“Should be along soon, I’d guess.”
My grandpa looked thrilled; his face was bright red and smiling. He was old, in his late sixties, I think, his face was all leathery and wrinkled, and he didn’t have any hair anymore, even white hair, but he didn’t seem so old when we were hunting. He had a full kit of good gear he wore; he wasn’t all sloppy like you’d expect an older guy to be; he rocked the high-tech stuff: wrap-around anti-fog Oakleys, layers of Under Armour, waterproof Gore-Tex, that kind of thing. He made the rest of us look like kinda bad, actually, amateurs tossing blaze orange vests over our chests. Brad in his stupid duckhunter’s camo, me in my old Carhartt coat and Eddie in his snowboarding jacket. But I liked how serious my grandpa took it, hunting; I liked that he was always trying new things every year, not just being crabby and traditional about things. He was always reading stuff about it. He’d been a veterinarian before he retired, so animals were kind of his thing. That was another part of this; it wasn’t so much about killing things, hunting. It was doing stuff with my grandpa. He’d always taken us hunting. My dad never went with us; he had some hang-up about guns or hunting. Or maybe he was just being pissy about Grandpa Chuck; he and his dad didn’t get along that good. But me and Brad had been going hunting with our grandpa since we were little. Grandpa Chuck had been the one to sign us up for gun safety classes, taught us how to shoot tin can targets out at his house in the country. I’d got my first doe when I was thirteen.
“Let’s get to it, then,” my grandpa said. He put his arm around Eddie’s neck and started telling him about field dressing as we hiked out to see my kill. I was trying not to run toward it, be so obvious and proud, but goddammit, I couldn’t wait to see my brother’s damn face when he strolled up.
The sun was rising, hot and white, when we got to the kill site. Sure enough, there were three of them. All three tags, in one go, still steaming in the morning chill. I couldn’t believe it, all over again. Grandpa slapped me on the back.
“Think this time you’ll want to field dress them?”
“Hell no, Grandpa.”
“Chickenshit,” he said. Laughing.
“Hey!” I said. I was smiling like crazy. “You expect me to do everything around here?”
I got closer to see where I’d hit the deer. Two in the chest, one in the neck. One was still alive, its hooves wavering in the air. That was the doe. The other two were bucks, their racks sticking into the mud. My grandpa knelt beside the doe, put his hand on her chest, and pulled out his field kit, laid it on the ground. Then he pulled a knife from it and slit the doe’s throat. Her hooves stopped moving pretty quick then.
“Whoa,” Eddie whispered to himself, stepping back, his eyes on the blood puddling in dark lines in the corn rows.
My grandpa put his gloves on, started on one of the bucks.
“Jesus,” Eddie muttered, his hand over his nose, when my grandpa made the first cut, breastbone to balls. The guts started tumbling out of the white-fur belly, all vivid red and blue, and Eddie stepped back from the smell. I started breathing through my mouth, swallowing a lot to avoid the stench; my grandpa had taught me and Brad that.
“First time’s the hardest,” my grandpa said, glancing at Eddie, who looked like he wanted to barf all over his shoes. I tried not to laugh, for Eddie’s sake. “This one’s a second-year buck, Sean,” Grandpa Chuck added.
“Sure that’s a second-year buck?” Brad, adjusting his ball cap, out of breath from running. “Looks like a first-year. You should have stayed up in the stand. Waited for more.”
I didn’t say anything. Saying anything would give him something to argue with. And right now, Brad couldn’t argue with shit. I’d filled my tag, plus his damn doe tag, plus Eddie’s. If he wanted to sit around and try to fill the last one, he could do it himself.
“More than enough work, dressing these three,” my grandpa said. He glanced back at Brad. Brad put his hands on his hips in a kind of bitchy way.
“Are you . . . is that normal to do that? Cutting around the asshole?” Eddie asked my grandpa.
Grandpa Chuck didn’t even look up. “You don’t want to nick the intestines; you’ll ruin the meat.”
“Jesus Christ,” Eddie said, his face squinching up like he was trying to hold in puke. But he didn’t stop looking.
“There’s a little creek down a ways,” Brad said. “Saw some tracks over there from last night’s snow. Might be another place to check out.”
