Dead Watch

always careful not to touch, because there might be a question of exactly when the touching would stop. And she loved Billy . . .
    The guys downstairs were slower getting up, but by the time he’d gotten dressed and into his boots, and gathered his coveralls and gear, they were moving around. He could hear the downstairs shower going, and the plop-gurgle of the coffeemaker, the smell of hot coffee on a cool, rainy morning.
    As he left the room, Peyson came out of the bathroom, steamy and pink, wrapped in the robe, and he said, “Scrambled?” and she said, “Yes,” and shouted, “Billy, get up,” and he followed her down the hall, watching her ass, and God help him, if Billy his best friend ever died in a car wreck, he would be knocking on this woman’s door the next week.
    Peyson went on to the other bedroom and he turned down the stairs.

    In the kitchen, he started breaking eggs into a bowl, got some muffin-premix poured into pan-molds, fired up the oven, took a package of bacon out of the refrigerator. Bob Wilson came out of the downstairs bathroom, hair wet from the shower, and said, “Rain.”
    “Mist.”
    “Gonna make the woods quiet, anyway. Hope the birds don’t hunker down.”
    Sam Barger walked sleepy-eyed from the bedroom and asked Wilson, “You all done in the shower?”
    “Yeah, go ahead.”
    “Rainin’,” Barger said. “TV says it should be outa here by noon.”
    They took a little time over breakfast: the smell of muffins rising in the oven, bacon and eggs, coffee, the pine-wood walls of the cabin. Peyson Carter across from him, curly blond hair, catching his eyes. Did all attractive women keep a spare tire?

    They hunted together every spring and fall, looking for Virginia wild turkeys, four men, one man’s wife. They had the routine down. Everybody knew what to bring—bows, boots, camo, pasta, booze, garbage bags, toilet paper, target faces—and everybody knew about where he or she would set up. They were all bow hunters. Between the five of them, they averaged two turkeys per season. Turkeys were tough.
    All that brought him to the rubber tarp, where he knelt in the gloom, waiting for his bird to move. A little hungry now, trying to ignore it. The four-foot-square mat made it possible to shift his weight silently; he had to shift frequently because of his lame leg. The tangle of brush around him made it possible to draw the bow without the motion being seen.
    He had a Semiweiss Lighting compound bow, the draw weight adjusted down to provide for a very long hold. He was shooting carbon-fiber arrows, one-inch broadheads with stoppers. A good-sized tom hung out in the oaks behind him. And the tom would be coming out to this cornfield, and with luck, following a track along a shallow ravine below him. He knew the bird sometimes did that, because he’d seen the scat and the tracks on scouting trips.
    Whether the tom would do it this day, he didn’t know.
    He waited, listening, straining to see in through the brush, the problems of the bureaucracy falling away from him. He’d hunted most of his life, since his grandfather had first taken him out when he was six years old. He hunted deer and turkeys in Virginia, elk and antelope out west. When he was hunting, he stepped into a Zen-space and became part of the landscape. Time didn’t pass, nor did it stop; it simply wasn’t. He faded away from himself and his day-to-day problems.
    He’d been in place since dawn. The sun came up, rose higher, broke briefly out of the clouds, disappeared again. A breeze sprang up, played with the oak leaves, died again; squirrels ran across the ground, noisy beasts; a chickadee stopped on a branch a foot from his nose.
    He saw it all, but didn’t look at it. He was waiting . . . When the cell phone went off.

    “Ahhhh . . . Jesus!”
    The sound was stunning, like being hit in the face by a snowball. He rushed back to the present, out of the Zen-space to the here-and-now. He unzipped a panel on his camo, pushed his hand through to a shirt pocket underneath, and took the phone out.
    “Yes.” The only people who had the number for that phone were people he needed to talk with.
    A woman’s voice, quiet, cultivated: “Jake, this is Gina Press. I’m sorry to bother you, I understand you’re on vacation. The guy needs to see you.”
    “When?”
    “Today. Where are you?”
    “Down in the valley. It’ll be a while.”
    “It’s pretty urgent. Can I put you on the log for four