Theft (18 page)

“It's hard work pulling the deer back to camp,” Zeb says.

“We could tie its legs to a thick branch and carry it upside down,” Zeb's father suggests.

“Dangerous,” Zeb says. “When hunters see a deer moving, some of them don't take time to see if its right-side up or upside down.”

“No kidding?” the father says.

Zeb laughs a little under his breath. His father seems so slow-minded and innocent sometimes. That's what he thinks to himself. He wonders if it comes with age, this slowness. He plans against it right then and there. He vows to never let himself become like his dad. He thinks about his mom now, wonders if his father were smarter and stronger, if she could be healed. It pisses him off, the thought of it, and he forces his mind back to the deer.

He considers making a travois to carry the carcass, but that would mean one man doing all the work. Instead, he cuts two thick branches from a tree, ties them to the buck's antlers, like handles. He hands one tied branch to his father, and the two men start walking together. Their breathing turns heavy and fast within minutes, and their layered clothes smother them. They keep on, working together. “Still don't like hunting?” he says to his father.

His father almost doesn't answer. He looks at Zeb as if he's silly for asking. Then he says, “It's your sport, Zeb. Not mine.”

Zeb admires his father now. He hopes he would be like this if he ever has a son.

They've been pulling this deer together for a good fifteen minutes when they hear gunshots nearby. “Hey,” Zeb calls out. “Got hunters here, not deer!” They both let go of the deer and crouch close to the ground.

The father follows Zeb's lead now. Zeb stays low, but tracks the sound and looks that direction. It's not just one shot, and then silence. It's one shot after the other, like target practice.

“Hunters target practice during hunting season?” the father asks.

“No,” Zeb says, firmly, pissed off. He calls out again, “Hey! No deer here. Stop shooting!” Both men are still breathing heavily, the adrenalin rush of pulling the deer mixed with the situation they have now.

“Let's get out of here,” the father says. Zeb can see that his father wants to leave for good. He wants to stop hunting altogether and regrets coming with Zeb. It pisses Zeb off, how moments can be stolen like that. He can see his father thinking of Willa and his mom back home. His father says, “Who knows what this guy's up to? Let's just move on out, Zeb.”

“Exactly,” Zeb says. “Who knows what this jerk is up to? It's not good hunting practice to move on without telling him.” Zeb has it figured out now. It does not come to him like a memory. It's like an entire world drops down around him, and he is back at home suffocating with all the anger he feels there and the way he hates Chet and Johnny and the people around him who are
not part of him, who do not help him or his mother or his family, when he knows they could. He remembers with his entire body why he led his father to this spot so close to Chet's cabin, and he adds things up in his head, the arrogance of Chet, the stupidity, the handgun, and Chet's idiotic target practice that he does in the field behind their house. He can barely hear his father's warnings now. He forgets about the deer and starts walking toward the shots. His father walks with him until they see a cabin in a clearing and a man standing alone, in front of the cabin.

“Chet,” Zeb says.

“Look! Our neighbor!” his dad says, cheerfully. There's a happiness in his voice that Zeb cannot stand. He thinks his father is like Howdy-Doody, a man who thinks only the best of people, even when they have never deserved it. The father waves like a real pal. “Chet!” he calls out. But Chet can't hear him over the shots. That's when Zeb loads his rifle and fires a shot into the air.

Chet stops cold now. He stands in the clearing, turning in a circle, looking for the source of the gunfire. Zeb walks toward Chet, his rifle hanging at his side. “You fucking asshole, it's the middle of fucking
deer
season and you're fucking
target
practicing?”

“There's no need for that kind of language,” says Zeb's dad, and Zeb is too angry to even laugh at that Howdy-Doody response. He looks behind him, sees his father waving at Chet, saying hello like a friendly neighbor.

