Orient Page 8

  That was two weeks ago, and even though he’d offered to meet Holly again at the motel when her husband was at work, and even though she had accepted, he feared a repeat performance. Don’t listen to women who swear that men age gracefully. They’re simply conditioned to judge their own kind more harshly. Age broke the confidence of most men, desiccated their primordial jungles of self-esteem. Bryan looked over at Ted, his chapped face covered in freckles, fainter than the freckles that enveloped every inch of Holly’s skin. When they had sex, Holly’s freckles vanished into a volcanic blush—and there it went, bulging in his pants as he looked at Ted and thought of Holly, that stupid instrument in his own body, the one he’d relied on his whole life, growing confidently in his underwear when he least needed it. His watch read :00. The deer chewed its last mouthful. It was time.

  Bryan rose in the grass. He positioned the bow at arm’s length and pulled the arrow back with his fingers against the fletching. The pulleys of the compound bow turned silently to gain maximum mechanical advantage, tightening the nylon string. Bryan squinted as he aimed at the white fleck of her chest. He had to shoot for her body, her boiler room of internal organs—heart, liver, stomach—and not her head. He’d seen too many inexperienced bow hunters try to kill a deer with an arrow to the cranium, watching in horror as the arrow punctured the jaw and the deer skipped away with a wound that would take a week to prove fatal.

  But Bryan also needed to consider his own hunting impediment: his spatial disorientation, triggered by a collision with a deer, which compromised his sense of distance and relation, so when his eye read a mark he was nearly a foot off. Bryan made the correction, aiming at her flank to account for his faulty internal compass. He drew the string to his shoulder and, in a move as quick as slitting his own throat, Adam’s apple to ear, let the arrow fly.

  Bryan’s most legendary deer kill had not involved a bow. It took place on Sound Avenue, just across the street from McGovern Vineyards, and the weapon in question was his 2006 burgundy Range Rover. It was a rainy February afternoon four years ago, in the prime of the second rut. Long Island’s uncontrolled deer population had long been a driver’s worst nightmare, and that nightmare arrived for Bryan as he drove home from a security job in Riverhead, glancing at the road while listening to basketball scores on the radio. He couldn’t separate his own memory of the accident from the newspaper report in the following day’s paper, front page in the Suffolk Times, headline reading DEER, VEHICLE DESTROY ONE ANOTHER, and below it a color photograph of Bryan standing on the road drenched in blood. The photo was taken by a passing motorist, who managed to snap the gruesome portrait in the seconds before Bryan lost consciousness. He had struck a doe that was scrambling to its feet after being hit by another eastbound vehicle. The deer had rolled over the hood and crashed through his windshield, its hoof striking him in the face as his car continued forward and the deer back. The glass disgorged the animal, emptying its thoracic cavity as it soaked the front seats, the backseats, the rear compartment, burgundying the burgundy, before hurtling through the rear window and coming to rest in a bone pile on the concrete.

  Bryan didn’t remember the initial impact of the deer, nor did he remember its graceless exit through the back window, nor did he remember his Range Rover continuing on for forty feet before gliding into an embankment. He did not remember climbing out of the car or posing for a photograph. All he remembered was the single microsecond the deer had been there in the car with him, the punch to his face before the ache arrived, the deer’s mammoth, mud-odor body blurring by him, and, worst of all, the sound the deer made. He didn’t know if it came from its mouth or from its rupturing organs or even its contact on the leather upholstery, but it was the sound of fleshy fingers sliding on glass or the bubbling contractions of a watercooler when a drink was dispensed, but louder and deeper and less human than either of those sounds, a blump ump ump that caught in his inner ear and brought him to vomit when he regained consciousness in the intensive care unit of Eastern Long Island Hospital.

