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Jack and Alice fought bitterly just before lunch over who should write the check for the telephone bill. Then, despite the scorching heat and without eating any lunch, Alice spent the entire afternoon wandering in the front yard and up and down the dirt road with her journal. She studied the flowers and the soil and the tree bark and took occasional notes. She made some sketches. At dinner, she scolded Jack for wasting his day, for letting himself discover nothing when there was so much to discover around their new rented home. It was a silent, stale dinner of bread, cheese and salad, and after it Alice turned on the television and molded some clay in the dining room while Jack stood and sipped chilled white wine by the screened kitchen door. The air was once again cooling in preparation for morning and the wine with ice was just right after dinner and after Alice had turned off the television and walked into the bedroom. Without looking at her Jack shouted from the kitchen, “Good night, I love you, I’ll just be up a little bit more.”

It was cool and the stars were clear, the cricket songs sharp in the blackness, and Jack was full of wine and cheese and full of the cool night air that seeped through the screen door that kept out the moths dancing around the bare bulb that lit the back porch. He did not want to sleep, ever, anywhere, not even with his beautiful wife.

But then the crack that shot the crickets silent scared him back to her side.

He stood at the edge of the bed. Through the window the porch bulb lent its pale yellow glow to the wall mirror and to the tiny closet and to the white cotton sheets of summer. She was sitting up naked, looking toward the window and bathed in dim shadows and wanting to be kissed, every inch wanting to be kissed and stroked to ease the pale fear slashed across her face.

“You hear that?” Jack whispered.

“Yes,” she answered. She pulled the sheet around her round brown shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“So am I,” she said.

Jack stepped closer and touched her soft cheek. His hand slowly traced her neck. Then he turned back to the window and said, “Sounded like a shot.” He stepped up to the screened window and looked out at the moths dancing their dance of sex and death. He walked back to the kitchen to shut off the porch light and then back into the darkened bedroom. He looked much farther out the bedroom window through the Ponderosa pine and up over and around the moonlit hills blanketed in the night air that sucked the heat out with every breath. He looked out farther than the barred owl could see but all he saw was the moon, the stars and the blackness of the night, which disappeared into nothingness just beyond the barbed wire fence. Still wrapped in the white sheet, Alice pulled herself out of bed and stepped beside Jack. She leaned her round hip against his.

“Wonder where it came from,” she said, and he said,

“Sounded far. Let’s go to bed,” and he turned to her and kissed her. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She carried the sheet back to their love nest and he dropped his shorts and sank into her warmth and into the thrilling, vital sweat of glorious, redeemed night.

Officer Larry Carmichael was at the door at eight the next morning. Jack, wearing purple polka dot shorts, stood before the officer and rubbed the grit out from between his eyes, stretched his neck to make it crack and squinted in the sunlight that was already hot against his face.

“Mornin’ Mr. Harriman. You hear anything funny last night?” the officer asked.

Jack remembered hearing.

“You mean like a gun shot?” Jack asked.

“Yes sir, like a gun shot.”

Jack invited the young man in. The officer was no older than Jack but he called Jack “Mister.” Jack put a kettle of water on the electric stove for coffee and then he woke her from her peace, kissed her cheek and told her to come out, and then he ground the coffee beans into a powder, dumped the powder into a paper cone filter, and he poured the boiling water through the coffee powder. Liquid coffee dripped slowly through the filter into a glass carafe while Jack told the officer what he knew: “About 11 p.m. heard the shot, then went to bed.”

“Anything else?” the officer asked.

“No, just the shot.”

“Hear a car drive away?”

“No.”

“Voices?”

“No.”

“Just the single shot?”

“That’s right. Somebody shot?”

“Yes sir, Judge Crane, shot once in the head.”

“Judge Crane?”

“Yes sir, Judge Crane. So you were here last night?”

“Yes, all night. With my wife. She was sculpting. So what happened to the judge?”

“Well, we’re not sure. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We found the judge lying out on his front porch. Found the shotgun by his head. Or what was left of it.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes sir, Jesus all right. It was a god awful mess. Most of his head was on the wall.” “Jesus.”

“Yes sir. Looks like suicide, shot right through the mouth. Looks like he he sat down in his rocking chair and smoked his pipe one last time. Then he shoved that old 12-gauge up to the roof of his mouth and blew a hole open for the vultures.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes sir, Jesus. But then it don’t look right, y’know. No sir, Judge Crane is no suicide. We know that much.”

“You mean someone killed him?”

“Yes sir, no doubt about it. Judge wasn’t suicidal.”

While the officer spoke Jack poured coffee into two big green mugs.

The officer continued: “Mrs. Crane was in Los Angeles cause the daughter, Lucy - I went to high school with her - anyway, she’s having a baby and my, I’m sure glad I didn’t have to break the news. Mrs. Crane says the judge was happy as a clam, looking forward to a second grandchild, set to run again this fall. Would have been his seventh term. Just no sign he was ready to check out and it just don’t add up, that’s what we think. Chief Boyle saw the judge yesterday in Rapid and the judge was gettin’ under everybody’s skin like he always did, tellin’ dirty jokes in chambers and giving Brian Murphy a hell of a time. You know Brian? The defense lawyer? No, I suppose not. Well, Judge Crane told Chief Boyle he thought they’d both have easy campaigns this year. Both of them uncontested. I guess that would make it easy. Judge smoked his pipe, slapped Sheriff Boyle on his back and no, the judge was no suicide. Someone shot him point blank in the mouth, how on earth we don’t know, but no sir, Judge Crane was no suicide. Morning Mrs. Harriman.”

The officer tipped his hat.

