Angels Unaware

monse?”
“Mon-ths,” I would correct him. For all his linguistic prowess, some sounds still announced that he was no native. “And you won’t see me in school for many more monse, so stop looking.” I gave him a sideways glance. “Besides, not all of us are as popular as you and want to go to that stupid hillbilly school for stupid hillbillies.”
He laughed, unoffended. “I should teach you to speak Italian. Then you could be sarcastic in two languages.”
“There’s nothing you can teach me. I’m older than you, and I know more.”
“Only one year,” he said. “I know something I could teach you. I could teach you how to hunt, how to use that shotgun you have in the barn.”
“How do you know about that?” I demanded.
“I saw it there. Why? Is the gun a secret?” he whispered, as if willing to be a part of the conspiracy.
“No. I know how to hunt just fine.”
“You don’t. I mean you could probably hit an elephant if it agreed to stay still long enough. But I mean deer, squirrel, something you could eat.”
I hesitated and hesitation is weakness.
“Tomorrow we will get up before the sun,” he said, “and we’ll walk until we find a proper place.”
I didn’t say anything. Not then. Not all through dinner that evening. I did not want to go with him. I did not need to learn anything from him. I did not like his company. I particularly did not want to be alone with him. And yet, when he came down the next morning wearing all the clothes he owned because it was a very cold morning and still dark, I was waiting for him. And if you had asked me why, I would not have been able to answer. Not then. Not yet.
We walked north. I didn’t know what we were looking for and didn’t want to ask him. So I just walked behind him and observed the silence. It was the only time I ever remember walking behind him and it felt natural and uncomfortable at the same time.
Finally, he stopped and pointed to a ridge. “See that? That’s a natural funnel, a space between the mountain and the road. The deer can’t get to the creek without passing this way.”
I nodded and he took my arm, leading me to a thicket where we crouched down behind the thick trunk of a fallen tree. “Keep your ears above the trunk or you won’t be able to hear them approach,” he said. “This gun only shoots one bullet at a time. We’ll only have one chance. If we miss, the animal will be in Wilkes Barre before we can reload. I’ll hand the gun to you when the deer’s in sight. You look down the barrel and squeeze very slowly. Now all you have to do is listen and be very quiet. No talking.” He laughed a little in anticipation of his own joke. “I know you can go without talking, sometimes for days on end.”
We sat there for what seemed like hours. My fingers and toes had long since lost feeling, and I was just starting to wonder whether they might be lost to amputation when I heard a faint rustling. Luca’s hand gripped my thigh in a quick squeeze, then swiftly, silently he pivoted the gun to his left so that his face, staring down the barrel, was so close to my own that I could feel his breath on my eyelashes. Something happened to me in that moment. I felt a rush of warmth, where I had been freezing only moments before and I wondered vaguely if that was a sign of frostbite. My heart pounded in my ears, as if I’d been winded from running, and my head swam. Time slowed or stopped or simply wasn’t—I can’t explain it any better than that—but I could look at him as if from a distance, though his face was mere inches from mine, and I thought how very beautiful he was, more like a painting or a sculpture of a man than a man himself and how fine his hands were, not coarse like farmers’ hands but not soft either, just perfectly formed hands. Then, as if it were coming to me in a dream, I felt him pressing the gun on me and murmuring, “Squeeze slowly.” But my arms were heavy and limp and I could not lift them to take the weapon. A gunshot sounded so close to my ear that I was deafened. I felt his shoulders heave back from the recoil, and he lowered the gun. “He’s going to run. He’s dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.” Luca motioned me to follow him and I did. “He’s looking for a place to die. We must allow him that much. All we have to do is follow the blood trail.”
Luca walked with his eyes to the ground. I supposed there was blood there and I supposed we were following it, but I couldn’t say for sure because my eyes were fixed upon him, held there by some mysterious gravitational pull like the moon on the tides.
We found the buck in a sheltered spot under a thicket. A hunter who could not read the signs of its flight would have never found it. Luca took a knife from his belt and cut the animal from throat to tail, then reached his hands within its body and removed organs that steamed in the cold air, all the while keeping up a narration of anatomy: “Heart, the best to eat….Liver…Intestines, we’ll make sausage…” When the entrails had been deposited in an old feed-sack he’d brought for this purpose, he tied a length of rope around the buck’s antlers and handed me the sack with the entrails. We made our way out of the woods and back home, him dragging the deer and me walking behind him carrying the sack still dripping blood.
I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point, on our walk home,