My father’s sport coat hung from a desk chair, the pockets stuffed with wads of ones and fives. On the desktop was an unfinished letter and a stubbed-out cigarette. In the bottommost drawer I found a tiny pistol with a pearl handle. It looked like a toy, and might have been.

Later I locked the house and drove to the apartment I shared with a man I’d met waiting for a bus. On the turnpike, I rolled my window down to toss the tumbler. It split on the pavement, then disappeared beneath the wheels of a big rig.

When I arrived, the apartment was dark. I took the ring from my finger and lifted the locket over my head. I unkinked the bills. I pulled the pistol from my pocket. I arranged everything in a neat line on the dining table.

He came up behind me and put his hands on my neck.

I’ve just robbed a place, I said.

Looks like there wasn’t much to take, he said, squeezing me in a way I’d come—after many years of failed attempts—to enjoy.

MEN OF THE WOODS

THE FATHER

He was a sharpshooter in the war, but now did odd jobs like cutting up dead or dying trees or shoveling run-over animals from the road and driving them to where they were burned. He raised his son and they raised rabbits for meat. They did not eat the meat. He’d quit forcing the boy’s mouth open. The boy wouldn’t budge. To make the boy happy, he covered the rabbit cages with cloth when he drove them to market so the rabbits might think it was night, and sleep. But the rabbits hopped from side to side and trembled like always, which made it hard to tell what they thought.

THE SON

He nursed the rabbit kits with tepid droppers of fake milk and kept one or two warming in his shirt pockets while he watched television in his bedroom with the door locked. When he played with them he tried to be gentle, but it was hard. His body was big and loose and he couldn’t get it to do anything lightly. One little rabbit he dropped on its head from his great height. One he squished beneath his heavy booted foot.

When the rabbits escaped into the woods, he went after them with a sack slung over his back. The rabbits sometimes died of natural causes, such as old age and fright. When that happened, he kindled a fire in the yard and placed the dead rabbits into it with care. Then he kneeled in the grass and watched the flames lick and fuss their fur like their mothers did.

THE BLACK-HAIRED BOY

He dug in his father’s desk until he found a butterfly knife, a vial of pills, and a tied-up stack of letters his mother had written. He swallowed the pills with milk and lay in his father’s recliner, where he read the letters and decided his mother was a useless woman. He went outside with the knife and stuck it into tree trunks and fence posts and anthills. He walked along the river and through the woods to the other side of town, where a girl named Jenny lived. He squatted in the bushes behind her house and looked.