“You can’t just keep stabbing at it,” I said. “You have to keep the knife in and cut.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
When the men in the film had the box cutters in their hands, I didn’t think they would really do it, that they would put them against the girl and carve into her back, so that narrow lines of darkness rose to the surface of her skin in shapes almost like words, and Lenny Richter had been standing beside me, and he had put his hand over his mouth, and I thought for a second he was trying to stop himself from getting sick, and then I realized that he was laughing. He had his hand over his mouth and he was bent forward and he was laughing. I had felt all the spit dry in my mouth, and my tongue had gone thick so that even if I had wanted to laugh and pretend I was not sweating through my T-shirt, I could not. All I could do was watch and not move.
Charlotte had the knife in a tight grip, and I could tell she wanted to drag it sideways, tear through the thin wall of skin that divided the second cut from the first, turn the 1-inch slit to 2 inches, but just when I thought she might do it, go ahead and run the knife the distance of the belly and make a line big enough for her to open the stomach and reach in, find the baby inside, and pull it out onto the tarp, she took her hand off the handle and sat back on her heels and left the knife stuck in the skin. She wiped her hands on the thighs of her jeans and stood up. She turned away from me and started walking back toward the car.
“I need to think for a minute,” she said.
I stood there with the flashlight still pointed down at the deer, the beam suddenly steady, the knife just a small interruption in the slight curve of belly that was divided now by a thick line of color. The deer didn’t look as swollen as I had thought she was in the dark. She was just a deer, caught in the open between one field and the next, dead on the road. I clicked the switch and cut the light and turned around and followed Charlotte over the embankment.
Charlotte was sitting in the Dodge, drinking, and I wished she had the keys back in the ignition so we could listen to the radio, but they were still hanging from the lock in the trunk. She passed me the bottle and I noticed with the door shut the car was too quiet and too still.
“Would you miss me if I left town?” Charlotte asked. She pushed the knob on the headlights and the single swath that had cut into the darkness went out and the gathered bugs scattered in confusion, and there were only prismed stars above us through the shattered windshield and the slope of the ditch rising around us outside the windows.
“I would miss you,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll go.”
“I might,” she said. “I might surprise you.” She had a piece of flannel shirt in her hands and she was rubbing at her palm, trying to get it clean.
“Who did Dad catch you making out with in the car?”
I took another small drink and turned my head toward her so I could see her face. She was staring straight ahead, staring out the broken windshield and into the darkness.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. She stopped rubbing her hand and wadded the shirt into a ball on the seat beside her. “Do you think we can get out of this ditch on our own? I don’t want to wait until the sun comes up for someone to drive by.”
I looked over my shoulder at the angle of the car in the ditch, the way the back end hadn’t slid so far that it was wedged into the slope, and if Charlotte cranked the wheel hard enough and put it in reverse, she could ease us down into the bottom of the gully and we would have a chance at punching our way up and over the incline if she was willing to wind the engine tight and hit the gas hard.
“You could do it,” I said.
She took the bottle from me and emptied it in one long swallow. “Help me gather everything, okay?”
We collected the things from around the deer, rolled up the tarp, folded it all together with the torn shirts, put them back in the trunk, and went back to the road. We both stood looking at the deer, and Charlotte crouched down and put her hand on the doe’s side and petted her.
“She’s cold,” Charlotte said.
The air around us was getting thinner, and I didn’t have to look at my watch to know that somewhere over the horizon line the sun was on its approach and the darkness would begin to soften and give way to light before too long. There were more birds making noise, but they were still too far out to see, and the crickets had almost given up, and I realized I was tired and ready to be home.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. For a second I thought she was talking to me, but she had said it to the deer, and her voice was quiet and I knew that she was crying even though I could not see her face. “I tried,” she said. She kept running her hand over and over the side of the deer, and then she reached forward and slowly pulled out my knife and handed it to me, bloody, and thick with matted hair, the handle sticky, the blade too stiff to fold.
