The Night of Trees Read online

  Murray was still trying to explain, and if there had been a moment in which to clear the air, it had passed.

  “Maybe they won’t kill everybody, O.M., but I’m afraid—I mean I’m really scared—that they’ll kill…I know this sounds stupid and romantic! I’m afraid they’ll kill the one I’m looking for. Isn’t that stupid?”

  “You’re looking for somebody?”

  “Yes, I’m looking and looking,” Murray said; then he smiled, and added, “I’m not really crazy, O.M., am I?”

  “I’ve always taken what I’ve had,” Richard said.

  “I suppose you have, O.M.”

  Again, was there irony? He tried to explain: “What I mean is, why do you want to cover so much ground? Where are you going, to do all this looking? What do you want, a girl? You’ve always had plenty of girl friends, Murray. You want to go on some silly quest, like a knight of the round table?”

  “On my trusty Volkswagen,” Murray said, laughing.

  “But what’s the hurry? You’re only twenty years old, Murray. Why don’t you finish college first? Listen, you’ll be surprised how things happen. You’ll meet her, all right.”

  “The hurry is that I don’t think they’ll give me the time, that’s all. You know I don’t go for this ’you were meant for me’ stuff, and you know I’m not silly enough to think that marriages are made in heaven and all that crap, O.M., but even you allow that we might start blowing each other up any time now. Sometimes I don’t even dare read the papers or listen to the radio. And I’ve got so much I want to do!” Murray did seem almost desperate, and Richard wondered if, possibly, it was the impending divorce that helped to make Murray afraid for the world—if Murray thought now that all contracts could be broken as easily as the one between his own mother and father.

  Wait a minute! He had been so nervous before that he hadn’t thought—he swung his legs over and picked up his mail. There it was, a long envelope with a familiar set of names on it. He’d vaguely thought that it was a bill. Troy, Sherman and Kaplan, Attorneys at Law. Rachel’s lawyers, recommended by her buttinsky sister Ruth, of course. He opened the letter and saw one word before he put it back on the table, face down. The word was divorcement. Well, it would not be impending much longer. Time? Maybe his son was right, and no one ever gave anyone else enough time. What could he do now? He’d known it was coming, but that strange legal word seemed to prove it for good and all. What could he do? He felt a little sick. Go screw Opal? At the thought a little thrill hit him somewhere in his spine—a little tremor. By God, he was still a young man, wasn’t he? Maybe he could go seduce Rachel! Oh, you ass, he thought, you blithering ass! He wanted his wife again, but he couldn’t ever have her again. No amount of pride in his manhood, not even the most sanguine, jumped-up optimism could hide the fact: knowing her, knowing himself, it was impossible. He had let her drift too far down that murky stream they called analysis, where the kind-looking fish nibbled away at parts of you called motives, or emotions, where there was neither privacy nor responsibility. Now she was gone into that alien place the air of which he couldn’t even breathe, and all the time he had stood proudly by, waiting for what he considered to be his by right, by talent and by law. What the hell was I doing? he asked himself, Is there some principle of human relationships, some little formula, that nobody ever told me about?

  “What’s the matter, O.M.?” Murray asked, his voice full of worry and kindness.

  How could he answer his son? He might despair, throw all his worries and inadequacies down at Murray’s feet and take whatever comfort Murray had to offer. Yes, there was a great weariness in him, and he was an old man, and here was his only son who had turned out, God knew how, to be a big, generous, and forgiving man, a man with whom he might be so completely honest that neither dignity nor pride would matter at all any more.

  “Murray,” he said, but at that moment there was a tap-tap on the door, and he thought, Why, the little fool! The silly bitch! Doesn’t she know! Murray opened the door, and Richard was tremendously relieved to see that it was only Shim.

