by Bryan Hurt
“Yep,” said Tucker. He knelt and ran his hand along the dark neck, feeling for the vertebrae.
“She and I met at school. I’ve got your son in my English class.”
“So he tells me.”
“You two have talked?” Knight seemed surprised, then worried.
“A little. He only comes over every now and then. He likes to watch me put the animals together.” Tucker filleted the hide away from the shoulders and neck then started to saw.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Knight said. “Shirleen and I have gone out for a couple of drinks.”
“That so?” Tucker hacked through the neck, secretly touching the elk’s sticky eyeballs as he worked and feeling a special thrill of anticipation at the flood of images inside his head. He saw Flint far below, shrouded in early-morning haze. He stood on the rocky slope of Arrow Mountain, grass in his mouth, steam rising from his black nostrils. His harem, the half-dozen female elk, lingered in the trees, watching him eat.
“She doesn’t talk much about you,” Knight said.
Tucker severed the head and set it aside. “Well, I don’t think much about her either.” He stood, putting the weight on his good leg.
“She said you used to be a rodeo star.”
“That what she said—a star?”
“I think those were her words. Maybe not.”
There was a long pause as both men stared again at the carcass, now abbreviated and less graceful.
“Well.” Herman Knight patted his pocket and pulled out his checkbook. “How much do I owe you for the deposit?”
Tucker named the amount and waited for Knight to write the check. Tucker put the check in his shirt pocket; then he asked the schoolteacher to help him drag the carcass around to the winch at the back of the trailer where together they hoisted it aloft so it could bleed out.
Tucker offered the use of his sink to wash up, but Knight just looked at the blood on his hands, smiled, and said no, he’d leave it there for Shirleen to see.
After the Toyota drove away from his trailer, Tucker went inside, dug out the eyes with his index finger, and dropped them into a jar with a flourishing sweep of his hand.
AND SO, TUCKER Pluid set to work, burying himself in fur and bone and viscera. This was his busy season, when the men, women, and children came down from the hills around Flint, carrying deer across their shoulders, clutching fistfuls of sage grouse by the legs, hauling moose on sledges pulled behind ATVs. They came to him in earnest, looking at him with shy smiles, punching him lightly on the shoulder, telling him they couldn’t wait to see him work his magic. Tucker nodded, grinned, assured them he’d do right by all their hard work—because hunting was hard work: high-stepping through endless miles of sage, snow, and downed trees; fording icy streams; toting food, weapons, tents, and emergency gear on serious weekend trips into the valleys beyond the mountains; sitting still as stones even in wind and needle-sharp rain; watching, watching, watching. Let’s face it, hunting could kill a man’s soul as sure as any firefight in Vietnam. It was Tucker’s job to reward that hard labor with a work of art that re-animated the dead on a canvas of thread, glass, Styrofoam, and wire.
Tucker bent over his worktable. He carved, he stitched, he glued. There were so many new orders, so many fresh-kill animals, he almost couldn’t keep up. The bodies piled up, the stink filled his small trailer, and still he worked as fast as he could, plunging his fingers into chest cavities, snipping, tucking, gluing, painting. He ate his dinners alone under the cone of his work light, stopping every now and then to pull a long bristly hair off the end of his tongue.
All the while, an elk sat in the corner of the shop, watching him through hollowed-out eye sockets. It said everything with its silence.
“Yes,” Tucker whispered in response. “You’re next, you son of a gun. You’re next.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, it was Shirleen who made the trip out to Tucker’s trailer. He stood in his living room and watched her pull into the driveway, gravel crunching beneath the Toyota’s tires. Tucker turned away from the window and looked at the elk head leaning against the inside of his front door. The fur still smelled of glue and the painted muzzle could stand another hour of drying, but he was anxious to get rid of the mount, to get it inside the schoolteacher’s house. His mouth felt full of cotton, as if he were about to take the wildest ride of his life.
“She’s driving his car,” Tucker Pluid told the elk. “That’s not a good sign.”
