On Fire

by Larry Brown

  He’s fixing to put that Coke bottle right through their windshield, I say. But he doesn’t. He just throws it to the road at his feet and it shatters into bits. He leaps and screams, waving his arms. We can’t imagine what he’s so pissed off about. I hope he don’t come over here, Poot Man says. Maybe we ought to get away from this window, I say. And then I see the cop car coming down the street, fast, lights off. Looka there, I say.

  The young crazy man sees the police about the same time we do and it gives him pause. The car slows and swings in and stops about twenty feet from him, and a cop I know named Bob gets out from the passenger side, holding what looks like a nickel-plated Colt .45 near his hip, not showing the gun, moving in a half-crouch. I hear him say: You get your ass on the ground. The young man kneels as Bob comes closer. Hands on your head, Bob says. The young man obeys, and he looks like a prisoner of war. He starts crying, saying something about his brother. Bob holsters the gun and cuffs him. The young man is now awfully cooperative and polite. Bob puts him into the back seat. There’s nothing quite like a good cop when you need one.

  It grieves me deep in my heart now to have to write about the death of Sam. He died while I was staying overnight at the University of Notre Dame, where I had gone to give a reading. He was involved in two fights with a black chow over a bitch that was in heat. He was hurt badly in the first fight, and did not survive the second one.

  Only a few days before I left for South Bend, I had noticed that he was running with a little cocker spaniel one of my neighbors owned. I figured she was in heat and this turned out to be the case. I was driving by one day and Sam was there, and he trotted out into the road to meet me. I told him to stay out of the road, and to get his little ass home after a while. I knew he was happy, because he looked happy, and I knew he was probably finally at long last getting himself a little from the cocker spaniel, so I was happy for him.

  But on Saturday afternoon, the kids brought him home pretty chewed up. His throat was wet from where the chow had mauled him, and he was all hunched up, and he stank. He just kind of stood there in the carport in a little miserable drawn-up ball, shivering. He looked really bad, but I never thought of taking him to the vet. He’d been in fights before and had healed up okay. I told the kids to put him in the pen and not let him out. He smelled too bad to stay in the house.

  I had an early flight out of Memphis the next morning, and Mary Annie took me up there like she always does. She couldn’t go to the gate with me because of the terrorist threat and tighter security while the Gulf War was being fought, so we had to say goodbye in the terminal. I got to South Bend late in the afternoon, and had just forty-five minutes to take a shower and be ready to go to dinner with some people and then give my reading. There was a party afterward, like there always is, and it was nearly midnight when I got back to my hotel on the campus. A couple of kids from the university walked up just as I was about to go in, and wanted to talk some more, so I invited them up to my room for a drink.

  My thoughts were more on home than anything else as I talked to these kids. The place I was in held no importance to me other than the money it brought me. I felt sometimes that I was just a whore with a high price. I could be had, I’d do my gig and jump through my hoops, but you had to come up with a check and some plane tickets. Otherwise I’d stay home.

  I never went to college, and I felt alien on college campuses. All I had done was stay in a room for ten years and write. I felt that I was ill-equipped to spout any advice to fledgling writers, and I liked critiquing their manuscripts even less. There was always something so terrible, so bad, written by somebody who had no idea what a story was supposed to be about, that it would be nearly impossible to find anything good to say about it. I didn’t like that part of it. What I liked was standing before a couple of hundred people and reading one of my stories and watching what happened to them. That night I had a new one, a long one, one that I had worked on for nearly a year, one that had taken nearly an hour to read, and I was about talked out.

  The students finally left. I probably hastened their departure by starting to pour them Cokes instead of whiskey and Cokes, by giving the gentle hint that the hour was late and I was tired. I had probably given them more of my time than they had hoped for. I wished them good luck with their work.

