We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ dogs’ panting before I saw them. A pack of dogs! In an instant the doe turned, leapt, and was running, her tail, white beneath, lifted like a flag of distress. Why do deer lift their tails, running for their lives? A signal to predators, glimmering white in the dark? The dogs rushed into the pond, splashing through it, growling deep inside their throats, not yet barking. If they were aware of me they gave no sign, they had no interest in me but only in the doe, five or six of them, ferocious in the chase, ears laid back and hackles raised. I thought I recognized one or two of our neighbor’s dogs. I shouted after them, sick with horror, but they were already gone. There was the sound of panicked flight and pursuit, growing fainter with distance. I’d stumbled into the pond and something stabbed into my foot. I was panting, half sobbing. I could not believe what had happened—it had happened so quickly.

      If only I’d had a gun.

      The does, fawns, their carcasses we found sometimes in the woods, in our cornfields and sometimes as close as the orchard. Once, a part-devoured doe, near Mom’s antique sleigh. Throats and bellies ripped out where they’d fallen. Usually they were only partly devoured.

      If only I had a gun. One of Dad’s guns, locked in a closet, or a cabinet, in a back room somewhere. The Browning shotgun, the two rifles. There was Mike’s rifle, too. Mike had lost interest in target shooting pretty quickly and Patrick hated guns and Dad hadn’t taught me to use either the shotgun or the rifles, hadn’t allowed me even to touch them. (Though I’m not sure, maybe I never asked.) Still, I believed I would know how to use the guns.

      How to aim, pull the trigger, and kill.

      Instead, I ran back to the house crying.

      Helpless little kid! eleven years old! Babyface, Dimple!

      Ranger, roaming the night. Wiping tears, snot from his face.

      In the downstairs bathroom, trembling, I ran hot water in the sink. I was trying not to think what had happened to the doe—what the dogs might be doing to her—what I couldn’t see happening, and couldn’t hear. Back in the woods it would be happening if she had not escaped (but I did not think she had escaped) but maybe I would never know. Don’t think about it Mom would say. Sometimes even with a smile, a caress. Don’t think about it, Mom will take care of it. And if Mom can’t, Dad will. Promise!

      I was terrified the hot-water pipe would make its high-shrieking noise and wake my parents. What the hell are you doing downstairs, Judd?—I could hear Dad’s voice, not angry so much as baffled. Going on four in the morning?

      My damned foot, my right foot, was bleeding from a short, deep gash. Both my feet were covered in scratches. For Christ’s sake, why didn’t you put on shoes? I had no answer, there was no answer. I sat on the lowered toilet seat staring at the underside of my feet, the smeary blood, the dirt. I lathered soap in my hands and tried to wash my feet and there was this uh-uh-uh sound in my throat like choking. It came over me, I’d trailed blood into the house! For sure. Into the back hall. Oh God I’d have to clean it up before somebody saw.

      Before Mom saw, coming downstairs at 6 A.M. Whistling, singing to herself.

      There were some Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet, I tried to put on my feet. Tetanus! What if I got tetanus? Mom was always warning us not to go barefoot. It would serve me right, I thought. If my last tetanus shot was worn out, if I died a slow terrible death by blood poisoning.

      Don’t think about it: back in the woods, what’s happening. Or not happening. Or has happened already. Or a thousand thousand times before even you were born, to know of it.

      Outside, Mike pulled up, parked. Quiet as he could manage. He’d driven up our driveway with only his parking lights on, slowly. Getting out of his car, he hadn’t slammed the door shut.

      I couldn’t get away in time, there was my older brother in the doorway, blinking at me. Face flushed and eyes mildly bloodshot and I smelled beer on his breath. Blackberry-color smeared around his mouth, down onto his neck—a girl’s lipstick. And a sweet smell of sweat, and perfume. Good-looking guy girls stared after in the street, Mule Mulvaney himself, the one of us who most resembled our father, and with Dad’s grin, slightly lopsided, teasing-reproachful-affectionate. Mike hadn’t shaved since morning so his beard was pushing out, his jaws shadowy. His new suede jacket was open and his velvety-velour gold shirt was partly unbuttoned, showing matted-frizzed red-brown hair at the V. A zipper glinted coppery in the crotch of my brother’s snug-fitting jeans and my eye dropped there, I couldn’t help it.

      Mike said quizzically, “Hey kid what the hell: what’s going on? You cut yourself?” There were splotches of blood on the floor, blood-soaked wadded tissues, I couldn’t hide.

      I had to tell Mike I’d been outside, just looking around—“For the hell of it.”

      Mike shook his head, disapproving. “You’ve been outside, this time of night? Cutting up your feet? Are you crazy?”

      My big brother, who loved me. Mikey-Junior who was the oldest of the Mulvaney kids, Ranger who was the youngest. Always there’d been a kind of alliance between us—hadn’t there?

      Mike, who was slightly drunk, like Dad good-natured, funny and warm when he’d been drinking in an essentially good mood, and nobody was crossing him, and he was in a position to be generous, crouched down and examined my feet. “If they know you’re running around outside, barefoot, like some kind of weird, asshole Indian, there’ll be hell to pay. You know how Mom worries about damn ol’ tetanus.” He gave the word “tetanus” a female trill, so already he was treating this as some kind of joke. Weird, but some kind of joke. Nothing for him to get involved in, anyway.

      Of course, Mike wouldn’t tell on me, that went without saying. Any more than I was likely to tell on him, mentioning to Mom what time he’d come home tonight.

      Lifting me beneath the arms like a bundle of laundry, Mike removed me from the toilet seat, suppressing a belch. Lifted the seat, unzipped and urinated into the bowl with no more self-consciousness than one of our Holsteins pissing into the very pond out of which she and the other cows are drinking. Mike laughed, “Christ am I wasted,” blowing out his cheeks, rolling his eyes, “—gotta go crash.”

      Too sleepy to wash his hands, his fly unzipped and penis dangling he stumbled across the hall to his room. The little bathroom, closetsized, was rank with the hot fizzing smell of my brother’s urine and quickly I flushed the toilet, wincing at the noise of the plumbing, the shuddering of pipes through the sleeping house.

      I was shaky, felt sick to my stomach. Don’t think! Don’t. I wetted some paper towels and tried to clean the hall, blood-smears on the linoleum which wasn’t too clean, stained with years of dirt, as for the braided rug—it was so dirty, maybe nobody would notice. I heard a quizzical mewing sound and it was Snowball pushing against my leg, curious about what I was doing, wanting to be fed, but I only petted her and sent her away and limped back upstairs myself and to my room where the door was half-open!—and in my room where the dark was familiar, the smells familiar, I crawled back into bed beside E.T. who made a sleepy gurgling cat-noise in his throat and Little Boots who didn’t stir at all, wheezing contentedly in his sleep. So much for the vigilance of animals. Nobody knew I’d been gone except my brother who not only would not tell but would probably not remember.

      The wind had picked up. Leaves were being blown against my window. It was 4:05 A.M. The moon had shifted in the sky, glaring through a clotted mass of clouds like a candled egg.

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