by Rick Bass
When she settled for me, I’m proud to say that we stayed together for five months, longer than she’d ever been with anyone—long enough for people to talk, and to kid her about it.
Our dates were simple. We’d drive up into the snowy mountains, on those mountains that had roads, as far as we could go before the snow stopped us, and gaze at the valley. Or we’d drive into town, sixty miles away on a one-lane, rutted, cliff-hanging road, for dinner and a movie. I could see how there might not have been enough heat and wild romance in it for some of the other men—there’d been talk—but for me it was warm and right while it lasted.
When she left, I did not think I would ever eat or drink again. It felt as if my heart had been torn from my chest, as if my lungs were on fire; every breath burned. I didn’t understand why she had to leave. I’d known it would come someday, but still, it caught me by surprise.
Besides being a bowhunter, Randy is a carpenter. He does odd jobs for people in the valley, usually of the sort that requires fixing up old cabins. He keeps his own schedule, and stops work entirely in the fall so he can hunt to his heart’s content. He’ll roam the valley for days, exploring the wildest places. We all hunt in the fall—grouse, deer, elk, though we leave the moose and bear alone because they are not as common—but none of us is clever or stealthy enough to bowhunt. With a bow, you have to get close to the animal.
Suzie doesn’t approve of hunting in any form. “That’s what cattle are for,” she said one day in the saloon. “Cattle are like city people. Cattle expect, even deserve, what they’ve got coming. But wild animals are different. Wild animals enjoy life. They live in the woods on purpose. It’s cruel to go in after them and kill them. It’s cruel.”
We all hoo-rahed her and ordered more beers.
She doesn’t get angry, exactly. She understands that everyone hunts here, men and women alike. She knows we love animals, but for one or two months out of the year we also love to hunt them.
Randy is so good at what he does it makes us jealous. He can crawl to within thirty yards of an animal when it is feeding, or he can sit so still that it walks right past him. Once shot, the animal runs but a short way—it bleeds to death or dies from trauma. The blood trail is easy to follow, especially in the snow. No one wants it to happen this way, but there’s nothing to be done about it; bowhunting is like that. The others of us look at it as being much fairer than hunting with a rifle, because you have to get so close to the animal to get a good shot. Thirty, thirty-five yards, max. Close enough to hear water sloshing in the elk’s belly, from where he’s just taken a drink from the creek. Close enough to hear the intakes of breath. Close enough to be fair. But Suzie doesn’t see it that way. She’ll serve Randy his drinks and chat with him, be polite, but her face is blank, her smiles stiff.
Last summer Randy tried to gain Suzie’s favor by building her things. Davey, the bartender—the man she was with at the time—didn’t really mind. It wasn’t as if there were any threat of Randy stealing her away, and besides, Davey liked the objects Randy built her. And, too, it might have added a small bit of white heat to Davey and Suzie’s relationship, though I cannot say for sure.
Randy made her a porch swing out of bright larch wood and stained it with tung oil. He gave it to her at the saloon one night after spending a week on it, sanding it and getting it just right. We gathered around and admired it, running our hands over its smoothness. Suzie smiled a little—a polite smile, which was, in a way, worse than if she had looked angry—and said nothing, not even thank you, and she and Davey took it home in the back of Davey’s truck.
Randy built her other things too, small things she could fit on her dresser—a little mahogany box for her earrings, of which she had several pairs—and a walking stick with a deer antler for the grip. She said she didn’t want the walking stick but would take the earring box.
That summer I lay awake in my cabin some nights and thought about how Suzie was with Davey. I felt vaguely sorry for him, because I knew she would leave him too. I’d lie on my side and look out my bedroom window at the northern lights flashing. The river runs by my cabin, and the strange flashing reflected on the river in a way that made it seem that the light was coming from beneath the water as well. On nights like those, it felt as if my heart would never heal—in fact, I was certain of it. By then I didn’t love Suzie anymore—at least I didn’t think I did—but I wanted to love someone, and to be loved.
