Hunter's Moon Read online

  Ten or twelve miles south of town, we turn onto a wide dirt road that runs straight as a surveyor’s transit across a plain studded with the stumps of white pine cut down decades ago. Two miles in, the desolation ends in a forest of beech and maple. Tom slams the brakes, the truck slewing in the mud. Leaning between the two front seats, I see what appears, at first glance, to be a doe, facing us from the road some fifty or sixty yards ahead. Then it turns broadside, long-legged, gray-black in the dull light, furred tail pointed like a semaphore.

  “Paul! My camera! In the bag on the floor!”

  But by the time I pass it to Tom, the wolf is gone. A moment later, as he fumbles to snap a long lens into place, two more cross the road at an easy lope, and then another and another.

  “A pack!” Tom shouts. “A whole pack in broad daylight! I’ve never seen that before!”

  The acid in his mood has been neutralized, the toxic atmosphere dispelled. For the next couple of minutes, we babble excitedly about our good luck. We’re friends again, which inclines me to regard the sighting as less a matter of luck and more as a blessing, the wild’s benediction.

  Following the crude map, we leave the gravel road and bounce down a rutted two-track that hits a dead end where decked pulp logs lie rotting. The dogs are sprung, and we set out on foot into a woods still damp from melting snow, cross a swamp thick as split-pea soup, and hike up a hardwood ridge. Below, an archipelago of spruce and aspen stands mottles a broad pale-brown meadow. And that, says Bill, is the honey hole.

  The dogs quarter out ahead, Rory way in front. He stops dead in front of a hazel thicket. Jasper and Erica honor, all three studies in complete concentration. Bill stands well behind Tom and me, making up for his bad behavior by giving us first crack at the bird. It goes up with the thundering sound characteristic of grouse, a sound that never fails to startle. At Tom’s shot, it tips sideways and falls. The dogs remain staunch. A single explodes from the thicket. Two shots, two misses, and still the dogs hold fast. This is astonishing—there must be two coveys in the thicket. Bill cocks the hammers on his gun, figuring that he’s been gracious enough. Two more birds take off, going straightaway, and he drops them. Half a second after he’s reloaded, another pair bursts from cover, streaking over the meadow, one just behind the other. Bill shifts his stance, twists his body, and the gun barrels seems to paint the sky in a smooth, elegant stroke, the shots following so closely that they sound almost as one. Both birds tumble in a fall at once thrilling and tragic. To shoot a grouse pair with a modern firearm is rare; to shoot two consecutive doubles with an antique is a feat that we’d talk about for years. Watching him pull that off so effortlessly was like seeing him, years ago, rifle a pass through double coverage. If we hadn’t already forgiven him for last night, we did now.

  Two hours and some miles later, he kills a fifth for his limit. Tom and I have four each, all but two mature birds, fat as chickens, their black-banded tails fanning out to a hand’s span. We take a break.

  “A honey hole all right,” Tom says, picking a burr out of Jasper’s coat. “Look, Bill, what I said this—”

  Sitting against a hemlock, Bill waves a hand to say, Forget it.

  “Helluva day. The wolves; you dropping two doubles in a row. One helluva day.”

  “Can’t imagine having a better one,” Bill murmurs, then stands and drapes a comradely arm over Tom’s shoulders. “You guys need one apiece for your limit. That’ll make it el perfecto.”

  We hunt our way back toward the truck, and after covering most of the distance, Erica and Jasper stop hunting seriously, contenting themselves to trot in a straight line. Rory, catching some scent on the wind, jogs across a cranberry bog and vanishes into the woods beyond. We follow his ever-fading bells to the T-junction of two skid trails, one leading toward the truck, the other into an overgrown clear-cut, a treacherous snarl of aspen sticks dense as a bamboo jungle, of brush-filled potholes, slash piles, hidden stumps, felled tree trunks. The wind has risen; leaves swirl in the air. Rory’s bells have gone silent; either he’s run out of hearing range or he has another point.

  “All yours,” Bill says.

  “Forget the limit,” I say. “We’re done; our dogs are done. No way we’re going to tromp through that crap.”

  Bill stares into the clear-cut for at least five seconds before he says, “Well, I’d better go find him. Wait for me here.”

