Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  HUNTER’S MOON / 37

  “Cut the bullshit. What’s coming at you right now?” Harry was a little shaken by Bud’s tears. Maybe this was beyond his compet-ence. Maybe it really was depression. Harry didn’t want to believe that, because if he did, he had to worry about covering all the bases and he hated the sound of the word suicide.

  Bud’s face quivered. Christ. Like looking at Orson Welles with triple chins in a wine commercial. Harry suppressed an urge to knock the needy expression off Bud’s face. God—what happened to the guy? The day they’d met at an antiwar rally at the University of Minnesota, they’d sniffed each other out like two skinny dogs who had lived out in the rain. Bud had stood straight on his crutch, his freckles were scorched pennies, and he’d worn this amazed Huck Finn grin from a year gone fishing in Hell—just back from Nam and Woodstock in the same week.

  For a few heartbeats, the predator in Harry was off the leash and padding in step with his conscience. Bud, the consummate player, had emerged from the crisis of his life as a mark. The perception bothered Harry, who believed you were innately one or the other.

  “You want out of this scene up here.” Harry stated it as fact, not a question. Bud pursed his dry lips and stared at the plastic tablecloth.

  Harry exhaled. “Okay. Bud. Look, you just need a little help getting off the meat hook…”

  Crying muscles bunched around Bud’s eyes and his mouth. “Easy for you to say.”

  “Bud. Buddy. It’s the good no-fault life in Minnesota. No one has to be right or wrong. You just have to have irreconcilable differences.” Harry tried for some levity. “Hell, when I got divorced back in Michigan I was guilty of acts of extreme cruelty.”

  Bud didn’t laugh. He growled and swung his head around, at bay. He clamped his arms to his chest to stop a spasm of shaking.

  “Fuck this.” He mumbled and reached inside his vest pocket, pulled out the pint of Jack Daniel’s, unscrewed the top, and poured two inches into his coffee.

  38 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Their eyes met. “Okay?” Bud asked defiantly. Harry shrugged.

  Bud took a long sip and the whiskey toned his face and tightened his eyes. His freckles seemed to pop out like brass rivets. He sighed and made a ceremony of lighting another Camel with a snappy barroom display of reflexes, twirling the cigarette in his blotchy fingers. His eyes slouched across the table. “Are you ever tempted, Harry?”

  Drifting hooks of alcohol came trailing and Harry sat absolutely still, not giving them anything to snag on.

  “Listen. You can do whatever you want. But you take another drink of that shit and I’m not going anywhere near the woods and loaded rifles with you.”

  Bud grimaced and screwed the top back on the bottle and stuck it back in his vest. “You can be a real drag. Does it ever go to your head? Being the designated hero everybody can count on?” Resentful words. Well, tough shit. Harry’s plan was simple. Get Bud out of the situation. Then get the booze out of Bud. Until that happened, talk would just be a devious game.

  “Another thing,” said Harry. “From what I’ve seen of Chris, I don’t think he should be around a rifle.”

  Bud tipped his cup, stared into the contents, and moved it aside.

  He dragged on his smoke so hard that strings of tobacco stuck to his lip. A tiny bead of blood welled up around a dot of white cigarette paper that tore his dry lower lip.

  “Bud, it’s all wrong up here. I’ve watched you and women for years. From astrologers to community organizers. They all wind up going to law school. I figured you married some backwoods feminist, Our Lady of the Whole Food Coop or something. Jesse might have the hottest ass in Maston County but she’s not Minnesota congress-man’s wife material.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “What do I have to do? Draw you a fucking picture?”

  Bud glowered at him. Harry reached in his pocket for a felt-tip pen. He quickly sketched on the tablecloth. A Scrooge HUNTER’S MOON / 39

  McDuck moneybag with a serpentine dollar sign on the side. Then he drew a grasping feminine hand descending from above.

  “Subtle,” said Bud dryly.

  “She’s a hustler. And Cox? I smell institution all over that dude.”

  “They’re hard-knocks folks. Takes a while for them to warm up to people who are better off. I just wanted to get lost up here. Be this ordinary guy…She took care of me. She had all these great ideas about fixing up the lodge—” Bud was gearing up to give a speech.

