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“Oh, Mother,” Jack cried, “help me find my fuckin’ eyeball.” He was grinding Lou for all he was worth.
Lou was starting to get pretty hot, and I figured another crack or two from my brother ought to do it. I knew I should say something to cool it down, but I figured that Jack knew what he was doing. If he wanted a piece of McKlearey, that was his business.
“Hey, you guys,” Mike said, inspecting Sloane’s substantial outside fireplace, “let’s build a fire.” It was a smooth way to handle the situation.
“Why?” Sloane demanded. “You cold or something, for Chrissake?”
“No, but a fire’s kinda nice, isn’t it? I mean, what the hell?”
“Shit, I don’t care,” Cal said. “Come on. There’s a woodpile over behind the garage.”
The four of us left McKlearey sulking in his lawn chair and trooped on over to the woodpile.
It took us a while to get the fire going. We wound up going through the usual business of squatting down and blowing on it to make it catch. Finally, it took hold, and we stood around looking at it with a beery sense of having really done something worthwhile.
Then we all hauled up lawn chairs and moved the keg over handy. Even Lou pulled himself in to join the group. By then it was getting pretty dark.
Sloane had a stereo in his living room, and outside speakers as well. He was piping out a sort of standard, light music, so it was pleasant. I discovered that a shot of that rotten homemade whiskey in a glass of beer made a pretty acceptable drink, and I sat with the others drinking and telling lies.
I guess it was Jack who raised the whole damned thing. He was talking about some broad he’d laid while he was on his way down to Willapa Bay to hunt geese.
“… anyhow,” he was saying, “I went on down to Willapa—got there about four thirty or five—and put out my dekes. Colder’n a bastard, and me still about half blind with alcohol. About five thirty the geese came in—only by then my drunk had worn off, and my head felt like a goddamn balloon. Man, you want to see an act of raw courage? Just watch some poor bastard with a screamin’ hangover touch off a 12 gauge with three-inch magnum shells at a high-flyin’ goose. Man, I still hurt when I think about it.”
“Get any geese?” I asked.
“Filled out before seven,” he said. “Even filled on mallards before I started back—a real carnage. I picked up my dekes, chucked all the birds in the trunk, and headed on back up the pike. I hauled off the road in Chehalis again and went into the same bar to get well. Damned if she wasn’t right there on the first stool again.”
And that started the hunting stories. Have you ever noticed how when a bunch of guys are sitting around, the stories kind of run in cycles? First the drinking stories—“Boy did we get plastered”—then the war stories—“Funny thing happened when I was in the Army”—and then the hunting stories, or the dog stories, or the snake stories. It’s almost like a ritual, but very relaxed. Nobody’s trying to outdo anybody else. It’s just sort of easy and enjoyable. Even McKlearey and Jack called a truce on the eyeball business.
I guess maybe the fire had something to do with it. You get a bunch of guys around an open fire at night, and nine times out of ten they’ll get around to talking about hunting sooner or later. It’s almost inevitable. It’s funny some anthropologist hasn’t noticed it and made a big thing out of it.
We all sifted back through our memories, lifting out the things we’d done or stories we’d heard from others. We hunted pheasant and quail, ducks and geese, rabbits and squirrels, deer and bear, elk and mountain lions. We talked guns and ammunition, equipment, camping techniques—all of it. A kind of excitement—an urge, if you want to call it that—began to build up. The faint, barely remembered smells of the woods and of gun-oil came back with a sharpness that was almost real. Unconsciously, we all pulled our chairs in closer to the fire, tightening the circle. It was a warm night, so it wasn’t that we needed the heat of the fire.
“You know,” Jack was saying, “it’s a damn shame there’s no season open right now. We could have a real ball huntin’ together—just the bunch of us.”
“Too goddamn hot,” Lou said, pouring himself another beer.
“Not up in the mountains, it’s not,” Mike said.
