It was a good show, and it even included the changes that had occurred, and there were people dressed up like the dead people, shuffling along, and there were a few comic bits associated with it, and then it was over.
As we were bused back to where the tracks were, and where our hotel was, Livia said, “You know, that was hokey, but I really enjoyed it.”
“So did I,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. I had begun to see that Livia was looking at other men in a way she hadn’t before. I don’t know if it was because she was thinking about cheating to even up the score, or if what I had done had just opened her mind to someone other than me. Anyway, I had watched her and I thought I had seen something in her eye when she was watching some of the male actors in the plays. They were all young, and most likely gay, I told myself, but still, Livia was watching. I felt certain of it. Nonetheless, I liked that she had spoken to me in that way, as it seemed natural and for a few seconds it seemed as if she had forgotten all about being mad at me.
But back at the room we went straight to bed, and I lay there and looked at the ceiling for a long time. Eventually I heard Livia breathing evenly as she slept, and I turned and looked at her.
There was enough moonlight through a part in the curtains to fall on her face and make her look angelic. I thought she was the kind of woman who could easily attract a much younger man, and I was the kind of man who, if I managed to keep my business and money, could most likely attract a younger woman, but only if they didn’t know I was in debt. She had options, and I didn’t have any real ones. Just ones I might be able to lie about.
I think that’s what it had been about, the infidelity, a feeling that I was getting past it all and needed some assurance of my manhood. It hadn’t been a classic sort of infidelity, and I told myself that because of the uniqueness of it, it didn’t count. But if it had been the other way, Livia instead of me that had done it, I know I would have been insane with jealousy.
I might have been better off had I had an affair, and not just an encounter—an encounter I paid steeply for, both financially and emotionally.
I hoped when we got to the hunt, everything would be better. That I could make it better and she would accept that. I lay there and tried to think of all the clever things I could do to make her happy, but all of them were fantasy and I knew none of them would work.
We had a private car on the train with food and alcohol and most anything that we seriously needed. There would be the hunting car later, but on the way out and back, when we weren’t stopped along the way at some site or entertainment that was planned, we had the room and a fold-down berth, and it was all nice and clean and private.
The humming of the train over the tracks had become soothing, and maybe that was why Livia was able to talk about it. She came at me with it out of nowhere, and it was the first time she hadn’t yelled at me when she brought it up.
“Was it because I didn’t satisfy you?”
I was sitting at the fold-down table with a drink of well-watered whisky. I said, “Of course not.”
“Then why?”
“I’ve told you, Livia.”
“Tell me again.”
“I’ve told you again and again.”
“Make me believe it.”
I sat for a moment, gathering my energy for it. “I suppose it has to do with getting older. I don’t feel all that attractive anymore. I’m a little heavy, going bald. I wanted to feel that I could be with another woman.”
“But that woman . . . That doesn’t work, Frank. She didn’t want you back. She was paid for. And she was . . . ”
“I know,” I said. “But it was the fantasy that she was someone who cared for me and that it was a secret rendezvous. It was the idea of it more than the actuality of it. It was stupid, but I did it and I’m sorry, and I am so sad it ever happened.”
“Childish.”
“Yes,” I said. “Very much so. I know that now. But I just felt it might give me a boost, so to speak.”
“I don’t give you a boost?”
“You do.”
“I know I’m older—”
“You look fantastic,” I said. “It wasn’t that. It was me.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“I don’t think that—no. It won’t make you feel better. But it’s an answer, not an excuse, and it’s the only one I have. There is no good answer. I was foolish. It’s just that . . . I love you, Livia. But I just wasn’t satisfied.”
“It wasn’t like I didn’t make love to you.”
“No,” I said. “You did. But . . . it wasn’t all that passionate.”
“We’re not eighteen anymore.”
“I guess that’s what I wanted, something more passionate. Something that would make me feel eighteen again.”
“The only thing that could make you feel eighteen again is being eighteen,” she said.
“I know. I just wanted something besides the usual, you know. I don’t mean that offensively, but I wanted to feel something akin to the old passion.”
Livia turned her head away from me when she spoke. “Why didn’t you ask? We could have experimented.”
“I hinted.”
“Hinted?” she said. “Isn’t it men who always say that women don’t say what they want? That they beat around the bush? Don’t you always say: ‘How am I supposed to know what you want if you don’t ask’?”
“I suppose it is.”
“No supposing to it.”
We sat silent for a long time. I didn’t even pick up my drink.
“Do you think you can ever feel good about me again?” I asked. “That you can ever trust me and feel that things are right again? Can we ever be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Livia said.
She went to the cabinet and pulled the latch and took out a glass and a bottle of some kind of green liquor. She poured herself a drink and put everything back, and went to sit on the fold-down bed.
“You’ll try?” I said.
“I try every day,” she said. “You don’t know how hard I try.”
“This trip . . . was it a mistake?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see how it makes me feel when it’s all over.”
I nodded and drank the rest of my drink. I couldn’t think of anything else to say or do, except get another drink, and I didn’t even do that. I just sat there, and in time Livia took a magazine from her suitcase and lay on the bed and read.
I finally got up and got another drink and sat down at the table with it. I sipped it and thought about how I had ruined everything that had ever meant anything to me for a piece of overpriced heavily lubricated ass.
I began to hang all my hopes on the hunt, and that the enthusiasm of it would excite her as it did when we used to deer hunt together. That had been years ago, and this was different, but I think, except for those times when we had been young and in bed together, it was the time when I felt the most bonded to her.
