Want Not (3 page)

Micah would have taken nearly all of it—she had a much higher tolerance for defects and rot, having been at this much longer. She also
liked
fruit and vegetables—helpful, since she was a strict vegan—whereas Talmadge, with some exceptions, mostly enjoyed the idea of them: the forkfuls of ideology he gulped down nightly, the bittersweet gratification of his adopted asceticism, the heroism of his caloric risk and sacrifice. When he swigged spinach like Popeye, it wasn’t to inflate his own muscles—it was rather to bolster the earth’s. Or to knock out the Bluto-sized idea that the earning and spending of currency was the sole means of survival for her hapless and swarming inhabitants. Or something like that—Micah could explain it all better. He could never confess to her, though, that sometimes, in bed, he’d close his eyes and fantasize about the roast beef po’boys at Lil’ Ray’s in Gulfport with an ardor that was almost sexual in nature; more than once, in fact, he’d sprouted an odd erection.

“Them grapes don’t look so bad,” Crabtree was saying, as Talmadge dug his hand farther into the bag. He’d been hoping for winter squash and/or sweet potatoes—it was Thanksgiving, after all—but he reckoned they’d been selling too swiftly to get chunked. Not to mention they had the enduring shelf lives of Twinkies. Whatever. Micah would make do; she always did. He just hoped Matty wouldn’t be too turned off by her meatless wonders—Matty had all the tact of a hydraulic log-splitter, something Talmadge credited, not altogether incorrectly, to Matty’s New Jersey upbringing. Back when he and Matty had lived together, in college, they’d more or less subsisted on the fried-chicken-on-a-stick at the University Avenue Chevron. The few potato logs on the side—those were strictly for ballast. Momentarily sidetracked by that reverie—him and Matty sprawled on their dorm beds at Deaton Hall, tripping on liquid LSD, then hiking to town through the brittle chromed aftermath of an ice storm to score some chicken-on-a-stick and lukewarm beer—Talmadge wasn’t paying close attention to what he was unloading from the bottom of the bag until he noticed Hunch’s boots go skittering backward—the frogs recoiling, their yellow eyes appearing to widen in shock—and heard Crabtree let loose a thunderous howl.

“A rubber!” Crabtree was shouting. Jumping up and down, he motioned for Scatman to come see. “Check this out, fool. They’s a used rubber on the boy’s lettuce!”

Which there was: a droopy, gelatinous sac of semen-stuffed latex clinging to the crown of a small pale head of butter lettuce.

“Hoo boy, don’t that ruin supper,” Crabtree said, clapping in delight. Because there it was, proof positive: the kitty litter on the carpet. The pot of shit at the end of every rainbow, the five-dollar cash-coupon at the back-cracking finish of a long day’s redeeming. “Some stockboy getting it on in the back! Cleanup on aisle two, baby!” He waved to the fat-faced Mexican employee huddled in the flower stall outside the store entrance. “Yo, man, check this out! Y’all having a good time in there, ain’t y’all?” He pumped his hips suggestively then, doubling over, clapped his hands again. “Getting fresh in the grocery store! Living it up, baby! That’s what I’m talking bout. Love on the clock!”

Scatman, still plugging his Evian bottles into the redemption machine, ignored it all, but the Mexican slid through the plastic flaps of his flower stall to come see. He looked grimly bemused, as if surmising that Talmadge had been seeking some particular treasure in the store’s trash bags and this gooey item was it. Two teenaged girls in matching furry boots paused to see about the fuss; through her scarf, one of them muttered, “Gross,” multi-syllabically, before the pair moved on. Cursing quietly, his face flushing, Talmadge corralled all of the produce back into the bag with the obvious exception of the butter lettuce which his fingers were in no mood to revisit. Violating Micah’s code of etiquette, he left the plastic bag untied—as with virtuous backpackers, the scavenger’s dictum was to leave no trace—as he pushed it, with his knees, back into the base of the pile. He wanted to say something to Crabtree—to tell him to pipe down, to stop laughing; that this was freakish, shit like this hardly ever happened; that the slop dished out at the burger chains along Third Avenue contained enough rat turds and body hair and pesticides and stray hormones and chemicals and various other effluvia to make a wadded-up condom seem as tasty as pizza cheese; that there was more at stake than just this, these two square inches of random spoilage, that we were gnawing the planet alive, all of us, that the entire mass-produce, mass-dispose system was like some terrible, endgame buffalo hunt, a horror-show of unpicked carcasses, and that
this
—this tube of driveled semen, flicked mindlessly onto food enough to feed a family—was Exhibit A, an ideal example of our blindness, of our pampered disregard and twisted self-indulgence, of the great unconsidered
flush
that defined civilization—but Talmadge realized it would be futile. Crabtree was in tears, flagging down passersby, performing an endzone-style two-step in his frog boots.