  A strange-looking Shim. He wore, over his wrinkled, baggy hunting clothes, a once-white butcher’s apron, now smeared with the pale juices of meat; in places the cloth was pink, in places it was grimy, where dirt had rubbed into grease. The hilt of his Randall knife, as greasy as his hands and forearms, protruded rakishly from its leather sheath, which he wore belted over the apron. He leaned against the doorframe, and his face was pale, orange-pink, as if it had received its own ration of gore. His eyes were glittery, yet not quite in focus; he looked stunned. Richard thought of a soldier—say a Tartar warrior after a victory that had turned into slaughter, and the act had become, though still pleasurable, intoxicating, even cloying. Then Shim raised a tumbler of cider—one reason for the stunned eyes—and drank. A drop of cider hung, pierced by reddish bristles, on the tip of his chin.

  “What, you hunters?” he said, “to beddy-bye so bloody early ?” And he leaned ’way back to laugh silently, his red mouth wide open. He beckoned to them with a greasy finger. “Come on, I’ll show you a shecret. Come on, come on, won’t take a shecond! My goodness! I can’t hardly talk straight!”

  He turned, and they couldn’t refuse; Shim never took refusal into his considerations. Richard put on his loafers and followed after Murray. Shim, he was almost certain, purposely exaggerated his drunkenness. He wavered from side to side on the stairwell, and balanced himself in a hippy, rather effeminate way, as if he were trying to slink.

  The kitchen was empty, Zach having put away his television and gone to bed. Shim went under the sink for the gallon jug of cider (did Shim know who had carried it upstairs?) and though he poured the three glasses unsteadily, he didn’t quite spill any. He was not really drunk, and Richard warned himself to be careful; he hadn’t the slightest idea how Shim would react to a certain bit of knowledge, except that Shim enjoyed violence. The warning, however, was to himself: he must consider the situation dangerous, for he found it hard to do so. Wasn’t Shim, for all his crazy, ominous posturings, a cuckold, and probably impotent? Yes, but what had that to do with violence of another sort? He had better not relax at all in front of the man. Shim’s ironies, the constant expression he wore of secret, shameful knowledge—who knew what dirty things he knew? Again Richard was reminded of a cat, because a cat seemed so stupid, and yet it seemed also to know so very much. How did a cat get its information? There were ways, he supposed, that an ordinary man could not understand, circuits he could not perceive, and a cat had to act out of suspicion, remember; he couldn’t afford to wait for proof.

  Shim presented them with huge tumblers of the pale cider, then beckoned them on, grinning, grinning his filthy grin, down into the cellar. The light was on, and when they had descended into the cool, unmoving air, Shim turned in the light that was at the same time glaring and inadequate, and put his finger along his nose. “Shecret, you hunters. Oh, ain’t I a shneak!”

  So Shim was going to show them his Bluebeard’s closet, and try to shock them. Richard stood in the cellar next to his son, both audience, and Shim did a weird dance, waving his arms like a magician before he would reveal the secret door. Richard suddenly remembered, with much wonder now that the moment had safely passed, that he had been about to pour out his insecurities, his perplexities upon Murray! What a terrible slough he must have been in at that moment! Or had he, really, been about to tell Murray that he was so unhappy—no, probably not. How could he, when he didn’t feel that way at all any more? It was impossible to remember the sadness he must have felt, the self-pity he must have been about to indulge in.

  Finally Shim pulled at the false vent pipe, and it turned into an insulated door and slowly swung open onto the violently white and red room, white where the fluorescent light glared on the white walls, rich, gaudy red on the meat. Shim had been busy—he must have been here all evening, from the work he’d done. The two does that had been skinned were now all butchered, and most of the meat had been se
aled in plastic for the freezer that took up one end of the room. And he had thought, just because Shim’s shotgun hadn’t been upstairs in its usual place, that Shim was on the mountain. That kind of carelessness, he supposed, came directly out of the rut. He must be more careful.

  The third doe’s skin had been peeled down below the ribcage, and the effect of those rags and flaps of loose skin hanging below the bright meat was one of half-nakedness, as though it were somewhat indecent for the doe to be half-clothed. And then he saw the slit up her belly to her brisket, and in the dark crack there gleamed the ivory insides of ribs.

