“Doesn’t this Ernie guy have a son? Somebody else?”
“He called me, so I suppose I’m it.” Her eyes weigh so heavily on him that he suspects he will fly when he gets out of her sight. “Don’t wait up. He’s way up in the foothills, past Black Butte. We might make a night of it, depending on the how fast we butcher and how cold it gets”
“You’re getting too old for this kind of stuff, Dad.”
He settles his hand on the knob and turns it. “I’m going to go help,” he whispers, a hurt in the whisper. He steps outside, where the sun has disappeared and the trees and the meadow are lost in gray shadows.
On the Santiam Pass, the pines change over to firs and the road grows steeper and the snow piles higher along the shoulder. It is blackened with exhaust and scalloped from the constant wind that makes Jim correct his course with little jerks of the steering wheel. Here and there, draped over the guardrail or glimpsed among the roadside firs, deer lie in misshapen postures of death, some of them split in two by the grills of semis. His eyes jog back and forth, scanning the darkness beyond the reach of his headlights, ready for something to come scuttling toward him.
The farther he drives the more the world seems to narrow around him—the blackness of the sky bearing down—so that it feels as if he is hurtling along a dark conduit. He maintains his concentration on the road while at the same time drifting off to some dreamlike place where the puzzle pieces of his life are rearranged for the better, like the bones of a broken animal he might cast together with screws and glue.
Two hours pass in the black blur of an instant. And then his right signal is flashing. And he realizes he has to follow it, exiting near Turner. The moon has risen and he can see the surrounding countryside: the gray-lit pastures, the silhouettes of Holsteins, barbed-wire fences, and beyond all this, in the distance, the glow of Salem and the steady stream of cars on the interstate heading toward it.
He has been here once before, to pick up the boy. The trailer sits off the road a ways, down a long winding driveway bordered by blackberry vines and thistle. He drives slowly past it and after fifty yards hangs a right down a dirt road that opens up into a clearing next to the river. There isn’t another house in sight. A pyramid of half-burned logs and the scattered litter of beer cans and potato-chip bags reveal this as one of those secluded areas where teenagers come to drink and smoke and screw. A pair of panties hangs from a nearby thatch of willows. Spent cigarette lighters catch the moonlight and glow like iridescent beetles.
He kills the engine. Even though his leg, the stump of it, aches from sitting too long, he remains in the truck with his hands on the wheel and his seat belt fastened around his chest. For a time he watches the constellations wheel above him, and then the windows fog over with his breath. Without anything to look at but his hands, their white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel, he feels more fully, awkwardly aware of himself, forced into conversation with the backpack beside him, the gun inside of it.
So he unbuckles his seat belt and pushes open the door and steps into the night. The air is cool and damp, so different than the thin dry air he is accustomed to breathing. It makes him feel as if he is drinking, drowning a little, with each breath. The river hisses nearby. White wisps of mist trail along it.
He waits another thirty minutes. During this time nothing makes a sound, nor moves, except a great horned owl that swoops past him with a huff of its wings and is gone.
He unzips the backpack and withdraws the gun and holds it before him. It seems heavier, somehow, than he remembers it. Its metal gleams blue. Its chamber gives off the faint smell of whiskey. And he is moving toward the river, following the trail trampled along it. The mist, thicker now, creeps through the cattails and gropes for his legs and in his passing swirls and rearranges itself.
His prosthetic comes down stiffly and regularly as he makes his way toward the trailer, its noise out of place in the cool still night, clocklike in the way it ominously ticks off his approach. And he can see now, through the moss-laden trees, the glow where the trailer will be, though not yet the trailer.
Then he sees it. The windows are squares of flickering light cast by the television. Jim waits a minute and when he sees no movement starts forward.
This is one of those luxury trailers—if you could call it that—a double-wide with a lawn that Jim walks across and a porch that he climbs up and a sliding-glass door he approaches and slides aside. The air has an electric snap to it. A sulfur smell teases around his nostrils.
