by Scott Smith
"You didn't get blood on him, did you?"
"Blood?"
I crouched beside Pederson, inspecting his clothes. There was a dark brown smear on the shoulder of his jacket. I scooped up a handful of snow and rubbed at the stain. Only a little bit came off.
Jacob watched me, a look of resignation on his face. "It's not going to work, Hank," he said. "We're going to get caught."
I continued to rub at the blood. "This isn't a big deal. It's not something people'll notice."
He held his hand out in front of him, stared down at his glove. "You said it's worse than fingerprints," he said, his voice taking on a quickness, a jagged quality.
"Jacob," I said firmly. "Calm down." I stood up and touched him on his arm. "All right? We can do this if we stay calm."
"I killed him, Hank."
"That's right," I said, "but it's done. Now we have to deal with it. We have to cover it up so you don't get caught."
He shut his eyes. He put his hand back over his nose.
I realized that I had to get him away. I pulled the car keys out of my pocket. "You're going to take Mary Beth and drive back to the bridge." I waved down the road toward Anders Creek. "I'll meet you there."
He opened his eyes, bewildered. "At the bridge?"
I nodded. "I'm going to drive Pederson there on the snowmobile. We'll push him over the edge, make it look like he drove off by accident."
"It'll never work."
"It'll work. We're going to make it work."
"Why would he be down at the bridge?"
"Jacob," I said. "I'm doing this for you, all right? You've got to trust me. Everything's going to be okay." I held out the car keys in the palm of my glove. He stared at them for several seconds; then he reached out and took them.
"I'm going to drive through the park," I said. "Out of sight from the road. You'll get to the bridge before me, but I don't want you to stop. I want you to drive by and then circle back. I don't want people to see you sitting there."
He didn't say anything.
"Okay?"
He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, and wiped at his cheeks. The car keys jingled in his hand. "I just don't think we'll get away with it."
"We'll get away with it."
He shook his head. "There's so much to think about. There's all this stuff we probably haven't even noticed yet."
"Such as?"
"Stuff we're not counting on. Stuff we're missing."
I was growing impatient. Time was slipping by. Any moment a car might appear on the horizon, driving toward us. If we were seen here like this, everything would be lost. I took Jacob by the elbow, guiding him toward the station wagon. I sensed that if I could get him moving, everything would be all right. We stepped out onto the road. The dog rose to his feet and stretched.
"We aren't missing stuff," I said. I tried to smile reassuringly at him, but it felt like it came out pleading. I gave him a little push forward.
"Just trust me, Jacob," I said.
IT WAS perhaps ten seconds after Jacob started the car and drove off, as I was turning toward Pederson to pick him up and set him on the snowmobile, that the old man let out a long, agonized moan.
He was still alive.
I stared down at him in shock, my head swimming. He kicked his leg a little, and it slipped off the snowmobile onto the ground. His boot made a heavy thumping sound when it landed. I glanced down the road. Jacob had disappeared.
Pederson mumbled something into his wool scarf. Then he groaned again. One of his gloves flexed into a fist.
I stood there, bent at the waist, my mind racing. With frightening clarity, I saw two paths opening up before me. Taking one of them, I'd be able to finish it right here. I'd get Pederson up on the snowmobile, drive him back to his house, and call Carl. I'd have to tell him everything, and give the money back. If I did that, if I were totally honest, and Pederson survived his beating, I knew I'd have a good chance at escaping a jail sentence. But Jacob wouldn't. Carl would send somebody down to the bridge to pick him up. He'd be charged with assault and battery, or attempted murder. He'd go to jail, probably for a long time. And the money would be gone.
Then, of course, there was the other path. It was already prepared for, already halfway trodden upon. I had the power to save Jacob, save the money. And in the end, I suppose, that was why I did it: because it seemed possible, it seemed like I wouldn't get caught. It was the same reason I took the money, the same reason I did all that follows. By doing one wrong thing, I thought I could make everything right.
