by Jodi Angel
I walked out the front door and held my arm across my face to block out the too-bright light. My mother was leaning against my car with a mug in her hand. She turned around when the door slammed behind me. “It’s about time you decided to get up,” she said. “I thought you were going for one of your noon wake-up calls.”
I stepped off the porch and walked across the driveway. The gravel was sharp and I tried not to put all of my weight on my bare feet. “What’s going on?” I said.
When I got closer to my mother, I could see that the mug was chipped and had the name Susan written in flowered script across the front. She was wearing a button-down men’s shirt that did not belong to her. “Casper says that sometimes this happens.” She pointed the mug in the direction of the garage and I saw that the door was pulled open. Inside, Ruby was crying hard, her face red and smeared, and Casper had a beer in one hand, and with the other hand he was pulling on an end of rope and yelling something about a hammer. Ruby stepped back and I could see a rabbit noosed by its hind legs to the end of a rope that went up toward the dark ceiling of the garage. I could tell it was Thumper. She was trying to kick her back legs free, and every time she did, her body would spin and make the rope jump like a pit bull was giving it a good shake. And when the kicking slowed down, she would open her mouth and scream like nothing I had ever heard before, like a girl, or maybe ten girls, something human and too afraid to feel pain.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What in the hell is going on?”
My mother sipped at the coffee and shifted her weight back against the car. “I guess she ate her babies, mostly all of them, anyway. Ruby has one of them wrapped in a towel over there, but it won’t live past tonight without a mother. Casper says that once a rabbit gets a taste for something like that, it’s no good anymore. It’ll never be right again.”
“So he’s hanging her for it?” I asked. I couldn’t take my eyes off the body spinning at the end of the rope, all of her stretched out long while her ears hung down toward the floor, and her front legs pawed at the air around her head while she screamed.
Suddenly Casper swung something and there was a soft sound that I could not describe, but would probably remember for the rest of my life, and then there was quiet in the yard. Even Ruby’s crying had scaled down to something like a whimper between breaths.
“I can’t stay here,” I said. “We need to get the car towed and go.”
My mother turned on me then, and she was smiling but there was nothing light in her eyes. “We can’t judge what they do here, Sonny. This is farm life, something we know nothing about.”
I looked around at the garage with the tires and car parts and dented sheet-metal sides, and beyond that a wire fence with leaning posts, and then grass and more grass and empty sky that was too blue to consider. “This is not a farm,” I said. “He isn’t even a mechanic. Do you know that? He can’t even fix the car, and no one is coming to help him. Ruby told me.” I turned to walk back to the house but my mother caught my arm and her fingers sank into the place between the muscle and the bone.
“Ruby told you that? I wouldn’t believe anything she says if I were you. Casper told me that ever since his wife left him, she’s gotten into trouble at school, started telling lies and running around with boys that are almost twice her age. He says it started even before his wife left, all this troublemaking, but now she’s out of control and it’s all he can do to keep her in line anymore.”
I could see Ruby crying in the garage. She looked as though she was miles away from the age of thirteen. “I don’t believe him,” I said. “And I can’t believe that you do.”
Her hand tightened on my arm and I knew that when she let go there would be marks. “I like it here, Sonny. I like Casper. I haven’t met a man in a long time who makes me laugh and feel good inside. And I’m not in any hurry to lose that feeling. We’re gonna stay here awhile and see what happens. So get used to it.” She loosened her grip on my arm and I pulled away from her. She let me go, but when I looked back at her, she was staring at me, trying to swallow me with her eyes.
Casper set a bucket under the swinging rabbit and I saw him take a knife from his back pocket and open it to the longest blade. I turned away from the garage and scanned down the drive toward the road. My mother once had a boyfriend who could play the drums and when he was drinking he’d hit them hard. He used to call it “Jake Brake”—the sound of a semi on a steep grade, and if I closed my eyes I could hear the sound again coming up from my chest in a solid beat. For a minute I lost my sense of direction, but I knew which way I had to turn. The grass was high, but I thought that I could see the black strip of asphalt rising up through the green.
