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  Elwin said, “Easy now.”

  “So this broad tonight . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “At McGuinn’s, right? Donna. Fucking cuts me off after, like, three beers. I’m like, what the fuck? And she’s like, after what happened last time, you’re lucky to get anything.”

  “What happened last time?”

  “That’s the fucking thing, man. I don’t know! It’s my brother. I’m like, that was Joey, we’re fucking twins, bitch. And she’s all, it ain’t my job to tell you guys apart. So I call Joey, right? I’m like, fucking bitch won’t give me a beer because of whatever shit you pulled at McGuinn’s. So he says, let me talk to her. So I give her the phone and she’s, like, nodding and shit, then she hands me back my phone and she’s like, I don’t know who you called but that guy doesn’t know you. He said you called a children’s hospital. Fucking ICU.”

  Distantly, Elwin said, “Nice.”

  “Asshole! Then he turns his phone off. He’s fucking garbage, man. And you should see this broad he’s doing, the one in Parsippany. She’s like a total cow. It’s like, grab a fold and fuck it. Not me, man.”

  “Yeah, well,” Elwin said, cringing as he assessed the fuckability of his own copious folds. He twisted the final leg off the deer and dumped it with the other ones. “How’s the meat looking?”

  “Here, hand me that flashlight,” Christopher said. “It’s not bad, man. Check it out. This side over here is kind of ripped up, but it’s all right. Make sausage out of that.”

  Elwin’s eyes followed the flashlight beam. Christopher’s appraisal, he saw, was far too generous: The collision had rendered the doe’s left shoulder ragged and jellied, reminiscent of cherry pie filling—completely unsalvageable. “It’s already sausage,” Elwin muttered. The flesh of the right shoulder, however, appeared, if not prime, then choice: nicely striated and evenly purple, just a shade lighter than the Douro wine that had indirectly led to the doe’s death, and layered with a webbing of diaphanous ivory fat. “Better than I expected, actually,” Elwin said.

  “Nice bumper placement,” Christopher said, and slapped Elwin on the back. “Like bullet placement, right? Bumper placement. Hey, you got a beer inside?”

  “No, sorry,” Elwin said, realizing he did but letting the lie stand anyway. “So let’s get this skin off. You mind? The two of us can manage fine without the quad . . .”

  “Come on, with the quad it’s like that,” snapping his fingers.

  “I don’t want to wake the whole street.”

  “Like that,” he said, re-snapping his fingers. “See that stainless-steel exhaust? That fucker’s quiet, man. These new models, they gotta be. Some law in California.”

  “Then let’s be quick,” Elwin said. “We need a rock or something . . .”

  Christopher said, “A golfball.”

  “You got one?”

  “I got everything,” he said, then took off running. The slam of the storm door, as he rocketed into the house, was enough to shake the slumbering icicles from the roof. He was back within a minute, holding a can of Bud Light in one hand, and, in the other palm, flaunting a yellow golfball as if it were a glinting nugget he’d just panned from a stream. Which wasn’t so far from the truth, as it turned out: “We used to fish these fuckers out of the ponds at Spring Brook, when me and Joey was kids,” he said. “Late at night, you know, ’cause they’d run you off if they found you. There’s this pond, on the fourteenth hole—fucking full of balls. Just put some waders on, walk around with a landing net. Fucking bonanza, man. We got, like, five hundred balls one night alone. Sold them back for a quarter a ball—except for those Titleist balls, you know? Fucking dollar per.”

  “Not bad,” Elwin said, plucking the golfball from Christopher’s hand and inserting it into a fold he made with a skin-flap hanging from between the doe’s shoulder blades. “Hand me that other rope,” he said. After tying a slip knot, Elwin rung the nylon loop around the base of the skin covering the golfball, so that the ball was tucked inside the furry bulge, and tightened the knot. This would secure the deer’s skin to the rope so that they could peel it from the carcass with a single motorized pull. “Your turn,” he said to Christopher, tossing him the other end of the rope.

  “We found this ball once,” Christopher said, setting his beer on the rear fender so that he could tie the rope to the quad’s hitch. “Had Saddam Hussein’s face on it, right? The Iraq dude? And it said, ‘Slam Saddam.’ Fucking beautiful. I saved that one.”

  “Now let’s do this quietly,” Elwin said.

