Stephen Graham

This scene of terror is repeated all too often in elk country every season. Over the years, the hunters’ screams of anguish have rocked the timber.
—Don Laubach and Mark Henkel, Elk Talk

he gets the rest of the trophies for having avoided all the car crashes and jail time and alcoholism on his cultural dance card. Or maybe the reward for lucking through all that—meth too, he guesses—is having been married ten years now to Peta, who doesn’t have to put up with motorcycle parts soaking in the sink, with the drips of Wolf-brand chili he always leaves between the coffee table and the couch, with the tribal junk he always tries to sneak up onto the walls of their next house.

Because he’s such a good and considerate husband, he eats it over the sink. Either that or he’s kind of scared of the living room. His big irrational fear now is that that spotlight in the ceiling’s not broken, it’s just waiting for him to be the right kind of alone, so it can shine down like a UFO beam, a woman with an elk head materializing in it. Or it can shine down on Peta when she’s standing right there, that light showing her true form.

Which is just Peta, Lewis insists to himself, raising the last triangle of the grilled cheese high to slam it down through the rubber flaps of the disposal, as if a grilled cheese can be the deciding gavel. It sort of works, but the crust breaks away on the backswing, lets that last good bite go flying. Trying to imagine either him or Peta finding a moldering hunk of bread and, worse, cheese behind some jar or can next week, he flips the light on, hunts the lost bite down.

Instead of finding it, he sees a paperback on top of the refrigerator. Not either of the two Shaney left in the garage, which he already put up, but the third in the series. Already. Beside it is Peta’s thermos, the one she takes to work, that she can never find, that she evidently didn’t find this morning, either. The thing with her is she’s tall, so when she comes home she sets stuff in the first place she sees, which is generally somewhere high. The top of the refrigerator, this time. The book must have been out front somewhere, the porch, maybe.

“You can bring them back all at once…” Lewis says to the idea of Shaney, taking the book down from its perch, and, as if by design, the guilty last bite of grilled cheese is right there behind it. Lewis pinches it up like it’s gross, like he wasn’t just eating it ten seconds ago, and delivers it to the sink, the headline scrolling across the back of his forehead: INDIAN MAN FIRST IN HISTORY TO PICK UP AFTER HIMSELF.