A Simple Plan Read online

  I began with his clothes, since that seemed the easiest. I didn't fold them, I simply jammed them into boxes. There wasn't that much: six pairs of pants -- jeans and khaki dungarees -- a half dozen flannel shirts, a bright red turtleneck, a large, hooded sweatshirt, a motley assortment of T-shirts, socks, and underwear. There was a single blue tie hanging from a hook, a picture of a bounding deer embroidered across its front; there were two pairs of sneakers and a pair of boots; there were hats and gloves, a black ski mask, a pair of bathing trunks, jackets for the different seasons. There were the gray slacks and the brown leather shoes he'd worn the morning he asked me to help him buy back the farm. Whenever I filled a box, I took it downstairs to my car and loaded it in the back.

  From the clothes I moved to the bathroom -- toiletries, towel, shaving kit, a plastic squirt gun, a stack of Mad magazines -- and from the bathroom to the little alcove Jacob had used as a kitchen -- two pots, a frying pan, a tray full of mismatched utensils, four glasses, a half dozen plates, a ragged-looking broom, and an empty can of Comet. Everything was greasy, grimy. I threw out the food -- a can of ravioli, a box of Frosted Flakes, a putrid carton of milk, an unopened bag of chocolate donuts, a molding loaf of bread, three slices of American cheese, a shriveled apple.

  I cleaned out the trash next -- the beer bottles and old newspapers, the candy wrappers and empty bags of dog food. Then I moved to his bed. I stripped his sheets, wrapped his clock radio in a pair of thermal underwear, and stuffed it all into a box. I tossed his pillow over toward the door. Everything smelled faintly of Jacob.

  The furniture in the apartment belonged to the landlord, so when I'd packed the sheets and pillow, there was nothing left to go through except his trunk. This was an old army footlocker -- it'd been our uncle's during the Second World War, and he'd given it to Jacob on his tenth birthday. I was planning on just taking it downstairs unexamined, but then, at the last moment, I changed my mind, dragged it over to the bed, and swung open its lid.

  The trunk's interior was surprisingly tidy. On the left, neatly folded and stacked, was an extra set of sheets and bath towels. They were from our parents' house; I recognized them immediately: powder blue towels, worn looking, monogrammed with our mother's initials. The sheets had little roses on them. On the right-hand side of the trunk there was a red tackle box, an old Bible, a fielder's glove, a box of bullets for Jacob's rifle, and a machete. The machete had belonged to the same uncle who'd given my brother the trunk; he'd brought it back from somewhere in the Pacific. It was long and menacing looking, with a thick, delicately curving blade and a light brown, wooden handle. It looked like something you might see in a museum, primitive and deadly.

  Beneath the machete was a large, ancient-looking book. Curious, I picked it up out of the trunk and sat down on the edge of Jacob's mattress. The sun had set since I arrived, and the apartment was dark. There was a light on in the bathroom, but that was all, so I had to strain to read the book's title. It was stamped in gold ink on the binding: Farm Management from A to Z.

  I opened the cover, and on the inside, on the clean whiteness of the facing page, I found, written in pencil, our father's name. Beneath it, Jacob had scrawled his own name, in ink. I assumed that it must've been one of the trivialities granted to my brother in our father's will, a pathetic substitute for the promised farm itself. But when I began to flip through the pages, I saw that Jacob had treated this particular segment of his inheritance as anything but trivial. The book was heavily underlined, its margins clogged with scribbled notes. There were chapters on irrigation, drainage, equipment maintenance, fertilizers, grain markets, government regulations, shipping rates -- all the things I'd told Jacob he'd never understand.

  He'd been studying to be a farmer.

  I flipped back toward the front of the book and checked its copyright date. It had been published in 1936, more than fifty years ago. There was no mention in its pages of pesticides or herbicides or crop dusting. The government regulations it discussed at such great length had been superseded several times over. My brother had been struggling through a uselessly outdated text.

