When Bob was married, he went hunting two or three times a year, but just getting out seemed more important than getting anything. Now, after his divorce and his father’s death, he had taken a more success-oriented approach, and his walls were beginning to fill up with heads, horns, and birds in arrested stages of flight. He felt that, once again, his autumns seemed measured by opening seasons. Not only did his job at the realtors’ office slow down in the fall, but he also took vacation days as he needed them for hunting trips. He felt he was forming something of a reputation and sensed that he was becoming the envy of every work and house bound husband in the county with a hunting license whose tags went unfilled year after year. Today he was going hunting with Dean. In high school, they hunted together almost every weekend, but since their marriages this was their first hunt in fifteen years. His car lights entered Dean’s driveway, then pooled in two huge spots on the garage door. When he knocked, he heard Dean’s wife say “Come-on-in.”
“It sure smells good in here, Jen.” Bob took off his hat, unbuttoned his coat, and threw them both onto a chair.
“Where’s Dean? A few last winks before we go?”
“No, he’s out feeding the dogs. Do you want a cup of coffee?”
“B’lieve I will, my head’s always in a fog till I get a cup in me.” He sat down at the table, put both hands around the cup, and pursed his lips at the cup’s edge as if he were practicing a whistle. The steam warmed him, and he sat for a moment letting it curl up his face.
“Bob, can you stay for dinner tonight? Dean said you guys might be out late, especially if you got something.”
“Sure, let’s plan on liver and onions. I’ve scouted this bunch for the last two months. Fish in a barrel.”
“Oookay,” she said, humoring him.
He heard it but couldn’t figure out whether there wasn’t just a hint of admiration, so he grinned and nodded to indicate that if she thought it was a joke, he’d be ready to laugh at himself if it came to eating crow instead. He also felt that women were somewhat inscrutable, and Jen was particularly wary and untranslatable. She seemed the ideal wife—supportive, funny, attractive, and willing to encounter each new predicament with grace, even if it were feigned — indulgent even. She seemed to enjoy the image she projected despite her inability to believe in it, despite a cold calculation at the center of her generous and appeasing hospitality.
Dean stamped his boots on the back porch, “Those deer should be sitting tight this morning with how cold it is.” He set his flashlight down and pushed his cap up with his thumb. He unbuttoned his coat.
“There was a skim of ice on the pond. I suppose the windshields are frosted up.”
“Yeah, cold as hell this morning.”
“Hell ices up in the winter too, huh Bob?” Jen asked.
“Well, if it does or it don’t, I don’t want to find out.”
Bob watched her lean body walk back to the stove. Dean went into the utility room. Jen looked good at 5:00 in the morning, even had a little make-up on, and her hair had been brushed. It wasn’t all cattywampus like Donna’s used to be in the mornings. Or his own; some days as he was brushing his teeth or shaving, he was struck by the rumpled aging, the tired creases that cut down from his eyes in the same way his father’s had.
When he looked up, she was standing in front of him with the coffeepot. He held out his cup.
“Just two fingers.”
“Straight up or sideways?”
“Well, let me check your fingers for size and I’ll see.”
“How close a view would you like?” she asked, making a fist.
“Oh, put one in it, I could use a little sugar.”
Dean came out of the utility room, toweling his hands.
“That coffee’ll taste like vinegar when she gets done with it. She’s got a mean streak that won’t quit.”
“It’s going to be egg-yellow and down the front of your shirts if you guys don’t behave yourselves,” Jen said, picking up the skillet and giving them a raised eyebrow that was crooked with possibilities, but mostly serious. When he spent time with Bob, Dean seemed to step back into some post-adolescent way of talking as if it had been scripted years ago and they were merely acting it out. Jen felt herself falling into it as if her own role had been preordained by generations of pre-hunting banter, but it was light and predictable, easy as frying eggs and making toast.
