"Unusual, gripping, menacing." —The New York Times

Available Fall 2003

This is what happened. Myself and four friends were hunting along the Sturrup River one weekend in the deer season. Around six o'clock on Sunday afternoon, just as we were starting to think about going back up to our lodge on Glass Hill and packing up and heading on home, we came down to the riverbank at a point where the river is about fifty yards wide. When we got there we noticed that there was another party of hunters standing over on the opposite bank. There were either six or seven of them. They looked more or less the same as us-were dressed in camouflage the same as us and seemed to be about the same age as us. They didn't wave or anything when they saw us, so we didn't either. They just stood there looking across the river at us, and for a couple of minutes we just stood there looking back at them.

TWO

It was eight miles by a dirt road from our lodge down to the highway. You couldn't go fast because the road wasn't much more than a goat path that zigzagged down the side of the hill through dense woods, and if you weren't careful you could break an axle or smash into a tree or a boulder, or even turn over. Normally we took my old army jeep, but it happened to have been in the shop that weekend and we had taken my Ford wagon instead, which was roomier and generally more comfortable inside than the jeep but of course didn't have its guts or its four-wheel drive.
      Nobody talked much going down the hill. We passed a bottle of Bourbon around, with warm beer for a chaser, and smoked our heads off. Even though we were all combat veterans and had all been under fire many times and had seen plenty of guys killed and blown to bits right before our eyes-and, in the case of Pete and me, had been seriously wounded in action ourselves, him at Beach Red on D-Day and me up against the Sixth SS Panzer Army in the Ardennes a little later-still we were all shaken up by what had happened at the river. I knew we were all thinking that we wouldn't really breathe easy until we got down off the hill and out of the woods completely, because in our minds we could see very clearly something happening, like suddenly coming around a turn and finding the road blocked and being blinded by lights and then getting riddled like a sieve before we could even get out of the car. Anyway, I noticed that nobody had to be told to keep their windows rolled down and their rifles cradled in their arms, ready for anything. Even Pete, sitting up front with me, had his little P-38, which he always took along in a shoulder rig for snakes, out in the open and cocked.
      But we all relaxed when we reached the highway and could see the lights of the gas station down the road and the cars going past. I stopped the car on the shoulder of the highway, and we sat there for a minute with the engine running while they put their guns away. Then we passed the bottle around again.
      "Them motherfuckers," Zeke muttered, looking back at the darkness we had left behind.
      It was seventy-six miles back to Maybock, where we all came from. At first I thought we should stop at the gas station and report the shootout from there, but then I thought it would make more sense to go on to Pembroke, which was a town about twenty miles beyond the gas station, and take Pete to the little hospital they had there and call the police from there all at the same time.
      On the way to Pembroke we had our first chance to really talk about what had happened. We tried to make some sense out of it but didn't get anywhere at all. The thing that baffled us was why the guy had shot at us to begin with-and there was no doubt in any of our minds that he had done it deliberately. Nothing could have convinced us that it was a mistake. He had simply raised his rifle and aimed at Pete and fired away, and that was all there was to it.
      "I've never heard of anything like it in my whole goddam life," Lou Jonkheer said.
      "The son of a bitch just took it into his head all of a sudden to plink me," Pete said.
      "He must have gone temporarily insane," Lou said. "How else could you explain something like that?"
      "Well, I'll tell you one thing," Zeke said. "He won't be plinking anybody any more where he is now."
      Everybody laughed.
      "He sure as hell won't," Bob Lissitzyn said.
      "You really took care of the bastard for me, buddy," Pete said.
      "Got him right between the eyes," Zeke said. "Did you see that?"
      "It was one of the prettiest offhand shots I've ever seen," Bob said. "I just wish I'd done it myself, because if there ever was a son of a bitch that deserved to get blasted, it was him."
      "I can't believe it really happened," Lou said.
      I craned my neck a little to get a look at him in the rear-view mirror. He was slumped way down in the seat next to the window, but I could see his face in the lights of an oncoming car. He looked scared shitless to me.
      "It happened all right," I said.
      "I just can't believe it," he mumbled.
      "I'd hate to see the back of his head," Zeke said. I had some of that soft shit in there, you know."
      "Well, he sure as hell deserved it," Bob said.
      "Sure as hell did," Pete said.
      "I just wish I'd done it myself," Bob said.
      "Who's got the bottle?" Pete said.
      "Are you hurting?" I asked him.
      "Not much," he said.
      Bob passed him the bottle and he took a healthy pull on it.
