Red

by Jack Ketchum

  The old man stood there stunned.

  Why? he thought. Dear god, why!

  The dog’s legs quivered.

  ‘Red!’ the boy shouted and laughed. ‘Red!’

  The shotgun was already pointing back at him. The boy was fast, the old man thought.

  It was something to keep in mind.

  ‘He’s red now!’ said the boy and he laughed again.

  The laugh was blood-crazy, dull and stupid. He’d heard them laugh like that during the war, lost to their hearts and souls.

  The old man said nothing.

  He glanced at the spent shell-casing on the ground and then looked back at the shotgun pointed at him.

  ‘Next time remember to keep a little more cash around, old man. Then stuff like this maybe won’t happen to you.’

  He glanced behind him at the other two boys.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

  The other two looked more than ready to leave. The skinny kid had gone white and even the fat one was scowling. The boy with the shotgun didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘We don’t want your goddamn keys, old man,’ he said. ‘Twenty bucks isn’t even worth our trouble. So today’s your lucky day. Just don’t get to thinking you should be coming after us, that’s all. You’ll stay lucky.’

  The old man nodded. ‘You’ve still got the shotgun.’

  ‘That’s right. I’ve still got the shotgun.’

  The boy looked at the dog and started laughing again. ‘Shit! He’s red all right!’ he shouted. In a moment the heavyset boy was laughing too, shaking his head like his friend here was crazy. Finally even the boy in yellow, in a shaky kind of way, though he didn’t appear to have his heart in it.

  That was your second mistake today, son, the old man thought. The first was coming down here, being with them.

  He heard them whooping and laughing all the way over the ridge even after they were no longer in sight.

  When he was sure they were not coming back he bent over and picked up the shell casing and put it in his pocket.

  Then he went to the dog.

  He looked down at him for a long moment, thinking. He took off his shirt and draped it across the dog’s ruined head and lifted it and tucked the shirt under and wrapped it around. He ran his hand over the back and the warm flanks of the dog. The hand the dog had always watched so carefully and with such great curiosity came away a copper red.

  The boy had made a joke of it.

  The dog was Mary’s gift to him on his fifty-third birthday.

  The dog had been a good dog. A damn good dog. His body was still warm.

  He got up and closed and locked his tackle box and set his rig, picked them up along with the cooler and walked back to where the dog lay. He tied the arms of his shirt around the dog’s neck against the seep of blood and picked him up and tucked him under one arm with the rig and cooler and tackle box all gripped in his other hand and then he started up the path.

  The dog grew very heavy.

  He had to stop twice to rest but he would not let go of the dog, only sat by the side of the path and put down the cooler and fishing gear and shifted the weight of the dog so that it rested in his lap across his knees, holding him in his arms until he was rested, smelling the familiar scent of his fur and the new smell of his blood.

  The second time he stopped he cried at last for the loss of him and for their long fine past together and pounded with his fist at the hardscrabble earth that had brought them here.

  And then he went on.

  Two

  The old man whose name was Avery Allan Ludlow drove up the hill to the house and thought that the boy was right about one thing.

  He didn’t have much.

  He had the store and the house and the two small parcels of land each of them stood on and that was about all.

  The house was over a hundred years old when he and Mary bought it back in 1970 along with an acre and a half for the sum of twenty thousand dollars. The reason it was only twenty thousand was that when it rained the roof leaked in twelve separate locations, leaked all the way through the floor of the attic which bats had colonized by the dozens and down to the kitchen, the three small bedrooms and the living room on the first floor all of which themselves supported a sizeable population of mice. But he’d liked the hand-hewn oak beams across the ceilings and the enormous kitchen, built in the old way so that the pot-bellied stove standing in the middle of it was the center of life in the house. And so did Mary. It took him a year to fix the roof and ceilings to the extent that neither rain nor bats got in any more. A tomcat named Adam, long dead now, handled the mice for them.

  His acre and a half of land sloped down a hill through a field of goldenrod, which when Mary was alive had been a seeded lawn, down to a trickle of a stream. There was a woodshed in back and a single huge oak crowning the hill, blackberry patches where he would sometimes see deer feeding at night and a tangled thicket of woods that was somebody else’s land beyond. The neighboring land had never been cleared and probably never would be, not in the old man’s lifetime. It belonged to a New York lawyer who had bought the seven acres beside him with the notion of building a summer home and then lost interest. Taxes were cheap and the land was appreciating. He kept it but would never use it.

  So that the other thing that Ludlow owned was privacy.

  He used that now like a wall between him and his anger as he parked the pickup and carried the dog up the hill and laid him down beside the oak tree. He went to the woodshed for his spade and pitchfork. He came back and began to dig.

  By the time dusk had fallen he had it deep enough so the bones would stay where he laid them and not rise to the surface through erosion or be dug up by some other dog like Emma Siddons’ black mongrel bitch and he lay the dog with his shirt still tied around his head down into the hole. He was never one for saying words over the dead though it was possible that words might have relieved the heaviness in his chest but he didn’t say any, just set to work covering him with the rich sweet-smelling earth.

