Hunter's Moon Page 7
The waitress stops by, a blue-eyed blonde with Valkyrie breasts and hands that would look more comfortable gripping a lug wrench than a pad and pencil.
“Decided what you’d like, hon?” she asks, addressing Hal first.
The word “hon” encourages his flirtatious streak. Composing what he must think is a rakish smile, probably imagining that he’s still the flat-bellied young sergeant who won a girl’s heart, he casts a glance at her bosom.
“Not on the menu,” she quips in a breezy, bantering voice that declares that she doesn’t mind the attention, even if it’s coming from an octogenarian. Jeff remembers that women always had been drawn to his father, though he’s never fully understood why.
After she’s delivered their orders—three bowls of chili, three pints of Moose Sweat, as Will has labeled his oatmeal stout—Hal watches her walk away.
“Always did grow ’em substantial up north,” he observes. “Keeps a man warm on nights when it’s forty below, isn’t that right, Will?”
He wouldn’t know. His wife, who is half Ojibwa, is “skinny as a fly rod.”
“How long’ve you been married?”
“Going on twenty-five years.”
“Kids?”
“One from my first marriage, one of our own.”
Hal scoops a spoonful of chili, blows on it. “I don’t know about your generation. First marriage, second, third. I’m not criticizing, but, damn, whatever happened to ‘till death do us part’?”
Will clears his throat nervously. “Uh … in my case, it did. My first wife died in a car crash.”
“Oh … I didn’t … Um … I didn’t know … If I’d known, I’d’ve, well, y’know…” This is the best Hal can do by way of apologizing. “I meant number-one son over here. Two marriages, two divorces, no kids. My wife died last year, and we got married when FDR was president.”
Will arches his eyebrows in appreciation for the feat of matrimonial longevity. Jeff, smarting, yearns to correct Hal’s boast by saying, Not quite. Harry Truman was in the White House. It would be worth it just to see the old man’s reaction.
“Sixty-one years!” his father continues. “And not because of me. It was all her. She put up with a lot that ninety-nine out of a hundred women wouldn’t have. I don’t know about all that heaven-and-hell crap. Personally, I think that when the shovelful of dirt hits your coffin, that’s it. But if there is a heaven, let me tell you, she’s there.” He gulps his beer, then looks toward the pressed-tin ceiling. “Isn’t that right, Ellen? If there is an up there, you’re up there.”
Ah, time to reopen the wound. He hasn’t mentioned her in three days. Fearing that a repeat of the beach performance is imminent, Jeff stretches a leg under the table and gives Hal a gentle kick.
“What’s that for?” Then to Will: “He thinks I’m crazy because I talk to her. Sure I do. After she passed, I thought I’d hear from her somehow or other, maybe see her, that maybe she’d visit me in a dream. But there’s been nothing, nothing. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, and she’s gone. The shovelful of dirt. That’s it.”
He speaks with a kind of delighted bitterness, as if he’s been waiting to pour out his feelings into ears that haven’t heard them. Will, plainly uncomfortable, fumbles for something to say and finally excuses himself to fetch the promised CD.
His departure doesn’t deter Hal, who just keeps talking. Jeff steals a glance at his cellphone, hoping for an urgent text from his production assistant, a voicemail from Diane. But there’s nothing. He looks out the window at Superior, heaving in the northwest wind, hurling waves into Vieux Desert’s harbor jetty. What are the springs, he wonders, for his father’s self-flagellation, his obsessive need to beatify Ellen? It’s over the top. He doesn’t dispute that she was everything Hal says she was, but there was a side to her that would disqualify her from sainthood.
He remembers what she did to sabotage his second marriage, which had been shaky enough on its own merits. To Will’s mother, Laura, a soap-opera actress, had been the home-wrecking Jezebel who’d come between her son and her former, beloved daughter-in-law, Melissa. On holiday visits, she treated Laura with a chilly correctness, except when the chance to criticize her presented itself. Her taste in clothes. Her sloppy housekeeping. Her tendency to utter banalities in her soap-star voice. You speak beautifully, dear. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone who can say so little so well. When the inevitable end came, she phoned him in New York. I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, Jeff, but you’re well rid of her. If you get mixed up with another tramp, promise you won’t marry her.