FIELD DRESSING
At first I thought maybe it was me, some dark cloud of dying that was hanging over my head, but when Shirley and I sat there on the embankment and I tried to convince her of things before the sun went down, she told me that there was never any rhyme or reason for death coming, and she didn’t believe in any god or fate or destiny or bigger plan. Shit happens, she said, and as it was we both figured we’d probably freeze to death once night came, and we were in about the deepest shit there could be.
My father went out for cigarettes and orange juice one Tuesday morning when I was five years old and never came back, and it had been my mother and me together since as long as I could almost remember, except for a hazy image of him tying my shoes, explaining to me again how the rabbit ears go in and out of the hole. My mother burned all the pictures and remnants of him in the weeks after he left, and there was nothing to anchor me to him.
When I was eight my babysitter was a ten-foot piece of rope knotted around my wrist and the other end tied tight to a leg of the couch. I could watch TV, sleep, get in the refrigerator, have access to two cupboards, and pee in a bucket—the bathroom was twenty-two feet away and we had only one length of rope. By the time I was thirteen my mother had four DUIs and a way of walking slumped over like she was carrying something heavy on her back. She had a boyfriend named Tyler and he had been in and out of “the program” for years—AA, NA, AA again—he went back and forth every time he failed, so she quit vodka and announced that she was off the drink, for me, for Tyler, for the sake of a normal life, but then the plastic bottles of Listerine started showing up around the house in places where they didn’t belong—under the couch, behind the TV. It was the original kind, which burns so bad you can’t swish it around in your mouth for a full thirty seconds, but she could do more than swish it; she could drain half a liter bottle in a day, empty three in a week, and smelled like medicine but not bad breath. She and Tyler pulled the blinds, drew the curtains, and decided to see whose liver would kick out first. My mother won.
She spent most of a Friday on the bathroom floor, and I called 9-1-1, but by then it was Sunday, and then Tyler said he had a warrant and went out the back door as soon as the flashing lights and sirens came down the gravel road. Uncle Nick was the one who picked me up from the hospital, my mother’s older brother and only next of kin, and he took me back to the trailer to pack a bag and then he drove me four hours north to what he kept calling my new home as we went up the interstate, as in I think you’re gonna like your new home and We’ve got a new bed set up for you in your new home. His was a deep voice of reassurance, but I was whipped and dog-tired and I stared out the passenger window without talking so I could watch the mile markers tick by without counting them.
For the next three weeks I went limp. Uncle Nick drove me places, bought me things, signed me up here and here and here, and I just went with him, stood quietly, filled out forms to the best of my ability: father’s name, date of your last tetanus shot. I spent two Saturdays sitting on a folding chair in a portable building behind the VFW hall, taking a hunter’s safety course—trigger, safety, barrel, butt—and then the test, and then I had a junior hunting license and my Uncle Nick was more proud of me than if I had won an award at school, which I was not attending yet because my mother was not big on organizing or sav
ing things or filing papers, and I didn’t have a birth certificate or any proof that I was fifteen and a California resident and really who I said I was. Uncle Nick could smooth that over with Bob, the hunter’s safety teacher and Uncle Nick’s trout-fishing buddy, but the school couldn’t be smoothed over and they put me in a holding pattern until proof could be shown. I couldn’t say that I was sorry for the delay, but then I found myself wandering around the house with Uncle Nick’s wife, Shirley, home during the day, telling me not to put my feet on the coffee table, put my cereal bowl in the dishwasher, take a shower, don’t watch so much TV—don’t you read?—and after three weeks of avoiding her and her bird hands that liked to snatch at me and my things, I was in the backseat of the truck, climbing in elevation, facing five days with them in the mountains—or until Uncle Nick and Shirley took their deer—whichever came first. Bucks, Uncle Nick reminded me. Buck hunting—there’s a big difference.
