The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  A mountain wight, the buck had been glimpsed by other hunters earlier that year and during the year before, but had always vanished like a ghost before anybody got a shot or even a good look at him. Old and wise, he was a master at using the secret, hidden places on the mountain in order to stay alive. And in this, the last year of his life, he had grown into a monster, the best of the gene pool, with enormous dusky shoulders and a huge basket rack of antlers chipped and scarred from subduing other males, stained with the juice of roots. This giant, aged male couldn’t, with his molars worn to the gumline, ever feed again; he only cared now for his few short, last weeks of autumn dominance.

  I was watching a young male in the stream when he appeared in order to drive the other animal away, and without my seeming to will it, the rifle fired and he vanished.

  By noon I had just about given up trying to find him, so I called Susanne’s husband, David.

  When David arrived, I stood in front of him exhausted, covered with mud, soaking wet, dripping puddles of filthy cold water on the clean kitchen floor. “Dave,” I said, “this was the biggest deer I ever saw in my life. This was the deer.”

  David looked at me carefully “Are you sure you hit?”

  “Dave, it was a long, long way to fire, but it was a perfect sight picture. I fired, he was knocked down for an instant, got up, ran ten paces, and then disappeared.”

  David smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. “Okay, I’ll be on it all day if you want. Now, show me where he was when you shot.”

  I went back to the beaver pond with him, walked him to where the buck was when I shot and said, “I lost sight of him right here”

  David looked back to where the buck had been standing, then shaded his eyes and peered off for a long, long minute toward the spot from where I had fired, shaking his head. “That’s an impossibly long shot.” But when he went to move, he looked down at the ground at his feet and caught his breath.

  There he was, dead, facedown in a hole clogged with tiny willow, with just the gray hump of his enormous shoulders pushing up through dead leaves. Right next to him were a dozen sets of tracks from my gum boots. I had been walking past him all morning, looking ahead instead of down.

  “Damn,” was all I managed to say, almost falling down. “Wait until the boys see this!”

  David cracked such a wide grin it looked like the top of his head would fly off. “So much for their theory that Dad can’t shoot any longer!”

  We could barely wrestle him out of the hole, but it was too wet to get a truck back there, so we tried to drag him. Eventually, David fell on his back, laughing. “We need help—I feel like I’m pulling a car sideways.”

  It was getting colder again, with afternoon shadows seeping out into the field. I looked at my watch. “It’s well past three. Liam and Mike will be at the house.”

  “Mike?” said David. “I don’t know. Remember Thanksgiving. You know how he is about animals. You’ll have to clean it with him watching. Then you’ll have to think about what The Harbour Program will say if he’s involved.”

  I shook my head. I was ready to give up on any calculation of Mike’s emotional dewpoint, but I did have left a flickering hope that somewhere within Mike’s snarly bundle of contradictions was, as in most boys, the one clear thread of an appropriate little savage.

  As for The Harbour Program, I knew, of course, that they’d much rather our family didn’t hunt, that Mike not be exposed to any aspect of the violence of it. I knew a growing segment of the population shared the same ambivalence, but from my sardonic and irreverent perspective the alternative was blandly despicable. Most children now are far too bleakly segregated from life; they operate in a world of video arcades and television and mind-numbing mall jaunts, isolated schools, and insipid, un-meaningful “meaningful activities.” Few of them ever seem to read a book, stake long it is left to us, is the last activity I can think of that still bridges the gap between what men and children do. And it’s all about family. It’s not something you send your sons to do while you watch, but rather something they begin to assume responsibility in at an early age, tutored by a grandfather or an uncle or a father, and then involving other uncles and brothers and cousins, and then finally teaching younger cousins, nephews, and children. And all of that is ever so much more than a brief season in the autumn. Hunting extends itself throughout the entire year in preparation and practice, in game meals and in a thousand stories—most particularly in stories. Stories are what you are, were, and will be. And Mike is one of the “will bes” around here now.

  So for all of those reasons and because I knew that with Sue gone seeing clients, Mike would be alone in the house, I said to David, “No, we need his help. Leave it up to him. Let him come to us out here in the field if he chooses.”

  David set off, and five minutes later I heard the distant slam of the kitchen door, then Mike shot out of the house, his blond hair flashing like a mirror under the shadows of the trees as he ran down and down and then out to where I was standing. He still ran with an awkward, toe-in gait, one shoulder stumbling forward and the other lurching for balance. But he ran on and on, laughing when the dogs caught up with him.

  As he ran I remembered Joanne reviewing his medical records, picturing the seventy-pound, nervous little waif that he was in the spring and saying, “I don’t think he’ll ever be able to walk long distances. He may never be strong.”

  When Mike got there, he danced like a young Iroquois warrior around the buck. “You did it! You did it!” He laughed and laughed. “This is bigger than Brendan’s, bigger than Frank’s … it’s bigger than Henry’s?

  Impressed and perplexed in spite of my earlier thoughts, I sighed. This was a brighter, shinier piece in the ragged, fractured ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that was Mike, but I didn’t know whether it was a piece of blue sky, a piece of the mountains, or maybe a corner. I didn’t know what the picture of Mike was supposed to look like when it was finished.