  Next morning I went down to the dining room and had a huge breakfast by myself, then lingered over my coffee and cigarettes. I love my coffee and cigarettes, although I’m certainly aware of how bad smoking is for you. My body is getting older and I can feel the ravages of time much sharper now than I could twenty years ago. I wouldn’t be happy if I couldn’t smoke, because I would always want something I couldn’t have. It’s the same way with drinking. I’ve seen many people damaged by drinking and I still see them, and I know the evils of it, having tasted them myself many times.

  Most all the trouble I was ever in was caused by drinking, whether it was trouble with the law or fights or whatever, because whiskey twists my head and I need to stay away from it unless there’s somebody around who can take care of me, but there’s nothing more enjoyable to me than to get into my truck late on a summer evening and ride down the road for an hour or so, drinking a beer, looking out at the fields and the warm horizon where the sun has just gone down, listening to Otis Redding or ZZ Top or Leonard Cohen, and watching the road go by. I love the land I was born to and I never tire of seeing the seasons and the weather change over it, or the hawks that sit high in the trees, or the rabbits that bound across the road, or the coons that band together in spring when they’re rutting, or later at night, the owls that swoop low across the ditches or fly down to light in the road in front of you with mice caught in their talons, owls that glare at you with a hateful look before gathering their prey and swooping back up into a black and rainy night on their huge beating wings.

  I finished my coffee, went back to my room and called MA’s office, and found out that she and Shane had been in a wreck and had been taken to the hospital. Everything fell apart in that minute. I tried to hold myself together, but all I could find out was that they had been in a wreck and had been taken to the hospital by ambulance. My mind blanked out and I couldn’t think of any of the phone numbers I needed. I tried to call my mother and she was gone. I tried to call MA’s mother and she was gone. Both of them gone to the hospital, I knew. I couldn’t even remember the fire station numbers. The only number I could think of was Square Books in Oxford, so I called Richard Howorth, told him where I was and what had happened and gave him my number, and asked him to find out what he could and then call me back. Then I sat down beside the phone to wait.

  It was a terrible time, that waiting. I couldn’t drive it out of my mind that one of them or maybe both of them were dead. All those dead in the highways I’d seen, the bodies I’d pulled from cars. I knew that was the wrong thing to think, and I sat there and willed the phone to ring. It did. It was Richard, saying he had talked to a nurse at the hospital who was reluctant to give him any information, always a bad sign. He gave me the number of the hospital, and I called, and was eventually connected to my brother who was there waiting, and he told me that MA and Shane were bruised up some, but not seriously hurt.

  It was nearly time to meet with my class, but I had other plans. I took my bags downstairs and told the group waiting for me about what had happened, and asked them to get me to the airport as soon as they could. I had a ticket for a flight at three o’clock, and I wanted to exchange it for an earlier flight if I could.

  I missed a United flight by five minutes and couldn’t buy a ticket for a Northwest flight that was already overbooked. What I had to do was hold onto the ticket I had and wait for the three o’clock flight. I spent most of the time in a bar drinking whiskey and making phone calls. I finally got ahold of MA and talked to her for a while. Her chest was badly bruised, and Shane had come out of his seatbelt and hit the windshield and had a big knot on his head, but they had no cuts, no broken bones. She promised that they were
all right, and then she said there was something she had to tell me. That’s when she told me that Sam was dead. He had gotten out of the pen and gone down and fought the chow again.

  She had taken him to Dr. Harlan, our vet, and he had put Sam on a table and shaved his neck to expose the dozen big cuts in his throat, and had done all he could do for him. She said the whole time she moved around the room as the vet did his work, Sam kept his eyes on her, and she said he seemed to be pleading with his eyes, seemed to be trying to say, Please help me. Then he died.

  Maybe the whiskey made me cry in a public place, in an airport in South Bend, Indiana, with people watching, with snow falling. Maybe I was so overcome with relief that they were all right that I couldn’t take the extra load of losing him. I knew that I was still over six hours away from home, and those six hours had to be gone through and lived through and there wasn’t any way to shorten them.

