15: ROAD MEAT

Howard Elman did not sleep all that night. The button of fire, like some malevolent Holy Ghost, set him to thinking. He thought about the point of flame a rifle makes when it is fired, and he thought about the point of flame a propane torch makes. He went to the barn and hunted up his torch and some scrap metal. After almost three hours of work, he had fashioned elegant metal brackets with the point of flame from the torch. He mounted the brackets in the rear of the cab of the pickup and then took a moment to admire his handiwork. The brackets reminded him of the cupped hands of African beggars. In the hands he placed the .308. “See you in the morning, nine A.M.,” he said to no one.

While he was making the brackets, he was not thinking that he would kill Mrs. Cutter and Reason. Indeed, it was not even clear in his mind what he was making until he was halfway through the process, and then it struck him that he was making an altar for his weapon. At the same time he realized that he was going to murder Reason and the woman at their appointment in the morning. He wished somehow that he could arm them, make a fight of it. But that was not possible. They fought with words, with law, with psychology, not with guns or knives or fists or anything else he understood. They were part of a vast, evil, nameless, incomprehensible conspiracy to reduce him to dust. They had cut off his finger, taken away his livelihood, stolen the affections of his son, crippled his wife, and they were on the way to stealing his property. It was time to put an end to it. “I needed relief,” he would tell the judge, for he certainly expected to be caught—until it occurred to him that the .308 had probably been stolen to begin with and could not be traced to him. He might get away with the killings after all. He thought about fingerprints and alibis; he considered staging a fake robbery to mask his motive. But he could not go far with these thoughts. Eventually they sickened him. He would simply shoot Reason and Mrs. Cutter dead and drive away in broad daylight. It didn’t bother him that he planned to deprive two human beings of their lives, because he had ceased to think of Mrs. Cutter and Reason as human. The woman was a high-ranking official in the government of hell, and Reason was her agent, a mere demon.

It was now two A.M. The moon was down and the wind had died. The clouds were gone. It was going to be cold in the morning. The sky was brilliant with stars, and he watched them until it seemed to him the earth under his feet moved slightly just for a moment. It was as if instead of looking up he were on the deck of a troopship looking down at the sea, alive at night with glowing things. The porch light was on at Mrs. Cutter’s house up the hill. Inside, it was dark. She had been waiting for someone, he supposed, who had not come; she had forgotten about the light; or maybe she just didn’t give much thought to details like electric bills. The woman slept, as generals and congressmen and bankers and gods and devils slept, in security if not peace.

He slid the barn door shut. Locking the barn door after the pony’s out. The phrase appeared in his head. He didn’t know why it came to him, and he did not consider it. It was just there, like a piece of food stuck in the throat. He returned to the house and opened a beer. Then he went upstairs to Heather’s room, walking slowly toward her until he could hear her breathing. The cat jumped silently from the bed and fled from him. He paused, sipping his beer, listening. It dawned on him that he didn’t hear as well as he used to. Once, he heard birds and crickets, like choruses, in the summer, and the wind brushing the dry grasses of fall, and the harsher wind of winter clacking in the trees. All had become hushed these last few years. He sat on Heather’s bed, lightly squeezed her foot, bent to it, and touched it to his lips. Then he went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table, drinking his beer and smoking in the dark. He waited for apparitions of Reason to torment him, but they didn’t come. I’m not insane—not completely, anyway, he thought. He dozed with his head on the table until the morning light fell upon his face.

Curiously, he felt no fatigue. His body was greased with something from his uneasy sleep. He washed. He made some toast but discovered that he couldn’t eat. Food sickened him. Heather came downstairs. He asked her whether she wanted to skip school. She sensed false cheer in his voice and fell silent. He called Charlene and told her he was dropping Heather off for the day. Normally Charlene would have questioned such a request (God, the girl questioned everything and learned nothing), but something in his tone-—even Howard heard it as he was speaking—made her an obedient child. They left for Keene in the pickup, and when Heather saw the gun in the rack, she burst into tears.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“Sing,” he commanded.

