Poachers (11 page)

Which is this: nothing.

If you’re wondering what somebody like Ned’s doing with somebody like me, it’s because he’s my little brother. I married for love, Ned married for money. Now he pays my light bill; it’s in his wife Nina’s name. Ned’ll come by on Thanksgiving or Christmas day with a case of beer, and he leaves what we don’t finish, maybe two cans. He rents movies which we watch on a TV/VCR unit from his real estate office.

In the divorce my ex got everything. Even kept her compos-ure—no crying in front of the judge for her. That was somebody else’s department. Thank God there weren’t any kids: that’s what Ned said. I came home from fishing one morning and she was gone, the damn house empty. I called Ned from a gas station because she’d taken our telephones.

“Bitch ripped off everything except the mallards and the deer heads,” I said.

“Well,” Ned said, “buck up, big bro. Some people don’t have that much.”

So What Ned does now
is find me these jobs. I cut the grass around some of his rental houses, rake the dead leaves, use the Weed Whacker. I wash his Porsche twice a week when the pollen’s thick, and this one time he even let me drive it to get it tuned. In the rearview mirror, I looked like Ned. But it was my eyebrow poking up over his sunglasses and it was me smoking his cigars from the dash pocket and shifting without using the clutch.

It was me, Duane, cruising past the downtown hookers standing in their heels to see if there was something in my price range.

Another time Ned let me clean out the attic of a foreclosure, he said keep anything I wanted. Here’s what I took: three shotguns, two graphite fishing rods, a tent, a rocking horse, a road atlas, an ice chest, a coin collection, a Styrofoam boulder from one of Nina’s plays. When Ned asked if I found anything worth keeping I went, “Not really.” I used the coin collection to buy TV dinners and pawned the rest, except for one of the shotguns, a nice Ithaca twelve-gauge pump.

It’s been a year since Debra left and I’m still in the gettingover-it stage. I’m drunk every day; that helps. With the TV Ned left I discovered
My Three Sons
and soap operas and PBS. At night I sit and watch. There was this show called
Animals Are Beautiful People
. It was funny as hell. This baboon in the middle of a field picks up a rock looking for something to eat and there’s a snake coiled there. The baboon screams, then faints dead away. When he wakes a few minutes later, he picks up the same rock, and there’s the snake and whammo, the goddamn baboon faints again.

One night Ned calls
. “Hey, big bro, Nina wants to sell the house.”

He means the one I’m living in. Holding the remote, the TV muted, I look around.

“But hey, don’t panic,” Ned says. “The price she wants, they’ll never move it. You’ll just have this for-sale sign in your yard.

“But you might need to cut that grass once in a while,” he says. “You can borrow our lawn mower.

“Another thing,” he says. “We’re going to the Bahamas for a

couple weeks. Will you check up on our place while we’re gone? Just drive by a few times, make sure it hasn’t burned down.

“There’s some cats there, too,” he says. “All those damn strays Nina feeds? Won’t get ’em fixed either. Says, listen to this, that it interrupts the natural goddamn flow of everything.

“Make you a deal,” Ned says. “If all those cats are gone when we get back, I’ll pay the responsible party two hundred bucks. All on the Q-T, though. Nina would freak.”

On the morning they’re leaving
for the Bahamas, I’m sleeping

on the porch: it’s too hot inside, and the flies.

Ned kicks a beer can.

“Hey, bro,” he says.

I sit up, blink, see dried vomit on my pants. Brush at the ants working in it.

Ned tosses me a small brown paper bag. “This might come in handy,” he says, and winks.

The bag’s heavy, like a pint.

Ned squats and socks me in the arm. “We’ll have to go fishing when I get back, huh?” He stands up, goes past the for-sale sign. Screeches off in the Porsche.

I open the bag to find a small silver pistol and two plastic boxes of twenty-two cartridges.