  I found a large, folded-up sheet of paper tucked into the back of the book. It was a diagram of our father's farm, drawn, from the looks of it, by Jacob himself. It showed where the barn was supposed to be, the machine shed, the grain bin. It showed the boundaries of the fields, with precise measurements from point to point and little arrows to indicate the drainage patterns. Paper-clipped to the diagram's top-right-hand corner was a photograph of our house, taken -- I could tell by the lack of curtains in the windows -- just before they knocked it down. Perhaps Jacob had driven out there to watch its demolition.

  It's difficult for me to articulate exactly the way I felt, looking down at that photo, at that diagram and that book full of notes. First there was regret, I suppose, the simple wish that I'd been wise enough to leave the trunk alone, that I'd followed my original inclination and carried it down to the car with its contents undisturbed. I'd planned to be quick here, brutally efficient. I'd anticipated the danger my brother's possessions might hold for me and thus had set about my task with the greatest of care, treating the room as if it were booby-trapped, the most innocent of objects wired with little bombs of sorrow and regret. I'd almost pulled it off, too, had reached the very end before, careless with curiosity, I'd paused over the trunk. And now I was sitting here on the edge of Jacob's bed, the tears welling up in my eyes, the dark, empty apartment echoing with the staggered sound of my breathing, the soft precursors to my sobs of grief.

  Grief: that's the closest I can come to describing what I felt. It was as though a tumor had blossomed suddenly in my chest, pushing aside my lungs, taking up the space they needed to breathe, so that I had to gasp out loud to fill them with air. I still believed what Sarah had said, that we'd done the right thing -- the only thing we could do, which was to save ourselves -- that if I hadn't shot Sonny and Jacob, we would've been caught and sent to jail. But at the same time I wished with all my heart that none of it had happened. I thought of the pain Jacob must've gone through, his body stuck full of tubes, his insides torn apart; I thought of his plans for the farm, his notes and diagrams; I thought of his coming to my rescue in the end, shooting his best friend to protect me, his brother; and everything was layered with grief.

  Jacob, I realized, was an innocent, a child. No matter what Sarah said about accidents and self-defense and lack of choices, I was still to blame for what had happened to him -- I was the murderer, there was no escaping that -- it was my guilt, my sin, my responsibility.

  For ten, maybe fifteen minutes I sat there, weeping into my hands. And then, without really wanting to -- crying like that, I felt as good as I had in months; I felt virtuous, clean, as if I were being purged -- I stopped. I fell silent as one falls silent after a bout of vomiting; my body, of its own accord, simply ceased to cry.

  I waited for a moment, breathing deeply, to see what would happen next, but nothing did. It was getting late. I could hear someone walking back and forth in the apartment above my head. The floorboards creaked beneath the footsteps. Intermittently, from outside the window, there was the hush of cars moving up and down Main Street. A soft popping sound came from the steam in the radiator.

  I wiped my face with my hand. I refolded the diagram and slid it back into the book. I set the book on the floor of the trunk and shut the lid. I'd rolled up my shirtsleeves to do the packing, and now I carefully rolled them back down, buttoning the cuffs.

  I felt shaky, a little fragile, as if I hadn't eaten all day. I was conscious of the weight of my clothes pressing down on my body. My face was still moist from the tears, and I could feel my skin tightening a little as they dried. There was the taste of salt on my lips.

  Before I even stood up, I knew how I was going to approach what had happened here tonight. I'd look on it as an anomaly, a parenthesis within my life, a tiny lacuna of despair into which I'd stumbled and then extracted myself. I would not tell Sarah about it,
would keep it hidden, a secret. And when it happened again, as I knew it must, I'd repeat this process. Because even while I'd been weeping, even while I'd been sitting there gasping for air, I'd realized that it meant nothing, that it could not undo my crimes, could not even alter how I felt about them. What I'd done, I'd done, and the only way I could continue to function, the only way I could survive my brother's death, was to accept this. Otherwise, if I gave it the chance, my grief would deteriorate slowly into regret, my regret into remorse, and my remorse into an insidious desire for punishment. It would poison my life. I had to control it, discipline it, compartmentalize it.