  All at once Shim seemed quite sober. “I ain’t a pig, you understand, but I do like my deer meat. I don’t cut down the herd much! You believe it? Look!” He swung the half-skinned doe around, spread her legs, and jammed a stick of wood between her hocks to hold her open. Out came the Randall knife, and he made two expert slits from her rectum upward, then neatly peeled out her whole sexual apparatus.

  “Look here,” he said. “I always leave these parts in until I git to where I can see better.” He laughed at his night work. “So’s I can tell. Now this doe should have been bred this year. See here.” He held up the long tube, silver-white and pink, with the ovaries and womb on the end of it, neatly slit it part way with his knife, and ran it inside out with expert, show-off fingers. “Look, she’s a lousy virgin! So damn many does around, why, the poor buck, he can’t get to all of ’em. This here’s what we call a ’boarder.’ She eats the food but she don’t produce.” His finger came out of the tube with a sucking sound. “So you see, dear judge, I really done the state a favor!” He bent back and giggled, then took a sip of cider. “Drink up!” he said, frowning at them.

  Murray seemed interested, but somewhat detached; his expression was inscrutable, but he paid attention. In himself Richard detected surprising pleasure. He liked the neatness of the scene of an hour before. While he was upstairs with this man’s wife (why should his having cuckolded Shim make him feel so friendly toward him now?), this carnivore was down here in the cellar dismembering with unnatural glee his female victims. It should, probably, have struck him with at least some horror, but it did not. It absolutely did not; he enjoyed the idea very much, but why, in God’s name, he would never know.

  Was Opal up in her bed thinking about him? He had to suppress a grin; he felt very strong (the cider? He’d finished his) and somehow in charge; wasn’t he the man, among them all?

  “Hard work, you know?” Shim said. “This critter’s too cold to skin easy, and I damn near pulled my fingernails off.” He swung the doe around. “But have a look at that pretty little backstrap! Tender? Man, I could eat that raw! That’s what I was thinking about before—how about I cut us three nice pieces out of this one’s back, we take ’em up and just sear ’em under the electric broiler? Ain’t as good as charcoal, but tender?” He licked his red lips with a red tongue.

  Richard was hungry. He also had been at some tiring work. Again he suppressed a grin. It, too, made you hungry. This illicit tenderloin also looked good to him. He had to swallow some saliva. “Sounds fine,” he said.

  “Murray?” Shim asked.

  “After that supper we had?” Murray was acting, now, and Richard felt somewhat betrayed—a strange sense of loss, very slight but there, that Murray did not want to join them at their meat.

  “Man,” Shim said disapprovingly, “this stuff is just like candy. Melts in your mouth.”

  “You go ahead,” Murray said. “I’m pretty tired, as a matter of fact. I think I’ll just hit the sack.”

  Shim shrugged his shoulders, and it seemed to Richard that he sneered just as he turned away—a little sneer that just barely disarranged his lips for a moment. Then out snicked the Randall knife, and with a few neat incisions Shim separated the tenderloin from the groove along one side of the doe’s spine. Dark red, rich without fat, a roll of meat came loose that was about two inches in diameter. “I could eat it like a banana,” Shim said, held it up to his mouth and pretended to do so, his teeth clicking on air.

  He led them out of the secret room and then carefully shut the door. “You got your glasses?” he asked. He certainly pretended to be drunk no longer, but trotted right up the cellar stairs, the meat in one hand and his glass in the other.

  Murray stopped in the middle of the stairs and turned, diffidently, toward Richard. “O.M.,” he said, “what I did want to talk about before…”

  “What, Murray?” Richard said. He looked up at his son, at his son’s youthful face that was so much like his own and yet so difficult to read. In the kitchen Shim was banging around with the broiler pan.

  “I wanted to ask about leaving—when I can go.”

  “When you can go?” Was he keeping Murray here? Was it like that? Of course. It was like that, but he had envisioned a time of comradeship and hunting; now he was merely keeping his son to a promise. “When do you want to go?”