The elk seemed to smile with his blue and green eyes, though his muzzle was clamped shut in a neutral expression. Tucker grasped the head by the large branches of its rack and brought the face up to his eye level. He had done his best work on this head, adding a barely noticeable curve to the neck and cocking one ear at a forty-five-degree angle as if the elk were listening to a rival bull’s challenging bugle echo off a canyon wall at the moment he was shot by Herman Knight. Tucker liked to think this bull had been about to draw a breath for a louder, more operatic reply.
Shirleen sat in the Toyota, watching him watching her. Exhaust smoked up from the back of the schoolteacher’s car.
Tucker walked out of the trailer and carefully carried the elk head to the passenger side of the car. Without turning off the engine, Shirleen got out, holding her unzipped coat together with one hand, and walked around to open the door for him. Tucker placed the head in the seat, facing forward. On impulse, he strapped the seat belt across the elk’s neck so it wouldn’t roll on the drive home. He stepped back and Shirleen closed the door with a hard thud that got muffled in the cold November air.
Then they turned and spoke to each other for the first time in more than a decade.
“Well—” Tucker said.
“So—” Shirleen said.
Tucker looked down at his boots, his left leg half cocked to one side. “I hear our boy’s starting to improve with the English language.”
“We’re working with him,” Shirleen said.
“‘We’?” Tucker said, looking up along the length of her body until he met her eyes. I shouldn’t have done that, he thought. I should just look away and forget about those legs, those hips, that rib cage.
“Jack’s teacher and I,” Shirleen said. Her warm breath steamed the air between them. “Herman and I.”
“Well, whaddaya know,” Tucker said. “Is he a nice fellow?”
“Fuck you, you son of a bitch,” Shirleen said.
“Please,” Tucker said with a wince. “Don’t use that kind of language.”
Shirleen continued as if she hadn’t heard, the breath leaving her mouth in sharp puffs, like a teapot finally coming to boil. “You goddamn son of a bitch. You stand there and act like you don’t know a thing, but you know everything, don’t you?”
“Flint’s a small place,” Tucker said, trying not to smile. “I can’t help but know everything.”
“Yeah? Well, you don’t know the half of it,” Shirleen said, her words tumbling out like guts from a knife-slit belly. “Herm’s not like you. He’s got goals. He’s going someplace. This teaching job here, it’s just a stepping-stone for him, that’s all. He’s a forward thinker. Always leaning into the wind. That’s what he tells me. Lean into the wind. You, you always got blown around like tumbleweed. And you can just wipe that shit-eating grin off your face because you know what I’m talking about, Tucker Pluid.”
He swallowed and heard his throat click. He hadn’t expected any of this—Shirleen coming out instead of Knight, then suddenly attacking him. Now, he just wanted to get rid of the elk.
“I never wanted to come out here today,” Shirleen said, as if reading his thoughts. “I even told Herm not to come out here in the first place, but he said it would be good therapy. He said if I came out here, it’d be like leaning into the wind.”
“He said all that?” Tucker said.
“Yeah.” A strange expression crept over her face. She dropped her hand and her coat fell open. “Hey. I just rea
lized something.”
“What?”
“Look at me, Tucker.”
He looked.
“I’m still standing, aren’t I?”
Indeed she was. She stood with her hands on her hips, the coat fallen open to reveal more of the soft curves that kept him awake, delirious, all those nights since their divorce.
“Aren’t you cold?” Tucker asked her. “Do you want to come inside and warm up?” His voice hitched with agony even as he said this.
Shirleen tipped her head back against her collar and laughed. Tucker grew dizzy at the sight of the muscles along her throat pumping up and down, the tiny chin bobbing and the sensual plumes of breath at her lips. His leg trembled.
“You know what?” Shirleen said when she’d caught her breath. “He was right. This was better than I thought it would be. I actually feel good.” She twirled around, dancing a short jig in the gravel driveway. “Woooooo! No more pussyfooting around town for me.”
