Poachers (12 page)

“Scram,” I say, but this one’s friendly, and as I pass, it strains its head toward me. “Nice pussy cat,” I say, scratching it behind the ears. Then I take it in both hands and toss it into the bushes.

I drive to the woods
, down dirt roads, leaving a trail of green bottles. Kudzu, wisteria, honeysuckle. Miles since the last house. I cross a little bridge with ivy and pull off the road into a clearing. Get out feeding shells into the belly of the twelve-gauge. The sky is high and the air is clean and clear and you can hear all these crows. I go to the trunk and open it a crack. Paws and whiskers appear and I swat at them with the gun barrel. They meow and hiss, and finally a whole cat wriggles out. It kicks off the bumper and I slam the trunk, shuck the shotgun’s action and lead the cat perfectly as it goes around in circles.

I don’t feel the gun’s kick, but the cat jackknifes and lands and now it’s only half a cat. It flops a couple of times. The woods are bone quiet, everything frozen, the leaves not rattling, the acorns perfectly still on their stobs. I go stand near the cat, which is dead now, and watch the black stuff pooling around its belly. It’s a dark gray one with white feet, the kind you’d name Mittens. Some of its fur is moist with blood and I shuck the shotgun; the smoking red shell case lands beside my boot. I think this cat ought to have a name, so Mittens it is. Was.

Back at the trunk, I open the last beer and raise it in a toast, then let another cat out. It hauls ass for the trees.

“Nina!” I yell. The first shot whirls her around but doesn’t stop her, and even before the gunshot’s faded I’ve jacked in an

other shell and I’m batting my way through limbs and spiderwebs in the woods, following her bright red trail. I find her scrabbling up a tree with her sides pumping. When she sees me she howls with her ears flat on her head. She tries to climb higher, but with another shot I send her spread-eagled through the air and she hits the leaves like a tiny bearskin rug.

Then I remember something. It was when we were teenagers, after Ned and I had dropped Nina off from a drive-in movie one night. We both liked her and we’d been drinking and smoking grass. As Ned drove home, we saw beside the road this dead poodle that had belonged to Nina’s family for like eleven years—it’d been missing for a day or two. The dog was lying on its side, its legs straight, and—Ned’s idea of a joke—we took it back to Nina parents’ mansion and stood it there dead on the porch, like a statue. In the car, Ned laughed so hard he started gagging. Then he passed out. When I snuck back to get the dog and bury it, Nina’s father caught me in the porch light, my hands around the poodle.

I name the next cat Debra, because it’s gray like one Deb used to have, but even as I pull the trigger I feel guilty. I find her wallowing in her pool of blood and shit, gnawing at her shoulder. I decide instead to hang a Mexican name on her. “Maria,” I say, taking the pistol from my pocket. But just when I’m about to put Maria out of her misery, I’m struck with a memory of Debra, before we got married, when there was a shitload of love. I don’t know why I think of it, but there we are, on the sofa, watching
Mad Max
. I’m getting fresh and Debra’s saying okay, okay, we can fool around, but we can’t
do it
because she’s smack in the middle of her period. So we’re kissing and groping until it gets real steamy and she’s climbing all over me. Finally she rolls off and stands up, kind of swaying, her nipples hard through her

shirt, and I follow her into the bedroom. She throws the covers off and gets a towel and spreads it over the bed. There’s this loud zip and she steps out of her skirt.
I hope you like it rare
, she says.

Closing one eye, I squeeze the trigger on Maria and that’s that.

At the trunk this time two escape and my beer bottle rolls off the car. Juan the Manx heads for the woods, his body opening and closing like a little hand, and I fire and bowl him over, then shucking the pump whip around and wing—I think—the one jumping into the bushes.

Left now are the kittens, two identical blacks and one solid white. I open the trunk wide: they’re cowering behind the spare. All this noise has their fur ruffled, their tails puffy, eyes red, ears flat, teeth bared. “Kitty kitty kitty,” I say, and get one of the blacks by the scruff and lift it out and hold it up against the sky. Do it with the pistol right there, specks of blood on my hand and arm.

