Brennan Dodge I Smell Like Beef

May 30, 2022 Post a Comment

Items Pending Protective Enclosure

Téa Obreht

One evening most 30 years subsequently, a phone call from an unknown number. The ringing brings your hubby out of the kitchen, ladle still in hand. This is the prelude to the but scenario that keeps him up at night: some stranger, a kelp-rig medic perhaps, interrupting dinner to notify you that your son has been killed, washed overboard somewhere off the coast of Cambria amongst the gray roil and blast of the Pacific.
     To flaunt your immunity to these catastrophic fantasies, you let the telephone ring and band.
     Tom'southward smiling, but he doesn't find it funny. "Pick upwards, Syl." Then, after a moment: "Fine. Why don't I just cancel our anniversary picnic and volunteer u.s. for roadside cleanup instead? I know how you dear scraping those possums off the freeway."
     When you finally lift the phone to your ear to evangelize the usual greeting—"Rayles-Brennan residence, home of the Arbor Cottages in scenic Grey'due south Canton!"—you get the current of air knocked out of y'all. It'south not a medic. Not a telemarketer. Not the Mammalian Gene Bank of the Rocky Mountains inquiring if you lot'd like to increment your annual donation.
     Information technology's Wade. Your Wade. Then long-lost that his name overcomes y'all as showtime a sensation and and so a smell earlier finally taking lettered form. Wade Dufrane. Calling from some other lifetime, his voice as familiar equally your own, saying: "Syl?" And then: "I knew yous'd sound exactly the same."
     In a minute, information technology will hit you that of course you sound the same. But for now—for this particular 2nd—there's simply that i-annotation whiff of Fell Gulch in January, of pino and woodsmoke, of you at twenty, assisting your father up the narrow stairs to the part of Serenity Pods overlooking Chief Street. Through his coat sleeve, Dad'southward elbow feels like a pocketbook of bolts. Somewhere outside, the Rendezvous Trio is fiddling an overzealous ii-footstep for the do good of the tourists.
     Serenity Pods occupies the attic above the Well Digger'due south Wallet Saloon, where your babyhood friend Kenny Kostic tends bar. In the six years you've been helping him oust inebriates, you've never thought to investigate where the dorsum stairwell leads.
     Dad'due south monstrous shirt hides the black threads of more than than a dozen mole excisions. Six-foot-three and down to 140 pounds, he'southward taken pale frailty to another level. And now here's Wade Dufrane, tall and ginger-stubbled, good-looking in the style of people who don't know it, manning the front desk-bound in a white linen getup.
     The place looks like a celestial break-room. Everything hums: the bare bulbs, the sleek computer console, the wall painted up like a field of tree-brindled snowfall. At its center stands a thick black elm. Its roots twisrayt around a subterranean teardrop, in which a glyphic body lies folded.
     Wade maneuvers you both to the sofa with pamphlets and rank gray tea, and then carefully sits betwixt you.
     "And then—which of you is looking forward to reabsorption?"
     While Wade talks your father through the marketing collateral, you effort to smother your irritation. Let Dad get the reassurance he needs: that he'southward doing the correct thing, that pod burial restores soil nutrients, that you just don't go this kind of solace from a coffin.
     "Something virtually committing to reabsorption just gives folks a sense of peace," Wade says. "I know information technology did for me."
     Conveniently, Wade's own father had signed the entire family unit upwardly for pod burial back when the process was yet new. "Not to mention far more expensive," Wade says, skirting around the cost, "merely I figured: if it could showtime some of my parents' debts to our world, worth every penny."
     You can't help yourself: "Nonetheless hither you lot are, sucking air and drinking h2o—I guess that means your folks are still in arrears."
     Dad says: "Syl. Please."
     Wade, equally it happens, came dangerously shut to reabsorption when he was a teenager. Some vague cardiac incident briefly killed him en road to the hospital. He perceived himself floating up, higher up the gurney, above the bald EMT trying to resuscitate him. Of his three remaining sensations—besides filial love and the strange, sulfuric odor of his chest hair frying under the paddles—what stood out nigh was how complete he felt, knowing that he would presently requite sustenance to a new tree. Even his miraculous render to his trunk, and the continuation of his life, oasis't dispelled the strength of that feeling.
     Dad nods gravely. Equally if Wade'south story has firmed the legs of a newborn notion.
     "We want to take a couple of days," you say, standing to get out. "Consult with the residual of the family."
     The residue of the family consists of an uncle in Cleveland who hasn't returned your father'due south calls in years and the dog who's been underfoot ever since the combined chaos of veterinary school and bartending forced Kenny to carelessness her at your house.
     Wade insists you have all the time yous need. "It'southward a tough mind-shift. In the end, we're all just items awaiting protective enclosure. Almost of us have a vision of what that is—a bury, an urn. Not everyone tin get used to the idea of a tree. But remember that with a Quiet Pod, the whole world is your memorial."
     The trouble is, he really means it. The spell is cast. All the way home, Dad rests his caput dreamily against the window. The tram winds past the Refuge boundary, past Highness Park, with its cocoa stands and skate rentals and brightly bundled husks of winter tourists, and then up Painter's Knoll, where the constellated hillside mansions recall the Fell Gulch of twenty years ago, when people were withal able to convince themselves that everything would work itself out somehow, equally it always had before.