  5.

  The investigator’s name is Ron Jankowski, and he’s built like a snowman—no chin, no neck, round torso squeezed into a chair facing Tom’s desk. A file folder lies open on his lap, and a small notebook is lost in his huge white hand.

  “Let’s start,” he says, and places a tape recorder on the desk. “All right, so, you saw Mr. Erickson step into a pile of…” He looks down at the Schoolcraft County sheriff’s incident report. “… a pile of slash. It covered a hole, kind of like camouflage over an animal trap. It gave way under his weight, he tripped, the shotgun struck the ground, and it discharged into his chest. Is that right?”

  From behind his desk, flanked by the American flag and state flags, Tom scowls thoughtfully. “Not quite.”

  “How ‘not quite’?”

  “We didn’t see it happen.”

  Jankowski snaps a finger against the report. “This says you witnessed the accident.”

  There is a note in his voice that encloses the last word in quotes.

  “Well, I suppose that’s just a figure of speech,” Tom explains. “On the sheriff’s part, not ours.”

  “This scenario, then, it’s speculation on your part?”

  He glances my way as he asks the question. I’m seated on the sofa, beneath Tom’s framed law degree and photographs of him with the governor and assorted dignitaries. More than a week has passed since the memorial service, at which Tom and I delivered eulogies and tried not to look at Lisa, sitting in the front pew next to Bill’s daughters. Jankowski wanted to interview us separately, presumably to catch inconsistencies in our accounts. Tom insisted that he talk to both of us in his office in the Ingham County building. It would put him on the defensive: the flags, the photos, the view of the state-capitol dome, the nameplate on the door. But Jankowski—he’s a freelance private eye who snoops for several insurance companies in addition to Midstates Mutual—doesn’t appear to be on the defensive. Not on the offensive, either. Only doing his job, which is to save his client a great deal of money.

  “It’s what made sense to us,” I reply. “We heard a shot, then another, not as loud. Like he was farther away. Like he’d fired at a bird and missed and chased it for a re-flush. When he didn’t come back, we went in to look for him, and when we found him, we figured he’d stepped into the slash pile and fell or tripped and the gun went off…”

  Tom had rehearsed me—he’s an expert at witness preparation—and I’m telling the same story I told the sheriff and Bill’s own newspaper—and Lisa. I’ve told it often enough that I almost believe it myself.

  “And he had a bad back, you know,” I add. “So it could be that when—”

  Jankowski interrupts with a dismissive gesture. “He was an experienced hunter. He didn’t have the safety on?”

  This gives Tom an opportunity to discourse on antique firearms. Bill, he explains, would have cocked the exposed hammer on the second barrel before shooting. When he stumbled and the gun butt hit the ground, the impact tripped the hammer, or a branch hooked the trigger. Either way, it was just terrible luck that the barrel was pointed at his chest.

  As if he’s pleased with his show of expertise, a faint smile passes across Tom’s lips, then fades, quick as smoke. Jankowski scribbles in his notebook. His eyes are hidden, tiny lumps of coal buried in his snowman’s face. I can’t tell if he finds the story plausible.

  * * *

  After we’d found Bill’s body, we dragged him out of the entangling brush, his mouth wide open, teeth bared, a ragged cavity in the middle of his chest, about the diameter of a grapefruit; it looked as if some small,
ferocious animal had gnawed through him from the inside out. My experience of violent death limited to the blank pistols fired in Chekhov plays, to the decorous expiration of the mortally wounded Prince Bolkonsky, the sight made me sick; yet my eyes were manacled to it, for there before me was a body that mere minutes ago had been someone I’d known all my life, who could think and speak and feel and was now only insentient matter. Tom was calm, inappropriately calm. True, he’d seen worse things, but this wasn’t a stranger in a police photograph or on a morgue slab. He removed his belt and buckled it through Rory’s collar for a leash and handed it to me. I wiped the gore from Rory’s nose with a bandanna. It would have been nice if, like a dog in a fairy tale, he had lain down faithfully beside his fallen master instead of lapping up his blood, but he was only a dog, thirsty and starved for protein after so much hard running.

  A minute or two passed in total silence until Tom, pointing at the slash pile—it would not have deceived an experienced eye—said under his breath, “He would’ve known better than to step into that with a cocked hammer.”

