We nodded to each other, began the ritual of tobacco. His voice sounded rusty and cracked. He moved his lips before each word, forming the word itself.
“Found one,” he said.
I knew immediately what he meant.
“Where?”
“Creek. Four mile downriver. Half mile in.”
“Flint?”
His head moved in a slow shake.
“Chert,” he said. “No flint in America.”
“You make the arrow?”
He shivered. Mosquitoes rose from his body and we looked at each other a long time. He never blinked. I smacked a mosquito against my neck. He compressed his lips and went back inside, softly closing the door.
I spent the rest of the summer drinking and didn’t think about Tarvis anymore. For a while I dated a woman, if you can call it that. We drank till the bar closed, then went to her house and tried not to pass out in the middle of everything. It eventually went to hell between us. Everybody said it would. She liked to laugh, though, and nothing else really mattered.
The day we split up, I got drunk at the Pig. Someone was in the men’s room, and I went in the women’s. It was commonly done. The uncommon part was falling through the window. The bartender didn’t ask what happened or if I was hurt, just barred me on the spot. He thought I threw a garbage can through the window. He said that nothing human had broken it, and I wondered what he thought I was.
I took my drinking down the street, but it wasn’t the same. I was homesick for the Pig.
A few months later a policeman arrived at my house and I got scared that I’d hit someone with my car. I was always finding fresh dents and scraped paint in the morning. The cop was neckless and blond, officially polite. He asked if I knew Tarvis Eldridge and I nodded. He asked if the deceased had displayed any behavior out of the ordinary and I told him no, wanting to side with Tarvis even dead.
“A will left his house to you,” the cop said.
“Maybe he wasn’t right when he wrote it.”
“We don’t think he was,” the cop said. “But the house is yours.”
He stood to leave, and I asked how Tarvis had died. In a slow, embarrassed fashion, he told me part of it. I went to the county coroner who filled in the gaps. It was his most unusual case, and he talked about it like a man who’d pulled in a ten-inch trout on a dime-store rod.
Tarvis had fastened one end of the bow to an iron plate and screwed the plate to the floor. Guy wires held the bow upright. He fitted an arrow with a chert point into the bow, drew it tight, and braced it. A strip of rawhide ran across the floor to the couch where they found him. All he had to do was pull the leather cord to release the arrow.
His body had been sent home for burial. As much as he’d tried to get out, the hills had claimed him.
I drove to Tarvis’s house and gathered his personal stuff — a toothbrush and comb, his tobacco pouch, knife, and hat. I dug a hole beside the owl’s grave and dropped it all in. It seemed fitting that he’d have two graves, one here and another in Kentucky. I filled the hole and smoothed the earth and didn’t know what to say. Everything I came up with sounded stupid. It was such a small place in the ground. I wasn’t burying him, I was covering over how I felt.
I left for town. My neighborhood was neat and clean, like dorm walls after a fresh coat. From the outside, my house looked like all the rest. The refrigerator held lunchmeat, eggs, and milk. The toilet ran unless you jiggled the handle. I didn’t even go in. I bought a pint for later and drove to the Pig, forgetting that I’d been barred. I sat in the car outside. The windows of the tavern were brightly lit and I knew everyone in there. I’d not been to the Pig for three months and none of my friends had called me, not a one.
I drove back to Tarvis’s road, pulled over, and cut the engine. I hadn’t known how tore up the inside of the owl was, and I couldn’t tell about Tarvis either. Both of them should have stayed in the woods. It made me wonder if I should have. I opened the whiskey. The smell was quick and strong, and I threw the full bottle out the car window. I don’t know why. As soon as I did, I regretted it. The bottle didn’t break and I heard the bourbon emptying into the ditch. I knew it wouldn’t all run out.
I went down the road and parked in the shadow of Tarvis’s house. The river was dark and flat. Long-eared owls were calling to each other, answering and calling. There was one female calling and three males hollering back, which reminded me of the Pig. Maybe Tarvis would still be living if he’d let himself take a drink to get through the hard parts. He’d gotten himself home, though, while I was still stuck out here in the world. I suddenly thought of something that drained me like a shell. I sat in the dark listening to the owls but there was no way for me to get around it. I missed Kentucky more than the Pig.
Target Practice
Ray set a log on the chopping block and swung the heavy maul. The seasoned ash split easily. He switched to the hatchet and cut thin strips of kindling that curved around knots and fell to the ground. The effort loosened a tension that had become habit since his return to the hills. He’d left Kentucky several years ago and now he wished he’d stayed on the assembly line at the Chrysler plant in Detroit.
The house didn’t have a bathroom and his wood-stove leaked smoke indoors. The clay dirt wouldn’t hold a garden. His wife had left him and Ray was too embarrassed to tell anyone.
A truck ground into a lower gear and Ray recognized the sound of the trashman’s pickup. Once a month everyone on the hill left money in a jar on top of their garbage cans. Ray’s father, Franklin, was the only person who made the trashman walk to his house and ask him for the money.
Three years back, Franklin quit work and began staying at home. His wife was dead. A neighbor brought him groceries. Twice a day he went outside to chop wood, though he had a gas furnace. Split cordwood was stacked high around his house. He hadn’t been off the hill in three years. As the neighbors said, Franklin had a funny turn to him.
The trash truck sprayed gravel climbing the steep bank of Ray’s driveway. Ray dropped the hatchet and walked to the pickup.
“Chopping wood?” the trashman said.
“Can’t get enough.”
“Hear ol’ Franklin’s got a regular sawmill full.”
“Yeah,” Ray said. “I’m planning to raid him the first dark night.”
The trashman laughed and showed Ray a semiautomatic rifle. It was old and plain.
“You’ll need this,” he said. “Swapped a dog for a VCR and got this to boot. Take twenty for it.”
Ray shook his head.
“Here,” the trashman said, “see how it shoots.”
Ray took the rifle. He opened the breech and saw a bullet. He was truly home — a man he barely knew had passed him a loaded weapon.
The trashman pointed at the slope behind the house.
“Hit that stump up yonder,” he said.
Ray peered down the barrel. He put the stump in the sight and squeezed the trigger. The rifle made a sharp crack and in the same second a bullet smacked the poplar stump. Birds lifted from the brush and sound stopped. Ray suddenly wanted the gun.
“Don’t know if I got twenty,” Ray said.
“Clean it up and it’s a forty-dollar gun.”
“See that milkweed pod?”
The trashman nodded, a barely perceptible move of his head. Ray aimed and deliberately missed.
“Sights ain’t right,” he said. “Give you ten.”
The trashman spat in the dirt. He took the gun, climbed in his truck, and started the engine. He jerked his chin to Ray.
“Take fifteen,” the trashman said.
“Throw in some shells?”