Toward the End of Time (43 page)

Proudly he shows us the absurd panoply of his camouflage gear. He owns, stacked on the driver’s side of the truck, a variety of patterns and weights of costume. The splotches on one canvas jacket imitate the greenery of pine forest, and on another are painted the branches and coloring of deciduous trees in the fall. For today, he chooses a water-repellent Gore-Tex suit with a life-sized tree trunk prominent on the front. But before he puts it on, he shows us his bow—of gray metal, notched and calibrated like a gun, with a set of candy-colored sights embedded above the flat-faced grip, including a small tube that, when tightened, as he demonstrates, lights a tiny red light, for aiming in darkness. The string of the bow, as dark and plangent-looking as a harp string from Hell, has an incongruous tangle of fluff, like a gauzy pipe-cleaner, tied to it. “What’s the purpose of that?” I ask.

“You know what they call that?” he asks in turn, chuckling. “A tarantula. It deadens the sound,” he explains. “If a deer hears the twang, it’ll drop down lower, as much as ten inches.” Dramatically, he illustrates the sudden defensive action with his own body. “It’ll ‘jump the string,’ as hunters say. Throws the shot totally off. The deer’s instinct, you see, when it hears anything, is to crouch down ready to spring.”

From Gloria’s beaming expression she expected him, her miraculous savior, to complete the lesson by levitating into the air. “You’re aiming at a seven-inch circle,” John went on, equably addressing the two of us, though we stood some feet apart, estranged by my illness. His half-gloved fingers and thumbs described the imaginary target. “So you can imagine it throws you off if they hear the string.”

In the interests of clarity, he bent his knees and became a
deer, about to leap. It seemed a kind of courting dance he was doing. An arrow of pain pierced me down below, on the dark side of my abdominal depths, as I murmured, “Interesting.”

He showed us his arrows—again, metallic and machined. “Grooved,” he explained, a finger lovingly tracing the groove. “For rigidity. Slow-motion movies show how a wood arrow, you can imagine with all that sudden pressure of release at the end, bends this way and that in flight, maybe six or seven times before it straightens out.” His hands showed how, flexing in and then out. “By the time it reaches its target it’s expended a lot of energy.”

“But not these arrows,” Gloria prompted, eagerly.

“No, ma’am,” he said, the “ma’am” conveying, in its odd formality, an ironic intimacy. “These fly true.”

The drizzle was making the driveway asphalt shine and gave a film-noirish intensity to our conference. The sun was a golden smear in a coarse gray sky washed by blue stripes of watercolor. As I made feeble motions toward helping Gloria with the leaves, John set about dressing, first in the large green-and-brown mock-arboreal pants, then a jacket, and last an olive wool hat stiffened in front like the cap of a Swiss yodeler. You would think he would have looked absurd, a walking tree, but in truth he looked distinguished, younger than his years—a gentlemanly shaman off to blend with the forest.

The light failed within an hour. Back in bed, I must have been napping when his truck drove off loudly into the darkness. As she set my dinner on a tray before me, Gloria moved with an abstracted grace, smiling to herself.

“Did he get a deer?” I asked.

“Of course not, not so soon. Not immediately. But he said he’ll be back in a few days. He’ll bring a fawn blat.”

“A fawn what?”

“Blat
, apparently. It imitates the sound a fawn makes, so the mother comes.”

“My God, how cruel. This is the cruellest guy I’ve ever met, and you seem to think he’s great.”

“I don’t think that.” Yet the inward-directed smile could not be erased from her tense cheeks, the tucked corners of her lips. “He’s hopeful. He says that the signs are good.”

“Signs.”

“You know, darling.
Signs
. Intimations.
He feels
things.”

“And I don’t, huh?”

“Oh, Ben, you do, but everything you feel has to do with yourself. John feels things about
others.”

Where are the stars? The ancient legends describe the sky as full of stars, congregations of bright points that to unsophisticated eyes took on the forms of gods and godlike creatures—a centaur, a dragon, a bear, a whale. Our ancestors watched their sheep by starlight, and mariners steered their fragile ships upon the teeming sea by stars they knew by name and faithful location. Now the night sky presents a hazy slate, whose faint points of light can be confused with the small coagulations that float in the vitreous humor within the eyeball. Scientific apparatus less subjective than human sight reports that there is still a universe of mass and momentum out there in the dark, behind the closed closet door, so to speak, and science, though reluctant to admit the dimness, or visual negligibility, of the stars relative to their reported presence in their past, has tried to produce theories as to why this should be so. A general muffling of signals has been proposed, due to
a cosmic moment of stasis. The universe after twenty-five billion years of inflation has reached the point where the Big Bang’s initial momentum is exactly equal to the total amount of matter and, like a ball at the apogee of its toss, it is momentarily at rest, a pause reflected in a heavenly brownout before a future surge in the other direction. The bloated, feeble state of our sun—the muddy color of brick and so swollen its arc subtends a third of the horizon— would seem to offer confirmation. We have entered, on the cosmic scale, a dull, declining time.

