In his mind, he was already crouched among twisted trees, smoke still rising from his gun, bagging an untouchable bird.

“Nobody ever died of guilt,” he said. Then he crossed the lawn toward his hangar.

Friends called to him as he passed. A woman placed a hand on his shoulder and he brushed it aside with a sneer.

At the door to the hangar, he looked once over his shoulder at the party in his honor. It registered as fog. And he entered the building at last.

“Hello,” he said, turning the overheads on. “Daddy’s thinking of bringing you a sister.”

He walked the rows of big game, a rhinoceros and a puma the first to greet him. Beyond them stood two zebras, a lioness, and a lynx. Each row was ten animals deep, so that Neal felt a surge of power so great it was as if he were passing them in the afterlife, their afterlife, where he reigned king, all of them belonging to him.

He came to an open space among the birds of prey. An empty case upon a column painted white. Between a condor and a bald eagle, Neal saw his own face reflected in the glass. He saw a black bird within, one that was not yet there.

“You delivered us these birds, Jonathan Trachtenbroit. You hunted them once and brought them to me to do the same. We’ll be in the books together. The only two men to ever call them our own.”

He looked over his shoulder. Took in the game.

The overhead lights made the animals look alive.

For a moment, he couldn’t help but feel the ground beneath him had gone slippery. As if a hole were opening up, a grave in the Goblin Cemetery, a space just big enough for Neal to fall straight into, to be buried standing up forever.

Perhaps he was falling from grace. But he was okay with that. So long as he caught an owl on the way.

11

By the time Neal found Roger (in the garage, in a cloud of smoke as thick as exhaust, smoking a joint with a cook from Barbara’s favorite restaurant and a lawyer who once helped Neal out of a pickle) the party was so out of control it was like a spill. There was no more separation for Neal. It was one sweaty, heaving mass, bending and writhing, singing its song. Barbara and he hadn’t invited one thousand people but an unruly creature called the Party instead. If it wasn’t Roger Fletcher’s face (and it seemed like it wasn’t for a hell of a long time) then it was just more of the monster. But the difficulty he’d had finding his oldest hunting buddy comforted him, too. The cloud of bodies might provide cover for their exit.

“Roger,” he hollered over the psychedelic noise. “Find Harvey and Saul and meet behind the showroom.”

Roger, stoned silly, smiled. “What’s up, Neal?”