American Spirits E-Book

Russell Banks

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 309

Beschreibung

From one of America's most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies. A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man's character. A couple grow concerned when an enigmatic family move next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes them. Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the reader through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.

Leseprobe

Praise for American Spirits

‘Elegant… As ever, the reader senses the confidence in Banks’s narrative voice. This is a welcome addition to the legacy of a master storyteller’ Publishers Weekly

‘Compelling narratives from this fine writer… All these stories include ruminations on the passage of time, changes and damage in the landscape, and the values and aspirations sustained from generation to generation. The tone in these passages is almost elegiac: hymns to a past when fewer wounds were self-inflicted’ Kirkus, starred

‘What a beautiful farewell gift the great Russell Banks has left us in American Spirits. Better than anything I’ve read, this book gave me hope… I learned so much about storytelling and about our country reading these stories, and I finished the book full of gratitude that such a man, and a writer, as Russell Banks could have existed’ George Saunders, author of Liberation Day

For Chase Twichell

NOWHERE MAN

The way i heard, it started one Saturday morning when Doug was trying to sleep in, so as to sleep off another Friday night’s overindulgence of alcohol down at the Spread Eagle, while Debbie kept the kids quiet in the basement. Debbie and the kids were decorating thank-you-for-your-service boxes to mail to the Fort Pierce reservists stationed over in Afghanistan. This was three years ago in the fall, before hunting season opened, or Doug would have been out early, which puts it near the end of October and shortly after the 10th Mountain 2nd Brigade got sent over to replace the 1st Brigade in order to participate in the U.S. counterterrorism mission against al-Qaida. Debbie and her St Agnes’s Ladies’ Aid Society had learned how the winters in the mountains of Afghanistan were brutal and had spent the summer knitting wool hats and mittens and scarves for the 2nd Brigade reservists.

It wasn’t crack of dawn early – nine-thirty or maybe ten – but Doug was still half-asleep, when the shooting from Zingerman’s firing range broke into his slurry, hungover dreams like somebody popping popcorn in a microwave next to the bed. He flipped back the covers and for a moment sat slump-shouldered on the edge of the bed and felt his long, gaunt body fill with the sound of gunfire coming from the hills beyond the woods. Semiautomatic rifles, AR-15s and AK-47s, three or four at a time.

He stared out the bedroom window past his Ram pickup and Debbie’s Forester at the pinched dry yellow lawn and the line of bony leafless birch trees that marked where his and Debbie’s eight-acre lot ended and Zingerman’s land – Doug’s father’s land – began. He stood and walked bare-assed and tousled down the hall to the bathroom, the whole way goddamning Yuri Zingerman and his fat-bellied, camoed, wannabe soldier boys. He peed and washed his face and berated the socialist Democrats and Governor Andrew Cuomo, along with the state police and the Essex County sheriff and the liberal members of the town select board and the tourist board, everyone in public office except the president, for refusing to shut down Zingerman’s so-called firing range and military training center.

Debbie heard him overhead stomping around the bathroom barefoot and a few minutes later clumping in his boots in the kitchen, mumbling and grumbling to himself about the injustice of it, the hypocrisy, that’s the word, the fucking hypocrisy. Down in the basement she couldn’t herself hear the guns that had set Doug off and still fired in rackety waves like a series of full-on frontal assaults, but she was used to her husband’s Saturday morning moods. She broke open a fresh pack of Crayolas and told Lannie and Leanne and Max to keep on writing their messages on the cards to our men and women in uniform while she checked on Daddy, and she’d come right back, and they’d fill the boxes together and later take them over to St Agnes’s for mailing and go by the schoolyard afterwards to play on the swings.

