I walk downstairs because of the smell and find my father sitting on a blue tarp in the middle of the living room floor. When he shifts the tarp crackles beneath him like a poorly constructed fire fighting against the wind. It’s difficult to tell what the animals were before he began, maybe gray squirrels. I ask him what he’s doing but he only mumbles about things getting smaller and smaller. He waves me off with tufts of fur clumped to his blood-stained hand.

He’s right you know. Used to be you could feed the family with a brace of those there. Now, just a snack.

My father’s buddy Clint leans on the kitchen counter, both hands wrapped around a pint of Evan Williams. He swirls the plastic bottle atop the laminate pondering the dark liquid and shaking his head as if disappointed. Jimbo, his son, has draped his bony self on the couch, but despite the languidity of his body language his eyes are tight, focused, taking in every flick of my father’s knife and tearing fingers. If either of us had gone to college we would have been graduating this year. Maybe we would have taken the same classes. The thought of sharing notes and a graphing calculator with Jimbo is enough to make me glad I’d never considered leaving. Not really at least.

Why aren’t you doing that outside? It reeks in here.

My father doesn’t look up but Jimbo answers for him. Snowing. All icy out. Don’t you hear the furnace running? My father snorts in agreement. In his view it was incredible I was still alive. Not a gift or a mercy, more of an oddity he was unwilling to become involved with in case that reshaped the outcome.

I grab a jacket. I’m going out.

Didn’t you hear? It’s snowing. And not letting up either.

Ah let him be, Clint says.

Hey, Jimbo says. Could I catch a lift?

He doesn’t look at me when he asks but Clint and my father do. I don’t have it in me to argue.

 

Jimbo wants to go to the Barrel but first he needs to meet a guy at the motel to grab something. He says he’ll give me five for gas. When I hesitate he says he’ll share what he’s picking up. I give him a Merit and we smoke with the windows up on my Geo. I tell him it is because the cold isn’t worth it but really they never worked even from when I bought it. Some broken inner mechanism. Just another busted bit with no horizon for getting fixed.

The motel, The Mountainside Inn, squats in yellow brick, its eight rooms nestling among encroaching weeds and frosted Witch Hazel. Out front an old Buick idles, puffing a cloud of exhaust into the cold air that doesn’t quite dissipate. I can’t make out the driver. Whoever it is has scraped the ice off their windshield in a small square right on the driver’s side and left the rest covered over. Jimbo hops out of mine and hunches his way against the cold over to the Buick.

My father stayed in that hotel for a while after my mom left or kicked him out or whatever. Different stories depending on who is telling it. I’d slept my fair share of times in room eight and there used to be a water stain on the ceiling that looked just like heaven, gates and angels and all, but the last time I was there someone had painted over it. Some horrible yellow color made worse in contrast to the cigarette-burned brown carpet. What kind of asshole paints over heaven?

Jimbo hops back in, tosses a baggie of powder onto the dash, and blows hard into his cupped hands. Where we going? He rummages through the trash on the floorboard beneath his boots until he pulls up triumphant with an old CD case. It doesn’t have a sleeve insert so I can’t tell what it is, maybe Boyz II Men or The Five Satins. We take a couple of bumps off the case and then he puts it in his coat pocket.

Shit’s probably mostly Clorox, he says, but he smiles and proceeds to drum with surprising rhythm using his index fingers on the dash. He asks again, so where we going?

I thought you wanted me to drop you off at the Barrel?

Nah. Forget that. I want to do something. Like really do something, you know? The kind of thing that will make me glow. Bones all lit up like neon. Where were you planning on?

Nowhere. Just not there.

He pauses his drumming for a second, looking at me, head slightly tilted. He’s not so bad, your dad. Just, I don’t know, stays inside himself too much these days. Anyway, I’ve got an idea.