Heather sang. She was still singing—and crying—when he let her off at Charlene’s. It passed through his mind that he would never see her again. Ridiculous, he told himself. Of course he would see her again.

From a phone booth he tried to call Elenore at the hospital in Hanover, but the thing in his voice that had humbled—no, terrorized—his daughters succeeded only in confusing the lines at long distance. He didn’t get through.

It was eight-thirty, half an hour before his appointment, when Howard reached Reason’s office-home, a huge wooden frame house with a slate roof, pillars, and turrets, and clapboards painted the same red as Reason’s sport coat. Inside, there would be the smell of old varnish, Howard guessed; there would be bent light coming in from curved windows; there would be the well-worked oak of long-dead carpenters. He parked across the street. The woman would come out of the west in her forest-green Mercedes. She would park it in the lot that Reason had blacktopped in the yard, in the embrace of an enormous elm that was only one-twentieth alive. She would be wearing a winter coat, fur perhaps, because although there was a hint of a thaw in the air—the morning wind had shifted from the northwest to the southwest—it was still cold. Businesslike, she would stride to the porch door, and here she would pause to push the doorbell, and here he would shoot her. Reason would open the door and bend toward the body on his step, and Howard would shoot him in the head. All shots would be to the head. Images of the deed marched through his mind with autumnal brilliance.

His mouth filled with vomit. He opened the truck door and threw up. He detected the faint smell of stale beer and vomited again. He laid the rifle on his lap and listened to the radio.

Eventually the police would find him and kill him. All right. Here lies Howard Elman: date of birth unknown, date of death marked for the ages in the newspaper. There was no malice in his heart. His heart was pure. He murdered for relief. (It seemed to him then that his mind was thinking in the voice of Mr.—no, Congressman—Lodge.) He leaves a loving wife, Elenore Apple-ton, who is a living saint and will pray for his soul; four daughters—Charlene, who will use him as a bad example to train her children; Pegeen, whose troubles are so great that his death will scarcely add to them; Sherry Ann, whom he hopes to meet again in hell; Heather (a blank: he could not bear to think about Heather); one son, Frederick—don’t you dare call him Freddy—who has cast off the father of his blood and taken a new father, Higher Education. Let the women in his life dab their eyes with dainty handkerchieves; let his son wonder about him; let the rest read a line about him—lo, be it a shameful one—in the books. Had he his life to live again, he would live it the same way, because of his ignorance and pridefulness. . . .

And so Howard eased with fantasy into the temporary tranquillity of self-pity.

The sun was full upon the Reason house now. The red clapboards seemed to pulsate as if from intense heat inside.

At ten minutes to nine, a small, dark man with a briefcase and a fur-collared overcoat entered Reason’s office. Nine o’clock came. Nine-thirty. Howard began to get suspicious. They had found him out. They were waiting for him to make a move. They were going to ambush him. The small, dark man carried guns. Howard was prepared to shoot it out. He steeled himself, even shutting off the radio in the truck. Quarter to ten. And then . . . and then, it dawned upon him.

The woman had stood him up!

Howard replaced the .308 on the gun rack and drove off in a huff. It would not be until later that day that he would figure out the truth of the situation. The small, dark man was a lawyer, hired by Mrs. Cutter to close the deal with Howard, and empowered to sign papers. Mrs. Cutter, like Howard, did not trust Reason.

