Full Draw

Chapter One

Ray Landis went out to the garage at nine o'clock on a Thursday night to load a truck he had already loaded twice.

The first time had been Sunday. He had brought everything up out of the crawlspace and laid it on the floor in the order it would go in, and then he had stood there looking at it with his hands on his hips like a man reading a set of prints, and then he had put most of it back. Five days early. A man who packs five days early has nothing else going on and Ray knew it about himself and did it anyway.

The second time was Tuesday. That time he left it in the bed overnight and took it all out again Wednesday morning because he wanted to check the tent for mice.

There had been mice. Not in the tent. In the box the tent lived in, which was a different problem and a smaller one, and he had spent an hour and a half on it that he did not need to spend.

Now it was Thursday and this was the last time.

He had been in that garage most of the week, which was not unusual.

There was a bench along the back wall that his father had built in a different garage in 1966 and that Ray had taken apart and moved twice, and above it a pegboard with the outline of every tool drawn on it in black marker in Sarah's handwriting, because in about 1994 she had gotten tired of him saying he could not find the small vise grips and had done the whole board in one Saturday afternoon while he was at work and had never once mentioned it afterward.

Most of the outlines still had the right tool in them.

On the bench there was a radio in nine pieces.

It was a Zenith, a wooden tabletop from about 1947, and he had gotten it at a yard sale in Croydon for four dollars in the spring because it had a nice cabinet and because the woman selling it had wanted somebody to take it who would do something with it. He had the chassis out and the tubes in a coffee can and the capacitors laid out on a rag in the order they came off, and it had been sitting exactly like that since the first week of September.

He was not avoiding it. He would have told you he was not avoiding it.

He turned the light off over the bench and went out to the truck.

The yard light threw everything long across the concrete. He backed the truck halfway out so the tailgate cleared the door and left it running for the first few minutes because the nights had turned and the cab took a while. An F-150, twelve years old, the plain one with the long bed. He had bought it in March of 2011 off the lot in Langhorne with Sarah in the passenger seat saying it was too much money in a voice that meant go ahead. Two hundred and six thousand miles on it now. He had done the brakes himself twice and the transfer case once and he had never once let anybody else touch the front end.

He loaded from the front of the bed back, heavy to light, the way he always had.

Wall tent first, in its box, twelve by fourteen and canvas and heavier than it needed to be. He had bought it in 1998 and it had been rained on in four states. Poles in a canvas sleeve alongside. The little sheet stove broken down into its own crate with the pipe sections nested inside each other and a coffee can of nails and stove cement wedged in the corner so nothing rattled.

Then the cots. Two of them, and he had thought about that Sunday and taken one out and then put it back in, because a cot is also a bench and a place to set things and there was nobody to explain that to.

Then the chainsaw, the axe, the splitting maul, the come-along. A five gallon can of mixed gas and a quart of bar oil in a milk crate so it could not tip. Two more cans of straight gas for the truck because the last station worth anything was forty minutes from where he was going and it kept short hours in the off season.

Water. Four six gallon jugs, filled at the spigot on the side of the house, capped and laid on their sides against the bulkhead with a ratchet strap over them.

The food went in a wooden box he had built maybe twenty years ago out of scrap poplar, dovetailed at the corners because he had been learning dovetails that winter and wanted the practice. He put in coffee and a percolator, bacon, eggs in a hard case, bread, a pound of butter, potatoes, onions, a bag of dried beans, a slab of scrapple wrapped in butcher paper, six cans of soup, a jar of instant in case the percolator went bad on him, and a two pound bag of hard candy that he had bought for no reason he could have defended.

Julie called at twenty of ten.

He got the phone out with two fingers because his hands had bar oil on them and looked at the screen and stood there a second longer than he needed to before he answered it.

"Hey, Dad."

"Hey, sweetheart."

"Is this a bad time? You sound like you're outside."

"I'm in the garage. I'm loading up."

"That's tomorrow?"

"Four in the morning."

"Four in the morning." He could hear a dishwasher going somewhere behind her, and a television, and at some distance a kid saying something twice. "Okay. Well. Be careful on that turnpike."

"I will."

"Text me when you get there."

"There's no service where I'm going, Jules."

"Right." A pause. "Right, you said that. Last year you said that."

"I'll call from town if I go in."

"Okay." A cabinet shut. "How are you doing, Dad?"

And Ray Landis stood in his own garage on a Thursday night in October with a phone in his hand and the whole thing right there in front of him, the tools in their outlines and the radio in nine pieces and a house behind him with one light on in it, and he said what he had said every single time for three years.

"I'm doing good."

"Yeah?"

"I'm doing real good. I got the gutters done. Mowed for probably the last time Saturday."

"That's good, Dad."

"How's Mike?"

"He's fine. He's traveling too much." She said something to somebody with her hand half over the phone. "Sorry. Bedtime. Hey, did Debbie call you?"

"Not lately."

"She's going to. She's had a whole thing with the school district, it's a mess, I'll let her tell you." A pause that went about a half second long. "I talked to Dave last week."

