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by Bryan Hurt

  He’d struggled up from the anesthetic two days later to hear a doctor telling Shirleen that he would never ride horses again, at least not like that. “We will want to keep a very close eye on him to make sure the concussion doesn’t clot his brain,” the thick voice said.

  Shirleen told the doctor, “I’ve told him time and time again. This rodeo business . . .” She shook her head then said, “He looks like an overcooked noodle laying there, don’t he?”

  Five minutes later, after a long silence in the room, he felt Shirleen bend over him on the hospital bed, smelled her flowery Avon perfume, and heard her say, “I’ve had it with you.”

  Tucker’s vision was gray and the edges tingled with broken dots for nearly a week. Now, looking back, he was certain God was fooling around with his eyes back then, fine-tuning the gift.

  It was, as the saying goes, both a blessing and a curse. Three months ago, he’d received his greatest revelation from the tiniest pair of eyes—two little pebble-shaped globs from Tom Shane’s three-pound cutthroat trout.

  Tucker Pluid watched Tom straighten the fish on the dining room wall. “What a beaut. That Pluid sure does nice work. Doesn’t he do nice work, hon?” He turned to his wife who was sitting on the davenport cross-stitching.

  “Nice work on fish, maybe, but he’s not so good with the people in his life.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Tom said.

  His wife shrugged and licked the tip of her thread before poking it into the eye of the needle. “I hear things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things in the beauty shop, 4-H meetings, the post office. Things about your taxidermist’s ex-wife.”

  “Shirleen? What about her?”

  “How she’s carrying on these days.”

  “Aw.” Tom waved his hand in dismissal. “She’s always carried on. Ever since she left him. Why she did that, though . . .” He trailed off and shook his head.

  “Oh, we women know.” Tom’s wife chuckled and stabbed the needle back and forth through the linen.

  “Huh?” Tom turned completely from his fish, the fish Tucker was inside, and looked at his wife. “C’mon, Maggie. What’s with Shirleen? Why’d she do it?”

  His wife sighed and let her stitching drop to her lap. “If you really have to ask, there’s no way you’ll ever understand.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that men like Tucker Pluid will never change. They’re the tired old men of the West who never stop believing that work is the only thing worth living for.”

  “Well, sure—”

  Maggie was on a roll and wouldn’t be stopped. “To them, just putting bread on the table is more important than who’s sitting around the table. Eventually, life gets the better of them, punches them down, and they just wither up and blow away.”

  Tom was silent for a few moments then, his voice higher and thinner, he said, “I’m not like that, am I, Mags?”

  Tucker never heard her response because he slammed the jar onto the workbench with such force the tiny trout eyes swirled around in the formaldehyde, chasing each other like frantic tadpoles. He watched them for a long time, until they settled to the bottom of the jar and he could forget about Shirleen talking about him in the beauty salon.

  “I never asked for this,” he’d tell the wood ducks, bighorn sheep, and largemouth bass on his worktable. The animals, in various stages of preparation, stared back at him, mouths closed and nostrils shining with shellac.

  To stop touching eyeballs would be to disappoint God, he thought. God was up there watching him watch Flint and yet He offered no relief for all that Tucker Pluid saw. Tucker walked around town much more slowly this hunting season, wary of nearly everyone he met. When he saw Danny Kingston in the post office or Bret Meyer in the aisles of the grocery store, Tucker shied away, trying not to look at the hands he knew slapped the women and children late at night when the shades were pulled. Then there were those who cheated at pinochle or lied about their sex life to the others in the office. Tucker was especially shocked to see those in his own church—the ushers, the deacons, the pillars of the congregation—who never even cracked open their Bibles until Saturday night.

  “God,” Tucker whispered in the silence of his workshop, “preserve me from their unrighteousness.”

  Once Tucker swore off the eyes for a week after the morning he sat down next to Charlie Holt at the Wrangler’s coffee counter and heard him tell Shellie, the counter waitress, about the operation his wife needed. “It’s some newfangled procedure she says will help straighten her spine. She’s had that slump ever since I can remember. Now, after all these years, she says there’s this doctor over in Casper who can fix her up good and she don’t even have to go under the knife.”

