by Ash Davidson
“You need a haircut,” Enid said.
“Why pay a guy to mow a dying lawn?” Eugene asked, running a hand through what was left of his downy hair.
“These are done,” Rich said. Eugene hopped up.
“Where’s Marla?” Gertie asked, sunk deep in a lawn chair.
“Washing her hair. She’s got a date later,” Enid said.
“A date?” Gertie asked.
“Talk to him.” Enid raised her chin at Eugene. So that’s what they’d been arguing about.
The seat of Enid’s lawn chair sagged, her bottom an inch off the ground. The girls’ dancing had turned to roughhousing. They veered, Agnes knocking over Enid’s beer.
“Hey.” Enid scooped it up and shook out the last drops. “Watch where you’re going, lazy.”
Agnes’s chin crumpled.
“C’mere, sugar.” Eugene held the tongs up in front of Agnes’s good eye until she covered it with her hand, then drew a circle in the air for her slow eye to follow.
“Good girl. Now, go tell your mom you’re sorry.”
“Sorry!”
“Yeah, well. I can’t drink a beer out of ‘sorry.’ ” Enid nodded at Colleen’s untouched bottle. “What are you, pregnant?”
“No.” Colleen searched out Rich’s eyes. How could I be pregnant when my own husband won’t touch me?
Rich straightened. Under his shirt his arms and chest were still stamped with pink patches of sweat itch.
“Wy!” Enid yelled. “Come eat! Chub! Wy-att! Where are those two?” Enid went around to the front yard.
A droplet of worry welled in Colleen’s mind. Then the yelling stopped.
“Found ’em,” Rich said, and she knew he was right, the way you always knew when the missing had been found: someone stopped calling their names.
November 12 RICH
He didn’t see the doe, but he smelled her: musk, the sweet, metallic tang of blood. She was making a racket, crashing through junk alder grown up between rows of rinky-dink crop firs.
“Somebody’s not doing his damn job,” Eugene bitched.
Rich swatted air to silence him.
“Look at this.” Eugene kicked brush. “You telling me they sprayed this?”
Rich swallowed a lump of frustration. Trying to shut Eugene up just made him talk louder. The crop firs were barely as thick around as a man’s thigh, close grown. The sign at the gate slated this side for harvest in 1996, date already marked on the calendar—more farming than logging. Rich stopped, listening for the doe.
“Helicopter jackasses,” Eugene griped, shouldering through another blind of alder. “A drunk could piss better.”
Rich saw her in his mind: foam at the mouth, glossy black ticks beading the white tufts of her rump. His breathing was still ragged from jogging across the clearing. They’d belly-crawled a hundred yards along the soggy ground, downwind of the herd, hell on his back. All for a crackpot shot Eugene could have taken standing where they’d started.
Wait, Rich had breathed.
A few legal bucks, three- and four-pointers, had browsed near the perimeter, but of course Eugene had gone for the big 5x5 hemmed in by does. The herd had broken and they’d seen her, struggling into the brush. He’d had half a mind to walk, let Eugene clean up his own mess for once.
Damn it, Eugene, he’d muttered, Eugene already sprinting across the marsh. Last time I hunt with that fool.
Colleen would sigh. That’s what you always say.
Wounded animals walked downhill, but the doe was lugging herself up toward the backbone of the steep ridge, pure animal terror, though Eugene had a better chance of beating her to death with that rifle than shooting her again. Her heart must have been double-timing, blood painting a trail through the undergrowth. The land was a patchwork of private, state, and national forest, hard to keep track of who owned what, but planting crop trees way up here? Only the Forest Circus was that dumb.
Eugene pushed ahead, turning to Rich to confirm he was still on track. Rich jerked his chin after snapping twigs, brambles combing flank. Eugene adjusted course, arms raised, wading through chest-deep brush, no ears in his head. A stick cracked under Eugene’s boot—making more noise than the damn deer.
Eugene stopped. Jesus H. Christ. Couldn’t he smell her? Salty sweet, sharp with adrenaline. Rich’s clothes were soaked, muddy from neck to boots. His undershirt clung where marsh water had gone cold, sticking to his skin, itching to be peeled. He should strip it off, let the skin breathe. Pink wood hickeys had just started to fade off his torso. He scratched the scaly mother patch on his ribs. Sweat, rubbing for hours, that’s how it started.