     Your father had been one of those people. And so came the Posterity Initiative, and a complete 180. He spent your unabridged childhood collecting prairie grasses for the Rocky Mountain Seed Vault, tallying pollinators, educational activity you lot to culture penicillin. All the while bewailing what was lost: bacon and air travel and elephants. Things you would never take, cheers to his generation'southward excesses.
     Y'all could never see the indicate of his retrospective manus-wringing.
     At abode, Dad fans the pamphlets out on the dining tabular array. He shouts pull quotes over the cleft of your pocketknife on the cutting board: "Did you lot know that the average Serenity Pod offsets two people'south worth of carbon dioxide a year?"
     "If it'south so make clean, they should be paying y'all to commit to it. Not the other style effectually."
     "Ha."
     "Don't you recall this is all a flake premature?" He looks up from the blue columns of numbers on his napkin. "Nosotros haven't got the biopsy results dorsum. Y'all're probably non even dying."
     "Well," he shrugs, "someday."
     The prospect of this "someday"—whose advent he'south attempted to advance at least twice—sends you lot dorsum to Serenity Pods one cloudy afternoon a few days later. Alone this fourth dimension.
     Wade, still in his diaconal finest, tries to bring yous effectually. "Tell me what'south giving you interruption."
     "Guilt rules my begetter's life. And now he's got it in his head that putting twelve grand down on a burial he might not fifty-fifty need—knock forest—is the all-time style to square his ecological debts."
     "It'south not a bad identify to beginning."
     "Yeah, well. We run a housekeeping service. It'due south about all we can do to keep the lights on."
     Serenity Pods, information technology turns out, offers a payment program. Wade pivots to show you the literature on making reabsorption attainable to everyone.
     You tell him you take all the pamphlets at dwelling. "I didn't come up hither for more than of the company line."
     He tilts his head a piffling, and says, "All right"—which is when yous go all warm. You sit there, blowing ripples across the smoggy surface of your tea.
     "How did you die?"
     "Well, I guess in the cease I didn't."
     As he resumes his pitch nearly soil renewal and generational duty, y'all're disappointed in his failure to intuit what y'all actually want to know: whether at that place's a crack of calorie-free and an eventual shore to dying, or merely darkness similar you suspect. When the fourth dimension comes, will trenching your male parent in a shawl total of seeds, then that filaments and roots tin can suck away everything that made him who he was, somehow render the one-time more likely? You can't bring yourself to say: I'thou afraid my father will just cease to exist.
     "I'd similar to hear more most burial from someone who doesn't go commission selling it to me."
     Wade laughs outright—a existent express mirth, earnest plenty to furrow his whole nose. "Believe information technology or non, there's fuck-all money in pod sales."
     "Yeah? What well-nigh this?" You claw a finger under his tunic collar to reveal the strap of his FieldSight 5000s—the latest model, the one you've been eyeing for months—and you're instantly embarrassed. Is information technology wrong to touch on a human who dresses similar a monk?
     "Those are an oversight." Somehow, he's managed to catch your wrist. "They're for my other job. I commonly remember not to wear them hither."
     "I didn't think revenant pod people needed side gigs."
     He smiles that smile. Huge white teeth from hither to doomsday. "If anything, this is the side gig. The other's more than of a calling."
     Which is how you get your start shed-hunting with Wade Dufrane.

All winter yous migrate forth trails and fire roads together in the blue hours before sunrise. Geese vault overhead. Thick mists leave the Bitterroot peaks and come up coursing down into the Refuge. You grow to love the cold walk from your porch to the corner where Wade picks yous up, the bitterness of his whiskey-laced java, the way the snowpack warps your bulky shadows. Together, y'all scout tracks, cut and climb fence, disable cameras, dodge patrols, sift through acres of deadfall in your pursuit of the shed antlers of bull elk.
     Near of the sheds have spent a decade or more surreptitious, a vestige of the days of the great herds that once wintered effectually Cruel Gulch. Generations of cast bone. Brittle scimitars snared in tree roots, or forking up where occasional mudslides take overturned the hills. You dig for them in gullies and creek beds beneath s-facing slopes, and forth old game trails Wade first prospected with his begetter every bit a male child.
     Yous're wary of encroaching on what was once a Dufrane family unit enterprise, merely Wade has a lot of sympathy for your current predicament. He, too, grew up in Westward Gulch with a renter in the attic and a father decumbent to rash, plush decisions. He'southward surprised your families don't know one another: like yours, the Dufranes would let their house to snowies every Christmas and drive due south to winter on the parched shores of Lenny Lake. Wade even supports an arthritic mother somewhere in Minnesota.
     All this is nominally why he sees fit to cut you in on his shed hunts. Of course, you suspect there may be something more to it. Something warm and visceral and clearly unspoken.
     On a good solar day, the two of you haul twenty or 30 pounds of os back to Wade'due south place, a converted garage behind Zeke's Antiques. Betwixt shots of whiskey, you lay the antlers out like kindling and sort them into pairs. Wade tin can read the life in them: tridents of bone notched with a hidden legacy of battles and famines and narrow escapes. He teaches y'all the criteria of appraisal: direct or crooked tines, spreads, points.
