“No. We’re doing fine. One day at a time, all right?” I turned my back to him to evidence my trust.
It took a moment for him to speak. “I’ll go out in the morning to get the eggs this time, okay? I know how now.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. The chickens like me. I want to.”
“I’d feel better about it if Maggie went with you though, you know?”
“No, it’s okay, really.”
“Swear?” I turned back to the grill. I had to turn around and ask again. “Swear?”
“Swear.”
It felt older brotherly. In his voice I could hear him wanting to please me. He wanted to do something on his own. He wanted to be an individual, and to stop being afraid. I thought it was a good idea. I’ll admit that gaining an extra half hour of sleep did appeal to me.
Though early evening, eager stars had winked into position. I spoke over my shoulder, “Eggs are nearly done. If you’ll go get some bread, I’ll toast it here and we can have breakfast for dinner.”
“Again?” he teased. Our thing.
“Again.”
Cue television laugh track.
I had incorporated their yipping and sniping into a dream before awaking, one of those dreams of a nebulous world at your periphery—blinded to it, you keep turning, your mind, your psyche, whatever you are, you’re spinning in a white void trying to connect.
The auditory connected because there was the yipping. A group of them, gathered outside. The feeling that they had returned woke me. Usually, I’d call up to Nate in his loft soon after I woke, but that morning I didn’t because I needed to know whether I had dreamed these noises or they had issued from the conscious world.
I sat and listened, moved my eyes back and forth in my sockets.
There—the yipping…
Sounding victorious and celebratory. There was also anxiety in it—wake up, come see.
I’d washed my clothes last night in the kitchen sink. They hung from a line of cooking twine I’d stretched across the front of the fireplace. As I slipped them on, dry and warm, the noises outside amplified.
The dogs had returned. I mumbled a missive out to the God that let this all happen, “Please let Maggie be among them.” I shrugged on my peacoat.
Beyond the ambit of the fire, I felt the morning cold before I reached the door. The storm door creaked. The dogs were gathered near the carport waiting to be fed. “Oh, so I guess you’re done carousing and you’re back to punch your meal ticket. What, hogs outrun you?”
Getting closer to them, I saw I was wrong. Each of their snouts, the fur on their chests, glistened red. A wave of revulsion moved through me. They froze as if gauging my reaction. I didn’t see Maggie. “I see you had yourselves a hunting lark after all.”
Their muzzles dribbled and dripped. Fresh kill. Standing among them now, they meandered all around me as if seeking praise, lifting their heads for my touch. Droplets of blood dotted my shoes. Some smeared on my hand-cleaned pants.
“Ack! Back! Back you fiends,” I kidded. The dogs scattered a bit, giving me room with laughter in their eyes and grisly smiles on their faces. Each had a gout of blood on its snout like they’d dipped it up to their eyes in red oily paint. They seemed to revel in it. I’d not seen them so happy and satiated since coming here.
“I doubt you’re hungry. Huh, you killers? Yeah, you guys are killers,” I teased and reveled with them as I arranged their food pans, looking forward to reestablishing the routine again, that rhythm we needed after yesterday’s scare. The coppery tang sluicing from their mouths intensified as they dug into their food with abandon. “Guess I’m wrong. Famished. Famished from the glory of the hunt. You killers you.”
I turned around at movement I felt behind me. Up the path came Maggie in silhouette, the sky brassy with dawn breaking behind her through the crease in the valley. She sauntered toward me. I didn’t like her deliberation—she had the uneasy gait of a rabid, untrusting canine gone fey—but I ignored it, squatted down and opened my arms to her. “Mags! Where the hell’d you go? You went poof on me. Worried us.”
She didn’t come running. She came more into focus and I saw that her muzzle shone bloodslicked as the rest.
And something else. The shine on her muzzle. I looked back at the group of dogs eating. I walked over to them. Having breached the horizon, the sun poured light on the dogs. Now I saw how slick and splotched their muzzles were. Along with the blood, flecks of eggshell clung to their yolky smiles.
The chickens’ silence struck me as unusual for early morning. Dawn broke behind Maggie yet no rooster crowed.
Maggie stopped in front of me, her muzzle dripping of egg and blood viscous and vermillion. Unlike the others, Maggie didn’t wag her tail and didn’t seem to revel.
“Oh, man! Tell me you didn’t get into the coop. Please tell me you didn’t just slaughter the hens and scarf the eggs.” Maggie averted her face from mine.
I strode through dewy grass to the coop, chuffing steam-breath into the air, yelling over my shoulder, the echoes highlighting my solitude, “Goddammit, you guys! This is our lifeline!” Maggie obsequiously loped behind.
When I got to the coop, I found it undisturbed. A couple of chickens came out of their holes and poked around. No blood, no signs of breaking and entering.
I circled the coop twice to make sure, thinking no feathers on the ground, no feathers on their snouts…
Maggie, tail tucked, scooted clear of me as I turned to run.
I didn’t call out. I topped the single flight in three bounds. The mattress on the floor of the loft lay empty, the comforter folded back, the pillow still impressed with his head-shape.
Downstairs, and I see the egg basket is gone.
The dogs weren’t disturbed as I tore out of the house. The storm door slapped the frame. I ran back to the coop. The chickens squawked and dashed back into their places when I barged in.
All the nests were empty.
My heart thudded between my ears and my stomach dropped.
He had wanted to do it himself. He didn’t want to wake me.
For hours I yelled out for him. I ran around the compound breathless and panicked.
Shadows thinned and slanted. I sat numb at the kitchen table and stared at its lacquered knots, black holes through which I tumbled.
I remember sitting there wishing I would cry. I just tumbled, I don’t know for how long, the silence of the world beating at my ears.
The dogs lay in a tight pack in the sun. A cool wind blew over them. Their bellies engorged with new-world blood, they all slept save for Maggie who sat at the front of them with her ears up, waiting for me.
I hadn’t made a fire. The room grew cold by noon. I tumbled.
I took the Bobcat around the property. About a quarter mile away in the other direction from the way we’d been walking—which means he must have been running from them because he wouldn’t have gone that way otherwise, not without me—up near the mouth of the creek which dumped into a small lake on the property, I found his egg basket, bent and slimy, a spray of shells like spent firework paper, his too-big hunters cap in a wet wad, and the grass all around matted with blood gone brown.
I stood there in the cold looking at the scene, wondering where the carcass was, wondering about what he had seen the morning of, wondering how much horror can a little kid see and still live on, wondering what kind of foulness had descended on the world to allow a little boy to witness his smiling mother blowing her head off with the pistol she kept in her purse.
I stood there and the sadness never came to me. The anger came. It came as an entity and swirled inside me under my breastplate, rooted itself and made a home there. My eyes stung with rage, and though I yearned to, I couldn’t scream out into the valley because it wasn’t a valley. It was a void which would only throw my own voice back at me in mockery, the void knowing that’s the most painful trick of all.