The buck’s gut sack slid out then on the ground, the blood in the dirt thick as oil. Eddie stared at it like he was hypnotized.
“Be a waste not to try,” Brad continued.
“Are you just going to leave all that . . . all that stuff, here?” Eddie pointed to the innards my grandpa had just removed from the first buck. “Just let it sit here? On the ground?”
“That’s what ravens and buzzards are for,” Grandpa Chuck said. “Think of it this way: everything living’s just waiting for the dinner bell.”
“I mean, I could go next weekend too,” Brad said. “But Krista’s got the weekend off so we can do this wedding thing . . .”
I wondered how long he was going to talk to himself. It made me feel even better, for him to sit there babbling to himself about his unfilled tag.
“Do you skin the fur off, too?” Eddie asked.
“Some people do,” my grandpa said. “I like to take the hide off once I’m back home. It’s a little easier at home, in my shed. I’ve got all the equipment. It’s not as cold, either.”
“It’s twenty-nine degrees, are you kidding?” Brad asked.
“Wind’s coming up,” my grandpa said, moving on to the next deer. “Eddie, will you get that tarp out? We’ll need to wrap that one before we tie it up.”
Eddie squatted beside my grandpa and got to work.
“So, we gonna keep going or what?”
My grandpa sat back on his heels, looked up at Brad, put on his fancy mirrored Oakleys, the expensive-but-cheesy kind the hockey players at school always wore. For some reason, they didn’t look douchey on my grandpa’s face, though.
“I’d say we pack it in, son,” Grandpa Chuck said. “Gonna be more than enough work getting these out of here. Seany blew his wad early, but we still have to haul everything out. Might as well do it and then go get some breakfast.”
Brad nodded. He wasn’t going to argue with my grandpa. He never did.
“Look at it this way,” I said. Blurting. “We can drive back early. Krista’ll be thrilled. More time to do wedding stuff, right?”
Eddie laughed, like he wasn’t expecting it. I stepped back, myself; Brad would have hit me if my grandpa hadn’t been there. But I didn’t care. I set down my shotgun and knelt beside Grandpa Chuck, handing him whatever he asked for, my back to Brad, looking at what I’d done and letting myself smile as much as I wanted.
Chapter Six
After I overheard her talking to Tristan Reichmeier, Neecie Albertson didn’t talk to me at all in school. Which was weird, because while we’d never been chatty, before we at least acknowledged each other, since we worked together and sat by each other in dumb Global Studies. But now she wouldn’t even look at me. Even when I was looking at her. Like if I said “hey” to her, it would pop her secret with Tristan into a big splattery mess.
I watched Tristan more now, though. Him at his locker with his stupid hair he couldn’t stop shaking off his forehead constantly, and that stupid black cap he always wore, in that total douche way. Him at lunch acting like a shithead with his hockey friends. Him surrounded by girls, the hot ones, plus this chick Hannah, who I think was supposed to be his current girlfriend, or just maybe the girl he’d be public about, or whatever. He’d put his arm around that Hannah chick and she’d always be laughing at whatever he said. You’d never in a thousand years put Tristan with Neecie. Never ever. She’d achieved ninja status in this, in my mind. Because you can’t do the simplest, littlest shit in high school without a dozen people noticing one second later. I w
ondered how long it’d been going on. How it’d ever started.
One Friday during lunch there was a college-career fair. They’d had them last year, too, but I’d skipped them all. Was planning on skipping this one, too, until Neecie came up to me while I was standing outside the gym, debating whether to go in. You could get free pizza if you went and got your thing stamped by a certain number of booths, and today the caf was serving nasty turkey tacos.
“What’s up, Sean?” Neecie said. All normal. Wearing her usual T-shirt and hoodie and jeans, her hair the long straight sheet of yellow everywhere. Drinking her giant can of iced tea—peach-flavored today—and holding a piece of pizza and a bunch of handouts and brochures.
“Nothing.”
“You going in?”
“No.”
“I only went for the pizza,” she said, laughing.
“I’m shocked you don’t care more about your future.”
