High Hunt

by Eddings, David

  "Shit!" McKlearey said. "You guys are just blowin' smoke outa your fuckin' ears. You ain't even got a rifle, Alders. You sure as shit can't go deer huntin' with a fuckin' shotgun."

  "I could lend you guys rifles from the pawnshop," Sloane said very quietly. He was leaning back, and I couldn't see his face.

  Mike swallowed. I think the hope that it would go had been a very faint one for him. Now, a strange combination of things had laid it right in his lap. "I'd better get a piece of paper and figure out a few things," he said.

  "The bugs are about to get me anyway," Sloane said. "Let's take the keg into the kitchen."

  We carted it inside and sat down around the table in the breakfast nook to watch Mike write down a long list with figures opposite each item.

  McKlearey straddled a chair over in the corner, scowling at us.

  Mike finally leaned back and took a long drink of beer. "I think that's it," he said. "Figure fifty for the horses and the guide — that's for a week or ten days. Food — probably twenty-five. License, ammunition, stuff like that — another twenty-five. Most of us probably already have the right kind of clothes and a guy can always borrow a sleeping bag if he don't already have one. I figure a guy can get by for a hundred."

  We sat in the brightly lighted kitchen with the layer of cigarette smoke hovering over our heads and stared at the sheet of paper in front of Mike.

  I glanced out the window at the rusty glow of the dying fire. The hills over on the peninsula loomed up against the stars.

  "I'm in," I said shortly.

  Mike scratched his cheek and nodded. "A man owes himself one good hunt in his life," he said. "It may start a small war in the Carter house, but what the hell?" He wrote his name and mine on the bottom of the paper. "Jack?" he asked my brother.

  "Why not?" Jack said. "I'll probably have to come along to keep you guys from shooting yourself in the foot."

  Mike put Jack's name down on the list.

  "God damn!" Cal said regretfully. "If I didn't have the shop and the lot and —” He paused. "Bullshit!" he said angrily. "I own them; they don't own me. Put my name down. I'm goin' huntin'. Piss on it!" He giggled suddenly.

  Mike squinted at the list. "I'm not sure if Miller — that's this guy I know — will go along with only four guys. We might have to scrounge up a few more bodies, but that shouldn't be too tough. You guys might think about it a little though. I'll call Miller on Monday and see if we can't get together on the price of the horses and the guide."

  "Guide?" Jack yelped. "Who the hell needs a goddamn baby-sitter? If you can't find your own damn game, you're not much of a hunter."

  "It's a package deal, shithead," Mike said. "No guy is just gonna rent you a horse and then point you off into the big lonely. He may not give two hoots in hell about you, but he wants that horse back."

  Jack grumbled a bit, but there wasn't much he could do about it. It was going to go; it was really going to go.

  Mike called a guy he knew and found out that the season opened on September 11, just about a month away. "At least that'll give us time to get our affairs in order." Mike laughed. "You know, quit our jobs, divorce our wives, and the like."

  We all laughed.

  Suddenly McKlearey stood up. He'd been sitting in the corner, nursing his beer. "Where's that fuckin' paper?" he demanded.

  Mike blinked and pulled it out of his shirt pocket.

  McKlearey jerked it out of his hand, picked up the pencil Mike had been using, and laboriously wrote along the bottom.

  "Louis R. McKlearey," he wrote.

  "What the hell —” Jack said, stunned.

  "Fuck ya!" Lou snapped. Then he leaned back his head and began to laugh. The laugh went on and on, and pretty soon the rest of us were doing it too.

  "Why you sneaky son of a bitch!" Jack howled. "You bad-mouthed the whole idea just to get us all hooked. You sneaky, connivin' bastard!"

  Lou laughed even harder. Maybe the others accepted Jack's easy answer, but I wasn't buying it. Not by a damn sight, I wasn't.

  After that, things got noisy. We all got to hitting the keg pretty hard, and it turned out to be a pretty good party after all.

  I guess it was almost three in the morning by the time we got Mike home.

  "I was gonna take you by to see Sandy," Jack said as we drove back to the trailer court, "but it's pretty late now." His voice was a little slurred.

  "Sandy? Who's that?"