They ate their breakfasts and got ready to leave. Dean spent a few minutes looking for his knife. Jen found it and slapped it into his hand with an I-told-you-so look. Bob stood by the door with his hand on the knob, waiting while Dean gave his wife a kiss and gently rubbed her back. At the door, he said, “You go on back to bed now, honey.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be asleep before you’re out of the driveway.”
When they got out of the pickup to hike to their stands, the sun was just pushing over the mountains and coloring the wispy clouds a deep orange. The few stunted pines stood up blackly against the wheat stubble and miles of sage. The bunchgrass had a thin white frost that flattened into a smooth glaze when they stepped on it. They walked through sagebrush and over hillocks, down a stretch of road Bob’s friend used about twice a year to check cattle. It was merely two tire tracks through sage with cheat grass and dried balsam down the middle. The fog over the river had begun to disperse and flow across the pastureland and up into the canyons. It was slowly erasing the south of town, and they were free to imagine they were entering a wide unsettled region.
As they approached the place where the hilltops divided around a ravine, they agreed to find stands near one of the last benches that gave them a view of the ravine on each side and the hill in front of them. Dean took the one to the west, and Bob the one to the east. The closer they got to the brink of the hill, the more boulders there were. Bob unbuttoned his jacket and slowly made his way around and over the basalt slabs and sagebrush. As he stepped from one boulder to another, his binoculars thudded against his chest. He pushed them inside his shirt. A jackrabbit flashed its white tail and hopped briskly away, a bounding ball with large legs and ears.
When he finally arrived at the stand, he was sweating, his breathing labored. He sat on a low flat boulder, the hill rising sharply behind him and falling away in front. Some of the gullies that curved into the main ravine were still in shadow. The serviceberry clusters in the bottom crept a brief distance up the gullies. There were also clumps of currant and, a little higher up, tall sagebrush. A deer could lie among these bushes and never be seen. He sat and watched the fog stretch out like the tops of clouds he’d seen from airplanes. As he sat there sweating and puffing, he thought of his father. He was of that generation that went through the Depression as a child, where even education starved, and sweat was the only route to food and sleep. He’d quit school in the sixth grade to work in the fields—sacking potatoes, digging ditches, picking fruit. He had a slow humor that flattened out periods of rest, that looked on the foibles of hurry and inexperience with a detached judgment. City slickers were objects of ridicule no matter how funny their cars and clothes. They were like cattle led into the corrals with a ruse as simple as salt. He could also look at his own errors as if they were city slickers too, primped and neat for the job, girlish and simple. He remembered his father outside NAPA’s auto parts meeting a distant younger cousin who had become a history professor at WSU. His father had shaken his hand limply like he was touching a dog turd and said “Oh, you’re one of them smart sonsofbitches.” Bob had laughed at this but there was a challenging glint in his father’s eye as if his long life of labor could back up whatever came next. The history man had come on like some women’s perfume—prancing and thick with an inner melodrama. His eagerness to tell what he knew to a man in grease-stained jeans, a week-old stubble, hands hard as weathered leather, a red shop rag in his left hip pocket was like a purple sundress on a poodle. Work and sweat were the currency of his father’s soul, irrespective of the money earned. He’d been doing it so long and so relentlessly that leisure was a mockery of the body’s capacity. It was a smothering boredom and a trap. But hunting sweat was good sweat; it had as its object cheap meat, mouths to feed.
He poured himself a cup of coffee. The smell brought back Donna and the kitchen of the house they had owned together. It had a pantry in which they had put a small table because the window looked out onto the garden and the fruit trees. They would have their coffee and read the morning paper on Saturdays and Sundays, especially in the spring when the tulips and trees were in bloom. Donna had black hair and dark eyes that seemed to soften into brown, like good strong coffee. They had used this thermos to keep the coffee warm and avoid having to go back to the pot in the kitchen.
