Hunter's Moon Read online

  She is unloading groceries from her car when he shows up on Wednesday afternoon at one o’clock. Accustomed to seeing him dressed for fall weather, she finds his summer apparel—khaki pants, polo shirt, lightweight sweater thrown cape-like over his shoulders and knotted at the sleeves—strange, like a costume.

  There is a distance in her greeting, which she doesn’t consciously intend; it’s simply there.

  “I expected you later,” she says.

  “The meeting let out early.”

  Her gaze drifts to the white SUV parked across the street.

  “A rental,” he says. “I flew up for the powwow. Give you a hand?”

  “I can manage.”

  “I insist.”

  He takes a grocery bag in each hand and follows her into the kitchen, where she orders him around as if he were a delivery boy. The bacon in the right bottom drawer of the fridge; ham and pork sausage in the left; canned stuff in the cabinet above the stove. When the contents have been put away, he presents a restrained smile, pleased with his chivalry. The lines in his face look like grooves etched into clay by a sculptor’s fingernails. And is it her imagination or has he lost some height? The impression is so strong that she looks at his feet. He’s wearing flat deck shoes rather than his thick-heeled hunting boots.

  That must be it.

  Then, clasping her waist, he draws her to him to kiss her. She pushes him away, gently.

  “Not here, not now.”

  “You don’t seem real excited to see me.”

  “Oh, it’s not … Give me a few minutes to adjust. It’s early, but how about a drink?”

  “If it helps your adjustment.”

  They go into the cottage, where they had spent so many nights. It’s not much larger than a double-wide, but its three rooms have enough space to avert claustrophobia. After pouring Gaetan a shot of his favorite bourbon over ice and herself a glass of sauvignon blanc, she steps into the bathroom, pees, brushes her hair, freshens her lipstick, collects herself. She returns to the living room and drops into one of its two matching chairs. Gaetan is in the other, kitty-corner from her.

  “So, here we are, face-to-face,” she says, and gives him an expectant look.

  “You were right about that guy last fall, the girl’s dad.”

  “Parish.”

  “Parichy.”

  “That’s it. He came after you?”

  Gaetan nods. “I got a letter of intent from some ambulance chaser in Traverse. Right around Thanksgiving. Pitched it to my lawyer. No case at all, he said. It would be dismissed as frivolous in a heartbeat. But I told him I didn’t want it to get that far, and I told him why.”

  Lisa sips her wine. “Because it might have come out in court that I was in the car? You’d have to explain to your wife what I was doing there?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So you settled.”

  He nods and slouches, so that he looks smaller, diminished, just as he had in the kitchen.

  “I hope it wasn’t too much.”

  “It wasn’t. Enough to make him feel he’d won one.”

  She doesn’t ask the amount. His definition of not too much and hers are probably not the same. Nowhere near the same.

  “And this is what you needed to tell me in person?”

  “No. Hell, no.” He rattles the ice cubes in his glass. “Are you adjusted yet?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Marlene and I are getting a divorce.”

  She’d intuited that this would be his news; nonetheless, she is startled.

  “Oh, Christ, Gaetan. I hope you’re not doing it on my account. I really hope not.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Can you explain that?”

  “She filed, not me. Three or four letters went between my lawyer and Parichy’s, copies to me, registered mail. One of them had the cop’s report attached, with your name in it. That happened to be the one Marlene signed for. I was in Chicago when it came, and she opened it and…”

  Lisa takes a healthy gulp of wine to relax the rubber tube that has cinched around her gut. “Is she in the habit of reading your mail?”

  “Not my personal mail. But she saw the law-office return address and figured it was business.” He pauses. “To get to it, I thought of a bullshit alibi. That you were just a friend I’d taken to Traverse to see Aileen. But I knew it wouldn’t fly.”

  “Because this wasn’t the first time she caught you leaving the dance with somebody else.”

  Gaetan doesn’t say anything, which is as good as an answer.

  “It’s not that I mind,” she says. Leaning toward him, she notices more lines in his face, lines as fine as spider’s silk fanning out from the deeper grooves. They make his skin look like crinkled paper. “I never, not for a microsecond, thought I was your first fling. All right, so you told her about me—”

  “Us.”