Uncle Nick was a big man, not particularly tall, but with a stomach that hid his belt buckle and rubbed the steering wheel as he drove. He used to smoke, but was determined to quit, so he would put a cigarette in his mouth without lighting it. He would just suck on it, hold it between his fingers, put it back between his lips again. He was a talker—didn’t take a break, could hold a conversation about anything, jumped from subject to subject, and covered everything once a subject stuck. Shirley was a clock-watcher and a speed monitor, a passenger-seat driver who told Uncle Nick we weren’t making good time, it was taking forever, slow down, you’re following too close, you’re back too far, you’re swerving.
Just past noon we pulled off the freeway and stopped at a chipped and faded burger stand near the two-lane junction between highways and ordered lunch. Shirley was disgusted with the picnic tables because they were splintered and carved up with names and dates and misspelled bad words that told Joey B. to fuk off, but we took a seat anyway because Shirley didn’t want spills in the truck, so we sat outside in the sunshine eating.
“Me and Shirley have been married . . . let’s see . . . five”—I could see him mentally ticking off numbers and changing his mind—“no, six years. Six years in August.” He picked up a fistful of fries and put them all in his mouth.
An El Camino full of teenagers pulled into the gravel parking lot and I turned to watch the girls get out while the driver gunned it once, twice, turned the stereo louder for a minute to blast the chorus on a song I didn’t know, and then cut the car to silence with the turn of the key. The girls were tall and long-legged and there were three of them and the driver looked as though he either really didn’t care that he was chauffeuring three girls or was doing a good job at pretending not to. I had never ridden in a car with that many girls. I could’ve had my learner’s permit last month but I had never taken the class for the certificate or the test for the paper and we didn’t have a car anyway because my mom was busy dying. I sometimes thought about what it would be like to drive, have my own car, maybe chauffeur three girls out to burgers on the way home from school, but I couldn’t even see that desire as more than a dream because from where I stood now that reality was not even in the distance.
“So Shirley, she’s taken a deer every damn year that we’ve been together,” Uncle Nick said. “Me? I’ve taken zero. No deer in six years. I call that shit luck.” He had a piece of lettuce stuck to the front of his teeth but neither of us pointed it out to him.
“Buck fever,” Shirley said. She was a skinny woman without a defined age—she could’ve been thirty or fifty—and she had wiry blond hair that she kept pulled back off her face with a black headband. I don’t know if she had ten headbands or just the one, but she was always wearing it no matter what time of the day it was. She had faint freckles on her face, like splatter from a flicked brush, and she chewed slowly, took forever to get through half a burger, and had one breast—the other one had been cut off because of cancer the year before she met Uncle Nick. When I came in the house and met her for the first time, she had walked to the doorway and given me a stiff and lopsided hug and when she stepped back to look at me, she held out her arms and said, “I’ve only got one boob,” and glanced down toward her chest where her T-shirt rose and fell like a hill butted up against a valley. “But I’m a survivor, so you better think twice before cracking a joke,” she said, then picked up my bag and walked it to the back bedroom of what my Uncle Nick had been busy convincing me was my new home. That was all she said to me.
“Tough as nails,” Uncle Nick had said and shook a cigarette from the soft pack in the breast pocket of his denim work shirt.
The wind made a halfhearted gust and tried to pick our grease-stained burger wrappers from the table. We all reached for them, but Shirley had those bird hands that could dive out of nowhere and managed to shove them all under her soda cup before I could get my hand down. She gave me a sideways glance out of the corner of her eye and said something under her breath, something at me, but the wind was rattling the bent rain gutter on the burger stand and I couldn’t hear her. It looked like her mouth said you suck, but maybe I was wrong.
Uncle Nick didn’t notice anything. He just kept forklifting fries to his mouth, five or ten at a time so that he had to chew while he talked. “Buck fever, my ass,” he said. “Bad luck is more like it. I never get a clean shot.”
“He always misses,” Shirley said, and she didn’t smile as she said it.