Almost to the ridgeline, Rich stopped to catch his breath.
“We lose her?” Eugene asked.
Rich squinted to sharpen his hearing, but the doe had paused too. If they didn’t find her soon, it’d be a fight, Eugene wanting to cut and run, leaving the deer to die, Rich calling him a pussy—always a last resort. Rich inhaled. Somewhere nearby: twitch of nostrils, moisture beading muzzle.
Where are you?
He cleared the last ten paces to the spine and looked down at the clear-cut on the other side: a six-hundred-acre dump.
“Where the hell’d she go?” Eugene asked.
Pampas grass rustled in the breeze, six feet tall, slice you like a knife—some weed from Argentina nobody’d heard of twenty years ago; now it was everywhere. They retraced their steps, a burr of irritation working deeper into Rich’s skull. If Eugene had just waited another goddamn minute…
You know what he’s like, Colleen would say.
Eugene hollered. Rich grabbed brambles—sting in his palm, damn Himalayans. The doe was sprawled on her side, head canted back. She thrashed at the smell of them, raised herself onto her forelegs, collapsed. The wound was high on her flank, her fur matted with blood, but it was the swollen belly that set Rich’s heart pounding. How hadn’t he noticed? She thumped the ground as though strapped there, hyperventilating.
“Christ,” Rich said. “Finish her.”
Eugene raised his rifle, hesitated. Foam cobwebbed the corners of her mouth, her tongue caked white. She drove her hooves into the duff, wild-eyed, and, for a moment, it seemed she might get to her feet. Eugene’s rifle barrel traced small circles, tracking her lolling head.
“Damn it, Eugene.” Rich swung his rifle off his shoulder.
Eugene squeezed off a shot, recoil kicking. He rubbed the spot where a bruise would darken into a badge. Whiff of sulfur.
“Shit.” Eugene spat. “What the hell’s she doing that pregnant this early?”
Blood bubbled from the wound, trampled grasses a thick mat where the deer must have bedded down before, and Eugene stepped into the flat area, nudged a glassy brown eye with his rifle barrel. Rich blinked.
“Where’s your tag?” Rich asked.
“Relax. I got it right here.” Eugene patted the front of his jacket where there was no pocket, slipped the gunnysack off his shoulder, and handed Rich the rope. Ten years in the woods and Eugene still couldn’t tie a knot worth a damn, couldn’t tell a cat’s paw from a boom hitch, raised by a goddamn bunch of women. Rich shoved his hands under her neck, lifted her: warm, heavy. Decomposing needles stuck to her tongue. He had the bizarre urge to wipe them off. Eugene tossed the rope up over a branch.
“On three.”
She rose in the noose. Normally, they’d gut a deer, haul it home, let it hang two days, rot sweetening the meat, but this wasn’t something for kids to see. They’d be in deep shit with Norm; he’d fine their asses for sure, gunning down a pregnant doe like a couple of lowlifes.
Eugene got out his knife. He was going to slit the doe’s belly and pull the thing out, squirming and pink, still alive. Rich braced an arm against a tree, as though he were holding it up instead of the other way around. Go half-assed, take the backstraps. Then came the punch-grunt of Eugene stabbing throat, slitting a collar, skinning her proper. He stood back, undersides of his sleeves gore-smeared.
/> “Help me out,” he said.
Rich yanked the hide down as Eugene slid the blade, Rich’s ear pressed against the doe’s wiry hair, his skin crawling with imagined ticks, until the heavy pelt dropped to the grass. Even with his head turned, the slip and plop of guts curdled Rich’s stomach. Steam rose off the pile, stink of blood and shit, urine and bile.
“Look at this.” Eugene shook a hose of intestine off his boot, stood back to show Rich there was no fetus, just some kind of growth. Eugene cut it loose.
Rich breathed through his mouth.
“What the fuck is it?” Eugene toed the lump, about the size of a baseball. He stepped around it and carved down the spine, taking the backstraps, the best cut.
Finished, Eugene dropped to his knees and dug hand-over-hand, like a dog chasing a mole, until he had a shallow pit. They heaved the carcass in and covered it. Her meat rested heavily against Rich’s back, still warm.
