“We’re going to make you a fucking ghost, brah!” Mike’s words echoed across the prairie and up into the mountains. Then Hawley heard their boots traveling over his head and their voices began to fade. He knew he was safe when the prairie dogs started up again with their weeping.
Hawley stayed squeezed inside the hole like it was his own tomb. He waited for the men to come back. He waited for what felt like hours. He waited with the beetles and worms and millipedes and ants, his mouth gasping at the tunnel, ready to taste the night on his lips, until the pain he felt became not pain anymore, but a creature eating into his flesh, clamping down with piercing jaws each time he kicked against it, and he pushed and punched and tore away at the ground and he stomped the pain beneath him and it was like stumbling through the dark, it was like the murky bottom of the lake that had taken Lily, and it made him dig harder and faster, until his fingernails broke and bled and he began to breathe dirt and sand. The earth was inside and outside and all around him, but he was moving, he could feel his body making its way, and then he touched the grass and he was rolling out of the burrow and onto the open field, every inch of him covered in dust.
It wasn’t as dark as he imagined it would be. The sky was clear overhead and the stars so multitudinous that they brightened the landscape to the edges of the horizon. Hawley covered his mouth to stifle his coughing, tried to gather some saliva and rid himself of the grit that had covered his teeth. Then he dug his filthy fingers up his nose to clear his nostrils and scraped the dirt from his ears until he could hear again.
The lights were on inside Nunn’s trailer. The windows were open and the men were arguing, their voices slurred. Hawley tore off a piece of his shirt, tied it around his leg, then crawled slowly across the dry ground, past the tunnels of the prairie dogs, until the voices of the dogs and the voices of the men started to meld together, and then he was coming up to the trailer, and he was right underneath the window. He was so close that he could smell the beer that had spilled—the foam and the busted cans across the floor.
“You think my parole officer is going to believe that shit? Some guy showing up out of nowhere and blowing Nunn’s head off? We gotta clean this up. We gotta clean all this up.”
“Shit, brah. Look at him.”
“I don’t wanna look.”
“So what do you wanna do? Bury him someplace?”
“Fire’s better. Fire happens all the time.”
“All right, but I’m gonna play him some music first. He liked music, didn’t he?”
They put on one of Nunn’s old country records. Hawley could hear the slide guitar, and a twangy voice singing. If you’ve got the money honey, I’ve got the time.
Hawley limped over to Mike and Ike’s Jeep. He could get in and drive off before they made it outside. He could leave and not come back. But then there would be loose ends, and he couldn’t have any loose ends anymore. Hawley went back to his car. The shotgun was somewhere out on the prairie, but the rifle was just where he’d left it, hidden underneath the front seat. He pulled his satchel carefully through the broken windshield. He opened the orange toolbox and gave himself a shot of morphine. Then he wrapped his leg in a pressure bandage. He checked the rifle and got a few extra mags loaded and left them on the hood of the car. He grabbed his knife, a pair of pliers and two roadside flares. He waited to see if the men had heard him. Then he slid beneath the trailer on his back.
It was damp and full of spiderwebs in the crawl space between the trailer and the ground. Hawley listened to the music and the men talking, and slowly pulled himself along until he reached the propane tank. He cut the lines and redirected them and opened the pressure valve as far as it would go. He lit the roadside flares next and slid them up into the air vents. He crawled back out and got between the two cars, with a clear line to the trailer door. He picked up the rifle.
Through the window, he saw the flames shoot up from the stove. The men did not even notice at first. And then there was a crackling noise in the air, and the propane blew, and the lights went out, and the trailer caught on fire. He could hear both men screaming. The first one, Ike, burst through the door, and Hawley shot him cleanly through the head, and the man’s body crumpled and fell against the trough. Then he heard some shuffling and realized the other one was climbing out the back window. He went around the trailer and there was Mike, half in and half out, his leather vest caught on the ripped screen. He was carrying the Magnum. The side of his face was burnt and he was aiming wildly. He shot off all the rounds. Hawley spun the rifle and knocked the piece from his hand. Then he picked the Magnum up from the ground and reloaded while the man struggled and cried out.
“God, Jesus, no, brah, Jesus, no, please.”
The man kept talking, kept saying God’s name out into the cold night air. Hawley shot him with the Magnum again and again, remembering the power of it going into his own leg, counting the bullets now, one after the next, listening to them strike bone and flesh and the metal of the trailer until the cylinder was empty and he had made enough holes, and the voices stopped coming out of them.
Hawley shoved Mike’s body back through the window. Then he went around front and opened the trailer door and lifted Ike and tossed him down into the smoke. The fire had spread to the curtains. Nunn’s body was on the bed, a blanket tossed over his face. On the table, the record player was still spinning. Hawley slammed the door. He hot-wired the Jeep and backed it up and attached it to the trailer and then drove the trailer to the edge of the hill. Then he unhitched the burning tin can and began to push. The morphine had kicked in. He couldn’t feel the pain in his leg anymore.
The hitch was low and Hawley had to lean down and wedge his shoulder against the metal wall, which was getting hot from the fire. The coach was heavier than he’d expected. Like he was lifting the whole world onto his shoulders. He forced Frederick Nunn and Mike and Ike and even Lily out of his mind. And he thought of Loo. Only Loo. Three years old. Still alive. Still breathing.