Sweet Jesus (12 page)

The vaulted rib cage, emptied now of the organs it once protected, stood like the inside of a small red cathedral. Hannah sliced an inch-wide strip of hide off the back bone. So when you saw through the spine, Norm said, the fur doesn’t get into the meat. Then she removed the head with a handsaw and carved out the antlers, the saw blade slicing through just above the eyes, making the ears wiggle. This was the hardest part. The face so undeniably a face.

When she was done, Hannah squatted back on her haunches and surveyed the bright red blocks of meat. She had never felt so intimately connected to the food chain. Or as able, or as fertile. Not guilty, as she might have expected, but full of a ripeness, a connectivity. Nor was she prepared for the feeling of what can only be called
love
that she had for the body.

Norm took the heart and put it in a plastic bag and they started to carry the quarters out, one at a time, over a shoulder. The quarters weighed roughly eighty pounds each. Norm heaved one onto his shoulder and hooked his wrist over the hoof to use as a counter-lever. It looked easy enough, but Hannah could only walk about a hundred paces before she felt pinched by the weight. Norm would throw his quarter to the ground, then hoist hers off and drop it, hide down, onto a pillow of tiny wet dark green leaves. They would go back and make the same trip again with the other two quarters, then a separate trip for the rifle, gear, antlers, and heart, moving forward like this in increments.

Shouldering a quarter was like carrying a dog or an injured lamb to safety. This is a paradox, Hannah thought, or a delusion. But she felt a fierce affection for the still-warm density of fur and muscle and bone, nestled against the back of her neck. It felt like an act of love. There was no shame. Because I know I’m going to eat this animal, Hannah thought. And there is no greater intimacy. It’s what we do to our gods, our lovers.
Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you
.

F
enton had called him at the nurses’ station and asked him to go pick up a rental truck. Fenton had never driven around in a truck before and today that’s what he wanted to do. He gave him an address and his credit card number. Zeus was tired, he just wanted to go home, but it was the first time in weeks that Fenton had expressed an interest in doing anything. So he offered to get a pizza on the way, and Fenton wanted ham and pineapple, an extra dough ball, and a ginger beer.

Zeus changed his clothes and shoes, wiped off his makeup, left the hospital, and took a taxi to the rental place. It was down an alley behind the bus station. He paid the driver and walked into the drafty station. A pigeon escorted him inside and out the other end. He found the office door sandwiched between two dumpsters, and made arrangements with a handsome young man who was wearing a really nice pair of jeans. He asked him for the name of the brand and didn’t quite catch it, but it was something ridiculous, something like
the milk of human kindness
. Then he had to walk another two blocks to
where the rentals were kept. A white Ford Ranger. For some reason, it looked whiter than any other vehicle he’d ever seen. Maybe it was the black bumpers. A white puppy with black lips. He ran his hand along the smooth side of the truck and gave it a stroke.

Finally, Zeus was sitting inside the high cab, inhaling the masculine smell of a brand-new vehicle. He backed out of the lot and drove to Rossi’s. While the pizza cooked, he watched a large woman in a hair net fill an aluminum tray with dough balls, squeezing the dough out the side of her hand and twisting it off with a powdery pop. A sleight of hand, Zeus thought, not unlike the dove trick. Hot little oven-warm dove buns.

Fenton had said only that he wanted to go see the lake. When he came out of the apartment building, he was wearing a dirty silver parka he’d bought at a secondhand store last winter. He was carrying a plaid wool blanket, which he spread over his lap like an old man when he got into the truck. He looked pale and sweaty. He coughed a wet and crashing cough, then closed his eyes and raised a hand to prevent Zeus from asking any questions. Zeus drove north to where the city felt less crowded at their backs. At a red light, Zeus found himself staring at a bungalow on the corner, with small, corrugated fibreglass awnings above the windows. On the front lawn, fenced in by a ring of filigreed wrought iron, a plaster stallion reared up on its hind legs, its two front hooves cracked off.

He parked the truck facing Lake Michigan and opened the pizza box. The water stretched out calm, milky, copper green. The sky to the west was a very pale blue. Large cement blocks, like giant dice, tossed and rolled to the edge of the water. Bordering the cement blocks, a muddy strip of grass covered in
bird shit. Three geese stood in a row and watched as a fourth one paraded by.

