by Harvey Smith
His mind reeled when he drew near the mesquite tree where the doe lay. Having only been close to horses and cows, the deer was tinier than expected, her body more delicate.
I killed a baby, he thought.
His heart went cold and his head felt light as he imagined his father's rage. He could visualize Big Jack's expression and he saw the others back at the camp house laughing at him, berating him for breaking some primal rule of hunting. He knelt beside the body, resting utterly motionless on its side. His fear faded and tears blinded him as he looked into the black eye of the thing before him, trying and failing to commune with her through the orb that was set like a precious stone in her face. With one hand, he reached out, stroking her fur as he might a sleeping dog. The coarseness surprised him.
“I'm so sorry,” he said aloud, wondering at the quietness of his own voice. His breath made fog in the air before him.
Keeping a vigil, Jack sat in the grass next to the doe for a couple of hours until his pants were damp with moisture from the ground and his teeth chattered in his head. Several times, he started crying. Ashamed, he blinked back his tears each time, drying them with his sleeve.
His father's truck came up the road just after eleven. Wiping his eyes a final time, Jack stood and turned toward the approaching sound. The truck door slammed and Big Jack emerged from the brush, smoking as he crossed the field.
“What you got?” he called over the wind.
Jack struggled to keep his throat from closing. “I think I screwed up,” he said. He tried to find the right words…something to shift the blame or ameliorate his wrongdoing.
Big Jack drew close. Looking down at the deer, maniacal glee lit up his face. “Goddamn, boy.”
“I know,” Jack said. “I'm sorry…it looked bigger through the scope.” He struggled with his tears as they threatened to return. “I didn't mean to shoot one so young. It was an accident.”
In confusion, Big Jack looked up at him. Finally understanding what his son was saying, he shook his head fiercely. “Nuh-uh, boy. What the fuck you thinkin'? That's a doe…they don't get much bigger'n that.” Big Jack knelt beside him in the grass and rested one hand on the deer's neck. “You just ain't seen one on the ground like this.” He looked at his son closely. “You done real good. This is a good deer…a good kill.”
Jack took a breath. “Really?”
“Yeah, oh yeah. I ain't even killed anything yet. You did good.” He reached over awkwardly and pawed his son's shoulder then patted him on the back. “Tomorrow I'll probably get an eight or ten point buck, but this is your first year huntin'…a doe ain't bad.” Big Jack smiled at him across the body of the fallen animal.
Jack watched his father, soaking in the words. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I just didn't know. It looked so small.” He looked back at the deer, pride intermingling with sadness.
Big Jack picked up the doe and slung it over his shoulders, ignoring the thickened blood. Together the two of them walked across the field and into the brush, heading for the truck.
At the end of the weekend, Big Jack drove home from the lease, smoking and staring ahead as the evening hours passed. Occasionally he spoke, offering his son some bit of wisdom as the truck blew along the highway.
“Ain't a lot of people knows this,” he said at one point, “but Jesus was a sand nigger.” He tilted his head and regarded Jack seriously across the space of the truck. When his son didn't challenge this revelation, Big Jack fell back into a murky, satisfied silence. He gripped the notched steering wheel with one hand, a cigarette poking up between his knuckles.
The trip passed like this, mostly quiet, punctuated by intermittent bits of conversation that randomly brought the boy to alertness, breaking through his daydreams. The ash-green quality of the East Texas landscape gave way to dusky olive then to black as the light fell. The truck finally came off the interstate highway and began to pass through the streets of Lowfield.
Jack was glad for the silence. He was physically exhausted, but also felt a weariness of spirit. The weekend had wrung him out, leaving him drained. He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window, thinking about his favorite comic books and sex, sometimes weaving them together. Cold air leaked around the door of the truck where he leaned against it, licking his right shoulder and his back with a chilly tongue.
The light fixture over the garage door was covered in cobwebs. It cast the truck cab in gold as they came to a stop in the driveway. Jack felt grimy. When he shifted in his layers of clothing, he caught little whiffs of smoke from the fire barrel. Sometimes he smelled something else, which he suspected was blood from the doe.