  “Modern medicine’s something else, isn’t it?” Shellie said, freshening their cups.

  “I tell her I’ll do whatever it takes to make her happy,” Charlie said with a shy grin. “Wish I could go, but it’s right in the middle of deer season.”

  Tucker knew Charlie was worried about putting meat on the table this year. It had been a slow summer down at the appliance store and he was sitting up late at night, hunched over the desk in the den, surrounded by his big game trophies from past seasons. While he fiddled with the calculator and shipping invoices, his wife was up in their bedroom underneath the whitetail deer placing calls to her lover in Casper. She cupped her hand over the phone and whispered dirty talk so pornographic that she blushed between her soft giggles.

  Charlie was still telling Shellie about the miracle operation when Tucker got up from the counter, put his money beside his coffee cup, and left without saying a word.

  For seven days, Tucker Pluid avoided the eyes, afraid of the pain he might bump into. He threw himself into his work, filled his nostrils with the smell of chemicals and cured hides, spent hours polishing antlers, painted as many lifelike expressions onto the dead faces as he knew how.

  “Everything’s fine, don’t worry about me, I’m holding steady,” he told the heads on the table.

  Then, on the seventh day, his hand brushed one of the baby food jars and he saw, without warning, Jacqueline Rodgers, the young cashier at Flint Foodland, sitting naked in front of her mother’s vanity. As she looked in the mirror, she brushed her waist-length hair with a silver-backed brush and hummed a hauntingly beautiful song, a hymn Tucker recognized from church. He knew he’d never be able to watch her scan his groceries again without thinking of her long hair and milk-colored skin. He listened to Jacqueline sing for nearly five minutes before he released that jar and started touching others on the shelf.

  Sometimes Tucker Pluid thought he would go pleasurably insane with all he knew and he wondered if God, the All-Seeing, ever had enough of the folks living down here. “Someday,” Tucker said, “I bet His head’s gonna explode and all the stars will fall out of the sky.”

  Tucker Pluid finally decided to give the elk one blue and one green because a freak of nature was the only thing Herman Knight could ever kill.

  He pressed the eyes into the head so hard and for so long he thought the glass was about to break under his white-nailed fingertips.

  He relaxed his grip. The elk stared at him, lop-eyed and unperturbed.

  “Just wait!” Tucker shouted at the elk head. “Just you wait and see. In a few days you’ll be up there on his wall and then”—Tucker got nose-to-nose with the elk—“then we’ll know what’s really going on, won’t we?”

  Tucker’s head pulsed and he ran his fingers through his thin, graying hair. He thought of Knight’s apartment—spare and unfurnished in his imagination—and he felt an anticipation building in his veins like he hadn’t felt in years, since he was straddling the chute, poised for that one instant above the restless back of the bronc.

  He paced the workshop. His bum leg throbbed like a heartbeat.

  Herman Knight took up with Shirleen two months ag
o, at the start of hunting season, when he met her at a parent-teacher conference to discuss the plummeting grades of Shirleen and Tucker’s son, Jack.

  Jack Pluid sat in a corner of the room and scowled behind the latest issue of Heavy Metal while his teacher and his mother talked about him. He propped the magazine in front of his face and pretended to read, but listened to every word they said in their low, conspiring voices.

  Herman Knight was Flint High School’s newest English teacher and when he spoke to Shirleen about her son he wore a tie that cut into his neck and made his eyes bulge slightly. He sat at his desk and said, in a tight, rasping voice, “Let’s talk about your son’s progress.”

  Shirleen, sitting in one of the student desks, said, “Progress? I’ll be happy if you can just keep him from dropping out.”

  “He’s doing fine, really. We’re studying subject-verb agreement and he doesn’t seem to be having too much difficulty. I understand his grades in the past have been rather low, but I think we can pull those up this semester.”

  Shirleen leaned forward so that Herman Knight could clearly see down the cleft of her half-buttoned shirt and said in a breathy voice, “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Mr. Knight?”