  Harry cut him off. “Don’t con the con, man. You running a fishing lodge in the sticks? C’mon. I can’t believe you let her get her hooks into you this deep. She’s turning your house into a hotel, for Chrissake. And now she’s got spousal rights. That’s half of something.”

  Bud’s expression belonged in a textbook over the caption: delu-sion. “She’s really got her heart set on opening the place next May—”

  “Bullshit, the tools in that place haven’t been used in weeks, there’s dust all over them. And when you leave her it’ll break her heart and she’ll cry great big tears for about twelve minutes until she finds a lawyer who can put a dollar figure on it.” Harry took a breath.

  “Enough of this shit. Do you want to be married to this woman?”

  “Jesus,” Bud groaned and avoided the eyes of the lady at the cash register who was pretending to read a magazine but who was really straining her ears to eavesdrop.

  Harry kept coming. “Look me in the eye and tell me you love her,”

  he said.

  Bud drew himself up in an attempt to meet Harry’s eyes. He burst into helpless laughter and muttered, “I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s like sticking your crank in a sack of wildcats.”

  He drew his meaty hand across his eyes. “Aw goddamn. What the fuck do I do? She thinks we’re going to have this social wedding in the St. Paul Cathedral. She’s asking me for 40 / CHUCK LOGAN

  an invitation list of everybody I know. She’s looking at dresses for Chrissake.”

  “I’ll talk to her, man. I’ll explain—”

  “Explain what? That I fell apart? A year ago I was so close I could taste it.” Bud’s fingers fondled a shapely vision of success. Then they balled into fists and he began to tremble.

  Harry reached over and put his hand on Bud’s arm. “You trust me on this?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Bud sighed. “I can’t get out on my own. That’s why I called you.”

  Harry nodded. “We go back, get our stuff, and split. Let me do the talking—”

  Bud banged both fists down on the table and overturned the coffee cups. “No! We go through with the hunting part. I can’t write it all off to drinking. I made a promise to that kid. I’m not running out on that. I have to start turning it around somewhere.”

  Harry shook his head.

  They drove back in silence. Harry pulled into the driveway, braked, and put the Jeep in neutral. He leaned forward and draped both elbows on the steering wheel and watched snowflakes tumble in the headlights. He’d never known such a feeling of physical inevitability about a woman. Like gravity pulling him down.

  Bud spoke in a rush. “Chris’s been getting in trouble. He gets thrown out of school. He’s been in some jams with the law. The sheriff up here is a good guy, he’s been trying to work with him, but I figured it was more my job if he’s living under my roof.”

  “What kind of jams?” Harry tried to fight it.

  “He got caught with some pot, some uppers. No way he’s going to listen to me about that. You’re more like the guys up here, a little scary. I thought maybe you could get through to him.”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 41

  “Too many things going on,” said Harry. “Forget playing daddy.”

  “Harry, when I was a kid up here in the summers I was…not real strong. I had asthma, hay fever. The town kids always put me down for a weakass. I cop out on this hunting, they’ll laugh at me.” Bud’s voice turned poignant. “My father always
wanted to take me hunting…” His mother and father, brother and sister had gone down in a freak sailboat mishap on Superior when he was twelve.

  Harry felt it turning, beyond his control, almost like it was meant to happen. “You should get your ass into detox, not the goddamn woods.”

  “Look. Let’s make a deal. We hunt opening day, then you can make your pitch. I’ll go back with you, go into treatment maybe—whatever. I’d rather confront Jesse about all this in a counselor’s office, not in my kitchen. C’mon, man, we drove all the way here through the fucking blizzard. We got the guns and the clothes…one day.”

  “Shit.”

  Bud grinned. “It was Chris’s idea to go hunting.” Bud held up the piece of paper he had been studying at the dining room table.

  “Treasure map to the big deer. Chris knows where he is. These ridges over a swamp. We built deer stands and I put him through a gun safety class with the sheriff. That tree with the ropes on it back there?

  Every year they hang the biggest deer and the winner gets a steak at the VFW cooked by…” Bud sighed. “Jesse.”

  “Jesus,” Harry groaned.

