by Amy Hempel
“How much money have you given her?”
He took a breath and wiped his nose. “I haven’t added it all up. Seven grand? I don’t know.”
I didn’t say anything. My heart was beating hard. I wasn’t sure why. Minutes went by and neither of us spoke. “So, Stephen—” I finally said. But right then, he sat up and cocked an ear. “Hush,” he whispered, fussing with the rifle. When he managed to lever a round into the chamber, he raised the gun to his shoulder and drew a bead on the far side of the clearing.
“There’s nothing there,” I said.
He fired, and then charged off into the brush. I let him go. The shot summoned George. He jogged into the clearing just as Stephen was emerging from the scrub.
“Hit something, little brother?” George asked him.
“Guess not,” he said.
“At least you got a look,” he said. “Next time.”
At noon, we climbed back in the boat. There wasn’t another craft in sight, and the loveliness of the day was enough to knock you down, but it was lost on me. The picture of gaunt Stephen, panting at his monitor as his sweetheart pumped and squatted for him, her meter ticking merrily, was a final holocaust on my already ravaged mood. I couldn’t salvage any of the low glee I’ve wrung in the past from my brother’s misfortunes. Instead, I had a close, clammy feeling that my brother and I were turning into a very ugly pair of men. We’d traced such different routes, each disdaining the other as an emblem of what we were not, only to fetch up, together, in the far weird wastes of life.
The boat plowed on. No planes disturbed the sky. Swallows rioted above the calm green lid of the lake. Birch trees gleamed like filaments among the evergreens. I was dead to it, though I did take a kind of comfort in the fact that all of this beauty was out here, persisting like mad, whether you hearkened to it or not.
George steered us to another stretch of lakefront woods, and I went and hunkered alone in a blueberry copse. My hands were cold, and my thighs and toes were cold, and my cabin would be cold when I got back, and to take a hot shower I would have to heat a kettle on the stove and pour the water into the rubber bladder hanging over my bathtub. The shower in my house in Charleston was a state-of-the-art five-nozzler that simultaneously blasted your face, breasts, and crotch. The fun was quickly going out of this, not just the day, but the whole bit up here, the backbreaking construction hassles, and this bullshit, too—crouching in a wet shrub, masquerading as a rugged hardscrabbler just to maintain the affection of an aged drunk.
Off to my right, I could hear George coughing a wet, complicated, old-man’s cough, loud enough to send even the deafest herd galloping for the hills. I leaned out of my bush to scowl at him. He sat swabbing his pitted scarlet nose with a hard green hankie, and disgust and panic overwhelmed me. Where was I? Three months of night were coming on! Stuck in a six-hundred-square-foot crate! I’d probably look worse than the old man when the days got long again! Sell the truck! Sell the cabin! Get a Winnebago! Drive it where?
The sun was sinking when George called out, and the three of us slogged back to the soggy delta where we’d tied the boat.
Glancing down the beach, I spotted something that I thought at first might be a driftwood sculpture, but which sharpened under my stare into the brown serrations of a moose’s rack. It was standing in the shallows, its head bent to drink. Well over three hundred yards, and the moose was downwind, probably getting ready to bolt in a second. I was tired. I raised my gun. George started bitching at me.
“Goddammit, Matthew, no, it’s too far.” I didn’t give a shit. I fired twice.
The moose’s forelegs crumpled beneath it, and an instant later I saw the animal’s head jerk as the sound of the shot reached him. The moose tried to struggle upright but fell again. The effect was of a very old person trying to pitch a heavy tent. It tried to stand, and fell, and tried, and fell, and then quit its strivings.
We gazed at the creature piled up down there. Finally, George turned to me, gawping and shaking his head. “That, my friend,” he said, “has got to be the goddamnedest piece of marksmanship I’ve ever seen.”
Stephen laughed. “Unreal,” he said. He moved to hug me, but he was nervous about my rifle, and he just kind of groped my elbow in an awkward way.
The moose had collapsed in a foot of icy water and had to be dragged onto firm ground before it could be dressed. I waded out to where it lay and Stephen plunged along after me.
We had to crouch and soak ourselves to get the rope under its chest. The other end we looped around a hemlock on the bank, and then tied the rope to the stern of the skiff, using the tree as a makeshift pulley. George gunned the outboard, and Stephen and I stood calf-deep in the shallows heaving on the line. By the time we’d gotten the moose to shore, our palms were torn and puckered, and our boots were full of water.
With George’s hunting knife, I bled the moose from the throat, and then made a slit from the bottom of the ribcage to the jaw, revealing the gullet and a pale, corrugated column of windpipe. The scent was powerful. It brought to mind the dark, briny smell that seemed always to hang around my mother in summertime when I was a child.
