The Animals: A Novel (22 page)

But you are not listening now. You have come to the doe. She has stopped moving and lies sprawled on the asphalt in exhaustion. You pray that she is already gone but then she starts her crying again, that explosion, that shriek of sound, so close now. Could this be her? Could this really be Ginny, who you pulled from the fence wire? Who you cared for? Who you named?

She is looking at you now. Her eyes roll.

You raise the rifle to your shoulder and aim. You wish you could say her name one time but your voice does not come and when you sight down the barrel at the hard cap of her skull you can say nothing at all.

YOU DO
not sleep that night, so completely is the image of that blown skull burned into your mind. You bottle-fed her and learned that to help her excrete her waste you needed to wipe her anus with a baby wipe and so you did, many times a day, and she came to you and you held her and fed her and when she was a year old your uncle told you what you already knew, that you needed to release her back into the forest, and so you did. So much effort and care, and then there she was—if not the very same animal then one so much like her—and all your work has been for naught. You saved her and then you were her executioner. You wonder, in such moments, what Bill would tell you about living and dying, about what is right and what is wrong, but there is only you, alone. In your mind, pickup trucks blow past with gun racks, and mustached men brandish firearms that spark and kick white smoke into the trees. And you see the animals. How they leap into the air, twisting upon a fulcrum of blood, their bodies blowing apart over the snow. Marmot and muskrat. Black bear and grizzly. Beaver and raccoon and snowshoe hare. The great cats whining and hissing as they go down. Mountain lion, lynx, bobcat. See how their claws cut the empty air, how their teeth snap on the ice. And the deer and the moose and elk. And from the sky the first few faint red daubs of blood marking the paperwhite cold of the earth, each a meltwater crater lined with red like a bullet hole. Then heavier droplets, the torrent constant and unceasing once it has begun and all of it smelling of death. The first of the birds is a small dark shadow that ricochets through the tree branches and falls at last to the snow almost without sound. A faint puff like a quick exhale of breath. A tiny green hummingbird barely as long as your finger. You hold it in your hand but already it is too late. For this bird. For them all. Now come the woodpecker and the kingfisher and the warbler. And then at last the falcon and the hawk and the owl and the eagle. How their wings flutter backward over their curved bodies, as if trying to pull that last scrap of sky from the blood rain that surrounds them. Everyone a killer and so everything killing. Death coming into snow, into the fallen needles, into the frozen earth under our feet. Everyone a killer.

Even you.

IN THE
late evening a few nights later, you find yourself at the Northwoods Tavern again. You can think of nothing else to do, of nowhere else to go, and you realize that your brief conversation with the bartender the week previous is the only real conversation you have had with anyone since your uncle’s heart attack. Or perhaps you return because what the bartender said and what you have now done cannot be reconciled in your mind. So you return, and this time the bar is full, nearly to capacity, with a live band in the corner of the room busily wrecking the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” and a few couples gamely attempting to swing dance to the faltering rhythm.

The big bartender you spoke with earlier in the week is talking to a group of flannel-shirted, bearded men farther down the small bar, but he comes down and says, Welcome back, and you nod and order a Budweiser and then try to find a place where you can stand in the crowded room. The band has shifted into a slow country ballad now, a song you do not recognize, and the dancing couples collapse together in various states of embrace. Behind the bar, the poster for the football pool hangs, a few more of its squares marked in with names.

Hours later you still have not added your own. It seems somehow less important now. You are in the full drunk of the evening and you find yourself amidst the animal heads, staring up at them, one after another, with a mixture of awe, horror, and confusion. A few feet away a group of men and women talk in loud voices about a planned hunting trip. They laugh and debate what they will bring and how big the animals are and what constitutes the Canadian wolf-hunting season and what kinds of weapons they have and do not have. They are young men, perhaps younger than you, but not by much. You think of Rick, of those nights at Grady’s and all the other clubs up and down the strip, at first with the fake ID and later with the real one, of those last five months after you turned twenty-one and before everything totally turned to shit. The winter of 1984. They look like boys to you, although they must have been at least twenty-one, and you are only twenty-five. And yet it feels, somehow, as if you have aged in animal years, that you are somehow older than you are, a sensation that you cannot quite pin down and yet which is there nonetheless.

You’re gonna need a gun with more power than that, one of the boys says.

Thirty-aught, another says.

Shit, man, that’ll punch a hole the size of a baseball.

Seven millimeter, maybe.

I’m thinking that Browning my dad has.

The one you bring for elk?

Yeah, it shoots two-seventy.

I like that rifle. You should sell me that rifle.

Shit, I ain’t selling you nothing.

