Now tired, I withdrew from the lake and made my way for the woods. Drenched from swimming and regret I found I wanted for Gene. It was such a drab, obvious equation: one I could not help solving. I was lonely. I sneezed as I dried. I wanted to bare my teeth at someone. I wanted to dig my fingers into his eye sockets. I wanted to punish the old man for the crime of being me.
I sneezed again, and looked out to the landscape for his silhouette. I found nothing, except: there was a squirrel, and another, at the edge of the meadow. Beyond there was something larger and slower and darker than a squirrel, or a shadow. And, birds! Then there again the dark shadow flipping in and out of my peripheral vision. I turned to see what looked like a small furred mammal, disappearing into the edge of the woods, brown or black.
In my hurry, I hadn’t remembered to be scared of the nonhuman beings in my new ecosystem. Having the gun, which sat in its bandanna back at the cabin, meant not a thing. The mammal made a switch-thump-switch in the thickets of brambles and trees. The new near prospect of death made me for a moment a straight-A student. I mean: I resolved to be more careful, more observant of my surroundings. I resolved to try and do research in my books. I resolved not to be eaten by a bear, nor bitten open by a slightly smaller thing disinterested in consuming me. I resolved not to watch such a wound infect and yellow, also resolved to begin target practice posthaste. Fear outstripped any cavalier feeling regarding my fate. I stood still until I could no longer hear the thing in the woods, then walked back gingerly.
The nature of nature is mystery, I reminded myself. Or it is like this down-mountain. There, beyond weather and bug bites, it’s largely illegible. Between nature and the gaze, gauze. Between modern humans and the natural world, a scrim. But now we were together in the blonde meadow: nature and I. A new romance. Or, a sweaty intimacy, the sort I could then handle.
LATER BACK AT the cabin I started a fire, wished and breathed on it. I started some soup, and read. I was on the blade of wanting to find any animal, any big animal, for a challenge and a ceding to some gore. Though the Boy Scouts book promised that it was a “complete encyclopedia of wilderness living,” it carried only a little section about backing away from predators, never running or challenging. There was a longer passage on currying your pack camel, by which they meant brushing, not cooking.
My other survival book—written by two companionable oldsters and published in the early 1970s—noted unhelpfully that “the ordinary farm bull” was the most dangerous animal in the world, and not to worry about wolves and coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, bears, nor something called a javelina. It was a wild hog, they said. I wondered was it jave-a-lina or have-a-lina, if it used a Spanish pronunciation. I remembered then Ken complaining about people speaking Spanish to him in Arkansas and sensed in myself a new and hollow cruelty. By being here and not there I would not only leapfrog Pop’s expiration, but also Ma’s, and Ken’s living and dying, missing the continual birthing and unfolding and decaying of the world. This cruelty was not unpleasant to feel; it was only news.
I got up and stirred the thickening soup and then when it seemed ready put the pot on a clay trivet the shape of a sun which was sitting on the table so smartly. I imagined Earl John’s old wife had selected it. The moon of the outhouse. The sun of the kitchen. Once the soup had cooled I gulped it. Full, I sat for a sec. Then I got ready for my next preservative chore: to practice, to take aim. Now that I had a firearm I would be able, I figured, to choose the moments of folly and those of defense. Fate is not a thing. But a gun is. I ate more soup.
When I finished I took the gun from its bandanna-wrap deep in the innards of my backpack, and revealed it to myself. Its sheen marketed something unclear. I remembered the skinny lady’s warning, her eyes wrung out from something like old loss. When looking for someone to show you how to respect a firearm, find a reformed junkie or career mourner. Find a sad queen of gun sales, in rural parts unknown. This is inaccurate and sentimental adornment. I was holding a gun. The bigger magazine stayed nestled in the pack: It was more than what I required.
Once more I wished Gene were there. He had shot far more than me, I gathered. With movie stars and dogs or fellow pilots or his pa or maybe even Marjorie. He was the part of me who had bullish confidence, and an aptitude for killing things: No wonder he was gone. I was scared on this mountain but it was a manageable fear. I would not admit it past my doorways. Gene had eaten what he had hunted, after posing with it for pictures, I imagined. On the other hand I got queasy when I thought too hard about steak or even eggs.
