By then, I had enough saved not only to fly to France, but to live there four or five seasons at least. This I had every intention of doing. Then one fine quiet night in early August, as I was renting out shoes to a very large woman named Ruth Lee Howard, in walked two soldiers dressed in the pea-green khakis of the U.S. Army. I was in the process of shrugging them off when a third soldier came through the doorway behind them and I looked so intently, I hit the wrong key and jammed the register. Not since Ramos Herrera had a boy turned my head so much. They looked nothing alike. This one was short with a wide neck and Popeye forearms. I immediately took him for a wrestler, asked myself what on earth I was gawking at, and went to fixing my register. But I kept watching him anyway. As the three of them went to the billiards tables, that one looked over the tenpin alleys and the people playing them with the softest dark eyes you’d ever want to see. And I realized that’s what had me. The same with Ramos. Right away I thought of Daddy and big game hunting. He hated it, but he had to do it at least once to truly know that. That one time was with me. His friend Buster was planning a four-day trip to the Big Thicket down near Houston to hunt deer with his son, Buster Junior. So Papa took his .410-which Buster Senior disapproved of greatly-and me.

Buster Senior ended up killing what they call a ten-point buck. Daddy and I tracked something to a water flat in the trees where we lost it. She didn’t lose us, though. She was in eight-foot-high grass in the clay bank. She bolted out and as she passed in front of us Papa raised his .410 and shot her in the neck. She went down right at our feet. He must have hit an artery, because the blood came out in pumping squirts onto the trail. She was looking right at us. There was enough muscle left in her neck that she could still use it and she held her head up off the ground, her wet nose pointed up at our faces. If it was not for all that blood, you’d have thought she’d been asleep and just woke up startled. My father and I were both quiet and still as we watched her watch us, her eyes so brown and unblinking and with an intelligence so primitive and simple, she looked like she forgave us on the spot. I recollect I began to cry. Then the doe’s hind hooves dug sideways into the trail, she blinked and rested her head on the ground and was dead.