As Talmadge slid away toward Avenue A, the wind crunching against his face, he could hear Crabtree calling after him. “You see?” he was shouting. “I may be homeless, motherfucker, that’s right, but I ain’t making salad dressing outta some stockboy’s jizz! You hear me, motherfucker? You hear me?”

H
E NEVER HAD TIME TO BRAKE.
By the time Elwin saw the deer, trotting across Route 202, it was three feet from his halogens, its final oblivious moments irradiated by the klieg lights of his Jeep Cherokee.
Ker-thunk:
Elwin’s head and shoulders rocked forward as he hit the deer broadside, an improbably perfect T-bone that sent the deer sliding, on its side, far far down the road, in a straight line for a while, its splayed-out body whirling on the asphalt, and then finally, as the force of the collision dissipated, to the snowbanked highway shoulder like some tragically weak gutterball. Elwin didn’t realize he was stopping until he was, in fact, stopped; some alternate self, his adrenalized Other, had pressed the brake pedal and turned the wheel, beaching the Jeep on the roadside. His chest was pressed tight against the steering wheel, his eyes fixed and unblinking, the sole evidence of his own continued existence the tiny smears of fog his breath was spraypainting onto the windshield. As his senses resumed, he heard a tinny clatter from the front of the Jeep, like that of a fan shredding plastic. He started to shut off the engine, then stopped himself—he worried it might not start again. Bleached by his headlights, the deer lay motionless, its alabaster belly facing him. Please, Elwin thought. Don’t move. Be dead. Be dead.

In his thirty-eight years of driving, the last three of them in the deer-swarmed New Jersey suburbs, Elwin Cross Jr. had never hit a deer. He couldn’t remember even swerving to miss one, though he saw them almost nightly on his commute back from Newark—grazing the road shoulder, or hightailing it across the Morristown golf course in such vast sovereign herds that the word Serengeti popped to mind. With a rifle, and later a compound bow, he’d killed a dozen or so in his lifetime, but that was years ago, back in his graduate school days when he was living in a commune—of a sort, anyway—in Pennsylvania’s Skippack Valley, doing his slipshod Thoreau imitation, brushing his long hair out of his eyes while studying the
Foxfire
books as if they were Talmudic scrolls. About 150 pounds and 300 haircuts ago, he figured.

He got out of the idling Jeep to assess the damage. The front grille was munched and one of the headlights was dangling from its socket but the overall scene was better than he’d feared. He patted the hood as if congratulating a good dog. A plow truck zoomed past, trailing a slushy salted wake, then a sedan, but Route 202 was unusually quiet tonight. Or rather this morning, Elwin realized, not happily, after checking his watch. It was almost one.

He hadn’t intended a late night—just a chummy, intradepartmental dinner with Fritz at a Portuguese restaurant in Newark’s Ironbound, to discuss Fritz’s Terascale Linguistics Initiative. But then Fritz had announced, over appetizers, that he and Annette were splitting, which had transformed dinner into a four-hour therapy session overlubricated with two bottles of midrange Douro red that Elwin was now fiercely regretting. He’d been drinking too much lately—sloppily, stupidly, the way his students drank; though, unlike them, mostly alone—and he’d been looking forward to an evening of sociable moderation. A glass of wine, a plate of potatoes and
bacalao
(of which he’d planned to eat just half, as his current diet book counseled; that plan had failed, too), some harmless shoptalk with Fritz whose notoriously boring company posed no danger to Elwin’s ambition to be asleep by ten-thirty at the latest. But then the sudden declaration: “Annette left me.” Followed by the questions: first from Fritz, “How do I deal with this?” then from the waiter, “Another bottle, gentlemen?”

This marked the second time in a month that he’d been forced to play marriage counselor: On Halloween, his assistant Rochelle had barged into his office, sobbing, because her estranged husband had switched his Facebook relationship status from “Married” to “Single,” digitally squashing her hopes for a reunion. She’d been dressed like a witch that day, pointy hat, etc., and as she daubed her tears she piled tissue after tissue on his desk, diminishingly smudged with green pancake makeup. At one point, hoping to fish a tonic laugh out of her, Elwin said, “You’re melting,” but she’d just stared at him, with her lips puckered, sighing through her semi-green nose. The most helpful takeaway she gleaned from him was something like “things will work out,” which, aside from being banal, was probably untrue. It was, however, the best he could offer: to Rochelle, and then tonight, to Fritz. All Elwin could figure was that he was now considered the departmental expert on marital collapse, owing to his and Maura’s ongoing, downgoing separation. But this was absurd esteem—like saying the deer in the snowbank was now an expert on collisions.

