Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

The Masons looked aghast. Never used a gun? And he says he comes from Africky.

‘The boys’ll show you how,’ Uncle Colley said.

‘I don’t believe in hunting, actually. I mean, I don’t mind if other people do it, but I’d rather not join in.’

He exchanged a knowing glance with his neighbour. For a moment, I was annoyed with Mel for making me play the city-boy, but my thoughts quickly turned to her reasons. Was she scared of him? And, if so, why had we come?

The Masons went off along the track. We sat in the rockers. There was nothing else to do.

In the course of the morning, I had a good look at Colley. Not that there was much to be seen: he kept the shirt buttoned to his throat and wore boots under the dungarees. His hair was cropped into a blunt block on top of his head. It was strange, I thought, that a man who apparently had too much hair should look like he was wearing a wig.

Around noon, he sent me into the yard behind the cabin to stack firewood. Grateful for the distraction, I put my back into it, working the tension and tedium out of my muscles. When I came back, Mel was balanced on his knee, with his long fingers clasping her hips and the heel of his boot drumming. Playing horsey, you could say. She rolled her eyes at me as she squirmed off his lap. Over her shoulder, he was smirking as if I was the biggest fool he’d ever met.

It was lunchtime. We followed him along a path through the trees to a lot where a dozen pickups were parked, one model after another like a row of old journals, and we climbed into the newest one and drove back down the road we had come on. He doesn’t need to work, Mike had told me, he owns shares in an oilfield in Oklahoma and he’s got more money than he knows what to do with.

At a rest stop on the interstate, we had chicken baskets and fries and big glasses of iced tea. Halfway through the meal, I noticed the five o’clock shadow on the backs of his hands.

We returned to the cabin. Still there was nothing to do and we sat on the porch again. As the afternoon wore on, the hunters started coming down out of the hills with the deer they’d shot. Mason and his son had a doe draped over the hood. ‘This one’s yours,’ Mason said to me. ‘She’s got your name on her.’ The kill looked underweight to me — there were rules about the size of the animals you could take — but, as a man who knew nothing about hunting, I thought I should hold my tongue.

Uncle Colley had the boy carry it around to the smokehouse. There was some spring left in the lithe body, and when he slung it across his shoulders it twisted in his grip as if it were trying to get away.

Alone that night, clinging together on the crumbling sponge like survivors of some natural disaster, Mel and I whispered and giggled for an hour.

‘What an old goat,’ I said, ‘he can’t keep his paws off you. You should have warned me.’

‘He’s harmless.’

‘Really? You seem quite scared of him.’

‘I know how to deal with him. I just don’t want to make it harder than it should be.’

‘Isn’t it weird, though, the way he keeps touching you? I mean, you could make him stop.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You have to imagine that he’s been alone all his life. I’m sure he’s never had a normal relationship. He’s starved for affection. Doesn’t it make you sad?’

I woke the next morning to the sound of running water. For a drowsy moment I thought I was in my own bed and Mel was taking a shower. Just as I realised where I was, the splashing stopped and I heard a low moan, and then silence. Pulling the blanket around my shoulders against the early-morning chill, I knelt on the mattress and looked through the blinds.

In the clearing behind the cabin, Colley was sitting in a metal tub with his head between his knees, enveloped in a fuzzy cocoon of steam. Mel was bent over him, lathering his back with a block of soap. Her skin was pale in the morning light and soft as tissue paper, so clear and thin I could see the angles of her hipbones and shoulder blades. I cannot say I doubted for an instant that the creature in the tub was Colley. What else could it be? And yet two certainties condensed in my mind at the same time like images superimposed on one another: it was Uncle Colley and something else, an animal covered in thick brown fur that had followed the smell of fresh blood out of the woods and let itself be domesticated.

Mel put the soap down on an upturned bucket and reached for a long-handled brush. The shaggy hound moaned in anticipation. With the ease of a circus girl who did this every morning, she scrubbed at his back, working the foam into his fur, shoving it all one way and then raking it the other. He submitted to this painful pleasure, drawing his head down between his shoulders against the thrust of the bristles and then stretching out his neck again as the brush went down his spine.

He looked to me like the dog-headed men in a medieval bestiary or one of those monsters out of Africa with eyes in its chest or the head of a lion. Except that it was the other way round: the head of a man on the body of a beast. I have always been more susceptible to myth than psychology. Perhaps that’s why this vision did not repulse me.

She poked him with the handle of the brush and he stood up. In an instant, the book learning was sluiced away and he was simply a man, a big man with too much hair on his body, two naked hands and a naked prick, and a big round head with a patch of fur on its crown.

There was a hose attached to the rainwater tank and Mel opened the tap and held her thumb over the end. He yelled and capered in the jet, feeble though it was, splashing suds over the sides of the tub, and the water ran off him, driving channels through the hair down his thighs, while the cloak of steam blew away in tatters. As a young man I was prone to jealousy, yet I felt nothing but a shiver of recognition.

I lay down and pulled the stinking blanket over my head. If I went outside, I knew, everything would change, the story would have a different ending, but I had no idea whether it would be better or worse. What would I say?

In the event, I did not have to make a decision because the door opened and shut. I pretended to be sleeping. Mel slipped in beside me. When I turned over and clasped her shivering, soap-scented body, the small of her back felt strange to my touch, cold and damp and covered with goosebumps.

Later that morning, as we were preparing to leave, Colley brought a ladder into the cabin and sent me up it to fetch a cardboard box from the musty cave in the rafters. There was something he wanted to give me as a going-away present. It was a red flannel shirt. God knows how long it had been up there. The thing was filthy; it smelt of bacon grease and sweat, but he insisted that I try it on. Ants, or some other insect I could not imagine, had been nesting in one of the sleeves and when I pushed my arm through it a lump of hard red earth fell out of the cuff.

He wouldn’t let me take it off. He told me it fitted perfectly, although the cuffs hung down past my fingertips, and he winked at Mel so theatrically that I couldn’t fail to notice.

I was still wearing the hunting shirt when we drove away. As soon as we rounded the first bend in the road, I stopped the car, pulled the thing over my head and flung it into the undergrowth.

The day after we got back from Arkansas, the aunts and uncles and family friends came to celebrate Shabbos at the Liebmans. In the afternoon, I helped Mike put the leaf in the dining-room table and bring the extra chairs up from the basement.

Mike’s brother Morris was the last to arrive. He was a psychologist, although he looked like a businessman in his dove-grey suit and burnished wingtips. His bow tie, a rash of pink polka dots on creamy silk, was a whimsical flourish with an ambiguous message. ‘Relax,’ it said, ‘I don’t take myself as seriously as you do.’ But I heard, ‘Beware! Don’t think I’m harmless because I’m wearing this silly tie.’