nobody home. In fact, Cappy said we had to find a more remote place for me to practice—we could go two pastures over and be out of sight, although people would hear us.
We have to get money though, hitch over to Hoopdance or get a ride. We’ll go into the hardware and I’ll buy the ammo.
No, I said, I should go myself.
So we argued back and forth until I had to leave. I had strict hours—my mother had told me she would send the police out after me if I was not home at six.
The police?
Just a figure of speech, she’d said. Maybe Uncle Edward. You wouldn’t want him out looking for you, would you?
No, I didn’t want Uncle Edward out looking for me in his big car, riding slow and rolling down his window, questioning everyone who happened to be out. So I went home. I had the money that Sonja left me. One hundred dollars hidden in my closet in that folder labeled HOMEWORK. Thinking of Sonja was like punching a bruise. As I rode back I decided on a plan to get my mother to drive me to Hoopdance. She still thought I was taking catechism classes. I’d need candles, maybe. Or dress shoes to be an altar boy.
The shoes were a good touch. After work the next day she drove me to the shoe store and bought the dress shoes, which I regretted for the waste of money. But I got into the hardware and sporting goods store on a casual excuse, and she waited outside while I bought forty dollars’ worth of ammunition for Doe’s rifle. The clerk did not know me and examined the large bill closely. I looked over at the paints, the basketballs and baseballs, the golf corner, the nail bins and spools of wire, at the home canning section, the shovels, rakes, chain saws, and I noticed gas cans for sale. Exactly like the one I’d found in the lake.
I guess it’s okay, the clerk said, giving me change.
When I came back out, I told my mother that I’d bought a surprise for Dad, who was supposed to take it easy. Besides the ammo, I had bought spinners for bass, our favorite fish to catch. I was building lie upon lie and it all came naturally to me as honesty once had. As we were driving home, I realized that my deceits were of no consequence as I was dedicated to a purpose which I’d named in my mind not vengeance but justice.
Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Justice.
I might have murmured this aloud. I was in a kind of trance, looking at the road, imagining the amount of practice it would take.
What did you say?
My mother had kept that edge. She was protective of my father and it gave her an intent authority, but more than that, there was what she had told me in Fargo when she put down the hamburger. I will be the one. No you won’t, I thought. But she was keen as a blade, as if during that time she lay dull in her closed room she had actually been sharpening herself. And then in Fargo, we’d talked about Dad, about things the doctors said. We’d weighed facts and questions together. She had treated me like someone older than I was, and this, too, had continued. She saw too much, didn’t have the same mild patience with me. She had quit indulging me. Never laughed at things I did. It was as if she had expected me to grow up in those weeks and now to not need her. If she expected me to act alone on my instincts, I was doing just that. But I still needed her. I had needed her to drive me to Hoopdance. No, I needed her in ways that now were lost to me. On the drive back from Hoopdance that day, after I had muttered that phrase about Sins Crying Out to Heaven, I asked her directly the thing my father would not ask. It was a childish thing, but also grown-up.
Mom, I said, why couldn’t you have lied? Why couldn’t you have said that sack slipped? You stumbled over something and you put your hand up, pulled it out, saw the ground? That you knew where it happened? It wouldn’t matter where, if you had just said where.
She was quiet for so long that I thought she wouldn’t answer. I felt no anger from her, no surprise,