Wingshooters (17 page)

“It’s bad,” Ray said. And then again, “We shouldn’t have left him alone.” Over his shoulder, from the living room, I could see the faces of his three children—Dale, five-year-old Jessica, and the baby, Andrew Lee—looking on with curiosity. The last time I’d been to Ray’s house was the previous Christmas, when he and Charlie had sat admiring Ray’s new rifles, pointing them at each other across the living room while the baby crawled between them on the floor.

“Carrie Sorenson called awhile ago,” Ray told us. “She lives over on Hanshaw Road down the street from the Garretts, and she saw Earl go up to their house. No sign of the buck yet, but he came out with the woman—with his gun to the back of her head.”

Alice Watson gasped and began to sway; Pete went over and guided her gently to a chair. And in the wake of their reaction, I almost didn’t notice that Ray had referred to the Garretts by name.

“Carrie saw this?” my grandfather asked.

Ray nodded. “Al Mueller did too—he told my guys who went out there. Earl took her and put her in his car.”

“No sign of the buck?” my grandfather repeated, looking from Pete to Ray.

Ray shook his head. “He must still be out of town. We’re keeping a squad car out at the house, in case he turns up.”

Charlie closed his eyes and lowered his head for a moment. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Holy Mother of God.”

“I don’t think,” said Uncle Pete uncertainly, “I don’t think he’d
do
anything, would he? I mean, he’s probably just trying to scare her.”

And now Alice Watson looked up from the table, her tear-stained face stuck here and there with strands of her light brown hair. “This is
your
fault!” she cried out. “You could have stopped this! You could have stopped him the day Kevin went to the emergency room. You could have stopped him when they saw Kevin’s scars at school. But you had to stick by him, be his
buddy
. You had to deal with this like
men
.” Her face screwed up when she said this. “And instead of doing right by Kevin and me, you just looked the other way. I hate you. I hate this stupid, godforsaken town. Oh, Jesus, why did I ever have to come here?”

She burst into tears and buried her face in her arms, resting them on the table. The room was silent. For while she had been looking directly at Ray, she’d really been speaking to all of them. All of them were culpable, and maybe, in their silence, they were finally acknowledging this; maybe it was only then they really knew it.

No one answered Mrs. Watson; there was nothing to say. In the momentary silence Ray’s radio crackled, and he jumped up and went into the other room. When he came back, his expression was set and determined. There was no more hesitation or uncertainty. “Someone spotted Earl’s car downtown,” he said. “They couldn’t peg which direction he was going—the car turned a couple of times, almost like he was lost or trying to mislead us.”

“So what should we do?” asked Charlie. “It’s not helping to just sit here on our asses.”

Ray thought for a moment. “I’ve got all my cars out looking for them, but we could go out too. Alice, you should stay here with Maryann and the kids. Pete and Charlie can go out together, and I can go by myself.”

“No,” Mrs. Watson said, standing up. “I’m coming. That’s my husband out there alone with that woman, and I need to be able to see him.” The tears were gone and her jaw was set, and she was dead serious. It was as if grief had burned away the soft outer casing of her personality, and now she stood before us hardened and pure, prepared in a way she’d never been before to face her husband and put a stop to him. The men just looked at her, surprised, not sure how to respond. But finally Ray said, “Okay then, Alice, you come with me. Pete, you go with Charlie.”

Both men nodded and then Uncle Pete asked, “Where do you think he’d go?”

“Well, my men are covering the main roads out of town,” said Ray. “But I don’t have any other ideas. Alice?”

“I don’t know,” she said. And then looking up quickly, “Well, there’s his folks’ place, up Route 5 toward Glenville. They’ve got acreage out there and an empty barn.”

“What about the state park?” Uncle Pete asked. “No one would be there now.”

“Or the gun shop or one of your fishing spots,” said Mrs. Watson.

“Yeah,” Ray said. “That all makes sense. He’d probably go somewhere he knows.”

It was decided that Ray and Alice would go out to her in-laws’ place, since she wanted, even if he wasn’t there, to be the one to tell them what was happening. That left Charlie and Pete to check the park and the places in the country. Ray glanced from my grandfather to me and back again, and I knew he was thinking I should stay behind. But Charlie gave him a look that cut off any question before he had a chance to ask. As we piled back into our respective cars, Ray said, “You find him, you just try to keep him calm. Let him know there’s a way out. Don’t get him in a position where he feels backed into a corner.”

