It was late on a dark, moonless night, and they were driving home from a party at their friends’ house on the other side of the city. Although they had been married for almost twenty years, Elliot still loved Susan very much and found her attractive. At the party, he’d glanced at her across the room, and the way she crossed her legs when she sat down made him desire her. Now he was anxious to get home so they could make love. He thought she must be feeling the same way, for her hand was resting on his thigh and she was looking at him while they talked.
They were talking about their friends’ little boy Joey, who had kept running in and out of the living room with a toy machine gun, pretending to shoot everybody. He had laughed like a crazed movie villain while he sprayed the room with bullets, the gun’s plastic muzzle glowing a fiery red. At first, everyone laughed too, but after the fourth or fifth time it stopped being funny. Finally, his father lost his temper, spanked Joey fiercely, and sent him crying to his room. Then his mother apologized to the guests. It was his grandmother’s fault, she said; every time she came to visit, she brought him a gun. He had a half-dozen in his toy box, most of them broken, thank God. But the next time she visited, they were going to tell her they were opposed to children playing with guns. They would have told her earlier but they didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
Elliot and Susan had married during the Vietnam War and, like many parents then, didn’t buy toy guns for their son. But Elliot had played with guns when he was young, and now he was telling Susan about the rifle his father had carved for him out of an old canoe paddle. “I loved that rifle,” he said, as he drove down the deserted street past the sleeping houses. It had been almost as long as a real rifle, and he had worn it slung over his shoulder wherever he went the summer he was nine. Even when his mother called him in for supper, he wouldn’t put it away; he had to have it propped against the table in case the Russians suddenly attacked. As he thought about the rifle, its glossy varnish and its heft, he moved his hands on the steering wheel and could almost feel it again. A thin shiver of pleasure ran through him. “It was my favorite toy,” he said wistfully. “I wonder what happened to it.”
“I used to think it was so awful for kids to play war,” Susan said, lifting her long dark hair off her neck and settling it over her shoulders. “But now I don’t know. Look at this generation of kids that were raised without toy guns—they’re all little Oliver Norths. They’re playing with real guns now. And kids like you—you turned out all right. You wouldn’t even think of going hunting, much less killing someone.”
“At least not anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she said. “You mean you used to hunt?”
Susan was a vegan, and she did volunteer work on Saturdays for the Humane Society. Elliot had told her many stories about his childhood—he had grown up in a small town in another state and didn’t meet her until they were in college—but he hadn’t told her he’d been a hunter. It wasn’t that he considered that fact a dark secret; he just knew she’d be upset and didn’t think it was worth telling her. He hadn’t meant to mention it now either—it had just come out. Perhaps he’d drunk too much wine at the party. Or maybe he’d gotten so lost in his memories of the toy rifle that he spoke before he could think. Whatever, he didn’t want an argument. He was in a romantic mood and he didn’t want anything to destroy it.
“I was a kid,” he explained. “I didn’t know any better.”
“How old were you?” she asked.
“What does it matter?” he said. “You know I wouldn’t even kill a spider now.”
“But you killed something then?”
He could lie now, he realized, and say he’d gone hunting but never shot anything. He could make up a story or two about his ineptitude as a hunter, and she would laugh and everything would be fine between them. But as he’d gotten older, lies had become harder for him. They had come easily to him in his youth, but now they tasted like rust in his mouth.
“Yes,” he said.
She took her hand from his thigh and sat there silently. They passed under a streetlight, and her face flared into view. “Come on, Susan,” he said. “Don’t be mad.”
Then she said, “How could you do it? Why would you even want to do it?”
It was a question he had asked himself from time to time. He had enjoyed hunting and trapping animals as a teenager, but now that he was an adult, he had no desire to do either. He thought of his brutality as a phase he had gone through, a period of hormonal confusion, perhaps, like puberty. But he still remembered the pleasure hunting and trapping gave him, and he still understood it.
“Do we have to talk about this?” he said.
“I want to know,” she said.
