by Andrew Smith
My throat was still tight. “Does Gabey know that?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
I lowered my leg and began swinging our feet from the edge of the gate again.
“He doesn’t want this place, anyway,” Luz said.
“He doesn’t?”
“No. He only wants our dad to think he’d be good enough to do it.”
“He is good enough,” I said.
“I know.”
By Friday of that week, the lion had taken another of our goats, and the Fish and Game officer hadn’t called us back. Carl said we should track the cat and kill it ourselves, and I was starting to feel more and more like doing that, too. So when I got home that day, nervous because I had to leave Reno behind in the morning to drive with Tommy into Holmes, the first thing I did was to go out to the barn and check on my horse. It started raining softly.
And there was the cat. I saw her right away, but her coloring blended right in with the bare dirt in the grayness of the afternoon drizzle. She was in the middle of the enclosure, hunched over my big tom turkey, biting its neck as it offered up a feeble and fading flutter of protest. And even though I was kind of happy to see that mean turkey finally meet his match and then some, I was mad at the thought of this cat coming back to take whatever she wanted from us. So I grabbed a big rake propped up against Reno’s stall, and I threw it like a spear. It tumbled in the air, landing so its handle struck right across the lion’s shoulders.
The cat shrunk down, alarmed, and without looking back at me leapt through the bars of the corral and vanished. The turkey lay in the mud, a big mound of bloodied white feathers, wheezing a bubbling spray of blood from its nearly severed neck.
And Reno just stood there in the mud, getting rained on, watching the whole thing impassively, the way that horses do.
“A couple months early for Thanksgiving,” I said, straight-mouthed, as I looked down at the bird’s remains.
I put Reno and all the other animals inside the barn and closed it up. I picked up the turkey by its horny, muddy feet, its purpled head lolling limply beneath its huge carcass, wings splayed out like filthy fans. It was heavy, about forty-five pounds, and in good enough condition that I wondered whether my father would ask me to pluck it and clean it.
I put the turkey on top of a big plastic trash bag and left it in the mudroom off the back porch and waited for my father to come home.
I called Tommy.
“We’ve got to get that mountain lion. I just hit her with a rake. She killed our turkey.”
“Hit her with a rake? Jeez, Stotts, you’re a caveman!”
“We could go out tonight, but it’s gonna get dark in about an hour and I don’t want to be out there in the dark, you know? Can you see if we can get out of work tomorrow and you and Gabey meet me up here early in the morning?”
“CB’ll cover for us. Sounds like fun.”
“Bring your gun.”
“As long as you keep Gabey away from it.”
“And Tom? We’re not saying nothing to my dad, okay?”
“Even if one of us gets killed, bud.”
“So we’ll have to leave before he’s up. Meet me at the bridge at five.”
“Happy Saturday, Stottsy.”
My dad told me to clean and gut the turkey. Then, he said, he’d cook it. I didn’t really mind being assigned this duty, and I half expected it. But I’d never done it before, and now, looking back, I don’t think I’ll ever do it again.
“How?” I asked him.
“Well, you know what a turkey looks like when you buy it in the store. Make it look like that,” he said, smiling. And that was about the extent of his instructions. But he stayed and watched me while I worked at it, and I never asked him for help and he never told me I was doing anything wrong. He just watched me and smiled.
After I took off the head, which wasn’t too hard since the lion had gotten it most of the way free, I had to deal with all those feathers. I’d seen my mother put a bird in boiling water to do this, but we didn’t have any pots big enough for this thing. So I worked for over an hour, plucking it in the sink and pouring boiling water from the teakettle onto it as I went. This made the bird give off a smell like a boiled barnyard.
