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No one ever leaves Clairton, Pennsylvania, and certainly no one ever arrives. There's nothing to draw people, but there's also nothing to tempt them away. That’s just the way it is: inertia of the spirit. So at eighteen years of age, Michael Vronsky has known every man in town for most of his life.
First there was Stan, whom he saw daily at school until they both dropped out halfway through junior high to work at the steel mill. Even as a child Stan had that air of bruised dignity, but then, as now, no one paid him any mind. Half the class was coming in Mondays with real bruises from their fathers' weekend binges.
Then there was Axel, who blundered into the middle of twelve-year-old Michael’s first hunting trip in the Alleghenies. Stepan Vronsky was teaching his son to track a buck in deep snow when Axel, seventeen years old and already as strong as the machinery he was working weekly, came plowing through the woods downwind and spooked their deer.
Stepan, with his remnants of old-country paranoia, was never much of a hunting partner, and when he died in a mill accident the next year Michael matter-of-factly began to join Axel on his jaunts. But Axel wasn't much of a partner either—he loved the forest too much to stay still, loved the sound of his own voice too much to stay quiet. Maybe, in some ways, he loved the deer too much to take any real pleasure in killing them. Later, some of Axel's friends would tag along, usually big John Welch from the bar down the road, and they were no good either. John started bringing along Steven, who worked in the mill and still lived with his mother. Steven had a keen eye, a light foot, and absolutely no stomach for death.
In the mountains, Michael broke off from the group early and learned the ways of hunting alone. You mark your own trail, because the snow makes even your home turf a strange land. You don't stop when your feet hurt, or when your feet go numb, but when your feet start feeling like wax inside your boots. And you only get one shot to do the thing right, because there's no one else to finish the job.
It's the end of another Friday at the mill where Michael's been working for five years now, and most of the men are stripping off their work clothes in the changing shed. Axel peels off his apron and grumbles, "You know the only thing I want right now?"
"A beer," shrills Stan from somewhere behind them.
Axel doesn't acknowledge this. “Gun in my hands and snow in my boots."
Michael looks at him speculatively. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
After a time, Michael says, "Sure, me too."
Axel's wide face breaks in a grin, and he bellows across the room to Steve, "Hear that? Huntin' trip this weekend!"
"You guys gonna invite me?" asks Stan.
Michael scowls at Axel, who ignores the look and says, "Stan, you are so fulla shit. You wanna come, come. Nobody's sendin’ you a card about it."
They settle back into silence until someone says, "You need another guy?"
Michael has a boot in his hand, and he puts it on his foot and begins lacing it before he even glances over. Nick Chevotarevich is standing in the doorway, still partially suited up. He’s looking at Michael.
No one ever leaves Clairton—no one of this generation, anyway—so Michael knows every detail of Nick’s history without ever having exchanged more than five words with the man. The Chevotarevichs fled Russia at the end of the thirties. As swiftly and unsentimentally as an assembly line, they forced out one son in the auspicious peacetime after the Great Patriotic War, then a second son three years later. When Nick was five, they just as swiftly and unsentimentally died in an influenza outbreak. They'd come to America too late; they had too much of the old country left in them, too much weight on their minds and not enough on their bones. Still, people their age knew how to end cleanly, all at once. Their younger son learned the lesson well and died of unknown causes before he reached his first birthday, but Nick too seems to have inherited something of their economy. In the mill, even under his heavy leather apron, he moves sparingly and without superfluity.
"You can shoot?" asks Michael dryly.
"Aw, c'mon, Mike," says Axel, "It’s not like Stan can shoot. That's not what it's about."
"That's what it's about," says Michael, without a blink. "Even one guy who can't shoot is too much."
"I can shoot," says Nick, his voice still level and amiable, as though he didn’t even notice the slight.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I'm a good shot." Nick's watching him steadily, but Michael doesn't look at his eyes at all. He looks at Nick’s hand on the door frame, looks for balance, looks for scars where a machine was handled clumsily. The line of Nick's mouth narrows. "Stanley's got a gun, doesn't he?"
Axel chuckles. "Yeah, Stan's got a gun. Stan's gonna have a hole in his foot, one of these days."
