Rosalyn had spit out that water when we first went to look at the land. “Ugh,” she’d said. She’d spoken with such vehemence that we got into an argument.
“Well, you don’t have to make such a sour face,” I said.
“It’s terrible. It tastes terrible.”
“You coming or not?” I had asked her.
“I’ll wait here,” she had said, standing by the locked cabin. She had looked in the windows and shaken her head. It was clear she didn’t appreciate the place. She wanted some mark of human existence up there, or maybe she just couldn’t imagine endless days with me and my thoughts and nothing between us but open space and sky above. And those thirteen years that separated us in age.
When I got back from walking the property, I asked her, “Are you going to complain every time we come up here if we buy the place?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t come up here,” I told her.
“Maybe I won’t,” she said.
I looked at her. “What’s that mean?”
“It means I’m not going to sit around and warm my feet by the fire and watch golden eagles nest and pretend to be happy.” A dust devil had come up and was spitting dirt in our faces. Rosalyn shouted through it. “I’m going to continue working part time, I’m going to volunteer more, I’m going to the health club, the malls, the museums, I’m seeing friends, eating out, traveling. I want a life, not an afterlife. I don’t want to close up shop. It’s all right if you want privacy, Charlie, but that’s not what I want. This fucking dirt!” she said and swatted at the dust, then ran for the car. I went after her, walking slowly.
“And does this busy life of yours have any room for me?” I asked.
“We should get back,” she said. Which was answer enough.
It’s a terrible thing to get to the end of a marriage and run out of good will about the future. Once you stop talking about what’s ahead—or start talking about it separately, as we had done—it makes you feel as if you’re on a train platform waving goodbye to the departing life you used to have. I always wondered if she agreed to sign the papers for the land just to have a reason to divorce me—two years ago now—and if I’d made her sign them because I honestly believed the place would bring us closer, like people do in a last-ditch try to stay happy by having a child.
“I’d be a little more concerned about letting those people stay up there if I were you,” Rosalyn said now. We were sitting on her dock. She didn’t own a boat and didn’t want one. But she liked to come down here and read a good mystery and have me come over and join her for a drink. “It’s your pride and joy,” she told me. “I’m surprised you don’t make them produce a passport to step on it.” We could joke about what it meant to me now. And she was right, I could have planted my own flag up there. She wore white slacks and a low-cut pink sweater that I wanted to believe she’d put on for me. She’d never looked better. It all agreed with her, retirement, this big house, the traveling, the new man, the freedom—even me being here to always depend on. I would come over as long as she needed me, and not a moment longer than she wanted me to. That she knew this should have made me an object of concern if not outright pity in her eyes, but all I saw was gratitude when she put her hand on my stubbled cheek and said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Charlie.”
Over the next few days, I finished painting the house, replaced a couple leaky windows, and pulled up some soiled carpet beyond cleaning in the dining room where we never could get Cora’s and Reginald’s markings out—always fighting for dominance, those two. Martin followed me around, seeming to enjoy the liberty of jumping up on the old familiar couch without getting shooed off, and made a few half-hearted attempts to chase rabbits around our backyard. He was good company, and I would have liked more of it, but we were pretty fair about sharing him, and Rosalyn said he still liked to stretch out his front paws for a dive into the lake when she threw a stick, like the excitable puppy he used to be. So it was good to shuttle him between us. Just like a kid, he had his own bag packed and ready to go with his special food, blanket, and medicine for his arthritis.
I was pulling some unidentified boxes from the crawlspace in the basement when the phone rang. I ignored it at first, let the voice mail pick it up. But it rang insistently again, and I went upstairs and answered.
“Charlie?” It was Peck, my neighbor up at the land. “You better get up here,” he said without any preliminaries.
“What’s going on, Peck?”
“Those people, the ones you let stay…” Peck was slow to rile, but he sounded mad as I’d ever heard him. “That fella shot a deer. With a pistol! ”
“I’m coming.” I got my rifle and was in the truck in seconds. Martin jumped in the back. I still had paint on my hands.
You would have thought a wounded mule deer shot in the leg couldn’t get far. That would be a misconception. A deer on three legs can outrun any man on two. This wasn’t the point, of course. The point was that this crazy fool had tried to shoot one out of season with a pistol and without a hunting license and with No Hunting signs posted on both our properties. That made him a poacher in the eyes of the law, even if I lied and said I’d given him permission. His van could be impounded, his gun taken away (a good thing, in my view), and the both of them fined more than they were worth.
“What the hell got into you?” I said when I drove up. I was jumping out of the truck before the engine had stopped coughing. “Are you nuts?”
“Sir,” said Calvert, “I…we needed food.” Where was Meredith? Down by the creek I suspected, maybe washing clothes in the stream.
“Food?” Peck was standing there red-faced. His family had owned a thousand acres of this land going back a hundred years until they divided it up. Peck and I had worked out a lease to let his horses graze on my property, and between our parcels the animals found plenty of room to roam. I’d gotten a better offer for cattle from the sprawling McDonald ranch to the east, but cattle tore up the place worse than horses, and frankly horses were just prettier. I’m sure Peck was thinking the same thing as me: this fool could have shot one of his horses. “What gave you the idea you could hunt up here?”
