the snow, where it hissed and steamed and went down slowly like a ship.
He found a beer at the back of the fridge and spiffed it open and took it into the living room and sat in his chair with his sockfeet up, drinking the beer and watching the fire play dimly in the dark face of the TV. He held the remote with his thumb over the button but did not push it. As to the question of a second vehicle, as to the question of possible foul play, no comment at this time.
There was a sound, a thump, and he looked to the ceiling. Her room up there, directly overhead. At her noisiest just before she went out again, hopping around to her music, chucking shoes into her closet . . . and then down she’d come, clock-clocking down the hardwood stairs as some girlfriend or more likely some boy pulled up the drive and whooshing by in perfume and too much leg, See you later, Dad. Don’t wait up, Dad. And there you’d sit all night watching for headlights, listening for the slam of a car door, for the sound of her heels on the porchsteps . . .
A log popped and whistled and settled onto its bed of coals. Small flames leaping for the flue and vanishing in midair, and he thought of Eileen Lindeman again and the story she’d told him—fifteen years old and getting out of that silver Buick and walking home. Just walking into the house like it was any other day. Going to school the next day. Going to college. Getting married. Getting divorced. Becoming a woman he himself would one day desire, and take to bed.
And the man—the driver of the Buick? Walking into his own house that night with terror in his heart at what he’d almost done, and were the police looking for him at that very second? Kiss the wife hello. Kiss the kids. Sit down to dinner thinking of the fifteen-year-old girl who believed in God. Thinking of what he’d almost done. Almost become. Did that man go back to work the next day, make his money, pay his bills, raise his kids, live his life? An old man now, or dead, and what became of his desire? Did it fade with time, with age? Or did the thing you fought inside yourself just grow bigger, hungrier, until it took you over?
He got up, intending to throw another log on the fire, but instead returned to the kitchen, and from there stepped into the utility room, flicking on the light, and squeezed himself between the washing machine and water heater, reaching back into the webby dark until his fingers touched what they felt for, until he could lift it free of the webs and lay it out before him on the washer. Canvas and leather, padded and heavy. The sound of a good zipper, then the smell of oiled lamb’s wool and metal and walnut rising from the opened case, and, more faintly, the cordite of the rounds that had been fired in the rifle’s chamber. Built into the case was a compartment with a Velcro flap. Just the one box? said the dealer. As if a single box of lethal bullets was not the norm, was strange even. Just the one, said Gordon.
He hit the light switch on his way out and he hit the kitchen switch and he hit the switch that killed the sixty-watt bulb on the porch and he opened the door and put the gun to his shoulder and steadied himself against the jamb. He put his eye to the scope and turned the focus ring until the trunks of the pines at the edge of the clearing stepped forward, weirdly lit by nothing but the light from the snow, and so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them. And with such power of vision he scoped, he searched, panning left, then right in great sweeps, though he moved the rifle itself barely at all. He scoped, expecting any second to see something in the lens other than trees—a shape, a face in the dark, staring back at him with eyes that had no idea what they were seeing, what the man held in his hands in the darkness of the house. That sudden flash of light.
The sound of the shot and the punch to his shoulder and the burst of white in the face of the tree and