Once I had it plucked, it looked reasonably good. I took the feet off at the knee joints and opened up the body cavity. Then the powerful stink of that tom turkey came oozing out, smelling like cigar smoke mixed with furniture polish and cheap perfume. That about nearly made me gag. That, and the texture of the guts, the popping little air sacs in the lungs, which looked like pale pink caviar, and my father standing quietly behind me, watching me, blood spilling down the yellowing porcelain of the sink basin, me reaching into the cavity up to my elbows and holding my breath all the while. I had taken my shirt off because I didn’t want any of the blood and guts on it, and I was splattered all over my chest and belly.
“Man, I bet most third-graders don’t have this many guts in ‘em.” I squinted my eyes, my mouth was turned down in sour disgust.
My dad laughed.
Then I went to clean out the crop, full of gritty, chewed-up food, looking like a pale and warm kind of oatmeal, which added another depth to the overall stench. When I was finished, I washed the bird off. I held out my arms, away from my body, fingers pointed up like a surgeon, like those mountains. But I did it.
“There. You can cook him now. I’ll be in the shower for the rest of the night.”
And I left my dad standing in the kitchen.
Even under the running water of the shower I could smell that turkey. What I had always remembered and associated with holidays and family reunions was now somehow transformed into something else, mature and unpleasant. I put on clean clothes, but that smell was everywhere in the house.
It was raining steadily now. I walked through the living room, stopping and bending down by our woodstove to breathe in a cleansing smell of burning oak.
My dad was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“Smells good, doesn’t it?”
“Smells. That’s for sure.”
“I don’t think it’ll be ready before midnight, though.”
“I don’t think I can eat right now, Dad. I think I’m going to bed.”
And I didn’t eat turkey again until the following year.
I woke up at 4 the next morning. The house smelled like turkey. It was still raining, but lightly and sporadically. I pulled my jeans on over the long johns I slept in, but even then they weren’t going to stay up. After not eating the night before, I felt like I was shrinking. I pulled a T-shirt on over my thermal, and then a sweatshirt over those.
It was lucky that my dad had stayed up so late cooking that turkey, because I knew he wouldn’t wake if I made myself some coffee before I left. While it was brewing, I stuffed the inside pockets of my coat with candy bars and cookies, a couple pieces of bread. I sighed as I pulled my pants up, tried to stick out my belly, but I couldn’t get it out far enough to snug up the waist on my pants much at all.
I poured a cup of coffee, black. I blew on it and sucked in a small sip. It tasted like turkey broth. I almost spit it out. I poured the rest of my cup back into the pot and left it for my dad. I quietly cursed that stupid bird for ruining my appetite for just about everything. I hoped he suffered while he was lying there in that mud. I hoped he could feel himself being cooked.
My rifle was still resting beside the door. I dumped the box of bullets into my coat pocket. I wished I could’ve taken my dad’s deer rifle, but that was impossible now. I’d be okay, I thought.
I walked out into the dark rain.
The air smelled good, cool and clean. I kept my head angled down, watching my feet push up little swells of water as I stepped, silently measuring the amount of time it would take until water began dropping down in front of me from the brim of my hat.
The “bridge” wasn’t really a br
idge at all. It was really just a big concrete pipe that had been placed in the creek running from behind our property. Before my father put it there, we would have to drive through the creek bed to get to or away from my house, and sometimes that would mean getting blocked in or out during the winter and having to cross by wading, which was never fun when the creek ran fast, muddy, and cold. As I walked there, I watched my breath form clouds out of my mouth, occasionally ducking my mouth into the upturned collar of my denim coat to warm my face.
Tommy and Gabe were sitting in the truck, waiting. I was glad they were early because it told me they wanted to be there, too. They both got out at the same time, Tommy moving mechanically from behind the wheel. His leg had stiffened up quite a bit after the rattlesnake bite, more so in the mornings, but Tom rarely complained. And any time he got close to griping about it, Gabriel and I reminded him that we had let him keep the fifteen dollars the day he got bit. Tom willingly pretended he didn’t remember, although he could remember almost getting shot by Gabe.
“Damn, Stotts, that’s all you brought?” Tommy asked, pointing a thumb at my rifle, then spit a splash of tobacco onto the rain-puddled ground. “You could’ve at least brought your rake!”