This last exchange put a charge of fear in my stomach. Until now, I couldn’t have imagined a situation where one of Charlie’s friends was treated as a threat. And when Ray asked Pete and Charlie, “You both got guns?” I knew that we were living in a different new reality where anything was possible.

How had it come to this? I wondered as Charlie drove in silence, both men looking straight ahead out the windshield. How had they let it get this far? And what would happen now? I couldn’t, even with what I had heard that night, believe that it could really get worse. And I began to wonder now about the Garretts—if Mr. Garrett was on his way back to Deerhorn, if he had worried because he couldn’t reach his wife. I wondered about Mrs. Garrett, what she must have thought when she opened the door and found Earl Watson there. The idea of that scene made my stomach turn over. I was scared for her, scared for what Earl might do. And I was scared for all the rest of us, too.

Charlie drove, as he always did when he and Pete traveled together, and the two of them hardly spoke—just an occasional word or half-sentence to indicate a direction, along with a quick gesture or nod of the head. Yet the two men seemed to understand each other perfectly, and it occurred to me that this was what they were like when they were hunting; the long familiarity, the years of tracking side-by-side making idle conversation unnecessary. The longest sentence that either one of them spoke was when Pete leaned forward to look out at the sky and said, “Full moon tonight. At least we’ll be able to see.”

Charlie grunted an acknowledgment and then turned off the highway and into the state park. It was empty at that time except for the animals. And it looked totally different now, at night, in the winter, than it had during my bike trips in the fall. The trees, so lush and green in summer and colorful in autumn, were a bare, dull gray. The meadow, where we could just make out the dark shapes of the bison, seemed vast and unforgiving. As the headlights searched through the darkness, the road they illuminated seemed unfamiliar, full of unexpected turns and digressions. At the turnoff for Treman Lake, Uncle Pete spoke again. “The lake’s not frozen, is it?”

“No,” Charlie said. “Not cold enough.”

I wondered why they cared about the condition of the lake. Then the thought struck me, like a punch in the stomach, that they were thinking of the likelihood that a body could sink down in the water and settle into its concealing depths.

When we reached the lake, I saw that it, too, looked different now in winter. In the summer, children played on the sandy beach and fishermen dotted the rock-covered banks. Now, the built-in barbecues were closed and locked tight, and a lone boat was tied up to the rickety pier, rocking slightly with the movement of the water.

“Not here,” Charlie said, and Pete nodded.

“Probably too easy to get to.”

“Maybe Alice was right and he went out to his folks’ place.”

“But that’d be the first place we’d look.”

Charlie swung the car around and drove out of the park. He hesitated for a moment at the exit.

“Where to?” Pete asked. “You think the cemetery? The clinic?”

My grandfather shook his head. “Too close to town. I think he was just driving down there to confuse us.”

“What about the satellite clinic?”

Charlie thought about this for a moment. “I don’t know. But it’s worth a shot.”

And it did seem worth a shot. It had a certain logic, because the satellite clinic, even more than the central clinic, had gotten under people’s skin. They seemed to find Mrs. Garrett’s presence there particularly offensive—out there where the people had no other recourse, where they had to take whatever care was offered. Out there where her presence was as surprising and dramatic as the deer that once raced down our school hallway.

My grandfather took a right turn onto the highway, heading further out of town. Again there was silence, and the growing sense of time passing, the uncertainty about what awaited us. As the buildings thinned out and the small stands of wood began to blend into each other, I stared out the window and feared for Mrs. Garrett. What would Earl do to her? Where had they gone? And why had he chosen her, taken her, when it wasn’t even the Garretts who’d caused his latest trouble? But these were not questions I could answer then, and so I gathered up the dog and hugged him hard, burying my face in his fur.

When we reached the satellite clinic, Charlie pulled into the parking lot and trained his headlights on the building. The clinic was dark and the parking lot was empty. “Not here,” said Uncle Pete unnecessarily.

