HUNTERS
by Ripley Mandanis
CLAY
It’s time now, so I put on the wolf head.
It doesn’t fit well; it never does. This hide wants a different kind of skull. Still, I’m able to line the eyes up, thanks to some careful doctoring after I first skinned and tanned the thing.
I close my eyes and open them again, breathing in the rich flesh smell. I use my wolf voice and tell the naked man quivering in the corner on a pile of his own filth that the door is right there. I’ve unlocked it for him and he’s welcome to leave. I’ll follow him of course, but still, he has a chance. That’s the point. If he doesn’t take that chance, I might get angry.
I can’t be held responsible for what I do when I’m angry.
Oh good. He goes for the door. Takes off into the night, barefoot. Adrenaline is a mighty powerful drug. When was the last time he ran like this? Probably not since middle school, if then. We’re all constricted by our comforts. Broken by convenience. Not anymore. Not this one.
Satisfied with the groundwork, I look back at the tools I’ve laid out over the table.
The rifle is always too easy, and tonight it’s a little windy for the bow. I scan over some knives, machetes, then take up a hatchet and follow the panting, fleeing prey into the trees.
KYRA
“What was your dad like?” Jude asks.
I blink once, twice, then six or seven times back-to-back and re-grip the steering wheel. Don’t even know that I noticed when I zoned out. Highway Hypnosis, I think they call it. Never happens when I’m on the XR. I wanted to take the bike down to Virginia solo but Jude wasn’t having it. I said I could do this by myself, but no, he said, he was coming for moral support, and so that meant Tegan was coming too, since we didn’t have time to find a Pet Sitter. Though, to be fair, T seems to be having the time of her life in the backseat with a window rolled down. She’s a born-and-raised New York City pittie. This is probably the longest she’s ever gotten to stick her head out a window without inhaling half a pack’s worth of secondhand smoke.
“Babe,” Jude nudges me.
Oh. Right. My dad.
“I know you don’t like to talk about him,” Jude goes on. “But I’d love to listen.”
Sweet Jude. He’s sitting in the passenger seat, eyes still glued to the map on his phone screen, but I know that’s mostly to keep me from feeling put-on-the-spot. I want to be annoyed, but can’t be. He’s right. I need to be thinking about this. Everyone’s gonna expect me to have something to say about it. I dunno. Where do I start. My dad was a racist redneck scumbag who somehow managed to charm the pants off my suburbanite mom, stopped living in his weirdo survivalist cabin, moved to Arlington, spawned a couple kids, did a couple tours in Afghanistan, and then came back to make our lives as miserable as possible until I turned eighteen, at which point I got the fuck out of dodge and never spoke to him again. Fast forward fifteen-ish years and here we are, in a Subaru Outback with NY plates, driving back down south for his funeral. This’ll be the first time I’ve crossed the Mason-Dixon line since I was fresh out of high school.
I don’t say any of that out loud. What I manage is: “He was really into hunting.”
“Yeah?” Jude perks up. “Had to live up to the family name?” Ha. Like I haven’t heard that one before. Still, I know he’s just trying to cheer me up, and it’s not his fault I’m in a shit mood. Again, I’d like to be pissy, but the fact that he genuinely cares so much combined with the fact that I guess I’m in love with him makes it kinda hard to act as evasive as I feel.
“Trophy hunting,” I hear myself saying. “He was really into, uh…repurposing, I think he called it. Skinning, tanning, I dunno, bone broth…he liked to use every part of the animal.” I swallow. My throat’s a little dry. “Everything except the head. He always kept the heads.”
On the side of the road, a billboard goes by with a woman’s face on it. The text reads:
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
I see Jude see it, and watch him rubberneck a little as it fades into the dust behind us.
“Anyway, he used to drag us along,” I say. “Me and Jacob. No guns. Longbow hunting. He said the gun was too easy. Gives you an unfair advantage. He said it was good for us to learn how to kill something that has a fair shot at killing you back.” I always thought that line was bullshit. I’ve never seen a buck carry a longbow. Jacob was really into it, though.
Another billboard. Another face. This one’s a teenager.
MISSING. REWARD FOR ANY INFORMATION.
Jude shudders.
“Would you do me a favor and share your location with me?” I hear myself saying it before I’ve even thought about it. “In case we have to split up while we’re down here?”