His father, meanwhile, reprises the conversation they had in the car five days ago. How lonesome he’d been in those early days, on the road in the spring before his family joined him, in the fall after they left. The hardships he’d subjected Ellen to in boondock cabins with no indoor plumbing. He segues into the trips she wanted to take after he’d retired. Cruises to the Bahamas. A cruise of the Danube. He had the money, but being a son of the Great Depression, sailing the Danube seemed an extravagance. They never went.
“Should’ve given her that much.” He contemplates his empty beer glass for a few moments. “Sometimes I hate myself.”
Jeff is practically grinding his teeth. “For God’s sake, lay off.”
The wave of disgust. “You’re no help. Never were, never will be.”
Another slap uncalled for, and this one stings more than the first. It shouldn’t, but it does. He’s sick of hearing about his failures. He notices Will, emerging from his upstairs office, spread two fingers to indicate that he’ll be along in a couple of minutes. It comes to him right then, all in a burst, and he feels as he did his year in engineering school, when the answer to some opaque equation would suddenly manifest itself.
It is the lingering sting that moves him to lean across the table and ask, “How many were there? Just one? Or were there more?”
“How many what?”
“When you were on the road all by yourself. I’m just curious. I’m not going to pass judgment,” Jeff answers in a confidential tone, the assurance subverted by an accusatory note, faint but audible.
Hal hesitates; then, the meaning becoming clear, a startled expression drops over his face. He recovers immediately.
“That’s good,” Hal says. “If anybody doesn’t have a right to pass judgment, it’s you.”
He stands, resting his hand on the chair to steady himself. “Where’s the men’s room?”
Jeff points toward the rear of the bar.
“Never pass up a chance to take a piss,” his father says. “That’s my advice, now that you’re an older man.”
* * *
Hal is silent on the drive back to camp and silent as he and Jeff trek to the stand for the late-afternoon hunt, silent at dinner and afterward, as they all sit around the fireplace, sipping Danny’s whiskey. It’s impossible to ignore him. He radiates a discontent that, more than the heat from the fire, more than the smoke from Will’s cheap cigar, makes the room feel oppressive. Danny, ignorant of the cause of his sullen mood, makes a stab at cheering him up. You’ve got three more days; that big eight-pointer is bound to show up. With a gesture of disinterest, Hal mumbles that he’s shot plenty of deer in his time; one more or less won’t make any difference.
Danny resorts to the TV for diversion. He scrolls through the channels to a night football game, the Lions against the Bears. But something, possibly snow on the satellite dish, interferes with the signal. The only clear channel is a local one out of Marquette. It’s showing a reality series about EMTs. A jerky handheld follows paramedics wheeling an accident victim into an emergency room while nurses babble medical jargon. Will solicits Jeff’s professional opinion about reality TV. The last refuge of mediocrities, he replies. Every bozo gets to be a celebrity, second-rate writers who can’t write a bad check get a job, and cheapskate networks don’t have to pay scale for talent.
“The Emmy-winner speaks!” Danny says.
“Why don’t you produce a series with Craig as the star? Emergency-Room Doctor.”
“There’s already a series called ER.”
“You’re a smart guy. You could think of another title.”
“Whatever you call it, I won’t be available,” Craig says; then, with his usual phlegm, he makes a surprise announcement: he’s quitting medicine as of the first of the year.
“You’re kidding! What’re you going to do?” Danny asks.
“As little as possible.”
“Christ, you’re the guy who graduated numero uno from med school, and you’re packing it in early?” says Danny, sounding genuinely distressed by Craig’s failed promise.
“I hated med school and I hate medicine and I hate patients.”
From out of a balloon of cigar smoke, Will says, “Definitely a problem for a doctor.”
