It was the day before Thanksgiving, and all week long there had been hunters parked down at the gate: pickups and a couple of old Chevys sitting empty all day—mostly with out-of-state tags—occasionally, two men standing beside their car doors drinking coffee and talking. I hadn’t given them any thought. Gainsborough—who I was thinking at that time of stiffing for the rent—had said not to antagonize them, and let them hunt unless they shot near the house, and then to call the state police and let them handle it. No one had shot near the house, though I had heard shooting back in the woods and had seen one of the Chevys drive off fast with a deer on top, but I didn’t think there would be any trouble.
I wanted to get out before it began to snow and before the electricity bills started coming. Since my wife had sold our car before she left, getting my business settled wasn’t easy, and I hadn’t had time to pay much attention.
Just after ten o’clock in the morning there was a knock on the front door. Standing out in the frozen grass were two fat women with a dead deer.
“Where’s Gainsborough?” the one fat woman said. They were both dressed like hunters. One had on a red plaid lumberjack’s jacket and the other a green camouflage suit. Both of them had the little orange cushions that hang from your back belt loops and get hot when you sit on them. Both of them had guns.
“He’s not here,” I said. “He’s gone back to England. Some trouble with the government. I don’t know about it.”
Both women were staring at me as if they were trying to get me in better focus. They had green-and-black camouflage paste on their faces and looked like they had something on their minds. I still had on my bathrobe.
“We wanted to give Gainsborough a deer steak,” said the one who was wearing the red lumberjack’s jacket and who had spoken first. She turned and looked at the dead deer, whose tongue was out the side of his mouth and whose eyes looked like a stuffed deer’s eyes. “He lets us hunt, and we wanted to thank him in that way,” she said.
“You could give me a deer steak,” I said. “I could keep it for him.”
“I suppose we could do that,” the one who was doing the talking said. But the other one, who was wearing the camouflage suit, gave her a look that said she knew Gainsborough would never see the steak if it got in my hands.
“Why don’t you come in,” I said. “I’ll make some coffee and you can warm up.”
“We are pretty cold,” the one in the plaid jacket said and patted her hands together. “If Phyllis wouldn’t mind.”
Phyllis said she didn’t mind at all, though it was clear that accepting an invitation to have coffee had nothing to do with giving away a deer steak.
“Phyllis is the one who actually brought him down,” the pleasant fat woman said when diey had their coffee and were holding their mugs cupped between their fat hands, sitting on the davenport. She said her name was Bonnie and that they were from across the state line. They were big women, in their forties with fat faces, and their clothes made them look like all their parts were sized too big. Both of them were jolly, though—even Phyllis, when she forgot about the deer steaks and got some color back in her cheeks. They seemed to fill up the house and make it feel jolly. “He ran sixty yards after she hit him, and went down when he jumped the fence,” Bonnie said authoritatively. “It was a heart shot, and sometimes those take time to take effect.”
“He ran like a scalded dog,” Phyllis said, “and dropped like a load of shit.” Phyllis had short blond hair and a hard mouth that seemed to want to say hard things.
“We saw a wounded doe, too,” Bonnie said and looked aggravated about it. “That really makes you mad.”
“The man may have tracked it, though,” I said. “It may have been a mistake. You can’t tell about those things.”
“That’s true enough,” Bonnie said and looked at Phyllis hopefully, but Phyllis didn’t look up. I tried to imagine the two of them dragging a dead deer out of the woods, and it was easy.
I went out to the kitchen to get a coffee cake I had put in the oven, and they were whispering to each other when I came back in. The whispering, though, seemed good-natured, and I gave them the coffee cake without mentioning it. I was happy they were here. My wife is a slender, petite woman who bought all her clothes in the children’s sections of department stores and said they were the best clothes you could buy because they were made for hard wearing. But she didn’t have much presence in the house; there just wasn’t enough of her to occupy the space—not that the house was so big. In /act it was very small—a prefab Gainsborough had had pulled in on a trailer. But these women seemed to fill everything and to make it seem like Thanksgiving was already here. Being that big never seemed to have a good side before, but now it did.