In the evenings, back when we’d been together, Suzie and I would sit on the porch after she got in from work. There was still plenty of daylight left, and we’d watch large herds of deer, their antlers still covered with summer velvet, wade into the cool shadows of the river to bathe, like ladies. They made delicate splashing sounds as they stepped into the current. Water fell from their muzzles when they lifted their heads from drinking. As the sun moved lower, their bodies grew increasingly indistinct, blurring into shadows. Later, Suzie and I would wrap a single blanket about ourselves and nap. When we opened our eyes we would watch for falling stars, and wait until we saw one go ripping across the sky, shot through all the other stars, and once in a great while they came close enough for us to hear the crackle and hiss as they burned.
In early July, Randy, whose house sits in a field up at the base of the mountains, began practicing with his bow. Standing in the field at various marked distances—ten, twenty, thirty, forty yards—he shot arrow after arrow at a bull’s-eye stapled to bales of hay. It was unusual to drive past then and not see him outside, shirtless, perspiring, his cheeks flushed. He lived by himself and there was probably nothing else to do. The bowhunting season began in late August, months before the shooting season.
It made Suzie furious to see Randy practicing with his bow and arrows. She circulated a petition in the valley to ban bowhunting.
But we would have been out doing the same thing if we’d had the skill, hunting giant elk with bows for the thrill of it, luring them with calls and rattles to our hiding places in the dark woods. Provoked, the bulls would rush in, heads down, their great antlers ripping through the underbrush and knocking against the overhanging limbs of trees.
If only we could have brought them in close. But we weren’t good enough to do that.
We couldn’t sign the petition. Not even Davey could sign it.
“But it’s wrong,” Suzie said.
“It’s personal choice,” Davey said. “If you use the meat, and apologize to the spirit right before you do it and right after, if you give thanks, it’s all right. It’s a man’s choice, honey.”
If there was one thing Suzie hated, it was that man-woman stuff. She shut her eyes and held them shut as if she were trying to be in some other place. “He’s trying to prove something,” she said.
“Randy’s just doing something he cares about, dear,” Davey said.
“He’s trying to prove his manhood—to me, to all of us,” she said. “He’s dangerous.”
“No,” Davey said, “that’s not right. He likes it and hates it both. It fascinates him, is all.”
“It’s sick,” she said. “He’s dangerous.”
I could see that Suzie and Davey did not have that long to go.
I went bowhunting with Randy once to see how it was done. I saw him shoot an elk, saw the arrow go in behind the bull’s shoulder, where the heart and lungs are hidden. I saw, too, the way the bull looked around in wild-eyed surprise before galloping off through the timber, seemingly uninjured, running hard. We listened for a long time to the clack-clack of the aluminum arrow banging against the trees.
Randy was wearing camouflage fatigues. He’d painted his face in stripes, like a tigers. “Now we sit and wait.” Randy seemed confident, not shaky at all, though I was. It had looked like a record bull, massive and dark. I had smelled anger from the bull—fury—when the arrow first snapped into his ribs, and when he lunged away. I didn’t believe we’d ever see him again.
After two hours we got up and began to follow the blood trail. There was
n’t much of it at first, just a drop or two in the dry leaves, already turning brown and cracking, drops that I would never have seen had Randy not pointed them out. A quarter of a mile down the hill we began to see more of it, a widening stream of blood, until it seemed that surely all of the bull’s blood had drained out. We passed two places where the bull had lain down beneath a tree to die, but had then gotten up and moved on. We found him by the creek a half mile away, down in the shadows, his huge antlers rising into a patch of sun and gleaming. The arrow did not seem large enough to have killed him. The creek made a gentle trickling sound.
We sat down beside the elk and admired him, studied him. Randy, who because of the scent did not smoke during the hunting season, at least not until he had his elk, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it.
“I’m not sure why I do it,” he said, reading my mind. “I feel kind of bad about it each time I see one like this, but I keep doing it.” He shrugged. I listened to the sound of the creek. “I know it’s cruel, but I can’t help it, I have to do it,” he said.
“What do you think it feels like?” Suzie once asked me at the saloon. “What do you think it feels like to run with an arrow in your heart, knowing you’re going to die for it?” She was red-faced, self-righteous.
