Orient (8 page)

He pushed his hips slowly against the sheet, wondering about Tommy next door. Was he circumcised? Here was a secret Mills kept: at nineteen, he was still a virgin. Only technically, and only concerning the opposite sex. He had been with men, and that’s what he preferred; he’d been certain of it for years and more so every day, with every erection pointing like a compass needle on its own magnetic pull. He pictured Tommy next door, maybe gay, likely not, exotic to him for being so unexotic, his short blond hair only a few shades deeper than his skin, his eyes dark and sunken and blue.

Before his mother had called him away, Tommy had asked him a zillion questions about New York—did he live downtown, had he gone to clubs, was he a skateboarder, a gutter punk, some sort of artist, did he smoke pot, was it true that people still flinched every time they heard a loud noise, expecting an explosion—the whole time standing confidently on his parents’ property, with the toughness of every spoiled suburban kid who imagined himself a gangster in his own front yard. Tommy had also asked about his earring—did it hurt—nodding to the stud in Mills’s right lobe with its small, gold cross. Tommy seemed so intrigued by the pain it must have caused that Mills didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d gotten it after a five-minute wait at a Sacramento strip mall, that eleven-year-old girls bore the puncture without much more than an
oh
. Did it hurt? Yes, and that’s why he did it. Tommy was tall and wide-hipped, but Mills couldn’t tell what kind of body lay underneath the black
T-shirt and jeans, what kind of person, what kind of smell or ability to reach over in the dark. There were certain things a person could only learn by touching someone else.

The bed started to creak against the floor, and Mills forced himself to flip onto his back. No wonder men learned to use their hands. Mills didn’t know how far away Paul’s bedroom was, so he pulled his underwear over his waist and collapsed his arms on his chest. He stared out the window and tried not to think about Manhattan. Maybe curiosity about Tommy was reason enough to stay in Orient, although Mills assumed teenagers with extremely normal existences were probably hopelessly disappointing in that respect. No, he would stay in Orient for himself. He smoothed his fingers over his chest and shut his eyes. Mills was still young enough to believe that his body, with so much of it uncharted, was the only home he would ever need.

CHAPTER
4

G
entle rocking, a splash in the water.

He came awake, drunk. Cold water choked him, salt guttering through his mouth and nose. He treaded, swimming, his hands clawing black liquid like a cat climbing a curtain just to keep his head above the surface. He felt the slapping waves of the bay against his cheeks and his heavy pant pockets weighing him down.

A boat groaned nearby, as a body pulled itself out of the water and slumped into its hold. He remembered sitting in the boat with a bottle of gin wedged between his thighs, as they steered into the harbor. Beefeater, too expensive not to drink. He must have blacked out. They must have capsized. “Hey,” he shouted. “I’m still out here.” He lifted his arms into the night air, but a second without treading brought him under. He gulped salt and paddled his hands to bring him back to the surface. Something was wrong with his legs. They weren’t kicking right. “Hey,” he called again. Nearby, waves lapped against the boat’s hull. Stars melted around him, little broken shimmers. Water plugged his ears.

“Wait,” he screamed, panicked now. “Get me the fuck out of here, would you?” He tried to bend his knees, but the motion jerked him under. He shut his eyes and squirmed his fingers down his uncooperative legs. He felt rope knotted around his calves, slippery as seaweed, too tight to unpick. Must have gotten tangled when they overturned. He tried to kick the rope clear. His ankles scraped together but wouldn’t liberate.
Liberation, babies, paddy fields so
orange they were kindling on a bonfire, all that air, all that oxygen burning up
. It was an old memory, too old for longing or repentance and not a good one either.

He shot his arms through the surface and pulled oxygen into his lungs. He saw the causeway one hundred feet to the west, strung like a tree branch in white glowing lights. He tried swimming toward it. The rope tightened and wrenched him into the black. He swam in the opposite direction, toward the deeper bay, but the rope yanked him back for another mouthful. He was caught in the eye of a clock and made rounds to all the numbers but couldn’t break through them, couldn’t go anywhere but straight up. He was punching the water at his neck now, the sleeves of his sweater weighted with what he punched. And, through the headache of sea and gin, he sensed the first fatigue of his muscles.

He heard an oar slip into the water. “Help,” he yelled. He could hear himself as loud as day. “For fuck’s sake, I’m stuck. Help me.” A shadow rose from the boat’s bow, alerted to his calls. The beam of a flashlight flooded his face. “Thank god,” he sputtered, squinting through the shine. He paddled toward the light, which beaconed a few feet beyond his leash. “Thought I lost you. Got my legs wrapped in a rack rope. Gimme a knife or your keys or something. Hurry.”