You stand outside that circle, wondering what truth lies sprawled beneath the severed heads of the animals that stare down from every wall. In your drunken reverie, you wonder if the bartender was right, and if he was right then maybe what your uncle David was doing up there in the forest was wrong because the animals he was keeping in cages had lived at least some of their lives in freedom. Maybe that freedom still burned deep inside their muscle and sinew and in their veins and especially in their hearts. Maybe they still and forever could recall a time when the forest was endless and they ran through it like gods, their worlds holding that fire, tending it. Can you imagine such a thing to be true? Even were you to raise a grizzly in a cage all its life, even were it born in captivity, did it not still understand that its nature was wild? And then you are struck with everything at once—everything that has happened to you and because of you—the whole of your life come swinging into your heart and with it a sense of frustration and despair and fury that sends you staggering forward.

You think you intend to push out into the cold night but when you turn toward the door your leg catches the edge of something—a chair, the carpet, a table edge—and you stumble forward into the circle of flanneled men and denim-clad women, your beer tipping out of your hand so that when you try to right it you instead send it exploding everywhere like a tiny geyser. The men and women all step back and one of them lays a hand on your shoulder. Whoa whoa whoa, he says.

Some part of you knows you should simply walk on but the eyes of the animals are upon you and the alcohol is running in your blood and what comes from your mouth instead of an apology is: Get your fucking hand off me.

What’s that? The young man leans in to look at you now, looks at you carefully. He wears a long blond mustache that comes down over his upper lip. On his head is a green cap with a yellow scrawl of words that you cannot focus on long enough to read.

And you say: You heard me.

Man, you need to take a break. Go get some air.

You go get some air.

Then the young man smiles. You watch his face carefully, his eyes on your eyes. You’re trying to pick a fight, he says.

And you say, Fuck you.

Then, from one of the women: You gonna let him talk like that, Jack?

Well, shit, he says. I guess not. There is something like joy in his features. Something like excitement. So let’s go, he says. He takes a step forward and you take a step back and in the next instant the young man’s friends are around you, pulling you off your feet and dragging you backward through the bar. You can hear the bartender—the woman now—yelling, Hey hey hey, and the group around you stops dragging for a moment and one of them says, We’re taking him outside, and she says, No fighting in the bar, Jack, and he says, I know, Laurie. That’s why we’re taking him outside. Then another voice, this from the bartender you spoke to those days earlier: Make it a fair goddamned fight. Don’t you boys just trounce him out there.

You can hear movement now and you are smiling, thinking of Rick at the clubs and bars the two of you frequented in Reno, and more than ever you wish your friend was by your side. But Rick is gone now and your uncle is gone and even your brother is gone and so you are alone.

They take you down the stairs backward, your boots bouncing off each step, and when they let go of you on the asphalt of the parking lot you surprise yourself by regaining your feet.

You fucked with the wrong guy, my friend, someone says.

It appears as if the entire crowd from inside the bar has filtered outside now. They stand in their flannels and T-shirts and beards, leaning on the rail, making side bets, watching as you sway in the reflected light of the sign and the single lamppost that lights a faint patch of the road.

You think only that you are going to be pretty badly beaten and that tomorrow you will still have to rise and feed the animals, that no matter what happens to you tonight, tomorrow all the animals you care for will look to you to provide, realize this suddenly and completely, not only that you are responsible for them and that they need you, but that you need them just as much. Everything else, everything beyond these simple and irrefutable facts, is wholly and completely irrelevant: their world and your own overlapping so tightly that they have become, at least in this one area, indistinguishable from one another.

I’m sorry, you say.

It’s a little late for that. The man in the green cap steps forward out of the circle of his friends and stands loose limbed before you, leaning into the dim light.

You open your mouth to speak and in that moment the man punches you full and hard in the stomach, doubling you over, and your breath rushes out of you all at once. Your hand is already raised. Wait, wait, you say, gasping for breath. Hang on. You think you are going to vomit, a sensation that comes and disappears and then returns again.

Hang on for what?

I got your point, you say between breaths. Don’t hit me again.

Don’t be a pussy about it, the man says. People are watching.

I get it. I was an asshole.

You’re goddamn right you were an asshole, the man says.

I know. I fucked it up. I’m sorry.

The man stands looking at you as if contemplating what to do next. Well, shit, he says, don’t be such an asshole next time.

There won’t be a next time, you say. I’m going home now.

Good, the man says. Jerk.

Yep, you say.

They all stand there waiting for you to throw a counterpunch but when you remain doubled over someone says, Let’s go back inside. The crowd assembled on the tiny front deck mumbles and murmurs and then the whole group begins to disappear through the door.

You got some problems. The words come from the same young man, the man in the green cap, who continues to stand there watching you.

I know, you say.

You need to get your shit together.

I know that too.

All right then, the man says.

He turns then and walks back up the stairs, his friends still watching you and then following the green hat back into the bar. The band stopped at some point during the fracas but now, from somewhere that seems very far away, it starts up again, the bass shaking through the walls without tune or rhythm.

You remain crouched on the asphalt in the darkness. At some point you vomit. Later still you stand and try to find your dead uncle’s pickup truck.