Her leaving was still something of a mystery to him. She had pretended to be happy up until the day she left. He thought it was the allure of something new—a new landscape, new face, new body, new mind—against the memory of mopping the same floors, scrubbing the same pots and pans, making love with the same practiced gestures and cues. He also blamed it on beauty. It created restless expectations, suggested opportunities unfulfilled because it had created them when she was younger. Of course, he was no saint. Faithful, yes. But bound by the local demands of living: work, mowing lawns, hauling garbage, gardening, laundry, the whole sad spectacle. He knew that he had deliberately left her with most of the housework, saying he had to show a house or run to the bank, the Title Company, the City Manager’s office. Her job as a secretary in Admissions at the college was not demanding, had a comfortable predictability. But were his domestic evasions enough for her to drop off the key and check out?
A movement caught his eye. He thought he saw a white spot on the edge of a shadow near a serviceberry tree. He glassed it, but it was only a coyote working its way along the sidehill, perhaps another hunter had spooked him. He stood up and stretched his legs. The fog was dissipating. He looked at his watch: 9:15. A shot in the canyon to the north of him rang out and bounced in decreasing echoes into the valley. Then he saw the deer emerge from the shadows. Three of them. The one in the lead moved in easy jumps for about fifty yards, stopped, turned to look back. Bob had his gun to his shoulder and could see horns, at least a three- or four-point. The deer was watching the lower trail, so Bob climbed the hill behind him and edged down the next ravine, circling around to where the deer would cross. He made his way slowly, careful to avoid the crunch of dried balsam leaves, or the slick zip of the brittle sage branches across his coat. In position, he took his rifle off his shoulder, made sure the bolt was completely down, the scope’s glass clear. He found a small basalt outcropping that he could stand behind and use as a gun-rest.
In just a few minutes rocks were clattering. When he peeked over the edge, he saw the two does not seventy-five yards away, bounding towards him. Sure as hell, he thought, the buck got out ahead of him. Across the small gully, the hill rose up sharply and flattened into a bench that was impossible to see into from his angle. He thought his only chance would be to climb the hill and hope the buck had stayed in the thick sage and long dry grass at the far end. He climbed steadily, pausing at the edge, panting. For a few seconds he closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on keeping his hands still. He picked a balsam burr, ground it in his palm, let it sift through his fingers like sand. A faint breeze came from the northwest. He fingered the gun’s safety and scanned the hillside through the scope. The buck saw him about the same time he saw it. At the extreme edge of the bench, it stood poised, ears erect. He had time for a quick free-handed shot: the crosshairs wavered over the front shoulder, stopped, and he fired. He saw the buck fall forward, roll, its legs bunch in the air.
Running through the tangled grass and sagebrush, afraid of tripping, he watched each footfall. The ground sped by as on a conveyor belt. About twenty yards from where the deer fell, he stopped, breathing hard. He saw some blood glistening on the blond points of bunchgrass. Then a thin streak on a rock. A red glob tinged with dust. A shot broke his concentration. Following the blood-trail, he ran to the crest of the ridge. Down the steep slope he could see a man in an orange suit, bright enough to stop traffic, moving toward the bottom of the canyon. He could see no other movement nor hear any other sound until his own name floated down from the ridge. Dean had heard the shots and had come to help.
“Well, we eatin’ liver tonight?” Dean asked as soon as they were near enough to talk.
“I thought I hit him square, went down like a ton of bricks, but damn if he didn’t get up and go again. I think he may have run into that goddamn Christmas tree ornament over there. He was bleeding bad, there’s a regular trail of it to here.”
“Maybe we ought to follow it. Maybe that guy shot something else.”
“Okay, but I doubt it.”
They picked their way down the slope, following the clots of blood and occasional hoofprints. The sage had a rich, acrid smell like gym sweat. When they began to climb up the other side, Bob could tell by the signs that he and the man in the orange raincoat and rainpants had shot the same buck.
As they neared him, the man looked up. His right hand, which held a knife, was covered with blood. He spat a wad that plopped into the congealing mass of fluids at his feet. “Howdy,” he said, his lips and teeth flecked with tobacco.
“Was that buck wounded when you shot it?” Bob asked, his gun pointing at the ground between them.