He sighed. “Okay. If you really want to know, I did it because I wanted to see if I could hit something a long ways off.” It was the simple truth. It was a thrill to shoot at the empty air half a sky in front of a pheasant or duck or goose and see that emptiness explode with the miraculous conjunction of bird and shot. It was a kind of triumph over chance, over the limitations of time and space, and each time it happened, he felt powerful and alive.
“But you could have shot at targets,” she said.
“Targets don’t move,” he answered.
“What about clay pigeons? They move.”
He wished they hadn’t started this. “Can’t we talk about something else?” he asked. He tried to make his voice as warm as he wished hers would be.
“First answer my question. Why not shoot at clay pigeons instead?”
He considered several lies while he turned onto the avenue that led toward the suburb where they lived. Then he sighed and said, “Because they aren’t alive.”
Susan looked at him. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “My own husband.”
“Come on,” Elliot said. “You’re overreacting.”
“Maybe I am. But I feel like I’m seeing something in you that I never saw before.”
“You’re making me sound like a criminal or something,” he complained.
“I think killing is a crime,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an animal or a person, it’s still murder.”
He’d heard her make this argument many times before, but this was the first time she’d directed it at him personally. He wanted to defend himself, but even more he wanted to regain the romantic mood they were in when they left the party. He drove on in silence. Then she asked, “How did you feel when you killed something?”
He was glad this question had a more human answer. “I felt bad,” he said. “I felt sorry for it.”
“But you kept on hunting?”
“For a while.”
“If you felt so sorry for the animals, why did you keep on killing them?”
He looked at her face then and knew he would have to tell her everything. If he didn’t, she would never forgive him, and everything between them would be changed. He looked back at the road. “It may sound crazy,” he said, “but the first time I shot something, I did it because I felt sorry for it.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
“All right then. I’ll tell you the whole story.” He took a breath. “The first real gun I owned was a .22 pistol. I was thirteen. I’d had the pistol for two or three months, and I’d never shot anything with it except Coke bottles and tin cans. I’d tried to shoot squirrels and birds, you understand, but I’d never hit anything. Then I met this boy. He was a couple of years older than me, and I looked up to him. Frank Elkington. He taught me to shoot and trap.”
“Trap?” she said. “You trapped too? Elliot, I just can’t believe this is you you’re talking about.”
“It isn’t. Not anymore.”
“But it’s who you were. And who you were is part of who you are, isn’t it?”
He didn’t like the way she was cross-examining him like a lawyer, and he thought about making some sarcastic joke about the statute of limitations. But he just stared straight ahead. They were driving through a business district now, and the reflections of neon lights crawled on the windshield. Finally he said, “I don’t have to tell you this. I’m telling it because I love you.”
“I know you do,” she said. “And you know I love you.”
He went on. “Frank trapped mink and muskrat and beaver along the Chippewa River and sold the pelts to a fur processing plant in town. I used to tag along with him when he did his paper route, and one day I went with him while he checked his traps. He was talking about trappers and how they lived off the land. They didn’t breed animals just to slaughter them, he said, and they didn’t keep them penned up either; they let the animals live free in the wild and gave them a sporting chance. He made it sound so noble that I told him I wanted to start trapping too. And he gave me my first trap.”
He paused, remembering that trap. It was a rusty number eleven Victor Long-Spring, and it smelled oddly sulfurous, like the air just after a match is struck. Thinking of the trap did not give him the same pleasure that remembering the wooden rifle did, but it gave him some. He could not deny that.
“Frank showed me how to set the trap,” he continued, “and the next day when we went to check it, there was a weasel in it.” He paused again. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
Susan’s back was against the passenger door now and her arms were crossed over her breasts as if she were cold. She nodded.
“Okay. It was a black weasel. It wasn’t worth much, but I was happy as hell. Frank was congratulating me, shaking my hand and patting me on the back, and I felt proud to have caught something on my first try, even if it was only a weasel. Then I noticed the weasel’s mouth was bright red. I didn’t understand at first, but then I saw its leg. It had started to chew the leg off, but we had gotten there before it could finish.”