  Christopher tapped his bootheels together, saluted, then mounted the quad. “Yippee-ki-yi-yay, motherfucker,” he said, to nothing and no one in particular, before glugging down a long swig of beer and starting the engine. Elwin flinched at the noise—California’s regulations were apparently generous with the decibel limits—as Christopher clunked the quad into gear and gunned it forward.

  The ropes sprang tight, and the half-dressed carcass swung upward with an appallingly violent jolt. “Slower!” Elwin screamed. “Jesus! You’re going to ruin—” Remembering Big Jerry, as quoted by his son, he cut himself off. No need to dunk the boy deeper.

  Thick purple shards of flesh clung to the peeling skin; the yippee-ki-yi-yay force of Christopher’s acceleration, Elwin saw, was shredding much of the meat. “Slower!” Elwin screamed again, this time more pleadingly. Christopher glanced back, his face contorted into a madman’s conjunction of sneer and grin, but he either couldn’t hear Elwin or was ignoring him—he revved the quad harder, and with his free hand, raised high and cradling his Bud Light, toasted the sparse night sky.

  The beer can was what caught Elwin’s eye first: sailing backwards through the air, it passed through the white glare of the porchlight for a single, spangly micro-moment, as the deer’s skin slipped off the carcass, like a sock freed from a foot, and the quad, freed as well, went jerking forward. Christopher appeared to have zero control. Focused on his left hand and its ejection of his beer, he neglected the angle of his right wrist, fixed on the throttle. The quad bounced across the driveway, dragging the tangled, meat-specked pelt and throwing wet bands of snow behind it, before one of two things, or a combination thereof, stopped it: Christopher finding the brakes, or the row of trash cans he smacked impeding further motion. The cans exploded with a clatter, one tipping left, vomiting bulbous white bags onto the snow, and the other tipping backwards, shaking the entire length of vinyl fence. Elwin maintained a cringe as Christopher killed the engine and dismounted with the spooked but prideful expression of a rodeo bull rider.

  “Lost my fucking beer,” he announced.

  Predictably, a light sparked in the upstairs window, and, after the miniblinds reeled upward into a slanting heap, Elwin watched Big Jerry’s face, bisected by his fat woolly grub of a mustache, snarling and glowering behind the glass as he rattled the sash open and flung up the storm window. The raw force with which his head and naked shoulders popped out of the windowframe suggested a full-scale dive that only the width of his belly had thwarted, if not Myrna grabbing his ankles. In the mildest conversation, Big Jerry’s voice was rich and grainy and preposterously loud, as if he were equipped with some sort of tracheal bullhorn. In California, one suspected, it would be illegal for him to speak. Now, stoked with the rage of his rude awakening, it thundered: “What the ever-loving fuck is going on down there? Christopher!”

  “What?” the son barked back at the father.

  “You piece of shit! It’s three in the morning! Whatchoo doing?”

  “Bite my ass!”

  “What?”

  “Bite my ass!”

  “You get the fuck inside,” Big Jerry yelled down, stabbing a thick bratwurst of a finger at him, “so I can put a gun to your stupid fucking head, and shoot it!”

  The eerie calm with which Christopher planted his boots in the snow, in a wide and cocky stance, then slowly raised his middle finger to the window reminded Elwin of the famous image of that Tiananmen Sq
uare protester staring down a tank. Whether it was the first time he’d done something of that brazen, bird-fingered nature, or the thousandth, it felt epic all the same—at least to Elwin, who’d conducted his own youthful rebellions with excessively diplomatic tact, like a philosopher breaking with his mentor over some minor dialectic: thoughtfully, and with profuse apology. In response, the word fuck, in nearly all its grammatical derivations, rained down from the window like mortar fire. When Big Jerry had emptied his big mouthful, he clawed the air, cheeks puffed with rage, until small hands appeared on his shoulders and pulled him back inside. A few seconds later, Myrna replaced him in the window: frazzled and frizzy-haired, her drowsy eyelids beating weakly, but kind-countenanced as always—a cartoonist’s rendition of the archetypal grandma face.

  She said flatly, “Christopher, you gotta work tomorrow,” adding, “and where’s your hat?”

  “Me and Doc just having some fun,” he replied.

  She brightened. “Dr. Cross?”

  Reluctantly, Elwin moved out of the shadows, where he’d been cowering ever since Christopher had demanded an ass-bite.

