he has never heard before.
The boy bolts out of bed and runs to the living room. He stops at the entryway, arrested by what he sees.
His father is holding a shotgun. It’s a twelve-gauge Remington, and the boy knows that it is always loaded with buckshot. And now it’s pointed at his mother.
Both of them, father and mother, turn to look at the boy when he appears. She is sprawled on the floor. The father stands astride her waist, holding the shotgun low, its muzzle inches from her face.
Just inside the entryway, where the boy stands, is a small table with a lamp. There is a single drawer in the table.
Inside the drawer of the lamp table is a Colt .45 pistol. The boy has never fired it, but he knows how it works. He knows all about the pistol. He knows that his father keeps a round chambered, hammer cocked, safety on. The father has taught him these things the way other fathers teach their boys to throw a baseball.
The boy opens the drawer and picks up the pistol, holding it with both hands, and he raises it. Notch and blade align with his father’s chest.
A sneering grin spreads across the father’s face. He turns toward the boy but keeps the shotgun trained on the mother’s face, holding it pistol-like at her head.
This is rich, he says. This is just too perfect.
Without disturbing his aim, the boy crooks the thumb of his right hand, pushing the safety off.
Go ahead, says the father to the son. I want to see this.
The boy looks at his mother. Meets the dark beautiful eyes, full of love.
Oh, Raymond, she says, a sorrowful sigh.
He searches her face, trying to understand. What does she mean? What does she want?
Oh, Raymond, put the gun down—is that it?
Oh, Raymond, I’m so sorry you had to see this.
Oh, Raymond, you’ll only make it worse.
Oh, Raymond, please protect me.
It could be any of these. Or more.
The boy wants to know how he should react, what he’s supposed to do. It’s the biggest moment of his life. He has to be sure, he has to get it right.
Pull the fucking trigger, his father says. The boy hesitates. His gaze jumps from his mother’s eyes to the target at the end of his gun sights. Back to his mother’s eyes, where he searches once more for a cue. Nothing there: she’s purely terrified, the shotgun’s muzzle inches from her face.
His father shoots. The shotgun roars. The beautiful face is instantly transformed to bloody pulp.
The father jacks a fresh round as he swings the gun toward his son.
The boy pulls the fucking trigger. The pistol bucks, the father falls.
The boy puts down the pistol and goes to the phone and calls his grandparents at the main ranch house a couple of miles away.
The grandparents are good people. They will persuade the sheriff, a friend, to call it a murder-suicide. They will raise the boy, they will love him. But they will never look at him quite the way they did before.
While he waits for his grandparents to come, the boy takes a seat in a chair near his mother’s body. He angles the chair so he doesn’t have to see her face. He sits and looks down at the father. That doesn’t bother him a bit. The father is on his back, looking up at the ceiling, his eyes unblinking. There’s a hole in the front of his shirt, dead center through the shirt pocket on his left side. Heart shot. Already blood is darkening the front of the shirt and pooling beneath the body.
The boy sits there and stares at what he’s done. And a thought comes to him that will return a thousand times more in the years that follow.
What’s in him is in me, he tells himself.
What’s in him is in me.
What’s in him is in me.
Arielle wondered whether she should wake him. But before she could decide, a wracked shudder passed through his body, and he snapped awake. She looked away so that he wouldn’t know she’d been staring at him, but he caught her anyway.
“What?” he said. “Hey, it’s nothing, I’m fine. You worry too much.”
Harvest Day
–5
Eight
It was morning in Manila, 7:10 a.m., when the call from Alex Mendonza came in to the cell phone of Edwin Santos. The phone was, in fact, one of three that Santos carried at all times.
Each represented a niche in his life, a certain level of significance.
The first phone he used