Christian Kiefer - The Animals

You’re gonna need a gun with more power than that, one of the boys says.

Thirty-aught, another says.

Shit, man, that’ll punch a hole the size of a baseball.

Seven millimeter, maybe.

I’m thinking that Browning my dad has.

The one you bring for elk?

Yeah, it shoots two-seventy.

I like that rifle. You should sell me that rifle.

Shit, I ain’t selling you nothing.

You stand outside that circle, wondering what truth lies sprawled beneath the severed heads of the animals that stare down from every wall. In your drunken reverie, you wonder if the bartender was right, and if he was right then maybe what your uncle David was doing up there in the forest was wrong because the animals he was keeping in cages had lived at least some of their lives in freedom. Maybe that freedom still burned deep inside their muscle and sinew and in their veins and especially in their hearts. Maybe they still and forever could recall a time when the forest was endless and they ran through it like gods, their worlds holding that fire, tending it. Can you imagine such a thing to be true? Even were you to raise a grizzly in a cage all its life, even were it born in captivity, did it not still understand that its nature was wild? And then you are struck with everything at once — everything that has happened to you and because of you — the whole of your life come swinging into your heart and with it a sense of frustration and despair and fury that sends you staggering forward.

You think you intend to push out into the cold night but when you turn toward the door your leg catches the edge of something — a chair, the carpet, a table edge — and you stumble forward into the circle of flanneled men and denim-clad women, your beer tipping out of your hand so that when you try to right it you instead send it exploding everywhere like a tiny geyser. The men and women all step back and one of them lays a hand on your shoulder. Whoa whoa whoa, he says.

Some part of you knows you should simply walk on but the eyes of the animals are upon you and the alcohol is running in your blood and what comes from your mouth instead of an apology is: Get your fucking hand off me.

What’s that? The young man leans in to look at you now, looks at you carefully. He wears a long blond mustache that comes down over his upper lip. On his head is a green cap with a yellow scrawl of words that you cannot focus on long enough to read.

And you say: You heard me.

Man, you need to take a break. Go get some air.

You go get some air.

Then the young man smiles. You watch his face carefully, his eyes on your eyes. You’re trying to pick a fight, he says.

And you say, Fuck you.

Then, from one of the women: You gonna let him talk like that, Jack?

Well, shit, he says. I guess not. There is something like joy in his features. Something like excitement. So let’s go, he says. He takes a step forward and you take a step back and in the next instant the young man’s friends are around you, pulling you off your feet and dragging you backward through the bar. You can hear the bartender — the woman now — yelling, Hey hey hey, and the group around you stops dragging for a moment and one of them says, We’re taking him outside, and she says, No fighting in the bar, Jack, and he says, I know, Laurie. That’s why we’re taking him outside. Then another voice, this from the bartender you spoke to those days earlier: Make it a fair goddamned fight. Don’t you boys just trounce him out there.

You can hear movement now and you are smiling, thinking of Rick at the clubs and bars the two of you frequented in Reno, and more than ever you wish your friend was by your side. But Rick is gone now and your uncle is gone and even your brother is gone and so you are alone.

They take you down the stairs backward, your boots bouncing off each step, and when they let go of you on the asphalt of the parking lot you surprise yourself by regaining your feet.

You fucked with the wrong guy, my friend, someone says.

It appears as if the entire crowd from inside the bar has filtered outside now. They stand in their flannels and T-shirts and beards, leaning on the rail, making side bets, watching as you sway in the reflected light of the sign and the single lamppost that lights a faint patch of the road.

You think only that you are going to be pretty badly beaten and that tomorrow you will still have to rise and feed the animals, that no matter what happens to you tonight, tomorrow all the animals you care for will look to you to provide, realize this suddenly and completely, not only that you are responsible for them and that they need you, but that you need them just as much. Everything else, everything beyond these simple and irrefutable facts, is wholly and completely irrelevant: their world and your own overlapping so tightly that they have become, at least in this one area, indistinguishable from one another.

I’m sorry, you say.

It’s a little late for that. The man in the green cap steps forward out of the circle of his friends and stands loose limbed before you, leaning into the dim light.

You open your mouth to speak and in that moment the man punches you full and hard in the stomach, doubling you over, and your breath rushes out of you all at once. Your hand is already raised. Wait, wait, you say, gasping for breath. Hang on. You think you are going to vomit, a sensation that comes and disappears and then returns again.

Hang on for what?

I got your point, you say between breaths. Don’t hit me again.

Don’t be a pussy about it, the man says. People are watching.

I get it. I was an asshole.

You’re goddamn right you were an asshole, the man says.

I know. I fucked it up. I’m sorry.

The man stands looking at you as if contemplating what to do next. Well, shit, he says, don’t be such an asshole next time.

There won’t be a next time, you say. I’m going home now.

Good, the man says. Jerk.

Yep, you say.

They all stand there waiting for you to throw a counterpunch but when you remain doubled over someone says, Let’s go back inside. The crowd assembled on the tiny front deck mumbles and murmurs and then the whole group begins to disappear through the door.

You got some problems. The words come from the same young man, the man in the green cap, who continues to stand there watching you.

I know, you say.

You need to get your shit together.

I know that too.

All right then, the man says.

He turns then and walks back up the stairs, his friends still watching you and then following the green hat back into the bar. The band stopped at some point during the fracas but now, from somewhere that seems very far away, it starts up again, the bass shaking through the walls without tune or rhythm.

You remain crouched on the asphalt in the darkness. At some point you vomit. Later still you stand and try to find your dead uncle’s pickup truck.

IN THE months that follow, it feels at times as if you have given up everything, and you come to understand that gambling kept you believing, against all reality, that there was a possibility of change, that you might one day be levered up and out of yourself, but now that sense of weird and groundless optimism is gone. You do not know if you can live without it. And then winter is upon you and with it comes profound isolation. You cannot get to town except by a freezing trip atop the snowmobile and sometimes the electricity is out for weeks at a time. You have never been so alone. For days on end you find yourself talking not to yourself or to the ghost of your uncle or even to the memory of Rick, but to the bear, and sometimes you think you can hear him answer. You have moved into your uncle’s trailer now, have sold the smaller trailer to someone who drove up from Sandpoint to retrieve it, and you sit at the little foldout table for many hours watching the vacant space that trailer once occupied. In your exhaustion, it feels at times as if your brother is somehow occupying that vacancy, as if he is out there, even now, in the snow.