A Simple Plan Page 23

  His momentum carried him into the room, right up to the foot of the bed. I didn't see him look down at Nancy's body, but he must've seen it, must've caught at least a glimpse of it before he turned, his hands raised in a pair of fists, as if to strike me. His nakedness made him seem savage, like a caveman. His face was contorted, a horrible mixture of terror and rage and confusion. His chin was smeared with blood.

  I was in the doorway, blocking his escape. I pumped the gun, and it ejected an empty shell -- the one I'd killed Nancy with -- onto the floor at my feet. Then, without pausing to think, I fired into Sonny's chest.

  There was a kick against my body, a loud explosion, and a fresh spray of blood slapped wetly across the blankets.

  Sonny was knocked onto the bed. He landed with a splashing sound, throwing a little wave of water off the edge of the mattress. His chest was a ragged mass of red and pink and white, but he was still alive. His legs were kicking, and he was trying to lift his head. He was staring at me, his eyes bulging from his head, showing more white than anything else. His right hand was clutching at the covers, pulling them toward his side.

  I pumped the gun again, the empty shell falling to the carpet. Then I stepped forward and aimed down at his face. As I pulled the trigger, I saw him shut his eyes. The mattress literally exploded, showering the headboard and the wall behind it with water. I had to jump back to keep from getting it on my clothes.

  From the safety of the doorway, I fired the last two shells into the ceiling above the bed. Then I reached into my pocket, put five new shells into the gun, and fired these indiscriminately around the room -- at the armchairs off to the left, at the bathroom door, at the mirror above the dressing table.

  I checked myself for spattered blood and reloaded the gun.

  Descending the stairs, I fired once into the ceiling. When I got to the bottom, I turned and aimed out into the living room. I shot the leather couch, then the TV set, and finally the coffee table with our glasses on it.

  I left one shell loaded in the gun.

  I FOUND Jacob hiding in the bathroom. He was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. His rifle was lying on the floor at his feet. Sonny's parka and boots were resting in his lap.

  "All right," I said. I was standing in the doorway.

  "All right?" Jacob asked. He didn't look up at me.

  I took a deep breath. I felt shaky, high, a little out of control. I had the vague suspicion that I might not be thinking very well, and I tried now to slow things down. The hard part was over, I told myself; the rest was just a matter of us acting out our parts.

  "It's finished," I said.

  "He's dead?"

  I nodded.

  "Why'd you shoot so much?"

  I didn't answer him. "Come on, Jacob. We have to get going."

  "Did you have to shoot so much?"

  "It's supposed to look like he's pissed. Like he's gone insane." I wiped my face with my hand. My gloves smelled of gunpowder; I realized I'd have to remember to hide them in the truck before we called the police. A string of water began to drip from the ceiling in the corner. It fell onto the ceramic toilet lid, making a sound like the ticking of a clock. It was from the water bed: it had already started soaking through the plaster.

  Jacob removed his glasses. His face seemed off balance without them -- the skin of his cheeks and jowls red and shiny, bloated to the point of distension, as if he were gout ridden, while up top his eyes seemed sunken, dim, weak looking.

  "Aren't you afraid of later?" he asked.

  "Later?"

  "Guilt. Feeling bad."

  I sighed. "We did it, Jacob. We had to do it, and we did it."

  "You shot Sonny," he said, as if surprised by this.

  "That's right. I shot Sonny."

  "Dead," Jacob said. "In cold blood."

  I didn't know what to say to that. I wanted to avoid thinking about what we'd done, knew implicitly that nothing good would come from self-analysis. Up to now I'd felt a comfortable sense of inevitability in all my actions, as if I'd merely been looking on, watching myself on film, thoroughly engaged in what was happening but harboring no illusion that I could alter even the most trivial of events. Fate, a voice seemed to whisper in my ear, and I let the reins slip from my hand. But now Jacob, with his questions, was eroding this. He was making me look back, see that the bloody water dripping down through the ceiling was there because I'd willed it into being. I pushed the thought away and immediately replaced it with an angry surge of resentment toward my brother, sitting there on the toilet, fat, passive, judging me while it was his own panic, his own rashness and stupidity that had trapped me into my crimes.

