“You coming?” Andre asked.
“You go on,” Smoker said. “Think I’ll work my way across the side of the canyon to that big rock.”
Smoker tracked Andre’s orange stocking cap as it scaled the bluff into the shale slides, a bright dot in a season that had quit on color. He envied his brother’s view from that promontory. Up there, a person could see the whole of the country. It was hard to hunt; there was so much to sort through. You got lost just looking. At least Smoker did. He could only guess about Andre. Smoker closed his eyes. The scent of burned fields, disked and turned, rested over him. He didn’t open his eyes until something stirred the rocks. He waited on the rhythm of steps. In his rifle scope, the deer poked through the shadows, just a two-point but solid from a summer of green wheat and lazy afternoons. Smoker watched the deer skyline then let him amble the wall break. Twice the buck pitched his ears and halted. Two does joined him. He let his harem lead. They wove through the draw bottom single file. Once the lead doe jerked into a trot. The buck faced the other direction, leaving nothing but an ass shot that would ruin the meat. Smoker waited. A noise in the rock above drew the buck’s attention. The deer turned. Smoker found him in the scope, put the crosshairs over his shoulder, but the deer collapsed before he could fire.
The does bolted over a barbed-wire fence, but the buck kicked dirt and weeds. A black stain blotched its stomach. It buckled then staggered to its forelegs. Smoker slowly pulled back on the trigger. The buck dropped hard and didn’t stir. Above, a boy slipped in the silt and slid down the grade, one of the two from the truck at the house.
“You shot my deer?”
“You knocked him down,” Smoker said. “I just finished him before he ran off.”
At the hill’s break, they saw the deer, still, tongue caked with dirt. Smoker sawed his knife through the windpipe gristle. Steam lifted from the deer’s throat. He handed the boy his knife and showed him how to notch his tag with the month and date, then puncture the buck’s ear and tie it. Ten minutes later Andre appeared over Smoker’s perch. The boy could see it was two against one. “We gonna share him?”
Smoker grinned. “Which part you want?”
“The horns,” Jack said.
“I think you could probably talk me out of the antlers.” Smoker split the deer’s belly. The boy rolled the guts onto the ground. Smoker separated the liver and slipped it back into the empty chest. They dragged the deer toward the house until a man and a smaller boy crested a bluff in front of them. The boy’s father shook. “John Miller,” he said.
“I shot this deer, then he got up.” Jack, the boy, turned toward Smoker. “He shot him so he wouldn’t get away. He said I could keep the antlers, Dad.”
John cocked a thick eyebrow at Smoker. “Awfully generous with your deer.”
“He got to that brush, he’d belong to the coyotes,” Smoker said.
“You say,” the man replied.
“Folks got to have permission to hunt this property. It’s private,” Smoker told them.
John fumbled his wallet from his pocket. He dug out an orange card and held it up. The boys did the same.
“That’s Fellers’s card,” Smoker said.
“Yes,” John said. “Harvey Fellers.”
Smoker told him, “This isn’t Fellers’s land. He just leases.”
John blew a breath. “Jesus. I didn’t know.”
The boy stroked the antlers with his forefinger. Andre looked into Smoker’s face. “Ain’t your land,” Andre told him.
Smoker eyed his brother.
Andre knocked dirt off one boot with his rifle butt. “It’s Fellers’s land. I sold it.”
Smoker gazed off a long while. No one spoke. Finally he kneeled and stared at the deer a long time then patted its haunches with his palm. The hair bristled and swirled where they’d rolled him. Smoker rubbed it flat and considered the animal dying: its busted gut and open nose full of gunpowder and the smell of its own blood. He imagined a wild, frantic brain trying to recall how to beat a heart or blow open a lung, a knowledge of a kind so useless and necessary it seemed impossible to recall.