      "How many rounds did you get off, Rex?" he asked me.
      "Half a box," I said.
      "Yeah, you were really pumping it out."
      "I wish to Christ I'd had my AR18," Zeke said.
      "I wish to Christ I'd had my little old Schmeisser," Bob said.
      "How many rounds did you get off, Lou?" I asked.
      "Huh?" he said, like a zombie.
      "How many rounds did you throw at them, Lou?" I said.
      "I don't know," he mumbled.
      "Did you shoot?"
      "Sure I shot," he mumbled.
      "You weren't scared, were you?"
      "Who said anything about being scared?"
      "I just wondered, that's all."
      "I wasn't scared," he said.
      "Well, what's the matter with you, then?"
      "What do you mean?"
      I didn't answer.
      "I'm not scared," he said. "But I'm goddam worried, I'll tell you that. What are the cops going to do to us when we report this?"
      "Not a goddam thing," Bob said.
      "Yeah?" Lou said. "Yeah?"
      "Yeah."
      "When we tell them we killed a guy back there?"
      "Not going to do a thing," Bob said.
      "For killing a guy? Nothing? Huh?"
      "Wait a minute," Bob said. "You've got it back-asswards, don't you, Louie? You mean, 'What will the cops do to them?' don't you? It was them that started it, wasn't it? They shot at us first, didn't they? It was just plain self-defense when we fired back, wasn't it?"
      "Yeah," Pete said.
      "Goddam right," Bob said.
      "What do you think they're going to do?" Pete said. "String us up for defending ourselves? What are we supposed to do, stand there and let every screwball who feels like it use us for target practice? Shit."
      "There's not a judge in the country who'd blame you for shooting back in a situation like that," Bob said.
      "We haven't got a thing in the world to worry about," Pete said.
      "A clear-cut case of self-defense," Bob said.
      "I don't know," Lou mumbled.
      "What did you say, Lou?" I asked him.
      "It's not as simple as that," he mumbled.
      "What, Lou?"
      "I said it's not as simple as that," he mumbled. "They're not going to see it as simple as that."
      "You're a cheerful little bastard, you know it?" Pete said.
      "Yeah, he sure is a cheerful little bastard," Bob said.
      "I'm just facing the facts, that's all," Lou said. "A man is dead."
      "He sure is, the prick," Pete said.
      "I'll bet he doesn't even have a back to his head," Zeke said. "That shit I hit him with was about the consistency of peanut butter. His brains are probably over in Lincoln County."
      "Pass me that bottle again," Pete said. "This son of a bitch is beginning to throb like a bastard now."
      We passed the bottle around again, and Bob popped open another can of beer and we passed that around.
      "Not going to do a goddam thing to us," Bob said.
      "Dirty son of a bitches chased us right off our own goddam turf," Zeke said.
      "Yeah, our own goddam turf," Bob said. "How many years have we been hunting along that river?"
      "Right out of our own goddam territory," Zeke said.
      "Yeah, our own goddam territory," Pete said.
      "Mood I'm in, I feel like turning around and going back after them bastards," Zeke said. "If it was daylight we could cross the river up at the bend and roll them up like Grant took Richmond."
      "I'd have my Schmeisser," Bob said, "and I'd stick so much lead up their ass their own mother wouldn't know them."
      "Who the hell were they anyway?" Pete said. "Did we ever see them before?"
      "Who knows?" Bob said. "They looked sort of like that bunch we passed down by the bend last weekend, but everybody looks the same in camouflage."
      "I'd like to find out who they were," Zeke said. "I'd send Stanley and Ray around to visit each one of them personally. Can you imagine what Ray would do to those guys if I decided to really give him the green light on them?"
      "We're going to find out who they were, don't worry," Lou said.
      "Is that right, Louie?" Bob said.
      "Not going to do a goddam thing to us," Zeke said.
      "I'm glad you think so," Lou said.
      "What do you think they're going to do to us, Lou?" I asked him.
      "I don't know," he said. "But these guys think we're going to call up the cops and report it and they're going to say thanks and that will be the end of it. Well, that's not going to be the end of it. That's just going to be the beginning of it."
      "Cheerful little bastard," Bob said.
      "I keep telling you, a man is dead," Lou said. "The minute a man is dead there's bound to be a mess. It doesn't make any difference how it happened. There's bound to be a big stinking goddam mess anyway."
      "Well, we've got lawyers, don't we?" Pete said. "Do you think Teddy Sloan and Ollie and Jerry Clark and all the rest of the lawyers we know between us are going to let those bastards push us around?"
      "I'm just saying there's bound to be a big stinking mess, that's all," Lou said.
      "Anyway, I don't see what you're so worried about," Zeke said. "If anybody has a right to be worried it's me, isn't it? It was me that shot him, wasn't it?"
      Everybody was quiet after that. Bob opened another bottle of Bourbon and we passed it around and lit up some more cigarettes. We were coming into Pembroke by then, which is a two-bit town where they roll up the sidewalks at eight o'clock and after that they don't want to know anything. There wasn't any traffic and there weren't any people on the streets. Driving along the streets you could see everybody inside the houses sitting around watching TV. The whole Red Chinese Army could have marched through there and they wouldn't even have looked out the window.
