Joey’s got a place in the woods—way out there off State Route 23—that smells like cigar ash and rotten wood. He took me out there last spring for a long weekend of bass fishing in an old farm pond, buck euchre, beer, and what he called general relaxation. He told me not to expect much in the way of luxury, but that was fine with me. I needed to get away from the twin demands of work and divorce. Being that I install and repair furnaces, April’s a downtime, anyway. Aside from that, my soon-to-be-ex, who I figured lawyered up even before she started the affair with the middle-school principal, kept stalling on the paperwork. In America, marriage is easy, and divorce is hard, and I think it ought to be the other way around.

So we packed up his truck with the basics: a couple loaves of bread and some canned goods, the fishing gear, light bedding, and four cases of beer. On the way out, we stopped at a Sunoco for three large bags of ice and a few odds and ends: granola bars, Twizzlers, and the like. The guy on the radio promised fine weather through the weekend—bright, sunny days and cool nights. No chance of rain. Yeah, it was going to be good to get away, and I didn’t care one way or the other that Joey was a bit of an eccentric; everyone’s got their quirks, and I made sure he only packed his long gun. For protection, he said, and I understood. Even in Ohio, bears are known to wander around in search of food or mischief. I’m not a gun person like Joey, who keeps a decent collection of handguns locked up in his house and will sometimes drive down to Kentucky or West Virginia for a gun show. I’m not what these Second Amendment-types call anti-gun, but I just assume not be around them. Guns do more harm than good, but I didn’t tell Joey that. He spent three years in ’Nam while I was at vocational school learning about gas furnaces. You gotta give a guy leeway once in a while. He wouldn’t shoot me.

But because you’re reading this in the form of a short story and pondering the usual aspects of irony and foreshadowing, you’ve probably already concluded that Joey did shoot me and that I’m just slowly leading up to that, and that I’ll spend the next few paragraphs immersing you in the details of bass fishing (we use spinners, of course, not live bait) and rural Ohio scenes to soothe you (the barns painted with tobacco advertisements, the dragonflies tittering on the pond, red-winged blackbirds and the squawking of jays in late morning). Or, à la E.B. White in that famous essay of his, the teenaged girls at the nearby campground who smelled of shampoo and fried chicken. And you’d be right, of course: Joey did shoot me, but it was in self-defense. Don’t scoff; he’s a good guy and I actually deserved it, no matter that the asshole cheated at buck euchre. That may seem like a stupid detail to you, but we Ohioans take four things seriously: God, family, Buckeye football, and euchre. He didn’t have to do that. We were only playing for nickels and garbage duty (beer cans, mostly, Blatz and Budweiser), but I don’t like cheaters. My wife was a cheater. Joey had no excuse.

So when I caught him the second time, I threatened him with a log that had probably been sitting in the fireplace long damn forever. I could’ve done him in, but I’m a merciful man, so I merely broke his shoulder with it, most of the teeth from the left side of his mouth, and his right knee-cap. You could hear it shatter the way a window does when struck by a baseball. The noise pleased me. Then we went back to euchre. He kept cheating, but I kept winning and my stack of nickels grew (and I imagined—no, I saw—the middle-school principal’s cock growing as he plugged my wife), so I didn’t care much and got up to use the outhouse. I didn’t think Joey could move, let alone find and load his shotgun, but of course, he did and shot me in my right buttock when my back was turned. The old ass shot. So we called it a night and decided to deal with the blood and the bits of Joey’s bones the next day. It was rainy that Monday, after all, and I steered while he maneuvered the pedals with hands. It was raining very hard with intermittent thunder when we finally arrived at the hospital in Wilmington.