Before the sun fell, Smoker and Andre hunted the creek drainage together. A cool wind leaned the weed tops in gusts. A line of does worked its way to the wheat. Fifteen, Smoker counted. The deer were jumpy and broke into a trot whenever the wind shifted enough to throw their scent line. Andre fastened his jacket buttons. They stayed quiet awhile. Smoker’s legs stiffened from the walk. He stretched them and enjoyed the tight muscles unbunching. Andre stared west to the river and the lighted line of the coulee. He pulled a weed from a tuft of dirt. His teeth worked it flat before he rested a hand on Smoker’s shoulder and pushed himself up. “You traded.”
“Yep.”
“I ain’t taking your blame.”
“I’ll let you blame yourself,” Smoker said. He found the moon, pale in the still blue sky, just a thin melon slice like they served in the café. He felt his brother’s shadow over him, and then he knew it was not. He listened to Andre’s steps until they’d played out and no sound at all was left in the grass.
* * *
“Don’t you fall asleep on me, goddamnit,” Smoker said. “You look only half here.”
“My powder’s dry,” Andre told him. “Make sure yours is similar.”
“How you think it’s going so far?” Smoker asked.
“Swimmingly,” Andre said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Me neither. It’s not going at all,” Andre said. “When Bird gets here. That’s when we’ll see.”
They were quiet for a while.
“How’d you get women?” Andre asked.
Smoker shrugged. “There ain’t no trick to it,” he said. “Past hello and a joke that makes yourself look silly, it’s just listening. She can read the phone book if she’s inclined. It’s better if you don’t know the topic. Leaves the questions easy to ask.” Smoker drank. “Smooth talkers are overrated. Woman’s got to be convinced and the only person can sell her is her. Just doing a different kind of math. You’d be good at it.” Smoker looked at him. “You’re starving for love songs, though.”
“What you’re describing doesn’t seem fodder for them.”
“Sing it long enough and it passes.”
“How come Dede runs off twice a year with you so tuneful?”
“Keeping them is another matter.”
“That’s why you fucked Claire? You wanted to know what a stayer was like?”
Smoker kept silent.
“And now she isn’t one anymore.”
“Ain’t her leaving,” Smoker said.
“She filed papers.”
“You were already gone. You can blame her and me all you want but don’t get the afterward turned around. She kept with you. Even before me and her you moped in your head by your lonesome. I crossed where I never should have one time and so did she. But that’s all, one time.”
“That’s felony logic. You just don’t want to own up.”
“I have owned up. I just owned up again. So has she. Your problem is owning up isn’t enough. None of us can rehang the goddamned calendar and put days back. We’re stuck and so are you.”
“That ain’t enough,” Andre said.
“You want to hit me?” Smoker asked.
“That’s not enough, either.”
“You want to hit her?”
Andre shook his head. “I want to know why.”
Smoker sighed. “It happened is all.”
Andre shook his head again. “Wasn’t any earthquake or tidal wave nor act of God. Something you did.”
“Yep. Me and her,” Smoker said. “And it wasn’t no act of God, you’re right. Just something two people did.”
“To me.”
“To each other. Wounding you wasn’t the goddamn purpose.”
“You were aware it would bust me up and so was she. Tell me that isn’t your fault and I’ll tear your ears off your goddamned head.”
>
“I got no excuse,” Smoker replied. “All you said is true.” He paused. “You know you’re the smartest of us, but you get the bit between your teeth about something and logic nor horse sense can dissuade you and that doesn’t seem so intelligent. It’s my fault, yeah, and hers, too. And yours. That’s why you can’t add it up. You’re not hunting a reason. You aren’t even looking to blame. You want me and her to make it so it didn’t happen. I’m not much of a thinker but Claire is. Don’t you figure she’s been studying it as hard as you? Hell, likely harder. She’s got no sum for that kind of math, either, and you’re back where you are.”
“Back where you put me, you mean.”
* * *
Harold returned not long after without Calvin. “He won’t be long,” Harold said.
Andre rose for the door.
“I said he’d be here anytime,” Harold said.
“Okay,” Andre said. “I’m just going to check the camper and get me some air.”
“Dogs’d hear anybody fussing with it,” Harold replied.
