It was on one such miserable morning that Keith Higstrom’s father swore off hunting forever. They were riding a tank-sized swamp buggy in hot pursuit of a scraggly, half-senile bobcat. Suddenly Keith began firing wildly at an object high in the sky-a bald eagle, it turned out, a federally protected species. The attempted felony was not consummated, due to the young man’s shaky aim, but in the fever of the moment he managed to blow off his father’s left ear.
Deafened, blood-drenched, writhing facedown in Everglades marl, the elder Higstrom experienced a peculiar catharsis, an unexpected soothing of the soul, as if a cool white sheet were slowly being drawn over his head. Yes, his injury was terrible, and the deafness would (if he came clean about it) cost him his job as an air traffic controller. On the other hand, he could never again be forced to go hunting with his excitable son!
Keith Higstrom couldn’t duck responsibility for the accident, nor the guilt that went with it. His father recovered from the gunshot wound, and was kind enough not to bring it up more than once or twice a day. Before long, Keith’s remorse gave way to an unspoken resentment, for he perceived that his father was using the missing ear as an excuse to avoid their weekend expeditions. A plastic surgeon had attached a durable polyurethane facsimile to the left side of the elder
Higstrom’s head, while a high-tech hearing aid had restored the old man’s auditory capacity to eighty-one percent of what it was before the Everglades mishap. Yet he stubbornly refused to pick up a gun. Doctor’s orders, he squawked.
For Keith, outdoor companionship was increasingly hard to come by. His friends always seemed to have prior commitments whenever Keith invited them to go hunting. Frustrated and restless, he spent long sullen weekends cleaning his guns and watching videotapes of his favorite American Sportsman episodes. Whenever his trigger finger got itchy, he’d drive out the Tamiami Trail and park by the canal. As soon as darkness fell, Keith would load a double-barrel shotgun, strap on a headlamp and stalk along the shoreline. His usual targets were turtles and opossums; anything faster or smarter generally eluded him.
Shortly after the hurricane, Keith Higstrom noticed four dairy cows and a palomino mare grazing on his neighbor’s front lawn. Everyone on the block was gathered on the sidewalk, laughing and taking pictures; a light moment of relief in the otherwise somber aftermath of the storm. That night, drinking with his buddies at an Irish bar on Kendall Drive, Keith asked: “How much does a cow weigh?”
One of Keith’s friends said, “I give up, Higstrom. How much does a cow weigh?”
“It’s not a joke. More than an elk? Because I got cows loose on my street.”
One of his friends said, “From the hurricane.”
“Yeah, but how big do you figure? More than a mulie?” Keith Higstrom drained his Budweiser and stood up. “Let’s go hunting, boys.”
“Sit down, Higstrom.”
“You pussies coming or not?”
“Have another beer, Keith.”
With a burp, he charged out the door. He drove home, slipped into the den, and removed his grandfather’s old .30-06 from the maple gun cabinet. He dropped a box of bullets, and giggled drunkenly when nobody woke up. He pulled on his boots and his mailorder camo jumpsuit, strapped on the headlamp, and went looking for a cow to shoot.
They were no longer grazing in his neighbor’s front yard. Dropping into an exaggerated half crouch, Keith Higstrom weaved down the block. He felt light as a feather, lethal as a snake. The rifle was slick and magnificent in his hands. His plan was to tie the dead cow on the front fender of his Honda Civic and drive all the way back to Kendall, back to the Irish bar where his chickenshit pals were drinking. Keith Higstrom chuckled in advance at the spectacle.
For cover he used mounds of hurricane debris, shuffling noisily from one to another. The street was empty and black and shadowless; the homes on the north side still had no electricity. Passing the Ullmans’ house, Keith Higstrom heard something in the backyard-deep raspy snorting. He thought it might be the runaway palomino. As he snuck around the corner of the garage, the beam of Keith Higstrom’s headlamp illuminated a pair of glistening indigo eyes, as large as ashtrays.