“I’m not fixed with him one way or another, Grant. We mostly leave each other alone. Does that answer your question?”
Grant nodded, frowning.
“I used to be the same,” he said. “It was a challenge for my wife, who was raised Catholic.” He opened his hands and observed the two white pools that were his palms. Then he told Billy the story he’d told the boy: of the two sixteen-year-old girls, Angela and Faith, twins, and their baby sister on the dock. Told him of the splash and the dive and the mouth-to-mouth while Faith didn’t come up, and she didn’t come up.
Billy tapped ash into a glass ashtray. “Your wife lost her Faith,” he said, and Grant said, “Yes, but it brought her closer to God. Now she understood him better. Understood that he saw to all things in the world, the beautiful and the ugly. The joyful and the heinous. There was nothing he didn’t touch. No beautiful summer day on the lake without him nor dead twin sister on that same day. He was whimsical and violent and hard but this was better, much better, than a godless world that was whimsical and violent and hard. Because you could not talk to the world. You could not pray to it or love it or damn it to hell. With the world there could be no discussion, and with no discussion there could be no terms, and with no terms there could be no grace.”
“Or damnation,” Billy said, and Grant said, “No, that was damnation. You mind if I smoke one of these?”
Billy told him to help himself, and he did.
They were silent, smoking. The moon sat in the very corner of the glass as if lodged there. The grandfather clock tocked away.
“I didn’t understand any of this until my daughter was taken from me,” Grant said. “I never talked to God, not even to ask him to watch over my children. I believed that the terrible things that happened in this world every day could not happen to me, to my family. I suppose every man believes that. Until shown otherwise, he believes no evil can touch the people he protects with his love. Then, one day, another man takes his daughter from him. Simply grabs her and takes her. He has no name and no face, this man, and he vanishes back into the darkness and he takes the man’s daughter there with him. What can he do, this father, in the face of such cruelty, but ask the God he never believed in to bring her back? And if he won’t bring her back, or show him how to find her, then some other deal must be made. Some other terms. I never believed in God like I never really believed in the truly bad man. In his power to touch me.”
The cigarette ash flared, then dimmed.
“Now I ask of this God, that if he will not give me my daughter back, at least give me my bad man. At least give me that. I spend my nights dreaming of nothing else. Of getting this man in my hands. I wake up with the taste of his blood in my mouth, only to find I’ve ground some tooth until my gums have bled, or I’ve bitten through my lip.”
He paused. He drew on his cigarette. He seemed almost to smile.
“For a time,” he said, “I would see a man and follow him. It could be any man, going about his business. I’d watch and I’d follow, driving sometimes to the man’s very house. I couldn’t help myself. Like the man I sought. Sick to my bones. I believe your brother, Joe, came up with this arrangement down here as a way to keep me away from those men up there in the mountains.”
They smoked, the clouds from their lungs merging and seething in the space between them. Somewhere in the room was a small constant buzzing, as of some feverish insect.
“So,” said Grant. “That’s how I’m fixed with God. If he will not give me my daughter back, then he owes me one bad man. And you want to know the hell of it? The hell of it, Billy, is that I don’t give a damn anymore if it’s even the right bad man. I have reached the point where any bad man will do.”
Billy appeared to study the tip of his cigarette. He tugged at the hair under his lip.
“And you get to decide that, do you? You get to decide if a man is bad enough to kill or not? That’s thinking kind of highly of yourself, isn’t it?”
“Deciding won’t have a thing to do with it, Billy.”
“It won’t.”
“No.”
“What will then?”
Grant looked at his hands. The pale weave of fingers. “God,” he said.
“God,” said Billy, and Grant nodded.
“If God put that man on that path to take my little girl, then I expect him to put a man on my path too. I’m demanding it.”
“And how will you know him, Grant? How will you recognize this bad man God has sent you?”
“That’s the easy part,” said Grant, and he looked up from his hands and Billy saw his eyes in their sockets like small openings to some blue flame of the skull. “I will know this man because he will be the next man who attempts to hurt anyone I love.”
Billy stared at him and Grant stared back from the chair and they remained that way in silence for a long time, until finally Grant reached forward and crushed the cigarette in the glass ashtray, and placed his hands on his knees and pushed himself up. He appeared beset by some brute weariness as he bent to collect the shotgun from where it leaned against the chairback.
“That’s what I got to thinking about over there,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t sleep.”
Billy watched the gun in the dark, the moon’s blue scrollwork along the barrels. Grant turned for the door and stopped. Neither of them knew how long the old man had been standing there, but when they saw him they knew he’d been standing there long enough.
“Sorry to wake you, Em,” Grant said, and eased himself by and descended the stairs, and Emmet watched him go until he reached the landing and turned the corner and was gone.
He turned to look at his boy in the bed. “What the hell did you do?”
“Me? Are you blind now too? Didn’t you see your buddy there with a shotgun in my bedroom in the middle of the night?”
Emmet had not put on a housecoat and under the thin pajamas he appeared to shake.
“I want you outta this house.”
“What? What was that?”
“I said I want you out of this house. I’m all give out, Billy.”
Billy stared at him, then fell back on his pillow in the moonlight, laughing.
“You crazy old man,” he said. “You can’t kick me outta my own goddam house.”
“I ain’t, son. I’m kicking you outta mine.”
He lay there, his eyes on the ceiling. Then he moved, and Emmet saw something flash in the center of the room like the blink of some ghostly eye, or a spinning moon, an instant before some other thing shattered on the door trim to the left of his head. He stood a moment looking at the wreckage of glass and cigarette butts on the floor, and then he backed away, closing the door behind him.