“Sure,” Jude nods, snapping out of his trance and tapping on his phone. Mine buzzes in my pocket. “Will you share yours too?” he asks. I nod. This is probably unnecessary, but this whole trip makes me nervous. I’ve never brought anyone home to meet my family since I moved, because I don’t ever go home. Things were bad when I was a kid, but at least I was used to it. Jude’s a native New Yorker. I know it’s irrational, but there’s a part of me that feels like if I let him out of my sight, my hometown won’t give him back to me. He’ll just disappear.
Another billboard goes by. Another woman’s face:
MURDERED. KILLER NEVER FOUND.
Jude grimaces. “Lot of those down here?”
I don’t know. I never really thought about it. Probably. I stick my hand into the back seat and Tegan licks my palm. I keep one hand on the steering wheel, and keep my eyes on the road.
JUDE
Well, Kyr did warn me we’d be the only trans people here.
There’s about a dozen folks in black huddled in this tiny plot of the otherwise massive Arlington National Cemetery. I’ve never seen a graveyard this big before. Closest thing we have in Queens is the Cemetery Belt, but that’s just like five little cemeteries squashed together. Even Greenwood in Brooklyn’s not even close. This place is like its own city of graves. Given Kyr’s experience, the headstone itself seems a bitter irony:
HERE LIES CLAY HUNTER. LOVING HUSBAND AND FATHER.
Kyra read me his obituary yesterday. Apparently, he died of a heart attack. She said that was kind of funny, since he’d probably have preferred to be mauled by a bear.
Kyr’s standing to my right, towering over me, the beautiful amazon warrior that she is. To her right is her brother, Jacob. I’ve seen him in pictures, but we’ve never met. I’d never met her dad either, but from the photos, Jacob could be his younger clone. To his right is Christine, Kyr and Jacob’s mom. None of them are crying. They’ve all got the same stony stare.
When the Priest is done, Christine speaks first. She talks quietly, and it’s windy, so I only catch a few words of it. Jacob’s up next. He speaks for under a minute in a low grumble and I get the sense he doesn’t want to be here. When he’s done, the Priest calls Kyra up, and then looks like he’s about to shit himself when he connects the face to the name. He looks down at the program to correct himself, but gets no help. Yes, this is her. No, there has not been a mistake.
Kyr takes the stand, all six and half feet of her, and I wonder how many people among the mourners have ever even seen another transsexual before, let alone listened to one address a crowd. No one says anything, but suddenly nobody seems to know what to do with their hands. I watch their fingers fiddle around their belts, shift in their pockets, worry the buttons of their jackets. I can just make out the outlines of the guns under a couple people’s clothes.
Kyr clears her throat. “My dad,” she starts, “was… difficult. There’s no point in acting like he wasn’t. You all knew him.” She pauses. “When I was a kid, if I ever acted up at school, he’d drive us down the highway at night, then pull over by the side of the road, kick me out of the car, then make me walk home in the dark.” She smiles slightly. “He said it was partially a punishment, and partially an exercise for my internal compass. Two birds, one stone.”
Next to me, Jacob smirks. Christine elbows him.
Kyr scratches her jaw. It’s hot and a kind of humid that absolutely nothing could have prepared me for. I’m sweating through my suit, and my binder is cutting into my ribs. I need to get this shit off as soon as the service is over, otherwise I’m gonna faint. A mosquito the size of my thumb lands on the back of my hand and I squash it. It pops like a grape. Tegan, who is sitting loyally at my side, looks up expectantly as if she’s heard me think the word “grape.”
Treat? she seems to ask. I scratch her head and look back toward the headstone.
“Once,” Kyr goes on, “when my brother Jacob was eight, he asked my dad which of us he loved more. My dad said it wasn’t his job to love either of us but he’d leave everything he owned to whichever one of us grew up strong enough to string his bow. Can you believe that?”
She scans the faces in the crowd. Her voice has gone dry. This isn’t a speech anymore. She’s just angry. I can’t blame her. She’s talking to the people who drove her out of town, and they’re the same people who’d have thrown a fit if she hadn’t come back down here today. A lot of southern social minutiae is lost on me, but I know disrespect when I see it. I feel a little bad for insisting that we come down together. I’m starting to wonder if maybe the reason she said she wanted to go alone was because it’d give her the leeway to back out at the last minute. But getting her to talk about family stuff has always been like pulling teeth, so I was trying my best not to interrogate her. Maybe I should have.
