by Sadie King
“Seriously? What’s going on tomorrow?”
“We’re meeting Jack and Vane at 6 o’clock sharp. An hour from here. Got to get up fucking early.”
The playfulness of the moment, its intimacy, drained from Zora like blood from a slaughtered lamb. She gave Victor a look that could curdle drained blood. She uncuddled herself from him, put some distance between them on the bed.
“What the hell are you talking about Victor? Why would I want to meet Jack and Vane tomorrow? Especially Vane—you know how much he despises me.”
“A good friend of mine owns a ranch about an hour’s drive away. We’re going hunting there tomorrow. Bowhunting. Whitetail. Big ones too, some real monsters. And don’t worry about Vane—I told you, he and I have come to an understanding.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Zora fell asleep that night away from Victor’s arms, angry, resentful—but despite herself, while she slept, she fell back into them. Try as she might, she could not escape his embrace. The fall.
Before she fell again, Victor tried to assure her that the trip would be fun, spectacular scenery, he tried to allay her fears of having to face the violent death of a living creature, told her she would play the role of the tagalong, they didn’t have equipment for her anyway. It didn’t help.
She was afraid of the blood, the innards spilling out and glistening sickly in the sun, the deer’s dead tongue lolling out of its mouth like a limp purple doll. Under the right circumstances, Zora was perfectly capable of turning a penis into sashimi, but she hated the thought of killing an innocent creature. Or of seeing it killed.
She dreamt that night that she was the deer, the bounding hapless prey, and that all three men were bent on her destruction. They wanted to kill her, fuck the life out of her, with their razor-sharp arrows. They cornered her in a canyon of rock, against a gigantic boulder, and at the same time shot their arrows into the terrified depths of her heart. They slit her throat and drank her blood. They flayed her and tore at her flesh with their teeth like ravenous beasts.
She couldn’t wake, the dream was too real, and her entire self was consumed in that horror of unwaking. She woke only when the three men had taken their fill of her and had fallen asleep themselves, lying upon her flayed skin after their orgiastic bloodfest. The moment of her waking was the moment of their slumber. She told Victor of the dream. He assured her with a faint smile that something like that could never happen—that hunters, three of them, could never shoot simultaneously into a deer’s heart with such accuracy. Thanks for the cold comfort, asshole.
The drive was pleasant enough. The terrain got hilly and picturesque, a profusion of oak and mesquite, some cherry and maple thrown in for good measure. Not just hills: canyons and mesas. This was the karst country of central Texas, porous rock, caves and springs, underground tunnels of water, babbling brooks. Once upon a time, before the land turned pale, this had been Comanche country. The men would be hunting where generations of Comanche braves had once stalked the same species of prey. A lost cartography of the spiritual, of the sacred.
This was also Victor country. On the drive he told her of his childhood. His parents had both been lawyers in Austin, Bryce and Victoria Ras. They ran their own law firm together, very successful, thousands of clients over the years, partners in life and law.
His dad loved hunting like flies love shit, absolutely fucking adored it, the raw sensuality of it, the raw brutality of it. The taste of it. The smell of it. Every hunting season for years on end, before Vane had to go away, father and sons ventured into karst country, into the sacred grounds of the Comanche, to kill whitetail. Victor and Vane probably knew those hills better than many of the Comanche who had lived there—they had the adventurousness of boys, they enjoyed the permissiveness of their father, they had scaled, crawled, and dived into every nook and cranny of that karst-carved land.
They killed whitetail as well as the Comanche ever had. They butchered the animals themselves, preferred the bow to the rifle, arrows to bullets. They could no longer go with their dad—he was dead for many years of throat cancer, one Cuban cigar too many. Their mom was still alive but wouldn’t hear a word of hunting. She lived now in Costa Rica, on the 11th story of an all-glass condo complex in Puntarenas, on a peninsula on the Pacific coast, on the eastern edge of the Gulf of Nicoya. On the beach. She was glad she would never set foot in Comanche country ever again—one time, only one time, Bryce had talked her into going, as Victor had talked Zora. She was equally glad she would never again have to see in her freezer the body parts of a butchered deer.
