“Amish guy?”
Billy and the chicken a blur at the periphery of my vision. My mind rushing and racing. Billy lifts the bird by the neck, lifts it high as if considering the weight. Houdini’s eyes follow the squawking, flapping victim.
This Amish guy, Sandy says, Billy encountered down in Rotary proper. “He was in town, putting up signs, basically. Odd jobs, concrete work. Will work for food, you know.” She looks at me, sees my intent expression—concrete work, I’m thinking, just two little words, concrete work—she keeps talking. “It was funny, actually, I was just telling Billy we had to make ourselves a coop for these damn things, and he says he’s got no idea how to do that. Half hour later, we run into these guys.”
“These guys? There were more than one of the Amish guys?”
“No. One Amish guy. A big guy, older guy, big thick beard, black with gray in it. Must have come from down county, that’s where they live out here. But he had a couple of foreigners with him, you know?”
“Foreigners, as in CIs.”
“Yeah. Exactly. CIs. Confused-looking sons of bitches. Chinese maybe? I don’t know. But they didn’t say a word, they just worked. Worked hard, by the way. The Amish guy, though, he was calling the shots.”
“Did you get his name?”
“You know what? I did not. I know Billy didn’t. I think we just called him Amish Guy for the four hours he was here. He didn’t laugh, but he answered to it.”
Billy presses the chicken’s small pinched face down on the top of an upside-down wooden crate to hold it still. The chicken angles his head upward by instinct so it seems to be staring straight ahead, while Billy’s big hand steadies the wriggling round body. He brings the axe down in one long sweeping arc, slams the blade through the chicken’s tiny neck, and blood shoots out in all directions. Billy turns his head away, just for a second, an expression of pure horror and disgust. The chicken’s body jumps and he holds it steady with his hands. Houdini comes to life, barking like mad, watching the twitching corpse of the chicken, the blood spouting from the open neck.
I pick up the pencil again and I get back into it with Sandy, taking everything down, writing quickly, all the new information, progressing rapidly toward the end of the notebook. Amish guy, up from down county—how far away is down county?—down county is forty miles. Two catastrophe immigrants on the crew with him—Asian men, anyway—but you’re sure he was the boss—he was the boss. Concrete work—you asked him to do the coop in concrete—no, he suggested it, he knows concrete, the hell do we know …
My fingers gripping the pencil in the old familiar way, my heart doing the thing it does when I’m working, soaking up facts like a sponge, really gunning and going. Sandy’s eyes are wide and amused as I nod and nod and echo her words, circle back to get things right, breathing fast, experiencing a welcome burst of self-confidence, a belief in myself as possessing the instincts and the intelligence to do this work properly. Five years? Ten?
I realize that my eyes are closed, I’m thinking hard, and then I open them and find that Sandy is staring at me—no, not staring, gazing, looking me over with a kind of abstract interest, and for a brief strange second it’s like she can see into my skull, watch the thoughts in there rotating and spiraling and orbiting each other in patterns.
I clear my throat, cough slightly. There is a trickle of sweat running down her chest, disappearing into the space between her breasts.
“What was her name?” she says.
“Who?”
“The woman. Any woman. One of the women.”
I blush. I look at the floor, then back up at her. She had reminded me of Alison Koechner, but it’s Naomi that I say. I whisper the name—“Naomi.”
Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling—not love, but the thing that feels like love—bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other—a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this. Sandy smells like cigarettes and beer. I kiss her hard for a long time and then we pull apart. The moon is up and full and bright, coming through the kitchen windows of the RV.