“When does deer season open?” Sloane asked.
“Middle of October,” Jack said. “Of course we could go after bear. They’re predators on this side of the mountains, and the season’s always open.”
“Stick that bear hunting in your ear,” Mike said. “First you’ve got to have dogs; and second, you never know when one of those big hairy bastards is gonna come out of the brush at about ten feet. You got time for about one shot before he’s chewin’ on your head and scatterin’ your bowels around like so much confetti.”
“Yuk!” Sloane gagged. “There’s a graphic picture for you.”
“No shit, man,” Mike said. “I won’t go anywhere near a goddamn bear. I shot one just once. Never again. I had an old .303 British—ten shots, and it took every goddamn one of them. That son of a bitch just kept comin’. Soaked up lead like a blotter. The guys that hunt those babies all carry .44 magnum pistols for close work.”
“Hell, man,” McKlearey said, “you can stop a tank with a .44 mag.”
Mike looked at him. “One guy I talked to jumped a bear once and hit him twice in the chest with a .300 Weatherbee and then went to the pistol. Hit him four times at point-blank range with a .44 mag before he went down. Just literally blew him to pieces, and the damned bear was still trying to get at him. I talked to the guy three years later, and his hands were still shakin’. No bears for this little black duck!”
“Would a .45 stop one?” I asked.
“Naw, the military bullet’s got a hard jacket,” Mike said. “Just goes right through.”
“No, I mean the long Colt. It’s a 250-grain soft lead bullet.”
“That oughta do it,” Jack said. “Just carryin’ the weight would slow him down enough for a guy to make a run for it.”
“I’ve got an old Colt frontier-style stored with my clothes and books in Seattle,” I said, leaning over and refilling my beer mug.
“No kiddin’?” Jack said. “What the hell did you get a cannon like that for?”
“Guy I knew needed money. I lent him twenty, and he gave me the gun as security—never saw him again. The gun may be hot for all I know.”
“Ah-ha!” Sloane said. “Pawnbroking without a license!” He giggled.
“It’s got a holster and belt—the whole bit,” I said. “I’m going to have to pick up all that junk anyway. I’ll bring it on down.”
“I’d like to see it,” Jack said, “and Sloane here knows about guns—he takes in a lot of them in pawn—he ought to be able to tell you what it’s worth.”
“Sure,” Sloane said, “bring it in. Maybe we can dicker.”
“Hey!” Mike shouted suddenly. “Shut up, you guys. I just thought of something.” He leaned forward, his slightly round face suddenly excited. “How about the High Hunt?”
“Are you kiddin’?” Jack demanded. “You really want to try the ‘Great White Hunter’ bit?”
“What the goddamn hell is the High Hunt?” McKlearey demanded harshly.
“Early high Cascade Mountains deer season,” Mike said, his eyes gleaming in the firelight.
“—In some of the roughest, emptiest, steepest, highest country in the whole fuckin’ world,” Jack finished for him.
“It’s not that bad,” Mike said.
“Aw, bullshit!” Jack snorted. “The damned boundaries start right where the roads all end. And do you know why the roads end there? Because there’s not a fuckin’ thing back up in there, that’s why. Man, most of that country’s above the timberline.”
“All alpine meadow,” Mike said almost dreamily. “It gets snowed in so early that nobody ever got a chance to hunt it before they opened this special season. Some of the biggest deer in the state are up there. One guy got a nine-pointer that when four hundred pounds.”
“Eastern count, I’ll bet,” Jack said.
“Eastern count my ass. Full Western count—the number of points on the smallest side not counting brow tines. Eastern count would have gone twenty—maybe twenty-one points. That was one helluva big deer.”
“And the guy got a hernia gettin’ it out of the woods.” Sloane giggled.
“No—hell, they had horses.”
“… and guides,” Sloane went on, “and a wrangler, and a camp cook, and a bartender. Probably didn’t cost more than a thousand a week for two guys.”