At the bottom of the ridge, Eugene dropped the deerskin over the fence and hopped it, Rich searching out a low place to step over.
“What’s the point of being seven feet tall if you can’t jump a fence worth shit?”
With Eugene’s jacket off, Rich saw his shirt pocket was empty.
“Where’s your tag?”
“I got it.”
“Let me see it.”
“Relax, it’s at the house.”
Rich shook his head. Just like Eugene to skimp on the tag fee and risk the fine.
“Look, it was an accident, okay?” Eugene asked.
“I’m sure Norm’ll be happy to hear that.”
“Fuck Norm. All I see is a hundred pounds of good meat.”
At the trailer house, they laid the cuts out on a tarp.
“Took you long enough,” Enid said, coming out with a roll of waxed paper.
“Deafest poacher I ever met,” Rich said. “Lose a cow with a bell around its neck.”
Eugene tossed a scrap at him. “Who you calling a poacher, asshole? I got the tag.”
“Sure you do.” Rich smacked dirt off his hands.
“Take some of this.” Eugene held up a backstrap.
“Keep it. Maybe Kel will give you fifty cents a pound.”
Tourists paid a dollar extra for a venison burger at the Only, too dumb to know wild meat came cheaper than store beef.
An engine grumbled in the distance. Norm could hear an illegal shot for twenty miles. Rich headed for his truck. Agnes hopped the creek after him.
“Where’s Chub?” she asked, balancing on one leg, scabbed-over cat scratches stitched up her shin.
“At home,” Rich said. “Watch out, kiddo.” She stepped back and he climbed in, rolled the window down. “See you around like a donut,” he said, and she smiled, her good eye on Rich. He’d worried about raising a daughter, but maybe it wouldn’t have been so different.
A black truck bounced down into the muddy yard and pulled up alongside him: not Norm at all, but the Sanderson kid, Owen, hair greased. Marla flew down the steps toward it, Eugene strutting around the corner, knife in his fist, like he’d been stabbing someone with it instead of cleaning it. Eugene wiped blood off his palm and shook the Sanderson kid’s hand through his window, gripping to bust a knuckle. “You get her home before dark or I’ll be on you like flies on shit, you hear me?”
“How old is that kid?” Rich asked after they pulled away.
Eugene shrugged. “Old enough to know I’d cut his dick off.”
“Would you tell him his daughter’s fifteen?” Enid called from the porch.
“She’s a smart girl,” Eugene said.
Enid crossed her arms. “What’s smart got to do with it?”
CHUB
From Uncle Lark’s porch, Chub watched a family drive a station wagon through the tunnel tree. The dad used the outhouse, then came up the steps for the boy to choose a Sasquatch. The mom sat in the car with the windows rolled up. Killer and Banjo lifted their legs on the back tire.
“Chub here is learning to carve them Sasquatches,” Uncle Lark told the boy, who eyed Chub.
He was a city boy, hair wet-combed like he was going to church. Chub felt proud, scraping a piece of driftwood with Uncle Lark’s knife.
“There a restaurant around here?” the man asked.
“You can get a burger down at the Only.” Uncle Lark tossed the man’s money onto the upside-down crate, like it was junk. “By the bridge. Where you turned.”
“Then can we swim in the ocean?” the boy asked his dad.
“That’s not a swimming ocean,” Uncle Lark said. “That’s a drowning ocean. Sneaker waves’ll grab a grown man by the ankles and drag him out a thousand feet.”
The dad put his hand on the boy’s head, steered him back to the car.
“How’s that knife feel?” Uncle Lark asked once they were gone.
“Good.”
Chub handed it back. Uncle Lark dug up the little notch that locked the blade straight and folded it closed.
“Lockback’s a good knife,” Uncle Lark said. “Won’t snap up on you the way a pocketknife will. I had her sixty years. Old guy down at Hupa used to make them. Your dad’s got her twin. His dad—your granddad—and me paddled all the way up the river to buy them.” Uncle Lark weighed the knife in his hand. “A good knife is like a good woman: she won’t cut you if you handle her right.” Uncle Lark pushed himself to his feet and grabbed his fishing pole. “Let’s see what’s biting.”
