arms.
Thump, thump, thump.
Craning their heads, they saw Hugo gesturing angrily at them from the cab of the truck. He was rapping on the window glass and staring apoplectically sidelong, his face grotesque. The truck rumbled onto the shoulder of the highway and ground to a bumpy halt.
A moment later Hugo put his hands on the sideboard and subjected the children to a powerful scolding, the gist of which dealt with the unseemliness of sultry displays of affection between brothers and sisters. Anna, aggrieved, protested that they were only “messing around,” but Hugo cut short her argument by banging on the side of the truck and resuming his lecture. Pete Grier, after easing himself out of the cab and leaning over the opposite gunwale, observed that kids seemed to be “starting younger every year.”
“Criminy!” Anna exclaimed, outraged. “Boy, do you guys ever have sick minds!”
Before Hugo could lay into Anna for this impertinence, a set of headlights flashed into view behind them and bore steadily up the highway toward Pete’s truck. When this vehicle pulled abreast of them, they could see that it belonged to the state highway patrol. Pete cursed under his breath.
“Everything all right?” called the trooper, leaning toward his passenger window. “Need a lift or a tow truck?”
“No, no,” Hugo replied. “Jus’ had to get my kids settled. We’re doin’ jus’ fine.”
The trooper went on his way, having defused Hugo’s anger by scaring him to death.
To give the patrol car time to draw off toward Chugwater, Anna made sandwiches for Pete and Hugo. Neither she nor John-John could eat another bite, but they each downed a soft drink and washed off their hands in the ice water in the bottom of the Styrofoam cooler. Eventually, Pete again felt brave enough to put their poaching operation back on Go, and they forsook the highway’s shoulder for the highway itself. John-John watched the corn chips dancing on the loadbed.
The truck bounced over a cattle guard and turned onto a rutted access road blockaded by a barbed-wire gate. Pete opened the gate, Hugo drove the truck through, and Pete returned to the driver’s seat. John-John and Anna felt the metal beneath them vibrating as the pickup, tilting first to one side and then the other, climbed an easy grade through empty pasturage.
“Where are we?” Anna called.
Pete kicked open his door, leaned out, and flicked on the spotlight he had installed that afternoon. Its beam swept the top of the opposite ridge and immediately struck fire from a pair of distant eyes. They shone like amber match heads there. The animal to which the eyes belonged stood unmoving, transfixed, in the trembling circle of the beam. An adolescent buck, by the look of the knobby points on its head. It was so still, so statuesque, that John-John tried to believe that a taxidermist had already mounted the creature.
Aloud he said, “I hope it isn’t real.”
“Of course it’s real,” Hugo responded, sotto voce. “What do you think, maybe it’s a piece of cardboard?”
Pete took his rifle from the cab of the truck, drew it out of its zippered scabbard, and sighted over the top of the half-open door. The deer gave a high, off-balance bound that carried it out of sight beyond the ridge top, whereupon the report of Pete’s rifle—so sudden it made Anna and John-John jump—echoed across the prairie like a thunderclap. John-John cried out, but Hugo reached over the truck’s sideboard and held his hand over the boy’s mouth until the night was quiet again.
“You missed him,” he told Pete.
“ ’Fraid not. He was dead when he jumped. Let’s go see.”
Doors slammed shut, and the truck bumped through a narrow draw and labored to the top of the ridge from which the deer had leapt. Pete cautioned the Monegals against stepping on loose stones, cactus clumps, and live rattlesnakes, then led them down the far side of the ridge with his flashlight. John-John, hoping that Pete had missed and his deer had gone pogo-sticking into the open wilderness, struggled along behind the men. Twenty or thirty yards down the slope Pete directed the flashlight beam under the dry skirt of a piñon tree and got back the glitter of a glassy eye. Anna turned aside, but John-John stared at the shadowy carcass in disbelief.
“I’m gonna gut this little Billy Buck,” Pete informed Hugo. “You can cut off the legs and head. There’s a bone saw in the truck, under the seat. We need to finish up and skeedaddle before anyone