“I’m a worrier,” Andre told him.
Outside Harold’s house, the bear lumbered to the camper window. Andre retrieved the pint from the cab, then fashioned a loop from their rope and unlocked the camper door. He passed it over the animal’s head as it lumbered out. Together man and animal climbed the bluff behind the house. Their breaths smoked in the clear cold air. After a hundred yards, Andre paused on a flat rock. He’d shouldered his rifle to provide an equalizer if the bear turned hostile, but instead, the animal crawled the distance between them and put his head at Andre’s feet, then lay on his back like he wanted scratched. Andre recognized a tiny plastic tag on its ear with numbers and a circus icon. The bear pawed Andre’s hands for more attention. He had no claws, Andre saw. His teeth, too, had been filed flat as a horse’s. He’d be hard-pressed to kill a squirrel.
The animal curled around his hands. Andre tugged the cork from Smoker’s whiskey pint. The bear rolled to his back and extended all four limbs. Andre dangled the bottle over him. The bear clamped it with both forepaws and employed a foot to gently tip the bottom. The bourbon trickled into his mouth. The bear coughed, then shuddered and extended his tongue. He hoisted the bottle again and whiskey glugged into his mouth and spilled out the corners. He steered the bottle upright, blinked, paused a moment, then dropped it. The glass clinked against a rock. The bear lifted his paws and bleated, and Andre realized this was one of his circus duties, though alcohol was likely a new addition.
Above, enough moonlight remained to silver the trees and rock outcroppings, but shadows draped the driveway portions where the outside lights couldn’t reach. The hard ground was blue and the sandpit behind looked like waves from a million years ago. Andre sang himself a lullaby then hummed other songs, just threads he recalled from the radio. The bear tipped with the rhythm until a motor scooter lumbered the road below.
LAMENTATIONS
August 1987–January 1988
A month after Rose’s encounter with the dogs, Andre and Claire’s child breached in her womb then stymied and died within Claire. The obstetrician performed a cesarean section. Finished, he withdrew the dead infant from Claire’s incision and a nurse weighed and measured it as she would a live, breathing child. It was a girl. The name they had chosen was Charlotte. Another nurse wrote it on the birth and death certificates and had Andre sign each. Later, a nondenominational adviser whispered to them of funerals and caskets. He placed a sweaty pamphlet in Andre’s hand before going. A sad-looking cartoon couple occupied the cover, no bubbles. Nothing existed for them to say or think. Inside contained a list of grief counselors.
Claire recovered two more days in the hospital, Andre next to her in a reclining chair. They watched cable television. The nurses forced Jell-O and gravy and potatoes into her until the doctor signed the release.
The undertaker lay Charlotte, whom the coroner determined was strangled by her own umbilical cord, in a cedar casket. He had dressed her in the gown Claire intended for her baptism. Claire’s parents purchased three cemetery plots. Charlotte was interred in the center with the notion that Andre and Claire would bracket her for their final rest.
Andre had only recently considered the possibility of a child of his own; he was ill equipped to consider one’s death. The thought was so immense that, like the child, it stuck crosswise in his mind and remained fixed there, neither a thought nor not one. Sometimes he believed he’d opted for a closed casket because he no longer desired a child of this world. Seeing her would cement the curve of her round cheek or the tiny bump of nose or thin black hair combed back like a Mafia boss, and his remembering those physical details would tether her to a place so fucked up it saw unfit to permit her entry. Other times, he thought it cowardice. Without her fixed in his memory, the tiny dress and matching ribbon in her hair, the lace shoes that he could fit his pinkie finger into, his loss was less intimate, less a daughter to lift and hold and speak to and hear, less a mystery of warm flesh; instead he opted for the idea of a child, not one he could forget but one he could recall on terms he could steer.
Claire had no such option and he worried that on top of the sky of grief over them she also endured tangible, physical pain like those with amputated limbs who ached in their absent places.