  “Me. Us. She forgave you the other time, if there was only one. Not this time. She’s done.”

  The whiskey goes down. He reaches for the bottle and carefully measures out another shot.

  “It was a weight off my shoulders, telling her.”

  “I don’t like to think of myself as the bitch who broke up a marriage.”

  “You’re not. Don’t go theatrical on me.”

  “Theater? This isn’t theater to me.” The rubber tube squeezes, relaxes, squeezes, like the band on a blood-pressure gauge. A thought begins to form. “When did this happen?”

  “She filed in March. We’re legally separated for now. I’m contesting one of her terms—she wants half my residuals till death do us part. Marlene is a Scorpio. The vengeful type.”

  “Does she have a job?”

  “Sort of. She freelances.”

  “Can I ask at what?”

  “Tech stuff. She used to be in IT for an investment bank on LaSalle. Quit when our oldest was born, so now she freelances, contract work for IT departments. Why?”

  “Curious, is all.”

  So now she knows who had the skills and the motive to hijack a registered reviewer’s online identity and post the vile review. Maybe she wrote the vulgar tweets, as well. The knowledge reassures her. She has not been trolled since then and is reasonably sure she won’t be in the future. It was a one-off, a virtual slap in the face to the Other Woman from the Woman Scorned. Lisa would have preferred the real thing, a good sharp crack across the cheek. There was something weaselly and underhanded about hiding behind the stolen identity DCR2404.

  “I’ve moved out,” Gaetan says. “Rented a condo in Lake Point Tower. Do you know it?”

  She does. She’d seen it on a trip to Chicago with Bill. Gaetan will not suffer in his single state.

  “Well, thanks for letting me know. I’m sorry you have to go through all this.”

  “There’s more.”

  More. All along, she’s been afraid there would be more.

  “The first year or two, I thought, It’s just bodies. Two bodies having a great time. But it’s turned into something else for me. I’m wondering if it has for you, and if it hasn’t, if it can.”

  “I didn’t think of us as just bodies,” she says. “There was passion, real passion. Not many people are lucky enough to ever know it, and we had it, Gaetan.”

  “Maybe I’m not making myself clear. I’m in love with you, and I—” He stops in mid-sentence, jerking his head, as if he’s been interrupted by a loud noise. “Was? You said there was passion? That we had it?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Making no reply, he lifts his eyes to the poster on the wall behind her. It’s a blowup of the lighthouse that marks the halfway point on her morning runs. She tries to parse the grammar of Gaetan’s silence, as he’d parsed the grammar of her words, but she cannot tell what it means, if it means anything.

  “I could ask you to think about it,” he says at last.

  “Please don’t,” she replies, managing the neat trick of sounding, simultaneously, tender and ruthless.

/>   He resolves things for her as, planting his hands on his knees, he rises from the chair.

  “It’s gotten late and it’s a long drive back to the club. I’d better go.”

  A tiny rise in his voice turns the statement into a question.

  “Yes, of course, you had better,” she answers.

  * * *

  It is the morning before the holiday rush, a fine morning, only a few wispy clouds brushing the sky. Lisa parks in her usual spot in the campground at the mouth of the Windigo. The river runs swift from spring melt-off, tumbling clear and cold over the multicolored rocks paving its bottom. Lake Superior reaches for the northern horizon, a gigantic blue eye in the face of the continent. She goes down the staircase to the beach. In the sand, deer and coyote tracks print the history of the night’s wanderings and predations. Gripping the handrail, she stretches her calves and thighs, then begins to jog toward the lighthouse. At this hour, there isn’t a soul between her and it.

  LINES OF DEPARTURE

  Even now, four years after hearing it, I cannot get Devin’s story out of my head. I remember the day when Will Treadwell put me on the path that would later cross Devin’s. I remember it from beginning to end, one of those exquisite days October produces in the north woods. Across Lake Superior—Gitche Gumee, Longfellow’s shining Big-Sea-Water—no horizon was visible in the windless, cloudless twilight of early morning. There was hardly a wrinkle in the lake, its gray perfectly matching the gray sky so that air and water seemed to be a single element. The sun rose, not with a riotous display but with a crimson blush that brightened as the disc bulged out of the lake. Then the horizon was drawn, the sky blued, and the lake darkened to a color mimicking the deep ocean.

