Taft

by Ann Patchett

  "Did you tell your aunt and uncle about Carl?"

  "Lord, no. They don't have any idea. They're not the kind of people who'd pick up on something like that. They don't have children. It's funny though, how once you see something you can't believe that everybody in the world doesn't see it too. They're mostly worried about my mother. She says she's not getting over it. Never. She loved my father, that's the thing. Everybody loves my father." Fay looked up at me like she'd just that minute noticed I was driving the car.

  "I'm talking too much," she said. "I'm boring you. I'm starting to bore myself."

  "You're not talking too much."

  "I'm boring myself," she said again and turned on the radio. We were just coming into Memphis so the reception was good, but every station she landed on seemed to be commercials or weather reports. After a while she just left it on to a woman who was talking about soup. Fay seemed like she was really listening to it, like she was trying to remember everything the woman said. Every now and then she'd repeat something she'd heard, like "celery" or "stock."

  I was worried about taking her back. I would have rather we stayed in Shiloh, found some motel where she could have slept and I could have kept an eye on her. Some people might say there's no point in fooling yourself, but I would have been all for it, at least for a night.

  "You want me to drop you off in the same place?"

  "I guess so," she said. We were in the city. The streetlights made everything bright. "I wish I could bring you over."

  "Don't be thinking about things like that," I said.

  "I'd like it if you could see them, my mother and Calvin and Lily. Then you'd know what I'm talking about."

  "I know what you're talking about," I said. "I've been inside their house."

  That made Fay laugh. "God, what would they have done if they'd seen that?"

  "They would have shot me," I said.

  The corner where Fay got out was Garden and Cherokee. It was smart. The house that was there sat so far back from the street that the people inside wouldn't have noticed the girl or the car or the color of the man driving it. "I'm coming to work tomorrow," Fay said. She looked for a second like she might say something else, but instead she smiled and blew me a kiss through the window and after she turned away I sat there because I was thinking about the day I'd hired her, and how young she looked wearing that stocking cap.

  The bar closed early on Sunday nights, so I figured I'd go by for an hour and then do the money. I wondered if I could teach Cyndi how to make up the deposit, if I could trust her. It's not something you want to say about a person, but it occurred to me.

  Everything was running fine without me. Wallace had come in to tend bar and Arlene was waiting tables with Cyndi. I was thinking I should put both of them on more.

  "Wallace," I said, taking a spot at the bar. "Having a good night?"

  "Good as the rest of them," he said. He asked me if I wanted a drink and I figured what the hell, I had been all the way to Shiloh and back. Wallace was a good bartender. He had a memory for what everyone drank. "That boy's been looking for you," he said. "He's been here since five o'clock."

  "What boy?"

  Wallace pointed over to the little table by the kitchen. "Carl," he said.

  I picked up my drink and walked over to what I had come to think of as Carl's table. Cyndi was sitting there with him and they were whispering to one another. Their heads were bent so close they were almost touching. Carl looked up and saw me before I had a chance to say anything. They both sat up straight.

  "I'm going to get back to work," Cyndi said, not especially to me or Carl, either one. She walked over to the table across from us and asked the people if they were interested in drinks.

  "Where's Fay?" Carl said.

  "I would think she was home."

  "Wasn't home before," he said. "She said she was coming to work."

  "She didn't work today."

  "So where'd she go?"

  "Carl," I said, "go call your sister if you want to talk to her." I wasn't quite in the mood for him just then. I'd had my fill the night before. He didn't look so bad, really. I don't think he was doing anything. He just seemed to have one of those all day hangovers.

  "It could be I just didn't understand what she was saying."

  "That could have been it," I said. I started to head back to the bar to see if Wallace wanted me to cover the last hour for him.

  "I appreciate you coming down to get me last night," Carl said.

  "Sure."

  "I just lost track of the time, was all. I shouldn't have been so late."

  I turned around and looked at him. I was trying to figure out just how much of an idiot he was, or how much of an idiot he thought I was. "Listen," I said, leaning into him over the table. "I make a point of keeping out of other people's business, but I'm going to tell you something. You have a real problem, son. You need to see about getting your act together. I know you've had a hard time—"

  "I'm not your son," Carl said.

