Christian Kiefer - The Animals

Nat lifted the rifle and squeezed the trigger, not even bothering to aim this time. When he opened his eyes against the shot, the water jug remained unchanged. Shit, he said. It’s impossible to hit.

Rick was silent behind him for a long time. Then he said, quietly, It’s just that she’s my girlfriend, you know?

Yeah I know.

No, I mean like when I was locked up she’s all I could think about. Seriously.

Yeah, she’s your girlfriend.

Yeah, well, it’s important. That’s all I mean.

Nat turned back to the targets and sighted quickly and squeezed and closed his eyes and fired and squinted and again the water jug remained there, unmoving. Dang, he said. In his mind, he could see her naked on his stained mattress, the Van Halen poster above them. Her breasts were small and had felt soft and warm in his hands.

The shadow at the bottom of the shallow draw had shifted as they spoke, crawling sideways across them both. His stomach was a tight ball now, a tight hot ball. So you’re in love, he said. Rick Harris is in love.

Yeah, I guess so, he said. I guess I am.

Didn’t see that coming, Nat said.

Me neither, Rick said. He took another draw on the cigarette. Goddamn, he said. Goddamn.

Nat tried to speak but his throat felt small and tight and the only sound he could make was a faint, dry rasp. He coughed and looked back down the draw at the water jug and the cans. They seemed in motion now, as if adrift on some ocean that was invisible all around them. He breathed in slowly but the motion did not stop.

Hey, let’s blow this fucking thing to pieces, Rick said.

Nat had not heard him come but Rick stood next to him now, the pistol held up in the air before him.

Hang on, Nat said. He reached down and levered a shell into the chamber.

You ready now?

Ready.

Rick leveled the pistol, both hands gripping the handle. Then he counted to three.

Nat squinted against the sound. Rick squeezed off shot after the shot. The cans jumped and fell. The water jug remained. Nat stood with the rifle against his shoulder and aimed and aimed and kept his eyes open, his broken finger pointing down at the targets. Then he squeezed off a round and watched the water jug as it exploded at last.

ALL WEEK CAME THE SNOW AND WITH IT A SERIES OF BLEAK dreams that he awoke from each morning in confusion and terror, a night spent scrambling through a blizzarding forest gone black and malevolent, his movement hindered by snow that lay everywhere in his path, clinging to him even as it seemed liquid, fluid, like quicksand. He did not know how many hours he labored in those frozen and claustrophobic landscapes but when he awoke at last it was, each time, to the muffled and strangling darkness of a trailer nearly buried, as if the waking world had come to mirror the dream he had fled, the details of which blew away with each gust of the storm, leaving only the sense of it — fear, panic, terror — his body shaking with cold even though the trailer itself was warm, the propane heater at a low constant hum. And yet he awoke trembling, as if somehow his skeleton had frozen in the night and he woke with cold dry bones everywhere inside him.

Each morning and evening he dug the snow away from the door, creating a burrow that led up to the surface, where all night and day fresh snow fell. By Friday morning it had reached the base of the windows and a heavy drift had accumulated on the trailer’s west side: a clean slope broken only by his dug-out passage, a partial tunnel that led, at a short diagonal, up to the surface. Each morning a new layer of snow had crept up past the bottom of the door so that he would pull the door open and find an icy wall, as if someone had built a second door to mirror the first. One morning he dug the area down nearly to the frozen dirt, the filtered cloudlight coming through the rim of the tunnel so that the whole tube glowed faintly, sky blue and luminous, the stairs he had cut into its side with the blade of the shovel leading into a storm that seemed as if it would never end.

The power had been cutting in and out since Tuesday and the phone service as well but midweek the snow turned to ice in the night and when he awoke in the morning its evidence sparkled on every surface — tree branch and gate rail and on the trailer itself — as if the world he knew had tipped into some other, a world where everything was coated in the transitory and liminal substance of a fairy tale. There had been no power since that night but through some miracle the phone continued to function, although he knew it was only a matter of time until he lost that as well.

He had spent each day working to clear paths, salting the edges of the enclosures in an attempt to clear the fence lines. The snow was too thick to use the blower, too thick and too heavy, and so most of the work had been by shovel and after two days he was so tired and weak that he could not fathom how he could keep up with it, so he had stopped doing all but the most necessary clearing: the doors, some walkways, nothing more than that. He had called a snowplow service earlier in the week and they had come and plowed from the trailer to the parking lot and all the way down to the turnoff to the main road, a span of just over a mile, and despite the plow scraping nearly to the gravel surface of the road, it was already close to impassible. Each winter he took the pickup down to Naples, parking it in a gravel lot near the railroad tracks and thereafter using the snowmobile to span the mile between the rescue and town. That shift usually came well into December, when the snows were heavy enough to close the road between the creek and the rescue, but this season it was already apparent that the days he would be able to drive the truck from town to his trailer were numbered.

He had called Grace on Wednesday and talked with her for nearly an hour, standing in the relative warmth of the office, the kerosene heater he had finally repaired sending an invisible stream of hot air blasting into the room. In confirmation of his concerns about the road, she had told him that she and Jude had driven up to see if they could get to the rescue but the big snowplows had just come through, revealing the snowpack on the rescue road to be nearly two feet deep. Had Jude not been with her, she said, she might have skied up the road, but the route was a full mile and she worried about the boy and so they turned back to Bonners, their progress slow and steady amongst cars spun everywhere into the drifts. She sounded happy to hear from him and he thought that maybe, just maybe, things could still move back to the way they had been before Rick had arrived.

A few minutes later, as if in confirmation of his desire, the phone rang as he was still seated at the desk.

Bill Reed, the voice on the other line said. Glad I caught you. This is Judge Harper up at the First District Court.

Yes? he said, his chest a flurry of electric lines.

I guess you’ve got a problem up there.

A problem?

With Fish and Game, the judge said.

Oh, Bill said, relief flooding through him all at once. Do I ever.

Yeah, Sheriff Baxter was telling me about it. Asked if there was anything the court could do.

Yeah, Bill said, Earl mentioned he might talk to you.

Well, no guarantees what this will do in the long run, but I got a lawyer friend to file an injunction on your behalf.

What’s that mean?

Means Fish and Game can’t do anything until we work it out in the court. It’ll just be temporary but maybe it’ll buy you a month or two. Hell, with this storm it might buy you a lot longer than that.

Dang, he said. Thank you so much.

Well, you should thank Earl, really. I owe him a bunch.

I’ll certainly do that.