I held perfectly still, staring at the bag and listening. I stared and listened and prayed that my ears had played a trick on me. Then I heard it again. Unmistakable. A human breath. My eyes widened, and my skin crawled, and my heart—already racing—lurched crazily. For an instant my whole life nearly forked differently as I imagined the cold days of my future warmed by the knowledge of this one decent thing I’d done. But I hadn’t done it—not yet, not ever—and then the instant was over, and what I saw was how this canvas bag in front of me was all that lay between me and the rest of my life, and I raised the shovel and brought it down and began to smash the bag as hard as I could. Again and again and again. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times. And I wasn’t only hitting the bag, I was stabbing it with the shovel’s sharp point. I was massacring it. I was no longer Will Walker—I was an animal in the woods and I was making this other animal go away. Nothing would be left when I was done. I was going to turn the contents of that bag to soup.
I don’t know how much time passed, but when Nolan returned I was sitting on the ground, hands tucked into my armpits, shivering because my sweat had turned cold, the shovel lying beside me in the dirt.
I let him dig awhile.
27
Three years passed before I saw any of them again.
Nolan lost the election. Would the extra money for his campaign have made a difference? It’s anyone’s guess. The 2004 election was more a referendum on George W. Bush than anything else, and Nolan was a Democrat running in a Republican state with gay marriage on the ballot. From the news stories I read online, he seemed to have fought a good fight. But how could his heart have been in it? He lost by eight percentage points and, following his concession speech, dropped out of the news, relegated by an unforgiving political machine to the status of burned-out firecracker. Not a has-been, but an almost-was. I don’t know what he’s doing now. I haven’t asked.
Evan made partner. I read this in the “Class Notes” section of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. I assume his life now is much as it was before he made partner, except there is more of everything: more money, more hours, more responsibility, more anxiety. I thought briefly about sending him a congratulatory e-mail, but then thought better of it. There was no way he’d want to hear from me.
Nor did I correspond with Jeffrey. A couple of times he e-mailed me—short, polite messages hoping that Cynthia and I were well. I never replied, and in time his messages stopped. Despite the kidnapping, I didn’t resent him. In fact, I felt bad for him. He’d come to my town battered and bruised, and left with nothing. That saddened me, but not enough to communicate with him ever again.
Without my money or anyone else’s—the two million got wired exactly as we’d all agreed—Long-Shot Records got put on indefinite hold. To avoid thinking too hard about what had happened, I started spending long hours in the studio. And gradually the unexpected happened: I stopped thinking of the studio as the place where we’d kidnapped a girl and started thinking of it as a place for music again. Joey began to take more notice of my work and to see the studio’s full potential. He invested money to refurbish. With digital recording technology exploding, he was able to modernize the place without spending a fortune. Word spread about the studio and the work I did there. We weren’t a record label, and we didn’t plan to become one, but several indie labels started sending their bands to us to record their albums. My name started appearing on liner notes under engineer and, occasionally, producer. I started to pull in better money for the studio and some for myself, too—enough that Cynthia and I began to talk about moving out of Newfield and buying a place of our own.