by Hannah Tinti
Nunn was standing by the stove, holding the Weatherby, and it was just as the girl said, a beautiful weapon with a laser and a scope that looked like something out of the movies.
“Take it easy,” said Hawley.
“Give me that gun and I will.”
Hawley turned around and Nunn put the Weatherby right between his shoulders. Then Nunn pulled the Magnum from the back of Hawley’s jeans. He opened the gun and took out the bullets and put both onto the counter behind him. He motioned to the bed and Hawley sat down on it.
“Right,” said Nunn. “Now what happens?”
“You try to change my mind,” said Hawley.
“About what?”
“About killing you.”
Nunn rolled his lips, so that his mustache moved forward and back underneath his nose, like it was itching him but he couldn’t take his hands off the gun to scratch it. “I thought you’d gone off and married some girl.”
For a moment Hawley just sat there. But his feelings were as straight as a line. He was not surprised that Frederick Nunn would know about Lily. Hearing this only made him more certain of the job he needed to do. In October, his daughter was going to be three years old. Three short years of being alive in the world.
“You said this was a job,” said Nunn. “But I think it’s something else.”
“My wife is dead.”
“So that’s it.” Nunn lowered the gun and put it across his lap. “You’re looking for a way out. Someone to off you? Is that it?”
Hawley wondered if Nunn was right. He closed his eyes and tried to listen, to dig the truth out of himself, but his body was numb. “I’ve got some errands to run first.”
The door to the trailer opened. The man with the leather-fringe vest poked his head inside, his rifle slung across his shoulder. “We’re outta beer.”
Hawley couldn’t remember if it was Mike or Ike.
“Whoah, brah,” the man said, eyeing the Weatherby. “Nice scope.”
“We were just talking about prairie dogs,” said Nunn.
The man blinked once. Twice. Then grinned. “Oh, shit. Don’t get this guy started.” He stumbled inside and opened the small fridge. He pulled out a six-pack. Hawley could smell the alcohol coming off his skin, a sickly-sweet odor that reminded him of his mother, before she switched to vodka and moved to Phoenix and drank herself to death.
“Getting dark out there,” said Hawley.
“Won’t stop us. Besides,” the man said, “you can hear the little fuckers.” He put down the six-pack and picked up Hawley’s .357 from the counter. “Nice.” He opened the cylinder. “Old school.”
“Take it,” said Hawley.
“You serious?”
“I’ve got another one just like it.”
Nunn shifted the Weatherby in his arms. “Better say thanks, Mike, or he’ll hold it against you.”
“Shit, thanks, brah.”
“No problem.”
Mike loaded the Magnum, sticking each round back into its chamber. Then he tucked the gun into his pants. He handed a beer to Hawley. The aluminum was cold and wet with condensation. The can was a good weight. Miller High Life. Hawley opened it and took a sip.
“What about you?” he asked Nunn. “I’m sure you get real dry talking to those prairie dogs all day.”
“Ha-ha,” said Nunn.
“Come on,” said Mike. “Drink with us.” He opened a can and held it out.
Nunn had already flipped off the safety on his rifle. Hawley could tell he was trying to make up his mind—whether to murder him or wait. Nunn was looking at Mike, sizing him up as a witness. One beer. That’s all it would take to decide.
Hawley sucked in a breath. He let half of it out. And then he threw his Miller High Life as hard as he could at Nunn’s face. It smacked his chin, then bounced and knocked the Weatherby, which went off, a hole blasted in the wall next to the Kit-Cat clock, the boom of the rifle ringing in their ears. The can dropped onto the floor, spraying foam and beer across the tiny kitchen. Hawley grabbed the Magnum from the back of Mike’s pants.
“Brah!” Mike said.
“You think you can come to my house and kill me?” Nunn shouted. “You think I’m going to let you do that? I got a right to live. A goddamn right.”
“She’s got more,” said Hawley.
