David Ryan


The Bull Elk

I saw the mumbler downstairs once, alone on one of these nights when I could not sleep. It was late. Because you have trouble sleeping and you let it bother you, let the sleep hover just out of grasp of your closed eyes. And when the sleep vanishes from the room it leaves a coil in its place that keeps tightening and there you are in your bed, hating the air as if it were invading you, as if it were trying to thin you, trying to make you less than you already are.
     I came down the stairs to find his tiny frame in the kitchen, standing and whispering an argument, as if with a spirit. In one hand he held a sandwich, the refrigerator motor rubbing behind him like a cicada, the mechanical sound you only hear alone, late at night, a sound that draws out the nothing of the air, a sound twinned to stammering florescent lights, the meat freezer chuckling occasionally in the basement, the refrigerator motor, that sound that smells like ice, oiled tools, and a bloody nose. I stood in the stairway and for a long time watched his sticklike arms making little votive patterns in the kitchen, sandwich flapping from his puny hand. I thought maybe he was trying to communicate through the wall to the elk that had trapped itself in our yard.

This winter a bull elk jumped over the fence of our back yard. The fence had pulled down under the weight of a blizzard several days before, and the elk must have kicked free some of the snow in the jump, because the fence raised and he could not get back out. Hang-eyed and crazy looking, his maw broken open and pasted with white saliva, none of us wanted to go near him; so we just left him there, inside our yard. He threw himself against the fence, splintering the cedar until finally the left rail of his antlers snapped and hung from him like a branch of a tree mangled by lightning. Then that horn fell off and he pounded and bloodied the wood of the fence with his forehead, rolling his eyes, soon matched and multiplied in the white and brown spotted markings of his hide. The blood made dull circles on the fence, went deep brown with aureoles of ocher. At times you could look at the yard outside and almost believe the animal was no longer there, when in fact he had begun only to blend into everything patterned with the brown and red and yellow he’d pounded his head into. But then you saw the yard flinch.
     That first day the mumbler stared out the back window as if trying to reflect onto the bull elk whatever mood he suspected it was sending into our house through airwaves. Hate or spite, probably one of the two. He mumbled something about bringing the son of a bitch down with his rifle, then something else about not being able to shoot since they took his guns away. But we never knew who they were. And we did not know what he meant when he said that elk bode ill on us all, and that this was no less than we had coming. Or when he said that we had murdered off all the pleasure in this life. He had said many peculiar things. He said there existed bad numbers and bad names of streets, streets whose names rhymed with the names of women. He would drive a mile out of his way to avoid these names. He had songs you couldn’t sing along with, songs whose pitches over time you didn’t dare try to hit, even if he would allow it. We didn't understand any of our father anymore, but it didn't matter. He had lost his hold.

After the bull elk was trapped in our yard, a man named Desmond was fired from the factory. This by itself is not worth mentioning. But the fact of his being fired had appeared to set me inside of his sight. They accused him of theft, I believe, and Desmond had offered my name when asked certain questions. They called me in. I told them I hadn’t done anything wrong and that I did not know Desmond well enough to speak any more on the subject. You could see Desmond had been drinking. It didn’t help his case, standing in front of his accusers, swaying forward, breathing that stale breath into the office. I felt nothing when they fired him. I didn’t know him. And I didn’t understand his logic.
     For some time after, Desmond would park his car across the road from our house and leave the engine running in the cold. He would sit and drink from a small bottle and stare at our front door. At times he would drive past the house and circle the block. Then he would drive past again. After a time, the car stopped coming by at all.

We let the elk have reign of the yard. He did all right for a while. He would tear free dead branches from the surrounding trees, or anger himself at our fence, cantering around in the snow, stupid and trapped and acting out over his inability to solve the problems of his animal life. His half set of horns caused his head to favor slightly to the right.
     When he ate up all he could from our trees, every branch and dry frozen dead leaf within reach, we joked, and said we might have to send the mumbler out there, give that animal something to pick at. We could say things like this now, even if our father had not yet taken to the idea that he was diminished. I could trace the origin of his shrinking to a time soon after our mother left, the first point back to where we could remember anything, really. Only a pin of light in the dark. When she left we didn’t see him for several days, only heard him padding around the ceiling above. His murmuring and his moaning continued often into the night and would keep us awake.
     And now, now we could surround him if this was our pleasure, lean well over him, and soon enough he’d stop singing his songs.

