Want Not (4 page)

What happened next, Elwin would later blame on the wine—far too glibly, however. He’d once overheard, in the college library, an undergrad telling a friend that he’d moved back in with his girlfriend solely because he’d “got drunk.” The friend protested: “After all she fucking did?” “Dude,” he said, with a wag of his head, “I don’t know. I was
drunk.
” The image of the kid staggering into an apartment with cardboard boxes of clothes and CDs, navigating stairwells in a cluelessly boozy stupor, had made Elwin chuckle aloud, mostly because it was so preposterous. The kid obviously lacked the mettle to confess, to his pal, that he was still in love with the girl in question, had forgiven her, couldn’t quit her—despite whatever crimes she’d committed, up to though probably not including faking seventeen years’ worth of orgasms. It was merely easier for him to pin it on a mind-bending beer buzz. So too with Elwin and the deer, though it wasn’t quite so obvious at the moment.

During his Grizzly Adams years (that was Maura’s phrase) he’d been fastidious about using every last bit of the deer he killed: the backstrap sinews for thread, the tendon sheath for glue stock, the hockskins for tool handles, the kidneys fried up in a pat of butter. He couldn’t recall the precise source of his hardcore purist ethic—the chapter and verse, be it Leviticus or Leopold, that had instructed him to squander nothing of his kill, not even the musky, fudge-textured kidneys of an old stringmeat buck—but it likely derived from all the Native American texts he’d absorbed while writing his dissertation on Ned Manx, the last fluent speaker of a Pomoan dialect, native to California, known as Xotc. Not that Manx himself had anything to do with it. The old man—he was 102 when Elwin finished his dissertation, 104 when he died—loved Chicken McNuggets,
Dragnet
reruns, and a syrupy homemade wine he called Hoopa Juice, the empty pint-bottles of which he sometimes tossed out of the car window when Elwin would drive him to visit his grandchildren in Cloverdale. Elwin had once, very gently, asked Manx how he reconciled the littering with the Pomo concept of
saltu,
the “spirit home” that infused the ancestral landscape.
Saltu,
Manx replied, didn’t apply to asphalt.

What happened next, then, wine-driven or not: Elwin grabbed two forelegs and started dragging the deer back toward the Jeep. He wasn’t sure the meat was salvageable—he might find most if not all of it bloodshot from the impact of the Jeep; additionally, there was a decent chance that the paunch had busted, and that the resulting interior blast of urine and feces was currently spoiling the meat—but abandoning it felt criminal, even if, according to the law, his current tack was actually the criminal option. He’d always heard that the meat of roadkilled deer, scavenged by the highway department, went to homeless shelters, which was a pleasant idyll that nevertheless crumbled under scrutiny: Who was the mythological state butcher culling the fresh meat from the rotten? What team of state lawyers had hashed out the vicious liability issues of dumping wormy meat onto the plastic plates of homeless children? No, this was some analgesic fantasy someone had cooked up to soften the sight of fawns lying flyspecked and bloodymouthed on the Garden State Parkway. Elwin could guess what really happened: the highway workers heaving the carcasses into the maggot-smeared bed of a hulking orange dump truck, the driver lipping a Marlboro and cranking Supertramp on the radio while pulling back the truck’s dump lever at some Meadowlands landfill, the deer slumping out of the bed in a tangle of rigor mortis–stiffened legs and split, sun-charred intestines. They buried them like everything else.

When headlights came sweeping around a curve to the south, Elwin immediately dropped the doe and glued his hands to his hips; he even nudged it with his toe, to heighten the impression of casual study. Just as quickly, when the car passed and no brakelights appeared, he re-seized the forelegs and scurried across the road. He was in dangerous territory now, and he knew it. If a cop happened by while he was heaving the deer into the back of the Jeep—Christ, just an imagined glimpse of the ramifications caused his big belly to flip, sloshing all that Douro wine it contained. When he’d pulled the deer to the rear of the Jeep, he paused for a moment, panting, to listen for traffic. It took a few seconds for the panicked clatter in his head to subside, for the hysterical warnings and recriminations being shouted from his subcortex to die down, and then: silence, or what passes for silence in that swath of New Jersey: the low-grade choral hum of a million near and distant engine pistons, firing through the night, and as many industrial processes, the muted hiss and moan of sawblades and metal stamps and hydraulic presses and conveyor belts and coalfired turbines, plus the thrum of jets, whole flocks of them, towing invisible contrails toward Newark, and the insectile buzz of helicopters flying low and locust-like over fields of radio towers and above the scrollwork of turnpike exits, all of it fused into a single omnipresent drone, an aural smog that was almost imperceptible unless you stood alone and quivering on a deserted highwayside in the snow-hushed black hours of a November morning with a carcass hardening in the ice at your feet. Elwin’s breath came in polar gasps.