Max, the oldest, said he wanted to stay home, swings were for babies. Lannie and Leanne, the tow-headed boy and girl twins, punched his skinny arms from both sides and said they weren’t babies, which they weren’t, they were eight years old. Max said Dad promised to show him how to shoot this year when he goes deer hunting with Dad and Uncle Roy and Uncle Dave. Max can be on the drive, but by law he can’t carry or shoot his own gun until he turns fifteen, still a few years off. Meanwhile he’s legally old enough to shoot small game like squirrels and nuisance birds like starlings, as soon as Dad trains him on his Ruger 10/22, which fires ten rounds in less than thirty seconds, a gun with a scope, a gun that Dad promised to give to Max as soon as the boy proves he can handle its weight and recoil correctly.

Lannie and Leanne rolled their eyes and looked up at their mother as if pleading with her to shut their brother up. He’d been using their father’s promise of the gun to lord it over the twins for weeks. It was as if he was repeatedly saying goodbye to them before going off to live with a different family, where he would have his own room in a newer, bigger house, where three kids didn’t have to share one bedroom, where no one argued about money or wasting it at the Spread Eagle instead of saving it for groceries and school clothes and doctors’ bills or building a garage. Lannie and Leanne wanted Max to hurry up and go live with that other family, so they could stop thinking about its existence and could make do with the mother and father they had.

Doug stood in his shirtsleeves on the deck off the kitchen, shivering from the cold and smoking a cigarette, staring in the direction of Zingerman’s property. His long, mahogany-colored hair swirled in the wind. His hair and boney face and lanky build gave him the look of a rock musician, but he liked bluegrass and folk and played banjo in a four-man band with friends from high school and traveled several times a year to Virginia and the Carolinas to play in festivals.

Debbie slid open the glass door and said, ‘Aren’t you freezing? Put on your jacket, Doug.’

‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘B-Z, before Zingerman, that is, there was a time when we had peace and quiet in abundance around here. When private property meant privacy. When a Dead End sign meant you didn’t see downstate and out-of-state jerks driving SUVs and pickups past the house day and night and ORVs and ATVs trashing the woods and trails and scaring off the game. ‘Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end,’ he sang to her. ‘We’d sing and dance forever and a day.’

She stepped outside and plucked the cigarette from his hand and took a deep drag from it and passed it back to him. They both smoked, but agreed that smoking wasn’t allowed inside the house or in front of the kids. They smoked the same brand, ‘classic mellow’ American Spirits in the yellow package. Smoking was something he and Debbie shared. It gave them time alone together, which they both still valued.

She wrapped her arms around herself against the cold and watched him from behind as if taking his measure for a coat. She was almost his height and had kept her figure despite three kids and was still regarded in town as a beauty. Back when they first got together people spoke of them as the perfect couple.

He said, ‘You could hear the wind in the pines and birdsong, Debbie, instead of automatic gunfire. Which Zingerman claims are just fireworks. Which we know are homemade explosives he’s using for blowing up old wrecked cars that he’s testing out in case he has to save the world from socialism. There was a time, Deb, when deer walked up to the deck and you could shoot the damned creatures from the house in your stocking feet. Now, when I want to kill a deer I got to put my boots on and drive over to Walsingham or Starkville and hunt on somebody else’s land.’

‘Are you still drunk?’

He turned around and said, ‘What d’you mean, “still”?’

Debbie took the cigarette out of Doug’s hand and rubbed it out in the cat food can they used for an ashtray.

He said, ‘I wasn’t quite done with that, y’know.’

She stepped back inside and slid the door shut and started making Doug’s late morning Saturday breakfast, scrambled eggs and the pork chop he’d missed when he didn’t come home for supper. He followed her inside and poured himself a cup of stale coffee and sat down at the table and waited for his breakfast. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘For what?’

‘I dunno. For being so touchy, I guess. Defensive.’

‘Touchy,’ she said. ‘Pissed is more like it, Doug. Call it what you want, “touchy” or “sensitive” or “defensive.” But it’s really pissed, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, you’re right. I am pissed,’ he said, as if he were naming his religion or his race. ‘It’s why I like Trump. Which you don’t seem to get. Trump, he’s pissed, too. All those other guys, Obama and the Clintons and the Bushies, they just want us to get along in order to go along. Trump, though, he’s freakin’ pissed.’

