A Simple Plan (27 page)

“Two.”

“You’re not going to shoot me, Hank,” Sonny said. His voice came out raspy and unsure.

I paused but saw no way out. “Three.”

Sonny didn’t move.

I tightened my grip on the gun, aimed down the barrel at his face. “I don’t want to do this, Sonny,” I said. He was ruining my plan.

Sonny just stared at me. With each passing second he was gaining confidence. “Put the gun down,” he whispered.

But then I had a revelation. I could shoot him here, I realized, he was undressed enough. It would look just as good: Lou discovered them, shot Nancy in her bed, then chased Sonny downstairs and killed him by the front door. It had the disorderly verisimilitude of reality.

I gave him one more chance. “Take them off,” I said. My finger brushed lightly against the gun’s trigger.

Sonny watched me, and his confidence seemed to waver. He licked at the blood on his lip. “What’s this about, Hank?”

“Go inside now, Jacob,” I said. I didn’t want him to get any blood on his clothes. I took a deep breath, then climbed up onto the porch. I was going to edge around him toward the doorway, so that I’d be facing the road when I shot him.

Jacob cracked open the door and slipped into the house.

Sonny watched him disappear, and then, as if suddenly intuiting what I was about to do, dropped his hands to his sides. He slid his underpants down off his legs.

Naked, he looked tiny, like a boy. His shoulders were hunched, skinny, his chest virtually hairless. He held his jeans over his crotch. I could tell just from his posture that I’d broken him. It was no longer a struggle for control: he was cowering, waiting to see what my next order might be.

“Drop them,” I said.

Sonny let his jeans and underpants fall to the ground. He kept one hand over his groin, the other on his lips. His mouth was beginning to bleed in earnest now. There was blood all over his chin, and some of it had dripped down onto his chest.

“Put your hands on your head.”

He put his hands on his head, exposing his groin. I pointed the shotgun at his chest.

“All right,” I said. “Now turn around and open the door.”

Very slowly, he spun around. I stepped forward, over his little pile of clothes, and pressed the gun’s barrel into his spine. I sensed him stiffen, his back muscles clenching at the cold touch of the metal against his naked skin. It was like the tightening of a knot.

“Don’t panic when you open the door, Sonny,” I said. “Just stay calm, and everything’ll be okay.”

He dropped one of his hands, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.

After the darkness of the porch, there was something almost surreal about the brightly lit entranceway. It was like stepping up onto a stage. Lou’s body was laid out across the tiles, his head thrown back, as if in laughter. The floor must’ve tilted a little toward the living room, because that’s the way the blood had spread. It looked darker than it had before, almost black, and it glistened in the light.

The door swung away from Sonny, all the way around on its hinges until it banged into the wall. Jacob was standing off to the right, his rifle pointing down toward Lou’s corpse; there was a startled expression on his face. He stared at us, waiting to see what we were going to do. Sonny didn’t move, but I felt him inhale sharply, his back expanding against the barrel of the gun.

“Come on, Sonny,” I said. “Just walk right by it.”

I pushed him with the gun, forcing him to step forward into the house, his bare foot slapping down against the tiled floor. He stopped like that—one foot inside, one foot outside—bucking a little, like a mule. I pushed him again, harder this time, and suddenly he wasn’t there. Jacob blocked the route to the garage, and Lou’s body lay in front of the living room, so there was really only one place for Sonny to go. He ran straight up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

I sprinted after him.

When he reached the top, he turned to the right, and we raced down the hallway toward the master bedroom. I have no idea what drew him in that direction, to the exact spot where I wanted him most—perhaps he knew that they kept a pistol there, hidden away in the top drawer of the night table, or maybe it was simply the light seeping out through the half-open doorway, with its implication of refuge and protection—but it must’ve been an awful shock when he burst into the room and saw the ruin there, saw the blood and the water and heard my footsteps pounding so close behind him. He must’ve known then—if he still had any doubts after seeing Lou’s body laid out across the entranceway—that I’d brought him over here to kill him.