“It was dragging a front leg but it was running fine. What the hell is it to you?” the orange man said, his knife waving with his words.
“Well, the way it was bleeding to here, it couldn’t have been running too hard. Hell, it’s been losing blood for two hundred yards.”
“Like I said, it was running fine when I shot it.” The knife had stopped waving and pointed towards the ground.
“Where you from anyways?”
“Tacoma.”
“You got permission to hunt here?”
“Never saw no signs.”
“What did you do, fly in?”
“I drove down that dirt road with the sign that says Public Hunting. And just walked over here along the ridges.”
“Well, you should have read a few fenceposts along the way.”
“This your land?”
“No, a friend of mine owns it.”
“Well, then, asshole, I’ll take it up with your friend.” He spat out another glob of juice, said, “if I see him,” and began to work again on the deer.
“Don’t worry, I will too. It’s pricks like you that ruin it for everyone else.”
“Fuck you,” the orange man said without lifting his head.
“Come on, Bob, let’s head on back,” Dean said, seeing the anger flicker across Bob’s face.
They climbed the hill to work back to the ridge. It was a slow hike and they stopped regularly. From a distance, the hills rolled smoothly along like you could run up them without breaking a sweat, but climbing was a lesson in deception. They were terraced by years of grazing and the habits of wildlife. Without bending or reaching, one arm could pick rocks off the next uphill path. If a large rock were accidentally kicked out, it would roll, pick up momentum, bound in long leaps, crashing through sagebrush or screeching through barbed wire fences. There was something releasing about this, though they never tried to do it deliberately. It’s just that if it happened, they both stopped to watch the stone’s progress. The willful abandon of the leaping rock, its new character wildly discharged, its uncontrollable force. The pleasure was in watching this turbulent expenditure of energy the impetus of which was so slight.
The afternoon had turned warm, and they had to pack their coats for the last hour. The sage took on a new smell, mellow and full. The sun had peeled away the acrid aftertaste, released it to join the other flavors. The bunchgrass smelled like damp straw. The balsam was dusty, papery. It was 12:30 before they made it to the top and sat down to eat their lunch.
“That guy will be hoping for a little civilization when he goes to pack that deer out of here. He’s got two miles of hell in front of him,” Dean said, unwrapping his sandwich.
“He’ll probably take the head and leave everything else for the coyotes. He’ll take the head back to show all the neighbors as if he’s the only one on the block with a real set of nuts. Until it starts to stink and the maggots crawl around. Then he’ll cut off the horns and pitch it in Thursday’s trash and hope the Teamster’s Union is on time for once.”
“There’s just too damn many people. I don’t blame them for coming over. Hell, who wouldn’t want to get out of Tacoma and smell some real air and walk on something besides a sidewalk.”
“Well, that’s what I like about you, Dean. You’re not the asshole I am. But that’s probably why you’re still married, and I live in Mountain View Estates with all the other dumb shits who can’t fry an egg. I think they’re all play-acting at life. The image of life is more interesting than the real thing. They’d rather watch the Disney channel than have to sweat to see a deer or a coyote.”
“Jen and I have our differences, and I’m sure I’m an asshole most of the time in her view. Marriage is mostly a matter of balancing the noes with yeses, of reading between the lines as much as the lines themselves.”
“I think I skipped school that day. I’m sure Donna thought I was illiterate.”
With Donna, Bob had always had a hard time reading what she said, let alone what was unsaid. She had not wanted children, was afraid of what that might do to her figure and her golf game. She had won the local Club Championship numerous times and was always among the top players. Bob played but preferred to fish and hunt in whatever spare time he had. Donna loved martinis and had one or two every evening which she often drank while watching a taped episode or two of The Days of Our Lives. Although she ridiculed the constant affairs, accidents, the sudden appearances of handsome and beautiful ex-lovers, she said it was a fantasy world that helped keep her own in balance, but Bob suspected she regretted not wanting children, that the shows inspired a restlessness, a critique of her own life and its predictable rhythms. She said she was happy, and he was used to taking what she said at face value which had always proven the safest route, but something quite poisonous had gotten inside her and he didn’t know why or how.