  “Like a contest, we all put in ten bucks, the money goes to the food shelf. I already put in for you. So what do you think? We stick Chris on one of these ridges. Then you and me sit on another…”

  Bud bit his lip.

  Harry glanced around. Not like he could hop a bus. “Okay, okay,”

  he said. Giving in was a guilty thrill, like the first time he stole something. “So we set up on these ridges—”

  “Thing is, shooting was never my strong suit,” Bud said. “I had to go back to the range three times in boot camp to 42 / CHUCK LOGAN

  qualify at the bottom of my company. You never had that problem…”

  He stared at Harry expectantly.

  “Where’s Cox going to be?”

  Bud smiled. “He’s the hired help, not a hunting buddy.”

  “Okay. We hunt tomorrow. But you have to lay it on the line with her.”

  Bud gripped Harry’s elbow. “Just get me through tomorrow. Go in there and try to talk to the kid, you know, about hunting. What do you say?”

  Harry reached inside Bud’s vest, seized the pint, rolled down the window, and threw it out. “No more booze.”

  8

  Back inside the lodge, Bud put on the clown face he wore around his wife, and Jesse challenged Harry. “You get all the mantalk straightened out?”

  “I’m going to take a shower,” said Bud nervously, stepping between them to stop the staring contest. He rolled his eyes toward the main room where Chris slouched in a chair. Harry didn’t move.

  “Harry?” Bud insisted, then, embarrassed, he dropped his gaze and walked to the bathroom.

  “Your master’s voice,” Jesse said under her breath, going past him down the hall.

  Harry went to his room, grabbed his rifle case and a cleaning kit, and came back out to the main room. Bud’s expensive Sako .30-06

  rifle with a Leupold scope lay on the sofa. A cheaper new Marlin, bolt action .30-30 with a Redfield scope sat next to it. A lighter load for the kid.

  “That your rifle?” Harry asked as he sat down on the floor in front of the hearth.

  “Bud bought it for me,” Chris said. He pulled his hair out of his eyes and his expression quieted into a puzzle of adolescent curiosity.

  “Looks all cleaned up and ready to go,” said Harry. Man HUNTER’S MOON / 43

  and boy warmed to each other as the old American flint and steel threw out a spark. Guns.

  “Larry showed me how to clean it.”

  “Larry?”

  “Sheriff Emery. I had to take a gun safety class, because, like. I’m just sixteen.” His eyes flitted in the firelight.

  “He shot the bear?” asked Harry. He pointed to the hide on the wall.

  “Yeah. We used to live with Larry. We thought mom was going to marry him.”

  Harry absorbed this large piece of information without blinking.

  “What about Jay? Your mom ever think of marrying him?” he joked.

  Chris laughed. “Mom says Jay is just this walking hard-on.” Chris leaned forward. “You see those scars on his cheeks? He shot himself once on a dare, right through. Missed his teeth.”

  “Dumb,” said Harry.

  “Yeah,” said Chris. “But he works like hell building all that new stuff out there. He’s going to retire and be a guide when they open this place.”

  “That guide stuff isn’t for you, huh?”

  “Fuck that,” Chris said. “If I never see another walleye it’ll be too soon.”

  Harry took Randall’s rifle out of the case and pressed the catch under the trigger housing and the bolt slid out with a soft, oiled click. He set it aside and threaded a cleaning rod together.

  “That’s an old gun. How long you had it?” said Chris. The boy’s fascinated expression reminded Harry of the faces of uniformed children in Civil War photographs.

  “Not mine. I borrowed it.”

  “Guns are beautiful,” said Chris. “They’re…perfect.” The turbulent drummer-boy eyes queried Harry for a response.

  Harry shrugged. He’d never particularly liked guns. Just a tool that brought to mind a certain kind of work.

  “How come you don’t have a scope on it?” asked Chris.

  “I learned to shoot without a scope.”

  44 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “They teach you to shoot in the marines?”

  “I was in the army, not the marines. Uncle back in Michigan taught me.”

  “You and Bud were in the war together, weren’t you?”

  Harry shook his head. “We were around some of the same places.”

  Chris gave him a taunting look of disbelief. “Bud says you shot a lot of people in the war?”

