Phantom Pain

CAT FEVER reads the headline of the Highland City Gazette on the first day of rifle season. There are two pictures below: a stock photograph of a mountain lion, teeth bared, ears pinned back, and a grainy photograph of Dave Hardy with another man Jack doesn’t recognize, serious looks set on their faces, crouched next to a wash somewhere up in the woods. An inset shows what they are pointing to: a blurred set of tracks in the mud, which mysteriously disappear, according to the caption, after only a few feet.

‘Could have been made by anything,’ Jack tells Ronnie, peering down his nose at the paper. ‘Coyote. Bobcat. Some little old dog. Listen. We just don’t have the wilderness to hold an animal of that size. Scraggly third-growth hardwoods chopped up by logging roads and so full of hunters on ATVs it’s a wonder they don’t shoot each other’s nuts off. A panther, first of all, is secretive and shy. Second, they can cover some ground. Fifteen, twenty miles a day. There just isn’t the room. He’d keep bumping up against highways.’

‘It’s hogwash,’ Jack tells Jeanne later, when she’s down in the afternoon to sweep. The pain in his stump has been building all day, like a swarm of ants. He wants to go home and lie down in the dark and not have to see or talk to anyone for days. ‘Where would it have come from in the first place? Closest it might have wandered in from, closest those things live to us, is the wildest bayous of Louisiana. You mean to tell me that a hundred-fifty-pound cat wandered out of some canebrake jungle, walked seven hundred miles without being sighted once, crossed four-lane roads and subdivisions and schoolyards and took up residence here? In Highland City?’

‘Well,’ Jeanne says quietly. ‘You don’t have to yell. And who knows? Maybe it didn’t walk. Maybe it climbed up and fell asleep in a boxcar somewhere. Maybe it came on a train.’

***

Late on a Friday afternoon, Jack stops Ronnie as he’s leaving the shop and asks if he’s given any thought to his future. ‘I’m not going to be at this forever, you know. If you put a little more into it, you could be taking over here in a couple of years.’ But Ronnie doesn’t think much about his future at all, at least not the kind measured in years. Ronnie has been thinking, lately, about quite a few other things. If he has enough credit to put a down payment on an ATV. If mountain lions are attracted to catnip. If he should ask his girlfriend, Tanya, to move in with him. Tanya is nineteen and a poet. Later that night, he picks her up at work and they drink beer over at Sullivan’s. She sits across from him in their booth and scrawls in a big loose-leaf notebook while he watches a wrestling match on the TV above the bar. His sweatshirt and glasses are flecked with blood and bits of fatty tissue. Jack is always trying to get him to change his clothes when he leaves work. ‘You can’t be taking a girl on a date dressed like that!’ But Tanya doesn’t care, or at least has never said anything.

‘You know what I wanna do?’ he says, eyes on the screen. ‘Get me one of them flat-screen TVs. One of them big ones.’

Tanya looks up at him, her pen in her mouth, and doesn’t say a word. She is writing a poem about the panther. All her life, one thing has been sure: nothing ever happens in Highland City. Now this. She believes it is some sort of sign.

***

The feet contain a quarter of all the bones in the human body, the doctors told Jack when he was in the hospital: 107 or 109, depending on how you count a bone or bones of the inner ear. Either way, he is down to double digits now. He thinks about that often–too often. In bed, trying to sleep, he stuffs a pillow over the place where his left leg should be, the way the nurses showed him. When that does nothing to calm the pain, he lurches out of bed and finds the heaviest book in the house. When that doesn’t work, he flings it across the room, pounds the mattress and bites the pillow. His leg. Sometimes he has a panicky thought that they gave it to Jeanne; in a jar, like a tonsil. And that she has it up there in the house, with all his things: his old records and taxidermy videos, the suit he wore at their wedding, his .22 and his mother’s bible. All those other things he would have said twenty years ago were essential but had proven after all not to be.