Taft (12 page)

Carl looks through the sight. "Now," he says.

"Wait," Taft says.

But Carl can't wait. His hands are sweating. In another minute they won't be steady anymore. He will have thought about it too much. He looks in the scope. It's right there. He aims for the neck, not the heart the way his father had told him. You shoot them in the heart and miss, you can track them by the blood. A neck shot was better, but it was trickier. You had to nail it, snap the bone. If you missed in the neck the bullet went right through the muscle and the wound would heal up fast. Neck. He fires. Taft is up. The animal swings down the second the crack goes off. It falls on its right side and its legs kick out again and again like it's slipped and is trying to scramble to its feet. It kicks like this for a half a minute, maybe a second more, not because it's suffering but because the brain isn't there to tell the legs it's dead.

"Got it!" Carl says, and he drops his gun and runs past the trees and into the grass. Taft picks up the rifle and follows him out into the clearing just to make sure the animal doesn't need another shot to finish it off.

"It's dead," Carl says. "Did you see it?"

"I saw it," Taft says. He's a little angry. The boy should have waited, he shouldn't have gone for the neck, but he got the shot off clean. There's no sense taking away from that.

"It's a big deer," Carl says, and squats down to stroke the animal's pelt like it's a dog asleep. He stays clear of the rip in the neck. The fur is turning soggy with the blood. "Did you see it go down?"

Taft nods. "You did a good job," he says. "A good, clean shot."

Carl looks at his watch. "Seven forty-five and we've already got a deer."

They're going to have to carry it to the truck. The thing surely isn't going to walk there by itself. It's probably a hundred-and-forty-, hundred-and-fifty-pound deer. Taft takes his Gerber knife out of its casing and rolls the animal onto its back to gut it. The guts will save them forty pounds. "You want to do this?" he says. He holds the knife by the blade and turns the handle out to Carl. He is careful. He can feel the edge of the steel inside his hand.

Carl shakes his head. Taft's father would have made him do it: "You shot the thing, you're going to have to dress it." But there's plenty of time for that. No need to learn everything in one day. Taft pulls back the animal's tail and slips in the knife. Carl flinches as his father cuts around the rectum. Then Taft brings the blade up between the hind legs and pulls the knife towards him. It's as good a knife as is made. You barely have to saw it at all, just work it up and down a little, a little more once you get to the brisket. It's the smell that Taft never gets used to. It's always worse than he remembers. Hot and dead. Carl takes a step back.

"You have to take the throat out," he says as he cuts the neck. "That's where all the acid is. Leave the throat and the thing will turn gangrene before it's dark."

They turn it over together and pour the deer out of itself in a great wave of blood and entrails. Steam comes up from what's lying there, and the smell of all the dark, wet things inside. "Let it sit a minute," Taft says.

Taft wipes off his knife and his hands. He's done this enough to know how to keep himself clean. He turns away from the deer. Everywhere he looks there are black walnuts. On this side of the meadow the ground is covered with them, too many to ignore. He takes the mesh bag out of his pocket. "Let's go pick some of them up for your mother," he says.

"We don't need to bring home walnuts if we've got a deer," Carl says.

"She wanted some. It'll only take a minute."

Carl wraps his hand around one of the antlers. He lifts the head up off the ground, just an inch or two to feel the weight and then he sets it down. "I want to stay here."

"It's dead, son. It's not going anywhere." Taft walks off in the direction of the trees and Carl watches him as he bends down again and again to pick up the nuts in their muddy black husks.

"Carl," Taft says.

I was still sitting in the office, still working on that drink Wallace had poured me two hours ago. I'd just been carrying it around from place to place and now the ice was gone. The water made the whiskey easier to take. I thought about calling Franklin, but it was late to begin with and an hour later there. I should have thought of it sooner.

