by Lydia Peelle
“You know what I wanna do?” he says, eyes on the screen. “Get me one of them flat-screen TVs. One of them big ones.”
Tanya looks up at him, her pen in her mouth, and doesn’t say a word. She is writing a poem about the panther. All her life, one thing has been sure: nothing ever happens in Highland City. Now this. She believes it is some sort of sign.
The feet contain a quarter of all the bones in the human body, the doctors told Jack when he was in the hospital. Well, Jack asked, how many bones are in the human body, anyway? Depending on how you count the sternum bones, 206 or 208. So: the bones of one foot, plus one leg from the knee down—count them—he was what, one-eighth gone? He thinks about this often—too often. In bed, trying to sleep, he stuffs a pillow over the place where his left leg should be, the way the nurses showed him. When that does nothing to calm the pain, he lurches out of bed and finds the heaviest book in the house. When that doesn’t work, he flings it across the room, pounds the mattress, and bites the pillow. His leg. Sometimes he has a panicky thought that they gave it to Jeanne, in a jar, like a tonsil. And that she has it up there in the house, with all his things: his old records and taxidermy videos, the suit he wore at their wedding, his .22, and his mother’s Bible. All those other things he would have said twenty years ago were essential but had proven after all not to be.
Ray Blevins finds a dead fawn under his tree stand, all ripped to hell, half-buried in the leaves like something is planning to return for it. He comes up to the shop for no other reason than to tell this story to Jack. Ray is one that Jack has a hard time finding any respect for. One of the big talkers who needs a dozen technological gadgets to bring down a measly spike buck, who wants to go out there on a Saturday morning with his cell phone and his GPS system, his digital estrus bleat caller and human scent killer and eight-hundred-dollar rifle, and pretend he is Daniel Boone, out on the knife-edge of danger, deep in the uncharted wilderness. But a man couldn’t get lost out there if he tried. That’s why Jack quit hunting long ago, even before he got sick—because you simply can’t get lost anymore—and where’s the excitement and danger and pleasure in that? Even if your GPS broke and your cell phone fell in the mud, if you didn’t run into another yahoo doing the same thing ten yards down the hill then you could just follow the sound of the highway, find the gas station, and call your wife.
“You know,” Ray says, jabbing his finger at the window. “They say one of these cats will follow you. Read about a man out in Colorado got followed for twenty miles. They’re just curious, though. Worst thing you can do is run. You run, well, then, kiss it good-bye. Get your jugular torn right out. If you know one’s behind you, you just got to keep your cool, keep going on about your business.”
Jack gives the clock a good long look, but Ray keeps going.
“Ten feet. Ten feet, they can pounce from a standstill. Tell that to your kid on his walk to school in the morning. Tell that to these people who think we should let this thing be.”
“Tell that to my ex-wife, then,” Jack says, turning away. “She seems to think we should put a cozy little wicker basket and a scratching post out for it.”
Ray snorts. “People just don’t understand. What we have here, what we’ve got on our hands is a monster.”
Those who have heard it say the call of a mountain lion is like the scream of a woman, more chilling, more hopeless, than anything you will hear in your life. The scream of a woman whose child has been wrenched from her arms and who is now watching, helplessly, as the last breath is choked out of it.
The fact that no one in Highland City has heard such a night-ripping scream is one of the many points that Jack constantly brings up in support of finding another explanation. What he does not tell anyone, not even Jeanne, is the sound that he himself heard one night, a week ago, at the moment he found a way to creep around the pain and part the curtains of a dream. Suddenly he was wide awake, heart pounding, terrified, thinking, What was that? What the hell was that?
But what with the painkillers he was still on. And the awful nights’ sleep he’s been having. Of course there’s an explanation. It was nothing more than a terrible hallucination. And yet for the past week he has kept the television on all night, the volume turned up loud. Just for company.
