for his steel-toed boots. “Old Puffy, that chain-smoking lard-ass, got himself some hired help, I’d say.”
“Some reason you can’t fuck in your own place?”
“You know how it is, John. My dick’s a basset hound.” He shrugs. “I’m just the poor sumbitch holding its chain.”
“I can’t figure out why you’re still here.”
“Nobody lives here’s asked me to leave.”
“Most guys make assholes of themselves don’t wait to be.”
“Hell, John, that was nothing. You shoulda come few minutes earlier—got the show the pizza man did.” He smiles, then holds up the bag. John wonders if he’s looked inside. “You want me to put this in the fridge? It feels like maybe it needs it.”
John strides forward and snatches the bag. Fighting an impulse to check its contents, he shoves it beneath one arm and glares up at the man, who leans casually back against the doorframe. “You mad at me for some reason, John?”
“I don’t like guns being pulled on me.”
“A fucking madman breaks into the place, what would you do?”
“I don’t like ’em around my kid.”
“A lifelong hunter like you, John? I can’t believe that!” John thinks fleetingly of grabbing for the pistol, which is making him more and more nervous, then tells himself that alcohol and recent events are making him paranoid. “Truth is, John, I’m like you. A person who makes good use of what he kills shouldn’t have to worry what time a’ year it is or whose fucking land he’s on. Christ, can you imagine if our ancestors who discovered this fine country could only hunt when the government told ’em to? Jesus, wouldn’t none of us be here!”
“Moira know you’re here?” says John.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I might.”
“Do that, John. When you give Moira her bag of goodies, ask her if she knows Obie—that’s short for Obadiah—Cornish—that’s like the hen!” He sticks out a hand, which John doesn’t take. “No shit, John, we might actually be acquainted, seeing as how a number a’ years back old Obie Cornish spent many a day busting his ass for peanuts around and about that old mountain you’re on. Though I’ve moved on to a more lucrative line of work, I’ll never forget those days, or that terrain. Jesus Christ, steeper than a hard-on, it was!” He pulls back his hand, places it onto the butt of his pistol. “Yup. Back in town after a lot of years, only to find out not much has changed, ’cept I understand you and yours had a string of bad luck. Money must be pretty tight these days, huh, John?”
“I don’t recognize you from a clump of cow shit,” says John.
The man laughs.
John walks past him into the kitchen, then over to the front door, his feet crunching against the broken glass. In the bedroom, the woman, in a low, throaty voice, starts singing a lullaby.
John opens the door and steps into the night, quieter even than when he’d stepped out half an hour before. “What about the bag, John?” asks the man. “Ain’t you gonna leave the bag?”
John doesn’t answer.
Descending the stairs, he has an odd feeling the man was never there. At the same time, he worries about being shot in the back. He glances in the bag and sees the meat and, beneath it, three rolls of cash, just as there had been.
The same dog starts barking again. This time, though, no one tells it to stop. A light breeze rustles the spruce trees; higher up, thin clouds blow across the moon. A pickup truck peels out from in front of the liquor store. John uses his key to open Moira’s car, then carefully wedges the bag beneath the accelerator, where Moira will be sure to find it.
TUESDAY
ON THE BACK of the dead girl’s neck, at the base of her skull, is a star-shaped birthmark. Had he seen it when he first discovered her, prior to turning her over? Couldn’t be! She had a ponytail and was wearing a hat. The rest of the time, she lay on her back. So how does he know it’s there?
Her breasts are milky-colored and large, the consistency of a soft pudding, more those of a mature woman than of a teenager; their centers are blood-red bull’s-eyes with cuspate nipples that, when sucked on, pop up like bulbs. He had not! When had he?
She has the hard, muscular calves of an athlete. A bike rider maybe. Or a field-hockey player. Her left knee, marred by a four-inch butterfly scar like that on his own right elbow, has been surgically repaired. The tissue is raised and slightly swollen, as if the operation was recent. Impossible for him to know! He certainly hadn’t removed her jeans! Why, then, does he recall the smooth, lacquered feel of her thighs? Her neatly manicured pubic bush, emanating the smell of apple-essence shampoo? The wet, musky taste of her?
In his sleep, John thrashes out with an arm, pushes open the truck door, and, with several empty beer cans and a schnapps bottle, tumbles onto the dew-covered grass surrounding the trailer, now convinced that his crime is more atrocious, even, than murder. His head hurts. His vision is blurry, though clear enough to see that the truck sits in the center of his unmowed lawn, a few feet from the trailer’s front door. He has no memory of parking it there. He can’t recall driving it home.
A damp, dew-marred morning breathes an earthen, fresh smell, slightly tempered by the odor of just-spread cow shit. Sitting like a pillow on the valley, fog obliterates the world past a hundred yards. Nobies’ electric barn cleaner drones beneath the bone-white canopy. Their yellow, toothless hound howls. John wonders if following his discovery of the dead girl he went into a trance-like state during which he committed horrendous, unforgivable acts he can’t consciously recall. The thought is nearly unbearable. He picks up the schnapps bottle and knocks himself over the head with it. The bottle’s refusal to break infuriates him. He flings it at the pond. The splash starts the frogs croaking. Two ducks lift off.
Drinking coffee later at the kitchen table, he consciously summons her face and finds it lacking in particularities, those individual nuances that make a person unique. This strikes him as being as sad almost as her death itself. He feels intimate with her, a closeness beyond his ability to understand. A familiarity that has nothing to do with sex. The coffee tastes bitter to him. He throws it out and opens his first beer of the day. He picks up a deck of cards, aimlessly shuffles them, starts playing solitaire. At the very least, he thinks, he owes her loyalty, which requires that in his memory she be forever preserved as the person she truly was and not as he dreams her. The implications of this are muddled and horrible.
The phone rings six times and stops.
The deck screen door creaks open. Something enters. The door bangs shut. Mutt, the three-colored stray that lives at John’s when it feels like it, shoves its wet nose in his lap. “Where you been, Mutt?”
Mutt wags its tail.
John stands up, walks to the refrigerator, pulls out leftover spaghetti, dumps it with milk in Mutt’s bowl. Mutt greedily gulps the food. Idly scratching the dog’s burr-impacted neck, John gazes down the valley at the slowly rising fog while mentally trying to reconstruct the previous evening, which in response to his thoughts roils like a quagmire of ambiguities. He remembers Obadiah Cornish openly referring to John’s poaching and, later—had he been dreaming?—the dead girl’s transmogrifying body and his orgasmic spasm entering it like a gunshot.
The phone rings again. This time he answers it. It’s Cecil Nobie wanting John to come down and give him a hand pulling a heifer out of the muck.
“Anne and the kids is to her sister’s for the day’s why I troubled ya.” Nobie spits, then shakes his head, too large for his bandy-legged little body that’s wearing fishing waders. The cow’s in up to the tops of its legs in a quag at the rear side of the barn where runoff from the meadow and mountain pools.
“What happened the fence?”
