Mary's Company

“I guess that’d be alright.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I won’t be on your property for long.”

“Just promise me one thing, son.”

“Anything ma’am. Just name it.”

“Promise me it wasn’t the big one that comes into my yard every night and eats out of my flower bed.”

“Well, I…”

“He comes in every night. Right at dark. I see him in the mornings too. But not as often. It’s mostly at night.”

            Adam looked at the old woman. She leaned against the doorway as if it were giving her oxygen through its hinges. Her spine appeared broken and crooked too, forty-five degrees and in need of a good oiling. She had to be 90 years old.

“I can’t say for certain if it was or not ma’am. I’m sorry.”

“I hope it wasn’t. You know I used to try and shoo him off. I got tired of replacing my rose bushes. But now I like him. Now it’s the only company I have to count on.”

            Adam looked down and scraped mud off of his boots with the toes. The old woman stood there leaning against the doorway looking at him. She wore glasses and her eyes were not entirely discernable as spheres through the mask of the yellow lenses. They looked more like slits wrapped in thin, gray blankets.

“I’m Mary.”

“Adam. You live here…I mean…you have any family around?”

            He regretted saying it that way. He didn’t want to come to the door in the first place. It was his brother who talked him into it. Now Walter sat back on the dirt road somewhere. He insisted Adam walk it by himself, said a landowner might be too intimidated if they both came roaring up in Walter’s loud diesel with a lift kit and tinted windows. Maybe he was right. One thing was for sure. They needed to find the wounded animal.

“Oh, dear. Not anymore. Used to. Had a husband but he died. Used to have my son and my daughter and all three grandchildren. They loved my plum jam. Made it from the real deal. Not the store bought nonsense they sell now. You know, they just don’t make good food anymore. Natural food. Good for you like nature made it to be.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I’m sorry, son. You’re not here to listen to an old woman jibber jabber. You go look for your deer now. I hope you find him. I just hope it wasn’t the big one. I hope you didn’t shoot him. I just like the company.”   

            Adam felt letters try to form in the bottom of his throat but none of them came out. She shuffled away from the doorframe and her entire spine seemed to collapse. Adam couldn’t believe she was standing without a cane. It was freakish, the way she was bent, like a hunchback or something. All alone out here in the middle of the woods. Just the deer and the flower beds and the wild plum thickets.

            He walked back down the drive toward the main county road. Walter’s probably gone, he thought. Probably left him out here all alone to get killed by a mountain lion. The Department of Wildlife said mountain lions didn’t exist in Oklahoma. But Adam had a friend who had one on his trail camera - one of those infrared jobbies that takes pictures when something walks in front of it. Adam saw the picture. Sure as hell looked like a mountain lion to him.

“What’d she say?”

            Walter had gone in to buy more Miller Lite. He finished a sip and lowered the silver at the end of the question, his thick forearms dwarfing the can like a small toy.

“Said we could look for him.”

“Fuckin A brother. Let’s go find him.”

            They weaved back down the dirt road, all the while Walter’s muffler predicating the speed of the jacked-up Ford. It was October 1st. Opening day of archery season.

“Tell me again about the shot. It felt good? You didn’t rush it?”

“No I didn’t rush it.”

“Squeezed it nice and easy?”

“Felt good.”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean then what?”

“Then what did the deer do little brother? Jesus.”

“I told you. He just kind of hunched up. He didn’t kick his back legs. Didn’t run at all. Just kind of sucked his stomach up into himself and limped away. All sick looking. Never found my arrow.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Not a good sign.”

“What isn’t?”

“Sounds like you gut shot him.”

            They parked next to the old barn and rundown grain bin on the east side of the property. Their uncle had 500 acres in Woods county. They hadn’t seen him in years but after the funeral he told them they could come down and hunt it any time they wanted. A week later they scouted it and hung tree stands. They pulled down the same old trailer they used for deer camp with their father. Frank only ever rifle hunted, this the first season he would miss in over fifty years. Adam had never killed an animal before, and he wished his father was alive to help him.

“How long is too long to let him sit?” he asked as they crossed over the barbwire.