"Okay," says Nick, coming the rest of the way into the room. "When we get out, lemme use it and I'll show you." In passing he bumps Michael with his hip, as if by accident. It reminds Michael of a body check between bucks, a test of strength; but when he catches a sideways glimpse, Nick is grinning a little. Nick pats him on the shoulder and says without a trace of bravado, "It's a good hand, I promise."
They file out together when the whistle blows: Axel and Steve, Nick and Stan with the gun, and Michael behind them all, watching the way Nick strides through the drifting snow. Nick halts at the far edge of the parking lot, head up against the wind, and says, "All right, here." He takes a piece of scrap metal from his pocket and perches it on an old oil drum, moves a few paces back. "Can I have the gun?"
Stan jogs to his side and hands it to him almost reverently. Stan loves the underdog, especially when it's not him.
"No," says Michael, and they all turn to him. Nick is the slowest to react, and even when his head does swing around to face Michael, the rest of his body remains oriented toward the target. Stance open, shoulders loose, body sideways. He doesn't look like someone who's been taught to fire a gun; he looks like someone who knows the pull of gravity, who stares straight into the sun. When he glances over, Michael can tell he's not thinking about the shot, but his body is feeling it, is rigid and cocked like the hammer of Stan’s gun.
"Farther back," says Michael tonelessly. "No buck in the state's so dumb you'll get that close."
Nick shrugs and walks backward clear across to the other end of the yard, heel to toe. He finishes standing just in front of Michael, so that Michael can see his jaw shift and his lips pull back hard and solemn when he says, "That good?"
"That's okay."
"Gun loaded?" Nick asks of no one in particular, taking off his gloves.
It takes a dig in the ribs from Axel to remind Stan that the question's for him.
"Uhh... shit, I dunno. I think there's only one round in there."
"Been takin’ potshots at people?" teases Axel, elbowing him harder.
"S’okay," Nick says, widens his stance, and braces his legs. There's the click of the hammer and the crack of the shot, and fifty yards away the small black square of metal skips into the air.
They watch it fall, and then Michael reaches over Nick's shoulder and takes the gun from him. He rolls out the cylinder, and into his hand drops the fired shell casing, warm, leaving a smudge of powder on his skin. The other chambers are empty.
Michael can't see Nick's face, but all the lines of his body still point straight toward the oil drum. The moment hangs around him, catches on his lean form pointing through the snow, snags the invisible tripwire of his bullet's trajectory. They all stand there waiting for Michael to say something.
"Good shot," he admits at length, and extends his hand. Nick turns, his eyes still deep and hazy with concentration, and shakes it. "Okay, pretty good shot. You’re in.” Michael returns the gun to Stan and starts toward his car. "Everybody get your shit together and be ready by five tomorrow morning."
Nick follows him out into the street at a few paces' distance. As the others disperse, Michael asks, "You got a long walk?"
"Trailer, couple of blocks." Nick doesn't say where his car is; doesn't say if it's broken down, or whether he owns one at all. He doesn't have the look of someone on a first-name basis with poverty, except maybe in the eyes and the tautness of the lips. But then Nick Chevotarevich has been working with Michael Vronsky most of his life, and they're still not quite on a first-name basis, so you never can tell about intimacy.
"Well, it's snowing," says Michael, as if it’s a revelation. "I'll drive you over."
"Thanks."
They wander over to the Cadillac, five years old and already looking like a discarded tin can. Michael starts trying to scrape the caked ice off the windshield. After a pause Nick joins in, with his gloves still bulging in his back pockets. Michael looks at his bare hands turning red with cold, but all he says is "Nick, right?" And they both know that Michael knows his name, knows his face and his family history and how well he mans his machine, but maybe they also both know that this is the only way to make anything solid between them. "Or Nicholas? Nikolai?"
"Nikanor. Nick to anybody who’s askin’. Real Americanized." Nick grins. "Or Nicky, to be familiar."
"That's pretty damn familiar," replies Michael. "We’re gonna wait on that." They both laugh, awkwardly welded to each other for a moment. Then Michael slams a hand down flat on the windshield and says, "What the hell, I’ll do it tomorrow. Little ice doesn’t make a difference to this car. Get in."
The drive is longer than a couple of blocks, but the trailer doesn't look bad at all. It sits a little lopsided where ice has gathered and expanded in the cracks of its cinder-block foundation, but the windows are intact and the walls caulked up tight against the cold. It looks right for Nick: self-contained and clean, nothing superfluous about it.
