by Blake Crouch
His customers didn’t like that.
Omnivores or not, most humans liked meat, and they liked it fresh, red and juicy.
All but alive.
“I got four deer back there need processing,” Ray reminded his young employee as he slid the tray of sirloin next to the one full of sausage. Luke shifted from foot to foot like a three-year-old who needed to pee. “And you’re not the only one who got lucky in the bear tag lottery, you know. I expect Bud’s wife’ll be in with a bear any day now.”
Ray glanced up, expecting the thought alone to make her appear at the front door.
Bud’s wife.
He still couldn’t say her name, even in his own damned head.
“Some bastards have all the luck,” Luke said, starting to cover trays with thick pieces of foil like he’d been taught.
Ray just stared at him. “Tell me about it.”
“So can I go?” The younger man didn’t look up from his job but Ray could tell he was pretty much holding his breath.
“Yeah, yeah, fine.” Ray nudged the kid aside, tearing off another long sheet of foil. His body did this work every night without prompting. “Be in by eleven.”
Luke pushed his boundaries like a teenager.
“Okay, noon at the latest. You need me to help you finish closing up tonight?”
Ray ripped another piece of foil down the metal teeth.
“I suppose you got the Burnham girl waiting on you?”
Luke just shrugged but his face said everything his mouth didn’t.
Ray remembered her as a pretty young thing, not too skinny like some of them.
Curvy in all the right places.
She reminded him a little of...
Bud’s wife.
Ray turned his attention elsewhere, pulling on a pair of gloves and grabbing a fistful of ground sirloin. He stuffed it into the grinder and turned the handle—it was the old-fashioned kind, like most everything in the shop his mother had left him—coaxing the grayed, pallid flesh back to life, red rivers flowing onto a new Styrofoam tray.
Reprocessed, refreshed, and repackaged, it would be ready for sale again tomorrow, like the regurgitations of a mother bird.
He couldn’t express how much he hated it, the fetid smell of meat. Even fresh, it had a pungent, rank odor that clung to him night and day. But it was all he knew, all he’d ever known. He wasn’t like Luke...or Bud.
He never got lucky.
He never won anything.
He never got the girl.
But he could pinpoint the moment his life had merged onto this particular path, could see it shimmering behind him like a distant mirage he was traveling away from instead of toward.
There was a time when love had made everything so fine. The girl was an angel, hair like corn silk and skin like sweet cream. She was heaven in his arms and when she wrapped her long, satin limbs around him that first time during their sophomore year in high school and whispered his name again and again, he was both lost and found.
That summer glittered in his past like a distant star.
She had been his entire universe.
They had made all the usual proclamations of young love—forevers and stolen kisses in the back of Ray’s pickup, the light of a harvest moon turning the red truck bed to quicksilver.
She had given herself to him, had promised with more than her lips, with far more than words. He could still feel her in his arms, arching, sleek as a cat, a smile curling the corners of her irresistibly kissable mouth.
He wanted her, maybe more today than he had then, knowing now what he had lost. His hunger burned. Whenever he saw her now, everything in him went still, as if any movement might provoke the pure appetite coiled in his belly to spring.
The truth was simple—he was a coward. He had been too afraid to claim her then and he lacked the courage of his convictions to do it now.
Time had eroded the space between them.
The distance was unbridgeable.
Besides, he had thought she was his.
Had believed the lies her heart had told.
He’d never gotten down on one knee, hadn’t approached her formidable father for her hand, but he had asked for her heart. On a bed of soft pine needles with chipmunks amassing a stockpile of nuts for winter around them and egrets sailing from tree to tree, he had given her his grandmother’s ring—not an engagement ring exactly, but the promise of something more. It was too big but he’d slipped it on her finger anyway and asked, “Will you?”
She had wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him, murmuring, “I love you, Ray,” against his lips before they came together in the deep, dusky greens and browns of the forest and she called out his name and clung to him, the fierce cry in her throat rivaling the wild eagle overhead.
He didn’t realize until later that she hadn’t really answered his question.
She wore the ring around her neck for him, but he’d noticed it was conspicuously absent in her engagement photo in the Ontonagon Herald.
He’d never asked for the ring back.
Wondered if she still had it.
Did she look at it sometimes and think of him, of that time in their lives?
He couldn’t tell, even though during hunting season he saw her nearly every week.