     Elk sheds sell by weight, and come up out to well-nigh two hundred dollars a pound. This is for difficult white, the stale stuff, probably older than you are. Fresh brown—newly fallen, dark with recent life—is a thing of the by. Wade hasn't seen fresh brown sheds, or whatever other show of living elk, in years. He can't begin to guess what they might exist worth.
     Your dealer, a scrambled vocalism who goes by the moniker "Antlerdam," communes with Wade once a week by telephone. He wraps your money in turn-of-the-century plastic numberless, which he leaves in a broken toilet tank at the Carter County Library. He is responsible for shipping your plunder to lavish and remote destinations: Canada, where bone smiths piece of work in underground to cleave the antlers into walking sticks and knife handles and door knockers; or California, where black-market apothecaries grind them into powder, measure them into tinctures and compounds.
     On radio broadcasts and reward flyers, the Forest Service calls you poachers; yet in his more winsome moments, Wade likes to say you're nothing just vernal custodians.
     Never mind that your exploits carry a $25,000 fine, and a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
     "Prison, Syl," Kenny says, when you finally admit what you've been upward to.
     His cloy is pretty righteous. Elk sheds, like everything on the Refuge, are protected under Posterity. They're supposed to stay where they fall, reintegrate with the undergrowth. None of this is news to you.
     Luckily, you lot've got a line for just this moment: Wade knows what he's doing, been at this for years. Besides, it's not ivory. Information technology's not hurting anyone. "What am I supposed to practice if Dad does turn out to have cancer, and I have to sell the house then he tin come dorsum every bit a tree?"
     Kenny'south having none of it. "I'm certain you lot'll be a lot of assist to him in prison."
     His resolution not to speak to you lasts about a week. Your father, meanwhile, is besides busy convincing himself of his imminent death to suspect that you're flouting your entire upbringing. If he realizes that your agreed-upon eight-month hiatus from college has turned into two years, he doesn't evidence it. He won't interview new hires for Rayles Management, or let you teach him how to balance the budget past himself. Most days, he simply ghouls around the house, checking for new skin lesions and comparing snowfall reports from down-valley towns. "Erlton merely got twenty inches this twelvemonth," he says by way of expert morning. "20 inches. I remember when they had to shell the laissez passer all night to loose avalanches. Now I doubt they'll get another existent winter."
     But it'due south still real winter in Fell Gulch. The snowies go along coming: go on sledding, skating, building legions of snowmen. Zambonis chug back and forth beyond Highness Lake. Curtains of icicles rim the Main Street gables. Christmas lights twinkle well into March, similar the whole place is some antiquarian snowfall world.
     Y'all starting time picking upwardly cleaning shifts whenever a staff member calls in sick. Changing sheets, staging ski compounds so you lot can visit the large mansions on Painter'south Knoll and study the handiwork of your clandestine life: antlers twisted upwards in huge chandeliers, trophy tips coming together neatly over stone fireplaces.
     "Nice twelve-point," yous say to the lady of a house on Ridge Street one afternoon, gazing at a mount above a mantel littered with pictures of towheaded kids. The elk'south optics are dark and stygian. A tendril of fiber drifts from 1 of his crowns.
     "Oh." She pauses at the bottom of the banister, 1 sapling leg braced on the first stair. You can't help thinking of her heating pecker, what it must cost to exist able to willow around in such a sparse nightie this time of year. "I don't really know. Somebody shot information technology a while back, I guess."
     "Well, if we e'er get bust, at least you know what to auction off first."
     "Mm."
     "That'south probably fifty inches of beam on each side."
     Knowing more than about her own possessions than she does thrills you. Then does every corner of this new, secret world you've staked with Wade: the coded cuts on the trees, the white silence of the Refuge, the alpenglow gilding the rumpled chevrons of the
Bitterroots, the black breaks of runoff ribboning the snow.

For all Wade's precautions, his lifework is hardly unknown. Jan through May, when the doors swing for him at Caviston's Roadhouse, shots line the bar.
     Growing up, you were made to understand that Dad would skin y'all live if you ever set foot inside Caviston's. It's out on Route 29, a lopsided cabin where the fur-trapper great-grandfathers of the current regulars would rendezvous back in the days before the chili pepper lights and neon signs and shamrocks that at present disgrace it. You feel a little out of place amid all the pretty women and their black-marketeers: James Muldoon, who however harvests forest out near Silver Pass; Roy Fitzgerald, who charges Painter'south Knoll–types two k a head for an underground quail feast every fall. Just one time Wade announces that "Sylvia Rayles is no fucking waster," you're as welcome amid them as anyone.
     And all assembled are eager to supplement what yous know about Wade. In that location'south an ex-girlfriend he's been hung up on, and a litany of hilarious entanglements with park rangers. They tell you not to worry nigh his vague idea of moving to his female parent's place in Minnesota—he e'er fails to follow through on his best intentions.
     Listening, you lot're warmed as their stories fail to alienation your own trove of hard-won intimacies: Earlier moving to Minnesota, his mother sang with the Silverish Banshees down in Miller'due south Hole. The night his male parent emptied his pill bottle he gave Wade xx dollars, which notwithstanding sits, untouched, in a tobacco tin under the sycamore at the onetime Dufrane business firm; passing on Pinedale Route, Wade reflexively pulls into the driveway sometimes. He's never cooked a dish without burning it, or made it all the way through "Shenandoah" without his voice breaking.