Uncle Nick and Shirley had deer tags for zone X-4, which Uncle Nick informed me contained the prime spots—Crater Lake, Eagle Lake, Antelope Peak, Harvey Mountains, Upper Hat Creek Rim, Butte Creek Rim, Ladder Butte, Negro Camp Mountain, Black’s Ridge—and was one of the most sought-after zones in the state. Deer tags for X-4 were only awarded by a drawing in June after all interested hunters applied, but Uncle Nick called it a lottery, as in he and Shirley had won it along with 413 others, and they were determined to both take deer this year, bucks, and Uncle Nick had already been scouting the zone, had decided on where to camp and where to hike and where to hunt, and he thought himself crafty because he had found an area that was hard to get to, out of the way, and went against the grain of deer-hunting success tips, which suggest that deer are more dense in less forest, and not the other way around. We rose in elevation and small green signs by the roadside announced the change—2,240 feet, 3,180, 3,540. Shirley turned in her seat and told me to stop chewing my gum like a cow—she could hear me chewing over the sound of the truck—and when we finally stopped climbing we went down a dirt road, and another dirt road, and the truck bounced over rocks, gullies, washouts, and Uncle Nick turned the hubs to four-wheel drive so we could climb out of mud tracks and low spots until the ground evened out again. The trees came up thick and tall and crowded the road that wasn’t really one until the road faded out altogether and Uncle Nick rolled to a stop and said, “We’re here.”
We got out, one by one, and I tried to shake the pins and needles from my legs. Uncle Nick put his hands on his lower back, stretched and belched. Shirley dusted off her hands even though they were clean, and walked around the back of the truck so she could lift the latch on the cabover camper and open the door to make camp.
I had never been in the mountains before, and I had not realized that there was so much quiet. It was a quiet that wasn’t without noise, but the noise was a hushing sound, the wind up high bending the pine trees, and there were the sounds of birds, but a different sound than in the city, not a call of warning and near misses, but maybe real communication and happiness, and somewhere above us I could hear a woodpecker. The air was clean, but I could not describe what I meant by that, only recognize that it was.
Shirley set up chairs and Uncle Nick had me find big rocks so we could make a fire pit. He said we were lucky that it wasn’t fire season or we’d be freezing our asses off at night, and we made a makeshift circle, stacked the rocks and then gathered dead wood and made a pile. By the time we were done with that, Uncle Nick was huffing and puffing and said we’d done enough manual labor for one day
and it was time to drink beer. He got comfortable in a chair and talked me through how to build a fire—pine needles, bark, and scraps, a lot of blowing, stack the wood in a tepee to let the air circulate and don’t let the flames get too high. He drank and pointed. When I was done he handed me a Coors and we sat in the last patch of light, drinking.
“You excited about tomorrow?” he asked. He had already folded and crushed three empty cans and was cracking open a fourth. He put a cigarette in the crease of the corner of his mouth and tilted his head back to look at the clear sky between the trees.
“I’m nervous,” I said.
“Well, you’re gonna be the spotter, keep your eyes peeled, but if you get a clear shot I want you to take it and we’ll just put my tag on it and take it home. What the hell—it might be the closest I get to taking a deer this year anyways.” He tried to sound hopeful but did a bad job at it. He would be disappointed if I got the deer. He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and held it between the first two fingers of his right hand, against the side of his beer, and it was hard to remember that it wasn’t lit. “Just remember that we’re looking for forks—forks and bigger—no rack, no shot, right?”
I opened the ice chest and reached for a Pepsi, then decided to test it and took another Coors instead. Uncle Nick didn’t notice, or didn’t care, and he raised up out of his chair and tossed a mossy chunk of wood onto the fire so that there was a whole lot of smoke until the fire could stutter back again. Shirley came out of the camper and I sat down and hugged the beer can between my thighs so she couldn’t see the label. She handed us bowls of spaghetti and pulled up a chair of her own.
“Goddamn this fire is smoking, Nick.” She coughed and waved her hand back and forth in front of her. “Robbie, you got dish duty and cleanup tonight.” She said it without looking at me. “Four tomorrow?” she said to Uncle Nick.
“Sounds good. Up at four. Up the trail by four thirty. Take the early movers.”