by Robert Stone
"Say," she said.
"Do you have Willoughby's today?"
"Could be we do," she said. "Like, what is it?"
Michael pondered other, different questions. Could he drive out every Friday and Saturday and have a Friday and Saturday kind of cowboy life with her? But not really. But could he? Would she like poetry with a joint, after sex? Not seriously. Idle speculation.
"It's whiskey," he told her. He thought he must sound impatient. "It's unblended Irish whiskey. You used to carry it."
"Unblended is good, right? Sounds good. What you want."
"Yes," Michael said. "It is. It's what I'm after."
"If it's good we mostly don't have it," she said.
And he was, as it were, stumped. No comeback. No zingers.
"Really?" he asked.
Someone behind, one of the young Indians it might have been, did him in falsetto imitation. "Really?" As though it were an outrageously affected, silly-ass question.
"But I can surely find out," she said.
When she turned away he saw that her black pants were as tight as they could be and cut to stirrup length like a real cowgirl's, and her boot heels scuffed but not worn down from walking. He also saw that where her hair was swept to the side at the back of her collar, what appeared to be the forked tongue of a tattooed snake rose from either side of the bone at the nape of her neck. A serpent, ascending her spine. Her skin was alabaster.
He heard voices from the back. An old man's voice raised in proprietary anger. When she came back she was carrying a bottle, inspecting it.
"What do you know?" she said. "Specialty of the house, huh? You Irish?"
Michael shrugged. "Back somewhere. How about you?"
"Me? I'm like everybody else around here."
"Is that right?"
"Megan," one of the smoldering drunks at the bar muttered, "get your butt over this way."
"George," Megan called sweetly, still addressing Michael, "would you not be a knee-walking piece of pigshit?"
She took her time selling him the Willoughby's. Worn menace rumbled down the bar. She put her hand to her ear. Hark, like a tragedienne in a Victorian melodrama.
"What did he say?" she asked Michael, displaying active, intelligent concern.
Michael shook his head. "Didn't hear him."
As he walked back to the diner section, he heard her boots on the wooden flooring behind the bar.
"Yes, Georgie, baby pie. How may I serve you today?"
Back in the restaurant, their table had been cleared.
"He ate your eggs," Norman said, indicating Alvin Mahoney.
"Naw, I didn't," Alvin said. "Norm did."
"Anyway," Norman said, "they were getting cold. You want something to take along?"
Michael showed them the sack with the whiskey.
"I'll just take this. I'm not hungry." When he tasted his untouched coffee, it was cold as well.
Beyond the Hunter's Supper Club, the big swamp took shape and snow was falling before they reached the cabin. They followed the dirt road to it, facing icy, wind-driven volleys that rattled against the windshield and fouled the wipers. As they were getting their bags out of the trunk, the snow's quality changed and softened, the flakes enlarged. A heavier silence settled on the woods.
As soon as it grew dark, Michael opened the Willoughby's. It was wonderfully smooth. Its texture seemed, at first, to impose on the blessedly warm room a familiar quietude. People said things they had said before, on other nights sheltering from other storms in past seasons. Norman Cevic groused about Vietnam. Alvin Mahoney talked about the single time he had brought his wife to the cabin.
"My then wife," he said. "She didn't much like it out here. Naw, not at all."
Michael turned to look at Alvin's worn, flushed country face with its faint mottled web of boozy angiomas. Then wife? Alvin was a widower. Where had he picked up this phrase to signal the louche sophistication of la ronde? Late wife, Alvin. Dead wife. Because Alma or Mildred or whatever her obviated name was had simply died on him. In what Michael had conceived of as his own sweet silent thought, he was surprised by the bitterness, his sudden, pointless, contemptuous anger.
He finished his glass. At Alvin's age, given their common vocabulary of features, their common weakness, he might come to look very much the same. But the anger kept swelling in his throat, beating time with his pulse, a vital sign.
"Well," Norman said, "all is forgiven now."
