back to my shoulder, reloaded. I was shaking so hard I rested the barrel on a branch, held my breath, and shot again. I couldn’t tell where that shot went. Once again I worked the bolt, reloaded, aimed, but my finger slid off the trigger—I couldn’t shoot. Lark pitched forward. There was another silence. My face was drenching wet. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. Lark began to make noise again.
Please, no, please, no. I thought I heard those words, but I could have said them. Lark was trying to get up again. He pedaled one foot in the air, rolled over, onto his knees, and rose in a crouch. He locked eyes with me. Their blackness knocked me backward. The rifle was lifted from my arms. Cappy stepped forward beside me. I didn’t hear the shot. All sound, all motion, had stalled in the sullen air. My brain was ringing. Cappy picked up the ejected casings from around my feet and put them in the pockets of his jeans.
C’mon, he said, touching my arm. Turning me. Let’s go.
I followed him uphill in the first drops of rain.
Chapter Eleven
The Child
At the oak tree, we turned and looked down. Lark was lying on his back, the golf clubs neatly waiting in their cart. His putter cast down at his heels. He hadn’t moved. Beside me, Cappy dropped to his knees. He leaned over until his forehead touched the earth and put his arms over his head like a child in a tornado drill. After a while, he lifted his head and shook it. We wrapped the rifle back up in its bag, and set it aside as we tried to restore the ground where it had been buried. Cappy used a branch to brush up the grass I had trampled.
Nobody’s home at my place, said Cappy. We gotta hide this. He had the rifle.
We waited until a passing car was out of sight before we crossed the road. Now the rain was misting down. When we got to Cappy’s, we went straight to the kitchen tap. We washed our hands, put water on our faces, and drank glass after glass of water.
I should have thought of where to hide it, I said. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this.
I don’t know why I didn’t either, said Cappy.
He went and rummaged around on the junk-laden coffee table until he came up with a set of keys. Doe had taken his car to work and Randall had gone off in his pickup, but Randall also had the red beater Olds that Cappy tinkered with. It had a black driver’s-side door and a cracked windshield. We went out, put the rifle in the trunk, and got into the front.
The starter’s bad, said Cappy.
It groaned the first time he turned it over. He gave it a spurt of gas. It died.
You gotta sneak up on it, Cappy said. While I’m psyching out this car, you think of where we’re going.
I know where we’re going.
He tried again. It nearly caught.
Where are we going?
To Linda’s. To the old Wishkob homestead.
We sat back, looking out at the shed through the two halves of the windshield.
That makes weird sense, said Cappy. Suddenly, he leaned forward, cranked the key hard, and pumped the gas pedal.
Engage, he said. The engine roared.
The rain was coming down like sixty now. Cappy opened his window and craned his neck to peer out as he drove. The windshield wiper worked on the passenger side, but not the driver’s side. He drove slowly and sedately as an old man. The Wishkob land was at the other end of the reservation in the dunelike brown hills of grass that were mostly good for grazing. It was a nice old place with plantings of lilac and a few twisted oak, battered shrubs that could stand the heavy wind. On the way there we’d passed maybe two cars and there was nobody to see us turn into Linda’s drive—the place was isolated. Cappy eased the car into Park and kept it idling because he didn’t know if it would start again. We got out and walked around the house to decide where. Linda’s old dog set up an asthmatic barking inside the house. We ended up pulling off a piece of the tan latticework tacked to the underside of Linda’s front porch. I crawled in and shoved the gun as far back as I could. We used a tire iron to pound the lattice back in