  He was, as all people are everywhere, lucky to be alive. His family cried in relief at his bedside, even inaccessible Tommy. His Range Rover had been taken to the place crashed cars go when their owners can’t bear to look at them. Ted and Chip framed the Suffolk Times front page for him with an engraved plaque reading “Bryan Muldoon will do anything to tag a deer.” Bryan later learned that there were 65,000 automobile collisions with deer in New York State every year, few of them fatal, yet he still felt special and lucky. But he wasn’t special or lucky. Ever since the accident, he experienced momentary spells of disorientation, where he told his feet to go one way and they went another, where he aimed his arrow at a mark and it sailed a foot off course. And that sound, blump ump ump, revived by tires bouncing over potholes or draining Pam’s water bottle into the bathroom sink, caused his head to go dizzy and his vision to star. He never told his doctor about it, because he feared the results of the tests. He never told Ted or Alistair or Chip, because he knew they’d tell him it was unsafe for him to hunt. Blump ump ump: it just stayed there in his head, locked behind imaginary doors in the mental room he created specifically for horrible things.

  This morning, the doe saw it coming, maybe a microsecond before he released the bow. Her front legs kicked, and her haunches dipped to spring her forward. Now it was a race between the arrow and her speed. The black dart shot toward her, a thin wavering line, and her tail fanned out white. She started to run as the arrow cleaved the air, racing for her heart, flying faster than any bird, but she was galloping and her gray fur prickled. The arrow swung wide, just missing the mark; it would have hit its target if Bryan hadn’t overcorrected in the first place. In another second she was cutting through the tall grasses and into a clutch of birch trees. Two other doe Bryan hadn’t seen streamed behind her, scattering out as they reached the impenetrable safety of the woods.

  “Shit,” he said, standing up.

  Chip and Alistair popped up from their grass trench. “Why the hell did you wait so long?” they said, though they knew why.

  “Maybe the wind shifted, and she smelled us,” Alistair offered, shaking his legs to circulate the blood.

  They walked forward, these fathers without their sons, through the scrub and marsh to reclaim the arrow. Chip unscrewed a bottle of water and lifted it above his mouth, guzzling. Ump, ump, ump. Bryan bundled his finger around the bow and conjured up a network of doors—massive wooden gates, steel bank vaults, pressurized submarine doors—to block the horrible sound. He clenched his teeth but forced his lips into a smile, anxious to hide his panic.

  “She was too old anyway,” he said. “Her meat’s already wormed. Wouldn’t be worth the trouble to dress her.”

  “Slice and dice,” Alistair chanted, unsnapping the sheath clipped to his belt and wielding his knife in the sign of the cross. They were all impatient for a kill. They wanted to fill their noses with the hot, acrid death that issued from a deer’s carcass minutes after it drew its last breath, the smell that allowed them, as men, to tremble momentarily with the sensation of life, its heat and quiet. Chip let some of the bottled water pour on his face and unzipped his camouflaged jumpsuit, gutting himself open to the chilly air, his fat stomach spilling out and his white undershirt butterflied in sweat. Chip walked through his days the same way he walked around cars in his mechanic’s shop in East Marion, sluggishly, like he knew there were deeper problems that a younger man might have the energy to fix but he’d settle for a few minor tweaks to keep the transmission running. Bryan did not consider it a betrayal that he took his own car to Greenport to get serviced. He liked Chip, but after his accident he didn’t trust him to ensure the reliability of his vehicle.

  The men stomped through the carpet of leaves that had fallen overnight in the state park, as if autumn had waited for Pam’s end-of-summer picnic to begin its molting. Some patches were red and yellow, a few still green, but most of the leaves were cardboard brown, crumbling under their waterproof boots
. Bryan paused a minute to enjoy the way he and his friends blended into the environment, their camel tans and drab greens mixing into the muddy scenery the same way his mother, in her floral blouses, disappeared into their living room curtains when he was a child. Bryan felt at ease in a world where no one stuck out, where living well meant meeting the world halfway. As he walked, he thought of Tommy in his predictable black T-shirts and jeans, his son in silhouette, as if he had purposely cut himself out of the happy family photograph. Oh, Tommy. What had Bryan done wrong? How could the boy slouch around without even a watch?