Another proposal is that, through an unforeseen but perfectly well understood effect of quantum mechanics and its uncertainty principle, “virtual” particles, called into “being” with their anti-particles, for titanically small periods of time, are multiplying in the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that permeate “empty” space, exciting each other into existence in such numbers that space is becoming a semi-transparent gel, occluding protons from afar. The condition may be restricted to our galaxy, or the nearer portion of it. A third school of scientific thought holds simply that industrial pollution and the dust raised by the last war have thickened our planet’s atmosphere. But the war ended ten thousand revolutions of this planet ago, time for most dust to settle, and industrial production is still far from regaining pre-war levels. A fourth theory is that the ancients simply had better eyesight than we, or (a fifth theory) their astronomical descriptions were grossly exaggerated, to benefit the priestly hierarchy and its imbecilic royal puppets.

Coming back in the late-afternoon dark from a visit to the dazzlingly lit spaces of the Beverly Hospital (the doctors say
I am doing fine: my impotence, incontinence, pain, paranoia, depression, and sense of dislocation are all on track in the normal course of healing), we picked up in our headlights, to one side of the driveway, a man disguised as a tree. It was John, walking back to his truck after two hours of remaining motionless in his stand. Gloria push-buttoned the Infiniti window down and asked in a musical, sprightly, loving voice, “How did it go?”

“It was quiet,” he admitted, with no hint of discouragement.

“Our neighbor, Mrs. Lubbetts, told me on the phone she saw four of them, feasting on her junipers.”

“Oh, they’re around,” he chimed back. “It’s just a question of time.”

And what isn’t?
I sullenly thought.

The quiver of four aligned arrows on his back made him look like an anti-aircraft battery draped in camouflage cloth. His wire-frame glasses seemed still to hold the light from our headlights. To make him aware of my presence, as I huddled there beside Gloria, desperate for a diaper change, I cleared my throat and asked, “Do the trinkets ever bother you? These bigger new ones can do a job on human beings, I hear.”

He straightened, so his saintly smile was all I could see through Gloria’s rolled-down window. “I carry a spray; they mix it of sand and glue. One squirt of that and those darn critters don’t come near your feet again.”

Gloria made the car seat bounce, this expertise excited her so. Her radiant hair, cut and tinted while I was suffering my hospital checkup, blazed filament by filament in the ambient glow of our headlights. Or was some cunning part of John’s armory giving off a secondary glow?

“Smell that?” he said suddenly.

“What?” she asked, breathless.

“A buck. Right about here.”

We were parked, our engine idling, at a spot on the driveway beside the sourwood tree, whose fallen leaves gave off, I had noticed, a rich, lusty smell of decay. But I didn’t want to argue. I wanted only to get back to the house and get out of my wet Depends.

“There could be a
buck?”
Gloria asked, with a rising inflection.

“Why not?” John asked in his slow voice. “This is the season. Fella I was shooting with over on Plum Island got a six-pointer whose nose was to the ground, following the scent of a doe. That’s what they do. Buck smells a doe, his brain can’t take in much else.”

“How exciting!” Gloria exclaimed.

“Wasn’t paying attention, that’s how he got shot,” John said, as if his nature lesson needed recapitulation.

“I’m soaked,” I muttered at her side. “I’m miserable.” Reluctantly she moved the car up the driveway, nudging it along as if keeping step with the hunter walking up alone.

Next morning, shuffling down to pick up the
Globe
, I stopped by the sourwood to consider the odor in its vicinity. It was rank but, like the smell your finger brings away from probing the folds of your navel, or that your socks deliver when held beneath your nose at the end of a long day, not exactly unpleasant, because it is
you
.

It happened in my sleep, at dawn, when tender-faced ruminants inquisitively tread—nose extended like a fending hand in the dark—through the frost-whitened leaf mulch of the forest floor scarcely expecting, in the morning’s innocence, an enemy to be awake. But John had gone three weeks without
his kill and had set his alarm to ring in the dark, in the middle of his faithful wife’s dreams. She rolled over, hearing him clump into his hunting boots, and fell back into a vision of venison.

I myself awoke to the sound of John and Gloria jubilating in mutually congratulatory murmurs down on the driveway. He had driven his green truck down the dirt road to collect the gutted carcass, then he had brought it back up to the house to show my wife his prize, the obscene fruit of their joint conspiracy. From my window I could see the deer’s body like a taut russet sack tossed into the square-ribbed flatbed along with the metal lattice of his treestand and some stray planks of lumber. The white of the throat couldn’t at first glance be distinguished from the big white-undersided tail. Heart thudding, I fumbled out of my sweated pajamas— never mind the soaked diaper, whose ammonia stung my eyes—and into yesterday’s corduroy trousers and moth-eaten wool sweater. Without the patience for socks, I stuck my naked feet into loafers and, moving faster than I had for months, grabbed the old parka, with its seams leaking down, hung on the hook nearest the kitchen door downstairs. The cold outside was misty, and felt like shackles on my bare ankles. The day was still too young to have acquired horizons.