Read Want Not for Free Online

’90s, the home-slash-house was now, Elwin had to admit, a weird eyesore. He’d made the offer on it himself, while Maura was still back in California, thinking they’d enjoy a renovation after all those years of living in prefab ranch houses—antiquing over in Bucks County, DIY Saturdays with a pot of chili simmering on the stove, the nerdy-fun detective work of historical restoration, et cetera. This had been a serious miscalculation. “Well, you’ve always liked rescuing things,” was Maura’s first impression of the place, her hostile tone more suited to a statement like
You’ve always liked my sister’s ass.
She was so thoroughly cool to the house that she seemed ambivalent about unpacking the moving boxes, in retrospect a glaring signal. Had there been other signals? Hundreds or none, he couldn’t be sure. He realized the preposterousness of saying he’d never seen the affair coming—does anyone?—yet the stark fact remained: He’d never seen the affair coming. And worse yet, the aftermath.
    Shutting off the engine felt like an act of mercy. The noise had gotten worse, much worse, and the Jeep rolled into the driveway like one of those smoking, rattling, backfiring Model Ts you saw in Laurel and Hardy movies. He glanced at the upper windows of the house next door—home to Big Jerry, a retired lineman with Jersey Central Power & Light; his wife Myrna; and their twin boys, Christopher and Joey, who like their dad worked for Jersey Central—and was relieved to see them stay dark. Elwin wasn’t certain, at the moment, that he could take Big Jerry, whose bombastic helpfulness caused him to preface nearly every utterance with “Whatchoo gotta do, see . . .” With a wince, he imagined Big Jerry stomping across the shared driveway, all too ready to dispense aid:
Whatchoo gotta do, see . . . is get rid of that fuckin deer.
By now, Elwin’s wine buzz had worn off, having been flushed by the adrenaline torquing his veins for the last half hour—and that was ebbing, too. He shook his head after opening the Jeep’s rear door and seeing the deer peacefully curled therein, like a napping child.
    The immediate question was where to clean the deer. He settled on the fire escape at the rear of the house, the other option being to hang it from the big maple tree, streetside, which he nixed for obvious reasons. The only viewers he’d risk seeing the deer beneath the fire escape—and his lurid autopsy of it—were Big Jerry and family, an unpleasant but manageable potentiality. Their standard weekend apparel—camouflage overalls, antler-emblazoned t-shirts—and the bowhunting targets in their backyard augured some measure of empathy.
    Inside the house Elwin muttered hello to Bologna, a fifteen-year-old mutt that he’d found, as a half-starved, mange-ravaged, and seriously ugly puppy, on the side of the Ventura Highway licking a dead duplicate of itself—clearly, someone had dumped a litter there. Maura had never warmed to the dog, gladly bequeathing custody of him to Elwin when she’d moved out, which Elwin could have held against her but didn’t—gassy, drooly, and dumb as a brick, Bologna was a challenge to love. The dog, deaf and more or less blind, raised his head, sniffed the air, then nestled his snout back into the dandery folds of his dog bed. “Hey boy,” Elwin mumbled, headed downstairs.
    From the basement he gathered a pair of rubber cleaning gloves, his old stag-handled skinning knife (stowed there with the rest of his Grizzly Adams paraphernalia: fishing waders, unwed flyrod sections, camouflage bib overalls, binoculars, a tin-plated manual meat grinder, magnesium firestarter, a rifle cleaning kit, half-empty ammunition boxes, all of it perfumed with the ’70s, with the odor of mildewed ideals), three Hefty garbage sacks, a headlamp, two lengths of rope (one nylon, one sisal), a rusted hacksaw, and, after noisily dumping its contents into yet another Hefty garbage sack (he was improvising