Halfway through our route, the bus came to a halt at the end of the hill which bottomed out into K’s drive. It had been some time since K had sat us. Since Mother’s return, she’d become just another of that summer’s passing apparitions. K descended from the steps of the salty Cape that morning just as I’d remembered her, leathered and floating. The small red door swung shut behind her. She paused mid-step in the middle of her parents’ plot. A look crossed her face. She pointed toward the wooden bridge that lined the brook where the water rose when the road washed out. A large tan form lumbered across it. In the beam of the bus’s headlights — the driver had been cautious in the mist — I could make out the faint glean of the animal’s coat. The body resembled a bobcat in grace and build. The thin grain of its fur pulled away from the muscle. There was something noble in its stagger. Its head hung, barely able to carry it’s own weight, and yet the animal continued forward despite the blood letting from the gash in its chest. From the scars and mud on its body, it looked as though it had traveled a great distance. Its torso was already weaving. Whatever had hit it had run.
As the bus came to a halt in front of K’s house, the animal collapsed in the gutter to the side of the road. The engine stalled. We stared out the windshield. After a moment, the driver swung open the door and descended the stairs. Her hand caught on the stick that started the wipers. The thin plastic blades screeched across the glass. I watched as the driver stooped over the body. The cat’s flanks were still heaving. A good deal of blood was gushing from its skull. She threw her jacket over its head. Before she went inside the house to place a call, the driver reascended the stairs of the bus in her shirtsleeves. Her face had paled. A blotchiness had risen on her neck. She gripped the steering wheel for a moment and peered down the aisle motioning us away from the windows. “Stay put,” she said.
K stood still on the lawn. The driver climbed toward the house at a waddle, the thicks of her thighs descending toward her knees, which seemed hardly to part. A few moments after she disappeared into the house a middle aged man in an old hound’s-tooth flannel came out. He went around back to fetch a shovel and a tarp.
The driver stood outside the bus smoking a cigarette as the man cleared the dog’s body from road. The road was narrow. It was impossible to skirt the remains. It took both of them just to lift the carcass onto the tarp. Afterwards, the driver picked her jacket up from the road with the end of a branch and tossed it into the gully. She said a few words to the man, climbed the stairs, and started the engine. As the bus pulled away, I peered out the emergency exit. The man dragged the carcass up the hill toward K’s house. He’d folded the tarp around the body, pulling it behind him like a sling.
“The Black Hills,” Mother had said tracing the landmass with her finger on the old Atlas that afternoon at the butte with Birdie in her lap as the cars had swooshed by us below. The Long Walker’s body, the gold of its coat still slick with sweat, was the final remnant of Wilson’s leaving us. The cat had done our killing for us. All we needed was one damp strip of flesh to know that we were human. If our graces got the better of us, we could stand in that gully and someone would off us. In the meanwhile, we could start anew.
The following week Granny Olga was back to Schenectady. She was having trouble with her mechanic heart. I woke one night to find her in the kitchen making a cake for her husband, John-John. All that remained of John-John was that white Panama hat in the back of Granny Olga’s Buick and his headstone in the cemetery upstate. Even his pension wasn’t lively anymore. Granny Olga stood in the kitchen that night and said she couldn’t find her breath. She only had a thin slip on. Beneath it, her body sagged and folded. She looked at the microwave and told me, “I’m going skating all the wrong ways.”
Mother put her on the Vermonter. There was a doctor near the Canada border. “You can count on him,” Mother said to Granny Olga as she boarded the train. “He’s a specialist.” Someone would fetch her at the other end. Maybe an aunt. Maybe her sister. Maybe a service that fetched people who got dropped off.
Granny Olga wore her fur out our front door.
That night at dinner Mother was into her wine. A big bottle of utility white. Reds, she said, reminded her of youth and all those churches with their sepulchers and their sipping cups.
Father brought out his box of White Owls and his carton of drawing pencils after dinner. He smoked a big smoking blunt in the living room and whittled away at the tip of his charcoals. He planned to lay his small-boned wife out on the L-shaped settee under the windows and draw some mercy into each of her curves.
Together, he and Mother were deep into their stash of vinyls. We were sitting in the living room, my parents still rocketing on the fibers of their imbibing, Birdie and I gutted of sleep, when the first sparks shot off the roof of the pheasant farm that sat on the Doctor’s run.
It was Birdie who first noticed the flames. “Fire,” she said pointing out of Mother’s windows at the smoke rising over the cornfields.
“It must be a brushfire,” Father said. “What with the drought.”
“Should we go see?” Mother said. “Just to be sure?”
We drove over in the Honda. Birdie and I were allowed. There was no one home to watch us, Mother reasoned. What if the flame leapt? What if it found its way through the gap in the fence? We had our five acres. We had Father’s land. We had all those future fir trees to drag in over the deck.
“Wait in the car,” Father said to Birdie and me as we pulled off the road a short distance from the smoke.
Otto was standing in the clearing across from the fire, the lights of his Caddy trained on the pheasant coup. I hadn’t seen him since that afternoon in his kitchen with Callie. He looked old, thin, nearly transparent in the darkness. Just another piece of fabric on the line the wind could blow around.
Birdie and I rolled down the windows to try to hear what the adults were saying. The air stank from the pheasants burning. I pictured the entire roost — all of the doctor’s prize — flying up in one wild swoop unleashing their fetid stench. They’d escaped our Rogers and our Remingtons. “It’s a shame they’ll never be hunted,” Otto said. “So much breeding gone to waste.”
Father circled the coup once, dragging his toe behind him as though drawing an invisible line in the sand over which the fire dare not cross. Mother stood behind Otto watching the black plumes where they merged with the night. The air had a poison on it. It reminded me of the scent of ammonia after Granny Olga blanched the tub. “Amateur job,” Otto said. “They opened the windows first to make sure to let in enough air for a good flame.”
“That’s an old crime,” Father said. “Where’s your evidence?”
“Multiple points of ignition,” Otto said. “Next, they’ll search for traces of accelerant. Looks like the work of those young bucks with the dogs.”
We waited until the fire trucks came. Once they arrived, they put up their yellow tape. The men rushed in with their helmets and their coats. A thick white powder shot out of their hoses.
“Don’t hustle any,” Otto said to them. “It’s not like there’s an emergency here.” He carried a cane. As he wandered around directing, he looked nearly crippled.
After they put down the flame, they turned off the sirens. The earth had a blackened hallow feel. Everything was wet. A light rain smoldered what was left of the ash.
Father took the roads slowly on the way home. We cranked down the windows and drove by all the people in their houses where the lights fell down at the end of the day. I let my arm out to catch the breeze. I thought about what it takes for a family to fall out of love with each other. Who knew how long this would keep? Our four bodies in this bucket of tin cruising the back roads of some town we only half recognized in the shadows. The rain was loud in the branches. Everyone had gone to bed except for the dogs.