“Do you ever go to the dogs?” Phyllis asked with part of her coffee cake in her mouth and part floating in her mug.
“I do,” I said. “How did you know that?”
“Phyllis says she thinks she’s seen you at the dogs a few times,” Bonnie said and smiled.
“I just bet the quinellas,” Phyllis said. “But Bon will bet anything, won’t you, Bon? Trifectas, daily doubles, anything at all. She doesn’t care.”
“I sure will.” Bon smiled again and moved her orange hot-seat cushion from under her seat so that it was on top of the davenport arm. “Phyllis said she thought she saw you with a woman there once, a little, tiny woman who was pretty.”
“Could be,” I said.
“Who was she?” Phyllis said gruffly.
“My wife,” I said.
“Is she here now?” Bon asked, looking pleasantly around the room as if someone was hiding behind a chair.
“No,” I said. “She’s on a trip. She’s gone out West.”
“What happened?” said Phyllis in an unfriendly way. “Did you blow all your money on the dogs and have her bolt?”
“No.” I didn’t like Phyllis nearly as well as Bon, though in a way Phyllis seemed more reliable if it ever came to that, and I didn’t think it ever could. But I didn’t like it that Phyllis knew so much, even if the particulars were not right on the money. We had, my wife and I, moved up from the city. I had some ideas about selling advertising for the dog track in the local restaurants and gas stations, and arranging coupon discounts for evenings out at the dogs that would make everybody some money. I had spent a lot of time, used up my capital. And now I had a basement full of coupon boxes that nobody wanted, and they weren’t paid for. My wife came in laughing one day and said my ideas wouldn’t make a Coke fizz in Denver, and the next day she left in the car and didn’t come back. Later, a fellow had called to ask if I had the service records on the car—which I didn’t—and that’s how I knew it was sold, and who she’d left with.
Phyllis took a little plastic flask out from under her camouflage coat, unscrewed the top, and handed it across the coffee table to me. It was early in the day but, I thought, what the hell. Thanksgiving was tomorrow. I was alone and about to jump the lease on Gainsborough. It wouldn’t make any difference.
“This place is a mess.” Phyllis took back the flask and looked at how much I’d had of it. “It looks like an animal starved in here.”
“It needs a woman’s touch,” Bon said and winked at me. She was not really bad looking, even though she was a little heavy. The camouflage paste on her face made her look a little like a clown, but you could tell she had a nice face.
“I’m just about to leave,” I said and reached for the flask, but Phyllis put it back in her hunting jacket. “I’m just getting things organized back in the back.”
“Do you have a car?” Phyllis said.
“I’m getting antifreeze put in it,” I said. “It’s down at the BP. It’s a blue Camaro. You probably passed it. Are you girls married?” I was happy to steer away from my own troubles.
Bon and Phyllis exchanged a look of annoyance, and it disappointed me. I was disappointed to see any kind of displeasure cloud up on Bon’s nice round features.
“We’re m
arried to a couple of rubber-band salesmen down in Petersburg. That’s across the state line,” Phyllis said. “A real pair of monkeys, if you know what I mean.”
I tried to imagine Bonnie’s and Phyllis’s husbands. I pictured two skinny men wearing nylon jackets, shaking hands in the dark parking lot of a shopping mall in front of a bowling alley bar. I couldn’t imagine anything else. “What do you think about Gainsborough?” Phyllis said. Bon was just smiling at me now.
“I don’t know him very well,” I said. “He told me he was a direct descendant of the English painter. But I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I,” said Bonnie and gave me another wink.
“He’s farting through silk,” Phyllis said.
“He has two children who come snooping around here sometimes,” I said. “One’s a dancer in the city. And one’s a computer repairman. I think they want to get in the house and live in it. But I’ve got the lease.”
“Are you going to stiff him?” Phyllis said.