She put his plate in front of him and walked toward the basement door. ‘It’s not about them, Obama and the Clintons and them. And it’s not about Trump. He’s not pissed, Doug. He’s just acting like he’s pissed. It’s about you.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t start.’ She said something before returning to the basement, but Doug couldn’t hear it above the steady, relentless hammering of the automatic weapons, even with the double-pane sliding glass door shut.

✦

Zingerman’s shooting range was a half mile farther up the narrow gravel lane that passed in front of his and Debbie’s ranch house. When he and Debbie got married, Doug’s father, Guy Lafleur, sold him the eight-acre lot for one dollar as a wedding present, and on weekends over the next three years Doug and his brothers-in-law, Roy and Dave, built their house where the lane ended and their land began. After Doug’s dad died, Doug and his two sisters, Nina and Tracy, and their husbands, Roy and Dave, his brothers-in-law and hunting companions, sold off the rest of the old man’s land, all 320 acres. It was the last large tract of undeveloped forested land inside the town limits. They sold it to Yuri Zingerman from New Jersey. He said he wanted it for a private hunting preserve, but promised Doug that he and Roy and Dave could continue to hunt on the property. Zingerman said he was a veteran of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, but he talked with a regular American accent. He ran a company in New Jersey that provided security for celebrities and professional athletes and business executives. It was impressive when he named who they were.

Doug, who worked as a full-time caretaker for summer residents and a part-time handyman in the winter months, spent his share of the cash sale of his dad’s land on a new Dodge Ram pickup and paid off the mortgage on the house. Without the mortgage hanging over them, he figured he could support the family with his caretaking and seasonal work as a handyman, and maybe in a year or two he could build a third bedroom onto the house and the two-car garage Debbie wanted. They could get off food stamps and buy health insurance. When the twins were old enough for Debbie to go back to waitressing full time instead of part time, which should be soon, they’d be sitting pretty. That’s how he put it to anyone who’d listen, with his lips pursed in an air kiss. Sitting pretty.

For a few years Zingerman showed up only during deer hunting season and sometimes came for a week or two earlier to shoot birds, usually alone or in the company of a couple of New Jersey hunting buddies, and stayed in town at the Bide-a-Wile. Then one fall he cut some trees in the center of his forested acreage and built a rough one-room hunting camp that was accessible by ATV from in front of Doug’s place, where Zingerman parked his black GMC Yukon Denali. The next year he cut more trees and put down a gravel extension of Lafleur Lane and installed a corrugated metal bridge over Blackstone Kill and a thirty-two-foot-long RV. The following year he added a single-wide mobile home.

The Dead End sign at the turnoff from Route 50 was still there, but now Lafleur Lane continued past where it used to end at Doug and Debbie Lafleur’s house and dipped down to the banks of Blackstone Kill and crossed the creek on Zingerman’s bridge, switchbacked uphill through pines and spruce and ended deep in the woods at a circular turn-around in front of Zingerman’s single-wide and the RV parked next to it and a barn-sized garage where he kept his vehicles and the fenced-in yard where he kept his dogs.

In winter the road agent for the town of Sam Dent, Doug’s brother-in-law Dave Fitzgerald, plowed the lane, courtesy of the taxpayers, state and local, but only as far as Debbie and Doug’s driveway. Zingerman by then had become a year-round resident of Sam Dent, albeit one who spent a lot of time away, presumably running his New Jersey business, Zip-Tie Security. He maintained the rest of the lane himself with his own trucks and plows and posted it with Private Property, No Hunting, and No Trespassing signs. Power and phone lines only went as far as Debbie and Doug’s place. Yuri Zingerman was living off the grid.

