Russell Banks - The Reserve

“He doesn’t have it here, Mother. He came by boat. Hubert brought him in, didn’t you, Hubert?” Vanessa looked at the guide and then at Jordan Groves with pleading eyes, Lie for me, please. Both of you, goddamnit, lie for me! Neither man’s eyes answered one way or the other.

Jordan took several steps to his right, separating himself from Vanessa and the others. Evelyn Cole watched him warily, but kept the shotgun trained on Hubert’s back. The end of the barrel wobbled a little, Jordan noticed, as if it had grown heavy to her. He said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but it can’t be worth someone’s getting shot. Whyn’t you let me have that gun, Mrs. Cole? I’ll fly you out, if you’ll give me the gun.” He extended his hands, palms up.

“No, you can’t!” Vanessa cried. “You don’t have your airplane! Don’t believe him, Mother. He’s lying. He came over in Hubert’s boat. See? It’s right here,” Vanessa said and patted the hull of the guide boat.

“Put the gun down, Mrs. Cole. We don’t need anybody getting hurt. We can all discuss whatever’s going on. Whyn’t you give the gun to me?” Jordan said and with both hands extended took a step closer to her.

“I heard the airplane,” Evelyn Cole said. “I was awake, and I heard the airplane. They’ve kept me prisoner, Mr. Groves. My daughter’s lost her mind, and this one, he’s helping her.”

Hubert slowly turned around, saw the over and under barrels of the shotgun a few inches from his chest, and inhaled sharply at the sight. He wasn’t sure the woman had ever fired a gun. Dr. Cole was the hunter. A good shot, too. But he’d never seen the wife with a gun in her hand. He looked along the length of the under barrel and saw that the safety was off and knew that the shotgun was hair triggered and remembered the box of shells stored in the drawer of the gun rack in the doctor’s clothes closet. He concluded that both barrels of the shotgun were loaded. The woman was having trouble holding the gun, he could tell. The barrel was ninety centimeters long and in her weakened condition was too heavy for her. If she doesn’t fire it first, Hubert decided, she will have to lower it. The moment for her to fire the gun has almost passed, he thought.

Mrs. Cole took her eyes off the guide to glance at Jordan Groves’s large open hands, then his eyes. She saw that he was a kind man, a worried man, and that, unlike the guide, he was not caught up in Vanessa’s insanity. “Please, Mr. Groves,” she said to him. “Please help me.”

“Vanessa,” he said. “For God’s sake, let me take her out of here, before something really bad happens.”

“It already has,” she said. Suddenly Hubert grabbed the barrels of the gun and wrenched the weapon to his left, with both hands pushing it away from Jordan and Vanessa so that if it went off it would fire harmlessly into the air. Evelyn Cole tugged fiercely back, surprising Hubert with her strength, causing him to yank hard on the barrels. The woman pulled back, but then lost her grip on the stock, and suddenly the barrels of the gun in Hubert’s hands felt like twinned snakes. He let go of the barrels and the shotgun flipped 180 degrees in the air, end over end. In precise, unforgettable detail Hubert and Jordan and Vanessa saw it happen. They watched in horror as the hair-triggered shotgun fell through the air between them and Vanessa’s mother, and the stock hit the ground first, and the gun fired. Both barrels emptied almost simultaneously into the woman’s chest. The force of it blew her backward the length of her small body and tossed her onto the ground in a crumpled heap, arms and legs akimbo. Her head flopped once, twice, then was still. Blood bubbled from her open mouth onto the hard ground. The dark, fist-size hole in her chest instantly turned scarlet and filled and overflowed. Her blue eyes stayed open, as if in permanent surprise.

No one uttered a word. The morning mist had risen above the warming lake and had dissipated. The sky was cloudless and azure colored, and on the far side of the lake the mountains of the Great Range glowed in bright sunlight. Jordan looked across the glassy water, and each individual tree — one and one and one — leaped from the bright greenery, sharp to the eye, even from this distance. A perfect Adirondack day. The sound of the shotgun blast echoed back once from the high gray cliffs. The two black loons broke free of the water and flew low to the northern end of the lake and disappeared above the trees.

Vanessa said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Hubert knelt down beside the woman and touched her throat. “Yes.”

“You’re sure?” Jordan said. “She’s really dead?”

“Yes,” Hubert said. “She took both barrels.” He stood up and looked off at the mountains on the far side of the lake.

Vanessa turned and started walking toward the house.

“Where are you going?” Jordan called.

“To get a shovel!”

“What the hell for?”

She stopped and looked back at him, her fists on her hips, and studied him for a second. “To bury her, Jordan,” she said and hurried on.

“To bury her! My Christ! Will you tell me what on earth has been going on here?” Jordan said to the guide.

Hubert stood and looked at his hands. His guilty hands. This was an accident that shouldn’t have happened. If he hadn’t tried to take the shotgun away from her, the woman would have had to put it down of her own accord. Or she would have handed it over to the artist. Maybe the artist would have flown her out of here then. And maybe Vanessa Cole would have agreed to do what her mother originally wanted, ship her off to that hospital in Europe. Only first they’d make the mother promise no brain surgery, no lobotomy that can turn you into a vegetable, that would be the deal, and maybe in a few months or a year Vanessa would come out cured of whatever mental sickness she had, and she would return to America, and her mother would have forgiven her by then for all this. For being kidnapped and imprisoned here at the camp by her own daughter. And someday Vanessa Cole would get her inheritance and enjoy the kind of life she was supposed to have.

“Hubert, for Christ’s sake, answer me! The woman has just been killed! This is goddamned serious. And Vanessa just wants to bury her and forget it? Are you two both crazy, like the old woman said?”

“No. What she told me made sense. Sort of. Oh, hell, at least yesterday it did.”

“Who? Who made sense?”

“Miss Cole. Vanessa. She told me that her mother signed her into a mental hospital in Europe and took away all her inheritance money from her father and her grandparents. It was extreme, maybe, what the mother did, and Vanessa was really scared of going into the hospital. What she did was maybe more extreme than what the mother did, but it was understandable, I guess. Because she was scared of having brain surgery. You know, a lobotomy. I was trying to get them to find some kind of agreement is all. It was wrong, what Vanessa did, tying up her mother and keeping her here against her will. It was wrong what the mother was doing, too. But it was an accident, Jordan, the gun going off.”

“Yeah, it was an accident. I know that. You know that. But it won’t look like an accident if we let Vanessa bury her out here,” Jordan said. He tossed his jacket on the ground, turned the guide boat over and slid it on its keel toward the water and in. “You’ve got to take the body out and report what happened. I’m not supposed to be here, especially with the airplane, so it’s up to you, Hubert. If we load the woman’s body into the boat now,” he said, “before Vanessa comes back with the damned shovel, you can row it across the lake to the Carry.” From there the guide could get the body of the woman over to the First Lake on the cart the guides used for hauling supplies between the two lakes, row across to the boathouse, leave the woman’s body, and walk in and report what had happened. “And by the way, Hubert, nobody needs to know I was out here this morning. It’ll only complicate things. So c’mon,” he said, “give me a hand with her before Vanessa tries to stop us.”