I suppose it was the thrill of the hunt, and mostly the thrill of the kill. I never deluded myself into thinking hunting was a sport. Killing was what it was all about, and to kill something was to satisfy something deep in the soul, something primal. And it was a strange thing to see that primitive nature in a woman, and to observe her face when she stood over the body of a dead deer; her eyes bright, the deer’s eyes dull, and on Livia’s face an expression akin to the one she had when she had an orgasm and lay in my arms, happy, satisfied, having experienced something that was beyond intellect and rationalization.
It was a cool, crisp morning when we reached Montana. The air felt rich with oxygen and the sky was so blue it was hard to believe it was real. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. By midday it would be relatively warm, if still jacket weather, but we would be in the hunting car, perched at the windows with our rifles, so it would be comfortable enough, stuffed as the car would be with other hunters, adrenaline and passion and the desire to kill. Though, perhaps,
kill
was the wrong word here, and that’s what made the whole thing somehow acceptable. You can’t kill what’s already dead, but you can enjoy the shooting, and maybe it wasn’t as good as a live deer brought down and made dead, but to shoot the living dead, a human, and not have any remorse because it was all sanctioned, there was something about that, something about the fantasy of killing a human being instead of just bringing down a walking thing that was the shell for someone who had once lived.
The train parked on the tracks and some of the guides went to the storage car where the dead people were kept. They would let them out and drive them to the center of the plain, and they would throw sides of beef in the dirt to keep them in that area, bloody beef that the dead could smell and want.
When they went for the beef, when the guides said it was time, we could point our guns out the window and take them as fast as we could shoot. Sometimes, the guides said, the dead would come to the window, and that you had to be careful, because you could get so caught up in the shooting, you could forget that they wanted you as much as you wanted them. If you’re arm was out the window, well, you could get bit, and the waiver we had signed said that if that was the case, we went out there with them. We wouldn’t necessarily be dead, but we soon would be, so there was a chance to shoot someone who was actually alive; someone already doomed. It was considered practical and even humane, and it was covered by insurance money that your family would receive.
Livia and I settled into our shooting positions. We had benches by a long window, and the window was still closed. We were given our rifles. They were already loaded, and we were told to keep them pointing up, which, of course, we knew without being told. Everyone here had gone through the program on how to handle the weapons and how to deal with the dead, and Livia and I were already hunters and we could shoot.
I had paid dearly for this event, and I hoped it would make a difference. When it was all over, I would be deep in debt, but I would have saved my marriage if it worked. Money was easier to regain than it was to regain the loss of a good marriage.
The guides came through and told us the basic rules again, gave us reminders, the same stuff I told you about not getting so caught up in the kill that we forgot to watch for the dead slipping through, getting hold of us through the windows. They said everything was very safe, but that it had happened, and they would be outside, on the fringes, with weapons to take down any of the dead that seemed to be getting through the line of fire and presenting a problem.
My hands were sweating. Not from fear of the dead, or even anticipation of the shoot itself, but thinking how it would be between Livia and me when it was over.
“What’s she wearing?” Livia asked.
I was startled out of my thoughts.
“What?”
“I said, what is she wearing?”
“I bought an orange jump suit for her.”
“How does she look?”
“Dark hair, tall . . . well built.”
“That could be me.”
“I suppose that had something to do with it,” I said. “Her reminding me of you.”
“A dead woman?”
I knew then my tact had backfired, and I could have kicked myself.
“Just the appearance,” I said. “But it’s been awhile. And even with refrigeration, she’s gone downhill. She still looks close to being alive. Not as much as before.”
“You mean when you fucked her?”
We were seated pretty close to other hunters, and I glanced to see if any of them had heard her, heard anything we might have said.
They all seemed preoccupied with their weapons and their thoughts and their eagerness, and I realized that Livia wasn’t as loud as I thought she was.
“I don’t know how to describe her so that you will know right off,” I said. “I’ll try and point her out.”
“You do that,” Livia said. “I want to be the one.”
“I know.”
“I thought maybe I’d want you to shoot her, just to show me it didn’t matter, but then I thought that wouldn’t do. I want to shoot her.”
“Of course it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It wasn’t like she was alive.”
“I want to shoot her,” she said.
“It could be anyone that shoots her,” I said. “There’s no guarantees it’ll be you that gets her.”
“It better be me,” Livia said. “You paid to fuck her, now you’ve paid for me to shoot her. It better be me.”
“You don’t just want to shoot her,” I said. “You want to finish her. A shot through the head to destroy the brain.”
“Think I don’t know that? Everyone knows that. And I can shoot. You know I can shoot.”
I couldn’t say anything right. Everything I said was like stepping in shit and being forced to smell my shoe.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course you can shoot.”
The guides were moving back along the aisle of the rail car.
“All right,” one of them said. “We are going to open the cars, and when the dead come out—and listen to me. Do not shoot! Not at first. The beef is in place. You see the yellow chalk line we’ve laid in the grass? You cannot, and will not, shoot until the dead are beyond that, on the beef. If some do not go past the line, the outside guides will work them that way with the push poles, and if they can’t get them to go, they may have to put a few down themselves. After the dead are over the line, you can fire at will. And if they start to come back over the line, you can still fire. But you have to wait until they are first over the line. Does everyone understand?”
We all called out that we understood.
“Any questions?” asked the guide. There were none.
“Then,” the guide said, “ladies and gentlemen, the windows will be lowered. Do not put your rifles out the windows until the dead are all past the yellow line, and when they are, then it is open season.”
The automatic windows rolled down. The windows gave plenty of room for propping the rifles and for laying your elbows on the sill.
We heard the train cars opening on either side of us, and we could hear the dead, moaning. Then we saw them coming out of the cars. The guides had big heavy poles and they pushed the dead with them to make sure they went toward the yellow line. But they didn’t need much pushing. The bloody meat smelled even better than we did to them, and the dead went for it right away.
Livia said, “Point her out. I want to shoot her a few times in the body before I take the head.”