  “I’d like to leave tomorrow morning,” Murray said, sympathy, even some pain in his voice. Also much determination.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Richard said vaguely. He could hardly justify a plea for Murray’s staying. What had he done but pursue his own game? Suddenly he was desperate. This all must stop, and his life must resume some of its former meaning and order. He was a father, and at least for a while yet, a husband. He loved his wife and son, he really did. Why must everything around him that was his, that not only was his, but was so perfect for him, so delightful to him, leave him? Mine, he thought. And now my son, leaving me for some quest I can’t join in on, can’t even understand. For a moment he felt like a man whose arms had been cut off at the elbows.

  “Please, Murray,” he heard himself say, “please stay one day more. We’ll hunt together tomorrow. How about it? Will you?” Then he watched Murray’s determination change through what he must believe to be love. Of course; hadn’t he counted on Murray’s generosity? Hadn’t that quality in Murray always won out? He and Rachel both had depended on it far more than either of them ever deserved. His son’s hand reached down and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “OK, O.M.,” Murray said. “One more day. Maybe we’ll score tomorrow.”

  They went on upstairs into the kitchen, where Shim was slicing the backstrap. “Sure you won’t change your mind, Murray?” Shim said without looking up.

  Murray didn’t answer. He had gone to the window, and he looked out into the dark.

  “I think it’s snowing,” he said. Richard and Shim both went to the door, and the three of them went outside into air colder than it had yet been that year.

  “Cold!” Shim said. Yes, it was snowing, those grainy little balls not much bigger than Number Nine shot that always seemed to come first, before the first real flakes of the year came down. Their tic-tic-tic was audible on the ground, especially on the odd dry leaves scattered in little drifts near the doorway, and were cool little dots and dashes on their ears and hands. The moon should have been above the roofpeak of the barn, Richard estimated, but the barn stood square and high, black against blackness, and the little snow closed the sky in and down, so that it seemed to hover just a few yards overhead.

  Each year the first snow brought back his childhood, and it had always seemed that in that season, on that very day all through his life, he had been expectant and happy. The light from the door behind them, and from the windows, threw their shadows out, where they cut strange holes in the air, and the snow disappeared where their shadows loomed—really, it was more as if their shadows pierced a warp of tiny white threads, and then the threads began again just before they hit the ground and turned miraculously into the tiny bouncing grains. He held out his hand, and the grains bounced and quickly, as they hit again, melted on his palm; it was such a delicate, tender feeling they gave him that it didn’t seem they could have been made of ice.

  “If this keeps up!” Shim said. “Well, one thing: no more night work for me—but I got enough meat anyway.” In the snow it would be too easy for Spoone
r to follow the trail of a jacked and dragged deer right back to Shim’s cellar window.

  “Maybe we’ll find them tomorrow,” Richard said. He was still full of remembered joy; other years and other expectations mixed themselves in with the new snow, and he believed that they would find the deer, even though he knew that it wasn’t that easy. It was easy enough to find tracks, but the deer were also aware that they left tracks, and they moved farther and kept a more distant watch upon the hunters. If they bedded, their trails would lead downwind, so that they could smell a hunter long before he appeared, or the trail would loop past their point of vision, so that they might lie in their beds a few yards away and see who came plodding after them; or by many intricate jumps and side steps and doublings back they could make their cuneiform patterns frustrating and unreadable.

  The snow was a clean wind in his nose—a kind of frosty nonsmell that somehow had character to it. He felt immediately younger—younger even than the men who stood beside him, and he looked toward them with an unspoken, youthful challenge: who would get a deer?

  Shim went back inside to prepare the steaks, and for a while Richard stood next to Murray as they watched the snow, which began to turn, now, into slightly flatter, slower-falling crystals. He put his hand on Murray’s shoulder, the snow there cool against his palm, and said, “Tomorrow we’ll see a deer.”

  Murray turned and smiled at him, his hair frosted with glittering flakes—even his eyebrows decorated with lights. “You mean one with his skin on, O.M.?”

  “Yes, with his skin on, and maybe a good rack, too. How about it?”

  “It makes me think of other times we hunted,” Murray said. He sounded very old—nostalgic, maybe, but happy in the memory. “Remember when I got my Mauser, and you made them let me keep it at school?”