You Only Get Letters from Jail by Jodi Angel Page B

thought that maybe the gunshot had come from Uncle Nick or Shirley—probably Uncle Nick more than Shirley, based on what she had accused him of—buck fever—not a sickness, but a weakness, she said. A jumpy hunter whose excitement got the better of him when the game stepped out from the trees.
    I started walking toward the sound of the shot and figured that even if I came up on other hunters I was moving in the right direction instead of ranging wider to the right. I didn’t want to be the last one to the clearing, make Shirley wait, take the accusation of her glare for the rest of the day. I needed the first kill and I hoped if another group had taken a deer it meant that a herd was moving down the mountain, that maybe there were more and they were coming my way.
    I kept moving left and forward, walking over downed limbs and rotten wood. The sunrise had brought smell back to the forest as the air warmed, and everything was rich and deep like broken dirt. Ahead of me I could see a flash of orange between the thick trees, and then I saw more orange and I kept moving forward until the orange took shape and I could see two vests, one up and one down. I started walkingfaster and thought that maybe Uncle Nick had finally taken his deer and I almost yelled out but then I thought maybe I was coming up on other hunters that I didn’t know and yelling might startle them and get me shot or scare something important or just make me look like an idiot.
    I pushed through another tangle of brush and saw that Shirley was standing on the edge of a gully—the ground dropped off in front of her and didn’t reappear again until it was a good eight feet away—and Uncle Nick was on the other side but half out of view because only the top of him was out of the gully.
    Shirley heard me coming and turned to me and her face was white. I had heard about faces going white—white as a sheet, white as a ghost, but I had never truly seen it happen. One time my friend Eddie drank half a bottle of Strawberry Hill and turned waxy yellow, but this color wasn’t the same. Shirley was white, and I stopped where I was as if her face had froze me.
    â€œIt’s bad,” she said and she turned back toward the gully and I waited for Uncle Nick to gain the high ground on the other side, but he wasn’t moving. His arms were above him and his rifle was over the edge of the gully, out of reach. He looked like he had stretched out and gone to sleep in the sun.
    Shirley slid down our side of the gully and I realized that it wasn’t that deep, maybe three or four feet, and then she was crouched next to Uncle Nick, touching him, rocking him from side to side. I stepped all the way out from the trees and went to the edge of the gully, dipped to the bottom, came up the embankment on the other side and looked down atUncle Nick. His right cheek was pressed to the ground but his left eye was open and looking at me and around me, but he did not blink. “He’s dead,” Shirley said, and she started rocking him again, pushing his arm with the palm of her hand so that he tipped up a little on his side and came down flat again.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I asked.
    â€œHe’s dead. That’s it. I don’t mean anything else.”
    She wasn’t crying and I’m not sure what I expected, but I watched a lot of TV and I knew that sudden death was tragic and full of hysteria and women had a tendency to scream, oftentimes in some sort of disbelief, and there was crying and a lot of shouting of the dead person’s name and a demand that he wake up. Wake up right now.
    But Shirley just rocked him with her hand, and then I knew what she was doing and I didn’t want her to do it, but she was faster than me and just as I reached down to make her stop, she put her weight into the rocking and got enough leverage to roll him over and then he was staring straight up at the sky and there was still only one