Hunter's Moon Page 24

  It was in the winter when his former brother-in-law phoned with dreadful news: his ex-wife and daughter had been killed in a car wreck, but his son had survived and was in the hospital. Unemployed again—his brick-laying job was seasonal—he had to borrow money for plane fare to Texas. Will loaned it to him.

  “I gave it to him, really; knew he’d never pay me back,” Will went on. “I didn’t see him for a while. A couple of years ago, right when I was in the middle of selling the bar, getting set to retire, he showed up again. The dude was in tears.”

  What had happened was this: By the time Chris got to Texas, his ex’s sister and her husband had taken legal custody of his son, spirited him out of the hospital, and brought him to Massachusetts, where they lived on a farm, a religious commune. They’d convinced the authorities in Texas that Chris was a bad father who’d deserted the family and missed too many child-support payments. They would not allow him to see the boy.

  “What Chris wanted from me was another loan to pay for a lawyer and for me to help him find one so he could fight this thing,” Will said. “But like I told you, I was in the middle of selling, setting things up to retire. I didn’t have time for Chris. And if you want to know the truth, I felt he was a hopeless fuckup. Iraq had fucked him up mentally as much as physically. Even if I had time to do what he wanted, he’d be back with some new soap opera, so I pulled a hundred from the till, gave it to him, and blew him off. I didn’t hear anything from him or about him till this past summer.”

  “This being a Will Treadwell story, what you heard wasn’t good,” I said.

  “It could’ve been a whole lot worse.” He removed his stained baseball cap and brushed his thin ginger hair with his fingers. “He found where this commune was and got there somehow or other and tried to kidnap his own kid. He had a handgun on him. That’s what I heard from a guy I know who knows Chris. The cops got there before he shot somebody … or himself. He’s in the Massachusetts state prison and is going to be there a long time.”

  Will’s English setter, Samantha, curled up with my dog in the car kennel behind us, began to whimper. Will turned to check on her, but there was nothing wrong. She was dreaming.

  “If you meant to ruin a beautiful day by depressing me, you succeeded,” I said.

  Will gave a caustic laugh. “I was leading up to something.”

  He hopped off the tailgate again, rummaged inside the truck, and returned, handing me a mailer printed on stiff, grainy paper. The Stiggs Wellness Center, read the front side, above a cheery logo showing a sun rising over pine trees. Above the sun, a comet streaked across a royal-blue sky, with the slogan Where New Lives Begin! riding its tail. A block of promotional copy filled up the rest of the space: Located on ten private acres adjacent to a state park in the dramatic Huron Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Stiggs Center is dedicated to individual and group renewal and empowerment.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Look at the back side.”

  It listed the various programs by which renewal and empowerment were to be achieved, with the prices alongside, like a menu. The last one was in bold black caps: A 4-WEEKEND PROGRAM FOR COMBAT VETERANS. VETS MENTOR VETS. FREE!

  “I volunteer there,” Will said. “I’ll be there this weekend.”

  “At a spa?”

  “It’s not a spa,” he replied testily. “It’s a kind of clinic. I’m one of the mentors.”

  “You mean you do counseling?”

  “Mostly, I listen. I’m good at that. You run a bar for thirty-odd years, you learn how to listen.”

  “Let me guess. The way Chris works into this is, you didn’t listen to him, you blew him off, he landed in jail. You felt guilty, so you got into mentoring vets.”

  He flapped a hand. “More or less.”

  “Okay, you’ll be gone this weekend. I’ll miss your company, but I think I can manage all by myself.”

  Will gave me a soft punch in the shoulder. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Hear me out. They use your book in the vet program. Charlie reads from it sometimes at the group sessions. Charlie Stiggs. He started the center with his wife. Her name’s Laura.” He threw me a quick, almost shy smile. “You’re a famous guy, eh.”

  Will was flattering me, and I was flattering myself earlier when I claimed to be a writer. Actually, I’d been a newspaper reporter all my career and had written only one book, title: Lines of Departure: Memoirs of a Combat Correspondent. It had made me famous for a brief time but not famous in the way the word is commonly understood, that is, celebritized. Most people had never heard of the book or me.

  “I mentioned to them that I knew you, that you were going to be here and we’d be seeing each other,” Will continued. “So they asked me to ask you if you’d drop in this weekend.”

  “Didn’t sound like you asked. It sounded like an order.”

  “Yeah, it was. You never got above lance corporal; I finished up as a sergeant E-five.”

  The sun was down; the sky had darkened to violet, the air grown colder.

  I said, “I could go for a beer and bowl of chili. You?”

  “Sounds good.”

  We started toward town, lurching down a rutted logging road through a recent clear-cut littered with slash piles, broken branches, stumps. It looked like a bombing range, but the absence of trees afforded a view of Venus, bright as a headlight, and a pinpoint to its lower left, Mercury. The moon shined above them, the first full moon of October, a hunter’s moon.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I asked, sounding a bit whiny. “I’m not a trained counselor.”

  “Neither am I. Do what I do. Listen. And talk to the guys about … y’know, stuff. How you got through your PTSD. Stuff like that.”

