He sits somewhere and he mews at the cougars and are there cougars in these mountains? He laughs. “Are you crying, pussy? Oh man, you know I wish we did put some meat on your bones. Cougars gotta eat too!” He mews again and he says that Robert Frost was right and no poetry. No. “Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy… I love that movie, man. I do.” It was a book, you fucking moron, and he snorts. “Fucking bullshit ending, though, because Ponyboy shoulda croaked like his little bitch-ass friend. The soc’s… they were the good guys but the movie makes ’em all out to be so bad just cuz they got good families.” He shoots something. A bunny? A squirrel? I don’t know. I can’t know. “See, you’re what happens in real life, fucking hoodlum, how long you been here and not one friend comes to visit? Fucking freak.”
I hate when he talks because I can’t hear the branches or the footsteps of God knows what might be approaching and Shortus finally does stop talking but then I hear the branches and the footsteps of God knows what and the theme of my bar fucking mitzvah is death and he’s on the move. Running. In my face.
“Don’t even think I’m gonna let some little squirrel peck atcha, pussy. You need to bleed. Just like all the little bitches do when they man up and become women.”
I am fucking bleeding—the ropes are cutting my wrists—and I try to talk and I shake my arms and he spits at my arms. “That’s rope burn, you pussy. You need to bleed like a man.”
He’s on the move again, Timberlands on leaves, crunch crunch crunch, and I see you in a hall of mirrors and you sing to me, you want to save me—There’s a man I know, Joe’s the one I dream about—and you are safe in a cushy hall of mirrors where nothing bad can happen to you and I am here in the woods. There are jaws on my leg. Teeth. That’s my skin cracking and that’s my blood leaking onto my pants and then Pop. The jaws let go and it’s another bunny down but I am wrong. Shortus whistles. “Huh,” he says. “I think this fox was pregnant.”
He killed a fox and you are my fox and he’s doing something different, shaking his phone. “Man,” he says. “When I get back down and I see her, I’m gonna tell her she was right to bitch about the shitty Wi-Fi. I can’t even get the score on the Sounders game.”
You were here with him—how could you do that to me?—and the image of the two of you in these woods is a shark inside my shark and he’s a liar. Shortus lies. This I know for a fact and I have to decide that you were never here so I do that right now. He killed my fox and he drops his phone. He heard something. I heard it too. Something larger than a squirrel and this is the Stephen King book Gerald’s Game and unlike Gerald’s wife, whose husband was dead and bad, I have someone to live for: you.
I beg and I plead with the universe to call off the cougar—or is it a bear?—and I promise if I get out of this I will do better. I will be the best goddamn man on planet fucking Earth and Gerald’s wife had it easy. No bag on her fucking head. My senses are hot-wiring and I can’t hear and I can’t see and I feel the tongue of something wild, something incapable of knowing the difference between a good man like me and a scorpion salamander of a man like Shortus and is it a wolf? Pop and the living thing whinnies and drops and Shortus sighs. “Duck duck goat. Goddamn hippies and their goats. Just do your yoga and leave the animals out of it.”
RIP goat—no supernatural forces coming to save me in this dull fucking neck of the woods—and Shortus drops his weapon. The flies are all upon me now, loud and close. Mundane.
“Whole shit ton of girls out there, Joe, and you just had to fix your eyes on mine.”
You’re not branded. You don’t belong to him. I scream into my sock.
“The worst part about all this, oh man, she tells me she wants you and she says that me and her can be friends.”
That’s your right, Mary Kay, and when you said that to me did I kidnap your husband? No. I accepted your terms and this is what I get for it and I scream again. It’s no use.
“One week ago, one fucking week ago she was in my cabin with me and you come back outta nowhere and boom. Finito. She’d be here right now if it wasn’t for you, you bookworm piece of shit.”
It hurts to think of you in these woods with him and this is not how I want to die. Knowing that you slept with him when you were seventeen is one thing. But last week… no. You should have told me that he pines for you, Mary Kay. We all get weak, we all make mistakes and I could have martyred your saint and then I wouldn’t be tied to this tree and he digs his rifle into my back.
“Stop crying, bitch. This is nothing compared to what I went through with my soccer team or my frat or my old man, so man up already.”
I am caught in the toxic cycle of masculinity, the one quietly tolerated by the American System of Miseducation and he was hazed so he wants to haze me and Dying for love is so bittersweet. He shoots another living thing and he whines—fucking squirrels—and every dead animal is a reminder that the days really do go too fast. My life is ending and I don’t want to die. I don’t want my son to be an orphan. He lost his mother. He can’t lose me too. I try to picture him older, and I can’t, too scared, and I try to remember being with you on our love seat and I can’t do that either. The Pain Pong tournament ended and the flocks of rabid fans are long gone. I will die here and I can’t even hate him, because like you, I am too good for my own good. The Empathy Bordello has been ransacked and burnt to the ground before it even existed and he heard something and he hisses.
“Hey,” he screams. “What is that?”
My eustachian tubes go to high alert. I heard it too. Is it you? You know about this cabin. You rejected him today and you’ve been to this cabin and did you come back?
“I’m warning you, buddy. You’re on my property.”
My heart pounds and I can’t hear so well and I want it to be you—save me—and I don’t want it to be you—he could kill you—and I don’t know what to want. Cops. Yes. Let you be the savvy fox that knows better than to come here alone.
“I’m counting to three,” he says. “One…” Please, God, let it be her. “Two…” Please, God, don’t let it be her.
He doesn’t make it to the number three. His voice is thwarted by the pop of a gun. Not his pop. A different gun. I can’t see and I can’t hear but I see dead people because in my heart I know that Shortus is dead. I scream into my sweaty sock for help—thank God for guns—and the footsteps are getting closer but my heart is beating faster. I want my nervous system to catch up to my brain and I tell myself over and over that it’s over. You need to calm down.
And then the shooter is at my tree. Breathing heavily. Close. He is not a cop because cops are loud. They announce themselves. The bag is still on my head and a police officer would have pulled the bag off my head by now. Here goes my heart again—tick tick tick—and I was so afraid of animals that I forgot about the worst of all predators, the most power-hungry predators on this planet: humans.
Urine runs down my leg once more and the shooter puts the barrel of the gun he used to kill my enemy against the back of my head as if I am the enemy. I am crying now, my pleas about my family muffled by the sock in my mouth and then he laughs and drops the gun. “Relax, my friend. Show’s over. Score one for the Poor Boys Club.”