He pulled the trigger. It was a perfect shot, right through the throat; he was sure he even heard the hit, a thropping sound like a bullet coring through a watermelon.
Then Earl systematically blew his target apart: a round that hit an elbow, one in the upper thigh, another just above the groin, a final one through the face.
Earl lifted the revolver up at a right angle with both hands, his body canted sideways, his heart thundering with adrenaline. He had never experienced an exhilaration like this one, and he knew for the first time how men could come to love war.
Now Peggy Jean was standing behind him, her face small with fear, her eyes staring into the darkness. Her breath was sour and he stepped back from it.
“Billy Bob Holland ratted you out, Peggy Jean,” Earl said.
“What?” she said.
“I killed Stump. I blew him apart. By God, I did it,” he said.
He went to the circuit breaker box and began shoving banks of switches with the heel of his hand. When he walked back to the open door, his wife was out on the patio, her skin white in the flood lamps, her fingers pressed against her mouth.
Jeff Deitrich floated facedown in the pool, the blood from his wounds trailing like clouds of red smoke in the lighted water.
33
We would never be sure about the events that occurred next, not unless we accepted the explanation given to us later by Kippy Jo Pickett.
Earl wandered into his front yard, the Smith & Wesson hanging from his hand. The wind was blowing hard now, but his skin felt numb, dead to the touch, as though it were freezer-burned. To his left he saw the fire in the ravine glowing against the clouds and sparks fanning across the sky, drifting onto his roof.
There was no sound anywhere. He opened and closed his mouth to clear his ears and tried to rethink what he had just done. But it was like waking from an alcoholic blackout. The images and voices had become shards of glass that he couldn’t reassemble in his mind. Could he have killed his own son only moments ago?
The fire had climbed out of the ravine and was burning through the soft pad of dead grass in the woods, crawling up the trunks of trees into the canopy. The sky was red and yellow now, swirling with ash and smoke, and the heat was as bright and hot on his cheek as a candle flame.
Why hadn’t Peggy Jean called the county fire department?
He turned and stared at his house. It looked enveloped in heat, shrunken, the symmetrical lines distorted, smoke rising from the eaves. The black-and-white-striped canopy over the side patio burst into flame, snapping dryly in the wind; the flowers in the beds stiffened and their petals fell like confetti into the baked dirt.
Then he saw her at a downstairs window, talking urgently into a phone.
Finally she did something right, he thought.
The fire truck came hard up the road, sooner than he expected, almost out of nowhere.
He probably looked pretty foolish, standing in the front yard, with a revolver in his hand.
Well, to hell with them.
It was a pump truck, the windows filmed with mud, the running boards full of dark, hatted figures who clung to handrails. The driver pulled parallel to the house and left the engine running and got out and walked around the front of the truck and grinned at Earl.
“Cholo?” Earl said.
“The job’s got its moments. Hop on. There’s a space next to your son.”
“Jeff’s there?”
Cholo shrugged good-naturedly, but he didn’t speak. The other men on the truck were stepping down from the running boards. They wore slouch hats and bleached, nineteenth-century canvas dusters and laced boots and tightly belted, baggy khaki pants, and Earl realized they were not firemen at all but men who had worked in Africa with his great-grandfather and who carried braided leather whips folded around wood handles in their coat pockets.
“You thought you had me on that first take-down scam, remember?” Earl said. “You handed me a gun with a blank in it.”
“Yeah, man, you surprised us. It took cojones to stick it up to your head and snap it off.”
“I still don’t rattle, Cholo. Ready for this? Because I don’t know if I popped off six rounds or not.”
“Do what you gotta do, man.”