grass near the cooler. He eats three more aspirins, washing them down with beer.
He thinks of the deer carcass sitting with his 12-gauge slug in it at the bottom of Hollenbachs’ pond. And the dead girl in the cave. If Waylon finds her, wonders John, how long will it take him to figure out some local hunter had killed her and stolen his money?
Only the stars and Nobies’ houselights, filtering up through the trees, illuminate the mountain. The temperature has dropped fifteen degrees. John’s slick sweat has dried, penetrated his skin, and turned rank. Where it has sat for three hours on the back-yard grass, his rear is stiff and sore. The empties from two six-packs form a roofless, four-sided building between his feet. Somewhere back on the hill, a coyote yips. Nocturnal birds and animals fly and scurry through the woods to his right. From the spring-fed pond below the trailer comes a cacophony of peeps and croaks.
John takes off his shoes, then shakily stands up, pulls off his jeans and underwear, and walks naked into the trailer. He gets a rattlesnake strip steak from the refrigerator, fillets it, cooks it for five minutes beneath the broiler, then rolls it in olive oil and cornmeal, and leaves it to slowly panfry on the stove while he showers, dresses his wound, and puts on clean clothes.
Before leaving the bedroom, he takes from the closet, then carefully lays on the bed, one of the few articles of clothing Moira had overlooked when packing to leave: a long, blue-and-white-striped, country-style dress that John best remembers her wearing, six months after they were married, to a heart fund benefit square dance at the old armory. He puts his face to the dress and smells her. Then he sees her, stately and beautiful. Her hair up and in dancing clogs, she is several inches taller than John this evening. John feels the envious eyes of the other men— eyes envying him. Moira wins a cake in the raffle, three layers of sour-cream chocolate. Later, lounging naked where the dress now rests, they feed the cake to each other, then spend half the night in a lingering, nerve-tingling, impacted embrace from which Moira occasionally reaches down, gently squeezes the leaking tip of John’s inflamed penis, and whispers, “Rein it in, cowboy. Rein it in. This ain’t no race. It’s a swoon!”
John never knew love could last that long. When, finally, he comes, he is a river, emptying into her not just his seed but all the words describing what he feels for her but is not adept enough to say. Looking at the dress now, he sees the moment as clear as if he were watching it on film: Moira’s wide-open eyes, like full moons in the dark; lean hands clutching his buttocks; vaginal muscles firmly milking him. Her throaty voice passionately urging, “Okay, John! Now!” A pulsating throb, like a crashing wave. Warm breath. That musky, just-fucked smell… John charges across the room and rummages through her bureau until he finds an overlooked pair of her briefs. Smothering his face in them, he inhales.
Then he drops his pants, lies down on the bed, and, ardently calling out her name, masturbates into the underwear.
He feels embarrassed afterwards. Then cuckolded. Looking at himself in the bureau mirror, he imagines his face is slowly evolving into a coarser, meaner him. Then he thinks, no. It looks like a clay lump that could turn out to be anything. He thinks of the crippled Daggard Pitt, who had helped steal John’s birthright, suddenly showing up in his life at this time, of all times. “I’m drunk,” he says aloud, as if that explains something. He thinks his face looks too predictable. He decides he will grow a beard. He puts Moira’s underwear on the headboard, goes out to the kitchen, and finds it engulfed in smoke.
He throws open the door to the front deck, then runs over to the stove, where his strip steak and the pan it’s in are in flames. John douses them both with water, then opens all the trailer windows and, loudly cursing, charges around waving at the smoke with a towel. In a few minutes, coughing heavily, he stumbles out to the deck to breathe. Collapsed in a plastic chair, he watches stodgy black smoke twist lazily into the night sky. He thinks about what he went through to get that rattlesnake back to the trailer, then butchered and filleted, and decides it wasn’t meant for him to eat. He goes back into the trailer, gets the burned strip steak and his .45 pistol, comes back out to the porch, tosses the steak onto the lawn, and empties his gun into it.
