John Updike - Toward the End of Time

Another proposal is that, through an unforeseen but perfectly well understood effect of quantum mechanics and its uncertainty principle, “virtual” particles, called into “being” with their anti-particles, for titanically small periods of time, are multiplying in the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that permeate “empty” space, exciting each other into existence in such numbers that space is becoming a semi-transparent gel, occluding protons from afar. The condition may be restricted to our galaxy, or the nearer portion of it. A third school of scientific thought holds simply that industrial pollution and the dust raised by the last war have thickened our planet’s atmosphere. But the war ended ten thousand revolutions of this planet ago, time for most dust to settle, and industrial production is still far from regaining pre-war levels. A fourth theory is that the ancients simply had better eyesight than we, or (a fifth theory) their astronomical descriptions were grossly exaggerated, to benefit the priestly hierarchy and its imbecilic royal puppets.

Coming back in the late-afternoon dark from a visit to the dazzlingly lit spaces of the Beverly Hospital (the doctors say I am doing fine: my impotence, incontinence, pain, paranoia, depression, and sense of dislocation are all on track in the normal course of healing), we picked up in our headlights, to one side of the driveway, a man disguised as a tree. It was John, walking back to his truck after two hours of remaining motionless in his stand. Gloria push-buttoned the Infiniti window down and asked in a musical, sprightly, loving voice, “How did it go?”

“It was quiet,” he admitted, with no hint of discouragement.

“Our neighbor, Mrs. Lubbetts, told me on the phone she saw four of them, feasting on her junipers.”

“Oh, they’re around,” he chimed back. “It’s just a question of time.”

And what isn’t? I sullenly thought.

The quiver of four aligned arrows on his back made him look like an anti-aircraft battery draped in camouflage cloth. His wire-frame glasses seemed still to hold the light from our headlights. To make him aware of my presence, as I huddled there beside Gloria, desperate for a diaper change, I cleared my throat and asked, “Do the trinkets ever bother you? These bigger new ones can do a job on human beings, I hear.”

He straightened, so his saintly smile was all I could see through Gloria’s rolled-down window. “I carry a spray; they mix it of sand and glue. One squirt of that and those darn critters don’t come near your feet again.”

Gloria made the car seat bounce, this expertise excited her so. Her radiant hair, cut and tinted while I was suffering my hospital checkup, blazed filament by filament in the ambient glow of our headlights. Or was some cunning part of John’s armory giving off a secondary glow?

“Smell that?” he said suddenly.

“What?” she asked, breathless.

“A buck. Right about here.”

We were parked, our engine idling, at a spot on the driveway beside the sourwood tree, whose fallen leaves gave off, I had noticed, a rich, lusty smell of decay. But I didn’t want to argue. I wanted only to get back to the house and get out of my wet Depends.

“There could be a buck?” Gloria asked, with a rising inflection.

“Why not?” John asked in his slow voice. “This is the season. Fella I was shooting with over on Plum Island got a six-pointer whose nose was to the ground, following the scent of a doe. That’s what they do. Buck smells a doe, his brain can’t take in much else.”

“How exciting!” Gloria exclaimed.

“Wasn’t paying attention, that’s how he got shot,” John said, as if his nature lesson needed recapitulation.

“I’m soaked,” I muttered at her side. “I’m miserable.” Reluctantly she moved the car up the driveway, nudging it along as if keeping step with the hunter walking up alone.

Next morning, shuffling down to pick up the Globe , I stopped by the sourwood to consider the odor in its vicinity. It was rank but, like the smell your finger brings away from probing the folds of your navel, or that your socks deliver when held beneath your nose at the end of a long day, not exactly unpleasant, because it is you .

It happened in my sleep, at dawn, when tender-faced ruminants inquisitively tread-nose extended like a fending hand in the dark-through the frost-whitened leaf mulch of the forest floor scarcely expecting, in the morning’s innocence, an enemy to be awake. But John had gone three weeks without his kill and had set his alarm to ring in the dark, in the middle of his faithful wife’s dreams. She rolled over, hearing him clump into his hunting boots, and fell back into a vision of venison.

I myself awoke to the sound of John and Gloria jubilating in mutually congratulatory murmurs down on the driveway. He had driven his green truck down the dirt road to collect the gutted carcass, then he had brought it back up to the house to show my wife his prize, the obscene fruit of their joint conspiracy. From my window I could see the deer’s body like a taut russet sack tossed into the square-ribbed flatbed along with the metal lattice of his treestand and some stray planks of lumber. The white of the throat couldn’t at first glance be distinguished from the big white-undersided tail. Heart thudding, I fumbled out of my sweated pajamas- never mind the soaked diaper, whose ammonia stung my eyes-and into yesterday’s corduroy trousers and moth-eaten wool sweater. Without the patience for socks, I stuck my naked feet into loafers and, moving faster than I had for months, grabbed the old parka, with its seams leaking down, hung on the hook nearest the kitchen door downstairs. The cold outside was misty, and felt like shackles on my bare ankles. The day was still too young to have acquired horizons.

Scarcely since our wedding day have I seen Gloria’s face aglow as it was beside the dusty, dented truck, with its lowered tailgate. Her bathrobe of purple chenille was clutched so tightly about her I knew she was wearing only a thin cotton nightie beneath. “He was crossing the old dirt road,” she burst out proudly to me, “right where John” -it made me shiver, the juices of affection and respect she managed to squeeze into the monosyllable-“had figured out the route up to our yard was.”

“She,” I said. “It’s a doe. It was a doe.”

“Right across beneath my stand,” John joined in. “A clean shot, the little downward angle suited me just fine, at about twenty feet.” His saintly face, with its shambly brown teeth and washed-out blue eyes, was unable to conceal, quite, his murderous pride. “Maybe she sensed my pulling the bow,” he went on. “She turned her head, to give me that seven-inch circle I spoke about. Zing! Right into the lungs. She didn’t get more than a hundred yards, and stopped breathing where she bedded down. She gave me this one long look, like I was coming to her assistance, and then lay down her pretty little head on the leaves. I didn’t have to use a second arrow. Depending on what gristle they pierce, they can be the devil to work out.”

I saw the wound now, a messy matted X. The dried blood blended in with her reddish-brown coat, its hairs glinting silver in the rising sun. From my angle the deer’s body stretched long as a lover’s beside you in bed. “How’d you get her up in the truck?” I asked.

“The old fireman’s squat-and-hoist,” he boasted, unable to control his grin. “Once you’ve removed the entrails, that cuts out a lot of the water and slop. Still, she weighs something over a hundred pounds, I can tell you. Luckily, it was near the road. Sometimes you wind up with a mile or so to drag out the carcass. I backed in the truck and hoisted. You try to take the weight on your legs and give a grunt out loud. That’s something we’ve learned from the Japanese, giving the power grunt.”