She stopped and stared directly at Tucker, her eyes shining like chips of glass. “You can do what you want with your life, but I’ll tell you one thing, Tucker Pluid: I’ve had it with you.” She pointed her finger at him and he felt himself deflate with each poke. “I mean I’ve really, truly had it with you. Once and for all.”
She skipped around to the driver’s side, got in the still-running car, her new lover’s car, and backed out of the driveway. As the car retreated, the elk head stared at him with its odd eyes.
Tucker Pluid walked back into the trailer, forgetting to shut the door so the cold air rolled in like fog around his legs. He moved around the tiny kitchen, putting a frozen dinner in the microwave though it was still the middle of the afternoon. When he ate the dinner, he discovered a hard, unthawed spot in the middle of the food, but he continued to eat, pretending not to notice.
He wiped his mouth, got up from the table, and walked back through the trailer to his workshop, the cold, foggy air from outside chasing him down the narrow hallway.
He stared at the row of jars, at the pairs of eyes floating in each one. He knew every one of those eyeballs intimately, he’d removed them from the sockets himself, as gently as a gardener lifting potatoes from the ground. He’d labeled the baby food jars, but after so many months there was no need for that anymore. He knew where every pair of eyes would lead him.
He thought of the breasts he had seen, the bare, saggy buttocks flashed during early-morning trips to the toilet. Tucker thought about the arguments, the dirty jokes, the cruel asides, the gossip, the injuries, the infidelities, the petty malice, the defeats, the triumphs at someone else’s expense. All that sinning. Tucker stood there in his workshop, his eyes sweeping across the row of jars, and for the first time in months, he felt weakened by all that he knew. He trembled to think everything he’d preserved in his jars was just one small drop in the mighty brain of God. Even if he had the eyes of every animal killed on Arrow Mountain by every hunter in Flint, there would still be events beyond his control.
“There are some things we’ll never know,” he murmured, without realizing he’d spoken. “Shouldn’t know.”
He looked at the newest jar on the shelf.
Then Tucker Pluid told himself: If I do this, if I touch that jar and close my eyes and think about the inside of his house, I will be tortured beyond repair. He remembered a cowboy he knew on the circuit, a shy bull rider from Rawlins who always stood on the outside of conversations but watched everyone with moist, caramel-colored eyes. One time, he let go of the halter and got tossed between the horns like a rag doll. No one knew why he’d unwrapped the rope from his hand, but they’d all stood there near the chutes and watched him do it. While the bull rider was in the intensive care unit, the doctor came out and told the other riders who were standing there holding their hats, “I’m sorry. It’s no use. He’s beyond repair.”
Tucker thought of that cowboy now for the first time in fifteen years and he felt something inside him drain away.
One day, before he was broken across the horns of the bull, the rider with the soft brown eyes told Tucker that knowing the bull or the horse you were about to get on was the worst thing in the world. “If you’ve been on his back before,” he said, “then you know what to expect. You end up anticipating which direction he’ll kick and your body leans that way, but then when his legs shoot out in a different direction—snap! Off you go.”
Tucker took a deep breath and looked up at God.
“God,” he said, “the gift is too large. Take it back.” He was sorry for talking to God like that, but there was nothing else he could do since Shirleen had shrunk his world that afternoon.
Tucker Pluid reached up with both hands, fingers clammy with sweat, and grabbed a pair of baby food jars. For an instant, his mind hummed and brightened, crazy with images: Jacqueline Rodgers brushing her hair in a waterfall over her breasts, Herman Knight and Shirleen locked in a never-ending embrace in the apartment’s living room where Tucker recognized two hunting prints he used to own now mounted on the wall opposite the elk head.
Then Tucker raised the jars above his head and sent them splintering to the floor. He reached for another and another and another until every jar was gone and he stood, panting, hearing only the ragged breath in his throat and the wind shaking the plywood walls of the workshop. Then, Tucker Pluid, the broken cowboy, the great preserver of all things dead and wild in Flint, covered his face with his hands and sobbed while, at his feet, hundreds of eyes looked up at him.