They got out of the truck and Big Jack opened the garage door. Unloading the bed of the truck, they worked quietly, piling their gear on the garage floor.
Ramona and Brodie came out through the kitchen door.
“Tornado-Bornado, tornado-Bornado, tornado-Bornado.” Brodie buzzed along with excitement at their return.
“What'd y'all get?” Ramona asked, smiling. She took a drag from her cigarette and laid her hand firmly on Brodie's shoulder. “Anything? You got deer back there that Brodie can see?”
“I wanna seeee,” Brodie whined.
Big Jack drew back his head and straightened his shoulders. “Sure as fuck, we do…you think we went all the way out there to come back with jack shit?” His lighter made a clinking sound as he popped it open with his thumb and deftly lit a cigarette.
The entire family walked to the back end of the pickup truck. Big Jack dropped the tailgate and pulled back the tarp, revealing the bodies of the two slain deer. They lay stretched out on forest-green trash bags. Reaching low, he picked up his youngest son and set him down in the bed of the truck. Brodie's eyes went wide as he looked at the faces of the dead animals a foot away.
Big Jack took the head of the spike buck he had killed and lifted it up. “Look at it, boy.” He said the words in the sing-song voice he sometimes used around Brodie. “Your daddy killed a buck…someday you'll get one of these here.”
Jack marveled at the black, cloven hooves and the elfin legs. Again he was struck by how delicate the animals were, how ghost-like and fey. He reached out and stroked one of the doe's forelimbs, tracing the coarse fur downward and running his thumb over the dewclaws just below the lowest joint in the foot. The smoke from his parents' cigarettes settled over him as he leaned against the cool metal of the truck. Again, he offered the doe a silent apology.
The plastic trash bags crinkled as Big Jack shifted the head around, holding it by the antlers. Before breaking away, he eyed Jack suspiciously, uncomfortable with his son's demeanor. “Alright, we gotta get this goddamn truck unloaded,” he said. “It's late…” He dropped the spike's head and scooped up Brodie, plopping him down onto the driveway.
With her cigarette dangling from her lips, Ramona lifted him to her hips and took him inside, allowing Jack and his father to continue unloading. Squinting as the smoke curled up into her left eye, she mumbled over the cigarette as she moved out of the garage, “I gotta get Brodie into bed.”
Carrying his sleeping bag into the center of the garage, Jack watched the kitchen door close at her back. After each armful, he went back for another load, careful to avoid disturbing the bodies of the deer. Passing the length of the truck, he turned his head slightly each time and gazed at the face of the doe, studying her dark, upturned eye.
When the truck was empty and everything was safely inside, Big Jack reached up and closed the garage door with a grunt. The wood and glass rattled and snapped. The metal runners gave a long squeal, thirsty for WD40. Jack flinched as the door boomed down onto the cold concrete floor.
Big Jack slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out his black and green pocketknife. “Now we gotta cut up this meat,” he said.
Chapter 14
1999
People were filling the Communion Hall, a large room decorated in styles from several decades. Black and white tiles covered the floor, worn to gra
y in places by foot traffic. Everyone mingled or sat in metal folding chairs as they waited for Big Jack's farewell service to start. His body rested elsewhere, in a room dedicated to the funeral ceremony.
My stepmother worked the area, moving among the attendees deftly despite her bulk. I watched her amid the assembly, chatting with each person soberly; shaking hands, hugging and sobbing. She leaned in close to an older woman and whispered something confidential, first looking around dramatically. The older woman reached out and grabbed Mincy's shoulders, holding her a short distance away then hugging her close.
I stood on the back wall, resting against the painted white brick with Brodie. It felt entirely natural to stand with him, despite the occasion, despite the emotional distance between us. It's one of those things from childhood that stays with you. You walk into a room, spot your brother and you go stand next to him. It made me feel better, but at the same time it reminded me that I didn't really know him. Our earlier argument had slipped away; Brodie didn't mention it again and I managed to resist my perverse curiosity. What did it matter if he believed some crazy shit about Dad's death? We stood quietly, watching people enter and mix.