That was Leigh, one of Ned’s girls, and this is Cindy, and there she goes, flung, landing in that tree. But here’s Duane Juarez, reloading.

The white kitten is moving. It jumps out, disappears under the car, and here’s Duane Juarez dropping to his knees, watching the kitten scramble up into the engine. Duane Juarez on his belly, sliding under the car, and trying to nab the bastard getting bit hard on the knuckle.

Duane Juarez by the Dumpster in the alley behind the Key West, kicking a stranger in the chest. Picking the guy up and breaking his nose with a head butt, Ned behind them, rooting in the shadows. Duane Juarez picking a tooth out of his knuckle and tossing it to Ned for a souvenir.

The woods are as quiet as a back alley. There’s only one way to deal with this kind of cat situation. You have to get in the Porsche and rev its engine to a scream. You have to leave the shotgun barrel holding down the accelerator. You have to climb onto the car with the pistol. The hood might buckle with your weight, but it’s your job to stand there, ready.

This one’s Ned.

a tiny history

Paul and Prissy
are coming to play spades. We’re having them over because they had us over a few weeks ago. Jan and I had a swell time there. It’s been a rocky year for Paul, but Prissy has taken him back and dropped the charges—he tried to set fire to her bar—on the conditions that he (A) stop drinking and (B) enroll at the community college. Jan thought higher education was something I ought to try, too. She said it might give our own shaky marriage a solid leg to stand on. So now Paul and I are in this Saturday morning public speaking class together.

“
Pubic
speaking,” Paul calls it.

Our wives arranged the game of spades at Paul and Prissy’s. Jan and I arrived at their house on Dauphin Island at six-thirty. We ate at eight, then brought out the cards at about nine. I’d never played, but spades is a pretty straightforward game and I caught on fairly quickly, though Paul and I—versus the girls—lost. But the thing was, we all had such a blast that we didn’t finish till seven the next morning, after eight pots of coffee and, for Paul and Jan, several packs of cigarettes. Paul was on the wagon, so none of us drank. The other thing was, I had to be at work at the chemical plant that evening at four.

So one night last week I ran into Paul at a liquor store. He was drinking again. He was buying some rum and I was buying

some beer and we got to talking about what a swell time we’d had playing spades that night, so I invited him and Prissy over to our house the next Saturday night. He said it sounded good, what should they bring?

Jan loved the idea, too. She called Prissy and told them to arrive at seven. “Don’t bring anything except yourselves,” she said. “Let us handle everything.”

Jan was actually excited. We’d been married less than a year and hadn’t really had anybody over. Not even our parents. (It’s been kind of iffy around here, with the baby and all.) Jan vacuumed the entire house—we’re renting—and washed the walls and rearranged the living room furniture. We’re broke, so she went to her mother’s and borrowed another fifty bucks and bought the ingredients for chicken piccata. She also got four bottles of white wine—Paul was off the wagon, after all—and a deck of cards.

Paul and I had Pubic Speaking the morning of the Saturday they were supposed to come over. We have to make a speech every week, and that day we were doing demonstration speeches. I was going to show how to put on a gas mask, which we use for emergency getaways at the plant, and I needed a volunteer to wear the mask while I delivered the speech. Paul offered to help with mine if I’d help with his. I asked what he was demonstrating, and he said he planned to show how to perform—get this—an emergency tracheotomy.

When the class started, Paul went first. He stood and made his way to the front of the room. He cleared his throat and said, “Imagine you’re in a restaurant and that man”—he pointed to me—“starts choking.” I blushed. Paul motioned for me to come stand in front of him.

“The first thing you’d do if he’s choking,” Paul said, “is to perform the Heimlich maneuver. You put your arms around his stomach like so, and put your thumbs here, in the soft spot.”

His arms were around me, his thumbs in my solar plexus.

“To dislodge whatever’s choking him,” he said, “you apply a quick punch of pressure, like so.” He jammed his thumbs into my soft spot and pushed all the air out of me. I felt dizzy, like I’d been hit.

“But what if there’s an obstruction?” Paul asked. “Something preventing that bit of food from being dislodged?” He let me go. “Then what would you do?”