Ned and Nina have been
gone for a week when I decide it’s time to head on over there. I sit up in bed at four in the afternoon and blink at the calendar girl. Finish the beer on the nightstand. The pistol will never work on cats—they’ll probably zigzag all over the place and my aim’s not that good—so I dig in the closet

and find the Ithaca and a box of shells—number eights, bird-shot—and go outside, load the stuff into the backseat. I get in front with the pistol, not relishing the idea of all that shooting with my hangover.

There’s a line of big black ants, some carrying white things over their heads, going across the dash of the car. Not to mention the water standing in the back floorboard, hatching all these mosquitoes. I put the car in gear and drive to Ned and Nina’s big spread in the woods. The magnolia trees and the million-year-old oaks and the Spanish moss. All so damn depressing.

Their lawn’s high; Ned’ll probably ask me to mow it. I get out slapping at mosquitoes, and four or five cats eye me from the lawn furniture. One yawning from the limb of a tree. There’s a sprinkler that I turn on: it makes a ticking sound that alarms the cats. The pistol is snug in my pocket and I take it out, load it. Point it at a fat calico.

“Bang,” I say.

I have the house key I copied off Ned’s key ring the day he let me take the Porsche. Nina, you can bet, won’t like me being inside. I go up the steps, winded at the top, and let myself into the den and sit on the sofa and rest. Rustic as hell. I leaf through a magazine. Try to remember the kind of wood they use to make these big ceiling beams. I get up and wander to the kitchen and take a Heineken from the fridge, put the rest of the six-pack under my arm and start rummaging through the pantry. There’s several cans of sardines and tuna that I pocket. Then I notice something else: Ned’s Porsche keys hanging on a rack over the sink.

Outside, I open the cans and imitate Nina’s squeaky, cute voice: “Here, kitty kitty kitty.”

Soon the clueless cats are feasting and purring at my feet, rubbing their shoulders against my ankles. They’re half starved. With

Ned’s Porsche’s trunk opened I pick up them one by one by the scruffs of their necks and load them in. They’re getting wary now, making these low moaning noises.

But five cats and three kittens are locked away before the smarter ones disappear.

I let myself back into Ned’s house and climb upstairs to wash my hands. I look like hell in the bathroom mirror. Those eyes, Christ. Opening the medicine cabinet, I find some Tylenol and swallow four. There’s some Valium, too, and I empty most of them from the bottle into my shirt pocket. Nina’s prescription. There’s dozens of bottles of pills in here. Reading their names is like reading Mexican or something. I unscrew some of the caps and sniff inside. Stale. When I find a container of Nina’s birth control pills it gives me a semi. A little packet of orange sinus pills looks sort of like the birth control, and I switch them.

Sometimes—and I’m not proud of this—I do a strange thing regarding Nina. I know it’s embarrassing, but on nights when Ned’s out, I call from a pay phone and wait for Nina to answer. When she says hello, I just hold the line, let her hear me breathing.

“I know it’s you, you bitch!” she screams. “You whore!”

Then I hang up, excited and guilty.

Finishing my beer, I go past the door-length mirror into Ned and Nina’s bedroom. Their water bed isn’t made. I crawl in with my boots on and slosh around: Nina’s pillow’s sweet smell, a blond pubic hair curling on the quilt.

Going through the nightstand I find seventy-five dollars. In Nina’s underwear drawer there are frilly pieces of lingerie that are like Kleenexes they’re so delicate. I toss one into the air and let it land on my face. Perfume. There are little fragrant soap balls

in the drawer. I lift a thin negligee from the pile and hold it in

front of the mirror.

The phone rings.

I stuff the nightie in my pocket and close the drawer, hurry down to the living room where the answering machine is. It beeps and Ned’s recording plays and some asshole comes on and asks about the house for sale. Call him, he says, as soon as they get in. I study the machine. A digital number changes from 12 to 13. I press the play button and listen for awhile. There are several calls, that I erase, about the house for sale.

My house.

