We sipped the whiskey and dried our socks and every few minutes one of us got up to turn the rabbit. After a while it began to lighten and then to brown. Mary lay on the carpet and watched it with us.
Pretty soon I was more relaxed than I had been in over a year. Outside the tall windows that looked out back in the dusk, great flocks of birds flowed in a fluctuating stream across the sky. I thought of how the redwing blackbirds and grackles gathered mornings and evenings in the bamboo thicket outside my screened porch. I have sat there and watched them, as evening ticked down, swoop in twos, threes, fours, and disappear into the bamboo until the whole thicket was alive with birds hidden by the bamboo leaves, invisible birds, the noise like a thousand old doors swinging on rusty, creaking hinges. In the mornings as they wake they take it up again, and burst from the thicket in bunches. It makes for some pretty strange dreams.
Sometimes in the dawn hour, the birds get so loud they wake me up and I lie there surrounded by their weird cacophonous voices, thinking about the Great Fuckup, and imagining all their beady little eyes darting around in that jungle green like all my quirky little demons. I’d married so young and didn’t know anything about it, and lost my wife and baby son when I was twenty-one years old, let them go with a kind of despair I could not begin to even recognize. It was true I didn’t love her at all. But it was just like Ivan had joked as we’d left that morning: she left the furniture, the silverware, the pots and pans, the television, the books, the carpet, the food, the car, her prescription medicines, her shower cap, shampoo, toothbrush, hairbrush, stuffed animals collection, inessential clothing, old letters and postcards, sheets and towels, cheap framed prints on the walls, stereo, and all the photo albums except the one devoted to our little boy. And she took him. And over the next few years things had shut down inside me with the regularity of lights in an empty warehouse where a night watchman is pulling the switches one by one. I moved around, went back to school, moved in with a friend and then moved out again, into the old man’s empty apartment. And finally one morning that spring I lay there awake, the small bedroom full of the blackbirds’ strange and beautifully dissonant warbling, and couldn’t think of what I really cared about anymore.
I said to Ivan, “Did you ever fuck Eve while those blackbirds were all out there in the bamboo?”
He poked at the fire a minute.
“What, when they’re all out there raising hell? It’s like fucking in the middle of a goddamn asylum,” he said. “You don’t know where you are when it’s over.”
I said, “In my bed.”
He laughed.
I said, “What are y’all going to do?”
He didn’t say anything, and tossed another split log onto the fire.
“I don’t know,” he said then. “It’s not going to be much fun for a while.”
“I don’t think I could ever do it again,” I said. “Go through a divorce. I don’t think I’d ever divorce again, at least not with children.”
“Then don’t remarry,” Ivan said.
“At least you don’t have children.”
We left the rabbit over the coals while we ate the quail, rice, and green beans. It was quiet in the room and warm. Ivan held up a glass of wine. I held mine up.
“Well,” he said, “fuck all of them, Jack. You know?”
“Fuck them each and every one,” I said, and had to shut my mouth and look away. I got up and went into the living room to the fire, put oven mittens on my hands, and lifted the spit with the rabbit out of its cradles. That took a little while. I carried it back into the dining room and laid it across the plate with the birds. Cooked, the rabbit wasn’t as disturbing to me. But the meat was tough and gamy.
“Should’ve at least put a little butter and salt and pepper on it,” Ivan said.
“I wish we hadn’t shot it,” I said.
“Enough about that!” Ivan said. “We’ll give it to Mary.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Mary killed it. She finished it off.”
“In innocence.”
“Exactly. It’s Mary’s rabbit.”
“Okay.”
We gave it to Mary. She trotted back into the living room and lay down in front of the fire with the rabbit under her front paws and began to eat it almost delicately, sniffing it and licking it as if it were her pup and she were eating it almost lovingly in maternal wonder. But when she began to crunch on the bones we sent her outside.
WE GOT UP LATE, WALKED THE FIELDS THE NEXT DAY. ON the evening before we left I went out by myself to walk the fencelines in the fields behind the house. Dusk settled in. I had the little rabbit’s foot in my pocket. The drizzling rain had stopped and things were very quiet. I walked down a narrow corridor made by a row of young pines set out from the edge of a thicket. I could hardly see, with dark advancing, but I spooked a single dove from one of the pines and as he flew away down the corridor against the darkening sky, I took a shot. It must have been low, confusing him, because he turned in a sort of abrupt Immelmann and headed straight back down the corridor at me. I leveled the gun and shot, but missed again — I forgot to aim high — and he darted out of the corridor and across the field.
I could hear the last shot echo over field after field, and then a great silence. A strange ecstasy sang in my veins like a drug. I raised the gun and fired the last shell into the air, the flame from the barrel against the darkening sky, and the chamber locked open, empty. Then silence. Not even a sifting of wind in the leaves. Not a single wheezy note from a blackbird, or any other kind of bird. I wanted the moment to last forever.
BILL
WILHELMINA, EIGHTY-SEVEN, LIVED ALONE IN THE same town as her two children, but she rarely saw them. Her main companion was a trembling poodle she’d had for about fifteen years, named Bill. You never hear of dogs named Bill. Her husband in his decline had bought him, named him after a boy he’d known in the Great War, and then wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He’d always been Wilhelmina’s dog. She could talk to Bill in a way that she couldn’t talk to anyone else, not even her own children.
Not even her husband, now nearly a vegetable out at King’s Daughters’ Rest Home on the old highway.
She rose in the blue candlelight morning to go see him about the dog, who was doing poorly. She was afraid of being completely alone.
There were her children and their children, and even some great-grandchildren, but that was neither here nor there for Wilhelmina. They were all in different worlds.
She drove her immaculate ocean-blue Delta 88 out to the home and turned up the long, barren drive. The tall naked trunks of a few old pines lined the way, their sparse tops distant as clouds. Wilhelmina pulled into the parking lot and took two spaces so she’d have plenty of room to back out when she left. She paused for a moment to check herself in the rearview mirror, and adjusted the broad-brimmed hat she wore to hide the thinning spot on top of her head.
Her husband, Howard, lay propped up and twisted in his old velour robe, his mouth open, watching TV. His thick white hair stood in a matted knot on his head like a child’s.
“What?” he said when she walked in. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Hello!’ Wilhelmina replied, though she’d said nothing.