“ By God,” said Boucicaut, flinging a handful of deer intestines out the door of his one-room trailer, “some car you got there, Gilly.” The 325i sat in Boucicaut’s muddy yard beside the pickup, a rusted and doorless oven, bald tires, a stained mattress, windblown scraps, garbage. Gil, drinking coffee at the grimy-topped card table by the sink, remembered yards like that from his childhood, but the Boucicauts’ hadn’t been one of them.
“Thanks,” Gil said, but he knew the car was ruined for him now. It meant payments he could no longer make and that pissy smell inside; his mind shrank from the thought. “So what are you doing these days?” he asked. The coffee was trembling in his cup, as though the earth were unsteady, far below. He put it down.
“Running for Congress,” Boucicaut said.
Gil, not sure he had heard right, stared at him.
“Joke, man,” said Boucicaut. “What’d you think I’d be doing?”
That was easy, and Gil blurted it out: “Catching for the Sox.”
Boucicaut laughed a barking laugh, then said, “I don’t get you.”
“That’s what I always thought,” Gil said. “That you’d end up in the big leagues.”
“Then you were living in a dream world.” Boucicaut gave Gil a long look. The expression in his eyes changed. “That’s a sharp suit, Gilly. To go with the wheels.”
A cheap suit, compared to what was out there in the world of suits, and stained with coffee besides. Gil said nothing.
“How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?”
“Raking in the big bucks.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Don’t appear that way to me,” Boucicaut said. He had the deer laid out on newspaper on the vinyl floor and was gutting, skinning, and butchering it, all with a monstrously oversized and ill-made hunter, probably from China. Gil watched Boucicaut hack away for a minute or two, his oily black hair hanging over his face in two wings, then pulled out the thrower and gave it a quarter spin across the room. It stuck in the floor, a foot or two from Boucicaut’s hand. Boucicaut didn’t even twitch.
“Try that,” Gil said.
Boucicaut turned to him and smiled. Both incisors were missing. “You kept it up?”
“Kept what up?” said Gil, and rubbed his tongue over his chipped tooth.
“Throwing.”
“Not really.”
Boucicaut jerked the thrower out of the floor. “Your old man’s?” he said.
Gil nodded.
“What’s it worth these days, a blade like this?”
“I’m not sure.”
Boucicaut ran the edge lightly across the ball of his thumb. “Jesus.” A red line seeped onto the skin, taking the shape of a lipsticked and unsmiling mouth. Boucicaut licked it off and returned to the deer, using Gil’s knife. He sliced easily through the white tendon at the back of a hind leg; the long purple hamstring slid free.
How to hamstring a man, thought Gil: dive, roll, come up behind, slice just like that and just there. His father had taught him that with rubber knives, not far from where he now sat, in a trailer too, and with a yard outside and under the same sort of scudding clouded sky; but it had all changed.
“Sure knew how to make ’em, your old man,” said Boucicaut. He pushed himself up with a grunt, his stomach hanging over his belt, and opened the fridge. “Switch to beer?”
It was eight in the morning, Gil had a headache and still hadn’t eaten, but he said yes to Boucicaut. And thought, yes, wouldn’t it be nice if Boucicaut took over, took charge, took care of him, the way the catcher does the thinking for the pitcher.
Boucicaut took out four Labatt’s Fifties and handed him two, leaving a red smear on the fridge door. “Some watch you’re wearing, Gilly,” he said, Gil’s sleeve sliding up as he reached for the bottles.
“No one calls me that anymore.”
“No?”
“No.”
Boucicaut knelt over the deer. He stuck his hand in the rib cage, twisted, ripped out the heart. Then he whistled. A big black mongrel appeared in the doorway and Boucicaut tossed it to him. The dog caught it in the air and ran off. Boucicaut’s eyes fastened again on Gil’s car.
“No one calls you Gilly?”
“No.”
“What do they call you? Mr. Renard?”
“Some do.”
“Some do.” Boucicaut shook his head. “You made it, didn’t you, old pal? Went out into the big bad world and made good.”
Gil didn’t want to think about how he’d done. For the second time, he asked: “What are you up to these days?”
“This and that,” said Boucicaut.
“Looks like you’re making out all right,” Gil said.
Boucicaut stopped whatever he was doing inside the deer carcass, the thrower out of sight. He gave Gil a look, the same combative look, Gil supposed, that he used to see through the bars of the catcher’s mask when the game was on the line. But now it had a menacing effect he didn’t remember; maybe it was just the black beard. “Is that meant to be funny?” Boucicaut said.
