You have thought less of Rick than you did years before but now in your loneliness and despair his face swims up out of the muddy darkness of your dreams. It has only been four years since you left Reno. Before your uncle’s death, you might have claimed that the whole of that geography felt cut off from you, like a severed limb, but now it feels too close, as if just beyond the trees. Thinking of Rick and then thinking of Susan. You know in your heart that you will never see her again and your relief at such an understanding is mixed with a slow and painful longing.
Soon after the reading of the will you stop at a low, dark drinking hall in the strip of small battered buildings that comprise Naples, the town you ostensibly live in and which is in some ways no town at all but a dot on the map between Bonners Ferry to the north and Sandpoint to the south. The sign reads Northwoods Tavern. Wagon wheels line the entrance. Old chain saws in the rafters. Perhaps you somehow think you will be welcomed here in the way you had once been welcomed at Grady’s. What you know is that you have never felt more alone in all your life. You take a stool at the bar and ask for a vodka on the rocks and then turn and look at the room. There are only two others present besides yourself and the bartender, two older men who sit at a back table, drunk and mumbling to each other. Beyond them are mounted all manner of animal heads: a big-horned buck, a moose of enormous size with a rack that extends like two huge fins, a feral pig of some kind, its mouth permanently molded into a snarl. Smaller animals as well. A badger and, mounted upright in a running pose, a mink or marten.
All mine, the bartender says.
What’s that? you say.
Those kills. All mine.
Oh.
You turn back to the bar, sip at the vodka. The bartender is a thickset man, barrel-chested and possessed of an enormous round belly and a downward-curving mustache not unlike the mustache that Grady wore those few years ago back in Reno. Perhaps the fashion choice of discerning bartenders everywhere.
I don’t really hunt, you say.
It’s not for everyone, the bartender says.
Your eyes have fallen upon a ten-by-ten grid marked on a big sheet of butcher paper and decorated with felt-pen drawings of football helmets. Various names have been scribbled into a good many of the squares. What’s that? you ask.
Football pool. Super Bowl. You want in?
How much?
Dollar.
Sure, you say, and even in that single word you feel the hard twist of metal in your gut. I pick the numbers?
The bartender looks up briefly and then returns his attention to a small, soundless television mounted up above the bar. Numbers will all be random, he says. Shirley’ll pick ’em out of a hat or something, day of the game. I don’t think I’ve seen you around. You new around here?
You look across the bar at him. I’ve been here four years.
Yeah?
Yeah, I live just up the hill.
Doing what?
My uncle has—had—a little wildlife thing. A grizzly and a couple of coyotes and that kind of thing.
You mean that weird little zoo up there?
You cringe at the description but not enough that the bartender notices. Yeah, that’s the place.
What’s the deal with that anyway? It’s like wild animals, right?
Yeah, it’s animals that can’t survive without help.
That’s what I mean. Those animals are wild. You don’t put a wild animal in a cage.
My uncle’d probably argue you don’t shoot one either.
That’s not the same thing, the bartender says, glancing at you and then looking up and down the bar. At least out there it’s understood. They’re part of the food chain. Caging them up ain’t right.
They’d die in the wild, though, you say. I mean they’re mostly permanently injured in one way or another.
That’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to die in the wild. Not in a cage.
You tip the contents of the glass into your mouth and swallow. Well, you say, thanks for the drink anyway.
Shit, don’t be sore about it, the bartender says. We’re just having a discussion.
What do I owe you?
The bartender tells you and you pay and slide off the stool.
Where you from anyway? the bartender says.
And you almost say, Battle Mountain, because you are angry but you catch yourself and in the end you simply say, I’m not from anywhere.
None of us are, the bartender says. You turn to leave and the bartender calls to you again, Hey, kid, and you turn back, standing in the doorway now. No hard feelings. Really.
Whatever you say, you mumble.
You are nearly back to the rescue before you realize that you did not give him a dollar for the football pool.
YOU SPEND the next three days feeding and watering the animals as always, but the bartender’s words continue to burn inside you, a twist of hot anger that you cannot release. You find yourself thinking of calling the bookie again, although it has been many years since you have done any such thing. You fantasize briefly that you might place some insubstantial wager but for some reason you do not make that call and because there is no one to talk to—not about this urge nor about your uncle’s death nor about the bartender’s words—you find yourself talking to the animals, a kind of ongoing monologue that continues as you make your rounds.
Then comes the day when you happen upon the wreck. It is dusk and you see the smoking car first and then the animal and you pull to the side and before you can think you are running up the center of the road. What lies before you is a deer, a white-tailed doe well into adulthood who drags her paralyzed hindquarters across the asphalt, her voice coming in crazed high bleats like a child’s screams cut short over and over again.
The man there calls to you: What do we do? He is dressed, incongruously, in a jacket and tie, eyes wide and breath coming in shallow gulps. Behind him his car steams, the gold hood crushed into a V.
There’s not a lot we can do, you tell him.
Ah jeez, the man says when the animal’s cry starts up again. Don’t you have a gun or something?
Why?
So you can put it out of its misery, the man says. We have to do that at least. His voice is high and keening and when the doe cries it is so loud that it obliterates his words.