I rubbed the knife against the hem of my shirt and was finally able to get it to close, and after I shoved it back into my pocket, Charlotte pointed me toward the front of the deer and she stayed at the back and we each grabbed a pair of legs and pulled. The deer had settled into the asphalt so that it was hard to free her, and it took us ten minutes to get her across the opposite lane. We dragged her to the side of the road and pushed her down toward the bottom of the other drainage ditch, away from the car. Her legs did not bend and she didn’t make it very far down the ditch, but she was out of the way and off the road and nobody else was in danger of hitting her. We both stood on the blacktop shoulder, sweating and breathing heavily, looking at her dark body lying in the grass like nothing more than shadow.
“Why did you stop?” I asked.
Charlotte bowed her head and said nothing for a second, and then she wiped both her eyes and turned back toward the car. “It wouldn’t have lived,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been natural to force it like that. It wasn’t meant to be born yet.” Behind her, in the thin light, I could see the narrow stain in the road.
She did just what I told her to do—eased the Dodge into reverse and turned the wheel so the entire car slipped back into the very bottom of the ditch, and we were only at a slight angle with the driver’s side high-centered on the incline. I told her to put the car into drive and floor it, get enough forward momentum to push the car up the side and out of the ditch, and to keep a tight grip on the wheel and not let the car slide out from under her in the grass and the dirt, and she did those things too, and we hit the top of the ditch so hard we caught air and crossed to the other side of the road, and Charlotte had to guide us into our lane without overcorrecting, and she did that, and there was a little bit of fishtailing and the sound of tires breaking loose, and then we were on our side of the road, with one good headlight pointing out the direction.
In the movie the girl had been almost naked; Lenny had said she would be, but it had taken a while. They had tied her across the bed and she had been shirtless without a bra, her back nothing but blank skin and bone, and she had been wearing panties, white and thin, and when she twisted around on the bed, rolling up off her hips, trying to loosen her hands from where they were knotted above her head, I saw the panties were the kind like my sister had for a while, the ones she used to hang out back on the line to dry, the kind with the days of the week on them, and the girl had been wearing a pair that said Tuesday. I was suddenly embarrassed for her, in the same way I was embarrassed when my sister did our laundry and hung everything out in the yard for the neighbors to see—all of our private things exposed.
I rolled down my window so the air would keep me awake and I could lean out to help guide Charlotte down the road. Everything smelled wet and sharp and alive and I watched it all fall behind us as we passed. We were finally leaving the country, the fields, and the fence lines, and I wasn’t sorry to watch them go. Outside my window was the sound of metal on metal and tire rub as the car tried to shake broken pieces loose.
The knife was shoved deep in my pocket, like a warm spot against my thigh, and when I looked at
it again in the daylight, unfolded the blade, there would still be blood on it, and strands of light-colored hair. Charlotte had her hands gripped tightly around the steering wheel, and I wanted to ask her what it had felt like to cut into the deer. If it had been me who had held the knife, I wanted to think that things would be different now. Maybe I couldn’t have gone as far as Charlotte did. Or maybe I wouldn’t have stopped.
RUSSELL BANKS
Former Marine
FROM A Permanent Member of the Family
AFTER LYING IN BED awake for an hour, Connie finally pushes back the blankets and gets up. It’s still dark. He’s barefoot and shivering in his boxers and T-shirt and a little hungover from one beer too many at 20 Main last night. He snaps the bedside lamp on and resets the thermostat from 55 to 65. The burner makes a huffing sound and the fan kicks in, and the smell of kerosene drifts through the trailer. He pats his new hearing aids into place and peers out the bedroom window. Snow is falling across a pale splash of lamplight on the lawn. It’s a week into April and it ought to be rain, but Connie is glad it’s snow. He removes his .45-caliber Colt service pistol from the drawer of the bedside table, checks to be sure it’s loaded, and lays it on the dresser.
