The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(31)

She thinks of it as a joint effort. In fact, she does all the work, while her father stands nearby, drinking from a thermos, watching the lake.

He has green eyes, like hers, but they are cloudy, troubled. His hair has thinned over the years to a weak shade of pumpkin. His features are angular, like the eroded ridges of a chewed cuttlebone. She thinks of him as tall and strong, but he has already started his decline. The smoking and drinking, the bouts of depression—all this has begun to take its toll.

She cuts the connecting tissue from the liver of the deer, holds the organ in her gloved hands—a heavy thing, milky black like petroleum, quivering as if it still held life. She checks for disease spots. Finding none, she sets the liver on ice along with the heart.

Her father always insists on this—save the heart. Save the liver.

She tells him that the liver is healthy, hoping this will please him, but he just stares at the lake. She wishes his thermos held coffee, but she knows it is whiskey with lemon and sugar.

Her job done—the entrails scooped out, the carcass cleaned with fresh water—she wedges a stick into the deer's empty chest to keep the rib cage apart.

Her gloves are sticky with blood, but she doesn't mind the work—the cutting, the cleaning. There is something satisfying about seeing the mess, the chaos of organs—and slowly cleaning it out, tying off the tubes, avoiding spills that could spoil the meat, sorting the innards, leaving a clean and empty shell, neatly framed by the symmetry of ribs.

"Would you like me to clean your doe?" she volunteers.

Her smile is sincere. She hopes for a smile in return. She has been so efficient—learned everything he taught her, done everything to make him proud.

She recalls the time when she was about eight, going with her father to Crumley's Store. He had ruffled her hair, told his friends that he needed no son, that he had his best hunting buddy right here. She protects that memory—drinks from it when she's thirsty, keeps her hands cupped around it like an exposed pilot light.

Now, her father is not five feet away from her—wearing the hunting parka she bought him for his birthday, tattered jeans, the deer rifle he has had as long as she can remember, even before her mother died.

It takes him several minutes just to remember she is there. He has been watching the waterline, as if suspecting that even now, so many years later, the lake is rising, eroding what is left of his inheritance. Only recently, a third business failed on his property— another lessee defaulting on their contract. What little money he has invested in stocks is doing poorly. He doesn't share the worst of this with his daughter—not yet—but she knows something is wrong. She knows the lake is sapping his life.

At last he says, "I'm sorry, sweetheart."

And he looks as if he wishes to say something more, but his voice dissipates as quickly as the steam from his mouth.

She remembers that brief moment of clarity in his eyes, twenty minutes before, when he aimed the gun, brought down the doe with a single wellplaced shot. She wishes there were another whitetail deer to kill.

Her buck is a much greater trophy, but she is willing to field dress his doe as well. She wants to be shoulder to shoulder with her father in the work, touch his hands, smell his breath, even if it reeks of whiskey.

Instead, he sets his gun against the tree. He kneels, grasps a handful of dry leaves and cedar nettles, lets them slip through his fingers. There, at the highest point of their property, at a place where the food can never touch, he seems to be praying, and she knows instinctively that whatever his prayer, it will not be answered. Fourteen years on the lake have taught her to expect that.

So she cleans her knife blade—the sharp steel, four inches, well weighted. She goes to the doe and turns it belly up, feels along the white fur until she finds the point for incision below the sternum.

She makes the cut as her father once showed her—inserting her fingers under the skin, making a V, cutting with the blade up, being careful not to puncture the intestines.

She can tell the doe was nursing, and she knows she must remove the mammary organs right away. Milk goes bad quickly. Nothing will spoil the taste of the meat worse than that.

She works with the knife, trying to be hopeful, trying to believe that she is drawing closer to her father, that he is not slipping away, becoming less and less present the more deer tissue she slices through.

She ignores the smell and the blood. She cuts away the mess— lets the offal spill out, prepares her father's doe lovingly.

And the less he pays attention, the more meticulous she is, the more she needs the knife and the wellmade incision, the liver without spots, the heart cut away and drained of blood.

Imagine her on that hill, and you will realize why she treats men as she does. Her affections were cut away long ago, examined for impurities and set on ice, claimed at the point of a hunting knife.

CHAPTER 13

"I can't talk to you," Dwight Hayes said.

He'd already helped himself to one lukewarm bottle of beer from the sixpack on the floor of my truck, and was starting on his second.

"Of course you can't," I said. "Which way on 135?"

"North."

We did a U on San Gabriel, went under the highway, took the entrance ramp. I said,

"What was your little disagreement with Pena?"

One street lamp went by. Two. We passed the UT campus on the left, the Longhorn stadium lit up for an event.