Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Your dealer, a scrambled voice who goes by the moniker “Antlerdam,” communes with Wade once a week by telephone. He wraps your money in turn-of-the-century plastic bags, which he leaves in a broken toilet tank at the Carter County Library. He is responsible for shipping your plunder to lavish and remote destinations: Canada, where bone smiths work in secret to carve the antlers into walking sticks and knife handles and door knockers; or California, where black-market apothecaries grind them into powder, measure them into tinctures and compounds.

On radio broadcasts and reward flyers, the Forest Service calls you poachers; yet in his more winsome moments, Wade likes to say you’re nothing but vernal custodians.

Never mind that your exploits carry a $25,000 fine, and a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

“Prison, Syl,” Kenny says, when you finally admit what you’ve been up to.

His disgust is pretty righteous. Elk sheds, like everything on the Refuge, are protected under Posterity. They’re supposed to stay where they fall, reintegrate with the undergrowth. None of this is news to you.

Luckily, you’ve got a line for just this moment: Wade knows what he’s doing, been at this for years. Besides, it’s not ivory. It’s not hurting anyone. “What am I supposed to do if Dad does turn out to have cancer, and I have to sell the house so he can come back as a tree?”

Kenny’s having none of it. “I’m sure you’ll be a lot of help to him in prison.”

His resolution not to speak to you lasts about a week. Your father, meanwhile, is too busy convincing himself of his imminent death to suspect that you’re flouting your entire upbringing. If he realizes that your agreed-upon eight-month hiatus from college has turned into two years, he doesn’t show it. He won’t interview new hires for Rayles Management, or let you teach him how to balance the budget by himself. Most days, he just ghouls around the house, checking for new skin lesions and comparing snowfall reports from down-valley towns. “Erlton only got twenty inches this year,” he says by way of good morning. “Twenty inches. I remember when they had to shell the pass all night to loose avalanches. Now I doubt they’ll get another real winter.”

But it’s still real winter in Fell Gulch. The snowies keep coming: keep sledding, skating, building legions of snowmen. Zambonis chug back and forth across Highness Lake. Curtains of icicles rim the Main Street gables. Christmas lights twinkle well into March, like the whole place is some antique snow globe.

You start picking up cleaning shifts whenever a staff member calls in sick. Changing sheets, staging ski compounds so you can visit the big mansions on Painter’s Knoll and study the handiwork of your clandestine life: antlers twisted up in huge chandeliers, trophy tips meeting neatly over stone fireplaces.

“Nice twelve-point,” you say to the lady of a house on Ridge Street one afternoon, gazing at a mount above a mantel littered with pictures of towheaded kids. The elk’s eyes are dark and stygian. A tendril of cobweb drifts from one of his crowns.

“Oh.” She pauses at the bottom of the banister, one sapling leg braced on the first stair. You can’t help thinking of her heating bill, what it must cost to be able to willow around in such a thin nightie this time of year. “I don’t really know. Somebody shot it a while back, I guess.”

“Well, if we ever go bust, at least you know what to auction off first.”

“Mm.”

“That’s probably fifty inches of beam on each side.”

Knowing more about her own possessions than she does thrills you. So does every corner of this new, secret world you’ve staked with Wade: the coded cuts on the trees, the white silence of the Refuge, the alpenglow gilding the rumpled chevrons of the Bitterroots, the black breaks of runoff ribboning the snow.

For all Wade’s precautions, his lifework is hardly unknown. January through May, when the doors swing for him at Caviston’s Roadhouse, shots line the bar.

Growing up, you were made to understand that Dad would skin you alive if you ever set foot inside Caviston’s. It’s out on Route 29, a lopsided cabin where the fur-trapper great-grandfathers of the current regulars would rendezvous back in the days before the chili pepper lights and neon signs and shamrocks that now disgrace it. You feel a little out of place among all the pretty women and their black-marketeers: James Muldoon, who still harvests wood out near Silver Pass; Roy Fitzgerald, who charges Painter’s Knoll–types two thousand a head for an underground quail feast every fall. But once Wade announces that “Sylvia Rayles is no fucking waster,” you’re as welcome among them as anyone.

And all assembled are eager to supplement what you know about Wade. There’s an ex-girlfriend he’s been hung up on, and a litany of hilarious entanglements with park rangers. They tell you not to worry about his vague idea of moving to his mother’s place in Minnesota—he always fails to follow through on his best intentions.

Listening, you’re warmed as their stories fail to breach your own trove of hard-won intimacies: Before moving to Minnesota, his mother sang with the Silver Banshees down in Miller’s Hole. The night his father emptied his pill bottle he gave Wade twenty dollars, which still sits, untouched, in a tobacco tin under the sycamore at the old Dufrane house; passing on Pinedale Road, Wade reflexively pulls into the driveway sometimes. He’s never cooked a dish without burning it, or made it all the way through “Shenandoah” without his voice breaking.

April brings mud season, and Antlerfest with it. Fell Gulch goes full cervine. Rangers scatter a modest haul of confiscated sheds all over Highness Park, and the whole town turns up to honor this last shred of heritage: ursine dads shouldering winter-swaddled daughters, reluctant teenagers milling around the parking lot, grandparents reminiscing about the days when you could hunt a whole elk, goddammit, and not just the antlers.

A whistle-blow at sunup sends four hundred citizens charging out into the field. Aware that your absence might raise suspicion, you and Wade make a point of being seen. You overturn logs and comb through bushes, right in the thick of it with all the grannies. You watch the kids hauling back their finds—nothing but spikes, straight and thin and practically worthless, but borne along as tenderly as sacrificial offerings. And all the while you recognize that you are the villains in this scene; you are responsible for this dearth.

You finally wind your way over to Kenny’s pickle stand to bridge the two sides of your life. Kenny grips Wade’s hand, then upsells him on a jar of beets and turnips.

“Twelve dollars?” you say through gritted teeth. “Really?”

Kenny shrugs. “They’re award-winning.”

He makes no attempt to mask his dead-eyeing of Wade, who wanders the parking lot inspecting the Antlerfest auction lots laid out on the tarmac like shot-down chandeliers. A chinless, brown-eyed ranger touches your elbow, keen to tell you more about the sheds. Did you know that elk cast their antlers every year? That once upon a time, pretty much anybody could just scoop them right off the ground?

You can hardly decide what thrills you more viscerally: knowing a man has underestimated you so profoundly, or flirting with a loathed enemy right in front of Wade.

The prize set of antlers—with an atypically considerable fifty-two-inch spread—sells handily for four grand. Afterward, Wade boosts you into the truck bed. The matter-of-factness of his presumption is stunning. As he continues to stand there, scraping a gob of mud off your knee, it hits you.

Still, you take a full week to say it aloud. “I think I might be in love with Wade.”