  He nudged the truck through a wide hole that resembled a meteorite crater. I maintained a strategic silence. I have an aversion to that term, “post-traumatic stress disorder,” partly because I dislike the clinical, bloodless sound of it, preferring older terms like “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” “soldier’s heart”; mostly because I don’t consider it a disorder so much as a normal reaction to an abnormal experience. Anyone who emerges from months of combat the same person as when he went in is the one with the disorder. Which isn’t to deny that war lacerates the soul. For a long time after I came home, I was afflicted with a sensitivity to loud noises, with outbursts of anger at the slightest provocation, with an unusual form of insomnia—I could not sleep without a light on and a loaded shotgun at my bedside.

  Over our beers and chili in his old bar, Will talked me into obeying his orders, presenting it as something like a civic duty. He and I were elders, obliged to dispense our hard-won wisdom to younger members of the soldier’s tribe. That I didn’t have much wisdom to dispense seemed beside the point.

  * * *

  We left Vieux Desert on Friday afternoon. While Will drove, I acquainted myself with the Stiggs Center by reading its online newsletter on my iPad. Upcoming events: a three-day session for people in transition, featuring an experiential process to build a dream structure within your life cycle. Cost, $300. A Women’s Pilgrimage celebrating female roles through ancient rituals carried a $350 price tag for single occupancy, $250 each for double. A Wellness Weekend that included a wisdom quest to a sacred forest was going for $380 per person.

  I tapped to the next page, which described the four-weekend Veterans’ Program in the same moony lingo. But it was offered at no cost, owing to a grant from the Michigan Department of Veterans Affairs. We begin the journey to restore wholeness with a welcoming drum circle.… We learn how to let go of the war experience and build the dream of a new life.… Guiding warriors to bring meaning to tragedy through cross-cultural ceremonies. It was the sort of prose I had been trained to avoid like Ebola. Phrases like “bring meaning to tragedy” rang obscenely hollow compared with statements of unadorned fact.

  The troops in Vietnam had a saying they uttered when a bes
t friend died for no good reason, when a Dear John arrived at mail call, or when forty-two men went up a hill and only nineteen came down, a mantra hymned in response to the lies they heard from generals, politicians, chaplains: Don’t mean nothin’, don’t mean a thing. Wisdom? To reject all comforting illusions, to embrace the war’s absurdity—that was the beginning of wisdom and the most effective vaccine against going crazy.

  I closed the iPad, feeling that I had been shanghaied once again.

  “Will, tell me you haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid. Drum circles? You don’t buy into this mumbo jumbo, do you?”

  “You have to ignore it. But the program does the guys some good. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect, but if stuff like this had been around back in the day, you and me wouldn’t have been as fucked up for as long as we were.”

  I wanted to say, Speak for yourself, but I kept quiet. I was aware that with unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, retreat houses and sanitariums like the Stiggs Center had sprung up all over the country, becoming as common as snake-oil wagons once were. To say that I was skeptical that war’s hidden wounds could be healed by well-intentioned amateurs spouting New Age psychobabble would be an understatement. When I thought about that grant from the VA, I caught the whiff of a hustle.

  * * *

  The Upper Peninsula is the wildest part of Michigan, and the Huron Mountains are the wildest part of the U.P.—a thousand square miles of steep forested slopes, rock bluffs, ravines, and crevasses sculpted by Ice Age glaciers. They aren’t true mountains, the tallest topping out at two thousand feet, but their ruggedness has spared them from the logging and mining that ravaged the rest of the U.P. in the past. From the worst of it anyway.

  Despite the claim its brochures made—located in the dramatic Huron Mountains—the Stiggs Center was on the verge of the range, a short drive down an all-weather road to a pine-shadowed meadow overlooking a lake. Through the trees, I made out a large building faced with half logs, three or four white-framed cabins, and two shingled bungalows that looked like old-timey motels. The center had been a summer Bible camp before the Stiggses bought it, Will told me. The bungalows had been the boys’ and girls’ dormitories, now converted into guest rooms. A volunteer, a young blond woman wearing hiking boots and Lands’ End togs, escorted me to my room. Will knew his way around and carried on by himself. The young woman gave me a key and a map of the grounds and said that we were invited to dinner with the Stiggses. She took my overnight bag inside, while I carried the rest of my gear: a metal case containing a pair of 70-by-20 astronomical binoculars and a cylindrical canvas holding a tripod. I had taken up astronomy in my retirement, following Marcus Aurelius’s advice to look round at the courses of the stars, as if thou wert going along with them … for such thoughts purge away the filth of the terrene life.

  “Are you going to do videos?” she asked, indicating the cases.

  I shook my head. “Hope to do some stargazing if the sky stays clear.”

  That wasn’t completely true.

  “Dinner is in the main building, the log one,” she said.

