Hunter's Moon Read online

  Jeff was a junior in high school when his future was laid out for him as if it were already an accomplished fact: “You’re going to UM, you’re going to get a degree in engineering, then I’ll teach you the business from the bottom up, and when I retire, you’ll take over.” Persuading himself that his father’s ambitions for him were his own, Jeff marched off to study mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, hated every day of it, and flunked out at the end of his freshman year. To keep his student deferment and avoid the draft, he enrolled in theater arts for the following term, mostly because he’d gotten an A in an elective, drama.

  The experience of defying his father’s wishes was as terrifying and exhilarating as a parachute jump. They almost came to blows. “I was handing you the chance I wish I’d had, and you’ve pissed on it!” Hal raged, and then he cut Jeff off.

  Jeff thought then that Hal would get over his hurt and disappointment and they would go back to being father and son but on a more equal footing. But it didn’t work out that way. Hal had loved him for what he’d hoped to make of him, as if his eldest child were a piece of metal to be fashioned on a lathe into something useful. When Jeff failed to measure up, Hal seemed to stop loving him. Jeff tried to do the same. But they were never able to completely sever their connection. They built a relationship of mutual antagonism, poking and jabbing each other face-to-face or on the phone. Big things and little things: politics and Vietnam and the Detroit race riots; Jeff’s divorce and remarriage; Hal’s love of stupid sitcoms; his constant bitching about the Detroit Lions. They became like a divorced couple who make a marriage of their estrangement.

  * * *

  Jeff turns off the highway onto a bumpy gravel road that shakes Hal out of his slumber. He smacks his lips and blinks at the woods—fir trees dripping grandfather lichen, congeries of aspen and hardwoods stripped bare except for a few oaks and beech, the last to shed their leaves in the fall.

  After two miles of this, Hal says, “When do we start singing ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall’?”

  They come to a junction, where a varnished sign, nailed to a tree and bearing the word CHAMOUN, points up a sandy two-track. Jeff shifts into four-wheel and turns.

  “What’s that mean? Chamoun?” Hal asks.

  “It’s Danny’s last name. Remember? I told you yesterday. I went to Michigan with him. Danny Chamoun. He’s Lebanese.”

  “Oh, yeah. Some kind of ambulance chaser, you said.”

  “Trial lawyer is what I said. Try to be civil, will you?”

  “The other guys are who? Remind me.”

  “Craig Ungar and Will Treadwell. Craig’s an emergency-room doctor in Grand Rapids, and Will runs the bar and microbrewery in town.”

  Most northwoods deer camps make sharecropper shacks look luxurious. Danny Chamoun’s, situated on a knoll above the tannin-browned Windigo River, could be a lodge advertised in an Orvis catalog. Hal emits a low “woo-hoo” and cracks, “Ambulance chasing must be good these days.”

  Jeff lets it go, trusting that his father’s resolve to be obnoxious won’t survive meeting his friends. The three men rise from the back deck, stride to the car, and greet the old man with warm handshakes, addressing him as “Mr. Havlicek” until he invites them to call him by his first name. Danny, who has a fleshy face that he can manipulate into a cavalcade of expressions—an asset sharpened by years of winning juries’ sympathies—composes a solemn look as he says, “Jeff told us about your wife, and we’re sorry for your loss.” The sentiment sounds a little canned, like a condolence card, but Hal is touched. Then Craig, six feet five inches tall, a fitness fanatic as buff at sixty as an athlete half his age, totes Hal’s duffel and cased rifle into the house. He’s the guest of honor, Danny tells him, and has been given the master bedroom downstairs. There is only one bathroom, and it’s also downstairs, so he won’t have to negotiate the winding staircase in the middle of the night.

  “I still piss a pretty good stream,” Hal says jocularly.

  Before dusk descends, they head out in Danny’s pickup to a makeshift range to zero their rifles. Ever the man’s man, Hal is happy to be in masculine company. He hasn’t had much in years. His friends from the hard old days are gone, like the smokestack Detroit they’d lived and labored in: the boys from the plant he’d hunted and fished with on weekends, drunk with in corner taverns when the shift was done, work-thickened fingers clasping shot glasses raised to choruses of skoal nazdarovya mud-in-your-eye, emptied in a gulp, and slammed down hard on the bar—all are gone into graves or nursing homes. He talks the brewing business with Will, banters about firearms with Craig, a gun nut who admires Hal’s .30-06, an iconic Winchester Model 70. The conversations—the right temperature for brewing ale, the advantages and disadvantages of bolt actions over semi-automatics—don’t interest Jeff, but he’s glad that he no longer has to keep his father distracted all by himself.