“You don’t want to push him. That’s for sure. You bump a deer when he’s not dead yet and he might run to the next county. Meat’ll taste like shit too. It’s all that adrenaline, see. Makes their muscles tight and gamey.”

“It’s been five hours.”

“Course you wait too long and the coyotes’ll get it. Then there’s no meat at all. Lucky to get the antlers and it’s a hell of a mess too.”

“But it’s still daylight.”

“So?”

“Coyotes won’t eat him in the daylight, will they?”

            Walter laughed, his chuckles piercing in the silent density of all that greenery, the mosquitoes flourishing and the humidity starting to swell like boiling water.

“Shit little brother. You got a lot to learn. But that’s OK. Stick with me and you’ll get there.”

            After half an hour down the game trail they came to a fork. Tracks were fresh on both paths. They agreed to split up. Adam went right.

“Now don’t screw around, you hear me? Soon as it starts to get dark you come back down this same trail, OK? I’ll meet you at the truck.”

“OK.”

“You seen any more blood?”

“No. Just that one little spot by the thicket.”

“I think you gut shot him. They can take a while to die.”

            Adam looked down, the sweat pouring from around the back of his scalp to the point of his nose.

“That’s OK, little brother. We’ll get him. One time I looked for a buck for three days before I found him. Meat might go bad but you’ll get the rack at least.”

“You think?”

            Walter nodded.

“Don’t screw around now, OK? And don’t get yourself lost. Mom would have my ass. Can’t believe she let us come anyway.”

“I know.”

“I just needed to get outside. Go hunting.”

“I know.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“OK.”

“I think everyone has something in life that’s too much for them. And I think it’s OK to admit it and do the best you can anyway.”

            And then he was alone with the insect sounds and moisture that seemed to come from all directions. As he walked further, he became more ensconced in the tunnel of his own mind. The trail ran through briar and open swaths of wild persimmon, over trickling mud puddles and swampy earth. The insects seemed to shout at him from the confines of their vines and leaves - some pulsating centipede or squawking black beetle. He thought of his father. It was strange to think of him as dead. He didn’t seem dead. He seemed alive still, waiting back at home in the red recliner, his Black and Mild cigarettes smoking beside him, his Lord Calvert whiskey mixed with Pepsi next to the ashtray, the black and white hairs splaying off the sides of his bald head like they couldn’t wait for the hat to sit back on top of them again.

            Adam heard something. A sneezing of air. He froze. It came again. Two snorts loud and outright. Then again, feinter, as though the beast had turned its head. A whitetail doe and fawn burst from cover yards away. They galloped across the trail, their brown Cadillac bodies streamlined in an instant, then hunched and powerful, then streamlined again, elegant, and beautiful. He let out his own breath.

“Scared the hell out of me,” he whispered to himself.

He kept going. Soon, he realized the woods held no significant point of reference. At least not one that he could see. The oak trees were all snickering twins. The coulees and draws were a maze. The plum thickets had no fingerprint. He looked down at the trail. All he had to do was follow it, right? Just turn around and walk back? But when he blinked the trail lost its curvature. It became no trail at all. And then it was several trails, all meandering lines on the planet walked on by creatures wiser than he was, better and more apt. He was lost.

            He walked for what seemed like hours. He began to feel the inside of his own skull. It reverberated with the ricochet of his pumping heart, swelled between his ears, then outward to all ends of his pores. He was drenched in sweat, and the earthen musk jettisoned into his nostrils. The feeling was otherworldly, like each droplet was on fire, each needle-pin of blood a wicked thing spurred by the onslaught of fear and death.

            Standing there at the precipice of his own air escaping him, he saw a shape in the shadows of the trees. The shape grew shingles, then walls and a window. It was a house, small and brown. He took primal steps through brush and thorn, as an alert deer might, and soon he was looking at the old woman’s place again. It was different as it was the backside, but as he rounded the corner, he saw the driveway and the front door. He didn’t remember crossing a fence. Surely, 500 acres was bigger than what he’d just walked through. But he didn’t know. And then he was standing on the front porch again before he could understand why.

“Was it him? Was it my big boy?”

