“Haven’t you read that thing a dozen times already?” Lester hovered at the base of the porch steps, his hand cupped over his forehead in a lazy salute. Nadine let the magazine drop to her lap.
“Don’t get on my case, Lester,” she said. “It’s hot.”
“I’d be happier to see you taking a walk around the perimeter. Maybe check on the rabbit traps.”
“You’d be happier?” She laughed at him. “By all means let me help you with that.”
The truth was, there were plenty of things in Lester that Nadine still felt good about, the same things that pulled her into his pickup truck that day. His eyes, of course—too often Nadine found herself handcuffed by the right shade of blue. The way he cupped her breasts from behind when he held her, the sensation of his unshaven face on her neck, tender more often than simply coarse. And the dozen lines that he recited like some actor in an old movie, the kind of guy with a rain-soaked fedora and a smoldering cigarette hanging from his lip. Not possibly real, except that they felt so genuine in the moment she could have folded them up and kept them in her pocket for the rest of her life.
“I’ve connected with people off and on all my life, but lady, you’ve got your hooks in me.”
“I could fall asleep to the sound of you.”
“I’d put my heart right here on the table, but I think you already stole it.”
Enough of it all still felt good, and the house was warm and still had all the right smells. And as cutting as he could be sometimes, he usually came back to the good, and he didn’t expect a lot from her, and it was all enough to cancel out most of the bad. It was better than it could be, that much was sure.
She took the usual path from the house to the near meadow, hugging the underbrush at the base of the trees, where the cage traps were. Lately they sat empty, sometimes probably due to uninterested rabbits, other times because Nadine had intentionally skipped over with the bait.
She had found herself fascinated with the first meal of rabbit and peas that Lester had prepared for her. She hadn’t eaten rabbit before and the presentation of the whole thing seemed so exotic. The smoky-sweet taste of the meat, and the fact that he’d captured it just for her. She was in the midst of a romance novel, love in the deep woods, a place lost in time. And it stayed like that for a while, Nadine growing to look at the rabbit situation as a sort of competition, a quest to discover all the ways there were to cook the same animal. She’d keep the traps set and ready, and she learned how to skin the things with the skill and precision of a surgeon. But now, well into the second season, she was sick of them, and it seemed like there wasn’t a way in the world to cook rabbit that would hide the gaminess. More and more, all she wanted was chicken.
In a cloud of Oregon grape near the cedar grove there was a commotion of sorts, a rattle of leaves, and Nadine knew right away what was happening. She could see the thing before she even reached it, flailing in a semicircle, its little unlucky foot caught in one of Lester’s nasty snags.
She’d always hated those snare traps, and even when she wanted rabbit she would often sabotage the snares when she found them. The sight of a rabbit cinched by the neck, the dirt and groundcover torn up in a wide circumference made her furious.
“How would you like it,” she asked Lester, “if someone suddenly took you by the throat? Held you there so you couldn’t get away?”
“You say it like it ain’t ever happened.”
No, Nadine decided she’d rather deal a solid club to the rabbit’s head herself, knowing it would be an instant death, than be a party to suffering. This terrified creature, wild-eyed and shaking, the foot swelling but not swollen, wrapped with the wire. She looked back toward the house, but Lester was nowhere.
“There’s no need for cruelty,” her grandfather would say to her, steadying the rifle butt against his shoulder. His eye settled to a wink, peering into the distance. “Be accurate and it’ll be over for her the instant she hears the sound of the shot.” And he’d squeeze his finger and there would be the crack, and Nadine would flinch, opening her eyes in time to see the doe fall to the ground.
She peeled her T-shirt over her head and laid it over the little rabbit like a blanket, pressing gently into the warm body, holding it in place with one hand and working the snare with the other. There was a weak fight and a few squeals of protest that always seemed such an unlikely noise to come from such a fairy tale thing.
Her fingers tugged at the wire and the little foot kicked and twitched, and when it was free, she yanked her shirt away like she was some magician. The rabbit sprung loose from her, disoriented and random at first, then straightening out and bounding off into the understory, a haze of yellow dust in its wake.
“Be smart next time,” she said, then laughed at the irony. “Says the princess living in the castle tower.” She stood and brushed off her jeans and went ahead and continued on her patrol, her T-shirt hanging from her pocket like a flag. The light breeze brushed over her naked skin and she imagined that if her mother would not have approved of her walking topless through the woods, she’d surely have smiled at the distance she achieved in hurling that damned snare trap out into the far cedar grove.