things were the real boogeymen. Real life was scary as hell all by itself. Real life had enough monsters without adding make-believe monsters to it as well. Real life was a horror movie. Pretend monsters were an escape.
Rich had just turned forty-two, but he felt much older. Middle age had not agreed with him so far. It wasn’t the catastrophic loss of hair on top of his head or the coarse, gray hairs sprouting in places they had never been before—his ears and nose, shoulders and back. It wasn’t that he ran out of breath quicker these days. Or that he was tired all the time. Or that his head ached from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep. Or the extra weight around his waist, or his declining interest in sex and subsequently declining erections, or the way his back and joints hurt after doing simple tasks. He’d expected those things, had watched his own father suffer through them. They were all just part of the aging process. These things didn’t depress him, except when he was really drunk.
What got to him, what really brought him down, was how his life had seemed to disintegrate in the last few years. Ever since he’d turned forty, fate had delivered one kick in the balls after another. First there was Tyler’s death, then the divorce, a mountain of debt, and now the loss of his job and the foreclosure on the house. Everything kept falling apart and there seemed to be no end in sight. His days were one long, endless slide downward. It wasn’t fair. This was supposed to be the second half of his life, the path leading to the golden years, the twilight years. But sometimes Rich didn’t think he wanted to stick around for the second half. Things were supposed to get easier. When would that happen, exactly? It felt like things were just getting tougher instead. Could the golden years even be worth living?
He felt betrayed and alone.
Sometimes Rich just wanted to die. He imagined it was a lot like sleep. No cares. No worries. No pain. Just sweet, welcome oblivion, forever and ever—and if there was nothing after this, no Heaven or afterlife, he wouldn’t care anyway because he’d be dead.
Of course, if that happened, the family name would die with him. He had no siblings, no uncles with sons. Rich was the last male Henry from his father’s line. When Tyler had died two years ago in Iraq, a big part of Rich had died with him. The military had never revealed the whole story; just that Tyler had been riding in a convoy across the desert when a roadside bomb—an IED, the government man had called it—shredded his Humvee. One of Tyler’s friends, a kid from Mississippi, had died right away. Not Tyler. He’d lingered for almost fifteen minutes. At the memorial service, an American flag was draped over his closed casket. His high school graduation picture sat on top of it in a nice frame from the Hallmark store. In the picture, Tyler was smiling and whole. In the coffin, he wasn’t. The preacher talked about God and country and sacrifice. Then Tyler was buried.
The rest of the world moved on.
Rich did not.
Carol left him soon after. She said she’d been planning it for years, and had just wanted to wait until Tyler was grown and out of the house. She’d delayed her plans when he joined the army and went to Iraq. But now…
She never finished the last statement. She didn’t need to. Sometimes, things unsaid spoke louder than words.
Carol had left him everything—the car, the house, the dirty dishes in the sink, their empty bed, and a mountain of debt. The credit cards were at their maximum, and they still had five years’ worth of payments left on the house. Whether she’d done it out of pity or guilt or just an eagerness to be done with him, the end result was the same: she’d fucked him one last time before moving in with her dentist boyfriend. Here he was, one year later, unemployed, almost homeless, poaching deer out of season. All so he wouldn’t have to spend his meager unemployment check on groceries, and could instead hold off the bill collectors for another few weeks.
No wonder he fucking drank. “Out of control,” his boss said? Not yet. Maybe soon, though, if things didn’t get better—and if he had enough bullets…
Yeah, he could get
Rich glanced back through the forest. There were no paths or trails. No wide spaces or clearings. This part of the woods had been unscathed by the big forest fire of 2006. Here the trees grew close together, and the rocky soil was covered with dead leaves and twigs. As dense as it was, he was surprised to see thick clusters of late-season undergrowth thrusting up from the ground: fragile ferns, poison ivy, Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed, blackberries and raspberries, snake grass, pine and oak seedlings dotted the landscape. All of it would be dead in another week or so. Already, the leaves were turning brown. He couldn’t see more than fifteen feet into the foliage, but that sense of being watched remained. It gave him the creeps.
That would be nice. Bag a good-sized buck, field dress it, and haul the carcass back to the truck. Then hide it beneath the tarp and head home. Move it from the truck bed and into the garage without any of the neighbors seeing (Trey Barker, who lived next door, would call the game warden if he knew Rich was poaching). With luck, he could have it strung up, butchered and in the freezer before dark, and he would then have the entire evening to drink a few beers and watch whatever was on the tube. Maybe he wouldn’t even cry tonight when he went to bed. That would be an excellent change of pace from his normal routine.
He’d parked on the side of one of the old dirt logging roads. Rich wasn’t worried about someone spotting his truck. He was way off the beaten path, hunting along the border of the state game lands. If a game warden or someone else happened to drive by, they’d just as easily assume the truck belonged to a hiker or a fisherman or somebody digging up ginseng roots as they would a poacher. They might even think it was broken down or abandoned. As long as he was careful when he dragged the deer’s carcass out, he’d be fine.
Of course, first he had to shoot one. Hell, shoot anything, something.
But there was nothing.
It was late October—almost Halloween. Small-game season had just ended and deer season was still a month away. The only thing he could legally shoot right now were coyotes and crows, but eating a coyote was like eating a dog and crows didn’t have enough meat on them—and what little meat they did have tasted like shit.
But even the crows were absent today.
Rich wondered if he’d have had better luck coming in from the Shrewsbury side of the woods. Maybe so. He hadn’t come in that way because the volunteers from the fire department and other civic groups were busy working on their Ghost Walk—a haunted attraction that would open Halloween eve and run until the first weekend in November. Even though it was the first one, the organizers had said they expected thousands of people over the next month, ferried back and forth on hay wagons, walking the trail through the forest while people in masks jumped out and scared them. It only took up a small section of the woods, but there were a lot of people working there currently, and he couldn’t risk anyone spotting him poaching.