            He couldn’t find the words. He didn’t remember knocking.

“Son, I hope it wasn’t him. Tell me it wasn’t him.”

“We haven’t found anything yet.”

“Well, I prayed about it. Probably sounds silly but I did. Prayed he was still alive. Don’t get me wrong. I got nothing against hunters. Good ones anyway that eat the meat. I just like the company. That’s all.”

            He said nothing.

“Have you eaten anything?”

“Ma’am?”

“What have you had to eat today?”

            Adam recollected. There was a Coke this morning when he woke up. A small bag of Lay’s potato chips later on.

“I…”

“You haven’t eaten a damn thing, have you son?”

“No, ma’am.”

            He put his hands behind his back and looked to his feet.

“Get in here. Let me whip you up something. Last thing I need is a boy falling over dead on account of starvation. Not on my watch.”

            She turned and retreated into the house faster than seemed possible, her shrunken frame agile and shifty. The door was left open, waiting on him to close it.

            He stood in the dining room surrounded by picture frames with faces staring back at him. They were ghostly, aged by decades, the nostalgic tone a whisper of decades.

“That’s Bud.”

            She must have seen him looking.

“Married forty-two years. Yes siree. You got a girlfriend, son?”

“Well…not really.”

“What the hell does that mean? Not really?”

“Well. I mean I have a girl I like.”

“Does she like you?”

“I guess so. I mean…I don’t know.”

“Bull hockey. She’s your girlfriend. Whether you two say it out loud don’t make a lick a difference.”

            He looked at his boots again. There was a deep scratch in the wood floor underneath his right Danner. He traced it. He didn’t know why he was telling her this.

“What’s her name?”

“Sara.”

“God blessed.”

            She was in the kitchen, speaking in echoes that reached around the doorway and caught him like he was stealing.

“You here alone?”

“No ma’am. My brother is looking too. He’s…out there somewhere.”

            Now she was standing in full view in the doorway. Her hair was strikingly white, her glasses yellow and planted on her wrinkled face. But there was color now where Adam had not seen it before. There were two tiny blue dots just above her nose and the mouth that spoke to him.

“Is he too scared to come into an old woman’s house and eat a hot meal? Is he a fraidy cat or something?”

            Adam smiled. She smiled too.

“No ma’am. Never seen him scared a day in my life.”

            Her head tilted back and she observed him.

“We went different ways.”

            It was a long while before she spoke.

“So he’s your hero.”

“Well...

“What about your father?”

            He shot her a glance, this time catching those blue dots.

“He was. Yes ma’am.”
            She blinked. It seemed. If not a blink, then some miniscule flicker of emotion.

“When did you give him back?”

“What?”

            She sighed, as if exhausted prematurely at the upcoming explanation. She shuffled to him.

“Take a seat.”

            He did. He expected her to do the same. Instead, she put her hands on top of his. She was inside his circle of comfortableness, but it was not strange. She smelled like fresh dough and plum thickets.

“Son. We don’t own our family. It might feel that way. But you can’t own a soul. Only God can claim that. And when the breath goes out of the body you got to give the soul back. How else you think it could work?”

            Back to the kitchen she went. Adam heard a plate brought down from a cabinet. Then the refrigerator door opened. Then a glass. A few seconds of silence. Then the ping of silverware and the old woman again, crouching with her offering, her shoulder caps shifting left and right.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

“Not at all.”

            She sat the plate down in front of him. It was a grilled cheese, but not just that. It looked like it had been on the cover of grilled cheese magazine, perhaps voted this year’s sexiest grilled cheese alive. Adam was ravenous. And beside it a tall glass of ice-cold milk. He put his palm to it. The coolness stabbed inside his wrist. It reminded him of growing up.

“What was he like?”

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”
            Adam leaned back and wiped his mouth.

“Well…” he started. “He was…”

            He trailed off, just sat there chewing, looking at the bottom of his plate.

“Did you like him?”

            Adam’s cheeks wrestled a pain which seemed to come from his bones.