I
F ANYONE
had told me a dozen years ago that
I
would be going over to have dinner with the Woodmoores in the middle of the week for no other reason than that they asked me, I would have said you were thinking of the wrong man. But there I was, a Thursday night, stopping off to get some flowers and a pack of cigarettes. Mr. Woodmoore liked company that smoked. I quit back when Franklin was born. Marion said it wasn't good enough that I promised not to smoke around him, she said sooner or later I'd slip up. I had to quit altogether, she said. It was a matter of a good example. But her father was a man who liked to bum cigarettes. He would ask anybody down to the basement after dinner to see whatever little thing he was building. You weren't at the bottom of the stairs before he was asking you if you had a smoke. I don't remember him ever having any of his own. For a while he was asking the mailman to come downstairs, till finally the mailman quit smoking or started to lie about it. The first couple of times I went over there without cigarettes, Marion's father would get so angry he wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the night. This was back in the days when they all hated me to begin with. So I learned. He liked it best when I brought Pall Malls. He'd turn the little red pack over and over in his hands, taking pleasure in thinking about it before he lit up. I don't bring those anymore. His blood pressure is high. I buy him something light and mentholated. I tell him it's because nobody can smell it on you later. He breaks the filter off and taps the loose tobacco back in with his thumb.

In the beginning, Marion's parents didn't like me because I played in a band. Didn't like me because they suspected I was having sex with their daughter. Hated me once she turned up pregnant. Talked about having her brother, Buddy, shoot me (Marion told me this) when I didn't marry her.

It was a girlfriend of Marion's who told me about Franklin being born. When I showed up at the hospital, hung over and a full day late, Mrs. Woodmoore grabbed my throat. She caught me coming through the waiting room, jumped out of her chair and clamped her hand into my neck like some sort of rabid dog, digging in her nails till she drew blood. She didn't say a word to me, didn't even blink. I couldn't shake her and I wasn't going to hit her. She cut my air off for a good minute before some orderlies came by and tugged her loose by pulling on her from behind. It was a story she loved to tell. For a while she told it to remind me that she'd done it once and was perfectly able to do it again. Later, when she started to like me, she told it to company when I was around like it was a funny story. "Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to kill John Nickel here?" she'd say, and everybody would laugh. "Show them the scars where I choked you." If I just sat there she'd come over and pull down the collar of my shirt to show the two crescent shaped marks her nails had left. The other cuts healed up fine, but those two left pale, ropy scars. "Look at that," she said, and touched them with her finger. She liked to tell the story at Easter and Thanksgiving dinner especially. She didn't tell it on Christmas, thinking it was too soon after Thanksgiving. Telling it was her way of showing there were no hard feelings. It made her proud to remember herself as someone who'd try and kill a man for causing her child suffering. I could understand that, having a child of my own.

If all my good behavior had no effect on Marion, it did plenty to bring her parents around. They saw how much I loved my boy. They started to like my regular job and the money I was making. They were proud of me, taking care of Franklin and sending Marion through school. When we went over to their house, Marion's mother would ask her politely to come into the kitchen and help her with supper. After they'd been in there for a while, she'd start to holler at her. "You've made your point," Mrs. Woodmoore would say, loud enough to make the neighbors lean towards their windows. "Now you're just being contrary. The man wants to marry you."

Marion would start to argue back, telling her to keep her voice down, that the baby was asleep. About that time Mr. Woodmoore would put a finger up to his lips and point to the basement door. The two of us would slip downstairs to smoke.

"Boy ought to have his father's name," Mr. Woodmoore would say to me. "It's criminal what she's doing to that child." Then he'd take a deep pull on his cigarette and shake his head.

Marion never liked me any better after those visits. In truth, I think they helped her decide to go to Miami, which was the last thing in the world her parents wanted.

It was raining like crazy when I got to their house and I held the flowers upside down to keep their heads from getting knocked off.

"You're going to drown out there," Mrs. Woodmoore said to me. "Come on, get inside."

I shook off my coat best I could on the porch so I wouldn't flood their house. I gave her the flowers and kissed her.

"Ruth, look at this," she said. "Now why don't you bring home boys who give me flowers?"

"Nobody brought him home," she said.

I was surprised to see Ruth there. The last I'd heard she had some job up in Detroit. I'd always liked Ruth and she liked me, mainly because she didn't like her sister. "What are you doing in town?"

