My back hurt like a bastard from lugging Scooter through the brush.  I let go of his feet when we reached the water’s edge.  My cousin Tom still held Scooter under the armpits and it kind of jarred him when I let the legs drop.

“Good thing we ain’t gotta haul him no farther,” I said, straightening up and pressing my palms against my lower back.  “If you had to kill him, I wish you’d made him walk himself out here first.”

Me and Tom was both sweating even though it was late September and the evening cool.  Tom had blood all down the front of his sweatshirt.  Scooter’s blood.  Maybe some of his brains, too, but I didn’t feel like looking close enough to find out.

Tom glanced back at the woods we’d just come through and said, “Hey, it ain’t my wife he was putting the boots to.  I figure I done you a big favor.”

“Still mighta been better if you’d let me talk to him first.  This shit ain’t right.”

“He fuckin’ bragged to me about it, Walt.  Said he’d been doing it for months, told me all the different ways him and Marie screwed and how they wasn’t going to stop.”

I didn’t want to hear that.  Right then, all I wanted was a beer.  We had a twelve-pack of Bud iced down in a cooler, but we’d left it in Tom’s truck.  Knowing the beer was only thirty or forty yards away made me even thirstier.

We stood on the shore of a little cove at the northeast end of Wesserunsett Lake.  A couple of nameless little streams empty into the lake there, and the cove’s silted up a lot the last few years so it was half-choked with cat-tails and mud.  Nobody fished there anymore; probably nothing living in that muck but snapping turtles and bloodsuckers.  When Tom and Scooter and me was in high school, we used to go out there to drink beers we stole out of Tom’s father’s store.  Sometimes I’d bring a girl to the spot in hopes of getting lucky.  It worked a couple times, though never with Marie.  But all the mud and mosquitoes kept teenagers away now.  That made it a good place for us to sink Scooter.

“C’mon, Walt,” Tom said.  “I wanna get this done and be outta here before dark.”

“So don’t I, but my goddamn back’s killing me.  I need to rest for a second.”  Tom never understood about my bad back.  A person can’t know what it’s like until it happens to him.  Then it ain’t so funny.

What made it worse was I’d spent the whole afternoon at Scooter’s house, helping him get in his firewood.  Scooter being Scooter, he didn’t even get started on his woodpile until almost the end of September.  I mean, how lazy can you get?  Those eight-foot logs laid in his dooryard, getting rained on the whole damn summer long before he finally sawed ‘em down to stove-length.  The next Saturday—only about eight hours before Tom killed him—Scooter called me up, asking could I come help him split and stack.  Like I had nothing better do.

Marie went into conniptions ‘cause I was supposed to go with her to visit her mother.  My mother-in-law was a nice enough old lady, but even splitting wood beat hanging around a nursing home.  It didn’t hurt that Scooter’s fridge was always stocked full of beers.  Marie took the car and Scooter picked me up.

The wood was a mixed load of twisted birch, popple and maple that was all full of knots.  Shit wood, my dad always called it.  Made me glad Scooter’d rented a gas-powered splitter from the farmer’s union.  By six o’clock we’d only split about two cords without stacking any, and we was both ready to quit for supper.  That’s when Tom pulled in.

He got out of his truck and walked across the dooryard just as I switched off the splitter.  Scooter grinned and pulled off his work gloves, said, “Guess you timed that right, Tommy.  How ‘bout a beer?”

Tom picked up a jagged stick of yellow birch, probably four inches thick, and swung it like a baseball bat right into the side of Scooter’s head.  Stove his skull right in.  The sound reminded me in an awful way of how we used to smash pumpkins in the road every Halloween when we was kids.  Before I could ask what the fuck he done that for, Tom nailed Scooter again.  Scooter dropped like a bag of rocks and didn’t move.

I hoped Scooter didn’t feel nothing, even if he was having an affair with Marie.  “Y’know, I was at his house half the friggin’ day.  Who knows who drove by and saw me there.  I’m the first one the cops’re gonna suspect.”

“Maybe.  Worry about it later,” Tom said.  “Right now, we gotta get the tarp and them chains outta the truck.”

Nodding, I followed him back through the woods to the old logging road where we left his GMC.  Before getting us the frig away from Scooter’s place, Tom had rummaged though his barn and found a couple good-sized pieces of blue tarp and a length of rusty skidder chain.  Now Tom let the tailgate down and dragged the chain out of the bed.  I grabbed the tarps and then got the beer cooler from the cab.

Seeing what I planned to carry, Tom said, “Don’t fuckin’ strain yourself or nothin’.”

We tromped and slogged our way back to the shore.  The bugs were still bad ‘cause there hadn’t yet been a frost strong enough to kill them off.  Tom dropped the chain next to Scooter’s body.  While he spread out one of the tarps, I opened the cooler and fished out a couple Buds.  Tom rolled Scooter up in the tarp before taking the beer I offered him.  A loon cried somewhere out on the lake.

Drinking beer at that spot without Scooter felt all wrong.  Even though he was wrapped up, I couldn’t stand to look at him lying there and I turned away.  Behind me, Tom burped.  I heard his empty beer can tink off the skidder chain when he tossed it away.  I heard the other tarp rustling and the sound made me jump.

“What’re you spreading that one out for?” I asked.  “You already got him wrapped up tight.”

Tom stood up and pointed at the tarp.  “Lay down on that,” he said.

“Yeah, I just about imagine.”