“Son, what I mean is that there are two kinds of love between a parent and a child. There’s the kind where the child loves the parent because he or she doesn’t have any other choice. Then, there’s the second kind. The kind where the kid and the parent like each other whether they were family or not. As if the blood’s only there to thicken the stakes.”

“I liked him.”

“Yeah I can tell. And he liked you too, son. You can bet on it.”

            Adam lowered his head to the middle of that white plate now crumb riddled and cheap looking. He chewed but the food became tiresome and hollow. A single tear broke the wall, landed beside a trimming of cheese. He wiped his eyes.

“Yep. That’s the way Mickey and I were too.”

            She stood and shuffled over to a silver picture frame on the top of a short bookshelf. Her head was out over her pink slippers, and she began each step with the cocking of the opposite hip, like a pair of revolvers pulling the hammers back before firing. She looked both like she was about to fall and as sturdy as an oak floor lamp, something built long ago and decorative but too strong to fall in this life. She held the frame out in front of her as she returned to the table. Her eyes widened now, as though the brightness of whatever was in that frame were pushing her lids up invisibly.

“Oh Mickey.”

            Now she sat down. It was awkward, the way she leaned even lower to get a handle on the chair, the way she plopped downward, the noise she made with her muffled throat. She showed him the picture. The boy was handsome, freckled, wearing a polo shirt that seemed not his usual garb. The backdrop was a wall of lasers in colors common for school picture day.

“How old was he?”
            Adam had finished his sandwich.

“When he died?”

            Adam put one hand on the table and leaned back a little. He did not look down. He had not realized the boy was gone until now.

“Yeah.”

‘How old are you?”

“I’m fifteen.”

“He was your age.”

            Suddenly the grilled cheese had an aftertaste. The room and the pictures began to move as if choreographed by the devil himself. There was a strong fear of vomit, but then it passed. The old woman lifted her arms to brace herself against the table for standing, then she began to rise. Then everything fell to one side and the world went out.

“It loomed over him, fell upon every fleck of hope and fear, this anvil of mortality.”

“Morning brother.”

There was sunlight pouring in from a window to his right. The window had a curtain with blue and white flowers. It was parted in the middle. Outside were the woods he’d walked the night before. They did not look like any trees he had ever seen, but Adam knew they were part of the same woodlot.

“What?”

“Easy buddy.”

            This was a different voice. The man that bore it was standing behind him. Adam rose quickly. He was on the couch in the old woman’s living room.

“Quite a night you put us through.”

            The man was a police officer. He had a mustache that was stained brown, the kind born one color and made another by use. He had thin hair that ran down the side of his face in greasy spikes. He was short. Bullet proof vest and a big black pistol in a black leather case. Adam studied it, could not look away.

“You wanna tell us what happened?”

“How bout you let him get his bearings first?”

            That was his brother, and the mellow tone of his deep voice washed over Adam like a dishrag soaked with cool well water.

“Walter?”

“Yeah partner? You need some water?”

“What happened?”

“You passed out.”

            Mary entered holding two cups of coffee, striding through the doorway in perpendicular direction. Walter stood up from the chair in the corner by the bookshelf. The old woman gave him a cup without looking, then shuffled painfully toward the officer. Everyone remained silent. The sound of her slippers sliding against the wood floor was heard among random bird chirps outside the clear window.

“You didn’t have to do that Mary.”

            The policeman appeared to contract. His face changed and the mustache was not so grotesque and there was a smile underneath it and the old woman reached up with her hand after the cup was taken from it and pinched his soft, round cheek. He giggled, and both cheeks reddened. When he saw the brothers watching him, he straightened his back quickly, but there was still red and joy written all across his mug.

“I’d hate to think it was my grilled cheese. Mickey never complained. Ate one every night.”

“No ma’am,” Adam said. “It wasn’t the grilled cheese.”

“What happened?” Walter asked.

            Adam had his elbows on his knees now sitting up.

“I guess I got kinda sick.”

“Sick?” The officer asked.

“Yeah.... One minute I was awake. In the dining room. Then...then I don’t know. I don’t remember anything else.”