  The range is an abandoned gravel pit a few miles outside the town of Vieux Desert. Craig hangs a target of a silhouetted buck in front of an embankment, while Danny stacks two sandbags atop a weathered picnic table that now serves as a shooter’s benchrest. Will, whose rifle is already sighted in, stands behind a spotting scope mounted on a tripod and trained on the target a hundred yards away. Danny muffles his ears with a headset and goes first, followed by Craig and Jeff, Will calling out corrections in windage or elevation, the gunshots sharp and crisp in the quiet air.

  The bullet holes are taped, and now it’s Hal’s turn. He sits down and lays the Winchester’s barrel on the sandbags, grimacing as he bends his arthritic neck to sight through the scope, liver-spotted hands quivering as he adjusts the focus and loads three rounds. Twenty years since he’s pulled a trigger. Jeff feels a vicarious embarrassment when all three miss completely, spattering dirt high and to the right of the cardboard deer.

  “Down five clicks,” Will calls. “And you’d better come … way left.”

  Hal, as good as stone-deaf with the muffs on, takes them off and looks at Will, who repeats the correction. He turns the scope’s windage and elevation knobs with a dime inserted into the center slot, but even through his glasses, he can barely make out the tiny, grooved increments, the arrows indicating up or down. He’s all over the place with the next three rounds. The first clips the deer’s antlers; the last two whip off far to the right, hitting the hindquarters.

  “You’re jerking the trigger,” Jeff says. Because he has to shout, it comes off too sharply.

  “Suppose I don’t know that, you’ve got to tell me? I taught you to shoot.”

  The old man’s barometer is falling; a Hal-storm threatens, the last thing Jeff wants the others to see. He backs off. Craig, also the son of a temperamental father, senses the tension, grasps the rifle barrel, and calls for a break to let it cool.

  Hal tries to slough off his performance—“Getting on in years. But the good thing about having birthdays is having them.” No one laughs or smiles. The doubtful look that crosses Danny’s face expresses the question on all their minds: the woods tomorrow, opening day, will be full of hunters. What if Hal shoots somebody?

  Maybe it was a mistake for Jeff to bring him along, a mistake for the others to agree to it. But something else is spoiling the companionable mood of minutes ago. None of them are young any longer, and Hal, with his fumbling hands, his dimming sight, his lost skills, is too clear a reminder of what they have to look forward to.

  Craig has a stoic philosopher’s cool detachment. It’s a useful trait for an emergency-room doctor. He knows, because Jeff has told him, that Hal was once a crack marksman. He sits down and begins to revive the memories interred in the older man’s muscles and nerves. “Breathe … aim … squeeze … exhale as you squeeze,” he intones. Six more rounds are fired, the final three forming a respectable group high up on the target. Craig reaches across the table and adjusts the elevation. Hal loads the five cartridges remaining in the box. He cheeks the stock, squeezes one off, and locks in another, his movements
as he flips the bolt smooth and unhurried. His transformation is wonderful to see.

  After the fifth round, Will squints through the spotting scope. “Do that tomorrow, and there’s venison in the freezer.”

  Jeff takes a look: all five have punched holes in a tight pattern slightly above and behind the deer’s shoulder, any one a killing shot.

  Hal is exultant. “Hell, I just needed to get the rust out. And you were my WD-Forty,” he says to Craig.

  Jeff gives him a bump on the arm. “You had us worried there for a minute.”

  Casing the Winchester, his father says in an undertone, “Good bunch of guys. How the hell did you ever get to be their friend?”

  It’s partly meant as a joke. Jeff decides to ignore the part that isn’t.

  * * *

  They’re awake well before dawn, and then come the smells of frying bacon, coffee brewing in an enameled pot. At breakfast, Hal chuckles at the camouflage outfits worn by his son and his friends. “You guys look like you’re going on a raid in Afghanistan.” He’s garbed in the hunting apparel of a bygone era—a wool cap with earflaps laced on top, twill trousers, a black-and-red checkered mackinaw.