Pederson groaned. He seemed to be trying to lift his head.
"I'm," he said very distinctly, but nothing more. He clenched his fist again.
I stooped down beside him. It was an ambiguous motion: someone watching us from a distance might've assumed that I was trying to help the old man.
His scarf was wrapped tightly around the bottom half of his face. His eyes were closed.
When I'd seen Jacob hit him, it had happened so quickly that it seemed natural to me, predictable. I'd been surprised, but not shocked. I'd accepted it immediately. Jacob, I said to myself, has killed him. In my mind at that instant Pederson had been dead. And that's what I told myself now as I crouched over his body. He's already dead, I said. He's already dead.
At first I'd planned to hit him again, like Jacob had, perhaps in the throat. For some reason I thought of the throat as a particularly vulnerable spot on the body. But looking at his neck, I saw his bright orange scarf, and the sight of it changed my mind.
I glanced up and down the road, to make sure no cars were coming, then leaned forward, took the scarf in my hand, balled it up a bit, and pressed down firmly against his mouth. With my other hand I pinched shut his nostrils.
Looking back now, it seems as though there ought to have been something more, some impediment or compunction, a barrier to struggle through. I would've expected at the very least a sense of terror, an atavistic revulsion, a realization that what I was doing was unequivocally wrong, not simply because the society of which I was a member called it such but because it was murder, a primal crime. There was nothing like that, though. And perhaps this shouldn't be surprising -- perhaps it's romantic to expect that epiphanic realization, that sudden sense of fate's diverging pathways as one hesitates between them, choosing. In real life the immensity of such moments must almost always slip by unnoticed, as it did for me, something to be added later, in hindsight, but buried until then beneath the incidental details -- the feel of Pederson's scarf through my glove, the worry that I was squeezing his nostrils too tightly, that I might be bruising them, and that this might be discovered in an autopsy.
I didn't feel evil. I felt nervous, scared, nothing more.
He struggled very little. He moved his hand once, a wiping motion across the ground, as if he were trying to erase something, but that was all. His eyes stayed shut. There was no noise, no death rattle, no final groan. I held the scarf there for a long time. The sky had cleared enough now for the sun to come out, and it warmed my back. I could see a cloud shadow moving slowly along the edge of the field across the road. As I watched it pass, I started to count. I counted very slowly, pausing before each number, concentrating on the sounds they made in my head. When I reached two hundred, I let go of the scarf, took off my glove, and felt carefully for the old man's pulse.
There was nothing there.
I RODE east through the nature preserve, keeping the road just out of sight to my right. I reached the pond after a minute or so. It was frozen solid. Picnic tables were scattered haphazardly about its border. Everything was covered with snow.
Past the pond, the woods were thicker, and I had to choose my route with more care, winding in and out between matted tangles of underbrush. The branches of the trees scraped against my jacket, as if they were trying to stop me, hold me back.
Pederson's body straddled the seat in front of me, slouched forward like the pilot's in the plane. I had to press right up against h
is back to reach the controls.
I tried to occupy my mind solely with thoughts of my plan. I sensed a danger in circling back to what had happened already that morning, sensed that doing so would only lead to confusion and anxiety, that the safest path was forward, where things could still be changed.
The bridge would be plowed and salted, I knew; there would be a thick bank of snow along either edge. If Pederson had wanted to cross without damaging his snowmobile's treads on the cement, he would've had to have ridden along one of these banks -- banks that were just wide enough to support his machine and just high enough to crest the top of the guardrails.
People would wonder what he was doing there, why he'd decided to cross the bridge, but it wouldn't be enough to make them suspicious. It would be a mystery, something they'd shake their heads over, nothing more. Unless, of course, the plane were discovered before it snowed. There would be the snowmobile's tracks then, the footprints leading into the park. There would be signs of a scuffle alongside the road.
I glanced up at the sky. It was continuing to clear with a startling rapidity. There was a wide expanse of blue now, sun streaming down through the branches of the trees, the air cold and crisp. What clouds remained were fair-weather clouds, white and fluffy. There was no sign of impending snow.
