When April explained what Samuel Mathis had done to her, Aiden knew Thad was right, that some people deserved to die. Everything he’d ever thought suddenly made sense, from the way April would sit almost trembling on the pew with her eyes straight forward as Samuel Mathis burned holes in her with his stare to the way she’d never seemed capable of loving her son. Aiden thought about that as he drove to the house. He was thinking about how much shit had been piled onto her over the course of her life when he parked a quarter mile from the driveway, shut off the headlights, and stepped into the night.
There was a chill in the air for late August, a reminder that it would not be long before summer was gone. In a little over a month, the leaves would start that slow smoldering, setting the mountains ablaze with autumnal fire. Then a few weeks after that, the color would be gone. There was something to be said for how quickly it ended. There was a lesson to be learned in that short-lived breath of beautiful. Good things never lasted, and when things fell apart, it happened in the blink of an eye. That was true for everything on this mountain.
Aiden took the tactical rifle Wayne Bryson had folded in half just seconds before he died out of the diamond-plated toolbox stretched across the bed of the Ranchero. He hit the release and checked the mag, the spring-fed magazine fully loaded with 9mm hollow-points, the copper jacket of that top bullet glowing in the moonlight. He slapped the magazine back into the pistol grip, folded the fore-end forward until the barrel locked in place, and racked the bolt to chamber the first round.
The moon lit the world with an electric blue that voided the need for any other source of light. Even from the car, Aiden could see the lights at the house showing through the woods. The road would’ve been easier, but he could not chance being seen, so he hopped the ditch into a briary thicket, where thorns tore at his pants as he walked. As soon as he reached the trees, he could see the house more clearly, the two squares of yellow light from the front windows, two more lit just the same along the side of the house. He crossed a small creek that, despite the heavy rain the night before, didn’t top his boots. Some animal he couldn’t see busted through the brush upstream when he approached, and Aiden was on such high alert that he shouldered the rifle at the sound and nearly fired into the darkness.
Trees stood on both sides of the creek, a mixed stand of poplar and oak, some old and so wide that Aiden couldn’t have stretched his arms around the trunks, some young and thin as telephone poles. There was white birch and maples and even a few scraggly locusts growing right against the bank, but there was little undergrowth. The grove of trees seemed to have been picked clean by deer, or maybe just kept up by whoever owned the property. Whatever the case, Aiden could see clearly through the spaces between the tree trunks. He could make out the field where the trees ended, the field that stretched from where he stood to the house.
The barbed wire was into his stomach before he even knew a fence was there, and when he hung against the wire, his abs seized, and that pain in his ribs froze him for a second. But he just took a step back and untangled his camouflage shirt from the barb. He grabbed hold of a thin birch and put his boot onto the wire, hopped the fence, and crept into the field. There were no horses or cows that he could see in the pasture, but they might’ve been there. The field was waist-high with oat grass, and Aiden kept to the edge of the woods until he’d reached the far side.
The locust post tying the fence together shook in his hand as he stepped up onto the barbed wire, the line swaying beneath him, and crossed onto the property. He was almost to the house now. He could see the lowboy trailer in the yard with an old mustard-colored CAT trackhoe chained down to the wooden bed. He could see the aboveground pool on the other side of the trailer, the busted-up shed just across the yard near the cars in the driveway. The night was nearly still aside from a slight breeze, but despite the coolness of the air, Aiden sweated all over. He skulked to the side of the house and stood with his back against the clapboards, the porch just around the corner. The television was loud and he could hear the words muffled through the walls. He knew who he was looking for was just on the other side.
Turning the corner, Aiden slunk onto the edge of the porch and spun his legs onto the planks. He crawled from there until he was beside the window, his cheek almost flush against the shutter as he lifted his head past the sill and peered inside. The man he was looking for was right there in front of him. Leland Bumgarner was on the far end of the couch with his eyes focused on something Aiden couldn’t see. The television must have been against the front wall, just past the window and past the door, somewhere on the other side from where Aiden was prowling. Leland wore a pair of blue jeans plastered with dried concrete. His shirt was off, and Aiden could see some dark tattoo on the left side of his chest, some shape he couldn’t make out. There was a cross inked from his shoulder down his arm, and he was spinning a gold can of Miller High Life on his knee, his bare feet kicked onto the table in front of him.
The youngest boy was in pajamas with blue pants and long blue sleeves on a white shirt that had a picture of Spider Man swinging through a city on the front. The boy had his feet toward his father and was lying down on the couch with his head in his mother’s lap. Karen was at the other end of the couch and she was running her fingers through the boy’s hair. A pair of shorts rode high on her legs, the boy’s head against her bare skin, and she wore a tank top that hugged tight to her chest. Behind her at the dining room table, the older boy had his head braced in one hand and scribbled with a pencil on a loose sheet of paper, a textbook open and spread in front of him.
Aiden’s first thought was how perfect they all looked. It was as if he were peering through a window into everything he’d ever wanted. What if he’d been the one to date Karen in high school? What if this was his family, if she’d been his wife and those had been his boys, or even if he’d just grown up in a family like that? Some folks just didn’t realize how good they had it. Some people had every fucking thing in the world and took it all for granted. Leland was one of those people. He’d always had it all and it filled Aiden with anger. Leland Bumgarner was the reason everything had gone so badly. Leland Bumgarner was the reason the world fell apart.