  They went somewhere. I went through them. Richard picked me up at the airport in Memphis and at eight-thirty that night I walked into my house. I even missed the funeral. Billy Ray had already buried him under a good tree in the pasture. He wouldn’t speak of him then, and he won’t speak of him now.

  It’s cold in the woods. I sit up high in a tree and the sun rises incredibly slowly from the woods behind me and my feet are frozen in my boots and my hands are rigid with cold on the rifle.

  Squirrels play on the ground below me. They run up and down the trees and a hunting owl sails over and they hide themselves underneath limbs until the owl passes. I watch these things and shiver in my tree. I want a system that makes it easier, something like a deer locator that clips onto your belt and lets you know when one’s close by so you can get ready, so you don’t have to sit every second without moving and freezing your ass off. I begin to doubt that there are even any deer in these woods, although the scrape I have built my stand close to has huge hoofprints and wet soil where one has soaked it with his urine, and pawed the ground, and torn a bush into shreds with his horns.

  But he is not going to come by and check to see if a doe in heat has visited his scrape. He is huge and he is old and he knows when the season opens because he has lived long enough to know that when the weather cools and he hears the sound of truck engines and Honda engines in the woods, the men are out looking for him, and he has found some small hidden place to lie during the daylight hours, some little clump of bushes where nobody would ever think of looking for him, and he will only rise out of it when the sun goes down and the men in the woods are gone. Maybe he has been shot before. Maybe he was downed and leaped away to safety and healed up and learned. He has been here. His tracks and his urine and the torn bushes where he has scraped the velvet away from his itching horns prove it, but he is not here now, just me.

  I climb down. My feet are so dead to me that I can’t feel them, and I build a small fire on the ground some distance away from my stand, finding a pine knot and peeling orange shavings of wood from it, laying them under small sticks and larger sticks and lighting them and warming my hands over the fire as I squat and shiver and wait for the sun to come up. It never rises any slower than when you are sitting in a tree waiting for it to warm you.

  I drink the last of my cold coffee. I smoke a cigarette. And I pull my boots back on, my socks steaming from the fire, and put the Marlin on half-cock and ease my way through the woods. I move maybe a quarter mile an hour, probably less. I stand and listen and look. Old tortoise shells in the woods, dead and white. Piles of deer-sign still wet and fresh. I bend and touch them. The huge oaks and the ground beneath them raked nearly clean by the deer hooves for the acorns that are there. I’ve seen the squirrels walk between their legs in years past, all of them feeding together, not disturbing each other, a fine thing to be able to witness. The deer probably watch me as I go along. They live in these woods and I don’t. I am only an intruder, come to try and kill them in their home.

  The morning stays cold. I walk slowly. I stop often, stand still, look and listen. I watch for movement, do the same thing they do. I cross a little sand road and ease into the young pines bordering it and my feet are quiet on the wet needles. I see other scrapes, other bushes hooked and torn. They are here. They have vast amounts of patience. They will stand still and let me walk by. I move into the wind.

  The sun comes up and I stop on a steep hillside where I can see up into a big hollow of hardwood trees with a little creek running down through the bottom of it. It’s so easy to get discouraged. Lay all these plans. Get up two hours before daylight, fix your breakfast, everybody else asleep in the house, Mary Annie and the two little boys, Billy Ray five and Shane just born barely, sprawled sleeping in the bed. Coffee in the kitchen, pulling your hunting knife from the scabbard and testing the edge above the remains of your eggs to see that it is sharp.

  Move on up through the woods and see that there is nothing moving in the hollow, time to sit down and take a break, smoke a cigarette, rest.