She had been his foothold on the world, the thing that both grounded him and allowed him to fly.
Nothing could stop them.
But that had been youth talking, whispering sweet nothings into his ear.
It couldn’t have fallen apart more perfectly, like a sequence of dominoes, and if he’d been a religious man, he might have believed that it had been all part of God’s plan from the beginning. Perhaps that would have given him a bit of comfort, or even just the ability to forgive. But Ray knew it was pure dumb luck, just random events falling on him like the bricks of a collapsing building, burying him under their weight.
First, his mother had taken sick.
But the dominoes had been falling for years before that, hadn’t they?
His father, a giant man with hands like paws and a booming laugh, plowing his pickup into a tree during a snowstorm.
On the way home from the bar, as usual.
His mother running the meat shop on her own, spine straight and eyes ahead.
Asking Ray’s help—hefting carcasses, cracking bones at the joint like kindling.
That was his life.
Bone saws and skin.
Blood and sinew.
“Have a little backbone!” she’d say when he shied away from the work.
His mother had backbone. She was fearless, unflinching.
He hated it, and sometimes he hated her.
So when his mother took to her bed with headaches, the room shades drawn down to dark, her pained voice raspy as she called out, “Keep the racket down would you please, Raymond?” when he let the front door snick shut behind him as he came in, he knew it was bad.
Her illness brought him to his knees, and hefted far more responsibility onto his eighteen-year-old shoulders than any kid should have been forced to bear.
He ran the shop and nursed his mother until the tumor in her brain made her crazy with pain. And all the while he looked into the future like a promise. He would sell the shop when his mother was gone and go to college and he would marry, because of course she would wait, would say yes, yes, Ray, it will always be the two of us against the world.
But she had slipped away when he wasn’t looking. First his mother, gone in the night and buried in the plot beside his father at Trout Creek Cemetery, and then his girl, right out from under him like some magic trick, him still standing there, struck dumb with wonder. Robert “Bud” Plano had come in with his big Texas accent and his big money and his big game ambitions and the man had taken his girl.
There was a time in his life Ray could have been anything.
Anyone.
Now he was nothing.
No one.
“Ray?” Luke reached for
one of the trays to take back to the walk-in but the bigger man grabbed his arm and stopped him.
“You go on.” Why had he even hesitated? He’d planned on sending the kid home early anyway. “I got enough work here to keep me ’til dawn.”
“See ya tomorrow.” Luke hesitated at the door, shrugging on his coat. “I’m sure she’ll be in tonight.”
“Who?” Ray turned to hide the color in his cheeks, picking up a knife, his hands moving with deft precision but without thought as he trimmed the fat edge from a steak Luke had left too marbled, creating something as close to a work of art as he was able.
“I heard Bud got a six-pointer yesterday.”
“Well good for him.”
And that wasn’t all he got, was it?
Even that bitter thought couldn’t stop the jolt of anticipation mixed with dread that clenched his stomach at the thought of her arrival.
Ray called to the kid as he walked out the door. “Hope you get lucky!”
Luke poked his head back in, grinning. “With Burnham or the bear?”
“Which one do you want more?”
Luke hesitated.
“Young bucks.” Ray shook his head. “Go! Before I change my mind. And drive careful on those roads!”
The door closed behind him with a sticking shudder and a faint tinkle. The bells that had been on that same door since he was a little kid were still there, letting him know when a customer had arrived. He hated those damned things, but as closing time grew near, he found himself listening for them anyway—listening for her.
3
The gales of November were capricious. By the time Ariana walked into Koski’s, the snow had turned to an angry sleet. The ground was lightly covered, making a bright palette for deer sign and blood trails.
The bells over the door tinkled.
Koski’s was small but brightly lit. Ray had started clean-up early, half of the long, silver counters already emptied of their contents. There were heads—two deer and a moose—mounted on the wall, an ironic reminder to customers of what they were really buying.
Ariana stopped at the register, and Ray didn’t even bother with eye contact. Just wiped his hands off on his apron and headed for the door without a word. She heard the muffled squeak of the tailgate coming down, and with Ray outside, it was quiet in the shop. Luke had gone home for the day. Just the two of them now.
She stared into a display case half-filled with bright red ground chuck.
Outside, Ray groaned, struggling to heft the meat.
He finally appeared in the doorway, shoulders wet with sleet, hauling the game bag through the shop and muttering something under his breath about how goddamn heavy it was.