Aiden clenched the rifle so tightly that his hands felt numb. Leland turned up his beer and sucked back the last drops of Miller before he crunched the can in his fist and stood from the couch. He hovered there for a second and rubbed circles around his stomach with his empty hand, watching the television, waiting for the break to commercial. The sound of some woman selling a facial scrub on the television was clear as day through the wall. Aiden watched as Leland headed into the dining room and then the kitchen, all of his movements visible across the open floor plan of the house.
Leland tossed the empty can into the trash by the cabinets and swung open the door of the refrigerator to grab another beer. When he came back and sat down and popped the top and threw back that can for another swig, Aiden would bust through the front door and fire the first shot before Leland had time to lower his head. After that, he would swing the gun and fire the second shot into Karen. He would have to. She would recognize him. He couldn’t stand the thought of seeing her as he pulled the trigger so he’d close his eyes and squeeze. The boys would be running by then and they’d tear off into the back of the house into their rooms. There’d be so much happening and they’d be so filled with terror that there would be no way they’d get a good luck at him, no way they’d be able to give an accurate description.
Leland stepped off the tile into the dining room and walked up behind his oldest son. He stared down at what the boy was doing and said something that Aiden couldn’t make out, and the boy looked up at his father and scrunched a funny face. Leland said something else, then tousled the boy’s hair and jumped away. The boy reared back and threw the pencil at his father, and Leland braced like he was about to be hit by a train. When the pencil bounced off Leland’s stomach, the two of them laughed and Leland headed back toward the couch while the older boy scuttled across the floor to pick up his pencil.
Leland was still laughing and smiling when he got back to the couch. He set his beer down on the coffee table and hovered over the smaller boy, who still lay across the cushions with his head in his mother’s lap. Karen looked up at her husband and the boy started to grin as Leland lifted his hands over his head with his fingers gnarled like claws. All of a sudden he sprang down on his son and dug his hands into the child’s ribs. The boy immediately tightened into a ball and writhed with laughter, his head rolling in his mother’s lap, his legs pedaling against the air. Aiden rose to his feet.
Something Aiden had never remembered until right then flooded his mind and consumed him. He could not have been more than five or six years old. His father had come home early from work and Aiden was out in the yard rolling a Tonka dump truck across the bumpy ground. When he was little, he played with that truck every day, no telling how much dirt he moved, the yellow all but gone from rain and snow and sun. His father came barreling across the grass, and before Aiden even had time to look up he was in the air. His father scooped him from the ground and swung him up into the sky, letting go of his body. All of his weight seemed to rush into his chest as he flew upward, Aiden just floating there for a moment before falling back into his father’s hands. When he came down, his father laid Aiden onto his back in the grass and tickled him until he couldn’t breathe. Aiden thought in that moment that a boy could die of laughter. He believed that a child could literally suffocate from happiness. These were things he had never thought of since. These were feelings he had forgotten until right then.
He was startled by where he was and what he was doing. He knew then that he could not go through with it. For all his faults, Leland Bumgarner seemed to be a good father. Despite what he’d done to Aiden and Thad, Leland loved his sons. If Aiden pulled the trigger, he would fulfill the nightmare that had haunted him his entire life. He’d be setting those two boys up to be just like him. He would become his father. Aiden couldn’t imagine anyone else having to see what he’d seen, having to see what he couldn’t stop seeing. He could hear that voice just like in his dream, that voice declaring that, “In the end, blood always tells,” but for the first time he knew that it didn’t have to be that way. These things weren’t set in stone. A man had choices. Aiden had a choice and he needed to leave. He needed to turn around and leave. And as all those thoughts rushed over him, Aiden was standing directly in front of the window. The boy was still laughing and Leland was still giving him fits and Aiden looked over at Karen, that simple turn of his head being some visible thing that she must’ve seen, because right then their eyes met and her eyes widened and her mouth opened slowly. She started pushing herself off the couch.
“Leland,” she said, her husband paying her no attention. “Leland! There’s someone on the porch!”
Leland Bumgarner let go of his son and turned toward his wife almost confusedly before he looked over his shoulder. Aiden met his eyes, and while he knew that Leland could see him standing there, he didn’t know whether or not Leland could make out his face in such darkness. The minute their eyes met, Aiden took off running across the porch. He jumped into the yard and that pain surged into his ribs and he almost fell from how bad it hurt, but only stumbled and cut around the back of the house because that was the nearest place to find trees, the nearest place he could hide. The field that stretched to the side of the house seemed so empty and so vast that he knew he didn’t stand a chance of making it out the way he’d come. He needed to find some new way out, so he shot up the hillside where the root cellar was buried and broke through the brush and the trees until he was in something so thick that everything was snapping around him, limbs and vines and bushes beating against him, and still, farther he ran. He didn’t stop until he had crested the slope and had found some ledge of flat ground, where he hit the dirt. He looked down and saw the lights flick on at the corners of the house. Leland’s yard was illuminated as he made his way into the backyard with a shotgun in his hands.
Aiden lay out of breath where he could see but not be seen, trying his best not to breathe, to keep entirely still. He watched as Leland stood at the base of the hill and scanned the trees to make sense of shadows and darkness. Aiden waited there a long time, scared to move. Leland seemed to be listening for a sound, some small crack of a twig snapping beneath a footstep, to give him a sign of where the person had gone, to give him some place at which to draw his aim. But Aiden did not move. He stayed put until his breathing slowed and only the sounds of the night remained. There was no time too great. Aiden crouched there waiting. He had no place to go and had already seen forever.