I told her I didn’t know, it was just the way it was. I paid for my drink and left.
Late in July, Suzie left Davey, as I’d predicted. It was an amicable separation, and we all had a party down at the saloon to celebrate. An entire deer was roasted in honor of the occasion: Bud Jennings had hit the deer with his truck the night before, coming back from town with supplies. We sat outside in the early evening and ate the steaming meat off paper plates with barbecue sauce and crisp apples from Idaho. The river that dovetailed with the road glinted in the fading light. This was back when Old Terjaney was still alive, and he played his accordion, a sad, sweet sound. We drank beer and told stories.
All this time I’d been uncertain about whether it was right or wrong to hunt if you used the meat and said those prayers. And I’m still not entirely convinced one way or the other. But I have a better picture of what it’s like to be the elk or deer. And I understand Suzie a little better too. She was frightened. Fright—sometimes plain fright, even more than terror—is every bit as bad as pain, and maybe worse.
Suzie went home with me that night, after the party. She had made her rounds of the men in the valley, and now she was choosing to come back to me.
“I’ve got to go somewhere,” she said. “I hate being alone. I can’t stand to be alone.” She slipped her hand into mine as we walked home. Randy and Davey were still sitting at the picnic table, eating slices of venison. The sun hadn’t quite set. Ducks flew down the river.
“I guess that’s as close to ‘I love you as I’ll get,” I said.
“I’m serious,” she said, twisting my hand. “You don’t understand. It’s horrible. I can’t stand it. It’s not like other people’s loneliness. It’s worse.”
“Why?” I asked.
“No reason,” Suzie said. “I’m just scared, jumpy. I can’t help it.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
We walked down the road like that, holding hands in the dusk. It was about three miles down the gravel road to my cabin. Suzie knew the way. We heard owls as we walked along the river, and saw lots of deer. Once, I thought I heard some wild sound and turned to look back, but I saw nothing, saw no one.
If Randy can have such white-hot passion for bowhunting, he surely can have just as much heat in his hate. It spooks me the way he doesn’t bring Suzie presents anymore in the old hopeful way. The flat looks he gives me could mean anything: they unnerve me.
Sometimes I’m afraid to go in the woods, but I go anyway. I hunt, working along a ridge, moving in and out of the shadows between the forest and the meadow, walking this line at dusk and thinking about Suzie, sometimes, instead of hunting. I’ll think about how comfortable I am with her—how gratified—if not actually in love. I move slowly through the woods, trying to be as quiet as I can. There are times now when I feel someone or something is just behind me, following at a distance, and I’ll turn around, frightened and angry both, and I won’t see anything.
The day before Halloween it began to snow, and it didn’t stop for our party the following night. The roof over the saloon groaned under its heavy load. But we all managed to get together for the dance anyway, swirling around the room, pausing to drink or arm wrestle, the antlers tied securely on our heads. We pretended to be deer or elk, as we always do on Halloween, and pawed at the wideboard floor with our boots. Davey and Suzie waltzed in widening circles; she seemed so light and free that I couldn’t help but grin. Randy sat drinking beer off in a corner. At one point he smiled. It was a polite smile.
The beer ran out at three in the morning, and we started to gather our things. Those of us who had skied down to the saloon tried to find someone to tow us home. Because Randy and I lived up the same road, Davey offered us both a ride, and Suzie took hold of the tow rope with us.
Davey drove slowly through the storm. The snowflakes were as large as goose feathers. We kept our eyes on the brake lights in front of us, with the snow spiraling into our faces, and concentrated on gripping the rope.
Suzie had had a lot to drink, we all had, and she held the rope with both hands, her deer antlers slightly askew. She began asking Randy about his hunting—not razzing him, as I thought she would, but simply questioning him—things she’d been wondering for a long time, I supposed, but had been too angry to ask.
“What’s it like?” Suzie kept wanting to know. “I mean, what’s it really like?”
