“Same chance,” Billy said.

“Thought that through, did you?”

“Wasn’t hard.”

The man smiled. “No, I bet not.”

Billy knew that the moment the man had seen him on the mountain, the girl’s fate was decided: sheriff or no sheriff, he would not remain up here and he would not let her live. Billy’s only hope was that the man would panic and run. It was not even a hope.

Thin light rippled along the man’s teeth. “You know how I know you’re full of shit, Billy? The fact of this ax stuck in my door. Why would a man do a thing like that if Sheriff Joe was on his way? Why wouldn’t he just sit tight and wait?”

“ ’Cause he’s dumb and reckless.”

They were silent. No sound on the other side of the door but the soft popping of firewood. The snow had stopped, and the clouds above the clearing were infused with light, as if beyond them lay a bright city. Billy coughed and spat and the effort raised red blots to his vision. The ground beneath him moved like a bed of rolling logs.

The man glanced up at the ax again. “Before you go, Billy, why don’t you tell me one thing.”

Billy said nothing.

“Why don’t you tell me why you came up here? What’s this girl to you?”

“Nothing. I know her people.”

“I’m her people, Billy.”

“Her daddy might not agree.”

“The same daddy who let her go off by herself up in those mountains?”

“Wasn’t by herself.”

The man huffed. “Might as well of been.”

Billy coughed. He felt the wet cling of his shirtback where the blood had soaked it.

The man watched him. Then he looked down and with his forefinger began writing in the snow. He seemed to be working out some calculus but the figures he made resembled none Billy had ever seen. Working on these equations, the man said: “I suppose you think I had my eye on this girl. This particular girl. That I built up a plan around her.” He glanced at Billy as a professor glances up from his notes, saw that Billy was listening and went on. “People don’t want to give dumb luck any credit for the turns in their lives, good or bad. People want to believe in some plan, or design, when all around them is the evidence that the whole world is nothing but dumb luck. Going back to the first cells in the ocean. Going back to the stars.”

He glanced up from his ciphers again. “You think I saw this girl and followed her up into those mountains? Hell. I was up there looking for a girl all right, I don’t deny that. But it was another girl altogether. It was this other girl who liked to ride her bike up there with her one-legged boyfriend—had some kind of a gadget leg for riding, this poor bastard. I had my eye on that girl. That was my plan. But then along comes nothing but chance, Billy, nothing but dumb luck to put this other girl in my path.”

Billy leaned and spat. “I guess it was dumb luck made you hit that boy with your car.”

“Are you listening? If I’d gone up into those mountains just a few minutes earlier or just a few minutes later, I never would of seen either one of those two. They’d be back in Wisconsin watching the corn grow. Why is that so difficult to understand? You of all people, with that bullet in you, ought to understand.”

Billy attempted to grin. “I got shot by dumb luck?”

The man studied him. “Let me ask you something. That bar down there, where we talked earlier. How often do you go there?”

“What?”

“How often do you go to that bar we were at today.”

“I don’t know.”

“Once a week?”

Billy shook his head.

“Once a month?”

“Few times a year,” Billy said, just to stop him.

“All right, a few times a year,” the man said. “Now ask me how often I go there.”

Billy stared at him.

“Go ahead,” said the man.

Billy spat. “How often you go there?”

“Never, Billy. Never. I can’t even tell you the name of the place. I never once stepped foot in there until today. Today, for no good reason at all, I decide to pull over and I go into that bar and I sit on that stool and who sits down beside me?”

Billy said nothing.

“And now look at you. Lying there with that bullet in you. When you woke up today did you think, hell, I reckon I’ll go down to town and meet the man who knows where that girl is my brother the sheriff never could find and while I’m at it get myself shot?”

He looked at Billy as if expecting an answer. When he got none he shook his head. He said, “You’re the same as that girl in there, Billy. You are both nothing but demonstrations of how the world really works.”

“You crazy bitch,” Billy said. “I chose to come up here. She didn’t have no choice. You just took her. What you call dumb luck,” he wheezed, “the world calls fucked-up perversion.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “She did have a choice, Billy. She could of stayed with her brother. She got in my car of her own free will. You can ask her. Go ahead. She’s listening to every word of this. Aren’t you,” he called out.

Billy looked away. His head felt so heavy.

The man made a long study of him.

“Perversion, you say? Thinking the world gives one damn what you do or don’t do, whether you live or don’t live—that’s the greatest perversion there is, Billy.”

Billy coughed up more blood. He thought he might be about to pass out or die. Likely both. Like this. Just like this. Nothing but a rapist son of a bitch to see him off. “Are you done?” he said.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause if you’re gonna keep talking . . . I’ll have some of that whiskey.”

The man produced the fifth of whiskey and unscrewed the cap and offered the bottle. Billy lifted it to his lips and tilted the hot whiskey down his throat. The man took the bottle back and screwed down the cap and chucked the bottle into the snow.

Billy licked the blood from his bottom lip, from the tuft of hair below it.

“Tell you one difference, Steve,” he said. “Between you and me.”

“What’s that.”

“I ain’t the one keeps pussy on a chain.”

The man stared at him. Faintly amused. “No?”

“No.”

“Maybe you don’t like girls.”

“I like girls.”

“I know you do, Billy. I bet there’s one somewhere right now wondering where you’re at. Why you’re not with her. Why you haven’t called. Wondering what other girl you might be with.” He looked at the door and shook his head. “That is a long chain, Billy. Going both ways.”

Billy lay wheezing and the man watched him with a look of false concentration. Like a chess player who has seen the endgame far in advance.

Billy gathered his breath and said, “Let me ask you something.”

The man sat waiting.

“Your old man,” Billy said.

“What about him?”

“What was he.”

“What was he?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean besides a drunk and a son of a bitch?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing. He worked on crews. He wasn’t anything.”

“He wasn’t,” said Billy, “the Roto-Rooter man.”

The man watched him, puzzling—and then slowly smiled. “Damn,” he said. “Is that what you think?”

Billy watched him.

“It never occurred to me you’d think such a thing. But I can see how you might.” He gave a quiet laugh. “Be damned.” He looked down at the designs in the snow, his calculations, as if finding something new in them.

“I suppose I could of been,” he said. “I suppose I could of been. And I won’t say that what old Delmar did with that Stillson wrench never left an impression on me. I won’t say that. But I just didn’t have it in me, Billy. Not at that age.”

A black wave rose up before Billy’s vision and rolled on.

The man looked off toward the woods. “Charlotte Sweet,” he said. “That was my first.”

He glanced at Billy with an odd little smile.

“Can you believe that? I saw her one day on the tennis courts in the park. Her and none other. Chasing those balls around with her friends. Ninety pounds and sweet sixteen, Charlotte Sweet. Can you imagine?” He watched Billy’s face. “You can imagine. You have imagined. All men have. Kings and emperors had them like candy—are still having them—while your average Joe—Billy!” he barked and Billy’s eyes slid open.