“Nah. I’ll tell you when. Anyway, you gotta drink it with me and you don’t look down for day drinking right now.”
“Heh, no, I guess not today. Well, I have zero trust in my phone, but you know where to find me.”
Green looked through the glass door to the dark trees across the road.
“Alf, you guys see anything weird out here…especially at night…just, stay away from it. You know?”
“Hear that, Jerome? The new guy is giving us advice.”
Jerome didn’t answer. He did something fancy with his deck, displaying the cards in a star shape, then continued shuffling.
“Yeah. Sorry. I guess you know how to live with weirdness out here.”
“Yeah, bro. I guess I do.”
“Okay. Stay safe, Alf.”
“Don’t be a stranger, brother.”
Green went out and something made him look back. Jerome was standing at the window, holding up his deck. Green grinned, nodded, and tapped his forehead.
King of clubs. Come on, man. You got this. King of clubs.
Jerome pressed a king of diamonds against the glass.
Close.
Green shook his head. Jerome turned away.
The Prius still smelled like fresh camping gear and old coffee. It was a smell from a week earlier and seemed to be from a bygone decade. There was a brown constellation of dried blood droplets smattered across the Toyota logo in the center of the steering wheel.
On the drive back to Candle-Fly, Green noticed three soft tan shapes lying in a patch of pine straw just off the road. He pulled over before realizing he’d made the decision. There were no other cars.
He climbed out and felt the profound isolation of an empty roadway pressed between great swaths of woods like a fossil folded in layers of shale.
He thought of Kyle Cartwright loading his fishing gear when something found him in a spot very much like this one.
The sun was still high in the sky. The wolf and fawn were creatures of the dusk and dark.
Aren’t they?
Green went to inspect the shapes.
Three deer lay dead beneath a white pine. They were unmarked. The animals might have appeared asleep, except they had fallen at unnatural angles, one doe’s black nose buried in the soil. Pine needles clung to the deer’s dark, sightless eyes.
Green knelt and reached to feel a soft white throat.
It was numbingly cold.
He looked up the hill and saw a dead chipmunk near an emerald tuft of club moss.
His eyes traveled farther up the slope.
How much death is out there, beyond what I can see?
How many corpses are hidden in thickets, unable to rot, to return to the soil?
How many victims are trapped in perpetual winter?