Michael, distracted by his own thoughts, had no idea what Cevic was talking about. What was forgiven? All? Forgiven whom?
In the morning they helped Alvin secure the cabin. His twelve-foot aluminum canoe was in a padlocked shed down the hill. Getting the canoe out, they found the padlock broken, but the burglars, in their laziness and inefficiency, had not managed to make off with the boat. One year they had found the bow full of hammered dents. Still working in darkness, they placed the canoe in its fittings atop the Jeep.
A blurred dawn was unveiling itself when they reached the stream that would take them into the islands of the swamp. There was still very little light. Black streaks crisscrossed the little patch of morning, the day's inklings. They loaded the canoe by flashlight. Glassy ice crackled under their boots at the shore's edge.
Michael took the aft paddle, steering, digging deep into the slow black stream. He kept the flashlight between the seat and his thigh so that its shaft beams would sweep the bank. Paddling up front, Norman also had a light.
"Nice easy stream," Alvin said. "I keep forgetting."
"It speeds up a lot toward the big river," Michael said. "There's a gorge."
"A minor gorge," Norman said.
"Yes," said Michael, "definitely minor."
"But it gets 'em," said Cevic. "Every spring they go. Half a dozen some years." He meant drowned fishermen.
Yards short of the landing, Michael picked up the flashlight, lost his gloved grip and sent it tumbling over the side. He swore.
They circled back, and riding the slight current got a look at the flashlight resting on the bottom, lighting the weedy marbled rocks seven, maybe eight feet below.
They circled again.
"How deep is it?" Alvin asked, and answered his own question. "Too deep."
"Too deep," Michael said. "My fault. Sorry."
"No problem," Norman said. "I've got one. And it's getting light."
By the time they offloaded, the day had composed itself around the skeletal woods, each branch bearing a coat of snow. They fanned out from the river, within sight of the glacial rock face that would be their rendezvous point. Each man carried a pack of provisions, a gun, a compass and a portable stand. Michael made for high ground, following a slope north of the rock. The snow was around four inches deep. He saw quite a few deer tracks, the little handprints of raccoons, the hip-hop brush patterns of rabbits. There were others, too, suggesting more exciting creatures, what might be fox, marten or wolverine.
He fixed his stand in the tallest tree among a cluster of oaks on sloping, rocky ground. The view was good, commanding a deer trail out of the pines above him that led toward the river. Now the animals would be prowling down from the high ground where they had passed the night, struggling only slightly in the new fallen layer, browsing for edibles. He waited. Invisible crows warned of his presence.
Then there commenced the curious passage into long silence, empty of event. Confronted by stillness without motion, a landscape of line and shadow that seemed outside time, he took in every feature of the shooting ground, every tree and snowy hummock. It was always a strange, suspended state. Notions thrived.
He watched, alert for the glimpse of streaked ivory horn, the muddy camouflage coat incredibly hard to define against the mix of white, the shades of brown tree trunks and waving dark evergreen. Braced for that flash of the flag. Every sound became the focus of his concentration. He got to know each tree, from the adjoining oak to the line of tall pines at the top of the rise.
Michael
had come armed into the woods for the customary reason, to simplify life, to assume an ancient uncomplicated identity. But the thoughts that surfaced in his silence were not comforting. The image of himself, for instance, as an agent of providence. The fact that for every creature things waited.
He regretted coming out. Somehow he could not make the day turn out to be the one he had imagined and looked forward to. The decision about whether to shoot led straight back to the life he had left in town. To other questions: who he was, what he wanted. He sat with the safety off, tense, vigilant, unhappy, waiting for the deer. He considered the wind, although there was hardly any.
The empty time passed quickly, as such time, strangely, often did. It was late in the darkening afternoon when he heard a voice. As soon as he heard it, he applied the safety on his shotgun.
