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things they call a gasket today, I wouldn’t blow my nose on.”
    He looked up at me.
    â€œSo, Bones. When we goin’ huntin’, anyway? We got to get you a deer. Nice big eight-point buck.”
    â€œI’d have to wrestle it down,” I said.
    â€œWell, Jesus, man. We’ll get you a rifle. Maybe even a bullet or two. You think you’ll need more than one?”
    â€œOnly if you want me to get your deer, too.”
    â€œOh, listen to him,” Varney said, picking up a putty knife and whittling at the motor head on the bench. “Gonna get me my deer, too. Bones, we’re gonna make a hunter out of you yet. Get you one of those guns that the flag pops out of, says bang . The deer’ll die laughing.”
    I grinned and picked up a greasy bolt from the bench and put it down, then looked for something to wipe my fingers on.
    â€œSeen any?” I asked.
    â€œOh, hell yes,” Varney said.
    He whittled at pieces of old gasket. Sort of like a sculptor, I thought.
    â€œMe and the old lady went out back to the old orchard last night. Musta been, I don’t know, six-thirty. Quarter to seven. I says, ‘Just sit there and hush your mouth.’”
    â€œYou said that, did you?”
    â€œWell, maybe I did put it a little bit nicer. So we’re sitting there on a couple of grease cans. Marmon left ’em up there when he was cutting that oak and beech up on the ridge. Goddamn son of a bitch. Stove the place all to hell and shorted me to boot. But anyway. What goes around comes around, right? So we’re sitting there and we’re real quiet and it ain’t five minutes before they come. There were two does, one good-size one, and then a third one comes out of the woods, sniffing and slow like, and I says to Mary, ‘You just wait. These girls are gonna have an old man with ’em.’ It’s getting a little darker and there he comes, big old boy, eight points, over two hundred pounds, and he’s out there under those apple trees, eating the drops, tame asa goddamn sheep. From here to that shed. Could’ve hit any one of them with a rock.”
    â€œBut they won’t be there November first,” I said.
    â€œWon’t be there. Won’t be anywhere where you’ll find ’em easy. They’ll go back in those cedar swamps way up on—well it used to be part of the old Wilkinson place. Old man Wilkinson, he’s dead now. What a tight son of a bitch he was. Used to hay with him when I was a kid, me and my brothers. Penny a bale. Had to beg to get that out of him. Old man owned something like six hundred acres. So friggin’ crooked, they didn’t bury him, they screwed him into the ground.”
    I smiled. Varney put the putty knife down and dipped his fingers in a can of hand soap. He was meticulous that way. Always clean-shaven. Hair short and neat. Tools all lined up like the barn was a BMW garage in Westchester.
    What twenty years in the Marines will do for you.
    â€œWe gotta get you shootin’, Bones,” he said, smiling, but more with his eyes than his mouth. ’Cause you know what’s gonna happen. I could look for that buck for years and not even see a track. You’ll walk out there the first morning and he’ll tap you on the shoulder.”
    â€œHe does that, I’m gonna tap him back,” I said.
    Varney pulled a clump of paper towels from the dispenser above the bench.
    â€œAin’t that the truth,” he said. “Hardest thing to shoot is something that’s lookin’ you right in the eyes.”
    For a moment, Varney was quiet and you could hear the flies buzzing in the warmth of the windows. He did this every once in a while. He’d go off somewhere else, disappearing into the wells of his eyes. I waited, as I usually did, and then he was back, the lines on his temple crinkling as he smiled.
    â€œCome on, Bones. Come on in and have something real to eat, instead