The Coffin Dancer

him ‘WGS.’ The World’s Greatest Soldier. He laughed at that.”
    At ages eight and nine and ten Stephen would walk behind Lou as they trooped through the hills of WestVirginia, hot drops of sweat falling down their noses and into the crooks of their index fingers, which curled around the ribbed triggers of their Winchesters or Rugers. They’d lie in the grass for hours and be quiet, be still. The sweat glistened on Lou’s scalp just below the bristly crew cut, both eyes open as they sighted on their targets.
    Don’t you squint that left eye, Soldier.
    Sir, never, sir.
    Squirrels, wild turkeys, deer in season or out, bear when they could find them, dogs on slow days.
    Make ’em dead, Soldier. Watch me.
    Ka-rack. The thud against the shoulder, the bewildered eyes of an animal dying.
    Or on steaming August Sundays they’d slip the CO 2 cartridges into their paint-ball guns and strip down to their shorts, stalking each other and raising molehills of welts on their chests and thighs with the marble-sized balls that hissed through the air at three hundred feet per second, young Stephen struggling to keep from crying at the awful sting. The paint balls came in every color but Lou insisted on loading with red. Like blood.
    And at night, sitting in front of a fire in the backyard as the smoke curled toward the sky and into the open window where his mother stood cleaning the supper dishes with a toothbrush, the taut little man—Stephen at fifteen was as tall as Lou—would sip from the newly opened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and talk and talk and talk, whether Stephen was listening or not, as they watched the sparks flying into the sky like orange lightning bugs.
    “Tomorrow I want you to bring down a deer with just a knife.”
    “Well . . . ”
    “Can you do that, Soldier?”
    “Yessir, I can.”
    “Now look here.” He’d take another sip. “Where d’you think the neck vein is?”
    “I—”
    “Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. A good soldier admits his ignorance. But then he does something to correct it.”
    “I don’t know where the vein is, sir.”
    “I’ll show it on you. It’s right here. Feel that? Right there. Feel it?”
    “Yessir. I feel it.”
    “Now, what you do is you find a family—doe and fawns. You come up close. That’s the hard part, getting up close. To kill the doe, you endanger the fawn. You move for her baby. You threaten the fawn and then the mother won’t run off. She’ll come after you. Then, swick! Cut through her neck. Not sideways, but at an angle. Okay? A V-shape. You feel that? Good, good. Hey, boy, aren’t we having a high old time!”
    Then Lou would go inside to inspect the plates and bowls and make sure they were lined up on the checkered tablecloth, four squares from the edge, and sometimes when they were only three and a half squares from the edge or there was still a dot of grease on the rim of a melamine plate Stephen would listen to the slaps and the whimpers from inside the house as he lay on his back beside the fireand watched the sparks fly toward the dead moon.
    “You gotta be good at something,” the man would say later, his wife in bed and he outside again with his bottle. “Otherwise there’s no point in being alive.”
    Craftsmanship. He was talking about craftsmanship.
    Jodie now asked, “How come you couldn’t be in the marines? You never told me.”
    “Well, it was stupid,” Stephen said, then paused and added, “I got into some trouble when I was a kid. D’you ever do that?”
    “Get into trouble? Not much. I was scared to. I didn’t want to upset my mother, stealing and shit. What’d you do?”
    “Something that wasn’t real bright. There was this man lived up the road in our town. He was, you know, a bully. I saw him twisting this woman’s arm. She was sick, and what was he doing hurting her? So I went up to him and said if he didn’t stop I’d kill him.”
    “You said that?”
    “Oh, and another thing my stepfather taught me. You don’t threaten. You either kill someone or let them be but you don’t threaten. Well, he kept on hassling this woman and I had to teach him a lesson. I started hitting him. It got out of hand. I grabbed a rock and hit him. I wasn’t thinking. I did a couple years for manslaughter. I was just a kid. Fifteen. But it was a criminal record. And that was enough to keep me out of the marines.”
    “I thought I read somewhere that even if you’ve got a record you can go into the