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There were four rounds of 12-gauge buckshot in there on a saucer. He picked them up and looked at them. They looked like they’d shoot. There was some dried dog shit on the floor. He guessed the Redbone puppy had been coming in some. The linoleum was torn and scuffed, ripped loose in places. The room was full of dead plants in pots. He turned the light off and walked out.
    In the bedroom he picked up the gun by the stock and slipped the shells in one at a time, pushing them up with his thumb. He checked it one more time to see that one was in the chamber, then turned off the light and went back up the hall.
    In his sleep, his father looked like some huge broken mannequin. Glen studied the gun in his hands and remembered when it used to hang above the kitchen door. It had been in canebrakes and the deep jungle woods of coons on steaming nights with spotted dogs leaping and howling and trying to climb the trees with their toenails, men standing inwater amid cypress knees, men with flashlights in their hands searching in the vine-choked growth of leaves and poison ivy above for two red eyes. It had been in river bottoms on mornings when ice cracked underfoot and the sudden yammering of dogs came through the woods gaining decibels and the deer broke free from the cover and rocketed forty feet in a second. It had been held beneath beech trees on foggy mornings when the squirrels moved and shook the dew from the branches or paused in profile to hull a hickory nut with their rasping teeth, little showers of shredded matter pattering softly down through the leaves to scatter on the forest floor. Or mornings when nothing came and the cold was a vivid pain that held him shivering in its grip and the gun was an ache in his naked hands where he sat huddled with misery in some gloomy copse of hardwood timber.
    He cocked the hammer now and swung the barrel up to his father’s head and held the black and yawning muzzle of it an inch away. He tightened his fingers on the checkered pistol grip. The old man slept on, father and son. Some sense of foreboding told him to pull back and undo all of this before it was done. Yet he put his finger on the trigger, just touched it. He already knew what it would look like.
    Virgil moved in his sleep, made a small sound almost like a cough. The puppy whined outside. The house was quiet but for that.
    He raised the barrel and caught the hammer with his thumb and eased back on the trigger, letting it down. He went out the door, lighting a cigarette, hurrying.

Sometime during the night somebody had pinned the monkey to the bar with an ice pick through the thorax and it lay there atrophied with its palms upward like Christ in His final agony. Several people had put out cigarettes on it. Somebody had bought it a drink. Somebody had cut off its tail.
    Barlow had two whores and an old fisherman left. The whores were trying to get the fisherman to put them up in the hotel in Pine Springs but the fisherman had to go fishing at six in the morning and Barlow was getting tired of hearing about it. He’d sent Rufus out to the road with the garbage and now Rufus came back through the door and walked straight to the bar.
    â€œSomebody out by the road,” he said.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œIt look like Glen Davis. Can you pay me?”
    â€œPay you?” Barlow stirred himself erect and glared at him. “Goddamn. Pay you?”
    Rufus nodded. “It’s been since last Friday.”
    Barlow reached over for a fifth of Wild Turkey and poured some in his glass. He reached into a tub of ice at his knee and dumped some in the whiskey. He pointed.
    â€œYou see my damn monkey?”
    Rufus looked at the thing with distaste. “I see him. He ain’t gone bite nobody else.”
    â€œHe bit you one time, didn’t he?”
    â€œThat’s right, he did.”
    â€œI bet you ain’t even sorry the son of a bitch is dead. Are you, Rufus?”
    â€œNaw. I ain’t