Howard’s feeling of normality, that is, of actually recognizing the emotions within him—disappointment, betrayal, and a certain detached sense of self-mockery at it all—was brief. He drove downtown to Lindy’s Diner, parking a short distance away in front of Tilden’s, leaving the engine running, like a bank robber. He tried to drink a cup of coffee but discovered his stomach was still crawling with demons. He stood on the street corner for a full five minutes, and then went into the newsstand and bought a candy bar, startling the clerk with that tone in his voice. He would have to go back to Reason’s and perform some act, any act. It didn’t matter about the woman. It didn’t matter about Reason. What mattered was that he got relief. He was afraid if the thing in him kept building up, he would do violence to the nearest stranger. He unwrapped the candy bar—Three Musketeers, he discovered, challenging him to a duel, or, from the looks on their faces, to a drinking contest—and took a bite. The lump flew out of his stomach, and he had the dry heaves in the street.

He was standing there breathing heavily when he smelled something strong and familiar, and a voice said, “Howie, how’s your finger?”

He turned and embraced Cooty Patterson. It was all he could do to keep from crying.

He showed Cooty his hand. The old man held it, examining the white jacket of skin snug over the stub of his little finger.

“I been wondering about that,” Cooty said, and it was as if the two men had spoken just yesterday. “I was wondering what they done with it. I seen it laying on the floor that day, and I picked it up. It felt kind of alive, like a baby something. I figured I ought to keep it because you’d have need for it, but then you was yelling and I dropped it. I come back later and it was gone.”

The old man was bent and frail, thought Howard, and yet there was something zestful about him, as though he had found some money and the secret knowledge of the find had brought him inner health. He wore a tattered green overcoat that hung well below his knees. The tips of a pair of brown mittens peeked from the ends of the coat sleeves. A bright wool cap was pulled over his head and ears, his galoshes were tightly clamped around his ankles, and the collars of several flannel shirts bloomed at his throat like the folds of a flower ready to open.

Cooty was holding a bulging green plastic garbage bag. He had come to town to do his “shopping,” he said, putting emphasis on the word to show that he had his own special meaning for it.

They went to the diner, and Howard bought Cooty a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee. Howard sipped water from a cloudy glass, listening alternately to Cooty and to the voice of his troubled stomach.

Cooty lived in a shack in the woods, he told Howard. The shack was owned by a Frenchman who was locked up in the mental hospital in Concord. The Frenchman had given Cooty the key to the shack.

Cooty said he hitchhiked to Keene once or twice a week to get supplies and to be in the presence of people.

“I hitchhike to town, and I stand in various places, and people talk to me,” he said. “It’s because they know I don’t want to hurt them and because they know their words warm me. I stand at the Salvation Army and they give me clothes and they invite me in the chapel and I listen to them sing, and then I stand on the street in front of the newsstand and Mr. Clarke gives me a paper to read and tells me how the children take candy from him and leave the wrappers on the sidewalk and how it bothers him and I stand at Mr. Underwood’s bank and he comes out and sometimes gives me a dollar and asks me to move on, and then I stand in the park with old men who talk about breaking a window so they can do time at the county farm because of the huge radiators there, and then I stand at the bakery and at the grocery store and the men with the aprons put things in my bag and speak to me, telling me about their families or about women they desire or people they hate, and then I stand at the doughnut shop and the Chinaman there gives me doughnuts, but only if I clean his bathrooms, which I like to do because I know he does not like to clean them himself because he is a proud man and I am not . . . and I love him and all the rest of them and pity them, and then I walk along the roads looking for road meat. . . .”

The old man’s soft blue eyes watered from time to time, and he wiped them with a restaurant napkin. His hands trembled. Signs of insanity were in the way of his speech, Howard believed, and yet he was amazed that none of this mattered to him, that all his ideas of order were now equally indistinct.

Howard sipped water from the cloudy glass. It seemed to him he could taste individually each of its trace elements, the chlorine the city put in to kill germs, the iron from deep within the earth, which indicated the long journey of the water, the copper residue from the pipes in the diner, the manure from piles stacked by farmers in the winter and swept away by the melting. But there had not been a melting! The tastes were from his mind and not from the water. He rushed to the men’s room and had the dry heaves.