His momentum carried him into the room, right up to the foot of the bed. I didn’t see him look down at Nancy’s body, but he must’ve seen it, must’ve caught at least a glimpse of it before he turned, his hands raised in a pair of fists, as if to strike me. His nakedness made him seem savage, like a caveman. His face was contorted, a horrible mixture of terror and rage and confusion. His chin was smeared with blood.

I was in the doorway, blocking his escape. I pumped the gun, and it ejected an empty shell—the one I’d killed Nancy with—onto the floor at my feet. Then, without pausing to think, I fired into Sonny’s chest.

There was a kick against my body, a loud explosion, and a fresh spray of blood slapped wetly across the blankets.

Sonny was knocked onto the bed. He landed with a splashing sound, throwing a little wave of water off the edge of the mattress. His chest was a ragged mass of red and pink and white, but he was still alive. His legs were kicking, and he was trying to lift his head. He was staring at me, his eyes bulging from his head, showing more white than anything else. His right hand was clutching at the covers, pulling them toward his side.

I pumped the gun again, the empty shell falling to the carpet. Then I stepped forward and aimed down at his face. As I pulled the trigger, I saw him shut his eyes. The mattress literally exploded, showering the headboard and the wall behind it with water. I had to jump back to keep from getting it on my clothes.

From the safety of the doorway, I fired the last two shells into the ceiling above the bed. Then I reached into my pocket, put five new shells into the gun, and fired these indiscriminately around the room—at the armchairs off to the left, at the bathroom door, at the mirror above the dressing table.

I checked myself for spattered blood and reloaded the gun.

Descending the stairs, I fired once into the ceiling. When I got to the bottom, I turned and aimed out into the living room. I shot the leather couch, then the TV set, and finally the coffee table with our glasses on it.

I left one shell loaded in the gun.

I
FOUND
Jacob hiding in the bathroom. He was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. His rifle was lying on the floor at his feet. Sonny’s parka and boots were resting in his lap.

“All right,” I said. I was standing in the doorway.

“All right?” Jacob asked. He didn’t look up at me.

I took a deep breath. I felt shaky, high, a little out of control. I had the vague suspicion that I might not be thinking very well, and I tried now to slow things down. The hard part was over, I told myself; the rest was just a matter of us acting out our parts.

“It’s finished,” I said.

“He’s dead?”

I nodded.

“Why’d you shoot so much?”

I didn’t answer him. “Come on, Jacob. We have to get going.”

“Did you have to shoot so much?”

“It’s supposed to look like he’s pissed. Like he’s gone insane.” I wiped my face with my hand. My gloves smelled of gunpowder; I realized I’d have to remember to hide them in the truck before we called the police. A string of water began to drip from the ceiling in the corner. It fell onto the ceramic toilet lid, making a sound like the ticking of a clock. It was from the water bed: it had already started soaking through the plaster.

Jacob removed his glasses. His face seemed off balance without them—the skin of his cheeks and jowls red and shiny, bloated to the point of distension, as if he were gout ridden, while up top his eyes seemed sunken, dim, weak looking.

“Aren’t you afraid of later?” he asked.

“Later?”

“Guilt. Feeling bad.”

I sighed. “We did it, Jacob. We had to do it, and we did it.”

“You shot Sonny,” he said, as if surprised by this.

“That’s right. I shot Sonny.”

“Dead,” Jacob said. “In cold blood.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to avoid thinking about what we’d done, knew implicitly that nothing good would come from self-analysis. Up to now I’d felt a comfortable sense of inevitability in all my actions, as if I’d merely been looking on, watching myself on film, thoroughly engaged in what was happening but harboring no illusion that I could alter even the most trivial of events. Fate, a voice seemed to whisper in my ear, and I let the reins slip from my hand. But now Jacob, with his questions, was eroding this. He was making me look back, see that the bloody water dripping down through the ceiling was there because I’d willed it into being. I pushed the thought away and immediately replaced it with an angry surge of resentment toward my brother, sitting there on the toilet, fat, passive, judging me while it was his own panic, his own rashness and stupidity that had trapped me into my crimes.

“None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t killed Lou,” I said.

Jacob lifted his head, and I saw with a shock that he was crying. There were tear tracks running down his cheeks, and the sight of them filled me with regret: I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly to him.