“It’s not all that much,” Mike said tentatively. “I know a guy—a rancher—who’ll take out a fair-sized party real reasonable. You could get by for fifty bucks apiece for a week—ten days. Food extra, of course. He’s tryin’ to get into the business, so he’s keepin’ his rates down for the first couple years.” Mike’s voice was serious; he wasn’t just talking. He was actually proposing it to us as a real possibility. His face had a kind of hunger on it that you don’t see very often. Mike wanted this to go, and he wanted it badly.
“Who the fuck wants to pay to go up in the boonies for ten days?” McKlearey demanded harshly, putting it down.
It hung there, almost like it was balanced on something. I knew that if I left it alone, McKlearey’s raspy vote for inertia would tip it. At that moment I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to go up into the high country, but I was sure of one thing; I didn’t much like McKlearey, and I did like Mike Carter.
“It’s what we’ve been talking about for the last hour,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “All you guys were so hot to trot, and now Mike comes up with something solid—a real chance to do some real hunting, not just a little Sunday-morning poaching with a twenty-two out of a car window—and everybody gets tongue-tied all of a sudden.”
“Didn’t you get enough of maneuvers and bivouac and shit like that in the Army?” McKlearey demanded, his eyes narrowing. I remembered what Jack had told me about crossing him.
“I did my share of field-soldiering,” I told him, “but this is hunting, and that’s different.”
“Are you gonna pay to go out and run around in the brush?” He was getting hot again. God, he was a touchy bastard.
“If the price is like Mike said it was, and if we can work out the details, you’re goddamn right I will.” A guy will make up his mind to do something for the damnedest reasons sometimes.
“You’re outa your fuckin’ skull,” McKlearey said, his voice angry and his face getting kind of pinched in.
“Nobody’s twistin’ your arm, Lou,” Jack said. “You don’t have to go no place.”
“I suppose you’d go along, too, huh, Alders?” For some reason, McKlearey was getting madder by the minute. He was twisting around in his chair like a worm on a hot rock.
“You damn betcha,” Jack said. “Just give me ten minutes to pack up my gear, and I’ll be gone, buddy—long gone.”
“Shit!” McKlearey said. “You guys are just blowin’ smoke outa your fuckin’ ears. You ain’t even got a rifle, Alders. You sure as shit can’t go deer huntin’ with a fuckin’ shotgun.”
“I could lend you guys rifles from the pawnshop,” Sloane said very quietly. He was leaning back, and I couldn’t see his face.
Mike swallowed. I think the hope that it would go had been a very faint one for him. Now, a strange combination of things had laid it right in his lap. “I’d better get a piece of paper and figure out a few things,” he said.
“The bugs are about to get me anyway,” Sloane said. “Let’s take the keg into the kitchen.”
We carted it inside and sat down around the table in the breakfast nook to watch Mike write down a long list with figures opposite each item.
McKlearey straddled a chair over in the corner, scowling at us.
Mike finally leaned back and took a long drink of beer. “I think that’s it,” he said. “Figure fifty for the horses and the guide—that’s for a week or ten days. Food—probably twenty-five. License, ammunition, stuff like that—another twenty-five. Most of us probably already have the right kind of clothes and a guy can always borrow a sleeping bag if he don’t already have one. I figure a guy can get by for a hundred.”
We sat in the brightly lighted kitchen with the layer of cigarette smoke hovering over our heads and stared at the sheet of paper in front of Mike.
I glanced out the window at the rusty glow of the dying fire. The hills over on the peninsula loomed up against the stars.
“I’m in,” I said shortly.
Mike scratched his cheek and nodded. “A man owes himself one good hunt in his life,” he said. “It may start a small war in the Carter house, but what the hell?” He wrote his name and mine on the bottom of the paper. “Jack?” he asked my brother.
“Why not?” Jack said. “I’ll probably have to come along to keep you guys from shooting yourself in the foot.”
