15 November

15 NOVEMBER
By
Lee Taylor
2425 words

Part I

The dry snap of a rifle shot slapped Sam awake the way the back of his mother’s hand would bring him back during Sunday mass as a kid. It came from a mile or two deeper in the woods. There was a chilled stillness in the air that made the sound almost artificial. A sound effect.

Has to be Walt, Sam thought. Already Nine AM and shooting at anything that moves. Sam wondered how many children’s heads had been blown off at the bus stop before they started calling off school the first day of hunting season.

Snowflakes rocked towards the earth like a drunk stumbling home. Sam’s fingers sank into the ground. That the ground wasn’t yet frozen was unusual, but nothing to prove or disprove global warming. Sam sat dusted in a thin layer of snowflakes. They clung to him as if staking their claim, immigrants from the sky granted their own tracts of land.

There came another dry matchstick rifle pop, then silence. Must’ve bagged one. That sunuvabitch. To have said he expected the same luck, a lie. Sam sat Indian-style in the leaves. They were frozen on top, but were long-since muck underneath so that his ass constantly slid. Sam was tired, bored, and colder than a penguin’s balls on an iceberg at midnight. He braced his back against the oak’s trunk, murdering the bulging disk in his spine. He shivered like a drug addict gone cold turkey. Every third breath was a moan and the cold sore on his lip was convinced it was twenty degrees colder than the thermometer claimed.

Fuck this hippy shit. I’m going home.

Sam stood and looked around at what had once been Uncle Tim’s place. To Tim and everyone else it was just “The Place,” and so said the hand-painted sign by the mailbox. The Place was just a few miles north of Frederick, Michigan, which itself was eight miles north of Grayling. Grayling was the gas-and-piss break between Interstate 75 and the hour’s drive along West 72 towards Traverse City. What this made Frederick was pretty much nothing at all. The flatlanders from downstate came up here winters to snowmobile and bang local single moms while their wives watched the kids back in D-town.

The Place was twenty-acres big. A dirt two-track ran three-quarters of a mile into the property from Quail Branch road. It brought you into some of the most beautiful woods on God’s Shitty Green Earth. The Place was dead-ed down to Uncle Tim from his Grandad, whose own father bought it after his chain of fried chicken places went up and under during the depression.

By the time Tim had gone from dust to dust, Copenhagen had paved a cancer trail from his jaw to his brain. Sam could smell the potpourri of tobacco and brain rot through the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Sam thought he could still smell it when he visited Tim’s grave two years since.

Part II

Fourteen years before you could see the sun through the hole in Uncle Tim’s jaw, he and Sam rode together in the front bench seat of Tim’s Jeep Wagoneer (rusted Swiss cheese on wheels) towards the crummiest single-wide ever spit back out of Hell. It was Uncle Tim’s then and would become Sam’s just fifteen years later. It looked like the lair of a sexual predator, the kind of “unbeknownst to the neighbors” pedophile shack you see in a Court Channel documentary. Beyond the trailer sat the bait pile--beets, corn, a few salt licks. A twenty-foot pole stood driven into the ground. A high-wattage spotlight peered down like the eye of God.

Year-round Uncle Tim sniped whitetails through a torched-out peek hole through the wall. The corner was as drafty as a Himalayan mountain peak and Sam avoided it from late November to mid-March. Uncle Tim would sit in his recliner, rifle in his right hand, bottle of Wild Turkey in his left. He’d peek through during commercials, waiting for something hungry and stupid to show up.

One day, the Trix Rabbit suddenly muted, Sam heard the squeak of tiny hinges and the rough sliding of the steel barrel across the torch-cut aluminum of the trailer wall. He watched Tim take aim. Sam crept up to the living room window to get a better look.

Tim’s bullet missed the doe’s abdomen--her kill zone. What the bullet did do was shear the doe’s lower jaw clean off. But “shear” wasn’t the right word. “Shear” implied some sort of smooth, scalpel-like precision--”tear,” ”rip,” “shred,” or “mutilate” was a bit closer.

“Come here, Sammy. Check her out!”