After lunch, they lay in the afternoon sun and took a nap, using a clump of bunch grass as a pillow. When they finally got moving again, they decided to hunt the tops of the ravines back towards the pickup. They saw five more deer, no horns. The late sun made the blond grass blonder, the sage bluer. A few pink-bottomed mushrooms tilted dry lumps of dirt off their heads in the shade of sage or balsam. A sage-grouse burst out of the brush like an airborne rototiller, and Bob and Dean hunched and gripped their gun’s shoulder-strap. They gave each other a sheepish look, shook their heads, and walked on. By the time they reached the pickup, it was 5:30.
When they pulled into Dean’s yard, it was dark and the houselights made bright squares in the lawn. Bob could see Dean’s wife through the living room window. She gave a short wave with a hairbrush and disappeared. A chocolate lab stood at the end of the cement sidewalk and barked; each bark sent a convulsion down his body that wagged his tail. Dean patted his head as he went by and the dog stopped barking, followed him to the door.
“How did it go?” Jen asked, brushing her hair as it dried in front of the fireplace.
“Want to hear the story about the one that got away?” Dean asked.
“I’ve probably heard it all before, but dooo tell” she said as Dean walked down the hall toward the bedroom, holding his gun by the barrel.
“I knocked one down but he fell into the hands of some clown that looked like he belonged in a MacDonald’s commercial.”
“How big was he?”
“A three point. A nice little buck, fat’n sassier than a rich man’s wife.”
“What do you know about rich men’s wives?”
“Nothing, ‘cept they probably sleep sounder and longer than the rest of us. I imagine you sleep pretty sound yourself.”
“Why do you say that?” Jen asked, getting up from the edge of the fireplace and giving her hair a backward shake. The fire made it glisten darkly.
“You have it so damn soft you probably have a pillow-fluffer come in once a week.”
“We don’t use pillows much.”
“Well, if you ever need one. . .” As soon as Bob said it, he regretted it. It was only half a joke, but he knew the half he meant and the half she’d take. Her eyes seemed to freeze for a second like a mouse when the lights flick on. He felt his face burn.
“We got plenty, thanks.” Jen smiled and picked up her towel, comb, and brush.
“You going to stay to dinner, Bob?” Dean asked as he came back into the room, his shirt neatly tucked, his hair wetted and combed. He looked clean, refreshed.
“Sure. Thanks. I could stand to wash up myself,” Bob said, moving towards the bathroom.
“If I planned on liver and onions, Bob, we’d have all gone hungry,” Jen said as she passed him, her hairbrush tapping his shoulders.
The smell of her clean hair and the touch of her brush made him think of his own wife, the little things that didn’t seem to matter at the time but do now. The way she flipped her hair after she put on a sweater. The way she snuggled into a tight pair of jeans. The way her nose wrinkled when his joke was bad. The calm distance in her face when she read a book.
“Well, good,” Dean said, “care for a drink? I got bourbon, scotch, and maybe some gin.”
“Bourbon and water will be fine.”
“I have meatloaf, beans, and potatoes. Is that going to be enough for the famished hunters?” Jen said, turning on the kitchen faucet.
“That’ll be fine, hon.”
“Beats half-frozen chicken pot pies.”
As Dean set the table, Bob took off his boots and warmed his feet by the fire. There was a quiet, understood ease about their kitchen talk and the clatter of plates, the hollow ringing of glasses being set on the table, the metallic thwack of silverware. He felt a pang of loss. It was like watching two butterflies twirl in the garden and one suddenly flies off. There was an empty hovering inside him, a soft fluttering, useless motion.
After dinner Bob and Dean sat before the fire, sipping drinks. Jen was putting the leftovers away and cleaning up the table and counters. She was wearing a white apron with small blue flowers linked above the hem and the square of the bib, her hair was held back by two white combs, and her strong tanned arms moved with a swift sureness. Bob watched her elbows rising and falling, the sway of her breasts when her arms lifted something or she scrubbed the tabletop. He imagined her hands moving over his chest, through his chest hair, around his nipples, down toward his navel. He clinked the ice in his glass, took a drink.