  Outside, their breath plumes in the cold. The sound of the Windigo quarreling with a boulder rises from below. A solitary star sparkles low over the woods across the river, and the patches of the Milky Way shining through the gaps in the trees could be mistaken for thin, moonlit clouds. Jeff never sees skies like these in New York.

  Craig and Danny hike toward their stands. To spare Hal’s legs, Will drives him and Jeff to theirs on an ATV, following a jeep trail upriver. Beneath the dense overstory, it’s as if they’re riding an ore car through a mineshaft. The headlight illuminates a strip of orange forester’s tape hanging from a branch. Will parks and, as the sky begins to brighten, guides them down a footpath to a giant white pine overlooking a clearing. Planks nailed to the trunk make a ladder to a platform, like the floor to a tree house, twelve or fifteen feet above. That will be Jeff’s stand. The climb would be too dangerous for Hal; he will shoot from a blind at the base of the pine—a three-sided frame of two-by-fours thatched with pine boughs and furnished, incongruously, with a ripped lounge chair hemorrhaging foam rubber.

  “An eight-pointer’s been hanging around here,” Will whispers. “I’ve got baits out in the clearing. See you at the four-wheeler, noonish.”

  He’s a man of bearish bulk but a fine woodsman, and he walks off toward his stand without cracking a branch. Hal settles into the lounger, the Model 70 across his lap, and mumbles that all he needs now are a TV and a beer. Jeff ties a parachute cord dangling vine-like from the platform to his rifle’s trigger guard; then, after scaling the makeshift ladder, he pulls the rifle up to his perch. He sits down to wait, back against the tree trunk. He isn’t fond of stand shooting. Too impatient for it, preferring to stalk on foot. Nor does he approve of baiting game. If it means the difference between putting meat or mac-’n’-cheese on the family table, fine. Otherwise, it’s unsporting, more like sniping than hunting. The baits, like the ground blind, are there for his father’s sake.

  The sky lightens from the gray of old asphalt to oyster and snuffs out the stars one by one until all are hidden in a canopy of brilliant blue. A hoarfrost glitters on the brown bracken fern matting the clearing, across which the white pine’s shadow lies like a fallen spear. Jeff stares past the open space into a maze of balsam fir and paper birch, his glance flitting side to side, alert for movement. The sun climbs, chopping off lengths of the pine’s shadow. After two hours, expectancy gives way to restless boredom. He falls into a fantasy of sex with his new girlfriend, Diane, a fortyish divorcée who sings airline commercials for a living and adores being taken from behind in front of a mirror. He’s getting a hard-on, a fairly rare event these days, when a doe materializes at the clearing’s edge. A big doe, her coat winter gray. She stands statue-still beside a leaning birch, its bark peeled back in scrolls, then steps out into the open space, bows her head, and begins to graze on the bait, a pile of apples and carrots. In a moment, a smaller doe joins her.

  Ever so slowly, Jeff lifts his rifle off his lap and rests it on the platform’s rail. The rut is on. If these two females belong to the eight-pointer’s harem, he, too, will have his mind on sex. He’ll come crashing out of the woods, his better judgment overcome by lust.

  Three or four loud snorts, followed by a teakettle whistle, cause the does to jerk their heads upright. They stare at the noise for an instant, then bound off, white tails flagging. The snorts and snuffles and whistles don’t stop. Jeff climbs down into the blind and, after shaking his father awake, cups his hands around his mouth and the old man’s ear.

  “You were making enough racket to scare every deer in the Central Time Zone. I’ve got a thermos of coffee up there. You want some coffee?”

  “It’ll just make me piss myself inside out. Stay down here. Gimme a poke, I start to nod off again.”

  Jeff clambers back up, lowers his rifle, comes down, and nestles into the blind. He sits on the ground on his folded jacket—the weather has turned warm—and resumes his watchful waiting. It’s more or less going through the motions. No buck with an ounce of buck sense is coming anywhere near, not now.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes pass. Hal leans over the arm of the chair and says in a low voice, “Know what I was thinking earlier? When the stars faded out? That’s what happened to your mother’s brain.”

  Jeff motions to keep still.

