The hunter's wife PATR 1

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It was the hunter's first time outside of Montana. He woke up, still struck by the vision of a few hours of ascending through rose-lit cumulus clouds, of houses and barns like buttes deep in snowy valleys, the whole country rolling below looks like December: brown and black hills dotted of snow, flashes of frozen lakes, the long braids of a river glistening at the bottom of a canyon. Above the wing, the sky had deepened to such a pure blue that he knew that if he looked long enough, tears would fill his eyes.

Now it was dark. The plane descended on Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast neighborhoods becoming lighter as the plane glided toward the airport: streetlights, headlights, lots of buildings, ice runways, a truck turning at a stoplight, remnants of snow above a warehouse, and flickering antennas on distant hills, finally the long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were below.

He entered the airport and passed the monitors. He already felt as if he had lost something, a beautiful perspective, some beautiful missing dream. He had come to Chicago to see his wife, whom he had not seen in twenty years. She was there to perform her magic for a superior at the state university. Even the universities, apparently, were interested in what he could do. Outside the terminal, the sky was thick and gray and the wind was rushing it. The snow was coming. A woman from the university met him and walked him to her Jeep. She kept her gaze out the window.

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They were in the car for forty-five minutes, passing first the tall, illuminated architecture of the center, then bare suburban oak trees, piles of plowed snow, gas stations, power towers, and telephone wires. The woman said, "So you regularly attend his wife's performances?"

"No," she said. "Never before."

He parked in the driveway of an elaborate modern mansion, with square balconies suspended over two garages, huge triangular front windows, graceful columns, vaulted lights, and a steep slate ceiling.

On the inside of the front door, about thirty identification tags were placed on a table. His wife had not yet arrived. Apparently, no one had arrived yet. He found her tag and pinned it to her sweater. A silent girl in a tuxedo appeared and disappeared with her coat.

The granite lobby was backed by a grand staircase, which extended widely at the bottom and narrower at the top. A woman got out. He stopped four or five paces from the back and said "Hello, Ana" to the woman who had brought him there and "You must be Mr. Dumas" to him. He took her hand, a pale, bony, weightless thing, like a bird without feathers.

Her husband, the university president, was simply tying her bow tie, she said, and she giggled sadly to herself as if bow ties were something she disapproved of. The hunter walked to a window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out.

In the dim light, he could see a wooden platform running the length of the house, angled and stepped, its width always changing, with a low railing. Beyond, in the blue shadows, was a small pond surrounded by hedges, with a marble birdbath in the center. Behind the pond were leafless trees: oaks, maples, a bone-white sycamore. A helicopter flew past, its green light flashing.

soon part 2 i write