Canada geese, Fenton said – his voice sudden and startling in the silence – are the black squirrels of the duck world. He was wheezing slightly with every intake of breath. Wherever they make their nests, they take over and drive all the other ducks away. Like the black squirrels, who drive out the grey squirrels, who in turn drive out the red. The red squirrels are the prettiest, but they’re the weakest.

Zeus was watching him. Fenton grimaced into his pizza crust. He had only taken a few small bites, while Zeus was on his fourth piece. The cab smelled of grease and cheese.

I’m dying, Fenton said.

You’ll be all right, Zeus said.

No, I’m
dying
, Fenton said, and his green eyes flared gold beneath the halo of his dark red hair. I got all my test results about a month ago.

What do you mean, tests?

I’ve got liver cancer.

No, you don’t.

From my chronic hepatitis.

I thought you had that under control.

It’s all through my body. The doctors wanted me to do chemo and surgery, but I decided against it. I don’t want to put myself through all of that if I’m going to die anyway.

You are
not
going to die.

I haven’t even told my parents. Those pills I’m taking, they’re morphine, but I’m not in that much pain, weirdly.

What are you talking about!

I’m sorry, Zeus, I couldn’t tell you. I felt like telling you would’ve made it feel real. And I didn’t want you to suffer – any more than I know you’re already going to. He touched
Zeus’s arm, but Zeus didn’t move. I don’t want to leave you, and I guess that’s why – I don’t know, Zeus. I just don’t know how to handle this.

Zeus stared out the window and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He offered the pizza box for Fenton to drop his slice on, then closed it. He nudged the door open and the handle shot out of his greasy fingers. Yanking on it impatiently, he felt the plastic crack a little and shoved the door open with his shoulder. He almost fell out of the cab. The pizza box slid sideways and he scooped it up and it started to flip and he wrestled it in the air. The box swung open and Zeus screamed, Fuckin’ shit-fuck, you just gonna stand there like that, or what? And flung it at the geese as they scattered.

Zeus drove while Fenton slept. Fenton had wanted to see more of the countryside, so they’d headed further north. It was dark and they were alone in the landscape, following the elongated funnel of their headlights. Zeus would not accept that Fenton was going to die. Why hadn’t he come to him sooner and asked him how they were going to fight this thing? How could he just resign himself, as if the date was set in stone and he was expected to be there on time, at death’s door, in his white satin jumpsuit and battered old suitcase, smouldering like he’d just been pulled out of a fire.

Fenton stirred and coughed and half woke up. Isn’t it interesting, he said, as if he was picking up from where he’d just left off in a dream, how everything seems to go back to the father?

Our fathers are always there, Zeus said. Even when they’re not there.

When I was eighteen, my dad insisted I spend a year in the Israeli Army. It’s your Jewish duty, my boy, Fenton said in a gruff
voice, then rattled up another mucousy cough. He pulled himself up in the seat. What did
I
know? I’d only been to Israel once before, on a high school exchange, to this kibbutz in the middle of nowhere. Fenton shrunk back down inside the padded shell of his parka and leaned back against the door. I was a fifteen-year-old goatherd from Chicago, he said in a tone of amazement. So I turn eighteen and head back to Israel at my father’s behest. This time as a soldier. I can barely do ten pushups, but I learn how to assemble an AK-47.

It was unusual for Fenton to go on about himself, and Zeus wanted to hear more. I can’t imagine you holding a gun, he said and Fenton didn’t answer him. After a while, he started to snore, like he used to when he was drunk. Damn you, Fenton, I can’t imagine a lot of things, Zeus thought. You know?

When they first met, Fenton had been wild and restless, full of anger at the world, and rebellious. I care about nothing and no one, he announced one evening at a bar and tossed a little bag of cocaine onto the table. He was thirty-seven. Zeus couldn’t believe how old he was when Fenton had first told him. In fact, he had trouble fitting Fenton into a description of
any
age. He’d had a few jobs – gallery assistant, overnight security guard in a museum – and had saved up some money, so Zeus never had to worry about paying for drinks, although they did share most of the bills when he finally moved into Fenton’s sweet, third-floor walkup. They used to go from his apartment to the bars and back again, for days on end, cruising the city like sharks, reeking of aftershave. Fenton would gorge on pork souvlakis and bacon sandwiches, and Zeus used to punch him in the arm and say, You know, for a Jew, you can be a real
ham –
which always cracked him up.