The doe just stood there, hyperventilating, ankle deep in rotting Farmer’s Market beets. Her jaw had fallen away or had simply disintegrated into a red mist. Bright, pencil-thin streams of blood flowed down the amber hairs blanketing her neck. The blood streamed to her shoulder and fell in tiny splashes against the white congregation of salt blocks. Her tongue, spattered with blood, dangled from hamburgered flesh like a fishing lure. It reminded Sam of a melting raspberry popsicle.

She stood as if nothing had happened. Shock. Sam imagined her pain buried deep behind the poker face of animal stupidity. Suddenly, she turned and sprinted back towards the woods, where she had been safe only moments before.

“Aw shit,” Tim said. The bloodlust seemed to rosy up Tim’s cheeks. “Let’s go, Sammy.”

Sam couldn’t help but catch the excitement as he zipped his jacket. Tim grunted with impatience as he helped pull up Sam’s boots. Sam thought Tim looked every bit of what he was--an overweight, underpaid, underlaid janitor at Grayling Elementary, Sam’s alma mater. Wherever he went, Tim brought with him a cologne of sawdust, vomit, and Pine Sol. It was the weekend, so add whiskey to that.

Part III


“I think we’re gaining on her, Sammy. See the blood trail? Hoof prints!” Tim never doubted that nature was more beautiful nursing an exit wound. The trail seemed to go on forever, in the sense a mile is forever to an eight-year-old.

“Almost on her, kid.” Adrenaline helped Sam stay a girly throw from Tim’s heels. His heart pounded. Hard. He imagined it escaping his throat with a wet pop, finally splashing down somewhere in the middle of Lake Michigan.

The trees were thick in young and old, in stumps and saplings. They all stood amongst each other like an immortal family reunion. The trunks curved in awkward, hideous directions, having sold their beauty for a better angle of the sun. Sam imagined faces in the older trees. The seemed to glare at him like he were a Mormon ringing the doorbell at dinner time.

“What if we get lost?” asked Sam.

“We’ll just follow the blood back to the trailer. We won’t get lost. Don’t worry now.”

The sun inched down towards the horizon. Sam felt the air chilling through his sweat-soaked clothes. He tried to cough the tickle out if his chest.

“Keep up Sam!”

“Okay, geesh!”

“Do you see her?”

He didn’t see her and wouldn’t had she been ten feet away. Sam was watching the ground to keep his balance. The earth sucked at Sam’s boots every step of the way--the sound like Uncle Tim’s morning not-so-dry heaves.

Part IV

Uncle Tim stopped dead behind the fallen zombie corpse of an oak tree, his left knee planted in the sludge of earth and dead leaves. Never slowing, Sam collided with Tim, falling hard as if a ghost’s hand had snatched him from behind.

“Oh shit! Sorry, Sammy.” Tim’s smile was apologetic, genuine, and warm.

Sam tongued at his now-stinging lip. The taste was metallic and sweet, like a penny dipped in pancake syrup. He brought his home-woven mitten to his mouth and pulled it away. The blood enlivened a small spot on the faded mitten, a crimson island in a yarn sea of pink. Sam spit. It made a small pool in the soaked ground and stayed there, as if the earth was turning up its nose and refused to swallow it.

Sam whined and was shushed.

“Look over there. See’er?”

“Weh?” asked Sam, his mitten to his lip.

“’Where?’”

“Yeth.”

“Ten o’clock.”

Tim watched Sam’s blank reaction.

“Look straight ahead.”

Sam did.

“Follow my hand to the left.” Sam’s eyes followed Tim’s glove the way a bum would watch a flying hundred-dollar bill with wings.

“Through the brush,” Tim said.

“Okay.”

“See’er?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. He felt pins and needles from his throat to his hands and back again.

Tim whispered into Sam’s ear. His strategy. His plan of attack. Sam heard none of it. His eyes met the doe’s for the first time. She was studying him, ignoring Tim entirely. Sam wondered if she thought he could save her. That’s what her eyes told him.

“Sammy, back off left. She’s watching you. I don’t think she’s gonna run again.”

She watched Sam, eyes unblinking, body unflinching. Her tongue, quivering Silly putty with a pulse, twitched absently.

“I’ll go right and flank her to get a better shot. Ready, kiddo?”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t fuck this up, Samuel.” Tim moved off.

Sam met her eyes again. They pleaded with Sam as if he could give her jaw back or return the blood to her body. He couldn’t and she knew it. He pitied her, but he slowly felt his eyes being drawn down to her dangling tongue again. He studied how the pink, leaking flesh made a circle around her tongue. It was a hole that could lead to anywhere. The other side of the universe… Who knows?

