Phantom Pain

Up on the ridge under Ray Blevins’s tree stand, the dead fawn’s flesh is stripped away by coyote, then fox, then possum, their eyes glinting as they visit it in the night, tiny teeth tearing. The ants come too. Whatever killed it does not come back. Soon all that is left is the ribcage, looming on the hilltop like an empty basket.

One chilly December afternoon, the smell of snow in the air, Tanya comes to the shop to pick up Ronnie, whose truck isn’t running again. Pulling into the drive, she sees Jeanne in the yard, fussing with her birdfeeders, squat and round in her big down parka, her glasses on a string around her neck. What is it with old people and birds? Tanya wonders. She thinks of her grandmother, the device she has with the microphone outside so she can sit in her living room and listen to the birds while she watches her soaps on television. If I ever end up like that, she thinks, climbing out of the car and skirting a puddle in the driveway. Stuck rotting away inside while the world goes on outside. Well, somebody just shoot me.

When Tanya comes in, Ronnie is working just outside the walk-in with a buck head that’s hanging upside down on a heavy chain. He is slowly pulling the cape from the shoulders forward, until it hangs inside out, dangling from the end of the nose like a sock. Exposed is the gleaming naked head: white subcutaneous fat, blue and red veins, lidless, staring eye. Jack started the fleshing-out himself but didn’t get past struggling with the winch. Now he’s sitting at his workbench, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. He watches Tanya go straight over to Ronnie and lay in on him, their voices sharp across the shop. Jack is surprised and impressed at how she doesn’t even take a second look at the buck – even Jeanne, after all these years, can’t go near them when they’re in this stage. After a few minutes she turns her back on Ronnie and, looking over at Jack, raises her hand to wave. He waves back. Suddenly she is next to him.

‘Hey,’ she says, almost flirtatious. ‘Want to see my new tattoo?’

Before he can answer, she yanks the neck of her sweatshirt off her shoulder and turns around. On her shoulder blade, there are four short slash marks and a drop of ruby blood. At first Jack thinks it is a real wound. She lowers her voice and steals a glance at Ronnie, then levels her gaze at Jack.

‘Ronnie thinks it’s all a load of bull, but that panther is my totem animal. Want to know how I know? It came to me in a dream and told me so.’

Jack wishes there was some way to hide his heaving gut. ‘You’re going to have that the rest of your life.’

‘Well, yeah.’

He’s got one himself, from his stint in the army – a cloverleaf on his biceps, with his infantry division printed inside; they had all gotten the same one, one night in Texas. The colour is faded out now except the blue. What he really means to say – how can he explain it? The rest of your life, Tanya, is a hell of a lot longer than you think it will be. And you’ll grow tired of everything. Your own face in the mirror. The sound of your own voice. And that’s when you’ll start regretting that tattoo. Not because you see it every day. But because you don’t. Because you thought it would last forever, and remind you of something forever. And it doesn’t.

***

On December 15, at one-thirty in the afternoon, Jack drives to the medical centre in Scottsville to be fitted with his permanent limb. He’s rescheduled the appointment once already, dreading it, moaning about it for a week until Jeanne finally said, ‘Oh, Hud!
Grow up and just go!’

The nurse takes his blood pressure and vital signs as impersonally as if she’s trussing a turkey, and shows him how to strap on the new limb. It is eerily lifelike, down to the wrinkles on the toes, and the exact same colour as his flesh. ‘You’ll forget it’s not yours,’ she says brightly. ‘And, it’s flame-resistant.’ Jack scrolls through the possibilities for a wisecrack, but finds he simply doesn’t have the energy. ‘Fine,’ he finally says. ‘Good.’

The doctor is in and out in three minutes, barely raising his eyes from Jack’s chart. ‘Any questions?’ he says as he goes, not leaving room for a ‘yes’. He is already tucking his pen in his breast pocket, checking his watch and groping for the door handle behind him.

Jack is suddenly alone, left sitting on the table in his flimsy gown with a pamphlet in his hand – LIFE WITH YOUR NEW LIMB. It is filled with glossy photos of retirees acting like giddy teenagers: walking hand in hand on the beach, bowling, ballroom dancing – the woman with a rose clamped between her dentures. Don’t ever admit anything has changed, they’re screaming at him. Never for a minute slow down or feel sorry for yourself. Look at us! He crumples the pamphlet up and throws it in the trash can.

I do have a question, Doc, he thinks, sitting there, his shoulders hunched. Actually, I do. What the hell am I supposed to do now? There is something he hasn’t had the nerve to tell anyone yet: he doesn’t think he can go on with his work. He has never before realized how physical it is: the lifting, the sawing, six or seven solid hours on his feet – foot – a day. And it’s not just the stump, the gone leg. He’s exhausted to the core. Just yesterday he had to ask Ronnie to finish a coon for him – a simple little raccoon – he got so winded, trying to stretch the cape around the form. Somebody tell me what to do, he thinks, struggling to pull his pants on over the new limb, disgusted by it as if it’s a bad joke, a gag trick. Somebody tell me just exactly what it is I’m supposed to do now.

On the way back to Highland City, Jack finds himself avoiding the rip and roar of the interstate. He takes the old road instead, the pike that stretches all the way up to Kentucky. It follows the natural valley of the hills and was the route the long hunters followed, two hundred years ago, when they came to these woods from the north to harvest the buffalo and deer. Jack’s father used to tell him stories of the long hunters. They’d arrive with nothing but a gun and an axe, build a log cabin and stay for a year, eating deer meat and salting the skins, which they rolled up on a travois and brought home when they simply couldn’t carry any more. Park-like forests, great open spaces under magnificently canopied trees. When the first of them came down from Kentucky, his father told him, they did not dismount, lest they be trampled, the woods were so crowded with game.

