ALT EXAMPLE - EBOOK - THE HUNTER'S WIFE - Flipbook - Página 5
The hunter met his wife in Great Falls, Montana, in the winter of 1972. That winter arrived
all at once—you could watch it come. Twin curtains of white appeared in the north, white
all the way to the sky, driving south like the end of all things. Cattle galloped the fencelines,
bawling. Trees toppled; a barn roof tumbled over the highway. The river changed
directions. The wind flung thrushes screaming into the gorse and impaled them on the
thorns in grotesque attitudes.
She was a magician's assistant, beautiful, fifteen years old, an orphan. It was not a new
story: a glittery red dress, long legs, a traveling magic show performing in the meeting hall
at the Central Christian Church. The hunter had been walking past with an armful of
groceries when the wind stopped him in his tracks and drove him into the alley behind the
church. He had never felt such wind; it had him pinned. His face was pressed against a low
window, and through it he could see the show. The magician was a small man in a dirty
blue cape. Above him a sagging banner read THE GREAT VESPUCCI. But the hunter
watched only the girl; she was graceful, young, smiling. Like a wrestler, the wind held him
against the window.
The magician was buckling the girl into a plywood coffin, which was painted garishly with
red and blue bolts of lightning. Her neck and head stuck out at one end, her ankles and feet
at the other. She beamed; no one had ever before smiled so broadly at being locked into a
coffin. The magician started up an electric saw and brought it noisily down through the
center of the box, sawing her in half. Then he wheeled her apart, her legs going one way,
her torso another. Her neck fell back, her smile faded, her eyes showed only white. The
lights dimmed. A child screamed. Wiggle your toes, the magician ordered, flourishing his
magic wand, and she did; her disembodied toes wiggled in glittery high-heeled pumps. The
audience squealed with delight.
The hunter watched her pink, fine-boned face, her hanging hair, her outstretched throat.
Her eyes caught the spotlight. Was she looking at him? Did she see his face pressed against
the window, the wind slashing at his neck, the groceries—onions, a sack of flour—tumbled
to the ground around his feet?
She was beautiful to him in a way that nothing else had ever been beautiful. Snow blew
down his collar and drifted around his boots. After some time the magician rejoined the
severed box halves, unfastened the buckles, and fluttered his wand, and she was whole
again. She climbed out of the box and curtsied in her glittering dress. She smiled as if it
were the Resurrection itself.
Then the storm brought down a pine tree in front of the courthouse, and the power winked
out, streetlight by streetlight. Before she could move, before the ushers could begin
escorting the crowd out with flashlights, the hunter was slinking into the hall, making for
the stage, calling for her.
He was thirty years old, twice her age. She smiled at him, leaned over from the dais in the
red glow of the emergency exit lights, and shook her head. "Show's over," she said. In his
pickup he trailed the magician's van through the blizzard to her next show, a library
fundraiser in Butte. The next night he followed her to Missoula. He rushed to the stage
after each performance. "Just eat dinner with me," he'd plead. "Just tell me your name." It
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