Apr brings mud season, and Antlerfest with it. Fell Gulch goes full cervine. Rangers besprinkle a modest booty of confiscated sheds all over Highness Park, and the whole boondocks turns up to honor this final shred of heritage: ursine dads shouldering winter-swaddled daughters, reluctant teenagers milling around the parking lot, grandparents reminiscing about the days when you could hunt a whole elk, goddammit, and non just the antlers.
     A whistle-blow at sunup sends 4 hundred citizens charging out into the field. Aware that your absenteeism might raise suspicion, you and Wade brand a indicate of being seen. You overturn logs and comb through bushes, right in the thick of information technology with all the grannies. You scout the kids hauling back their finds—nothing but spikes, straight and thin and practically worthless, but borne along as tenderly every bit sacrificial offerings. And all the while you recognize that you are the villains in this scene; you are responsible for this dearth.
     You lot finally wind your way over to Kenny'southward pickle stand to bridge the two sides of your life. Kenny grips Wade's hand, then upsells him on a jar of beets and turnips.
     "Twelve dollars?" you lot say through gritted teeth. "Really?"
     Kenny shrugs. "They're award-winning."
     He makes no attempt to mask his dead-eyeing of Wade, who wanders the parking lot inspecting the Antlerfest auction lots laid out on the tarmac similar shot-down chandeliers. A chinless, dark-brown-eyed ranger touches your elbow, not bad to tell you more about the sheds. Did you know that elk cast their antlers every year? That one time upon a time, pretty much everyone could just scoop them right off the footing?
     You tin can hardly decide what thrills you more viscerally: knowing a human has underestimated you and then profoundly, or flirting with a loathed enemy right in forepart of Wade.
     The prize set of antlers—with an atypically considerable fifty-two-inch spread—sells handily for 4 yard. After, Wade boosts you into the truck bed. The matter-of-factness of his presumption is stunning. Every bit he continues to stand up in that location, scraping a gob of mud off your knee, information technology hits y'all.
     Notwithstanding, y'all have a full week to say it aloud. "I think I might be in dear with Wade."
     "Well, fuck," says Kenny, without looking up from his textbook. "Simply give me a moment to absorb this completely unexpected slice of news."
     Apart from marooning you in a constant state of impatience, the realization changes very little of your daily life. Maybe yous slumber a niggling less, rotate your more than flattering wearing apparel to the top drawers. But well-nigh nights Wade only picks yous up, and the two of you drive the long, pine-ribbed highway to the Serbian diner over in Gentry. You share burek and chips and tease out where you'll land when Cruel Gulch finally goes bust. You revisit the sense of humour in familiar things: tourist tat shops, people who stand on ceremony, the daily reenactment of Crazy Jim Collins'southward murder at the Wallet, in which yous briefly appeared as Dolly Dove, the shrill whorehouse madam.
     Before your limited run, Wade had played Bertrand Stills, shooting ol' Jim right in the eye every Tuesday and Th.
     "I'd have paid to run into you in that white Stetson and bolo."
     His fork dimples the top of your hand. "Those were mandatory."
     He decides that if the need for aliases should e'er arise, the two of you lot volition exist "Stills" and "Dove."
     On the drive home, Wade cracks a window to let in the smell of pino. His fingers drum the console between you. The truck feels likewise small to contain this electric haze of possibility. Your outset kiss is imminent, a single dram of backbone abroad. There's rubber in the knowledge that either of you could choose it anytime, a kind of chemical understanding. It'south a world across the high school boys who used to agree you downwardly.
     Midnight, however, usually finds you on opposite ends of Wade'southward sofa, reading aloud to one some other. By 2 30, you're home.
     Fielding your reports of the lack of consummation exasperates Kenny. "What'southward taking him so long?"
     You lot've spent hours puzzling this out. Maybe you lot've overestimated your appeal. Peradventure if yous were more than delicate, more than serious. More than feminine. Perhaps if every meal didn't stick to your ribs, if your body had whatever corners at all.
     Kenny doesn't see the point of speculation. "You'll never know unless you face up him, Syl; and the faster you get on with it, the better. Go for bankrupt."
     You volition yourself to backbone. But information technology's easier to imagine almost annihilation—your father absolved, Cruel Gulch parched—than that kiss and its aftermath. You can't fifty-fifty slip your manus past your waistband in the darkness of your room for the sheer mortification of having to face Wade afterward.
     Once again and again, yous return to the same reality: a declaration of love volition alter things, ane way or another. Better to linger in dubiety than to lose your only source of joy, better to preserve the veil of promise. Similar that shed hunt in mid-Apr, when y'all and Wade dissever upwardly to cover more ground. He sends yous downwardly to Bitterroot Creek, a bottomland bearded with red-twig dogwoods. The twenty-four hour period is warm and blindingly bright. You're enjoying the solitude, the ftt-ftt of your steps mashing the snowfall, when there's a whistle behind y'all. A rising note that could peel the enamel off your teeth. You twist around to discover the source. A red flare explodes over the woods to your left, about a half mile away.