  “Oh hello, Dr. Cross.” A church-supper smile. Or Rapunzel greeting suitors. “How are you tonight?”

  This question didn’t normally require contemplation, yet, for several intensely awkward, spotlit moments, Dr. Cross found himself wholly incapable of an answer. How was he tonight? Excellent question . . . other than being trapped in an absurdist nightmare which had begun, so far as he could track its course, when Maura had left him for the liberating sexual tactics of the Chef, and which was now culminating, here, in the blood-spattered, trash-strewn snow, in this dizzying, freakish alternate universe he’d tumbled into when the deer flashed into his headlight beams and his conscience subsequently unraveled him, and especially in these last few innocent moments that remained while Big Jerry’s plump, shaking fingers dropped bullets into a gun barrel for the filicidal cataclysm to come, he was fine. Fine. Of course. This almost made him laugh. He was fine.

  “Fine,” he lied, with a cheery wave.

  “Well, good,” she called back. Despite her smile, Elwin could see her waving a hand sideways, with hot insistence, to shoo Big Jerry, whose shadow was violently roaming the bedroom walls. “Will you send Christopher inside, please? He has to work tomorrow, you know.”

  “I’ll let him know,” said Elwin, standing five feet behind him.

  “Thank you. Well, goodnight, Dr. Cross.”

  “Goodnight,” he called back.

  Her tone chilled. “Christopher, you need a hat,” she said, before sliding down the window sashes. In fierce, spasmodic slants, the miniblinds came tumbling down behind them.

  Immediately, Christopher asked, “You see my beer anywhere?” But his voice was quavery, fissured with hairline cracks. Shaking his head no, Elwin slipped his hands into his pockets. Despite his age, he felt small and childish beneath the window’s rebuke, though not nearly so small and childish as Christopher now appeared, absently kicking at the snow while combing a hand through his gel-spiked hair—subconsciously, or so it seemed, feeling for a nonexistent hat. Christopher’s meager, spindrift mustache, which had previously struck Elwin as foppish, struck him now as something sadder: a failed attempt to challenge Big Jerry’s burly gray one, to defy his father’s croaky, bullying manhood (and, perhaps, that of his twin brother, with his new used boat and fleshy girlfriend) by exerting his own nascent manliness, follicle by tender follicle. From that weedy mustache to his legacy job at Jersey Central, to the beer-drinking to the boat-collecting, it was imitation as insurrection, a simmered bid to defeat his father at his own game. Standing there, in his distressed low-slung jeans and rap-star parka, with a gold-plated chain rung around his neck and dandruff-like snow flecking the coifed black cactus topping his head, he bore the doughy stink of oppression, of undue kneadings and poundings. Elwin suppressed the desire to say something to him, something consoling and avuncular, partly because he knew it would be batted down hard—you didn’t air shit like this, not in Jersey; better yet, you didn’t think it—but also because he was oh for two on dispensing wisdom. Things will work out didn’t cut it. Clearly, his powder was wet.

  Finally, he said, “Thanks for all the help,” with all its gently implied finality. “It’s easy going from here.”

  “Yo,” Christopher replied, whapping Elwin’s chest with the back of his palm, and grinning unhappily, “that’s what neighbors do, right?” He sucked back a belch, with obvious though appreciated discomfort. “That’s what it’s about, right?”

  “Right,” Elwin answered, adding softly, “You the man.”

  “Nah,” Christopher said. He grasped for something else to say, some immodestly modest rebuttal, but none came; he was either too drunk, or too drained, or too flattered, or too mooky and young. “Nah,” he repeated. Then his expression sagged, those ice-blue eyes drooping downward in private defeat. He ran his fingers through his hair again: still no hat. His shoulders slumping, and a sigh whirring through his nose, Christopher turned toward the house. “Fuck that old man,” he muttered, and headed inside, lazily scanning the snow, as he went, for the four-leaf clover of his ejected beer. This time, when the door shut behind him, the icicles held fast; they’d been warned. Elwin listened, but there was no gunshot, not even the reverb of raised voices. When he looked up, the light in Big Jerry’s bedroom was out. Back below the fire escape, he picked up the knife, and the flashlight, and resumed dismantling the deer.

