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  Working steadily, he noosed the sisal rope around the doe’s neck, tied it, yanked the knot to test it, then (standing tiptoed atop the overturned plastic bin) looped the rope’s other end over one of the fire escape’s iron rails. He pulled the slack through. With a heavy grunt, he tugged hard on the rope, drawing the doe’s head off the ground so that it appeared an unfamiliar sound had just roused it from sleep. But that was as high as he could lift it. Hoisting the deer, he realized, was going to be more difficult than he’d planned; at 340 pounds (a weight deemed “morbidly obese” by his tactless primary care physician), Elwin wasn’t remotely so fit as he’d been in his grad school years, back when he could’ve raised a buck like a yo-yo. Dropping the rope, he considered tying it onto the Jeep and hoisting it up that way, but this would entail parking on the back lawn, in eight inches of snow and probably atop the brick planters. He wiggled his arms like an on-deck batter, picked up the rope again, braced his boots against the snow, and pulled mightily. The doe’s neck rose, then its limp forelegs, its torso, then finally its hind legs—slowly and smoothly, like a saint ascending—at which point Elwin, his overinsulated arm muscles seething, tied off the rope then collapsed onto the snow.

  He lay there for a while, on his back, the soft-faceted snowflakes that the wind was sweeping off the roof grazing his eyelashes and powdering his lips. The deer he’d just lynched was dully twirling in the sideward glow of the 150-watt floodlight tilted over Big Jerry’s back door. Light-years above him, partly screened by woolly black clouds, were two stars: Sirius and Rigel, guttering weakly. When Elwin was a boy, and begging for a telescope, his father had told him that the Indians took the stars with them when they were forced out of New Jersey, which explained the star-deprived blackness above Montclair as well as the overfreckled skies out west. Those few stars they’d left behind, like Sirius and Rigel, had been merely too big to carry; they were like abandoned monuments, a celestial Stonehenge lodged in the skies above Ho-Ho-Kus and Secaucus, the last physical vestiges of an erased civilization.

  As the cold began penetrating Elwin’s back, he wondered, idly, as he sometimes did, how he’d ended up here. Not the immediate here—face-up in the snow at 2 A.M. with a pendant carcass nearby—but the wider, more existential here: securely tenured and middlingly comfortable, yes, but piercingly alone, unloved and unheralded, a coroner of dead languages, dead marriages, and now (refocusing the mental lens) a dead and dangling deer. This was a question—How did I end up here?—that as a younger man he used to ask himself regularly, most often in a tickled and self-congratulatory mode: How did I end up here (limb-tangled in bed with this woman, so obviously out of his league; doing fieldwork in places he enjoyed hearing described as “far flung”—the Amazon, the Mongolian steppe, an Inuit village in Nunatsiavut; or accomplishing feats for which his Montclair upbringing had scarcely prepared him, like shooting a deer or tilling a half acre of meaty black soil in that Skippack Valley commune, or sewing up his own gashed arm, in a vocal haze of mosquitoes, after a machete mishap in a Bolivian Indian village)? The swivels of his life used to please him greatly. They were a rebuttal—not angry, but insistent—to the straight, level course of his father’s life: from the Army to college to grad school to a teaching post to marriage to fatherhood to retirement to nursing home, each progression as engraved and invariable as the Stations of the Cross. Elwin had been different; he’d zigged, he’d zagged, resisting the tamped-down paths, the blatant grooves. For a while, anyway, until he found that same question, so luscious for so many years, beginning to curdle in his mind: How did I end up here (here, in yet another fertility clinic, Maura sighing and patting his fattening back; in yet another overstarched faculty committee meeting, and yet another classroom, ignoring his students ignoring him; back home in near-flung New Jersey, trapped in congealing Turnpike traffic; in a Morristown marriage counselor’s office, watching the therapist’s thatchy eyebrow ascend as Maura described sex with her new chef-lover as “frankly the most liberating experience” of her life)? Until recently, however, the question had never seemed final—the word end having always been exaggerated, a touch of young-buck melodrama.