Ariana grabbed one of the nylon cords hanging off the polyester, rip-stop material and helped Ray drag the bag to the freezer. He glanced at her, surprised at the aid.
The latch on the freezer door stuck and Ray had to yank it open. It creaked on its rusty hinges, the old-fashioned kind. His mother had never invested in anything new and neither had he. Ray grabbed a door stop off a shelf and dropped it to the floor, using his foot to shove it under. Pushing past the black floor-to-ceiling rubber flaps that kept in the cold, they struggled to pull the bag behind them, both out of breath, both sweating, Ariana lagging behind under the strain.
Ray hit the switch. Overhead, the fluorescent light buzzed like a mass of carcass flies, pausing to flicker in protest before illuminating something raw and unrecognizable on the butcher block.
Ariana’s right boot grazed against something on the floor.
It nearly tripped her, and she just managed to catch herself before falling, struggling to keep up with Ray.
Wasn’t a loud noise.
Just a quiet click.
Ray said, “Oh, fuck.”
“What?”
Ariana looked back toward the door, obscured by the insulating rubber. The bright light from the front of the shop was gone now.
Ray glared at her. “Do you have any idea what you just did?”
“I think my foot knocked the door stop. Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Yeah, it was an accident. What’s the big deal?”
Ray laughed, but there was anger in it. “That door only opens from the outside.”
“You’re joking.”
Ariana let go of the nylon cord and walked over to the door, looking for the latch. There was nothing but smooth metal. “Who would make a door that opens only from the outside?”
“It’s old.”
“No shit. And Luke’s gone?”
“Yeah, I sent him home a half hour ago. Guess we’ll have to call Bud.”
“My cell’s in the truck.”
“Well, shit.”
“You’re telling me there’s no way to open that door?”
“Luke will be in tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I can’t be in this freezer all night.” Ariana looked at her watch. “It’s ten of five. Maybe you’ll have another customer.”
“I locked the doors behind you. The snow. It was getting heavy. I didn’t think—”
“You can say that again.”
“I’m not the one who knocked that door closed.”
“Is that door even up to code? Jesus!”
Ray looked at her. “Some of us don’t have your money.”
“It’s common safety, Ray. Now we’re gonna freeze to death.”
“We are not gonna freeze to death.” Ray looked up toward the ceiling. “I can block off those vents up there. It’ll be cold. I’ll grant you that. But we can make it ’til tomorrow afternoon.”
“Afternoon? What time does Luke show up for work?”
“I told him to be in around eleven.”
“You have got to be kidding me. Great management there, Ray. Top notch.”
“Noon at the latest.”
“Noon?”
“Unless he doesn’t get himself a bear.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then he might not come in at all.”
She stared at him, speechless. Ray ignored her and tried the door, hitting it hard with his hip. It shuddered but stayed shut. He grabbed one of the long beef hooks—the closest thing he had to a pry bar—and tried to wedge it between the door jamb and the metal door.
If it had been the new aluminum kind, it would have bent like a tin can, but this thing was heavy, solid steel, more bank safe than freezer. Of course, if it had been one of the new freezers, it would have a latch on the inside.
“No luck?” Ariana shivered, looking over his shoulder.
“If it weren’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any.” Ray gave up, swinging the beef hook idly as he looked around the freezer, assessing. He squinted up at the vents in the ceiling and then looked at Ariana, speculative. “Think you could fit through there?”
“Are you crazy?” Ariana blinked, looking between Ray and the vents, about a foot-square each.
He shrugged and tossed the beef hook aside, letting it clatter to the cement floor. “Well then, I guess we’ll have to hunker down and wait it out.”
“I could punch you in the face, Raymond.”
“Go ahead.” Ray jutted his chin out like an offering. “Hit me. At least that’s something. It’s better than twenty years of pretending.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Pretending you don’t hate me.”
“I hate you?” Ariana said, incredulous. She turned away from him, nudging the rubber flaps aside so she could get to the door, pounding on it with her fists. “Help! Help! Someone help us!”
She tried to twist away from the vice grip Ray had on her shoulders, pulling her back into the room.
“That’s not helping.”
Ariana panted, out of breath. “Well it’s more than you’re doing!”
“Look, we have to stay calm.” Ray turned her toward him, meeting her eyes. Ariana blinked back tears. “We’re going to be okay. Do you hear me?”
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