Kenny Peabody buys a number 41/2 steel bear trap with a double-pronged drag hook on an eight-foot chain and hauls a dead calf for bait up the hillside behind the filling station and when word gets out about it, all hell breaks loose. “We need to take action,” men start saying. “For the safety of our women and children. Before something happens that we all regret.” Some Rotarians get together and invest in night-vision goggles and go out every midnight with an arsenal and don’t come home until sunrise. Jack shakes his head and wonders how soon before someone gets himself shot. Whatever that thing might turn out to be, he thinks, why not just leave it the hell in peace? Every third customer who comes in asks if Jack will mount the cat for him if he bags it. And Jack, weary, counters with the oldest joke in the book: “Sure, Bud. Two for one and we’ll do your ex-wife too.”
They slap him on the back, sending a tide of pain down his spine. “Good one, Jack!” they all say.
One morning Ronnie grabs a pencil from Jack’s workbench, draws something on the back of an envelope, and thrusts it in front of Jack. He’s breathing through his nose, his glasses slipped down, his flabby face trembling. “I seen it,” he says. “Out on the road last night. I seen it! Scared the shit out of me. Nearly wrecked.”
Jack squints at the picture: a primitive cave painting, a child’s crayon drawing. “You saw a water buffalo?”
Ronnie stares at him. He hits the paper with the end of the pencil. “The cougar. Last night, around eleven. I was leaving Sullivan’s. I caught it in my high beams, coming around that bend. It was there on the shoulder. Then it just disappeared into the trees. I pulled over but it was long gone.”
“You don’t say.”
Jack considers the drawing again. It reminds him of the first couple of mounts Ronnie has attempted himself, a coon and a pintail duck: graceless, stiff, hastily and sloppily done. You have to lose yourself in the work, Jack has always believed. At some point in the process, even for a few minutes—and it sounds like a bunch of hocus-pocus—you have to let the animal lead you. After all, it’s not clay or paint or iron you’re working with. What you’re working with has, up until recently, been a living, breathing thing, for years has been blinking, snorting, sleeping, grazing, scanning the horizon. You have to respect that. You have to get in touch with that, if you want to come close to reproducing it.
“Believe it now?” Ronnie says, striking the paper with the pencil.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Jack says, feeling suddenly depressed. He’s ready to go home, lie down on the couch, turn the television on, fry up a pork chop. To hell with his new diet.
“That bitch is mine,” Ronnie says, as if Jack has suggested otherwise. “That son of a bitch is all mine.”
Up on the ridge under Ray Blevins’s tree stand, the dead fawn’s flesh is stripped away by coyote, then fox, then possum, their eyes glinting as they visit it in the night, tiny teeth tearing. The ants come too. Whatever killed it does not come back. Soon all that is left is the rib cage, looming on the hilltop like an empty basket.
One chilly December afternoon, the smell of snow in the air, Tanya comes to the shop to pick up Ronnie, whose truck isn’t running again. Pulling up the drive, she sees Jeanne in the yard, fussing around with her birdfeeders, squat and round in her big down parka, her glasses on a string around her neck. What is it with old people and birds? Tanya wonders. She thinks of her grandmother, the device she has with the microphone outside so she can sit in her living room and listen to the birds while she watches her soaps on television. If I ever end up like that, she thinks, climbing out of the car and skirting a puddle in the driveway. Stuck rotting away inside while the world goes on outside. Well, somebody just shoot me.
When T
anya comes in, Ronnie is working outside the walk-in with a buck head that is hanging upside down on a heavy chain. He is slowly pulling off the cape from the shoulders forward, until it hangs inside out, dangling from the end of the nose like a sock. Exposed is the gleaming naked head, white subcutaneous fat, dark veins, lidless, staring eyes. Jack started the fleshing-out himself but didn’t get past struggling with the winch. Now he’s sitting at his workbench, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. He watches Tanya go straight over to Ronnie and lay into him, their voices sharp across the shop. Jack is impressed by how she doesn’t take a second look at the buck—even Jeanne, after all these years, can’t go near them when they’re at this stage. After a few minutes she turns her back on Ronnie and, looking over at Jack, raises her hand to wave. He waves back. To his surprise, she comes over.
“Hey,” she says, almost flirtatious. “Want to see my new tattoo?”