  "None of this would've happened if you hadn't killed Lou," I said.

  Jacob lifted his head, and I saw with a shock that he was crying. There were tear tracks running down his cheeks, and the sight of them filled me with regret: I shouldn't have spoken so harshly to him.

  "I saved you," he said, his voice choking a little on the words. He turned his head to the right, trying to hide his face.

  "Don't do this, Jacob. Please."

  He didn't answer. His shoulders were shaking. He had one hand pressed against his eyes. The other one, the one that held his glasses, was resting on top of Sonny's boots in his lap.

  "You can't fall apart now. We still have to deal with the police, the reporters--"

  "I'm okay," he said. It came out like a gasp.

  "We have to be composed."

  "It's just...," he started, but he couldn't find the words to finish. "I shot Lou," he said.

  I stared down at him. He was making me scared. I was beginning to see how, if we weren't careful, it could all unravel on us. "We have to get going, Jacob," I said. "We have to call it in."

  He inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, then put his glasses back on and struggled to his feet. His face was wet with tears, his chin shaking. I took Sonny's parka and boots from him and carried them out to the hall closet. The living room was a shambles. The coffee table was shattered, the TV imploded. Great, white, round hunks of stuffing protruded from the couch, like clouds, the way children draw them.

  Jacob had forgotten his rifle in the bathroom, so I had to go get it for him. He followed me there and back like a dog. He was starting to cry again, and hearing him gave me a hollow pit in my stomach, a vertiginous sensation, as if I were falling off a building.

  I opened the front door. "Go out to the truck," I said. "Call the police on the CB."

  "The CB?" His voice sounded far away, like he wasn't really paying attention. I shivered. I could feel the cold air rising along the damp, sweaty skin of my back. I zipped up my jacket. Like my gloves, it smelled of gunpowder.

  "It has to look like you're calling in scared," I said. "Like you saw me shoot him and, instead of going inside, ran back to the truck."

  Jacob was staring down at Lou's body again, his face limp.

  "Don't tell them too much, just that there's been a shooting. Tell them to send an ambulance, then get off."

  He nodded but didn't move. His tears kept coming, seeping out the corners of his eyes one after the other and dropping down his face. They were dripping onto the front of his jacket, darkening the fabric.

  "Jacob," I said.

  He dragged his eyes upward, glanced over at me. He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

  "We have to be alert now. We have to remember what we're doing."

  He nodded again, took another deep breath. "I'm okay," he said. Then he started out the door.

  I stopped him when he reached the porch. I was in the doorway, right where Lou had been standing when Jacob shot him. "Don't forget your rifle," I said. I held the gun toward him, and he took it. I was still out over the abyss, I realized. There was a fourth step to be taken before I could reach the other side.

  As I watched him begin to pick his way down the icy walk, I brought the shotgun up against my body and pumped the last shell into its chamber.

  Because he was my brot
her, I'd forgiven him for telling Lou about Pederson, and for lying to me about Sonny being in the car, but I couldn't forgive him for his weakness. That, I saw now, was a greater risk even than Lou's greed and stupidity. Jacob would break down when they questioned him tonight; he'd confess and turn me in. I couldn't trust him.

  When he reached the end of the walk, I called his name. I was tired, exhausted with what I'd already done so far that evening, and this made it easier.

  "Jacob," I said.

  He turned around. I was standing in the doorway, with Lou's gun leveled at his chest.

  It took him a moment to realize what was happening.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  He tilted his head, like a giant parrot, confused.

  "I didn't plan to do this, but I have to."

  His body seemed to settle somehow, to freeze and solidify. He understood finally. "I'd never tell, Hank," he said.

  I shook my head. "You'd fuck up, Jacob. I know it. You wouldn't be able to live with what we've done."

  "Hank," he said, pleading now. "I'm your brother."

