Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

“Lucy knows everything about me,” Mr. Jansen offered. It seemed a silly, conciliatory remark, not at all the kind of thing my wife’s father believed.

Steve called him on it. “Yeah, right — I know more about you than she ever will.”

Steve continued to scrape the call, but the wind had blown the horizon blank and there was no sign of a bird.

“And both of you know a fuck of a lot more about me than Sandy does,” he said.”The way I see our marriage is, like, finally, after thirty-nine years, we understand we don’t understand each other. We finally got that cleared up.

“Give me another drink,” he said, beating senselessly on. “She could give a rat’s ass about hunting — sitting out here in this box would seem stupid to her.

“Forget the turkey,” he said. “I have a mind to shoot myself.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

Steve barked a frantic, nearly hysterical call, working the tongue rapidly, like honing a knife against a whetstone.

“You don’t like me, do you? You got a problem with me.”

“Jesus, how’d we end up here?” Mr. Jansen said. “Let’s just everybody shut up for a minute.”

Steve said, “There’s key shit Sandy doesn’t know and never will. Stuff about Katrina, and that whole saga, right?” He sniffed, then spat through the window. “And yeah, every Friday about eleven, twelve o’clock you could always find Lindy’s car parked outside the massage parlor on Warren. Those Oriental girls, they look like teenagers until they’re forty, eh Lindy? And you,” he said, turning on my father-in-law. “You—”

“That’s enough, Steve.”

“Hey,” Lindy said.

“And you,” Steve said to me. “You obviously got some kind of fucked-up agenda—”

“Look,” Lindy said.

“Where?” Steve said.

Moving against a low sea current of snow, a turkey, its narrow neck bent, came toward us, following the call. Lindy grabbed a spotting scope from one of the packs, adjusting the focus. “It’s got a beard and a half,” he said, passing me the scope. I slipped off my mittens. Steve worked the wooden slat in a new rhythm, as if mating the tempo to his excitement, locating the music of his desire. I looked through the scope and saw the turkey, its long straggling beard and chocolate-brown feathers and its beady black eyes, narrowed in a heavy-lidded squint against the blowing snow. I passed the scope to Mr. Jansen and he slid the gun into my hand.

We were all silent now, and even the smallest sounds — Lindy’s labored breathing or Mr. Jansen absently rubbing his thigh — seemed a gross and fatal intrusion. Steve let the call fall silent for a moment, and then resumed, and when he did we could hear for the first time the low guttural of the old tom’s response. The turkey drummed and strutted in what seemed to me like hesitation, and then, in a sudden dash, hurried straight toward the decoy.

The gun had a satisfying heft, a weight in my hand that was exactly right. I raised the stock to my shoulder and looked with one eye down the barrel, arranging the red wattle neatly within the notched iron sight. In this snow the dark-brown bird was exposed, and I had a vague sense of understanding the risk it took, the declaration it was making. The tom’s beard blew in the wind, and he began to circle the hen, spreading his wings and fanning his tail. The bird puffed up to three times its size. It was a terrific display, cocky and proud and blustery and, I thought, soon to be irrelevant; my father-in-law gave a nod and I drew a breath and my mind went blank and I let go of the breath as I squeezed the trigger and nothing, nothing at all, happened. I went cold and, confused, stopped sighting the bird. Lindy said, “The fucking safety.” He grabbed the gun, raised it to his shoulder, and fired. A deep blast echoed and unrolled, just as the tom seemed to know it had been fooled. Instantly, the fan of feathers folded and the turkey collapsed.

We rushed from the blind and gathered in a circle over the bird. The shot had been a good one; the turkey’s head was gone, and its neck was now hardly more than a hose filling a hole in the snow with blood. No one bent to touch it, as if this were the scene of a crime and we were waiting for some other, final authority to arrive. At last, Steve Rababy lit a cigarette and, covering his heart with his hat, gave the bird a brief eulogy.

“He was looking for pussy and now he’s dead. Let that be a lesson to you liars.”

Lindy offered a sentimental rephrasing, managing to work a trace of irony into his voice: “He died for love.”

“Dinner,” Mr. Jansen said, putting his vast appetite where it belonged, before all.

The shell had detonated inches from my ear. I worked a finger in it to clear the ringing.

Lindy said to me, “I had to take your shot.”

“I didn’t know about the safety,” I said.

“That’s my fault,” Mr. Jansen said.

“Let’s agree on a story,” Steve said.

“Fine by me,” Lindy said.

They looked at Mr. Jansen for ratification, and then he said, “Okay, we’ll say it was Daly.”

After the high of the hunt, the rest of the afternoon had the long, languid feel of a Sunday. People kept up a compensatory busyness. Mr. Jansen plucked the bird in the garage and brazed the remaining nubs with a blowtorch. He wore an orange watch cap with a comical fur ball dangling from a string, and drank steadily from a cache of beers he’d buried in a mound of snow. Sandy Rababy worked a wooden spoon in a big pink bowl, and Lindy sat on the couch reading the newspaper. Caroline and Lucy discussed acting careers, my wife’s in particular, although now and then my mother-in-law offered an item of gossip she’d gleaned from the tabloids, restating fantasy and rumor as if they were fact. I listened, not so much to the content as to the lilt in my wife’s voice, the English phrasing in some of her sentences, a strange cadence that rose up, seeming to free itself, now and then, from her flat Michigan accent. She had an actor’s gift for mimicry, a hunger for imitation, absorbing the speech of others unself-consciously, and on several occasions in the past her affairs had chillingly registered for me first in a new sound, a surprising word in her vocabulary, a foreign inflection in her voice.

Late in the afternoon, in guest mode, with no specific chore, I went for a walk. The trail I took led through a stand of white pine, ending at the lake behind the Jansens’ cabin. A diving raft was beached on the icy shore, and a string of rental boats was chained to a tree, each boat filled with snow, its gunwales whelmed by deep drifts. I felt as though I were seeing a sculptor’s rendition of my wife’s memories, a summer dream hacked into ice. The lake was fairly large, the surface sealed shut as though paraffin had been poured over it. I walked to the end of the dock. Below the ice, a blue sand pail and a yellow shovel from summer had sunk into the murk. Then I saw my wife out on the lake, perhaps half a mile from the dock, bundled in a shapeless red snowsuit. Her progress over the ice was painfully slow, as though she feared falling through, but then she was gone, and I heard a loon and tilted my good ear toward its call. A loon’s cry makes a haunting music on summer evenings, a tremolo you hear in the dark — eerie, because the two alternating notes mimic the sound of an echo, a call going out and then returning unanswered, a prayerful lament without a response. It was very late in the season to be migrating. The black bird was standing on the ice. Loons are ungainly, barely able to walk, achieving flight only after a long awkward struggle. In the air, they’re graceful and capable of flying sixty miles an hour. I watched until the bird rose up and the black speck, clearing the trees, dissolved like a drop of tint in the darkening sky.