     It'southward one thing to memorize protocol in example of a ranger encounter. Some other matter entirely to follow it. You take off mindlessly into the trees, spraying snow everywhere, losing a snowshoe in the loamy creek bed. Finally you drop down in a stand of cottonwoods and await. A line of melt drips beneath your collar. Through all that panting and hammering, you're a long while in returning to silence.
     Information technology's dark by the time you lot hear Wade calling. He'due south empty-handed, hatless, quietly infuriated by a wasted day, but relieved you're in one piece—which is definitely something.
     The stars are out in their whorled millions. Somewhen yous surrender arguing about where the road might exist. Wade unpacks his winter hammock, strings it between ii oaks, piles ambush for insulation, while laughing periodically at your chattering teeth.
     "At least we're together," he says. "If information technology grows too common cold, we can just get to fucking." Then, after he sees your face: "Calm downward, Syl. I'm joking."
     The hammock sags with your combined weight, though your stomach is so empty it hurts. And even as the wind leaches all the heat from your back, there's a college order of warmth between y'all, knees clicking, ribs grazing, the white purl of your breath massing in the clear air.
     All night you district over the truly celestial questions: What meat would you have most enjoyed, if you lot'd been born before Posterity? Wade thinks salary; y'all say beef. How much olfactory organ could a person lose to frostbite and still look respectable? It obviously depends on the nose. "I could probably lose a good inch and be fine," Wade says. He butts his forehead against yours. "Only yous'd be doomed with one tenth of that."
     If ever in that location was a moment to ask. "How did you dice?"
     "Briefly and stupidly." His long silence makes y'all hopeful. Then he says: "When people measure distance past 'a cunt pilus,' do y'all call back they hateful length or breadth?"
     Yous manage to reply: "Latitude."
     The next morning, during your postmortem of the evening's unrealized romantic potential, Kenny snaps. "I don't care how long he lingers over his proficient-nights or how many Yeats poems he knows past middle: no guy breathes the words cunt pilus to a adult female he cares about."
     "I don't recall I'm describing the moment properly."
     He shakes his caput. "You tin can take that to the bank, Syl."
     You take it nowhere. You crumple it upwardly and hurl it into the void that devours all evidence of Wade's ambiguity toward you.
     Dad meets you in the doorway, floating effectually in a beloved tartan nightgown that refashions him as a junkie Ebenezer Scrooge. "Just getting in?"
     "You know I am."
     He watches yous unlace your boots. "I almost called the police."
     You glance upwards at him. How to explain you lot can't exist officially unaccounted-for the aforementioned dark poachers are spotted on the Refuge?
     "Well? Did you?"
     "Kenny said you were out with that Wade fella from the mortuary. You could accept called to check on me." He gives you a dubious once-over. "You lot look similar you slept in a ditch."

In tardily April you find a cast antler out past Willow Fort. Just lying there, precipitous as a scythe, half-buried by terminal dark'southward snowfall. Fresh brown. Wade spectacles it from across the field and starts running. Past the fourth dimension you get in that location, Wade is standing it upwardly. Information technology's taller than you, and then big your hand tin't fit effectually its knotty stem. The burr is pink with blood.
     Water ice encrusts Wade's nostrils, and in the morning sunday his laughter courses out in shining eddies.
     "It'll be a grand a pound if we can find the matching one."
     "To hell with the matching one," yous say. "If there's a live elk around, I desire to see him."
     Wade indulges your frantic search for the bull'south tracks. The few hoofprints evident disappear into a bluestem grove. He isn't surprised.
     "You lot're chasing ghosts," he says.
     All the way back to the road, you let him rhapsodize about the living elk of his childhood. The disheveled bulls, with their flat, night eyes, mean-mugging like he owed them money. Riled as hell in winter equally they shed and looked utterly robbed. Often a single antler would linger, listing the head, the empty pedicle raw and leprous. The cows, with their accusatory stares, distinguishable from 1 another only by the tick trails in their coats.
     That nighttime, emboldened past tequila, the two of you effort the door of Zeke'south Antiques. Cones of low-cal fall through the hangar windows. Yous trail your fingers delicately forth racks of empty dresses. Wade won't quit with conjectures about where Zeke's old partner might be rotting. The steamer trunk is the obvious pick—but there's room enough for a trunk in the one-time roll-top desk, also.
     "Jesus," you say every bit he swipes a feather boa forth the nape of your cervix. "Stop that."
     A chance intimacy arises when a mannequin tips over while you lot're unspooling its neckband of pearls. Of your clumsiness, Wade says merely, "Oops"—but softly, as though your mishap is predictably endearing. As though he'southward grown accepted to telling you to watch yourself. His hand lingers on the small of your back as you right the dummy. Flushed with booze and the thrill of the break-in, you will him to lean in and shut the final altitude between yous. Maybe become to it right there on the old menu table where Crazy Jim Collins allegedly played his final manus of poker, amongst the mining lanterns and a century'south worth of license plates from the 40-five states neither of you will always run into.
     Instead, he sinks a plug lid onto your head. You force a laugh while he pries open the coil-top. Its night insides scent like the woods after a pelting.
     In the morning you offer Kenny a ride to work. He bids his latest paramour for her accost, and you detect yourself winding up a familiar aspen-lined bulldoze on Painter's Knoll, past bison topiaries and frosted ponds. You slink around the house before finding Kenny hunched over a breakfast counter, pectorals roiling in an undershirt you'd mock were information technology not for the similarly clad waif charring pancakes inside earshot. She calls yous "honey" without raising her eyes and spoons three more puddles of batter onto the griddle.
