Hunter's Moon Page 8
“I hit him! I hit him good!”
But maybe not good enough, Jeff thinks. He sprints to where the deer fell and finds bright blood speckling the dull brown ferns. His father is behind him, breathless from excitement. Jeff says, “You’d better stay back. I’ll track him.”
Hal shakes his head. “My responsibility.”
They climb over windfalls, thrash through a willow thicket, following the blood trail. It’s faint at first—a few splotches here, a few there, stain fallen leaves, patches of snow. They find more at the base of a ridge forested with oak and beech. It’s no longer bright; it’s almost black. Liver shot, Jeff concludes; he traces the blood trail with his eyes as far as he can and spots the buck partway up the slope. He’s kneeling, facing away. Catching scent or sound of his pursuers, he tries to rise, pushing up on his forelegs. The wound is too grave. His hind legs do not respond. The two men climb and, when they’re about twenty-five yards from him, circle around for a broadside shot. The deer struggles, front hooves pawing the ground. He twists his neck to look at the men who have done this thing to him, and his valiant efforts to flee, to live, and the look of dumb animal pain in his eyes are heartbreaking.
“Now I…” Hal begins. Though they haven’t come far, less than a quarter of a mile, he’s gasping. “Remember why … I quit hunting.”
Jeff raises his rifle. His father nudges the barrel aside and says, “Clean up my own messes.” He flops into a sitting position for a steadier aim and fires the finishing shot. The buck’s forelegs crumple, thrash, and then stretch out, still.
Hal starts to stand but falls back onto his seat. “Help me up.”
As Jeff grabs his outstretched hand, he groans. “Feeling a little … sick. Like I’m going to puke.”
“Sit right there. Get your wind back. I’ll dress him out.”
Skinning knife drawn, he hasn’t gone ten feet toward the dead animal when he hears another moan, much louder than before. Hal sits doubled over, forehead on his knees.
“Dad? What is it?”
“Jesus H. Can’t catch my breath.” He taps his sternum and brushes his fingertips across his chest to his left shoulder. “Like somebody’s tightening a belt in there.”
Breaking out in a sweat, Jeff goes to him. “Lie down,” he says, at the same time pushing him gently onto his back. His face is ashen. “Lie down. Take deep breaths. Deep breaths now.”
He isn’t sure if this is the correct treatment. It’s the only thing he can think of. He reaches into his coat pocket for the radio to call Craig. Craig will know what to do. The radio isn’t there. He left it at the stand.
He cannot drag or carry his bulky father out of this wilderness. He tries to think of a sensible course of action. He needs to clear his mind, clouded by guilt; it’s as if, in some unredeemed part of himself, he’s willed his wish of last night to come to pass.
Hal’s chest swells, sinks, swells, sinks. “Hurts when I do that. Goddamn, the big one…”
“Listen. Keep trying!”
Jeff takes out his GPS, turns it on, and waits for it to acquire satellites. It’s taking longer than it should; the tree cover is hindering the signals. As he waits, he tightly clasps his father’s hand. Hal’s fingers enfold his, requiting the pressure.
“How is it now?”
“Maybe a little better. What’re you doing?”
Jeff explains: he’s going to pinpoint their position, then run a GPS track—electronic breadcrumbs—back to the stand and call the others on the radio. He’ll need their help, especially Craig’s. Craig will know what to do.
At last a green miniaturized topo map flashes on the screen. Jeff lets go of the hand and presses the button to mark the waypoint. Hal rolls his head aside and raises his eyes, magnified by his glasses. The plea in them is clear enough to make his next words superfluous.
“Stay beside me, Jeff. It’ll be all right.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Can think of worse ways,” he says in a weak voice. “Worse places. Some nursing home…”
“I’m not going to let you die here, even if you want to. Can’t break my record.”
“Record?”
“It’s one more thing I’m not going to do for you.”
DREAMERS
It was past the lunch hour and Jerry’s Dew Drop Inn was empty except for the bartender, the cook, and a customer, an old man wearing a blaze-orange shirt and cap with a mottling of black camouflage. He sat at one end of the bar, sipping a beer between bites of a cheeseburger and fries in a plastic basket.
