An American Dream by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

the long finger of God and the swish of the Devil, I had come to give my scientific apprehension to the reality of witches. Deborah believed in demons. It was Celtic blood, she had once been ready to explain, the Celts were in tune with the spirits, made love with them, hunted with the spirits. And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06 Winchester), I suspect she finally lost her nerve. She hinted once that she had broken from an animal and the guide had been forced to take it. But that I didn’t know—she was not definite. I offered to go hunting with her, to Kodiak, to the Congo, I did not care where: in the first two years of our marriage I would have been willing to go to war with any expert, guide, or champion—she took pains to separate me from that romantic heart. “But darling, I could never go hunting with you,” she said. “Pamphli”—the almost unpronounceable nickname of her first husband—“was a superb hunter. It was the best thing we had together. You don’t think I want to spoil that memory by smashing about with you? That would do none of us any good. No, I’ll never hunt big ones again. Not unless I should fall in love with somebody who’s divine as a hunter.” Like most of her friends, she had an aristocratic indifference to the development of talent. One enjoyed what was in flower, one devoured it if it were good for one, but one left the planting to others.
    Finally she took me on a hunt—for moles and woodchucks. I was shown the distance of my place from her beloved Pamphli, but even on this hunt, a casual walk through the Vermont woods near a house we were renting for a season, I saw how good she was.She did not see a forest like others. No, out of the cool and the damp, the rent of forest odor aromatic and soft with rot, Deborah drew a mood—she knew the spirit which created attention in the grove, she told me once she could sense that spirit watching her, and when it was replaced by something else, also watching, well,
there
was an animal. And so there was. Some small thing would leap from concealment and Deborah would pot him with her .22. She could flush more small animals than any hunter I ever saw. Often as not she fired from the hip, as nicely as pointing a finger. And many of the creatures she allowed to escape. “You take him,” she would say, and sometimes I would miss. Which elicited a laugh of gentle contempt altogether sinister. “Buy a shotgun, darling,” she would whisper. We hunted only a few times but by the end I knew I would never go hunting again. Not with her. Because Deborah went for the most beautiful and the most ugly of the animals she flushed. She knocked down squirrels with exquisite faces, tender as a doe in their dying swoon, and she blasted the hindquarters off groundhogs whose grimace at death was as carved in stone as a gargoyle’s horn. No patch of forest was quite the same once she had hunted there. “You see,” she told me once at night, late, when the booze had left her in the rarest of moods, not violent, not vicious, not amorous, but simply reflective, an air circling in on itself, “I know that I am more good and more evil than anyone alive, but which was I born with, and what came into me?”
    “You shift allegiance from day to day.”
    “No. I just pretend to.” She smiled. “I’m evil if truth be told. But I despise it, truly I do. It’s just that evil has power.”
    Which was a way of saying goodness was imprisoned by evil. After nine years of marriage to her I did not have a clue myself. I had learned to speak in a world which believed in the
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: Experts Divided on Fluoridation, Diplomat Attacks Council Text, Self-Rule Near for Bantu Province, Chancellor Outlines Purpose of Talks, New Drive for Health Care for Aged. I had lostmy faith in all of that by