Calvert, all twenty-something years of him, let out an exasperated sigh. “I was just trying to feed my family.”
“You ever heard of a grocery store?”
“I thanked the land for its bountiful offering,” said Calvert. I looked at Peck, who screwed up his face in disgust. “I thought you’d understand.”
“Here’s what I understand. You leave that deer out there to die and it’s wanton waste, not to mention cruelty. I’m obligated to report this to Wildlife, and if I don’t, I’m up my own damn creek. Any way you look at it, you’ve done something mighty illegal.”
Calvert mumbled something. He had the fedora pushed down over his forehead, his eyes darting around under the brim. I asked him what he said.
“Nobody has to know.”
“I know.”
“We’re wasting time,” Peck said. “Let’s go. We’ll argue about what to do later.”
•
We went in three different directions. I told Calvert that if he found the deer first to stay with it and we’d be by eventually. I mapped it out so we’d circle the perimeter and move toward the center, gradually tightening our radius. We’d meet in the upper canyon where I suspected the deer had gone to bed down, if it were still alive. The shot could have hit more bone than blood depending on where it went in the leg. I won’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy getting off a double lung shot. You could drop a bull moose in its tracks with a clean shot like that and I’d always been taught that was the fair shot you took—and you didn’t take it until you were sure.
Martin started barking when we came to a pile of brush with some wooden boards from a collapsed outbuilding. The deer, a big one, close to three hundred pounds, I figured, had his black-tipped tail drooped between his legs and had risen up from the thicket. His antl
ers were budding out and his coat had started to turn reddish brown from its winter gray; those big ears were twitching independently of each other just like a mule’s, trying to hear our movements upwind from him. He was considering whether it was worth bounding out of there, his flanks moving in and out like a bellows, exhausted, pained, and I saw too when he did bound up that his back leg was barely attached to the bone. Calvert had shot him in the hip and about severed the leg. It was a horrible sight. The leg was swinging around as if it were a piece of the poor creature’s intestine hanging out.
I squared my shoulders, calmed my shaking hands and squeezed my left eye shut to line up a shot I prayed would go straight into his heart. It did, or close enough to drop him after a good two hundred feet before he flopped over. Martin ran up, sniffed warily and then backed off and lay down with his face on his front haunches, whining and waiting for me. The buck’s eyes bulged with hard pain in them. A mule deer ran different than a white tail, starting up from go and bounding eight feet and then coming down on all four feet at once like a landing craft, and I thought it was terrible to lose one of your legs when you got around like that, and that this buck had died without his due dignity.
I blew my whistle in short bursts. Before long Peck showed up. He’d already heard the shot, and we stood there silently looking over this big fellow and trying to decide what to do with him now. We could try to get one of our trucks up here and move him back to Peck’s place and gut him there, but I didn’t think that would be easy given the steep incline and loose shale down to this spot. If we were going to eat this meat, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let it go to waste, we needed to cut him up now and let him cool and then pack him out. The worst thing was to let him stay warm. He’d spoil for sure.
“Where’s the kid?” Peck said to me.
“I don’t know. Did you see him shoot it?”
Peck shook his head. “All I know is he’s carrying around a pistol and shooting up things like he’s in a saloon. I gave them your number, Charlie. I should have checked with you first. We got no business letting strangers stay up here. This ain’t no Woodstock.”
“Can I have your knife?” I said.
Peck’s knife was good and sharp and I cut around the diaphragm and reached all the way up and felt for the trachea. If you did it right, cut from stem to stern, and you had the strength and a steady hand, you could pull the whole business down from the windpipe and avoid the mess of cutting out the gut sack by itself. I sliced the trachea across its diameter and started pulling. We each had a foot braced on one side of the buck and were yanking. I told Peck to hold up a moment while I sawed more through the center of the pelvis channel and then we started pulling again. It was the easiest way. I didn’t want to cut out the organs one by one and risk piercing the gut sack and transferring the digestive juices to the meat and spoiling it. Somebody was going to eat this creature and do him the honor of a good death. It was ugly to think of his last hour or two with his leg twirling around like that. I stuck my hand back up past the lungs and grabbed inside the throat and Peck pulled with me and we gave it one good heave and tore everything out. It was about then, just when I’d started to skin it and fold back the cape, that Calvert came up, panting. He took a good look at the buck’s insides and bloody cavity and fainted.
Peck said, “This fella’s one lame excuse for a human being.” We stared at his sprawled out body and shook our heads. “If he don’t come to in five, you’d better take him over to the hospital.” I said I would and asked him what he thought I should do about the deer.
“Might as well enjoy it,” he said.
“But should I report it?” Peck gave me a puzzled look. He’d bred horses all his life and he knew them as well as anybody, but an animal was still an animal to him. “Nobody’s going to know any different if you don’t.”
“I’m not worried about somebody finding out. I just want to do what’s right.”
Peck opened his hands; he’d lost two of his left fingers in Vietnam. He was quiet about it except once to tell me he woke up every day and looked straight through that hole and saw the war. “If it was me? I’d get those people on their way and fill up your freezer with that meat. Case closed.”