Before he can answer, she yanks the neck of her sweatshirt off her shoulder and turns around. On her shoulder blade, there are four short slash marks and a drop of ruby blood. At first Jack thinks it is a real wound. She lowers her voice and steals a glance at Ronnie, then levels her gaze at Jack.
“Ronnie thinks it’s all a load of bull, but that panther is my totem animal. Want to know how I know? It came to me in a dream and told me so.”
Jack wishes there was some way to hide his heaving gut. He points to the tattoo. “You’re going to have that the rest of your life.”
“Well, yeah.”
He’s got one himself, from his stint in the army—a clover-leaf on his bicep, with his infantry division printed inside; they all got the same one, one night in Texas. All the color is faded out now except the blue. What he really means to say—how can he explain it? The rest of your life, Tanya, is a hell of a lot longer than you think it will be. And you’ll grow tired of everything. Your own face in the mirror. The sound of your own voice. And that’s when you’ll start regretting that tattoo. Not because you see it every day. But because you don’t even notice it anymore. Because you thought it would last forever, and remind you of something forever. And it doesn’t.
On December 15, at one-thirty in the afternoon, Jack drives to the medical center in Scottsville to be fitted with his permanent limb. He has rescheduled the appointment once already, dreading it, moaning about it for a week until Jeanne finally said, “Oh, Hud! Grow up and just go!”
The nurse takes his blood pressure and vital signs as impersonally as if she were trussing a turkey. When she asks how he is feeling, he catches her eye and smiles, trying to flirt a little.
“Well, what can I say? I’ve got one foot in the grave.”
She gives him a blank look and a feeble, false smile that makes him feel old and ridiculous in his flimsy gown. Then she goes out into the hall and returns with his new limb. It is eerily lifelike, down to the wrinkles on the toes, and the exact same color as his flesh. “You’ll forget it’s not yours,” she says brightly, as she shows him how to put it on. “And it’s flame-resistant.”
Jack scrolls through the possibilities for a wisecrack, but finds he simply does not have the energy. “Fine,” he finally says. “Good.”
The doctor is in and out in three minutes, barely raising his eyes from Jack’s chart. “Any questions?” he says as he goes, not leaving room for a yes. He is already tucking his pen in his breast pocket, checking his watch, and groping for the door handle behind him.
Jack is suddenly alone, left sitting on the table with a pamphlet in his hand: LIFE WITH YOUR NEW LIMB. It is filled with glossy photos of retirees acting like giddy teenagers: walking hand in hand on the beach, bowling, ballroom dancing—the woman with a rose clamped between her dentures . Don’t ever admit anything has changed, they’re screaming at him. Never for a minute slow down or feel sorry for yourself. Look at us! He crumples the pamphlet and throws it in the trash can.
I do have a question, Doc, he thinks, sitting there, his shoulders hunched. Actually, I do. What the hell am I supposed to do now? There is something he hasn’t had the nerve to tell anyone yet: he doesn’t think he can go on with his work. He has never before realized how physical it is: the lifting, the sawing, six or seven solid hours on his feet—foot—a day. And it’s not just the stump, the gone leg. He’s exhausted to the core. Just yesterday he had to ask Ronnie to finish a coon for him—a simple little raccoon—he got so winded, trying to stretch the cape around the form. Somebody tell me what to do, he thinks, struggling to pull his pants on over the new limb, disgusted by it as if it’s a bad joke, a gag trick. Somebody tell me just exactly what it is I’m supposed to do now.
On the way back to Highland City, Jack takes the old road instead of the highway, the pike that stretches all the way up to Kentucky. It follows the natural valley of the hills and was the route the long hunters followed, two hundred years ago, when they came to these woods from the north to harvest the buffalo and deer. Jack’s father used to tell him stories of the long hunters. They’d arrive with nothing but a gun and an ax, build a log cabin and stay for a year, eating deer meat and salting the skins, which they rolled up on a travois and brought home when they simply couldn’t carry any more. Parklike forests, great open spaces under magnificently canopied trees. When the first of them came down from Kentucky, his father told him, they did not dismount, lest they be trampled, the woods were so crowded with game.
