to myself—a mistake. “You don’t give a damn” my wife told me, “but each bush would cost hundreds of dollars to replace.” Like many of us past a certain age, she says “dollars” when she means “welders,” the Massachusetts unit of currency named after a fabled pre-war governor, a rare Republican. She corrected herself. “This deer will do fifty thousand welders’ worth of damage—then see how funny you think it all is.” Whenever Gloria feels me balking, she pulls out the whip of money, knowing me to have been a poor boy, and in my well-padded retirement still tender with financial anxiety.
“Do I think it’s funny?” I asked. I doubted it. Rapacity, competition, desperation, death to other living things: the forces that make the world go around. The euonymus bush once had some powder-blue irises beneath it, but its spreading green growth, insufficiently pruned, had smothered them, even as their roots crept forward, damaging the lawn.
“Look how he kept shitting everywhere! Little puddles of shit!”
“Can’t you say something other than ‘shit’?” In our courting days I had been attracted to her way of saying “fuck” instead of a softer expression. “With deer, I think you can say ‘scat,’” I suggested. “Or ‘spoor.’”
Scornfully Gloria stared at me, not even granting me a moment’s incredulous amusement. Her face was pink in the morning cold, her ice-blue eyes vibrant beneath a bushy wool hat that, set square on her head like the hat of a wooden soldier, is oddly flattering. Symmetry, fine white teeth, and monomaniacal insistence upon her own concept of order mark her impress upon the world. Hunting and tracking and plotting an enemy’s death become her, like fur at her throat. Before we were married I, still married to another, bought her a black cashmere coat trimmed in bushy gray fox at the collar. The middle-aged saleswoman exclaimed, “How great that looks on her!”—sublimating her hope of making the sale into the simple rapture of a shared vision. It was a blessing of sorts; she connived in our adultery. I yielded up fifteen hundred dollars as painlessly as emitting a sigh.
Gloria asked sharply, “Can you tell by the tracks which way he went?”
The deer had seemed to me clearly a large doe, but to my wife, in her animus, the creature was a “he.”
For my own sanity I had to resist this inexorable, deer-pitched tilt the universe was taking on. “What does it matter? Into the woods one way or another,” I said. Some of the woods were ours, and some belonged to our neighbors.
“It’s important to know,” Gloria said. Her pale, nearly white eyes narrowed; her killer instincts widened like nostrils to include me in her suspicions of a pervasive evil. “If he had been still there, shitting all over our hedge, would you have helped me throw golf balls?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. My time on Earth is getting too short, gradually, for lies.
“Oh!” Her disgust couldn’t have been more physical if I had held one of my turds—a sample of my own scat—up to her fair pink face. “You want him to destroy everything. Just to get at me.”
“Not at all,” I protested, yet so feebly the possible truth of her assertion would continue to gall her.
“If we got a gun, would you shoot it then?”
The cold air was sifting through my pajamas. The morning Globe was down by the mailbox, waiting to be retrieved. “Probably not.” Yet I wasn’t sure. In my youth in the Berkshires, those erosion-diminished, tourist-ridden green hills, I had handled a .22 owned by a friend less impoverished than I. There had been a thrill to it—the slender weight, the acrid whiff, the long-distance effect.
She sensed this uncertainty, and pried into it the wedge of her voice. “The homeowner can, you know. Out of season or anything, as long as it’s on his property. Shoot any pest. That’s the law.”
“I’d be scared,” I told her, knowing it would sting, “to shoot a neighbor. Talk about money, honey—what a lawsuit!”
That night, we planned to go to bed de bonne heure, to make love. In our old age we had to carefully schedule copulations that once had occurred spontaneously, without forethought or foreboding. Before heading upstairs, she said, “Let’s look out the window, to see if the deer has come back.”
The yard was dark, with the thinnest kind of cloud-veiled moonlight. My wife saw nothing and turned to go up to bed. Once I would have given all my assets, including my body’s health and