Brodie had fetched our mother an hour earlier, and now she sat alone in a corner, stuck between stupor and grief. She looked out one of the windows blankly, without moving. A steady line of tears ran from her eyes and a trail of shiny mucus stretched from her nostrils to her liver-colored lips. Each time she caught my gaze, I was puzzled; I wasn't sure how to interpret her reaction.
“John-David won't be here, given that he passed away last year,” Brodie said.
Suppressing a laugh, I studied my younger brother to see if he was joking. John-David scared the shit out of me as a kid; him and his psychopath sons.
“I guess you knew he had a heart attack.”
I narrowed my eyes. “No, I didn't.” And how the fuck would I have known that? It didn't really make the news out West.
“Yeah, they said it was just an explosive heart attack...out on a deer lease somewhere.” He took a sip from the Coke he'd gotten from a vending machine in the funeral home break room. That alone made me laugh. The funeral home sold refreshments. He was so earnest, so disconnected. I wondered what it was like to live anesthetized. “You know he was a big man,” he said evenly.
I snorted, unable to help myself. “If by big man you mean morbidly obese ogre, then yes.”
Blinking a couple of times, my brother looked at me then at the ground. The lines at the corners of his eyes made him look like he was flinching. He watched my face, surprised at my reaction but finding his nerve. “John-David was a real good friend of Daddy's, you know.”
“You're kidding? That's what you think?” I could feel my forehead knotting. Brodie seemed so genuine that it confirmed the existence of a massive delta between our perceptions. “You think they were friends?”
“Hell yeah, I do.” His face tensed up; I'd pierced the opiated veil. “They were friends for years, Jack. They hunted together, worked together, drank beer together. He might have been one of Daddy's best friends.”
I was at a loss, with no idea what to say. Remembering all the sullen stand-offs, punctuated by moments of cruel humor, I realized that I didn't understand what the word friend meant down here. Looking away, I shook my head. “I guess. His friends never made sense to me.” But what the fuck did I know? Maybe they had been friends and it was my view of the world that was flawed. Maybe I had no idea what the word friend meant anywhere. Suddenly I wanted to make peace with my brother. “At least John-David died hunting.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, true. That's probably what he would have wanted.” Indicating a direction with his Coke can, he said, “Kohen is here, his son.”
While I was trying to find Kohen in the crowd, an elderly man nearby pointed to Brodie. “That there is his son, one of 'em.” Brodie nodded and smiled, walking toward the old man, leaving me alone.
Kohen stood in a corner. He was huge, just as his father had been, over six foot five and fabulously thick. Dressed in a pin-striped suit, he wore wire-frame glasses and fancy cowboy boots. We'd been around each other as kids, but I hadn't seen him in over a decade. Sweat ran from his brow and neck, dampening the dark bristles of his hair. His sideburns were a straggly mass attached to the jowls of his face.
We saw each other across the room and moved closer, shaking hands in the center of the room.
He looked me up and down. “Jack...man, you look good. You still as skinny as you were in high school.” He smiled down at me generously, with warmth.
“Thanks, Kohen.”
“California is treatin' you right.”
I forced myself to smile. “You look good too.”
He laughed. “Well, I don't know.”
“I appreciate you coming.”
“Yessir...” His face became serious. “I felt like I needed to be here, you know. Your daddy was a real good man.”
I sucked on my bottom lip for a second, rolling it between my teeth as I remembered my father regarding me with a sharp, avian scrutiny. “Thank you for saying so. It's good to hear that people thought of him that way.” As monsters go, he was unbeatable.
“I guess you heard we lost Daddy last year…John-David, I mean.”
I ground my teeth together. “Yeah, I was sorry to hear about his passing. Someone I know mentioned it out in Sunnyvale.”
Kohen's eyes went wide behind his glasses. “I'll be damned.” He blinked a few times.