  When he was finished he put the spade and pitchfork back in the shed and realized he’d forgotten the fish in the cooler and his fishing gear so he went to the pickup and got them, wondering what it was going to be like to eat the fish he caught the day his dog was shot, wondering how he’d feel about that. He could throw the fish away but that would be like throwing part of the dog away not to mention it was wasteful.

  In the kitchen he wrapped the fish in foil and put them in the freezer.

  He stowed his gear in the closet.

  It was only when he was finished with that and turned to walk back to the stove to heat a cup of coffee that he felt the sudden silence of the house, broken only by his own footfalls and not the accustomed tap-tap-tap-tap of the dog’s feet on the wood beside him. He stopped midway across the room as though waiting beside some invisible door that lay there, pausing just a moment before entering into his rage, shaking, as he fingered the spent shell-casing in his pocket.

  He took it out and smelled it. The biting scent of powder.

  He set it upright on the kitchen counter next to the sink.

  He thought that if the boy himself and not his father or someone else had bought the Browning Auto-5 12 Gauge here at Moody Point or in some nearby town he had a very good chance of finding him.

  If it was in Portland or even Kennebunkport it was going to be harder.

  Part Two

  FATHERS AND SONS

  Three

  He began with what he knew. That Harkness’ General Store stocked pretty nearly the same merchandise he did in his own store, which included rifles and shotguns. But the shotguns were mostly side-by-sides and over-and-unders, nothing as fancy as the Browning Auto-5. So he could rule that out. Which left Downtown Guns and Ammo out on the highway and Dean’s Sporting Goods over on Ridge-field Road the only shops in Moody Creek proper that might have sold the weapon to the boy.

  He called Bill Prine and asked him to come in an
d cover for him at the store even though today was Monday and Monday was Bill’s day off. Bill was good about it. But Bill generally was. He had no more of a life than Ludlow did these days and clerking at Avery’s General Store was about as social as he got.

  Ludlow showered and shaved and by the time he was done in the bathroom the fog had burned away and the morning was bright. He got in the pickup and drove Stirrup Iron Road past the old Lutheran Church and past his store and saw that the lights were on inside and Bill’s Ford was in the driveway.

  In town he stopped at Arnie Grohn’s restaurant for a cup of coffee. He admired Arnie’s waitress Gloria for about the hundredth time that year. Gloria was in her early thirties, red-headed, pretty and married to a drunken schoolteacher from Portland who was rumored to beat her. Which possibly was true because sometimes Ludlow would see bruises on her legs and thighs. He doubted she was just clumsy.

  He wondered why she would put up with that.

  There were so many hidden realities in the world, so many secret lives. It seemed like nobody lived just one.

  He remembered reading in the paper not so long ago about a woman in Florida who had orchestrated a strip-show in her home for some of the local teenage boys, with her fourteen-year-old daughter as the star attraction. She’d turn down the lights and turn on some music and her daughter would take off her clothes and then the woman would leave the room and her daughter would have sex with the boys on a first-come, first-served basis. There didn’t even appear to be money involved.

  Why anyone would want to do that he didn’t know. But then he didn’t necessarily believe that age brought wisdom. He didn’t understand a lot of things. He figured he never would.

  When he finished the coffee he walked across the street and down a block to Dean’s Sporting Goods and asked Dean about the shotgun and the boy. He didn’t say why and Dean didn’t ask. But there wasn’t any need for him even to consult the ledger, he said, because Dean’s had never stocked the Auto-5. Only the Browning Semi-Auto 12 Gauge. Try Downtown Guns and Ammo, he said, out on 95.

  The clerk behind the counter at Downtown Guns and Ammo was a man of about Bill Prine’s age, about forty-five, with powerful arms beneath the white short-sleeve shirt and a sallow hangdog look which, along with the beer gut hanging over his belt, told Ludlow that the man spent too many late nights in bars and too few mornings waking to the sun. Behind him a small thin older man in rolled-up shirtsleeves was stocking boxes of standard 2¾″ field loads onto the shelves. The clerk didn’t smile when he walked in the door, only nodded and said, what can I getcha? The older man just kept stocking.

  ‘I’d like to know if you’ve sold a Browning Auto-5 to a boy of about eighteen, maybe nineteen, years old recently. Tall boy, on the thin side, short blond hair.’

  ‘You a policeman?’ said the clerk.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t look like a lawyer or PI either.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Then why you asking?’

  ‘Say it’s a private matter.’

  ‘Private matter?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The man smiled and shook his head.

  ‘Sorry. We can’t be dealing with private matters here, friend.’

  ‘This boy I’m looking for. He used the Browning on my dog. He didn’t have a reason.’

  The man stared at him a moment frowning and then shrugged and spread his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about that, mister,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to understand, though, we can’t go getting involved in that kind of thing. You were a cop that’d be a whole other matter.’

  ‘I think I can come back with a cop if I need to. But I don’t see why you’d want to put us both through the bother. I’m asking you as a personal favor.’

  ‘Sorry, friend. Can’t do it.’

