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"Another night of rabbit stew," he sighed. "Just how many more nights of this damn stew am I gonna be expected to eat?" he asked, more in exasperation than anger. It was, after all, not entirely Bill's fault that that's all the seven of them had to eat.
Peter was sitting hunched over the kitchen table. He was a man of middle size with a perpetually rounded back, a small head with brown hair and eyes; a small mouth pertly pursed forward from beneath a small, brown moustache and his back affectionately bore a dark brown cardigan sweater. His body language suggested thoughtful, subservient alertness.
"Eat of the fruit of the land," said a middle-pitched resinous nasal voice. Peter looked up at the small, straight-backed man in blue jeans and a faded, plaid shirt stirring the stew.
"Bill," he said, "doesn't it bother you to eat your rabbits?"
"Me?"
"Yes, you. You remember when we were kids? Mom would make me kill the chickens. I remember once I wanted to scare you, you couldn't have been more than seven, and I made you hold the chicken while I took the knife and slipped it in the chicken's mouth. There was that little 'snick' when I cut the spinal cord, and you dropped the chicken like it burned your hands. I picked it up and chased you, laughing like a banshee." He shook his head and laughed a little. "I remember how Mom cooked that particular chicken, roasted with dumplings, my favorite. You threw up, and I couldn't eat. I'd never think you could eat your rabbits."
"I tried making snail stew and dandelion salad, but Kevin, Michael, and Shivaun wouldn't eat. I could make heart of palm, but we only have two palm trees. Chocolate covered ants would require chocolate, and though cockroaches are nutritious and crunchy when you fry them slowly, I don't think any of you would eat them. Our neighbors wouldn't appreciate me cooking their cats, and I couldn't eat Gato even if he takes all the mice before I can get them. The garden isn't ready yet, and I don't think we can live on dirt. Hence, we have yummy stew, made with Twinky and Dinky and potatoes from last year."
Peter nodded. Then he hunched forward in a way that was like straightening. His eyes brightened. "You know I've been around," he said. Without waiting for the other's assent, he continued, "I think I know something that might help you. Did you know there is a boar down in the river valley?"
Three days later, the sturdiest men took off with their gear atop the jeep. After that final ridge, they figured they still had a two hours' journey to the river valley. As Bill drove, wrinkles deepened along his forehead, and the sweat of fear ran down the sides of his rib cage.
Peter sat behind the sturdiest men in the back of the jeep. Return to the River valley was for him a return to his childhood. He felt sick to his stomach.
"Kevin," Peter said. The wide tall man in front of him half turned, his body turning with his head as if he was a tree trunk, and cocked an ear to indicate he was listening.
"I was just thinking," Peter said, "of how you peed in your pants when we went duck hunting with Dad."
Kevin grunted and settled back in his seat. Peter tried to imagine what Kevin was remembering.
The river valley was below them. The river was narrow in the center. On this side the hills were bare, marked chiefly by the dirt road that wound to a shallow place used as a ford. Willows grew along the river, but by the ford they were wiped out in a wide, messy, muddy swale where the boars wallowed. The hills opposite, that got more moisture in the winter, were covered with thick oak forest. Smoke drifted up from an invisible chimney about half way up the other side.
"Excuse me, could you repeat that?" Peter asks, aware suddenly that he needs to bring his mind to the present, where it is now becoming obvious a waitress stands at his right shoulder. He looks up meekly at her, as she smiles graciously, and repeats-
"Wild boar, stuffed with comfit then roasted and covered with a glaze of fruit, in this case figs to which a hearty port has been added to make a kind of demi-glaze. The comfit, as you might know, consists primarily of dates and walnuts finely chopped and then stuffed into the boar's cavity before cooking."
Peter must have nodded in polite acquiescence, because the waitress then suggests he look over the wine list. In response to his blank stare, she makes some suggestions as to what might be appropriate. Peter barely hears this part. He concentrates instead on being back in the present, in this lovely northern California country restaurant, quite elegant, he notes. His eyes catch the first page of the menu, indicating prix fixe of $28, which means that with wine and coffee and dessert, he'll be looking at $60 just for himself for dinner. He allows himself to sift through his memories one more time, to where he and Kevin came from, and the paths they each had chosen, and what brought him to this time/place now.
They had started down the rough road to the bottom of the canyon. The smoke from the other side had begun to drift horizontally, making a sort of eraser mark against the dark green of the opposite slope. Peter felt his skin crawl. He lifted the shoulder at the outside of the cab and curved it in half to shelter himself.
The valley was not a place for duck hunting, but that didn't matter to their father. It was a wet year, and the swale was a pond, surrounded by swampy ground, and ducks liked the sheltered spot away from the hunters in the Central Valley. Their father got Kevin and Peter up at 4am, smelling of whiskey and cigarettes.