Mike put Jack’s name down on the list.
“God damn!” Cal said regretfully. “If I didn’t have the shop and the lot and—” He paused. “Bullshit!” he said angrily. “I own them; they don’t own me. Put my name down. I’m goin’ huntin’. Piss on it!” He giggled suddenly.
Mike squinted at the list. “I’m not sure if Miller—that’s this guy I know—will go along with only four guys. We might have to scrounge up a few more bodies, but that shouldn’t be too tough. You guys might dunk about it a little though. I’ll call Miller on Monday and see if we can’t get together on the price of the horses and the guide.”
“Guide?” Jack yelped. “Who the hell needs a goddamn baby-sitter? If you can’t find your own damn game, you’re not much of a hunter.”
“It’s a package deal, shithead,” Mike said. “No guy is just gonna rent you a horse and then point you off into the big lonely. He may not give two hoots in hell about you, but he wants that horse back.”
Jack grumbled a bit, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. It was going to go; it was really going to go.
Mike called a guy he knew and found out that the season opened on September 11, just about a month away. “At least that’ll give us time to get our affairs in order.” Mike laughed. “You know, quit our jobs, divorce our wives, and the like.”
We all laughed.
Suddenly McKlearey stood up. He’d been sitting in the corner, nursing his beer. “Where’s that fuckin’ paper?” he demanded.
Mike blinked and pulled it out of his shirt pocket.
McKlearey jerked it out of his hand, picked up the pencil Mike had been using, and laboriously wrote along the bottom.
“Louis R. McKlearey,” he wrote.
“What the hell—” Jack said, stunned.
“Fuck ya!” Lou snapped. Then he leaned back his head and began to laugh. The laugh went on and on, and pretty soon the rest of us were doing it too.
“Why you sneaky son of a bitch!” Jack howled. “You bad-mouthed the whole idea just to get us all hooked. You sneaky, connivin’ bastard!”
Lou laughed even harder. Maybe the others accepted Jack’s easy answer, but I wasn’t buying it. Not by a damn sight, I wasn’t.
After that, things got noisy. We all got to hitting the keg pretty hard, and it turned out to be a pretty good party after all.
I guess it was almost three in the morning by the time we got Mike home.
“I was gonna take you by to see Sandy,” Jack said as we drove back to the trailer court, “but it’s pretty late now.” His voice was a little slurred.
“Sandy? Who’s that?”
“Little something I’ve got on the side. She’s a real fine-lookin’ head. Tends bar at one of the joints. You’ll get a chance to meet her later.”
I grunted and settled down in the seat. I realized that I didn’t know this brother of mine at all. I couldn’t understand him. A certain amount of casual infidelity was to be expected, I guess, but it seemed to him to be a way of life. Like his jobs and his wives, he just seemed to drift from woman to woman, always landing on his feet, always making out, always on the lookout for something new. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t so worked up about Lou and Margaret. I guess the word I was looking for was “temporary.” Everything about him and his life seemed temporary, almost like he wasn’t real, like nothing really touched him.
I drifted off to thinking about the hunt. Maybe I was kind of temporary myself. I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have a girl, and I didn’t have a job. I guess maybe the only difference between Jack and me was that he liked it that way, and I didn’t. To him the hunt was just another thing to do. To me it already seemed more important. Maybe I could find out something about myself out in the brush, something I’d sure as hell never find out on a sidewalk. So I sat musing as the headlights bored on into the dark ahead of us.
6
IT wasn’t until Thursday that we finished up the deal on the car I was buying from Sloane’s lot. I guess I got a pretty good deal on it. It was a ten-year-old Dodge, and I got it for a hundred and fifty. One of the fenders was a little wrinkled, and the paint wasn’t too pure, but otherwise it seemed OK. Jack assured me that I wouldn’t have been able to touch it for under three hundred anywhere else on the Avenue.