  By the time Elwin finished—having sliced and sawn the salvageable flesh of the doe into backstraps, tenderloins, shanks, a shoulder roast, and one dubious slab of ribs (both hams, having borne the brunt of the pavement, were wrecked), and having exhausted an entire roll of plastic wrap and half a roll of aluminum foil in swaddling the meat, the sheer glut of which forced him to evacuate much of his refrigerator’s contents and even then spilled over into a cooler he dragged up from the basement, and having then collected and washed all the tools from outside, and bundled all the remaining deer parts (including the severed head, with its jutting pink tongue) into ever more black Hefty sacks, so that the multitude of trash bags piled against the house resembled the aftermath of some civic festival, and rubbed the snow with his boot to conceal or at least pinken all the bloody spatters and driplines, and (almost forgetting) untied the pelt from the quad hitch and stuffed it into yet another Hefty sack—the eastern sky was unblackening, the soft gray of dawn edging the horizon. He wanted to shower, but didn’t have the energy; instead he undressed, emptying his BlackBerry and keys and change onto the nightstand, and collapsed into his bed, groaning in weak protest at the uninvited light creeping across the walls. From downstairs he heard the heavy click-clack of Bologna’s claws on the floor, as the dog rose from his bed, then the thwap of the dog door flapping closed behind him. Poor old guy, Elwin thought. Must’ve finally picked up the scent of all that meat, like an astronomer viewing the glow of a distant star that’s been dead five hundred years.

  By force of ritual—or addiction, as Maura claimed: “Crackberry,” and all that—he checked his BlackBerry before completely nesting in. Holding it high above his head, he noted the reddish-black gore under his thumbnail as he tapped the small screen. A message from his sister. He knew what that was about: his father, who’d also called—six times during dinner, it appeared. Also there were late-night emails from his students, which he ignored or skimmed (“I was wondering if the 500–750 words counted toward quotes used from the Lanza book, or [if] this limit [is] only in reference to our own thoughts and ideas expressed in the paper . . .”), various bits of Listserv pollution (DELETE, he pressed; DELETE; DELETE), and then one email, sent late that afternoon from Rochelle, in her semi-lovable, semi-competent way, which aroused a curious frown: “Somebody from the government called today,” she’d written. “I wrote it all down but I can’t find the message. SO SORRY!!! It was some governemtn [sic] agency. Department of Something :) It will turn up! You know it always doe
s. Have fun with Dr. Horten tonight! ;) AND HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!”

  Somebody from the government, Elwin wondered, as he replaced the BlackBerry on the nightstand and, to depressingly little effect, flicked off the lamp. In his bleary, blood-encrusted state, which precluded logic or chronology or anything resembling cogent thought, he imagined only one possibility: the State of New Jersey, or maybe some obscure federal agency, wanted its deer back. They’d seen him, they knew. It was government property, and theirs to dispose of. He’d broken some sacred but little-known code, the New Jersey equivalent of saltu, enforced by the waste-management mobsters who got paid by the pound for every last scrap of metal, plastic, rubber, paper, wood, stone, fruit, vegetable, bone, and flesh they dumped into those mountainous, methanating piles. With his eyelids rolling shut he silently challenged them, all those myriad Big Jerrys he imagined storming his desolate house and raiding his fridge: Come take it, and me with it. Please. Why didn’t you find me earlier? I’m here. And then, darkness: as black and airless as the Hefty sack in which the doe’s severed head lay sideways, nestled on a pillow of her stiffening organs.

  3

  LIFESOLUTIONS 24-HOUR SELF-STORAGE was located on an otherwise farmy and intermittently wooded stretch of two-lane near the New York border: an agglomeration of steel buildings painted red, white, and blue and arranged in something like a hopscotch pattern. With its overexpanse of parking, its high, barbwire-crested fencing, and its excessively fulgent security lighting, it brought to mind a small-scale penitentiary. Sara Tetwick Masoli was there to retrieve a roasting pan, and maybe also (if she could possibly figure out which box it was in; she wasn’t about to dig through them all) the china from her first marriage, but the process—plugging in her security code at the gate to induce its yawning, automated opening; plugging it in again on the keypad by the door; then traversing the long, fluorescent-lit hallway, her echoing heel-clicks as loud as ricocheting bullets, to the corrugated overhead door of Unit #592—made her mission feel weightier: an overdue conjugal visit, perhaps, or as witness to an execution. She unbolted the thick brass lock and, with a monstrous rattle, raised the door. “Oh my,” she said.