“Oh, Elliot, that’s awful,” Susan said, and hugged herself tighter.
“I know. I know. I felt so sorry for that weasel I took out my pistol and shot him four or five times, to put him out of his misery. Frank yelled, ‘What are you doing!’ and grabbed the gun from me. ‘You idiot,’ he said, ‘you’re supposed to shoot it in the head. Now the pelt’s worthless.’”
Elliot could feel Susan looking at him, and he gripped the steering wheel a little harder. “That was the first animal I shot. The next one, I shot in the head, between the eyes, just to prove to Frank—and, I guess, to myself—that I could do it right.”
“And you sold their fur?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“Yes. And that’s how this farmer found out about me. Mr. Lyngen. He got my name from one of the men at the fur processing plant, and he hired me to trap gophers in his bean field. They were damaging his crop, and he didn’t have time to trap them himself. He bought me a case of traps, and he gave me twenty cents a tail. By mid-summer, I’d earned enough to buy a .22 rifle, and by pheasant season I owned a 12 gauge shotgun too.”
“You cut their tails off,” she said. This time it was an accusation, not a question.
Yes, he had. When he’d found a gopher trapped in the entrance to its own burrow, he’d killed it with a single shot to the head, cut off its tail, then buried it in the grave it had dug for itself. He kept the tails in a marble bag tied to his belt, and every week or so when the bag got full, he took it to Mr. Lyngen and collected his bounty.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then Susan said, “What made you stop?”
“Another trapper. A kid named Jake Weckworth. I’d been trapping for a couple of years when he moved to town, and he started trapping too. One morning I went to check my traps, and they were missing. I didn’t know who’d taken them, but I suspected Jake. A few days later, I found the traps set along a creek that ran into the river. I’d scratched my initials into them with a nail, but Jake had filed them off and scratched his own in. I collected the traps and took them to Jake’s house and showed his father what he’d done. That afternoon, Mr. Weckworth brought Jake to my house and made him apologize. Jake mumbled he was sorry, and his father gripped his arm and said, ‘Say it louder.’ So he said it again. I could tell Jake was mad: his jaw muscles were working, and he wouldn’t look at me. But I never expected anything to come of it.” He paused. “I was wrong, of course. The next morning, when I went down to the river to set my traps, he was there waiting for me.”
“Did he beat you up?” Susan asked.
Elliot shook his head. “No. Not really. Mostly, he just threatened me. I was walking along the river, looking for good places to set my traps, and all of a sudden he just stepped out from behind a tree and pointed his 12 gauge at my face. I stopped dead. Then he said, ‘Hello, Richie,’ and smiled. For a second I thought he wasn’t going to do anything. But then he stuck the muzzle of his shotgun against my throat. ‘I ought to kill you,’ he said, and poked me with the shotgun, hard. And he kept on poking me until I was crying and gasping for breath.”
It had happened twenty-five years ago, but as he described it, he could feel the cold steel against the soft flesh under his Adam’s apple. He touched his throat gingerly with his fingertips as he steered the car through the dark tunnel formed by the huge oaks that lined the street. In a few minutes, they’d be home. In a few minutes, he’d walk into his house, a grown man with a son who was himself almost grown. It seemed amazing that all these years had passed and, at the same time, somehow not passed too.
“That’s terrible,” Susan said. “What happened then?”
“Not much. He took the traps back and warned me not to tell his father or ever show my face in the woods again. If I did, he said, he’d kill me.”
“He couldn’t have meant it,” she said. “He must have just been trying to scare you.”
Elliot thought for a moment. “Probably. But I don’t know. He looked like he meant it.” He turned to Susan. “There was something in his eyes. It may sound strange, but it was something like fear. Not fear exactly, but close to it. I remember thinking, Here he is, the one with the gun, and he’s afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” she asked.