  Knight cleared his throat, put his eyes elsewhere. “Herman, please.”

  “Are you sure you’re telling me the truth about my son, Herm?”

  “Let me be perfectly honest with you, Mrs. Gerstein.”

  “Ms. Gerstein. But I’d prefer Shirleen.”

  “Shirleen,” Knight said and got up from behind his desk and sat next to Shirleen. He looked directly into her eyes. “You have nothing to worry about with Jack. I’ll keep pushing him forward.”

  “What a relief,” Shirleen said, putting her hand to the bottom of her neck and releasing a nervous laugh. “Here I was, all uptight about this conference, thinking this new English teacher I’d heard so much about was gonna put him in a slow readers’ program or something.”

  “No, nothing like that,” Knight said.

  “I’m so relieved,” Shirleen said, her voice low and purring.

  “We move on to predicates next week.”

  “Predicates? They sound dangerous.”

  “Oh, they are,” he said and they both laughed, Shirleen leaning farther forward and Knight’s eyes pulled downward, watching the way the front of her shirt bobbled.

  Shirleen’s conference had gone overtime, cutting fifteen minutes into Gloria Hume’s session. When she and Knight spilled out of the room, giggling like schoolchildren, there was Gloria tapping her foot and checking her wristwatch.

  That night, Shirleen went home and played all of her Nat King Cole albums while downing a six-pack of beer.

  Tucker learned all of this from Jack. For once, he was thankful not to have a stuffed animal mounted in the English teacher’s room.

  Tucker got most of what he needed to know about his ex-wife from his son. He and Shirleen hadn’t spoken to each other since the divorce, that day they left the Sublette County courthouse together and his bum leg suddenly gave out on him and he scraped his knuckles on the sandstone brick facade when he reached out to support himself. Tucker Pluid stood there for what seemed an eternity sucking on his knuckles and watching her car drive down the street, the brake lights flaming to life at the stoplights. Tucker Pluid stood there waiting for God to interrupt the eternity, to reach down with His hand, to turn her car around in traffic and steer her, like a miniature toy, back to him.

  Since then, he’d often seen Shirleen around town, but for years she ducked his attempts at conversation and gave him the cold shoulder when they were standing in line at the post office. Soon, Tucker gave up trying and eventually he stopped waving at her when he passed in his pickup truck.

  “So what do you think?” Tucker asked his son. He was sanding the nose of a mule deer mannequin and Jack was leaning against the doorway with his hands in his pockets.

  “About what? My grades?”

  “No,” Tucker said. “About your mother and your teacher.”

  Jack shrugged. “He’s an asshole.”

  “Don’t use that kind of language in this house.”

  “All right, he’s a prick who thinks the world revolves around his prick.”

  “Jack, I’m warning you—”

  “Whatever, Dad. You asked, I told.”

  The two of them fell silent, listening to the rasp of sandpaper. Jack was leaning against the shelf full of jars and though he had never asked his father about the eyes, Tucker knew his son wondered about them. Tucker Pluid longed to share his gift with him and often prayed that God would reach down and touch Jack, too. Then Tucker would pull a certain jar from the shelf and press it between Jack’s fingers until his son was able to see the children spilling through the halls of Flint High School, the metal lockers banging and the voices crushing all other sound from the air. If he held the jar long enough, Jack might see the teachers coming from their rooms once the halls were quiet, locking their classroom doors behind them and rinsing out their coffee mugs in the teachers’ lounge. In that particular jar, there were four eyes and they belonged to the heads of the two wild mustangs mounted above the school’s trophy case. Painted on the wall between the horse heads were the words: WELCOME TO FLINT HIGH SCHOOL, HOME OF THE 1979 CLASS AA HIGH SCHOOL RODEO CHAMPS.

  Jack did not ask to hold the jars. Instead, he said in a low, flat voice, “I think he’s gonna start shacking up with her.”