Nick sits in the passenger seat for a moment, blowing on his fingers. "Five o'clock," he says absently. "I'll see you then."
"Yeah." Michael twists around in the seat and glances at him sideways. "How'd you get that shot off right? How’d you know where the bullet was?”
"Know?" repeats Nick. He gingerly slides one hand into a glove. "I didn't know a thing. I didn't even think a thing. Thinking about it throws me off. I just take a guess and go." He puts on the other glove, opens the door, and holds it with his hip as he maneuvers himself out. "The shot's not the only thing there is."
"Easy to say," observes Michael, "when you've made the shot." But he's smiling.
* * *
Nick isn’t the world’s greatest hunter himself, at least not by normal standards. He can’t navigate to save his life; whenever he tries to lead, he gets the two of them hopelessly lost. But what keeps Michael with him is that he doesn’t second-guess himself. Until Michael takes over and gets them out of the woods, Nick will keep going, straight as an arrow, on the path he’s chosen. When Nick does something, he commits to it. He follows through, even when he’s wrong.
On the day after Steve’s wedding, they leave the cabin as soon as they’ve dropped off their excess gear, before the others even realize they’re setting out. Nick drops into the rear without a word. This is their last trip for a long time; they ought to do it right.
And they do. An hour out, Michael fells a buck with one shot, no fuss. The mountains ring with the explosion, and Nick comes up behind him and looks at the deer where it lies crumpled at the foot of the cliff.
“Straight through the heart,” Nick says without inflection.
“Yeah.” Michael measures the buck with his eyes. “Gonna be a heavy one to drag back.”
“They don’t go down right away,” says Nick. “Even when you get it perfect. Why is that?”
“Yeah. No.” Michael glances up, puzzled, only half-listening. “Sorry, what?”
“Even when you hit straight through the heart, deer goes around in circles a couple times, doesn’t it?” Nick’s leaning on his rifle, a sort of smile on his face, but one without levity. He’s taller than Michael remembers, and thinner. It’s funny, because they’ve seen each other every day for five years, ever since Michael moved into Nick’s trailer after their first hunting trip together. There should be no secrets left between them. But sometimes Nick comes out of the mill at the end of the day, comes toward Michael, and he seems to be yet another head taller than the rest of the crowd. Sometimes he wanders into the living room where Michael sleeps on the couch, and he’s lighter on his feet than he seemed the morning before. And sometimes he stands with his weight resting on a pool cue or a rifle, and he smiles, and the world skips a beat.
“Yeah, it does.” Michael rests his gun in the crook of his arm. “Why? I think maybe it doesn’t know at first how bad the hit is. Yeah.”
“Body gets it right away, brain doesn’t,” says Nick. “That’s what I thought.” He sighs and begins taking off his pack. “We oughta go down and get him.” For a moment Michael thinks he feels Nick’s hand on his own, the battered leather of Nick’s glove brushing the tips of his exposed fingertips, cold. It’s a good hand, I promise. Then Nick says “Good shot” and passes him, and maybe Michael was just imagining the contact.
Although they take their time cleaning and hanging the deer, they still find themselves alone outside the cabin as the sun sets. Far away a mourning dove begins its dirge, but there’s not a human sound to be heard in the woods.
“Stan probably lost his gun,” says Michael, opening the back door and peering into the undisturbed cabin.
“Or his boots,” adds Nick.
“My boots,” says Michael testily, and then feels the skin of his face prickle a little with shame. He doesn’t know why it still matters, especially here with Nick.
Nick continues as though he didn’t hear: “Or his pants. His head.” He’s standing on the porch steps below Michael, one hand on the railing. His face is turned away, toward the mountains.
“Stan lost his head a long time ago. Stan’s head, it’s like a tent—you don’t tie it down right, it just floats away.” Michael swings the door, making it squeak against the silence. “You comin’ in?”
Nick moves blind and backward and graceful up the stairs, and sits on the middle step. He rests his elbows on the porch, tilts his head back to look at Michael, and says, “I think I lost mine, too.”
“It’s just off-center,” says Michael, tapping the base of his skull with a boot. But momentarily he sits down on the doorstep. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I asked Linda to marry me last night.”
