungs, his heart, his aorta, three of his thoracic vertebrae, his diaphragm, his esophagus, his liver, and his stomach. He had a foldout chart to show Sarah and me where all these parts were in the body. As he listed off their names, he circled them with a red pen.

“We’ve done all we can for now,” he said.

He gave Jacob a one-in-ten chance of surviving.

L
ATER,
when I was at the window again, Sarah turned to me and whispered, “Why didn’t you check to see if he was alive?”

I could tell from her voice that she was on the edge of tears.

“If he lives…,” she said.

“Shhh.” I glanced toward the door.

We watched each other for a moment, in silence. Then I turned back to the window.

J
UST
before three o’clock, a new doctor appeared. It was as if he’d snuck up on us; neither Sarah nor I heard him approach, he simply materialized in the doorway. He was tall and thin and good looking, with short gray hair and a white lab coat. Underneath his coat, he was wearing a red tie—bright red—and it made me think of blood.

“My name’s Dr. Reed,” he said.

He had a firm handshake, quick and tight, like a snake striking. He spoke rapidly, as if he were afraid he might be called off at any moment and wanted to get his say in before this happened.

“Your brother’s regained consciousness.”

I felt a surge of heat rush up my neck and into my face. I didn’t look at Sarah.

“He’s incoherent,” the doctor said, “but he’s calling your name.”

I followed him out of the room, leaving Sarah sitting there with the baby. We walked down the hallway at a brisk clip. The doctor had long, efficient strides, and I had to break into a jog to keep up. We went to the elevators. Just as we arrived, one of them opened its doors for us, as if by magic. Dr. Reed pushed the fifth-floor button, a chime rang, and the doors slid shut.

“He’s speaking?” I asked, slightly out of breath. I felt suspicious saying it and looked away.

The doctor was watching the numbers above the door. He held his clipboard clasped behind him in his hands. “Not really,” he said. “He’s drifting in and out of consciousness. All we’ve picked up is your name.”

I closed my eyes.

“Normally I wouldn’t let you in to see him,” he said. “But to be frank, it may be your last chance.”

The doors slid back, and we stepped out onto the fifth floor. The lighting was dimmer here. A group of nurses were whispering together behind a big counter right across from the elevators, and they glanced up when we appeared, looking at the doctor, not at me. I could hear soft beeping sounds coming from somewhere behind them.

Dr. Reed went over and spoke to one of them; then he came back and took me by the elbow, leading me quickly down the hall to the left. We passed several open doorways, but I didn’t look inside them. I could tell which room was Jacob’s. It was at the very end of the corridor, on the left-hand side. Carl Jenkins was standing outside it, talking to the deputy with the farm boy’s face. They both nodded to me as the doctor led me inside.

My brother was lying in a bed just beyond the doorway. He looked huge beneath the covers, like a dead bear, but at the same time somehow depleted, as if he’d been drained and what was left now was merely his husk. His body was perfectly still. There were tubes everywhere, draped over the bed rail, trailing out haphazardly across the floor. Jacob was stuck full of them, like a puppet on a set of strings.

I went up to the bed.

There was an orderly on the other side, a very short, dark-haired young man, working at the tubing. He ignored my presence. A large boxlike machine with a tiny yellow video screen sat on a cart behind him, beeping steadily.

The room was large, a long rectangle, and had several other beds in it, hidden behind white curtains. I couldn’t tell if they were occupied.

The orderly was wearing translucent rubber gloves. Through them, I could just make out the hair on the backs of his hands, black and wirelike, and pressed down close to the skin.

Dr. Reed stood at the foot of the bed.

“You can only stay a minute,” he said. Then he turned to the orderly, and they whispered back and forth. While they talked, the doctor scribbled on his clipboard.

Holding my breath, I took my brother by the hand. It was cold, heavy, damp, like a hunk of meat. It didn’t seem to belong to Jacob anymore. It was revolting. I had to grip it tightly to keep myself from throwing it away.

His eyes flickered at the pressure. When they opened a second later, they fell right on me. Then they didn’t move at all. A set of tubes was stuck up his nose. His face was absolutely bloodless, so pale it seemed transparent. I could see the veins in his temples. His forehead was beaded with sweat.

He stared at me for a second, and then his lips moved, as if by reflex, into a smile. It wasn’t Jacob’s normal smile, it was unlike any I’d ever seen before. His lips stretched out straight across to either side of his face, so that he looked like a dog baring his teeth. His eyes didn’t move at all.

“I’m here, Jacob,” I whispered. “I’m right here.”

He tried to respond but couldn’t. He made a harsh, gasping sound at the back of his throat, and the machine’s beeping increased its tempo. The doctor and the orderly glanced up from their discussion. Jacob shut his eyes. The beeping gradually slowed back down.

I continued to hold his hand for another minute or so, until the doctor asked me to leave.

D
R
. R
EED
remained in the room with the orderly, so I made my way back to the elevator unaccompanied. Carl was at the opposite end of the hallway now, talking with a nurse. The farm boy had disappeared.

As I stepped into the elevator, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Carl turn from the nurse and start to walk quickly toward me. Without thinking, I pressed the door-closed button. It was more from a simple desire to be alone than from any fear of him, but as soon as I did it, I recognized what it might look like—a guilty man’s attempt to escape further interrogation. I jabbed my finger at the door-open button. It was too late, though; the elevator was already sliding slowly down its shaft.

When the doors opened again, I stepped out and turned to the left. I’d gone about ten feet before I realized that I was in the wrong place. In my hurry to avoid Carl, I’d pressed the third-floor button, rather than the second. It was the maternity ward; I recognized it from my visits to Sarah. I spun around, but by the time I returned to the bank of elevators, the one I’d arrived on had already shut its doors and disappeared.

There was a nurse’s station directly across from the elevators, a long L-shaped counter, painted bright orange, just like the one on Jacob’s floor. Three nurses were seated behind it. I’d seen them look up when I’d gotten off the elevator, and I could feel them staring at me now. I stood with my back to them, wondering if they knew who I was, if they’d seen me on TV or heard about me through the hospital’s rumor mill. “That’s the man whose brother was shot last night,” I imagined them whispering, while they eyed me for signs of grief.

Somewhere down to the left a baby was crying.

The elevator on the right emitted its electric chime, and the doors slid open. Inside was Carl Jenkins. I blushed when I saw him but forced my voice to sound calm.

“Hello, Carl,” I said, stepping forward.

He beamed at me. “What’re you doing down here, Hank? You have another baby on me?”

I returned his smile, pressing the button for the second floor. The doors slid shut. “Got so used to visiting Sarah, I punched the wrong button out of habit.”

He laughed, short and soft, a polite chuckle. Then his face turned serious. “I’m real sorry about all this,” he said. He was holding his hat in his hands, playing with the brim, and he stared down at it while he talked.