The closer I got to the edge of the park and the bridge beyond it, the harder I had to work to keep my mind fixed on my plan. Other thoughts crept in. It began with the physical sensation of Pederson's body against my chest. His head was nestled beneath my chin. I could smell his hair tonic through his hat. His body itself was compact, dense. It didn't feel at all like I would've expected it to. It felt like it ought to be alive.
And as soon as I thought this -- that Pederson was dead, that I had killed him, smothered the life out of him with my own hands -- my heart fluttered heavily up into my throat. I realized that I'd crossed a boundary, done something abhorrent, brutal, something I never would have imagined myself capable of. I'd taken another man's life.
This thought bewildered me, set my mind tumbling backward and forward, rationalizing, justifying, denying, and it was only with an extreme effort of will that I regained control. I shut myself down, pulled back, forced my mind to concentrate on nothing except what was going to occur in the next fifteen minutes. I continued on toward the eastern edge of the park, my arms supporting Pederson's body, guiding the snowmobile through the trees, half my brain occupied with thoughts of the bridge and Jacob and the sheriff, the other half desperately trying to fight off a strange, horribly threatening sensation -- that I was doomed now, trapped, that the rest of my life would pivot somehow off this single act, that in trying to save Jacob, I'd damned us both.
THE PARK'S southeast corner went right up to the foot of the cement bridge.
I paused at the edge of the woods, making sure no one was in sight. The creek was about fifteen yards wide here. It was frozen solid, the ice covered with a thin layer of snow. Pederson's farm was behind me, down the road. There were fields across the creek, empty to the horizon. Jacob hadn't arrived yet.
I eased the snowmobile out alongside the road, the engine rumbling beneath me. I looked to the east, then back to the west. There were no cars in sight. I could see the old man's house now, just visible around the edge of the trees. It was closer than I'd thought. I could make out its windows, could see the collie sitting on the top step of its porch. If someone had been standing there watching, they'd have been able to see me, too.
I gunned the engine, maneuvering the machine up onto the bank of plowed snow, moving slowly along it until I reached the center of the bridge. There was a ten-foot drop there from the roadway to the ice. The guardrail was buried in snow.
I put Pederson's hand on the throttle, adjusted his body in the seat, sliding him back a bit, planting his boots on the footrests. I slung his rifle over his shoulder, pulled his hat down on his ears, wrapped his scarf tightly around his face. The motor coughed a little, stuttering, and I gave it some gas.
I glanced up and down the road again. There were no cars, no movement whatsoever. The collie was still sitting on Pederson's porch. It would've been impossible to tell, of course, whether someone was watching from a window there, but I quickly scanned them all the same. They reflected the sky back at me, the bare branches of the trees surrounding the house. I turned the snowmobile's skis toward the creek and eased it slowly forward, until it hung partway over the ice, balancing on the edge of the snowbank.
I tried to think if I was forgetting something, shutting my eyes, but my mind refused to help me. I could think of nothing.
The collie barked, once.
I stepped down onto the roadway, braced my feet against the pavement, and pushed the snowmobile forward with my shoulder. It went over with surprising ease. First it was there, and then it was gone. There was a tremendous crash when it hit the ice, and the engine shut itself off.
I climbed back up onto the bank to see.
The snowmobile had rolled over in midair, landing on Pederson, crushing him beneath its weight. The ice was cracked, but not collapsed, forming a bowl-shaped depression around the old man and his machine. The creek was seeping slowly in, covering his body. His hat had fallen off again, and his gray hair floated out away from his head in the icy water. His scarf was tight around his face, clinging to it like a gag. One of his arms was pinned beneath the snowmobile. The other was thrown palm upward to the side, as if he'd died struggling to free himself.
JACOB arrived a few minutes later, from the east. He slowed the car to a stop beside me, and I climbed inside. As we sped away, I glanced back at the bridge. The old man's body was just visible beneath it, a splash of orange on the ice.
