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empty pint-bottles of which he sometimes tossed out of the car window when Elwin would drive him to visit his grandchildren in Cloverdale. Elwin had once, very gently, asked Manx how he reconciled the littering with the Pomo concept of
saltu,
the “spirit home” that infused the ancestral landscape.
Saltu,
Manx replied, didn’t apply to asphalt.
    What happened next, then, wine-driven or not: Elwin grabbed two forelegs and started dragging the deer back toward the Jeep. He wasn’t sure the meat was salvageable—he might find most if not all of it bloodshot from the impact of the Jeep; additionally, there was a decent chance that the paunch had busted, and that the resulting interior blast of urine and feces was currently spoiling the meat—but abandoning it felt criminal, even if, according to the law, his current tack was actually the criminal option. He’d always heard that the meat of roadkilled deer, scavenged by the highway department, went to homeless shelters, which was a pleasant idyll that nevertheless crumbled under scrutiny: Who was the mythological state butcher culling the fresh meat from the rotten? What team of state lawyers had hashed out the vicious liability issues of dumping wormy meat onto the plastic plates of homeless children? No, this was some analgesic fantasy someone had cooked up to soften the sight of fawns lying flyspecked and bloodymouthed on the Garden State Parkway. Elwin could guess what really happened: the highway workers heaving the carcasses into the maggot-smeared bed of a hulking orange dump truck, the driver lipping a Marlboro and cranking Supertramp on the radio while pulling back the truck’s dump lever at some Meadowlands landfill, the deer slumping out of the bed in a tangle of rigor mortis–stiffened legs and split, sun-charred intestines. They buried them like everything else.
    When headlights came sweeping around a curve to the south, Elwin immediately dropped the doe and glued his hands to his hips; he even nudged it with his toe, to heighten the impression of casual study. Just as quickly, when the car passed and no brakelights appeared, he re-seized the forelegs and scurried across the road. He was in dangerous territory now, and he knew it. If a cop happened by while he was heaving the deer into the back of the Jeep—Christ, just an imagined glimpse of the ramifications caused his big belly to flip, sloshing all that Douro wine it contained. When he’d pulled the deer to the rear of the Jeep, he paused for a moment, panting, to listen for traffic. It took a few seconds for the panicked clatter in his head to subside, for the hysterical warnings and recriminations being shouted from his subcortex to die down, and then: silence, or what passes for silence in that swath of New Jersey: the low-grade choral hum of a million near and distant engine pistons, firing through the night, and as many industrial processes, the muted hiss and moan of sawblades and metal stamps and hydraulic presses and conveyor belts and coalfired turbines, plus the thrum of jets, whole flocks of them, towing invisible contrails toward Newark, and the insectile buzz of helicopters flying low and locust-like over fields of radio towers and above the scrollwork of turnpike exits, all of it fused into a single omnipresent drone, an aural smog that was almost imperceptible unless you stood alone and quivering on a deserted highwayside in the snow-hushed black hours of a November morning with a carcass hardening in the ice at your feet. Elwin’s breath came in polar gasps.
    But the road was clear. Now was his chance. He raised the Jeep’s rear door and shoved aside the piles of papers stacked therein: Fritz’s dutiful Terascale Initiative report, a sheaf of student papers on variable phonology, a three-page letter from Maura that even after a dozen rereadings he found indecipherable. Explaining to his students why he was returning their papers smirched with mud and blood was going to be difficult.