The Searcher(79)

Trey looks down at the bag, and it sinks in. “Hah!” he says, a sound halfway between a burst of breath and a triumphant crack of laughter. “I did it!”

“You did, all right,” Cal says, grinning down at him. He feels an impulse to clap the kid on the shoulder. “Come on,” he says instead, turning towards the house. Its wall is lit to pale gold by the setting sun, so that it stands square-set and radiant against the gray sky. “Let’s take it home.”



They dress the rabbit on Cal’s kitchen counter. He shows Trey how to take off the feet, make a slit across the rabbit’s back and hook his fingers under the skin to pull it off, twisting the head away with it; then how to cut open the belly, free the organs and coax them out. He’s pleased to find the skill coming back to him so smoothly, after all these years. His mind hardly remembers what to do, but his hands still know.

Trey watches intently and follows Cal’s instructions, with the same methodical neatness that he brought to the desk and to the gun, as Cal shows him how to pinch out the urine sac cleanly and how to check the liver for disease spots. Together they strip off silverskin and sinew and the mangled front leg, then cut away the three good legs, the belly and the loin. “There’s your eating meat,” Cal says. “Next time I’ll make stock from the rest, but today we’re gonna put a little bit of this back where we got it.” It’s what he and his granddaddy did with his first squirrel, way back when: gave the parts they didn’t need back to the wild. It seems like the right thing to do with a first kill.

They take the offal down to the back of the garden and leave it on the stump, for the rooks or the foxes or whoever gets to it first. Cal whistles up to the rooks, but they’re settling into their tree and ignore him, except for a halfhearted rude remark or two.

“Well, we did offer,” he says. “You hungry? Or that take the edge off your appetite?”

“Starving,” Trey says promptly.

“Good,” Cal says, glancing up at the sky. The strip of pale yellow has dimmed into a clear green. “I was planning on stew, but that takes a while. We’ll just fry it up.” He wants Trey home before it gets too late. “You like garlic?”

“I guess.”

It occurs to Cal, looking at his blank face, that he may not know. “Let’s find out,” he says. “You cook?”

Trey shrugs. “Sometimes. Sorta.”

“OK,” Cal says. “You’re gonna cook today.”

They scrub up, and Cal puts on some Waylon Jennings to help them work. Trey grins up at him.

“What?”

“Aul’-fella music.”

“OK, DJ Cool. What do you listen to?”

“Nothing you’ve heard of.”

“Smartass,” Cal says, getting ingredients out of the little kitchen cupboard with the busted hinge. “Lemme guess. Opera.”

Trey snorts.

“One Direction.”

That gets him an outraged stare that makes him grin. “Well, thank the Lord for small mercies. Quit complaining and listen. Maybe it’ll teach you to appreciate good music.” Trey rolls his eyes. Cal turns up the volume another notch.

He shows Trey how to shake the chunks of meat in a plastic bag of flour, salt and pepper, and then fry them up in oil, with strips of bell pepper and onion and some garlic Cal picked up in town. “If I had tomatoes and mushrooms,” he says, “we could throw those in too, but Noreen’s tomatoes weren’t looking too perky this week. This’ll do fine. We’ll have it with rice.” He microwaves packet rice while Trey, frowning with concentration, turns the meat frying in the pan. The kitchen is warm, condensation veiling the window, and starting to smell good. For a minute Cal thinks of the dusk thickening outside that window, and about the fear in Sheila’s eyes and Caroline’s, but he puts them out of his mind.

Cal is waiting for Trey to bring up Brendan again, or the cottage, but he doesn’t. For a while Cal is wary of this; he’s inclined to take it as a sign that the kid is making plans he’s not sharing. Then he happens to glance over, checking how the rabbit is doing. The kid is poking at the frying pan and nodding his head along to “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” his lips pursed in a goofy half whistle, his cheeks rosy from the heat of the stove. He looks several years younger than he is, and completely at ease. It comes to Cal that, for once, the kid’s mind isn’t taken up by worrying about Brendan. He’s rewarded himself for the rabbit by allowing himself to put that away, just for a little while.

Trey looks askance at his plate when they sit down at the table, but after one bite his doubts disappear. He shovels in the food like he hasn’t eaten in weeks. His face is practically touching the plate.

“Turns out you like garlic, huh?” Cal asks, grinning.

The kid nods, over another big forkful.

“This dinner’s down to you,” Cal says. “Start to finish. No farmer, no butcher, no factory, no Noreen: just you. How’s that feel?”

Trey is smiling a particular small, private smile that Cal has come to realize means he’s specially happy. “Not bad,” he says.

“If I had my way,” Cal says, “I’d do this for every piece of meat I ever ate. It’s harder and messier than buying a hamburger, but that seems fitting. Eating a creature shouldn’t be a light thing.”