by Tim Curran
“This looks homemade, Lou. I don' see any markings. No brand, no serial number- nothing. She's a peach. I'm going to call her Lucy I think,” Brock stated without blinking his rigid eyeballs, presuming that the gun practically already belonged to him, for all intents and purposes. He could not tear his eyes away from her for fear that they would melt in brokenhearted devastation. It was simply not feasible for Lucy to become “the one that got away”.
Laughing aloud, Lou replied, “Well, it sounds like you've already made up your mind, but I never said I would sell it to you, maybe I was just showin' off my new trick. I like the way it feels myself, so you'd have to make a bold offer to tear this puppy away from me. You feel that buzz when you touch it?”
“Yes, I do.” He glared at Lou, thinking to himself how many pieces he would shred the man in to, were he to dare not sell the weapon. I'll kill him for that gun, Brock whispered inside of his mind's eye, biting his lip to hold back from saying his thoughts for all (that being Lou... the only other person in the shop- nice and quiet, as Brock has reasoned to himself in a dark nook at the back of his conscious being) to hear. “I feel her buzzing and I want her. I want her right this moment.”
“She's pretty.”
Brock scanned his mental bank account for crannies of cash and upcoming bills that he could postpone. He pulled up each cushion in his financial life, rifling through the crumbs and dander for loose change. There was no other option.
“How much? How much do you want for it?” Brock asked, repeating his proposition instantaneously with desperation, sounding like a junkie on the verge of dying from a lack of proper fix.
“Everything you got, buster. I've even got just the right bullets for you, free of charge.” Lou winked. “Now empty that there wallet and let's talk business, whaddyasay?”
***
Five thousand two hundred and twenty seven dollars, mostly borrowed from his brain-dead (quite literally, by means of a skiing accident) sister Tammy's bank account, and an hour plus five minutes later, Brock was propped in his tree stand on the eastern edge of Polly Garrett's serene hunting property. Polly's husband had died a few years earlier and rented out buckets of time on her land to local hunters, with hopes that she may supplement the hefty mortgage along with her meager widow's income. Mr. Garrett had likewise been an avid hunting enthusiast, and so the business seemed fitting, and in the spirit of his eternal memory. And Brock was her most loyal and regular customer, from the first day she hung her sign by the road, “HUNTERS WELCOME- FREE BREAKFAST WITH HUNTING FEE!”. He had bagged seven deer in the previous three years since Mr. Garrett's death. The property withheld a perfect conglomerate of subtle openings and trees, hiding spots and clearings, hills and moats and everything in between. A deer could wander through without any legitimate suspicions. And without warning, it would turn a corner to see Brock grinning with a loaded rifle, ready to split Bambi's fuzzy head open like a pomegranate.
And on this day, he brought along a new hunting partner.
Lucy. Sweet Lucy. Lucy in the sky with diamonds. I love Lucy.
He sniffed her solid chamber and studded fore-stock, wondering what he had done to become so blessed by Lucy's presence (besides forking over an unbelievable bundle of cash). She continued to hum and buzz and crackle like AM radio static in his hands, whispering sexy words into the attuned nerve endings of his fingers and hands, seizing his very spirit with a brand of ecstasy he had long missed from so many years of a useless and failed marriage to his repulsive slippers-on-Monday mate. Maybe if Lucy became jealous enough, he reasoned, she could set right his marital situation with one swift tug on her bouncy little trigger. “You smell like roses, Lucy. Aren't you just about as sweet as you can be?” he asked of his weapon, unknowing of the odd words that came from his lips. He could feel her at every pressure point and juncture of his sizzling electric bloated body.
Placing her on the cold icy grates of his prime-pickin' tree stand, Brock withdrew a can of beer from his camouflage mini-cooler, cracking the tab open and slurping a grateful glug of frigid amber beer. “Just refueling, Lucy. I won't forget about you so quick, so don't go off getting' jealous.” He nodded his head towards Lucy, who he imagined was scowling at him for his neglect and faltering compassion. “Keep your eyes peeled. We need to bring home a big ol' fat Bambi or the cross-eyed sow will never lemme hear the end of it.” Lucy nodded, forgiving him instantly. Maybe he could train her to bring him beers and rub his feet.