Resisting the urge to laugh, I nodded. “Your father knew people everywhere. He was well regarded.” I studied him, watching his reaction.
Kohen bobbed his chin slowly, looking out over the crowd. He took a deep breath. “Yessir. Yessir, he was. Daddy knew a lot of people and everybody loved him, no matter where he went. He'd done real well at work and out in the world. There were over a hundred people at his funeral.” Looking uncomfortable, Kohen cut his head toward me. “Well, goddammit,” he said, “I didn't mean nothing by that. I swear I didn't, Jack.”
I looked around and tallied the people in the area at probably twenty. Feigning ignorance, I said, “I'm not sure what you mean.”
“Oh, I just didn't want you to think that I meant something bad about your daddy. He was a good man. Yessir, he was…”
I studied the room, pausing deliberately. “You mean because there are so few people here?” Turning, I faced him fully. “Is that what you're saying?”
“Aw, lordy, Jack…I'm real sorry for saying that. Sometimes I just say stupid things. That was always Daddy's biggest gripe with me.”
I looked at the floor. You terrified me as a boy, mother-fucker. “I guess it's true that there aren't many people here…two dozen, if that. He wasn't a great man, Kohen, even though it was nice of you to say that.”
He shook his head. “I am so sorry, I really am.” Sweating, he reached up and adjusted his collar where it bit into his neck fat.
“I guess that's why he did it,” I said, as if the idea was just occurring to me. “He must have known the thing you're talking about…that he wasn't worth much.”
Kohen rocked back on his heels. “Lord God, Jack…I wasn't tryin' to infer nothing bad about your daddy.”
“No, no…it's okay. Maybe he's better off this way.”
“Oh, man, don't say that…”
I regarded him soberly, done with this, wanting to get away. “I'm going to walk around for a while.”
He was still distressed. “I feel so stupid, Jack. I am truly sorry.”
I smiled up at him, “It's okay. Your dad was a great man and mine was a failure. No one really cared for him. In the end that's why he put his mouth down around the barrel of a pistol and blew out the back of his head.”
Kohen looked ashen and clammy.
“Thanks for coming. I'll talk to you later.” I walked away from him.
My amusement faded as soon as I left Kohen. With no real connection to anyone here, I didn't know what I was supposed to feel. I moved
past the knots of people, pretending not to notice when someone gestured toward me or said my name.
As I passed, someone with a drawl mentioned my father owning a dog. “Yeah, he wrote a hot check for that thing and it was expensive…a bird dog from a breeder up in Montana. But he never did mess with it, so the thing was just half crazy…nearly goddamn dead from starvation when they found it.”
The comment made me falter in my step. Head down, I left the Communion Hall. A moment later, I stopped in a corridor outside. Windows ran the length of the passage, bringing in light and making the dingy walls brighter.
There was a drinking fountain in the corridor. The thought of cold water flowing over my face and into my mouth was appealing. My lips were dry and cracked...I needed some kind of relief, some comfort, but I was unable to force myself to drink. The fountain was old, with mineral deposits caked around the spigot. A steady leak ran slowly across the flat aluminum trough and down into the drain. There was a mossy smell emanating from the niche in the wall where the fountain sat. The aged compressor kicked on, filling the hallway with humming and rattling sounds.
I was looking for the break room, but before I could find it, an old man emerged from the restroom and stepped in front of me. He was leaning forward, head down as he toddled along, digging vigorously in one ear with his pinky finger. In his seventies, his hair had once been black, but was now frosty white. His body had once been muscled, but now sagged. I recognized him right away.
“Mr. Bornado.”
“Eh?” He looked up, sternly at first, then a gleeful smile came over his face. “Little Jack. Well, I'll be damned.” Even as old as he was, the man still had a ruddy complexion as if he spent every spare hour out under the sun. Several of his teeth were missing now, creating holes in his smile.
“Hey, Mr. Bornado.”
Obviously happy to see me, he cackled and twisted his head to the side. He probed my face with his eyes. “How are you, boy?”