“You’ve got a truck. You’ve got this place.”
Something snapped inside the carcass. “The truck’s a rusted-out piece of shit with two hundred thousand miles on it. And this pigsty isn’t even mine. Belongs to my old lady.”
Gil couldn’t stop his gaze from sliding toward the bed against the back wall, empty and unmade.
“Don’t get a hard-on, Gilly. She won’t be back till August.”
“Gil.”
Boucicaut tilted a beer to his lips, swallowed half of it. “Ask me why, Gil.”
“Why what?”
“Why she won’t be back till August.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause she’s in the pen.”
Gil didn’t say anything.
“Ask what for.”
“Just tell me, Co.”
“No one calls me that either.”
“What do they call you?”
“Len.” Boucicaut finished his first bottle, set it on the table, coming close to Gil. Gil heard him breathing, the heavy breathing of a fat, middle-aged man, not a big-league catcher. That didn’t make sense. “It’s my name, right?” said Boucicaut.
“Right.”
“Did you know that Boucicaut was a knight in the Crusades?”
“No.”
“A real one, not like Robin Hood. A college chick told me that.”
“You went to college?”
“That’s a good one. This was a college chick I picked up in a bar.” Boucicaut started on the second bottle. “You haven’t finished asking me.”
“Asking what?”
“What they got my old lady for.”
“Speeding?” Gil, his first beer drained too, was feeling lightheaded.
“Another joke. You’re out-jokin’ me, old pal.”
“I give up, then.”
“Sellin’ her tail.”
“They locked her up for that?”
“She was workin’ the ski places. Not a bad idea-that’s where the money is. Hurt their image, though, so they went after her. Image is the whole fuckin’ deal with those assholes.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry for me. I miss the money is all.”
The mongrel returned to the door. Boucicaut threw out another red organ.
They emptied their second beers, had a few more. Boucicaut finished with the deer, bagged the meat, put it in the fridge; then kicked the remains outside, rolled up the newspaper, stuffed it in the woodstove. “What day is it?” he said, wiping the thrower on his jeans and handing it to Gil.
For a moment, Gil wasn’t sure. Was that what it meant to be unemployed, you lost track of time? Then he pictured his schedule, laid out in boxes, now demolished. “Thursday,” he said.
“Thursday,” Boucicaut said. “Sale on ammo, down at Sicotte’s. Think I’ll run down.” He stepped outside, crossed the yard, stopped by the 325i. “Wouldn’t mind a little test drive.”
“Want me to drive you there, you mean?”
“More like drive myself. Unless you don’t trust me.”
Gil went outside, gave him the keys. He’d trusted Boucicaut since he was five years old. “Be right back,” Boucicaut said. He opened the car door, saw the trophy lying on the passenger seat. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Gil said. “My kid’s.” He reached inside, took it out.
“You’ve got a kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too. A couple.”
“In school?”
“If it’s really Thursday.”
“They must have left early.”
Boucicaut looked puzzled.
“For school,” Gil explained. “They were gone when we got here.”
“They don’t live here, for Christ’s sake. They’re with their ma.”
“In jail?”
Boucicaut’s forehead knotted. “Not her, man. Down in Portland. This was before.”
He climbed into the car, wheeled it around as though he’d been driving it for years, and sped off, spewing mud. His whoop of pleasure hung in the air, or else Gil imagined it.
Gil went back inside, closed the door. It was cold. He lit the stove, had another beer, looked around. He found nothing interesting-unless guns and ammo were interesting; plenty of guns, plenty of ammo-until, on the floor at the back of the only closet, he came across two baseball gloves, both buried in dust balls. One was a fielder’s glove, the other a catcher’s mitt. A black Rawlings. Gil recognized it. He put it on, pounded his fist in it a few times; then he took it off, sniffed inside, and set it on the table beside the trophy.
He lay down on the bed, got a hard-on. Boucicaut’s old lady was a whore. That meant she’d sleep with him if he paid. He toyed with the idea of sleeping with Boucicaut’s old lady, decided he wouldn’t do it. But what if she walked in the door that very minute? He watched the door for a while. Then he closed his eyes.
When he opened them the trailer was cold and full of shadows, and the objects he saw-trophy, mitt, beer bottles-had fuzzy edges. He checked his watch: six-thirty. He’d slept all day. Gil rose, opened the door, went outside. No car. Sicotte’s, as he recalled, was about fifteen minutes away. The mongrel trotted past, toward the woods.