  "Little something I've got on the side. She's a real fine-lookin' head. Tends bar at one of the joints. You'll get a chance to meet her later."

  I grunted and settled down in the seat. I realized that I didn't know this brother of mine at all. I couldn't understand him. A certain amount of casual infidelity was to be expected, I guess, but it seemed to him to be a way of life. Like his jobs and his wives, he just seemed to drift from woman to woman, always landing on his feet, always making out, always on the lookout for something new. Maybe that's why he wasn't so worked up about Lou and Margaret. I guess the word I was looking for was "temporary." Everything about him and his life seemed temporary, almost like he wasn't real, like nothing really touched him.

  I drifted off to thinking about the hunt. Maybe I was kind of temporary myself. I didn't have a family, I didn't have a girl, and I didn't have a job. I guess maybe the only difference between Jack and me was that he liked it that way, and I didn't. To him the hunt was just another thing to do. To me it already seemed more important. Maybe I could find out something about myself out in the brush, something I'd sure as hell never find out on a sidewalk. So I sat musing as the headlights bored, on into the dark ahead of us.

  6

  IT wasn't until Thursday that we finished up the deal on the car I was buying from Sloane's lot. I guess I got a pretty good deal on it. It was a ten-year-old Dodge, and I got it for a hundred and fifty. One of the fenders was a little wrinkled, and the paint wasn't too pure, but otherwise it seemed OK. Jack assured me that I wouldn't have been able to touch it for under three hundred anywhere else on the Avenue.

  It was cloudy that day, one of those days when the weather just seems to be turned off — not hot, not cold, not raining, not sunny — just "off." I kind of wandered around the car lot, kicking tires and so forth while McKlearey finished up the paper work in the cluttered little shack that served as an office. I hate waiting around like that, I get to the point where I want to run amok or something. It wasn't that I had anything to do really. I just hated the standing around.

  Finally Lou finished up and I took the paper and the keys from him.

  "Be sure to keep an eye on the oil," he told me.

  "Right."

  "And watch the pressure in the right rear tire."

  "Sure thing." I climbed in and fired it up. Lou waved as I drove off the lot. I didn't wave back.

  There's something about having your own car — even if it's only four wheels and a set of pedals. You aren't tied down any more. You're not always in the position of asking people for a lift or waiting for buses.

  I drove around for an hour or so through the shadowless light, getting the feel of the car. It was still fairly early — maybe then thirty or eleven in the morning — and finally it dawned on me that I didn't have anyplace to go really. Jack was busy at the trailer lot, and I hate to stand around and watch somebody else work.

  I thought about taking a run up to Seattle, but I really didn't want to do that. None of the people I'd known would still be around. Maxwell had taken off and Larkin, too, probably. I sure as hell didn't want to look up my old girlfriend; that was one thing I knew for sure.

  Larkin. I hadn't really been thinking at all. Last time I'd heard from him, he'd been teaching high school here in Tacoma someplace. I guess I'd just associated Tacoma with guys like my brother and McKlearey and Carter — beer-drinking, broad-chasing types. Stan Larkin just didn't fit in with that kind of picture.

  Stan and I had roomed together for a year at the university. We didn't really have much in common,
but I kind of liked him. There are two ways a guy can go if he's a liberal arts major — provided, of course, that he doesn't freak out altogether. He can assume the pose of the cultured man, polished, urbane, with good taste and all that goes with it. Or he can play the role of the "diamond in the rough," coarse, even vulgar, but supposedly intelligent in spite of it all — the Hemingway tactic, more or less. Larkin was the first type — I obviously wasn't.

  I think liberal arts majors are all automatically defensive about it, probably because we're oversensitive. The dum-dums in PE with their brains in their jockstraps, the goof-offs in Business Administration, the weird types in the hard sciences, and the campus politicians in the social sciences, have all seen fit at one time or another to question the masculinity of any guy in liberal arts. So we get defensive. We rise above them, like Stan does, or we compensate, like I do. It kind of goes with the territory.