“Look over to your left my love—that’s the ranch.”
Victor and Zora were almost to their destination. The highway they were on formed the easternmost boundary of the ranch. After skirting the property for a few miles, they turned off to the left onto a dusty dirt road. And abruptly stopped. The road was gated.
Victor and Vane both had keys. They were good friends with the owner of the ranch, Tom Nellis, that’s Senator Nellis to you and me, Republican from Texas. Longest serving member of the United States Congress. And one of the horniest and crookedest. If you know anything about the private lives of members of Congress, that takes some real skill. Their dad had done some legal work for the good Senator when he was caught with $90,000 of bribe money in his freezer and a hooker in his bed, both on the same day. Ouch. Not only did their dad get him a slap on the wrist, the Senator actually got some of the money returned to him, thawed of course, enough money to slap that hooker on the ass a few more times. So yes, Senator Nellis was grateful to the Ras family. They could hunt on his property whenever they wanted, in or out of season.
Vane and Jack were already waiting at the end of the road. How they had both arrived in one piece, riding in the same vehicle, Zora had not the first clue. Maybe Victor really had come to an understanding with his brother. Whatever the elder brother had done, whatever he had said, it didn’t entirely work when it came to Zora. Standing there at the end of the road, greeting his brother, Vane still managed to completely look past Zora. To utterly ignore her humanity. As though she were a rock or a tree in the landscape.
The men gathered their gear and the group split up into the same pairings they’d had in transit. There was a canyon that opened beyond the road, a natural extension of the dusty vehicular tracks. Each pair would tackle the terrain on either side of the canyon. Jack and Vane would hunt to the right of that gash in the earth, Zora and Victor to the left.
Aside from their hunting equipment, each pair of trekkers had a GPS, a two-way radio, and a cooler. Zora got to carry lunch for herself and Victor. That would be her job. Generic food from a convenience store along the way, stale sandwiches and syrupy drinks. Actually, her main job was trying not to spook the shit out of all the deer in a 5-mile radius by making too much of a commotion. Victor was there to sever the spine of a whitetail buck with his arrow, or bleed the creature to death from internal hemorrhaging—not dine on Wolfgang Puck or shush his lover.
Man and woman, hunter of deer and carrier of lunch, moved stealthily for an hour, through the scraggly rocks and brushy flora of the hills, without seeing a wisp of whitetail. Zora was truly happy about that. She had no desire to see Victor with blood on his hands, innards at his feet. The only four-legged life they saw was a hog-nosed skunk scurrying between some rocks. Out of their path, away from their nostrils.
Zora didn’t even bother looking for deer; she was too busy watching her step. The whole expanse of karst through which they traveled was littered with crevices and sinkholes large and small. One of those could swallow a man—or a woman—as easily as a whitetail could elude a shitfaced hunter. And from the number of shitfaced hunters in central Texas every year who shot a bush or a rock thinking it was a deer, that was pretty damn easy.
At the base of a large dome-shaped hill that looked as though its top had been sheared off with a giant scythe, Victor grabbed her arm, bringing her to a stop alongside him. He whispered.
“
I want you to wait here for a little while. I’m going to go scout ahead for a path.”
“Why can’t I come?”
“It’s a special spot my dad showed Vane and me when we were boys. Sacred to the Comanche. But the terrain around this hill is dangerous, too many precipices in the rock, so it’s better if I find the path first.”
“Fine. Just don’t take too long. I’ve heard there are mountain lions up here.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’ve never seen one but I’ve found their scat. For a juicy morsel like you, a mountain lion might be tempted to venture out of the shadows. I know I would be.”
“Thanks for setting my fears to rest. Shithead.”
She shoved him forward. He stumbled over some rocks, almost pitching his head into a boulder, but regained his footing in time.
“The sooner you leave the sooner I can stop worrying. Get your ass moving.”
Without another word, he jumped through a screen of juniper bushes and disappeared quickly from sight, leaving her to stare at shadows.