By the time he has shaved and dressed and driven to town in his pickup, three and a half inches of heavy wet snow have accumulated. The town plows and salt trucks are already out. The plate-glass windows of the M & M Diner are fogged over, and from the street you can’t see the half-dozen men and two women inside eating breakfast and making low-voiced, sporadic conversation with one another.
By choice, Connie sits alone at the back of the room, reading the sports section of the Plattsburgh Press-Republican. He has known everyone in the place personally for most of their lives. They are all on their way to work. He, however, is not. He calls himself the Retiree, even though he never officially retired from anything and nobody else calls him the Retiree. Eight months ago he was let go by Ray Piaggi at Ray’s Auction House. Let go. Like he was a helium-filled balloon on a string, he tells people. He sometimes adds that you know the economy is in trouble when even auctioneers start cutting back, indicating that it’s not his fault he’s unemployed, using food stamps, on Medicaid, scraping by on social security and unemployment benefits that are about to run out. It’s the economy’s fault. And the fault of whoever the hell’s in charge of it.
Connie has already ordered his usual breakfast—scrambled eggs, sausage patty, toasted English muffin, and coffee—when his eldest son, Jack, comes through the door. Jack nods and smiles hello to the other diners like a man running for office and pats the waitress, Vivian, on the shoulder. He shucks his heavy gray bomber jacket and pulls off his winter trooper hat, hangs them on a wall hook next to his dad’s Carhartt and forest-green fleece balaclava, and takes the seat facing the door, opposite his dad.
“I was starting to think it was time to pack that stuff away,” Jack says.
Connie says, “One of my goddamn hearing aids just told me, ‘Battery low.’ Like I can’t tell when it’s dead and that’s why I’m getting no reception. Man my age, his batteries are always low, for chrissake. I don’t need no hearing aid to tell me.”
“Your hearing aids talk to you?”
“It’s a way to get me to buy new batteries before I really need them. I’ll probably buy fifty extra batteries a year, one a week, just to get my goddamn hearing aids to stop telling me my battery’s low.”
“Seriously, Dad, your hearing aids talk to you? You hearing voices?”
“Yeah, I’m a regular schizo. No, it’s these new computerized units Medicaid won’t subsidize. Over six grand! I shouldn’t have listened to that goddamn audiologist and bought the subsidized cheapos instead. With these, there’s a little lady inside whispers that your battery’s low. Also tells you what channel you’re on. I got five channels with these units—for listening to music, for quiet time, reverse focus, and what they call master. Master’s the human conversational channel. And there’s also one for phone. I can’t tell the difference between any of ’em, except phone, which when you’re not actually talking on the phone is like a goddamn echo chamber. It does help me hear with a cell phone, though.”
Vivian sets Connie’s platter of food and coffee in front of him. “That gonna be it, Conrad?”
“Please, Viv, for chrissake, don’t call me Conrad. Only my ex-wife called me Conrad, and thankfully I haven’t heard it from her in nearly thirty years.”
“I’m kidding,” she says without looking at him. “Connie,” she adds. She takes Jack’s order, oatmeal with milk and a cup of coffee, and heads back to the kitchen.
For a few seconds, while his father digs into his breakfast, Jack studies the man. Jack’s been a state trooper for twelve years and studies people’s behavior, even his seventy-year-old father’s, with a learned, calm detachment. “You seem sort of agitated this morning, Dad. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure. I was just teasing Viv about that Conrad business. But it is true, y’know, only your mother called me that. She used it to give me orders or criticize me. Like she was afraid I’d take advantage of her somehow if she got friendly enough to call me Connie.”
“You probably would’ve.”
“Yeah, well, your mother took off before I really had a chance to take advantage of her. Smart gal. She quit before I could fire her.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“You have to let it go, Jack. She didn’t want the job, and I did. In the end, everybody, including you boys, got what they needed.”
“You’re right, Dad. You’re right.” They’ve had this exchange a hundred times.