Cooty was waiting for him at the checkout counter. It was time to return to the shack, he said. Howard insisted on driving him home. The shack was on Spaulding Brook Road in the town of Donaldson. Howard knew the area: deer country, thick with the tips of young evergreens amidst ledges. Indeed, Donaldson Center was only two miles from Howard’s town of Darby. But a century ago leaders from the two towns had feuded about the upkeep of the stagecoach road, which crossed the rugged hills that divided the towns. As a result the road was closed, never to be reopened, and it was a ten-mile drive from Donaldson to Darby by the valley road.

They left in the pickup, Cooty’s bag in the back. Howard drove by Reason’s house. It glowed in the sunshine. He looked for the woman’s car and didn’t see it. He wondered whether he really would have shot her, or whether he might yet shoot her, and why he had the idea in the first place. They left Keene on the bypass. The sky was blue and immense, warming, it seemed, although the air was still cold, and he could see low clouds in the hills beyond. He must stay close to Cooty. He was beginning to believe that the old man had been sent to save him.

“Howie, you don’t look so good,” Cooty said.

Cold ran through him. The old man’s words seemed like a prophecy. He could feel himself slipping into the same incoherent beastliness that had possessed him the night of the town meeting. He shook it off, telling—no, shouting, he realized—the things that had happened to him since the shop closed and how now he was close to murder.

He could see the old man’s hands tremble in his mittens, then hug himself, as though the arms were his only companions, and the sight buoyed Howard’s spirits, and his mind became clearer. It was as if the old man were doing his suffering for him. He touched the old man’s hand. It quivered with the peculiar strength of a dying bird.

They were almost to the Donaldson turnoff when Cooty told Howard to stop the truck. Howard pulled the vehicle to the shoulder and backed up about two hundred feet. In a patch of grimy snow pushed up by the snowplow was a dead cat. “Road meat,” said Cooty.

The cat was a tom with red hair and scarred ears. Howard deduced what had happened. A car had hit the cat and broken his back. For a minute or two the tom had had command of the front half of his body. With his front paws he had dragged himself toward some imaginary, unnecessary cover in the snow, snarled at the universe, and died. His teeth were still bared. The teeth were sharp and white and yet delicate, but the gums were black and meaty.

Cooty lifted the body, feeling it with his fingers. “Too stiff,” he said. “I don’t like ’em when they’re stiff. I ain’t going to take him; I got meat already.” He was bragging.

They laid the cat’s body beside the drainage ditch that paralleled the shoulder. Here the grasses would grow with the spring rains, providing wonderful cover for a cat on the prowl.

“There’s all the meat a man needs along the highways, Howie,” said Cooty, beginning a speech. “There’s dogs and cats, which are very abundant; mice and other frightened little things if you’re looking for ’em; and skunks when you’re hard up; and foxes with mange; and you’ll find birds of every description along the highway, and porcupines and now and then a deer that the dogs chase into the path of the cars; and I imagine that when summer comes there’ll be turtles and snakes and lizards and rabbits—I forgot rabbits, which is strange, since I found my first just yesterday. Howie, there ain’t a kind of animal or bug in these parts that ain’t been hit by a car. The cars don’t know the difference, see, and don’t care. I turn down enough road meat in a week to feed a family of poor people in India or Europe, or someplace. I’m a rich man, Howie, just because I walk along the highway and put road meat in my bag. This time of year it stays fresh a long time, but sometimes the road salt gets to it and I won’t eat it. Some of the road meat ain’t got a mark on it; I swear it dies from fright. Sometimes it’s all run over. Sometimes it’s so run over you don’t know what it is. One thing I learned is, and that’s that you can’t change guts. I mean you can run over a face until it ain’t a face, but you can run over guts all day and it’s still guts. Some of the road meat, if it’s fresh, still has an expression on the face. Surprise, mostly. A car going sixty miles an hour hits and kills, but it don’t hurt. After a while, maybe five hours, the expression goes away and the thing looks deader than before. I think the expression is the soul of the thing. The meat gets killed real quick, and the soul don’t know what happened for a while, and then when it realizes that the body’s dead, it leaves and that’s when the expression goes away. I think there’s souls everywhere, souls floating around that were once in people and in cows and in dinosaurs from long ago and from fleas and a million other crawling things and hooting things that hoot still, if you listen. I ain’t saying this is all good or all bad, but some of both; I’m saying there’s no place on the face of the earth where a man need feel lonely.”