✦

You’ll want to know what he was like, Yuri Zingerman. I ran into him a couple of times in town early on. The car he rode in on only reinforced our first impression – New Jersey plates, a block-long, black Denali with tinted windows, possibly armor plated. He was a short, blocky man, wearing one of those Jewish caps, a yarmulke, which you don’t see here very often. Otherwise he was dressed like a regular local guy in camo and jeans and insulated vest, although you knew right away he wasn’t local, because of the yarmulke and the way he held his body, like it was a chisel waiting for a hit from a hammer. He had no discernible body fat, but did not seem particularly muscular. Just hard, as if carved from a chunk of stone. He was in his early or midthirties, and his face was bronzed, like he’d visited a tanning salon, which stood out, because it was early spring then and nobody was tanned. We figured he must’ve spent time in someplace like Miami or Las Vegas. He had a buzzed haircut and a thick black mustache and matching eyebrows that were almost connected in the middle and squinty blue eyes with crinkles in the corners and a cleft chin. He wore a small diamond stud in the lobe of his left ear. If he didn’t seem so hostile and foreign, you could say that he was conventionally handsome, because his face was symmetrical and clean cut.

The morning he first showed up in town, the Noonmark Diner was crowded, all the tables taken, as usual. Zingerman checked out exactly where everyone was seated and simultaneously rejected them, as if the tables were empty and he was deliberately choosing not to sit at any of them. He chose instead to sit on a stool at the counter, squeezing in alongside a half dozen local workmen who were getting ready to head out to their job sites, and he spread a give-away real estate sales pamphlet out in front of him and read it like it was a newspaper.

When Debbie came up to take his order, he spoke to her in a surprisingly soft voice. This was right after she’d married Doug and before the kids. They had closed on buying the eight acres from Doug’s dad, and Doug had already dug the cellar and put in the cinderblock foundation for the house, and she was waitressing full time at the Noonmark. Debbie was just twenty then, and with that red hair and gray eyes and perfect teeth and her height, she could’ve been a model. She had a wicked sense of humor and didn’t take herself too seriously, so most of the male customers liked to flirt with her, especially the first time they met her and she hadn’t had a chance to verbally flip them off yet.

No playing around for Zingerman, though. He ordered two poached eggs and asked about the raisin English muffins. ‘Are they homemade?’ he said. ‘I read the Noonmark Cafe is famous for their homemade muffins and pies.’

She lied and said, ‘Yes. Homemade.’

He gave her a thin smile like he knew she was lying. He said, ‘Well, okay, I’ll have a corn muffin instead. Toasted.’

‘It’s Noonmark Diner,’ she said, ‘not Cafe,’ and went back to the kitchen.

When she brought him his eggs and corn muffin and refilled his coffee cup, he pointed to the real estate pamphlet. ‘Who among these do you think is the most honest realtor in town?’

In a flat voice she said, ‘They’re all honest,’ trying not to sound insulted, although she knew that none of them was wholly honest, just a person in business, a person trying to make a living, like everybody else.

Sam Dent is not the kind of town where a few people make a killing and the rest are on welfare. Here everyone gets by, just barely – except for the summer residents and Yuri Zingerman, people who make their money elsewhere in ways that are mysterious to people like Debbie and Doug and the other locals.

On his own, Zingerman found a realtor he trusted not to screw him, which wasn’t hard. Most of them, as Debbie said, were honest. And although he was obviously a man with plenty of disposable income and from away, a flatlander, as the locals say, he was not a man a realtor wanted to lie to. With the blunt force of his personality and his sharp-edged physical presence, he made people deal honestly with him. We heard he wrote a personal check to Doug and his sisters for a quarter-million dollars for the 320 acres they’d inherited from their father, and for a while there were no problems between him and the town and between him and Doug and Debbie. As soon as his check cleared, Zingerman posted the acreage with the No Hunting, No Trapping, No Trespassing signs, but he told Doug that he could continue to hunt the land, sometimes with Roy and Dave, the same as he had since he was Max’s age.

