to yourself, he thought. Buying an actual little car like that. Unthinkable even a month ago, you are changing. You are changing in front of your own eyes. He got a hose and bucket and sprayed the leaves and dirt off and got his special car soap from the house and sudsed the Camaro so it wouldn’t look so bad for a buyer. He was still wearing his boxer shorts. It felt good being out there in the sun like that, practically naked, he could feel the heat all over him.
Then he heard someone coming up the road. It sounded like his mother’s Plymouth. He didn’t think his mother would be back that early, but maybe so—her hands were getting worse every day. That was another thing he hadn’t considered—that soon his mother would not be able to work, at least not much. Winters were hell on her. She pulled in next to the trailer and there she was, his mother, dressed for church and him standing in his underpants in the driveway, nearly one o’clock in the afternoon. She shook her head, but not in a friendly way. She was not happy to see it.
“I’m selling it,” he said, by way of making up for being caught like that.
She just looked at him.
“The car. I’m getting something that runs. I’m going to college. In September, if I can.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m gonna call that coach at Colgate College,” he continued. “He said I could check in with him anytime. And there’ll be other places. Either way I’ll be in school by this September. And not any California University of Pennsylvania, either.”
“Okay,” she said. She went up onto the porch. She didn’t believe him.
“I’m serious,” he said.
She went inside.
He followed her in. He looked around for a pair of pants to put on, as if it would make him seem more serious.
“Are you really going,” she said. “Or are you just saying that so I don’t start charging you rent.”
“I’m going,” he said. “I’m going to the library to get the applications. Get them in the mail soon as possible.”
“What about letters from your teachers and copies of your transcript?”
“Right,” he said. “I’ll do that, too.” He had forgotten that part.
“Billy?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a good boy.” She hugged him but still, he could tell, she didn’t believe him. Who could blame her? He was hungry and he went to the fridge, there was nothing he wanted. He checked the chest freezer on the porch, but it was nearly empty as well. Some venison wouldn’t hurt anything. He would go and get a deer—poaching—it ran in the family. There were too many deer now, they kept on extending the hunting season but never enough to catch up with the deer population, a little poaching it was no big deal. Fifty pounds of venison, it was free money. Though his mother wouldn’t touch it.
After getting dressed he took his .30-30 off its rack, his Winchester 94 from before Winchester went to shit, the gun was fifty years old. Top-eject the way God wanted and no scope—that was for people who couldn’t shoot. An original Lyman peep. Someone might have guessed it was his father’s or grandfather’s rifle but neither one of them knew or cared to take care of anything this nice. He’d saved and bought it himself, passing up the clunky newer models, mostly plastic, that cost half as much.
He dropped a few cartridges in his pocket, three was the right number, then walked down into the field, it was definitely spring now, that rich green smell was everywhere, he wondered where it came from. After slipping into the small blind he’d built, he drew in the air, even the damp soil in the blind smelled rich, it was just the smell of things growing. Smell of life, really. He pushed a pair of blunt- nosed rounds into the magazine. It was all a cycle. It would continue long after he was gone. It was turning out to be a good day. Though already he’d nearly pissed it away, he wouldn’t get to the library before it closed. It’s Sunday, he thought. Probably closed anyway. He would get it done tonight and still mail the apps tomorrow. But for now it was a nice day and you did not piss away days like this in the library.
The field had not been mowed in a year and the grass was high and the goldenrod was taking over. He would have to mow it soon. He would do that tomorrow as well, a field unmowed did not stay a field very long. He would stop being the kind of punk that put everything off till tomorrow. No excuses it was time to grow up. In his way he was still a momma’s boy. He admitted that now. He was good at some things but not at others. He looked out over the land, rolling off in all different directions as far as the eye could see, it was all ridges and hollows, deep wrinkles in the earth as if God had taken a great armful and squeezed it in on itself. Like when you play with the skin on a dog’s face, it all wrinkles up. He had not even bothered to get another dog, he thought about that. He was still mourning Bear. But Bear had been dead two years. Was that mourning or being lazy? He went back to the rolling terrain. Of course God was not the explanation. Isaac would know why it did that. Underground plates, probably.
The field descended gradually to a stream and then the land went uphill again, a hundred different types of green, the pale new grass and new buds on the oaks and darkness of the pine tree needles, the hemlocks. Spring —Christ even the animals loved springtime. You called it all green but that was not correct, there should have been different words, hundreds of them. One day he would invent his own. The air was cool and the sky was very blue. Christ it was a nice day. It could have been back in Indian times, a day like this, with the land all greening up and beautiful. He did not see why people would ever want to leave here. It was a beautiful place and it was no exaggeration to say it. It was because of the job situation. But that was changing as well. The Valley was recovering. Only it would never be what it had been and that was the trouble. People couldn’t adjust to that—it had been a wealthy place once, or not wealthy but doing well, all those steelworkers making thirty dollars an hour there had been plenty of money. It would never be like that again. It had fallen a long ways. No one blinked at taking a minimum- wage job now. He had not been old enough to see it fall is why it didn’t bother him. He just saw the good parts of it. That is a gift, he decided, to only see the good parts. Because we’re the first ones to grow up with it like this. The new generation. All we know. But things are improving in different ways. Right now, right from where he was sitting, there were patches of woods that he remembered being overgrown fields when he was younger. Oak, cherry, birch, the land going back to its natural state.
He looked at the area he was hunting, the strip of woods at the edge of their property, a long thin funnel of trees that ran along the edge of the field down to the creek. There were creeks everywhere, that was the other thing about this land. It was rich with life only most people went by it without noticing, as he often did himself. The deer would break from the end of the treeline into the small opening before the creek. He would take the smallest one. He sat and let his mind empty out.
Time passed, he was just watching, he was in his trance, his body was all numbed out he couldn’t even feel it, he hadn’t even twitched in an hour at least, just his eyes. That was the trick, disconnect your mind from your body. It felt very natural, his father had taught him, you watch any nature show and you know all animals do it, it was not possible to sit still for any length of time otherwise, to just completely blend in. You put every part of you to sleep except your eyes. But people didn’t have to do that anymore. You did not have to be a part of your surroundings. You just went to the drive- through. He decided there was something wrong with that. He himself couldn’t eat a McDonald’s hamburger, he could taste the chemicals in it, he had a delicate stomach. He could eat a pile of vension, or rabbit or quail or anything that lived in the woods, just anything where he knew where it came from. Any wild meat you could tell, it gave something back to you. But Christ, McDonald’s. Not to single them out. It was not that their product was inferior. Burger King, Wendy’s they were all just as bad. They gave him diarrhea. It was most likely the chemicals. He checked his watch again and only a minute had passed. That’s what you get for thinking, he thought. Time won’t move if you think. He let himself focus again. He thought about the deer. Taking a nap under those trees where you’ll hear anyone coming in after you. But soon you’ll want to eat and maybe take a sip from that cool stream and you’ll have to cross that little opening. He sniffed and turned his head slowly and sniffed again to check the wind. It was still favorable, coming from the direction of the treeline, blowing toward him. The deer couldn’t smell him.
Wait for them to come get a nice cool drink from this stream. He thought about Lee. That will be fine, he thought. Even if she’s married she still loves me. He wondered if he would see her that night. It didn’t have to be so tragic, their ending. They loved each other but the stars were not in favor of it, so to speak. She was doing what was best. He thought about Isaac then, and the dead man in the factory. He shivered, it was not a good thought