  "You know what I meant."

  "I know what you meant," Carl said.

  I started to say something else, but judging from the look on his face there was no real point in trying to talk. I nodded at him, stood up from the table and went about my business. I didn't hold it against him. It was the carrying. A man shouldn't be carried that way. There's nothing to do but resent the person who picks you up when you're sleeping on the street. No one picks you up, then a time comes you either die or you get up by yourself. At least that way you don't have to worry about feeling ashamed.

  The news about Fay not being there didn't seem to bother him any. Carl stayed until we closed up. He was happy there. Every now and then somebody'd stop by his table and talk to him for a while. I thought that maybe I was giving Fay a little rest by watching him. If that's what it was, then I was glad to do it.

  When it was time to go Carl stopped by the bar. He must have made a trip to the bathroom because his eyes had gone all watery again. "Good night, then," he said.

  I told him Fay was working tomorrow. Both of us were trying to show there were no hard feelings.

  "So I'll see you tomorrow," he said.

  I locked the door behind him and took the cash drawer out of the register. Then I went upstairs and did the money. It was never very much on a Sunday night. People go to church and change their minds about drinking for the day.

  "Stand still," Taft whispers.

  "Do you see something?"

  "Hush." It's hard to see in the dark. Maybe he hasn't seen anything, maybe he's heard it. His eyes are straining to open wider. Carl isn't good at being quiet. His boots make a sound as he shifts his weight from side to side. He's young. He has too much energy to hold still. There was something, Taft's sure of that, but whatever it was it's gone now.

  "Nothing," he says. "Come on."

  "What was it?" Carl says.

  "Doesn't matter," Taft says.

  The sun is coming up fast. It'll be pitch dark and then a minute later, nearly day. Taft keeps his flashlight pointed down. All you need to see are your feet. There's nothing else to look at. Just watch your feet and concentrate. They had come in the day before and tracked to a good spot, a meadow at the bottom of a sloping hill, closed in by trees on all sides. Better to get your shot when they're out in the open. Deer are always on the alert. He tells this to Carl all the time. They're on the alert so you have to be on the alert. It's October and there's no walking through so many leaves without making some noise. When Taft was a boy he liked to read books about the Indians, the Cherokees and Chippewas who lived in east Tennessee and could walk through the leaves without crushing them beneath their feet. He had practiced, but he never could do it. He thought it must be something in the blood. He had given the books to Carl, but Carl wasn't so interested. Reading meant keeping still.

  "Up here," Taft says.

  Carl comes up next to his father and they make their way down the slope together, up to the front line of trees.
The dogwoods there still have their leaves and the leaves, Taft can see in the first of the light, are blood red on the branches. There are a few white birches, pretty trees, he's always thought. Most of the other ones around are black walnuts. The last to get their leaves in the spring and the first the lose them in the fall. His wife sent a net bag with him, asking could they pick up some black walnuts on the way back if there was time. Taft doesn't know why she fools with walnuts. Once you line them up to dry, the squirrels make off with half and whatever's left is damn near impossible to get into. He feels for the bag in his pocket. It's still there.

  "How long you think we'll have to wait?" Carl whispers.

  "Depends on the deer." There are two types of hunters, the ones that rim after the deer and the ones who stay still and wait for the deer to come to them. Taft says he's a lazy hunter because he waits. He's seen those fools, trailing after a herd, breaking their necks in the underbrush. Doesn't matter how well you know the woods. The deer know them better.

  They stand there, looking. The light is coming up fast now. All around them things start to take shape, the trees and grass, tough jewelweed growing nearly waist high. It was good for poison ivy, something else he'd learned from his Indian books. Taft smells the air and wishes he were a Cherokee who could smell the deer a mile away.

  "Hope some come soon," Carl says.

  Taft sits down and takes a thermos of coffee out of his pack. "It's black," he says.

  "That's all right," Carl says.

  They each take a cup of coffee and enjoy holding it more than drinking it. "I'm going to shoot us a deer," Carl says, and he pulls up his Winchester and looks through the sight, through the meadow, and takes aim at a white birch on the other side. "Pow," he says softly.