We drove by the Pederson place for the second time that day. The collie barked at us again, but Mary Beth, lying curled up in a ball on the backseat, didn't seem to notice. I'd been right earlier, there was smoke coming out of the chimney. That meant the old man's wife was there, sitting beside a fire in the parlor, awaiting his return. The thought of this made my chest tighten.
When we passed the spot where the fox had crossed the road, I heard Jacob give a sharp intake of breath.
"Jesus," he said.
I looked out the window. There were tracks everywhere -- the fox's, the dog's, Jacob's, Lou's, mine. There was a gash in the snowbank from Jacob's truck and, crossing the road, tread marks from Pederson's snowmobile. It was a mess, the whole thing, impossible to miss. The tracks seemed to converge as they disappeared into the woods, as if to form an arrow, pointing straight toward the plane.
Jacob started to cry again, very softly. Tears rolled down his face, and his lips began to quiver.
When I spoke, I made my voice sound very calm. "It's all right," I said. "It's going to snow. As soon as it snows, that'll all be gone."
Jacob didn't say anything. He started making hiccoughing sounds in his chest.
"Stop it," I said. "It's working out. We're getting away with it."
He wiped at his cheeks. The dog tried to lean over the seat and lick his face, as if to comfort him, but Jacob pushed him away.
"Everything's okay," I said. "As soon as it snows, everything'll be okay."
He took a deep breath. Then he nodded.
"You can't react like that, Jacob. The only way we'll get caught is if we fall apart somehow. We have to stay calm."
He nodded again. His eyes were red and puffy.
"In control."
"I'm just tired, Hank," he said. His voice was rough, barely more than a whisper. He looked out the window, blinked his eyes. His nose had stopped bleeding, but he hadn't wiped off the dark smear from above his mouth. It gave his face the look of a fat Charlie Chaplin.
"I was up too late last night, and now I'm tired."
I HAD Jacob drive us all the way around the park. We headed back toward town along its northern edge, on Taft Road.
The nature preserve looked exactly the same on this side as it had on the other. It was just woods -- sycamore
s, buckeyes, maples, a few evergreens, the occasional white curve of a birch. Some of the pines were still dusted with snow from Tuesday's storm. There were birds every now and then, flashes of movement among the bare branches, but no signs of any other wildlife, no rabbits or deer, no raccoons or possums or foxes. It seemed strange to think that the plane was in there -- the bag full of money, the dead pilot -- and that beyond the wreck, on the other side of the park, was Pederson, whom I'd smothered, lying there in the icy water of Anders Creek.
I'd never pictured Jacob and myself as men capable of violence. My brother had gotten into fights at school, of course, but always because he'd been trapped, teased to the point where he had no choice but to lash out. He wasn't articulate enough to use his tongue, so he used his feet and hands instead, but the result was just as pitiful. He never really learned how to fight, never managed even an imitation of the true pugilist's desire to cause pain: no matter how overwhelmed with rage, he always appeared to be holding himself back, as if afraid to hurt his antagonists, and it made his fury seem farcical, make-believe, like something out of a silent movie. He'd flail clumsily at them, open fisted, as though he were swimming, tears streaming down his face, and they'd laugh at him, calling him names.
In our hearts, we were both products of our father's temperament, a man so pacifistic he refused to raise livestock -- no cattle, no poultry, no swine -- because he couldn't bear to see them slaughtered. Yet somehow, together, we'd managed to kill a man.
When we reached Ashenville, Jacob pulled to a stop in front of his apartment. He put the car in park but didn't turn off the ignition. Most of the town was closed for New Year's. There were only a few people on the street, hurrying somewhere private, heads tucked low against the cold. A wind had come up, and it blew things across the road. The sky was perfectly clear now; sunlight danced off of the hardware store's plate-glass window and made the pavement sparkle. It had turned into a beautiful winter day.