Fenton was never one to give into pressure, or hide his opinions, but the one thing he couldn’t do was stand up to
his father. One day, he told Zeus that his father had been a member of the Zionist movement in the 1970s. He said it like it was a terrible secret.

How in the world, Fenton said, can anyone condone military violence against innocent civilians in the name of protecting the so-called Jewish homeland!

Zeus had wanted to sympathize, but he was too distracted by how amazing Fenton looked, his eyes glowing with outrage. Fenton was always so well dressed, in his secondhand retro suits and narrow ties. So different from himself, in his jeans and motorcycle t-shirts, the higher the trucker’s cap the better. A child of New Mexico.

Fenton had got so worked up that a faint sheen appeared on his upper lip. It made Zeus stare at his mouth while he kept up his rant. He watched his lips move and fantasized about kissing him. Apparently, his dad had a gun in his office. Had he ever used it in the movement? It was some kind of Russian World War II thing. Would it incriminate them one day? And what about his mother? What if she got arrested? Did he ever think about
that
? This kind of speculation used to drive Fenton crazy, but he would never know what the story was because he couldn’t bring himself to talk to his father about the past. His dad’s own parents had died in the camps, and Fenton wasn’t going to be the one to stir that up. Suddenly, Fenton broke down and cried. It was the first time Zeus had ever seen him this way, and it left him feeling churned up and sorry.

Families, Zeus thought. The things you can’t talk about. He’d always wanted, for instance, to ask Tim Crowe if he ever felt bad about what he’d done to him. He might still be in contact with the Crowes if Tim hadn’t caught him in the garage that day, half-naked and on his knees in front of a boy from school. Zeus could still feel the shameful, emptying-out dread
of it. Tim had announced to Rose that it was a problem he would handle with prayer and the Spirit, and took him straight to church, where he painstakingly lectured Zeus on the perils of homosexuality. Tim was a rational man, not prone to hysterics, but adamant about living life in a righteous way, as he knew the word to be defined. Tim’s own view of the situation was that homosexuality was like an illness, unwittingly caught as if by contamination and cured through prayer, forgiveness, and celibacy. A prayer team was quickly gathered and asked to pray for his adopted son.

So Zeus found himself kneeling again, this time uncomfortably on the oak floor of Tim’s office, surrounded by a small coterie of his spiritual advisers. They circled him like protective fencing, and had a casual way of joking that was a preamble to a great seriousness. They laid their hands on his head and his shoulders, and he thought about pigeons landing on a park statue – the repeated phrases, imploring God to make eminently clear the correct, high, bright, and admirable path his life should take. He felt dizzy and claustrophobic. The women wore too much perfume, the men too much cologne – and yet it still couldn’t mask the locker-room smell of the warm crotches that pressed in around his head. It was a smell he would always associate with a sickening feeling of disappointment.

That night he’d dreamt he was sailing past the shores of heaven in a slave ship with all the other heathens and non-believers. He knew there must be other people out there who were like him. A tribe he could belong to. That’s how he’d felt with Fenton, as soon as he met him, like everything was going to be okay because he wasn’t alone in the world anymore.

Drunkenly, they had tumbled into the gay nightclubs of the city, and took ecstasy and danced, drenched in sweat, until the sun came up. They fell in love and were proud and
self-serving until Fenton walked through a park and saw that film of Yuri Nikulin that had made him stop and change his life. One day, he came rushing into the kitchen with his big Toshiba laptop. He’d found the very same footage on the internet. He forced Zeus to stop what he was doing and watch it with him. They must have watched it twenty times, each time more hilarious and poignant than the last. The film became a standard for their own clowning – it actually made them want to be better than they were. It was like a challenge, and Fenton gave it everything he had. Except for this, now. This death thing. He was bowing down in front of it, as if it was something sanctified.