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It was then that the writer was aware of what he was listening for: nothing. It was nothing that he hoped he would hear. It was the no-shot that might mean his dad would be safe--that the cowboy, like Paul Polcari, might never pull the trigger.
Danny was trying not to think about what Jimmy had told him--this was concerning the tube of toothpaste and the toothbrush in Joe's car. Possibly, they'd not been put there by Roland Drake; maybe the toothpaste and the toothbrush hadn't been part of Drake's mischief.
"I hate to tell you this, Danny, but I've busted lots of kids who've been drinking in their cars," the trooper had said. "The kids often have toothpaste and a toothbrush handy--so their parents don't smell what they've been drinking on their breath, when they come home." But Danny preferred to think that the toothpaste and the toothbrush had been more of Drake's childish business. The writer didn't like to think about his son drinking and driving.
Was Danny superstitious? (Most writers who believe in plot are.) Danny didn't like to think about what Lady Sky had said to Joe, either. "If you're ever in trouble, I'll be back," she'd said to the two-year-old, kissing his forehead. Well, not on a night as dark as this one, the writer thought. On a night as dark as this one, no skydiver--not even Lady Sky--could see where to land.
Now the rain had blotted out what little moonlight there was; the rain was coming in the open windows of Danny's car, and the water had beaded on the windshield, which made the darkness more impenetrable.
Surely, the state trooper had already arrived in Drake's junkyard of a driveway. And what would Jimmy do then? Danny was wondering. Just sit in the patrol car until Drake had noticed the car was there and came outside to talk to him? (And would Roland have come out alone, or would he have brought the back-biting dog with him?) Then again, it was raining; out of consideration for the hippie carpenter, and because it was late, the trooper might have gotten out of his car and knocked on Drake's door.
At that thought came a knocking on the passenger-side door of Danny's car; a flashlight shone in the writer's face. "Oh, heart be still--it's just you," he heard Barrett say. His former lover, who was carrying a rifle, opened the car door and slipped inside to sit beside him. She was wearing her knee-high rubber stable boots and an oil-skin poncho. She'd pushed back the hood when she got into the car, and her long white hair was unbraided--as if she'd gone to bed hours ago, and had suddenly been woken up. Barrett's thighs were bare; under the poncho, she was wearing nothing. (Danny knew, of course, that Barrett slept naked.) "Were you missing me, Danny?" she asked him.
"You're up late, aren't you?" Danny asked her.
"About an hour ago, I had to put one of my horses down--it was too late to call the bloody vet," Barrett told him. She sat like a man, with her knees spread apart; the carbine, with the barrel pointed to the floor, rested between her pretty dancer's legs. It was an old bolt-action Remington--a .30-06 Springfield, she'd explained to him, some years ago, when she'd shown up on his Putney property, where she was hunting deer. Barrett still hunted deer there; there was an untended apple orchard on the land, and Barrett had shot more than one deer in that orchard. (What had the cook called her--a "selective" animal lover, was it? Danny knew more than a few like her.)
"I'm sorry about your horse," he told her.
"I'm sorry about the gun--I know you don't like guns," she said. "But I didn't recognize your car--it's new, I guess--and one should take some precaution when there are strange men parked in one's driveway."
"Yes, I was missing you," Danny lied. "I'm leaving Vermont. Maybe I was just trying to remember it, before I go." This last bit was true. Besides, the fiction writer couldn't tell such a selective animal lover the dead-dog story--not to mention that he was waiting to hear the fate of a second dog--not on such a gloomy night as the one Dot and May had created, anyway.
"You're leaving?" Barrett asked him. "Why? I thought you liked it here--your dad loves his place in Brattleboro, doesn't he?"
"We're both leaving. We're ... lonely, I guess," Danny told her.
"Tell me about it," Barrett said; she let the butt of the gun rest against her thigh while she took one of Danny's hands and guided it under the poncho, to her breast. She was so small--as petite as Katie had been, the writer realized--and in the silvery light of the blotted-out moon, in the near-total darkness of the car's interior, Barrett's white hair shone like the hair of Katie's ghost.
"I must have wanted to say good-bye," Danny said to her. He meant it, actually--this wasn't untrue. Might it not be a comfort to lie in the lithe, older woman's warm arms, and not think about anything else?
"You're sweet," Barrett said to him. "You're much too sad for my taste, but you're very sweet."
Danny kissed her on the mouth, the shock of her extremely white hair casting a ghostly glow on her narrow face, which she'd turned up to him while she closed her pale-gray, ice-cold eyes. This allowed Danny to look past her, out the open window of the car; he wanted to be sure he saw Jimmy's state-police cruiser if it passed by on the road.
How long did it take to deliver a dead dog to the animal's owner, and to deliver whatever lecture Jimmy had in mind for the asshole hippie? Danny was wondering. Almost certainly, if the trooper was going to be forced to shoot Drake's other dog, Danny would already have heard the shot; he'd been listening and listening for it, even over his conversation with Barrett. (It was better to kiss her than to talk; the kissing was quiet. There would be no missing the gunshot, if there was one.)
"Let's go up to my house," Barrett murmured to him, breaking away from the kiss. "I just shot my horse--I want to take a bath."
"Sure," Danny said, but he didn't reach for the key in the ignition. The squad car hadn't driven past Barrett's driveway, and there'd been no shot.
The writer tried to imagine them--Jimmy and the writer carpenter. Maybe the trooper and Roland Drake, that trust-fund fuck, were sitting at the hippie's kitchen table. Danny tried to envision Jimmy patting the husky-shepherd mix, or possibly scratching the dog's soft ears--most dogs liked it when you did that. But Danny had trouble seeing such a scene; that was why he hesitated before starting his car.
"What is it?" Barrett asked him.
The shot was louder than he'd expected; though Drake's driveway was two or three miles away, Danny had underestimated the sound of Jimmy's gun. (He'd been thinking that the trooper carried a .38, but--not knowing guns, handguns especially--Danny didn't know that Jimmy liked a .475 Wildey Magnum, also known as the Wildey Survivor.) There was a muffled bang--even bigger than the cowboy's Colt .45, Danny only realized as Barrett flinched in his arms, her fingers locating but scarcely touching the trigger of her Remington.
"Some bloody poacher--I'll give Jimmy a call in the morning," Barrett said; she had relaxed again in his arms.
"Why call Jimmy?" Danny asked her. "Why not the game warden?"
"The game warden is worthless--the bloody fool is afraid of poachers," Barrett said. "Besides, Jimmy knows who all the poachers are. They're all afraid of him."
"Oh," was all Danny could say. He didn't know anything about poachers.
Danny started the engine; he turned on his headlights and the windshield wipers, and he and Barrett put up the windows of the car. The writer turned around in the road and headed up the long driveway to the horse farm--not knowing which piece of the puzzle was missing, and not sure what part of the story was still ongoing.
One thing was clear, as Barrett sat beside him with the carbine now across her lap, the short barrel of the lightweight rifle pointed at the passenger-side door. Enough was never enough; there would be no stopping the violence.