  I nodded. I tightened my grip on the shotgun, raised it a little, adjusting my aim. But I didn't fire. I waited. It wasn't that I was wavering -- I knew that I couldn't go back now, that it was as good as done -- it was simply that I felt like I was forgetting something, skipping some crucial step. Something had to happen still.

  Mary Beth appeared suddenly out of the darkness, making both of us jump, dog tags clinking together on his collar, his tail wagging madly. He went up to Jacob and pressed close against his legs, asking to be petted. Then he started toward me.

  Jacob, when he saw me glance down at the dog, quickly raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. It made a clicking sound. The chamber was empty. There'd only been the one bullet in it, the bullet he'd loaded back on New Year's Eve, at the very beginning of all this, when we'd set off into the woods after the fox. My brother's face settled into a rueful smile. He seemed almost, but not quite, to shrug.

  I fired the gun into his chest.

  BEFORE calling the police, I went inside to pee. The bathroom floor was covered with water. It dripped through the ceiling now at several points, like a miniature rain shower. The plaster was stained a light brown from it.

  I picked up Sonny's clothes from the porch and carried them to the bedroom. I dropped them into the water beside the bed, then retrieved the pistol, dried it off with my jacket, and returned it to its drawer.

  Downstairs again, I took the leftover shells and stuck them into Lou's pocket. I laid his gun on the floor beside his shoulder. His expression hadn't changed. The puddle of blood had spread to the edge of the living room and was dripping quietly onto its shag carpet.

  Sonny had left his lights on, so I had to drive over there quickly and turn them out. While I was there, I hung Nancy's robe in the trailer's bedroom closet and set her tube of lipstick on the sink in the bathroom.

  As I drove back to Lou's, I looked for the dog, but he'd disappeared, scared off by the sound of the shotgun.

  I called the police from Lou's driveway. I was brief on the radio, trying to sound panicked. I gave the address, said there'd been a shooting. I didn't answer the dispatcher's questions. "My brother," I said, forcing a sob into my voice. Then I clicked off the radio. I sounded good, I knew, convincing, and I felt a sudden infusion of confidence.

  It's believable, I said to myself, it's going to work.

  I took the tape recorder from my shirt pocket and played it one last time. It was eerie, sitting in the cab of the truck like that, listening to their voices go back and forth, and knowing they were dead. I stopped it before it was through, erased the whole thing, and hid the machine beneath the seat.

  I waited in the truck for a while, then climbed out and went up the walk. I wanted to be by my brother when the ambulance arrived, crouching there, holding him in my arms.

  I tried calling Mary Beth, but he didn't come. I stood on the walk for several minutes, shivering in the cold, listening for the sound of the dog's tags. I'd hidden my gloves with the tape recorder and was hoping that the wind would air the smell of gun smoke from my jacket.

  I could just make out the ambulance's lights, far away across the fields but coming fast, flickering red and white off the horizon, when Jacob reached out and grabbed my ankle. His grip was tight, violent. I had to yank my leg twice to get it free.

  A gurgling sound came out of his chest, very faint. As soon as I heard it, I realized that it had been going on for some time.

  I stooped down beside him, just out of reach. His jacket was torn and soaked through with blood. I could see the lights coming closer. There were three sets of them -- silent, no sirens, converging on Lou's house, two approaching from the east, still far away, and one from the south, which was closer.

  Jacob tried to lift his head but couldn't. His eyes took a moment to find me; then they focused a little, faded, and focused again. His glasses were lying beside him on the walk.

  I could hear the ambulance's engine now, racing.

  "Help me," Jacob gasped.

  He said it twice.

  Then he lost consciousness.

  7

  THE NEXT morning, just after eight, I was sitting in an empty room on the second floor of the Delphia Municipal Hospital, watching myself on TV. First an announcer talked from the studio, reading something off a sheet of paper. The television was broken, so I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I knew that it was about what had happened the previous night because from the studio they cut to a shot of me, just a short one, perhaps five seconds, as I walked from a police car into the hospital. I was hunched over, hurrying, head down. I didn't look like myself, and this reassured me. I looked shaken, shocked, like I belonged there, on the news.