  After another minute or so, I rose to my feet and put on my jacket. I went into the bathroom and washed my face at the sink. Then I carried the footlocker and the box of sheets down to the street, locking Jacob's door behind me.

  I left the boxes in the back of my car. I knew that if I took them out, it would be to throw them away, and I didn't feel like doing that just yet.

  MARY BETH was the only one besides myself who seemed to mourn Jacob's absence. The dog went through a remarkable personality shift in the weeks following his arrival at my house. He became angry, a barker. He started to growl at us and would bare his teeth if we tried to pet him.

  Sarah was worried about Amanda's safety, afraid the dog might attack her, so I decided we should keep him outside. Each morning as I left for work, I would tie him up by a piece of clothesline to the hawthorn tree in our front yard, and at night I'd stick him in the garage. This new routine seemed only to increase the dog's irritability. All day long he sat in the snow out front and barked at cars passing by, at the children waiting on the corner for the school bus, at the mailman making his rounds. Raw spots appeared on the skin beneath his collar from tugging at the rope. At night he would howl in the garage, over and over again for long stretches of time, and the sound would echo up and down the street. Among the children in the neighborhood, the rumor even sprang up that our house was haunted -- that the nightly baying wasn't from the dog, it was from my brother's tortured ghost.

  Amanda, as if it were infectious, also became short-tempered, loud, difficult to please or quiet down. She cried more than she used to, and there was a sharper edge to her voice now, as if she were complaining about real pain rather than mere discomfort. She became inflexibly attached to her mother and started to scream if she couldn't see her, or feel her touch, or hear her voice. Horribly enough, it was Jacob's bear that did the most to keep her calm. As soon as the man's voice within the toy's chest began to sing, she'd freeze, her whole body seeming to listen, to follow along with the tune:

  Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques,

  Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

  Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines.

  Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

  I could quiet her down only at night, when it was dark and she was very sleepy.

  AFTER much debate, I sold Jacob's truck to the feedstore, and now, each morning when I drove in to work, I saw it parked there in the street, its rear end sagging down with sacks of grain.

  A WEEK after I cleaned out my brother's apartment, the sheriff came by my office. He asked me what I was going to do with Jacob's rifle.

  "To tell the truth, I haven't really thought about it, Carl," I said. "I suppose I'll sell it."

  He was sitting in the chair beside my desk. He was wearing his uniform and had his dark green police jacket on over it. His hat was in his lap. "I was guessing you might do that," he said. "And I was hoping you might let me put in the first bid."

  "You want to buy it?"

  He nodded. "I've been looking for a good hunting rifle."

  The thought of him owning Jacob's gun gave me a distinctly unsafe feeling. It seemed like a piece of evidence somehow, and I didn't want him to have it. But I couldn't think of a way to put him off.

  "I don't think it'll be a matter of bidding, Carl," I said. "You just offer me a price and it's yours."

  "How's four hundred dollars sound?"

  I gave my hand a little wave. "I'll give it to you for three hundred."

  "You're not much of a bargainer, Hank." He smiled.

  "I wouldn't want to overcharge you."

  "Four hundred's a fair price. I know my guns."

  "All right, then. Whatever you feel more comfortable with. But I'll give it to you for three."

  He frowned. I could see that he wanted to pay less now but felt like he'd trapped himself into paying four hundred.

  "How about I drop it off at your office tomorrow morning," I asked, "and you can just send me a check after you give it a closer look?"

  He nodded slowly. "That sounds like a good plan."

  We talked about other things then: the weather, Sarah, the baby. But when he rose to leave, he returned to the rifle. "You're sure you want to sell it?" he asked. "I wouldn't want to pressure you into it."

  "Can't say I have much use for it myself, Carl. Never hunted in my life."

  "Your father never took you hunting as a boy?" He seemed surprised.

  "No," I said. "I've never even shot a gun."