He looked away. “I’m not sure. Afraid he might actually do it, I think. Afraid he was capable of it. Maybe even afraid he’d enjoy it.”
He didn’t know whether he should say anything more. Then he did. “I wanted to kill him, Susan.” And as he said those words, he remembered picturing Jake dead, his face turned to pulp by a shotgun blast, and for an instant he felt again the comfort and pleasure that thought had given him then. Leaning back in his seat, he let out a slow breath. Then he continued. “I never did it, of course, but I thought about it for weeks. And night after night, I dreamed about it. I must have killed him a hundred times in my dreams.”
Susan was silent. He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, he turned to look at her. He had thought she was punishing him with her silence, thinking thoughts she didn’t dare let bleed into words, and he expected to see her glaring at him, her face a mask of anger and disgust. But even in the dark, her face looked pale, and she was wincing as if his words had wounded her. “Susan?” he said. And then she put her hands over her face and began to cry.
Elliot turned away. He had tolerated her self-righteous questions, but her tears angered him. She wasn’t crying for him and what he had gone through; she was crying for herself, pitying herself for having married a man who had once killed animals and dreamed about killing a human being. She had no right to take his past so personally. It was his past, not hers. And she had no right to judge him.
“In one dream,” he went on, his voice thick with a bitterness that was directed more at her now than at Jake, “I trapped him just like an animal. His foot was caught in the trap, and he couldn’t get it out. He kept asking me to let him go, but I just—”
“Stop it,” Susan said. “Please stop it.”
And then he was ashamed of hurting her, and of wanting to hurt her. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t want you to—” But he couldn’t explain. He sighed, then drove on without talking for a while. When he finally spoke, his voice was gentle. “I know it’s awful even to think about killing someone,” he said, “and I don’t know why I did it. I’ve never felt that way about anyone else, not ever. All I know is that it wasn’t real, it was just a fantasy. I never really considered doing it.” He glanced at her. “You know that, don’t you?”
She was drying her eyes with a Kleenex. She nodded.
“At any rate, that was the end of my hunting and trapping. I never went back to the woods, and the next time my mom had a garage sale, I sold the rest of my traps and all my guns.”
He looked at her and tried a smile. “That’s it,” he said. “The whole story. The End. Fini.”
She didn’t return his smile. “I’ve never wanted to kill anything,” she said. “I can’t imagine feeling that way.” Then she added, almost as if she were talking to herself, “It makes me wonder. What if he hadn’t threatened you? Would you have kept on hunting and trapping? Would you be the same person you are now? Would you even be married to me?”
“You’re making too much of this,” he said. “It happened years ago. I didn’t even know you then.”
“I know,” she said.
“It was a big mistake to tell you this,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Susan said. “I don’t mean to make you feel bad. It’s just that I never thought of you like this before. I always thought you were different from the kind of people who hunt and trap.”
“I am,” he said.
“I know. I just had too much to drink tonight, and I’m taking everything too serious. I’ll feel fine tomorrow.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear that.”
Then they were out of words. They drove the last few blocks in silence, and when he had parked the car in their garage, they got out and went quietly into the house. Stepping softly so they wouldn’t wake their son, they went down the hall to their bedroom. There, they undressed slowly in the dark, then put on their pajamas, got into bed, and lay on their backs, breathing quietly. Susan’s hand was lying palm down on the sheet beside him, and he traced its small bones lightly with a fingertip. After a while, she moved her hand away. “Goodnight,” she said, and turned her back to him.
Elliot lay there for a long time, looking at the dark ceiling. He could tell by Susan’s breathing that she was still awake, but he knew she didn’t want to make love now, or even talk, so he didn’t say anything. But after a few more minutes, he couldn’t bear the silence anymore. Turning to her, he said, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she answered.
But still she kept her back to him. He lay there on his side, facing her rigid back, awhile longer, until the distance between them was too much of an affront. Then he put his hand on her shoulder and, whispering her name, turned her beautiful body toward him.