Thumbsucker Read Free Page B

wouldn’t pay up.”
    “Pay up for what?”
    Mike watched me open the beer and start to gulp it. I opened my throat and let the cold pour into me.
    “Easy,” he said. “Slow down. A sip or two.”
    I think we both knew that would be impossible.

2
    Next I lost my desire for food, my appetite. It happened in late October and took four days. It was as though my mouth were turning against me, my one source of pleasure becoming a dry hole.
    We’d been eating venison all month, trying to empty the chest freezer of game before Mike started filling it back up. We started with the chops, a cut I liked, and worked our way down to the sausages and roasts, which coated my mouth with waxy, rancid fat. I said I thought we should throw the meat away, the first time I’d everspoken out like this, but Mike said a moral issue was at stake. With another bow-hunting season coming up, he just wouldn’t feel right, he told the family, if last year’s kill and this year’s overlapped.
    “Ah, the ethics of savagery,” said Audrey. Smoke from the roast she’d been cooking all afternoon hung in thin gray layers above her head.
    “Hunting’s the basis of civilization,” Mike said. “Read your anthropology.”
    “I have. While you were out vanquishing Ohio State, your sweetheart was actually attending classes. And the basis of civilization, my dear, is agriculture.”
    Mike bore down hard as he carved the roast and it slid around on its bed of wrinkled carrots. He’d managed to convince me over the years that venison tasted better than beef or pork, even though my own senses told me other wise. This year, however, I wasn’t buying it. I tasted what I tasted, and it disgusted me. I remembered reading an article once that said the muscles of hunted animals produce a fear hormone that cooking doesn’t break down. I wondered how much of this substance was in me now.
    Half the roast remained when we finished dinner. Audrey wrapped it in cling film and in foil and stashed it in the back of the refrigerator next to an open box of baking soda, which meant she didn’t intend to touch it again. “Maybe your folks will take some venison home with them.”
    Mike’s parents were set to arrive the following morningon one of their rare trips west to Minnesota, a state which they considered the frontier. Everybody was on edge about it.
    “My mother thinks deer are precious creatures,” Mike said. “She thinks they have feelings.”
    “So do I,” said Audrey.
    “Human feelings. Not just the primal drives.”
    “And what would those be?”
    “Hunger. Thirst. Lust. Pain.”
    Audrey closed the refrigerator door. “It bothers me that you can tick them off like that.”
    Mike went into the yard after dinner to practice his archery in the fading daylight. His target was a paper bull’s-eye pinned to a stack of straw bales. Joel, who’d never shown interest in the outdoors—unlike me, who’d faked it out of guilt—was allowed to go to a neighbor’s house to play, but Mike demanded that I stay near and watch him. He notched an arrow, drew the string, let fly.
    “I used to have to sneak out to hunt,” he said. “My mother had some idea that it was cruel. What’s cruel is not letting a boy grow into a man because you’ve had a bad experience.”
    “What happened?”
    “Someone hit her once. A boyfriend. A smack me and Dad have been paying for all our lives. We snuck out to see a boxing match downtown once and when we got home she’d changed the locks on us.”
    “I’m surprised she let you play football.”
    “Dad drew the line.”
    Mike made a bull’s-eye. Another. I pulled the arrows out.
    “Your mother was wrong about civilization,” he said. “Civilization is a perfect lung shot.”

    Mike’s parents pulled in around lunchtime the next day in their new Winnebago motor home, the Horizoneer. Mike had asked them to visit at Thanksgiving, when it wouldn’t interrupt his hunting, but Grandma had insisted on seeing Joel and me