44
Day of My Death
The memory of my mother with her knife has faded. It’s my own knife I’m thinking of now. If Uncle Jim hadn’t given me that field kit for my seventeenth birthday, none of this would have happened.
It was Daniel who insisted we go that last night, who directed me a good ten miles out of town. Earlier in the day, he’d asked me to pick him up from football practice. He wanted to surprise Sammy by showing up unannounced at her place. That didn’t sound like a great plan to me, but who was I to question?
As soon as he jumped into the truck, I knew something was off. His voice was too loud, and he was swearing about everything and nothing and laughing at weird times. He used to do that when we were little kids to keep himself from crying.
Out of the blue, he said, “Didn’t your uncle give you a new field-dressing kit a while back?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Want to test it out?”
I didn’t. I wanted to drop him off and go searching for Red. She was all I could think of. “It’s not deer season.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“But you’re going to Samantha’s.”
“Naaaah. Let’s go hunting. You got anything better to do?”
“Maybe I do,” I said.
That caught his attention. I never had anything better to do.
“Like what? Like a girl?”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure I’d find Red again, and I didn’t want to jinx it.
He studied me a long while, like he was reading my face. “You’ve got nothing,” he said. “Believe me.”
I started to turn to take him home. He grabbed the wheel and jerked it. Just a little. Just to shake me up. “Come on. I know you got that field kit in back.”
“What will your dad say?”
“He won’t say anything.”
“But your rifle. He’ll hear you come in.”
“I’ll use yours,” Daniel said, pulling it from the rack behind our heads.
“And me?”
“You get to dress it out. That’s what you get.”
A COUPLE HOURS IN, Daniel lit the lantern he’d slung across his back and hung it on a scrawny pine. I guzzled a beer and checked out the kill, a muscular six-point buck. Daniel had landed the perfect shot, back third of the neck.
The buck stared at us, his eyes looking fake, which was good, because I felt bad enough. Kept thinking how that beautiful animal had been bounding and running around, enjoying its life, probably humping a cute doe here and there. It seemed kind of a waste.
Every time we killed something, I went through this. But as my dad taught me, “It’s not like they were going to live forever anyway.” Once, in meeting for worship, I heard Daniel’s father say, “From death, life springs,” which I liked and made me think that on a net basis maybe a kill didn’t change all that much. Though I doubt that was his point.
I took the last swig and got started, everything by the book: screaming-sharp blades, rubber gloves, and those first careful incisions around the anus. Daniel slugged back a beer, narrating the action in mock hushed tones: “Ladies and gentlemen, quiet, please. The buck fucker’s going for it. Shhhh. Check out that form . . . straight hard in at that bunghole . . . and . . . and . . . he nails it!”
He’d been on me all week, more than usual, even, puffing out disgusted breaths every time I said something, calling me a “pathetic dumbshit” when anyone was around. Now he fell quiet. I sliced off the testicles, then dissected around the penis and slid it through the same opening as the anus. Daniel popped open another Bud and handed it to me. I chugged it down, switched to my gut-hook knife, and slit the belly from pelvis to rib cage. The hot, coppery odor of fresh blood rose up. I didn’t so much as scratch the entrails or we’d have been dealing with a whole new order of stink.
Daniel started grumbling about Sammy. A while back she’d been the one nagging for a commitment, but the tables had turned. She was applying to Ivy League schools and had a decent shot of getting in. Rumor had it that she was planning on dumping him. I half wondered if she already had.
“Why would she want to be with those asswipes on the East Coast?” he said.
I severed the windpipe from the base of the skull, my new blade slicing that tough cartilage like warm butter. I half listened to him singing that song of loss, surprised it’d taken him so long to figure out that if a girl’s smarter than you and beautiful besides, it’s your ass that’s going to get kicked.
That’s when his eyes slid sideways at me. “Hey, dickbreath.” He waited till I stopped, till he had my full attention. “I did that girl from the park.”
“What girl?” I said. He didn’t mean Red. That wasn’t possible.
“You know. From a couple days back. That skanky redhead. That ‘better’ thing you had to do tonight. That girl.”
And even then it took a moment, because the Red I knew was most definitely not a skank. She was beautiful. Her green eyes radiated crazy fierce sweetness, wounded yet tough as hell.
I did that girl from the park. I kept hearing it in my head, but I don’t remember feeling pissed or jealous or anything at all, really. Like I said, he had to be talking about somebody else. I don’t remember moving. I only remember seeing an odd twitch of his lips, like he was enjoying how those words tasted in his mouth. And then somehow I was airborne, that blade singing through the air.
When it struck his neck, our eyes met and the same thought flashed over our faces: What the fuck?
In all our years together, I’d never before landed so much as a single solid punch on the guy. No one could dodge incoming like Daniel Balch. The pure blind luck of such a spectacular hit, something straight out of a kung fu movie, would have made us burst out laughing, would have brought us back from our hateful last week. The two of us would’ve been snorting and rolling around on the damp ground, puking from laughing so hard, just like we had when we were kids. “You should have seen the look on your face!”
But of course Daniel’s neck was severed clean through, and I’d swear it was my own blood that was spilling out of him.
It’s hard to explain why I kept hacking after that, except that it was necessary, what with his eyes screaming every kind of pain at me and him gurgling and drowning in that horror show of a throat. I loved the guy. Who else was going to make it stop?
When it was over, I pressed myself up, his blood still warm on my skin. I told myself I’d only been kidding around, swinging at him like that. What were the odds he’d lean forward at the exact wrong moment? A freak accident. The freakiest of the freakish. But I knew better. For those few seconds, I wanted him dead. I wanted him dead with a clarity beyond thought. Maybe not the moment before or the moment after, but while I was swinging and whaling on him.
It’s strange how you discover what’s been hiding in you all along.
I’M LYING ALONE ON THIS BED, but I swear I hear Red breathing somewhere near. I whisper to her, tell her she’s in no way to blame. I was born with the potential to explode. She had seen that.
As for the fuel that propelled me into the air? It had been loaded over the years, one tiny drop at a time.