Though I did not have any wish to eat game, that is, an animal I had shot—or even pose with it—I did want to be able to defend myself if necessary. So what would I do with a carcass? I would leave it to rot as a sign to all other potential carcasses, let the ill maggots and munchers come, warning: look here, do not challenge this wild woman of the valley. She will allow your body, dead, to undo itself without majesty or respect.
OUT BACK BEYOND the latrine there was a remnant of weathered wood fence, about fifteen feet long and four feet tall, and against it grew late pink blossoms, leggy and darting in the breeze. I zoomed at those petals. They felt like the right target. With not a little trouble, I loaded the clip as the skinny lady had shown me. I listened for the mammal but all I heard was chirps and caws from birds in the tree tops. I watched the blossoms bob.
Finally, finally, Gene appeared, sitting on the fence a good length down. My own brain had at last bestowed a mercy. “Don’t aim that thing at me,” he said all bratty.
“—the fuck have you been?” I asked.
“Busy,” he began. His voice was more tattered than usual. His eyes looked unfocused, as if he were drunk or ill. “You’re not my only charge.” He dismounted the fence and then slumped upon it, waving his hand at bugs. “Git!” he squealed. He was a sputtering irritant of a man. Had he been this way all along. I wondered was he sinking further out of sight.
At this I felt nauseous, and held up the gun. “Look what I got!”
“A toy?” he laughed.
“A toy what’ll kill ya.”
“Oh, well!” He straightened and curtsied at me. “You know you could use a Lucie, some hound to fetch your kills.”
“I’m just doing some target practice.” I made an impatient back-of-throat uch. So recently I had been wanting Gene. Now I felt like this. I didn’t know then it was a common condition—to want something, to get it, and then to regret getting it. I didn’t know it was usual to be annoyed at your own wants.
“When I first got her she liked to clomp down on the kill. But I trained her out of it. Now let me see what you can do with that hunka junk.”
I nodded. The gun felt smooth in my hand. I was no longer scared. Now there was no variance between who I was to the world and who I was to myself. Boldly I raised the gun and pointed it one-handed at the blooms, then lowered it to the stems, remembering the way the kickback could warp an aim. Then I lowered it and took a breath. Gene was now standing beside me, watching. “Not bad for a girl! You look almost natural.”
“Not bad for anyone, you dolt.” I seethed glamorously. A bug bite on my wrist was making a little siren up my nerves but I ignored it, pushing back my shoulders like Ma had always wanted me to. A ladylike posture. I raised the gun, brought up my left hand, stabilized myself, and squeezed.
The kickback was just a light shove. The bullet thunked, taking a rude bit from the gray rotted fence. I stood hefting my breath as in reps. The latrine let loose a low shit scent on the breeze. Gene had walked over to the cabin’s back stoop to rub his temples and miserate under his breath. I watched the birds in retreat against the sky, sprinting jerkily. The fence asters waved as if underwater. “You know about mouthing?”
“Mouthy? Like you?” I said.
“No. Like you gotta give the hunting dogs a taste of the kill before you take it from them. The dogs track the scent, they tree the thing, you shoot it, then you gotta give them some satisfaction, so you let ’em sn
ap at it a bit.”
“That’s normal?” I asked. He nodded. It seemed, simultaneously, uncouth and logical. I wondered what movie, what person, what book had seeded this info, what lie, what stray scrap of eavesdrop. His face screwed and unscrewed, lively as a propeller in the wind. “What you gotta do is take the fruit out of the pan before it burns on account of the sugar,” he said.
“What?”
He coughed and said sharply, “Never you mind!” He was back on his scramble.
I resumed; I raised the gun again, squeezed, hit nothing.
Squeezed it again, hit nothing.
A dead branch screeched behind me. My stomach sloshed itself full of acid. I thought, maybe this is enough for now. Maybe I’m a wuss.
Then I remembered how the skinny lady had told me not to put down the gun till it was unloaded. I had more shots to go.
So I did it again, raised and squeezed, squeezed again. The flowers bobbed, pink as porno labia.
Again, again.
Then the petals were gone, a whole bloom gone, a whole stem broken and doubled over the fence. “Woo hoo!” I yelled with a full throat into the sweet air. “Yee haw!”