            The officer looked at the old woman. Walter moved his camouflage baseball cap between his fingers. His head was shaved clean, and his face was stubbled with dark brown hair that culminated in a slightly longer goatee. He had a cross on a silver chain that swung forward outside his shirt which was camouflage to match the hat.

“You take it easy on him Jeff. Out there walking in the heat all day. Just got a little too hot is all. All on an empty stomach. What he needs is some more rest. Maybe some breakfast. Let me make you some eggs, son.”

“No, ma’am. That’s OK. I’m fine. Really. Just...just a little tired. I’m sorry. I’m sorry officer. I was looking for my deer and then I came here at dark and then...then I don’t know. I guess I just fell asleep. I’m sorry.”

“We were looking for you all night, little brother. I thought you got lost or tripped and broke your damn leg. I called the sheriff here and he helped me look for awhile in the woods where we separated on the trail. Then Mary called the station and they told us where you were. We came right over but you wouldn’t wake up, little brother. You just slept right here on this couch like you wouldn’t wake if the world was on fire.”

“I was just tired I guess.”

            After several moments of them watching him, Jeff nodded to Walter, and they started outside. Slowly, Adam moved the blanket off of his legs.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Mary.

“Don’t be, son. Ain’t no shame in needing rest. And if you don’t make yourself do it, your body will.”

            He rose.

“And I suspect you haven’t been sleeping much since the funeral, have you son?”

“No ma’am.”

            Walter and Jeff chuckled about something just outside of the house. Walter was doing that thing where he was a different person than Adam knew him to be. He could charm any stranger he wanted to. Just like Dad. He’d change his voice a little and his shoulders would bounce, and he was quick to laugh. He’d go from one story to the next, none of them relevant to the other but all of them connected. Jeff was moving a toothpick around his teeth, laughing around his hand.

“Your brother’s the life of the party, isn’t he son?”

“Yes ma’am he is.”

            Adam was smiling. Perhaps for the first time, he saw his father in his brother.

“And what are you?”

            Adam turned to her. Now her blue eyes were open through those gray blankets. They were not small as they had been before, but wild and full of light. She appeared taller than he knew her to be. She was still hunched, but she was higher somehow.

“I don’t know,” Adam said.

            Mary took her hand off the door jam where it had been. Now, indeed she did rise. Her neck straightened and her spine did not fully erect itself but her shoulders did and she was proud looking.

“I’ll tell you what you are.”

“What?”

“You are your father’s son.”

            Adam began to cry. It was not a run of tears, as it had been the night he passed, but it was more than a few. He wiped them unapologetically. He was not embarrassed for Mary to see him.

“How did Mickey die?” he asked her.

            The old woman smiled but then the smile faded into something sheering and quick. She retracted her proud stance, gave in to something more severe.

“We were coming back from a football game. He’d just won his first game as starting quarterback. He was skinny but he was strong for his size. Like Bud. It’s not that unusual for a sophomore to start at quarterback in a small town but it’s unusual enough to mean the kid’s got potential. And he did.”

            She coughed suddenly and violently, as a smoker might, as his father did during chemotherapy. Adam felt bad for her, the way her small, clinched fist trembled in front of her mouth, the way her veins pulsated and her eyes pinched themselves shut. When she began to speak again it was with a strained voice.

“We were almost home. On 281. Just up the road there.”

            She pointed behind Adam. He followed the direction. Jeff and Walter were still chuckling, seemed to be unaware of anything else in the world.

“He was probably driving too fast. But we were talking. He was telling me about the game. He was so excited. So happy. So proud of himself.”

            Then her mind drifted. Adam couldn’t place it at first, but then he knew the look. The eyes were away from themselves - cloudy and cold. The mind was not in this realm, the body and muscles dead. It was the way his mother had looked, and he wished she was there, felt guilty that she wasn’t. Mary cleared her throat and began to speak at the same time, the pitch concerted and hiccupped like a small engine trying to start.

“Yes, son, he was proud of himself. And excited. So excited, he didn’t see the deer. I saw it before he did. And I think he saw my face turn. But by the time he turned, it was too late. We hit him dead on.”

Adam felt like a fallen tree. He could not move a single cell. More than that, each cell seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. His entire being was heavy, as if for the first time in his life he could feel the true weight of eternal gravity.