But I looked at the building anyway, and remembered how it was in the daylight, with cars parked in the lot and the inside full of people. I thought of Mrs. Garrett standing on the front landing; I thought of her taking me inside. The place seemed abandoned now, or maybe it was just that night, the darkness that had settled over everything. In any event, as Uncle Pete said, no one was there, so Charlie turned the car back around. Then suddenly he hit the dashboard with his fist and said, “I know where he went.”

I sat up straight and Pete looked over. “Where?”

“The deer stand.”

And Pete said, “I’ll bet you’re right.”

Charlie got back onto the highway and hit the gas hard, sending the car up over eighty. Now that we had a clear destination, time shifted again, began to be measured in well-defined minutes that were rapidly escaping us. I watched the trees go by in a blur and held the dog tighter against me. I prayed that my grandfather was right.

I’d never been to the deer stand—the couple of times I’d gone deer hunting with Charlie, he’d taken me somewhere else—so I didn’t know where it was or how long it would take to get there. But I knew it existed, because he’d talked about it at home—how they’d built a little elevated platform in the forest, covered with leaves and branches, nestled in a triangle of trees. They’d wait there for unsuspecting deer that were traveling through the woods. Below it, in a lean-to they’d also covered with branches, they kept coolers full of food and beer. And a little apart from it, a small depression in the ground where they placed the deer they’d already killed. The men had talked about this stand—the perspective it gave them, the modifications they would sometimes make—with the intensity and delight that their grandchildren might feel about a backyard treehouse. For some of them, spending time at the deer stand, away from their lives in town, seemed as much the point of going out to the woods as the actual hunt. The stand was their sanctuary, their recreation and escape. It was a place where they couldn’t be reached by spouses or employers or anyone else who had a claim on them, and as soon as my grandfather had mentioned the deer stand, the air was charged with purpose and certainty.

We drove for what seemed like forever. Then finally we turned off the highway onto a small side road, and turned again onto a dirt and gravel road that seemed too treacherous and rough for the car. The bumping and rocking unsettled the dog, who sat up and started to whine.

“Quiet, Brett,” my grandfather scolded, and I heard the tension in his voice. Both he and Pete were leaning forward now intently.

After several more minutes of the bumpy road, another slight turnoff. The trees were in so close they were scraping the car. The headlights reached only a few feet ahead, into impenetrable darkness. I thought that maybe we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and were being swallowed up by the forest.

Then suddenly we were in an opening and the car came to a stop. The space was about twenty-five or thirty feet long and maybe fifteen feet across, and it was obvious that someone had been back here with an ax and cleared out the low-hanging branches. At the end of the space, its nose reaching into the forest, was Earl’s big gray Buick.

Both Charlie and Pete jumped out of the car and quickly went around to the back. They opened the trunk, moved some things around, and slammed it shut again. Then Charlie opened the back door and looked me in the eyes.

“Stay here, Mike. Don’t move,” he said. And then he held something toward me, gesturing for me to take it, and I stared at it for a second or two before I realized that it was a gun. “Take this and keep the door locked. If Earl comes back, don’t open the door, no matter what he says. This is a .38—do you think you can handle it? It’s single action, just like the .22 you learned on. It’s just a bit bigger, is all. Use both hands and keep your arms locked out so you can handle the kick when you fire.”

I hesitated for a moment, and Charlie pushed it closer. “Go on, Michelle. Take it. You’ve got to take this now.”

And so I took the gun from him, felt the cool weight of it in my hands, held it away from the curious dog. And in the moment before my grandfather pulled back and shut the door, I got a good look at his face. His jaw was set and his lips were pressed tightly together; he was ready for the task at hand. But his eyes did not look angry or fearful. They looked knowing and resigned. They looked sad.

Then he slammed the door shut and the two men were off, reduced to beams of light in the forest.

I sat in the backseat, holding the gun, adjusting to the silence after the sound of the men’s voices, the commotion of the last sixty minutes. With the headlights off I became aware of just how dark it was; I couldn’t even make out the hood of the car. The gun in my hands felt warmer now, but no less heavy; it was much bigger than the .22 I was used to. I wondered where it had come from—this was not the .38 from Charlie’s gun case—and I realized he must have kept it in the car. I wasn’t confident that I could fire this gun with any control, and I didn’t know what to do with it now—whether to set it beside me, hold it, or put it away in the front seat. What I finally did was rest it against my leg, my right hand holding it in place. With my left arm I reached over and held my dog.