by Blake Crouch
“We don’t know that any of what’s happening is connected to the lights. It’s total speculation.”
“I agree, but what if Cole changes? What if he becomes violent?”
“Jack, I’m just telling you, if it turns out. . .I want you to shoot me.”
“Dee—”
“I’m not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.”
“You have a daughter, too. You don’t have the luxury not to handle shit.”
“‘Should we kill our son if he becomes a threat?’ Is that the question you’re dancing around?”
“We have to talk about it, Dee. I don’t want it to happen and us have no idea what to do.”
“I think I already answered your question.”
“What?”
“I would rather die.”
“Me, too,” Jack said.
“So what are we saying?”
“We’re saying. . .we’re saying he’s our boy, and we stay together, no matter what.”
AT dawn, Jack crept out of bed and dressed in the dark, grabbed the shotgun leaning against the bedside table and took it with him out into the living room.
He unlocked the front door and stepped outside.
Freezing. A heavy frost on the grass.
The desert purple. Still black along the western fringe.
He walked across the meadow into the trees and sat down against the base of an aspen. Everything still. Everything he loved in that dark house across the way.
His breath steamed and he thought about his father and he thought about Reid, his best friend in the humanities department, and the pints they’d put down Thursday nights at Two Fools Tavern. The remembrance touched something so raw he disavowed it all, on the spot. Focused instead on the coming hours, and all the things he had to do, and the order in which he might do them. Nothing before this cabin mattered anymore, only the given day, and with this thought he cleared his mind and scanned the trees that rimmed the meadow, praying for an elk to emerge.
He took the chainsaw and felled aspen trees until lunch. His stitches held, so he fished the rest of the day, taking three cutthroats and a brook trout out of a section of the stream a quarter mile upslope that boasted an abundance of deep pools. The water clear where it passed over rock and green where the sun hit it. Black in the shadows.
In the late afternoon, Jack stood across the stream from Cole watching the boy float aspen leaves into a cascade. He reeled in and set his rod down and waded across. Climbed up onto the bank and sat down dripping in the leaves beside his son.
“How you doing, buddy?”
“Good.”
Cole pushed another leaf into the water and they watched the current take it.
“You like being here?” Jack asked.
“Yes.”
“I do, too.”
“These are my little boats, and they’re crashing in the waterfall.”
“Can I sail one?”
Cole offered a leaf, and Jack sent another golden ship to its death.
“Cole, remember the aurora you watched with Alex?”
“Yes.”
“I want to ask you something about it.”
“What?”
“Did you feel different after you saw it?”
“A little bit.”
“Like how?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you have strange thoughts toward your mom and your sister and me?”
The boy shrugged.
“You could tell me, you know. I want you to know that. You can always tell me anything. No matter what it is. No matter how bad you think it is.”
“I just wish you had seen the lights, too,” Cole said.
“Why is that?”
“They were real pretty. More than anything I ever saw.”
They drained the cooler as the sun dropped and carried it back to the cabin, fish flopping inside against the plastic.
Jack and Dee sat in rocking chairs on the front porch drinking ice cold bottles of Miller High Life from a case that had been left behind. They were watching great spirals of smoke swirl up into the sky sixty miles northwest near the base of Grand Teton.
“What’s burning out there?” Dee said.
“I think that’s Jackson.”
They ate dinner and put the kids to bed. When they came back out onto the porch, the sun had finally crashed, leaving the flames of that distant, burning city to stand out in the darkness like an abandoned campfire.
Jack cracked open a new pair of beers, handed one to Dee.
Tired and strangely satisfied with the soreness in his body.
He’d been rehearsing how he would say it all day, the last two days even. Figured he might as well get on with it, though the phrasing had completely escaped him.
“Does it feel to you,” Jack said, “like we’re starting a new life?”
“Little bit. How many days have we been here?”
He had to think about it. “Three.”
“Feels longer. A lot longer.”
“Yeah.”
He could feel the good beer buzz beginning to swarm in his head. Didn’t know if it was the altitude or malnourishment, but he couldn’t think of the last time two beers had gotten him this close to drunk.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“What?” she laughed, “you’re seeing someone?”
None of the permutations of this conversation, as he’d imagined it, had involved Dee asking that question. His head cleared so fast it left him with a subtle throbbing at the base of his skull—a premonition of the hangover to come.
“Two years ago.”
