—Of course he was runnin’, you idiot. We was beatin’ on him. You’da run too.

—Shoot. Only a Jap anyway.

—Now we gotta dig. And it’s rainin’ cats and dogs.

—I’ll get the shovels.

—He was runnin’. What else I s’posed to do? He was runnin’ away.

—That was the whole goddamn point. He was s’posed to run away. That’s what she paid us for.

And so the last words he ever heard. Above him, the slate of clouded sky continued to recede and the men leaned over what had become a kind of black tunnel cut into the air, their faces and the clouds all at the far end of it, the whole of that sky fleeing from him so that the thought that came at the very end was that he was lost, but when he turned his head he saw that he was, all the while, winging out toward some other sky, a vast plane of deepest blue which was yet familiar to him, more familiar than the world he had just departed, and he knew it was a kind of homecoming and that homecoming was bright and golden and its hills rolled on forever and his heart burst at the sight of that pure blessed land.

THE BONES OF THIS ARE what Jim Tuttle told me that afternoon, although of course I have imagined aspects of his story that no one will ever know. Tuttle’s father had been the one stalking the darkness, just outside the range of faint orange light from the campfire. “That man Tucker was a bad man,” Tuttle told me. “Ended up in Folsom Prison for murder later on.”

“No one turned him in?” I asked him.

“Wasn’t their way,” he said sadly. “Look, Mr. Frazier, I’m a Christian. Born again, you might say, and I just don’t want that blemish on my conscience.”

“Your dad told you all this?”

“When he was dying,” Tuttle said, nodding. “Told me he was afraid he’d go to hell.”

“Did he pull the trigger?”

“That man Tucker did.”

“And they buried him out there?”

“That’s what he said. I don’t know where exactly. Would help complete things to have him moved into a Christian cemetery but there’s no way to find him now. I tried. It’s just grass and boulders and trees and not much else. All looks the same.”

“He was Buddhist,” I said, as if this somehow addressed his concern.

“Still, seems wrong for him to be out there alone,” Tuttle said in response.

When he was leaving, Jim Tuttle stopped in my doorway and reached into his shirt pocket, the movement of his thick fingers awkward and raking, but he came out with what he intended to find there, a length of silver chain upon which something dangled, a kind of pendant. “I don’t know if this’d mean anything to you,” he said.