Letting Loose the Hounds

by Brady Udall

  On the other side of the coin Mr. Tilousi is the nicest, most unassuming man on earth, and that was a big part of the problem. That he saw action in Viet Nam does nothing to change this. He is anything but one of those ex-soldiers with vulgar tattoos on his biceps and too many stories to tell. He is the type of veteran who, even after everything, still believes in the shining ideals that only the truly stubborn can hold onto—obligation, loyalty and trust. When Mrs. Tilousi failed to come back from one of her excursions, he was the last to understand that his wife had run out on him.

  Louis parks the car under Turnback Bridge, next to the river. Vernon is dead quiet around us; the only sound is water moving through the dead reeds, rustling them like paper. I start to get out to take a piss, but Louis touches my arm and begins talking again in a rush of words, everything blurted out a little too loud as if it is something he wants to hold back, but can’t. Speaking of the day the photographer took his mother away for good, he says, “Shit, you know, I thought it was just another one of their trips. I was helping load her things in this asshole’s car and there was one of those metal photographer’s briefcases in the guy’s trunk and I opened it up to check out what kind of equipment he had. There were a bunch of black and white pictures in there of a naked woman—legs spread, butt in the air, that kind of thing.”

  Louis stares into the lights of the control board and his fingers pop the cigarette lighter in and out. “I started getting horny until I realized the woman was my mom.”

  I look at my reflection in the windshield. The moon has just come up and there are pieces of it floating in the river. Louis gets out and stands away from the car in the tall weeds, as if he can’t stand to be anywhere near the ghosts of the words he just said.

  Sometimes we like to relive the glory days. After work and supper on a calm evening we’ll go round up a few high school boys and drive out to the football field for a pick-up game of night football. We won the state championship our senior year, the only time a Vernon team has even come close to doing something like that.

  Gart Higgins, the school custodian, won’t turn on the field lights for us anymore ever since the school district got an unaccountable extra three hundred dollars on its electric bill, but we have the next best thing: a glow-in-the-dark football that Waylon ordered from a novelty magazine. It’s hollow, made of hard, thin plastic, and has a clear tube through the middle in which you insert a green glo-stick. You might think something like this would be hard to play with, but it’s weighted just right, takes a tight spiral and the holes in it make it easy to grip. In the dark, green rays of light shoot out of it like something from a science fiction movie—a huge egg out of which an alien baby is about to come forth.

  We divide the teams and dig in. What is there to say about adrenaline in your veins, the smell of grass, a ball like a spiraling star against the black, bug-filled air? For me it is beauty or art, something better than life. The dim, grunting bodies on the dark field, the sound of your own feet pounding the turf, the hollering and cussing that comes from deep down, the green, liquid light of the ball above you as you dive to catch it, early dew spraying your face as you slide to a stop in the long grass. Have you ever collided with someone so hard you feel no pain whatsoever, only a warm, pleasant buzz? There’s something to that. There’s something to putting it on the line in a pitch-dark, deserted place where nobody watches.

  When we’ve had enough we sit around on our tailgates and talk about this hit or that catch or who might be getting a piece of ass this weekend. Maybe we rib the high school boys for what a shitty team they are fielding this year. It’s on nights like this we are powerful and unafraid, and we can drive off separately into the night, alone, satisfied, and wake up the next morning with a sweet ache sitting in our bones like a memory.

  The lack of viable women in Vernon is heartbreaking. The young ones are either gone, married or pregnant. There are a few older single ladies, but these scare me: they have husky voices and are the hardened leftovers from a generation gone by. The most famous of this group is Ginny Whurt, a red-haired woman in her forties who drives around in a long, avocado-green Plymouth, propositioning men from the car window. She makes no distinctions; she’s been known to sit out in front of the junior high school and ask the boys coming out if they wouldn’t like a nice blow job. We don’t really mind having her around—she makes the place a little more interesting and provides a release for those desperate souls who really have a need.