At the other end, Lonnie the bartender and Mike the cook stood watching World Series highlights on a TV on a shelf above the bar. Mike was a big man, bearded and shaggy-haired; Lonnie was undersize, with a long nose and the predacious eyes of a feral terrier. He wore a military haircut, shorn close above his ears but longer on top, and his wiry arms were so covered in tattoos they looked like the sleeves of a tight-fitting paisley shirt.
The old man called for another draft. Lonnie went to the taps, poured, and set the glass down in front of him.
“How did this town get its name? Germfask?” the customer asked.
Lonnie said, “No idea. You’re about a week early for Halloween. All that orange you got on, you look like a pumpkin.”
“Are you new around here?” asked the old man amiably. “It’s bird season, and bird hunters wear orange. State regulations.”
“What about your hat? What’s with the black camo stuff? That state regs, too?”
The old man grinned. He had crooked teeth. “It’s to fool the grouse. It’s to make ’em think I’m a camouflaged pumpkin instead of a hunter.”
“You’re hilarious,” Lonnie said. “And just so you know, I’m not new round here.”
He turned back to the World Series. Two guys in suits were analyzing last night’s game. He lit a cigarette and had smoked about half of it when the old man said, in the loud voice of someone hard of hearing, “Excuse me, could I ask you to put that out?”
“Sure,” Lonnie answered. “Go ahead and ask.”
“Hey, Lon,” Mike said. “No mouthing off.”
“Ah, fuck him. I’ll smoke if I want to.”
The old man motioned at the sign hung above the cash machine. “No smoking in bars anymore. State law,” he said. “And I’m allergic to tobacco smoke.”
“The allergic pumpkin. You’re kinda big on these state laws and regulations.”
“C’mon, dude,” said Mike under his breath. “You’re lucky Jerry gave you this job.”
“That’s what you call it? Lucky? Some luck this is.”
“You’re young, so maybe you never heard of the saying the customer is always right?” the old man said.
“This time the customer is wrong.”
Now the old man looked angry and scared at the same time. He said, “Well, you’ve lost this customer. What do I owe?”
Lonnie snubbed the cigarette in a coffee saucer, snatched the bill, and slapped it down next to the beer glass. “After you pay up, you can go outside and breathe all that fresh air.”
“I don’t know if you’re obnoxious or just plain ignorant.”
“Obnoxious? Ignorant? You can add an apology to the tab.”
“Maybe nuts is what you are,” the old man said.
As he turned slightly to reach for his wallet, Lonnie’s right arm shot out and smashed the old man in the mouth, knocking him off the barstool. He staggered and grabbed the barstool to keep from falling. Lonnie vaulted over the bar, swung wildly for his jaw, missed, and stumbled into him, both sprawling backward, Lonnie on top, flailing with his fists and screaming, “I’ll show you nuts, you old fuck!”
Mike ducked under the counter, ran over to the two men rolling around on the floor, and locked his arms around Lonnie’s chest. As big as he was, he had trouble pulling the smaller man off. Lonnie writhed and kicked until Mike lifted him off his feet, body-slammed him, and then, straddling him, pinned his shoulders to the floor.
The old man—he looked to be sixty-something—had got to his feet. He was leaning against the bar, wheezing, blood drooling from a corner of his swollen lips.
“Hey, mister, if you can walk out of here, do it,” Mike said, still sitting astride Lonnie. “If I was you, I’d walk out of here right now. Lunch is on the house.”
* * *
All three were jammed so tightly in Will Treadwell’s pickup that nothing short of a head-on collision could have dislodged them. Will was six feet two and two forty, and each of his clients matched him in size, although their weight was better distributed than his, they being half his age and in gym-rat condition: Chicago cops who belonged to some sort of tactical unit that tracked down gangbangers and crack dealers. They were on vacation now, off the mean streets and in the woods to hunt bear with bow and arrow. It was their first time hunting bear. They had shot deer and elk, and Will hoped they were as good with their bows as they claimed. He did not want to track down and kill a wounded bear, as he’d had to do last year on a moonless night, his client shining a flashlight on the blood trail, the bear, an arrow buried to the feathers in its gut, rising to its hind legs from behind a deadfall, its eyes glowing a preternatural green in the flashlight’s beam. Will put a round from his .45-70 into its chest. The beast screamed and thrashed in the underbrush before it died. He could hear it still—that half-human scream—and he’d been thinking to quit guiding bear hunters. Sometimes it made him feel like an accomplice in murder.