He won’t tell what the plan is, only gives directions out of town. He pops the Geo’s cigarette lighter in and out not bothering to use it. We’re heading toward Rifle or maybe Clifton I think but his bag has me all screwy, hot all up my sinuses and behind my eyes and he keeps drumming and popping the lighter and talking about Clint’s new girlfriend, anatomical details thrown in and vacillating between derision and exhalation and with the way he’s talking I can’t help but think about God and his many failed ways, and then, just as that unworthy thought crosses the threshold of my chemically burned mind the snow stops. Snuffed out. A candleflame beneath a quick, wet breath. And I can see the clouds encroaching, pushing closer and closer and closer, sure to crush us beneath their sodden weight. Already their heft bears down on my shoulders. I can’t breathe. I know it’s finally time. The firmament has come to call. Jimbo says something. I nod but I can’t look at him. I am afraid.

 

We make it to a field. It’s nothing special. Just a normal Colorado mountains who-the-fuck-knows-quite-where field. Pine trees and aspen, random frosted scrub. Beautiful. Desolate. The kind of place you don’t notice when you live in it but it could be on a postcard. We step over a fallen barb wire fence and the snow crunches beneath our steps. He shares some Evan Williams that he apparently swiped from his father. We chat about nothing and I’m glad as I’m still shaken from the clouds. The snow hasn’t picked back up, at least not yet.

How are your bones, I ask.

He chuckles. Can you see them yet?

I smile and try to pull a stick out of the snow but it’s stuck, thing’s got roots somehow. I try to pull it out, really put something behind it but it barely budges. I swear and drop it, my palms torn slightly from the effort.

Then Jimbo pulls a pistol out from the inside of his jacket pocket.

Let’s see what you can hit, he says.

My hand’s bleeding.

What?

Yeah. I know.

Oh. Well. It’s just a single shot. Bought it from Gary. Well, traded for it.

What happens if you miss?

Can’t miss with this. Blow a hole the size of basketball in the side of a barn.

I doubt that very much but he loads it and tosses it to me. I fumble it and drop it into the snow at my feet and swear and kick it trying to pick it up. The guns buries under the snow and I drop to my knees flailing about and pushing it farther away. Jimbo laughs so hard spittle drips from his lips and onto his chin. I laugh too, becoming more animated, making a right spectacle of myself. He mimics me and falls to the snow.

We lie there for a few minutes chuckling until the moment wears off. My face hurts from smiling and the snow all around me is pink from the cut on my hand. I sit up and with a grand gesture, attempt to hand the gun back to Jimbo, but he’s gone stock still. I look where he’s staring and at the edge of the clearing, maybe twenty yards away, stands the most perfect antelope I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure why it looks so perfect. I’ve thought about that moment many times, the image seared into my head. Maybe the curving prongs of his short antlers. Maybe the twin visible streams of hot air from his nostrils as he scrapes at the ground. Maybe just the way he holds his head. Symmetrical. Regal. Maybe it was the dope.

I slowly slide to my knees and level the pistol at it, aiming just behind his front leg. I breathe slow, adjust to aim a bit lower, expecting a kick. As I squeeze the trigger, Jimbo swats at my arm sending the shot low and into the snow and dirt. The antelope bounds off towards town before the ringing in my ears stops. A ghost gone before we knew to be afraid.

I’m so confused about what just happened I can’t speak. Jimbo is still holding my arm, his eyes wide. I feel a snowflake on my face and then on the back of my neck. I look up and it’s begun to snow again in earnest, and there doesn’t appear to be break coming.

 

On the way to the Barrel we don’t speak for the first bit. No smoke. No drumming. Just sitting in an unsettled silence, unsure of what to make of the antelope and what Jimbo had done. I hit a dip and nearly spin out on the ice. It must’ve jogged something for Jimbo. Still staring out the window, he begins to speak in a quiet voice.

Once my dad took me hunting. Back then, I was probably eleven or twelve, I could barely hold up a rifle. He had hurt his ankle and had a cast and crutches, but he wouldn’t cancel the trip. Said it wasn’t really for him, it was for me anyway. We drove way out east, almost all the way to Nebraska. We camped in our tent, the green one. We ate chili. It was fun. At least I think it was. It’s hard to remember those good parts.

