When Lemuel Kittredge came to, he was high, high up, lying in a drafty cage of planks and rusty pipes.   

     Weak sunlight drifted in like smoke through cracks in three of the walls.  The fourth wall had been mostly window but now it was just a giant, rectangular hole, paneless and raw where birds and small, climbing animals had chewed and pecked at the rotting wood.  

     He should have destroyed the old fire tower along with the rest of the forest.  Instead, he had left one hilltop of old-growth trees standing to shut up the environmentalists.  Turn it into a little park, the tree-huggers had begged, so future generations could have a little taste of what the great, rolling forests had been like.  They had wanted the tower to come down, though, saying it was too much of an attractive nuisance to kids. 

     But taking it down piece by piece and trucking it out without destroying the trees around it would have cost too much.  Beside, kids living in his billion-dollar development didn't care about poking around outdoors, fatties, most of them, computer junkies who were too lazy even to climb the hill, never mind one hundred rickety steps just to see air.  

When Lemuel tried to sit up, the rib where the slug grazed it lit up white hot, just like someone was holding the steady, butane flame of a cigarette lighter to it.  He sank back a little on the makeshift mattress of newspaper-stuffed garbage bags, trying to ease the pain both in his side and in his bladder, damned if he'd embarrass himself in front of this young jackass by either wetting himself or begging for something in which to urinate.  

     The jackass was kneeling with last year's Christmas present, a Remington 12-gauge shotgun, poked out the window.  He was silhouetted against the pale, dawn sky like he was posing for some kook paramilitary publication, except the goofballs in those rags didn't wear navy blue blazers with gold-crest buttons saying "VERITAS" or handmade, red silk bowties or one-hundred-per-cent cotton Brooks Brothers shirts.  

     "Mark," Lemuel said. 

     The jackass shook his head.  "In a minute." 

     "Listen," the old man said, trying to shift his full body weight without twisting his midriff, "about last night--" 

     Mark Kittridge laughed.  "You sound like a girl." 

     Lemuel tried to laugh, too.  "Do I? Funny, nobody's ever accused me of that before, or at least not after I hit puberty.  Mark--" 

     "I told you, wait," his grandson said without turning his head.  "There," he muttered to himself.  "I think I see something moving just...over..."  

     Lemuel felt the agony in his ribcage as his whole body jerked mindlessly upright.  "For God's sake, don't shoot!" 

     Mark's back stiffened.  Slowly, he withdrew the shotgun barrel from the window.  "Grampa, don't yell.  I do not like it when you yell." 

     Lemuel gave his head a little jerk of a nod to show he understood.  "Okay, son.  I apologize." 

     "And I'm not your son," Mark muttered.  "He's dead." 

     "Right."  Lemuel felt faint. 

     Mark cocked his head.  He raised the shotgun, pointed it back out.  After a minute, he sighed, lowered the barrel again and said, "Too bad you're hurt." 

     Lemuel felt his heart leap.  "I'm okay," he said. 

     Mark turned and looked at him with blue eyes so wide and innocent he could have been a mischievous three-year-old with a plastic popgun trying to kill flies.  "Really?" 

     Lemuel nodded. When he spoke, he couldn't recognize his own voice.  "I'm fine." 

     With a grin and a toss of his blond hair, Mark raised the shotgun again and aimed it at Lemuel.  "Then I screwed up royally. Guess I should fix that, right?" 

     Lemuel froze. 

     "Got you in my sights," Mark said in the drawling, muffled voice a man uses when he's aiming down a gun barrel.  "You know, Gramps, this is a great gun. Good for deer.  Especially good for turkeys." 

      Involuntarily, Lemuel's eyes moved, following the dot and dash progress of a flock of crows across the blue-white screen of sky.  

      Mark laughed into the walnut stock of his gun.  "The only thing that could be behind me, Gramps, is an angel, some big, old bugger with wings and a nightgown."  His finger curled on the trigger.  "And, speaking of angels--" 

     Three things scalded Lemuel Kittridge simultaneously: tears, urine and shame. 

     Mark dropped the barrel.  "Hey, don't cry.  I was just kidding."  He wrinkled his nose.  "What's that smell?" 