Outside, you can hear the
cats meowing and clawing around in the trunk of the Porsche. I get in and rev the engine, spin off and take curves hard and fast to shut them up.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever killed a cat. Deer, sure. Doves, squirrels, coons. Practically any game animal. Three or four dog accidents with my car and a few dozen snakes, possums and armadillos.

But none of that’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. The worse thing I’ve ever done was when I woke up in my car after drinking all night with Ned—it was a time I don’t remember that much, a week or two after Deb left,
blackouts
are what they call them in jail—and my clothes had a lot of blood on them. I couldn’t remember where it came from, so I called Ned and he said he didn’t have a clue. Said not to call him at work. Hung up on me. It was my first week renting Ned’s place. There was so much blood that I burned the clothes in the fireplace, went outside wearing a bedsheet and watched the smoke coming out of the

chimney, worried what my new neighbors would think of a man who burns fires in August and stands in his yard in a sheet.

While I’m paying five dollars
for gas at the Jiffy Mart, the clerk squints her eyes and says, “What’s that commotion coming out your trunk? Sound like you got you a wildcat in there.”

I tell her it’s my ex-wife and she laughs a toothless, good-natured laugh.

A drink seems in order next, so I drive the Porsche to the Key West and get a corner table. I finger the pistol in my pocket and think about killing things. Stub out my cigarette in an ashtray shaped like an oyster shell. I glance around. This place is designed to look like an island. Tropical shit, I mean. Every once in a while a fairy floats in thinking it’s a gay bar because of how Key West is down in Florida. I guess they don’t take the hint from the pickups in the parking lot. The gun racks in back windows. But when they see how the regulars glare at them, they get the picture pretty quick and gulp down their peppermint schnapps or whatever they drink and drop a giant tip for Juarez, the bartender. Juarez for the record isn’t foreign: his real name’s Larry, but Larry says with a foreign name you get more pussy. Over a shot of tequila, I consider changing my name to something better, tougher-sounding.

I roll my mind over this: What if Ned ever hires me for a real job, to knock off a person, say? Or at the least just beat the shit out of some asshole, maybe some yo-yo who cuts Ned off at a red light and Ned gets the guy’s license number. Or maybe somebody’s fucking Nina. Ned calling me and saying he’s got a big score, yeah, the real thing. Meet him at the Key West. “
It’s a

doctor
,” he’ll whisper in my ear, “
a fat plastic surgeon that’s fucking her
.”

All I’d have to do is call Ned in the middle of the night and hang up a few times. Get him worried.

“Ten grand,” I’ll say, and Ned’ll go, “Too much,” and I’m like, “Hey, Ned? Then pay somebody else, okay, Ned? This ain’t some piece of real estate you’re buying, Ned. Some piece of ass. This is a professional job, little bro, and if you get some clown who don’t know what he’s doing, he gets excited by the blood and suddenly you got a body on your hands. Now you’re dealing with forensics detectives, Ned, guys pulling hairs off the body with fucking tweezers.”

I’m enjoying my little plot until Juarez appears and hits me with more Cuervo. Seeing him reminds me that you need an alias for certain kinds of deals. I pronounce my name out loud and decide my last name’s the problem. So I take my cue from Juarez and there on the spot become Duane Juarez.
He
sounds like a dangerous guy, somebody you don’t fuck with.

I head to the bar to buy the original Juarez his poison of choice. Pouring, he wants to know what the occasion is, and I tell him I’ve just made an important decision and we clink our glasses.

“To you,” he says. “To Duane.”

“Juarez,” I add.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Then the subject of cat-killing comes up, and Juarez tells me he grew up on a farm where their mousing cats were always giving birth. Juarez says his old man would stuff a whole damn litter of kittens in a croaker sack and beat it against the ground until the bag stopped moving. Which reminds me that I have a job to do,

so I pay my tab with one of Ned’s twenties and head outside. There’s another cat sitting on the Porsche, attracted, I guess, by the noise or the cat piss smell coming from the trunk.