George was in a rapture, giddy at how I’d put us both in six months of meat with my preposterous shot. “We’ll winter well on this,” he kept saying. He took the knife from me and gingerly opened the moose’s belly, careful not to puncture the intestines or the sack of his stomach. He dragged out the organs, setting aside the liver, the kidneys, and the pancreas. One strange hitch was the hide, which was hellish to remove. To get it loose, Stephen and I had to take turns, bracing our boots against the moose’s spine, pulling at the hide while George slashed away at the fascia and connective tissues. I saw Stephen’s throat buck nauseously every now and again, yet he wanted to have a part in dressing it, and I was proud of him for that. He took up the game saw and cut off a shoulder and a ham. We had to lift the legs like pallbearers to get them to the boat. Blood ran from the meat and down my shirt with hideous, vital warmth.
The skiff sat low under the weight of our haul. The most substantial ballast of our crew, I sat in the stern and ran the kicker so the bow wouldn’t swamp. Stephen sat on the cross bench, our knees nearly touching. We puttered out, a potent blue vapor bubbling up from the propeller. Clearing the shallows, I opened the throttle, and the craft bullied its way through the low swells, a fat white fluke churning up behind us. We skimmed out while the sun sank behind the dark spruce spires in the west. The gridded rubber handle of the Evinrude thrummed in my palm. The wind dried the fluids on my cheeks, and tossed Stephen’s hair in a sparse frenzy. With the carcass receding behind us, it seemed I’d also escaped the blackness that had plagued me since Stephen’s arrival. The return of George’s expansiveness, the grueling ordeal of the butchery, the exhaustion in my limbs, the satisfaction in having made an unreasonably good shot that would feed my friend and me until the snow melted—it was glorious. I could feel absolution spread across the junk-pit of my troubles as smoothly and securely as a motorized tarp slides across a swimming pool.
And Stephen felt it, too, or something anyway. The old unarmored smile I knew from childhood brightened his haunted face, a tidy, compact bow of lip and tooth, alongside which I always looked dour and shabby in the family photographs. There’s no point in trying to describe the love I can still feel for my brother when he looks at me this way, when he’s stopped tallying his resentments against me and he’s briefly left off hating himself for failing to hit the big time as the next John Tesh. Ours isn’t the kind of brotherhood I would wish on other men, but we are blessed with a single, simple gift: in these rare moments of happiness, we can share joy as passionately and single-mindedly as we do hatred. As we skimmed across the dimming lake, I could see how much it pleased him to see me at ease, to have his happiness magnified in my face and reflected back at him. No one said anything. This was love for us, or the best that love could do. I brought the boat in wide around the isthmus guarding the cove, letting the wake pus
h us through the shallows to the launch where my sturdy blue truck was waiting for us.
With the truck loaded, and the skiff rinsed clean, we rode back to the mountain. It was past dinnertime when we reached my place. Our stomachs were yowling.
I asked George and Stephen if they wouldn’t mind getting started butchering the meat while I put a few steaks on the grill. George said that before he did any more work he was going to need to sit in a dry chair for a little while and drink two beers. He and Stephen sat and drank and I waded into the bed of my pickup, which was heaped nearly flush with meat. It was disgusting work rummaging in there. George came over and pointed out the short ribs and told me how to hack out the tenderloin, a tapered log of flesh that looked like a peeled boa constrictor. I held it up. George raised his can in tribute. “Now there’s a pretty, pretty thing,” he said.
I carried the loin to the porch and cut it into steaks two inches thick, which I patted with kosher salt and coarse pepper. I got the briquettes going while George and Stephen blocked out the meat on a plywood-and-sawhorse table in the headlights of my truck.
When the coals had grayed over, I dropped the steaks onto the grill. After ten minutes, they were still good and pink in the center, and I plated them with yellow rice. Then I opened up a bottle of burgundy I’d been saving and poured three glasses. I was about to call the boys to the porch when I saw that something had caused George to halt his labors. A grimace soured his features. He sniffed at his sleeve, then his knife, then the mound of meat in front of him. He winced, took a second careful whiff and recoiled.
“Oh good Christ, it’s turning,” he said. With an urgent stride, he made for the truck and sprang onto the tailgate, taking up pieces of our kill and putting them to his face. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “It’s going off, all of it. Contaminated. It’s something deep in the meat.”
I walked over. I sniffed at the ham he’d been working on. It was true, there was a slight pungency to it, a diarrheal tang gathering in the air, but only faintly. If the intestines had leaked a little, it certainly wasn’t any reason to toss thousands of dollars’ worth of meat. And anyway, I had no idea how moose flesh was supposed to smell.
“It’s just a little gamy,” I said. “That’s why they call it game.”
Stephen smelled his hands. “George is right. It’s spoiled. Gah.”
“Not possible,” I said. “This thing was breathing three hours ago. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“It was sick,” said George. “That thing was dying on its feet when you shot it.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Contaminated, I promise you,” said George. “I should have known it when the skin hung on there like it did. He was bloating up with something, just barely holding on. The second he died, and turned that infection loose, it just started going wild.”