Brock leaned forward, laying on his invasive gut with Lucy touching the edge of his elbow, sending shock waves through his mortal being. He peered at the snowy ground with a concrete gaze, sipping his beer quietly so that his prey would not detect him when he pounced upon its soon-to-be corpse.
***
A dozen rattling beer cans later, Brock was cradling Lucy against his chest, motionless like an armless Renaissance statue, only breaking his concentration to urinate his liver-processed light beer from the edge of his ivory castle in the trees. His vision had blurred, but he yearned for a few more suds of Forget It Juice. He grumbled to himself that he should have purchased two twelve packs instead of only one. Brock looked down listlessly at the graveyard of empty beer cans beneath him, circling the tree like stones around a campfire, curious if it had been Lucy who had drank all his beers. “Was that you did that?” he asked of her in broken English, bringing her barrel up to his lips, kissing the cold oily surface in forgiveness. “Can't stay mad at you.”
A twig snapped in the distance.
I heard you, thought Brock. You picked the wrong trail to grandma's house.
Brock shifted his position, crouching to one knee with Lucy in his hands, worried that the crumpling of his vest and jacket would scare the approaching animal. He accidentally kicked an empty can from the tree stand and it tumbled to the ground to meet its drained brothers, Brock hoping against all hope that the sound had not given him away. “Smile, you son of a bitch,” he recited, his typical mantra when he readied himself to pull his deadly trigger, an ode to one of his favorite films, Jaws. “You think God's watchin' from above. But that's just me.”
From behind a fallen pine tree emerged a sluggish moose, lumbering forward with calculated steps, its wide hooves crunching the twigs and dead frozen leaves beneath him. A male moose- a bull, antlers and all. It stood, based on Brock's fairest estimate, nearly twelve feet high, from hoof to antlers. It hunched its dopey shoulders forward, dropping its head and sniffing through the snow-covered pine needles, burrowing with its nose for a hidden treasure. Then it pulled its hefty head (perfect for a wall hanging) back up straight, looking left, then right- as though crossing a busy intersection, Brock thought to himself. The moose stepped forward once. Then a second step. Brock had a fair shot at the thing, the only problem being that he had had no permit for a legal bull kill.
Why could it have not been a goddamned deer?
Decisions. Decisions. Decisions.
Every year in Maine, a lottery is held to allow the moose population some sanctity from the drooling fangs of the hunting populace. A prospective applicant is required, in the spring, to submit his personal information to the state of Maine for his or her chance at bloodshed. Then the applicant is required to patiently wait for summer to determine what his eventual fall and winter would allow him. As far as Brock was concerned, it was all a tree-hugging liberal bullshit process seeking to effectively ruin his otherwise pleasant life, save for the old lady who was already managing a fine job in that regard. He had never once in his life won a moose license, and felt as though he may never win. Time was ticking, his blood pressure inflated by one or two points every year, and he wasn't getting any younger- nobody was, for that matter. And Lucy simply hummed her throaty incantations, begging him to pull the trigger and end the beast's life where it stood.
A man only technically broke the law when he was caught and Brock would refuse to allow liberal socialist bureaucrats to dictate his existence. If they caught him, it may be well worth the
slaps on his wrists, he decided. As long as he could keep his wife's wordy trap shut about the booty he was about to bring home, there would be no further issue with regards to his supposed law-bending. He would dress the monstrous weakling where he lay, taking only what he could haul back to his truck in one or two trips. All the leftovers, he could bury. The widow Garrett's land had hidden gullies and crevices and crags all about, places that allowed for him to do the necessary grunt work without discovery.
He trained Lucy upon the beast, breathing slow as he calculated the distance and wind. Though his target was less than thirty yards away, he hesitated to leave any factors to chance. It may very well have been his last opportunity at a moose, since they were so rare to simply happen across by accident, even with a lottery ticket in hand like a bloody-booted Willy Wonka. “You're mine, big boy.”
He applied easy pressure to the trigger and fired.
Mr. Moose dropped like a bag of bowling balls, crying out with three groans and then falling into the abyss of silence, dead forevermore. It began to snow, as if prompted by the gunshot, and Brock was quite sure that he could hear the gentle sounds of snowflakes dripping to Earth, coating his kill like freezer burn.