  In a minute or so David and Liam showed up, David shaking his head at the sight of Mike and Liam grinning. Then, with the four of us huffing and puffing, we got the animal back to the house and used a car hitch to pull him up into the hemlock.

  An hour later the vehicles started pulling into the drive.

  And a couple of hours after that I was standing there in the barroom looking at Mike and remembering the deer, remembering how Mike had acted that afternoon.

  “Rich, there are more and more of those people coming,” Mike said now.

  I groaned. All I wanted was to shower, eat, and lie down. “Mike, you go out and talk to them if you want to.”

  He took a step forward and then a step back. “Me?” He trembled as if with an electric shock.

  I hadn’t really been serious, but when I saw something work its way into his face I said, groping my way, “Answer their questions, Mike.”

  “Can I have a flashlight?” he yelled at me.

  He looked like a hound chafing at the leash, and I was startled. “Uh, sure—there’s one behind the bar.”

  A short time later I was coming out of the shower in my robe when Sue came in and grabbed my arm. “Do you know what you started?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t turn any lights on. Just walk into the office and take a look outside.”

  I could hear a strange, loud voice before I even put my head close to the window. A dozen men were outlined in the headlights from their cars and trucks, others were pulling in, and Mike was standing in front of them, gesticulating like an impresario as he swung the beam of the flashlight upward, emphasizing various points about the deer. His frosted breath was puffing white in the hazy darkness, and although typically loud, it was a relaxed and totally new voice. No tension, no stress, the words fluid and clear. “My dad shot this. This is the biggest deer in America, even in the whole state. He shot it with one shot even though it was almost a mile away. I helped him bring it home, and David helped, and …”

  All those fears bund
led up inside that strange little person, and yet the commonest of fears, that of getting up in front of a group of new people and talking, wasn’t numbered among them.

  Then I thought I understood. “Mike’s not afraid of or angry with strangers—only with people he has a relationship with.”

  “Yeah,” Sue said slowly, “you’re right. It’s creepy. It’s exactly backwards, isn’t it?”

  Where had I just heard that?

  Then I remembered—and also what I had neglected to tell Sue the day before. “I think I might know what’s been bothering him.”

  “I hope so,” she said, hunched up and looking through the window. “The little wretch should’ve been sent to us with an instruction manual.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  the test

  We were standing knee-deep in pre-Christmas litter in the barroom. Dusty boxes with newspaper-wrapped Santa Clauses and ornaments, many little decorations various kids had made over the years in grammar school or Boy Scouts. Where to put the large antique crèche scene that Aunt Alice had given us years ago? It takes fifteen or so square feet to set up, and if one of the pieces got smashed, Sue would be heartbroken.

  “How’s your karate practice going?” I asked her. Her response to my theory that it was the karate test that was bugging Mike had been disbelief, followed by a vow to help him practice, if that really was the issue. (“Hey, I’ve seen all those Bruce Lee movies….”)

  Now she was picking the odd piece of last year’s tinsel off her sweater. “I haven’t done anything. He’s been real good in the morning ever since he got involved with you and that deer, so I’ve just let it go. His problem probably wasn’t karate at all. If anything, he acted up because we’ve been so busy lately and he felt pushed out of the way.”

  “Sue,” I said doubtfully, “I don’t think that was it.”

  “Rich, don’t worry. Tomorrow’s Tuesday, karate day. I’m sure he’ll go.”

  But Mike didn’t go. He found out I was going down to the taxidermist that night and begged and begged until Sue and I agreed he could go along.

  The taxidermist was a young guy named Curt Cabrera who had just opened a business called the Wild Art Studio in Highland. Tony Tantillo from Sunset Sporting Goods had recommended him. “This guy just won the nationals,” Tony told me. “He does incredible work. Go see him.”

  So Mike and I trucked on down there, a frosty, clear night with the stars like diamond shards overhead as we quietly swept past the views of the Hudson, the only sound in the truck cab the soft hum of the heater fan.

  When we arrived, Mike followed me into the brightly lit studio and then drifted off by himself, quietly walking from mount to mount, studying the displays while Curt and I talked about how he would do the deer.

  Later on we stood at the counter while I wrote out a check and Curt looked down at Mike. “Hey,” he said, smiling, “your dad tells me you’re in karate.”

  Mike looked back, and the interested, relaxed expression on his face fled.

  Back in the truck, I probed. “Mike, you are thinking about quitting karate, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not a quitter. I’m not quitting!”

  “Okay, if you’re not quitting, are you still worried about the test?”

  “I don’t care about the stupid test!”

  “Okay,” I answered, honestly confused.

  Then Thursday night came, and after an early dinner Sue asked me to go find out whether Liam and Mike were ready for karate. Liam was getting his uniform on, but Mike was downstairs in the barroom, watching TV.

  “Mike, are you going to get ready for karate?”

  A moody, cutting look away. “No. I’m doing hunting now.”

  “Huh?”

  He glared around his shoulder at me. “I’m hunting. I talked to all those people. That’s what I’m doing new.”

