To the Bone by Neil McMahon Page B

“Are there a lot of them around? Rattlesnakes?”
    â€œI only ever killed one other. I was getting firewood and it came out of the woodpile, between me and the door. Things got pretty tight for a minute there.” Monks pointed at the woodshed, an old board-and-batten structure with only a narrow aisle between the stacks of split rounds. “The cats have taken out a few. They leave them on the doorstep.”
    â€œI didn’t know cats would hunt snakes.”
    Another harsh image from his past seared Monks’s brain—the cats on the hood of the Bronco, leaping and howling in the moonlight, while on the front seat a cobra weaved from side to side, trying to strike at them through the venom-smeared windshield.
    â€œThese cats will,” he said.
    They walked on, past the workout shed. It was almost dark, cool and still now, with the jays quiet. Higher up, a breeze rustled the redwood fronds and madrone leaves. A few tree frogs were tuning up for the night’s concert. He walked slowly and she kept pace with him, swinging her leg without complaint. But on this rough and hilly terrain, she would get tired quickly. Monks stopped again, on the edge of the gully that led down to the creekbed.
    â€œThat old cabin down there?” he said. The neighboring place had been abandoned decades ago and had mostly fallen into the creek, a couple hundred yards down the steep hill. “I forbade the kids to go near it, but of course it was a magnet. One day, I’d worked all night and was trying to get some sleep, and I heard this shriek. I ran down there and found poor little Stephanie, she was maybe eight, screaming bloody murder. She’d jumped off something and landed on a rusty old fence post, broken off to a point, sticking a couple inches out of the ground. Went right through her tennis shoe and clear up through her foot.”
    Stephanie, his daughter, was now in medical school at UCSF. She and Martine had gotten quite close.
    For a minute or so, Martine was silent. He could see her head moving, her gaze wandering the woods, but not turning to him.
    Then, abruptly, she said, “I don’t think I want a kid. My mind doesn’t. I don’t even think my body does. I don’t know what it is.”
    She was forty-three. Monks was long since vasectomized and out of the child-raising mode. He did not consider that he had done all that good a job the first time around.
    â€œSorry I can’t help you there,” he said.
    â€œNo, you’re not.”
    â€œYou’re right. I’m not.”
    â€œHave any of your women ever told you you’re too honest?”
    â€œNo,” Monks said. “You’re the first.”
    â€œLiar.”
    He smiled gravely. They turned and started back. He knew, and supposed she did, too, that this had been a last-ditch attempt to woo her—offering the things that made him what he was.
    When they had first been together, there were words of passion, each assuring the other that this was what they had been waiting for. But it was useless to invoke that. The problem was not any single one of the obstacles, or even all of them together. The affair was just something that had run its course, and this was like the point in a really great party that had gone on most of the night, when a silence touched the room, and everybody knew that there might be a few more drinks and laughs, but the good-byes were going to start soon.
    If he hadn’t pushed, it might have lasted longer—maybe quite a while. But Monks could not leave things like that in general, and she was right. Today’s events had put him in the mood to have it out. He could have pushed it the other way, and asked her to marry him. But that would only be trying to bind her, to keep her from what she wanted—another chance at the kind of life most people considered normal, the kind of life that he had pretty much let go.
    He had not thought he would ever live with a