“I couldn’t get my dad’s deer gun,” I apologized.
“Well, if you shoot her, you better kill her, ‘cause I don’t want to be there if she gets pissed at you.”
“I don’t think she was too happy about the rake anyway.”
“Do you think it’s a female?” Gabe asked.
“She could be pregnant,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Jeez, Gabey. Don’t you know why females get pregnant?” Tommy said, and we all laughed.
Then Gabe punched Tom’s arm. “Shut up.”
“She’s obviously thinking she’s settling in,” I said. “I don’t want her to clean us out. Or start looking at Reno. Or me.”
“So why doesn’t your dad just go out and bag her?” Gabe asked.
“Fish and Game’s not doing anything, but he wants to give them time to deal with it because it’s the law.” I know my friends thought my dad, so boring and teacherlike, never took risks and always followed rules. My nose was running and I wiped the sleeve of my coat across it. “I think we should follow the creek up. Tommy, you can go on one side and me and Gabey’ll go on the other since he doesn’t have a gun.”
“Yeah, and he probably tastes better, too. He kind of smelled like bacon this morning when he came and woke me up,” Tommy lied, grinning, trying to scare Gabriel.
Bacon. Meat. I could feel my stomach rising in my throat, the pepper and vinegar taste of vomit burning in the back of my nose.
“Shut up,” Gabe said. Then he smelled his hands.
“Anyway, I think she’s got a place where she’s staying in that dark stand of pines right in back of our corral, so that’s where we really want to be careful.”
Tommy pulled his pistol from his coat pocket and cocked it to chamber a round. I loaded my rifle’s single-shot breech.
“Okay, then, let’s go.” Tommy held out a fist, sideways. Gabe and I hammered down on it with ours.
And Tommy walked right across the creek, sloshing water up to the knees of his jeans. When he got to the other side we all began following the creek up behind our house.
I told Tom and Gabe about my dad making me gut that turkey. Gabe groaned and said it sounded “sick,” but Tommy just held his fingers over his mouth and gave me a dirty look because I was talking too loud. I didn’t say anything after that, but I did give him a dirty look back, and we made our way deeper into the darkness of the quiet woods.
I felt different that morning, like something had been emptied out of me. But it wasn’t an emptiness from not eating, it was something more. As I lifted my soggy feet over the slick rocks and brush on the forest floor, I thought about how Rose told me I’d be giving things up; and I believed that what she said was beginning to make sense.
I played at being grown-up when I was a kid, but it was something I could always snap right out of. I guess all boys want to be grown-up when they’re little. So as we walked along, I glanced over at Tommy and back at Gabe from time to time and tried to picture them from my earliest memories, just to see if they looked different, too, in some way from the boys I knew. And Gabe said, “What?” when he caught me looking at him, but I just turned my head away and said, “Nothing.” Tom wiped his sleeve across his nose.
And if I closed my eyes, I could almost see Luz and me sitting beside each other in that truckload of hay.
My friends and I went out there to kill something, and I couldn’t help myself considering the weight of that, feeling a bit excited, looking back at Gabriel, seeing him bite at his lip, while Tommy just slogged along through the mud and moss across the creek from us, as quiet as if he weren’t even there.
EIGHT
I gotta pee,” Gabriel whispered, and turned toward a tree.
I looked across the creek and saw Tom’s silhouette moving stiffly from black trunk to black trunk; like a ghost, or like the way, sometimes, you can see a big owl flying at night, blacker than the sky itself and not even making the slightest noise.
We were trying to be as quiet as we could now. We had moved past my house, beyond where I had seen the cat vanish those two times.
Tom didn’t notice we had stopped. He kept following the edge of the creek, sometimes ducking under branches or broken saplings, then out of my sight and into the dark. It was still raining, but most of it was getting held up in the treetops, so I was only feeling an occasional drop or two. When I closed my eyes, the sound of the erratic dripping was like a slow fire.