This made sense to me. You could say that an ignorant individual had made the mistake of thinking he could shoot his dinner and that it was more an accident than a crime. You could say, too, that they were young and naïve. But what you couldn’t say is that any of it was right, the way a crooked line down a highway wasn’t right, and you had to fix it. I’d had a perfect record over the years of inspecting roads. I saw plenty of bulges and rough spots in the concrete and places where the excavation had cut corners, and I had offers, some lucrative, if never put in so many words, to look the other way. Rosalyn once told me that cheating was so pervasive in the schools these days it was almost an anachronism to be honest, maybe even quaint. But I’d never been tempted.
When we got back to the cabin, Meredith was there staring dumbfounded at her groggy man coming through the door. She’d set up a little housekeeping in the cabin, a box of teabags and some water boiling in a pot on the stove, a couple toothbrushes and toothpaste on the one windowsill, and two sleeping bags rolled out on the bed next to a flashlight. This was no kind of place to be expecting a baby. I’d always planned to build on and shore up the foundation to get the drainage working right so there wasn’t mold growing up the walls. The last owner had used the place for storage and that was about all it was good for now.
“What happened?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“I’ll see you,” Peck said—wisely making his exit. Up to our elbows in blood, we’d washed our hands and arms in the stream, but you really never got out the stains unless you scrubbed at them with a brush. We had the deer and all its dismembered parts in the back of my truck after dragging up the whole mess—and Calvert too—on a tarp.
“He just needs to sit down,” I said. “He fainted.” I helped Calvert over to the bed and he lay down and held his head and moaned. He put his arms across his eyes and stayed that way. Meredith sat down next to him. “You have one?” she said to him. He made a clenching sound with his teeth and nodded. She turned to me. “He gets these terrible migraines. They make him vomit and faint.” She got up and went over to a plastic jug of water. A towel and washcloth were laid out neatly on a corner of the bed and she picked up the washcloth and got it damp and then came back and folded it over Calvert’s forehead. He was still gritting his teeth and his toes were pointed out the door, his fingers clenching the bare mattress.
“I’m going to report this in the morning.”
Meredith turned her head toward me. “Report what?”
“The deer. You can’t shoot a deer without a license. Even on private property.” I repeated what I’d told Calvert, it was illegal and despite having the animal all carved up in the back of my truck and no one to know any more about it, we’d broken the law of the land.
“I’m sorry,” Meredith said. “We should have asked permission first.” She had changed from this morning and put on some stretchy sweat pants and washed her feet and combed her brown hair, her eyes a soft shade of jade. “Calvert didn’t want to. He said we’d sell some of our stuff in town. But I can’t wait. I need some meat now. My baby needs it. Calvert doesn’t think so, but I know different. I’m hungry all the time.”
“Where’d you shoot him?”
She pointed down by the stream.
“I was hungry,” she said again.
“You should have just asked. I could have brought you something.”
“We’re not beggars,” she said.
Calvert moaned, “Your voices!”
“He can’t stand noise when he gets like this,” Meredith said. “Let’s go outside and talk.”
We stood there in the dark with the stars pulsing above and not an artificial light in sight. I had mixed feelings about running electricity over here and plundering the darkness. Peck’s house was on the other
side of the ridge and hidden from view. You could hear coyotes howling, and I’d seen the remnants of a mountain lion’s kill, and what did it matter if another deer died on the property one way or another? I could hide the evidence, ignore the deed, and the taint to the land—the purest thing I had in my life at the moment—would disappear. But there’s a thinner line between rigidity and tolerance than most people think. I’d always tried to stay on the latter side of that line, but I knew my position as of late had been corrupted by a foolish kind of anger that wanted everyone held accountable.
I went to my truck and got out my jacket and put it around her shoulders. She was standing there with her thin arms shivering and nowhere to go but back into that dark cabin with her partner sprawled out and his head exploding.
“I think about getting away.” She looked back at the cabin.
“Are you afraid of him?”
“No.” She pulled her arms tight around her chest. “Sometimes.”
I wasn’t surprised that Calvert who snapped his “Sir!” out at me might be the same fellow who could slap around this young woman not long out of her girlhood with her pretty pale face. For all that traveling she didn’t have much color to her. She was more pallid than Rosalyn ever looked when she was pregnant and had three miscarriages, before we stopped trying. We had that river of disappointment under our feet, too.
“Come with me now,” I said, and Martin trotted up behind me, as if to make his appeal too. He’d been guarding the tailgate of my pickup with its deer payload.
She shook her head. “He’ll find me. He’ll—”
“You need to see a doctor. You need care. Nobody’s going to harm you. I’ll see to that. I know a lot of people here in town, folks who can help you legally.” She winced at “legally.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to him,” she said.
I had the idea that Calvert was no stranger to outstanding warrants, and that this had made my place more attractive to him than any so-called holiness of my land. “I’ll take you somewhere safe,” I promised. I had in mind the extra bedroom of my house, and if she wasn’t comfortable with that—I had no untoward motives—I’d put her up in a motel and talk to the safe house people in Fort Collins where Rosalyn volunteered.
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