Second Chance
by Etgar Keret
translated by Miriam Shlesinger
On the face of it, it seemed like just another service—innovative, revolutionary, monstrous, call it whatever you want but when you came right down to it, Second Chance was the greatest economic success story of the twenty-first century. Unlike most great ideas, which tend to be quite simple, the idea behind Second Chance was a bit more complicated: Second Chance gave you the opportunity to go to one particular critical moment in your life, and instead of having to choose either one road or the other, you could continue along both. Can’t decide whether to have the abortion and drop your boyfriend, or to marry him and start a family? Not sure whether you should start from scratch overseas, or stay put in your dad’s business? Now you can have it both ways. How does it work? Well, it’s like this: You’ve reached the most important crossroad in your life and you can’t make up your mind? Just head for the Second Chance outlet nearest your home and give them a full rundown on your dilemma. Then choose one of the options, whichever you want, and keep on living your life. Don’t worry, the other option, the one you didn’t choose, doesn’t disappear. They have it running on one of their If-Only-I’d computers (Reg. Tr.), carefully keeping track of all the variables. Once you’ve gone through your life in full, your body is taken to one of the Road-Not-Taken halls (also Reg. Tr.), where the entire data set is fed into your brain in real time, and kept alive through a unique bio-electronic process developed expressly for this purpose. So actually, your own brain can give you the experience of the other life you could have had, down to the last detail.
Miri or Shiri? Teary or cheery?
Placid old age or perhaps hara-kiri?
A child or a pup? IVF or adopt?
Move to Miami or pick up where you stopped?
At Second Chance, whatever you do—
You can have your cake and eat it too.
It’s perfect. Seriously. Nothing cynical about it. It’s a fabulous concept. I mean there aren’t many inventions that actually succeed in meeting some human need. Ninety-nine percent of them are just some ugly combo of pushy marketing and spineless consumers. And Second Chance is clearly in that single significant, useful percentile. Except what does that have to do with Max?
Our Max lived his life straight as an arrow, fast as lightning, no ifs, no buts, at least until now. Max’s dad—well, that’s a different story altogether. Max’s dad not only opted for Second Chance
, he never stopped talking about it either: “If it weren’t for that rotten Second Chance, I’d never—and I do mean never—have married that revolting mother of yours,” he’d tell Max at least once a day. “I swear, sometimes I feel like putting a bullet through my head, just so I can finally make it to Road-Not-Taken.” (By the way, a bullet through the head specifically is a very poor choice. Second Chance assumes absolutely no responsibility for the quality of service in case of major damage to cerebral tissue.) Max knew that his father didn’t really mean it, and he hoped that his mother realized this too, but even if she did, it didn’t make his dad’s behavior any less upsetting. “If he’d taken the Second Chance in connection with my being born instead,” Max tried to console her, “he’d have been just as obsessive: ‘I feel like putting a bullet through my head just so I can relive my life without that egotistical kid. If I went and died tomorrow I bet he wouldn’t even bother coming to the funeral.’ You know how Dad is, it has nothing to do with you.”
The truth is that his mother really did opt for Second Chance in connection with having him, but she was tactful enough never to let on about it. In her case, the Road-Not-Taken would have led her to a quick divorce, a successful business venture, and a happy second marriage. No harm done, she’d get a chance to live that life too.
Max had always preferred women who were curvy, tan, with big tits and thick lips. And Shana, who was very very pretty, by the way, was the complete opposite. She was skinny, flat as a board, and her lips were about as thick as a credit card. But love, as the saying goes, is blind, and Max fell in love. Before the wedding they didn’t opt for Second Chance, or before the twins either. Max was against it in principle. He said people ought to assume responsibility for their own decisions. And as for Shana, she’d already wasted hers long before that on a previous boyfriend, whose proposal she’d turned down in her regular life. The thought that after her death she’d experience marriage with someone else was pretty frustrating as far as Max was concerned, but it was also motivational. And the need to feel that he was the right choice often drove him to be a better husband.