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ache. And now he felt drained, as though pummeled by some massive orgasm.When in fact his own had been weak, brief, unfulfilling. Nothing to what it would have been, he knew, had he given in.
    Had he killed her.
    He wondered—for maybe the thousandth goddamn time in his adult life—why he hadn’t dared.
    So close.
    He tied his Reeboks, got up and slipped the backpack over his shoulder. He felt depressed. It would be good to walk for a while. There was a place down by the pond he thought was okay. He had the sandwiches.
    Jesus! She’d been angry!
    Thinking about it now, it was almost comical. He almost laughed. Because of all she didn’t know. Because of what none of them knew and what they couldn’t see.
    That so many of them asked to die. Men, women, kids. Their sex didn’t matter. Their age didn’t matter. The Leigh kids who kept tearing up his fence at night. Roberts, the fatass next door with his goddamn dog from hell. Half—no, nearly all —his regular customers over at the Black Locust Tavern. Murdoch with his smelly backyard barbecue every summer. The weird old lady who waved to him from her three-wheel bike and whose name he didn’t know but who seemed to know him or want to know him, some friend of his mother’s maybe attempting some fucked-up down-home intimacy.
    Assholes. Going through life with so little on their minds that it was comical. Knowing nothing about life, really—that life had nothing to do with love and home, family and friends, that life was made up of stealth and planning and brains: brains and guts and will. That, and the obvious—the isolation. All of them thinking that they actually mattered to somebody. And that because ofthat their weaselly little lives had to matter too. When they didn’t. Couldn’t. Ever.
    He kept a notepad and jotted down offenses. “Roberts: dogshit in left-hand corner of the yard, 1/3/93—he picked up the big chunks but left some smeared on the grass. RETAL. ” Or “Loden: ordered scotch with water back, then tells me no, soda back, 2/25/93. RETAL. ”
    Just so he wouldn’t forget just who and when.
    He wondered why he hadn’t.
    Killed her.
    It felt cowardly somehow.
    There had been deaths at his hands for sure but he hadn’t dared for years now, not with what they called the higher animals, and even then it was only cats. And one old miserable stray dog.
    Even then it was wonderful.
    Of course the aftermath wasn’t. Not exactly. He’d had to bury them in his yard. Worrying all the time that his mother would see or suspect something. Whereas here, now…
    Here he could have just pulled her into the bushes and left her that way.
    The way god left his dead.
    The bird who strikes the wire.
    The old raccoon too crippled to fish or scavenge anymore.
    The weak and the stillborn and the cold and hungry.
    The way the dead had been left useless—no, not useless, because you had to think about the soil and how the dead enriched the soil—since life began.
    God’s way.
    There was nobody who would miss her. Not for a few days at least and maybe not for a long time. Her parentshad moved to South Carolina and they’d never been close.
    They had that much in common, at least, he and Susan. Nobody would miss either of them.
    He lit a Camel. Susan didn’t like him to smoke. Now it hardly mattered.
    The Black Locust Tavern had gone half smokeless three months ago. A separate section, and smaller than the other, for those with the habit. It was a case of the manager, Peters, allowing himself to get pussywhipped by a bunch of yuppies and blue-hair oldsters.
    Peters was in the notebook, naturally.
    RETAL.
    He climbed a shelf of rock and allowed himself a glance over the edge. He was susceptible to vertigo sometimes but felt sure that this was the way to beat it. Just keep on looking over. The trail below was obscured by a squat stand of windblown pines growing out of the rock, trunks twisted like elbow joints of gutter pipe to accommodate the need for growth both