In return, at Zingerman’s request, Doug patrolled the property during and out of season, as if it still belonged to his father or all of it still belonged to him and his sisters, warning off it anyone from town or elsewhere who wanted to hunt there, as he had always done. Except that now he carried a typed letter from Yuri Zingerman that said Douglas Lafleur was authorized by the owner, Yuri Zingerman, to expel anyone who did not have written permission to hunt on this property. If said person refused to leave the property, Douglas Lafleur was instructed to have said person arrested for trespassing.

✦

Then there was that strange confrontation at the Spread Eagle. It was right after Columbus Day, an unseasonably warm night, one of the special once-a-month occasions which Doug and Debbie called Date Night that they set aside for hiring a babysitter and going out together without Max and the twins. ‘Date Night, it’s designed to save the marriage,’ Debbie told her three closest female confidantes at the St Agnes Ladies’ Aid Society. ‘You ought to try it.’ Side by side at the buffet table in the church annex recreation room, sorting and bagging groceries donated to the Sam Dent food pantry for families in need, the women had smiled and nodded in sympathetic approval. Half the town takes care of the other half or at least donates a month’s time or income to the care and feeding of those who have nothing to donate. It’s a form of tithing.

Standing at the bar, Doug ordered his third gin and tonic and another beer for Debbie and said, ‘I get to hunt there, Debbie, which is like I’m hunting my own land. My dad’s and my granddad’s land. And Roy and Dave, them, too, as long as they’re with me.’

Debbie said, ‘What kind of deal is that? You’re not his caretaker. You’re like his private forest ranger. Only he’s not paying you, Doug.’

‘The right to hunt is not nothing for something, y’know.’

This was back before strangers every weekend started driving past the house on their way to Zingerman’s, most of them in SUVs and pickups with out-of-state plates, some flying Confederate flags, their bumpers and tailgates plastered with stickers promoting gun rights and libertarian slogans like Don’t Tread on Me and Live Free or Die and Christian references to apocalyptic biblical verses. This was before the automatic weapons and the explosions, when it was still possible to hunt the property and kill a deer. It was before Doug, and especially Debbie, decided that Zingerman might be dangerous.

The truth is, on those date nights Debbie wasn’t trying to save their marriage. She was trying to save her husband from his drinking. Back then no one except Debbie thought Doug had a problem with alcohol. He was just a happy, weekend drunk, a smiling noncombatant who, after his third or fourth gin and tonic, enjoyed playing around with words, twisting and stretching their meanings like they were made of taffy. When he was sober, which even she had to admit was most of the time, he was reticent and slow to speak, one of those men whose body seems more intelligent than his mouth. A few drinks into an evening at the Spread Eagle, however, and Doug Lafleur would come off as the smartest, funniest guy in the place. Caitlin Mungo, the owner, kept her late husband Sam’s banjo behind the bar solely for Doug, who toward the end of the evening was happy to play and sing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Closing Time’ for the few remaining celebrants, and afterwards everyone would head out to their cars and trucks, humming the song.

The fiddler fiddles something so sublime

All the women tear their blouses off,

And the men they dance on the polka-dots,

And it’s partner found, it’s partner lost

And it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops:

It’s closing time… clos-ing time.

Debbie took a seat by the screened door to catch the autumn evening breeze and watched Doug get warmed up with the kid bartender and a half dozen customers at the bar, telling them his story of driving from Sam Dent over Iron Mountain to Port Henry on a snowy late February night back in 2012 in a van with Larry Gaines and three of his and Larry’s friends and Doug’s brothers-in-law, Roy and Dave Fitzgerald. They were on a sacred mission, he told them. They were off to collect Larry’s winnings in the Super Bowl pool at the Lake Monster Tavern, a basement dive somewhat notorious for the owner’s collection of Nazi regalia – helmets and Luftwaffe flight caps and flags and banners and swastika armbands – that hung on the walls and around the mirror behind the bar.