  “New?”

  “I mean now.”

  “Mike, the other night you said you weren’t quitting.”

  Silence.

  “Mike, you shouldn’t let a test stop you, and as far as hunting goes, you don’t own a gun or any equipment, you’re too young, and besides, it’s not deer season any longer.”

  “I hate this whole—”

  “Don’t you dare say that word!”

  “—fucking family!” He jumped down, knocking over the barstool. “I want to go to a good family.”

  I left him there, yelling at my back. Then I went and collected Liam and drove him to karate. But afterward I took a long drive alone, back through New Paltz, down Route 208 through Gardiner, and then down to a white frame house just outside the Shawangunk Prison. I saw the lights were on, got out, and walked up the back path to the kitchen door.

  The next day I was home from work and waiting when Mike got off the school bus.

  “Mike, I have to talk to you.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Fine, you can have something to eat after we talk.”

  He followed me into my room, making exaggerated dragging gestures.

  “Mike, I want to talk to you about hunting.”

  “Boring.”

  “Mike, you said you wanted to hunt. I have to explain to you what’s involved.”

  “Boring.”

  I set my teeth. “Mike, we can sit here all afternoon, all evening.”

  He sat down, cupped his chin in both hands, and stared at the ceiling. “So talk.”

  I was getting angry, my jaw still clenched and a little muscle working furiously away in my face. But I forced myself to calm down and tried to begin reasonably

  “Mike, what do you think hunting is?”

  A long silence. Then he said in the tone one would use to talk to a moron, “You take a gun and go out and catch a deer.”

  “And then?”

  He stamped his foot. “And then people come to the house and talk to you about it. They put your picture in the paper and then you go to the taci, the taxi—”

  “The taxidermist.”

  “Yes, the taxidermist.”

  “And,” I said in an offhand manner, “that’s all there is to it?”

  He shrugged.

  “But you want to do hunting?” I asked.

  “I am doing it,” he answered. “I’m good at it”

  “What are you good at?”

  “I talked to all those people.”

  I tried to be as gentle as I could. “Mike, you were great at talking to those people. You did a real good job. But there’s something you don’t know about that.”

  “What?”

  I stood up and took out a box I had retrieved from the storage area. Inside were hundreds of loose photographs.

  “Mike,” I said, “these are all the pictures that aren’t in the photo album.” Then I started to shuffle through them and flip prints out on the bed. “Here, look at these.”

  Mike got up, slouched over, and angrily picked up the photographs as I tossed them out.

  After about five minutes I stopped and walked around behind him. By now he was holding a stack of twenty or thirty photographs. “Here,” I said, pointing at the first one. “Do you know who those people are?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Mike, that’s me and Bill Allen, a friend I used to hunt with. Bill moved to California in nineteen seventy-two. That picture had to be taken in sixty-nine or seventy. Now, look at this—it’s me standing with Henry next to a deer I shot. Henry is only four or five there, so how old is that photograph?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Henry is twenty-four now, so how much is four subtracted from twenty-four?”

  “Twenty?”

  “Right,” I snapped, “so this photograph is twenty years old. Now, how about this one from nineteen sixty-eight…. Here’s one from ’eighty-seven with Craig Erhorn. Look, look, this one is from only two years ago.”

  I went through about half of them, naming the years.

  “I don’t care about any of this stuff.” Mike grated his words.

>   “How long have I been hunting, Mike?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look at these photographs and tell me how long.”

  “A long time,” he mumbled.

  “Thirty years,” I said. “Thirty years. Now, how many times a year do I go out in the woods to hunt or scout?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mike, maybe forty times during the course of a year. Not forty full days, but at least thirty scouting walks and ten times hunting, even just for an hour or so. So how much is forty times thirty years?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Yes, you do. How much is forty times thirty? You can do that in your head.”

  Grudgingly, “Forty times thirty is one thousand two hundred.”

  “Right,” I said. I sat down on the bed and pulled him over to me so that I could look into his eyes. “I went out one thousand two hundred times over the course of thirty years. Now, Mike, I want you to listen very, very carefully to what I’m going to say next.”

  “What?” he said, dropping the photographs on the bed and struggling out from under my arm.

  “Mike, in all those times out, in all those thirty years, this is the first time any people have ever come to my house to look at the deer I’ve shot.”

  Silence.

  “Mike, did you understand that?”

  “Why?” Now he didn’t seem so angry. “Why didn’t the people come?”

  “Because, Mike, that deer was a once-in-a-lifetime deer. People can hunt every day of their lives and maybe only once, if then, get a chance to take a deer like that.”

  He shrugged.

  “So, Mike, talking to people has very little to do with hunting. Being able to is great—you have a great command of yourself in front of a crowd and you can use that well later on in life—but that’s not what hunting is about.”

  He shrugged again a little bit more helplessly. Was I making my point?

  “Another thing,” I said, standing up and walking over to my desk. “Last night after I dropped Liam off I went over to a farmhouse by the prison where the local firearms safety instructor lives, and I picked this up for you.” Then I handed him a legal-sized piece of paper covered with type.