EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 16
"I helped pull him out of the truck. I don't think I was much good."
He looked at the back of her head. He felt like driving his fork through the table. "What
tricks did you play? Did you hypnotize people?"
Her shoulders tightened. Her voice came out furious. "Why can't you—" she began, but her
voice fell off. "It wasn't tricks," she muttered. "I helped carry him."
When she started to get phone calls, he hung up on the callers. But they were relentless: a
grieving widow, an orphan's lawyer, a reporter from the Great Falls Tribune. A blubbering
father drove all the way to the cabin to beg her to come to the funeral parlor, and finally
she went. The hunter insisted on driving her. It wasn't right, he declared, for her to go
alone. He waited in the truck in the parking lot, engine rattling, radio moaning.
"I feel so alive," she said afterward, as he helped her into the cab. Her clothes were soaked
through with sweat. "Like my blood is fizzing through my body." At home she lay awake,
far away, all night.
She got called back and called back, and each time he drove her. He would take her after a
whole day of duck hunting and pass out from exhaustion while he waited in the truck.
When he woke, she would be beside him, holding his hand, her hair damp, her eyes wild.
"You dreamt you were with the wolves and eating salmon," she said. "They were washed up
and dying on the shoals."
He drove them home over the dark fields. He tried to soften his voice. "What do you do in
there? What really?"
"I give them solace. I let them say good-bye to their loved ones. I help them know
something they'd never otherwise know."
"No," he said. "I mean what kind of tricks? How do you do it?"
She turned her hands palms up. "As long as they're touching me, they see what I see. Come
in with me next time. Go in there and hold hands. Then you'll know."
He said nothing. The stars above the windshield seemed fixed in their places.
Families wanted to pay her; most wouldn't let her leave until they did. She would come out
to the truck with fifty, a hundred—once four hundred—dollars folded into her pocket. She
began to go off for weekends, disappearing in the truck before he was up, a fearless driver.
She knelt by roadkill—a crumpled porcupine, a shattered deer. She pressed her palm to the
truck's grille, where the husks of insects smoked. Seasons came and went. She was gone
half the winter. Each of them was alone. They never spoke. On longer drives she was
sometimes tempted to keep the truck pointed away and never return.
In the first thaws he would go out to the river and try to lose himself in the rhythm of
casting, in the sound of pebbles driven downstream, clacking together. But even fishing
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