  “Like there was a little man up there, a kind of electrician in her brain, throwing circuit breakers, turning out the lights one after the other.”

  Jeff produces a prolonged sigh. “Another time, not now.”

  But the image—vintage Hal, the brain as machine—starts a series of mental quick-cuts: The lights of memory and recognition. Out. Jeff’s mother, on one of his monthly visits, confuses him with her father and asks his permission to leave the house. The light of bodily functions. Out. Ana, a Polish hospice nurse, is hired to bathe and change her. The light of speech. Out. Ellen is able to make only unintelligible sounds as Ana combs her hair and puts on her makeup and fusses over her as if she were an infant, which is what she’s become. Ya, my Ellen, I make you real pretty, okay? She sits in the living room, coiffed and looking pretty and mute as a mannequin, nothing behind her eyes, no flicker of human consciousness, already gone, Jeff thinks—her soul, or whatever made Ellen Ellen, has fled her body. Her cancer, in remission for two years, roars back. Hal wants to bring her in for a radical mastectomy. His three younger children, as wary of opposing his wishes as when they were kids, are going along. Jeff phones her doctor and convinces him to convince them that an operation not only would be futile, it would be torment, for her, for all of them. Another thing his father holds against him. Might have given her a few more months. The light of motor control. Out. She’s moved into a bed in a spare bedroom, where she lies, respirating and drugged on a Demerol drip, until the little electrician, at last showing some tender mercy, flips the master switch.

  Two distant gunshots, echoing through the woods, return Jeff to the present.

  Hal mutters, “I looked up her nostrils when she passed.”

  “You did what?”

  “I was kneeling by her bed. I wanted to feel her last breath on my face, and I looked up her nostrils, and they were pink. Pink and clean, like a baby’s.”

  He wants to say that this is one of the weirder things he’s heard, but he restrains himself and pleads, “Stop talking.”

  * * *

  On the morning of the fourth day, a morning that brings snow and high wind, Jeff, Hal, and Will return early to camp, where they see a six-pointer hanging from the meat pole. Its gutted cavity, gaping like an enormous mouth, breathes steam and drips dark blood that stains the snow pink. While Craig skins the carcass, Danny stands aside, his hands and sleeves splattered with gore. The buck is his. First one in three years, he says, molding his lips into a jubilant grin. Jeff suppresses a fla
sh of envy and congratulates him.

  Craig works with surgical care, peeling back the hide. The sight of the exposed flesh is one Jeff has seen before, and it always awakens a shameful fascination. The carcass is lowered to the ground. Craig saws it into quarters and stuffs them into burlap game bags. The wind rumbles through the trees; the snow swirls in the wind.

  Will has to attend to business in town. He offers to deliver the antlers to the taxidermist, the meat to the butcher at the IGA, who will complete the deer’s disassembly.

  “How about me and Jeff tag along?” Hal asks. It’s more demand than request. “I’d like to get out of these woods for a while. Grab some lunch.”

  “Sure. We dish out a mean chili,” Will says.

  His establishment, the Great Lakes Brew Pub, occupies a long, shingle-sided building facing the main street and Lake Superior. The bar and grill are in front, the brewery in back. Hal asks to see it. Will ushers them through a hallway into a room where gleaming copper vats sprout pipes that lead to pumps and stainless-steel tanks. To Jeff, it’s a bewildering rat’s nest of metal, but it makes perfect sense to his father, who converses with Will about mash kettles and lauter tanks and automatic superblocks. Machinery. Hal turns nostalgic when they sit down to lunch, carrying on about the machines he worked on and the men he’d worked with back in the day.

  “When ‘we were makin’ Thunderbirds,’” Will says.

  From Hal, a puzzled squint.

  “It’s a Bob Seger tune. All about the times when we made stuff in this country.”

  “Now we buy it from the Chinese with money we borrow from them.” Hal shakes his head in dismay; but he’s in a good mood. “Never heard of this Bob Whatchymacallit.”

  “Seger. A real Dee-troit boy. His old man worked for Ford,” Will says with a certain civic pride. Will had grown up in Detroit, one of only five white boys in his high school, a fact that gave him an incentive to become a boxer. He claims to have sparred in Kronk’s gym with Tommy Hearns, the Motor City Cobra. “I’ve got one of his CDs in the office. I’ll give it to you. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.”