He shot Frederick Nunn in the head. It was a clean shot. Done and done. The back of the man’s skull opened in a dark spray across the walls. Mike started screaming and whacked the Magnum from Hawley’s hand with the butt of his rifle. Hawley pushed out the door of the trailer, cutting around the corner just in time to see Ike hustling toward them from the shooting range.
Hawley got the door open to the car, but before he could get inside, Mike had shot out the windshield with the Weatherby and then rattled up the rest of the sedan with holes, hitting the tires. Hawley snatched the shotgun and blew both barrels into the trailer, and it was enough to make both Mike and Ike dive for cover. Enough time for him to run.
Hawley chose the only direction he could: toward his own land. But first he had to cross the prairie-dog town. He covered fifty yards and then a bullet rang out over his head in the gloom, and he flattened, losing the shotgun. He got his elbows up and started army-crawling across the dirt, dragging himself over the holes.
The prairie dogs had all disappeared into their tunnels, but he could still hear them underground. Thousands of little throats straining in a mile-wide game of telephone. And then he felt the earth give and his whole arm broke through into one of the holes and he was up to his shoulder. He tried to pull himself out but another shot rang over his head, and then he felt an even bigger shift in the earth and he was falling through, a chasm opening beneath his body. Dirt and sand was all around him and in his eyes and in his ears and up his nose and in his mouth.
When Hawley finally hit bottom, he wiped the grit off of his face. He’d fallen into a hollowed-out den, seven or eight feet from the surface. Something was moving in the dirt around him, struggling out from the sides and below, biting and scratching. The prairie dogs. At least a dozen of them. They had looked small and cute from a distance. But up close they were giant furry rodents, backing up on their hind legs, with rigid tails and fat bellies and short noses and black eyes and agile, humanlike paws with long fingers and even longer nails. Overhead he could see the darkening sky and some of the prairie dogs were clambering up toward it, and others were trying to find the tunnel out, and still others were crawling across his back and his head, and Hawley pushed himself up and threw the dogs off of him, shoving away until he was sitting against one side of the den and the dogs were scuttling back and forth across the other. They seemed to move and act as one. All of them barking, barking, barking.
Once Mike and Ike found this hole, he was dead. Unless he could get out in time and make it to the fence. Hawley moved to his knees and then to his feet, but when he pulled himself up, the edge crumbled around him. It was like trying to crawl out of a hole in the ice. Hawley dug in with his boots and scraped at the sides and he got his head above the burrow, just enough to see Mike and Ike searching the field about two hundred yards to the west. And then the whole side collapsed, and Hawley dropped to the bottom, and the earth fell down and buried him.
The loose ground pressed on Hawley like the weight of a blanket. He was covered up but he couldn’t breathe. He clawed with his fingers and felt an opening. A tunnel left behind by the dogs. He grabbed hold of some roots, shoved his head inside and took in the fetid pocket of air. The walls were tight, but he forced his shoulders through. Then he dug madly and widened the space until he was jammed half in, half out of the narrow tunnel. He could hear the men’s voices getting closer.
“Thought I saw something.”
“Brah, check this out.”
Hawley bent his head to the left. He could see their shadows at the edge of the hole.
“Think he fell in here?”
“Can’t see the bottom.”
Hawley h
eard one of them spit. There was the sound of a bullet being chambered and then both men aimed their guns and fired down into the hole. The first missed and the second drove through the layer of soil covering him and split Hawley’s calf and nicked the bone. He knew at once it was the Magnum from the force of the blow and how much it hurt and the way it made his leg feel like it had been ripped from the rest of his body.
He bit into his arm to keep from shouting, even though a part of him was aching to scream and let them know he was stretched out in the bottom of this hole. They wouldn’t even have to dig a grave to bury him. It would be so easy. It would all be over. But Hawley only bit himself harder. There were more errands to run. So he just lay there in the dirt and bled.
Above, the men were listening.
“There’s no cover out here.”
“You spooked?”
“I can’t see for shit. We should go back to the trailer.”