***
He nudged the massive beast with Lucy's barrel, wanting to be absolutely positive that the thing was indeed deceased. It had an awful odor to it that wafted through his sensitive nose, that which Brock could not discern between the natural smell of a moose (he had only once been so close to an assassinated pile of moose meat) or the smell of its gaping wound. The neck wept rich red blood into the pristine ivory snow, pooling and absorbing into the now quickly growing accumulation of flurries.
The moose had thudded to its right side in its last gasp of existence, his dead eyes still staring straight ahead, wide open. He had received such an overly shocking blow that he could not even shut his big brown eyes before exiting the world for good, and Brock found some form of pleasure in that, that it had faded into blackness while watching him climb down from his tree stand, three quarters of the distance to drunk as a skunk in a Volvo's trunk.
He poked the dead thing a second time, the tip of Lucy firm against the stiffening body, nudging into its expansive motionless rib cage. “This old boy must way fourteen hundred pounds. You done good today, Lucy,” he whispered to his newly acquired partner in population control. She did not respond this time, and in fact she had stopped her interminable buzzing altogether. Her essence had faded away as the moose had, absent since the trigger was ignited and their massive furry victim had dropped to the ground. “Lucy?” he asked. Where had Lucy wandered off to? “You must be sleepin',” he concluded. He shook the weapon in his hand, hoping to spark the fervent kinetics of Lucy again, shaking her like a worried parent would shake a blue-faced child that was choking on a strawberry. “Lucy? LUCY?”
Diverting his attention back to the animal, he leaned down close to it, inhaling the aroma of his fresh kill. It was partially repugnant to his senses, but there was a hidden glory inside of it, knowing that he had successfully conquered a wild beast, as was God's will. If those tofu-eating hippie motherfuckers could see Brock now, they might have climbed their favorite tree for a good cry. Praise the Lord. Brock spit a juicy brown wad of Skoal into the snow, intermingling with the reddish patch of Mr. Moose's demise. Brock grinned and leaned back, stretching his aching back. Standing upright again, Brock could not resist the urge to haul back his black polished boot and give his deadened slave a firm kick to the ribs. The crunch of the bones collapsing at his manly beck and call was nearly as satisfying as the foul stench of it. “You sorry sack of shit. Man versus beast, and beast gon' lose every dang time.” He leaned back, pointing Lucy towards the sky, and then pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
He had reloaded on his walk over to the moose, and the gun had no safety.
Glaring at his weapon with disgust, he wondered why Lucy had turned into such a frigid heartless bitch. “What did I do to you, whore?”
Lucy's work was complete, and so she had simply checked out, left her keys at the front desk, brought the car around for Brock to load up the suitcases. There was little left to do beyond driving home in silence. Brock tossed Lucy into the snow, spitting at her with his rotting brown spittle, cursing her behavior in his mind. Their relationship had been a beautiful one from the start, but it had both blossomed and come to a burning crash landing over the course of one perfect day.
Mr. Moose moaned and Brock leaped back a step in fright. It turned its exposed eye towards him, studying his attacker with bleary-eyed confusion. The eye had taken on a neon green hue, and it seemed as though something had turned rotten in his eventual dinner and wall-mounting. “There's no way,” he gurgled to himself. Reaching down into the side pocket of his pants, he retrieved a holstered Beretta, unsnapping it from the case in one fluid movement, clicking the safety into the Go Soldier, Go position. Without any pause as to the process and delivery of his actions, he squeezed the trigger with four consecutive bursts, sending the echo of his secondary weapon bouncing through the wooded glen of the Garrett property. The bullets entered the side of the beast's head, with the fourth bullet piercing the eyeball, sending a splatter of wet pink mucus on to Brock's camouflage pants. “How you like that, you son of a bitch?” he asked of it, offering a final kick to its inflexible neck, chuckling in childish delight.
It lay still for a moment.
Then it jolted back to life for a third go at livelihood.
