The Hunter

Rip streaks after them, vowing to tear them apart. “Well, sonofabitch,” Cal says, amused. He’s been trying to build up a relationship with his colony of rooks ever since he arrived. It’s working, but the relationship isn’t exactly what he had in mind. He had some Disney idea of them bringing him presents and eating out of his hand. The rooks definitely feel he’s an asset to the neighborhood, but mainly because he leaves them leftovers and because they like fucking with him. When they get bored, they yell down his chimney, drop rocks into his fireplace, or bang on his windows. The barking is new.

Almost at the tree, Rip does a 180 and tears off around the house towards the road. Cal knows what that means. He heads back into the house, to unplug the iron.

Trey comes in the door alone: Rip and Banjo are playing tag around the yard, or hassling the rooks, or rooting out whatever they can find in the hedges. The dogs know the boundaries of Cal’s land, which is ten acres, more than enough to keep them occupied. They’re not going to go chasing sheep and getting themselves shot.

“Went and got this,” Trey says, swinging the chair off her back. “Your woman over the mountain.”

“Good job,” Cal says. “You need lunch?”

“Nah. Had it.”

Having grown up dirt-poor himself, Cal understands Trey’s prickly relationship with offers. “Cookies in the jar, if you need to top up,” he says. Trey heads for the cupboard.

Cal puts his last shirt on a hanger and leaves the iron on the kitchen counter to cool off. “Thinking of getting rid of this,” he says, giving his beard a tug. “What do you figure?”

Trey stops with a cookie in her hand and gives him a stare like he suggested walking naked down what passes for the main street in Ardnakelty. “Nah,” she says, with finality.

The look on her face makes Cal grin. “Nah? Why not?”

“You’d look stupid.”

“Thanks, kid.”

Trey shrugs. Cal is well versed in the full range of Trey’s shrugs. This one means that, having said her piece, she no longer considers this her problem. She shoves the rest of her cookie in her mouth and takes the chair into the smaller bedroom, which has turned into their workshop.

The kid’s conversational skills being what they are, Cal relies on the timing and quality of her silences to communicate anything he ought to know. Normally she wouldn’t have dropped the subject that fast, not without giving him more shit about what he would look like clean-shaven. Something is on her mind.

He puts his shirts in his bedroom and joins Trey in the workshop. It’s small and sunny, painted with the leftovers from the rest of the house, and it smells of sawdust, varnish, and beeswax. Clutter is everywhere, but it’s ordered. When Cal realized they were getting serious about carpentry, he and Trey built a sturdy shelving unit for boxes of nails, dowels, screws, rags, pencils, clamps, waxes, wood stains, wood oils, drawer knobs, and everything else. Pegboards on the walls hold rows of tools, each one with its shape traced in its proper place. Cal started off with his granddaddy’s toolbox and has since accumulated just about every carpentry tool in existence, and a few that don’t officially exist but that he and Trey have improvised to suit their needs. There’s a worktable, a lathe bench, and a stack of mixed scrap wood in a corner for repairs. In another corner is a dilapidated cartwheel that Trey found somewhere, which they’re keeping on the grounds that you never know.

Trey is kicking a drop cloth into place on the floor, to stand the chair on. The chair has good bones. It was handmade, long enough ago to have a dip worn into the seat by many rear ends, and another worn into the front stretcher by many feet. The back and the legs are delicate turned spindles, ringed and beaded here and there for decoration. It’s spent much of its life near cooking or burning, though: smoke, grease, and layers of polish have left it covered in a dark, tacky film.

“Nice chair,” Cal says. “Gonna have to clean it up before we do anything else.”

“I told her that. She said good. Her granddad made it.”

Cal tilts the chair to inspect the damage. “On the phone she said the cat knocked it over.”

Trey makes a skeptical pfft noise. “Yeah,” Cal says.

“Her Jayden’s in my school,” Trey tells him. “He’s a prick. Hits little kids.”

“Who knows,” Cal says. “All these are gonna need replacing. What wood do you figure?”

Trey examines the seat, which all those rear ends have kept clean enough to show the grain, and the insides of the breaks. “Oak. White.”

“Yeah, me too. See if we’ve got a piece thick enough to turn. Don’t worry about matching the color; we’re gonna have to stain it anyway. Just get the grain as close as you can.”

Trey squats by the assortment of scrap wood and starts poking around. Cal goes out to the kitchen and mixes white vinegar and warm water in an old jug. Then he dusts off the chair with a soft cloth, leaving space for the kid to talk into if she feels like it, and watches her.