“We’re going to make you a fucking ghost, brah!” Mike’s words echoed across the prairie and up into the mountains. Then Hawley heard their boots traveling over his head and their voices began to fade. He knew he was safe when the prairie dogs started up again with their weeping.
Hawley stayed squeezed inside the hole like it was his own tomb. He waited for the men to come back. He waited for what felt like hours. He waited with the beetles and worms and millipedes and ants, his mouth gasping at the tunnel, ready to taste the night on his lips, until the pain he felt became not pain anymore, but a creature eating into his flesh, clamping down with piercing jaws each time he kicked against it, and he pushed and punched and tore away at the ground and he stomped the pain beneath him and it was like stumbling through the dark, it was like the murky bottom of the lake that had taken Lily, and it made him dig harder and faster, until his fingernails broke and bled and he began to breathe dirt and sand. The earth was inside and outside and all around him, but he was moving, he could feel his body making its way, and then he touched the grass and he was rolling out of the burrow and onto the open field, every inch of him covered in dust.
It wasn’t as dark as he imagined it would be. The sky was clear overhead and the stars so multitudinous that they brightened the landscape to the edges of the horizon. Hawley covered his mouth to stifle his coughing, tried to gather some saliva and rid himself of the grit that had covered his teeth. Then he dug his filthy fingers up his nose to clear his nostrils and scraped the dirt from his ears until he could hear again.
The lights were on inside Nunn’s trailer. The windows were open and the men were arguing, their voices slurred. Hawley tore off a piece of his shirt, tied it around his leg, then crawled slowly across the dry ground, past the tunnels of the prairie dogs, until the voices of the dogs and the voices of the men started to meld together, and then he was coming up to the trailer, and he was right underneath the window. He was so close that he could smell the beer that had spilled—the foam and the busted cans across the floor.
“You think my parole officer is going to believe that shit? Some guy showing up out of nowhere and blowing Nunn’s head off? We gotta clean this up. We gotta clean all this up.”
“Shit, brah. Look at him.”
“I don’t wanna look.”
“So what do you wanna do? Bury him someplace?”
“Fire’s better. Fire happens all the time.”
“All right, but I’m gonna play him some music first. He liked music, didn’t he?”
They put on one of Nunn’s old country records. Hawley could hear the slide guitar, and a twangy voice singing. If you’ve got the money honey, I’ve got the time.
Hawley limped over to Mike and Ike’s Jeep. He could get in and drive off before they made it outside. He could leave and not come back. But then there would be loose ends, and he couldn’t have any loose ends anymore. Hawley went back to his car. The shotgun was somewhere out on the prairie, but the rifle was just where he’d left it, hidden underneath the front seat. He pulled his satchel carefully through the broken windshield. He opened the orange toolbox and gave himself a shot of morphine. Then he wrapped his leg in a pressure bandage. He checked the rifle and got a few extra mags loaded and left them on the hood of the car. He grabbed his knife, a pair of pliers and two roadside flares. He waited to see if the men had heard him. Then he slid beneath the trailer on his back.
It was damp and full of spiderwebs in the crawl space between the trailer and the ground. Hawley listened to the music and the men talking, and slowly pulled himself along until he reached the propane tank. He cut the lines and redirected them and opened the pressure valve as far as it would go. He lit the roadside flares next and slid them up into the air vents. He crawled back out and got between the two cars, with a clear line to the trailer door. He picked up the rifle.
Through the window, he saw the flames shoot up from the stove. The men did not even notice at first. And then there was a crackling noise in the air, and the propane blew, and the lights went out, and the trailer caught on fire. He could hear both men screaming. The first one, Ike, burst through the door, and Hawley shot him cleanly through the head, and the man’s body crumpled and fell against the trough. Then he heard some shuffling and realized the other one was climbing out the back window. He went around the trailer and there was Mike, half in and half out, his leather vest caught on the ripped screen. He was carrying the Magnum. The side of his face was burnt and he was aiming wildly. He shot off all the rounds. Hawley spun the rifle and knocked the piece from his hand. Then he picked the Magnum up from the ground and reloaded while the man struggled and cried out.
