Calamity

She insisted, and when Kat insisted, she always got her way.

Not that she didn't usually get her way, but Brett had decided to draw the line at some things, like hunting. Hunting is a pastime for men, usually him, his best friend since middle school, Ed Hicks, and a hunting enthusiast from work named Tim Jantzen. For at least four years, the three of them had been meeting at Miller's Quickstop every third Saturday morning of the month during deer season and riding together in Ed's truck to the hunting club near Ridgeville. There, they unloaded their guns and each trekked alone through the woods to his favorite tree stand.

They liked to tell others, especially those who had objections to hunting in general, that a day of the year never went by that they couldn't go to the freezer for a cut of venison to cook. Tim, a bachelor, said he dumped a package of frozen meat, a can of carrots and a can of Bud Light into a Crock-pot before he left for work in the mornings, and when he got home, he enjoyed a delicious stew that cost him literally only pennies. "I like things simple," he'd said many times, and always Brett agreed with him.

After the hunts, if any of them had gotten a deer, the others met at the shooter's stand to gather the animal for the trip to the deer processor. If no one had any luck, they met at the parking area and stood around the tailgate of Ed's truck for a while, talking over recent events at work or the week's most spectacular football plays or controversial calls by the referees. Sometimes they talked about local happenings or recent political machinations. They almost never talked about religion or money, but sometimes they talked about sex, usually in the form of raunchy jokes they'd picked up on the job or in their e-mail. They never talked about women, at least not about their own relationships with women. Women just didn't belong in the woods.

"If I am going to be married to you, I'd like to know all about you," Kat said while he pulled his hunting gear off the shelf in the garage. "No secret hunting trips with the boys. Lord knows what you're liable to be up to while I think you're sitting out there in the middle of nowhere."

They were getting married in seven weeks. Brett had spent the long summer looking forward to the beginning of deer season because he knew he'd get at least a few hours reprieve from the constant stream of "decisions" about food, caterers, flowers, invitations, seating arrangements, and too many things that didn't really seem important enough to him to make much of a fuss over but that Kat spent hours comparing and considering and changing her mind about.

Now, he was taking her hunting with him. Ed and Tim were not going to be happy when he showed up with her, even though they'd clearly enjoyed her company at parties and their occasional Sunday afternoon cookouts since he'd started dating her a year and a half ago. The hunting trip was almost sacred. It was a serious thing, not a social event. It was not a place for a fiancee.

Kat was almost silent on the drive to the Quickstop, and Brett worried over this. It either signaled that she had fallen into a pensive mood and would stay quiet for most of the day, which would be a good thing. Or it meant that she was building up a stream of chatter, which she'd probably unleash as they sat in the stand, alerting any deer within the vicinity that there were humans, which the deer mysteriously always recognized as a threat, in the area. Even though he usually hated her silly talking when she was excited, he almost wanted her to start up the chatter now, on the drive, to get it out of the way so maybe she could sit quietly for the couple of hours they'd be in the stand. He didn't think it was going to happen, though. He tried once or twice to engage her, but she responded without enthusiasm, so he gave up and drove.

"So this is it?" she asked him as he pulled the truck up next to Ed's F 150 in the parking lot of the Quickstop. He shut the ignition and looked at her. He'd given her an old mesh camouflage jacket to wear over her T-shirt and a pair of camouflage pants that were too tight on him now that he'd gained a few pounds. She'd had to cinch up the pants with a belt to keep them from sliding off. Her pale face and blond hair pulled back into a long ponytail seemed to glow against the mottled dark fabrics. She started to get out of the truck.

"Wait," he said and he rummaged in the console and came up with the camouflage face paint. She looked at the plastic compact and laughed.

"You wear makeup?" Her mouth was open and her teeth gleamed at him. He should have known.

"It's face paint," he told her, rubbing his fingertip one at a time in the green, the brown, and the tan compartments and smearing a stripe of each color across her cheeks beneath her eyes. Then he smudged the colors together, a little too urgently. When he finished, she dropped the visor and flipped the mirror and looked at herself.

"Just because it's not girly colors doesn't mean it's not makeup," she said, and then she was out of the truck and greeting Ed and Tim, who had looks of what he thought were a combination of surprise and fury on their faces. In the dark before dawn, a few minutes after 4 a.m., they didn't seem to want to argue the fact that Kat was here and she was going with them to hunt deer.

The tree stand overlooking a thick growth of woods with a small clearing just at the end of a narrow cut through the trees they used as a path in and out had been his choice since he'd joined the club. It was comfortably larger than average, built of salvaged plywood and spray painted a freehand camouflage pattern on the outside and in. Frayed burlap screens covered the open sides, and a ledge across the front opening made a convenient gun rest. Brett liked the familiar smell of the stand, the smell of musty burlap, old wood, moss — that warm damp smell of deep woods on a fall morning. He liked the way the raw wood felt under his boots, and how when he looked through the slit in the front burlap screen, he had a perfect view of a well-traveled deer path that ranged along the edge of the clearing below. Brett always sat this stand. He considered it his.