“I know son. I know. There are things in life that happen to us. Sometimes they seem too much...too much to bear. Too much to continue on. I should have been driving that night. But I wasn’t. And now I’m here, this back a constant reminder of what I had once. What I lost. What it means to be a human being. Bud couldn’t take it. Took to the bottle. We tried to stay together but eventually he did what he had to do. Two years ago, I heard he passed away. Natural causes, they said, whatever the hell that means. Means your damn heart stops pumping is what it means. What else could it be? And Melissa, she left soon as she could. She’s strong. She’s got a family in Indiana. Married to her work and a husband that sells insurance or something. I don’t know. They don’t come to visit. I think seeing me…seeing this place, this home…I think it’s too much for her. I think everyone has something in life that’s too much for them. And I think it’s OK to admit it and do the best you can anyway.”

            Adam swallowed. It was like trying to stomach a baseball.

“I’m sorry,” he finally mustered.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling, her eyes now fluttering with life again.

            Walter called from outside the door.

“Come on littler brother. We got work to do.”

            The old woman looked at him.

“How did your father die,” she asked.

“Lung cancer,” Adam said.

“I’m so sorry.”

            The sheriff and Walter were quiet. Mary stood away from the door frame, different than when Adam first saw her.

“Thank you.”

“Take care of yourself, son.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“He was in that space of time only a hunter knows, the pierced bubble of air filling and abandoning the lungs of predator and prey.”

They stood at the edge of the trees. They had to leave by two. They had promised their mother they would be back in time for evening service. They did not want to let her down. They had only allowed themselves to come hunting because of her insistence. She said they needed to get out and do something they loved, something they used to do with him. Her sisters were staying with her, and the house was full, but both felt bad and were eager to return. But they knew they owed the deer a fair search. Their father had taught them that the worst thing they could do was wound an animal. He taught them that if this happened, they were to quit hunting for that year and only practice. They were not allowed to purchase another game license until their aim was proven on paper targets. But now, he was no longer around to check their aim. They would have to do it alone and for each other.

“You gonna get lost again? Go sleep at the old woman’s place?”

            Adam huffed and shook his head.

“You scared me, you know?”

“I know.”

“Thought you got kidnapped by a damn methhead or something.”

“I was just tired.”

            They looked ahead into the woods. So many times they had entered the trees, so many times they had harvested berries or wood for treehouses or only dirt in the nails of boys who believed in outside work for inside gain. But now, it was not only a forest. It was something else stretching out in front of them.

“I’ll come with you.”

“No,” Adam said quickly.

“Little brother...”

“No,” he said again. “You go your way again. I’ll go mine. Let’s meet on the corner of the highway. By the green barn.”

            Walter looked at his watch.

“We got time,” Adam said. “You never saw any more sign?”

“No. But I didn’t look long before I had to come rescue you from Mother Hubbard.”

Walter hit Adam’s arm with the back of his hand.

“I told you. Was just tired is all.”

“I know.”

            Adam checked the arrows in his quiver, then he checked the release strapped to his wrist.

“See you at noon,” he said.

            Inside the trees the dank atmosphere was a comfort. Whereas in the dawn the night before he had been edgy and almost afraid, now he was calm and surefooted. The trees were not shadows of monsters anymore, and the hope of finding an animal that would give him pounds of meat spurred him further. The buck was also a trophy. It had a rack bigger than any he’d ever seen, and he admitted to himself as he walked a narrow game trail that his excitement for the deer was born partly from the bragging rights he would achieve over his brother. He would have a bigger buck than Walter ever had, their father even, and in a family of men and the accolades they touted over one another this was reason alone to keep looking; a way to keep hunting long after the season.

            Adam began to head toward the end of the lot, his shoulders falling and his back crouching like Mary’s, the arrow on the rest directing his way. That’s when he saw him. At first, it was only movement a hundred yards away. Then it was a sleek brown back and the shine of antlers weaving through the canopy of cedar and elm. He tried to focus on the rack, the color and shape and number of points, to make sure it was the same buck. They were huge, the way they grew upward and curved wider than the ears, the almost bone white color. Would this be his first harvest? Was this him? Was this Mary’s deer?