* * *
Chub stood on the stump, fishing line swaying in the brown water. His dad sidestepped down the riverbank. His clothes were bloody.
“What happened, String Bean?” Uncle Lark asked. “You finally kill one of those tree huggers?”
“Why do you always call him String Bean?” Chub asked.
“Who, him? ’Cause he used to be skinny.”
“Eugene got one,” his dad said, picking up a flat stone and skipping it across the water. It skimmed the surface, like a deer bounding away across a clearing.
“No shit.” The flyer stuck her head out from Uncle Lark’s wild hair. “You get some steaks out of the deal?”
“They’re pretty hard up.” His dad took Chub’s fishing pole, reeled in, and cast a long arc.
Uncle Lark watched the hook sail out over the water and plop in above the riffle. A blue heron lifted off, flapping across the river. “Your dad’s still got an arm on him.”
“He’s got two,” Chub said, and looked down at Uncle Lark’s hand, short index finger’s skin cinched together at the first knuckle like a sausage casing.
“I ever tell you how I lost this?” Uncle Lark wagged it. “That damn flyer. Wow-wee, nothing like a squirrel bite.”
“Nun-uh.”
Uncle Lark frowned. “I told you that story already, huh? Bitch lion. I trapped her fair and square.” He jutted his chin. Chub turned, as though the cage might still be there, though it had happened before he was born. “Tourists used to fork over a quarter just to get a picture with her. Hell, I gave her a fresh deer liver.”
“Did she eat it?”
“Damn right. And took my finger for dessert. Would have took my whole arm if I let her.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Not too bad.” He held out the finger for Chub to grip, scarred skin like a rawhide drawstring pulled tight. “Got fifty dollars for her pelt. Sweetest fifty bucks I ever made.”
Chub picked at the end of the rifle cane’s barrel, looking for the door to the secret compartment inside it that Uncle Lark had popped open earlier to retrieve a hidden cigarette.
“I never seen anything like it,” his dad said to Uncle Lark. “Big as my fist.”
“Must have smoked too many cigarettes.” Uncle Lark scratched the lump on his neck.
They followed Uncle Lark up the dirt path, his hip hitching like a broken puppet’s. His face was sweaty by the time he collapsed into a plastic porch chair.
“Any customers?” his dad asked.
“One big shit from Frisco. You
could smell it from here.” Uncle Lark’s body shook with his cough. “Chub, where are those field glasses I gave you?”
Chub pulled the binoculars from his bib pocket.
“Good. Keep a lookout for whales on the way home. And don’t take any wooden nickels.” Uncle Lark mussed Chub’s hair, pulled a carved nickel from behind Chub’s ear, and dropped it into his bib pocket.
Chub followed his dad down the steps.
“Watch out for potholes,” Uncle Lark called after them. “And assholes.”
November 13 RICH
A rumbling, like thunder. He reached for the clock: 11:43 p.m. Nothing rattling, no water glass walking to the edge of the nightstand.
“What is it?” Colleen asked drowsily.
“Blowdown, I think.” Even in the dark, Rich could make out the rolled-up map, propped in the corner. Hope it’s not ours.
She scooted closer, burrowed her cold nose into his neck. He turned his head toward the bedside table, the rubbers tucked into the drawer, but she’d already fallen back asleep. He pictured the blowdown, his timber tipped by the wind, busted to pieces. He itched to walk up and check, but instead he forced himself to concentrate on the map, retraced its lines behind his closed eyelids. When he opened his eyes again, it was daylight. Sunday.
Outside, mist smoked off the ground. Scout rocketed up the path, Rich scanning for gaps, for trees lost to the wind. His heart pounded. Over the Little Lost. Please. Finally, weather-beat but proud, the 24-7 appeared. He surveyed his other big pumpkins. All still standing. Scout sat on his haunches, panting. A truck door slammed in the distance.
Rich waded across the creek and loped up through Lower Damnation Grove, to the road. Water roared from the culvert. Eugene’s Chevy was parked on the shoulder, door ajar. Pete’s truck too, mud-splattered bumper stickers peeling.
IF GOD DIDN’T WANT US TO CUT TREES, WHY’D HE MAKE THEM GROW BACK?
MY HOOKER’S BETTER THAN YOUR HOOKER.