The Rat Hunt

Garland Bruce, driving to the annual rat hunt, coaxed his new Dodge pickup from the highway onto a secondary road, lighting a cigarette with his hands free of the steering wheel. Spent tomato fields passed by, sheets of black plastic slowly swallowing up the flagging stalks and fruit not suited for canning. In the distance a boy shuffled along a berm between field and woodline. Here and there he paused to kick at brush, and Garland wished for an explosion of quail, but no explosion came before the boy, who, like the dead field around him, faded from sight.

The road narrowed, the macadam surrendering to gamy oyster shells that snapped under the pickup’s tires, ditches to either side, the chest-high water tinted brown. Beyond the sandy steep banks, tangled brakes of briar and marsh grass quivered with feathers and tatters of paper, an abandoned couch sat as if awaiting a tired traveler, an oven with a creased door pitched on its side. Under the branches of a loblolly pine sat Dan Bloodworth in his rust-green Impala that doubled as home; the tiers of electronics and appliances and bagged aluminum cans sitting around the car reminded Garland of a members-only discount store. Dan had been pastor of his church until boys in the congregation brought charges. After his release the landfill and a mixed-breed dog became his life. He tapped his horn and called out, “Dickie Dan,” and the dog barked a shrill warning from Dan’s lap; but Dan responded with nothing more than one of his patented looks, intense and confused. “Must be interrupting sex,” Garland said to himself, bringing the rotting car into his rearview mirror.

One of the ditches diverged and widened, angling away to an anchored dredge—the decks and sides and spartina around it all dusted with a patina of silt. He passed mounds of recently dredged bay floor, the drying sludge intended as cover for compacted trash. Then the sour yellow currents of living things now rotting reached him as the landfill came into view. He tossed his cigarette and rolled up his window, suddenly disheartened by ten acres of the unrestorable and extra, the bulldozed waves where seagulls worked the spume and called out as if at sea, while the catacombed rats waited for dusk.

The others were grouped upwind on a promontory overlooking the great pit. He found his friend and hunting partner, David Earl—in designer jungle fatigues and bush hat—leaning against his Ford Explorer, his face smooth, his hair trimmed, a hickory cane in hand. A few feet away a woman in camouflage applied eye drops while an audience of men looked on. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, and the sight of a woman, especially one so choice, gave him pause. He traced her profile and turns of blonde hair as she pinched the bridge of her nose and gave her head a shake. He whispered, “Jesus of swollen rivers save us.”

He parked, retrieved his Winchester .30–30 with telescopic sight, hunting jacket, and cooler with twelve iced-down Buds. “I smell me cologne,” he said, cracking the door, though he smelled nothing but foul moldering rubbish. He took an exaggerated sniff of air. “I smell me something sweet.”

“You should’ve seen me before I had a bath and shave, Garland; couldn’t tell me from the bears,” said David Earl, adding, “Got us some cold ones over here.”

David Earl had been county sheriff until the night he and his deputy boarded a cigar boat suspected of transporting marijuana. David Earl, hand to bulwark, stepped down and upset the boat’s equilibrium which triggered a shotgun round from his close-following deputy that changed both their lives. Now he spent his pension hunting and fishing from the suv. “When did you get back?”

“When it was too late to call,” said David Earl.

Garland waved to some others as he closed on David Earl, setting down his cooler and shaking hands. “Too damn many women in your life.”

“They’re like ticks, Garland. Can’t keep...