On the second inhale of Virginia’s Lemon’s cigarette, the front door of her neighbor’s trailer winges open, as expected. Across the soggy gravel drive, Duster Mulligan, a banged-up, almost-forty stockboy, all veins and tattoos, steps onto a porch he made himself from plywood, astroturf, and cinderblocks. He’s crooked and unsteady, a couple packs in, slinging a can in his right hand.

The sky is dusty black and the yellow light cast by Virginia’s porch catches snowflakes coming in at a slant, traveling at the speed of open parachutes. 

Before Virginia arrived in Natagwa, Quantico vetted the whole trailer park. Duster’s rap sheet was long and boring, ten miles of petty street shit. He isn’t a threat to Virginia, anymore than he’s a threat to the halter-top girls he pays for conversation. But he is a kind of lonely that makes him jack-in-the-box out his door every time she lights up on her porch. 

Virginia Lemon is not her real name. It’s the alias that Quantico dickholes invented for her last July. They must have laughed their asses off when they pictured her practicing a thousand times in the mirror. I’m Virginia Lemon. 

This is Virginia’s first undercover assignment and it’s simple: spend a year on the west side of Natagwa flirting with a homegrown militia called the Glory Boys. The militia was born right here in this trailer park but now has cells in six other towns. Virginia was sent here to find out which boys are just loud and which boys are buying fertilizer. 

“How’s it hangin’, sugar?” Duster asks. When he first met her, he looked her over and said, “You sure as shit ain’t no virgin.” He started calling her “sugar”, for Sugar Briar, a pinup girl he said kept his pop safe through two tours in Vietnam. 

 “You need company?” Duster’s smile is gappy. 

“Like I need the clap,” she exhales without looking at his porch. She isn’t pretty—her sister took all the good genes before she arrived—but she’s blonde and angular with athletic legs, which is almost the same thing.

“You don’t never get no visitors,” he says.

“I’m new to this shithole.” 

“You a lesbian, sugar?” 

“Not that I’m aware,” she answers. “You?”

“Not anymore.”

“What happened?” 

“Got Jesus.” Duster nods. “Since then I don’t smoke.” He inhales, “an’ I don’t drink.” He raises his can over his head.

“I guess Jesus ain’t famous for being fun.” Virginia gazes down the double row of trailers to where it fades.

“Has more important things to do,” Dusty taps his temple. “Like savin’ the world.”

“Is that what he’s up to?” 

Duster pulls his plastic chair closer to the rail. “You got family, sugar?”

“I wouldn’t call ‘em that.”

“Fair ‘nough.”

“How ‘bout you?”  She lifts the lid of an empty peanut butter jar and tosses her smoke in. ”No kids or ex-wife comin’ over tonight?”

“I’m spendin’ Christmas with you ain’t I?” Duster asks.

“Well shit, Dusty,” Virginia finally looks his way, “Merry Christmas.”

“You, too, sugar.”

The rubber seal on her door scuffs both ways as she enters the trailer, followed by a tin clap. She jams the bolt. “Merry Christmas,” she says to no one. 

Her waitress uniform is drying on a hanger crooked over the bathroom door. The trailer smells like Pine Sol with base notes of cat piss. The former tenant was a Desert Storm vet who ate his revolver and left his cat trapped for days. Something else Quantico told her.

Colored lights on a tree with plastic needles glow against the wall in one direction and then the other, alternating patterns like a half-off sign. The tree is only as tall as her ribs and looks exactly like the one her pop used to drag out every year. 

There is a reason Quantico gave her this assignment. Even with a summa cum laude degree in political science, she can become her pop’s daughter when she needs to. The ‘ain’t’ and ‘they was’ and ‘done been fucked,’ the discount eroticism, the sinuous, hard-bit air of a girl with no options, they aren’t hard to summon. 

She doesn’t think about it often, because she needs to be Virginia inside and out, but there’s some kind of poetic tragedy in climbing so far up only to be sent back to the bottom.

When Virginia was four, her mom left. When she was eight, her older sister knocked the dust of Ekron, Colorado off her perfect little slippers and moved to Baton Rouge to play flute with the orchestra. She got married. Had kids.

After that it was just Virginia and her pop. And her Uncle Nash, who would come by to give her pop a break—who was eager to give her pop a break.  

Her pop’s name was Finch, and she called him by his name as soon as she was able to pronounce it. The adults called him Finch, and she didn’t want to be treated like a kid. In turn Finch called her “Old Buddy,” a term from his trucking days, which started as a joke and stuck.

She never felt small or like a girl with Finch. He taught her how to repair barbed wire fences, clean his rifle, and bleed their kills. Every year in December, Virginia helped him erect their plastic tree and drape it with tinsel, which is why tonight, her trailer feels like a time machine. She cranks the dial on an AM/FM, and like a holiday miracle, Conway Twitty’s voice fills the room. 

One day she’ll write a memoir and she’ll admit that the tree by her couch is the tree that her pop took out every year. She shouldn’t have done it, but she took two souvenirs when she said goodbye to her old life three months ago. 