After another hour, he still hadn’t returned. Where the fuck is he? The shadows of the terrain, of rocks and trees, loomed over her more and more. She was getting pissed. And very, very scared. She called out his name as loudly as she could, several times, getting nothing in return but an eerie woodland echo. Hollow sound bouncing back and forth off of jagged limestone.
She swore to herself that she would pummel him when he returned. Pummel him to a bloody pulp. She was not a courageous soul, not in that unfamiliar, that alien terrain, and every twig snapping, every ambiguous animal sound, set her heart palpitating. Even though she was surrounded on all sides by throbbing life, the vibrant flora and fauna of the karst, she began to feel the first whispers of the horror of isolation. The horror of being lost in the wilderness. And the heat was getting oppressive.
She needed to rest and calm her nerves. She peeled off her bright orange vest, her hunting safety vest. Threw it aside, onto the cooler. She had set the cooler down even before Victor had vanished into the brush. She leaned back against a large honey mesquite tree, slid to the ground, her back scraping against its gray-brown scaly bark. Victor had given her cold comfort, now the tree would give her no comfort. She closed her eyes.
The snap of a branch nearby snapped open her eyelids. That was no little woodland animal. She stood, erect against the tree. Her body quaked.
“Victor! Victor! Victor, is that you?”
The sound of that single solitary snap was replaced with stillness. An abyss of silence. The unnatural calm began to truly unnerve her, and she began to sway and shake against the trunk of the tree, shivering uncontrollably in the mid-day heat, ready to run helter-skelter away from the next sound.
Without warning, a new sound. A new horror.
Coming toward her was the faintest whoosh she had ever heard. She barely had time to register the sound in the center of her brain. On the back of the sound, an instant behind, the arrow invisibly flew. It came at her with unbelievable speed, unnatural speed, faster than her fastest reflex.
It burrowed an inch into the tree just a fraction of an inch above her head. Her body automatically, violently recoiled from the shock. She crouched in a spasm, and then leapt away from the tree.
Zora fell into an animal panic, the panic of a hunted deer. She screamed and ran, ran and screamed, heedless of her steps. She tripped and stumbled over rock after rock. She slapped her face against bramble and branch, covering her cheeks with scratches, drawing blood. Her mind had no thought but flight. The arrow had not killed her, but her haphazard dash through the woods might. She could fall to her death in the ragged karst, bash her head against a boulder, cascade down a hillside like a rag doll, bones breaking along the way, organs rupturing.
“Zora! Stop!”
Running, she turned her head toward the voice. It was Victor, over to her right, by a large outcropping of grotesquely weathered rocks at the base of the sheared-off hill. The rocks resembled the rotting teeth of an enormous statue. She was passing about 100 yards away from him, heading in the opposite direction.
Her reflexes had taken over, and in her blind panic, the voice of her lover was not enough to break the spell of fear. In fact she veered away from his voice, instinctively thinking the tone of his cry a threat. She continued to hurl herself forward, oblivious of obstacles in her path, running obliquely away from Victor. The turmoil in her mind, in her heart, was so bestial that she trusted no one and nothing around her. That arrow had not materialized on its own. She could not consciously conceive that Victor had fired that arrow, but she also had no proof, no physical evidence, that he hadn’t. Who else could have?
Victor took off after her. He ran like a hunter after his quarry, after a terrified fleeing whitetail doe. He was incredibly fit, but even more important, he knew the contours of this land like the contours of his own skin. Zora was exhausted and confused, spurred onward only by adrenaline and fear. She was a hopelessly inefficient runner over the unfamiliar ground, continually getting caught up by the rocky terrain and the thick rough vegetation.
Within minutes he had caught up to her. When she still ignored his repeated cries to stop, he leapt upon her and held her tightly to himself. She squirmed and fought the grip of his arms, like a deer might fight the jaws of a mountain lion around its throat. Like a deer in the grip of a lion, she expended her last ounce of energy fighting a futile battle. She stopped struggling.
“What the hell are you doing Zora? Why didn’t you stop? Did you actually see a mountain lion?”
“Why, Victor, why?”
Her eyes brimmed with tears like a sinkhole during a downpour.