The Frenchman’s cabin was just barely visible through the trees, although it was only about a hundred feet from the road. Like many shacks and trailers in the county, it had electric power, and a television antenna stuck out of a nearby tree, but there was no inside plumbing. Beside the cabin was a path, which once had been the old stagecoach road from Donaldson to Darby. From the narrow deck of the cabin, Howard could just make out the outline of the old road, flanked by stone walls green with moss, winding up the hill, disappearing. The snow was still deep here; it was hard, crusty, ugly, changing like the forest floor itself. The Frenchman had built the cabin in the woods, it seemed to Howard, so that one could only peek at it through trees as one approached. Even the sun had to peek. In a sweep of the eye he counted eight different kinds of trees: gray birches in clusters, doomed to die in the shade as greater trees rose above and took their light; white birches, which to the Indians must have looked like boats growing out of the ground; maples, whose species he could not immediately identify; a huge wolf pine that left its needles on the snow and on the cabin roof; poplars upslope, an indication of ground water, a spring perhaps; wild cherry trees about six inches in diameter, growing as they liked—in pairs; a single balsam fir forty feet high, straight as a flagpole; and hemlocks, whose bases enveloped rocks as though out of love. “Tough trees—hemlock,” said Howard. Cooty wasn’t interested; he was anxious to get inside, and his shaking hands fumbled with the padlock on the front door. The cabin was tiny, about twelve by sixteen feet, Howard guessed, sheathed with rough pine boards, the building set into the hill on wood piers, dark from creosote preservative. It would have looked like any number of shacks in the New Hampshire woods except for the windows, which were long and very narrow and arched at the top. Howard couldn’t imagine where the Frenchman had got such windows and why he would want to put them in a shack. The effect the windows created was to make the cabin look like a chapel in the great cathedral of the forest.

Inside, a broth bubbled sweetly on the top of the Canadian box stove. The aroma mixed uneasily with the smell of the old man’s sweat, which rose, it seemed, from yellowed sheets on a cot. At the foot of the bed was a television (twelve-inch), which rested on a crudely made dresser, which did not rest but balanced uneasily on collapsed casters, which cut into a floor of pine boards, softly aging to yellow. The furniture included a hot plate, an undersized refrigerator, a GI footlocker with smashed hardware, a folding card table, and one straight-back chair, which, from the severity of its lines, appeared to have been designed to make standing preferable to sitting. However, the cabin was dominated not by the large objects in the room but by a thousand tiny things—apparently things Cooty had found, things that had no relationship to one another, except that someone had thrown them away—which were nailed and tacked and Scotch-taped and glued to Sheetrock walls papered with (of all things) a repeating scene of two little girls chasing butterflies. Howard sat on the cot.

Cooty laid out the things from the sack on the table and stooped over them, touching them, pondering them, judging them, throwing most of them away, displaying the rest: A button was taped to an empty bottle of Canadian Club whiskey; a popsicle wrapper was affixed by a paper clip to a photograph of John Kennedy; a used safety was pulled over a wooden knob, part of a ridiculous Tinker Toy construction hanging by a hair ribbon from a cabin collar tie; and so on. When he had finished, the old man began to breathe differently, as though he were coming out of a trance; and then he sat beside Howard on the cot and put his feet up on the table (thus signaled, Howard did the same), leaned his back against the wall, and lit, with much difficulty, his corncob pipe. Rich curls of Half and Half tobacco smoke filled the room, and Cooty said, “I just took up smoking last month, and boy, I sure like it.”