On the washboard next to her sink, there are three carrots with tangled green hair, two potatoes, five cloves of garlic, and an onion. If she wasn’t Virginia, there would be a sprig of rosemary as well, and a pot of homemade beef stock. But she is Virginia, so she bought bouillon cubes instead.

She twists up the volume and chops vegetables. Then she unwraps the other souvenir: a three pound chunk of top round venison in butcher paper, which has been thawing since dawn. 

One night last October a buck hurtled onto the highway, an eight-pointer with a white rump. Suddenly, he was crunching against her right fender, sliding along the corner of her hood and up the steel rim of her windshield toward the roof, until he finally dropped onto the right wall of the pickup bed and slumped back to the pavement. 

Virginia’s truck skidded to a crooked stop, leaving black rubber for twenty yards. After she started breathing again, she put the stick in neutral and jumped out. It was snowing that night, too, and steam from the buck’s breath pooled in her flashlight beam. The 1967 Dodge Fargo she was driving had been Finch’s before he died, and so was the custom hunting knife she’d pulled from a holster under the seat. She knelt behind the buck, whose eyes were glazed and roving and ended his pain with a deep, sure draw. Because she was the daughter of a hunter. 

Every time she thinks about the deer she thinks of Steve Munchauser, who died in a hit and run. She doesn’t want to spend time in the past, but Steve’s homicide was the most shocking thing that ever happened in Ekron, Colorado, and it was never solved.

Virginia cleaves the thawed venison into precise half-inch squares, removing every last silvery sinew. When the oil in her pot is crackling, she dumps the cubes in batches and leaves them to form a salty brown crust. It takes twenty minutes for the last round to finish and then the veggies go in. When those are done, she loosens the crunchy glaze from the bottom of her pot with a full can of beer.

Steve’s hit and run was the reason she applied to the FBI in the first place. Or actually, it was the Ekron Police Department’s back-assed, fat-finger, investigation into his hit and run. 

She’d graduated college almost a year before Steve was killed. She’d moved back to Ekron to be with Finch, who was sick in a way that wouldn’t end well. Together they followed the investigation by way of nightly news and gossip at the Crow’s Eye Diner.

Virginia actually knew Steve. Not just in the way that small town people know about each other, they saw each other every day in high school. Steve’s family had money. He drove a white Mustang and flashed his perfect dental work around. He flirted with teachers and skipped assignments and drank on campus. Everyone who didn’t worship football thought Steve Munchauser was a top shelf piece of shit. 

After college Steve had landed a job at an insurance company in Baltimore and he’d come  back to Ekron for a week to visit his mother. He was hit while crossing a two-lane road in the woods just north of the Ekron High School stadium, where he once broke records as a quarterback. He’d even drawn a few national recruiters. 

For three days, everyone thought he was just missing. Then the mayor announced in a press conference that Steve had been in a motor vehicle accident involving an unknown driver. They didn’t suspect foul play but the driver had fled the scene. He refused to take questions. 

That story only held for thirty-six hours until two high schoolers hacked the police database and posted crime scene photos on a site they built just for that purpose. The images brushfired from phone to phone and in the span of three hours, they’d saturated the town, and the county, and bounced over both oceans via expat family members. 

Virginia sat on the edge of Finch’s bed and together they stared at her phone. There was Steve’s body on the gravel shoulder of the highway, his eyes wide and blind. His striped shirt was torn and soaked in blood, his chest was pried open, and his hands were holding his own wet heart, as if the beloved athlete had caught one last interception. 

His jeans were also gaping from the left hip down and dark with blood. They heard later than the majority of his left buttock and upper thigh had been removed. 

Virginia started to poke around on her own. She chatted with Steve’s pastor, looked up family birth certificates, paged through old newspapers on microfiche at the library. She’d always had a mind for mysteries but it was more than that. The Ekron police were never going to figure it out. They liked to rub their power in people’s faces. They’d pull a car over and make the driver wait by the side of the road for an hour. They’d make a woman bend over the hood while they ran her plates. They’d write a ticket for a dirty windshield. But when it came to actually solving a crime, they were embarrassing. 

“Those boys couldn't find evidence if it was tied to a goddamn donut,” Finch said to the TV one night. “You could find the guy before they could find their own asses.” 

The following day was Steve’s funeral so Virginia put on a plain black dress and squeezed into a pew. It was hot in the sanctuary and smelled ripe, like flowers in heat. When friends began to eulogize, she suddenly had to get out. She pushed past twelve knees and rammed open the double doors in the back of the room with both hands. When they closed behind her, someone was sobbing into a microphone. Virginia lit a cigarette on the church steps. 

Back at home, she crossed her ankles on Finch’s bed and drank an entire beer without coming up for breath. 

“How was it?” Finch asked. 

“It was bullshit. They said he was generous to a fault,” she snorted. “Had a kind word for every soul he met.” 

Finch’s eyebrows went up with mock respect. “Did he.”

“Bright. Talented. Funny. What a loss.”