     Kenny slides his coffee over to you. "How'south your sorry picayune heart?"
     "Beat upwardly."
     He squeezes the waif'southward hips as he gets some other mug, taking an historic period to select one. His movements are oddly, infuriatingly labored whenever he'due south choosing his next words with caution.
     "Why isn't information technology enough only to be in love with him, Syl? I mean—what'll happen if the feeling turns out to be mutual? You gonna give up on college, motion back here for good? Wait around till the place goes bosom?"
     This enrages yous. It'southward meant to. "Mayhap."
     Kenny shakes his head. "I dubiety you've even thought that far."
     At dawn you climb into Wade's truck fully intending to lay it all out in the open. His unwitting smiling convinces you to get out information technology until after the chase—no point in ruining the day. Your plan, however, doesn't anticipate the telephone telephone call from your neighbor, whose breathless words all run together over the roar of the engine: "They took your father! They took your father!"
     By the fourth dimension you determine that they are the paramedics, you're back in boondocks and Wade is racing daylight on his mode to the Refuge alone. You finally track Dad down at St. Luke'south. Laid up in urgent care, he'south stake and sallow, with a brown plash of blood on his sleeve where the nurse made a failed run at his veins.
     "I got a little out of breath," is all he offers every bit explanation.
     You lot expect his chest scans to resemble an alien invasion. Bright orbs roaring out from the darkness between his ribs. Merely Dr. Miller just admonishes him for declining to take proper intendance of himself: "More protein, Mr. Rayles, more than sleep." Nodding and smiling, he looks exactly as a doctor should, which makes you wonder why he has still to leave Carter County. He rifles through a chart as thick as a cornerstone. "I see you lot recently got some very skillful news about your biopsies—just that's no alibi to get complacent about lifestyle."
     In the hallway outside, Dr. Miller spells it out for you lot: the pathologist gave your father the all-articulate weeks agone. He squeezes your shoulder and hands yous a pamphlet on panic disorder.
     Your telephone call goes straight to Wade's voicemail. "You lot won't believe this shit," you say. "Come back and go me."
     From the foot of Dad's bed, you read the pamphlet aloud: "Do y'all feel jolts of fright that make you recollect you lot are ill, dying, or losing your heed?"
     "I know yous're angry," he says, "simply still, this is squeamish." His fingers on your hand are so calorie-free they experience deboned.
     An hr later, returning from a coffee run, you detect him hyperventilating over again. "I can't finish thinking about all those water bottles I threw away."
     "Jesus," y'all say. "Please don't start."
     "How many gallons of water y'all retrieve I just tossed into trash cans, back when I was a trucker?"
     "I actually don't know, Dad."
     "Think it's more a hundred?"
     "Probably. And then what at present? You want to moonlight as a capper? Dig through landfills for trapped h2o?"
     He takes a striking of oxygen to steady himself. "When I was a teenager, I used to run the tub every time I went to the bathroom. And I mean every time. Nosotros lived in such a small house—I couldn't stand the thought of anyone hearing."
     Your venom slips away from you. "Well, don't worry," you say. "One time nosotros get you into that Serenity Pod, you'll exist square with the earth, and everything will revert to the manner it was."
     By the time you lot realize his eyes are wet, it'southward too late. "When'd you get to exist so fell?" he says, without looking at you, which makes it worse. "Tin't you be a piffling gentler to me? Don't I deserve to make amends? Aren't I worthy of the things I desire?"
     Perhaps to break this weird, sour sadness, Dad turns on the TV. He flips between aerial shots of a dry riverbed and close-ups of manicured fingers pressing eggplant slices into a lasagna pan, before stumbling on the breaking news of a raid on the Refuge. Hovering above the trees, the chopper'southward camera zooms in on rangers escorting a homo toward waiting squad cars, while the chyron announces: Shed Poacher Caught!
"Syl," Dad says, "isn't that the guy from the mortuary?"
     At Caviston's the next morning, the barroom is clenched in a gallows hush. Wade's compatriots fort upward below the TV, as Aqueduct 4 loops footage of him getting pinned to the hood of a cruiser. There are no new details.
     From behind the bar, Alfred, the owner, finally notices you and says: "Hey, own't you Wade'due south girl?"
     Suddenly drinks are on the house, and everyone's trading Wade stories again and treating you lot like the widow: reassuring you while you all wait for the bond jar to top up.
     "Ever wonder why he's such a legend at shed-hunting?" Luckily, Alfred's not the kind of man who asks questions to have them answered. He leans over the counter toward you. "He'southward got elk in his blood." In a whisper intended to comport to the far corners of the room, he tells you the secret you've been longing to hear.
     On a shed hunt almost twelve years back, Wade was caught out in a blizzard up near Brake Creek; and after stumbling around in the drifts for hours, he chanced on an old hunting bunker. The Caviston's crowd argues about whether his entry was through a door or a ceiling. Within were all the trappings of fonder days: meat cooler, bone boiler, rusted hooks. And in a corner, miraculously, an elk hung up for dressing. Alfred insists that the hunter's body was there, also, but nigh agree it was just the elk, dangling with open eyes, every bit if its blood had run just hours before. So Wade hunkered down to outlast the atmospheric condition every bit the snow piled up, burying any point of exit.