It started to breathe again, Brock befuddled by the impossible rise and fall of Mr. Moose's chest, heaving in the cold morning air. Brock backed away after snatching Lucy back off the ground (though they were fighting, he didn't dare leave her behind, there was still a reasonable chance that they could reconcile), unable to fathom what was happening to his righteous kill. “You can't be. You can't be alive.” He spat on the ground, wanting to relieve the burden of his eyes through his wrinkled itchy mouth. “You can't be alive,” he repeated.
As if in response to his statement of disbelief, the moose kicked out his legs, rolling his torso enough to fold his long brown legs beneath him, lying now in the snow like a dog does by the fireplace, his paws beneath his chin and his spine facing God. It groaned in a tremolo of pain, turning its head towards Brock, who was now contemplating whether he should climb back up into his tree stand or head for the Garrett's house, which was less than two hundred yards away. “Stay down, you cocksucker. Stay down. I killed you!” Brock called out, running his hand along a tree behind him, hoping that it would serve to support his wobbling knees.
It craned its impossibly lively neck at him, turning his head in curiosity, once again reminding Brock of a curious dog. The moose was wishing that it could speak to him, to say something pertinent, had it any vocal cords to do so. Perching its two front legs before itself, the moose rose on his haunches, his oozing ocular cavity spitting forth a fresh geyser of membranes and blood vessels as he next dragged his back legs upright behind him. Now fully upright, it stared right through Brock with an unrelenting gaze... at the man who had attempted to take his life only minutes earlier. It groaned low, less like a dog and more like a silly zombie movie that Brock had once been forced into watching by his undignified wife.
Brock looked down at Lucy in his hands, trembling and wet from the snow and spit he had sloshed her with. “What have you done, you bitch?” he asked of the inanimate gun in his mitts, wanting to blame the seemingly infeasible resurrection of his prey on Lucy. “You did this, didn't you? You filthy whore. I thought we had something special.” His words ran together with his torrential brain waves of dread, flustered and spinning like tops.
The moose took a lurching step forward, sending Brock back one step in frightful accordance.
When it took off into a steady gallop, directly towards him, Brock turned his back and started off on his own, grunting to himself in trying to convince the less rational half of his brain that this was no happening- dead is dead and that i
s that. He weaved in and out of the lanky trees, turning to see the moose right on his tail, crashing into each tree trunk and limb in stoic repetition, a titanic brain-dead beast without any form of effective coordination or agility. With each crash, it groaned and maneuvered enough to continue on a basic trajectory, that being the soft skull of Brock, his former judge, jury, and executioner. “Stay back!” Brock called into the air, hoping that the revived animal could understand English by means of whatever demon had entered it. Brock quickly gained distance from Mr. Moose's awkward scramble, and that felt reassuring to him. The moose grunted in response, throwing its head back in a howl. “Stay back!” Brock repeated, and it called back, in its own feeble response, with a second howl.
Brock regretted every cheeseburger and fried chicken bucket he had every consumed, gripping at his heaving fatty belly (effectively holding him back from safety) as he trundled though the scattered trees and bushes of the wooded landscape, scanning the hopping horizon before him for the clearing that led to the Garrett house. Once he found the field that led to Garrett's door yard, he was home free, with less than fifty yards remaining by that point. Brock could only hope to keep a growing distance between him and the resurrected mammal that sought to inflict brutal harm upon him. Luckily, Brock informed his racing mind and body, MOOSE DO NOT EAT MEAT. They were the dirty hippie vegetarians of the animal world, and that only served to make Brock ill. They subsisted on pine needles, grass, weeds, twigs, bark, nuts, and roots. This food preference of the supposedly mighty moose displeased Brock, further lowering the moose on his immovable scale of respect. Nothing, in Brock's opinion, was more admirable than a lion eating a dead zebra, and the limp-wristed moose plopped his nansie-pansie ass at the opposite end of that (re)spectrum. The worst damage it would inflict was to trample him, but even that was an ugly possibility, given the sheer difference of mass between he and his pursuer. “Dirty hippie!” Brock shouted over his shoulder, watching the moose barrel into a thin tree, bending the trunk behind its momentum, folding it in half on to the ground as he fought through the next bevy of natural obstacles. It vocalized its growing discontent, scorning Brock with its one good eye.