Ten days after the game, Super Bowl XLVI, Larry had found, tucked into his overstuffed wallet, the fifty-dollar ticket with the winning score, Giants over the Patriots, 21–17, that he thought he’d lost. When he went alone to the Lake Monster to collect his winnings, the owner, Regis Warriner, who’d organized the pool and held the $1,250 pot, told him that it was too late for Larry to make his claim, and there was no proof that he’d kicked his fifty bucks into the pool, anyhow. Warriner told Larry that since there was no declared legal winner, he had rolled the whole amount into next year’s pool. If Larry wanted a piece of that, it was going to cost him another fifty bucks to play.

‘So we stroll into the Lake Monster,’ Doug continued, ‘all seven of us, with little Larry Gaines invisible in the rear. You know how he disappears when he’s with normal-sized people. Anyhow and otherwise, it’s like the Lake Monster is the fucking OK Corral and we’re the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo come looking for the Clanton Boys. None of us’d stepped foot into that Nazi cave before, except for Larry, who’d been working construction in Port Henry that winter, and the Lake Monster regulars are all giving us these hard-assed SS looks. We part them like the Red Sea, and little Larry steps between us and bellies up to the bar, like he’s a Big Dog now, and Regis Warriner looks us over, and he greets him like they’re soul mates, twin brothers separated at birth and at last reunited, and, jeez, ever since the Super Bowl, Regis says, he’s been waiting for the chance to give Larry his winnings, but just didn’t know how to reach him.’

Knowing laughter from Doug’s listeners – when the screened door next to Debbie swung open, and Yuri Zingerman entered. Rarely sighted at the Spread Eagle, he was thought to do his drinking alone or maybe with his New Jersey and downstate cronies at his hunting camp in Lafleur’s Woods. Doug stopped telling his story, and the place dropped into silence.

Debbie said, ‘Doug, let’s go now. The babysitter…’

Doug turned and gave Zingerman a wide, welcoming smile. ‘Wow! It’s the high plains drifter, and he’s come to town! Let me buy you a drink, Drifter,’ he said and waved him over to the bar.

Zingerman walked across the room and came in close to Doug. He lifted his upper lip, more a grimace than a half smile. In a thin voice he said, ‘No, thanks. I stopped by your place to speak with you about something. The kid, the babysitter, she told me you’d be here.’

‘Sure you won’t let me buy you a drink?’

‘I don’t drink.’

Doug got suddenly somber, as if from slightly hurt feelings. ‘O-kay,’ he said. ‘What’s on your mind, then?’

The two men stood facing each other, Doug leaning down and forward as if to hear better, the shorter, blockier Zingerman looking at Doug’s throat, as if targeting it. Doug’s audience had backed away to give the two some space to speak in private.

Debbie called over, ‘Doug, we promised the babysitter. We ought to go now.’

Zingerman said, ‘You planning to hunt on my land this season?’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Forget about it. I don’t want anyone hunting there anymore. Even you.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’ Zingerman turned and started to move away. Doug reached out and with his thumb and forefinger held on to the loose sleeve of Zingerman’s plaid flannel shirt, but before he could tug it, Zingerman pinned Doug’s offending hand to the bar and had Doug bent backwards against the bar, off-balance, knees buckling, his free hand flailing the air, Zingerman’s hand wrapped around Doug’s throat, so that Doug was looking up at the ceiling, unable to breathe.

A second later, Zingerman released him. Doug stared up at Zingerman in a mix of relief and disbelief, his eyes filling with tears. He touched his throat gingerly, looking for a wound to explain the pain. He tried to speak, but couldn’t make a sound.

It all happened too fast for anyone to say or do anything to stop or slow it. No one in the place moved or said a word as Zingerman walked past Debbie and out to his big Denali idling in front and got in and drove off.

