Robert Wilson - The Harvest

The campers were lined up outside the Connor house, and Joey sat minding his Sterno fire on the concrete drive at Abby Cushman’s door, listening.

He had honed his listening skills quickly. The world might seem empty, but Joey knew it wasn’t. There were animals, for one thing. Dogs: ex-pets, maybe, learning how to survive in the wild; or wild dogs; or wolves—he had heard some howling the last couple of nights. And people. It was amazing, the variety of noises people made on a still night. These camper-trailers had thin walls, and he often heard the murmur of night talk. People talking to themselves, talking in their sleep. Or rolling over in bed, rocking the RV a little. Maybe somebody trotting into the house to use a toilet; somebody else, restless, stepping outside to look at the stars.

Tonight he tried to calm himself, to make his ears come alive.

But he couldn’t help rerunning his encounter with Beth.

It was stupid, what she had said. Joey knew what went on in this camp, especially at night. He knew all about Beth and what Beth did at night: slept alone, mostly; snuck over to the doctor’s RV sometimes.

Which was bad enough. The mystery of Beth was that he simultaneously wanted her and didn’t. Sometimes just looking at the way she moved across the tarmac in her blue jeans was enough to give Joey a raging hard-on. Other times she was as appealing as a day-old cut of meat. Sometimes he hated to think about her; sometimes he hated to think of anyone else thinking about her.

He guessed she was fucking the doctor; and as bad as that was, he had begun to live with the idea.

But the thing she had told him tonight—her dirty comments about Colonel Tyler—

No.

It was impossible. Colonel Tyler, Joey thought, was like an avenging angel, a pure and powerful force from far beyond the limits of this ratty trailer caravan. It was Colonel Tyler who had come into the ruins of Buchanan with clean clothes and a pistol on his hip and asked to talk to Mr. Joseph Commoner. It was Tyler who had trusted Joey to walk the perimeter, Tyler who had trusted him with a gun.

The idea that the Colonel would stoop to some furtive little night fuck with a nonentity like Beth—it was obscene, and he didn’t believe it.

But the night wore on, and the moon began to rise, and the new Artifact radiated a pale light of its own, and Joey heard Beth’s door ease open—the whine of the hinges above the moth-flutter of the Sterno flame—and he stood and took three silent steps to the corner of Abby’s camper, helplessly curious, and watched Beth moving, a shadow, to the front door of the Connor house and inside.

Probably she was just using the toilet. But Joey itched with the insult of what she had told him, and he circled around the house to the side, to the window where Colonel Tyler’s light was still burning. The blind was down, but Joey put his face to the glass and was able to capture an angle of vision where the blind gapped against the sill. Colonel Tyler sat motionless in a chair. His pistol rested on the arm.

Joey touched his own pistol, snug against his belt. He knew the Colonel couldn’t see him, that the lamp and the blind would have made a mirror of the window on a night this dark, but his face was hot with shame and suspicion and his heart was beating wildly.

He saw Colonel Tyler look toward the door, saw his lips move but couldn’t make out the words.

The door was at the wrong angle and Joey wasn’t able to see who had arrived… but who else could it be?

He began to take small, sharp breaths.

Colonel Tyler spoke, paused, spoke again.

Joey registered these images but ceased to think about them. He couldn’t think any longer; could only watch.

Now Beth moved into his range of vision. She was dressed too lightly for the weather. She was blushing a little. She looked nervous and aroused, her — hair hanging loose around her shoulders.

She came and stood beside Tyler’s chair. Tyler didn’t move. Beth spoke. Words inaudible. She reached for Tyler’s huge hand and took it in her own. She put his hand on her blouse, on her breast, and moved against it in a way that seemed to Joey brutally obscene.

Joey took his pistol out of his belt and hurried to the front of the house.

Once it was obvious why Beth had come, Tyler felt in control of the situation.

She wasn’t much different from the hundreds of such women Tyler had hired at various times in his life, and there was nothing very surprising, he thought, about her presence tonight. Apparently he had inherited more than a gavel from the deposed Matt Wheeler.

She put his hand against her blouse and he felt the shape of her breast, the hard nugget of the nipple. He admired the sight of his hand there, the creviced skin against the flimsy cloth.

He stood up and pressed her against him. She wasn’t very tall. Her head was tilted back, her eyes half-closed, expecting a kiss. Tyler didn’t kiss—it was a dirty habit. Instead, he tangled his right hand in her hair and pulled.

Her eyes widened. He warned her not to speak, not to say anything. He didn’t like women who talked.

He pressed his hips against her, put his left hand under her blouse and explored. He pulled her head back until her throat was exposed in a fine white curve. She wasn’t sure what to make of the pain, seemed to hover between arousal and fear.

Her blue jeans were closed with a row of buttons. Tyler had opened two of them when Joey kicked open the door.

Colonel Tyler had never been wounded in combat—he had never experienced combat firsthand—and he was surprised when the bullet hit him.

There was pain and anger but first of all, above all else, an enormous surprise, as if it were an act of God, a causeless momentum that tumbled him backward.

He caught himself against the recliner with his right hand. The left hand, his left arm, in fact, wouldn’t answer to the helm. It felt as if someone had cut off the arm and replaced it with a fleshy, useless slab of rubber. There was blood all over his shoulder.

Beth was still standing, though the shot must have come very near her head. Tyler realized that she was screaming, that the sound was exterior to him.

“Move away,” Joey was telling her—the Colonel recognized Joey’s petulant whine. “Get out of the way.”

Tyler braced his hip against the recliner and reached for his own pistol.

He had loaded it earlier tonight. He had meant only to touch its cold steel against his forehead, perhaps taste the barrel with his tongue, as was his habit. Never to pull the trigger. Sissy always talked him out of that. But now someone else had pulled a trigger, someone else had shot him. Joey had shot him.

He grasped the pistol and swiveled around.

One foot slid against the polished oak floor and Tyler bumped to a sitting position with his back against the recliner. Joey must have tracked this motion as a fall, or ignored it altogether; his attention was still on Beth. To the Colonel’s eyes Joey looked grotesque, inflated with jealousy to bullfrog proportions.

“Move aside,” Joey repeated, and Beth seemed finally to understand; she took two steps toward the window and turned to look for Tyler. Perhaps she saw the blood for the first time; her eyes widened and Tyler wondered if she would scream again. Beth looked a little ridiculous, too, with her smooth belly showing through the gap of her unbuttoned pants.

Joey looked at the Colonel and the Colonel shot him in the head.

There was no precision or elegance in the act, only the raising of the pistol and the pulling of the trigger and Joey falling down and convulsing for a horrible thirty or forty seconds before he died.

Beth went to Joey and knelt above him and made a choked sound at the sight of his injury. Her hand rested on the pistol Joey had dropped beside him. Colonel Tyler watched that hand. Watch that hand, Sissy instructed him. Sissy was a sudden, nebulous presence hovering near the ceiling of the room, but Tyler didn’t look for her, merely followed her advice, watched Beth’s hand on the pistol.