The Poacher's Son

by Paul Doiron

  “And I’m the chief bottle washer!” said Truman.

  The girl glanced up at me and quickly looked away. She couldn’t have been older than twelve. Except for a single long braid that trailed halfway down her back, I might have mistaken her for a boy. She had a bony face with eyes the same almond shape as Truman’s.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Doreen lives up at our house in Flagstaff during the week,” said Pelletier. “That makes B.J. here the only full-time female at Rum Pond. Isn’t that right, B.J.?”

  “I guess,” she said without looking up from her cutting board.

  “She’s shy,” said Truman.

  Pelletier escorted me into the lodge’s great room, where a towering fieldstone fireplace rose up to a smoke-blackened ceiling. A shabby-looking moose head stared down from the mantel, and old upholstered chairs and wicker rockers were arranged around the hearth. In the dining room were two long tables with benches where the “sports”-as Pelletier called his guests-ate their meals family style. A big picture window showed twilight descending on the hills and the first canoe returning across the lake. Pelletier poured himself a mug of coffee without offering me one and lighted a new cigarette and leaned back against the serving counter.

  “Your dad says I should put you to work,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what a serf is?”

  “It’s a Russian peasant-sort of an indentured servant.”

  “I wasn’t really joking when I called you one before. You’re going to work hard here if you plan on eating my food. And don’t think you’re going to be guiding fly fishermen. You’ll be washing dishes and cleaning cabins.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He gestured through the window at a stretch of heavily wooded shoreline a hundred yards or so down the lake. “Your dad’s camp is down in those trees. Go settle in but be ready to wash dishes after supper.”

  I was about to leave when he called me back. “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your dad works for me, understand? What that means is that I’m the boss here. Your dad does what I say and that means you do, too.”

  “I understand.”

  “Just so we’re clear, kid.”

  My father’s camp was set back amid the pines on the hillside above the lake. It consisted of three separate log cabins-one for sleeping, another with a fireplace and table for playing cards, and a third with a kitchen-all of which opened onto a plank deck with cedar rails. The whole affair was raised on stilts above the floor of the forest, and a steep set of stairs tumbled down the hill to the gravel beach below. There was no electricity, only propane gas for the lights, stove, and fridge, and no plumbing, just a two-seater outhouse behind the woodpile.

  My “room” was the middle cabin. A plastic-coated mattress, taken apparently from a child’s bunk bed, had been laid out in a corner, but aside from that, my father hadn’t made any effort to clean up for me. Empty beer cans lay scattered about the floor, amid water-warped issues of Fur, Fish, and Game. The roof, I later learned, leaked just about everywhere.

  What Pelletier had told me about my role as camp serf proved to be an understatement. When I wasn’t washing dishes, I was sweeping out cabins or splitting firewood or clearing brush. Enviously I watched the fly fishermen, affluent men and sometimes women from Massachusetts and Manhattan outfitted with the best Sage rods and Simms waders, head out in canoes in the morning. In the evening, I had the privilege of filleting the trout they had caught for lousy dollar tips. Groups of them came and went, but to me they were always the same insufferable rich people.

  My father didn’t seem particularly interested in spending time with me, either, as it turned out. In fact, I saw more of Russell Pelletier and even his wife, Doreen-a hard-faced, unhappy woman who was only at the camp on weekends-than I did my dad, who always seemed to be off somewhere in the woods or running errands out to Flagstaff.

  The person I spent the most time with was Truman’s daughter, B.J., who worked in the kitchen with me. She was a strange, silent girl. From Pelletier, I learned that her mom had died of alcohol poisoning some years earlier. The two of them-Truman and B.J.-had lived in the same cabin at Rum Pond ever since, spending each winter with relatives on the reservation at Indian Island in Old Town.

  The fact that Truman and B.J. were actual Penobscot Indians seemed exotic at first. After a while, though, I found myself disliking both of them, and I began to wonder whether that made me a racist. Truman was an obnoxious fool, and B.J. was just weird. But then, I also disliked Pelletier, for his chain-smoking bossiness. I probably would have disliked his wife, too, if she’d ever noticed me.

  Every day that passed at Rum Pond I felt more and more disillusioned and lonely. I don’t know what I had expected-something out of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, maybe. I thought I’d have some free time to canoe or fish or hike. And I did have time, but I was almost always too exhausted to make use of it. All I wanted to do was sleep, but even that was impossible since my father and Truman stayed up just about every night past midnight, drinking.

  After dinner, I would walk back to my father’s camp in the half-light, bone-weary and stinking of sweat from my day’s work, and I’d find them there on the porch or in front of the fire. I tried to ignore them and just go to sleep, but they wouldn’t let me. The more they drank, the more they wanted me to join them.

  “Do you know what I think?” said Truman one evening-it must have been three weeks or so after I arrived, sometime in early July. It was a cool night and therefore not so buggy, and we were all sitting in Adirondack chairs on the deck. I wanted to go to sleep, but I knew their laughter and loud conversation would keep me up, so I was doing my best to humor them by having a beer. I guess I also thought that this was what my father expected of me, and I hadn’t yet given up trying to please him.