The voice was a man's. At first Michael thought the man was singing. But as the voice grew closer, he realized that the slight musical quality there reflected pain. He came completely out of the long day's trance and prepared to get down and help. Then, the vocalist still approaching, he caught the anger, the quality in the voice that dominated all others, the rage of someone utterly beside himself. Presently the words came—obscenities, strung together without a breath, alternately bellowed and shrieked as though they were coming from someone walking with difficulty. It still seemed possible to Michael that someone was hurt.
He scanned the woods in front of him, then adjusted his position to take in the ground just over his shoulder. At that point, he saw the fool.
A man about fifty came out of the pine cover forty yards away, slightly up the slope. If Michael's stand had not been placed so high, he realized, the man might easily have seen him. But the man's attention was altogether focused on the buck he had brought down, a fine ten-pointer with a wide rack.
"Oh shit," he cried piteously, "oh goddam fucking shit cocksucker."
He was struggling with the odd wheelbarrow across which he had slung his prize deer. It was a thing full of seams and joins and springs. Though it appeared altogether large enough to contain the kill, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair. And as the unfortunate man shoved and hauled, pushed and pulled his burden, covering the ground by inches, the extent of his rage became apparent. To Michael, observing from the tree, it was terrifying.
And justified. Because against every snow-covered rock and log the wheels of the weird contraption locked. Its useless container spilled forth the corpse of the deer and its antlers caught on the brush. Each time, the hunter manhandled it back aboard, whereupon it fell out again the other way, and the crazy wheelbarrow tipped on its side, and the handle slid from his grasp and he screeched in impotent but blood-chilling fury. Some men were poets when they swore. But the hunter below was not a poet; he was humorless and venomous and mean.
On and on, tripping on boulders, slipping on the ice and falling on his ass, endlessly locked in a death grip with his victim as though he had single-handedly strangled the poor thing.
"Oh shit, oh goddam shit the fuck cocksucker."
And when he stopped to stand to one side and kick the contraption—and followed that by kicking the deer—Michael, hardly daring to stir lest he be seen, buried his face in his sleeve against the trunk to repress the laughter welling up in him.
But now the fool, following the deer trail in his one-man danse macabre, was coming under the sparse bare branches of Michael's very tree. Michael could see his eyes and they were terrible and his red face and the freezing spittle on his graying beard. The man was covered with blood. He was humiliated and armed. Michael prayed that he would not look up.
He held his breath and watched fascinated as the man and the deer and the wheelbarrow passed beneath him in fits and starts and howlings. If the hunter below was possessed of the violent paranoid's tortured intuition, of the faintest sense of being spied out in his ghastly mortification—if he tilted back his head far enough to wail at the sky—he would see the witness to his folly. High above him lurked a Day-Glo-painted watcher in a tree, his masked, delighted face warped in a fiendish grin. If he sees me, Michael thought suddenly, he will kill me. Michael slipped his shotgun's safety off and put his gloved finger at the trigger.
Iced by fear, Michael's hilarity was transformed into a rage of his own. Oh priceless, he thought. Bozo sits up late drinking Old Bohemian in his trailer. In between commercials for schools that will teach him to drive an eighteen-wheeler and make big money, or be a forest ranger and give people orders and live in the open air instead of cleaning shovels down at the guano mill, he sees an ad for this idiotic conveyance to haul killed deer out of the forest. No more jacklighting them off the interstate ramp or chainsawing roadkill, hell no, he'll go into the forest like a macho male man with his nifty collapsible wheelbarrow. Folds up into twenty-five tiny parts so you can stick it in your back pocket like a roll-up measuring tape or wear it on your belt. It was shocking, he thought, the satisfaction you took in contemplating another man's disgrace. Another man's atoned for your own.
Finally, cursing and howling, the hunter bore his burden on. When he was gone, Michael realized he had been tracking the man down the barrel of his shotgun, every stumbling inch of the way. He shivered. It had got colder, no question. A wind had come up, whistling through the branches, rattling the icy leaves that still clung to them. When he looked at his watch, it was nearly four and time for the rendezvous. He tossed his pack, climbed from his tree and set out for the base of the granite rock where he had left the others.
