The big bartender you spoke with earlier in the week is talking to a group of flannel-shirted, bearded men farther down the small bar, but he comes down and says, Welcome back, and you nod and order a Budweiser and then try to find a place where you can stand in the crowded room. The band has shifted into a slow country ballad now, a song you do not recognize, and the dancing couples collapse together in various states of embrace. Behind the bar, the poster for the football pool hangs, a few more of its squares marked in with names.
Hours later you still have not added your own. It seems somehow less important now. You are in the full drunk of the evening and you find yourself amidst the animal heads, staring up at them, one after another, with a mixture of awe, horror, and confusion. A few feet away a group of men and women talk in loud voices about a planned hunting trip. They laugh and debate what they will bring and how big the animals are and what constitutes the Canadian wolf-hunting season and what kinds of weapons they have and do not have. They are young men, perhaps younger than you, but not by much. You think of Rick, of those nights at Grady’s and all the other clubs up and down the strip, at first with the fake ID and later with the real one, of those last five months after you turned twenty-one and before everything totally turned to shit. The winter of 1984. They look like boys to you, although they must have been at least twenty-one, and you are only twenty-five. And yet it feels, somehow, as if you have aged in animal years, that you are somehow older than you are, a sensation that you cannot quite pin down and yet which is there nonetheless.
You’re gonna need a gun with more power than that, one of the boys says.
Thirty-aught, another says.
Shit, man, that’ll punch a hole the size of a baseball.
Seven millimeter, maybe.
I’m thinking that Browning my dad has.
The one you bring for elk?
Yeah, it shoots two-seventy.
I like that rifle. You should sell me that rifle.
Shit, I ain’t selling you nothing.
You stand outside that circle, wondering what truth lies sprawled beneath the severed heads of the animals that stare down from every wall. In your drunken reverie, you wonder if the bartender was right, and if he was right then maybe what your uncle David was doing up there in the forest was wrong because the animals he was keeping in cages had lived at least some of their lives in freedom. Maybe that freedom still burned deep inside their muscle and sinew and in their veins and especially in their hearts. Maybe they still and forever could recall a time when the forest was endless and they ran through it like gods, their worlds holding that fire, tending it. Can you imagine such a thing to be true? Even were you to raise a grizzly in a cage all its life, even were it born in captivity, did it not still understand that its nature was wild? And then you are struck with everything at once—everything that has happened to you and because of you—the whole of your life come swinging into your heart and with it a sense of frustration and despair and fury that sends you staggering forward.
You think you intend to push out into the cold night but when you turn toward the door your leg catches the edge of something—a chair, the carpet, a table edge—and you stumble forward into the circle of flanneled men and denim-clad women, your beer tipping out of your hand so that when you try to right it you instead send it exploding everywhere like a tiny geyser. The men and women all step back and one of them lays a hand on your shoulder. Whoa whoa whoa, he says.
Some part of you knows you should simply walk on but the eyes of the animals are upon you and the alcohol is running in your blood and what comes from your mouth instead of an apology is: Get your fucking hand off me.
What’s that? The young man leans in to look at you now, looks at you carefully. He wears a long blond mustache that comes down over his upper lip. On his head is a green cap with a yellow scrawl of words that you cannot focus on long enough to read.
And you say: You heard me.
Man, you need to take a break. Go get some air.
You go get some air.
Then the young man smiles. You watch his face carefully, his eyes on your eyes. You’re trying to pick a fight, he says.
And you say, Fuck you.
Then, from one of the women: You gonna let him talk like that, Jack?
Well, shit, he says. I guess not. There is something like joy in his features. Something like excitement. So let’s go, he says. He takes a step forward and you take a step back and in the next instant the young man’s friends are around you, pulling you off your feet and dragging you backward through the bar. You can hear the bartender—the woman now—yelling, Hey hey hey, and the group around you stops dragging for a moment and one of them says, We’re taking him outside, and she says, No fighting in the bar, Jack, and he says, I know, Laurie. That’s why we’re taking him outside. Then another voice, this from the bartender you spoke to those days earlier: Make it a fair goddamned fight. Don’t you boys just trounce him out there.
You can hear movement now and you are smiling, thinking of Rick at the clubs and bars the two of you frequented in Reno, and more than ever you wish your friend was by your side. But Rick is gone now and your uncle is gone and even your brother is gone and so you are alone.
They take you down the stairs backward, your boots bouncing off each step, and when they let go of you on the asphalt of the parking lot you surprise yourself by regaining your feet.
You fucked with the wrong guy, my friend, someone says.
It appears as if the entire crowd from inside the bar has filtered outside now. They stand in their flannels and T-shirts and beards, leaning on the rail, making side bets, watching as you sway in the reflected light of the sign and the single lamppost that lights a faint patch of the road.