  Over to his left, Ted whistled as he shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack of Camel Lights. It was Ted’s outdoors-only indulgence, another strike against him in the potential-future-surrogate-father department. Bryan looked around and realized that his feet were leading him far right when he had asked them to head straight. He corrected his movement and returned to the group.

  Alistair had grabbed hold of Chip’s stomach, clawing it like a bowling ball. “If we want meat today, it’s all right here,” he said, shaking Chip’s lard.

  Chip smacked the hand away, then overcompensated with a tilt of his chin. “Go on, take a good handful,” he said. “That’s what a man feels like. None of this waxing and dieting and an-oh-rectum nerv-oh-sa that killed off the dinosaurs and the Indians. I’ll tell you what will ruin white men. Not greenhouse gases or warming oceans or cigarettes. It’s vanity, plain and simple. It’s weakening you, Alistair. Those eyebrows of yours sure are getting thin. I could swear they used to meet above your nose, didn’t they?”

  Alistair fingered the space between his eyebrows, and looked to Bryan for support. “Well, then your wife will make it through the next Ice Age A-OK,” he said after a pause. “What a relief when the next superior beings find Barbara squatting on an ice floe, and all of their books will show what white women once looked like, a bit like you but meaner and with a hairier back.”

  “Yep, sounds like white women to me,” Ted agreed, relishing the fact that he didn’t belong to one. He carefully snuffed the half-smoked cigarette on his boot and collected the butt in his pocket.

  “Bryan, did you see Beth Shepherd at your picnic?” Alistair asked him. “I’d give a deer to spend a minute between those tits. I could see her nipples poking through her dress.”

  “Like she’d let you,” Chip replied. “She’s got an Armenian ogre for a husband.”

  “He’s an artist,” Alistair said, dangling a limp wrist.

  Bryan laughed along with the barbs, but he resisted trading any himself. He never spoke ill of a family member, never swapped sexual fantasies about local women like Beth Shepherd, and never commented on people’s weight or money troubles. That was the greasy talk of feeble men. Bryan was proud of the fact that he took care of his own body, twenty minutes on his basement rowing machine every night to make up for Pam’s indulgent use of butter. Unlike Ted or Alistair or Chip, he also had a real secret life that wasn’t the stuff of backslapping fantasy. He had cheated on Pam with three different women since the car crash four years ago, although cheating after twenty years of marriage and one near-death experience seemed like the wrong description for those tidy, dispassionate rendezvous. They were testing grounds for his own virility, a simple compromise a man made in an otherwise successful career as husband and father.

  To Bryan, these dalliances hardly seemed like cheating because there was no love involved. Bryan would do anything for Pam: risk his life for her, hold her at night when she cried, anything. But the truth of what a person needed in order to feel human wasn’t always something you could discover by asking the people who knew him best. The answer was in the moments he went missing from his life, the quiet corners in the day that were his alone; because they were secret, because those precious seconds were so carefully counted and stored, they were his.

  Still, the muscles in his neck tightened at times, flares from Bryan’s conscience causing him to wonder if he was really any better than his hunting partners after all. Maybe he was worse.

  Alistair pointed to a herd of deer clipping through the marsh grasses, shooting single-file over the hillcrest that sloped down to the beach. Five doe were running as if spooked, each one a feasting prize if brought to earth.

  “Why are they bolting?” Ted wondered.

  “It’s not rut yet. They can’t be fleeing a buck,” Chip said as he followed them with his finger. The deer scrambled through the state park grounds and into the flatter grasses of private property, where licensed hunting was not allowed.

  “Let’s follow them,” Alistair suggested.

  Bryan shook his head. Tagging a doe on private property was illegal. And there was another reason he didn’t want to be seen on that property: he and Ted, as senior members of the historical board, were quietly negotiating to purchase it in hopes of preserving it from development, protecting it from an invasion of condos or golf-course greens. Looking past the ridge where the deer had come, beyond the tall grasses and planks where osprey built their branching nests, he could see the churning blue waters of the Sound, the swirling currents of Plum Gut, and, beyond the water, the faint coastline of Plum Island.

