Matthew Null: Allegheny Front

When it happened, we were discussing who’d take home the tenderloin, the finest meat. You take it. No, you. Shovel whimpered at my boots, fell, and began to seize.

I clamped my hands on the dog’s head and called out. Warm blood trickled over the webs of my fingers. I used my thumbs to parse the skin. Shovel shrieked in a way you don’t expect from a dog. He bled from the mouth and the nose. A swollen brain, something ripped and bleeding beneath the skull, where the bear’s teeth had punched through. Shovel bucked, eyes rolling. Something so disturbing about the sick-animal thrash against my arms.

Andy hollered, “Where’s my gun?”

It took me a second. I took out the pistol and handed it over. I had forgotten I had it.

With the heel of his hand, Andy slid in a fresh magazine with an oily click. He staggered off the tailgate, moving somehow on that broken peg of a foot, and held the pistol out to Bud.

“Your bear,” he said. “Your job.”

Bud didn’t move.

“Come on,” Andy said, seething now. “Time you done some growing up.”

Bud’s voice wasn’t as steady as it should have been. “I’ll take him to the vet. I’ll pay for it, I’ll use my own money.”

The men jeered, spitting on the snow, telling him to suck it up. I watched the kid choke something back, swallowing it slowly, barely, like a peach pit.

He took the pistol and held it, doing nothing.

Shovel whined in an awful, wounded way, like we were cutting his tail off.

Conner shouldered up. “Do it, damn it. He’s in pain.”

I turned away. I didn’t want to see Shovel’s face break open. A moment later, I heard the distinct crack of a dry-fire. I turned and looked.

Conner said, “You got to put a bullet in the chamber, genius! You little liar. Give me that shitty fake Glock.” He jerked the live pistol from the boy’s hand. He pulled up a round and swung on Shovel’s brain.

I had forgotten to check the barrel for mud and snow.

A metallic belch and the pistol split its length in a flash of fire. Conner dropped to his knees. Everyone shouting. The dogs were silent. I remember how chilling that was. I was afraid to look.

The gun had exploded in his hand. Conner unclenched his fingers. He gazed at his hand in wonder. There was no flurry of blood and bone, only the gun barrel in many slivers upon the snow. It should have taken off his arm. He was lucky then. He looked again and again, for the slightest nick, the slightest flaw. You could have done it a thousand times over, and it wouldn’t have happened this way.

It took me a while to register the dog was dead at our feet. No one would touch it.

There is a little white house outside of town. It stands away from the road. All alone. You can just see the driveway and a red hint of door through the laurel.

There is no death penalty in this state, but if there were, Conner and his friend, the one who stripped off his shirt that day, surely would have gotten it. They emptied her medicine cabinet for pills. They took less than fifty dollars from her purse. It was night. They beat her to death with their hands. Eighty years old. They beat her with a savagery no one could understand. Why did he kill her? He didn’t have to. In a just world, lightning or flood would level that place. I drive by it again and again.

This is one of many houses.

Her name was Angela Sayles. One of those old sweet women I visited on my rounds. She had, I remember, skin so white and clear, like cigarette paper. You could see the bones fluttering in her hands. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose and a pleasing loud laugh you couldn’t imagine from her slight body.

“Something You Can’t Live Without” first appeared in Oxford American (Spring 2010) and was anthologized in PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011: The Best Stories of the Year. “Mates” appeared in the minnesota review (Fall 2014). “Natural Resources” appeared in Baltimore Review (Spring 2013). “Gauley Season” appeared in West Branch (Summer/Fall 2013) and was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2014. “Telemetry” appeared in Ploughshares (Winter 2012–2013). “The Island in the Gorge of the Great River” appeared in Ecotone (Spring 2014). “Rocking Stone” appeared on the Tin House website (May 31, 2013). “The Slow Lean of Time” appeared in American Short Fiction (Spring 2014). “In the Second District” appeared as “Destinations” in Mississippi Review (Winter 2013–2014).

The author wishes to thank the editors and magazines that first published these stories, as well as the following institutions and people who helped make this book possible: the University of Iowa, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Jentel Foundation, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Key West Literary Seminars, Sarabande Books, Sarah Gorham, Kristen Radtke, Ariel Lewiton, Lydia Millet, Janet Silver, Charles D’Ambrosio, Allan Gurganus, Lan Samantha Chang, Connie Brothers, Deb West, Jan Zenisek, Roger Skillings, Salvatore Scibona, Jaimy Gordon, James Alan McPherson, and Arlo Haskell.

MATTHEW NEILL NULLis the author of the novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout Books). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the PEN/O. Henry Award, his short fiction has appeared in Oxford American, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, Best American Mystery Stories, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He divides his time between West Virginia and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he coordinates the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center.