“Are you done yet? Tommy’s way up ahead.”
Gabe didn’t say anything. He was still turned away from me, hands down. I heard something move in the trees near where Gabe had been peeing.
“I heard that,” I whispered.
“Do you think that’s it?” Gabe said, almost inaudibly, as he fumbled with his fly.
“Shhh.” I raised my rifle, pointing it past Gabriel’s ear.
“What am I gonna do, Troy?”
“Get behind me, but don’t make noise.”
“Aw hell! I peed on my leg.”
We stood there for what seemed like twenty minutes, Gabe behind me, both of us breathing with our mouths open, just listening to what we could—the creek, rain, birds now and then. The sun was starting to gray the sky.
Something moved.
I saw the cat. She was only about ten feet away, just looking at us with that dispassionate stare, unafraid.
“Do you see her?”
“Oh my God,” Gabe whispered, his mouth about an inch from my ear. “Troy. Let her go.”
It was like an optical illusion. She was right there, enormous, plainly visible. But her coloring and markings made her almost transparent among the tree trunks and dirt and decay on the forest floor.
“I’m going to shoot her,” I said, so low I almost couldn’t hear it myself.
“Don’t!” Gabe hissed. “Please, Troy. Let her just go away. Please.”
“I can’t, Gabey.”
I lined the sight of my rifle. I pointed at the side of her shoulder. There was a bit of a branch in the way; I couldn’t tell if it was a tree or part of her. I aimed right into her eye.
“We can’t just stand here till she goes away. I’m going to kill her.”
I don’t mind saying that I was scared. I watched my sight shaking on, then off target. I breathed in deep, exhaled, tried to loosen my shoulders, my grip on the trigger.
On target.
As I fired, Gabriel pushed the gun away. I could hear the bullet striking tree limbs, cutting so far away, so fast.
“What the hell, Gabey!”
I pulled the bolt back, the shell arced noiselessly, glinting a dull brass streak over my shoulder. I could see the pink of the cat’s tongue in her open mouth, jerking back and forth with her panting like some kind of bouncing toy. Her
amber eyes, brassy like the bullet shell, were fixed right on Gabriel as he crouched down by my side and whimpered, “Don’t, Troy. Please!”
I jammed my hand down into my pocket and fumbled for another bullet. Without taking my eyes from the lion, I slid the bullet into its seat and bolted the rifle again.
“Damn you, Gabey. You touch me again and I’m gonna shoot you.”
I heard him breathing; staccato, like he was crying.
I raised the rifle again. The cat was hunching down, lowering herself under a fallen black and rain-slick sapling, still watching Gabriel, coming toward us. Her head came out from beneath the small tree. I fired.
“Got her!”
Right in the eye; I was sure of it.
She howled quickly, a sound that I could only have imagined before. I could smell her, now just paces away. She leapt straight up into the air and flipped over backwards, hind legs tucked up to her belly like an acrobat. She landed with a soft thud, back on her feet.
I pulled the bolt back quickly, the spent shell ejecting and bouncing off Gabriel’s raised arm. I reached down into my coat pocket and nervously tried to push another bullet into the breech, but it went in crooked. I couldn’t get it in the gun.
“Troy!” Gabe spun around and bolted off, through the trees toward the creek. I could hear him running, crashing, splashing away.
The cat was standing on all fours. It shook its head several times, slinging blood, like she was shaking off a bad dream.
She was coming at me.
I pulled the crooked bullet out of the breech to try to straighten its seating. I dropped it, felt it hit my boot and bounce away. I grabbed another from my pocket, brought it up to the open rifle.
She was hardly bleeding, stepping slowly through the damp underbrush as though nothing were wrong. Did I miss? She shook her head back and forth like she was saying, “No. You shouldn’t have done that.”
Getting closer.
I got it loaded. I raised my rifle and fired before I even had my eye on the notch of the sight.