by Lynne Hugo
The dime rolled on.
I still left out the more terrifying details. I told her what a revolting mess the kitchen was, dirty dishes crusty with food on the counters, unwashed pots on the stove, the sour smell, the way I could hear my sneakers peel heel-toe from the sticky floor.
“Get on with it,” she said. “You’re not going to turn him in to the Board of Health for revenge. Obviously, having an immaculate home is not what he cares about.”
She was right, but she was taking all the fun out of this. I scooped Marvelle under one arm and got up to pour myself some more sherry. There was a time I went for bourbon, way back, when Harold and I were young. On my next trip to town, maybe I’ll get myself a bottle of that to improve my tea.
I could have used a belt of bourbon without the tea when I crept out of that kitchen, which was painted a pukey tan. Bam! Right there in front of me was a deer, staring me down. A deer with huge antlers. In the dining room, behind the head of the Early American table. A dead deer, I mean, the kind mounted on the wall, confronting me. No, that’s the wrong word. The deer was asking for help. Begging. It broke my heart. And, oh my God, in what passed for a living room, there were four more. Those poor animals, those poor, poor animals. Their majestic heads, their enormous unblinking eyes.
As strange as it sounds for the years I’ve lived in the country surrounded by animals, I’ve never been near a trophy. Such a ridiculous word to use for something that meant you no harm, isn’t it? I almost couldn’t go forward or backward. The deer—it felt like a herd, or really, one of the groups of families I’ve seen so often on our land or running out of the woods between farms—looked magnificent, dignified and humiliated at once. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whispered. My eyes filled and I was ashamed to be a human.
Finally, I lowered my head and tiptoed past the last of them into a hallway to look through the rest of the house, though I was sure I knew now what Larry Ellis cared about.
In the living room were big framed pictures of him, beefed-up by camouflage and boots, a rifle slung over his shoulder, with a propped-up dead deer, his cap jauntily tilted back to show an outsized grin. There were more lining the hallway. The pictures of this man who’d testified he didn’t know if a deer in the road was a buck or a doe (though it was November, rut season, when bucks have full antlers and he’s a trophy hunter) made me nauseous, which distracted me from fear. This was one time I should not have listened to my body.
The first room on the left was a bathroom, ordinary except that the shower curtain was a camouflage print. CarolSue went so silent I thought she’d fainted when I told her I went in and used it. “Well? I told you how badly I had to pee! I was desperate. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Tell me you didn’t flush it.”
“Of course I flushed it. You know what Mom always said about the filthy people who don’t flush.”
“Oh my God, I bet you washed—”
“—Well, of course I washed my hands. Did you listen to anything Mom said about people who don’t?”
Later, of course, it would be apparent how close I’d come to being caught with my pants down, and I mean that literally, but it had seemed perfectly okay at the time. And I didn’t have a head injury yet, either.
It looked like there were three bedrooms, light brown carpeting running down the hall and through each one. I thought I knew already which was the master, and I was oriented correctly—there was that king bed, more hunting pictures, I now saw, and its own bathroom. I scanned a small walk-in closet: his side, her side. Hers with a lot of pinks, reds, blues, blacks. High heels on shoe racks. Thick boots on the floor of his side. Jackets, camouflage, jeans. Heavy, dark bureaus and nightstands in the room, a lamp on each side of the bed. American Hunter magazine lying on the floor. Another magazine, open to a centerfold of a naked woman on the floor. Rumpled clothes on the floor. White socks, obviously dirty.
Nursing disgust, I stepped into the hallway and opened the door into another room, which was darkened by a shade pulled down over the only window. I’d taken only two steps into the room when I heard sirens in the distance. Roots shot from the soles of my feet through the thin carpet. Louder, louder. Someone must have seen me and called the police. My car was right across the road, too. How could I have been so stupid?
At the same minute as these thoughts—which all jumbled and flew together much faster than I could have begun to enumerate them for CarolSue—if I had told her about the sirens and the boy who suddenly sat upright in a twin bed there, apparently startled awake by the screeching sirens. A shout: “Hey!”