  Harry answered the inappropriate question with busy silence. He looked up and saw that Chris was watching him. Demanding an answer. Harry said, “Lot of people did.”

  “He said you did creepy stuff. Like at night.”

  “Bud tends to exaggerate.”

  Chris, riveted to Harry’s every move, accepted this answer without comment. Harry screwed a bore brush into the rod and dipped it in a bottle of cleaning solvent. His fingers warmed to the smell and feel of solvent on machined steel as he ran the brush down the barrel.

  Then he tipped the rifle up and squinted down the muzzle, inspecting the rifling against the firelight.

  “Listen, Mr. Griffin, I’m sorry about walking in on you in the bathroom,” said Chris.

  “Harry.”

  Chris nodded and slowly extended his hand and touched Harry on the forearm above his left wrist. “Harry, could I see that tattoo you have on your arm?”

  Harry tensed at the gentleness of Chris’s touch. He started to reach over with his right hand to roll up his sleeve.

  “I’ll do it,” said Chris. He turned the sleeve away and for a brief second held Harry’s left forearm in his hands. The tattoo was losing its edge, blending into the pigment; a winged Griffin below a word like a fading shout: AIRBORNE.

  Chris pulled his hands back and folded them in his lap. “You ever have any other tattoos?” he asked.

  Harry shook his head. When enough time had passed, he asked Chris, “How’d that happen? Your leg?”

  Chris grinned. “Becky’s got nice legs, don’t she? She’s got HUNTER’S MOON / 45

  nice everything. That’s because she took my leg before we were born. When we were tangled up in Mom’s belly like two little red-skinned rabbits.”

  “So you were born with it?”

  “Uh-huh. Bud says he’s gonna take me to a specialist to get an operation. Some kind of muscle graft deal. We just haven’t got around to it yet…”

  “You like Bud?” Harry asked offhand as he replaced the brush with a slotted tip and ran a patch down the rifle barrel. The patch came out pure. Randall had cleaned the gun before giving it to him.

  Harry was just going th
rough the ritual. Getting acquainted.

  “Mom likes him right now.” Chris said. “She married Bachelor Number Three. They should all go on the fucking Dating Game.” A drip of poison.

  Harry felt eyes on his back and glanced up. Bud stood in the kitchen wearing a baggy brown terrycloth robe. He smiled, seeing Harry and the boy sitting in front of the fire. Becky came down the hall. Harry heard Becky open the refrigerator. Close it.

  “So what are you going to do if you see a deer tomorrow?” Harry asked.

  Chris fidgeted. “Shoot the sucker.”

  “Where you going to shoot him?”

  Chris’s eyes glittered at the fire. “Larry says an animal’s life is between its shoulders. So aim there.”

  Harry squinted at Chris. He wasn’t used to being around kids.

  Maybe he was reading it wrong. “First time hunting, huh?” he asked in a fraternal voice.

  Chris bit his lip. “Yeah,” he smiled sheepishly.

  “Tell you what you do: you count to three,” said Harry. “One, make sure it has horns. Two, while you’re aiming, make sure you have the safety off. Then put the sight right on the front edge of his chest and move smooth with the shot. Make sure the crosshairs stay in the same spot. That way you’re moving with the target. Three, squeeze. Don’t jerk it.”

  “What if it’s standing still?”

  46 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “Then it’s easier. But you’ll be real excited if you see a deer. That’s why you should count, to control yourself.”

  Chris chewed on his lip and glanced around. “One—two—three.”

  “Good,” said Harry. He slid the bolt into the rifle, pointed it at the fireplace, and pulled the trigger with a hollow click.

  Abruptly Chris got up, went into the den, and turned on the television. A stereo came on in Becky’s room at the end of the hall.

  The quiet interval had ended.

  Jesse, barefoot in a purple silk robe, came out of the hall and glided down the steps and firelight licked her carved ankles and calves and the glowing moisturizing cream on her face. With a lan-guid, utterly female gesture she raised her arm and placed her hand behind her head. Harry caught every rustle of the silk sleeve and saw and smelled the dusky roundness under her arm as she slowly pulled a binder from her hair. The braids loosened and breathed.