Then he goes downcellar, pulls from the big freezer what’s left of the rattlesnake, half a dozen venison steaks, and a bag of ice, and takes them all out to his truck, where he tosses everything into the portable cooler. Standing in the driveway afterwards, still three-quarters drunk, he decides that offering mere meat to his family is not enough. A much bigger gesture is needed. He runs up to the woodshed, crawls beneath it, pulls out the pillowcase, withdraws several packets of money, then reattaches the pillowcase to the foundation beam.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he counts the money. Five thousand six hundred dollars. A lot. Much more, certainly, than he’s ever seen at one time. Yet only a tiny percentage of the whole. He wonders, though, if it’s too much. If word got out that he was giving away sums that big, what then? Still, the gesture must be big. A big— great big—not tiny, cash wad is the point. Like John’s cataclysmic orgasms, the gift is meant to speak volumes; to say more than he is able to say in words about his love and concern for his family. He eats two bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, washes them down with a quart of raw milk. He thinks himself nearly sober. He looks around at the kitchen walls streaked with soot. The whole trailer smells like burning charcoal. He decides to give Moira all the money but a thousand dollars. Before he leaves, he rolls up the latter amount and stuffs it into the sugar jar above the sink.
He drives the eight miles to town in a blindered, half-drunk state, foreseeing from his mission only positive results—a grateful Moira, an impressed Moira, a contrite Moira, begging for him to take her back. He parks in front of a liquor store at one end of the street, then, carrying in a paper bag the deer and snake meat and the cash, he walks the two hundred yards to where she lives on the top floor of a three-story, white, flaking clapboard building, half obscured by spruce trees. Her car is out front.
Looking up at the third-floor windows, dark except for a single flickering light, John is suddenly not so sure he’s doing the right thing. It’s later than he thought. Nearly ten o’clock. What if Moira is in bed? Worse yet, what if there’s someone up there with her? The street behind him is so quiet he can hear the buzz of the streetlights. An occasional car passes. John walks back up the street to the liquor store, goes inside, buys a pint of schnapps, then walks back to Moira’s, and, drinking the schnapps, leans against her car, staring at the flickering light, imagining it to be about anything. A firefly lights several times in front of his face. John tries unsuccessfully to catch it in his hand. He wonders what it would feel like to fly, to bypass walking altogether.
A vehicle comes fast down the street, slows up, then turns into the dirt driveway next to the house. It’s a small compact car. Rap music pours from its open windows. While the engine’s still running, the driver’s door opens. A long-haired kid holding a square, flat box steps out. He glances at John, then quickly walks to the outside stairs on the side of the house and starts up them, two at a time. A dog starts barking somewhere in the building. A voice tells it to shut up. John watches the kid climb past the second floor and head for the third. He drops the empty schnapps bottle onto the grass. A horrible image of Moira naked beneath another man flashes into his head. “She don’t even like pizza,” he thinks. “I’ve never seen her eat even a single goddamn slice.”
He starts on a half trot toward the stairs.
He reaches the bottom of the first platform just as the kid, guffawing to himself, steps onto it from above. “Unfucking real, man,” he says, shaking his head. “Some dudes got all the luck!” More to steady himself than anything else, John puts his hand not holding the paper bag on the kid’s chest. The kid stops laughing. “What’s the deal, man?”
The world spins around John. He asks the kid, “Who ordered it?”
“Huh?”
“Who ordered the fucking pizza?”
The kid nods up the stairs. “She did, man. The chick.”
John pushes past the kid. Holding on to both rails for support, he lurches up the wooden stairs to the third- floor platform. He leans against the entrance-way door, hearing inside, above soft music, piggish grunts, moans, one-and two-syllable verbal barks. Through the door he sees past the kitchen into the living room, where the light flickers. He thinks, “How can the world end in a single day?” He is past reason, several drinks beyond thought. He puts his hand on the door handle and turns. The door is locked. He smashes the paper bag into the lowest section of glass, reaches through the hole, unlocks the door, yanks it open, and runs through the kitchen into the living room, where a naked woman holding a pizza slice sits cross-legged on the floor before a television set. John starts to speak, then hears behind him a click and a man’s voice. “Drop the goddamn bag.”
John doesn’t recognize the voice or the woman. He’s not sure he recognizes the house. People are fucking on the television. He says, “Is this 1201 Belmont?”