“I already applied to the places I wanted to go. I don’t need any more information. Here,” she added, handing me the pile of handouts. “Go expand your horizons. I don’t need any of this shit. You just have to talk to six places. It’s no big deal. Go to the Marines’ guy. He’s giving out water bottles and nobody’s at his table. He’s all lonely, and there’s no line. Plus he’s really kind of cute.”
I looked at her.
“Well, anyway,” she said. “Just saying.”
“How long have you been with Tristan?” Blurting.
She almost dropped the pile of papers she was dumping into my hands. She stopped, looked around. I grabbed the stuff, lowered my voice.
“I mean, has it been a while?”
“Since summer,” she said. “Since July.”
“Oh.”
“You can’t say anything,” she said.
“Who would I say anything to?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Here. I’m not hungry, anyway.” She handed me the pizza and then she was gone, and I just watched her ass walk away like an idiot, until she turned down the senior hallway. I sat down, then, and looked at all the handouts from colleges I’d never get into, eating the pizza, which was a little cold and greasy, but still good.
The Marines brochure showed dudes climbing up ropes and standing in formation and sighting rifles with pretty sweet scopes and running in combat boots and doing pull-ups. I had been decent at pull-ups, back in tenth grade. I was skinny, so it wasn’t as hard for me to heave my weight up, probably. But still.
I would have kept sitting there, eating and looking at the handouts, but then I saw Emma and Libby coming down toward me and I didn’t want to deal with that. I mean, I didn’t hate Emma or anything, but I hadn’t really talked to her since our failed make-out. And I supposed I would have made out with her again, but I didn’t really want to have a girlfriend anymore. Well, I guess I would have had sex with someone. So maybe that meant I wanted a girlfriend. But I didn’t want to deal with any of it. Not since Hallie. I jumped up and tossed all the handouts into the recycling, and that was how I met Sergeant Kendall for the first time.
The next Friday, while driving to my follow-up appointment at the Marines recruiting center, I started to wonder if maybe Neecie was crazy. Like, actually mentally ill. Pathologically lying about this. Or delusional, hallucinating. Maybe playing some complicated joke on me.
The Marine recruiting center was in this little junky strip mall, which included a shitty grocery store that sold expired spaghetti sauce and 3.2 beer to anyone with a pulse, a place that did those fakey nails like Krista had, and this kind of porn store, which wasn’t super porny. It sold “novelty” gifts like dick-shaped pasta and feather boas for bachelorette parties. There was some porn and sex toys and crap in the back, everyone said, but you had to be eighteen to go in so I didn’t actually know for myself. Really, except for the hooker nails, it was kind of one-stop shopping for a kid who just turned eighteen and didn’t have Internet, I suppose.
Sergeant Kendall remembered me. I was sort of surprised about that. We shook hands, he called me Sean Norwhalt, all formal, like he spent his evenings memorizing names of kids he’d met at career fairs. Which maybe he did. He looked like he was basically on top of everything. He wasn’t wearing the same uniform like last time, just a basic button-up and matching pants, but it was a uniform—you could see that in every inch and ironed seam. I felt like a slob in comparison.
But just like the first time we’d met, I couldn’t stop looking at him. Also, we were standing up. He was standing up, in front of his chair, and though I had a chair, too, I felt weird getting all comfortable when he was standing. And also wondered if maybe this was a test or something. Or some Marines ritual I needed to observe.
So, standing, he started going over some stuff with me, about Delayed Entry, and how I’d need to graduate on time in order to qualify, and I was nodding, but I was barely listening. Just staring at him. Studying him. Maybe it was because he was black. In Oak Prairie, there aren’t that many black people, beyond that one African minister’s family, but they were from somewhere in actual Africa where they spoke French for some reason and his church was the weird one where everyone got all nuts with the praise music and speaking in tongues. Not that I went there; just that was what people said. His daughter was this girl named Mahali or something and she always wore a fancy dress every day to school, which alone made her weird, even though she was pretty. Also, she was like Neecie, off-limits from sex stuff, even though she had a nice rack and all. Plus she was a couple grades below me, and so I didn’t really keep track of her like you did other hot chicks, maybe also because of her minister father and French-accent weirdness too. Not that I’m racist—I’m not—but anyway, it was just unusual for me. Talking to a black dude.