Was he legally drunk? He doubted it. Poor Fritz, that fresh marital orphan, was the one who’d really be feeling the wine’s kickback, just a few hours hence. But Elwin had no clue how much alcohol the current law permitted in one’s bloodstream, so maybe. Until recently, he hadn’t needed to consider his BAC in twenty-five years or so—and that was back when no one really thought to consider it anyway, back when uproarious drunk-driving anecdotes were a staple of the Johnny Carson show: the studio audience howling when Peter O’Toole told of snagging a covered bridge with a panel truck. He thought he was supposed to call the state police about this, to report the downed deer . . . but might the dispatcher instruct him to wait at the scene? Would he need to fill out an accident report? He imagined a flashlight in his eyes, the cop’s leery squint, that dread highwire walk he’d seen doomed teens performing on the roadside. Damn Fritz anyway, he thought. Or rather Annette, not only for leaving Fritz but for telling him, on her way out, that she’d faked every orgasm of their seventeen-year marriage, up to and including the raucous, headboard-beating ones on their honeymoon that had made Fritz so giggly and proud that he’d eaten nothing but oysters for the rest of the trip. Elwin had squirmed madly when Fritz confided all this and even feigned a bout of heartburn after the oysters detail so that he could escape to a bodega across the street, for a stage-prop roll of Tums, hoping that in the meantime Fritz might reconsider the quality and quantity of guts that he was spilling across the table. It didn’t occur to Elwin until he was outside, however, that he’d responded to the sad disclosure of Annette’s fakery by immediately faking a physical condition of his own. He’d probably grabbed his chest and drawn and released a melodramatic breath in much the same way Annette had. Elwin’s guilt over that bought Fritz another two hours of therapeutic drinking.

He rummaged through the Jeep, searching for something he felt certain he wouldn’t find: ideally a knife, though anything sharp enough to slit the deer’s throat—if appallingly necessary—would suffice. A plastic ice scraper, however, was the sharpest blade the Jeep contained, and it definitely wouldn’t suffice. He grabbed the tire iron, more for his own mental aid than utility; if the deer was alive, he wouldn’t possibly be able to bludgeon it to death with a tire iron. His goal was mercy, not a mob hit. Warily, he approached the deer. On his side of the road were woods, sloping upward. Houses lined the opposite side, where the deer was lying, but their windows were mostly dark; the shimmery aurora of a television glowed in one upstairs window, faint and bluesy, like a pilot light preventing the inhabitants’ brains from freezing. When a car rolled past, spraying Elwin with a violent splash of light then a black wave of slush pellets, he envisioned the odd sight of himself—a fat, middle-aged, wine-rumpled man in a camel hair topcoat, armed with a tire iron, scampering across the highway at 1
A.M.
; cop bait if ever there was such—but there was no way around it. If this was to be a hit-and-run, it would be a fatal one. He couldn’t leave the deer to suffer, slowly twitching to death in the greasy moon-colored snow. Maybe other people could. He didn’t think about it.

But the deer was dead. Or looked dead, anyway. Wanting to be sure, Elwin lowered himself to the ground and pressed his ear to the deer’s chest, directly behind its foreleg. He listened, but there was nothing, not even the faintest quaver of a heartbeat—just the still, warm density of its body beneath him. He noticed a raw pink nipple, jutting from the white belly-fur. A doe, he realized, with an extra lump of sadness. Female deaths were always sorrier; with males, you could almost always cite a valid reason why they had it coming. The impact must have knocked the life right out of her, he figured, imagining, for the moment, that “life” to be something like the vaporous soul which, back in Catholic grade school, the nuns claimed you exhaled from your body at the precise moment of death, when it would go curling upward toward judgment like a campfire spark.

She was a pretty young thing, noted Elwin, who was now up on his knees and running a hand across her smooth dunnish fur. From this angle, it appeared she’d died a peaceful death: an obnoxiously anthropomorphic observation, he corrected himself, since in the wild there are no peaceful deaths—particularly deaths involving pavement. What a waste, he thought. What a stupid, stupid . . . waste. Stifling a nauseating rush of emotion, or maybe an emotional surge of nausea, he started to damn Fritz again, but then stifled that, too—Fritz had enough on his karmic plate. He warmed his palms on the doe’s chest, falling snowflakes bunching between his fingers. The doe’s eyes were open, aimed at the dead stubble of brush poking through the snow, just beyond the pavement edge. That’s where the vultures would begin eating, he thought. Either the eyes or the anus—they always started at the vulnerable parts.