  Anyway, Stan had spent a year picking up my dirty sox and dusting my books, and then he'd given up and moved back to the dorm. Even our literary interests hadn't coincided. He was involved with Dickens, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Pope, while I was hung up on Blake, Donne, Faulkner, and Hardy. It's a wonder we didn't wind up killing each other.

  I'd dropped him an occasional postcard from Europe, and he'd responded with the beautifully written letters that seemed, to me at least, almost like my picture of Stan himself — neat, florid, and somehow totally empty of any meaning.

  At least he'd be somebody to talk to.

  I wheeled into a tavern parking lot, went in and ordered a beer. I borrowed a phone book from the bartender and leafed through the L's. He was there all right: Larkin, Stanley, and right above it was Larkin, Monica. Same address, same number. I remembered that he'd mentioned a girl named Monica something or other in a couple of his letters, but I hadn't paid much attention. Now it looked like he was married. I don't know why, but he'd never seemed to be the type. I jotted down the number and the address and pushed the phone book back to the bartender.

  I finished my beer and had another, still debating with myself, kind of working myself up to calling him. I have to do that sometimes.

  "Hey, buddy, you got a pay phone?" I finally asked the bartender.

  He pointed back toward the can. I saw it hanging on the wall.

  "Thanks," I said and went on back. I thumbed in a dune and dialed the number.

  "Hello?" It still sounded like him.

  "Stan? I didn't really think I'd catch you at home. This is Dan — Dan Alders."

  "Dan? I thought you were in the Army."

  "Just got out last weekend. I'm staying here in town, and I thought I'd better look you up."

  "I guess so. It's good to hear your voice again. Where are you?" His enthusiasm seemed well-tempered.

  "Close as I can figure, about eighty-seven blocks from your place."

  "That's about a fifteen-minute drive. You have a car?"

  "Just got one. I think it'll make it that far."

  "Well then, come on over."

  "You sure I won't be interrupting anything?"

  "Oh, of course not. Come on, Dan, we know each other better than that."

  "OK, Stan." I laughed. "I'll see you in about fifteen minutes then."

  "I'll be waiting for you."

  I went back to the bar and had another beer. I wasn't sure this was going to work out. I wouldn't mind seeing Stan again, but we hadn't really had a helluva lot in common to begin with, and now he was married, and that along with a couple of years can change a guy quite a bit.

  The more I thought about it, the less I liked it. I went out and climbed in my car. I pulled out of the lot and headed off toward his house, dodging dogs and kids on bicycles, and swearing all the way. It had all the makings of a real bust.

  Oddly enough, it wasn't. Stan had aged a little. He was a bit heavier, and his forehead was getting higher. He was combing his hair differently to cover it. He was still neat to the point of fussiness. His slacks and sport shirt were flawlessly pressed, and even his shoe-soles were clean. But he seemed genuinely glad to see me, and I relaxed a bit. He showed me around a house that was like a little glass case in a museum, making frequent references to Monica, his wife. The house was small, but everything in it was perfect. I could almost feel the oppressive presence of his bride. The place was so neat that it made me wonder where I could dump my cigarette butt. Stan gracefully provided me with an ashtray — an oversized one, I noticed. He obviously hadn't forgotten my slobby habits. He had changed in more ways than just his appearance. He seemed to be nervous — even jumpy. He acted like somebody who's got a body in the cellar or a naked girl in the bedroom. I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

  We sat down in the living room.

  "How's Susan?" he asked me.

  My stomach rolled over. "I wouldn't know really," I answered in as neutral a tone as possible.

  "But I thought you and she —”

  "So did I, Stan. But apparently she shopped around a bit while I was in Germany. She must have found somebody more acceptable to her mother — you know, some guy who thought that the Old Lady was a cross between the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc, and Eleanor Roosevelt."

  "I'm sorry, Dan. I really am." He meant it.

  "Those are the breaks, old buddy," I said. "It's probably all for the best anyway. Her Old Lady and I probably would have been at each other's throats most of the time anyway. About the first time I told her to stick those chest pains in her ear, the proverbial shit would have hit the proverbial fan."

  "Did she have a bad heart?"

  "She had a useful heart. It may have been rotten to the core, but it was as sound as the Chase Manhattan Bank — how's that for mixing metaphors?"