“You’re even dumber than Scooter if you think this is a fuckin’ joke, Walt.”  Tom reached into the front pocket of his jeans and came out with a little .22 Ruger automatic we used for shooting rats out at the dump.  “Get on the tarp.”

I didn’t usually take it personal when people’d say I wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box.  I mean, I knew I weren’t no genius and it ain’t something that ever worried me.  But I felt like the biggest goddamn idiot in the world when I saw that gun in my cousin’s hand and realized that he’s the one was doing it with my wife.

And now he was gonna shoot me in the head and dump me in the lake.  My own fuckin’ cousin, the guy who’d been my best friend since we was both in diapers.  Jesus Christ, but that was a hell of a thing.

“Get on the tarp,” Tom said again.

That time, I did it.  I went to my knees like I was about to lay down for him.  Tom stepped so close I could smell his sweat and the bar-and-chain oil on his jeans.

I said, “So why’d you have to kill Scooter?  He didn’t do nothing.”

“I told you he was fuckin’ Marie.  Wasn’t you listening?”

I looked up and knew Tom could see the confusion on my face.  He shook his head and said, “Y’know, Walt, every time I think you can’t get any stupider, you prove me wrong.  Marie and me’ve been sneaking around behind your back for three years now.  It wasn’t just about the fuckin’, though.  Marie loved me and she was gonna divorce your worthless ass.  Had herself a lawyer and everything.  Then last night, I’m over to Scooter’s watching the Red Sox game and he says he’s got something to tell me.  Guess what?”

“She was cheating on me with you and cheating on the both of us with him.”  Jesus, it was almost enough to make me laugh.

Tom nodded.  “She only did it three times with Scooter, but it was enough to make him feel guilty.  He told me about it and said he was gonna have to come clean with you.  Those were his words, come clean.  Like everything could go back the way it was before.  Like I’d ever let him or Marie get away with that shit.”

My guts went cold and watery.  Maybe Marie hadn’t made it to her mother’s nursing home, or maybe Tom had been waiting for her at my house when she came back.  I didn’t want her hurt.  I wanted her to look at me and tell me to my face why she’d chuck twenty-six years of marriage out with the trash.  We could talk about it.  We had four kids.  We had two granddaughters.  Everything we’d been through together: the shoe shop closing down and me not finding work; my sciatica; Marie’s cancer scare; her dad dying; kids getting sick or hurt like they will.  The stuff that’s supposed to make you stronger.  It couldn’t all have been for nothing.  There was still a chance we could fix this goddamn mess.

“What’d you do to Marie?”

“Nothing you got to worry about now.”

Still looking up at Tom, I reached out and muckled on to his legs, right above the ankles.  Tom started to swing that .22 toward the side of my head.  I yanked his legs and lifted up at the same time.  The gun went off with a pop and I felt something tear across my shoulders.  Couldn’t tell if the bullet had gone in or just nicked me.  Tom whipped his arms around, trying to keep balanced, but he landed on his back in the muddy shallows.  The pistol flew off into the cat-tails, making a smaller splash.  Tom rolled onto his stomach and tried to push himself up.  The mud clutched at his hands and legs.

I saw Scooter stretched out there like a redneck mummy.  Scott Meader.  My other best friend.  Moved to Wesserunsett when we was in the fourth grade.  His parents had died in a car wreck and his grandma brought him up.  A scrawny little kid, he was targeted by the bullies until me and Tom stood up for him, taught him how to fight back.  If I’d known being friends with us would get Scooter killed, I would’ve minded my own business and let them big kids whip his ass all through school.  Better that than ending up turtle food.

Tom spat out a mouthful of dirty water and said, “Walt.”  He was halfway out of the slop with his hands on solid ground and his feet still struggling for a purchase.

“You kill Marie, too?”

He didn’t answer, just grabbed at a cedar sapling and tried pulling himself clear.

Ignoring the pain sparking up my back, I dragged the skidder chain over to Tom.  He scrabbled like crazy, kicking his legs in the mud.  I took that chain and looped it around his neck three times.  When he reached for it or tried to block me, I knocked his hands away.

“I asked if you killed Marie, goddamn it.”

Laying there on his belly, he said my name again.

And it was all the answer I needed.

I moved around so my knee pressed down between Tom’s shoulder blades.  The skidder chain was a good ten feet long, and I wound it round and round his head until it muffled his screams.  Tom kept trying to swat at me, but his arms grew weak.  Even when he managed to hit me, I hardly felt it.

Then I dragged him out past the cat-tails to a pool of black water.  I was up to my knees in the muck at its edge.  My back hurt so bad that I would’ve fallen right over if the mud weren’t helping me stand.  Blood pounded inside my head.  My face was hot and every breath burned my chest.  I gave my cousin a good shove, good as I could manage with the little strength I had left.  Tom went head-first to the bottom of the cove.

The fucker didn’t even kick.

Shivering in my wet clothes, I stayed there and watched the night come on.  All the feeling in my feet was gone.  It seemed like a hell of a long way back to solid ground.  That unseen loon cried again.  I heard another cry after a couple minutes.  I wondered if it was the loon’s mate answering him back or just the same bird calling out ‘cause he knew he was all alone.
_

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Patrick Shawn Bagley’s stories of rural crime have appeared in Crimespree, Spinetingler, Thrilling Detective, The Iconoclast and the anthology Uncage Me (Books, July 2009). He has an MFA from theUniversity of Southern Maine/Stonecoast and sometimes teaches fiction writing. “The Cove,” like much of his work, is set in the fictional Maine town, Wesserunsett.