His eyes followed the line of thickening blood on her shoulders. He tried to match his breathing to hers, until he got light-headed and stopped. He watched her, not knowing Tim was steadying his rifle on the Y of a branch only fifty feet away. He realized then that the sight of her, nervously skirting death’s perimeter was somehow beautiful. It was right.

Her eyes shined. They started to say “please,” but then realized the hopelessness of it, like a condemned man’s apology ten minutes to midnight.

She stumbled, the world beginning to fade around her. She turned her gaze east. He followed her eyes. A Hail Mary pass away, a fawn, its spots faded but there, trotted towards his mother. He would start and stop in small bounds, knowing something was wrong, but not what. She tried to stomp a warning but stumbled. Her bleats came out gurgles and the fawn understood none of it. He continued towards her.

She looked to Sam one last time.

“I’m so disappointed in you, Sammy.”

It was the voice of his mother in his head, four years dead that July. He looked into the doe’s eyes again and knew who she really was.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

The crack of Tim’s .30/06 struck Sam’s eardrums like a chisel. He watched as what was left of the blood in her guts painted the trees beyond. She kicked into the air then became still. The fawn quipped a wailing bleat and ran off. Tim hooted like a dude ranch cowboy.

“Praise the beast! The beast is dead!”

Sam moved towards her. His hands trembled. The bile in his throat brought the taste of Lucky Charms with it. The last of her life was leaving her.

“I’m so disappointed, Sammy. But I forgive you. I love you. Goodbye.”

Her eyes stopped speaking and she died. A black fly wandered along her muzzle, not believing, Sam imagined, his unbelievable luck. He paced while Tim field dress his sister, Sam’s mother.

What was once inside her was now an uneven, steaming pile of organs tossed to the side. Brunch for the coyotes. Sam looked at her, ashamed, but was struck at how lovely she was now, at how right this all was. If this wasn’t how God wanted her to be, why would he make the blood so beautiful? The color of Christmas and ripe cherries.

The hike back to the trailer took over an hour. At every step, something new would cling to the clammy wetness of her eyes and tongue. A step later, a new leaf or twig would force its way and claim its place, like clamoring children in a crowded playground.

A week later, the jerky was sweet, but made his stomach cramp up. He ate three more pieces.

Part V

Nearly twenty years later, seven minutes after the sound of Walt’s rifle slapped him awake, Sam was packing his things to head back. A breeze walked through the woods like a slow whisper. There were ice chandeliers in the trees and the woods themselves swayed in an odd rhythm, like a three-year-old who has to pee.

A movement caught Sam’s eye, one that didn’t match the sway of the woods. He moved towards it. He eased back the rifle bolt and eased it forward again. He steadied the rifle on the Y of a branch, the way Uncle Tim had taught him.

He saw the movement again, obscured behind a cloud of brush. Just a shape. Moving.

Antlers.

Fire.

The shot carried through the woods like the Big Bang. Sam stalked his way to the brush, where there was no longer movement against the sway. He rounded the corner.

It was Walt. He stood a horseshoe’s throw from the fresh carcass of the largest buck Sam had ever seen. It was the fatally wounded buck Walt had just tracked into Sam’s property (“The Place” they called it), but it wasn’t the fallen Whitetail that seized Sam’s eyes.

Walt stood frozen. Trembling. The red raged down the front of Walt’s orange vest. The colors mixed. It looked like fire. The sound of Walt’s rapid breathing reached his ears, the sound of a child blowing bubbles into his tomato soup through a straw.

The buck was dead before Sam ever pulled the trigger. Walt found his buck the moment Sam’s bullet found Walt.

Sam missed Walt’s abdomen--his kill zone. What the bullet did do was shear Walt’s lower jaw clean off. Of course, “shear” wasn’t the right word. “Shear” implied some sort of smooth, scalpel-like precision--”tear,” ”rip,” “shred,” or “mutilate” was a bit closer.

Sam watched Walt’s dangling tongue and remembered how beautiful it all was. He missed his mother terribly.

Sam reached for the knife in his boot. Walt turned and ran. Sam followed. He hoped Walt had forgiving eyes.

The End