  “I think Mike has a secret admirer,” said Truman.

  “And who would that be?” asked my father.

  “He knows who.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Is it you, Truman?” asked my father. “Come on, you can confess your true feelings.”

  “Me!” He threw back his head and let out a laugh so loud it stirred up one of the loons out on the lake. “No. B.J.! I think she has a crush.”

  My father lighted a cigarette and shook out the match. “Hey, Mike, you know what that stands for-B.J.?”

  “She’s just a little girl!” I said.

  Even Truman made a displeased, grumbling noise. “That’s not funny.”

  “You’re a prissy one, aren’t you?” My father took a sip of his beer. “How’s your mother, anyway?”

  He had asked me this question ten times since I arrived here, always when drunk. “You know how she is.”

  “How’s my buddy Neil?”

  “The same.”

  “Fucking lawyer. Drives a Volvo.”

  “Yuppie,” said Truman with disgust.

  “So what do you think of Rum Pond?” my dad asked me for the umpteenth time. He always fell back on the question when he could think of nothing else to talk with me about.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the Nazi who escaped from the POW camp?” He gestured with his cigarette in the general direction of Hobbstown.

  “You told me when we went on that trip to Spencer Lake, remember?”

  I became aware of a soft sound, a faint almost insect-like buzz. It grew louder and louder. In the purple sky above the hills I saw the red lights of a very small airplane, equipped with pontoons instead of wheels, flying lower than any plane I had ever seen.

  “Son of a bitch,” said my father.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Game warden. Charley Stevens.”

  Truman spit over the rail. The airplane darted across the lake and then turned and disappeared over a hill.

  “You know why he’s doing that, don’t you?” asked my father. “He wants to l
et us know he’s watching us. Like he’s daring us to try something.”

  “He’s a game warden and a pilot?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And he flies at night?”

  “You just saw him.”

  “Must be pretty dangerous.”

  My father sat up in his chair and pointed a finger at me. “You ever meet a warden?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. They’re arrogant bastards, is what they are. You won’t think they’re so cool when they take you to jail.”

  I finished the last foam in my beer. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  Inside my cabin I undressed down to my undershorts and climbed into my sleeping bag. As always, my feet overhung the end of the child’s mattress. I could smell their cigarettes through the screen and heard them talking for a while in unusually hushed tones. After a while, I heard the Ford truck start up and saw the white headlights cutting through the unchinked slats between the logs of my cabin. Then they were gone, and all I heard was the wind moving through the tops of the pines and, every now and again, one of the loons calling out on the lake.

  I dozed fitfully, whether because of the single beer I had drunk or because I sensed that my father and Truman had gone off to make trouble of some kind.

  But several hours later-it might actually have been less-I was awakened by the sound of the Ford returning. At first I was disoriented because there were no headlights shining into my cabin. Then I realized that they’d driven up with the lights off. I heard the doors slam and the pickup gate thrown open and harsh whispers and grunts and Truman breaking into a fit of giggling. Heavy boots sounded on the deck. As their shadows passed my screen I saw that they were dragging something big into the kitchen cabin.

  I pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and went barefoot outside. A propane lamp fizzled on in the kitchen, throwing light onto the deck. Through the screen door I saw the carcass of a big deer, a doe, spread across the table and my father and Truman standing over it drinking thirstily from cans of beer.

  “Where did you get it?” I asked.

  They both jumped at the sound of my voice.

  “Christ,” said my father.

  “Where did you get that deer?”

  “Hit it with the truck.”

  “You did not.”

  My father threw away his empty beer can. It clattered off one wall. “Come inside and shut that door.”

  I stepped in and pulled the door shut behind me. “You jacked that deer. That’s against the law.”

  My father and Truman looked at each other and started laughing.

  “Kid,” my dad said. “You don’t know how funny you are. Come on. I’m going to show you how to butcher a deer.”

  I remembered all those solemn lectures my father used to give me on poaching-how he only took illegal game out of necessity, that it shamed him to have to do it, but he had a hungry family to think of. Now here he was laughing about it.

  I glanced at the window. “What about the warden?”

  “Screw him.” He removed his hunting knife from his belt. “Grab that old blanket. We’ll need it to catch the blood.”

  I watched my father slit open the deer. He spread the doe on her back along our breakfast table and inserted the blade down below her rib cage and began working backward, using his fingers to open the cavity. Then he tied off her anus and vagina with a pigging string and, climbing up on the table and straddling the deer’s leg, pulled out the entrails. As a child, I remembered watching my father field dress a deer but never with this kind of speed. My father did all the cutting while Truman caught the organs in a five-gallon pail.

  “Here,” said my father, tossing something at me suddenly.

  I caught a small piece of metal in my hand. It was the mushroomed bullet that he’d dug out of the doe’s heart. For some reason I didn’t drop it but instead squeezed it tight in my fist.

  Truman cocked his head. “Oh, shit,” he said.

  That was when I heard the plane.

  It was flying in low across the lake getting louder and louder until we heard the splash of the pontoons setting down on the water’s surface. I glanced through the window.