  So: we must go elsewhere to find feminine affection. We get on the old, cracked highways toward Round Valley, Holbrook or Snowflake, wind in our hair and anticipation taking the spit out of our mouths. Usually we end up walking the empty streets or sitting in bars watching pretenders in cowboy hats dancing with the pretty ones. Lord, what long drives those are, coming home failures, like the wounded from a lost war.

  Last night was one of our few successes: a trio of girls from Ohio with a yearning to match ours. They were making a tour of the great Southwest and we ran into them at the county fair in Payson.

  In the truck on the way to Payson, Louis and I presented Waylon with the possibility of the mobile-home job. As we discussed it, I tried to talk it up, whip up some enthusiasm; when it comes to topics like this, Waylon and Louis look to me because I am the one who went off alone to college, because, except for Hymie, I’m the only one of us who has ever ventured out into the unknown.

  After some serious deliberation, we decided we were definitely going to do it, we needed to get away from Vernon where some real money could be made. Then Waylon started mumbling that he didn’t think he would be able to leave that soon, there were a lot of things he needed to take care of before he could just take off, and suddenly Louis chimed in about all the problems with his parents, and if he was going to quit his job he had to give at least two weeks’ notice, and so on and so forth. With my heart constricting in my chest, I started shouting at them, I couldn’t help it. Fucking cowards! I yelled at them. Candyasses! Louis punched the dashboard and told me to shut up. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Meeting that Midwestern trio, however, instantly cleared our minds of doubt and hard decisions, made us forget about anything that wasn’t soft, curved, perfumed and right there in front of our faces. When one of them started stroking Louis’ braids, asking him if being an Indian didn’t give him any special abilities, I knew things would go well for us. It didn’t take long for us to pair off to private places and after one of the best nights of our lives, with the sun just over the trees, we made a dramatic scene of saying good-bye forever to those sweet girls and got in the truck, feeling flat-out content with ourselves; the bubbling, silvery gas of success filled our heads and we pretty much floated back to Vernon.

  By the time we dropped Waylon off at his house it was ten o’clock in the morning, four hours after he should have been to work at Frank’s store. Making things worse was the fact that Waylon, his brain seized up with hormones, had forgotten to call Frank and tell him he wouldn’t be home until morning. Frank is forever worrying about Waylon’s well-being, and when Waylon is away without Frank knowing where he is, even for just awhile, Frank gets completely bent out of shape.

  When we drove up Frank was out in the front yard digging up a dead fruit tree. “Shit, shit, shit,” Waylon said before he got out of the truck.

  He tried to make it to the front door, but Frank blocked his way, his thick glasses catching the sun. “What the hell?” Frank said.

  Waylon mumbled something at the ground.

  “What?” Frank said.

  “Nothing,” said Waylon.

  Frank grabbed Waylon around the back of the neck, the way you would a kid who’s done something naughty. Now, Frank is a big man, but not as big as his son. To get his hand on Waylon’s neck he had to reach up. Waylon tried to push him away, Frank cuffed him on the side of the head and they went at each other. They wrestled around for a minute, vying for leverage, then stood toe to toe, hitting each other point blank
like two big hockey players producing the time-honored crack and slap of meat and bone. God, how they loved each other! Frank gave up at least four inches and seventy pounds, but he held his own; he must have the skull of a rhino. His glasses had been knocked off and his eyes were like two puckered holes with nothing in them, but he kept flailing away, not giving an inch. Waylon reared back and delivered a stiff right cross that laid his father out. Holding his head in his knobby, scraped hands, Frank got up and said in the strained voice of someone who has just downed a glass of vodka, “Holy Jesus what a shot!” He was proud of his boy, but he wasn’t giving up. He dived in for more and Waylon, tears dripping off his nose, grabbed Frank around the chest in a bear hug and pulled him to the ground. They lay there in the dirt, like survivors of a car crash thrown clear of the wreckage, locked in a desperate clinch, all the heat and blood gone out of their faces, not wanting to hurt each other any more than they already had.