The light from the flashlight was tender, almost warm, and he saw the motion of an arm reach over the side. But the arm launched a streak of glass, and the bottle struck him on the forehead, knocking him under with a blunt jolt. He floated downward, stunned by the blow. When he swam to the surface, coughing and spitting, the light returned to his face, a light that took him a minute to realize was receding, fading like a sunset clocking out. “Wait,” he shouted, “you can’t do this. You can’t leave me here.” The light clicked off, and the boat careened away.

The gin bottle bobbed just beyond his reach. It went south with the tide. He dove under the water, tugging frantically on the rope, the only thing he could hold on to, the only thing that wouldn’t give him up. For a second, he laughed, still drunk,
this is a bad dream
,
and when it wasn’t, exhausted from pulling, he tipped his head back on the water’s surface, the wind on his nose blowing from ocean to land.
I won’t pick a last memory
, he reasoned.
If I don’t, I’ll stay here until somebody finds me. I’ll wait all night if I have to for the sun. They need me. They’ll notice I’m gone and come looking
. Fish slithered around him. The stars moved in and out. He would remember how they moved, closer and then farther back, pushing at planets, wiping his coldness away, as his head dipped forward, and the night came in.

CHAPTER
5

A
t 5:58
A.M
., the mist rolled off the water and into the tall brown grasses like steam off a gutted animal. There was the smell of life in it, the algae and the wheat, and the sun was low and waxy in the sky, rolling the mist white and not yet strong enough to burn it clear. Bryan Muldoon crouched in the scrub alongside Ted Herrig, both of them camouflaged in faded tan jackets, mint green cargo pants, and black rubber boots. Chip and Alistair crouched a ways behind them, the tops of their hats poking above the grass blades. Bryan had his prize in sight, a white-tailed doe eating the sweeter grasses thirty feet away, her mouth chewing lazily while her neck lifted by the urgency of her eyes, searching for anything that would cause her to run. She dipped her head down, content. Bryan drew his hand up and pointed at her to signal
Mine!
, but it was still 5:58 on his wristwatch and the legal state hunting hours began at six o’clock.

Bryan was a man of principle, an adherent to the minute details of regulations most other, lesser men breached. If he weren’t here, even Ted would have rounded 5:58 to the hour, pulled the bowstring to his ear, the whole weapon wired like a mosquito hungry for blood, and taken the shot. But shave two minutes, and soon it’s twenty, then an hour, and then the rules don’t matter anymore, nothing but empty vessels tossing in the waves. The idea of floating out there in a sea of meaningless rules, where latitudinal and longitudinal lines tangled like seaweed, made him queasy.

His friend Ted was the geography teacher at Sycamore High, a man, like Bryan, who had a wife and three children, although his wife, Sarakit, was of Thai descent, and his children had been adopted from China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Ted and Bryan served together on the Orient Historical Board, and they had hunted side by side for more than twenty years. Long ago, they had made a pact that if anything bad were to happen, each would look out for the other’s children. As a result, Bryan was always auditioning Ted for the role of surrogate father, and he didn’t necessarily approve of his friend’s laid-back approach to life. Weren’t Asian kids supposed to be the hope for America’s future? Ted’s children were blithe and style-conscious and destined for careers in fashion or TV, the kind of junk that blighted the Muldoons’ living room during Theo’s Saturday morning cartoon binge.

“Go on,” Ted whispered. “She’s there for you.” The doe craned up, her ragged ears turning 280 degrees to pick up predatory vibrations. Bryan wrenched his eyes at Ted, code for silence. The 8 on his watch changed to 9. Ted’s watch already read 6:01, but Ted didn’t set his watch to International Atomic Time like Bryan did every morning before a hunt. International Atomic Time was based on the readings of three hundred atomic clocks located in sixty laboratories around the world; Bryan took comfort in the idea of those clocks, buried in disaster-proof orbs all over the globe, army-guarded and ticking to the same precise heartbeat. Time was the single asset that every country, every market, depended on. Bryan so admired those atomic clocks that for his eldest son’s last four birthdays he had given him books about time and state-of-the-art GPS watches. His son had long stopped feigning gratitude, throwing the gift boxes on the sofa in defeat, his face as blank as a watch face without hands. It was an expression all parents understood in the vicinity of unwrapped, unwanted presents:
You don’t get me, do you?
it said.