  Tucker Pluid blew the dust off the deer’s nose. Tiny drops of his spittle darkened the Styrofoam. He thought about rain hitting this deer’s nose during a lightning storm in the valley. Then, he wondered if the deer would actually feel those drops since his nose was always cold and wet.

  Tucker Pluid sighed. He knew so little about the ways of animals.

  “You hear what I said, Dad?”

  “Yes.” He turned to Jack with a fallen look on his face. “I heard.” He got up from the stool. “Tell you what, let’s go heat up that frozen pizza now.”

  Five weeks after his talk with Jack, when Herman Knight pulled into Tucker’s driveway and gave two short taps on the horn of his Toyota hatchback, Tucker felt a tingling in his guts like he hadn’t felt since that Sunday in Reverend Dodge’s congregation.

  He stopped in the tiny living room of his trailer and peered through the small, unwashed window before going outside to meet the man.

  Herman Knight had called a day earlier and they’d arranged the delivery of the elk.

  Knight got out of his car and came toward the trailer. He was a small man, thin in the chest, with pale, acne-pitted cheeks. Tucker Pluid relaxed a little—but not completely.

  He swung open the door. It banged against the side of the trailer as if caught in a hard gust of wind.

  “Oh,” said Herman Knight. “There you are. I’ve brought the elk.”

  Tucker grabbed for the door and pulled it shut behind him gently. He hadn’t meant for it to be that loud and dramatic. “Let’s go take a look,” he said.

  Together, they walked to the rear of the hatchback.

  “I brought the whole thing.”

  “I can see that,” Tucker said.

  The entire carcass, bled and gutted, was stuffed into the car—the hatchback tied down over the splayed legs, the cream-colored torso twisted and pressed up against the side windows, the head and antlers jammed into the front passenger seat. Tucker noticed a growing rip in the upholstery where the seven-point rack had dug in. A plastic tarp was spread in the back to catch any still-seeping blood.

  Tucker had already heard stories from his other customers of how Knight dragged the elk halfway down Arrow Mountain to the road where the Toyota was parked. In spite of himself, Tucker Pluid marveled at the schoolteacher’s apparent strength.

  “I didn’t know what you’d need, so I brought it all,” Knight said in a high, raspy voice. “This was my first one, you know. Since I’m new in town, I wasn’t sure wh
ere to take it. I asked around and heard you do good work.”

  “That so?” said Tucker.

  “I’ve never killed anything like this before, but I was surprised how easy it was. I just stepped out of my car and saw him up near the trees.” Knight fumbled with a knot on the hatchback’s tie-down rope.

  “Here, let me,” said Tucker and he sliced the cord with the knife he carried on his belt.

  “Thanks. So, when I saw him, I grabbed my rifle. I made sure I was far enough off the road and then I put the rifle up to my shoulder and boom! it was all over, his legs just kicked out from under him. It was pretty messy—blood everywhere. All very Hemingway-esque.”

  “That right?” Tucker said. He pulled the elk from the rear of the car, grabbing the hind hooves and tugging until the shoulders flowed out in a tumbling rush and the antlers clattered against the chrome bumper. The car sprang up, free of the dead weight.

  The two of them stared at the elk as if it were a puddle of spilled coffee there in the gravel driveway.

  “I cleaned him out myself,” Knight said. “Like I said, it was my first one so I hope I did okay.”

  Tucker knelt and examined the ragged knife cuts running down the belly. “Seems fine,” he lied. He looked up at Knight. “All I really need is the head and part of the hide back to the shoulders.” He drew a line across the creamy coat with his finger.

  “I wasn’t sure so I brought the whole thing.”

  “What are you going to do with the meat?”

  Knight shrugged. “Don’t really need it. I eat out a lot.”

  “Well.” Tucker scratched the back of his neck though it didn’t itch. “I know a few folks in this town could use half an elk in their freezer this winter.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me. I was just going for the trophy.”

  Knight’s voice had a high-pitched, spoiled-kid quality that irritated Tucker. He scratched his neck again then went inside the trailer for a handsaw. When he returned, Knight said, “You’re Shirleen’s ex, aren’t you?”