We were sliding through the night, holding on to the rope. The snow struck our faces, caking our eyebrows, and it was so cold that it was hard to speak without shivering. “You’re too cold-blooded for me,” she said when Randy wouldn’t answer. “You scare me, mister.”
Randy stared straight ahead, his face hard and flat and blank.
“Suzie, honey,” I started to say. I had no idea what I was going to say after that—something to defend Randy, perhaps—but I stopped, because Randy turned and looked at me, for just a second, with a fury I could feel as well as see, even in my drunkenness. But then the mask, the polite mask, came back down over him, and we continued down the road in silence, the antlers on our heads bobbing and weaving, a fine target for anyone who might not have understood that we weren’t wild animals.
Wejumpka
WHEN WEJUMPKA was eleven, Vern, his father, made me Wejumpka’s godfather. Vern’s health had been going downhill fast all that fall, although he was only in his fifties.
Vern and I had been playing that ridiculous game of liar’s poker, and our final bet obliged me to be Wejumpka’s godfather if I called and lost, but if Vern was bluffing, he had to marry the woman he was then seeing, if she would have him. She was barely out of her teens, plump, with a pear-shaped face and orange hair. She had an easy laugh and had had two children already. I agreed to the bet with the hope that she could do something with him—straighten him up, as I knew women could sometimes do.
The woman’s father, who was a few years older than me, had attended my high school. We’d played football together; he was a wiry little halfback who’d gotten more wiry since, working on cars in his garage out near the Pearl River. His name was Zachary, and he collected insurance money each spring when the rains brought the river into his garage and on up into his house. Generally, he didn’t even move out when it flooded. He’d wade around, doing his chores, making sure all the circuit breakers were off, and wait for the water to go down. When he’d collected the insurance money, he would bury it in secret places.
The rains began in March, and he would sit on the roof of his garage and listen to the weather station, praying for more rain; each foot of water in his shop was worth about ten thousand dollars. It’s cruel, but I don’t know what his daughters name was. Worse, I don’t think Vern did either. We called her
Zachary’s girl.
The final bet between Vern and me was made only around midnight, but we’d started drinking at four in the afternoon. It was a serious hand of poker. Vern wasn’t bluffing, it turned out, and as I suspected later, he wasn’t even drunk. It was a setup. It was as if I’d killed him, like in one of those hunting accidents where a best buddy trips and hits the trigger, shooting his partner. By losing the bet, by assuming responsibility for Wejumpka, I’d given Vern the last go-ahead he needed to let go of everything, let his downward spiral have its way with him.
After that hand, Vern wasn’t the same anymore. I played cards with him out of a sense of duty, and that was probably why I got so drunk—I don’t handle duty very well. Later that year, when Vern received the old stop-drinking-or-you’ll-only-have-one-year-to-live speech from his doctor, and yet didn’t stop, not much anyway, I felt naive and stupid for having called an older man’s bluff.
About the boy I have won, Wejumpka. When he was eight, he went with his scout troop on a father-and-son camp-out. They roasted marshmallows and sang songs around the campfire. The moon was high and silvery over the lake. Bats chittered and swooped above the water. There was the cool, sweet trill of a screech owl coming from the woods along the shore. Solemnly, the boys gave each other Indian names, written on slips of paper and drawn from a wooden box.
Every other scout soon forgot his name, or was less than flattered by it and threw the paper in the fire. But Wejumpka remembered his; he embraced it. Formerly his name was Montrose. Another thing about the boy I have inherited: he is a hugger, and he’s wild about puppies, cats, parrots, guinea pigs—he loves all animals, and other children too, even the mean ones who pushed him down and ran away when he tried to embrace them.
He’s always been that way, always holding on. Perhaps when he was in his mother’s womb he could feel, as if with some prenatal sonar, the dark shape of his future, of the divorce looming between Vern and his wife, Ann. Perhaps Vern said unkind words to his wife while Wejumpka was forming in her womb. It’s also possible that Ann could see into the future, could feel the absence of a thing. Perhaps she held Vern more tightly than ever then, being wise and clairvoyant and scared in her pregnancy, and this affected the unborn child, made him hold on in the same way.