They talked for an hour, giggling and illogical as two small boys riding in the back of a pickup.

Howard remembered when Freddy and the Mooney kid—what was his name? Alvin or Elvis or Alkali, or some such thing—rode in the back of his truck while he drove them to Yardley Pond on sultry evenings for horn-pout fishing, and the fun they had—fumbling in the dark, swatting mosquitos, staying up too late, stalking fish of no redeeming value.

“Christ, I hate farmers,” Howard said, unaccountably.

Cooty was anxious to tell Howard about the Frenchman, a man respected by his friends—and even by the inmates of the hospital in Concord—for his calmness, his good sense, his good honest Republican distrust of the weird, who nonetheless carried in his heart a secret, dirty dream for twenty years before he made it real and destroyed himself. The Frenchman lived in Keene in a tract house with a big lawn and no trees, with a wife who had babies every other year for ten years. He worked in a shop, behind a drill press, where amidst the repetitive sounds of steel on steel he nurtured his dirty little dream. He managed to save money without his wife’s finding out, and eventually he bought the piece of land where the cabin now sat. Bit by bit, lie by lie, he built the cabin from the blueprint of the dream. The cabin was finished after two years of part-time labor. Here the Frenchman hesitated. He deferred; he compromised the dream. He would tell his wife he was going fishing or hunting or drinking at the Moose, and he would drive to Fitchburg and buy dirty books, and he would take the books to the cabin and read them. Then he would go home and ravage his old lady. She greatly approved of his fishing. But the Frenchman was not fulfilled. In Bellows Falls he found two whores who lived in a trailer park. He would bring the whores to the cabin and make them undress, and while they did dirty things to each other he would take their pictures with a Polaroid camera. The police found the pictures (Cooty pointed to the footlocker) and confiscated them. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. The dream must be brought forth whole.

“I daresay, a man with ideas like that ought to keep ’em to himself,” said Howard.

At this point in the story, they went outside to take a leak; there was no toilet in the house. Cooty used the forest for his bathroom, like any other creature of the woods. When the warm weather came and melted the snow, he would build an outhouse, he said. It was now late afternoon, and the cold had held. It would hold through the night and deep into the morning, Howard guessed. Then would come the melting.

He watched the old man pick his way cautiously among the trees until he found one he liked. What could it be about a tree that made a man want to piss on it? Ridiculous. Howard pissed on the naked snow and walked over to the old man, who had climbed the old stagecoach road a ways.

“Can you hear ’em, Howie?” said Cooty.

Howard strained to listen—and heard the baying of dogs running deer far up in the hills.

“Sometimes they run ’em from my side of the ridge,” said Howard. “More dogs this year. Don’t know why. Do they come down this side much?”

“They stay up there,” said Cooty, pointing skyward. “They run them deer to a strange place.”

“You’ve been up there,” said Howard, and the old man nodded. Howard’s mind was set in motion.

They went back inside and Cooty finished his story about the Frenchman. What the Frenchman really wanted to do with the cabin was to use it for a dollhouse for little girls to play in. He preferred a certain age, about eleven, when a girl is on the brink of changes. He got away with it for about a year. He found girls around school grounds. He would buy them things and be nice to them. Eventually he would take them to the cabin, which he furnished with everything a girl would want—dolls and other pretties—and he would pose them in grown-up women’s underwear, bras and negligees and high-heeled shoes. They liked to pose, the Frenchman claimed. Indeed, some of them thrilled to it. Some he got to pose in the altogether. He never touched the girls; he took his lust out on his wife. Of course the authorities caught him. The odd thing about all this was that they could find nothing wrong with the man. He was neither crazy nor criminal but merely a man bringing a dream into the world of the real. They locked him up anyway.

“The story ain’t true, is it?” Cooty asked, getting, it seemed, to his central question.

“I don’t know,” Howard said. “Could be. Anything anybody can make up probably can happen.”