  We are jammed together in the front seat of Louis’ Bug, on the way to Haight’s Peak, climbing toward the sun, doing our best to get ourselves out of the rut we’ve been in much too long. It’s the last day of the hunt and all three of us have yet to bag a deer. Nothing like this has ever happened before; we’ve always got our kills in the first couple weeks of the season when the big bucks still have the green music of summer on their minds and don’t expect what’s coming. This fall we’ve had our distractions: Louis’ parents’ ongoing divorce, Frank’s kidney problems, and lately the prospect of this mobile-home job.

  Over the past week since our trip to Payson, we’ve done nothing but argue about whether or not we should take off and head for Oklahoma City. Two nights ago, just twelve hours before we would have had to leave town to arrive there by the December first deadline, we were at a booth in the Alpine Diner, the only sit-down eatery in Vernon, nibbling chicken wings and watching the TV over the bar. After arguing and agonizing and writing the pros and cons down on a grease-stained napkin, we had almost convinced ourselves that, yes, we were going to do it, we were going to hop in our vehicles the next morning and head east toward the rising sun, out into the wide open spaces—when the weather report came on the television: severe weather for at least the next three days, travel advisories for all southern Rocky Mountain states. We didn’t look at each other or speak; a weatherman with swirled acrylic hair talking about wind speeds and icy roads was all it took to destroy what little momentum we had built up for ourselves. In one instant we gave up altogether on Oklahoma City, on piles of money and all the happiness it could buy us, on stopping off in Albuquerque to visit Hymie’s grave.

  I didn’t—couldn’t—say anything. I wanted to scream, shout myself ragged, but I didn’t have the strength even to mumble a cussword; it was like I had been paralyzed by the dark things grinding inside me—fear, shame, anger—all tangling together in the pit of my gut like a wad of junk metal.

  We sat limp at that booth for awhile, all the air gone out of us, and finally, when we were able to haul ourselves up and go outside, there were already tiny crystals of snow falling, ticking on the hood of my truck. We talked for a few minutes, whispering, never looking each other in the eye, and decided that if we weren’t going to Oklahoma City, the very least we could do is go get our deer. It’s an embarrassment to anybody who doesn’t get their deer in a season—not only that, it’s considered a bad sign for things to come. But the weather has been even worse than expected: in the past two days there have been windstorms, snow flurries, some rain, some lightning, a little of everything. We even had to give up on our idea of the last-ditch hunt. I stayed home in bed (I had taken the days off from work) and listened to the wind rattling my walls, making my trailer shake and shimmy like an old boxcar going too fast on a ruined track. After the wind bawling in my ears all last night, I woke up this morning to Louis poking me in the ribs, telling me to get my boots and gun, we were going hunting. Feeling like somebody raised from the dead, I walked out into a world so calm it spooked me.

  We did nothing to prepare for the hunt, just jumped in Louis’ car and now, because the back seat is full of old engine parts, I’m stuck between Louis and Waylon in the front seat. I do what I can to keep from being seriously injured by the gearshift between my legs.

  “Do you think Haight’s Peak is under eight thousand feet?” Waylon says. “The book I was reading says it’s a rare moose that will go much higher than that.”

  Forget bagging a deer, Waylon is intent on bringing home our famous moose, not only to prove the unbelievers wrong, but as a birthday present for Frank, who turns fifty-eight next week.

  “I just want to kill something,” Louis says. “Anything.”

  I keep quiet; I’m trying to enjoy the hush of the air in the trees, the flat, empty sky. The narrow road we’re on is littered with broken branches that crunch and jump up when we pass over. Every second we’re moving higher and higher to a place where the air is so sharp and clean it can make you forget who you are.