      I parked near the emergency-room door of the two-bit hospital. The street was dark and silent, and inside the hospital you could see the nurses moving around and the pale glow of the patients watching their TV. Instead of everybody getting out, we all just sat there in the wagon, not saying anything, with our two-day beards, coughing and belching and fuming, and shifting around in our seats, stinking of the booze and the cigarettes. A couple of nurses came out of the emergency-room door and walked across the street to the parking lot. Ordinarily, whenever Zeke saw a nurse, he always said, "Hey, nurse, I'm worse," or, "Okay, honey, how about you bending over this time and letting me give you an injection?" But this time he didn't open his mouth, and the nurses got in their car and drove away.
      "Shit," Pete said.
      "I wonder what they'll do to me," Zeke said, in a kind of blubbery voice. He seemed to have suddenly lost all of his cockiness over his beautiful wing shot. "They'll probably send me up, won't they?" he blubbered.
      "Cut it out," Bob said.
      "Send my ass to prison for a five-to-ten," Zeke went on, disregarding Bob and sounding even more blubbery.
      "Will you listen to me?" Bob said.
      Zeke was a big powerful guy with thick black hair all over him. When you saw him with his shirt off he looked just like a gorilla. He was in the infantry in World War II, and then he went back in for Korea. In World War II he was in North Africa and Sicily, and finished up against Smiling Albert Kesselring at the Rapido. In Korea he was in the first wave ashore at Inchon, which was how he got his second Silver Star.
      "I couldn't stand being in prison," he blubbered.
      "Wait a minute," Pete said. "I've got an idea. What if we just get them to fix up my head here and don't tell them anything about the goddam shootout?"
      "They'd report it," I said. "They have to report all gunshot wounds, and they'd know that was a gunshot wound."
      "We could say it was an accident."
      "They'd report it anyway."
      "So-"
      "Forget it," I said. "There's no way the cops wouldn't make the connection between this and that dead guy."
      "Well, how about this, then?" Pete said. "What if we just go back to Maybock and get Jim to fix my head and just don't say anything to the cops about anything?"
      "Doesn't make a damn whether we report it or not," Lou said. "They're going to trace it to us anyway."
      "I'm not talking to you," Pete said. "I asked Rex."
      "He's right, though," Bob said.
      "Why? How are they going to trace it to us?"
      "First thing they'd do is collect our brass and then find out the names of everybody who hunts in that area regularly and go around and match up the brass. For another thing, it just wouldn't be too much of a problem for a good investigator, no matter how you look at it."
      "Okay," Pete said. "Why don't we just go in there and get it over with, then?"
      But nobody moved.
      "Well, we've got to do something," Pete said. "This son of a bitch is really starting to burn now."
      "You tell us what we should do, Lou," Bob said.
      "You're so goddam smart."
      "I don't know what the hell we should do," Lou said.
      "Five years in the goddam pen," Zeke moaned. And that's if I'm lucky. Do you know how old I'll be when I get out? My whole goddam life will be down the spout."
      "Well, let's do something," Lou said.
      "Yeah, let's do something," Zeke said.
      "I know what I'd like to do," Bob said. "I'd like to go home and get out of these clothes and soak in the bathtub for about three hours with a good stiff highball."
      "I'm with you," Zeke said.
      "I think I've got a miserable goddam cold coming on," Lou said. "I feel like six pounds of shit in a five-pound bag."
      "Some beautiful weekend," Zeke said.
      "Yeah, some beautiful weekend," Pete said. "We spend two solid days farting around in the woods and we don't even see a rabbit, much less a deer. I lose sixty-five dollars that I haven't got to you assholes at poker. And then, to make it complete, we get bushwhacked and I wind up with a hole in my head."
      "And I get five years for murder three," Zeke said.
      "A really beautiful weekend," Pete said.
      "Well, we've got to do something," Lou said. "We can't sit here like this all night."
      "Yeah, let's do something," Zeke said.
      "Maybe we ought to go and call Teddy Sloan or somebody before we do anything," Bob said.
      "What about my head?" Pete said. "If somebody doesn't fix it pretty soon they'll probably have to amputate."
      "What do you think we should do, Rex?" Bob said.
      "Yeah, Rex?" Zeke said.
      "Yeah, what do you think, Rex?" Lou said.
      "Yeah, Rex?" Pete said.
      Which, of course, was what I had known it would come down to in the end. I flicked my cigarette out the window and turned the key in the ignition. I had given them every chance, but it was always the same. They were good guys and the oldest friends I had in the world, but the difference between them and me was that they were born followers, while I was a born leader. They had been waiting all along for me to step in and take charge, and I could tell that they felt much better immediately.

Excerpt © 2003 The Estate of Douglas Fairbairn