Jack tries to picture it, squinting up into the sparse trees on the hillside along the pike, but he can’t. It must have been something like being in the shop, he decides. Big-antlered deer standing shoulder to shoulder, fox and weasel cheek by jowl. Except also wolf and bear. Mountain lion.

What if? Jack thinks, entering Highland City limits. What if there really is a mountain lion up there? The houses huddle on either side of the pike, brick and squat, with car ports and dog runs; the older ones at the edges of the last few tobacco fields, the farmers inside in front of their TVs, getting paid by Uncle Sam not to grow tobacco. He passes the gas stations, the cinder-block barbecue stand, the shopping centre, the new shopping centre. The smokestacks of the Plaxco plant poke up out of the hills to the north, crowned by white smoke.

If a panther really is up there, sniffing out an ancient path its great-great ancestors once followed; if, at this very moment, it is twitching its huge muscular tail and arching its back to run its claws down the trunk of a tree, dropping to all fours to nose at a beef jerky wrapper filled with dirty rainwater and picking its way around rusted old tin cans and television sets to make its way into one of those hollers, miaowing a lonely miaow – well, Jack thinks, pulling into his driveway and stopping to check the empty mailbox in front of his trailer – then I pity the old bastard.

***

Tanya, alone in Ronnie’s house, takes off all her clothes and lies down on his new couch, staring at the blank space on the wall, cleared of posters to make room for the new TV. She’s been driving back and forth to her place all day, bringing the last of her stuff over. Now she wishes it would all disappear. All those things that seemed so special when she bought them: her leather jacket, her laptop, her map-print shower curtain, her black boots, it all looks like a load of junk, now, stacked up in liquor boxes on Ronnie’s kitchen floor. Moving in with Ronnie is the start of something, she knows, but she also knows that it is maybe not the start she was looking for. She closes her eyes and pictures herself hovering above all her possessions, flying away. She imagines herself in a forest. A dark, deep forest. Walking out into it, naked, and never coming back. She hears Ronnie fumble
with his keys at the front door, swearing. She disappears into a cathedral of trees.

Tiny goes missing. Jeanne calls Jack late on a Sunday, apologizes if she’s interrupting anything. He has been watching a tedious sitcom, his prosthetic off, the stump tucked away out of sight under a blanket. The bowl of chilli he spilled reaching for the phone is splattered all over the floor. He looks at it dolefully. Well, it was giving him heartburn and he shouldn’t be eating that junk anyway. He pounds his chest and burps.

‘Now, Huddie, I don’t want to jump to no conclusions. But that cat, Hud – it could have just come down out of the woods behind the house and waited. I let him out for five minutes. Five minutes. That panther could have just slunk in and – oh! I’ve got goosebumps just thinking about it – carried him away.’

Jack can picture her perfectly, pacing the kitchen, ripping at her fingernails, the phone pinched under her chin. In moments of crisis, she has always managed to lose herself in a cyclone of panic. Never keeps her head. He sighs, too loudly, sending a rush of wind into the phone. Jeanne falls silent.

Damn, he thinks. Christ. Now I’ve done it.

‘Well I’m sorry, Jack. I shouldn’t have called you so late. I’m sorry. Never mind. Get back to what you were doing. Never mind me.

We can talk in the morning.’

‘We’ll find him, Jeannie,’ he hears himself saying, cutting her short. ‘We’ll find him. He’s just gone off to sow some wild oats. He’s just been feeling full of himself, these days.’ As he goes on, Jack finds that he wants to believe himself. ‘He just went off for a little tour of the neighbourhood. That’s all, Jeannie. That’s all. I promise. We’ll find him tomorrow.’

When he walks into the shop in the morning Jeanne is there already, red-eyed and red-nosed, leaves clinging to her jeans where she’s been down on her hands and knees, checking under the porch and in the old spring box. She takes a step towards him, as if she is going to fall into his arms, then hesitates, bites her lip, collapses in a chair and covers her face with her hands, letting out a muffled sob that hits Jack like a hammer in the chest.They drive around all day, doing twenty-five, Jeanne hanging half out the window, calling and whistling. Tiiiii-ny! It’s a warm day, more September than December, and clouds of hatched gnats hover in the road.

Jeanne calls herself hoarse. Every so often Jack finds himself looking at her heavy backside waggle as she strains out the window, then looks back quickly at the road, as if he’s done something wrong. At four o’clock they decide it’s time to quit, without having found hair or hide ofTiny.

When he drops Jeanne off back at the house, he grabs her hand before she gets out of the car and meets her eye. ‘You gonna be all right tonight?’

She bites her lip and nods.

‘You call me if you need anything. You just pick up the phone and call. I’ll put the phone right by the bed. All right?’ He watches her go in and waits until she’s closed the door behind her before he puts the car in gear.

Jack stops at the end of the drive and pops a pill, eats a granola bar from the glovebox. He is cramped up, exhausted, the small of his back aching and his glucose levels all out of whack. He feels hollow, nearly desolate. It can’t just be the damn dog, he thinks, driving home. It’s something else, something bigger.

They’d driven down roads they hadn’t been on in years – past the old empty high school and the field where the drive-in used to be, now grown over with highbush honeysuckle and littered with junk cars, a few speakers still hanging off their posts like rotted teeth. It looked like a war field. Finished.

He stops and buys a pack of cigarettes – to hell with it, he thinks, something else is going to quit long before my lungs do – aching for just some small physical pleasure to get him through the night. Before he leaves the gas station, though, feeling guilty, he shakes out three, leaving the rest of the pack on top of the trash can. Just as well, he thinks. Make some lucky sucker’s day.