You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause Page A

when I was a kid. Mastoid operation. Oh, that was tough. The nurse went away, and I pulled everything out. Could have died, I guess. What’s yours for?”
    “A biopsy to see if I have cancer.”
    “Cancer.” Ah, what a word, Leonard thought, almost smiling,a word that carries its own exclamation point after it. “How’d it turn out?”
    “I have cancer.”
    “Son of a bitch,” the young man said with a kind of understanding and sympathy that Leonard would not have believed possible.
    “Now I do a little shooting to take my mind off it,” he said, knowing that his mind had not been taken off it since he found out.
    “If all your shots are like that last one, you’re some hell of a shot.”
    “Do you do any shooting?”
    The blue eyes came up, studied him a moment. “Me? No. Oh, I’ve hunted now and then.”
    “What do you hunt?” Yes, what do you give palliation to, was it palliation the five in the farmhouse wanted yesterday afternoon?
    “You know, rabbits, pheasant. The best ones are out of season, ain’t they?”
    Somehow shaping them together, Leonard thought, he knowing that anything he shot here in May was out of season, from pigeons to rabbits to song birds. Just as people were out of season.
    “You ever been to Craig?”
    There was a careful hesitation. “Craig? Is that a town? No, I don’t believe I’ve been there. No.”
    “Some people were murdered there yesterday. Farmhouse right near Craig.”
    “Is that right?”
    “Nobody can figure out why the young hired man was shot too.” Leonard waited. The other pulled at grass stems, acted as if he had not heard. “He was a young fellow about your age. Shot with the family; weren’t even relatives.”
    The blue eyes looked at him. “I hadn’t heard about it. I wasn’t listening to the news. I bet it makes quite a story around these parts.”
    “Yes, it’s quite a story all right,” Leonard said.
    A story of choosing, he thought, the kind of choosing that had troubled him in these last few weeks. He had been chosen like the five in the house by Craig, like he had chosen the squirrel or the cat to shoot. God had nothing to do with it really, he thought—there was no evidence of such involvement one way or the other—but yet it remained that something somewhere, inside him or out, had chosen him. By strange accident perhaps. His being somewhere or not being somewhere, perhaps—as that young hired man’s bad luck to be at the house where the murderer struck—had made the difference. He was not aware of any commission of awful sin to warrant his death at thirty-six, or whenever. No, it was best to leave God out of it, until we knew ourselves better, and that would take a thousand years at least.
    An icy chill at his abdomen, snuff and crawl of cancerous lumps, like cool rats in his belly.
    “I wonder,” he said, clearing his throat, “if the motive was robbery.” The other said nothing, picked at the grass by handfuls.
    But what could I be robbed of? Leonard asked himself. Could anything really be so anxious to get his flesh?
    “Or maybe it was a whim.”
    “A what?” the other said.
    “You know, just a hell of it, spur of the moment thing. Just to kill something. The way you shoot things sometimes, like birds.”
    “Yeh. Like birds you can’t even eat,” in a petulant tone. Vaguely accusatory, alluding to his shot of the wren, Leonard knew. He could have laughed at that.
    “Or maybe an old hatred. An old score to be settled.”
    The other grunted something, dug at the grass and weeds with his slender hands.
    What offense had he given to his body at some distant time or place, what had he defiled, and it had lain in wait, remembering?
    Something tiny, that is not wanted, doesn’t belong there, something driven apart, and then it returns, burrows into one cell, blasts it apart, enjoys it, it’s wonderful, tries another and another, loves the way they’re ripped and bloody, devours them, destroys them, expands them till they