Vivian sets Jack’s coffee and oatmeal in front of him and scoots away as if a little scared of Connie, mocking him. Jack smiles agreeably after her and shakes out the front section of the newspaper and scans the headlines while he eats. Connie goes back to the sports page.
Jack says, “Looks like we got through March without another bank robbery. Maybe our boy has headed south, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He flips the front page over and goes on to national news.
After a few minutes, without looking up, Connie says, “You talk to Buzz and Chip recently?”
Jack looks over at his father as if expecting more, then says, “No, not in the last few days.”
“Everything the same with them these days?”
“More or less. Far as I know.”
“Wives and kids?”
“Yep, the same, far as I know. All is well. No news is good news, Dad.”
“I wouldn’t mind any kind of news, actually.”
“They’re busy, Dad. It’s easier for me, I don’t have a wife and kids. Plus Buzz has that long drive every day up to Dannemora and back, and Chip’s taking criminal justice courses nights at North Country Community College down in Ticonderoga. And they both live way the hell over in Keeseville. Don’t take it personally, Dad.”
“I don’t,” Connie says, and goes back to reading the sports page.
Jack finishes his oatmeal, shoves his bowl to one side, and cups his mug of coffee in his large red hands, warming them. He’s thinking. He suddenly asks, “You ever consider it a little weird that all three of us went into law enforcement? I sometimes wonder about it. I mean, it isn’t like you were a police officer. Like me and Chip. Or a prison guard like Buzz. I mean, you ran auctions.”
“Yeah, but don’t forget, I’m a former Marine. And you’re never an ex-Marine, Jack. So that was the standard you boys were raised by, the United States Marine Corps standard, especially after your mother took off. If my father had been a former Marine, I probably would have gone into law enforcement too. I always kind of regretted none of you boys were Marines.”
“Dad, you can’t regret something someone else did or didn’t do. Only what you yourself did or didn’t do.”
Connie smiles and says, “See, that’s exactly the sort of thing a former Marine would say!”
Jack smiles back. The old man amus
es him. But he worries him too. The old man’s in denial about his finances, Jack thinks. He’s got to be worse than broke. Jack gets up from the table, walks to the counter, and tries to pay Vivian for both their breakfasts, but Connie sees what he’s up to. He jumps from his seat and slides between his son and the waitress, waving a twenty-dollar bill in her face, insisting on paying for both his and Jack’s meals.
Vivian shrugs and takes Connie’s twenty, just to get it out of her face.
She hands him his change, and father and son walk back to the table, where both men pull their coats and hats on. “You take care of the tip,” Connie says. “Make it big enough so you and I come out even and Vivian ends up forgiving me for being an asshole.”
“Dad, you sure you’re okay? I mean, financially? It’s got to be a little rough these days.”
Connie doesn’t answer, except to make a pulled-down face designed to tell his son he sounds ridiculous. Absurd. Of course he’s okay financially. He’s the father. Still the man of the house. A former Marine.
It’s a thirty-mile drive from Au Sable Forks to Lake Placid, forty-five minutes in good weather, twice that today. The roads are plowed and passable but slick all the way over—slowing to a creep through Wilmington Notch, where the altitude is more than 2000 feet and the falling snow is nearing whiteout.
It’s a quarter to ten when Connie pulls his white, two-wheel-drive Ford Ranger into Cold Brook Plaza. He’s filled the bed of the truck with a quarter ton of bagged gravel to give the vehicle traction in weather like this. The truck is seven years old, with a rust belt under the doors and along the seams of the bed. He parks it off to the windowless side of the Lake Placid branch of the Adirondack Bank, a low pop-up building not much larger than a double-wide. There are no other vehicles in the parking area. Nobody’s using the drive-through or the ATM. He notices in the employees’ lot behind the building a new Subaru Outback and one of those humpbacked Pontiac SUVs he hates looking at because they’re so ugly.
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