I turned fast, bumping hard into the doorjamb, clutched my head where I’d hit it, and ran.
16
You might think a woman my age can’t move all that fast. You’d be wrong, so wrong. I fled back down the hall, through the herd of deer, the tack of the kitchen floor seeming to grab my feet. Between the dining room and the back door I thought I heard either “Mom!” or “Help!” but it slid into the piercing sirens, that high-low high-low screech like adrenaline coming, coming, coming, and it was all just sound mixed into the explosive drumming of my heart.
My head thrummed with pain. As I made it to the back door, I had two impulses: do anything to escape, and to go out with my hands up, the way I’d seen trapped criminals surrender to cops in movies, to avoid being shot by the SWAT team that was doubtless surrounding the house right now. Panicked, I picked a middle course. I made a run for it with my hands up. Palms in the air like white flags, I ran around the far side of the house, away from the driveway, expecting to be confronted by drawn guns.
Nothing.
Only unmowed grass mixed with scrappy weeds. There was a stand of trees fifty feet to my right and I made a break for that, keeping my hands up just in case. Keeping trees between me and the house and the driveway as much as I could, I moved toward the road. The driveway was vacant. The noise of the sirens was raising the hair on my arms and felt like something physical in the air. I kept going toward the road.
Still nothing except sound. I pulled the car keys out of my pocket and made a break for it out of the trees across the end of Larry’s yard. I almost ran into his mailbox because I was looking back at the house to see if anyone was coming. Just then a police car raced down the road toward me. I raised my hands to surrender. The police car flew on by me.
I couldn’t believe it. My God, didn’t I just hold up a sign for them? Another police car was coming, and this time I kept my hands down. But I was stuck, for the moment, at the end of Larry’s driveway. Those guys must be lost, I thought. They hadn’t even slowed down.
When the second one passed, I hurried across the road, got in my car, and started my getaway. Not a quarter mile down the road was a flock of police cars, two ambulances, and three fire trucks. A tractor trailer had collided with a farm tractor. The SMV—Slow Moving Vehicle—sign was visible, sideways and just off the ground above a jutting oversize tire emerging like a bent wrist from the wreckage. It looked like there was a car involved. I spotted some crumpled blue on the far side of one of the police cars, and realized more emergency vehicles must be coming because sirens were screaming, red and blue lights flashing, on that side, too. Something was spilled on the road. Twisted metal glinted in the slanting sunlight.
I braked and for once I thought fast. There wasn’t a car behind mine and nothing coming toward me. Of course not; the road was blocked. One car was ahead, up near where the policeman stood in front of his vehicle. I just needed a little of the berm to do a three-point turn. I drove back past the scene of my crime and was only lost for about twenty minutes as the new person I’d become found a new way home.
17
They haunt me, the deer. That terrible trapped beauty, preserved, hung on a wall. Gone but not gone, more real than my grandson or my husband. More real than memory that can’t place details about the shape of teeth, fingernails, the placement of small moles, the exact color of eyes.
This is what a ma
n does for fun: he kills animals that did him no harm and would have done nothing but run from him, and he hangs their heads on a wall. How many shots does it take him, the big man, to kill? Does he follow bleeding and suffering deer to the triumph? What kind of mother raised this man? I have agonized over my mistakes; my son has made bad choices, yes, and now he is vulnerable and foolish, but he would not kill and call it sport. He may not have absorbed my love for the creatures of the land, but he would not kill for sport.
I see a buck raising his head just as the bullet explodes. Cody felt the truck the instant before it hit him. I see them like movies paused in my head.
They haunt me.
18
Larry
The kid was playing on the Nintendo. It was pretty much all he ever did as far as Larry could tell. Although when Crazy Connie from down the road told LuAnn that she’d seen a strange car at the house while they were at work, LuAnn flipped out and accused the kid of having a girl there. Somehow she knew there was this girl he liked. Larry couldn’t imagine that the kid had told her, even if he was kind of a mama’s boy. How did women figure this shit out?