"Come on, you little faggots," he said, "get your tails up. You're going to learn something today."
So they huddled in the back seat of the old Pontiac, their father and Jim, a neighbor in the front seat, listening to their father curse as it bottomed out on the rutted road, nearly asleep, still dark outside. Peter was bigger, then, Kevin still only five or six or maybe seven.
Looking out the side of the jeep Peter saw, half concealed in the underbrush, a dark hollow he had never seen before. It was disquieting. He leaned forward and tapped Kevin on the shoulder again, half whispering in his ear. "Did you know that the best way to hunt boar is from a blind?" he asked.
Kevin half turned his head and nodded, acknowledging Peter's comment while dismissing it.
Bill drove a few more yards and pulled into a little clearing off the dirt road. The men piled out of the car. Peter noticed Bill's bumper sticker: "Spotted Owls taste as Good as Pheasant". Peter worked as the controller of a Federal agency in the Federal building in the Civic Center in San Francisco: no political statements were allowed on his car. The smell of aftershave, tobacco, and sweat dissipating into the cool air, replaced by the dust kicked up by the car; by car exhaust; by the oil smell of the guns; by the wet green smell of the woods. Peter lifted his nose and sniffed deeply. He turned back up the road trying to decide if he remembered it. As he approached the hole in the bank another smell pierced his attention. It was a dank, sour smell.
"I'm sorry now sir, but the kitchen has closed for the night. I could serve you a coffee or perhaps a brandy out in the foyer. There's still a bit of flame in the fireplace."
"Any chance you could bring one of each up to my room? I'm in number 34. No cream, just sugar" he says with what he hopes is enough confidence that it might actually happen.
There is a pause. He sizes up the eyes of the waitress. They are large, a rich brown, set rather wide in a narrow face framed by straight brown hair, cinched with rubber bands at each side of her neck. She is slight and wears a loose dress like warm canvas that is elaborately embroidered with tiny vines and flowers.
"Sure," she says, and gives him a big smile. Peter smiles back, but she is already gone. He catches a whiff of her, wafted towards him by the movement of her dress. A small smell of perspiration from the day's work; the familiar perfume of some popular shampoo; a flower smell, perhaps a scented oil she wears. He catches all that in his nostrils and savors it for a while, then stands and takes a deep breath. God, I am tired, he thinks. And today was a day he rested, too. He shakes his head, and checks his pocket for his room key. It is there, hard and reassuring.
He goes up to his room. It is a small room with verathained pine walls, a double bed with a coverlet that reminds him of the waitress' dress, a simple, hand crafted chair and dresser, and French doors opening onto a tiny balcony overlooking the highway and beyond that the sea. He puts his hands on the back of the chair and leans, resting his weight on them. He closes his eyes. It seems as if his mind had been blank a long time.
He walks to the bed and sits slowly upon its sinking mattress. He stares out the French doors, first at the foreground, some random passing car. Then, farther out, just there, at the horizon. He brings himself back into the room and loosens his shirt collar. He leans slightly forward to untie the laces first of one shoe then the other. He removes them both and in a quick gesture slides them under the bed. Then he removes his glasses and lays them on the night stand. With his right hand, he pinches at the place at the bridge of his nose, there, where his glasses had been sitting. As he leans slightly forward, he rests his elbows on his knees and lowers his head into his palms.
A knock on his door makes him anticipate the smell of coffee brightened into the air by the brandy, but at the same time he can not help recollecting the sour smell from the hole in the bankside. He puts his glasses back on and opens the door.
Peter looked back at the big men, who were busily hefting rifles from the rack and checking scopes and ammunition. Peter wished there were a woman in the party. Peter liked men all right, but women made life comfortable for him in a way men did not, and he needed comfort. He stopped and looked at the hollow. It seemed, from this close, to be a proper cave. He took another step forward. He could almost see the air coming from it: it seemed thick and dark, stained with the color of earth. He took another step forward, and reached to push the underbrush aside. She enters the room, and walks straight away over to the window seat, carefully setting down the tray. She looks out the window briefly, where she seems to be composing herself, breathing in a slightly shallow way. Motivated by curiosity, and not a little excitement, she smiles visibly. She then removes her shoes, the first by using the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other in that peculiar way he'd seen women do before. She then turns from the window, and lifts the chair from the corner of the room and carries it to within inches of Peter. She sets it down, sits in it, and pulls it even closer, til her knees touch his.
"What," Peter blurts out, "is going on?"
"You idiot," his father said, striking him on the side of the head. His ear rang, and he thought he might never hear right again from that side. His laughter from seeing pee spreading in Kevin's pants died away. The ducks who were alerted by his sudden exclamation flew away, escaping to some other, possibly safer body of water. A rabbit came out of the woods, shooting across the bank. Like an afterthought, Peter's father turned and fired twice. The rabbit faltered at each shot, but kept going into the underbrush.