  The dining hall where Methodist adolescents once refueled after a day of hiking, swimming, and hymn-singing had been downsized into a cozy dining room accommodating six round tables, each with four chairs. A stone fireplace helped create the feel of a rural inn. Will, showered and changed into fresh clothes, introduced me, likewise cleaned up, to Charlie and Laura Stiggs. If he’d been standing on a medicine ball or any large round object, Charlie would have looked like a human exclamation point. Everything about him was long and thin: his face, his neck, his torso, his legs. But my second impression, taking in his white eyebrows, trim white beard, and white hair curling over his forehead like foam on a wave, was of an ascetic, somewhat underfed monk. Laura, brown-haired, round-faced, smooth-skinned, must have been twenty years younger than her husband. She wore a pair of oversize glasses, the copper-tinted eyes behind them holding a benign and vaguely dreamy expression. She shook my hand firmly and presented a warm smile that struck me as not entirely sincere: professional, rather, the kind of smile you might get from a saleswoman behind the cosmetics-and-perfume counter in a department store.

  We sat down to eat (no cocktails, no wine, alcohol prohibited). My fears of a vegan meal were unfounded, and I silently thanked the chef (whom I never saw the whole two days I was there) for the meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas.

  The Stiggses proceeded to stroke my ego, praising Lines of Departure. My glance pivoted to Will. In all the years I’d known him, he’d never offered his opinion about the book. I’d often had the feeling that he disapproved of it, not for its literary flaws but for its very existence. To him, the experience of battle was incommunicable to those who were strangers to it. All war stories were therefore false to one degree or another; to publish an entire book of them was to commit a kind of fraud. That is what I thought he thought, probably because I sometimes thought it myself.

  “I was intrigued by the title,” Charlie was saying, his hands clasping his glass of iced tea. “It’s a military term for … for…” He fumbled, trying to recall the definition, and looked to Will. “You told me once.”

  “For the start point for an attack on an enemy position,” Will explained. “When a unit crosses the line of departure, it’s committed to the assault. No turning back.”

  “Yes, I remember now,” said Charlie. Then, to me: “But you use it in a metaphorical sense, don’t you? The lines can refer to the lines you wrote in your reporting, the departures to…”

  Again, he struggled, his slender fingers plucking the air. Now it was my turn to help him out.

  “Do you know a Hemingway story, ‘A Way You’ll Never Be’?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “You go into combat one thing, you come out something else, if you live through it. You aren’t you anymore.”

  “That’s what we do here!” Laura chimed in. “I never thought of it before, but it’s what we do. We provide a line of departure.” Her fixed smile deepened into something near beatific. “From one mode of life to a new and better one.”

  “We open them to the possibility of one,” Charlie added by way of refinement. “To the dream of one. And we hope you can help our guests make that transition.”

  I scooped up some mashed potatoes before they got cold.

  “Tomorrow starts the first of the four weekends for this session,” Charlie said. “There’ll be five guests, all vets from Iraq or Afghanistan. Adam, Alex, Bruce, Larry, and Devin.”

  “I don’t see how I can help them make this transition you’re talking about,” I said, and I should have inquired as to the nature of the transition. Something more concrete than from one mode of life to a new and better one.

  “Much of that will be up to you,” said Laura. “But we would like you to read from your book at tomorrow afternoon’s group session.” She dipped into a tote bag at her feet and pulled out a paperback copy sprouting Post-it notes as bookmarks. “These are the passages we think would be most effective, but feel free to choose your own. It’s your book after all!”

  She passed the copy to me. I squeezed a little more ketchup on my meatloaf.

  “Since it’ll be up to me, what would you say if I took them out stargazing tomorrow night? If it’s clear enough.”

  “Stargazing?” asked Charlie.

  “I do some amateur astronomy. I’ve got a pair of binoculars with me. You can see the moons of Jupiter with them.”

  Laura, who so far had hardly touched her food, looked perplexed. “The purpose being?”

  “It puts things in perspective.”

  The couple traded glances, then nodded their approval.

  * * *

  We assembled in the dining room next morning at eight. We sat while Laura stood by the stone fireplace, dressed as if for a hike, in cargo pants, a flannel shirt, and a down vest. Will introduced himself to the vets; Laura presented me as a special guest. There was an awkward moment, more awkward for her than fo
r me, when the announcement of my name and the title of my book was greeted with silence and blank looks. Evidently, my great fame had not reached any of the five men. This prompted her to give them a brief biography, with encomiums to Lines of Departure, which elicited a slightly more animated response.

  Her round face—it really was almost a perfect circle—beaming a tyrannical benevolence, she then welcomed her guests to the program in a mellow, hypnotic voice and took them through the steps they would follow to their eventual recovery. “We will begin this morning with a welcoming drum ceremony. This will prepare you to learn how to build a dream structure for a new life.…”

  What was a dream structure? I tamped down an urge to grimace at this drivel and studied the others to see how they were reacting. To a man, they looked befuddled but attentive, like students on the first day of class in differential calculus.

  Adam was from Wisconsin and, like the others, in his late twenties. He had cloudy green eyes—cloudy but hard, like agate marbles—a wide mouth with thin lips, and flaxen hair nearly as white as Charlie’s. He was the biggest of the bunch, tall and broad, and sat with his legs apart, both arms hanging between them. Even when still, he emitted waves of tension, a belligerence easily provoked.

  Next to him was his friend Alex (they’d come together)—skinny, dark-haired, a sharp nose and cheekbones, garbed in biker black, serpentine tattoos twining around his neck.