"Ruth's moved home," Mrs. Woodmoore said. "She had some hard times so she came back. All my children are always welcome at home."

Ruth looked anxious to get out of the room. "I'll get you a beer," she said. It would be hard on Ruth to come home. She was the wild one. Everybody thought Marion was wild, getting pregnant and then staying single, moving in and out of everyplace all the time. But Marion was staid at heart. She would have liked to get married and settle down if things had gone differently. It was just that her luck was bad. I wondered if some of that bad luck had come to Ruth.

"Business good?" Mr. Woodmoore said. He was always under the impression that I owned the bar no matter how many times I told him otherwise.

"Good enough," I said. "Yourself?"

"Boat's still running. I picked myself an industry that's never going to fold." Mr. Woodmoore ran a tugboat that brought the freighters into dock. "I figure when they retire me I'm going to get myself a job on one of those gambling boats. Then I'll be just like you, spending all day in a bar." He laughed at his joke and Ruth gave me a beer in a bottle.

"What're you doing now?" I asked Ruth.

"This and that," she said, meaning that it wasn't the time to talk about it. Ruth looked like Marion. She wore her hair different and she didn't have the same sort of style, but there was no mistaking the similarity. Being in that house always made me feel like I had gone back to another part of my life. Pictures of Franklin sat on every tabletop. There were her parents. Ruth was Marion. I drank my beer.

"Let's go ahead and eat," Mrs. Woodmoore said. "I know you have to get back to work. That's why we didn't ask you over for Saturday. I know how busy things get for you then."

Ruth stood up in a tired way, stretched a little and headed out to the kitchen to help her mother put out the food.

"Buddy okay?" I asked Mr. Woodmoore.

"Fine," he said. "Fine except he stays away too much. I don't see why they have to station him in Germany. Too hard to come home. Crazy how they keep those boys over there. Hell, fifty years later. It's too far away."

Mrs. Woodmoore stopped frying things when the doctor told her she was killing Mr. Woodmoore with kindness. "Feeding him to death," Marion used to say. She still put bacon in the green beans though and there was chicken gravy for the potatoes. "Take more," she said to me. "You probably never get any food at all. You didn't used to be thin like that."

I put another biscuit on my plate. Whatever people might say about me, it wasn't that I was thin.

"You hear from Marion much?"

"I talk to Franklin once a week. Sometimes I talk to Marion then."

"So you heard about him getting the stitches." Mrs. Woodmoore asked cautiously, like she wasn't sure I had heard.

"Marion called me right after it happened."

Mrs. Woodmoore smiled and nodded.

"It's dangerous for a boy down there," Mr. Woodmoore said, salting his corn. "He shouldn't be running loose that way."

There was nothing for me to say.

"You playing at all?" Ruth asked me. I looked up at her, surprised.

"We don't think Marion is happy," Mrs. Woodmoore said. "Last couple of months, every time I talk to her she starts crying about one thing or another. She says the hospital's not as good as the one here. She said the job she left was better than the one she has. They'd take her back, too. Baptist was always crazy about her."

Ruth put down her napkin and got up from the table. "I'm going to get another beer. You'll have another one, won't you?" She went to get it before I answered, though I would have said yes.

"I don't think Franklin is happy there either."

"He keeps telling me about his friends," I said. I'd be the first to list off all that Marion's done wrong in her life, but no good came from talking this way about a woman to her parents.

"I don't think he likes the school as much. Marion's said that. I think they both want to come back. She just doesn't know how to do it. You know how Marion is, prideful. She'd just as soon choke on her own pride than ask for help."

Ruth came back from the kitchen holding two bottles of beer. She was smiling at me, walking in a slow way. Her sweater had ridden up and was showing an inch of her stomach above her jeans. "Mama thinks that if you ask Marion to come back to you, she'd do it now." She set a beer down on the tip of my knife.

Mrs. Woodmoore looked at her younger daughter, not unlike the way she looked at me when she tried to pull my throat out.

"Marion wouldn't come back to me," I said. "We've tried that. Every way two people can try, Marion and I tried that."