  His thoughts were running ahead of mine. Really, I was too stunned to think at all, but when he asked, “When did Lisa say he took out those policies?” my brain unlocked.

  “May; I think she said May,” I said. “He might have been in worse trouble than we knew about.”

  “How so?”

  I lifted the embargo on the late-night conversation I’d had with Bill. No point in keeping it secret any longer.

  “There’s going to be questions,” Tom said after he’d digested my intelligence.

  He walked around the corpse, pausing to study some detail with the dispassion of an evidence tech examining a crime scene. When he finished, he looked off into the middle distance, then went into full lawyerly mode and crafted the narrative we would present to whoever had those questions.

  “Are you with me, Paul?”

  I answered that I was. After all, his version sounded more believable than the alternative. Bill couldn’t have choreographed the whole thing, planned it out ahead of time, planned to have Rory run off into those woods.

  “There’s still going to be questions. The books are full of stories about guys who’d been thinking about it for a long time, then all of a sudden drive off the road at sixty miles an hour right into a tree. It might have gone down something like that. He saw the circumstances were just right, and time was running out. Our last day. He knew he could count on us.”

  “That’s why he told us to wait for him, that’s why he fired the first shot?” I asked.

  “Listen, none of that makes any difference, and maybe it was an accident.…”

  “I don’t think it was, Tom. And neither do you.”

  “Whatever, let’s keep Lisa and his girls in mind. We’re gonna say what we’re gonna say for their sakes, not his, okay?”

  Breaking the news to Lisa had been the hardest part. It was the hardest thing either of us had ever done. I’ll never forget leaving her in that house alone, with what I knew to be a lie. If she believed it, it was only because she needed to. Bill may have convinced himself that he was doing the best thing for her and his daughters, but there was no more forgiving him.

  * * *

  Jankowski has stopped writing. He clicks his tongue, looks at Tom. “How would you describe Mr. Erickson’s state of mind?”

  “His what?” Tom asks, feigning surprise.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Muhlen. I’ve done my homework.”

  “Then you know what the coroner’s report said. Death caused by blah-de-blah due to the apparent accidental discharge of blah-de-blah.”

  Jankowski stabs the air with his pen. “That wasn’t my question.”

  Tom ponders for a couple of seconds. “Well, only an hour before, he said he’d had the best day of his life. What does that tell you about his state of mind?”

  Tom is improvising, spinning Bill’s actual words, certainly the truest he’d ever spoken. Jankowski turns to me, leaning forward as far as his bulging gut will allow. “And what did you hear him say, Mr. Egremont?”

  It is Lisa I have in mind; it’s her stricken face I see when I answer.

  GRIEF

  The photograph was taken the summer after his father’s war. It’s a black-and-white that shows the family on the beach of a northern lake, pine trees picketing the background. Jeff’s mother wears a one-piece swimsuit that hugs her like a girdle; his father is in baggy patterned trunks. Between them, in a diaper, Jeff stands on bowed, chubby legs. His parents hold him by the hands, and because both are tall, his arms are raised high, as if in surrender to the adults towering over him.

  “Look at you, a little guy. Couldn’t stand on your own long enough to pose for a picture,” Hal says. “That beach, that’s where you took your first steps. Right there.” He taps the strip of sand in the foreground with a finger. Emphatic taps, as if he’s indicating the site of an event worthy of a historical marker: HERE, IN JULY 1946, JEFFREY HAVLICEK TOOK HIS FIRST STEPS. “You waddled three, four feet, then flopped back down to all fours and crawled to the water like a goddamn little turtle.”

  Jeff presents a hesitant smile, certain that the affection in Hal’s voice is for the toddler in the photo, not for the man he grew up to be.