“No. I wouldn’t do that. He’s been fair to me, even if he lies sometimes.”
“He’s farting through silk,” Phyllis said.
Phyllis and Bonnie looked at each other knowingly. Out the little picture window I saw it had begun to snow, just a mist, but unmistakable.
“You act to me like you could use a good snuggle,” Bon said, and she broke a big smile at me so I could see her teeth. They were all there and white and small. Phyllis looked at Bonnie without any expression, as if she’d heard the words before. “What do you think about that?” Bonnie said and sat forward over her big knees.
At first I didn’t know what to think about it. And then I thought it sounded pretty good, even if Bonnie was a little heavy. I told her it sounded all right with me.
“I don’t even know your name,” Bonnie said, and stood up and looked around the sad little room for the door to the back.
“Henderson,” I lied. “Lloyd Henderson is my name. I’ve lived here six months.” I stood up.
“I don’t like Lloyd,” Bonnie said and looked at me up and down now that I was up, in my bathrobe. “I think I’ll call you Curly, because you’ve got curly hair. As curly as a Negro’s,” she said and laughed so that she shook under her clothes.
“You can call me anything you want,” I said and felt good.
“If you two’re going into the other room, I think I’m going to clean some things up around here,” Phyllis said. She let her big hand fall on the davenport arm as if she thought dust would puff out. “You don’t care if I do that, do you, Lloyd?”
“Curly,” said Bonnie, “say Curly.”
“No, I certainly don’t,” I said, and looked out the window at the snow as it began to sift over the field down the hill. It looked like a Christmas card.
“Then don’t mind a little noise,” she said and began collecting the cups and plates on the coffee table.
Without her clothes on Bonnie wasn’t all that bad looking. It was just as though there were a lot of heavy layers of her, but at the middle of all those layers you knew she was generous and loving and as nice as anybody you’d ever meet. She was just fat, though probably not as fat as Phyllis if you’d put them side by side.
A lot of clothes were heaped on my bed and I put them all on the floor. But when Bon sat on the cover she sat on a metal tie tack and some pieces of loose change and she yelled and laughed, and we both laughed. I felt good.
“This is what we always hope we’ll find in the woods,” Bonnie said and giggled. “Somebody like you.”
“Same here,” I said. It wasn’t at all bad to touch her, just soft everywhere. I’ve often thought that fat women might be better because they don’t get to do it so much and have more time to sit around and think about it and get ready to do it right.
“Do you know a lot of funny stories about fatties,” Bonnie asked.
“A few,” I said. “I used to know a lot more, though.” I could hear Phyllis out in the kitchen, running water and shuffling dishes around in the sink.
“My favorite is the one about driving the truck,” Bonnie said.
I didn’t know that one. “I don’t know that one,” I said.
“You don’t know the one about driving the truck?” she said, surprised and astonished.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime, Curly,” she said. “You’d get a big kick out of it.”
I thought about the two men in the nylon jackets shaking hands in the dark parking lot, and I decided they wouldn’t care if I was doing it to Bonnie or to Phyllis, or if they did they wouldn’t find out until I was in Florida and had a car. And then Gainsborough could explain it to them, along with why he hadn’t gotten his rent or his utilities. And maybe they’d rough him up before they went home.
“You’re a nice-looking man,” Bonnie said. “A lot of men are fat, but you’re not. You’ve got arms like a wheelchair athlete.”
I liked that. It made me feel good. It made me feel reckless, as if I had killed a deer myself and had a lot of ideas to show to the world.
“I broke one dish,” Phyllis said when Bonnie and I were back in the living room. “You probably heard me break it. I found some Magic Glue in the drawer, though, and it’s better now than ever. Gainsborough’ll never know.”
While we were gone, Phyllis had cleaned up almost everything and put away all the dishes. But now she had on her camouflage coat and looked like she was ready to leave. We were all standing in the little living room, filling it, it seemed to me, right up to the walls. I had on my bathrobe and felt like asking them to stay over. I felt like I could grow to like Phyllis better in a matter of time, and maybe we would eat some of the deer for Thanksgiving. Outside, snow was all over everything. It was too early for snow. It felt like the beginning of a bad winter.