Alvin Mahoney was already waiting, hunkering down out of the wind. He stood up when Michael approached.
"See anything?"
"No deer. I did have something to watch, though."
Norman Cevic came trudging up from the direction of the creek, his red-banded felt hat low over his eyes.
"So, I didn't hear any firing, fellas. Nothing to report?"
With all the suppressed energy of his long solitary day, Michael spun out the story of the sorry, angry man and his wonderful device.
"Didn't you hear the guy?" he asked his friends.
Norman said he had heard nothing but crows and wind in the trees.
"Poor bastard," Alvin said.
"You're lucky," Norman said. "Lucky he didn't look up and shoot you. A local. Probably needs the meat."
Michael wiped his lenses with a Kleenex. "You're breaking my heart."
"Revenge on the underclass," Norman said. "Nothing like it."
"Oh, come on," said Michael. "Don't be so fucking high-minded."
"We all enjoy it," Norman said. Then he said, "You know, more game wardens get killed in the line of duty than any other law-enforcement officer?"
For a while they talked about populism and guns and militiamen. They had fallen silent in the dimming light when Alvin put a delaying hand on Michael's arm. Everyone stopped where they stood. There were deer, four of them, an eight-point buck and three females. One of the females looked little older than a yearling. The deer were drinking from the icy river, upstream, upwind. The three men began to ease closer to the stream, where a bend would provide them a clear line of fire. The deer were something more than thirty-five yards away. Michael tried shuffling through the snow, which was topped with a thin frozen layer, just thick enough ice to sound underfoot. He stepped on a frozen stick. It cracked. One of the does looked up and in their direction, then returned to her drinking. Finally, they came to a point beyond the tree line and looked at one another.
The target of choice would be the big buck. If they were after meat, the does, even the youngest, were legal game. The buck was splashing his way to the edge of deep water. In a moment all four of the deer tensed in place, ears up. A doe bent her foreleg, ready to spring. There was no more time. Everyone raised his weapon. Michael, without a scope, found himself sighting the shoulder of the buck. It was a beautiful animal. Magical in the fading light. Things change, he thought. Everything changes. His finger was o
n the trigger. When the other men fired, he did not. He had no clear idea why. Maybe the experience of having a man in his sights that day.
The buck raised his head and took a step forward. His forelegs buckled, and he shifted his hindquarters so that somehow his hind legs might take up the weight being surrendered by his weakening body. Michael watched the creature's dying. It was always hard to watch their legs give way. You could feel it in your own. The pain and vertigo.
"If he falls in that stream," Norman said, "he'll float halfway to Sioux City."
But the animal staggered briefly toward the bank and toppled sidewise into the shallows. The does vanished without a sound.
"Did you take a shot?" Norman asked Michael. Michael shook his head.
Examining the kill, they found two shotgun wounds close to the animal's heart.
"Guess we both got him," Norman said.
"He's yours," said Alvin Mahoney. "You shot first."
Norman laughed. "No, man. We'll have the butcher divide him. Three ways."
Michael helped drag the dead deer by its antlers out of the water.
"Anybody want to mount that rack?" Norman asked. "I don't think my wife would live with it," Michael told him.
"I wouldn't care to myself," Norman said. "Anyway, it's not trophy size."
They were only a short distance from the canoe, but it was dark by the time they had hauled the deer aboard. Paddling upriver, they came to the place where Michael had dropped his flashlight overboard. The beam was still soldiering on, illuminating the bottom of the stream.
They secured the buck to the hood of the Jeep and set out for the state highway. This time they did not stop at the Hunter's Supper Club but drove all the way to Ehrlich's to get the deer tagged. When they had finished the forms for Fish and Game, they went into the restaurant and sat down to dinner. Mahoney was the designated driver and abstained from drink. He would, Michael thought, make up for it at home. He and Norman had Scotch, but it was not nearly as good as the Willoughby's. Then they ordered a pitcher of beer.
