Mohawk

always
was
good to be alive, but these nights he could see himself living to a hundred.
    It was roughly fifty yards through the trees to the house. He’d left a light on in the kitchen to see by, but when he started up the path, something passed between him and the yellow window. “Who is it?” Rory Gaffney said, feeling a flicker of fear. Then, “Oh, it’s you.”
    The first bullet caught him in the shoulder and spun him around as if he’d been grabbed from behind. He regained his balance and looked at his ruined shirt. “What—” he began, but his voice was stopped by two sharp explosions and he staggered back toward the trailer. The impetus flung him off the path, but he kept running through the thick underbrush anyway. By the time he got to the trailer, everything was going black.Even before he hit the door face first and slumped into it, his knees resting on the cinder block, he suspected that he wouldn’t live to a hundred. And by the time the girl inside could get to the door that his solid body had buckled, he was dead.

55
    Randall drove past the diner, but there were no lights upstairs or down and he didn’t want to drop Wild Bill off in his present state. Randall hadn’t expected him to speak. For years now he hadn’t. But huddled in the corner of the van, shivering like a dog that’s misbehaved, Bill looked even more pitiful than usual. “We’ll get some coffee,” Randall said. “Then I’ll take you home.” Wild Bill showed no sign of having heard. He was staring straight ahead, but whatever he saw was coming from inside.
    Main Street glistened beneath the street lamps. Though the rain had ceased, Randall kept the wipers on, reassured by their gentle rhythm. “You’re cold,” he said, though the air after the storm was clear and still warm.
    The closer they got to the outskirts and the Gaffney house and trailer, the more Wild Bill shook, his shoulders hunched up beneath his ears, his hands clenched prayer-fashion over his groin. “Almost home,” Randall reassured him. “We’ll get you taken care of.”
    His companion seemed far from comforted, and if they hadn’t been so close, Randall would’ve pulled over. When they turned into the drive and something flashedin front of the van’s headlights, Wild Bill howled in panic. Randall hit the brake just as Rory Gaffney rammed the side of the trailer so hard that it rocked. Bill lunged forward, his head striking the windshield, then sat back dazed, fingering the knot that immediately started forming on his brow.
    Randall got out of the van. Rory Gaffney had hurtled in front of the van so suddenly that he hadn’t been able to make out who it was. Now the body lay crumpled and still near the cinder block step, its back to the van’s headlights. There was a large dent in the trailer door, which had sprung inward from its hinges, then jammed on the carpet. Inside, the baby was crying, the only sound besides the water dripping from the trees. Randall waited for the man to get up off the ground. Utterly still, he looked like a big pile of someone’s dirty wash left outside a laundromat. Randall approached cautiously. Only when he saw the blood smear on the caved-in door did he begin to guess, and he wasn’t sure the dead man was his grandfather’s tormentor until he rolled him onto his back.
    “Dead,” said a voice a few inches away. The trailer’s sprung door left a gap about three inches wide between the door and the frame. Behind it, on her knees, was B.G., and Randall could see she was naked.
    Rory Gaffney was blood from shoulders to groin. “Yes,” Randall said, stepping back. The headlights illuminated the old man’s face, a mask of horror and perplexity.
    “Good,” the girl said. “You love me, then. I didn’t know.”
    “What?”
    The baby had stopped crying, and a sudden gust of air shook a shower from the trees arching overhead.Randall could see he had blood on him from touching the dead man. “Call the police,” he said.
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll tell ’em it was me. He had it coming. I’ll say it was self-defense.” He could see that in the split second it took to invent the lie, she had adopted it as the only reality.
    “No,” he said, but she was gone. Then he heard her dialing the phone in the living room. At the same moment he became aware of the policeman standing a few feet away, just outside the focused headlights. The gun in his hand was pointed at the ground. “Step away,”