I drove out ahead of Ann, and Jordan rode with her. I began to relax some. I began to see everything in a different light. I felt silly. Just because Russel was trying to scare me, didn’t mean he had the balls to do anything. It didn’t necessarily mean anything more than he was upset about his son, which was normal. He was certainly no cream puff, I could see that, but he was still an old man and my house was barred and full of alarms and I had a shotgun in the garage and tough as he might be he couldn’t eat lead, as they might say in a B gangster movie.
I thought about the shotgun. Like the pistol, it was something I had acquired more on the spur of the moment than by design.
About five years back, in a town close to LaBorde, some nut had broken into a house and killed a family while they slept. Two of the victims were kids. Ann was pregnant with Jordan at the time, and I guess I was overcome with paternal instincts. I had never owned a gun and had never wanted to, but I went out and bought the. 38 that had eventually killed Russel. I told Ann’s father about the. 38 on a visit to Houston, and he had given me the shotgun, told me it was better than the revolver. Said it was less likely to penetrate walls and injure family members. It was a short-barreled Winchester pump, and he gave me some double aught loads and I took the shotgun and the shells home and they went into the garage and the pistol stayed in the shoe box. As my hysteria faded, I forgot about the shotgun and nearly forgot about the. 38.
To the best of my memory the shotgun was broken down and was in the garage storage cabinet in the original box with oilcans and tools in front of it. I told myself I would get it out of the box when I got home and load it, put it under my bed, but in the end, I was certain I would feel silly with it there because nothing was going to come of my mental cowboy movie. Russel would lose interest in his dead son, as he had probably had little interest in him when he was alive, and he would go away and things would return to normal.
But when I pulled up in our drive and Ann and Jordan pulled in behind me, the fear and uncertainty returned. Even with the bars and the alarms, or perhaps because I had to have them, I knew I might never feel safe in that house again. And I was more certain of this when I went ahead of them with my key in hand ready to unlock the door.
It was cracked open about three inches already.
I turned and scooped Jordan up with one arm and grabbed Ann’s elbow with the other and directed them back to Ann’s car.
“Get in,” I said.
“Richard?”
“We just got here, Daddy.”
“Get behind the wheel, Ann. The front door is unlocked and open.”
She gave me a strange look, then turned and opened the car door. I put Jordan inside and Ann climbed in behind the wheel.
“Get to the Ferguson’s and call the police. Ask for Price.”
“Come with us,” Ann said.
“Git.”
I closed the door and walked back toward the house. I listened for the sound of the car’s engine behind me, hoping my hardheaded wife would do as I asked, and finally I heard it crank and heard the familiar sound of tires on the gravel drive, heading toward the road.
I didn’t go through the front door, but went around the side of the house, trying to be quiet about it, though I figured that wasn’t necessary. If he was in there, he had heard us drive up and probably knew I had stayed and sent them away.
I knelt down and dug out of the sand an old two-by-four that had been there for the longest time, since the carpenters expanded our garage, and tested its strength against my palm. It was still solid enough to crack a skull. I moved around to the rear of the house, expecting any moment that the bastard would jump me. I wondered what in hell I was doing, and why I hadn’t gone with Ann and Jordan, but in truth I knew the answer to that. The sonofabitch had me mad and there was too much macho Texas culture in my blood in spite of myself. The sonofabitch had offended me and my family and I wanted to get hold of him and use the board on his head until my arm got tired and I had to switch to the other hand.
A part of me knew there wasn’t much point to what I was doing. It was stupid. Russel had already proved he could handle me, and I didn’t imagine the board amounted to much in my favor. He might even have a gun, like his son.
When I got around back I was going to use the key, but the door was open here too. T he grill and the alarm had n’t done a damn thing to stop him.
I cocked the board back and stepped inside. The air-conditioning hit me like a blue norther, and the sunlight had been so harsh outside, my vision was affected. Standing there, half-blind, I felt as if I had put my balls in a vise and was waiting for someone to turn the crank.
But nothing happened. My eyes adjusted and I saw the living room was empty and so was what I could see of the kitchen. I checked out the rest of the kitchen and went out in the enclosed garage and found the shotgun. I had remembered wrong. It was put together. The shells were with it. I loaded it and went looking through the rest of the house. I looked Jordan’s room over extra hard. No one was under the bed or in the closet or hiding behind a Mickey Mouse curtain.
I tried the hall bathroom, half expecting, half hoping, Russel would come out from behind the shower curtain after me. I wanted an excuse to kill him. It wasn’t that I had acquired a taste for blood, but right then I was a little crazy and I just wanted to end things between him and me, and I wanted the end to be final.
Using the barrel of the shotgun, I swept the curtain back, but he wasn’t waiting for me in the tub. I went on into the master bedroom.
On the bed was the shoe box that had been in the closet and had held the gun the night of the burglary. Price still had the gun, but there had been some shells in the box, and they had been poured onto the bed and the shoe box had been ripped to shreds.
Jordan’s favorite teddy bear lay there among the pieces.