smile drained away. He focused on the short, unkempt red hair, the steely blue eyes, and the unshaven nubs on the man’s face. He saw a powerful forearm, a tattoo, and a hand gripping a shiny black handgun pointed at David’s chest. “Are you fuckin’ stupid? Get the fuck in the garage, unless you want me to drop you right here.”
“Just take whatever you want.” Get him out of here. Get him away from you.
“Shut up and close the garage door. Now!”
The garage door sputtered closed with its electronic drone. Instead of a buffer between him and the animals, snow, wind, or sheets of rain, the shut door felt like a sealed tomb. David’s heart drummed faster, not tired anymore, adrenalin coursing through his blood and muscles. Wild thoughts spun through his head. Should he lunge at this man and try to yank the gun away? This crazy looked like a hardened townie, wiry, stinking of cigarette smoke and alcohol, his jeans ripped at the knees, what his father would have admiringly called an obrero, a worker. He had a slight Scottish or Irish accent. He was someone you might see at a construction site with a stack of rebars on his shoulders, and certainly not someone with the slightest bit of bluff. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to try to overpower this man, at least not now.
“Get in the house and shut the door.”
“Please just take whatever you want. I’ll help you carry it. Take my wallet, it’s in the kitchen.”
“Sit down and shut the fuck up,” the man said, as he yanked bills from David’s wallet and stuffed them in his jeans. As David stared at the intruder, he thought the man looked like Cormac McCarthy, one of his favorite authors, who was also from El Paso, except this man was thinner, his face more angular, but with that same wide forehead, the arms thick and tanned and freckled, the torso muscular and lean. It was the body of a man who might routinely go hungry for a day or two. David had once been like that at Ysleta High School, more lanky than chubby, but years of college and graduate school and working as a professor had softened David and left him with a slight paunch, an easy smile on his face, and the touch of gray at his temples—the looks of a distinguished older man.
The intruder stared out the window to the backyard, stepped to one side of the kitchen, and glanced out the front window of the cranberry red dining room.
“Please, just leave me alone. My name is David, and I live alone here. Please, take whatever you want.” David thought about how victims should become people to their tormentors, not abstractions. He remembered he had read that in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times. He thought: instead of becoming a thing, become a someone. David needed to keep talking to this man.
“Oh yeah, fuckin’ David, so who the fuck is that on the mantel, your girlfriend?” the man said icily, glancing out the dining room window again. “No car, so whaddya do, walk the four fuckin’ miles for groceries into Kent? If you lie to me again, you asshole, I’ll put a bullet through your skull.” Through the open window above the kitchen sink, David heard a siren approaching from the west on 341, a rarity on these country roads. In a few seconds the siren faded and suddenly stopped in the direction of Warren, the next town to the east. A helicopter’s earth-shaking roar reverberated overhead and faded toward Huckleberry Hill. Were state troopers already hunting for this man? The town of Kent was so small, it could afford only one resident trooper, but the Litchfield barracks were not far away. Why did this man keep checking the front windows?
“Please leave us alone. Take whatever you want.” David thought about Jean. How long would she be gone? He could not allow Jean to walk into this danger. He didn’t care what happened to him as long as Jean survived, as long as she was never hurt.
“What’s in the back over there?”
“A creek that leads to Lake Waramaug, I think. Over that ridge is another pond. A small road’s on the other side of the pond, and it leads to the lake.”
“Get me a fuckin’ jacket as good as what you have on. Gloves, boots like yours, a hat.” At once David stopped staring at the black gun in the man’s hand or at his rough-hewn, pockmarked face, and noticed that this man was not wearing a coat and that he had sneakers for shoes. David walked to their mudroom, with a corner of his eye always on the gun behind him, which seemed to float in the air with a life of its own. David handed the man a pair of new Timberland hiking boots he had recently bought at the Sun Dog in Kent, the shoe shop for the scraggly and smelly through-hikers who emerged from the Appalachian Trail alongside the Housatonic River. David slipped off his jacket and handed it to him as well. He thought about El Paso and his mother and father. He thought about his boys, Matthew and Henry. He thought about Jean Catherine. He loved her more than anything else in the world. Whatever happened today, Jean had already saved him. This moron could never take that away. David could not allow this man to hurt Jean.
“Hey, asshole, you’re gonna need one too,” the intruder said, cracking a crooked smile as he slipped his arms into David’s North Face jacket and zipped it up. The man glanced again at the long gravel driveway. It was still empty.
“Please, mister, you don’t need me. Just take whatever you want. I love my wife. I love my children. You don’t need me. I don’t know what trouble you’re in. But—”
“Hey, fuckhead,” the man sneered in David’s face, jamming the gun into David’s chest. For a moment David thought about grabbing it, trying to grab it, but he didn’t. “You don’t want a jacket, then step the fuck out, and let’s take a walk.” The man shoved David into the living room facing the backyard, kicked him in the ass toward the patio glass doors, and shoved him into the doors before David could slide them open. David’s face slammed against the metal frame. His brow was bleeding. For a second he saw stars in front of him as he stumbled onto the wooden deck.
“Over there. We’re headin’ down there.” The man waved his gun toward the little creek, where David had always imagined the bear roamed. The rocky ledges formed small caves with the half-exposed roots of gigantic maples and oaks. They slowly descended the rough stone stairs his Brazilian landscaper had created with a forklift upending the earth and shoving massive stones into the side of the slope toward the creek. Jean had admired the landscaper’s ingenuity. They had originally just asked the landscaper to create an open path to the creek, but he had presented them with the handiwork of these stairs that seemed to have existed in the Litchfield forest for centuries. David took one last look at his house, at what he had worked so hard to achieve, at how he imagined his family would suffer inside that house, at how everything would change forever for his boys, once their father’s body was discovered in the forest. A tear burned across David’s face.
What did this man want from him? They marched alongside the creek, over and around dead logs and meandering channels of water, deeper into a primordial valley of nature’s matter. Sun-bright yellow and cinnamon-colored leaves covered the uneven, muddy floor. Oaks and maples and birches hovered overhead in the spectacle of a New England fall, a fluttery, animate ceiling. Would this man kill him? David had never seen him before, but that didn’t matter one way or the other now. This man, David imagined, breathing hard, was being chased by the police. He was running away. Was David a hostage to keep the police at bay? Should he refuse to go on? Why did this man need him? If he stopped, if David refused to take another step, he would die. But if they lost themselves deeper in the valley toward Lake Waramaug, away from the house, what would stop this lunatic from killing David anyway? What would stop him from eliminating the only witness to his escape?
“Hey, keep movin’!”
“I’m not going anywhere. You don’t need me. Please leave me alone. You’re free. Just leave me alone.”
“Did I tell you to stop? You fuckin’ disobeying me, asshole
