“Gun’s not loaded. Probably not till spring. Turkey season. Though I’ve got tags for deer.”
“You hunt turkeys?” She put the gun down. It was heavy.
“You eat turkey, don’t you?”
“The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They’re different. They’ve signed on the dotted line.” She paused and sighed again. “What do you do, go into a field and fire away?”
“Kind of. You try to catch them midflight. You know, I should take you deer hunting. It’s the last two days, this weekend, and I’ve got tags. Have you ever been?”
“Pulease,” she said.
IT WAS COLD in the woods. She blew breath clouds, then rings of cigarette smoke, into the dead ferns. “It’s nice out here. You don’t suppose we could just watch nature instead of shoot it.”
“Without hunting, the deer would starve,” said Pinky.
“So maybe we could just cook for them.” They had brought along a bottle of Jim Beam, and she twisted it open and took a swig. “Have you ever been married?”
“Once,” said Pinky. “God, what, twenty years ago.” He quickly shouldered his rifle, thinking he heard something, but no.
“Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I’d ask.”
“How about you?”
“Not me,” said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.
She looked down at her chest. “I don’t think orange is anyone’s most flattering color,” she said. They were wearing blaze-orange hats and vests. “I think we look like things placed in the middle of the road to make the cars go around.”
“Shhhh,” said Pinky.
She took another swig of Jim Beam. She had worn the wrong kind of boots — gray, suede, over the knees, with three-inch heels — and now she studied them with interest. One of the heels was loose, and mud was drying on the toes. “Tell me again,” she whispered to Pinky, “what makes us think a deer will cross our path?”
“There’s a doe bed not far from here,” whispered Pinky. “It attracts bucks.”
“Bucks, doe — thank God everything boils down to money, I always say.”
“During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That’s how she gets her mate.”
“So that’s it,” murmured Odette. “I was always peeing in the bed.”
Pinky’s gun suddenly fired into the trees, and the noise filled the woods like a war, spilling to the ground the yellowing needles of a larch.
“Ahhhhhh!” Odette screamed. “What is going on?” Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Damn!” shouted Pinky. “I missed!” He stood up and went crashing through the underbrush.
“Oh, my God!” cried Odette, and she stumbled after him, snapping the same twigs underfoot, ducking the same barbed wire. “Where are we going?”
“I’ve only wounded the deer,” Pinky called over his shoulder. “I’ve got to kill it.”
“Do you have to?”
“Keep your voice down,” said Pinky.
“Fuck you,” said Odette. “I’ll wait for you back where we were,” but there was a sudden darting from a bush behind her, and the bleeding deer leaped out, in a mournful gallop, its hip a crimson gash. Pinky raised his gun and fired, catching the deer in the neck. The air shimmered in the echo, and the leaves fell from a horse chestnut. The deer’s legs buckled, and when it tipped over, dead in some berry bushes, its eyes never blinked but stayed lidless and deep, black as outer space.
“I’ll leave the entrails for the hawks,” Pinky said to Odette, but she was not there.
• • •
Oh, the ladies come down from the Pepsi Hotel
Their home has no other name
than the sign that was placed
like a big cola belclass="underline" Pepsi-Cola Have a Pepsi Hotel.
Only a few of Odette’s poems about whores rhymed — the ones she’d written recently — but perhaps the library crowd would like those best, the anticipation of it, knowing what the next word would be like though not what it would be; stanza after stanza, it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.
The local library association had set up a lectern near the windows of the reference room and had arranged chairs in rows for about eighty people. The room was chilly and alarmingly full. When Odette read she tried to look out past the faces, toward the atlases and the biographical dictionaries. She tugged on the cowl of her sweater and pulled it up over her chin between poems. She tried to pretend people’s heads were all little ears of corn, something a dance instructor had once told her ballet class to do when she was seven and they had had to dance before the parents.
They come down to the truckers
or the truckers go up
to the rooms with the curtains pell-mell.
They truck down for the fuckers
or else they fuck up
in the Pepsi Have a Pepsi Hotel.
There was silence. A door creaked open then shut. Odette looked up and saw Pinky in the back, tiptoeing over to a chair to sit. She had not seen or spoken to him in a week. Two elderly women in the front turned around to stare.
Oh, honey, they sigh; oh, honey, they say,
there are small things to give and to sell,
and Heaven’s among us
so work can be play at the …
There were other stanzas, too many, and she sped through them. She took a sip of water and read a poem called “Sleeping Wrong.” She slept wrong on her back last night, it began, and so she holds her head this way, mad with loneliness, madder still with talk. She then read another long one, titled “Girl Gets Diphtheria, Loses Looks.” She looked up and out. The audience was squinting back at her, their blood sugar levels low from early suppers, their interest redirected now and then toward her shoes, which were pointy and beige. “I’ll close,” she said loudly into the mike, “with a poem called ‘Le Cirque in the Rain.’ ”
This is not about a french monkey circus
discouraged by weather.
This is about the restaurant
you pull up to in a cab,
your life stopping there and badly,
like a dog’s song,
your heart put in funny.
It told the story of a Manhattan call girl worrying a crisis of faith. What is a halo but a handsome accident / of light and orbiting dust. What is a heart / but a … She looked out at the two elderly women sitting polite and half attentive, unfazed, in the front row. One of them had gotten out some knitting. Odette looked back at her page. Chimp in the chest, she had written in an earlier draft, and that was what she said now.
Afterward a small reception was held out by the card catalogs. There were little cubes of pepper cheese, like dice, placed upon a table. There was a checkerboard of crackers, dark and light, a roulette of cold cuts. “It’s a goddamn casino.” She turned and spoke to Pinky, who had come up and put his arm around her.