“Oh, yeah?” says Michael. He looks up at the sky and closes his eyes. In the darkness the clouds still float, superimposed.
“She said yes,” Nick adds. It could be an apology or a reassurance; it’s hard to tell.
“That’s good. That’s really good.” Michael sits up abruptly and shakes his hand. “No, really, Nick. Christ, congratulations. When?”
“When we come back,” says Nick. “September, we’re thinking. She wants a warm day in September.”
“Don’t we all,” says Michael, grinning. “Listen, congratulations. ’Course, I’ll move my shit outta the trailer once you tie the knot—”
“Nah,” Nick interrupts, a study in nonchalance. He’s still not looking at Michael, but rather at the woods. Nicky and the trees: it’s something Michael doesn’t understand rationally or verbally. He doesn’t understand when Nick sits beside him on the couch and tries to tell him about the different ways of the trees; sits there in his white tuxedo shirt with his bow tie askew, his lips slightly parted, his eyes far away. But it’s something that sometimes makes a kind of gut-level sense to Michael, maybe on those mornings when Nick gets up early and walks in on him still half-asleep on the couch. The sun coming through the window, the clock striking the hour, and Nick, scruffily unshaven and smiling and never quite the same as before. The different ways of the trees, the moments of unfamiliarity. Michael insists he doesn’t like surprises, but with Nick he’s always making exceptions for everything.
“No? C’mon, Nick. Linda doesn’t want another guy around the place.”
“No,” Nick says. “Actually, it’d upset her if you ran off. I mean, you know her, she’d hate to think we were kickin’ you out.”
“Linda wants me to stay?” asks Michael, trying to catch a glimpse of his face.
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely, definitely.”
“Well,” says Michael, “we wanna keep Linda happy, that’s for sure. I’ll think about it.”
“Good. She’ll be glad.” Nick lets his head drop back again, nearly onto the toe of Michael’s boot. “After all, how would you ever bother us? After last night, Linda’s seen it all.”
“So’s the rest of the world,” Michael points out. “So’ve you.”
“That,” drawls Nick, matter-of-fact, “wasn’t a shocker. Five years together in a three-room trailer, that was not exactly anything new under the fucking moon, you know, Michael.”
Michael thumps him on the shoulder with a fist, affectionately, but doesn’t say anything. For a moment he thinks of Stan, spitting at him in rage: “I mean, is that some faggot-soundin’ bullshit or is that some faggot-soundin’—” and Nick, cracking like a whip: “Hey, shut up, Stan, willya?” Then he sets it aside. They sit together on the porch, watching the birds settle in the trees for the night, with Michael’s hand on Nick’s shoulder.
Nick says, “Speaking of weddings—Christ, Steve and Angela, I can hardly believe it.”
“Yeah. That was good. Stevie’s done okay for himself.”
“I was watchin’, and—” Nick hesitates. “Now you’re really gonna think I’m an asshole, but you know, they didn’t—Angela spilled some of their wine, at the end. When they were drinking. Isn’t that bad luck?”
Michael gives a shout of laughter. “Nick,” he says, “I didn’t know better, I’d think you worried about shit like that.”
“I don’t. But you do.”
“So you wanted me to worry. I got it.”
“No. I was just sayin’.” Nick shrugs, and it turns into a full roll of the shoulders as he eases out the day’s tension. “You know. Steve’s… I like Steve. Known him a long time, longer’n the rest of you. I graduated from high school with him. He’s like a kid brother. So I just saw.”
Michael regards him. No one talks about Nick’s nameless kid brother. There’s nothing taboo about death in a mill town—they’re too poor to afford taboos—but Nick has made this death unmentionable. That’s just his way. He doesn’t always understand other people’s customs, like taking deep offense at an insult or being skittish around another man’s nakedness, and other people don’t always understand his.
“Well, it’s first-class bullshit,” says Michael. “I don’t believe in that superstition. Hunting stuff, sure. Signs in the clouds, yeah. That’s different. But not about… people, being together. That doesn’t—that isn’t.” He gestures with a hand; on a whim he points toward the trees. “Like them. Doesn’t fit into little stories.”