“Here, boy.”
The dog growled and kept going.
Gil took a piss, watching the lane, listening for the sound of an approaching car. He heard no cars, heard nothing at all. The temperature fell, the silence grew, like a living thing. Gil felt the woods all around. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket for warmth, for comfort.
And felt something crumpled up in one of them. He withdrew it, smoothed it out: a long, sealed white envelope, addressed to him. He opened it.
Inside was a legal document he could make no sense of at first. Words and phrases from various parts of the page leapt out at him: “Defendant’s DOB,” “Probate and Family Court,” “Plaintiff.”
“Hold it,” he said aloud, “just hold it.”
The mongrel reappeared, wagging its ragged tail, brushing Gil’s leg. Gil kicked it away.
He forced himself to begin at the top, read word by word. Ellen’s name was typed in the box labeled PLAINTIFF. His appeared in the box beneath: DEFENDANT. For a moment he thought he was the good guy; the plaintiff was a complainer, right? Then he read on:
THE COURT HAS ISSUED THE FOLLOWING ORDERS TO THE DEFENDANT (only items checked shall apply):
There followed nine numbered lines, preceded by little boxes. X s appeared in two of them:
YOU ARE ORDERED NOT TO ABUSE THE PLAINTIFF by harming or attempting to harm the plaintiff physically, or by placing the plaintiff in fear of imminent serious physical harm, or by using force, threats, or duress.
YOU ARE ORDERED NOT TO CONTACT THE PLAINTIFF or any child(ren) listed below, either in person, by telephone, in writing, or otherwise, and to stay at least 100 yards away from them, unless you receive written permission from the Court to do otherwise.
CHILD(REN): Richard G. Renard II.
Gil’s first thought was a crazy one: someone had slipped into the trailer while he slept and stuck the envelope in his pocket. Then came a dim recollection, dim not because of a long passage of time, but because it was such a cool bland memory in a hot sea of them: red-faced Bridgid in tears, Garrity’s pink and snappable leg, shaking Figgy’s Judas hand. A cool bland memory of a man in a windbreaker rising from a chair in the office waiting room, polite and smiling. “Mr. Renard?” Then the long white envelope. And: “Have a nice day.”
A cool bland process server. Ellen had hit him when he was down. Every muscle in his body went tense, frozen between need for action and ignorance of what that action might be. Gil stood in the mud outside Boucicaut’s trailer, with the pressure building and building inside, until he thought he might just die there, and it would be a good thing; and then he remembered the thrower, strapped to his leg.
The next moment he had it in his hand, a work of art, but also an ugly little bugger, as Mr. Hale had said. Gil flung it at a tree across the yard, ten yards away, perhaps farther. The knife missed the trunk completely, flashing into the woods and out of sight.
Gil went after it, found it lying on a wet pile of leaves, returned to the tree he had missed. A red maple; he could tell by the few dead leaves that had held onto its branches all winter. Gil inscribed a circle at chest height, the size of the deer heart Boucicaut had cut out, or a little bigger. He measured fifteen paces across the yard, hefted the knife. Perfectly balanced to rotate around its midpoint, maximum effective distance for a one-and-a-half-turn, handle-to-point throw forty-two to forty-eight feet, taking into account the extent of the sticking range. Front foot forward, leg flexed, elbow bent, wrist locked, knife behind the head.
Gil let go, careful to keep his wrist still until the follow-through, careful to aim high, allowing for gravity. The knife spun through the air one and a half times and stuck in the trunk, two or three inches to the right of the circle, blade pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle. Gil retrieved it and tried again, monitoring the movements of his arm more closely this time.
Stick: on the outside of the circle, blade pointing down at about thirty degrees.
And again: Dead center, blade at a right angle.
And once more: Dead center, blade at a right angle.
For Ellen: Same.
And Tim: Same.
And Figgy: Same.
And Bridgid: Same.
And the busybody old lady in the Harvard cap: Same.
And who else?
Bobby Rayburn: Missed.
Bobby Rayburn: Missed.
Gil cried out, alone in the clearing, night falling around him, no words, just a noise tearing up from his chest, through his throat, out his mouth.
Bobby Rayburn, who had humiliated him in front of his kid, face it, face it, face it: Bull’s-eye.
Bobby Rayburn: Bull’s-eye.
Bobby Rayburn, Bobby Rayburn, Bobby Rayburn: harder, harder, harder: same, same, same.
It was springtime. Sap ran down the trunk of the red maple like blood.