I came downstairs another night hoping that I might find our father eating his sandwich and mumbling to spirits again. But he wasn’t there. I noticed that the back glass door had steamed over, and then saw clarified through it the outline of the elk’s nostrils, his big muzzle pressed, flexing and bubbling a fluid onto the runny glass. I came closer, until I stood on the other side of the back glass door. His eyes examined mine and suddenly I felt scared, as if my blood was suddenly running away. This feeling gathered itself up in me, and certain unspoken disgraces revealed themselves in that window, as if the glass were able to play out my past: the petty larcenies, the assaults and theft, the disappointments of a girl I imagined I once knew, the several lies I imagined I had told for no good reason, all as if pulled from some hole-bitten, filthy sack in my memory and placed into a stereopticon before me. I mouthed the word for each sin I could name as the feeling came to me in the window, and saw motion out in the middle of the yard, back where the fence had first tipped down and welcomed our elk in. Then it disappeared. I stood there most of the night, waiting to see it again, but never did.

     In daylight the bull elk began to look stretched over its bones, like a failed taxidermy. What remained of him was shearing away. The skin around his maw had pulled back above his teeth. He didn’t seem real. He looked like a decoy, or a well-rendered cartoon. Then one day he collapsed in the yard. His ribs rose and fell and sent steam rising off the snow. Only a few minutes earlier we had watched him tear a piece of siding from the house and try to chew.
     This brought the mumbler down from Mother's old room. He walked past us, his voice rubbing, speaking what sounded like some new language he learned late at night from the motor of the refrigerator, and went outside in his bare feet. He crossed the snow over to the animal and kneeled, appearing to speak into its ear for some time: He put his face up to its muzzle tenderly and tried to part its maw with his hands, his little grey shape bobbing over its huge head. It looked as if he wanted to climb inside the animal, crawl down its throat and take lodging in the dying warmth. On the ground the animal’s haunches lunged, kicked out a couple of times, but it was too weak to do much else. Steam from their breath filled the air around them. When our father came back inside he didn’t speak, just backed slowly up the stairs. We didn’t know what he’d meant to do. One of us observed that he was wearing Mother’s nightgown, which hung from him now like a parachute. He looked like a desiccated infant. We heard his pacing coming down through the floorboards above.
     The following day the elk was gone. We assumed it had pulled some reserve of strength from somewhere, had perhaps discovered a way out of our yard. This seemed unlikely, but we couldn’t explain it any other way. Days passed and the snow kept drifting down and the elk's tracks and the last place we had seen it rest on the ground went white and smoothed over. I suppose we forgot about the animal. One day I came home from work and found a plain brown package outside, tipped against the door. It was heavy and didn't have a postmark or a return address written on it. I unwrapped the butcher paper and found a tongue, large like a cow’s but thinner and longer. A couple dozen bolts fell out of the bloody paper, leaving small red stars on the linoleum floor. I recognized the bolts as #3s from work. A few days later another package arrived, then several others, almost every day they came: a cleaved hoof, frozen, more or less, with some meat sprouting from the cut joint above the knee; a package of long bloody teeth, a couple of them shattered. His ears came with the last package.

Desmond stayed inside his trailer at first. I saw that someone had already smashed milky spiderwebs, into his car’s windows. Around back the skinned elk was slung over the side of Desmond's well by its hind legs. I saw the sockets of the ears, the one torn stump for the leg, the red hollow of its gutted mouth. Desmond came out finally, once my brothers began to cut down the carcass. But he only stood in the snow halfway between his trailer’s butane tank and his well with the animal hanging from it, the elk we had come to think of as ours.
     I wrestled Desmond down onto the snow with me, held him while my brothers took the elk down from the well. Desmond had gone very light. He felt almost brittle to the touch. He felt like the husk of a large insect rather than a living person. His eyes, close up, seemed to be running on some reserve current, seemed to be shooting off sparks deep inside. I could hear his breath working unevenly in my face, like someone dying from an illness in the lungs. Desmond didn’t move from beneath me as my brothers cut the animal down. I could smell mint soured on his breath. When I heard my brothers unhinge the elk from the well and then drag and load it into the back of our pickup I rose and left Desmond there in the snow. We drove away, two up front, the other and myself in the pickup bed, the animal’s three remaining legs propped up and bound, pink and sinuous like giant purled sticks of taffy, my arm slung over the one reddened stump, gripping its slippery ice.

We feasted on the elk’s flesh, grey even to the taste, throughout the winter. It seemed the snow wouldn’t ever stop falling. I heard Desmond pulled himself together, left Monee, went north and was swallowed into Chicago. God bless. And later this winter when all the meaning left our father and he shrank finally to the size of a cheap doll, we put him in with our mother’s things for good. We propped him up, fed him with toy silver and china, made certain he was comfortable. He sat and chattered and drank his tea while my brothers and I waited for the inevitable. Which is all anybody can ask of family.