  But now . . . he was not yet at the age, like his father, when life shifts to past tense, when what is becomes what was and all the other verbs defining your existence go slumping into the preterite, crusted with apophonic alternations (I sing calcifying into I sang), and you can do nothing but marvel or wince at the irredeemable, irreversible arc of it—not yet. On this November night he was fifty-four years old. By no means, he told himself, was he beyond the future tense. But he could feel the past tense gaining on him, like the cold seeping into his back and dusting his face. He licked it off his lips and stood up. He had work to do.

  He slid the plastic bin directly beneath the deer and lined it with one of the Hefty bags, then, after ditching his wristwatch and jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves, replaced his leather gloves with the rubber cleaning gloves and fastened on the headlamp. With his knife, he made a tiny incision near the doe’s pelvis, then squeezed his hand inside the cut; it was still warm in there, the gap exhaling a brief air-kiss of steam. Cupping the end of the blade with two fingers to prevent it from slashing the entrails, Elwin slowly cut upward, unzipping the doe’s belly. When the organs flopped out, with a slurpy sound, he severed the connective tissue, scouring the area around the diaphragm with his hand and blade. The organs tumbled down—dark liver and multi-chambered stomach and grayish-purplish intestines—into the Hefty sack below.

  He aimed his headlamp downward, to inspect the makeshift gutbucket, and was simultaneously relieved and dispirited to see that all the digestive organs had survived the collision intact: relieved, because that meant a burst of gastric juices or excrement hadn’t spoiled the meat, and dispirited, because that meant he had to keep going.

  He tied off the bung then pushed it through the rectum, and then, with the knife, cut off the rectum and a ring of the flesh surrounding it, letting the oblong chunk fall, with a gassy splat, into the Hefty sack. Not wanting to risk contaminating the meat, he slid the right glove off and used his bare hand to rip down the heart and lungs. Steam rose from the Hefty sack as from a pot of soup, a visual reminder, for Elwin, of just how cold he was—without his coat, and with his right forearm blood-wet and gore-gloppy. Only when he stepped back and focused did he realize his teeth were chattering.

  He was just turning the corner of the house, headed inside, with his coat and gloves in his left hand and his mucoid, red-splotched right arm extended perpendicular to his body, when a pickup came roaring into the driveway, its headlights and foglights and aftermarket whatever-else lights bouncing over the potholes and freezing him in their comet-bright glare, before the truck came lurching to a stop.

  “Shit,” Elwin whispered. This was worse than being caught redhanded, he thought. He’d been caught red-armed.

  The tinted window glided downward, releasing a potent blast of guitar distortion, sounding something like two chainsaws engaged in especially noisy sex, and revealing a glowing orange cigarette tip encircled by the ruddy, grinning face of Big Jerry’s son Christopher. Or maybe Joey: It was hard to tell the twins apart. But no, it was Christopher. Joey, the more urbane of the two, drove a sportscar. “What up, Doc?” shouted Christopher, who had clearly—considering the hour, the beery warble of his voice and the canine droop of his eyes—just finished a typically monumental night of drinking in Morristown. Biting his lower lip, Christopher slung his head back and forth before turning off the music, then continued his headbanging for a few moments afterwards as if failing—maybe actually failing—to register the silence. The graceless, viscous way he came spilling out of the truck called to mind the organs plopping out of the doe’s split belly.

  Only when he tried to shake Elwin’s hand, and was silently rebuffed, did Christopher notice all the blood. His eyelids leapt upward at the sight of it. Christopher had the kind of cold, windshield-washer-fluid-blue eyes that, on some men (Clark Gable
as an antique example), women find devastating. Yet something was wrong with Christopher’s set. They were too icy, too pale, and less roguish than sociopathic—zombie eyes. Christopher’s other Gable-esque features—his cleft chin; his dimpled grin; his narrow whisper of a mustache—were similarly marred: the chin too cloven, and yeastily puffed, resembling a miniature set of buttocks adorning his lower lip; the dimples too deep, and too suggestive of the skull-lines beneath; and the mustache foppish and dated. He was staring at Elwin’s out-held arm in mortal bafflement. “What’d you do, Doc?” he asked. “Deliver a baby?”