“Why did you shoot that arrow at me?”
Now it was Victor’s turn to be shocked.
“Someone shot an arrow at you? How do you know?”
His incredulity was a sign to her of his innocence. Her fear dissipated. But her anger returned—anger over him leaving her there for so long, leaving her to flirt with death alone in the wilderness. He released her from the cage of his strength, and she faced him with the strength of her rage.
“How the fuck do I know? Because the arrow hit the tree right above my head. You shouldn’t have left me there for so long.”
“Oh shit, oh shit, that’s awful. I’m sorry. Let’s go back and see if we can find the arrow. I know a lot of the hunters up here, maybe we can figure out who it was.”
But when they returned to the tree, the arrow was gone. Her vest was still lying on the cooler where she’d left it. Victor inspected the damage to the trunk from the impact of the sharpened steel. He glanced at her vest, unworn.
“You took off your vest. Whoever shot at you must have mistaken you for a deer. The brush is pretty thick around here.”
“Victor, do I look like a goddamned deer to you? What kind of imbecile would mistake me for a deer?”
“Believe me, guys around here will shoot at anything. Especially when they’re drunk. He probably just saw some different coloration against the tree, couldn’t tell what it was through his blurry vision. Let an arrow fly at it anyway, in case it was a deer.”
In the back of her mind, Zora could see Victor’s point: maybe it hadn’t been the smartest idea to wear a shirt that day whose color could accurately be described as “whitetail tawny.”
But she still had serious doubts about his theory of the shitfaced hunter. If someone was so fucking drunk they mistook a woman for a deer, would they really be able to almost impale her head to a tree? Zora suddenly had an idea.
“Call up Vane. Call him up on the radio. I want to hear what he’s doing right now.”
“Well, what if he’s into some deer? We can’t just—”
“CALL UP VANE. RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.”
Victor had learned, sashimi-style, how risky it was to provoke Zora. He obliged without another word of protest.
“Vane, come in, where are you guys? Any deer?”
The radio crackled to life. It was Vane.<
br />
“Can’t talk right now. We’re tracking this huge buck. Over by Lacey Hollow. A 6-by-5. Beautiful spread on him. I’ll radio you if we bag him.”
The airwaves fell silent. Vane was gone.
“Where’s Lacey Hollow? Close to us?”
“No, not by a long shot. Three miles on the other side of the canyon. Probably at least six miles from us.”
The hollow got its name from its old growth of Quercus laceyi, the Lacey Oak. A regal tree, unusual for that region of the karst, topped with an expansive crown of foliage. A sultry tree, dressed in a silky coat of blue-green leaves.
Zora closed her eyes as if meditating. She sent aloft a slow exhale, a sweet breeze through the skein of trees around her. She opened her eyes, looked at her lover. Accepting of his words, his judgment.
“You may be right. Some dumb Texas hillbilly probably did shoot at me. Drunk on his own moonshine.”
She hadn’t been joking, she was still incensed just beneath the surface of her meditative face, but Victor had to laugh.
“Hillbillies and moonshine? Think closer to home—think Kentucky or Tennessee. But it really doesn’t matter. Hunters everywhere like to get drunk. It’s almost an unwritten rule. A 6-pack for a 6-point. No beer, no deer.”
A smile finally leafed itself across Zora’s face.
“No beer, no deer. I’ll have to remember that when we get married. I’ll make a new rule for you, one for the bedroom: You’re drunk, you’re out of luck. Doesn’t quite rhyme I know. Too bad.”
Victor quaked in his boots—almost as much as Zora had when the arrow nearly split open her skull. The blood drained from his face. He began to sputter.
“W-w-hat do you mean, when we get married? Did that arrow somehow jilt your brain?”
Of course he meant jolt instead of jilt—but in his panic-stricken state, he was falling prey to slips of the tongue. And this particular Freudian slip just happened to highlight his womanizing nature.
“My brain is fine, you jerk. No thanks to you. And you had better not jilt me. You’ll get an arrow in you if you do. Don’t play games with me. What do you expect when two people love each other?”