“Everybody lies at a funeral,” Finch said. 

She nodded. “Saint Steve.”

Saint Steve once forced her to turn around in the hallway so he and his neckless ballers could rate her ass. “Good but not great,” they decided. “Definitely not good enough to make up for the flat chest.” 

Steve also pushed her against a wall and plunged his record-breaking fingers into her shorts. Just to confirm, since her tits never came in, that she really was a girl. 

“You know who the police should talk to,” Virginia told Finch, cracking a second beer.

”Who?” 

“Those girls who dropped out.” She was thinking about the eight or so students with not-good-but-great asses who left school because of Steve and his varsity thugs. 

The following week she flirted with an off-duty rookie at Jerry’s to find out what he knew. She even gave him head, which is when she knew for sure she’d make a good agent. After that night, a smile was all it took to get him talking. 

She asked if the police had talked to any of the girls. “We ain’t gonna spend time on high school drama,” he said. “If you’d seen what they done to him, you wouldn’t think it was girls.”

“We all saw what happened to him,” she replied.

His expression turned hard. “Then you know it was some weird Satanic shit, not some girl got her feelings hurt.” 

“Depends on how hurt.”

He bit his lip for a second. “Steve was a good kid.” 

The police instead ran tox screens for city drugs. They interrogated Steve’s alcoholic stepfather. They chased their canines through fifty acres of woods around the high school. They ran financials and discovered that Steve had been setting records in credit card debt. They searched his phone and found porn. 

“Basic shit,” the rookie said, “wasn’t even hidden.” He leaned toward her and said in a hot whisper, “same shit we all got.”

“Any other suspects?” Virginia asked.

”Well,” said the rookie, “we had reports of a suspìcious car in the area bout then. But it was just a couple come up from Denver. Nothing to it.”

”And?”

”And,” he thought for a minute, “we talked to the boys from Tahook county who got their asses whooped at the state championships back in the day. In case one of em’s been holdin a grudge.”

”Oh, my motherfucking god,” Virginia said. 

If the boys in blue couldn’t get justice for Steve, they definitely couldn’t get justice for the girls who dropped out because of Steve. That was the moment she knew what she wanted. She wanted justice for all the girls who dropped out of high school because of good kids like Steve. 

Later Finch listened to her recap of the investigation with his lips pressed together. “Duke says the neighbor boy was selling dope outta the basement. Maybe Steve got caught up in that.” 

“We’ll never know,” she said. 

When she left for the academy four months later, Uncle Nash came to live with Finch. Virginia returned for holidays and weekends. By the time she graduated she had a 92% hit rate from a concealed holster at 45 shots a minute. By the time she graduated, Finch was gone.

The last time he was awake he pulled her head to his chest and held her. “I’m gonna miss you old buddy,” he said. 

When his chest stopped rising, Virginia threw her arms around his neck and cried. The day after she got her assignment, on the 21st of October, she scattered Finch’s ashes in the Ekron River. Then she had nothing to do but wait. 

She was restless and suspended between lives. It was a snowy night and she was driving under the influence of four beers and a grief she couldn’t begin to understand. Exactly a year had passed since Steve was murdered, and that night, a buck sprang from the forest. 

When she writes her memoir one day, she’ll admit that she saw the buck pause in her headlights and had time to miss him—that instead of slowing, she fed the Fargo’s engine enough gas to make it fatal. 

After she hit him, she jumped to the asphalt and used her hunting knife to end the buck’s pain. With the crime scene photos of Steve clicking through her mind like slides in a projector, she cracked open the deer’s chest with a crow bar and severed his heart valves, exactly like the images she’d seen.

She pulled the core of the beast’s power from his rib cage, and closed her eyes while two pounds of hot purple muscle beat a rhythm in her palm and ejected blood through her fingers and down her forearm. When the heart was finally still, she carried it toward her flashlight, which was angled against a stone on the road. She watched snowflakes dissolve into the ridges of the heart for a minute, and then she laid it gently between the buck’s front legs. 

The hunter’s daughter carved a top round, a rump roast, a knuckle roast, and a bottom round from his hind quarters and wrapped them in a tarp her pop always kept in a roll under his rifle rack. She was breathing hard. The re-enactment was thrilling and nauseating and valuable. 

Virginia went back to Finch’s trailer for the last time that night, after she’d pressure cleaned the Fargo’s cab at a car wash. She slept profoundly. At dawn, she left for her mission in Natagwa in a rented Hyundai with Virginia Lemon’s driver’s license, a plastic tree, and a blue cooler. 

Tonight, she doesn’t regret any of it. In fact she wanted it. She chased the buck to that exact spot on that exact day. On the 21st of October next year she’ll find another member of the herd and do it again.

Her stew has been simmering for an hour and the trailer smells like Finch’s trailer. She swallows a forkload of venison and imagines the gymnasium back home, with its display case bearing trophies from every year the Ekron High Bucks won the state championships. 

Her trailer smelled like this last Christmas, too, when she made stew from the top round of a Buck named Steve. Except last year’s stew was made with rosemary.