“Who do you think—the Mexicans.”
Art stood there blinking at him, the tentative expression gone now, subsumed in something harder. He looked pained, looked angry, as if he’d been shot himself, Art Tolleson, friend, neighbor, former colleague, a lifelong bachelor in his early fifties who taught English at the high school, and whether his sexual orientation had been a matter of conjecture in the faculty lounge or not never factored into the school board’s perception of him because he drew students like a magnet, male and female alike, and never a complaint or even the hint of one. He had a high nasal English teacher’s voice and a slack body, but as if in compensation—and to still rumors—he dressed as if he’d been born and raised in a logging camp, workboots, jeans, plaid shirts, and made a point of attending the full range of sporting events at the school. He hunted in the fall. Fished in the spring. And he’d done Sten a huge favor by taking the house off his hands, though the day he took possession was a disaster, every window in the place smashed out, glass everywhere, the coffee table staved in and the toilet in the guest room—Adam’s room—shattered in porcelain fragments that lay scattered across the floor like unearthed bones, the water three inches deep and flowing out under the door. Sten had cleaned up the place himself, paid for everything, and he and Carolee had put Art up in the guest room at their place till the glazier got done because it was the least they could do. As for Adam, he hadn’t laid eyes on him since—or heard from him—and that was a month ago. “He needs help,” was what he said to Carolee, but what he was thinking, exhausted now, fed up, terminal, was Goodbye and good riddance; there’s no paternal or even human sympathy left because the well has run dry. It’s dried-up and blown away.
“What are you talking about? What Mexicans?”
Art should have been wearing glasses but he wasn’t—contacts, had he gotten contacts? Or what, laser surgery? Art gave him a strained look, ever so slightly myopic. “They found him last night, up on the north logging road—you know, the one where there were all those downed trees last spring?”
He didn’t have anything to say to this. He was picturing the Mexican with the pistol tucked in his waistband, the Don’t-Fuck-With-Me clown with the scooped-out face. That picture went gray and broadened out till it was like a shovel whacking him in the back of the head. His blood pressure rocketed. Here it was, right in your face. The only surprise was that it hadn’t come sooner.
Art, myopic Art, was studying him out of his dull brown eyes, expecting some sort of response, but Sten was thinking about Carey, trying to picture him, and drawing a blank. All he could see was the Mexican, duplicated over and over again.
“They shot him twice is what I hear and left him there to die. That was night before last so there’s no telling how long he suffered. And then”—he hesitated, his eyes jumping in their sockets—“the animals got to him. After he was dead, I mean. Or I think. I hope.”
There was nothing to say but he had to say something so he said, “All right,” and what that meant—I’ve heard enough or I feel your outrage or The tank’s full—he couldn’t have said himself.
Art said, “We’ve got to do something.”
“Yeah,” Sten said, or heard himself say because he wasn’t all there yet, “definitely. Definitely we have to do something.”
“You have a gun?” Art’s tone was nasal but elevated with emotion, and he might have been reading out a line from David Mamet or Arthur Miller to his drama class. You have a gun?
Sten didn’t answer him, or not directly, because he didn’t want to go down that road because that road led to people getting shot in the woods, led to poor Carey with his hot head and thumping knee getting it not once but twice until he was dead, dead, dead. Take Back Our Forests. Fine. Sure. But not that way. “They ought to call out the National Guard,” he said. “Sweep the whole fucking forest.”
“That’s an idea. Really. That’s what they ought to do.” A pause, a look, direct, eyeball to eyeball. “But Carey’s dead. And they’re still out there. Right now. Laughing, probably laughing about it.”