Want Not Read Online Free PDF Page B

Perhaps he could tell them, with a wink, that a dog had tried to eat their homework? But then that wouldn’t address the blood. “So I killed it,” he could say, then wait to be pilloried in the student evaluations. With one hand under the deer’s neck and his other arm cradling its belly, Elwin hoisted it into the back of the Jeep, noticing, in mid-heave, two things: that the doe’s flopping neck signaled it was broken, indicating a clean, instant kill; and that the fragile little
pop
he’d heard was from his own spine, which meant that in several dire moments, if he bent or turned too quickly in the wrong direction, he might find himself on his back in the snow, directly beneath the hot smoking tailpipe, immobile, and in epic howling pain, with a dead doe’s fluffy white ass hanging halfway out of the Jeep. If there were worse ways to die in times of peace, he couldn’t think of them.
    Stepping back from the Jeep, he tested his spine by performing a slow, arrhythmic twist on the roadside. It was a risky use of time, this dance, but necessary. When he felt confident his spine wouldn’t buckle on him, he scooped the doe’s rear into the Jeep—gingerly, because he wasn’t
that
confident—and slammed the hatch shut. Scrambling into the front seat, and yanking his seatbelt on, it occurred to him that this was the closest he might ever get to the sensation of driving a getaway car. It also occurred to him that he’d left the tire iron on the road, but that would have to be sacrificed; only a pinheaded bank robber would go storming back into the bank to retrieve his forgotten pistol. It didn’t go unnoticed, furthermore, that he was suddenly, and weirdly, having more fun than he’d had in many many years.
    “What the hell am I doing?” he asked himself aloud, and then, despite himself, he started giggling—so hard, and so irrepressibly, that he checked his face in the rearview mirror to see what a giggling Dr. Elwin Cross Jr., Imperial Grand Poobah (Rochelle’s pet title) of the Trueblood Center for Applied Linguistics at Marasmus State College, looked like, in such an unusually florid state. Like a fool, he decided. Like a juiced-up, fatassed, Cumberland County redneck who’d just picked roadkill off the highway and would now be up—he hadn’t considered this until now—until three or four or maybe five in the morning cleaning a deer that might or might not provide a single ounce of edible flesh, which he really wasn’t sure he wanted anyway. “What the hell am I doing?” he repeated, but this time grimly, and without a subsequent giggle. At least tomorrow was the day before Thanksgiving, the start of the Marasmus holiday break, which meant he could sleep in, if needed. Except that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept past seven. (Two hundred haircuts ago? One fifty?) But he
could
sleep in. And that’s what mattered now, he thought: the
potential.
The potential of the deer’s rammed flesh, the potential of untroubled rest, the potential of happiness, of brightness down the line, of “things”—what was that he’d told Rochelle, told Fritz?—“working out.”
    The dashboard clock read 1:37 when Elwin arrived home. “Home,” however, struck him as an inaccurate term for the house Maura had ceded him; it’d been a home with her in it (at least he’d thought so), but she’d switched up the consonants on her way out the door, downgrading it to mere house. Either way: It was a three-story Colonial, circa 1890, majestic and maybe even ostentatious when it was built but having been divided and subdivided over the years, overhauled and underhauled, and modernized and plasticized, its honey-colored plank floors layered and relayered with linoleum sheathing, its pineboard exterior inhumed with aluminum cladding, its fireplaces bricked and a massive iron fire escape bolted to its flank, and with a ring of split-levels having grown around it in the early ’70s, followed by McMansions in the