“Put up with it all this time, so I’ve earned the right to be an underachiever.”
Something in what Craig has said animates Hal. He pokes his head from out of his burrow. “If you hated med school, how did you graduate top of your class?”
“Force of habit,” Craig answers, and elaborates: his father, a world-class eye surgeon, had raised a brood of what Craig terms “über-children.” Three boys and a girl, all expected to excel at everything they did, and what they did was dictated by him. “I was the oldest, so I had to follow him into medicine. No questions asked.”
“Wonder what his secret was.” The example of a patriarch’s successful tyranny draws Hal out entirely. He’s also had a little too much scotch. Tiny red veins fracture his florid cheeks. “I tried like hell to put Jeff through engineering school. He was going to run my firm one day,” he says, as if Jeff is absent. “He had the brains for it, but … Keg parties, frat-boy hijinks, and he flunks out and winds up studying”—he raises both arms in a flourish, his hands fluttering, and puts on a stagy accent—“thee-ah-ta!”
Jeff bristles; he feels a fullness in his ears. It would give him deep satisfaction to smash the old prick in the mouth. This is ridiculous. Almost five months into his sixty-first year, and he’s reacting to a father’s censure like an angry adolescent.
“Well, Jeff won two Emmys,” Danny chimes in, coming to Jeff’s defense. “How many guys can say they have a son who’s won two Emmys?”
Now it’s Hal who corrects him, albeit incorrectly. “He was nominated; you might say he finished second in a game where only first counts.” He pours another shot of single malt into his glass and drinks half, swishing the whiskey like mouthwash. “We went to those ceremonies, both of ’em, my wife and me. Never felt so out of place. A thee-ah-ta full of fagolas dressed up like penguins, handing out little gold statues. For what? Playing make-believe.”
“Fagolas?” Jeff says, forcing a lopsided, sarcastic grin. “Last time I checked, I was straight.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
“What did you mean, then?”
“For sure, not to hurt your feelings.” A pause, another sip. “If you’ve got any. A guy who doesn’t cry at his own mother’s funeral.”
He must be drunk, letting go like this, as if no one else is around.
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself, not her,” Jeff says. The others aren’t present for him, either. He and Hal are, as it were, alone in a cage of their own making. “Like you’re the first man in the whole fucking history of the human race to lose his wife.”
Hal launches himself from his chair, as if rage has instantly cured his arthritis, and crosses the ten feet of space between him and Jeff, who thinks for a moment that his father is going to slug him. He jumps to his feet, ready to block the punch. It doesn’t come. The two stand there, nearly nose-to-nose, the scarlet veins spreading across the older man’s cheeks like cracks in a windshield.
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” Hal shouts.
Craig and Will are dumbstruck; Danny is rummaging through his inventory of facial expressions but can’t find one appropriate for the occasion.
“You’ve never done one goddamn thing for me. Name one goddamn thing,” Hal says.
“I brought you here! That’s one thing. I’ve listened to your whining and crap for nearly a week. That’s another!”
“Like that’s some big sacrifice? You’ve got a perfect record, because shit is what you’ve done for me, you son of a bitch.”
At that moment, Jeff wishes a massive stroke would drop his father lifeless to the floor, and it could be the sincerity and depth of that wish that compel him to break his promise.
“Bastard is more like it. I was born one,” he says, in a voice as hard, flat, and cutting as he can make it. “Yeah, that’s the word you want. ‘Bastard.’”
And it silences Hal, takes all the fight and fury out of him, like a blow to the liver.
“You want to hang our dirty laundry in public?” Jeff continues. “Okay. I’ve got more skid-marked skivvies to hang. If Mom hadn’t changed her mind the last minute, I wouldn’t be Jeffrey Havlicek, would I?”
Hal’s eyelids flutter, his lips flap to make reply, but there is none to make. Jeff almost feels sorry for him.
He says, “Why don’t you go to bed, Dad?”
“Maybe we all should,” Danny says.