Alice had stepped into the dining room, where Jack and the officer were talking. She wore jeans and sandals and a white button up shirt with blue flowers stitched across the neckline and across the ends of the short sleeves. Her long light brown hair was draped over her shoulders.

“Good morning,” she said softly.

“He says that shot we heard was Judge Crane,” Jack said. “Somebody blew his brains out.”

“Lord.”

“Yes m’am,” the officer said. “You heard the one shot too Mrs. Harriman?”

“That’s right,” she said. “Must have been about eleven fifteen. I’d just gone to bed and Jack, he was going to stay up, but not more than fifteen minutes later we heard the shot and Jack came in to bed.”

“Eleven, eleven-fifteen. That’s about what we figured,” Officer Carmichael said. “Did you hear anything else Mrs. Harriman?”

She poured coffee into a green mug, added a splash of milk and half a teaspoon of sugar, and she took a sip. It was rich dark, organic Guatemalan coffee, espresso roasted in Vermont. Alice sipped again and ignored the deputy sheriff calling her Mrs. Harriman when she was still called Ms. Hoffman, Ms. Alice Hoffman.

“No,” she said, “that was all I heard.”

The tall officer, wearing a dark blue uniform and hat and sweating at the temples, hardly touched his coffee. He said, “Thanks so much, we may need a statement some time, you have yourselves a good one,” and Alice stood beside me and her hair fell on my shoulder as together we watched the officer drive his squad car back out the driveway. The car kicked up a mini dust storm and turned down Crane Lane back out toward Highway 16, which bisected the hills that Jack and Alice had picked for a home so they would become inspired, so they would live among the people, real, living people and their land and their animals pushed and shoved by wind, rain and progress, and by men like Circuit Judge Horace Crane, who lived half a mile up Crane Lane on a ten acre plot that he had planted with peas and corn and zinnias.

“I don’t know,” Jack said, squeezing his arm around Alice’s waist. “I think these cops are dumb as shit.”

“Why’s that?” Alice asked, both of them staring out the window as the dust settled back to the driveway beneath the big old cottonwood and the aspens and the pines. They walked arm in arm to the dining room and sat opposite each other around the coffee at the dining table.

“The guy blew his brains out,” Jack said. “What’s so hard to see? They just don’t want to believe it.”

“How do you know ?” Alice asked, leaning harder against the dining room table and staring at Jack.

“Because,” Jack said. “You think someone did it to him?”

“I don’t know. How do you know? The police know what they’re doing. Maybe they’ve got evidence.”

“I guess. Maybe there were finger prints or foot prints or tire prints or something. He asked me about a car.”

“He didn’t ask me,” Alice said.

They sipped at their coffee. Jack listened to the robins and the meadowlarks and the thrushes. The heating air that drifted through the open windows and doors was sweet with the scent of vanilla pine carried on the light wind that circled and cleansed the hills each morning. But the sugary air was not enough to fully cover the subtle distaste of death. Jack could hear the old crackpot judge’s chuckles and grumbles. They had been neighbors for six months, and Jack hardly knew the man. But sitting at the table and staring at Alice, Jack heard the judge’s know-it-all smoker’s hack, saw the rotund body and the brown plastic-framed glasses. Jack didn’t feel sadness, didn’t feel like he’d lost a friend or a family member, didn’t feel like he had lost a thing, not even a neighbor. But still, the sweetness could not fully mask the nearness of death. And the fragrant pines could not possibly have fully sweetened the night air that rushed through the judge’s head and on up and over the rise to the little house in the woods that Alice and Jack rented.

“You okay?” Alice asked. The morning sun poured through the dining room window and reflected off her golden skin. “Jack, are you okay?” she asked again, and he was full of wonder because as she asked he momentarily forgot the judge and remembered only Alice and her strong, mesmerizing beauty that had touched his heart the night before like a spirit’s touch, full of knowledge and wisdom and forgiveness.

“You okay?” she asked again.

He wondered if she had known that while they caressed each other death had paid a visit to their neighbor. Was it her touches that had put death out of his mind? Was it her breath, her scent, or the burn of her intent, loving eyes? He hadn’t seen it, hadn’t felt it, but there it had been, out there, just beyond. While they kissed and touched the smoke was still lifting, diffusing, and the powder burns were still hot and the blood still gushed from a terrible hole in the universe that sucked away a man’s spirit faster than the night air sucked the heat from the baked earth. But indoors, Jack and Alice had remained hot in each other’s arms.

“I’m fine,” he said, and as Alice poured herself another cup of coffee Jack decided that he was fine, that he was as fine as sifted flour floating into the stainless steel mixing bowl that Mrs. Crane had used to make thick flaky pie crust for the frozen blueberries that she and the judge had collected the summer before. He was fine, sifted, broken apart, filled with sweet air that blew in from the northwest, and he was waiting to be mixed, mashed, spiced, sweetened and baked, waiting to find out what all the sifting was about. He was waiting in the bowl, silent, fine, staring at Alice and, without explanation, thinking about Mrs. Crane’s blueberry pie.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m fine,” and again he decided that he was fine, and that his wife was fine and that together they were wonderfully fine. Nothing was more marvelous than sitting together and smiling like young pups and swaying like trees and warming like summer air. No explanation was needed.

Jack stretched his hand across to Alice, and she kissed it.

“What shall we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. He sat up straight, smiled, again reached across the table and squeezed Alice’s hand tightly, and he said, “How about a hike”

“A hike?” she asked.

“Yes, a hike in the woods,” Jack said. “Maybe up Harney peak. And then let’s eat out tonight.”

They stood to find their hiking shoes.