THE MOOSE HAD BEEN THERE for three days, ghosting among the birches. Ben watched her through the kitchen window. Her great head hung down as if weighted; from time to time she gave it a slow shake. When she’d first appeared, she’d walked in circles, stumbling, falling to her knees then hefting herself back up. She had stopped moving now, her legs braced out, like those of a saw-horse, stacked ergonomically on her bones. The coyotes knew she was here. Ben had seen them slinking across Ed’s fields, yellow-eyed and sly; he’d heard them calling out to each other in the evening. She was waiting for them. They’d tear the velvet of her muzzle. They’d eviscerate her, coil by coil.
Ben grabbed his .30-06 from the top shelf of his closet. He walked past Shevaunne asleep on the sofa, the TV mumbling and our next contestant, her mouth open with little snores coming out. Even the hot noon light blasting through the bay window and heating the interior of the mobile home like a convection oven didn’t wake her, merely raised a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Shevaunne slept like a cat, an opportunist, at all hours and on numerous surfaces, sometimes even the floor, and she woke up with the imprint of the bath mat on her cheek. He stepped over an empty 16oz Dunkin’ Donuts pumpkin spice latte and out the back door.
The moose acknowledged Ben but did not move away or flinch, and he could have gone right up to her, put the rifle right up against her skull. But she was a wild thing dying a wild death, he did not want to belittle her. He shot her from 50 yards, a clean shot through the heart, and she went down on her knees with a kind of relief. She was dead by the time he got to her.
It took several hours to butcher her, there was so much meat. When he cut off her head and sawed open her skull, he knew what he would find: the smooth brain sprouting clusters of worms, like a potato left in the bottom of the box too long. The worms had laid their eggs in deer excrement and the moose grazed on the grass nourished by the deer scat; the worms traveled from the stomach to the tender, soft brain, and, relentless, voracious, they ate it. Nature was not benign.
The meat of the moose, however, remained untouched, and she was a gift to Ben: a winter’s supply of free protein. He’d teach Jake to enjoy even the liver cooked with onions, the heart and kidneys in a stew. Some nights he’d go over to Ed’s, beers and a couple of flank steaks for the barbecue; there wouldn’t be much to say, the honey-combed conversation of men: trucks, huntin’, the cocksuckers in Montpelier who made up new regulations for dairy farmers.
When at last the moose was fully stripped, when she was the essential arc of her ribs, when she was joints and hooves and pelvis and the flies were a veil around him, Ben felt the weight of himself, his lumbering, earth-rooted body. He envied the animal’s transcendence.
He walked back into the house. Now—again—he saw the Dunkin’ Donuts cup. He picked it up, considered it carefully. There was no point in asking Shevaunne. She would lie. She lied without even knowing she was lying. She lied when there was no point—what she’d had for lunch or if the sky was blue, lying not merely from habit but as the state of her being. She was a sack of lies, bloated with lies, even her snores were lies.
He put the cup on the counter where she would see it, and she would know that he’d also seen it, his bloody handprint upon it.
She opened her eyes and screamed.
She continued to scream, hyperventilating, scrambling up the back of the sofa, a panicked animal, her eyes on him and full of horror, and, at first, he did not know why. He imagined she could no longer tell the difference between sleep and dream; the lying had so infused her that a door was not a door and a nightmare was real.
Then he realized he was covered in blood. “It’s from the moose.”
Did she think he’d killed someone? But she would not listen.She kept screaming, so he stood immobile, his hands raised and open-palmed in surrender.
Her own hands covered her face, and she gulped air. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Ben. Mother of fuckin’ God, Ben.”
“The moose. I shot her and butchered her.”
Shevaunne’s scream segued into a coughing spasm, the wheezing protest of her tar-lined lungs. “I need a cigarette, man, I need a ciggie,” and she searched frantically on the sofa, among her nest of covers, for her pack of Marlboro Reds, her green lighter. Her hands were trembling, and he was amazed at her fear, it was the only emotion un-dimmed by heroin, her fear was pure and uncut as truth.
He left her still searching and jibbering. He ran the shower and watched the water spiral shades of pink and crimson down the plug hole, and he thought about the pumpkin latte and how it came to be inside his home.