Phantom Pain

At the end of the summer, just seven weeks ago, Jack lost his left leg at the knee, the latest battleground of his diabetes. He has only just returned to work full-time, and the walk-in freezer is stuffed with back orders: stiff red foxes stacked six deep and more buck head-and-shoulders than he cares to shake a stick at. Finished work crowds the shop: dozens of bucks, turkeys, coons, pheasants, squirrels on cured oak branches, large-mouth bass on maple plaques.

Ronnie, the latest in a long line of apprentices, still around only because he hasn’t knocked up a girl or blown his face up cooking meth, sits just outside the walk-in in a ski parka, defrosting a marten skin with a hairdryer and grunting along to the radio. He came in three days a week and did prep work while Jack was recovering, leaving a pile of buck capes so sloppily fleshed out that Jack is having to go back over each one of them with a razor blade to get rid of the leftover bits of fat and vein. Jack is sitting at his workbench, shaking out a cramp in his hand and cursing the day Ronnie was born, when Jeanne comes in, the bell on the door jingling.

‘Well, well, well,’ Jack says to the full-body doe mount which stands next to him, ears pricked, front hoof raised, frozen in the moment just before flight. ‘Don’t look now.’

For twenty years, since Jack started the taxidermy business, Jeanne has come down to the shop from the house at least twice a day: in the morning to bring the sorted mail and in the evening to do the receipts and sweep. Four days a week she works down at the elementary school in the principal’s office, a job she’s had for forty years, since the summer after they got married. Jeanne kept the house in the divorce. Jack moved into a little trailer on what was left of his father’s tobacco holdings, where he’s been ever since. But his shop remained in their old two-car garage, a hundred yards down the hill from the house. It’s a good spot – tucked up against a wooded hill, no neighbours for miles. He would never be able to rent a place like this, and even back then it had already become something of an institution among the men of Highland City. What he didn’t anticipate was that the thin path that links the house to the shop would persist, worn down to the hard dirt through the years by his steps, now by Jeanne’s. Jeanne does the ordering, the taxes, the books. Ask Jack Wells how his ex-wife is and he’ll shrug and roll his eyes and always give the same answer: ‘Around.’

‘All right, Hud, shoe off!’ Jeanne claps her hands with cheerful authority. Once a week, for the six weeks he’s been home since the surgery, she has insisted on cutting the toenails of Jack’s good foot. This was how it started, on the other side: an ingrown toenail, a raging infection, his circulation shot to hell from the diabetes. Jeanne driving white-knuckled to the emergency room.

Jack throws down the buck cape and pushes his stool back with a screech.

‘Where’s the dog?’

He’s peering into the open doorway behind her. Tiny, Jeanne’s ancient and devoted black-and-tan beagle, was banished last week, after lifting his leg on a ruffed grouse.

‘In the house. Don’t you worry about him. I told him, I said, “Tiny, I’m not letting you out of my sight any more, you hear me?”’

She raises her voice an octave, to the sing-song tone she uses with the dog.

‘No sir. Not with that mean old hungry panther prowling around here. Uh-uh. Not out of my sight.’

She takes off her windbreaker and lays it carefully between two raccoons, nostrils stuffed with cotton batting, drying on the plywood table in the middle of the room. ‘Now, I want to get this over with just as much as you do, Huddie, so be a good boy and give me something for under my knees. These old bones can’t take no more kneeling on concrete floors.’

As she struggles to her knees on his old corduroy jacket, he looks down at her. The top of her head is so familiar. The same perm she has always worn, only grey now, instead of red-brown: a black-and-white photo of her younger self. He feels a startling rise of anticipation for her warm, wet mouth, a forty-year-old memory stirred by the sight of her head at his lap: the back seat of his car at the drive-in. But then she pulls the little leather kit out of her sweatshirt pocket and unfolds it to reveal an array of cold, sharp metal tools, and he coughs and shifts his weight.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ he barks.

Jeanne furrows her brow in concentration as she sets to work on each tough yellow nail. Jack folds his arms across his chest and puffs his cheeks, letting out a long breath. His stomach is bothering him. His stomach is always bothering him. It gurgles and spits, clenches and churns. Those pills. They gave him another set of prescriptions after this round in the hospital, after he made it through the unbearable days of physical therapy. He frowns and studies his gut, like a basketball under his shirt. He can’t see beyond it to his foot, or to the metal rods of his prosthetic that peek out under his left cuff. In six weeks he goes back for the permanent one, the one that is supposed to be so lifelike he will forget it’s not his.

‘Betty Ann Flowers called last night. Her new miniature schnauzer? Missing. Disappeared clear out of her yard. That dog cost her four hundred dollars, too.’ Jeanne draws in her breath. ‘Can you even imagine? I told Tiny, I said, “Not out of my—”’

‘Careful,’ Jack snaps.

‘I am being careful, Huddie,’ Jeanne sighs. She can’t understand why he doesn’t see that this is all for his own good. He seems to think she wants to do this. She shoots him a look. His face, between the jowls, is the same as it has always been, like a familiar road widened for shoulders. She wonders if he is really watching his weight. He seems heavier. Her breath catches in her throat, and she looks back down quickly, telling herself not to worry about him. In high school, she’d thought he looked like – just a little bit like – Paul Newman. Not the eyes – Jack’s were brown and sleepy – but in the chin, mostly. They saw Hud down at the drive-in when they were first married, and she teasingly nicknamed him after the movie’s cold-hearted, cheating hero. By the time the bad years rolled around, they were both so used to the name that neither one drew the connection, saw the irony.