  Just after we’ve passed the Fancy Springs turnoff, Louis throws on the brakes and says, “Shit!” and gets out. There is a young ponderosa, about as thick as a telephone pole, lying across the road. I give it a kick and find that it’s heavy enough to make my toes smart. If we had my truck, we could use the chainsaw I keep in my utility box and be on our way, but my truck is at Clay’s garage, getting the front end fixed. Early Saturday morning with the storm moving in from all directions, just a few hours after we’d parted ways at the Alpine Diner, Sheriff Naegle caught me weaving down Main Street with an empty pint of Wild Turkey and the dents from the stop sign I’d run over all too evident on my front bumper. I can’t remember any of this, but it made it to the front page of the weekly paper that came out yesterday: an embarrassment to everyone. But just as embarrassing is going hunting in a piece of shit like this.

  It’s pitiful, really, but what can we do? We mill around, cussing under our breaths, trying to think. Waylon is not to be deterred: he assumes a squatting position, places his hands under the front bumper, gives himself a short pep-talk and lifts. He actually gets it three or four inches off the ground, the freckles on his face turning white against his red skin, and he hisses at us, “Are you going to stand there and LOOK?” We hustle over to help him pull the front tires over the tree, and while Waylon holds up the front end, Louis and I, with a lot of groaning and yelling, lift the back end over so that the car, with its delicate oil pan and muffler, does not even graze the tree’s rough bark.

  You lift a car over a tree (even a small foreign car) and for a time you feel capable of pretty much anything. Two miles up the road we have to go through the procedure again, only this time with a slightly bigger tree, and it takes so much exertion I feel like at any second my intestines are going to fly out of my ass like paper streamers.

  By the time we make it to the turnoff, we have about five hours of daylight left, just enough time to make the circle around Mount Baldy and back. This is a place where we’ve had a lot of luck before, but today it’s quiet and empty, as if the rain washed all life right off the mountain and into the rivers. We skid over the slick clay and listen to the sound of hope crumbling to dust inside us; there is no deer sign at all—no tracks or scat or fur left on the side of a tree by a rutting buck, and certainly no indication that a moose has ever been here—only the weird, clean stillness cracked once in awhile by the tired shriek of a bird.

  In our hurry to make it up here we forgot everything but our guns and ammunition. Instead of camouflage I’m wearing a sweatshirt that says “Stanford” in bright neon yellow, something my mother bought me back before she had lost all hope too. After awhile there doesn’t seem to be any point in stepping quietly or keeping our guns up and ready. When we slip and fall on our asses we don’t even bother cussing. We trudge along silent and shamefaced, as if the lack of life on this mountain is something we are responsible for.

  The sun is just above the treeline when we make it back to the road, covered to our armpits in mud. The car is ab
out a mile down the road, which at this point seems too, too far. We walk no more than a hundred yards, come around a sharp curve and there before us, a gift: a hundred and fifty yards away down in a tiny meadow, four bucks walking lazily together, their brown backs sleek and shiny in the dull yellow grass. It’s what they call a bachelor group—young males, not yet ready, like the older, seasoned bucks, to go it alone in the higher elevations where the air is thinner and the footing not as sure. There is no wind to speak of and they are aware of nothing but themselves.

  This is as easy as it gets, as easy as falling off a chair. We fire at the same time, a single snap! that loses its sharpness and turns into the sound of dense static as it echoes away. Two of the bucks drop instantly as if something has fallen on them from out of the sky and the two others hightail it in opposite directions, diving into the underbrush. We forgot to decide who was shooting which deer before we fired, but that doesn’t matter, we’ve been smiled upon by God or Mother Nature or whoever it is that controls things around here—we got two bucks in the dying minutes of the hunt. Louis goes running down the slope to see what we’ve come up with, his hair flowing behind him like a banner.

  It’s dark by the time Waylon brings the car back and we get the carcasses up on the road. We’re whooping and shouting and clapping each other on the back. We got a two-and a four-pointer, both in the area of two hundred pounds, and what’s more, we made good hits; they were both dead before they knew their numbers had been called. A small breeze comes up and I can already smell the steaks cooking. It’s too dark and we don’t have any of the necessary equipment to gut and dress them, not even a pocketknife, so we throw them on top of Louis’ car, blood, guts and all. Because we didn’t bring rope, we have to lash them on as best we can with our shoelaces.