Jack tries to picture it, squinting up into the sparse trees on the hillside along the pike, but he can’t. It must have been something like being in the shop, he decides. Big-antlered deer standing shoulder to shoulder, fox and weasels cheek to jowl. Except also wolf and bear. Mountain lion.
What if? Jack thinks, entering the Highland City limits. What if there really is a mountain lion up there? The houses huddle on either side of the pike, brick and squat, with carports and dog runs, the older ones at the edges of the last few tobacco fields, the farmers inside in front of their TVs, getting paid by Uncle Sam not to grow tobacco. He passes the gas stations, the cinderblock barbeque stand, the shopping center, the new shopping center. The smokestacks of the PLAXCO plant poke up out of the hills to the south, crowned by white smoke.
If a panther really is up there, sniffing out an ancient path its great-great ancestors once followed, is at this very moment twitching its great muscular tail and arching its back to run its claws down the trunk of a tree, dropping to all fours to nose at a beef jerky wrapper filled with dirty rainwater and picking around rusted old tin cans and television sets to make its way into one of those hollers, meowing a lonely meow, well—Jack thinks, pulling in his driveway and stopping to check the empty mailbox in front of his trailer—then I pity the old bastard.
Tanya, alone in Ronnie’s house, takes off all her clothes and lies down on the couch, staring at the blank space on the wall, cleared of posters to make room for his new TV. She’s been driving back and forth to her place all day, bringing the last of her stuff over. Now she wishes it would all disappear. All those things that seemed so special when she bought them: her leather jacket, her laptop, her world map shower curtain, her black boots, it all looks like a load of junk, now, stacked up in liquor boxes on Ronnie’s kitchen floor. Moving in with Ronnie is the start of something, she knows, but she also knows that it is maybe not the start she was looking for. She closes her eyes and pictures herself hovering above all of her possessions, flying away. She imagines herself in a forest. A dark, deep forest. Walking out into it, naked, and never coming back. She hears Ronnie fumble with his keys at the front door, swearing. She disappears into a cathedral of trees.
Tiny goes missing. Jeanne calls Jack late on a Sunday to tell him, apologizes if she’s interrupting anything. He has been watching a tedious sitcom, his prosthesis off, the stump tucked away out of sight under a blanket. The bowl of chili he spilled reaching for the phone is splattered all over the floor. He looks at it dolefully. Well, it was giving him heartburn, and he shouldn’t be eating that junk, anyway. He pounds his chest an
d burps.
“Now, Huddie, I don’t want to jump to no conclusions. But that cat, Hud—it could have just come down out of the woods behind the house and waited. I let him out for five minutes. Five minutes. That panther could have just slunk in and—oh! I’ve got goose pimples just thinking about it—carried him away.”
Jack can picture her perfectly, pacing the kitchen, ripping at her fingernails, the phone pinched under her chin. In moments of crisis, she has always managed to lose herself in a cyclone of panic. Never keeps her head. He sighs, too loudly, sending a rush of wind into the phone. Jeanne falls silent.
Damn, he thinks. Christ. Now I’ve done it.
“Well, I’m sorry, Jack. I shouldn’t have called you so late. I’m sorry. Never mind. Get back to what you were doing. Never mind me. We can talk in the morning.”
“We’ll find him, Jeannie,” he hears himself saying, cutting her short. “We’ll find him. He’s just gone off to sow some wild oats. He’s just been feeling full of himself, these days.” As he goes on, Jack finds that he wants to believe himself. “He just went off for a little tour of the neighborhood. That’s all, Jeannie. That’s all. I promise. We’ll find him tomorrow.”
When he walks into the shop in the morning Jeanne is there already, red-eyed and red-nosed, leaves clinging to her jeans where she’s been down on her hands and knees, checking under the porch and in the old spring box. She takes a step towards him, as if she is going to fall into his arms, then hesitates, bites her lip, collapses in a chair, and covers her face with her hands, letting out a muffled sob that hits Jack like a hammer in the chest.
They drive around all day doing twenty-five, Jeanne hanging half out the window, calling and whistling. “Tiiiii-ny!” It’s a warm day, more September than December, and clouds of hatched gnats hover in the road.