Nick is watching him intently, with that brief, small curl of the lip he gets when he’s trying to hit on the heart of what someone’s saying. After a while, he smiles. Nick’s smile is always cautious and small-mouthed, and he snuffs it out at a moment’s notice, as though he thinks nothing’s permanent enough to truly warrant it. But when he shows it, for that split second he puts all of himself behind it.
Now that is some faggot-soundin’ bullshit, Michael knows, but he doesn’t worry about that either. He’s about to say something; he’s not sure what. Then from out of the woods, in a burst of noise, the others come tramping up the mountain. Axel, John, and Stan: no deer, beers aplenty, three sheets to the wind.
“Hey!” yelps Stan, catching sight of the deer dangling from a nearby tree. “There it is, the prize of the night. Knew we could count on ya, Mike.”
“Beer for everyone!” whoops John, and there’s Axel like an echo behind him with “Fuckin’ A!” Michael and Nick catch the tossed cans and grin at each other, but with eyes averted. Finally, the others trail into the house to gather up their extra clothes, leaving Michael and Nick in the backwash of their homecoming.
“You oughta tell them about Linda,” Michael says quietly.
“Later,” says Nick. “Some other night. When we get back.”
“Well, I’ll drink to it.” Michael pops the top of his can and tosses back his head in a gulp. When he comes up for air, he says, with an exaggerated wince, “Bitter. You’d think John could think of something better to bring.”
Nick chuckles. “You know, no one yelled that at the wedding.”
“Yelled what? That John is a shitty off-duty bartender?”
“‘Gor’ko.’” Seeing Michael staring at him uncomprehendingly, he says, “You don’t know about that? It’s an old Russian tradition.”
“Too old for me to know, I guess,” says Michael.
“You shout ‘bitter’ at the wedding, the bride and the groom have to kiss.” Nick looks almost abashed at having to explain. “To make things sweet again, right? ‘Gor’ko.’”
“Huh.” Michael takes another drink, so long it makes his eyes water. “Maybe life’s too bitter these days for it to work.”
Nick cocks his head. Light slips across his face like water. He reaches back and claps Michael’s hand.
“Or maybe,” he says, sitting slim and erect as a new tree against the sky, “already too sweet.”
Michael doesn’t answer that. He squeezes Nick’s shoulder, and then he draws back and says, “Anyway, I don’t believe in that superstition either.”
* * *
Saigon makes men superstitious, spooked and strange, never the same again. In Saigon luck goes both ways, not just forward but back; you take your charms retroactively if you have to. You wake up shaking in hotel rooms where the wallpaper’s rotted clear through, and you don’t remember your dreams and you don’t know what you’re afraid of anymore. Only this: just because it didn’t kill you then doesn’t mean it can’t be killing you now.
So Michael knows to take luck wherever he finds it, and to apply it any which way he can. At night, instead of drinking in the hotel bar, he paces the streets and buys from the rachitic children who hawk souvenirs on the sidewalks. Bullets are the best finds. He knows that in all likelihood none of them were ever fired, that they’re just castoffs, but every time he picks up a cheap trinket made of that melted-down metal, for a moment it almost still feels warm to the touch. They all found their marks, he thinks, sooner or later; there are no misses here. It’s good karma, somehow, to carry some man’s old death in the pocket of your uniform. It makes you steadier to think about it. One shot.
There’s a back alley near the river he turns into during the darkest hours, a set of rickety stairs he climbs, and a hall he slinks down that leads to the brightest room in all of Saigon. That’s what it is to him, anyway. The single high-power bulb swinging over the table and the sharp report of the revolver when some bastard’s luck runs out: this is his night-light. He can’t sleep without it.
Julien, the proprietor, is usually waiting for him when he comes in. Julien, who winks at him over the heads of the local thrill seekers, who always seems to be staring at him when the gun goes off and he flushes with involuntary excitement, who once cornered him in the hall and asked him if he wanted a seat at the table—a shot at the prize, disons? Michael had refused, but every day that he spends here in limbo, waiting for transport home, is a day he considers it a little more seriously. Julien knows: Julien is a Frenchman, and the French understand better than anyone the way this country creeps up on you, guerrilla-style.
One night, Michael arrives and Julien is nowhere in sight. Michael stands at the edge of the crowd, watching the game, and when the back door swings open he looks up distractedly.
