You Will Never See Any God: Stories (6 page)
Interesting, always interesting, he thought, plucking at the bandage on his neck that itched and was hot suddenly, and hurt worse after he plucked at it, interesting to see that change, the profound and remarkable alteration that the snap of one small .22 bullet could make. The birds fled, a quiet dropped on the windbreak, only the impervious hogs went on completely unaffected. The target itself, the squirrel, headed forward, still facing downward, but now as if its whole will and effort must be to return, to go upward, and the weight of ten planets sucking it with deadly force.
A sag, tail, fur, fat, everything wrinkled downward, and that enormous gravity drew it down, the pads of feet dug grimly into the bark. He thought for a moment he would have to shoot again but then with a slipping suddenness the brown squirrel skittered down the bark, crashed with astonishing heaviness into the bush beneath the tree.
The lurking dog came up and seized the squirrel, and Leonard spoke sharply, and the dog retreated. The squirrel was male, very heavy. Fed on Iowa corn, it should be, Leonard thought. The bullet had gone in an inch in back of the skull. It had been dead from the moment of the shot, he thought, and had hung on not even reflexively, only the feet thinking reflexively.
He picked it up by the tail, studied the dulled round eyes without wanting to. “Palliation,” he said aloud, and threw the squirrel right at the dog. The dog hopped away, turned away from him, the animal uncertain if he were angry with him.
“Poor sensitive beast,” he muttered viciously at the dog, thinking—perhaps you need palliation too, poor creature.
The woods were quiet, and very hot now. The gnats, fat and hairy and insistent, thick as miniature buffalo and shaped like them, were everywhere. Leonard went out, skirted the old machine shed, the dog coming after, forgetting the squirrel now, the dog fat and useless although not old, it ever useless, but interested in hunting, nothing could make it move as could the appearance of a gun.
“Go on, go back! Get!” The dog retreated, showing whites of eyes, one raised forepaw, its dignity wounded, it trying to save a remnant of that. It backed away. Leonard slid along the side of the barn, past the empty milking shed, and at the corner he waited, carefully, pulled in his breath, for he could hear the cooing, the pigeons always pursuing breeding, always ready for that. If he shot a dozen a day there would yet be pigeons. His brother wanted
them out for they carried a host of diseases, he said. On that hint Leonard had shot many.
At the top of the barn, under the long eave where the hay trolley ran the pigeon perched, the blue head pivoted and bobbed and looked at him, and it too foolish or inexperienced to fly. The beautiful rifle arced perfectly, the little wedge of sight fastened on the blue breast with the elegant tracings of lavender, so bright, so stunning it almost hurt the eyes, like something imagined when one was young and worked with the brilliant range of colors in drawing books, and could never hope to achieve, the little needle of front sight bobbed at the lower edge, just a hint of brass touched the lavender V on the blue breast. The snap of sound, clear, washing all eardrums of fuzziness, and down it came, fluttering of bluish down, and it much faster, quick as lightning, thunked against the concrete, did not move.
He heard the frightened movement, waited, this one exit there above, the white-winged bird came out, was just on the point of its hurried and hysterical flight when he shot (his hand had changed old used bullet case for new one automatically, the greased slide, slip and motion, click nicely of steel), and thought he might have missed for an instant the way the bird did fly, but the puff of feathers told him different immediately. He waited, saw the pull of wings turn ineffectual, the flight fall lumpish, and it slammed somersaulting and rolling into the ground down there beyond the tank.
The dog whined in its anxiety to be in to them, but the gates were closed, the whining almost a whistling, it so anxious and insistent and begging.
Beyond the barn he saw the other pigeon, up on the silo in the middle of the feeding yard, a long shot for a .22 without a scope. (The rifle had had a scope when he came, but he took it off, the shots too easy with it; “what’s the sense?” he’d asked, “you lay
the crosshairs on it and shoot, what sport in that?”; he’d taken the scope off and now only open sights and his eye), and out of the corner of his eye he saw his brother and the old hired man watching. He rested the stock firmly, very firmly in his shoulder, settled the rifle on the distant bird, so far it blurred and nothing but the whole bird to sight at, it so small it filled the entire sight. And shot.
