had even slept. He had paused at the door but had not gone inside, fearing another fight.
“Found part of the sawed-off barrel in the trash out in the machinery shed,” Steve continued. “He planned this and maybe worse. Grizz, we got to find him before he hurts someone else. Tell us where he might have gone.”
The mountain. He would go to the mountain. There were caves there that only the boy knew. There were the little wolves Seth had raised from pups. He kept his head down and twisted his hands in his lap while the hope took shape.
Don’t you know your own son? was what Steve was asking. Grizz started to explain about the twelve gauge, how it was a gift meant to reward the boy for staying in school to finish out his junior year, when another man walked in the door and drew Steve aside. They whispered together, Steve watching Grizz over his shoulder.
He put his face into his hands. The mountain wasn’t big enough. They’d send dogs and find him. He hoped that Seth had run, that he had stolen a car and made for the Northwoods and was even now nearing Canada and that the awful thing he had done had scared all the evil out of him. Wild thoughts. Get as far from here as you can, he prayed. Be gone; then don’t you ever come back. Even as he thought these things, he knew on some level his only child was dead.
Steve walked over to him. “They found Seth,” he said. “He went into Miller’s cornfield and shot himself.”
The emptiness in his gut seared up into his throat, but Grizz swallowed it and felt it burn all the way down. When he held out his hand it trembled, but he was determined not to show any sorrow before these men. “Good,” he said, raising his gaze to Steve’s. “I’m glad he can’t hurt no one else.”
“He was carrying a bandolier of ammunition,” Steve continued, his voice rising in pitch, “and the pockets of his coat were filled with lead slugs.… If Will hadn’t stopped him earlier, there’s no telling.”
Grizz took this in. “Seth stopped himself.”
“Seth didn’t say anything to you? What was the last conversation you had?”
He tried to answer, but the words drained away. Steve kept after him, badgering him with questions. Grizz swallowed several times, and his breath wheezed in his lungs. Don’t you cry, he commanded himself. Goddamn you. Don’t you give them any kind of satisfaction. “I need a glass of water,” he said in a parched whisper, “please.”
Steve walked into the kitchen and slammed around the cabinets before he found a glass he filled with tap water and carried it to the table. He didn’t hand it to Grizz. With his man looking on, the one who had brought the news about Seth, he made a noise in his throat and hocked into the water, so Grizz would know how things were going to be for him here on out, a Fallon with a criminal history of his own in a valley settled by law-abiding Germans, the father of a cop-killer. Steve set the glass down with a thunk, the water Grizz longed for sloshing up the sides and the yellow phlegm riding the surface. Steve leaned in, his small eyes black as beetles, and said, “Sin as ugly as yours won’t stay down.”
Grizz hesitated. His son had been right all along. Seth had come to Grizz for help, but he turned his back on him because he had to learn how this town was and his place within it. Child, where you have gone, I will follow. Yes, even there if it means I might see you once more.
He lifted the glass and drained it to the dregs. Then with them looking on he held the empty glass in his palm and squeezed. It was one of those old-fashioned ones his wife Jo had liked, with Drink Coca-Cola in red letters on the sides. It shattered in his grasp, and he kept squeezing until the shards bit into his palm, and only then did he let it drop. There wasn’t as much blood as he hoped for, his skin too leathery and cracked. He looked up at Steve, and his eyes had cleared, and he had his voice again. And he knew this was the terrible clarity that must have come over his son when he went into the fields after murdering Will. “There isn’t any reason