He left the highway leading out of Vieux Desert and headed up an unpaved forest-service road toward one of his stands, on the verge of a cedar swamp.
“I’ve got a boar coming in there,” he said. “Fattening up for winter. He’ll go four-fifty at least.”
“That’s what we want!” said the white cop, whose name was Kevin Walsh. Hands crossed on his lap, shoulders hunched, he sat squeezed between Will and his black partner, Lamont Lewis. “So guiding is your sideline?”
“More like a hobby that pays a few bucks,” Will answered. “Gets me out in the woods. The woods are good for my head. The bar business drives me crazy sometimes.”
“We ride with the guide, guides on the side, does his mind good to be in the woods, it’s his hobby…” Lewis’s palms beat out rap percussion on the dashboard. “Kev, gimme a word rhymes with ‘hobby.’”
“’Lobby’?” Walsh suggested. “‘Snobby’? ‘Knobby’?”
“How about this: ain’t no jobby, it’s his hobby, a fine line from a sideline…”
“Beautiful,” Walsh said. Then to Will: “It’s what we do on stakeouts. Make up rap lyrics.”
“Because a stakeout can be as boring as hangin’ drywall,” Lewis said.
“Not the last one,” Walsh said. “No drywall on the last one.”
“What happened?” Will asked.
“I’ll give you the abridged version,” said Lewis. “We were in hot pursuit—I’m talkin’ on foot—of a badass Mexican, Eduardo Morales. He was what the Mexicans call a sicario, an assassin, for the Latin Lords gang. They’re kind of the sales force for the Sinaloa Cartel in Chicago. We spot him, we get out of the car to pop him, and he takes off running like he’s got an afterburner in his ass down an alley in Pilsen. That was onetime a Czech neighborhood, now it’s all Latino—”
“Hey, abridge, Lamont. Abbreviate,” Walsh said.
“Kev is a little way behind me. I’m maybe five yards from collaring Morales when he spins, reaches behind his back for his piece. Mine’s already out, so I send him to his own funeral. It’s SOP—you cap somebody, no matter who, no matter what, no matter why, Internal Investigations gets into it. The IID guy is interviewing me, and he asks, ‘Why did you shoot him thirteen times?’ And I go, ‘’Cuz I ran out of bullets.’”
Walsh gave a short, sharp laugh. “‘’Cuz I ran out of bullets.’ Lamont is a legend for that one.”
Will said nothing. He supposed that a bear would be a piece of cake for these two.
“Don’t know what Morales was thinking,” Lewis said. “Like he’s gonna get away with shooting a cop? Had to be Mexican machismo.”
“Nah. It’s because he was Catholic,” Walsh said.
“What’s that got to with it?” Will said.
“Those Latino gangbangers go to confession every week, no shit. It’s like, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Since my last confession, I missed mass, and, oh, yeah, I killed a guy. And the priest is like, Say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. Your sins are forgiven, name of the Father, the Son, et cetera. Morales must’ve figured, I kill this cop, I’ll go to confession; he kills me, I’ll go to heaven.”
Distracted, Will did not see the deep washboard rippling the road as he rounded a curve. He banged over it before he could brake, the tailgate to his old pickup flew open—it had a faulty lock—and the bear baits tumbled out of the truck. He pulled over, and they climbed out to retrieve the baits: two five-gallon buckets of kitchen scraps and grease, a bucket of fermenting crab apples, and a beaver carcass rank and rotten enough to make a man gag.
“I ain’t touchin’ that,” Lewis said. “Goddamn, what a stink.”
