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“A blue-eyed elk would serve the son of a gun right for getting lucky his first time out,” Tucker said aloud in the dead silence of his workshop. His voice was muffled by the feathers piled in soft mounds, the furs folded and stacked like blankets, and the naked Styrofoam mannequins stored in a jumble along the west wall.

At forty-eight, Tucker Pluid was no longer embarrassed by the sound of his spoken thoughts. He'd worked alone in the drafty plywood-walled workshop for so many years, it had ceased to worry him. His trailer was on the outer limits of Flint where not even the strongest Wyoming wind could carry his voice into town.

He picked up a handful of glass eyes, most of them the tame amber the hunters expected; but a few of them were brighter and more exotic—the color of showcase gems or Caribbean lagoons. He shook them across his palm like dice, trying to decide.

For Tucker, this was the most critical step in the mounting process—never so crucial as that moment with that head, Herman Knight's elk head.

Herman Knight was sleeping with Tucker's ex-wife and that made all the difference in the color of eyes his elk received.

There was another reason Tucker held the glass eyes in his hand for so long, clicking them back and forth. Once the eyes were in place and Herman came to collect his elk, Tucker could watch his ex-wife's lover as if through a hidden security camera. He would retreat into his workshop where he would pick up a freshly labeled jar from the shelf above his workbench. Inside that jar would be the elk's real eyes and when Tucker Pluid so much as laid one finger on the glass of that jar, a lightning bolt would pass down his arm and shoot straight up his spine. Then he would close his eyes as the vision, sharp as the bitter smell of cordite, burst free in the back of his head. This was his gift from God: to peer into the homes of Flint through the eyes of the animals he mounted.

One year ago, at the beginning of moose season, Tucker Pluid was sitting in the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Flint when a tremor passed along his network of muscles, lit up his brain. It was like, he later told the stuffed heads, the pews were wired with joy buzzers.

Tucker listened as the Reverend Donald Dodge read straight out of God's Word: “For His eyes are upon the ways of a man and He sees all his steps.” Like a flaming meteor striking the earth, the verse lodged in his head, scattering all other thoughts. He'd been troubled by thoughts lately, plagued by dreams in which he seemed to have turned into a camera poking in and out of scenes from what looked liked TV sitcoms but that were, on morning-after reflection, actually the homes of his friends and neighbors. And now this verse from Reverend Dodge's lips seemed like a revelation, a clarity to the muddle. If he hadn't been sitting in the middle of church, Tucker Pluid would have clapped his hands together, loud as a gunshot, and shouted, “That's it! The eyes, the eyes!”

He held himself in check until he dashed home to his workshop and fished in the waste bucket behind his trailer until he stood there holding the antelope eyes—scooped out of Frank Withers's kill the week before—in the palm of his hand. The eyeballs were a soft, sticky mess, but he'd closed his fingers over them and concentrated.

After an initial, startling blur of sagebrush and black hooves in his peripheral vision, Tucker's sight sharpened and changed. He stared at Frank sitting in his kitchen. One forearm rested on the blue-checked oilcloth, the other hand stirred his coffee then tapped the spoon delicately on the rim. Frank took a sip and Tucker saw the tiny beads of light brown coffee clinging to the tips of his mustache hairs. Frank looked up along the wall where Tucker was perched, staring googly-eyed, and raised his cup to the freshly mounted antelope head. He smiled and said, “Looks like the ol' Pecker Factory's still in business, pardner.”

Marilyn, Frank's wife, entered the kitchen. Her hair was tousled, as if she'd spent a restless night in bed. Frank turned to her and said, “Heckuva buck, isn't he?”

“If you say so, Studley,” Marilyn purred as she dropped two slices of wheat bread in the toaster. “What say you to a little more, um, exercise?” Then, with a smile and a cocked eyebrow, she brought her hands to the belt of her robe, tugged once, and let everything fall open to her husband.

Tucker dropped the eyes on the workbench. They made a soft, spongy splat when they hit. He was too afraid to touch the eyes again and so he left them there like that for the rest of the day, the filmed-over pupils staring off in opposite directions.