  ‘Oh for Chrissakes, Sam,’ said the old man working the shelves behind him. ‘The kid shot his Goddamn dog. Would you just check the damn ledger?’

  Ludlow guessed from his tone that these two were not exactly in the habit of walking home arm in arm together after closing time.

  ‘Sure. Great. So suppose he shoots the kid, Clarence?’

  ‘Suppose he does?’

  The old man looked at Ludlow, looked him over carefully and then nodded. Ludlow nodded back.

  ‘Hell, he’s not going to shoot him, Sam. Check the ledger.’

  Sam moved down the counter and opened the ledger.

  ‘I sold it,’ he said. ‘I remember. Three, four days ago. Boy came in with his father. Real snappy dresser, the father. Kid had a crew cut, right? Cut real short.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ludlow.

  ‘Here it is. I sold it to him Tuesday afternoon. Registered to a Daniel C McCormack, eighteen years of age.’

  ‘Got an address there?’

  The clerk turned around to the older man.

  ‘Clarence, you sure about this?’

  The older man sighed and turned away from his work and looked at Ludlow again. The man was a true downeaster. He had old New England eyes and there wasn’t an ounce of harm in them but there wasn’t an ounce of forgiveness either.

  ‘Mister,’ he said, ‘if anybody asks you about this . . .’

  ‘I happened to spot him on the street,’ Ludlow said. ‘I followed him home. I got lucky.’

  He nodded. ‘That’ll do. Sam, show him the address.’

  The clerk turned the ledger around and Ludlow wrote down the name and address. The purchase was on an American Express card held by Michael D. McCormack. That would be the father. He wrote that name too.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine display of weapons by the way,’ he said, pointing to the wall racks.

  ‘Why, thank you,’ said the older man. ‘My little brother here and I do all the ordering. We arranged and hung ’em ourselves. Come by sometime if you ever feel the need of one. Personally I like a good dog. Good luck to you.’

  Four

  The McCormack address was in the Northfield section of the Point and Ludlow drove there passing houses he could have fit three of his own into and still have had space for extra bedrooms.

  Northfield was mostly a second-home community for rich folks up from New York or Boston who thought these enormous eighteenth-and nineteenth-century homes were the perfect way to get away from it all. Every morning a parade of maids and caretakers got off the buses and trudged the streets to work. Every night at five they herded home again.

  The writer Norman Mailer once had a home here and Ludlow knew of at least one CEO in a telecommunications firm who split his time between Northfield, New York City and some small town in Colorado. The man was eccentric enough to prefer to purchase his socks and underwear personally at Ludlow’s store which was a good three miles and half a town away from here. Ludlow wondered who he bought his socks from when he was in New York City and out in Colorado.

  By Northfield standards the McCormack home was modest. The old man could only have fit two of his inside. He judged it had been built somewhere in the mid-eighteen-hundreds with a second wing added maybe fifty years later. He got out of the truck and smelled fresh-cut grass and passing through the tall hedges and the wrought-iron fence he saw it was the McCormacks’ grass he smelled, newly trimmed tight to the earth. He walked the wide grey fieldstone path to the stoop and up the steps past a pair of white fluted columns to the door. The knocker was an inverted brass horseshoe copied right down to the fuller-and-toe grab and he used that.

  The maid was a small young black woman with a withered left hand that was discolored white from her wrist to the knuckles. Ludlow tried not to look at the hand but like probably everybody else she met he failed in the attempt. He asked to see Mr McCormack and told her his name.

  She smiled politely and turned and walked down the hall past a flight of stairs and disappeared through a door to his left There was another open door to his right and through it he could see a parlor, plush soft chairs and, hanging over a fireplace, a d
ark landscape of the stormy coast of Maine. The maid appeared again and said to follow her, please, Mr Ludlow, and he thought it also polite of her to have used his name.

  She led him into a study that was wall-to-wall carved oak, nearly as big as his kitchen which was the largest room in his house. And with a good four more feet of space floor-to-ceiling.

  The man behind the walnut desk was in his late forties, broad-shouldered, well-muscled and barely greying, not blond like the boy but dark-haired. He wore a white shirt open at the collar and red-and-blue striped suspenders looped to the buttons of baggy beige trousers. The man reminded Ludlow of somebody but he couldn’t say who just then. The handshake was firm and the man was smiling in an open good-humoured way and Ludlow distrusted him immediately.

  ‘You’re Av Ludlow? Happy to meet you. Have a seat.’

  Ludlow eased himself into a chair facing the desk.

  ‘Do you know me, Mr McCormack? The name I told the girl was Avery.’

  McCormack laughed. ‘I don’t know you personally, but I know your store. Ludlow’s General. I’ve been by many a time.’

  That still didn’t explain the use of his shortened name but Ludlow let it pass.

  ‘I’m here about your boy, Mr McCormack.’

  ‘Call me Michael. Which boy is that, Av?’

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘Okay, Daniel. What about him?’

  ‘Daniel owns a Browning Auto-5 shotgun. He used it yesterday to shoot my dog.’