Relentless

to him.

   I am six years old. Every morning is a call to adventure. Every evening is a promise of mystery, especially this evening in mid-September.
    The air is cool and the light is sharp, but by late afternoon, the edge wears off the sun, whereafter the day is blue and gold and magical during the drive out from the city.
    Twilight distills blue into purple, reduces purple to crimson, by the time the family gathers for a celebration at the spacious farmhouse Uncle Ewen has bought and restored.
    His forty-acre property by the river is not a working farm. A large freehold has been subdivided into smaller parcels.
    The river runs red under the stain of sunset. Ripples, whorls, and lapping wavelets imply that exotic forms of life swarm under the surface.
    My uncle has bought the place to have a weekend refuge from the city. As a man who plans ahead, he intends to retire to these fields and gentle hills in two decades.
    In the dining-room fireplace, the andirons are brass griffins. They have wings and seem to be flying toward me, out of the fire.
    My father, Ewen, and Kenton own a numismatics business. They buy and sell collectible antique coins as well as contemporary gold coins and bars desired for the protection they offer against inflation.
    The brothers also have expanded into a proprietary line of gold and silver jewelry. They find good profits with every endeavor.
    As I wander through the party, an unusual grandfather clock in the living room enchants me. Carved from mahogany, a monkey climbs the cabinet. His long arms, reaching up, encircle the face, while the fingers of his hands entwine above the twelve. His tail is the pendulum.
    “Time is a monkey,” Uncle Ewen tells me. “Full of mischief, unpredictable, quick as a cat, with a nasty bite.”
    At six, I have no idea what he means, but I like his words and their enigmatic quality.
    Ewen, Kenton, and my father are the kind of men who view success as a reason to share. The entire family is lifted on their shoulders. Every employee is a relative, and enjoys a profit-sharing plan.
    Only Tray is not part of the enterprise. He lacks the sense of responsibility for a position with his brothers. Besides, having no interest in real work, he would turn them down if made an offer.
    Tray remains out of jail in spite of scrapes with the law. As will be discovered, he operates an illegal methamphetamine lab.
    Ewen’s housewarming draws all the family except Tray, who has not been invited, and my mother’s sister, Edith, who lives nine hundred miles away.
    Counting Ewen, his wife, Nora, and their daughter, Colleen, thirty-nine family members are present, including children.
    An hour after sunset, Tray arrives unexpectedly. He is so estranged from the family that none of them has seen him in six months. No one imagines he knows about the gathering.
    I am in the front hall when he knocks.
    Through a moon-and-cloud pattern of clear and frosted leaded glass, I recognize Tray on the front porch. Seeing me, he puts his eye to the clear moon and winks.
    I open the door to him.
    “Cubby,” he says, “clean up your act, kid. You’ve got a string of snot hangin’ out of your nose.”
    When I wipe at my nose with a sleeve, he laughs, plants a damp icy palm against my face, and shoves me aside so hard I almost fall.
    Closing the door, he brings the gun out from under his long coat: a compact, fully automatic rifle, essentially a short-barreled submachine gun capable of single-shot or continuous-fire action.
    He grabs me by the hair and pulls me with him into the archway between hall and living room. Then he shoves me forward while he remains straddling the two spaces.
    People see the weapon and shy back, but they do not at once try to flee, as though openly acknowledging the threat of violence will precipitate it.
    The guests are distributed throughout the four main rooms of the lower floor, but Uncle Ewen happens to be in the living room when his errant younger brother appears.
    “Hewey,” Tray says, “how’re they hangin’?”
    Ewen remains cool. “What do you want, Tray? What do you need?”
    “I don’t know, Hewey. Maybe … two million in coin inventory?”
    As it unfolds, Tray has heard a rumor—or has fantasized—about his brothers splitting their inventory between the walk-in safe at the shop and a secret safe in Ewen’s newly restored farmhouse.
    In truth, their inventory is only a fraction of what he imagines it to be, and the safe at the shop