Profound change. Profoundist. Down it dropped. Plummeted. Straight down. He could hear it hit.
“Good thing you didn’t make a hole in the silo roof,” his brother muttered, but obviously impressed.
He went in through the wooden gate, the whining dog going wild, the dog seized the first pigeon, although the dog was so fat and used to cooked scraps of steak and pork chops it never ate more than the head or a piece of pigeon breast, whichever the bullet made a hole into.
Leonard inspected the birds one by one, and this is what still made him shake a little, just a little, the inspection afterwards that he did not need to do, but always forced himself to do, remembering each time he did so his not wanting to shoot things when he was very young and being ordered to by his father when he was twelve or so, the first time, and how his father had put the rifle in his hand, another rifle then, assuredly, and had chosen a random bird, just to have him shoot something, a woodpecker, a bird he’d always liked, a woodpecker! and he had shot and hit it. The bird had come down, alarming him, horrifying him, yet in the fatherly approval that he desired delighting him too. He had not looked at the bird, could not, but ever after that he had, always examined that which he had brought to death, picked up the bundle of feathers, felt for the point of being hit, and ever amazed at the awful impact of the bullet. That was it, really, the real heart and matter of it, he thought, even as he fed the slender
gray little bullets into the clip, nosed them in, the brass case seated firmly, and felt the bullets, so tiny, a quarter the size of his little finger, and from that what awful impact! What terrible change from something so small, hardly to be believed, and sometimes he had mused on whether one bullet, so little, so few grams there, whether one could hurt
him
, whether if he shot himself somewhere, arm, foot or wherever, if it would hurt. And knew it would, smiled at the thought, shot a hog for butchering once; and was astounded at how the 260-pound lumbering beast had thundered down as if a cosmic scythe had struck with whirlwind force to reap off its legs, it had scuttled down so suddenly. With awful impact the bullet found home. The turning bullet goes home (and why “home”? he asked, why that word?), the flesh is pounded to jelly, the bones that the victim thinks will surely last a thousand years are riddled and smashed (he had felt the crunched crispness like rattled potato chips of the bones of pheasants he had shot) . But the bullet carries its own palliation, he thought grimly. It was said that the bullet deadens all pain in the locale of striking. Perhaps that was why the dying animals offered yet to flee from him instead of from that which was killing them—the bullet within.
He crossed the fence, driving the dog back for sure this time, went down along the pasture, picked up a stray cat at forty yards, scrubbing along the fence row, tacky and mean, and shot it dead. The cat went straight into the air, wrestling with something there, and down again, thrashed along for ten feet or so. When Leonard came up, it lay on its side, hissing and stroking with one forepaw, the other side paralyzed apparently, a smoking and open wound in its belly.
“What’s your history, cat?” he asked, touched it with the rifle muzzle to see if it would need a new bullet. It did not move at the gesture. “Only one life today?” he asked. And thought, god, god,
profoundly altered, changed, eternally for it, eternally changed by that awful meeting of something brought crushing and unexpected through space to meet it here, unexpected and unpredestined except as the shooter destines, now in one casual determination. He watched, pulling at the hurting bandage on his neck. Hissing of remarkable anger, a rage, that changed to a terrible rattle in its throat and two great spasms, and freezing in that clenched posture. Forever, forever, Leonard thought; or as long as the bugs will let it alone—that’s how long this forever is.
There was a tightness around his forehead, a coolness in his chest; it always came upon him when he watched something die, this meditative and hurting helplessness at the irreversibility of it, even if he had brought it, but the bringing had been from a distance, the dying was up close. This nearness of the smashing, the impact, irreversible, irretrievable. He felt it more powerfully now. Especially now.