“I saved you,” he said, his voice choking a little on the words. He turned his head to the right, trying to hide his face.

“Don’t do this, Jacob. Please.”

He didn’t answer. His shoulders were shaking. He had one hand pressed against his eyes. The other one, the one that held his glasses, was resting on top of Sonny’s boots in his lap.

“You can’t fall apart now. We still have to deal with the police, the reporters—”

“I’m okay,” he said. It came out like a gasp.

“We have to be composed.”

“It’s just…,” he started, but he couldn’t find the words to finish. “I shot Lou,” he said.

I stared down at him. He was making me scared. I was beginning to see how, if we weren’t careful, it could all unravel on us. “We have to get going, Jacob,” I said. “We have to call it in.”

He inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, then put his glasses back on and struggled to his feet. His face was wet with tears, his chin shaking. I took Sonny’s parka and boots from him and carried them out to the hall closet. The living room was a shambles. The coffee table was shattered, the TV imploded. Great, white, round hunks of stuffing protruded from the couch, like clouds, the way children draw them.

Jacob had forgotten his rifle in the bathroom, so I had to go get it for him. He followed me there and back like a dog. He was starting to cry again, and hearing him gave me a hollow pit in my stomach, a vertiginous sensation, as if I were falling off a building.

I opened the front door. “Go out to the truck,” I said. “Call the police on the CB.”

“The CB?” His voice sounded far away, like he wasn’t really paying attention. I shivered. I could feel the cold air rising along the damp, sweaty skin of my back. I zipped up my jacket. Like my gloves, it smelled of gunpowder.

“It has to look like you’re calling in scared,” I said. “Like you saw me shoot him and, instead of going inside, ran back to the truck.”

Jacob was staring down at Lou’s body again, his face limp.

“Don’t tell them too much, just that there’s been a shooting. Tell them to send an ambulance, then get off.”

He nodded but didn’t move. His tears kept coming, seeping out the corners of his eyes one after the other and dropping down his face. They were dripping onto the front of his jacket, darkening the fabric.

“Jacob,” I said.

He dragged his eyes upward, glanced over at me. He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

“We have to be alert now. We have to remember what we’re doing.”

He nodded again, took another deep breath. “I’m okay,” he said. Then he started out the door.

I stopped him when he reached the porch. I was in the doorway, right where Lou had been standing when Jacob shot him. “Don’t forget your rifle,” I said. I held the gun toward him, and he took it. I was still out over the abyss, I realized. There was a fourth step to be taken before I could reach the other side.

As I watched him begin to pick his way down the icy walk, I brought the shotgun up against my body and pumped the last shell into its chamber.

Because he was my brother, I’d forgiven him for telling Lou about Pederson, and for lying to me about Sonny being in the car, but I couldn’t forgive him for his weakness. That, I saw now, was a greater risk even than Lou’s greed and stupidity. Jacob would break down when they questioned him tonight; he’d confess and turn me in. I couldn’t trust him.

When he reached the end of the walk, I called his name. I was tired, exhausted with what I’d already done so far that evening, and this made it easier.

“Jacob,” I said.

He turned around. I was standing in the doorway, with Lou’s gun leveled at his chest.

It took him a moment to realize what was happening.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He tilted his head, like a giant parrot, confused.

“I didn’t plan to do this, but I have to.”

His body seemed to settle somehow, to freeze and solidify. He understood finally. “I’d never tell, Hank,” he said.

I shook my head. “You’d fuck up, Jacob. I know it. You wouldn’t be able to live with what we’ve done.”

“Hank,” he said, pleading now. “I’m your brother.”

I nodded. I tightened my grip on the shotgun, raised it a little, adjusting my aim. But I didn’t fire. I waited. It wasn’t that I was wavering—I knew that I couldn’t go back now, that it was as good as done—it was simply that I felt like I was forgetting something, skipping some crucial step. Something had to happen still.

Mary Beth appeared suddenly out of the darkness, making both of us jump, dog tags clinking together on his collar, his tail wagging madly. He went up to Jacob and pressed close against his legs, asking to be petted. Then he started toward me.