Another venture that held no interest for his son was hunting. Bryan had taught him the basics of the longbow, but on their single
father-son hunting expedition two years ago, Tommy had brought along his iPhone and yawned each time he aimed and released an arrow, without enough velocity to puncture a balloon. Bryan assumed he would come around, but that window was rapidly closing, shutting them off from each other, a glass divider through which they could still see each other but not speak or touch. Had he failed as a father? Lisa and Theo loved him dearly, he was sure of that. But Tommy was a remote province in the Muldoon kingdom, accepting orders, attending the necessary functions, but without any of the patriotism that united them as a clan. Sometimes, late at night, Bryan peered in at Tommy asleep in his bed, and his eyes would water at the sight of his son, not because he loved him so much but because he knew him so little. He found himself getting emotional over Tommy far more often than he ever did over Lisa’s stack of college brochures or the buttery swirls on the back of Theo’s head. If only he could have a chance to try it all again with his son, to shake Tommy awake and show him what they were missing, what little time they had left.

His watch read 5:59. He locked the bow in the shaft and waited.

The joints in his knee tingled. The weight of crouching caused the arthritic pain in his ankles to shoot through his calves. He was getting too old for the squatting posture required for hunting. He’d soon have to give up the longbow for the easier January muzzleloader gun season, or take up the minimal torture of fishing in the bay. Bluefish instead of venison steaks on the grill. That would be the first outward sign of old age, which so far had been contained to his body. His wife had noticed it before he had, in the sinewy droop of his arms and legs. And so had Holly Drake in that embarrassing finale of their six-month affair, when he couldn’t manage an erection in the motel bed, when his penis bobbed, expanded an inch, shyly refused to venture farther, and finally deflated against his testicles as if in spite.

That was two weeks ago, and even though he’d offered to meet Holly again at the motel when her husband was at work, and even
though she had accepted, he feared a repeat performance. Don’t listen to women who swear that men age gracefully. They’re simply conditioned to judge their own kind more harshly. Age broke the confidence of most men, desiccated their primordial jungles of self-esteem. Bryan looked over at Ted, his chapped face covered in freckles, fainter than the freckles that enveloped every inch of Holly’s skin. When they had sex, Holly’s freckles vanished into a volcanic blush—and there it went, bulging in his pants as he looked at Ted and thought of Holly, that stupid instrument in his own body, the one he’d relied on his whole life, growing confidently in his underwear when he least needed it. His watch read :00. The deer chewed its last mouthful. It was time.

Bryan rose in the grass. He positioned the bow at arm’s length and pulled the arrow back with his fingers against the fletching. The pulleys of the compound bow turned silently to gain maximum mechanical advantage, tightening the nylon string. Bryan squinted as he aimed at the white fleck of her chest. He had to shoot for her body, her boiler room of internal organs—heart, liver, stomach—and not her head. He’d seen too many inexperienced bow hunters try to kill a deer with an arrow to the cranium, watching in horror as the arrow punctured the jaw and the deer skipped away with a wound that would take a week to prove fatal.

But Bryan also needed to consider his own hunting impediment: his spatial disorientation, triggered by a collision with a deer, which compromised his sense of distance and relation, so when his eye read a mark he was nearly a foot off. Bryan made the correction, aiming at her flank to account for his faulty internal compass. He drew the string to his shoulder and, in a move as quick as slitting his own throat, Adam’s apple to ear, let the arrow fly.

Bryan’s most legendary deer kill had not involved a bow. It took place on Sound Avenue, just across the street from McGovern Vineyards, and the weapon in question was his 2006 burgundy Range Rover. It was a rainy February afternoon four years ago, in the prime of the second rut. Long Island’s uncontrolled deer population
had long been a driver’s worst nightmare, and that nightmare arrived for Bryan as he drove home from a security job in Riverhead, glancing at the road while listening to basketball scores on the radio. He couldn’t separate his own memory of the accident from the newspaper report in the following day’s paper, front page in the
Suffolk Time
s, headline reading
DEER, VEHICLE DESTROY ONE ANOTHER
, and below it a color photograph of Bryan standing on the road drenched in blood. The photo was taken by a passing motorist, who managed to snap the gruesome portrait in the seconds before Bryan lost consciousness. He had struck a doe that was scrambling to its feet after being hit by another eastbound vehicle. The deer had rolled over the hood and crashed through his windshield, its hoof striking him in the face as his car continued forward and the deer back. The glass disgorged the animal, emptying its thoracic cavity as it soaked the front seats, the backseats, the rear compartment, burgundying the burgundy, before hurtling through the rear window and coming to rest in a bone pile on the concrete.