       Lemuel lay on what he had come to think of as his deathbed having to bite his lip to keep from spraying up huge gouts of laughter into the hairless face of this jackass of his loins, well, his dead son's loins. All of a sudden he felt light, released of all worldly pain, beyond all human fear.  His fixed his eyes on Mark's face.  "After your dad died, I thought, well, I've got Mark," he said. 

     Mark pulled a fake, cheesy smile. 

     "Yes, that's what I thought," Lemuel said in that same dispassionate voice.  "I thought I was so lucky, having a smart, good-looking grandson like you, somebody who'd take over for me, take care of me.  That's right, Mark.  I actually thought I was lucky."  With a sigh, Lemuel shut his eyes. 

     "Shut up!" 

     Lemuel shrugged.  "Why?  It's the truth.  Until last night, I thought I had the best grandson a man could ever have." 

     "Shut up!" 

     Lemuel felt the planks beneath him vibrate.  The feet--he could just see them in their six-hundred-dollar loafers and sixty-dollar socks--stopped just at his right temple.  While he waited for the shot, or the kick, or the bludgeon, he smiled up blindly like a man basking in sunlight.  "You couldn't wait.  Never could." 

     Mark knelt.  "Oh, man."  The voice was so young.  "I was just going to make you jump out the window and then I was going back up to Cambridge." 

     Jackass.  "And then what?"  He could feel the dried blood from his ribcage sticking like glue to his fingers. 

     "Wait for them to come and tell me," Mark said. 

     Lemuel opened his eyes.  He nodded, absent-mindedly picking at the dried smears with his nails.  "And then?" 

     Mark sighed.  "I'd cry, I guess." 

     "Thank you," Lemuel said.  "And then you'd laugh all the way to the bank." 

     "Yeah," his grandson said.  "Something like that."   

     Lemuel shut his eyes again.  He heard Mark shift back on his heels.  "Do I seem like the suicidal type?" he asked. 

     "Well, not until lately," Mark said.  "You know." 

     Lemuel shrugged.  "The prostate, you mean." 

     "Well, yeah." 

     "These days, people don't kill themselves because they have cancer," Lemuel said.  Meaningless figures danced on the red screen of his eyelids.  "Hell, I could have lived for another fifteen, twenty years." 

     "Gross," Mark said.  He laughed, then stopped.  "What do you mean, could have?" 

     "Well," Lemuel said, shifting on the garbage bags so that he could get in a little scratch between his shoulder blades, "you're still going to go through with it, aren't you?" 

     "What?"  

     The jackass sounded like he had sucked helium.  Lemuel said, "Why not?" 

     His grandson said peevishly, "You got shot, remember?" 

      Lemuel twiddled his thumbs to rub the blood off.  "So?" 

      Mark said, "I mean, even if you jumped, you'd still have that graze on your ribs.  They'd take one look at that and figure out something was fishy." 

     Lemuel nodded. "True."  

     "And," Mark said, "they'd figure out it was from a 12-gauge and somebody would think back to last Christmas, and I'd be screwed." 

     "Too bad," Lemuel said.  He smiled. "You shouldn't have shot me." 

     "I didn't mean to," Mark mumbled.  "I mean, you were just poking along on those stairs.  All I meant to do was hustle you a little." 

     "By sticking my Christmas present to you in my ribs," Lemuel said. 

     "Well, yeah."  Mark's knuckles popped.  "But nobody asked you to trip." 

     "You'll ruin your finger joints doing that," Lemuel murmured.  "So, where are we?" 

     "I don't know."  Mark's voice had gotten lower, too. 

     Lemuel opened his eyes.  "What do you want to do?" 

     Jackass looked miserable, squatting there still holding the shotgun.  "Get out of here."

     "Then what?"  Lemuel asked.  

     "Just go on, I guess," Mark said gloomily.  Like a defeated Sandinista, he laid down the gun and rested his chin on his knees.  They were clothed by trousers that must have cost as much as Lemuel would have once spent on a car.  "Act like nothing happened." 

     Lemuel's eyebrows rose.  "Easy for you to say.  How do I know you won't come after me again?  Put glass in my sugar bowl?  Put arsenic in my gin?  Cut the brake line on the Jag?" 

