“For a time,” he said, “I would see a man and follow him. It could be any man, going about his business. I’d watch and I’d follow, driving sometimes to the man’s very house. I couldn’t help myself. Like the man I sought. Sick to my bones. I believe your brother, Joe, came up with this arrangement down here as a way to keep me away from those men up there in the mountains.”

They smoked, the clouds from their lungs merging and seething in the space between them. Somewhere in the room was a small constant buzzing, as of some feverish insect.

“So,” said Grant. “That’s how I’m fixed with God. If he will not give me my daughter back, then he owes me one bad man. And you want to know the hell of it? The hell of it, Billy, is that I don’t give a damn anymore if it’s even the right bad man. I have reached the point where any bad man will do.”

Billy appeared to study the tip of his cigarette. He tugged at the hair under his lip.

“And you get to decide that, do you? You get to decide if a man is bad enough to kill or not? That’s thinking kind of highly of yourself, isn’t it?”

“Deciding won’t have a thing to do with it, Billy.”

“It won’t.”

“No.”

“What will then?”

Grant looked at his hands. The pale weave of fingers. “God,” he said.

“God,” said Billy, and Grant nodded.

“If God put that man on that path to take my little girl, then I expect him to put a man on my path too. I’m demanding it.”

“And how will you know him, Grant? How will you recognize this bad man God has sent you?”

“That’s the easy part,” said Grant, and he looked up from his hands and Billy saw his eyes in their sockets like small openings to some blue flame of the skull. “I will know this man because he will be the next man who attempts to hurt anyone I love.”

Billy stared at him and Grant stared back from the chair and they remained that way in silence for a long time, until finally Grant reached forward and crushed the cigarette in the glass ashtray, and placed his hands on his knees and pushed himself up. He appeared beset by some brute weariness as he bent to collect the shotgun from where it leaned against the chairback.

“That’s what I got to thinking about over there,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t sleep.”

Billy watched the gun in the dark, the moon’s blue scrollwork along the barrels. Grant turned for the door and stopped. Neither of them knew how long the old man had been standing there, but when they saw him they knew he’d been standing there long enough.

“Sorry to wake you, Em,” Grant said, and eased himself by and descended the stairs, and Emmet watched him go until he reached the landing and turned the corner and was gone.

He turned to look at his boy in the bed. “What the hell did you do?”

“Me? Are you blind now too? Didn’t you see your buddy there with a shotgun in my bedroom in the middle of the night?”

Emmet had not put on a housecoat and under the thin pajamas he appeared to shake.

“I want you outta this house.”

“What? What was that?”

“I said I want you out of this house. I’m all give out, Billy.”

Billy stared at him, then fell back on his pillow in the moonlight, laughing.

“You crazy old man,” he said. “You can’t kick me outta my own goddam house.”

“I ain’t, son. I’m kicking you outta mine.”

He lay there, his eyes on the ceiling. Then he moved, and Emmet saw something flash in the center of the room like the blink of some ghostly eye, or a spinning moon, an instant before some other thing shattered on the door trim to the left of his head. He stood a moment looking at the wreckage of glass and cigarette butts on the floor, and then he backed away, closing the door behind him.

47

Grant had reached the bottom step of the porch when the screen door pushed open and Emmet came backing out, an aluminum travel mug in his gloved hand. He saw Grant and stopped.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“So are you.”

“This ain’t early.” He gripped the railing and came carefully down the steps. He wore his good dark overcoat, dark slacks, black shoes, and the bright red cap pulled down over his ears. Gaining solid ground he looked up and met Grant’s eyes. “How’s that boy?”

“Sleeping it off.”

“How bad?”

“Not as bad as it looks. Two good shiners and a somewhat enlarged nose.”

“Broke?”

“What?”

“The nose.”

“No. Just the wrist. They put a cast on that.”

“I want you to give me that hospital bill, Grant.”

Grant waved this away. “It was just a scrap, Em.”

Emmet cocked an ear at him. “How’s that?”

“It was just a scrap.”

“If my dog gets loosed and kills a man’s chickens, is that man gonna come to me and say, don’t you bother, Emmet, it was just a scrap?”

“Not the most flattering analogy, Em.”

The old man cocked an ear at him again and Grant shook his head. He looked to the corner of the house where the tail end of the El Camino jutted. Emmet sniffed and looked at the sky.

“Why don’t you let me drive you, Em?”

“They ain’t took my license from me yet.”

“I know it. I feel like a drive myself.”

“What about the boy?”

“He’s fine,” Grant said. “He’s sleeping.”

WITHIN THE BORDER OF ponderosa pines were a few decorative birch trees, bare and white amid the stones. Grant got out to walk but there was no place in the cemetery from which he could not see the old man clearly, and he watched him trek through the snow until he reached a rose-colored stone of modest size and began to clear the snow from its crown, whisking left and then right, the way she must have once brushed snow or dander from his shoulders. When the stone was clean he pulled the cap from his head and rested upon the stone, his back to the graveyard, his fine white hair bristling.

Grant swept the snow from a bench and sat on the cold slats. The bench was aligned for a view to the north where on a clear day the mountains must be visible, rising above the hills, but this morning there was only the low thick clouds like a gray canopy over the world. In the corner of his eye he saw the old man at the stone. The white head nodding, cocking as if to listen, nodding again. Sipping his coffee. After a while the old man stood and turned and touched the stone once more and began walking toward Grant. Grant brushed more snow from the bench, and Emmet sat down beside him.

“Her folks are buried over in that corner there, where that birch is. She wanted to be closer, but them plots was bought up long ago.”

“It’s a nice spot she’s got,” Grant said.

“I bought the two plots for us and two more for the boys if they want them. If they don’t, they can sell them at a good profit.” He paused. “Twenty-five years ago that was, and I never once saw myself sitting here.”

Despite the cold and the snow there was the damp, moldering smell of the graves, or Grant imagined there was, and he took out his cigarettes unthinkingly, and then returned them to his pocket.

“Go ahead and smoke.”

“I can wait.”

“It ain’t gonna kill me.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

“That wasn’t the smokes, that was the goddam chemo.”

Grant brought out the cigarettes again and got one lit and blew the smoke well away, Emmet watching him closely. Emmet sniffed at the air. He sipped his coffee. Then he reached two gloved fingers casually toward Grant.

“What?” said Grant.

“Give a man a puff.”

“Forget it.”

“Come on now.”

“No.”

“One goddam puff, God damn it. Night I had.”

Grant looked into his eyes and handed over the cigarette.

Emmet sipped at the filter, held the smoke briefly in his lungs, and exhaled it slowly from pursed lips. He handed the cigarette back, grinned, and pitched forward on the bench coughing with such violence that Grant reached over and took hold of his arm.