Gene laughed in a single huff then began to meander along a row of brambles stage left. “Atta girl,” he said. “I suppose.”
By my casual math I had one more bullet, one or two. My heart was fast, turned on. All I wanted to do was eat and fuck. A steak? I’d eat it raw. In compensation to myself, steak-less, I decided I’d hit the fence, give it something to remember me by, then go home and tend to myself.
My stomach rippled and laced with energy. I raised the gun in a messy kiddie pose and squeezed that trigger till the kickback. A real whammo. The last bullet bit the fence good.
Then, sassy, I did it again—just for funsies. Just for the feeling.
Except, as is always true in public service announcements: guns are unpredictable. The last bullet hadn’t been the last bullet. It was instead penultimate. And when, unexpectedly, I let out that real last-last bullet, it whiffed under the last cross post of the fence and fast and far to who knew.
Then all at once, it came—the noise to spoil a party: a baby’s shocked yelp. A baby wailing. A baby howling purple, indigo, maroon. I looked around for Gene, but he had his back to me and seemed to be breathing heavily. I wondered then was he dying too, wondered then at the fiendishness of my imagination. Then I remembered the yelp.
I may be a cold customer, but I’m not heartless. So soon as I heard that cry I knew I’d have to ferret it out. I laid the gun on the ground by the fence post. My limbs were full of cold pins as I scaled the fence in a one-two swing and began to crash farther away from the cabin and into the deeper woods. As I ran—for I realized then I was running—I let the branches snap me in the face, brambles knot and then tear at my feet. The wail ripped and ripped and ripped the air as I ran and ran and ran.
And then it stopped.
I was deep into the forest by then, and I turned about, looking for any sign. As the adrenaline soured I thought, is this just another Gene-type scenario? Was I letting myself go mad, or, well, I mean, madder? Lock elbowed, I used my arm to brace myself vertically against a trunk. I surveyed my body to see that now every part of me uncovered by fabric was streaked with raw and bloody scratches.
I prepared my brain to propel my body cabin-ward. There I would reevaluate, shit, and sleep. Then I heard another cry. Only this time it wasn’t a baby wail, but rather, clearly, that of an animal: guttural. I saw a glitter of light way off through thick greenery, and had the thought: That’s a pool of blood if it’s anything.
But by the time I’d pulled my body through that thick greenery I’d discovered that what I’d believed was a pool of blood was instead a creek. It flowed cleanly and brightly: a clarification. I should have known this by its trickle-tinkle. Yet my ears were deaf to anything but that wail. I waited for it to come again, kneeling by the edge of the water, splashing my face, my raw legs down in the suck of shore mud.
The cry came again, burred. I wondered which it was: a coyote or a mountain lion, perhaps a bear come down a bit too south for its own good. Even a feral hound, some Baskerville-by-way-of-Deliverance situation.
My stomach ached with imprecise fear. The beautiful green gray brown black woods showed no sign of caring. Nor did the low white sky. I was no adventurer, only a suburban girl who’d had an idea once. So I kneeled there, face dripping with creek water, waiting.
When once more the cry came I scanned the forest floor until my gaze hit it, twenty or fifteen feet down the brook. There was a small dark form heaving against bright green moss and a stand of shivering ferns. I duckwalked closer and saw it was a Hershey-colored house cat, its leg fur thickly matted with blood.
Closer I saw that the cat’s wild yellow eyes were looking out into nowheresville. The channel of blood on the meat of the hip was red at the wound and darker and then syrupy where it had started to clot.
I’m no sicko, but: I wasn’t used to such blood, and didn’t know I’d admire it so. It was beautiful, the color and the gloss. The flies at the lab had seemed so bloodless. My own menstrual cycle was unpredictable and sloggy; that blood, full of gray-brown lumps, was nothing to admire.
The cat didn’t look at me; rather, it looked insistently and blankly to the left middle distance or the upward faraway. I tasted blood in my mouth, that is how observationally empathetic I was. Or, I had been biting my lip ever since that last bullet shot, and so my teeth had loosed a plug of flesh. I remembered then the paste of the Rangoon, its sodium. From it I recalled the indignity of the group hug. I shook my head to address the present.