  The ground is wet and frozen and my ass is wet. I sit smoking the cigarette, the rifle across my lap. In the creek below me I see yellow horns move and I drop the cigarette from my fingers and look at him. He is standing there, testing the wind with his nose. The white patch of his throat, his tail down, not alarmed at all. I count the six points on his head and raise the rifle out of my lap in extra-slow motion and move it toward my shoulder as he swings his rack, as he stands in the creek in his world and doesn’t know that I am here. I don’t look into his black eyes. That would alarm him and he’d run. The sun is out and it’s ten-thirty as I lay the crosshairs on his chest. I nestle my eye into the scope, and small bushes with dead leaves garnish the bright patch of white hair that runs all the way up from his belly. I pull the hammer back to full cock. I want to kill him dead, with one shot. He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen besides my babies. The crosshairs rest steady on his chest and I try to calm myself. I’m reminded of the days at Parris Island, when they told us to get steady and then squeeze off, not to dread the slap of the rifle. I hold it firmly and touch the trigger gently, fire, clap of sound, slap of the rifle all instantaneous, and he goes down. He kicks hard in the leaves. I lever another round into the chamber and hold it on his chest again. He is kicking violently on the ground, thrashing in the leaves. But I don’t believe that he’ll get up. I don’t want to shoot him again. It’s hurt me bad enough to shoot him the first time.

  In less than ten seconds the thrashing dies down. I hold the scope on him and look. Jesus Christ. I’ve killed him. He lies dead.

  I ease the hammer back down into half-cock and I go down to him. He lies in a bright patch of sunshine on the brown leaves with brilliant red blood leaking out of the hole in his chest where the 170-grain Winchester bullet has gone in and scrambled his lungs and heart. His head lies propped up by the antlers, his eyes growing glassy and dull, fading from their former gleam.

  I unload the rifle first, jacking all the rounds out of the magazine and the one in the chamber, emptying it completely so that it’s safe and no threat. I lay it aside, prop it on a log. I sit down beside him and feel the long hairs on his coat. I stroke the brownish-gray pelt. I note the nest of white hairs on his belly, and look at the horns. He’s the biggest one I’ve ever killed. He suffered some. But he didn’t suffer a lot. He felt confusion and then died. Not unlike Sam, years later. Would that we could all do that when it comes.

  I pull my knife out. I turn him over onto his back. I cut the testicles off, and then I enter his body cavity with the blade, running it between two spread fingers to keep from cutting into the guts, and run it all the way up to his chest, where the ridge of bone between his ribs stops the knife. I hack through the cartilage and open him up to his throat, and then I go back down to the hindquarters and carefully cut around the anus and draw it out with my fist and tie it off with a strip of cloth I cut off my shirt. It would be easier if I had somebody to help me, but I don’t mind doing it by myself. There is no sound but the wind in the trees while I do these ne
cessary things on my knees. The diaphragm holds the respiratory organs away from the digestive organs and I slice through it with the Schrade. I reach far up into the throat and sever the windpipe and haul forth the guts and organs and pull them out. I dip water from the creek with my cap and wash out the body cavity. He’s field dressed. I wash my bloody hands.

  I sit down and look at him and smoke another cigarette. The day has warmed and it’s a little after eleven. I finish the cigarette and shoulder the rifle, and take him by one horn. I start pulling him.

  We go down hillsides and up other hillsides and I estimate his weight at 150 pounds, a big deer for Mississippi. The horn is hard in my hand and it hurts and I have to stop often to rest. I get hot and I start coming out of my clothes. The temperature is probably nearing fifty degrees. I keep pulling him and pulling him and I take off all the clothes I can and sling them over my shoulder and still they are not enough. My heart starts pounding. It beats harder than it has ever beat before. I stop and we lie in the dead leaves together. I put my finger on my wrist and look at my watch and measure my pulse at 130 beats a minute. I rest, pull some more, rest some more, pull some more, holding the rifle and my clothes, the flies starting to buzz on him, and I drag him up over the last hill and up to my father-in-law’s ’67 Chevy pickup, and put the rifle inside, checking it again to see that it’s unloaded, and then I strain everything I have to get the deer into the back end, and then I drive out of the road that leads to Vallis Chapel, a little church deep in the woods where services were once held, where once I walked among the silent pews and saw a wasp nest that spanned twenty inches and a small owl that stood on a ledge and saw me and spread his small brown wings to glide without sound into the summer brightness, and was gone.