“Jesus, I hated to see that buck get away,” Bob said, turning again to Dean who had just put on an Anne Murray disc. She had a warm, lonely voice that came from a good heart and a bad life, honest, even if the words weren’t.
“Hell, that guy needed to get one just to remember how hard it is to pack out, probably won’t be back next year,” Dean said, sinking heavily into his favorite chair, putting his feet up.
“Yeah, but the goddamn greater Tacoma area will be trotting on over here after his story gets out. Even if he never comes back.”
“I suppose,” Dean felt like avoiding that subject. City people migrating to their valley were Bob’s livelihood and nemesis.
“Is Ronald MacDonald still bothering you guys?” Jen asked, picking up the drink Dean had fixed for her, “I’ll bet he did just fine and had liver and onions tonight. Why do you two always think you’re the only ones who know how to do this, this call-of-the-wild thing?”
Dean brought his knees up and uncrossed his feet. He looked down into his drink. “We don’t always think that. And it’s not just the call of the wild.”
“It’s blood and sweat, maybe even a little lust mixed in, if you ask me,” Jen said, swirling the ice cubes with her finger.
“Lust?” Dean said, “that’s spoken like a woman, you think everything a man does is lustful. He takes out the garbage and it means he wants to hit the sack. I think women just like to keep bringing it up so they can sleep sounder.”
“I don’t know, Dean,” Bob said, “she might be right. Hunting brings out the prowl in me. Maybe it’s just that I feel so alive and want the whole day just to keep on going. Maybe I’m just a horny old bastard and will take any excuse. Who the hell knows?”
“Here’s to horny old bastards,” Jen said, lifting her drink.
After Bob had drained his, he said, “Well, thanks a lot, but I better get my tail home before I fall asleep, it’s pretty cozy here by the fire.”
“You don’t have to rush off,” Dean said.
“I know, I have a few houses to show tomorrow. If I don’t get my beauty rest, I’ll scare them away.” He laced up his boots, put on his coat and hat, and made his way to the door.
“We’ll have to try them again next week.”
Bob listened to the radio, but it was a distant music that couldn’t fill the emptiness of the car. He didn’t know the songs, the singers. A vague uneasiness filled him as if he were waiting for the consequences of his lie to catch up to him. But he didn’t know what it was. The dark of the car was like a confessional—enclosed, a sense of hurtling through space, the only light coming from a point in front of him. The cold made him shrink further into himself toward some inner warmth. The country lights spread out below him looked like solitary boats in a black harbor. He felt he was slipping into them, anonymous, one more indistinct reflection.
When he pulled in front of his mobile home, its white moonlit panels gave off a luminous strangeness. It looked like someone else’s house—the yellowed grass, the dying shrub at the steps, bones in the yard from his neighbor’s dog, the similar windows arranged across the front, the shoulders of the furniture peeking through. The lock on the door clicked back like the bolt of a gun. He stood for a moment looking into the interior darkness.
The light that spread over the newspapers, bottles, socks and shoes, dirty dishes, and face-down magazines had a peculiar loneliness. The pheasant above the tv was dusty, cobwebbed. He made himself another drink and got ready for bed. The red light on his phone was blinking. He pushed the button.
“Hello, Bob, Art Burke here, say, I ran into a guy who said you told him he could hunt on my place, that he was a friend of yours. He had the head of a three point, said you were going to help him pack it out. I just wanted to confirm this, a lot of guys have been sneaking in and I like to keep it for my friends. Call me in the morning, leave a message if I’m not around.”
“Bob, this is Annie, I found a picture of you and Daddy. I had it blown up and framed. I wanted to send it to you, but I realized I don’t have your new address. Could you call and give it to me? Thanks.”