"You find that rabbit," his father said, pushing him so he fell outside the crude blind.
Peter stands and brushes his pants off.
"You seemed like you wanted to talk," the waitress says. "My name is Astra. It means 'star' in Greek."
He was trying to pull aside the vines to reach the entrance of the cave.
He followed the rabbit for an hour, at least, hearing its rustling in front of him, finding bits of blood on leaves, sometimes seeing a flash of movement. Then, he heard and saw nothing. He sat down and looked around, the sound of his panting loud in his ears. The woods looked the same as it had each step of the way: thin trees pressed around him, a slope, patches of dry grass. He looked behind, but it was all the same, and for a minute he was unsure which was the way back and which forward. Then he heard something moving in front of him, leaves or dry grass crunching loudly. He stopped breathing. He backed up the hill slowly, thinking of stories he'd heard of wild pigs or dogs that roamed the woods here. Then he saw red, white, brown through the trees. He stopped. The thing moved again, a fitful flapping motion, like a fish thrown down on the bank. He edged towards it, carefully. It was the rabbit. It had flipped itself on his side, and was intermittently trying to right itself by kicking out with one of its feet. The pellets had torn the lower part of one leg half off, had taken out an eye, had cut a gash in the animal's side. The fur was smooth and pure. The remaining eye was clear and blue as a glass marble. He could see the rise and fall of its breath. He took off his shirt and reached with it, intending to wrap the rabbit up. It panicked at his touch, its injured leg waving up and down so he thought it might tear off completely. He grabbed the rabbit up as quickly as he could, pressing the shirt around it so it couldn't move. He lifted it and hugged it to his chest. He could feel the breath; the heart beating.
As he started back toward the place where his father had parked the car, it began to rain. As he climbed through the rain and brush, the rabbit stiffened in his arms. He looked down at the suddenly glazed eyes, the wet fur giving off a bad smell. He knew if he put it down his father would hit him again.
He was soaked by the time he came in view of the muddy swale. The old Pontiac was gone, replaced by a blue Ford pick-up. He tried the doors of the Ford but they were locked. He shivered and thought that if he were home he would be smelling his mother's cooking. A tangle of vines and bushes by the hillside might be dry. As he began to pull the vines aside he sensed something, a rustling, most of all a smell of sweat mixed with a musky, metallic odor. The bushes gave way to reveal a shallow cave. A sudden animal grunt came from the inside, and he froze. Lying on the ground was his father, half clothed, and astride him, gouging his neck, was a boar. He dropped the rabbit, stood for a moment like a deer in headlights. His mouth opened to scream, but fear took his voice away. Then the boar lifted, and its skin fell away and became a tan coat lying on the dirt and he saw the breasts and naked body of a woman, arched back, her pelvis rising up and down, her pubic hair mingling with his father's. Their smell sang in the air. He turned and fled. When he got home, after three hours walk in the rain, his father took a strap to him for disappearing and losing the rabbit. When he turned his mind to why he had walked home, it slid off as if he were trying to stand on an icy mound.
"You know, once I was a little boy," he says to Astra. He chuckles in his embarrassed and complacent way again.
She leans slightly forward and touches his thigh with her hand, reassuringly. He looks down at her hand, but says nothing.
"It's not as if you went from being a little boy to being a grown-up with nothing in between," Astra says.
He hears something in the cave. It echoes in his ears the way sounds sometimes do, so he wondered after a few seconds if he had actually heard it or just imagined he had. A grunt, the kind of noise his grandfather made when clearing his nostrils after smoking too many cigars.
He realizes with a start that the sound had come from his own throat. Astra looks at him intently, and he realizes some words are expected of him. He holds her. He had lifted her and hugged her to his chest. He feels her breath; her heart beating. Her heart is the beast, her chest the cave.
Jonathan Simonoff was born in Manhattan and grew up in a Long Island beach town. Too much early exposure to science fiction led him to attend MIT where he eventually graduated with a degree in writing and literature, and became a technical writer as a way to support writing fiction. Dirk van Nouhuys eventually hired him at a famous fruit-related company. He has two young children, and lives in San Francisco.
Rainbow is an unreconstructed hippie. She grew up in another Long Island beach town and has always lived in small college towns: Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, California and now Palo Alto, California (Stanford), near large universities with access to independent bookstores frequently open late at night. Her longest employment was as a technical writer at a famous planet-related company.
Dirk van Nouhuys is a native of Berkeley, California with a BA from Stanford in creative writing and an MA from Columbia in contemporary literature. He is married with three grown children. He worked for decades as a tech writer and manager. About fifty items of fiction and a few poems have appeared in literary or general magazines. He occasionally publishes photography. You can learn more about him at www.wandd.com.