Debbie rushed across the room to Doug and said, ‘My God, honey, are you okay?’ and examined his throat, which was red from Zingerman’s grip, but appeared to be uninjured. A few people, including Caitlin, the owner, and the young guy tending bar said things like ‘Jesus Christ!’ and ‘What the hell was that all about?’ and ‘What’d you do to piss him off like that, Doug?’

When he could speak again, Doug leaned away from Debbie and gave a little laugh and said, ‘He don’t… Zingerman don’t like anyone touching him… uninvited. I guess.’

Debbie took him by the arm and led him out the door to her Forester. She got in on the driver’s side, Doug, unprotesting, the passenger’s. She said, ‘What did he say to you?’

‘He don’t… he don’t want me hunting Pop’s land anymore.’

‘He say why?’ She started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot onto the road and headed toward home, five miles east of the village center. Doug didn’t answer. It was shortly after nine, and the winding two-lane road was empty of vehicles. The white center stripe flashed into the spray of the headlights and disappeared into the darkness behind. Doug half opened the passenger-side window and inhaled. The wet smell of an approaching lake-effect snowstorm out of Ontario mingled with the odor of mouldering leaves blown off the trees by wind and rain the week before. Fall was slipping into winter. Deer hunting season.

He tried to replay in his mind what had happened – Zingerman pinning Doug’s hand to the bar and rendering him helpless, knees buckled, his free hand grasping at air, and Zingerman’s ability to do it so quickly that Doug couldn’t see it happening until it was already over and done. It mystified Doug. It somehow gratified a desire he didn’t know he had and left him strangely satisfied afterwards. He couldn’t remember the actual event beyond reaching out and catching Zingerman’s shirtsleeve between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. All he remembered was Zingerman turning around, presenting a blurred image of his face, impassive, expressionless, almost bored looking, and Doug’s own body suddenly off-balance, no longer under his control, steered backwards and down, his offending left hand, palm up, clamped to the bar, open and ready for a spike to be driven through it straight and deep into the wood, the right hand extended as if trying in vain to avoid sharing the fate of the left, trying to escape the arm and shoulder it was attached to. He did recall Zingerman’s left hand locked on his throat, the thumb pressing the carotid artery, the fingers closing on his windpipe, a black halo closing in on Zingerman’s cold face.

And just as suddenly, Zingerman was gone, and Doug saw that the spike had been pried out of the wooden bar, and his left hand had been sewn back onto the arm and the arm onto the shoulder, and he could draw air back into his lungs again, blood into his brain. The black halo faded to gray, and the lights came up as at the end of a movie, leaving him feeling strangely sated, as if something long desired had finally come to him in an unanticipated form with unimagined content. It was exactly what he had hoped for. Not so much the thing itself, Zingerman’s sudden inexplicable dominance of him, but the thrilled feeling aroused in his chest afterwards, when he began to breathe again, the buoyancy in his captured and released left hand, the restful peace of his right hand settled at his side, the return of his body to his body after having been briefly absent.

Doug remained silent until they pulled into their driveway. Debbie shut off the engine and sighed. ‘This is the second winter we were going to have a two-car garage,’ she said.

‘He can go straight to hell if he thinks I’m not hunting on Pop’s land.’

‘Who? It’s not Pop’s anymore, remember?’

‘No. It’ll always be Pop’s. Just like it’ll always be Grandpop’s. That’s why people call it Lafleur’s Woods. Those two old boys, Pop and Grandpop, they’d roll over in their graves if they thought me and Roy and Dave couldn’t hunt that land. Max, too. Max’s gonna get his chance to hunt those woods, just like I did when I was his age. And my dad before me. And Grandpop. That sonofabitch Zingerman, he can have his hunting camp out there if he wants, he paid for that right, but he can’t keep me from tramping across those ridges and creeks that I know like the lines of my own hand and killing a deer once a year and busting up a few coveys of partridges and quails. It’s my goddamn birthright.’

