Alexei’s father tells him about the birds and the bees when he is ten years old. They say everything happens earlier, in Russia. Alexei’s father tells him how to get a wife and keep her, tells him, tame, declaw, domesticate. The oldest picture in Alexei’s family is a black and white, grainy photograph of a man standing alone in a forest. He is dressed in fur and is carrying a rifle on his back. His mother teaches him hand feed. Make tender by force. You will be her claws and she will love you for it. Alexei thinks of hunting trips. He thinks of the man with the gun alone in the snow. Alexei’s father is a good man, there is so much of that lone hunter in him, somehow these things coexist. Alexei does his best to be good, but he does not purge the man in the photo from his insides. He looks down at his little cruel one, his Kent, asleep in his bed wearing one of his shirts. He strokes his hair and thinks of the many years it took to get him like this. Hunters must be patient. Alexei can be patient. Alexei is a good man, or he tried to be. He is a hunter, too, raised taming wild dogs. He smiles when Kent bares his teeth, he knows how to get him to eat out of his hand. When he was twelve his grandfather had brought home a dog with a broken leg, growling at anyone who came near, starving and afraid. Alexei had sat with it every day, soothed it and cooed at it for weeks until it would eat out of his hand and sleep in his bed. When it was hit by a car and ended up as roadkill on the dirt road in front of his house he had refused to eat for days. Alexei has been patient. The Mashkovs are hunters; elk, olympic medals, wild dogs and skittish people to tame. When Alexei was thirteen, he had seen a deer dying of wasting disease, thrashing and grinding its teeth on the ground, and begged his father not to shoot it, couldn’t stand the thought of a mercy kill. He had held Kent when the cocaine made him shake and when he screamed at night, eyes blank and unseeing. Last night when they were having sex, he had put his fingers to Kent’s lips and felt his soft tongue curl around them. He will do better this time. he will protect what’s his. Alexei cards a big hand through Kent’s soft hair and he doesn’t even flinch.