"How's he doing."

"He's good. He's busy."

"That's good."

"Yeah," Julie said.

Neither of them had anything after that and they both went looking for something at the same time and ran into each other twice, and then she said she had to get them down, and he said go ahead, and she said love you Dad, and he said you too, and it was over.

Six minutes.

Ray stood there and put the phone back in his shirt pocket, and if you had asked him he would have told you it was a nice call, and he would have meant it.

He set the bow case in the cab, behind the passenger seat, flat.

The bow was a Hoyt he had bought in 1996 and had restrung and re-cammed and finally, four years ago, re-limbed, which the kid at the shop in Fairless Hills had told him was throwing good money after bad. Ray had listened to the whole speech. Then he had paid for the limbs. He shot it at sixty pounds now, down from seventy, which had happened over about a decade in a way he had not particularly noticed until he went to draw one October and it did not come back the way it used to and he had stood there in the yard for a minute thinking about it.

Six arrows in the quiver and eighteen more in a tube with broadheads and field tips, because you shoot the field tips to stay honest and you hunt with the other, and a man who has driven four and a half hours and then not put three arrows into a block before he goes up the hill is a man who is guessing.

He had sharpened every broadhead in that truck on Sunday, sitting at the bench under the pegboard, one at a time on the stone with the light down low the way you have to have it to see an edge.

Then he had sharpened them again on Tuesday.

It took most of an evening either way, and both times he had enjoyed it more than he was going to admit to anybody, because it is two hours of work with your hands that has a right answer, and there is not enough of that in a house with one person in it.

No rifle. Statewide archery ran the third of October to the middle of November, and it was the nineteenth, and the season said bow so he took a bow. He had never in his life gone into the woods with the wrong thing for the season. It had not occurred to him to start.

The rods went in the rack above the back window. The fly rod in its tube and the ugly little spinning rod he actually caught fish with.

Then the rest of it. Rope. A tarp and a second tarp. The medical kit in the red bag, which he opened and looked at and closed. Headlamp and two spares. A folding shovel. A twelve volt compressor. The tow strap. Wool. More wool than a reasonable person would take, but he had been cold in Potter County in October before and he had made a decision about that in about 1987 and stuck to it.

His father's compass, which did not work.

He put that in the console the way he always did.

He was strapping the last of it when the phone went in his shirt pocket.

"You leave yet? You gone?" Sal said. "You're not gone. You'd have called me from the road."

"It's nine o'clock at night."

"So that's a no."

"That's a no, Sal."

There was a sound on the other end like a chair. Sal Petrucci had a bad hip he would not get done and a chair in his kitchen that he had been complaining about for two years, and Ray could hear both of them.

"I'm going about four," Ray said.

"Four in the morning."

"Beat the Harrisburg thing."

"There's no Harrisburg thing at four in the morning. There's no Harrisburg thing at eight. There's no Harrisburg thing, Ray, that's the thing I'm telling you. You just want to leave in the dark."

Ray leaned on the tailgate. "You want something, or."

"Do I want something. When are you back? That's the question. When are you back."

"Sunday week."

"Sunday week." Sal said it the way you say a number you're writing down. "That's nine days."

"It's ten."

"So you're telling me ten days."

"I'm telling you Sunday week."

Sal did not leave a hole in it. In the background a television was on low, and then it wasn't.

"You got that thing where you don't have a signal up there."

"There's no signal anywhere up there."

"That's what I'm saying to you."

"I know what you're saying to me."

"I'm not saying anything. I'm asking," Sal said. "I'm asking a question and you're answering a different question, which is a thing you do."

Ray watched a car come up the street and slow and turn into the Dillons' driveway three houses down. The Dillons' kid, home late. He had watched that kid learn to ride a bike in front of this house.

"If I'm not back Sunday week," Ray said, "you can call somebody."

"Who."

"I don't know, Sal. Somebody."

"That's a plan," Sal said. "That's a plan. That's a real plan you got there. Ten days and somebody." Then, in a different voice, easier, and without leaving any room in front of it: "You want anything from the store."

"I'm all set."

"You got coffee."

"I got coffee."

"Because last time."

"I got coffee, Sal."

"All right. All right." He did not let the pause get anywhere. "Hey. Hey, bring me back a fish."

"You don't eat fish."

"Bring me one anyway."

Ray put the phone back in his pocket and finished the strap.

He went through the house one more time with the lights off, out of habit rather than need. Kitchen, hallway, the office where the desk had nothing on it that mattered. He checked the back door and the basement door and the window over the sink that did not latch right and had not latched right since the Bush administration.

In the bedroom he took the last thing, which was a pair of wool socks off the top of the dresser, and stood there with them in his hand.

"I'm going up Friday," he said. "Kettle Creek. That same spot."

The house did the thing houses do at night, the small tick of something contracting somewhere.

"Ten days. Sal thinks I'm going to fall down a hole."

He put the socks in his coat pocket and turned the light off and went out.