Dee’s face emptied of the lightness of the moment and her bottle hit the porch and the beer fizzed out and drained through a crack between the two-by-sixes. The air suddenly reeked of yeast and alcohol.
“Lasted a month,” he said. “Only time I ever. . .I ended it because I couldn’t stand—”
“One of your fucking TAs?”
“We met in—”
“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear a single detail of any of it and I don’t ever want to know her name. Nothing about her. Just why you’re telling me this now. In this moment. I could’ve died never knowing and you took that from me.”
“When we left Albuquerque, our marriage was on life support. I mean, three nights ago was the first time we’d been together in. . .I don’t even know—”
“Seven months.”
“Dee, I know I’ve been checked out on our family, and for a long time. Because of guilt, depression, I don’t know. These last nine days have been the worst, hardest of our life, but in some ways, the best, too. And now, it feels to me like we’re starting something new here, so I don’t want to start it with any lies. Nothing between us.”
“Well, there is now. And. . . . . . . . .why the fuck would you tell me this?”
She shrieked it, her voice bouncing back from the invisible wall of trees.
“At least I was always honest with you about Kiernan,” Dee said.
“Yeah, that was such a comfort as our marriage imploded.”
Dee jumped up from the rocking chair and walked off the porch and vanished into the meadow.
Jack slammed the rest of his beer, threw it in the grass.
Sat watching the horizon burn to the soundtrack of his wife crying out there in the dark.
5:15 a.m. and Jack rose up slowly, shouldered the shotgun. He took aim on the neck of the same giant bull he’d seen two mornings ago on the hike up from the road. The recoil drove a splinter of pain through his left shoulder, a thundering blast across the clearing.
The elk’s head dipped. It staggered.
Jack on his feet, bolting through the frosted grass as he pumped the Mossberg and fired again.
When he reached it, the animal lay on its side, eyes open, breathing fast and raggedly. Jack knelt beside it and held one of the spurs on the enormous rack while the blood rushed out across the
ground.
He hadn’t field-dressed an animal in over twenty years, since the last time he’d hunted with his father in Montana when he was in college. But the anatomy and the method slowly returned to him.
Naomi and Cole looked on in semi-horror as he tied off the hoofs, heaved the animal onto its back, and with the bowie knife he’d been given in Silverton, Colorado, slit the elk from anus to throat.
He worked hard, tried to work fast. As the first rays of sunlight streamed through the aspen onto the meadow, he severed the muscle tissue that held the entrails and let the steaming gutpile roll out of the carcass into the grass. He excavated the colon and the bladder, liver and heart, and sent Cole back to the cabin in search of several blankets.
He was three hours skinning the elk, two more separating the shoulder from the ribcage. All afternoon removing the backstrap, boning out the meat from between the ribs, peeling off the tenderloins from underneath. Everything laid out to drain and cool on a large blanket. He cut the hindquarters from the pelvic bone as the sun slid down over the desert, trying not to slice the meat itself but still doing a fair amount of damage.
Naomi brought him a can of tomato soup for supper, which he drank down in less than a minute. When he asked about her mother, she told him Dee was sleeping. Had been all day.
In the cold still dusk, thirteen hours after the kill, Jack carried, in five trips, what he estimated to be two hundred pounds of meat to the front porch of the cabin.
The bags of water had frozen solid in the chest freezer, and Jack stowed the meat inside, still wrapped in blankets. He was sunburned and weak and covered in blood, the elk’s and his—several stitches had ripped and the wound in his shoulder had opened again.
He took his first shower since arriving at the cabin. Twenty minutes under near-scalding water scrubbing the blood out of his hair and skin and watching the filth swirl down the drain under his feet. Crawled into a double bed on an aspen frame a little before 10:00 p.m. in the second bedroom upstairs. Cole snoring softly next door. Through the window he could hear the sound of the stream in the woods.
A footstep snapped him awake. He opened his eyes to the silhouette of Dee standing in the doorway. She came over and climbed into bed, their faces inches apart in the dark.
“I hear we have an elk,” she whispered.
“In the freezer. As we speak.”
“You’re your kids’ superhero, I hope you know. I’ve never heard Naomi talk about you like she did today.”
“I’m going to miss being a constant source of embarrassment.”
She put her hand on his face. “You don’t stink,” she said.
“Showers will do that.”
“Why are you up here and not in my bed?”
“Figured you still needed some space.”
She kissed him. “Come with me, Jack.”