Smooth barrel, oiled stock, smooth, easy, he walked. The nervous cattle lifted their beautiful heads, pointed their tipped white ears and muzzles and looked at him. He remembered vaguely Homer and the lines of “cow-eyed”; was it cow-eyed dawn or cow-eyed Diana? Large, brown, beautiful eyes of these animals; immense eyelashes; Homer was right. The cattle sniffed, backed away, ran a little. He worked through them, crossed the creek. The cattle circled, some went ahead, some behind, and that was strange, he thought, for he expected them to go on to the other end of the pasture as they always had done, far away from the farm buildings, but today they did not, hung close, sniffing with that heavy challenging but frightened way and then running a little, circling, and coming back to study him.
Leonard walked along the edge of the creek, the creek itself about forty feet wide in that area, but the water at its bottom only six inches deep and two feet wide, a nice creek with minnows and
frogs in abundance. The grass was tall already, pale green and heavy with occasional giant burdocks lifted like watchers. Some of the cattle went ahead of him, splashed through the mud and up the slippery far bank where he would follow. Most of the bank was too steep to be crossed at all, the straight slice of black dirt, caved off in chunks at intervals, and down there the ribbon of water in the sand, the curling motion. He looked for raccoons, knew he would see none now, and remembered, not so certain, how he had seen one in broad daylight up on the farm one spring, and watched, looked at the placid water reflecting reeds, the smear of sky, himself.
Four weeks before he had come (he and his wife) to visit his mother; in the best of health, he thought, except for that persistent new back ache, something clamped on him that wouldn’t let go, and he’d lost weight, everyone noticed that right away, and he’d said it was his diet, one that had never worked before, some slight fevers, dizziness. And now confirmed in the ancient certainty of his own mortality, yes truly that over the easy optimism of the others—oh if you find it soon enough they can get it, can work miracles, great doctors nowadays, and so on—but he knew the statistics on this one, most assuredly, two years or three. In three weeks, in a moment really after that first biopsy, from healthy man to dying man. He had not thought of death, before, coming to him, no healthy person of thirty-three would except perhaps melodramatically when having flu or a cold or driving a car fast. He had thought much on it these last three weeks.
He went through the grove of willows, young trees near the creek bed. He was tired now, but he told himself he would not be, not yet. He was though, as he had told himself the cancer could not spread, but it had. He could feel the cut on his neck burning, and the cold lump in him on his side. The young green grass there on the other side of the creek was very heavy, and he
looked down at his shoes, hearing as if for eternity the shuff with each step of the grass—shuff, shuff, shuff, not watchful now, knowing he was drifting, bitter and drifting.
The jackrabbit took him by surprise, gave him that sudden striking jolt in his heart region, the flash and movement. The big rabbit had fled the brush, bounded easily up past the spring there on the pasture hillside, a big old jackrabbit, gray with age and remnant of winter coat. Leonard waited, trailing it with the points of the rifle sights. When the animal stopped, as he thought it might, dropped to a pause, let its tall ears fall over its back, Leonard shot it, a good long shot. The rabbit gave a spasm and frantically kicked in a circle when it hit the ground again. Leonard was in no rush getting there. The rabbit was dead, of course, head covered with dust, the dead film on the eyes already. Knobbed feet, old powerful legs, blistered haunches. Tiny bullet, smallest penetration not even to be found but by someone who knew, a fragment of weight against the big heavy rabbit, really a miracle of sorts.
“You were an old one,” Leonard said. “You should have been prepared, shouldn’t you?” touching it with the rifle tip. “How many near misses from coyote or fox or rifle have you had?” He reloaded the clip and grinned. I cannot miss today, he thought. Everything comes down today.
He went down the hill, breathing hard, his head aching a little now, his neck itching. The doctors had encouraged exercise but not too much, to keep his strength, the way the doctors always could blandly respond in clichés, yes one needs milk and exercise and sunshine. For what should he keep his strength, and he knew, for those days of debility that awaited him, this debilitating disease that would grind him down to an emaciated parody of himself until he contracted something like pneumonia that would kill him. Build strength for that.
The cattle at the pinch of the pasture along the creek did not go on ahead of him, as they would before, but turned and came back, right around him.
“Something scares you more than I do,” he murmured.