  “It’s coming up to the beach!”

  My father blew out the gas lamp, plunging the cabin into darkness. “Go down there,” he said to me. “Don’t let him come up here.”

  “What am I going to say?”

  “Just stall him.”

  I slipped outside and paused for a moment on the plank deck looking down at the small floatplane as it taxied into the shallows. The door popped open and a man dressed in a darkish uniform climbed out and stood on one of the floats. Then he splashed into the water and waded to shore. It was my first look at Charley Stevens.

  “Hey!” I said, and jumped barefoot down the plank steps to meet him.

  He squinted up at the dark figure hurtling toward him. “Good evening.”

  “Hi!” I said. “Hello.”

  “Now who might you be?”

  “Mike Bowditch.”

  “Bowditch, you say? You’re Jack’s son, then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you tell him that Charley Stevens would like a word.”

  “He’s busy.”

  He paused and gave me an appraising look up and down. “Mike,” he said finally, “I’m going to ask you a question, and I’d like you to answer with the truth. If I go up to that cabin there, what am I going to find?”

  A jacklighted deer, I wanted to blurt out. The words were literally at the tip of my tongue. But when I spoke, it came out as, “Nothing.”

  He shook his head and let out a sigh, and I realized the expression on his face wasn’t displeasure so much as disappointment. Even though we had never met, he had expected better of me. “I’m afraid I’ll have to have a look, anyway.”

  He brushed past me and had taken two steps up the stairs when my father’s voice sounded above us in the darkness: “Kind of late for flying, isn’t it?”

  Charley squinted up at the moonlit silhouette looming at the top of the stairs. “Is that you, Jack?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I thought we might sit down and have a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m all out of coffee, Charley.”

  The warden smiled. “Maybe you can help me with some detective work.”

  My father laughed. “Is that so?”

  “You see, I’ve been flying tonight and-maybe you saw my plane earlier?”

  “I saw it.”

  “The thing of it is, we’ve had a bad problem with night hunters out this way. So I thought I’d fly around a bit, what with the moon so bright, and see what I could see. And wouldn’t you know about a half hour ago I saw a pair of headlights over on the King and Bartlett Road. The funny thing about them, though, was that they weren’t moving. In fact, it looked to me like maybe what was going on was that somebody was jacking a deer over there. You know what also gave me that impression? The minute I swung over in that direction, those lights just snapped off all of a sudden.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Well,” said Charley. “The coincidence is that the truck I saw bore a resemblance to that old Ford you drive.”

  “That’s quite a coincidence.”

  “It occurred to me it might actually be your truck, in fact.”

  “I’ve been here all night. Ask the boy.”

  The warden looked at me. “Is that true, son?”

  I nodded.

  “You mind if I have a look at your truck, anyway? Just so in the future I can learn to tell it from the other one.”

  “How about showing me a warrant first?”

  “What do you say I just have a look around so we can clear up any misunderstanding.” The warden took another step up.

  “Don’t come up here!” said another voice.

  Charley froze. I saw his hand drop down near his holstered sidearm. “N
ow who would that be?”

  “Truman Dellis,” I said.

  “I’d like a look around, Jack,” Charley said. There was a new hard edge to the warden’s voice.

  “Not without a warrant,” said my father.

  “Go away!” shouted Truman.

  I heard my father hiss, “Put it down. What’s wrong with you?“

  “What’s going on up there, Jack?”

  “Nothing. It’s just too late for this bullshit, Charley. Why don’t you just get out of here?”

  “Please.” I wasn’t even aware that I had spoken, but Charley Stevens turned to me. Something in my eyes must have told him of the danger he was in.

  “All right,” he said after a long moment. “I’ll come back in the morning.”

  “Bring a warrant!” shouted Truman.

  Charley smiled but didn’t answer him. Instead, he turned to me. “I’ll see you later, Mike.”

  Standing rigid as a statue, I watched the warden pilot descend the remaining stairs and wade back out into the shallows to his plane. He tapped his forehead, a gesture of good-bye to me, and then climbed into the tiny cockpit. Moments later, the propeller began to turn and the plane taxied off to deeper water. I watched it take off until its shadow passed across the moon.

  Only then did I realize that I had been holding the bullet the whole time. I opened my fist and saw it gleaming there in the moonlight. Quick as I could, I tossed it into the lake.

  Later I learned that Truman Dellis had been aiming a rifle at Charley Stevens while he stood on the stairs.

  My father chewed him out about it. “What were you going to do? Kill him over a damned deer, you fucking idiot? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  I was unimpressed by this sudden show of conscience or rationality or whatever it was, especially since we spent the rest of the night getting rid of the deer parts. Truman and my father carted the meat and bones away to bury in some secret spot in the forest while I scrubbed the kitchen clean.

  The next morning, while I was working at the sporting camp, Charley Stevens returned with another game warden to inspect my father’s camp and truck. Russell Pelletier was pissed about it, but he told me they didn’t find so much as a deer hair. Truman Dellis spent the next day with a smug grin on his face, but I knew my father had been humiliated by having the wardens search his cabin. And he hadn’t even been able to keep the deer.