Maybe it’s the innumerable beers he had in a bar earlier, or the smoke in the air, but at first he doesn’t recognize the newcomer. Julien is ushering him in with that casually hypnotic manner he has. Michael can’t hear what he’s saying, but it’s not hard to imagine: the money, the fame. And behind Julien stalks a man, colorless and emaciated, who’s obviously hearing none of it. At first he means nothing to Michael; he’s just another specter, one of the hundreds who arrive every day. Then the man says something to Julien, and suddenly Michael can barely breathe. He can’t be sure, not here, but it might be Nick. The narrow lips, the eyes speaking of starvation—hunger, said Nick in a former life, keeps the fear up. It might be Nick.
But he can’t be sure. He isn’t sure when Nick breaks forward and snatches up the gun, pulls the trigger on one of the players and then on himself; isn’t sure as he’s yelling Nick’s name and lunging out of the room after him. He isn’t even sure when he sees Nick flash down the sidewalk in front of him.
On another road—Division Street, Clairton, Pennsylvania, where once they raced against tractor-trailers and Steve’s honeymoon ride and the impossible machine of time—he would have recognized Nick in an instant from five hundred yards behind. In another place, Nick moved like no one else, as though he had music forever in his head. Not just when he was in the bar, flourishing his cue and grinning at Michael and mouthing along with Frankie Valli, Pardon the way that I stare.... No: in the mill, in the parking lot, in the mountains, in the living room when he put on his boots each morning. A long time ago, Nick was like a door gunner Michael met during his first year here, a man who seemed to nod at the strangest moments until Michael realized that even when he flew operations he was wearing his headphones and listening to the music on AFVN, plugged into that antediluvian, subterranean rumble that’s always vibrating somewhere in this country if you only know where to put your ear.
Nick doesn’t have that anymore. When he sprints down the street all he’s doing is running, caught up in the current of the crowd, a leaf on an updraft. Somewhere the connection failed, the signal faded. When Nick put that gun to his temple and pulled the trigger, the chamber was empty, but he blew something out of his head anyway.
So Michael isn’t sure until Nick is already lost. Julien pulls up to the curb ahead and lets Nick into his car, and he’s already talking. He won’t be talking about the money or the fame anymore; Julien is experienced in matters of temptation, and he’ll have started to figure out by now that Nick’s here for something else. He seems to hit on what it is, too, because Nick twitches and glances sideways at him. In profile, his upper lip curls up slightly as he tries to understand, begins to understand. That’s when Michael knows it’s Nicky and screams his name once more, almost deafened by the music that spills out of the Mississippi Soul Bar behind him. He’s leavin’, leavin’… on that midnight train to Georgia… said he’s going back… to a simpler place and time….
“Nick! Hey, Nick!”
Nick looks back, the way only Nick can look, can stop and stare at you so it’s as though no one else has ever seen you before. Then it vanishes, and he has that expression that so many men have now. Michael can tell he thinks he’s smiling; but nothing changes in his face at all.
Then Nick turns away again. The car roars ahead through a gap in traffic. To the north, where the fighting rages on, the horizon flickers like a faulty bulb, and Michael is alone.
You only get one shot, he knows, to do a thing right. He has always known. In the end it has to be him alone, him and the trigger finger and the silence of a strange land. He’s made so many shots this way, enough to cover all the walls of their trailer back home with his trophies. But this time, when it matters—this is the one he misses.
* * *
It took Michael a while to love Linda at all, the way it takes him a while to love anyone. He thinks he can pinpoint the exact moment, though. The morning before Steve’s wedding, Linda and Nick stood out on the back porch of the trailer, framed by the narrow window. Linda had a bruise high on her face, so high that Michael didn’t realize until later that it was anything more than a shadow in the hollow of her cheekbones. Nick stopped in the pale early light, and he took her by the arm and spoke to her in a voice too low to make out. Michael was embarrassed, and looked away, and loved her for the first time.
At the bar later that night, he didn’t quite kiss her, because he loved her because Nick loved her. Even drunk, he knew somehow that it didn’t work.
They buried Nick on a freak cold day in September of ’74, and now it’s June, two months after the fall of Saigon. Two months after the funeral of the city where Nick died, Michael’s taking even longer to love Linda for herself. They’ve been living in the same trailer since he got back and sleeping in the same bed since before they knew Nick was really gone. But Michael still leaves all of the lights on at night, and they don’t talk about comforting each other anymore.