            Adam dropped into a deep cut when the deer lowered his head to feed. He crept deftly along the bottom, the small water spilling over the fronts of his boots as he pressed his toes deep into the mud, then slowly lifting them back again to move forward as quiet as he could. When he peeked after sneaking down the creek bed for what seemed like a half hour, the massive buck was only forty yards away. Feeding. There were old acorns scattered on the forest floor. The buck appeared to be checking each one.

            Adam, to his own surprise, was able to step out of the creek bed behind a large oak. He was in that space of time only a hunter knows, the pierced bubble of air filling and abandoning the lungs of predator and prey. It loomed over him, fell upon every fleck of hope and fear, this anvil of mortality. So many times the deer had run off. So many times the stalk was blown by the wind at the back of his neck or the betrayal of some twig underfoot. But not now. Now he was a killer about to take a life. He bent his left elbow and prepared to draw his weapon.

            As he did the massive buck turned broadside and looked away, showing his entire body, neck, and rack. The deer did not see him, which was unbelievable considering the proximity of the two. Adam came to full draw. Is this the same buck? Do I shoot him if I know it’s not the same buck? No, his father answered him in his head. Never shoot another deer unless you know the one you tried at is unharmed. You can’t be out there slinging arrows and bullets like a jackass. You have to be efficient. You owe the animal that.

            He noticed something. There was a red patch on the top of the hind quarter, a small and insignificant wound. This was him. Adam had pulled the shot from the tree stand yesterday morning, had jerked his finger. This was Mary’s buck, and Adam’s efforts to kill it had barely phased him. These animals were better than men. Tougher. Faster. Never lost.

            His heart began to pound with unreal thunder. The buck, now on high alert via the sense of something in his presence, held his head high and taught. His eyes focused on the source of all that vibration, then locked in on Adam and the bow he was holding at full draw. It was palpable in his mouth, the death cologne of the hunt. Adam put the top pin on the animal’s vitals, just behind the shoulder and six inches up from the belly line. At this proximity, the arrow would pass straight through both lungs. The buck was as good as dead, and both seemed to know it.

            Adam imagined life ending, and that he would be the one to end it. He thought of Mary and and his father, thought of how much death they had seen in their lives, how they had become it. He thought of his mother now without a husband, and his brother now without a father. He did not think of himself, because he had already done so much of that. Instead, he thought of God and the animals he made and the men that chased them both. Everything was connected by the inescapable truth. In order for there to be life, there had to be death. What other contract could there be? What other negotiation could bring such meaning?

“We don’t own our family. It might feel that way. But you can’t own a soul. Only God can claim that.”

            When Walter picked him up, he seemed to already know there was no carcass to recover. Hunters had a way of seeing this in the eyes of the passengers they carried. The brothers traded a look through the windshield that communicated an empty freezer, and then Adam was riding shotgun and they were going home.

“No sign of him?” Walter finally asked after they hit the interstate.

“No,” Adam said as the loud pipes of Walter’s lifted pickup barked and coughed and groaned.

“Did you talk to the old woman?” Walter asked.

“No.”

            They leveled out and the engine hummed.

“Walter?” Adam said as the truck moved to pass a white minivan. “Can we come back next weekend?”

“Hell yeah, little brother. That’s the spirit. We’ll get that buck yet.”

            The truck moved back into the right lane.

“Maybe we can stop in and say hi to Mary.”

            Walter looked at his little brother, grinned, then back to the road. In the cadence of rubber tires and speed, the radio began to play audibly. Merle Haggard sang about home and the music forever tied to it. Adam thought about his mother and how lucky he was that she was the second kind of parent. The kind he liked. Like his father. He was glad to be going back

“You think he’s still alive? Walter asked in earnest, a detection of sincerity Adam understood to mean his brother wanted his opinion, that he respected it.

“He’s alive,” Adam said, and the windshield splayed outward to a sloping road, the sky washed blue with cattle of gray clouds riding high above the canopy.

“Somewhere out there.”