SNOW, just a dusting, lay upon the meadow the following morning but it was gone before lunch. Dee replaced the stitches in Jack’s shoulder and he spent an hour butchering steaks out of the tenderloins. Made a dry rub from the available spices in the kitchen and worked it into the meat.
He found a wiffle ball set in the shed. They used empty milkjugs for bases and weeded a pitcher’s mound and held a series, boys versus girls, that concluded in game seven when Cole knocked a line drive over third base and brought Jack home.
The afternoon, Jack spent sitting on the porch drinking beer and watching Dee and the kids play out on the meadow. He wouldn’t allow himself to think back or forward, but only to register the moment—the wind moving through gold aspen leaves, his skin warm in the sun, the sound of Cole’s laughter, the shape of Dee when, every so often, she would turn and look back toward the porch and wave to him. Her shoulders were brown and the details of her face obscured by distance and the shadow of a visor, though he could still pick out the white brushstroke of her smile.
As another day set sail, he grilled the elk steaks and a rainbow and surprised everyone with a bottle of 1994 Silver Oak he’d found hidden away in a cabinet over the sink. They gathered at the kitchen table and ate by candlelight, even Cole getting his own small pour of wine in a shotglass. Toward the end of supper, Jack stood and raised his glass and toasted his son, his daughter, his wife, each individually, and then said to everyone, his voice only breaking once, that of all his days, this had been the finest of his life.
ANOTHER fall day in the mountains, Jack fishing alone with his thoughts and the sound of moving water that never seemed to leave him now, even in dreams. Imagining what winter might be like in this place. An entire season spent indoors.
He caught two brookies before lunch and stowed them away in the cooler. The exhaustion from two days ago still lingered. He found a bed of moss downstream and took off his disintegrating trail shoes and eased back onto the natural carpet. There weren’t as many leaves on the aspen as there had been just a week ago when they’d arrived, the woods brighter for it. He could feel the moisture from the moss seeping through his shirt—cool and pleasant—and the sunlight in his face a perfect offset. He slept.
Walked home in the early evening, the inside of the cooler noisy with the throes of four suffocating fish.
Called out, “I’m home,” as he climbed onto the porch.
Set the cooler down, kicked off his shoes.
Inside, Dee and the kids played Monopoly on the living room floor.
“Who’s winning?” he asked.
“Cole,” Dee said. “Na and I are broke. He’s bought every property he’s landed on. Owns Community Chest and Chance. I just sold him Free Parking.”
“Can you even do that?”
“I think he’s paying us not to quit at this point. It’s all very ridiculous.”
He bent down, kissed his wife.
“You smell fishy,” she said. “How’d you do?”
“Four.”
“Big ones?”
“Decent size.”
“We can eat whenever you’re ready.”
Jack showered and dressed in a plaid button-up and blue jeans that were perhaps a size too small and still smelled strongly of their prior owner. Tinged with the remnant of sweet smoke, cigar or pipe. Something crinkled in the back pocket as Jack walked from the bedroom to the kitchen, and he dug out a receipt for a box of tippet from the Great Outdoor Shop in Pinedale, purchased four months ago with a credit card by Douglas W. Holt.
A three-course meal: freshly-baked bread, one can of broccoli cheddar soup, a rainbow trout, seasoned and grilled. They had learned to eat slowly, to stretch out each course with conversation or some other diversion. That afternoon, Dee had perused a shelf of old paperbacks in the game closet, picked a David Morrell thriller, and now she read to them the first chapter during the soup course.
After supper, she boiled a pot of chamomile tea.
“That soup was excellent,” Jack said as she carried four steaming mugs over to the table, two in each hand. “You really outdid yourself.”
“Old family recipe, you know. The Campbells.”
“Who’s that?” Cole asked.
“Mom’s kidding around.”
“But seriously, Jack, the fish was incredible.”
He sipped his tea. Could’ve been stronger, but it felt so good just to hold the warm mug in his hands which were still raw from long hours of casting.
“Busy boy today, huh?” Dee said. “Four fish and how much wood did you cut?”
“I didn’t cut any wood.”
“Of course you did.”
He flashed a perplexed smile. “Um, I didn’t.”
“Are you joking?”
“About what?”
“Cutting firewood.”
“No, why?”
“I heard a chainsaw.”
Jack set his mug on the table and stared at Dee.
“When?” he asked.
“Late this afternoon.”
“Where was the sound of the chainsaw coming from?”
“The driveway. I thought you were takin
g down more trees.”
Cole said, “What’s wrong?”