He is standing in the living room. There is a green loveseat and a vine-patterned couch and a big-screen television tuned in to CMT. Alan Jackson is singing about the Chattahoochee, how it gets hotter than a hootchy-kootchy. The living room runs into a dining area that runs into the wood-paneled kitchen dark with shadows. The only light comes from the TV and from the moonlight streaming in the windows.
Jim notices Dwayne maybe a dozen feet away from him. He sits at a Formica table with peeling edges. He is as dim as a ghost in the blue shade of moonlight. He has a bottle of Miller High Life in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His eyes are closed and his chin rests against his chest. His cigarette is a long red ash crumbling onto the table.
Jim carefully closes the door behind him and moves across the living room to where the carpet gives way to linoleum the color of an old man’s teeth. Here he stops and studies Dwayne. He has a thin wiry body and a square-shaped face and a thick broom of a mustache. The mustache has a bead of beer or sweat dangling from one of its hairs. It is odd to see him like this. For so long he has been faceless, bodiless, a dark nebulous force, like a storm cloud that occasionally descends upon his daughter.
His head appears loose on its hinges when he raises it to look at Jim. His eyes are too close together, muddy with drink and confusion. “Who’re you?” he says.
There is a shaft of blue moonlight hanging between the two of them. Cigarette smoke ribbons through it. And through the haze Dwayne looks at Jim like he can’t quite figure out if he’s dreaming or not.
Jim raises the gun. His finger fits over the trigger but doesn’t pull.
Right then Dwayne seems to mimic him, raising his own hand, the one with the cigarette pinched in it. He brings it to his mouth. Its ember burns bright when he drags a breath from it. That hand. Jim imagines what it has done and remembers the misery that defined his daughter’s voice when she called the other night.
“Who,” Dwayne says with the anger rising in his voice. “What the hell are you—”
“Shh,” Jim says. And pulls the trigger.
He experiences, in these long subsequent seconds, between the time when the trigger gives and the hammer falls and the revolver jumps with the force of a bullet discharged, a dangling sensation, like the cartoon characters experience when they discover they have stepped off the edge of a cliff, that instant of weightlessness, suspension in time, before the world comes crashing down.
Dwayne watches the bullet blast toward him and screws up his face to absorb it. A softball-size portion of his skull comes off and strikes the wall behind him with a red and gray splatter. He slumps back in his chair and his beer tips over and gurgles across the table in a foaming rush. His mouth gapes open, as if frozen around a silent scream. From it trails a thin ribbon of smoke.
Jim can smell the harsh familiar scent of gunpowder.
It’s the smell that defined his time in the 33rd Aviation. He would fly troops out of Manila and drop them off at the Port of Saigon or Cam Ranh Bay in a CV-2 Caribou. When the troops got off, the bodies got on. The bodies were zipped into black bags. Some of the bags were bigger than others and some of them would leak through their zippers. There would be stacks and stacks of them. And there would be a smell coming from them, the rottenness brought on by humidity. It got into your clothes and hair, like cigarette smoke, so badly that a Saigon whore once refused him until he showered, and even then she kept her face turned away.
His entire adult life he has
been surrounded by dead things. That is how he saw the black-bagged bodies and that is how he sees the animals he drains and peels and dries and refigures—as dead things. Dwayne is now one, too. The sight of him creates no more emotional effect in Jim than the sight of an elk with steam rising from the bullet wound in its ribs, like smoke from a secret chimney.
He goes to Dwayne and nudges him forward and his body slumps onto the table and some redness joins the yellowness of the beer. With some difficulty Jim digs the wallet from his back pocket, then goes down the hallway to the bedroom and empties his daughter’s jewelry case. He shoves the tangle of necklaces and rings into his pocket and opens up all the drawers and throws clothes all over the place.
