“I think that’s Jackson.”
They ate dinner and put the kids to bed. When they came back out onto the porch, the sun had finally crashed, leaving the flames of that distant, burning city to stand out in the darkness like an abandoned campfire.
Jack cracked open a new pair of beers, handed one to Dee.
Tired and strangely satisfied with the soreness in his body.
He’d been rehearsing how he would say it all day, the last two days even. Figured he might as well get on with it, though the phrasing had completely escaped him.
“Does it feel to you,” Jack said, “like we’re starting a new life?”
“Little bit. How many days have we been here?”
He had to think about it. “Three.”
“Feels longer. A lot longer.”
“Yeah.”
He could feel the good beer buzz beginning to swarm in his head. Didn’t know if it was the altitude or malnourishment, but he couldn’t think of the last time two beers had gotten him this close to drunk.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“What?” she laughed, “you’re seeing someone?”
None of the permutations of this conversation, as he’d imagined it, had involved Dee asking that question. His head cleared so fast it left him with a subtle throbbing at the base of his skull—a premonition of the hangover to come.
“Two years ago.”
Dee’s face emptied of the lightness of the moment and her bottle hit the porch and the beer fizzed out and drained through a crack between the two-by-sixes. The air suddenly reeked of yeast and alcohol.
“Lasted a month,” he said. “Only time I ever. . .I ended it because I couldn’t stand—”
“One of your f**king TAs?”
“We met in—”
“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear a single detail of any of it and I don’t ever want to know her name. Nothing about her. Just why you’re telling me this now. In this moment. I could’ve died never knowing and you took that from me.”
“When we left Albuquerque, our marriage was on life support. I mean, three nights ago was the first time we’d been together in. . .I don’t even know—”
“Seven months.”
“Dee, I know I’ve been checked out on our family, and for a long time. Because of guilt, depression, I don’t know. These last nine days have been the worst, hardest of our life, but in some ways, the best, too. And now, it feels to me like we’re starting something new here, so I don’t want to start it with any lies. Nothing between us.”
“Well, there is now. And. . . . . . . . .why the f**k would you tell me this?”
She shrieked it, her voice bouncing back from the invisible wall of trees.
“At least I was always honest with you about Kiernan,” Dee said.
“Yeah, that was such a comfort as our marriage imploded.”
Dee jumped up from the rocking chair and walked off the porch and vanished into the meadow.
Jack slammed the rest of his beer, threw it in the grass.
Sat watching the horizon burn to the soundtrack of his wife crying out there in the dark.
* * * * *
5:15 a.m. and Jack rose up slowly, shouldered the shotgun. He took aim on the neck of the same giant bull he’d seen two mornings ago on the hike up from the road. The recoil drove a splinter of pain through his left shoulder, a thundering blast across the clearing.
The elk’s head dipped. It staggered.
Jack on his feet, bolting through the frosted grass as he pumped the Mossberg and fired again.
When he reached it, the animal lay on its side, eyes open, breathing fast and raggedly. Jack knelt beside it and held one of the spurs on the enormous rack while the blood rushed out across the ground.
He hadn’t field-dressed an animal in over twenty years, since the last time he’d hunted with his father in Montana when he was in college. But the anatomy and the method slowly returned to him.
Naomi and Cole looked on in semi-horror as he tied off the hoofs, heaved the animal onto its back, and with the bowie knife he’d been given in Silverton, Colorado, slit the elk from anus to throat.
He worked hard, tried to work fast. As the first rays of sunlight streamed through the aspen onto the meadow, he severed the muscle tissue that held the entrails and let the steaming gutpile roll out of the carcass into the grass. He excavated the colon and the bladder, liver and heart, and sent Cole back to the cabin in search of several blankets.
He was three hours skinning the elk, two more separating the shoulder from the ribcage. All afternoon removing the backstrap, boning out the meat from between the ribs, peeling off the tenderloins from underneath. Everything laid out to drain and cool on a large blanket. He cut the hindquarters from the pelvic bone as the sun slid down over the desert, trying not to slice the meat itself but still doing a fair amount of damage.
Naomi brought him a can of tomato soup for supper, which he drank down in less than a minute. When he asked about her mother, she told him Dee was sleeping. Had been all day.
In the cold still dusk, thirteen hours after the kill, Jack carried, in five trips, what he estimated to be two hundred pounds of meat to the front porch of the cabin.
The bags of water had frozen solid in the chest freezer, and Jack stowed the meat inside, still wrapped in blankets. He was sunburned and weak and covered in blood, the elk’s and his—several stitches had ripped and the wound in his shoulder had opened again.
He took his first shower since arriving at the cabin. Twenty minutes under near-scalding water scrubbing the blood out of his hair and skin and watching the filth swirl down the drain under his feet. Crawled into a double bed on an aspen frame a little before 10:00 p.m. in the second bedroom upstairs. Cole snoring softly next door. Through the window he could hear the sound of the stream in the woods.
A footstep snapped him awake. He opened his eyes to the silhouette of Dee standing in the doorway. She came over and climbed into bed, their faces inches apart in the dark.
“I hear we have an elk,” she whispered.
“In the freezer. As we speak.”
“You’re your kids’ superhero, I hope you know. I’ve never heard Naomi talk about you like she did today.”
“I’m going to miss being a constant source of embarrassment.”
She put her hand on his face. “You don’t stink,” she said.
“Showers will do that.”
“Why are you up here and not in my bed?”
“Figured you still needed some space.”