She was silent for a moment. She knew that he’d had three gin and tonics and had been publicly humiliated by Zingerman, but even if he were stone-cold sober and Zingerman had managed to be polite and had apologized for posting the land and barring him from hunting it, Doug would be threatening to kill his deer over there anyway. He was a man. That’s what men do. She knew that by tomorrow he’d be trying to talk Zingerman out of his decision, and by Monday he’d be grumbling about Zingerman’s decision, and when hunting season opened, he’d meet up early with Dave and Roy, and they would hunt on somebody else’s land, not Zingerman’s. Not Pop’s and Grandpop’s.

She said, ‘Seriously, Doug, when are we going to get the garage built? We can’t go another whole year without it.’

✦

It snowed twice that week, six inches, then another three – heavy wet snow that half melted during the days and refroze at night and got wetter and heavier as the week went on. At first Doug did as Debbie predicted. He called Zingerman and tried to talk him into letting him and his brothers-in-law continue to hunt his father’s and grandfather’s land. That was Monday.

Zingerman said forget it. ‘Nobody’s going to be hunting there from now on. I got different uses for the land,’ he said. He wanted to know how Doug got his phone number.

Doug said he looked it up online. He didn’t say, but Debbie had done the search for him. ‘It’s posted on your company’s website,’ he said. ‘Zip-Tie Security, Inc.’

‘It’s a business number,’ Zingerman said. ‘I don’t usually answer, but my secretary’s out sick.’

‘From your website, that’s quite the business you’re running, Yuri. I mean, “Penetration room clearing.” “Deep conceal holster training.” “Israeli security training package.” I don’t know what half those terms mean, but it’s pretty impressive.’

‘You wanna take one of my courses, Doug? You could use one, judging from the other night.’ He gave a short, cold laugh. ‘You oughtn’t grab a man from behind unless you’re prepared to take him down. Lesson number one, Doug. No charge.’

Doug said no, he wasn’t interested in any of those courses. He was only interested in killing one deer a year for himself and one each for his brothers-in-law, Roy and Dave Fitzgerald. He tried to explain how hunting culled the herd and was a good conservation practice or the deer would overpopulate and start to starve, but Zingerman cut him off.

‘Look, we got nothing to talk about. I’m putting in a shooting range, it’s part of my business, and I’ll be bringing clients in for advanced training. Last thing I need is local deer hunters wandering around the place and accidentally stepping into the line of fire. They don’t sell insurance for that, Doug. You’re a good guy, be a good neighbor, okay?’

It was more a warning than a request. Zingerman clicked off before Doug could respond, which Doug realized later was lucky, because he was about to say that he planned on hunting his dad’s and granddad’s woods anyhow. And he was bringing Roy and Dave, and if anyone was going to accidentally step in the line of fire, it was likely to be him, Zingerman, or one of his so-called clients, not Doug and his brothers-in-law, and in fact, he was so confident of their safety and Zingerman’s lack thereof, he was going to bring his eleven-year-old son, Max, to help drive the deer. He wanted his boy to learn the deers’ bedding spots and trails the same way that he and Roy and Dave had acquired intimate knowledge of such things from a lifetime of hunting those same woods.

He thought that if he said it right, this information might soften Zingerman’s heart. It took him another full day before he realized that it would not have been useful to let Zingerman know in advance that he and his son and his brothers-in-law would be hunting his dad’s and granddad’s land this coming weekend. No point in forewarning him. It was late Friday afternoon, almost dark at 5:30. He and Debbie were drinking beer and smoking together on the back deck off the kitchen, standing side by side, gazing in the direction of the dusky woods. Zingerman’s woods. Lafleur’s Woods.

‘We’ll just go in there early the first day of the season and take out our deer, and the hell with him,’ he told Debbie. ‘He’ll never even know we done it.’

‘Doug, that’s about as dumb a thing as you’ve ever thought of doing.’

‘Sometimes you got to do a foolish thing in order to do the right thing,’ he said.

‘I’m not letting Max go with you.’