The kid denied it all, said some stranger broke in. Larry called bullshit on that because the guns were worth a lot and they were all there. Then LuAnn said her jewelry wasn’t gone either and no stuff was locked up, so the kid’s story made no sense, and she’d grounded him except for his job because she didn’t want him getting some girl pregnant like happened to her. Big deal, Larry figured. The kid’ll just play video games anyway. LuAnn made him put the sound on mute, but she’d gone shopping with Crazy Connie, the only woman alive who liked shoes as much as LuAnn. Larry let him have the volume on. Easier to get in LuAnn’s pants if her kid tells her that her boyfriend’s cool. Larry also thought: big deal if the kid did have a girl in his bed. LuAnn was always telling Larry how the kid needed a dad so he’d learn to be a man, wasn’t she? Then the minute the kid acts like a man, she flips out. Women were always contradicting themselves. But maybe he should give the kid sex pointers. LuAnn could count on his father to be completely useless on this score as every other.
Larry smirked to himself. She’d owe him some dirty sex herself if he educated the kid about condoms. But it wasn’t just about getting her to let loose her inner whore, even if it used to be. Larry hadn’t forgotten about LuAnn getting him the lawyer.
She’d told him to just play a video game with the kid. She’d said, “You can do it. And, please, his name is Brandon, not Kid.” He hadn’t answered one way or the other, rather she didn’t know he’d never played a video game in his life. She kept on about it, said it would mean a lot to her, and finally he’d said, “For God’s sake, will you drop it.” Usually, he didn’t like it when she left him alone with the kid, but today, he was relieved not to have her watching him.
Now Larry finished the ham sandwich she’d left him, crumpled the potato chip bag and squashed his Coke can, pushed all of it toward the center of the table. He sighed, slid back the chair, hitched up his pants, and headed into the living room where the kid was on the couch fixated on the TV screen, his thumbs a blur on the game control. The sound effects were automatic gunfire, an AK47, no good for hunting.
“Hey, kid.” Tried again, louder. “Hey, kid.”
“Hey.”
“Whatcha up to?”
“I did it already.”
“What?”
“Got the wet towels off the bedroom floor.”
“Oh. Yeah, well, that’ll make your mom happy.”
The kid was staring at the screen where he was getting guys to shoot stuff. Cars and bodies were flying into the air. It was pointless. It wouldn’t even improve your aim out where it counted. You weren’t looking down sights; there was no weight in your hands or against your shoulder. You sure didn’t feel the kick of the shot.
“What’s that called?”
The kid glanced at him suspiciously. “I got this for Christmas.”
“Just wonderin’ what it’s called.”
“Mafia III.”
“Looks pretty easy.”
“Ever tried it?”
Larry didn’t know how to take that—an invitation or a challenge. He looked around the living room for reassurance. The fourteen-point buck he’d taken down two years ago inspired him. “You ever done that for real?”
“Huh?” The kid looked away from the screen. Looked at him. Progress.
“Like what actual men do—tracking, shooting, for real. With a rifle.”
The kid must have thought he hid that smirk. His voice was polite when he said, “Uh, no. These guys aren’t cops, Lar.”
“Nah. Not talkin’ about cops. I’m talkin’ hunting.” Larry swung his arm up and pointed to the trophies mounted around them. “This stuff on the screen doesn’t do crap to make you a man. You get out in the world, it doesn’t do crap to put you in real control of anything. You wanna have power, learn how to hunt. Be a predator.” Larry looked at the kid straight on. His hair was short, blond, but not as blond as LuAnn’s, that was for sure. Maybe LuAnn’s wasn’t real, even if she claimed it was. The kid’s eyes were sort of like hers, round and blue. He had the look of a yearling buck, scrawny and leggy, too delicate to be tough. With any luck, he’d fill out. Just a couple pimples. Patchy facial hair starting to come in. He did need a man to show him stuff, LuAnn was right about that much even if he was sick to death of hearing about her kid, her kid, her kid. She was freaking obsessed with her kid. That’s what started the fights and the only way to shut her up was a good slap, sometimes a little more. Her fault.