Dolly comes running out of the house now. She's got her frilly apron on, and her hands are white with flour, and she's cooking Chet a fine meal, no doubt. She waves toward Zeb, smiles like she's greeting the president himself into her home. Chet hears her voice, turns around, and tells her to get back into the house. “I'm target practicing,” he says. “You shouldn't be out here. It's dangerous.”

“Oh,
now
it's dangerous,” Zeb says. “Two seconds ago me and my dad were ducks in your fucking shooting gallery. But
now
it's dangerous. Good thing you couldn't hit a goddamn elephant two feet in front of you.”

“Your boy's got a mouth on him,” Chet says, to Zeb's dad.

“Better watch it, Chet. That's my son you're talking about.” Zeb hears his father's voice like a cyclone rushing through his head.

“Better keep a leash on him,” Chet says.

“Now, Chet,” Dolly says, admonishing him while at the same time smiling at Zeb and his dad.

She doesn't have time to know what hits her when Chet turns on her, grabs her arms so tight that his fingers dig through her sweater and into her flesh. He pulls her close to his face and says through clenched teeth, “I said get back in the house.”

“Get your fucking hands off her,” Zeb says.

Zeb can see his father stepping aside now, half-stunned, still trying for the friendly smile, anger and confusion spilling out of him, and that's when Chet turns back to the two men. He lets go of Dolly and points the pearl-handled handgun at Zeb. Right then, Zeb sees his own father step toward Chet, asking Chet to stop, and Chet has the gun.

And then Dolly walks up to Chet and says, “Who are you kidding? Put that thing down. You look silly. That's the Robbinses, honey. That's our next door neighbors, Zeb and Hal Robbins,” and she walks right between Chet and Zeb, no fear of the gun. She takes Zeb and Hal by the hand, saying, “Come on in. I've got coffee and cookies inside,” and that's when Chet does his favorite trick. He grabs her by the hair, almost lifts her off her feet. When he lets go, he slams her to the ground, her bones crack, you can hear them, and Chet doesn't see that Zeb's up on him now too, doesn't see that Zeb is about to take that gun back from him, and his father is still back there trying to be a good neighbor, but Dolly is on all fours, blood streaming from her nose and hands. Zeb catches sight of the blood now, and he elbows Chet in the face, grabs the gun, and the stupid sonofabitch wrestles with Zeb. He knows Zeb already beat him, he
knows
it, but he keeps coming at Zeb and calling Dolly a bitch and saying he's going to teach Zeb a lesson, and that's when Zeb stops. He takes the handgun and presses it to Chet's head. He pulls the trigger.

I
N THE AFTERMATH THERE'S just silence. Zeb can't hear anything now except his own breathing. He wants to kneel down, to beg forgiveness from Dolly, but Dolly seems a part of it all. Her eyes go wide and she looks scared, and it's like she has absorbed some of Zeb's guilt, his bad feeling. She is the first one to move. She bends down and holds Chet's bleeding head. Tears come. She holds her husband's lifeless body. “I'm sorry,” Zeb starts saying, and then he can't stop saying it, and he realizes he's not saying it aloud anyway. It just plays over and over in his head. Then Dolly stands up. Tears slice her plump and reddened cheeks, and she starts walking in circles, then she beelines for Zeb. “Give me the gun.”

Stunned, Zeb does what she says. She takes the gun and rubs it in the snow. She hands it to Zeb, places it right into his gloved hand. “Put it in Chet's right hand,” she says.

“What?”

“Put the gun in Chet's hand.” She commands him. She is suddenly stronger than all of them, and Zeb does what she says. He bends down and wraps his hand around Chet's hand. This is the hand that beat the dog, that beat Dolly, the hand that he has killed, and it makes him want to throw up. He stays stoic and strong, but in his gut he wants to puke. He knows what Dolly is doing. He doesn't know if she's protecting him, or if she's thinking about how many years she's been beaten. It doesn't matter. Zeb wraps his own hand around Chet's and let's go of the gun.

