Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

Someone in the diner said for everyone to be quiet as the waitress leaned up on her toes to turn the knob on the television, and out poured a reporter’s voice, a microphone and some woods, a moving camera at a treeline, some yellow tape and flashing lights. You can’t go anywhere without the televisions. The café filled with the loud wind in the reporter’s microphone, the volume way up, and no one said a word or made a sound among the tables, everyone froze. I saw snow on the ground, so it was today, it was live. I thought I remembered the run of the same trees across the skyline when I took the long shot, so that would have to mean this morning.

Friends, the reporter said, had found the body, the long-distance body, the new one, but those last ones were my words, and thankfully I said them low and no one heard me. They had gone out hunting with him late this morning, the reporter said, and heard a shot and thought it his, but when they had not seen him for a while they back-tracked and eventually found him in the brush.

That detail told me the news item must be dealing with this morning’s event, if only they would pull back on the camera shot so I could see the bigger picture, recognize the woods. That was a relief, my cabin was still safe at least.

The mouth on the microphone continued, The friends stumbled on to a terrible sight, the body of their friend buried under leaves and branches, as if stored, shot only minutes before, according to police sources at the scene.

Yes, but did they see anything, a person walking away with a rifle? And where was Troy now? I had to keep an eye everywhere it seemed to me.

The camera pulled back. Then a banner appeared at the bottom of the screen, Long Lake, St. Agatha. The relief in me when I saw that it was this day’s man and not the previous men who were lying not one mile from where I lived and who would have pointed the way to my cabin even in death. The television showed my footprints in the snow but blurred from the wind and too deep for detail, and the reporter said that the victim, whom police described as a local hunter, was shot from a half mile away, shot through the teeth, killed instantly, an expert shot. That seemed insensitive, I thought, that kind of detail. What if the family were watching? What was she thinking? Then the reporter held her hand to her ear as if listening and went pale and flustered, and the camera moved to an officer of the law standing beside her.

Particularly savage, said a police captain to the camera. Appalling, he said.

A fast world I lived in. An hour at most, and the reports already widespread.

Then more news flashed across the screen, breaking news, a gravelly voice, police now saying that a serial killer, a sniper, could be loose in and around Fort Kent and the western St. John Valley.

I checked outside: that swirling vague fog, but no Troy, no police. They were waiting out of sight or they weren’t waiting at all. No point in thinking like a victim, and if they were there, fine. Time to go home.

I slipped the sight into its case and went outside, went right for the supermarket and my truck; along the way I passed a boy and his mother, tipped my hat and smiled at the young fellow, and he smiled back. I sensed they were without, and if I had some money I would have bought the child a toy, or something at least. The festival tree grew brighter as I approached, lit the pavement and my boots, but I sensed no heat in the light, they were just the decorations.

Already the locals had gathered outside the supermarket, a constable there too in the middle, nodding and holding up his arms and then shaking his head and criss-crossing his arms in a big no.

What about the law, why can’t you catch him, one man said. Two men walked out of a side street, large men, heavy with big coats and guns. One waved his in the air and said, We’re being shot at and no one is doing anything.

The policeman said, We’re trying, it’s all woods up here and you know that very well, Pascal, and we don’t know for sure that anyone else has even been shot. This is early on.

What do you think, the gun waver shouted back at the policeman.

I think you need to calm down, the policeman said. I think you all need to move on and stop blocking the thoroughfare.

I stood beside the crowd and tried to read the poster through all the shoving and the consternation in the cold mist. People get upset very quickly, the citizenry teems along, never more than an inch from their passions. One dead body half an hour away and everyone is up in arms.

There you have it, I could not read the poster, but I could see some new writing on it, that man had penned something for sure: a black spider of words. Just too many bodies in the way. Didn’t want to be obvious, peering at it up close. I decided to go back to the diner and wait, let them disperse like snow in a bluster. First I put the sight back in the truck, no point in carrying that around and asking for trouble.

Since I left, the diner had filled with pedestrians come in for the reports, two extra televisions had sprouted, one on a table they cleared for it, so different people stared at different televisions. I stood between the two television tables, looking for my waitress. She was standing with her tray extended in front of her, mouth open. The entire place was silent, and I could have been standing in the silent forest with all those straight, standing bodies and the sitting ones like trees around me.

Can I have a cup of coffee, I said to no one in particular.

Someone looked me up and down as if I had done something terrible. All I had done was ask for coffee. I looked for a table, but the only one available was the table with the television on it, so I sat behind it on a chair I dragged up. Now everyone was looking at me but not at me. That was strange, that I was in the best hiding place, the best camouflage in the countryside, better than any hole in the deep forest. I was sitting behind a television with everyone staring.

I passed the next hour listening to words like news, fast and anxious, the mounting evidence, the fading light in St. Agatha, a high-caliber bullet, battle-munitions variety, victim killed instantly, and then, police have a lead, some footprints. I could not see the images that went with the reporter’s voice, but I had seen those footprints before anyway. I leaned with my chin in my hand, with an ear to the details. Police have a lead indeed. She was not telling the truth, I could tell because the tone of her voice changed, the timbre. They were telling her to say that, to rouse the prey.

When I felt it was time, I rose and walked away, and to everyone in the café it must have seemed that I rose out of the television itself and walked toward them saying, I am the killer of all these men. Can’t you see me? Outside, I noted how empty the streets were all of a sudden. Maybe because it was dark and there was a shooter of men abroad. The supermarket had closed early and the lights were out around it, so I had to lean close to the noticeboard, and the writing was tiny: Guess who shot your dog .

Of the writer I saw no sign, but the writing was his, the geography of the D was the same as the other notes on the posters. So I had the bastard. Shooting the other man today was not justified in that case. But he was ruled out now, as well as any others not directly in the woods around the cabin. So from now on, if there were any more incidents, they would only happen there, even if it invited attention in the long run. And I committed to memory the scarf’s appearance. I would know him again.

Beside my index card hung a sheet on which someone had written in black marker: “Wanted, the shooter of Henri Dupre on Long Lake. Information to Fort Kent or St. Agatha Sheriff’s Office.” Not an official poster, that one. An angry citizen. I thought of drawing a bullseye around the word SHOOTER with an X through it, but there was no reason for doing it, no point in that kind of cruelty.