  Father and son are in the motel dining area—with its self-service counter and paper plates and cups, it can’t be called a dining room—eating the “free hot breakfast” advertised in the lobby. They are on their way to hunt deer in the Upper Peninsula, but the point won’t necessarily be to shoot anything. The point will be to give Jeff’s younger brother and sisters a break from looking after their difficult father. All three live near their childhood home in Bloomfield Hills, which Hal refuses to leave for the retirement community they found for him in Florida. Golf course, activities, the company of people his own age. “A nursing home is what it is,” he said, and nobody was going to kennel him in some goddamn nursing home where seniors watch TV not knowing what’s on. For the past year, Jerry, Jennifer, and June (it had been their mother’s idea to give her kids names beginning with “J”) have made sure that he gets a call from at least one of them every day. They’ve taken turns inviting him to dinner on Sundays, when the woman who does his cooking and cleaning is off; they’ve chauffeured and shopped for him and put up with his complaints. And what has Jeff done? Nothing more than phone every now and then from New York. Time he did his share. Take him with you.

  Jeff objected at first. He and Hal don’t get along, haven’t for, oh, it must be forty years now. And besides—hunting? With a man of eighty-five with failing eyesight? But his siblings wore him down. It would do the old man good to get out of that house. He’d loved to hunt when he was younger. Maybe, in the woods, he’d forget his loss for a little while. A kind of holiday from grief.

  Jeff’s plan had been to drive due north and across the Mackinac Bridge into the U.P., but when they left, yesterday morning, Hal demanded that they go the long way, around the tip of Lake Michigan, past Chicago, and up through Wisconsin. He wanted to make a pilgrimage to the beach at Lake Gogebic and—if they found it—stand where he’d stood with his wife and infant son nearly sixty years ago. Jeff didn’t see how that was going to help him forget, but he agreed just to be agreeable.

  All they have to guide them on their quest are Hal’s unreliable memory and the photograph. Hal lifts it from the table and, holding it at arm’s length, tilts his chin to focus through his trifocals.

  “She was a beauty, wasn’t she?” he murmurs.

  “You were pretty good-looking yourself,” Jeff remarks, trying to steer the conversation in another direction.

  “With that face and that figure and the way she could swim—boy, could she swim!—she could’ve been another Esther Williams.”

  “But then she would’ve gone to Hollywood, run off with Tarzan. The guy who played Tarzan, the swimmer.”

  “Johnny Weissmuller. Won the Olympics. Esther Williams wasn’t in Tarzan. Maureen O’Sullivan
played Jane.”

  “A joke. I meant, if Mom became a movie star, you’d never have met her.”

  “How the hell do you know? Some things are meant to be, no matter what.”

  Jeff decides not to argue with destiny.

  “It was her father,” Hal goes on. “Kept her under lock and key. Those brothers of hers could do as they pleased, but not her. She wanted to try out for the Aquacade, like Esther Williams did. He wouldn’t let her.” Jeff cannot remember how many times he’s heard this story. “I don’t know, maybe in those days, if I had a daughter that pretty, I’d’ve done the same thing. Look at her.”

  He does as he’s been told, as though he’s reverted to the obedient boy he’d once been. At first, he tries to find in the Hal of today—the bottle-bottom glasses, the stooped shoulders, the horseshoe of gray hair over his elongated ears, plugged with hearing aids—some resemblance to the Hal of the photo. If it’s hard to see any, it’s impossible to connect the last image he has of his mother—her body wasted by cancer, her mind by dementia, her vacant eyes staring from a face veneered in translucent flesh—with the glamorous young woman he’s gazing at now. Her blond hair, dazzling in the sunlight, partly veils one eye, so that she appears to be winking; that and the slight cant of her head and her coy smile give her the coquettish allure of a 1940s pinup girl.

  Jeff, of course, had never thought of his mother as a sexual being. Now, looking at her as she was, he can imagine the effect she must have had on Technical Sergeant Harold Havlicek when, on a weekend pass from Fort Leonard Wood, he met her at a USO dance in St. Louis. The urgent desire, heightened by the war.

  Ellen Fancher, only daughter of a prominent St. Louis lawyer, came home gushing about the tall blond-haired sergeant with whom she’d danced every dance. She and Hal dated every weekend he could get away. Her father warned her not to do anything foolish. The war was making young people crazy, and she was very young—eighteen. She paid no heed, and in the autumn of 1944, when Hal’s engineer battalion was ordered to France, they decided to get married. He asked for her father’s blessing. Differences in class and background meant something then, and Roland Fancher, Esquire, refused. His baby girl marry the son of bohunk immigrants? A soldier-boy she hardly knew, and not even an officer?