  "Scrambling them might be a little more precise."

  "Anyway, the old bag would get this pained look on her face, and the old hand would start clutching at the maternal bosom anytime Sue and I were about to leave the house. One of the great weapons of motherhood, the fluttery ticker. My Old Lady never tried it. I don't think she was ever sober enough."

  "You still haven't much use for motherhood, have you, Dan?" he asked me, an amused look on his face.

  "As an institution, it ranks just downstream of San Quentin," I said sourly.

  Stan laughed. I think that's one of the reasons he and I had gotten along. With him I could be as outrageous as I liked, and he was always amused. I'd never really offended him.

  "Could you drink a glass of wine?" he asked suddenly. The perfect host.

  "I can always drink — anything," I told him.

  "Alders, you're a boozer, you know that?"

  "It's part of my charm." I grinned at him.

  He went out to the kitchen and came back a minute later with two glasses of pink wine. "This is a fairly good little domestic rose," he said handing me one of the glasses.

  "Thank you," I said. "Your manners, charm, and impeccable good taste are exceeded only by your unspeakable good looks."

  "Steady on," he said. He glanced at his watch. I seemed to catch that edginess again. Maybe I was imagining things.

  "How's your gun eye?" I asked him. Oddly enough — or maybe not, when you think about it — Stan was a spectacular shotgunner. He'd started out on skeet and trap — gentlemanly, but not very nourishing in terms of meat in the pot — and had moved on up to birds. I'd actually seen him triple on ducks once — one mallard coming in high, another on a low pass right out in front of the blind, and a widgeon going away like a bat out of hell. He'd just raised up and very methodically dumped all three of them, one after another.

  "Probably a little rusty," he said. "I've only been out to the range a few times this summer."

  "You'd better get on it, old buddy," I told him. "The season's coming on, you know."

  "I don't know if I'll get the chance to go out much this year," he said regretfully. "Monica and I are pretty busy."

  I got another flash of that nervousness from him. Something was definitely wrong. I decided to let it drop.
I didn't want to be grinding on any open sores.

  "Say," I said suddenly, "do you ever hear from Maxwell?"

  "He was in California last I heard," Stan said. Maxwell had been a sometime visitor when we had roomed together. He was a nut, but we'd both liked him.

  "Did he really bum his draft card that time?" I asked.

  "Of course not," Stan snorted. "He was just trying to make a big impression on a girl who had an acute case of politics. He told me later that he just pulled out one of those printed ID cards — you know, the kind that comes with the wallet — and set fire to it before anyone could see what it was. The real joke was that he was really 4-F or whatever they call it."

  "You're kidding. A hulk like that?"

  "He had a kidney removed when he was eleven. The military wouldn't touch him."

  "Man" — I laughed —”what a con artist. Did he ever make it with the girl?"

  "I suppose," Stan said. "He usually did, didn't he?"

  "That's why he flunked out of school. If he'd spent half as much time on his classes as he did on those elaborate campaigns of seduction, he'd have chewed up the department." I took a belt of his wine.

  "Alders, you know, you're a beer drinker at heart. You drink a fine rose like you would a glass of draft beer in a tavern two minutes before closing time."

  "Baby, I've had the best. Liebfraumilch, Lacrima Christi, Piper Heidsieck — you name it, I've swilled it."

  He winced. "What a word — swilled. All right, now that we've gotten past the amenities, tell me, how was Paris?" I should have known that was coming. Paris is always the favorite city of anybody who hasn't been to Europe.

  "It's a dirty town, Stan," I said sadly, telling nun the truth. "I think that all my life I've wanted it to be great, but it's just another dirty town with a lot of dirty people trying to stick their hands in your pockets. Berlin was wild, very sad; Florence was lovely — but the flood —” I shrugged. "Venice is a crumbling slum in the middle of a sewer; Naples is still in nibble; Rome is — well, it's Rome — a monument. If you can get clear of the tourist traps, it's fine. London is dignified, honorably scarred, and — where the action is supposed to be at — cheap. The plays are good, but the eating and drinking are rotten. You want my vote, try Vienna — or Heidelberg — or Zurich. And that completes the Cook's toenail tour."