  It was impossible to tell whether or not he meant this question sincerely. His father, Big Jerry, referred to Elwin as “Dr. Cross,” but not out of respect—rather, because he enjoyed telling himself and others that a doctor lived next door, no matter what kind. He gleaned similar satisfaction from telling strangers what he’d paid for his house, in 1982, compared to its present value ($65,000 versus $320,000) and, whether they were interested or not, the amount of the monthly payment on the twenty-three-foot Bay Ranger he bought upon retiring, a not-insignificant figure—especially considering that, after nineteen months of payments, Big Jerry had used the boat only once. So for Christopher, whose curiosity, at twenty-two, was mainly limited to the varying shapes and sizes of New Jersey breasts and the still-unpredictable effects of legal beer consumption, Elwin was simply Doc—an ornamental doctor of some kind or other, be it linguistics or linguine, or maybe backyard obstetrics.

  “No,” said Elwin, after a long, pained pause. “Peek around the back.”

  “Fuck yeah,” Christopher shouted, after doing so. “Nice one. I didn’t know you hunted. Hey, we got a place on the Delaware we go. It’s all managed and shit. Huge fucking bucks. Where’d you bang that one?”

  “Two-oh-two,” Elwin said.

  “Two-oh-two?” The depth of his frown suggested advanced mental arithmetic. “What the fuck?”

  “It jumped in front of me.”

  “Holy . . . fucking . . . toledo,” Christopher exclaimed—slowly, but with increasing volume. He pitched forward in the snow to get a closer look at the deer. Elwin didn’t follow. “You tee-boned this thing then brought it home?”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “Where at?”

  “Just past Harter Road. By Spring Brook.”

  “Was it dead?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fuck the car up?”

  “A little.”

  “A drive-by, wow,” said Christopher, grinning. “That’s fucking punk, Doc. Damn.”

  Elwin said, “Seemed like such a shame . . . you know, to waste it.” His mouth was open to say more, but nothing emerged. He was overaccustomed to dealing with kids Christopher’s age, having taught them for almost a quarter century, which was why his current unsteadiness felt so odd and inverted: He was feeling a total absence of authority. If Christopher were to turn on him now, and snap, “Shame on you, Doc” (for any number of valid or semivalid reasons: driving home from the restaurant half drunk, or even a quarter drunk; going seven miles an hour over the speed limit, thereby reducing his ability to brake and/or swerve for the deer; failing to report the collision; heaving the carcass into his Jeep despite his lack of hunting license and/or deer tag; butchering the deer in this macabre and presumably unzoned-for suburban setting; and so on), Elwin might bow his graying head and beg forgiveness from this twenty-two-year-old utility lineman who was currently struggling, pickled as he was by a dozen Bud Light longnecks and three Jägermeister shooters, to unite the flame of his Bic lighter with the swaying tip of the Marlboro Red between his lips. But Christopher did not say For shame. Instead, once his cigarette was lit, he grinned madly, and jutting his chin toward Elwin with what appeared to be newfound affection and admiration for his neighbor, said, “Punk, Doc. Totally punk.”

  “Anyway,” Elwin said, “I’ve got to wash this arm off, and get some water.”

  “Right on. We gotta skin this bitch. I’ll get my quad.”

  Meekly, Elwin protested, but Christopher was already scrambling toward his house, wobbling his way across the tiretracked driveway, past a row of beefy trash cans, and through the gate to where his Kawasaki quad was parked, beneath the sunporch. “Fucking crazy, Doc,” he was shouting. “You the man!”

  Inside the house, rinsing the bloody film from his arm under the warm stream of the kitchen faucet, Elwin cringed when he heard the guttural rumble of Christopher starting up the quad. Closing his eyes, with a wounded grimace, he imagined lights appearing in bedroom windows up and down the street, like flashbulbs at a press conference. This had somehow gotten entirely out of hand—if at any point it was in hand, Elwin reminded himself. Scooping the water in his cupped palms and lowering his face into its warmth, he wondered if this was the way lives crumbled: swiftly, within the flickering span of a night: one unfortunate, ill-considered decision leading to another, and then another, followed by another, until it was impossible to see where the logic had forked, where rationality had dissolved—until all traces of sense and sensibility were scrubbed clean, like the minor stars from the skies over New Jersey, and you were left with a mid-life professor attempting to explain, to a crowd of livid, orey-eyed neighbors wearing bathrobes and snowboots, and perhaps accompanied by a pair of cops, and maybe even by a graveyard-shift reporter mulling a Satanism angle, why Bambi’s pink-nippled mother was dangling from his fire escape at 2-something A.M., her eviscerated organs steaming inside a recycling bin. (“You know,” he could almost hear the neighbors whispering, “his wife did just leave him.”) Elwin felt as if he was watching a video of his own demise. The decision, he felt, was whether to let it keep playing, ominous soundtrack-music and all, or fast-forward it. Bologna raised his head again, with a perturbed scowl, as Elwin rushed past him outside.

