“Oh, they’re around,” he chimed back. “It’s just a question of time.”
And what isn’t? I sullenly thought.
The quiver of four aligned arrows on his back made him look like an anti-aircraft battery draped in camouflage cloth. His wire-frame glasses seemed still to hold the light from our headlights. To make him aware of my presence, as I huddled there beside Gloria, desperate for a diaper change, I cleared my throat and asked, “Do the trinkets ever bother you? These bigger new ones can do a job on human beings, I hear.”
He straightened, so his saintly smile was all I could see through Gloria’s rolled-down window. “I carry a spray; they mix it of sand and glue. One squirt of that and those darn critters don’t come near your feet again.”
Gloria made the car seat bounce, this expertise excited her so. Her radiant hair, cut and tinted while I was suffering my hospital checkup, blazed filament by filament in the ambient glow of our headlights. Or was some cunning part of John’s armory giving off a secondary glow?
“Smell that?” he said suddenly.
“What?” she asked, breathless.
“A buck. Right about here.”
We were parked, our engine idling, at a spot on the driveway beside the sourwood tree, whose fallen leaves gave off, I had noticed, a rich, lusty smell of decay. But I didn’t want to argue. I wanted only to get back to the house and get out of my wet Depends.
“There could be a buck?” Gloria asked, with a rising inflection.
“Why not?” John asked in his slow voice. “This is the season. Fella I was shooting with over on Plum Island got a six-pointer whose nose was to the ground, following the scent of a doe. That’s what they do. Buck smells a doe, his brain can’t take in much else.”
“How exciting!” Gloria exclaimed.
“Wasn’t paying attention, that’s how he got shot,” John said, as if his nature lesson needed recapitulation.
“I’m soaked,” I muttered at her side. “I’m miserable.” Reluctantly she moved the car up the driveway, nudging it along as if keeping step with the hunter walking up alone.
Next morning, shuffling down to pick up the Globe, I stopped by the sourwood to consider the odor in its vicinity. It was rank but, like the smell your finger brings away from probing the folds of your navel, or that your socks deliver when held beneath your nose at the end of a long day, not exactly unpleasant, because it is you.
It happened in my sleep, at dawn, when tender-faced ruminants inquisitively tread-nose extended like a fending hand in the dark-through the frost-whitened leaf mulch of the forest floor scarcely expecting, in the morning’s innocence, an enemy to be awake. But John had gone three weeks without his kill and had set his alarm to ring in the dark, in the middle of his faithful wife’s dreams. She rolled over, hearing him clump into his hunting boots, and fell back into a vision of venison.
I myself awoke to the sound of John and Gloria jubilating in mutually congratulatory murmurs down on the driveway. He had driven his green truck down the dirt road to collect the gutted carcass, then he had brought it back up to the house to show my wife his prize, the obscene fruit of their joint conspiracy. From my window I could see the deer’s body like a taut russet sack tossed into the square-ribbed flatbed along with the metal lattice of his treestand and some stray planks of lumber. The white of the throat couldn’t at first glance be distinguished from the big white-undersided tail. Heart thudding, I fumbled out of my sweated pajamas- never mind the soaked diaper, whose ammonia stung my eyes-and into yesterday’s corduroy trousers and moth-eaten wool sweater. Without the patience for socks, I stuck my naked feet into loafers and, moving faster than I had for months, grabbed the old parka, with its seams leaking down, hung on the hook nearest the kitchen door downstairs. The cold outside was misty, and felt like shackles on my bare ankles. The day was still too young to have acquired horizons.
Scarcely since our wedding day have I seen Gloria’s face aglow as it was beside the dusty, dented truck, with its lowered tailgate. Her bathrobe of purple chenille was clutched so tightly about her I knew she was wearing only a thin cotton nightie beneath. “He was crossing the old dirt road,” she burst out proudly to me, “right where John”-it made me shiver, the juices of affection and respect she managed to squeeze into the monosyllable-“had figured out the route up to our yard was.”
“She,” I said. “It’s a doe. It was a doe.”
“Right across beneath my stand,” John joined in. “A clean shot, the little downward angle suited me just fine, at about twenty feet.” His saintly face, with its shambly brown teeth and washed-out blue eyes, was unable to conceal, quite, his murderous pride. “Maybe she sensed my pulling the bow,” he went on. “She turned her head, to give me that seven-inch circle I spoke about. Zing! Right into the lungs. She didn’t get more than a hundred yards, and stopped breathing where she bedded down. She gave me this one long look, like I was coming to her assistance, and then lay down her pretty little head on the leaves. I didn’t have to use a second arrow. Depending on what gristle they pierce, they can be the devil to work out.”
I saw the wound now, a messy matted X. The dried blood blended in with her reddish-brown coat, its hairs glinting silver in the rising sun. From my angle the deer’s body stretched long as a lover’s beside you in bed. “How’d you get her up in the truck?” I asked.
“The old fireman’s squat-and-hoist,” he boasted, unable to control his grin. “Once you’ve removed the entrails, that cuts out a lot of the water and slop. Still, she weighs something over a hundred pounds, I can tell you. Luckily, it was near the road. Sometimes you wind up with a mile or so to drag out the carcass. I backed in the truck and hoisted. You try to take the weight on your legs and give a grunt out loud. That’s something we’ve learned from the Japanese, giving the power grunt.”
The deer’s head was toward me, on the lowered tailgate, as if to be fed something, her lips slightly drawn back, a lavender sliver of tongue visible. There were little crusts of blood around her black nostrils, relic of the bloody foam she breathed in her last minute. Her eyes were open, long-lashed, coffee-brown globules in which our oaks and tall white house set vertical reflections like tiny submerged fins. The short-haired barrel of her body, dented by the removal of its intestines and multiple stomachs and liver and lungs and heart, emitted in the frosty morning a vapor of relative warmth, like the winter sea, and a helpless strong animal smell, of dry hair and damp hide and the pellets released from her tidy anus in the sorry unravelling of death. From the inner corners of the deer’s eyes flowed two dark markings, like tear trails. But the consciousness that had protruded into the two bright, snuff-flecked eyes had moved on, into another cosmic space.
John stepped toward me, exuding his own scent, of patiently absorbed woods and a hint of bad breath-he must have been a pipe-smoker, once, to wear down those teeth like that-as if to claim my congratulations. Gloria beamed in a happy daze behind his mottled shoulders. In his bulky camouflage outfit, and his intricately shaped knit cap, with its stump of a bill, he seemed princely, a groom at a pre-Christian wedding. The deer was his bride. Or was she mine, and he and Gloria the blessed pair on this gala day? It seemed plain enough that among the four of us my affinity was with the deer. Her conical slender face, with its coarse rubbery muzzle and indelible tear trails, gazed toward me; I could see myself move, a reflected splinter wearing a parka and no socks, in the orb of dulling gel.
With a woman in love, for a time, you can do no wrong; then you reach a point where nothing you do is right. I had reached that point with Gloria a while ago and felt hardly a flicker of jealousy as she with grave sweetness-North Shore Lady Bountiful clad in naught but thin cotton beneath her regal purple robe-thanked the hunter over and over, pressing his trembling hands in both of hers.