  The air bit, but not too sharply, just enough to make me greedy for it and suck it into my lungs until I was half dizzy. By midday, alto-cirrus appeared far overhead, some ribbed like beach sand after a tide has run out, some sweeping in thin, multiple threads—the clouds that sailors call mare’s tails, prophets of heavy weather. But November is the month for Superior’s gales. No storm threatened on that day; nothing was permitted to spoil it. Even the cedar swamps and jackpine barrens looked inviting.

  In spite of the high latitude, the sunlight was intense, bleaching birches to the whiteness of paper, exposing nuances in the autumn colors that would have been lost to the eye on a dull afternoon: cardinal red, blood red, maroon, and plum; pale yellow, yellow green; and shades of orange from tangerine to burnt ocher. The hour before dusk was the most enchanting, also the saddest. The sky took on a lilac tinge, a shelf of flat gunmetal cloud formed, and the sun, falling beneath it, illuminated the treetops. They glowed with an unreal brilliance, as if each leaf were a tinted lightbulb. I still wished I could live forever, if only to behold such beauty once a year, even as I knew that my portion of eternity, like everyone’s, was a fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond; and yet there was a melancholy in the slant of mellow light, a forecast of ever-shortening days, of things ending, of winter’s coming.

  Will Treadwell and I were sitting on the tailgate of his pickup, relaxing after an afternoon of woodcock and ruffed-grouse shooting in the woods near Vieux Desert. We hadn’t been too successful, but that didn’t matter as we looked at those electric trees, hypnotized by their gorgeousness. When you reach a certain age, you tend to treasure small moments that would pass unnoticed if you were much younger. We were in our sixties, mid-sixties, on Medicare and Social Security, “card-carrying geezers,” Will said. We had had our big moments, but that account was closed, and in lieu of plunging into self-pity, alcoholism, or senior-citizen grumpiness, we accepted that the small ones were all that was left and tried to make the most of them.

  I had met Will through a friend from Connecticut who raised and trained sporting dogs and knew Will from the hunting trips he made to the Upper Peninsula. He convinced me to join him one year, 1987. I’d never been to the U.P., and I took to it immediately, the wildness and lonesomeness of it—a place that had managed to escape the bulldozing depredations of land developers. I liked it so much that I returned the following year on my own and linked up with Will. I had hunted with him every autumn but three since then. It became a necessary annual ritual for me, so much so that I was willing to drive a thousand miles rather than miss it.

  We are very different, Will and I. I’m midsize; he’s extra-large, with arms and shoulders that, even at his age, project an impression of superior leverage. I’m a writer; he ran a bar and a local craft brewery until he retired; but we share a passion for tramping through wild country behind spirited bird dogs. There were—still are—sterner strands that tie us: the semi-mystical brotherhood of the Marine Corps and the bonds of war.

  We both participated in the misbegotten venture into Indochina, though our tours there did not overlap, and our roles had been as dissimilar as our physical statures. Will had been a grunt, a machine gunner, and I had been a combat correspondent, an accidental Marine, really, the accident being my last name, which begins with a “C.” I got my draft notice a month after flunking out of journalism school at Northwestern University (a singular achievement; journalism isn’t exactly astrophysics). I reported to the induction center on South Jefferson Street in Chicago (I was born and raised in Joliet, Illinois) and passed the physical, following which a sergeant ordered us draftees to line up facing him. He then commanded everyone whose surnames began with “A” through “D” to take one step forward. We did. “You people are now in the United States Marine Corps,” he announced, stunning us all. The fabled corps was a volunteer outfit, wasn’t it? The sergeant’s declaration struck every one of us as a death sentence. It was 1967; the Marines were suffering casualties on a par with World War Two—the reason we with surnames beginning “A” through “D” had been ordered to take that fateful one step forward. There weren’t enough volunteers to fill the corps’ depleted ranks; it had to shanghai conscripts.