He undressed, turned his small reading lamp on, and lay under the bedroom ceiling he had been examining for three months now. A sadness went through him, futile and inexplicable. He deliberately tried to imagine Jen, the dark aureoles of her breasts, but she disappeared and the breasts could have been any woman’s, bathroom drawings, the Penthouse pinups in magazines scattered beside his bed.
He got up and stood before the dark window. The lights of some of his neighbors were still on. The Mountain View Estates sign blinked off then on, the “E” having been shot out. Yes, Mountain View Estates, a liar’s paradise. Finishing his drink, he looked into the window, but he could see only himself. He was tired, his belly sagged, his arms were loose and white as frost. Like some pale replica of his father. He had died alone too, in an apartment that looked just like this.
For twenty-seven years, his father had worked without complaint at Fresh-Pack Foods, a frozen food plant. Boxing frozen corn, washing the milky seep of corn juice off conveyors and sprockets and angle-iron scaffolding. That sour mash smell crept into his clothes, dampened by the constant fog of the high-pressure steam. And in winter, the cold that must have entered into his joints glazed his cheeks with an icy slush, frosted the fringes of the hair under his stocking cap. What a mockery time makes of us, he thought. He had wanted to fly, join the Air Force, see the world. The Vietnam War was going on and the chopper pilots were getting slammed. The one defining moment between him and his father was when they’d yelled at each other, squared off to fight. His sister, Annie, in tears, grabbed him around the neck, wrapped her legs around him, and would not let go, screaming, “No, no, no” until his father turned and walked out the door. He came back at 2:00 in the morning, stumbling drunk. Bob was gone before he’d slept it off. And always between them was this knowledge, the possibility of what they might have done to each other.
An apartment manager had found his father three days after he died, his dinner still on the table. He realized he’d never asked what his father’s last meal had been. He suddenly wanted to know. It seemed important, suggested a lapse in him, an inability to love. He wondered now about the picture that Annie had framed. He shut his eyes, but nothing came into his mind, no images demonstrating happier times, no grins beaming their good fortune into the future, no grace period before that open season on the rest of their lives. And when he again gazed into the window, all he could see was the fat outline of the orange man, and the bird behind him, flying into a wall.
He thought about Jen, Donna, the other women he knew. Who was he kidding? He and Dean had been friends since high school, and here he was coveting his wife. The valley had changed, was filling up with houses, people he didn’t understand. And he was helping to make it happen, though if not him, someone else would. And what did he really know of Annie who had gone into social work and lived in Issaquah with her husband and two boys? She always invited him to holiday dinners, called to check up on him, sent him pamphlets from her church on healing after grief or divorce, on helping foster children, or the merits of volunteerism. He had politely declined the invitations, and thought of her as doughty, trite, too solemn. Yet she had always stood between him and his father like a referee in a boxing match, trying to minimize the damage, trying to. . .do what? He wasn’t sure. How old were her boys now? Eight and ten? He suddenly realized he didn’t even know their names.
He poured himself another drink and sat on the edge of his bed. He saw again the look his wife had given him as she left. It was not contempt or regret or loss. It was emptiness, as if her emotional tank had been used up, and all her love and regard had simply passed into another state like liquid into air. Contempt at least left something to work with, some combustible residue, but emptiness, inertia, were unassailable. He might as well have been a stranger occupying the same temporary space.
He drank and shook the ice left in the glass. His rifle inside a leather case leaned in the corner beside his dresser. Three brass bullets from his pockets were lined up along the edge of the dresser like miniature missiles, innocent as language, but deadly too. The unsaid and the said. He thought of liver and onions, how he had to smother the fried, thinly sliced meat in catsup to get it down, how its grainy paste swelled thickly in his mouth before he swallowed it, tasting of old iron and beets. His mother used to make it after each deer was killed, and it had become a kind of ritual in many of the farm families he had grown up with. He laughed, suddenly, at the thought of all these men, generations of them, choking down wads of liver covered with catsup and onions, and calling it good.
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- Liver and Onions by Joseph Powell - November 30, 2023