Plus, everything about Sergeant Kendall was so polished and scrubbed. Like, my fingernails were all dirty and needed cutting, while his were trimmed and short. And his hair was short, like a dusting of black color on his scalp. While my hair had become kind of a mop lately. Which I liked, I liked having mop-hair, you didn’t actually have to do anything with it, which was nice. Hallie had loved my hair.
He’d asked me about my job history and I told him about the Thrift Bin; then he moved down a list of stuff on a form.
“Are you involved in any sports, Sean?”
“No. No, I mean, I was. Not currently. I used to swim, though.”
He nodded, like he was a little bummed out.
“There’s a fitness requirement all recruits must pass. Pull-ups, crunches, and a timed run. There are also weight and BMI standards, which, just from looking, I think will be okay with you. How tall are you?”
“Six one or so.” He looked at me more, nodded again.
As if that didn’t make me feel gay, him giving me the whole up-and-down. But also kind of happy.
“The timed run’s a mile, right?” I asked.
“A mile and half. And we ask that you finish in thirteen minutes, thirty seconds. So . . .”
“Okay, that’s doable.”
I thought it was, at least. I should have talked to Eddie about this. We used to run sometimes, back when we swam together and were all gung-ho about making varsity and keeping in shape in the off-season. Eddie still did that, as far as I knew. But I hadn’t. And my running shoes were shit. I needed new ones; my old ones were covered in cement from me and Brad pouring a patio out at Grandpa Chuck’s place.
Sergeant Kendall nodded and smiled at me. I smiled back. We were smiling at each other, like two people on a date, almost. And then he told me to have a seat. I tried not to look too relieved to finally sit down. In case that was also part of the invisible test or something.
Sergeant Kendall handed me a DVD, which he said showed proper technique for pull-ups and crunches, and told me to keep on with the running, and we made another appointment to meet after my birthday. There was a list of documents I needed to bring for that meeting, and I had to register for Selective Service, too, which I’d forgotten about but needed to
do, and I stared at all the papers seriously for a minute before saying anything. I was kind of bad with paperwork. I didn’t know where half that shit was before we’d moved; I didn’t exactly want to ask my mom where it was now, either.
“I really want to do this,” I said, like maybe he could see me getting all bummed out. “I do.”
“I’m glad,” Sergeant Kendall said.
I felt like it was clear on my face that I was all freaked about the paperwork part. But he just stood up, and so I stood up, quickly, ready to be dismissed. I shook his hand and took the papers and then I walked out.
But before I could even dig my keys out of my jacket pocket, I saw Neecie Albertson. She didn’t see me, though. Because she was coming out of Private Delights. Which was the real name of the porny store. She had a brown paper sack with something in it. And she was digging in her bag for something and then she dropped her phone and the battery knocked out of it and then she was picking up all the little bits of stuff and when she stood up again, she saw me, standing there in front of the Marines place, staring at her.
She looked completely freaked.
Then a red truck pulled up to the curb and she practically leaped toward it and got in the passenger seat.
Tristan Reichmeier’s red truck. It was nice. New. She buckled in, and he drove off, not even seeing me, or if he did, he didn’t care. And I knew she’d text me, later. And I knew, then, that I’d call her again. I just knew.
“He didn’t see you, so don’t worry about it,” Neecie said.
“I’m not worried about anything,” I said.
“He gets kind of nuts about things. Like, he’s paranoid, I swear.”
“He’s just being a douche,” I said. Then tried to gulp it back when she looked across the table at me and stopped cutting her pancakes. “Sorry,” I added.
She didn’t say anything. We were at IHOP. It was Friday night, almost nine o’clock. Neecie had texted me (“please don’t say anything,” again) two hours after I saw her. So I just called her, and she said she was at work, and I said I’d come get her. I pulled up to the group of employees standing around waiting together for everyone to get picked up by their rides in the parking lot at the Thrift Bin—Wendy’s rule, as the store wasn’t in the greatest part of town—and when Neecie climbed in, Kerry stood there smoking and looking at me like, Really? You and her, huh?
Perfectly Good White Boy Page 7