“It’ll smell like prime filet to a bear.” Will put on his gloves, grabbed the beaver by its tail, and tossed it into the bed of the truck. The lid to the apple bucket had come off in its fall; crab apples were strewn down the road. The three men walked along, picking them up one by one. They looked like a farm crew. As they were returning to the truck, Lewis paused to gather a few apples they’d missed. Just then, a Ford F-250, jacked up and tricked out in tongues-of-fire decals, spotlights racked on its roof, sped around the curve behind them, slammed over the washboards, and veered sharply toward Lewis. He leapt aside, the Ford shooting past him without slowing down.
“Lonnie! You sonofabitch!” Will hollered, ineffectively: the Ford was already a hundred yards away, churning up funnels of dust. He turned to Lewis. “You okay?”
He nodded.
“Man, right now you look whiter’n me,” Walsh said.
“No shit. You coulda slipped a credit card between that dude’s door handle and me. You know him, Will?”
“Lonnie Kidman. Our village asshole.”
They wedged themselves back into the cab and drove on.
“That looked a little on purpose to me,” Lewis said. “It looked personal.”
Will shook his head. “He lost control hitting that washboard. Thirty is fast on this road, and he must’ve been doing fifty-five.”
“What I’m sayin’ is, my face is the only black one I’ve seen since we got north of Milwaukee.”
“Whatever else Lonnie is, he isn’t a bigot,” Will said. “He hates everybody—white, black, brown, or in between.”
“He hate you?”
“I’m part of everybody. He worked for me for a few weeks last year. Dishwasher. I fired him, so maybe he hates me a little more.”
* * *
They sat in the tree stand all afternoon, Walsh and Lewis with steel-tipped arrows notched, and waited for the reek of the baits to entice the bear out of the swamp. They waited until dusk bled toward night and then climbed down and tramped through the darkening woods to the truck. Will dropped the hunters off at their motel in town and said he’d come for them in the morning, an hour before sunrise.
“We’ll be ready,” Lewis said. “Sure do hope your village idiot won’t be on the road that early.”
That reminded Will. Instead of checking up on things at the brew pub before going home, he phoned Madeline and told her to keep his dinner on the stove; he would be a little late. He took the highway south to Seney and a gravel road out of Seney to the Kidmans’ place, a seasonal deer camp that Lonnie’s father, Angus, had rehabbed into an all-weather cabin without detracting one bit from its original shabbiness. Just the two of them, living in male squalor. Mrs. Kidman had fled ages ago, and most people wondered why she hadn’t done it sooner.
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br /> Lonnie’s redneck wagon wasn’t there, but a light was on and Will could hear a TV inside. He stepped up to the porch and knocked. No answer. He knocked harder. Someone turned down the volume on the TV and called, “Who’s there?”
“Will Treadwell.”
Angus opened the door. “To what do I owe this honor?”
Like his son, he was a slightly built man who might have topped out at five feet eight. Will looked over his head into the room with its buckled fiberboard paneling and woodstove, behind which an assortment of animal traps were piled in a corner and shotguns and assault rifles stood in a makeshift case. Angus drove a logging truck for a living; like a lot of people on the Upper Peninsula, where food stamps were good as gold and far more prevalent, he did a little of this, a little of that, to make ends meet. The little of this and that he did was to shoot game out of season and net whitefish and trap beaver without a commercial license and peddle whatever he’d shot, netted, or trapped to whoever was willing to pay and ignore legal niceties.
“Mind if I come in?” Will said.
“Hell, yes, I mind.”
“Lonnie around?”
“See his truck, eh?”
“Is he here is what I asked.”
“Nope.”
“Where can I find him?”
“What d’you want him for?”
“He damn near ran over one of my hunters this afternoon. He was coming down a forest-service road like it was I-75 and swerved and came right at him. Would’ve killed him if he hit him.”
“Where’d this happen?”
Will told him. Angus tilted his head aside and half-closed one of his wide, protruding eyes and looked up at Will with the other.
“So you’re a traffic cop now? Gonna give him a ticket or what?”
“If I was, I might cite him for attempted vehicular homicide. My hunter thought Lonnie was trying to run him over. Because he’s a black guy.”
“Don’t see many nig-nogs up here. Coulda been Lonnie got curious and wanted a closer look.”