The Golden Shadow

The rifle smelled like Sicily. Not literally -- it was a Model 70 Winchester, Remington manufacture, bought new in a store in Albany in 1942, three months before Patrick Moran shipped out for Palermo. But to Red, it smelled like Sicily the way a bottle of cologne smells like a woman: not the thing itself, but the memory of it, the ghost of it, the thing you can never quite forget even when you wish you could.

He cleaned the rifle every Sunday. That was the only reason he bothered with it. The deer in the Adirondacks were plenty. The bears were plenty. He did not need the rifle for food. He cleaned it because cleaning it made him feel like he was doing something that mattered, and for the past eight months, nothing Red Moran had done had mattered at all.

The cabin was small. One room, a wood stove, a cot, a table, a shelf with three cans of beans, a box of crackers, and a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey. The walls were pine boards that hadn't been planed. Red had built the cabin himself, six months ago, after he'd decided that Hell's Kitchen was too small a place for a man who had seen what he had seen.

Hell's Kitchen was where he'd been born. It was where he'd worked for the Genovese family as a collector and a cleaner -- which meant he went to places and asked people for money they didn't want to give, and when they said no, he made sure they gave it anyway. He had done this for twelve years. He had done it well. He had done it badly. He was not proud of either fact.

The golden fox appeared at dawn on a Tuesday.

Red was sitting on the stump behind the cabin, drinking coffee from a tin cup and watching the sun come up over the ridge, when he saw it. It was on the far side of the clearing, maybe thirty yards away, standing in a patch of sunlight that fell through the trees like water. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Not because of its color -- though it was gold, the kind of gold that made you think of coins and light and things that were valuable and warm. But because it was alive. It was moving. It was exactly what it was supposed to be, with no hesitation and no apology.

Red had spent his entire adult life destroying things that were exactly what they were supposed to be. He had destroyed men. He had destroyed families. He had destroyed reputations and livelihoods and marriages and lives. And now, sitting on a stump in the Adirondacks at dawn, drinking bad coffee from a bad tin cup, he was looking at the most beautiful thing he had ever seen and he wanted to ruin it.

Not because he hated it. Because he hated everything else. Because the fox was proof that beauty existed in the world and he had spent twelve years making sure that beauty never reached him. If he killed it -- if he put a bullet in its chest and watched it die on the snow -- then the world would be the size it should be: small, ugly, and entirely his.

He raised the rifle. The fox did not move. It stood in the patch of sunlight and watched him with eyes that were dark and flat and knew exactly what he was thinking. Red felt something in his chest tighten. He lowered the rifle.

The fox ran.

Red followed.

He did not chase fast. He did not need to. The fox was running away, but it was not running fast. It was running at a pace that suggested it wanted him to follow. It was leading him. Red knew it was leading him. He did not know why he was following.

The terrain changed as he went deeper into the mountains. The pine trees gave way to hemlock. The hemlock gave way to bare rock and scrub brush. The ground sloped downward, and the wind changed direction, carrying the smell of water and iron and something else -- something old and metallic that made Red think of blood, though there was no blood here.

The fox stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked back at him. Behind it was a hole in the ground. A mine shaft. Maybe eight feet across, its edges lined with rotting timber that had gone grey and splintered with age. The shaft went down into darkness. Red could not see the bottom.

The fox jumped in.

Red stood at the edge of the shaft and looked down. Nothing. Just dark. The smell of water was strong down there. Iron-smelling water. He could also smell something else -- something organic and decomposed, the smell of things that had been wet and dark and untouched for a very long time.

He had three mining tools in his truck: a pickaxe, a shovel, and fifty feet of rope. He took the rope and tied one end around a sturdy spruce at the shaft's edge. He lowered the other end into the dark. The rope disappeared. He let it down about forty feet and pulled it back up. Wet. Smelled like iron.

The fox was in there. Somewhere. Red did not know why he felt compelled to get it out. Perhaps because it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Perhaps because he was bored. The mountains were beautiful and empty and Red was bored. He had come here to disappear, but disappearing was boring when nobody knew you existed and nobody cared if you lived or died. Even the fox, which had jumped into a mine shaft for reasons that made sense to the fox and nobody else, seemed more alive than Red felt.

He lowered the rope again. This time he tied a loop at the end. He let it drop. The loop opened in the dark like a mouth.

Red pulled the rope up. Empty.

He lowered it again. Pulled it up. Empty.

Lowered it. Pulled it up.

The loop caught on something. Red pulled harder. The rope held fast. He yanked it free.

The gunshot was loud in the shaft. Red felt the bullet catch him in the forehead just below the right eyebrow and push him backward. He fell onto the rotting timber at the shaft's edge and his back hit the ground and the world went white for half a second and then dark.

The fox climbed out of the shaft. It moved quietly, efficiently, the way it had moved everywhere it had moved since Red saw it on the ridge: without hesitation, without apology, exactly as a creature that knows what it is and does not need anyone's permission to be it. It sat at the edge of the shaft and looked at Red. Its eyes were dark and flat and knew exactly what was happening.

Red looked back at it. He thought about the men he had killed. Not the ones in Sicily -- he did not think about them anymore. He thought about the men he had killed in Brooklyn. A guy who owed Genovese three thousand dollars and told him he did not have it. A guy who had it and refused to give it to him. A guy who was friends with the guy who refused and happened to be standing next to him when Red decided that friendship was complicity.

Three men. Three men who had been alive and then were not. Red remembered all three of their faces. He could not remember the face of the man he had kissed good-bye before shipping out of Naples.

The fox stood and walked away, through the scrub, across the ridge, and disappeared into the pines.

Red lay on the ground and looked at the sky through the trees. It was grey. Not a nice grey. Not a sad grey. Just grey. The kind of grey that does not care whether you live or die.

He thought about the whiskey in the cabin. He thought about the rifle in his hands. He thought about the fox, climbing out of the shaft and walking away like a creature that had just finished something it needed to finish and was ready to move on to the next thing.

Red closed his eyes. The last thing he heard was the wind moving through the pine branches, making a sound like someone breathing.

They found him five days later. A hunter from the town of Keene had come up the ridge looking for deer signs and spotted Red's truck and come to investigate. The coroner wrote "accidental discharge" on the death certificate. The coroner had never met Red Moran. The coroner did not know that Red had spent twelve years making sure other people's deaths were accidental discharges too.

The mine shaft filled with water slowly, season by season, until it was just a wet hole in the ground that nobody noticed. The timber supports collapsed. The forest began to digest it the way it digested everything.

The fox was never seen again. Not that season. Not the next. Not for eleven years, when a biologist from the State University spotted a golden fox on a ridge in the Adirondacks and took a photograph that made the local paper. The article called it an unusually colored red fox. The biologist knew better. He had spent twenty years studying these mountains. He knew that some things did not fit into categories.