  Next there was a reporter, a woman, talking into a microphone in front of Lou's house. She had on a heavy down jacket and thick yellow ski gloves. As she spoke, her long brown hair lifted itself an inch or so from her shoulders, trembling in the wind. Several police cars were parked behind her in the driveway. The yard was crisscrossed with tire tracks. Lou's front door was wide open, and I could see two men crouched inside the entranceway, taking pictures.

  The woman talked for a bit, her face serious, grief-stricken. The announcer reappeared when she finished, and he seemed to say something consoling to her. Then the newsbreak was over.

  There was a commercial next, and after that a cartoon. Elmer Fudd chasing Daffy Duck. I turned away from the screen. I was sitting with Sarah and Amanda in what was once a two-bed, semiprivate room. For some reason it had been emptied of furniture. The beds were gone, the night tables, everything. Except for the two folding chairs Sarah and I sat in, the room was barren. The floor was light blue. I could see where the beds had stood; the tiles were a little darker there, two perfect rectangles against the wall, like shadows. There was a single small window, a slit in the side of the building, the same size and shape as the ones they used to have in castles, to shoot arrows through. It looked out onto the hospital's parking lot.

  The television set hung on a bracket hooked into the ceiling. Though it gave me a sick feeling to look at it, I found it hard not to watch. It was the only thing in the room besides Sarah, and I didn't want to look at her. If I looked at her, I knew I'd start talking, and I didn't feel safe talking there.

  We'd been put in the room as a courtesy, for our privacy. There were reporters down in the regular waiting room. I'd been up all night, had not eaten since the previous day. I was unshaven, dirty, shaky.

  The FBI hadn't been called in. It was just the Fulton County Sheriff's Department. I'd spent two hours talking with them, and it had been fine. They were normal people, like Carl Jenkins, and they saw things exactly as Sarah and I had anticipated they would: Lou coming home drunk, finding Sonny and Nancy in bed together, getting his gun and shooting them; Jacob and I hearing the shots as we pulled away, Jacob running up to the house with his rifle, Lou opening the door, pointing his shotgun, two ex
plosions ripping through the night.

  The sheriff's deputies had treated me with great care and courtesy, like a victim rather than a suspect, mistaking my unconcealable distress over the possibility of Jacob's regaining consciousness for a brother's heartfelt grief.

  Jacob was in his third hour of surgery.

  Sarah and I sat in the room and waited.

  Neither of us seemed to want to talk. Sarah tended Amanda. She nursed her, whispered to her, played little games with her. When the baby slept, Sarah closed her eyes, too, slouching forward in her folding chair. I watched the silent TV -- cartoons, a game show, a rerun of "The Odd Couple." During commercials I went over to the window and stared down at the parking lot. It was a big lot, like a field of asphalt. The cars clustered around the building, leaving the far edge empty and forlorn looking. Beyond the parking lot was a real field, buried in snow. When the wind came up, it carried grains of this snow across the asphalt in little semitransparent waves and threw them up against the hospital.

  Sarah and I waited and waited. Doctors and nurses and policemen walked by outside the door, the clicking of their shoes echoing up and down the tiled hallway, drawing our eyes to their passing, but no one stopped to tell us anything.

  Whenever the baby started to cry, Sarah hummed a little song to her, and she quieted down. After a while, I recognized the tune. It was "Frere Jacques." Listening to Sarah, I got it in my head, and then I couldn't get it out, even when she stopped.

  Just after eleven, a sheriff's deputy came into the room. I was sitting in my chair, and I stood up to shake his hand. Sarah smiled and nodded, her arms wrapped around the baby.

  "I don't want to impose at a time like this," the deputy began. Then he paused, as if he'd forgotten what he'd come to say. He stared up at the television, a Toyota commercial, and frowned. He wasn't one of the men I'd spoken to earlier. He looked too young to be a policeman, looked like a kid dressing up. His uniform was a little too big, his black shoes a little too shiny, the crease in his trooper's hat a little too perfect. When he frowned up at the TV, his whole face frowned, even his eyes. It was a perfectly round face, lightly freckled, a farm boy's face, flat and pale and moonlike.