The cat’s chest puffed out packets of air in the shade of the umbrella fern. I said aloud, “I don’t want to deal with you.” But I was lying. I didn’t want to leave the cat to die at my hand, like this, slowly bleeding out. The bullet was plainly my fault.
And in that was a logic: the cat was now my charge. I wondered, could I kill it all the way? I couldn’t. I hadn’t yet done anything but stare. It’s overclear that being human’s not the same as being humane. But I pushed forward, trying to pretend it was.
“We’ve got ourselves a pet!” I hollered to Gene, but he had not followed me into the woods and so would not learn the news until later. Or would not performatively react to it until later, however that goes.
With two umbrella ferns and my shirt I made a bunting to wrap the cat. I scooped it slowly. Its needle teeth added only more injury to my beat-up arms. I took the activity as a positive sign. In the swaddling the cat rolled and rocked. I tried to hold it so it couldn’t move its legs and succeeded in part as I tromped back to our cabin. I had not, it turned out, run very far afield. Presently I spotted the purple outhouse and its moon. Through the bunting I could feel the cat’s heart pumping sewing machine fast. “Oh shush,” I said to it, and it, tuckered and bloodied from our battle, seemed to capitulate.
What a little victory I had made, in the shadow of such a mistake. Sure, I wanted to be the one taken care of. I wanted egg noodles and swaddling. I wanted safe rest. But in absence of these things, I could be the one to take care. With not so much cost to myself. Or so I presumed at the time. I held the animal tight, warm and wet again my chest. I had to hold to mountain life. I had to forget the old, now, for here was my new, wild life, just beginning!
ONCE I GOT back in the cabin I took the tatty animal directly to the shower cube. I freed it from the shirt and ferns, then slid the door shut and waited. I pretended I could hear it breathing on the other side. I did wonder if the thing was dead.
To restore is to address violence. To violence is to disrupt a whole. I wanted to wash the cat’s wound, to see what we were working with. I had never owned cat nor dog, nor bird, nor lizard, nor fish. Once Pop had asked if I wanted a dog. I think I said I didn’t. Pop had already been sick. When he wasn’t sick, he was “in recovery.” No one ever had taught me how to respond to an animal or a bullet wound. “Gene!” I screamed. The d
issolving rascal was still in absentia.
THOSE FIRST MOMENTS with that cat, my scalp pulsed hot. I wondered would I kill it or would I coddle it to health. I could not tell you what I thought then. Though now it seems ridiculous that I considered both options equally.
For soon I’d start to call the cat “the Thing.” What other name might I have chosen? Leo? The Lion? The Kill? The Mouse? Sweetheart? Snooky Ookums? That last, courtesy Irving Berlin. But to each, no. This thing was a thing to me: soft, and blurred, and inexact. An announcement of presence, further details forthcoming.
I fetched the first aid kit and my needle and thread, and my lighter. I laid each of these out on the floor beside the shower cube. I got Pop’s orange vial of pain pills, a bowl of water, and my least favorite T-shirt, which I ripped to strips. Needful, I congratulated myself for my quick action. I was trying to make my thoughts more orderly. I took a big breath and opened the door.
Inside the shower cube was a primetime crime scene, blood spatters and smears. I tried to catch its yellow eye like I’d find an answer—a plan, a man, a canal, Panama . . . It’s easy to let oneself go in emergency, take any old scraps of hope and sew them together with your eyes closed.
Quite alive, the cat was making its demon shrills. It threw its little jaws wide. The teeth were sharp looking. It shrilled as if it thought the sound could help. As if we two were anything but victims of man and life. I dried my eyes before realizing I was midsob. “I’m doing the fucking best I can!” I told the cat but the cat didn’t fucking care. In it I recognized pain.
So I jammed a crumble of pain pill into the cat’s throat, feeling a tender membrane of interior cheek. Then shut the shower cube once more and waited.
After many minutes, the squall abated. I went back in, washed the lethargic animal with water, sterilized the needle with the lighter, and sewed up the wound, a deep graze which was three inches long and a quarter of an inch deep. It was like sewing a pillow: something I had done once. I found myself in shock. With antibiotic ointment I frosted the wound. Then I closed the cube once more, and took a conscious breath, exhaling wetly into the cabin, which was now otherwise quiet.
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