     "He got to chewing the rawhide string of the expressionless hunter's bow before he'd touch that elk," Alfred continues, shaking his caput. "A true child of Posterity. Not like Fitzy here. Wade would have done damn near anything to keep himself from putting teeth to flesh."
     But by the third mean solar day he had to square with the hard realities of his predicament, and he peeled hide off haunch and dug his knife tip into the blue gloss of muscle there.
     "And you lot know what, Syl? It was then perfectly preserved by the cold that it was fine: raw and sugariness, right down to the marrow."
     It kept Wade live for 3 more days, until the rescue party dug him out. And it wasn't bad meat that killed him, similar some people said, or the cold. No, it was the warming-upward that put him into cardiac abort in the ambulance on the manner to St. Luke'due south.
     "Because you're one person before something like that," Alfred says. "And some other afterward it. And information technology's a keen shock for the body to switch between."
     Solemn faces fill your vision. The ensuing silence is giving you abroad. Wouldn't he have told you by at present, if you were really his girl?
     You lot say the only thing that comes into your head: "I tell y'all what—later on all that, if he's the kind of person who can find a fresh dark-brown shed out past Willow Fort when no i's seen a live elk in a decade-plus, I'd say it's worth the freeze."
     That earns you another shot of Brimminger's, an inquest about the shed, and an earful about how Posterity is either our conservancy or the unmarried greatest disaster the country has ever faced.
     The following morning, Wade makes his phone phone call—to Alfred, of all people—and it'south decided at Caviston'south by unanimous vote that you alone should go post his bail. You bulldoze over to Moreland County, guts thudding with all your intended declarations.
     Wade emerges looking tough every bit a two-dollar kicking. A scruff of beard softens his jaw. He slings an arm around you and gives you a squeeze, and then sits quietly, looking out the window at the blur of copse. Any you say now won't end the mode you desire it to.
     "My dad got the all-clear."
     "That'south bully," Wade says, "he must be so relieved."
     Yous tin can't seem to keep the auto off the shoulder. "He's never put also much stock in doctors' opinions. Incertitude it'll talk him out of a Pod."
     You roll downwards the window as Wade slopes up the driveway to his identify and telephone call later on him: "I should have been in that location with you."
     "And so we could both get stung?" he says, without turning around. "Don't be ridiculous."

You don't hear from him for days. His truck stays tarped nether the big elm guarding his business firm, and past Wednesday is covered in a thick, slap-up coating of snow. On Friday, the commuter'south side window and the margin of the door are clear, only and so a cold snap glazes the exposed panels with ice well into the post-obit week.
     Y'all ride the tram habitation from Painter's Knoll most evenings, help Kenny with inventory at the Wallet. It feels like trying to recall a native linguistic communication you haven't spoken in years. 1 half-hearted morning, you wake up to a aroma that reminds y'all of Jan so much it hurts, and you determine Wade is incidental to your happiness. You fifty-fifty make it out to the Refuge, probing ingress after boarded-off ingress until y'all're scraping through the trees fashion north of Miller'due south Hole, before the hopelessness of information technology all overwhelms you lot, and you give up and go abode.
     You're driving by Zeke's Antiques again a few days later when you see the vivid glare of Wade's taillights. You park at the corner and look. Soon enough he appears, looking almost similar the Wade you remember. Knowing he's all right should be plenty—but the sight of snowshoes hung over his shoulder finds you trailing a quarter mile behind him on Road 29, rehearsing your admonition of his silence: information technology'southward cruel, information technology's unnecessary. To avoid detection, you pass the Willow Fort turnout when he takes a left, and then double dorsum a few minutes later to find his truck parked in the ditch.
     Wade's tracks get-go simply beyond the fir trees, where the May dominicus has yet to breach the snowpack. Clouds hurry overhead, plunging the valley in and out of shadow. You lot keep the bald, brownish domes of the Blacktooth Hills to your correct and press on.
     In a concluding insult to all your efforts, Wade is waiting for yous at the far edge of the tree line. "Goddamn it, Syl."
     "Goddamn yourself."
     His pants are torn, and a modest spot of claret blooms near his right knee. "Go domicile. You tin't be hither." Neither can he, yous signal out—and what'southward he later anyway, a felony conviction? Is a couple m dollars' worth getting stung once again? He lets you continue for a while. And so he says: "I'm hither to give Antlerdam the Judas kiss."
     "What exercise you hateful?"
     "He's meeting me just over the pass, and then we're going up to Bitterroot Creek, where there'southward most a dozen rangers hiding in the fucking bushes. After which I get off for giving him up. Still wanna come along?"
     You lot stand at that place in the full glare of ruin. Somewhen discover your mode to what feels like an acceptably sedate response: "What near my father?"
     "If I've put away plenty to motion to Minnesota, y'all probably have enough to take care of the Pod."
     "Minnesota." It'southward supposed to be a question, but it lands as ridicule. As if he's but told you lot that the earth is flat, or that the icecaps are intact. Minnesota. Impossibly absurd. "When did you decide this?"
     "Right around the fourth dimension I decided confronting three to five in county."
