Yeah, well, it’s important. That’s all I mean.
Nat turned back to the targets and sighted quickly and squeezed and closed his eyes and fired and squinted and again the water jug remained there, unmoving. Dang, he said. In his mind, he could see her naked on his stained mattress, the Van Halen poster above them. Her breasts were small and had felt soft and warm in his hands.
The shadow at the bottom of the shallow draw had shifted as they spoke, crawling sideways across them both. His stomach was a tight ball now, a tight hot ball. So you’re in love, he said. Rick Harris is in love.
Yeah, I guess so, he said. I guess I am.
Didn’t see that coming, Nat said.
Me neither, Rick said. He took another draw on the cigarette. Goddamn, he said. Goddamn.
Nat tried to speak but his throat felt small and tight and the only sound he could make was a faint, dry rasp. He coughed and looked back down the draw at the water jug and the cans. They seemed in motion now, as if adrift on some ocean that was invisible all around them. He breathed in slowly but the motion did not stop.
Hey, let’s blow this fucking thing to pieces, Rick said.
Nat had not heard him come but Rick stood next to him now, the pistol held up in the air before him.
Hang on, Nat said. He reached down and levered a shell into the chamber.
You ready now?
Ready.
Rick leveled the pistol, both hands gripping the handle. Then he counted to three.
Nat squinted against the sound. Rick squeezed off shot after the shot. The cans jumped and fell. The water jug remained. Nat stood with the rifle against his shoulder and aimed and aimed and kept his eyes open, his broken finger pointing down at the targets. Then he squeezed off a round and watched the water jug as it exploded at last.
13
ALL WEEK CAME THE SNOW AND WITH IT A SERIES OF BLEAK dreams that he awoke from each morning in confusion and terror, a night spent scrambling through a blizzarding forest gone black and malevolent, his movement hindered by snow that lay everywhere in his path, clinging to him even as it seemed liquid, fluid, like quicksand. He did not know how many hours he labored in those frozen and claustrophobic landscapes but when he awoke at last it was, each time, to the muffled and strangling darkness of a trailer nearly buried, as if the waking world had come to mirror the dream he had fled, the details of which blew away with each gust of the storm, leaving only the sense of it—fear, panic, terror—his body shaking with cold even though the trailer itself was warm, the propane heater at a low constant hum. And yet he awoke trembling, as if somehow his skeleton had frozen in the night and he woke with cold dry bones everywhere inside him.
Each morning and evening he dug the snow away from the door, creating a burrow that led up to the surface, where all night and day fresh snow fell. By Friday morning it had reached the base of the windows and a heavy drift had accumulated on the trailer’s west side: a clean slope broken only by his dug-out passage, a partial tunnel that led, at a short diagonal, up to the surface. Each morning a new layer of snow had crept up past the bottom of the door so that he would pull the door open and find an icy wall, as if someone had built a second door to mirror the first. One morning he dug the area down nearly to the frozen dirt, the filtered cloudlight coming through the rim of the tunnel so that the whole tube glowed faintly, sky blue and luminous, the stairs he had cut into its side with the blade of the shovel leading into a storm that seemed as if it would never end.
The power had been cutting in and out since Tuesday and the phone service as well but midweek the snow turned to ice in the night and when he awoke in the morning its evidence sparkled on every surface—tree branch and gate rail and on the trailer itself—as if the world he knew had tipped into some other, a world where everything was coated in the transitory and liminal substance of a fairy tale. There had been no power since that night but through some miracle the phone continued to function, although he knew it was only a matter of time until he lost that as well.