IT HAD BEEN dark by the time Victor strode out of Jon Merryfield’s office. He’d stopped by the Canaan Police station to speak with the woman cop, but she had not been in. He’d called and left a message with the state police for Detective North to call him as soon as he could.
Since then, he’d walked about town, too nerved up to go home, trying to get his thoughts straight, and going over his notes to tell the police all of it at one time, collected and calculated. They would press him, and he had to have the story perfect. The memories clear.
Now, as he walked around town, he kept thinking, It’s going to be all right. My boy is going to be all right. He would reveal all, even if it meant losing Fran and Brad; he’d do it in order to save his son.
He’d confess and when they heard the motive, they’d have someone to investigate, to give reasonable doubt regarding Brad.
The girl had been killed in Jon’s house after all.
They’d see. They had to.
Victor shivered. The temperature had crashed and the night air felt cold enough to crack glass. The town lay barren.
The frozen sidewalk made the footing treacherous. Victor’s feet went out from under him and he fell, cracking an elbow hard on the concrete.
He sat, cradling his elbow. Bewildered.
The ice melted beneath him and the concrete’s cold seeped through his jeans. As he reached out for a nearby bench to get support, he heard a scream.
It came violently.
Followed by shouting.
The baying of the wounded.
Victor cocked his head like a dog sensing the distant danger of the enraged master he’d run away from but who now was gaining ground and would find and beat him. But the shouting was not that of a master yelling at his hound. It was that of two men, railing.
And more than that too.
More than heated words, more than anger and threats.
It was wrath. Lunatic. Animal. Incandescent. And it was pain. Feral and unchained.
And it was something else, too, that Victor could taste but could not yet name.
The two voices ruptured the night air with their fury, entangled. They melded into one voice that rose up as if from the earth itself, as if the two voices were two souls trying to rend themselves loose of their purgatory, and only the one whose screams rose above the other could free itself of the hatred that bound it.
The cries were full of blood, and cut into Victor as cleanly as a scalpel between his ribs. He had lived with such shouting as a boy. How his father had howled.
Vic scrambled to his feet.
The screams came louder, no longer that of souls or animals, but humans and their ancient violence.
Victor ran.
He ran as if his father were after him. He ran on the ice with an athleticism that surprised and elated him, as though a last reserve of his youth had been stored up to be tapped now, for this purpose, to reach the voices and stop whatever awfulness was about to unfold.
Fear crowded him with each stride. A pressure so enormous it seemed he might explode into vapor. Still, he ran toward the voices.
He came around the corner and saw it.
Saw them.
Across the street.
On the ground, on the village green. In front of the Civil War cannon. A small crowd circled them, watching. Victor bolted across the street and pushed through the crowd.
Two men struggled on the ground. A knot of limbs as they beat each other.
Jed King and Gregory Sergeant.
The icy ground had gone soft beneath them, turned muddy as a pig sty. The men’s fists pounded each other’s flesh. A hard fist smashed an eye socket. Split it. Another fist burst open a mouth. Blood misted. Teeth broke and bit. A hand grabbed hair to lift a head and rock it against the ground with the dull thud. Feet kicked groins, stomped on hands. Clothes ripped. Fingers gouged and tore. Blood flowed. It flowed as the voices howled.
Victor could not tell one man from the other. There seemed no separation. It was as though the two men were a conjoined creature of mythology, tired and sick and enraged from having to share the same heart, yet separate minds, and each would rather tear the other apart and die than continue as one.
Or perhaps, it was just the opposite.
Perhaps they were two humans tired of resisting the urge to join, to couple, and what appeared as violence was only a sort of ugly, primal lovemaking.
As if in agreement, one of the creatures shouted, “Fuck!”
Then, “You’re killing me!”
No one in the crowd blinked. Larry Branch stood smoking a cigarette as if watching friends bowl at Riverside Ten Pins. Another man stood with his arms folded, shaking his head as if disapproving of boys throwing snowballs at a car. Each face watched with the same look. Not afraid. Not repulsed. Not moved. Resigned. As if what was happening was beyond their control, the arrival of a storm they all knew was coming, and now there was nothing to do but look out the window from the safety of their homes and weather it.
King grabbed Sergeant by the hair and pounded Sergeant’s skull against the cannon. Blood sprayed. “Fuck you!” King shouted.
“Stop!” Victor roared.
King cracked Gregory’s head against the cannon again.
“Stop!” Victor pleaded. “In the name of God!”
King pinned Gregory beneath him and grabbed a rock. His wet hair like a tangle of seaweed, his eyes lunatic. He raised the rock high above his head. Gregory lay motionless.
“You queer fuck!” King roared.
“Stop!” Victor rushed King, lowering his shoulder as he squared himself, as if to put a hit on a wide receiver, to jar that ball loose, one last time.
He struck King with the whole of his upper body.
King tottered backward.
But he held fast the rock.
As he teetered, he swung the rock.
Hard.
Lightning flashed in Victor’s mind. He suddenly felt very warm. Hot.
He heard a far-off sound. The thunder that followed the lightning? It must have been. You could not have one without the other.
If you did, the world no longer made sense.
He heard a thud. Saw the darkness. Collapsing on him with the mighty weight of an ocean wave.
A voice said: “You’ve killed him.”
Victor did not know to whom or about what the voice spoke, but it made sense.
You’ve killed him.