They did not speak of their mourning. Words would reduce it to the trivial. The mail brought Hallmark cards and notes with inspirational sayings as consolation. Andre bore them with a furious silence. He did not drink. That was as demeaning a cliché as words. He refused to fall into any recognizable pattern of mourning or sorrow that would shape his grief like others and his child like others lost.
Claire donated the baby’s clothes and blankets from her showers to Goodwill. The crib she boxed and shipped to a Spokane orphanage. She painted the room beige and furnished it with the cheap nondescript items that typified guest rooms. She sealed other things in boxes and placed them high in a closet. A week later, however, she grew dissatisfied with the results and returned the furniture and painted once more an eggshell color and purchased a rocker and old desk and hung photographs of their parents and grandparents on the walls. A month later, she painted a backsplash and opted for green curtains and plants on nightstands and the dresser.
Smoker brought playing cards and a cribbage board and once a week they dealt three-handed and ate takeout. He was little comfort for Claire or Andre, but they were of no more to each other.
* * *
At recess four months later Claire fainted. A fever she had failed to mention had passed 101 degrees. She complained of stomach cramps. Chills shuddered through her. Antibiotics sometimes eased the symptoms but only for a day or two and afterward they circled back angrier than before. Andre burned his sick days nursing her. She began to discharge oozing puss pellets. The GP finally referred her to a Spokane surgeon, who discovered Claire’s obstetrician gouged her bladder during the Cesarian and overlooked the error. Another surgery was required to stitch the leaking organ.
Claire’s temperature leaped to 105 degrees before she left the OR. She was wet as a hard-rid horse. The nurses drained a sour-smelling tube from her side. Her pain was such she couldn’t tolerate a bedsheet. The doctor insisted on a cold room to fight staph so Claire’s skin goosefleshed and she shivered constantly. The drip antibiotics didn’t perform. Claire’s stomach, filled with gas, neared what it was pregnant. Three times her heart stuttered, honking the monitors, which alarmed the doctor enough to speak to Andre about medicine’s limitations.
Smoker visited twice a day. He prodded Claire to weak laughter with tavern stories, but she requested more morphine and he and Andre ultimately settled for patting each of her hands. When she was asleep, Smoker bent to hear her body under the machine hum.
“I ain’t ever going to think of breathing the same,” he said.
Andre refilled their coffee cups from his thermos. “I been turning loose of her,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
&n
bsp; “When I get home, I walk a room in the house. I stay until I got it in my head without her. The upstairs is nearly finished.”
“You quit her that easy?”
“It’s nothing like easy,” Andre said.
Later that night, Claire suffered a nightmare. Andre bent and whispered to hush her until she butted him with her head hard enough to raise a knot. Her eyes flew open. She hunted his face. Andre understood he’d relegated his daughter to something that would comfort him and was betraying Claire even before death could force his hand. Happiness was full of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Charlotte was the first and Claire the second. Their loss would return him to the familiar.
* * *
Then, two days later, Claire’s fever broke. In ten more, she returned home. Another week and Andre was in front of a classroom again, though he left school to feed her lunch and administer her medicines. Mornings, she’d prop herself on the pillow for a kiss, but he cited the school’s contagions.
Once he arrived home to find Smoker with an electric drill and a coping saw opening his living-room wall. “You adding to my house?” Andre asked him.
“Just an outlet,” he said.
Under the end table was a perfect hole waiting for a junction box that would keep the lamp cords from dangling over the heater. Before her illness, Claire had hounded Andre to perform the chore but electrical work left him like a monkey working calculus.
* * *
Another week passed before Claire stretched across Andre’s heavy stomach and fooled with him for a while. After a time, she stopped. Morning as he woke, she steered his hand to her and slapped herself with it. “I’m not going to break,” she told him.
The next evening Andre lay in their bed, listening to Claire breathe beside him. Her bare spine bent like water meandering through a groove in a pale land and her shoulder blades rose into flattened mounds. Andre opened his hands over her. Each breath, Claire’s skin rose near enough to warm his palms, then dropped away. She would wake if he asked her, but it seemed his hands didn’t have the question in him.
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