     At that place is no alternate version to this, no subconscious meaning. Y'all've waited likewise long, and now anything you tin think to say rises to your rima oris in some reduced form.
     "You lot must realize I'd desire to know something like that."
     "Syl," he says. "Come on."
     And that'southward information technology. The evening light purples the last dregs of wintertime all across the field, to the lodgepoles on the opposite hill. A shiver of motion catches your eye. A shadow leaving the shelter of the trees.
     "At that place'south Antlerdam," y'all say.
     You don't fence when Wade tells you to cover your face. The human raises both arms and waves. His gear is then new and tight y'all can practically hear information technology squeaking even at this distance, and he falls once or twice equally he struggles through the snow, gouging a huge wake in the hillside. By the time he reaches the bottom, you're following Wade to meet him. Up close, his face is battered and blood-plashed. His eyes are wild.
     "Jesus," Wade says.
     "Oh, thank God," the homo says. "Rangers, give thanks God. I idea I'd take to spend the nighttime for sure."
     Not Antlerdam, so—simply some lost greenhorn bumbling his manner toward nightfall.
     Wade doesn't miss a beat. "Practice you realize you lot're trespassing, sir?"
     The guy's nose is red and peeling, and you get the sense that he could throw himself into your arms at any moment. You lead him to a stump and sit down him downwardly.
     "Got any h2o?" he says. "I'thou and then damn thirsty."
     Information technology dawns on you both that he didn't think to eat snow. Wade hides a smile. He easily the greenhorn his h2o pack, and turns to nudge your shoulder with his chin. Cold with sorrow, you edge away from him.
     This is when you come across the antler. Fresh brown, the bole stiffly cabled to the foreigner'southward backpack. "What the hell is this?"
     "Oh, God." The foreigner twists around, clawing at his straps. "I forgot. Oh, God, please don't arrest me—information technology'south my offset fourth dimension, I swear."
     Wade drives his vocalisation real low. "What'southward your name, sir?"
     He says information technology's Gavin—except that's a prevarication, and all three of you know information technology. Wade takes out his notebook and writes it down anyhow. You sentry information technology materialize slowly—Gavin—right under the bloated consonants of Wade's previous note to himself: Tell Syl.
     "Where did you get this, sir?"
     "I found it. Heard from some guys over at Caviston'southward there might be new chocolate-brown around."
     "Fresh brown," you say, a trivial dizzily.
     Wade grasps the greenhorn'due south pack and squeezes the burr. "This can't have cast more than a few hours ago. Were y'all trailing this bull?"
     "No." Then: "All right, yes—I trailed him. Merely only considering I knew it was just a thing of fourth dimension." He turns to you confidentially. "So tardily in the flavor."
     "You empathize that's wild animals harassment?"
     He understands, he'll never do it again, it'due south his first and but time—merely if the 2 of y'all had seen that bull, the sheer size of him, the way this unmarried antler weighed down his head, only magnificent. Well, it would have got the better of you lot, too.
     Wade's balaclava is smoking like an incinerator. "Where's the balderdash at present?"
     The greenhorn points. "In that location's a slope upwardly behind that stand up of trees. I ran at him, just a bit to go him to drib it, and he went down the far side."
     For weeks, this elk'southward other antler has been wrapped in paper under Wade's bed. You've built joy on knowing information technology's there—but in the end information technology was this apprentice who got to run across him, this idiot who doesn't even know to swallow snow when he's thirsty, this snowie bounder with the doleful optics who'due south at present emptying his wallet into Wade's easily and uncoupling the antler from his pack and saying, "Can I go now?" while the calorie-free fades.
     Wade points him toward the road with a ranger-like alert: "Try to avert the thin ice." And then he looks at you lot and says, "Come up on, Officeholder Dove, allow'south get a await at that bull."
     For a moment it feels similar Wade may be extending his mitt—merely the point is, he's not. Not really.
     "What for?" you say. "He doesn't fifty-fifty have his antlers anymore." You lot help the greenhorn to his feet. "Come on, Gavin, let'south get yous dwelling."
     By the time you reach the road and come across the greenhorn shakily off, you lot've imagined information technology all differently. You've imagined the climb up the hill in the bitter common cold, a furrowed track nearly the summit, a glimpse of hide through the trees.
     By the fourth dimension the newspapers are detailing Antlerdam's abort, this is no longer imagination, but memory.
     And by the fourth dimension your husband is moving toward you with the ladle, asking, "What's wrong? Who is information technology, Syl?" information technology's no longer retentiveness, but truth: the great, unrealized dearest of your youth ends with a sighting of the last bull elk in Fell Gulch, his huge, black head in full sylvan splendor.
     So of course, of course you sound exactly the same. So does Wade. And information technology shouldn't really surprise you lot that even later on everything—subsequently the bust; and Kenny's move to Michigan; and your render to ecology; and your years on the same kelp rigs that will somewhen lure at to the lowest degree one of your sons; and the not bad, wild-easy love of your wedlock; and life here in Grayness's County; and the eventual death of your father (not from cancer, but pneumonia, of all things, at the age of eighty-3); and then many iterations of disappointment and hope—all information technology takes is the sound of Wade'due south voice to unearth that other office of y'all: clenched around your guttering twenty-year-old heart, intact, still and ever in that moment, in that immigration, raw and sweet, right downward to the marrow.