He stayed behind in the garage/basement of that grim, brightly painted San Francisco box house, rooted in place, trembling and terrified by her anger, until she had climbed the inside stairs, and closed the door of her mother’s apartment, turning off the lights as she went. In the darkness, he could hear her angry steps on the floor above move toward the rear of the house. He didn’t want to go out the back door to the garden because she would be able to see him from the window, and he feared upsetting her even more if he tried to go that way to the woods directly behind the back fence. So he walked carefully and quietly to the side door, and out to the sunlit outside stairs to his father’s separate apartment above the garage.
Once inside, he ran to the kitchen sink and washed his hands, finding relief in the cold water; then changed his clothes in the bedroom, anxious to get out of the house and into the shaded cool of the woods again. He felt hot and uncomfortable in his body, confused about what had just happened to him with her. He grabbed his pellet rifle on the way out.
On the sidewalk, he noticed the haze forming in the bright sunlight; the late afternoon fog was returning. He turned down the street and around the corner, and along the edge of the woods to where the coast road ended and was barricaded, and where it had slid down the cliff-face, as if from an earthquake. There he could enter the woods directly. In one step, he was inside and calmer, taking in the piney scent of the cypresses in their tortured poses. A few more steps, and he sat on a nearly horizontal section of one of them, feeling the quiet between the low mooings of the distant foghorn.
He placed the rifle next to him on the log, and thought about the landlady’s daughter. He often saw her there from deep inside the woods where he imagined she couldn’t see him. For long periods, she would sit silently by the window, looking at her plantings, occasionally talking in a strange language to someone behind her. He realized that he had never talked to her before except to say hello and goodbye when he went through the garden, and she was there, digging in the plants on her knees. Now in the comforting shadows of the woods, he felt the crash of her anger fade from his ears.
In its place, he became aware of the constant, sibilant hiss of the ocean waves crashing onto the rocks far below the cliffs, while the soft sounds of the woods came up slowly. How could he say anything to her now? he thought, when he heard the gentle cooing far above him in the tallest branches. He looked up and searched, but couldn’t see anything. He spotted it, the dove, there, standing high on a tall thin branch, outlined against the mist that was now settling over the trees. He reached for the gun and, cradling himself into the curve of the cypress, took aim. He waited for the breeze to pass, calculating the erratic trajectory of the pellet when…he fired. The plop startled him. A moment passed, the dove disappeared from his sight. The shot bird took forever to come down, crashing into branches on one side, then the other, on its way to earth, landing finally on the soft sandy ground strewn with pine needles, in front of him. It looked at him from one side for a long time, twitching slightly; it blinked once, and died.
He gazed at it, dimly, for several cycles of the foghorn. Quickly, he left his perch on the tree trunk and, with his rifle, dug a small, shallow hole near the dead bird, grunting furiously on his knees, using the rifle to dig into the sand. Finished, he heaved the gun over the edge of the nearby cliff. He picked up the bird with both hands, and laid it into the hole, covering it with sand and pine needles, as though to hide it from all eternity. But, there was a rustle above him: the dove’s mate had already returned. They stared at each other in mournful silence. He looked behind him, through the trees, toward the back of the house. In the failing light, he saw her in the yellow glow of the lighted window, looking into the trees, seemingly at him.
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