     "How could I?" Mark protested.  "The element of surprise would be lacking, wouldn't it?"  He sighed.  "You just hand over the money and I leave you alone.  I promise.  Scout's honor."    

     "Well, I guess that's fair," Lemuel said.  He held out a hand.  It looked like something you'd buy in a Halloween horror shop, dried blood still stuck in the hairs on the back, more blood under the yellowed fingernails, gray veins sticking up under the crinkled flesh.  "Help me up." 

     It didn't take much to yank the jackass down onto the garbage bags. "Hey!" Mark cried as he fell. 

     Lemuel rolled aside, shoving the gun with one wide-sweeping arc of his arm to the far side of the tower.  Using Mark's backside as a bolster, he shoved himself upward, first to his knees, then to his feet. 

     Stamping hard on Mark's hand as it grabbed for his ankle, Lemuel half-staggered across the rotting floorboards.  "Jackass," he panted, and flung himself down on the gun.  

     "What are you doing?" Mark shouted.  He was sitting up amongst the black, plastic billows shaking his hand hard.  "You broke my hand!" 

     Lemuel leveled the gun.  He looked down the sights.  His finger itched to pull the trigger. "Look at the birdie," he said.

     Mark stared.  

"Mark, let me ask you something."  His grandson tearfully put his hurt hand to his mouth and began sucking on it, all the while gazing at his grandfather like a bewildered two-year-old.  "Remember your dad?" 

     Mark looked disgusted. 

     "Well, let me be more specific," Lemuel said.  "Remember how he died?" 

     For a second or two, Mark went on nursing his hand.  Then, he looked up.  "He blew his brains out.  Couldn't stand living with you." 

     Lemuel squinted down the barrel.  "You think so." 

     "I know so."  Mark went back to licking the purple patches on his knuckles. 

     "What if," Lemuel said, "I shoot you. Make it look like a suicide." 

     The tongue, pink as a cat's, stopped lapping.  Mark looked up. "First of all, you don't have the balls.  Second, nobody would believe I killed myself." 

     Lemuel paused.  He cocked his head. "They thought your dad did, didn't they?" 

     "You're rambling," Mark said. 

     Lemuel's index finger curled on the trigger.  "You sure about that?" 

     "Go on, Grampa, do it," Mark said.  He let out a soft laugh.  "I dare you." 

     "That's just what your father said."  Lemuel lowered the barrel enough to make his grandson involuntarily shift a little to the left. "That was hard, Mark.  Hardest thing I ever had to do." 

     Mark looked both bored and puzzled, the way he used to look when Lemuel talked about chamfering two-by-fours.  "What was?" 

     Lemuel lifted the barrel.  "Come on, Harvard."

     Mark laughed.  "You're saying you killed Dad?"

     Lemuel gave his head a single jerk.  The barrel bobbed.

     Mark held his eyes.  "No way."

     Lemuel kept the gun barrel steady.  "He turned on me.  Up here.  Same thing.  Money.  Always money.  He had a gun, a little snubbed-nosed Beretta.  We fought.  He tripped.  I won."

     "You're crazy."  Mark's lips were quivering.  "They found Dad in his car, miles from here." 

     Lemuel Kittridge cocked an eyebrow. 

     Mark half rose onto his knees, his eyes wild.  "I don't believe you!  You're crazy!"

     "Of course, the difference is, when he went, I still had you," Lemuel said.  "Without you, who am I?"  He lowered the gun, held it out with both hands.  "Take it.  Go on, take it."

     Slowly, Mark uncoiled himself from his crouch.  Walking very slowly, an old man's walk, he came face to face with his grandfather.

     Lemuel winced at the sight of the kid's bleeding knuckles as Mark grabbed the gunstock.  "When you get home, put some antiseptic on that."

     Mark's blue eyes traveled away from Lemuel's face down to the gun.

     "Okay.  Well, then, let's go."  Lemuel limped through the raw hole of doorway with all the hairs on his neck rising.  Placing his hand on the rusty railing, he put out one foot, and stepped, then the other.

      Balanced there, he looked down, down, down, wondering what was taking the jackass so long.

Contact the Author - clarx@shore.net