  "You've done real well shooting targets."

  "I can knock off the cans," Carl says. Carl shoots better than Taft. He has a natural talent for it. He can hold himself steady, concentrate once he's looking down a gun. And it's not just cans he's good at. Taft bought him some paper targets and tacked them up to a piece of plywood. Carl shot in the three inside rings every time and usually he nailed the bull's eye. Taft couldn't understand how a boy who couldn't sit still for more than a minute could take such aim. He thought it must have something to do with the wrestling.

  "Go ahead and load up," Taft says. Carl has an ammunition belt he bought for himself with money he made doing chores. Taft keeps a handful of loose shells in his pocket. He brought the soft-tipped Spitzers. That makes it easier. Makes a nice big hole going out. He'd given his old rifle to Carl, a Winchester .30–30 lever-action that he'd had ten years. It's a good gun for a boy. His wife doesn't like it, says Carl's too young to have a gun of his own, but Taft had his first gun when he was thirteen. Here Carl is, sixteen already. Besides, Taft wanted that new Remington .270.

  They wait in the quiet. In the trees.

  Half an hour goes by before Taft touches Carl's leg and points. It's a buck, maybe two years old, a hundred and fifty yards from where they're sitting. Not a huge deer, but a good deer, a nice four corn.

  "Wait," Taft whispers. He wants the deer to come out a little so Carl can get a clean shot. The deer is grazing. There's plenty of time. Carl gets up on one knee, raises his gun.

  "Wait," Taft says. He has been on hunting trips where the men sat in the same spot for hours. Sometimes they camped, went two or three days without catching sight of a deer. Now Carl's first time out, it's right there. It would give the boy the wrong idea about how things went. Waiting for them, that was most of the fun.

  Carl looks through the sight. "Now," he says.

  "Wait," Taft says.

  But Carl can't wait. His hands are sweating. In another minute they won't be steady anymore. He will have thought about it too much. He looks in the scope. It's right there. He aims for the neck, not the heart the way his father had told him. You shoot them in the heart and miss, you can track them by the blood. A neck shot was better, but it was trickier. You had to nail it, snap the bone. If you missed in the neck the bullet went right through the muscle and the wound would heal up fast. Neck. He fires. Taft is up. The animal swings down the second the crack goes off. It falls on its right side and its legs kick out again and again like it's slipped and is trying to scramble to its feet. It kicks like this for a half a minute, maybe a second more, not because it's suffering but because the brain isn't there to tell the legs it's dead.

  "Got it!" Carl says, and he drops his gun and runs past the trees and into the grass. Taft picks up the rifle and follows him out into the clearing just to make sure the animal doesn't need another shot to finish it off.

  "It's dead," Carl says. "Did you see it?"

  "I saw it," Taft says. He's a little angry. The boy should have waited, he shouldn't have gone for the neck, but he got the shot off clean. There's no sense taking away from that.

  "It's a big deer," Carl says, and squats down to stroke the animal's pelt like it's a dog asleep. He stays clear of the rip in the neck. The fur is turning soggy with the blood. "Did you see it go down?"

  Taft nods. "You did a good job," he says. "A good, clean shot."

  Carl looks at his watch. "Seven forty-five and we've already got a deer."

  They're going to have to carry it to the truck. The thing surely isn't going to walk there by itself. It's probably a hundred-and-forty-, hundred-and-fifty-pound deer. Taft takes his Gerber knife out of its casing and rolls the animal onto its back to gut it. The guts will save them forty pounds. "You want to do this?" he says. He holds the knife by the blade and turns the handle out to Carl. He is careful. He can feel the edge of the steel inside his hand.

  Carl shakes his head. Taft's father would have made him do it: "You shot the thing, you're going to have to dress it." But there's plenty of time for that. No need to learn everything in one day. Taft pulls back the animal's tail and slips in the knife. Carl flinches as his father cuts around the rectum. Then Taft brings the blade up between the hind legs and pulls the knife towards him. It's as good a knife as is made. You barely have to saw it at all, just work it up and down a little, a little more once you get to the brisket. It's the smell that Taft never gets used to. It's always worse than he remembers. Hot and dead. Carl takes a step back.