But the road was clear. Now was his chance. He raised the Jeep’s rear door and shoved aside the piles of papers stacked therein: Fritz’s dutiful Terascale Initiative report, a sheaf of student papers on variable phonology, a three-page letter from Maura that even after a dozen rereadings he found indecipherable. Explaining to his students why he was returning their papers smirched with mud and blood was going to be difficult. Perhaps he could tell them, with a wink, that a dog had tried to eat their homework? But then that wouldn’t address the blood. “So I killed it,” he could say, then wait to be pilloried in the student evaluations. With one hand under the deer’s neck and his other arm cradling its belly, Elwin hoisted it into the back of the Jeep, noticing, in mid-heave, two things: that the doe’s flopping neck signaled it was broken, indicating a clean, instant kill; and that the fragile little
pop
he’d heard was from his own spine, which meant that in several dire moments, if he bent or turned too quickly in the wrong direction, he might find himself on his back in the snow, directly beneath the hot smoking tailpipe, immobile, and in epic howling pain, with a dead doe’s fluffy white ass hanging halfway out of the Jeep. If there were worse ways to die in times of peace, he couldn’t think of them.

Stepping back from the Jeep, he tested his spine by performing a slow, arrhythmic twist on the roadside. It was a risky use of time, this dance, but necessary. When he felt confident his spine wouldn’t buckle on him, he scooped the doe’s rear into the Jeep—gingerly, because he wasn’t
that
confident—and slammed the hatch shut. Scrambling into the front seat, and yanking his seatbelt on, it occurred to him that this was the closest he might ever get to the sensation of driving a getaway car. It also occurred to him that he’d left the tire iron on the road, but that would have to be sacrificed; only a pinheaded bank robber would go storming back into the bank to retrieve his forgotten pistol. It didn’t go unnoticed, furthermore, that he was suddenly, and weirdly, having more fun than he’d had in many many years.

“What the hell am I doing?” he asked himself aloud, and then, despite himself, he started giggling—so hard, and so irrepressibly, that he checked his face in the rearview mirror to see what a giggling Dr. Elwin Cross Jr., Imperial Grand Poobah (Rochelle’s pet title) of the Trueblood Center for Applied Linguistics at Marasmus State College, looked like, in such an unusually florid state. Like a fool, he decided. Like a juiced-up, fatassed, Cumberland County redneck who’d just picked roadkill off the highway and would now be up—he hadn’t considered this until now—until three or four or maybe five in the morning cleaning a deer that might or might not provide a single ounce of edible flesh, which he really wasn’t sure he wanted anyway. “What the hell am I doing?” he repeated, but this time grimly, and without a subsequent giggle. At least tomorrow was the day before Thanksgiving, the start of the Marasmus holiday break, which meant he could sleep in, if needed. Except that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept past seven. (Two hundred haircuts ago? One fifty?) But he
could
sleep in. And that’s what mattered now, he thought: the
potential.
The potential of the deer’s rammed flesh, the potential of untroubled rest, the potential of happiness, of brightness down the line, of “things”—what was that he’d told Rochelle, told Fritz?—“working out.”

The dashboard clock read 1:37 when Elwin arrived home. “Home,” however, struck him as an inaccurate term for the house Maura had ceded him; it’d been a home with her in it (at least he’d thought so), but she’d switched up the consonants on her way out the door, downgrading it to mere house. Either way: It was a three-story Colonial, circa 1890, majestic and maybe even ostentatious when it was built but having been divided and subdivided over the years, overhauled and underhauled, and modernized and plasticized, its honey-colored plank floors layered and relayered with linoleum sheathing, its pineboard exterior inhumed with aluminum cladding, its fireplaces bricked and a massive iron fire escape bolted to its flank, and with a ring of split-levels having grown around it in the early ’70s, followed by McMansions in the ’90s, the home-slash-house was now, Elwin had to admit, a weird eyesore. He’d made the offer on it himself, while Maura was still back in California, thinking they’d enjoy a renovation after all those years of living in prefab ranch houses—antiquing over in Bucks County, DIY Saturdays with a pot of chili simmering on the stove, the nerdy-fun detective work of historical restoration, et cetera. This had been a serious miscalculation. “Well, you’ve always liked rescuing things,” was Maura’s first impression of the place, her hostile tone more suited to a statement like
You’ve always liked my sister’s ass.
She was so thoroughly cool to the house that she seemed ambivalent about unpacking the moving boxes, in retrospect a glaring signal. Had there been other signals? Hundreds or none, he couldn’t be sure. He realized the preposterousness of saying he’d never seen the affair coming—does anyone?—yet the stark fact remained: He’d never seen the affair coming. And worse yet, the aftermath.