She wraps up the speech pretty abruptly, then stalks back to me, fuming. Jacob watches her like this is all funny in some way I don’t quite understand. Christine’s gone a little pale.
“Well, I did it,” Kyr hisses under her breath. “Are we done yet?”
“Oh, almost,” Christine whispers. “Come back to the house first. Just for a cup of tea.”
CHRISTINE
I clear my throat and set the tray down on the coffee table. “Shall we read the Will?”
All three of them look up at once. Kyra (he, ah, I mean, she, is calling herself “Kyra” now, grown his–her hair out, and he–she has clearly done something to his–her body but I’m not sure what, and it’s a little unsettling), and Jude (his or her girlfriend? partner? this one looks like a girl in boy’s clothing to me, but Kyra introduced her or, ah him, as his er, her boyfriend? this is all too confusing for me, I don’t see how they can expect me to keep up), and Jacob (my little angel and perfect boy, so handsome, just like his father) all look a bit startled.
Kyra looks at Jude. Jude, who has been staring warily at Clay’s guns on the wall ever since we let her into the house, frowns. “Isn’t there supposed to be a lawyer for that?”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” I say. This northern girl (boy? girl-boy? transgender? transsexual?) doesn’t understand what kind of man my husband was. How could she–(he)? Kyra at least is nodding. She’s irritated, but not surprised. Jacob is smiling. Always the perceptive one.
“You already know what it’s gonna say,” Jacob says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. “You said it at the service. You thought that was funny?”
“About the bow?” Kyra asks. “No, I just thought it was fucked up that he would say something like that to an eight-year-old. Stringing a bow isn’t even really about strength; it’s about leverage. He was just being an asshole.”
Jacob scoffs. He knows the truth, his father’s truth, and he wants to tell her. Not yet.
I clear my throat again, and for a moment, I have their attention back.
“I’m afraid Jacob’s right,” I say. “That’s all the will says. I’ve already read it. Of course, this house is in my name, so he’s really just talking about his cabin. And his legacy, of course.”
Jacob’s eyes light up. He’s been waiting for this moment.
“Ok,” Kyra nods. “Jac, you can have it. I’m good.” She starts to stand up.
Jacob’s face falls. His hands clench into fists. I don’t know how Kyra manages to do this. She always says exactly the thing that’s going to upset him.
“Oh yeah?” Jacob asks. “Just like that?”
“Mhm,” Kyra nods, and motions for Jude to join her. “I got bored of dad’s weird mind games twenty years ago, I’m not playing them now. You want the cabin. I don’t. So, take it.”
“It’s not mine yet,” Jacob says. He steps between Kyra and the door.
Kyra stops and looks critically at him. “Dude,” she says. “Don’t make this weird.”
“It’s in the Will,” Jacob hisses. “It’s not mine unless I win it from you.”
Kyra rolls her eyes and groans with her whole body. Jude is watching the two of them like a tennis match. She (he?) has never seen brothers (siblings?) like them before, I’m sure.
“Just come out to the cabin with me,” Jacob says. “We can both take a crack at the bow. Then you can fuck off back to New York and we’ll see you at the next funeral.”
For a moment, Kyra looks like she wants to hit him, but she doesn’t. She never has. Even when he used to hit her first. She was a good big brother (sister?), but too kind. That wasn’t ever what Jacob wanted. Jacob always wanted to be like Clay: he wanted to be seen as a threat.
Some telepathic exchange I can’t make out passes from Kyra’s face to Jude’s. Jude nods.
“Fine,” Kyra says to Jacob. “You drive.” She turns to Jude. “Stay here with T?”
“Yes, stay,” I say, even though no one is listening. “We’ll get to know each other.”
This is happening too fast. It’s not going the way we planned. Jacob is too impatient. My sons (sons?) are out the door, just like that, leaving me alone with this… Jude person. She (he?) turns to look at me, starts to say something, and then stops.
I hear Jacob’s truck start up outside, and listen to it roll out of the driveway.
“Hey,” Jude says slowly. “Where’s Tegan?”
