Phantom Pain

Something’s out there. Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City. Dave Hardy was the first to see it, the first weekend of bow season, up in his grandfather’s tree stand on the hill behind Wal-Mart. Afterwards he bushwhacked hell-bent down to the parking lot and, gasping for breath, tried to tell the story to anyone who would listen. The story changed with the telling, and after a while Dave Hardy himself didn’t know what to believe: See that old pine tree over there? It was close to me as that tree. As close as that blue Honda over there. As close as you to me.

Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. People started talking. Word spread. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more claimed they had caught a glimpse of it: a pale shiver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.

Twenty years in a taxidermy shop and Jack Wells has heard his share of tall tales, near misses, the one that got away. But the panther stories are different, told with pitch and fervour, a wild look in the eye. They don’t carry much truck with Jack. No one, after all, has any sort of proof – a photo, a positively identifiable set of tracks, or even a really good look at the thing. For all Jack is concerned, it’s an overgrown coyote, someone’s German shepherd, or a figment of everyone’s imagination. A mountain lion in Highland City? Sure, there’s woods out there, hills with deep hollers and abandoned tobacco fields; not a whole lot of people, nothing to the south but the Plaxco plant, nothing to the north but Kentucky – but the chances are just as good you’ll run into a woolly mammoth. People, if you ask Jack, have lost all sense.

His ex-wife Jeanne is the worst of them. Jabbering on about it like it’s some kind of cuddly pussy cat.

‘Oh, isn’t it something!’ she tells Jack, when they bump into one another in the frozen foods aisle of Tony’s Shur-Save. ‘Wouldn’t I like to catch me a glimpse of it.’

Jack is on one of the store’s motorized scooters, the basket filled with items he’s begrudgingly picked from the doctor’s new list: brown rice, cottage cheese, egg replacer. He’s embarrassed by the scooter, and when he realizes Jeanne isn’t going to say anything, he shifts around on the seat, boxed in by his shame.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jeanne. There’s nothing out there.’

Jeanne lets go of her cart and puts her hands on her hips, cocks her head at him and gives him a look.

‘And how do you know?’

‘Because I seen everything that come out of these woods the last twenty years. Every buck, doe, weasel, turkey, tick and flea. There ain’t no panther out there. There ain’t been a panther for over ninety years.’

‘Well,’ Jeanne says, pursing her lips, considering this. ‘There is now.’