Nobody said anything.

“In that case,” Paul said, “you’d need to perform an emergency tracheotomy. To do this, you want the victim lying on his back.”

“Or her,” someone in the audience said—it’s a very politically correct class.

“Right,” Paul said, grinning. “Or
her
back.” He has this way of making things sound dirty.

As rehearsed, Paul and I moved the overhead projector and slid the table to the center of the room. I climbed onto the table, my legs hanging over the edge.

“What you do,” Paul said, “is hold the victim here”—he placed his hand under my chin—“and make sure he—or
she
—is unconscious.”

I closed my eyes.

“Now,” Paul said, “the first thing you do is find the Adam’s apple. Then you follow the victim’s throat down until you locate a soft spot. That’s where you’ll make your incision.”

The audience was quiet. No sound in the room except Paul’s watch, ticking at my throat.

“Of course a sterilized scalpel’s best,” Paul said, “only almost nobody carries sterilized scalpels in their shirt pockets.” Polite laughter. “But,” Paul went on, “lots of people do carry pocketknives.”

I cracked an eye. The knife Paul flicked open was seven inches long, its blade stained and worn, as if it’d been used to skin animals and cut wire and slash Prissy’s tires, which was another thing Paul had done the night he tried to set her bar afire.

“You put the tip of the blade on the soft spot, like so,” Paul said.

Its cold steel point touched my throat.

“After the knife’s in place,” Paul said, “you hit it flat, with the palm of your hand, like so.” His hand rose, had just started back down when I shut my eyes.

Nothing happened. I peeked and Paul was explaining how you might need to stick a pen or drinking straw in the bloody hole like so, so I could breathe through it. When he finished, the audience clapped, and I got up and went to my seat, sweaty and nervous. Later, my speech was okay. I got a 78, ten points less than Paul.

I bought gas on the Texaco card on the way home. I added a quart of oil, put a six-pack on the card, too. At home, Jan was asleep. I took off my shoes and crawled into bed beside her and slid my hand inside her panties.

“Don’t,” she said without turning over.

“Fine.” I went into the living room and watched TV and drank the six-pack, fell asleep on the sofa.

Jan had set the alarm clock for five
P.M.
I sat up. She was already in the kitchen, banging things around. She sent me to the Jiffy Mart for a bag of ice. When I came back, she was taking a bath. I walked in and sat on the toilet and talked to her. She lay in the water, listening to me tell about having the knife at my

throat. Then she sat up, a drop of water hanging from her left

nipple.

“Wanna fuck?” I asked.

“They’ll be here any minute,” she said.

Half an hour later I’m at the table working on next week’s speech (persuasive) when their little VW rattles up outside. I hear them get out, arguing, and walk to the door. I let them in.

Paul’s a tall man, taller than me. Bald, bearded. Red eyes. Once, at a party at Prissy’s bar, he made a pass at Jan. It was before we were married, before he and Prissy split for the first time. Prissy and I were mixing shots at the bar, and Jan and Paul were dancing, and he grabbed the cheeks of her ass and stuck his tongue in her ear, saying sex and marriage were totally different concoctions.

Prissy’s half-Vietnamese. She’s short and dark, has thick lips. Sexy. If you look closely enough at her fine black hair, you can see through it to the brown skin of her head. We have a tiny history, the two of us, that nobody knows about. A kiss, a long time ago. It tasted like tequila.

Jan comes in from the kitchen and we all say our hellos, sit and chat for a while. Then Jan says she’ll finish dinner. Prissy offers to help and they go, leaving Paul and me alone on the sofa. I tell him he scared the shit out of me with that knife and he laughs, lighting a cigarette. I ask him if he wants a before-dinner cocktail and he says he thought I’d never ask. I go into the kitchen and get a bottle of wine and, using the corkscrew, work the cork out. I pour us two glasses and head back to the living room. The bottle comes with me. Paul is standing, examining Jan’s bronze sculpture of the pregnant woman on her perch over the television. She—the statue—is about a foot tall, and I love her perfectly rounded, sensuous belly.