“Can’t I get you girls to stay over tonight?” I said and smiled hopefully.
“No can do, Curly,” Phyllis said. They were at the door. Through the three glass portals I could see the buck lying outside in the grass with snow melting in its insides. Bonnie and Phyllis had their guns back over their shoulders. Bonnie seemed genuinely sorry to be leaving.
“You should see his arms,” she was saying and winked at me a last time. She had on her lumberjack’s jacket and her orange cushion fastened to her belt loops. “He doesn’t look strong. But he is strong. Oh my God! You should see his arms,” she said.
I stood in the door and watched them. They had the deer by the horns and were pulling him off down the road toward their car.
“You be careful, Lloyd,” Phyllis said. Bonnie smiled over her shoulder.
“I certainly will,” I said. “You can count on me.”
I closed the door, then went and stood in the little picture window watching them walk down the road to the fence, sledding the deer through the snow, making a swath behind them. I watched them drag the deer under Gainsborough’s fence, and laugh when they stood by the car, then haul it up into the trunk and tie down the lid with string. Hie deer’s head stuck out the crack to pass inspection. They stood up then and looked at me in the window and waved, each of them, big wide waves. Phyllis in her camouflage and Bonnie in her lumberjack’s jacket. And I waved back from inside. Then they got in their car, a new red Pontiac, and drove away.
I stayed around in the living room most of the afternoon, wishing I had a television, watching it snow, and being glad that Phyllis had cleaned up everything so that when I cleared out I wouldn’t have to do that myself. I thought about how much I would’ve liked one of those deer steaks.
It began to seem after a while like a wonderful idea to leave, just call a town cab, take it all the way in to the train station, get on for Florida and forget about everything, about Tina on her way to Phoenix with a guy who only knew about greyhounds and nothing else.
But when I went to the dinette to have a look at my ticket in my wallet, there was nothing but some change and some matchbooks, and I realized it was only the be
ginning of bad luck.
Empire
Sims and his wife Marge were on the train to Minot from their home in Spokane. They had left Spokane at five, when Marge got off her shift, and it was after nine now and black outside. Sims had paid for a roomette which Marge said she intended to be asleep in by nine, but she wasn’t in it yet. She had talked Sims into having a drink.
“How would you hate to die most?” Marge said, waggling a ballpoint in her fingers. She was working a crossword puzzle book that had been left on the seat. She had finished the hardest puzzle and gone on to the quiz in the back. The quiz predicted how long people would live by how they answered certain questions, and Marge was comparing her chances to Sims’s. “This will be revealing,” Marge said. “I’m sure you’ve thought about it, knowing you.” She smiled at Sims.
“I’d hate to be bored to death,” Sims said. He stared out at the glassy darkness of Montana where you could see nothing. No lights. No motion. He’d never been here before.
“Okay. That’s E,” Marge said. “That’s good. It’s ten. I’m ten because I said none of the above.” She wrote a number down. “You can see the psychology in this thing. If E is your answer for all of these, you live forever.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” Sims answered.
At the front of the parlor car a group of uniformed Army people were making a lot of noise, shuffling cards, opening beer cans and leaning over seats to talk loud and laugh. Every now and then a big laugh would go up and one of the Army people would look back down the car with a grin on his face. Two of the soldiers were women, Sims noticed, and most of the goings-on seemed intended to make them laugh and to present the men a chance to give one of them a squeeze.
“Okay, hon” Marge took a drink of her drink and repositioned the booklet under the shiny light. “Would you rather live in a country of high suicide or a high crime rate? This thing’s nutty, isn’t it?” Marge smiled. “Sweden’s high suicide, I know that. Everywhere else is high crime, I suppose. I’ll answer E for you on this one. E for me, too.” She marked the boxes and scored the points.