“God, Jesus, no, brah, Jesus, no, please.”
The man kept talking, kept saying God’s name out into the cold night air. Hawley shot him with the Magnum again and again, remembering the power of it going into his own leg, counting the bullets now, one after the next, listening to them strike bone and flesh and the metal of the trailer until the cylinder was empty and he had made enough holes, and the voices stopped coming out of them.
Hawley shoved Mike’s body back through the window. Then he went around front and opened the trailer door and lifted Ike and tossed him down into the smoke. The fire had spread to the curtains. Nunn’s body was on the bed, a blanket tossed over his face. On the table, the record player was still spinning. Hawley slammed the door. He hot-wired the Jeep and backed it up and attached it to the trailer and then drove the trailer to the edge of the hill. Then he unhitched the burning tin can and began to push. The morphine had kicked in. He couldn’t feel the pain in his leg anymore.
The hitch was low and Hawley had to lean down and wedge his shoulder against the metal wall, which was getting hot from the fire. The coach was heavier than he’d expected. Like he was lifting the whole world onto his shoulders. He forced Frederick Nunn and Mike and Ike and even Lily out of his mind. And he thought of Loo. Only Loo. Three years old. Still alive. Still breathing.
The back wheels of the trailer teetered at the edge of the ravine. For a moment Hawley was all that was keeping it there, the metal hitch tugging at his fingers. And then a clod of earth gave way, and he could feel the wheels go and the weight shift and then the trailer left his hands. Hawley stood at the edge of the mesa, the wind across his back, his palms reeking of oil and soot. The coach rolled slowly at first and then it bounced and began to gain speed. The glass burst from the heat. There was smoke coming out of the windows. The coach roared down the slope like a headless horseman, like Cinderella’s pumpkin turned to flame and ash.
It barreled across the flat plain, a streak of light through the prairie-dog town, and then kept rolling until it rammed the chain-link fence surrounding Hawley’s old place. The blaze lit up the edge of the gas field, and he could see blue sparks as the electricity caught and failed and then the floodlights went out, and the land went dark, and all that was left was the burning trailer, roaring like a monster against its cage.
The Cooler
POLICE CARS SWARMED UP AND down Main Street. Local and state au
thorities were put on alert. The Coast Guard was upping its patrols. The mayor gave a press conference, and the head of Fish and Game made some comments he later had to retract. Even The Boston Globe had sent a reporter to cover the story, and the local headlines were printed in inch-and-a-half type: BULLETS OVER BITTER BANKS.
Someone had fired a single shot into the front door of Mary Titus’s house. Disgruntled fishermen, folks were saying, or maybe one of the Moonies, or some hired thugs sent by Nova Scotia or the Japanese. Whoever pulled the trigger, it had brought enough media attention to the depletion of the catch and illegal fishing practices—including a TV spot on the national news—that the EPA and NOAA announced they were temporarily shutting down parts of the Banks until further studies could be performed. Each day millions of dollars were being lost. At the Sawtooth, it was all anyone would talk about.
“They were lucky no one was hurt,” said Agnes.
“They were lucky they didn’t get caught,” said Loo.
Mary Titus didn’t say anything, because Mary Titus wasn’t there. She’d taken a personal day. But Principal Gunderson was sitting at his booth, and he was losing his mind.
“This doesn’t happen,” he said. “Not in our town.”
“It does,” said Agnes. “It happens everywhere.”
Gunderson took another bite of his kippers. He ate kippers with eggs on toast every morning for breakfast. Kippers and eggs and coffee. Usually people would avoid his table for the smell. But now everyone was gathered around, because Principal Gunderson had started dating Mary Titus (three dates, he said—well, two and a half, really), and that’s where Mary Titus had been when her house was shot up—on her second-and-a-half date—eating dinner at Principal Gunderson’s house. Not kippers, Principal Gunderson said, because Mary Titus was a vegetarian.