After a long moment spent lingering in the doorway, he steps inside and shuts the door. He stands alone for another moment in the murky dark. The air is still stagnant, just as stale as he remembers it from that night, but now it’s tinged with an ambient tang of cleaning products. He flicks on his flashlight, swings its beam around the room, focusing his search. He figures it’s better not to turn the overhead lights on and spook anyone who might notice him poking around. Part of him doesn’t want to be here at all—more than part of him, to be truthful. Cooper shines his beam over the chair where Colfax died. He spotlights the dark brown oval stain on the floral upholstery. No amount of scrubbing could remove that, apparently.
He gets on his hands and knees and rubs his palm lightly over the shag carpet, a foot or so from the chair. When Greta and her crew were cleaning up, they would have focused on the blood, not on finding a shell, which would have ejected in the opposite direction. Maybe one of them thought to check for it and never mentioned it to Cooper, or maybe they vacuumed the carpet and sucked up the shell with a rattle without even knowing it, and the shell is gone forever, but he doubts it. Just as he’s contemplating these possibilities his palm rolls over a hard cylinder in the shag, and there it is. He picks it up and holds it in the flashlight’s glare: a spent 9 mm shell. He pinches it between his fingertips and inspects it, then pockets it.
Then he stands up and walks to the wall adjacent to the chair and shines his light over the painted cinder block. Now this wall, they did a real good job of scrubbing. Cooper remembers well just how much blood there was that night. Now there’s not a trace. Maybe a faint tint, if you look long enough. And the bullet shouldn’t be too hard to find, he thinks. One nice thing about cinder block is that no round is going to penetrate it, and given how close Colfax’s chair is to the wall, the gun was basically fired point-blank into the cinder block, with only Colfax’s skull to impede its journey.
Cooper traces his flashlight beam over the wall until he finds the point of impact, a small but unmistakable pockmark. He rubs his thumb over it. No bullet lodged in there—not deep enough. So he gets on his knees again and searches. He wonders again if maybe they found the slug in the cleanup. No one mentioned finding a bullet, but then, he’s not sure they would have thought it worth mentioning. After all, there wasn’t any doubt among them about what had happened in this bungalow: Colfax put a bullet in his brain. In a way, it made sense. Colfax was always a recluse. A gun had gone missing in the town. And who among them hadn’t thought at least once of ending it, in that way or some other, during their long tenure here?
As Cooper searches blindly, groping along the floor, he remembers Colfax’s body, the way it slumped awkwardly sideways in that floral La-Z-Boy chair. Colfax was not the first dead body Cooper had ever encountered, but it was the first he’d seen that had been so violently ended. During his time as a prison guard, he’d seen a few stiffs gurneyed out: diabetic shock, a heart attack, each body gray and unmistakably stilled. Colfax was different. Cooper was profoundly struck at the time by the disorder of it all—the anarchic pattern painted by bodily innards so powerfully ejected. The thought of just how inadequate the body’s natural defenses—skull, bone, brain—were in the face of the advanced physics—lead, gunpowder, momentum—of invented death. It all seemed so absurd to him: that a life comprising so many accumulated years could be interrupted with such indifferent swiftness. The fundamental fragility of it. The truth of it lingers with Cooper still. How quickly and casually it all ends. Unlike the other longtime residents of the Blinds, the ones he’s been tasked to protect, he does not enjoy the privilege of forgetting what he’s seen. He remembers everything.
His fingers find it first. It’s wedged in a crack in the baseboard where the floor meets the wall. Cooper wiggles his finger in until he gets hold of the slug, then retrieves the misshapen round and studies it under his flashlight. God, he’s getting old, he thinks, his eyes are going, especially in low light. He holds the bullet closer until his eyes can finally focus and it snaps into detail, this misshapen killer. He’s amazed that the bullet’s still here, frankly, after all this time, just waiting for him to find it, but then, where else would it go? Its job is long over. Just like the people in this town. It served its one purpose and now it’s been discarded and forgotten.
Except this bullet has one more job, Cooper thinks: To be a witness. To be bagged and sent to Agent Rigo, in Amarillo, to tell him everything it knows. To be compared with the bullet that killed Gable and, possibly, to confirm that they were both fired from the very same gun. Which, if true, would mean that both Colfax and Gable were likely murdered, and likely by the same hand. It’s possible the bullet is too damaged, too mashed, to reveal anything useful, but then again, as the people in this town can attest, even the profoundly damaged sometimes have useful stories to tell. Even if those stories are later wiped away. Some stories are probably better lost forever, never remembered, never told.
This bullet here, for example, thinks Cooper, has quite the story to tell, if it’s ever allowed to tell it. For starters, it was definitely fired from the same gun that killed Hubert Gable.
Same finger pulled the trigger both times, too.
But then, Cooper already knows the story of this bullet, from the moment it left the gun.
Given he’s the one who fired it.
He considers the bullet a moment longer, then drops it in his pocket, alongside the spent 9 mm shell.
Cooper raises a glass.
Happy birthday. To forty-five.
He drinks.
Forty-five, he thinks, is basically a quick spit’s distance from fifty. And fifty, he knows, is the moment in life when you stop looking forward and wondering what kind of person you might become, and start looking backward and wondering how you became the person you are.
He sits at his kitchen table under the light of a single pendant lamp. It’s nearly midnight. A half-drunk bottle of bourbon is on the table before him, and the half-drunk Cooper contemplates it.
He refills his glass. Holds it aloft.
Here’s to the person you might have been, and to the person you have become. May they never meet in a dark alley.
He downs it.
Then Cooper sets the glass aside and begins to count his scars.
It’s an annual ritual, every year on his birthday, like revisiting a topographical map of his past misadventures and mistakes. He starts with the crescent-shaped scar on his elbow, earned at age eight, during a brief experimentation with skateboards. Eventually, he decided that it was hard enough to keep your feet under yourself in this world without adding the complication of wheels.