Shutting off the engine felt like an act of mercy. The noise had gotten worse, much worse, and the Jeep rolled into the driveway like one of those smoking, rattling, backfiring Model Ts you saw in Laurel and Hardy movies. He glanced at the upper windows of the house next door—home to Big Jerry, a retired lineman with Jersey Central Power & Light; his wife Myrna; and their twin boys, Christopher and Joey, who like their dad worked for Jersey Central—and was relieved to see them stay dark. Elwin wasn’t certain, at the moment, that he could take Big Jerry, whose bombastic helpfulness caused him to preface nearly every utterance with “Whatchoo gotta do, see . . .” With a wince, he imagined Big Jerry stomping across the shared driveway, all too ready to dispense aid:
Whatchoo gotta do, see . . . is get rid of that fuckin deer.
By now, Elwin’s wine buzz had worn off, having been flushed by the adrenaline torquing his veins for the last half hour—and that was ebbing, too. He shook his head after opening the Jeep’s rear door and seeing the deer peacefully curled therein, like a napping child.

The immediate question was where to clean the deer. He settled on the fire escape at the rear of the house, the other option being to hang it from the big maple tree, streetside, which he nixed for obvious reasons. The only viewers he’d risk seeing the deer beneath the fire escape—and his lurid autopsy of it—were Big Jerry and family, an unpleasant but manageable potentiality. Their standard weekend apparel—camouflage overalls, antler-emblazoned t-shirts—and the bowhunting targets in their backyard augured some measure of empathy.

Inside the house Elwin muttered hello to Bologna, a fifteen-year-old mutt that he’d found, as a half-starved, mange-ravaged, and seriously ugly puppy, on the side of the Ventura Highway licking a dead duplicate of itself—clearly, someone had dumped a litter there. Maura had never warmed to the dog, gladly bequeathing custody of him to Elwin when she’d moved out, which Elwin could have held against her but didn’t—gassy, drooly, and dumb as a brick, Bologna was a challenge to love. The dog, deaf and more or less blind, raised his head, sniffed the air, then nestled his snout back into the dandery folds of his dog bed. “Hey boy,” Elwin mumbled, headed downstairs.

From the basement he gathered a pair of rubber cleaning gloves, his old stag-handled skinning knife (stowed there with the rest of his Grizzly Adams paraphernalia: fishing waders, unwed flyrod sections, camouflage bib overalls, binoculars, a tin-plated manual meat grinder, magnesium firestarter, a rifle cleaning kit, half-empty ammunition boxes, all of it perfumed with the ’70s, with the odor of mildewed ideals), three Hefty garbage sacks, a headlamp, two lengths of rope (one nylon, one sisal), a rusted hacksaw, and, after noisily dumping its contents into yet another Hefty garbage sack (he was improvising now), the twenty-five-gallon plastic bin he used for his recyclables. All this Elwin amassed on the snow, along with the deer, beneath the black gridwork of the fire escape.

Working steadily, he noosed the sisal rope around the doe’s neck, tied it, yanked the knot to test it, then (standing tiptoed atop the overturned plastic bin) looped the rope’s other end over one of the fire escape’s iron rails. He pulled the slack through. With a heavy grunt, he tugged hard on the rope, drawing the doe’s head off the ground so that it appeared an unfamiliar sound had just roused it from sleep. But that was as high as he could lift it. Hoisting the deer, he realized, was going to be more difficult than he’d planned; at 340 pounds (a weight deemed “morbidly obese” by his tactless primary care physician), Elwin wasn’t remotely so fit as he’d been in his grad school years, back when he could’ve raised a buck like a yo-yo. Dropping the rope, he considered tying it onto the Jeep and hoisting it up that way, but this would entail parking on the back lawn, in eight inches of snow and probably atop the brick planters. He wiggled his arms like an on-deck batter, picked up the rope again, braced his boots against the snow, and pulled mightily. The doe’s neck rose, then its limp forelegs, its torso, then finally its hind legs—slowly and smoothly, like a saint ascending—at which point Elwin, his overinsulated arm muscles seething, tied off the rope then collapsed onto the snow.