Oh god, I’ve forgotten about that awful, slobbering dog. Where did it get off to?
“T!” Jude calls, and the dog barks from somewhere deeper in the house.
“Oh goodness,” I say, shuffling toward the sound, “I’ll go get it.”
“Probably better if I go,” Jude says sheepishly. “She can be a little jumpy before she gets to know you.” She (he?) steps past me, down the hall. The barking is coming from the basement, and by the time I realize what the goddamn dog has found, it’s too late. Jude screams, and I know the game is over. I should have locked all the doors. I thought I had more time.
I take one of Clay’s rifles from the case on the wall and slowly make my way down to the basement, as quietly as I can. These stairs always creak. When I reach the bottom, Jude is standing in the middle of the basement, surrounded by Clay’s trophies, dialing furiously on her phone. Silly girl. There’s no service down here. I cock the gun.
Jude turns to look at me. “Christine?” Her voice shakes, but she stands her ground. I realize as I look at this strange girl that I don’t really know anything about New Yorkers and that I haven’t asked her a single question the whole time she’s been in my house. My son (daughter?) finally brings someone home, and this is how I treat her? Terribly embarrassing.
I close one eye and level the gun.
Jude’s face hardens. Suddenly, she yells: “Bite!”
And the dog hits me like a train.
The gun goes off in the air. I hit the ground, hard. My leg is screaming. Jude shouts something I can’t quite make out and the dog’s jaws unlock. It lets me go, then I hear footsteps over my head as the two of them run back up those terrible, creaking stairs.
I taste blood in my mouth. I must have hit my head.
The room spins. The faces of my husband’s trophies all blur together.
Clay, bless his heart, could never help himself. He always had to keep the heads.
JACOB
I park the Tacoma at the end of the gravel road into the forest and we clamber out, then slowly make our way through the trees toward the cabin. There’s no path. We don’t need one. We could find this place blindfolded. Dad made sure of that. I try to make conversation:
“How come this is the first time you’ve brought someone home to meet us?”
My deviant freak of a brother frowns. “I brought a girl home in high school once. Dad was super weird about it, and then I never saw her again. She just disappeared.”
We walk the rest of the way in silence. Quiet like the woods. When we reach the cabin and I key us in, the bow is lying there on the table as if it were waiting for us. A fresh string lies coiled next to it, waiting to do its duty. My inverted sibling gestures to it. “Go ahead.”
I could kill him. He knows I can’t string the bow. I’ve been trying since our father first put the idea in my head. No matter how much I can bench or squat or deadlift, sweat and strain, it doesn’t matter. I can’t string the bow. But maybe the prodigal son-thing can’t either. Then we’ll have to settle this another way. My way. I turn to look at “Kyra.” He looks at the bow.
For a moment, all the sounds of the forest fall away. Neither of us moves. Kyra stares at the bow, and for a split second I could swear that it’s staring back at him, calling for him, begging for him to take it. It’s never looked at me like that. Suddenly, there’s a knot in my throat. Then the moment passes. I can hear the cicadas and the wind in the trees, and I can breathe again. Kyra looks back at me.
“I’m not gonna do it,” he says. “This is stupid.”
And in a way, he’s right. My idea is better.
I turn to the trophies mounted on the wall. Dad’s heads. The buck, the bear, the coyote, the moose… Mom went to a lot of trouble moving the other ones back to the house. The special ones. She wants to show Kyra the whole collection, to make him understand, to bring him in, but that all sounds like wishful thinking to me. We’d have to convince him to kill that boy-dyke he brought home. It’s the only way we’d ever be able to trust him, and I know he won’t do it. He doesn’t have it in him. He’s not like me.
I discovered Dad’s secret years ago. I don’t know if he ever intended to bring me in, but I didn’t leave him any choice. The only way I could earn his respect was by forcing his hand. That was how I became a man. “Kyra” doesn’t realize how right he was to be afraid of our father, and he doesn’t realize how wrong he was to never be afraid of me.
He’s about to learn.
I reach out, and take the last trophy off the wall. The stitched together, hollowed out one that can be worn like a mask.
The air changes. I feel my brother tense up behind me. Too late.
It’s time now, so I put on the wolf head and turn to face him.
