A great horned owl high up in a hemlock one tier back from the road had been watching a vole in the high grass the other side of the road. When the automobile broke through the night the vole shrank tight against the earth and the owl tipped up on its talons, the muscles tensing where the wings lifted from the back. Then the automobile was gone and the owl lifted off, a long dive swooping silent that with a single wingbeat carried it over the road and the strange bundle below and on into the grass where it seized up the vole and again a single beat lifted the bird back into the night. Up to a new perch.

The Ford came to a stop fifty feet down the road. The man and woman got out and walked up the road to where he lay. As she passed the front of the car the woman stopped, stooped and lifted out the heavy elbowed crank and carried it with her. He was on his side in the road, one arm torn off his jacket and a splinter of bone showing through. Bloodfoam seething around his lips. A hand lying open on the gravel as if waiting for something to fill it, the hand a broken thing with a broad wound crusted over. Some feet away a stiffened towel. The turned-up side of his face was cut and scraped away where he’d struck the gravel and then turned or rolled over with the momentum. The man leaned close, his hands on his knees. Leaned and then stood quickly. Speaking, the peak of bile rounding and thickening his voice.

“He’s done.”

With the voice the head seemed to bounce up, the other arm raised away from his side where it had laid slack, the arm led up by the hand a short distance into the night, the hand opening and closing as if trying to grasp the night and draw it back.

The woman said, “Jeeter, he’s not.”

The hand fell back down.

“I guess maybe he is.”

“No,” she said. “We won’t risk the chance. Someone might come along.” She tried to hand him the crank.

“No Amy,” he said. “I won’t do it. The man is dead. Can’t you see?”

She looked at him then. The both of them shaking a little with the night. She hated him for the shaking, his and her own. She said, “You’re piss-poor of a man.” And she stepped the final step and raised the crank with both hands and brought it down once and then a second time on the head of the man on the road. Each time feeling the skull break and the crank pierce through and stick before she wrenched it free. Each time she brought it down and felt it first break into the skull she said Oh.