Linda’s father dies in his room one morning and no one finds him until two days later, when the newsboy notices the smell. Michael takes Linda out to the mountains that weekend and teaches her how to shoot a gun. The first time she hits a tin can, she walks over to it, examines the hole coolly and appraisingly, sits down on a tree stump, and cries for five minutes. It’s the first time he ever understands her; here, where her mind catches on a moment as sharp as the punctured edge of the can.
After that it gets easier. He likes to watch her bowl, her long, loosely curled hair falling down her back, her spine arching when she releases the ball. Sometimes all the lines of her body will fall in parallel, and she’ll make a strike through blind luck. Then she’ll look back and catch him watching. Once her old man shook her so hard he dislocated her shoulder, and she works on too little sleep and not enough hope, and by now she’s nearly thirty, which in Clairton years means middle age; but still she sometimes conjures up that secret smile of a teenage girl.
Michael has discovered his own secrets, too. Like that last night on the porch of the cabin in the Alleghenies. Like streets in Saigon and back alleys to Hell. Like the fact that every now and then he sees someone on the street who didn’t know he was back, who greets him warmly and shakes his hand, but it’s never the face he wants to see, never the welcome he’s been waiting for.
The final secret is this: sometimes people do leave Clairton, Pennsylvania, but certainly no one ever comes back. So one night he takes Linda home from the supermarket and says, “All right, now.”
”Now what?” she asks. “Now we comfort each other, Michael?” She lets herself into the trailer where Michael has spent almost half his life, and she doesn’t hold the door for him. “Day late, dollar short,” she says. “I get by okay.”
”No,” he says, “now I know why Nick was marrying you.” He stands there and she comes back out to him, up on the dilapidated porch, in the night glazed with heat. He puts his hands on her thin hips and kisses her. When they go to bed he still won’t let her turn the lights off; but when he finds himself pressed into the corner of the room later that night, reliving some old dream, she’s squatting beside him. For now, that’s enough.
Some mornings when Linda gets up, these days, Michael’s already half-awake. He listens to her move around the kitchen in a sort of erratic, buoyant ballet, because she’s shoeless and walking up on the balls of her feet to keep her soles off the cold floor. He knows without looking that she’s put on one of Nick’s old shirts. Maybe the red plaid one. He knows because he used to do the same thing, pick up a stray shirt without regard for the niceties of personal property, so that even coming home a decade later, he could still remember to tell Linda that yes, he and Nick were the same size.
He lies tangled in the sheets for those few minutes before he has to rouse himself, with the light falling over him through the window without a curtain. The room smells of her, faintly musky, and him and the brewing coffee she brings home cheap every week. And maybe of Nick, who lived here once. Nick, whom Michael still expects to see sometimes, sitting at the counter where Linda makes breakfast, cleaning his gun and talking about the trees.
Michael smiles at Linda, and he smiles at himself, and he smiles at Nick.
He smiles at Nicky, lounging on the hood of the Caddy out on a road in the middle of the Alleghenies, while Axel and John root through their lunches and Stan starts to bitch about not having boots. Mornings like this, Michael thinks back through the years, thinks of Nick this way, fixing on every detail as if he’s sighting down a rifle. For a little while Nick is just sitting in the light, his back against the warm car and his legs crossed loosely at the ankles. For a little while he’s there, he’s here, he rests with his pale impoverished eyes closed against the glare of the rising sun, and everything waits.
Waits for them: the road ahead, the silver stretch of the guardrail, the mountains against the sky that speak to them in a long and solemn voice. Soon Nick will open one eye and say, “Those deer are gonna be dead of old age, time we get there.” They’ll reload the car and go. Axel and John and Stan can wander the woods as they like, fumble through the motions, but this is really for Michael and Nick, who always hunt together. There will be years and years out there in the forest for them, with the trees and the sermon of the mountains and, someday, that one perfect shot where everything comes together.
And when that’s done, they’ll shoulder their rifles and their prize. They’ll file down the cliffs and through the trees, which never look quite the same as when they started. Unerring as a compass, no false starts and no wrong turns, Michael will lead them out.
They’ll go home, Nicky and he. One clean shot will do it.