Brett silently unfolded one of the lightweight portable stools he'd brought along, and Kat sat gingerly on it, her hands tucked between her knees for warmth. He sat down next to her, and pulled the 30.06 across his shoulder and laid its barrel across the railing in front of him. Kat motioned at him. "Let me," she whispered. He knew it. Now she was going to hold the gun and pretend she was actually here to hunt. He shook his head, but she stuck her chin out at him and frowned, which he knew meant "Do it now!" if it had been a spoken command rather than a silent one, and he slumped his shoulders in resignation and slid the butt of the heavy rifle toward her.

She set up like an old pro. He'd taken her to the shooting range a few times, so he knew she could handle the weapon. She'd told him a little too often that she'd gone hunting with her father and his friends several times when she was a girl. He'd figured she was just talking, but now, it seemed she knew what she was doing. He settled his back against one post of the stand and got as comfortable as he could, watching the opening in front of them and waiting for the daylight to slant in through the trees.

He had fallen asleep and when he felt her shift her weight on the stool just enough to angle her body a little to the right for a better shot at the animal in the clearing, he awoke from a dream of being deep underwater and praying for air. He saw her shoulders tense then relax, and he sensed rather than heard her take in a long breath and exhale steadily as she pulled the trigger.

He waited for her to react to the firing of the rifle, but she showed no sign of feeling the force of its recoil. He remembered hearing Ed say at a party some years ago that women didn't like to shoot long guns because they ended up sore and bruised from not holding the gun firmly. "They wanta squeeze it instead of holding it close against 'em," he'd said seriously, and the small group of men who were his audience snickered and nodded. Another man in the group said, "They don't like to see nothing die, either."

Ed responded quickly, "Except their menfolk and only when they're the ones doin' the killin'."

"And it's usually a death by tongue lashing," the other fellow added, and the group responded with laughs and agreements.

Some time later, as the daylight spread through the woods and birds began their daily songs and the echo of the rifle shot had ceased to ring in his ears, he heard Ed's truck approaching through the cut in the woods and he tapped Kat's shoulder.

"OK. Now you gotta go get her," he told her and without hesitating Kat handed the gun over to him and scrambled out of the stand.

He watched the top of her blond head from above as she descended the wooden steps that formed a ladder to the stand. She looked so sweet when she glanced up at him as she stepped off the bottom rung and onto the ground, smiling a little lopsidedly with her lips pressed together and her eyebrows raised. He felt his chest tighten up and then she turned and walked toward Ed and Tim, who were out of the truck and walking over to the edge of the clearing to check out the trophy.

As the three of them closed in a circle around the downed animal, he saw her say something to Ed that he couldn't hear and he heard Ed say, "Dang, girl! We're gonna start calling you Calamity, like Calamity Jane!"

Ed laughed, clapping her on the back the way he did any of the guys when they'd accomplished something admirable. Brett could almost feel the weight of Ed's thick hand between his shoulder blades as he watched. He frowned in the direction of the group, squinting in the brightening day. He'd pulled the burlap screens aside and secured them to the posts of the stand, which was always the last thing he did before the end of a hunt.

"Or Deadeye," Tim added. "That's a helluva shot, little lady."

Kat nodded in agreement and Brett almost expected her to tip her head to the side, spit on the ground at their feet and adjust herself, just like any of them might have done in the face of the same compliment. Instead, Kat crossed her arms and stood there looking proud and satisfied, the delicate pale fingers of her right hand laced just above the bend of her left elbow.

As Brett stepped out of the stand and onto the ladder, he suddenly imagined a morning years from now, when he might be here in these woods, maybe in this same spot with Ed and Tim or someone else, but not her. Kat would be home, making some blond-haired children clean their rooms before they watched Saturday morning television, or getting them ready for a ball game or a dance recital or helping them decide what college to attend.

She'd take yoga classes or aerobics and count every calorie and gripe at him about his beer belly and the unknown lawn. She'd spend six months buying Christmas presents and six weeks wrapping them, while he'd get everything on Christmas Eve and pretend he meant to give the items unwrapped. She'd complain about his watching football and falling asleep in some beat up old La-Z-Boy he'd had since he could remember, an object of perfect form and function to him but to her an eyesore in the middle of her otherwise neat and well-decorated family room.

He looked across the clearing and saw a flash of blond ponytail, and he remembered how he'd felt last February when he'd asked her to marry him and she'd said, "Yes, I will marry you, Brett." He wanted to feel that same feeling now, wanted to believe what he'd believed then, that this was it, she was the one, they'd be together forever, crazy in love and always happy. But as he stood alone on the ladder halfway to the ground, he knew he'd never know that feeling again.