  "You have to take the throat out," he says as he cuts the neck. "That's where all the acid is. Leave the throat and the thing will turn gangrene before it's dark."

  They turn it over together and pour the deer out of itself in a great wave of blood and entrails. Steam comes up from what's lying there, and the smell of all the dark, wet things inside. "Let it sit a minute," Taft says.

  Taft wipes off his knife and his hands. He's done this enough to know how to keep himself clean. He turns away from the deer. Everywhere he looks there are black walnuts. On this side of the meadow the ground is covered with them, too many to ignore. He takes the mesh bag out of his pocket. "Let's go pick some of them up for your mother," he says.

  "We don't need to bring home walnuts if we've got a deer," Carl says.

  "She wanted some. It'll only take a minute."

  Carl wraps his hand around one of the antlers. He lifts the head up off the ground, just an inch or two to feel the weight and then he sets it down. "I want to stay here."

  "It's dead, son. It's not going anywhere." Taft walks off in the direction of the trees and Carl watches him as he bends down again and again to pick up the nuts in their muddy black husks.

  "Carl," Taft says.

  I was still sitting in the office, still working on that drink Wallace had poured me two hours ago. I'd just been carrying it around from place to place and now the ice was gone. The water made the whiskey easier to take. I thought about calling Franklin, but it was late to begin with and an hour later there. I should have thought of it sooner.

  IF ANYONE had told me a dozen years ago that I would be going over to have dinner with the Woodmoores in the middle of the week for no other reason than that they asked me, I would have said you were thin
king of the wrong man. But there I was, a Thursday night, stopping off to get some flowers and a pack of cigarettes. Mr. Woodmoore liked company that smoked. I quit back when Franklin was born. Marion said it wasn't good enough that I promised not to smoke around him, she said sooner or later I'd slip up. I had to quit altogether, she said. It was a matter of a good example. But her father was a man who liked to bum cigarettes. He would ask anybody down to the basement after dinner to see whatever little thing he was building. You weren't at the bottom of the stairs before he was asking you if you had a smoke. I don't remember him ever having any of his own. For a while he was asking the mailman to come downstairs, till finally the mailman quit smoking or started to lie about it. The first couple of times I went over there without cigarettes, Marion's father would get so angry he wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the night. This was back in the days when they all hated me to begin with. So I learned. He liked it best when I brought Pall Malls. He'd turn the little red pack over and over in his hands, taking pleasure in thinking about it before he lit up. I don't bring those anymore. His blood pressure is high. I buy him something light and mentholated. I tell him it's because nobody can smell it on you later. He breaks the filter off and taps the loose tobacco back in with his thumb.

  In the beginning, Marion's parents didn't like me because I played in a band. Didn't like me because they suspected I was having sex with their daughter. Hated me once she turned up pregnant. Talked about having her brother, Buddy, shoot me (Marion told me this) when I didn't marry her.

  It was a girlfriend of Marion's who told me about Franklin being born. When I showed up at the hospital, hung over and a full day late, Mrs. Woodmoore grabbed my throat. She caught me coming through the waiting room, jumped out of her chair and clamped her hand into my neck like some sort of rabid dog, digging in her nails till she drew blood. She didn't say a word to me, didn't even blink. I couldn't shake her and I wasn't going to hit her. She cut my air off for a good minute before some orderlies came by and tugged her loose by pulling on her from behind. It was a story she loved to tell. For a while she told it to remind me that she'd done it once and was perfectly able to do it again. Later, when she started to like me, she told it to company when I was around like it was a funny story. "Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to kill John Nickel here?" she'd say, and everybody would laugh. "Show them the scars where I choked you." If I just sat there she'd come over and pull down the collar of my shirt to show the two crescent shaped marks her nails had left. The other cuts healed up fine, but those two left pale, ropy scars. "Look at that," she said, and touched them with her finger. She liked to tell the story at Easter and Thanksgiving dinner especially. She didn't tell it on Christmas, thinking it was too soon after Thanksgiving. Telling it was her way of showing there were no hard feelings. It made her proud to remember herself as someone who'd try and kill a man for causing her child suffering. I could understand that, having a child of my own.