With a damp dishtowel he wipes his fingerprints off everything he has touched. On the television the country song comes on, the one playing from his daughter’s phone, and he pauses in his cleaning to watch. On the screen a weathered Johnny Cash hunches over a piano, singing about hurt.
Jim heads outside, back down the porch, to the lawn, following the dark strip of grass where earlier his feet swept away the dew. The jewelry goes in the river, along with the wallet, but not before he removes the cash from it—a tenner, some ones—to buy the boy some candy on his way home.
Midnight has come and gone by the time he gets home. His daughter has left the porch light on for him. A long time ago, he vaguely remembers, he would come back from the tavern and find the light on and stumble up the porch and crawl into bed and seek out his wife beneath the sheets, her naked body warm and soft, but that was a long time ago. Now he stares at the light so long its afterimage remains in his eyes after he closes them.
He goes directly to the pole barn. The fluorescent lights sputter to life above him when he heads to the back of the studio and withdraws from the fridge the bucket of formaldehyde and unpeels its lid. The smell of stale blood and old fur and powdered latex vanish, replaced by something ammoniac. His eyes immediately water from it.
Alongside his severed foot float the remains of the photograph. The formaldehyde has leached his daughter from the photo paper and flecks of her hang along the top of the bucket and maybe in one fleck he sees what looks like a mouth, smiling or snarling at him, it’s hard to tell.
The revolver is shoved into his pants, just above his crotch, and he removes it now and dangles it above the bucket a moment before releasing it. It descends to the bottom of the bucket and knocks against the beer can and photo frame, making a muted clicking noise like some deadly underwater creature.
He seals the bucket and hoists it up and it makes a sloshing sound with his every step. Next to the pole barn is a carport where he stores the Gator. He straps the bucket down in its bed with bungee cords. He throws in a shovel and fires up the engine and starts toward the forest. The moon makes a milky circle on the hood that slides up and up and vanishes in his lap as he follows the weed-ridden trail to the bone pile.
The engine coughs off and a hush falls over the forest. No frogs drum, no crickets chirp. Frost sparkles across the browned bear grass and the bones in the bone pile give off the kind of pale blue light found in sunlit ice.
He digs a hole as deep as his waist and lowers the bucket into it and after returning the dirt to the hole he neatens it with his hand and sprinkles some pine needles here and there. Then he pulls some bones down from the pile to cover the place where the dirt has been disturbed.
Part of this, but not all of this, has to do with evidence.
Afterwards, he sits on the bumper of the Gator, his old muscles aching, his legs painted with dirt. He can feel the moon looking down on him, through the branches, but he keeps his eyes on the forest, on a possum, already shaggy-coated for winter, climbing the trunk of a nearby tree.
“I’m looking at you,” the moon seems to say, even as he avoids the white unblinking gaze of it, watching instead the possum race along a branch and execute a clumsy leap into a neighboring pine, where it hisses an evil-sounding song.
He stops breathing for a moment and then starts again when the forest shifts in whispers, when the air trembles into a breeze that rises into a cold wind.
Outside the sky, red with morning, is clotted with clouds. For the past thirty minutes his eyes have traced their passage. He can see them from where he lies in bed, on top of the covers, still wearing the clothes he wore last night. He can smell the smell of earth coming off them.
His daughter is awake. He listens to the noises she makes—the muffled roar of the shower, the clatter of a spoon in a cereal bowl, the babble of morning television. The boy soon joins her, his feet pounding up and down the hallway, his voice high and lovely.
If Jim closes his eyes, if he concentrates hard enough, he can imagine himself out of bed, out there, among them. He will read his newspaper and fold it precisely with every turn of the page. He will sip from a mug of coffee—the coffee steaming in his hand like a gun recently fired—until it is just porcelain against his teeth. And his daughter will splash it full of coffee again. And she will cook him eggs, over hard. And the boy will ask him a question and he will answer with a gruffness that belies the smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
Then his eyes snap open and the dream falls apart. There is an engine outside, growing louder, coming up the driveway. A police cruiser, he feels suddenly certain. And all at once, with a panicked gasp that sounds like a pile of logs collapsing into embers, he is thinking about all the things he doesn’t want to think about.