* * *
In the morning, everyone tries to pretend that nothing happened. Neither Hal nor Jeff says anything beyond pass the salt, pass the butter. Danny, appointing himself master of the hunt, volunteers to organize a deer drive. He theorizes that with so many hunters scouring the woods, the wise old eight-pointer has chosen to hunker down and avoid exposing himself. So, he proposes, Will, Craig, and he will beat the woods and push the buck out of his hiding place into Hal’s or Jeff’s crosshairs. Jeff guesses his thinking: Let’s do all we can to get this sour old man and his son their deer so they’ll go home and we won’t have to witness any more psychodramas like the one last night.
A topographic map is rolled open on the table, a plan is worked out, two handheld radios are tested. Jeff takes one, Danny the other; then he and the other two men, donning bright-orange vests to reduce the chances that they’ll be mistaken for deer, head out for the logging road from which they’ll start their sweep. Jeff mounts the ATV, his father beside him, and drives upriver to the trail that leads to the stand. They wait there, in the frigid darkness, for Danny to call on the radio. They don’t speak, both afraid that the things they said have opened a breach too wide to be bridged, each thinking the other should be the first to apologize. It is Jeff who takes that step.
“You’re eighty-five, I’m sixty,” he says. “It’s sort of stupid to be carrying on like this, isn’t it?”
Hal nods and asks, “When did you find out and how?”
Jeff tells him about the discovery—the letters, the marriage certificate. He says, “You hid it all these years. What for?”
“I don’t even remember anymore.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It was one those things that got started … After you were born, your mother moved in with a girlfriend and … A single mother in those days, not like now. So she told people that her husband was overseas. And after I got home, we took it from there.”
“So that I’d never know you almost handed me off?”
“Maybe. Are you glad we didn’t?”
“You make it pretty goddamn hard sometimes. How about you?”
“You don’t make it so easy, either.”
Hal pauses, staring at his boots. “There’s one other thing, the question you asked me in the bar. If you’ve got to know, there was one other a long time ago. It didn’t mean anything. It was just loneliness.”
“Did Mom know?”
“I think so, but she decided not to know. I broke things off, anyway. I couldn’t stand the lies and her pretending that I wasn’t lying.”
“Okay. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“But you did, an
d now I’ve answered, and we’re square.”
They fall silent again. They aren’t reconciled. This isn’t peace; more like an armistice between combatants who’ve run out of ammo.
Morning twilight comes. They hear from Danny; the drivers are in place and ready to start. Hal and Jeff hike to the ground blind and settle in, Hal in the lounger, Jeff on a tree stump he’s rolled inside to keep his butt off the frozen ground. He raises Danny, reports that they’re on stand, and sets the radio on the stump. They wait and watch the sun, rising over the trees across the clearing, go from red to orange to a yellow-white that bleaches a skein of low, wispy clouds. Hal removes his glasses and wipes them with a bandanna. It’s not, Jeff sees, the warming air that’s misted them. Her ghost, unbidden, has come calling. He leans over to lay a consolatory hand on his father’s shoulder. The movement is stiff, awkward, like that of an aging athlete whose body only half-remembers what to do. Maybe there was some truth in what Hal said last night about his lack of feeling. Maybe he’s spent so much of his life reacting to the contrived emotions of TV that he’s forgotten how to respond, gracefully, to the real thing.
The ghost departs; the spell passes. Hal cautiously leaves the blind to piss. Just then, Danny calls. They have moved a deer. They didn’t get a good look at it, but it is a buck. Jeff motions his father to finish up, get back inside.
Minutes later, the buck emerges from out of the woods, head high and prancing—not the magisterial eight-pointer, only a six. But he’ll do. Jeff lets out a soft whistle to stop him. He pauses, turning his head to locate the strange sound. Hal leans forward in the chair, snapping the rifle to his shoulder. But he hesitates—the sun is in his eyes. Sensing danger, the deer whirls and lunges for the sheltering trees. Hal swings the gun for a lead and fires. The animal tumbles, regains his footing, and vanishes into the woods.