Tucker was afraid of what he'd seen in Frank's kitchen, but he was equally afraid to turn away from what God was offering him. Two weeks earlier, the Reverend Dodge had delivered a sermon about the gifts God plants in every person, Christian and sinner alike, and though some people waste those talents, burying them in the earth and going on about their business, God's ultimate desire is to see those gifts used to glorify Him. Really, it was just a simple matter of cultivating the gift so that God would be fully pleased with Man.

The Reverend Dodge had been so earnest during the sermon, his face straining and his eyes shining, that Tucker wracked his brain for two weeks, studying himself in the mirror several times every day to figure out what gifts God had given him, Tucker Pluid, a battered old rodeo star who now made his living sewing up other folks' dead animals.

Then, when the Reverend Dodge read that verse about the eyes of God, it was like the Lord Himself snapped a puzzle piece in Tucker's brain. When he rushed home and touched the antelope eyes, he knew he'd found his gift.

At first he was skeptical, thinking he must be under some sort of spell—maybe Shirleen had gone to consult with a voodoo specialist during one of her shopping sprees to Denver. He didn't think she would, but he also wouldn't put it past her.

But, he reasoned, the magic was too authentic, too startling to be anything but something released directly from the Hand of God.

Over the past year, Tucker had learned his gift was by no means an exact science. Sometimes all he saw was a confused tangle of pine branches, magpie tails, and steaming dung piles. Sometimes all he heard was the exploding crack and then everything—the sky, the sage—was rolling uphill away from him.

However, most of the time when Tucker Pluid closed his eyes he was in the homes of his customers. He saw his banker, Glen Hume, frowning over crossword puzzles while his wife Gloria sang hymns in the kitchen and fixed a meal that sizzled in the frying pan. He watched Bill VanSant, hosting a cocktail party last New Year's Eve, reach up and stick his pinkie finger in the snarling nostrils of the wild boar he'd shot on his trip to Texas. His guests blew party favors at him and laughed as Tucker sneezed at his workbench.

Tucker stayed up long into the night, letting his eyes roam every corner of Flint. He'd wake up in the morning, head throbbing, and reach for a pair of eyeballs like a smoker reaches for his first cigarette of the day.

There was Edith Pond sitting on her sofa, watching Cary Grant movies around the clock after her husband died; Chance Gooding Jr. making out with Roseann Hume on his father's bed while the seven-foot rattlesnake Chance Sr. shot the previous summer coiled like a spring on the nightstand beside the bed; Juanita McPherson folding laundry and singing along with a John Denver album on the turntable; Ringo Smits copying his girlfriend's homework; the 6:00 a.m. regulars at the Wrangler Restaurant drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and staring up blank-faced at the wall of heads behind the counter.

Tucker preserved the dead animals' eyes in baby food jars. By now, he had several shelves of labeled jars, each with its own pair of eyes floating in formaldehyde like large pearl onions. He no longer needed to hold the hard, slippery eyes in his hands—he had only to touch the jars to start seeing through the walls of Flint's homes.

Eventually, Tucker limited himself to one pair of eyes a day. “After all,” he said, “there's only so much of Flint a fella can take.”

When he had time to think it through, Tucker Pluid had a pretty good idea he knew exactly when God first handed him this gift (though he hadn't recognized it for what it was back then).

It came at the end of his rodeo career—that hot afternoon in Billings, Montana, when the black, dusty hoof crashed down on his head, leaving a deep purple dent between his eyes; when everything—the sun, the foaming nostrils of the bronc, the pennants waving like colored hands from the announcer's booth—flicked off like a light switch.

He'd struggled up from the anesthetic two days later to hear a doctor telling Shirleen that he would never ride horses again, at least not like that. “We will want to keep a very close eye on him to make sure the concussion doesn't clot his brain,” the thick voice said.

Shirleen told the doctor, “I've told him time and time again. This rodeo business . . .” She shook her head then said, “He looks like an overcooked noodle laying there, don't he?”

Five minutes later, after a long silence in the room, he felt Shirleen bend over him on the hospital bed, smelled her flowery Avon perfume, and heard her say, “I've had it with you.”