  In a collective state of dread, we were packed off to Parris Island for boot camp. Following that ordeal and an additional month of advanced infantry training (it is holy writ in the Marines that every man is a rifleman first), I was granted what I thought would be a reprieve from the death sentence. Some angel somewhere in the records department noticed that I’d studied journalism in college. I was assigned the primary MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) of 4341—i.e., combat correspondent. With a happy heart, I shipped out to the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, where I graduated top of my class. There were two reasons for this unusually excellent performance: (1) the course repeated much of what I’d already learned during my three semesters at Northwestern; and (2) I was highly motivated. Ignoring the combat part of my MOS, I’d deluded myself into thinking that if I did well at the school, I might not be sent to Vietnam or, if I was, would spend my tour of duty banging out press releases in an air-conditioned office.

  “You were a goddamn REMF,” Will has mocked, with genial scorn. REMF was the unofficial acronym for Rear-Echelon Motherfucker. In actual fact, I saw more combat than he, sent out week upon week, month upon month, to cover one operation after another. But Will’s derision was accurate in one sense—I didn’t fight; I only saw combat. Not a warrior, I observed and recorded the warriors’ deeds. With one exception.

  About eight months into my tour, I’d been assigned to cover a search-and-destroy mission near the Laotian border. I flew out on a helicopter and joined up with a platoon from the First Battalion, Ninth Marines, an outfit known as “the Walking Dead” for its off-the-charts casualty rate. The platoon went out on patrol the next morning, me tagging along armed with a notebook, Nikon camera, and a pistol that would probably be good only for committing suicide. We began climbing some nameless numbered hill through the jungle’s greenish twilight. Men walking, men who would soon be dead. I was raising my camera to photograph a Marine clutching a tree root to pull himself up the steep incline when the North Vietnamese sprang an ambush. A bullet blasted the camera out of my hand. I belly-flopped onto
the muddy slope. The enemy fire ripped through us like a typhoon through tarpaper shacks. The Marine whose picture I was going to take tumbled down and came to rest beside me, the lower half of his face shot away. I picked up his rifle and fired back and saw an NVA soldier fall, though I can’t say if it was I who killed him or someone else.

  Forty-two of us started up that hill, nineteen made it down, me among them, bleeding from the fragments of a Nikon SLR embedded in my hands and face.

  * * *

  Now Will and I sat on the tailgate, drinking lukewarm thermos coffee spiced with bourbon while we gaze at the treetops. Their brilliance dimmed as the sun fell behind a flat purplish cloud, igniting a gold fire at the edges that resembled a gilded frame around a blank canvas. I mentioned the sunsets in Vietnam, the spectacular sunsets over the Truong Son Mountains—my only pleasant memories of the war.

  Will relit the thin, ropy, stinking cigar he’d been smoking.

  “Phil, you remember that guy who bartended for me a while back? Chris?”

  The question, seeming to come out of nowhere, puzzled me, but I gave it a few moments’ thought.

  “Tall guy, scrawny, on the shy side?”

  “Him. He didn’t last long behind the bar. Bartending and shy don’t mix. He was one of us, y’know.”

  “Us who?”

  “A vet. Different war. He enlisted right after nine-eleven, did a tour in Afghanistan, another one in Iraq with the Army engineers.” Will dropped the cigar into the dirt, slid off the tailgate to crush it, hopped back up. “A Humvee he was riding in in Iraq hit an IED, and he got a shitload of shrapnel in his guts. They had to cut out half his stomach. The reason he was so skinny. Like that surgery they do on fat people, but he wasn’t fat to begin with.”

  In the pause that followed this, I steeled myself for the hard-luck saga I knew was coming. Will was a storyteller who gravitated toward tragedies, an inclination I attributed to a morbid streak in his nature or to the Upper Peninsula’s long, gloomy winters, maybe both.

  And the tale of Chris the bartender was as long as it was woeful. I’ll try to abridge. Medically discharged, he returned to his hometown, Saginaw, landed a job in an auto-transmission factory, but when it moved to China, he moved to Texas, where he found work in construction and married a woman from Houston. The marriage lasted long enough to produce two children, a girl and a boy. After it broke up, Chris migrated back to Michigan and wound up on the U.P., laying block brick days, bartending nights for Will. He was a terrible bartender and spared Will the heartache of firing him, a veteran, “one of us,” by quitting.