  "Not once?"

  I shook my head.

  He stood there before my desk, staring at me for several seconds. His hat was in his hands, and he was playing with the brim. For a moment it seemed like he might sit back down. "You'd know how to shoot one, though, wouldn't you?"

  I thought about this, suddenly cautious. His voice had changed, become less casual. He wasn't asking the question just for conversation now; he was asking because he wanted to know the answer.

  "I suppose," I said.

  He nodded, standing there as if he expected something more. I looked away, staring down at my desk, at my hands spread out across it. In the bright light from my reading lamp, the hair on the backs of my fingers looked gray. I closed them into fists.

  "How well did you know Sonny?" he asked, out of the blue.

  I glanced up at him, my heart quickening in my chest. "Sonny Major?"

  He nodded.

  "Not that well. I knew who he was, he knew who I was. That's about all."

  "Acquaintances."

  "Yes," I agreed. "We'd say hello when we passed on the street, but we wouldn't stop to talk."

  Carl took a second to absorb this. Then he put his hat on his head. He was about to leave.

  "Why?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Just wondering." He gave me a little smile.

  I believed him, could tell somehow that he was simply curious rather than suspicious: just as his feelings about my character had blinded him to the possibility of me killing Jacob and Sonny and Nancy, his feelings about Lou had made it hard to accept our story. He sensed, I think, that something was wrong with it, but he couldn't guess exactly what. He wasn't investigating; he was simply reviewing things, idly probing for missing pieces. I knew this, could see that he wasn't a threat. But still the conversation upset me. After he left, I went over and over everything I'd said, every gesture I'd made, searching for mistakes, subtle confessions of guilt. There was nothing there, of course, simply a vague aura of anxiety, growing more and more diffuse every time I tried to pin it down.

  I told Sarah about selling the rifle to the sheriff but not about his questions.

  THE NIGHT after Carl came by my office, Amanda kept us up late with her crying. We lay in bed with her, the lights out, the room dark, Sarah cuddling the baby in her arms while I wound and rewound Jacob's teddy bear. It was well after midnight before she fell asleep. Sarah and I both sat there in the silence that followed, as if stunned, terrified to move lest we startle the drowsing infant back awake. Our legs were touching beneath the blankets; I could feel Sarah's skin, a little patch of heat along my calf.

  "Hank?" she whispered.

  "What?"

  "Would you ever kill me for the money?" Her tone was playful, joking, but within it, snaking deviously through her voice, I could hear an earnest note.

  "I didn't kill them for the money," I said.

 
I sensed Sarah turning to glance at me through the darkness.

  "I did it so we wouldn't get caught. I did it to protect us."

  Amanda made a sighing sound, and Sarah rocked her back and forth. "Would you kill me to keep from getting caught, then?" she whispered. The earnest note had grown, pushing aside the playfulness.

  "Of course not," I said, sliding down onto my back. I nestled into my pillow, making a show of it, trying to end the conversation. I was facing away from her.

  "What if you knew you could get away with it, and that if you didn't, I'd turn you in?"

  "You wouldn't turn me in."

  "Let's say I had a change of heart. I wanted to confess."

  I waited a moment; then I rolled over to face her. "What're you saying?"

  Sarah was a dark shape outlined against the ceiling above me. "It's just a game. A hypothetical situation."

  I didn't say anything.

  "You'd go to jail," she said.

  "I killed them for you, Sarah. For you and Amanda."

  The bed made a creaking sound as she shifted her weight. I felt her leg move away from me. "You said you killed Pederson for Jacob."

  I thought about that for a second. It was true, but it seemed like it wasn't. I tried to work my way around it.

  "I couldn't do it," I said. "I'd just go to jail. You two are all I have." I reached out to touch her but brushed against Amanda instead. She woke up and started to cry.

  "Shhh," Sarah said. We both listened, holding our bodies still, until the baby quieted down.

  "Would you've thought you could kill Jacob before you did it?" Sarah whispered.

  "That's different. You know that."