The few houses he passes are not lit. This late, even dogs are asleep. Inarticulable thoughts like voiceless music touch and rouse him in mysterious ways. The dead girl, in her deep sleep, her placid beauty frozen in time, is forever intricately intertwined with him, John Moon—alive or dead—a disturbing thought he finds oddly comforting. In this dynamic, ever-changing world, he suddenly can’t wait to see her static face again. Did he think that, really? He’s not sure. Images in the next moment are forgotten or change into something else. One thing is certain: she is the core around which his random thoughts now spin. The money doesn’t matter anymore. It could blow out the windows and he wouldn’t care.
A car passes him going the other way, causing him to snap straight up behind the wheel. The memory of zigzagging headlights are spots in his eyes. A drunk, he thinks, heading home after last call. Then he realizes he is traveling less than twenty miles per hour and is afraid to go home, afraid of what might be waiting for him. So why is he? Where else is there for him to go? he asks himself, only subconsciously aware—or able to admit—that the real reason is her, Ingrid Banes.
He is nearly in front of the dark one-story cabin that is Simon Breedlove’s home, before he remembers it is on this road and understands his actual motive for coming this way. Now his mind’s not laboring at all. Just acting or reacting. Striding moment to moment, a hiker on fate’s predestined course. Two hundred yards past the cabin, he switches off the headlights and ignition and rolls the pickup down a dirt incline into a cornfield of knee-high plants where invisible cicadas make a cumulative buzz.
The smell is of fertilizer, damp soil, and adolescent growth. The sporadic spark of fireflies intrudes on the darkness. A night, in his past life, for hand-holding, duet whistling, blanket love. John pulls the .45 from the glove box, checks to see that it’s loaded, shoves it down the front of his pants, and steps from the truck. Beneath his feet the dirt is powdery and soft. From his left comes a rustling sound. He wheels that way and sees four sets of glistening eyes that, in less than a second, are gone. Raccoons. He hears them scurrying through the field.
Standing fifty yards to the right of the cabin, concealed beneath a willow tree, he watches the dark house inhale the night air through its wide-open, sash-covered windows, and thinks how he doesn’t really know Simon, and never did. A hard worker, hunter, drinker, with streaks affable, morose, and mean, he has, like John, few close friends. When was it that John had watched Simon, the two of them whiskey-shitfaced, hand-walk across the five-hundred-yard guide wire atop the Coxsackie Gap Bridge, screaming at John and the cars and river below that he had fucked, fought, drunk, and killed enough for one life and that John ought to shake the wire and knock him off? John can’t remember whether it was before or after the Hollenbach murders, but it was right around then, and he remembers too, before the police had shown up to take Simon to detox, him standing on the far side, telling John, “After the first time, Johnno, even the worst things get like riding a bike…” which John had figured was a reference to Simon’s war experiences, though now he wonders if it hadn’t been meant to encompass more recent events.
Around back, on the dampened grass lawn, catercorner to the house, sits the Cadillac, its driver-side door open and its dome light dully flickering. Leaf-heavy branches, swaying from an adjacent ash tree, lightly caress the car’s roof, creating a high-pitched mewl. Beneath the tree, amid scattered engine parts, lies a gutted motorcycle, and farther back, parked in front of the small, unpainted barn Simon uses for storage and to house two beef cows and a handful of pigs, goats, and chickens, is his dual-wheel pickup truck. From the barn come clucks, tired groans, and unshod hooves lazily shifting on the cement floor.
Tiptoeing toward the Cadillac, John is hit with an eerie sensation that this little one-acre patch with its unkempt cabin and barn, like the secrets in its inhabitant’s mind, exists solely in a zone beyond the expected and civilized. The image of Simon, his childhood mentor and hunting buddy, becomes the mysterious man who, with no regular income, vanishes for weeks at a time and, upon his return, only gets together with John on his own terms, suddenly showing up at the trailer or by phone arranging to meet him in a bar or the woods somewhere. In the twelve years since Simon built his cabin, John can count on one hand the occasions he has been in it and then only to wait while Simon showered, changed clothes, or retrieved something he had forgotten. The last time, several years before, that he stopped by the cabin uninvited, Simon had snarled through a crack in the front door that he was busy and would call John when he wasn’t, which turned out to be weeks later.