  He found Christopher wiping the skinning knife in the snow, with the quad, looking as showroom clean as Big Jerry’s Bay Ranger, parked beside the fire escape. “Nice knife,” he said. Elwin looked around: no cops, no reporter waving a steno pad at him, no sleep-encrusted neighbors brandishing rolling pins. Not even a glow from Big Jerry and Myrna’s bedroom window. Just the dark balm of New Jersey at night: the collective snore of millions of exhausted commuters, awaiting their execution by alarm clock. “You cool?” Christopher asked, pointing the knife at the doe.

  “Be my guest,” Elwin said, relieved—even thrilled—to stand back and observe. He slipped his washed hands into his pockets, the way Pontius Pilate might have done.

  “My dad never lets me clean them,” Christopher said. With his right hand, he sliced the skin on the neck, just behind the ears, while pulling, with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, on the flap he was making. He did an imitation of Big Jerry in full-choke cantankerousness: “‘You’ll just fug it up.’ Whatever.”

  “Where’s your brother tonight?”

  “That asshole,” Christopher said. “He’s nailing some broad up in Parsippany. He’s whipped. We never see him.” After he’d cut a collar-like ring around the doe’s neck, he made a vertical slice downward to where Elwin had split the belly, adding a dramatic, Zorro-like flourish. “Beauty!” he shouted, somewhat unclearly, then paused to light another cigarette. “You see that new boat he bought? Used boat, I mean.”

  Elwin hadn’t, but it wouldn’t have been so easy to notice: Big Jerry’s backyard was a metallic garden overplanted with quads, jonboats, a Jet Ski, a canoe, an antique Japanese motorcycle so frail and rusted it resembled a cicada shell, and several engine blocks in varying states of dishabille.

  “Your brother, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Says it’s a”—here his voice went lispy, queeny—“‘perfect lake boat.’” He took an intemperate drag from his cigarette. “Come on. It’s a twelve-foot jonboat. He’s like, but it’s fifty-six inches wide! Like that’s gonna matter in four-foot swells. The engine’s worth more than the whole fucking boat. And there’s a big gash in the hull! Think he noticed it? Whatever. He’s like, ‘
What gash?’ What an asshole.”

  “Here,” said Elwin, picking up the hacksaw. “We’ve got to get these forelegs off.”

  “Oh yeah, right. I knew that.”

  While Elwin sawed, Christopher sliced, the smoke from his Marlboro coiling above his head, the winddrift snow powdering the carcass like a sugared pastry: two butchers working in tandem, the scritch-scritch of the knife a call-and-response phrase to the intermittent rasps of the hacksaw. After Elwin dropped the deer’s right foreleg into the Hefty sack, he applied the pink-gummed hacksaw blade to the left leg. Then he knelt in the snow, sawing apart the hind legs.

  “Big night tonight?” he said, enjoying the silence but feeling obligated to break it.

  “Naw. Same old shit, you know.”

  “You have to work tomorrow?”

  “Oh yeah. Time and a half, bay-bee. Working Thanksgiving, too. That’s overtime. They had us on call because of this storm but this was nothing. City got bombed, though. Long Island, too. Them crews’ll be working all night.”

  “Careful now,” Elwin said, after glancing upward. “You’re pulling some meat off . . .”

  “Okay, yeah. I got it. I see it, Doc.” But in fact he was making a total hash of it, and Elwin was reminded that arming a drunk, no matter the task, was probably never a good idea. As he cut, Christopher swung his shoulders and hips about, in a woozy semi-dance, and sang, over and over again, the chorus to Mötley Crüe’s “Doctor Feelgood,” which Elwin suspected was in his honor. At one point Christopher’s hip reeled dangerously close to Elwin’s head.