Bryan didn’t remember the initial impact of the deer, nor did he remember its graceless exit through the back window, nor did he remember his Range Rover continuing on for forty feet before gliding into an embankment. He did not remember climbing out of the car or posing for a photograph. All he remembered was the single microsecond the deer had been there in the car with him, the punch to his face before the ache arrived, the deer’s mammoth, mud-odor body blurring by him, and, worst of all, the sound the deer made. He didn’t know if it came from its mouth or from its rupturing organs or even its contact on the leather upholstery, but it was the sound of fleshy fingers sliding on glass or the bubbling contractions of a watercooler when a drink was dispensed, but louder and deeper and less human than either of those sounds, a
blump ump ump
that caught in his inner ear and brought him to vomit when he regained consciousness in the intensive care unit of Eastern Long Island Hospital.

He was, as all people are everywhere, lucky to be alive. His family cried in relief at his bedside, even inaccessible Tommy. His
Range Rover had been taken to the place crashed cars go when their owners can’t bear to look at them. Ted and Chip framed the
Suffolk Times
front page for him with an engraved plaque reading “Bryan Muldoon will do anything to tag a deer.” Bryan later learned that there were 65,000 automobile collisions with deer in New York State every year, few of them fatal, yet he still felt special and lucky. But he wasn’t special or lucky. Ever since the accident, he experienced momentary spells of disorientation, where he told his feet to go one way and they went another, where he aimed his arrow at a mark and it sailed a foot off course. And that sound,
blump ump ump
, revived by tires bouncing over potholes or draining Pam’s water bottle into the bathroom sink, caused his head to go dizzy and his vision to star. He never told his doctor about it, because he feared the results of the tests. He never told Ted or Alistair or Chip, because he knew they’d tell him it was unsafe for him to hunt.
Blump ump ump
: it just stayed there in his head, locked behind imaginary doors in the mental room he created specifically for horrible things.

This morning, the doe saw it coming, maybe a microsecond before he released the bow. Her front legs kicked, and her haunches dipped to spring her forward. Now it was a race between the arrow and her speed. The black dart shot toward her, a thin wavering line, and her tail fanned out white. She started to run as the arrow cleaved the air, racing for her heart, flying faster than any bird, but she was galloping and her gray fur prickled. The arrow swung wide, just missing the mark; it would have hit its target if Bryan hadn’t overcorrected in the first place. In another second she was cutting through the tall grasses and into a clutch of birch trees. Two other doe Bryan hadn’t seen streamed behind her, scattering out as they reached the impenetrable safety of the woods.

“Shit,” he said, standing up.

Chip and Alistair popped up from their grass trench. “Why the hell did you wait so long?” they said, though they knew why.

“Maybe the wind shifted, and she smelled us,” Alistair offered, shaking his legs to circulate the blood.

They walked forward, these fathers without their sons, through the scrub and marsh to reclaim the arrow. Chip unscrewed a bottle of water and lifted it above his mouth, guzzling.
Ump, ump, ump
. Bryan bundled his finger around the bow and conjured up a network of doors—massive wooden gates, steel bank vaults, pressurized submarine doors—to block the horrible sound. He clenched his teeth but forced his lips into a smile, anxious to hide his panic.

“She was too old anyway,” he said. “Her meat’s already wormed. Wouldn’t be worth the trouble to dress her.”

“Slice and dice,” Alistair chanted, unsnapping the sheath clipped to his belt and wielding his knife in the sign of the cross. They were all impatient for a kill. They wanted to fill their noses with the hot, acrid death that issued from a deer’s carcass minutes after it drew its last breath, the smell that allowed them, as men, to tremble momentarily with the sensation of life, its heat and quiet. Chip let some of the bottled water pour on his face and unzipped his camouflaged jumpsuit, gutting himself open to the chilly air, his fat stomach spilling out and his white undershirt butterflied in sweat. Chip walked through his days the same way he walked around cars in his mechanic’s shop in East Marion, sluggishly, like he knew there were deeper problems that a younger man might have the energy to fix but he’d settle for a few minor tweaks to keep the transmission running. Bryan did not consider it a betrayal that he took his own car to Greenport to get serviced. He liked Chip, but after his accident he didn’t trust him to ensure the reliability of his vehicle.

The men stomped through the carpet of leaves that had fallen overnight in the state park, as if autumn had waited for Pam’s end-of-summer picnic to begin its molting. Some patches were red and yellow, a few still green, but most of the leaves were cardboard brown, crumbling under their waterproof boots. Bryan paused a minute to enjoy the way he and his friends blended into the environment, their camel tans and drab greens mixing into the muddy scenery the same way his mother, in her floral blouses, disappeared into their living room curtains when he was a child. Bryan felt at ease in a world where no
one stuck out, where living well meant meeting the world halfway. As he walked, he thought of Tommy in his predictable black T-shirts and jeans, his son in silhouette, as if he had purposely cut himself out of the happy family photograph. Oh, Tommy. What had Bryan done wrong? How could the boy slouch around without even a watch?