Last night, he must have left something behind—maybe a fingerprint they traced back to his military records—some obvious clue that brings the police to him now. In a panic he rolls over and jumps out of bed. With that first step there is a vanishing beneath him, as if his foot has slipped through the floor. He has forgotten to reattach his prosthesis—and his naked stump comes down painfully against the hardwood. He staggers forward and catches himself against the dresser.
It takes him another minute to fit his stump into its slot, to loop the bands over their hooks—and by this time there are footsteps on the porch, a knock at the door. He hurries out of his bedroom and limps down the hallway and yells, “I got it!”
But his daughter has already answered the door. The latch clicks and her voice calls out, “Hello,” at once a greeting and question.
Just then Jim rounds the corner. He expects to see, in the doorway, surrounded by sunlight, two uniformed officers. He is certain of it. He can already picture them lazily chewing their gum, their hands near their holsters. But no.
It’s Ernie. Ernie Nelson. Of all people he’s the one standing there, smiling kindly at his daughter. His NASCAR cap is in his hands. His beard is stained yellow around the mouth from his incessant smoking. It’s been a long time—nine years since Anne played guard for the Mountain View Mountain Lions, since Ernie ran up and down the court in a striped shirt and blew his whistle and made authoritative arm gestures indicating a jump ball, double dribble—but they recognize each other and exchange an awkward handshake along with their Good-to-see-yous.
“So how’d it go last night?” she says.
“Sorry?” he says. “Last night?”
“That elk you shot. Getting it out of that canyon.”
Ernie smiles blankly at her before saying again, “Not sure what you mean.”
Before she can respond Jim pushes his way between them. “Ernie!” he says. “Glad you stopped by!” His words come out with too much spit and he wears a smile not connected to his eyes.
“I was driving by and thought, what the heck, I’ll stop in and ask him about that salmon—”
“Sure, sure, sure.” He takes Ernie by the elbow and begins to lead him down the porch. “Let’s talk in the studio. I’ll show you what I’m up to.”
They’re halfway down the steps when Anne calls out, “The elk you shot, Ernie. The elk you shot last night.”
Jim tries to urge Ernie forward without success, as his friend stops and turns and says over his shoulder, “I’m sorry but I jus
t don’t have the slightest—”
“Ernie,” Jim says.
“It’s just that I haven’t been hunting—”
“Ernie.”
“Not since my knee replacement.”
Hearing this Anne doesn’t so much blink as snap shut her eyes. “Oh,” she says and settles her gaze on Jim. “I must have mixed you up with somebody else.”
Jim says, “Come on now, Ernie.”
They move along the pea-gravel path. Their footsteps make crunching sounds that sound like coyotes gnawing through bones “What’s she talking about anyhow?” Ernie asks.
“It’s like she said. She’s confused.”
“I should come back some other time?”
“No. Don’t you pay any attention to that.”
“You’re sure?” Ernie fits his cap back on his head and rounds the brim with his hands. “Everything’s okay?”
“More than okay.” Jim thumps him on the back and sends him in the direction of the pole barn. “You go on ahead. I’ll catch up with you. The Coho should be on your left, on the counter. I’m about halfway through with her.”
Ernie runs a hand through his beard—and a smile appears there, like a card suddenly sprung from a magician’s fingers. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
“She is.”
Ernie starts toward the barn and Jim starts back toward the house and as he does the shadow of a cloud passes darkly over the meadow. He flinches and looks up as if he discerns in its shifting shape some enormous sharp-taloned bird that will swoop down on him. But it only drops a few snowflakes before hurrying on to someplace else. All around him the flakes melt and leave behind damp freckles, like a spattering of tears, on the soil.
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