But each morning we went out and walked the fields and I carried the rifle even though I’d only shot it a couple of times. We went slow because of his crutches. I tried to pay attention to everything. Crushed grasses. Skat. Game trails. Anything that would help us.

On the third morning we saw him. The last full day of hunting. He was standing on the crest of the ridge at first, body and prongs outlined against the rising sun. I remember he was so bright, so unexpected, so welcome. Just what we’d come for.

I waited for my dad to line up the shot but he said we should wait until he came down from the top of the ridge in case the bullet went through. The antelope could’ve gone down the other side, away from us. Maybe he would have kept on. Maybe we never would have found him. But that didn’t happen. He strolled toward us, casual, unaware, gently picking his way down like he owned every bit of the land he stepped on.

We found a mound of dirt and my dad leaned his crutches onto a bush and he awkwardly crawled onto his stomach. He sighted the antelope in and I covered my ears but he didn’t pull the trigger. Instead he rolled to the side and motioned for me to join him. I lay down and I could feel the blood pool in my feet. Everything tingled. He patted my shoulder and muttered something about how I could do it. I slowed my breathing. I pulled the trigger.

The rifle knocked me back, my shoulder immediately aching like I’d been socked by one of the older guys from church. I pulled the sight back to my eye but I couldn’t see the antelope. My dad had his binoculars up, slowly scanning the ridge. He swore and started to get up.

“What? What happened? Did I get him?”

“You clipped him alright,” he said covering long swathes of ground by putting his crutches out too far. “Blew his belly right out.”

He wasn’t dead when we found him. He’d got caught up in a bard wire fence. His guts were dragging and didn’t clear it when he tried to jump. I remember the smell most of all. And the fear in his eyes before we put him down.

My dad took care of everything and never said a word more about it. Told everyone it was a clean shot, better than he could’ve done. But I knew, even if no one else did. I still wonder what that antelope’s eyes saw when we got to him, what he knew. I bet he knew everything. I bet he could see where he was going, where he would end up, and that’s why he was so afraid.

He rubs his face and then knocks with a knuckle on the cold window, as if the sound might help him to understand what he just told me. He rummages through his pockets, apparently looking for the baggie but it’s gone.

It’s dark now, the roads shiny with ice and expectation. I pass where I would turn to head to the Barrel. Jimbo notices.

I thought I would show you something first. So in the motel, in room eight on the ceiling…

But then I’m coming around and something warm is running into my eye. I can’t make sense of it. Nothing is warm. It’s freezing out. And then I notice the cold seeping in through the busted window, though which, apparently Jimbo has flown. The warmth is blood of course. That’s all it ever could have been.

I don’t know what I hit, but the Geo is tilted at an odd angle. Snow falls heavily through the busted windshield, headlights illuminating each flake. The passenger seat is going to get so wet.

My door swings open easily and there, prongs cracked like mistaken providence, lies the antelope. It could be any antelope I tell myself but deep down I know. The animal is still alive somehow. It won’t be long though. There’s nothing to be done.

I find Jimbo in the ditch just ahead, his leg bent impossibly beneath him. I peel back his eyelid; try to see what he’s seeing. He’s somewhere else and I envy him that distance.

I rummage through the rear of the Geo until I find it and I wrap Jimbo in a blue tarp. Now that he’s splayed out, I can see where his shin bone has punctured his skin. It’s bright, nearly glowing, beneath the headlights and falling snow.

Jimbo’s breathing matches the dying antelope’s. They are in sync, barely breathing, existing in-between. I try to breathe with them, to harmonize, to get on their plane, but I can’t. I’m still solidly here, snow melting into my hair and dampening my shoulders. Jimbo groans and I half-carry, half-drag him back to the car. Only his height makes it tricky. He barely weighs a thing.