“Could be,” said Cooty. They let the tale hang there, something about it still untold.

Howard asked Cooty to tell him what he had seen up in the hills. The yards where the deer congregated in the winter were about a mile up in rugged country, the old man said. He had seen the deer earlier, huddled together for warmth, but they were gone now. The dogs had scattered them. Almost round the clock a pack of dogs was chasing deer. The dogs ran the deer, as if by plan, into a steep, narrow valley and killed them. The place was an execution chamber for deer.

Cooty stirred his broth, and Howard could feel hunger, deep and pure, in his belly. Things were becoming clear to him now. The dream, the gun rack, his own rage, even Reason’s foray into his mind—these were signs, which inevitably had led him here. He was a soldier recruited in the service of an unknown army. His stomach was calm; he could feel; the earth seemed a place of vast possibilities. There was work to be done.

He asked the old man to take him up on the ridge.

“It ain’t that I care about the killing,” the old man said mysteriously. “I mean, it wouldn’t hurt me to kill. It would scare me. Course a lot of ’em, kids for example, like to get themselves scared so they can feel the difference when they’re not scared. Not Cooty Patterson. Cooty Patterson is scared about being permanently scared, and is not interested in trucking in activities that start a person on the road to being scared. . . .”

The old man rambled on about subjects beyond Howard’s understanding, and then he fell silent. Finally, he nodded.

They agreed to climb the hill at dawn.

It was now getting toward dark. Howard drove to the general store in Donaldson and called Charlene, telling her to put Heather up for the night. Charlene sounded frightened of him. It made him sad. He considered calling Elenore but changed his mind, not knowing exactly why. He bought two bucks’ worth of gas for the truck, two six-packs of beer, and some cigarettes.

When he returned to the cabin, Cooty served the broth, thickened to a stew now, and bread and butter. The stew was dark and strong. It contained the flesh of rabbit, deer, a strange bird, fat from a porcupine, and numerous vegetables. Cooty was proud of it. The food filled Howard’s belly like dollar bills filling a wallet: He felt fat and rich.

“I found that bird in the woods, fresh dead. Some critter got him and killed him. I watch the birds in the trees, and I come to the conclusion that birds are more like people than the other animals. They don’t like each other. They’re always pecking at each other, chasing themselves for sport, screeching at their neighbor. They fight over a branch; and they fight just to pass the time of day. If you gave a bird a machine gun, he’d shoot up the countryside with it and probably plug his neighbor.”

After the meal Cooty reclined on his place on the bed and watched television. Howard went outside on the deck. It was cold, starlight through the trees. He could just hear the dogs, high up on the ridge. The quality of the sound had changed from the afternoon. It was a different pack, he figured. Apparently the dogs worked the deer in shifts. Some might run the deer for four or five hours, tire and return home for a rest, take water and a light snack, and then go back to the hunt, called by some unknowable command as now Howard himself was called to hunt the dogs. It occurred to him that the earth itself was a living being and all its creatures its living fibers—as, in turn, each of the creatures was full of its own fibers and secrets and ways of their own, unknown by the host, and so on ad infinitum outward into the stars and inward into himself, the whole making up God. He would like to explain this concept to Elenore, he decided, but that was impossible. He would forget; she would not understand. At any rate, the idea, like most of his ideas, had passed through his mind without words, and any attempt to form it into words would fail, indeed might chase it from his mind.

He stayed outside until he got good and cold, and then he went inside and warmed himself by the fire. He watched television with Cooty. The two men drank silently, watching the glowing thing. Aspects of other lives, other places. About ten o’clock they went to bed, Howard lying on the floor by the stove. He ran his fingers through his hair and knew it was full of smells from the cabin. He lay there in the dark, listening to the old man breathing. He was asleep, in a moment it seemed. How was it, he asked himself, that someone as nervous as Cooty could fall asleep so quickly? Amazing. Amazing. So many amazing things.