certainly he was imagining too much now as he stood up here in the middle of the tree and the season 's first snow , hair leaping up in tufts , finger locked on the garand 's trigger - not tightening still , as he had for a moment feared , but not loosening , either , the man almost below him now , the garand 's gunsight on the top of the orange cap , the man 's life on an invisible wire between the garand 's muzzle and that cap , the man maybe thinking about trading his car or cheating on his wife or buying his oldest daughter a pony ( jonesy later had reason to know mccarthy had been thinking about none of those things , but of course not then , not in the tree with his forefinger a frozen curl around the trigger of his rifle ) and not knowing what jonesy had not known as he stood on the curb in cambridge with his briefcase in one hand and a copy of the boston phoenix under his arm , namely that death was in the neighborhood , or perhaps even death , a hurrying figure like something escaped from an early ingmar bergman film , something carrying a concealed implement in the coarse folds of its robe .