  If he squinted, he could make out the white buildings on the island, the restricted government laboratories that were home to the U.S. Animal Disease Center. It was inside this distant compound, heavily protected by Homeland Security, that government scientists conducted research on animal pathogens. Plum Island hung off the coast of Orient in the vaporous haze of a mirage, but by the standards of local legend it was very real. There, government scientists conducted clandestine biological warfare experiments on live animals. For decades, stories had circulated that killing agents like anthrax were being cultivated there. It was widely believed by the residents of Orient that Lyme disease had been invented in those laboratories, created by the government to inflict on future enemies, and that the disease had been carried by wildlife across the water to the North Fork and the neighboring feeding grounds of Connecticut. It was biological warfare turned on its own citizens as they enjoyed their summer picnics and trips to the beach. When do the defense measures of a paranoid country become their own agents of self-destruction?

  By some hardwired collective desire on the part of the year-rounders, the threat of living so close to such a dangerous landmark had been neutralized, dismissed as the lunatic talk of conspiracy theorists, fringe-literature writers, and fishermen with too much time to kill. Whenever the moon-eyed, antigovernment sort appeared by the carload in Orient wearing their WE WANT ANSWERS T-shirts, the locals dismissed their questions with a wave of their hands. “It’s all perfectly safe,” they insisted, until it was more like “IT’S ALL PERFECTLY SAFE!” An Orient year-rounder who openly questioned such home truths about Plum Island received cold shoulders and suspicious eyes.

  Unlike most of the residents, Bryan had actually been to Plum Island. A few years ago, his security company had been awarded a short-term government contract to set motion detectors along its dock. He had taken the ferry over and was given a tour by armed officials of the management offices and the neighboring grounds. He had watched the deer amble through the grasses, the terrain of Plum Island so much like Orient but wilder, weed strewn and vacant of homes or service roads. “You let the deer run free?” he asked the official leading the tour, a man wearing a hard hat that made Bryan wonder what could fall on him out in the open. “We shoot them on sight,” the man replied, although the deer he saw were not taken down.

  Bryan had signed a confidentiality agreement as thick as an almanac, and when he got back he said only, “Yeah, I went out there,” and placed his finger to his lips. He hadn’t seen the labs, or their notoriously efficient waste-management system, or even the ammunition room they purportedly maintained in case of terrorist attack. But the memory of those deer—which ran free on the island throughout the two weeks it took to rig the dock—troubled him when he returned home, a mile and a drip of salt water away from the facility. After tha
t, he started using gloves when field-dressing his game and cooked his steaks until they were practically bricks of charcoal.

  In theory, an island is a paradise of protection, guarded from human encroachment by its own geography. But any hunter knows that an island has pores too small for humans to slip through but large enough for animals to exploit. Deer swam. So did coyotes. They could paddle through the turbulent Plum Gut to hunt or graze on the island, collecting any mutant germ-warfare strain they came across, and carry it back to the mainland on the smallest follicle of skin. Birds flew easily from Orient to Plum. So did bats. Bryan couldn’t watch deer crowd his backyard, staring from his sliding door, without thinking of their fur as disease carriers, their heads and legs as warning skulls and crossbones. It would take only one of them, wet from the water, fat from Plum, to wipe away all life as he knew it.

  He kneeled down to retrieve the arrow in the grass. His right hand missed by a foot, scooping up nothing. He concentrated on bringing his fingers over to where the arrow lay. A black dot lifted up from the island, as if it were an asteroid falling in reverse, but as it rose it tilted and became an army helicopter transporting government officials. It sped toward them over the Sound, and Bryan could hear its rotor blades ticking in the morning air. The sound of a helicopter overhead was the worst blump ump ump sound of all. He squeezed his eyes shut as the reverb invaded his ears, and stayed there, heart on knee, until the helicopter banked and drifted off.