He stares at me. He’s so baffled for a moment that he doesn’t even see it coming when I pull out my hunting knife and lunge. He catches my wrists at the last second and the blade slashes across his ribs, rather than sliding between them like I’d wanted. Shit. He’s still fast.
He headbutts me. Right through the wolf’s face. I see stars. I taste blood in my mouth. I slash with the knife. He ducks, then punches me in the face. His fist gets caught in the wolf’s mouth, and I can’t see shit with the mask off kilter like this, but I take the opportunity to put everything I have into the knife. I make contact. I drive the point into him. He screams and falls back. I let the knife go with him. I straighten up, adjusting the mask so I can see again. He’s slumped back against the table. The knife is sticking out of his side. He’s breathing hard. Good. That won’t kill him, but it’ll slow him down. That’s all the advantage I need.
A dog barks in the distance. Tires on gravel. Fuck. How could they have followed us?
My brother is turning a little green, but still manages to smile knowingly at me.
He taps the phone in his pocket as his jeans start to turn black with spreading blood.
“Location on,” he rasps.
Motherfucker. I grab Dad’s hatchet off the wall and take off out of the cabin. I’ll kill the other one first. “Jude.” I’ll kill her. I’ll kill the dog. Get them out of the way. Let my pervert brother bleed out in the meantime and finish him later. I can kill all three of them. Dad must have killed dozens all by himself. I can too. I have to. It’s my duty. It’s my birthright. My legacy.
I see the Subaru parked between the trees. A door opens and that fucking pit bull runs out, snapping its jaws. I raise the hatchet, and my sibling’s voice behind me calls out:
“Jac!”
And I don’t know why, but I turn around.
The trees line up like a long hallway and I can see straight through the window of the cabin, twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred yards back. Kyra is standing in the middle of the cabin, staring right at me, holding our father’s bow. She notches an arrow and pulls the line taught.
Of course, she was able to string it. She probably could this whole time.
Leverage. Fuck her.
The dog barks behind me. I turn toward it and raise the hatchet.
And somewhere far behind me, I hear a short, sharp SHUNK as Kyra lets the arrow fly.
TEGAN
The bad man wearing the dog face lifts the sharp thing over his head, and then a stick goes through his chest. It takes him off his feet and pins him to a tree. He stops moving. Jude (who is my dad and I love him very much) gets out of the car and runs to me, grabs me, and tries to pull me back, but I keep barking, because I can smell Kyra (who is my mom and I love her very much) and she smells like she’s bleeding. I want to run to her but Jude won’t let go of me so I stay put, but oh, oh, oh, Kyra’s smell is coming closer now which means she can still walk. Oh! Oh, oh, oh! She’s alive! She’s ok! Ohhhh, good, good, good, good! I run up to her and bark so she knows I’m happy to see her but I don’t try to jump on her because I am a good girl and she looks like she is having trouble standing up so I walk next to her even though I would like to jump on her (because she is my mom and I love her very much). Jude runs up to Kyra and says something that I don’t understand all of because Jude is crying (but part of it is: Kyr, she had heads in the basement, human heads, it was those people from the billboards, Kyr, oh my god, fuck) and Kyra doesn’t say anything, she just keeps limping toward the car. Jude wraps his arms around her and holds her tight and the two of them lean against the side of the car and slide down it until they’re sitting in the grass, and Kyra finally talks: she tells Jude she loves him, and that she didn’t know, and she’s so, so, so sorry she brought him here and Jude says it’s ok, it’s ok, he loves her too, and I run in a circle around them and bark because I love them both too, and Jude asks Kyra if she’s going to be ok, and Kyra says probably but she’s gonna need stitches, and she laughs, and then she starts crying, and Jude pets her hair the way he pets me and whispers to her: it’s ok baby, it’s ok. We’re ok. We’re all ok. Let’s get out of here, baby. Let’s go home. We don’t ever have to come here again.
Ripley A. Mandanis (she/her) is a graduate student and adjunct lecturer at CCNY. Her fiction, essays, and poetry are featured in Bloodletter Magazine, No Dear Magazine, New Words Press, Lilac Peril, Left Voice, Exquisites, and WMN Zine. She also teaches workshops on transgender history and culture at SUNY Westchester. Originally from Arlington, VA, she now lives in Queens.