“He's been shooting that gun all day,” Dolly says. “No one will know, Zeb. Know one will know. Now leave,” Dolly says. “Get out. Both of you.”

Zeb and his father stand motionless. Then Zeb grabs his father's shirt sleeve. “We need to help her,” he says. “We need to help Chet.”

Dolly steps up close to him. Her entire body shakes, and she seems bigger than Zeb can remember her being. “Go. Now,” she
says in a whisper that is so strong and threatening that both men move away from her, Zeb leading the way.

A few minutes later, Zeb hears footsteps. He does not have the gun and Dolly does, and he hears footsteps and he turns. She is behind him and his knees weaken. She comes at him strong and she is sobbing now. She hugs him. She squeezes his whole body tight and presses her sobbing face into his chest. Then she backs up, pushes him away, and walks back toward Chet's body.

“Son,” Zeb hears his father say, but it's like a dead hum that goes nowhere in him. “Son!”

Zeb keeps walking. By the time they get back to the deer, the father has quit calling to Zeb. Zeb knows he has to leave his home now. He knows this is the last time he will hunt with his father, that this is the last time he will have Thanksgiving with his family, that if he sees his Mom and sister again, it will be the last time he sees them. The deer is heavier now, even though it is hollowed out. It feels weighty and full of guts and heart and blood and bile, even though it has been relieved of all those things. He looks back at it as they walk. Zeb and his father carry the deer through the woods, back to camp.

U
NDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, no pack was stable. Pack members disappeared sometimes like vapor in the desert, like the dust devils that started up and turned to ghosts in the same in-out breath of the land. Sometimes new pups were introduced and accepted into a pack. Centuries of tradition in their clans had been fractured. They would change, adapt, or they would die off forever.

There was something about the word
forever
that they could taste. They could smell it in the smoke trailing from the fireplaces of new suburban homes built at the edges of the wild, in the star-hazed sky that turned cold sooner than it had in centuries past, the winds that shredded the same lands they once caressed, the earth itself frayed at the edges, pulsing like a wound, and fighting to survive all the same. They could taste it in the bony meat of a dozen scrawny rabbits and the fading memory of the heft of a single elk, in the scraps of the elk kill they had traditionally left for scavengers. It was in their nature to feed what remained around them, what depended on them, the same things they depended on.

In this climate, within these confines, only the alpha female and the alpha male would mate, and there was room, on this
slender ground, for only one of each. Their survival depended on scarcity and proliferation, simultaneously. Every pup must be strong. They killed to eat, and in that act, encouraged life in their habitat to flourish, a paradox like proliferation and scarcity held in one human fist.

With their loping canine gaits they feigned ease, even arrogance, as they crossed the earth, all four paws leaving the ground for an instant with every stride. But within that split-second suspension lay the solid desire to return to earth, the dirt beneath their feet, the ground that gives rise to all life. They followed the deer and elk, kept the animals on the move, which let the land beneath the hooves of their prey replenish as they all moved together with what fed them, a relationship of understanding, a simpatico of survival.

Mornings, Ciela and Hector would rise from the horizon like smoke coming up over a desert ridge, you could see them, their doglike heads familiar, almost human in their gaze, their awareness. They had this working for them and against them: their doglike appearance to humans, half-familiar, wholly wild. They were the essence of evil on the one hand, and on the other, the only animal humans saw as able to take in and raise children, the myth of the wolf-child. Their coats were tufted here and there, clumps of grey fur making them look scrappy, lean at the haunches, bony and almost hunched at the shoulders like silhouettes of the buffalo that once grazed the land with the elk, the shadows of everything that had come before cast over them now. Their evolution had narrowed the set of their eyes even closer together, their line of sight designed for the tunnel vision of predators, not the wide, two-sided eyes of prey, the softened gaze that can see the world as two wholes coming together at the center. Like humans, the wolves had the eyes of hunters, set forward in their heads, with only a slight sense of periphery.