Tucker's vision was gray and the edges tingled with broken dots for nearly a week. Now, looking back, he was certain God was fooling around with his eyes back then, fine-tuning the gift.

It was, as the saying goes, both a blessing and a curse. Three months ago, he'd received his greatest revelation from the tiniest pair of eyes—two little pebble-shaped globs from Tom Shane's three-pound cutthroat trout.

Tucker Pluid watched Tom straighten the fish on the dining room wall. “What a beaut. That Pluid sure does nice work. Doesn't he do nice work, hon?” He turned to his wife who was sitting on the davenport cross-stitching.

“Nice work on fish, maybe, but he's not so good with the people in his life.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Tom said.

His wife shrugged and licked the tip of her thread before poking it into the eye of the needle. “I hear things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Things in the beauty shop, 4-H meetings, the post office. Things about your taxidermist's ex-wife.”

“Shirleen? What about her?”

“How she's carrying on these days.”

“Aw.” Tom waved his hand in dismissal. “She's always carried on. Ever since she left him. Why she did that, though . . .” He trailed off and shook his head.

“Oh, we women know.” Tom's wife chuckled and stabbed the needle back and forth through the linen.

“Huh?” Tom turned completely from his fish, the fish Tucker was inside, and looked at his wife. “C'mon, Maggie. What's with Shirleen? Why'd she do it?”

His wife sighed and let her stitching drop to her lap. “If you really have to ask, there's no way you'll ever understand.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means that men like Tucker Pluid will never change. They're the tired old men of the West who never stop believing that work is the only thing worth living for.”

“Well, sure—”

Maggie was on a roll and wouldn't be stopped. “To them, just putting bread on the table is more important than who's sitting around the table. Eventually, life gets the better of them, punches them down, and they just wither up and blow away.”

Tom was silent for a few moments then, his voice higher and thinner, he said, “I'm not like that, am I, Mags?”

Tucker never heard her response because he slammed the jar onto the workbench with such force the tiny trout eyes swirled around in the formaldehyde, chasing each other like frantic tadpoles. He watched them for a long time, until they settled to the bottom of the jar and he could forget about Shirleen talking about him in the beauty salon.

“I never asked for this,” he'd tell the wood ducks, bighorn sheep, and largemouth bass on his worktable. The animals, in various stages of preparation, stared back at him, mouths closed and nostrils shining with shellac.

To stop touching eyeballs would be to disappoint God, he thought. God was up there watching him watch Flint and yet He offered no relief for all that Tucker Pluid saw. Tucker walked around town much more slowly this hunting season, wary of nearly everyone he met. When he saw Danny Kingston in the post office or Bret Meyer in the aisles of the grocery store, Tucker shied away, trying not to look at the hands he knew slapped the women and children late at night when the shades were pulled. Then there were those who cheated at pinochle or lied about their sex life to the others in the office. Tucker was especially shocked to see those in his own church—the ushers, the deacons, the pillars of the congregation—who never even cracked open their Bibles until Saturday night.

“God,” Tucker whispered in the silence of his workshop, “preserve me from their unrighteousness.”

Once Tucker swore off the eyes for a week after the morning he sat down next to Charlie Holt at the Wrangler's coffee counter and heard him tell Shellie, the counter waitress, about the operation his wife needed. “It's some newfangled procedure she says will help straighten her spine. She's had that slump ever since I can remember. Now, after all these years, she says there's this doctor over in Casper who can fix her up good and she don't even have to go under the knife.”

“Modern medicine's something else, isn't it?” Shellie said, freshening their cups.

“I tell her I'll do whatever it takes to make her happy,” Charlie said with a shy grin. “Wish I could go, but it's right in the middle of deer season.”

Tucker knew Charlie was worried about putting meat on the table this year. It had been a slow summer down at the appliance store and he was sitting up late at night, hunched over the desk in the den, surrounded by his big game trophies from past seasons. While he fiddled with the calculator and shipping invoices, his wife was up in their bedroom underneath the whitetail deer placing calls to her lover in Casper. She cupped her hand over the phone and whispered dirty talk so pornographic that she blushed between her soft giggles.