Stephen looked at the meat strewn across the table, and at the three of us standing there. Then he began to laugh. I went to the porch and bent over a steaming steak. It smelled fine. I rubbed the salt crust and licked at the juice from my thumb.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said.
I cut off a dripping pink cube and touched it to my tongue. Stephen was still laughing.
“You’re a fucking star, Matty,” he said, breathless. “All the beasts in the forest, and you mow down a leper moose. God, that smell. Don’t touch that shit, man. Call in a hazmat team.”
“There’s not a goddamned thing wrong with this meat,” I said.
“Poison,” said George.
The wind gusted suddenly. A branch fell in the woods. A squad of leaves scurried past my boots and settled against the door. Then the night went still again. I turned back to my plate and slipped the fork into my mouth.
Wells Tower’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, and elsewhere. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Discovery Prize from the Paris Review, Tower was named Best Young Writer of 2009 by the Village Voice. He is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. He lives in North Carolina and Brooklyn.
Here’s a remarkable swindle: somehow I managed to persuade the excellent and otherwise undupable people at McSweeney’s to publish “Retreat” two times. In the first go-round, the younger (and in that draft, more sympathetic) of these two unhappy brothers was telling the tale, but when it came time to revise it for publication in a collection, an emotional niggardliness seemed to pervade the story. A brief synopsis might have read, “A smug narrator perceives his brother to be obnoxious, and his perceptions are ratified when his brother ultimately ingests a ration of possibly lethal moose flesh.” The story aspired to stingy ends, a kind of glib, just-deserts satisfaction at best. So I took another stab at it, tasking myself with a mission of greater narrative generosity, a more complicated balance of sympathies, fewer cheap tricks. It struck me as a sadder and more interesting story if we could get to know Matthew as a plenary human being, an aware, discerning narrator who nonetheless can’t stop alienating people despite what he believes are his best intentions. Amazingly, McSweeney’s took that version, too: the old mechanic’s hustle of doing a crappy job on somebody’s head gasket and then getting a second paycheck to fix your own shoddy work.
APPENDIX
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
A list of the magazines currently consulted for New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2010, with addresses, subscription rates, and editors.
A
AGNI Magazine
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215
Biannually, $20
Sven Birkerts
American Short Fiction
P.O. Box 301209
Austin, TX 78703
Quarterly, $30
Stacey Swann
The Antioch Review
P.O. Box 148
Yellow Springs, OH 45387-0148
Quarterly, $40
Robert S. Fogarty
Apalachee Review
P.O. Box 10469
Tallahassee, FL 32302
Semiannually, $15
Michael Trammell
Appalachian Heritage
CPO 2166
Berea, KY 40404
Quarterly, $25
George Brosi
Arkansas Review
P.O. Box 1890
Arkansas State University
State University, AR 72467
Triannually, $20
Janelle Collins
Arts & Letters
Campus Box 89
Georgia College & State University
Milledgeville, GA 31061-0490
Semiannually, $15
Martin Lammon
The Atlantic Monthly
600 New Hampshire Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20037
Monthly, $39.95
James Bennet
B
Bayou
Department of English
University of New Orleans
2000 Lakeshore Drive
New Orleans, LA 70148
Semiannually, $15
Joanna Leake
Bellevue Literary Review
Department of Medicine
New York University School of Medicine
550 1st Avenue, OBV-612
New York, NY 10016
Semiannually, $15
Ronna Weinberg
Black Warrior Review
University of Alabama
P.O. Box 862936
Tuscaloosa, AL 35486
Semiannually, $16
Nick Parker
Boulevard
6614 Clayton Road, PMB 325
Richmond Heights, MO 63117
Triannually, $20
Richard Burgin
C
Callaloo
Department of English
Texas A&M University
MS 4212
College Station, TX 77843-4212
Quarterly, $50
Charles H. Rowell
The Carolina Quarterly
Greenlaw Hall CB# 3520
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
Triannually, $18
Matthew Luter
Cimarron Review
205 Morrill Hall
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK 74078-4069
Quarterly, $24
E. P. Walkiewicz
The Cincinnati Review
Department of English and Comparative Literature
McMicken Hall
Room 369
University of Cincinnati
P.O. Box 210069
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069
Semiannually, $15
Don Bogen
Colorado Review
Department of English
Colorado State University
9105 Campus Delivery
Fort Collins, CO 80523
Triannually, $24
Stephanie G’Schwind
Columbia
www.columbiajournal.org
Annually, $10
Alexis Tonti
Confrontation
English Department
C.W. Post Campus
Long Island University
Brookville, NY 11548
Semiannually, $10
Martin Tucker
Conjunctions
21 East 10th Street
New York, NY 10003
Semiannually, $18
Bradford Morrow
Crazyhorse
Department of English
College of Charleston
66 George Street
Charleston, SC 29424
Semiannually, $16
Anthony Varallo
D
Denver Quarterly
University of Denver
Denver, CO 80208
Quarterly, $20
Bin Ramke
E
Ecotone
Department of Creative Writing
UNC Wilmington
601 South College Road