He’d do her a favor and pay her back for the lawyer if he taught the kid how to be a man. “Some time ya oughta try real hunting.”
“Mom—”
“Jeez, does your mom need to know every time you take a shit? I mean, you’re not a baby, are you? And besides, she says she wants us to have ‘a good relationship.’ ” Larry put air quotes around the words, his tone mocking. “She ever tell you that?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you like it when she wants us to go shopping or sit on the patio with her? Or visit your grandma, my personal favorite.”
The kid sort of rolled his eyes up and sighed at the same time, maybe a cross between disgust and fatigue. Larry wasn’t sure if it meant he was bored with the conversation or sick of his mother, but then the kid said, “Not exactly.”
Larry took heart and pressed on. “Yeah. Me neither not exactly.” Then he stalled, couldn’t think of another thing to say. The kid turned his face to the TV screen and fired his thumbs up again.
“So—see, it’s a guy thing. Y’interested?”
“In what?” But the kid kept playing his stupid game now.
“Hunting.”
There was only the sound of the fake AK47s, the fluid motion of his thumbs. Larry glanced at the screen. The kid was blowing up bodies. Larry wanted to blow up the kid right then for making him feel small when the kid didn’t even know Larry was talking about something big. Screw him.
“So, you lookin’ for a job, huh?” He vaguely remembered LuAnn saying something like that.
“I got one.”
The kid didn’t even glance in his direction. His arms looked thin as a fawn’s forelegs. He definitely ought to work out. Or something.
“Yeah, I guess your mom mighta said that. She’s cool, right?” Larry figured she probably had said something. There was no point to this at all. He was just trying to pay LuAnn back. LuAnn was loyal, he’d say that about her. The big thing was paying the bond and the lawyer, sure, but she was good about driving when they went out at night, too. Anyway, no one had been loyal to him like LuAnn, but it was a weird feeling, not that he’d ever let her have something over him.
“How about you show me how you work that thing,” he said, pointing to the Nintendo with his chin, “as long as you know it’s not worth crap about being a man. Did’ja know hunting raises your testosterone? Keeps you healthy.”
Larry put his fist u
p and the kid actually fist bumped it before he got a second set of controls from under the couch. Larry saw a brief half-smile on the kid’s face. He thought he’d won until the kid beat him hugely.
19
Louisa
I was young yesterday, which was a quick forever lifetimes ago. I recognize myself completely and not at all. I might be like anyone who’s old. How would I know? Some mornings I catch myself staring out the window and the yard looks unfamiliar. So I look down and wonder if that’s a small tremor in my hand. So I set the coffee cup down. It’s chipped. I need to throw it away. It clatters softly against the saucer. Marvelle winds herself around my calf, and I know she is real.
Sometimes there is a good reason for death. Old age, or to end suffering. Or, I suppose, both. When Harold killed Meg, she was sick. We’d thought she had a bound egg, but when I felt inside her, there was none. I held her in a warm bathtub for twenty minutes, talking to her the whole while, girl talk about which member of the family should get the Darwin Award for Least Evolved Behavior Of The Year (which we always awarded to one of the males, Nicole and I being the final judges, of course). We finally realized Meg had vent gleet, which is like thrush, and could have spread to the others. She was sick and suffering, and Harold wrung her neck and then he buried her and we mourned. We mourned while we shoveled all the bedding from the roost and scrubbed out the whole coop with a bleach solution. We mourned. I knew what had happened and the reason.
But everything does not happen for a reason. Or if there is a reason, as people, bless their hearts, kept saying at Cody’s funeral, and then at Harold’s, then there’s not a good reason. That is something that human beings cannot abide: there really is not a good reason for everything. I am thinking about the deer hunted down by men creeping through cold woods in southeast Indiana, and men hunted down by men creeping through the hot jungle in southeast Asia. Some things happen for a bad reason, like hubris, or no reason at all. Or reasons so complex that trying to untangle them makes you stare out of windows and tremble and almost wish it was just a tremor in your hand.
