“Sure,” I said.
“It’s a waiting game is all,” the blond hunter went on. “When he gets done fucking around here he’s gonna be ready to hunt …”
He spit, a five-foot riser that cleared the ends of his boots and clapped the dirt in front of him like a shard of buckshot. “What did you say your name was?”
“Roy.”
“You didn’t catch no fish?”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe you ain’t much of a fisherman.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Shit,” the blond hunter said. “It ain’t got nothing to do with you.”
He picked up his gun now, and rubbed circles with the ball of his thumb across the oiled stock. He seemed to have forgotten us suddenly. The fat one, swinging my rod between the trees, appeared lost in a world of his own conjuring. He cocked his wrist, casting laterally, his belly rolling like a wave beneath his T-shirt, the rod tip jumping and then stiffening at the peak of its arc. Occasionally he would stop and casually massage and knead his breasts, or touch his belly knowingly, or paste his hair against his forehead, running his hand over his cheeks as if to gauge the extent of their fatness. He ignored everything—us, the forest, the blond hunter lolling on his pack and spitting chew—absorbed in his body and my rod.
I stripped off my wet socks and draped them over the biggest of the stones that ringed the firepit. Then, barefoot, I tidied up the camp. I stowed my daypack inside the tent and zipped the mosquito netting over it. I closed the tent flaps. I stuffed some sardine tins and soup packages and the bag full of flapjack mix inside my trailpack and lashed it shut. When everything seemed in good order I unzipped one of my side pockets and slipped my fillet knife, buckled inside its leather sheath, behind the elastic band of my underpants.
“Stay cool,” the blond hunter said when I turned around again. “I don’t give a shit what your camp looks like.”
I nodded. The fillet knife punched against my hipbone. The blond hunter cradled his gun in his arms and stared up through the branches of the firs. I considered him, his gun, my knife, the trees, then swiveled once more around on my bare heels and unlashed my trailpack. I searched through my things for a dry pair of socks, and when it seemed right I dropped the fillet knife into a side pocket.
Tumpline came weaving into camp between the tree trunks. When he reached his pack he picked up the rifle that lay across it and pointed it at me.
“I didn’t want to have to do this,” he said evenly.
“Then don’t,” the blond one answered him. “Put that thing down.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to, Private Fields?”
“Didn’t I tell you about his brains?” Fields asked me.
Tumpline clicked off his safety, then pulled back the action on the rifle. His eyes seemed to have retracted even deeper into their sockets, like things at the backs of two caves. “You see this, asshole? This is a Mauser. It carries a magnum cartridge. One hundred-eighty-grain bullets. It could tear a hole where your face is, Big Guy.”
The fat one had come back to the real world. He was staring at me from almost directly behind Tumpline, still clinging to my rod.
My throat wasn’t working. Tumpline’s index finger lay against the trigger; the Mauser was leveled at my chest. I had to stare at Tumpline, into his eyes—it seemed as if that was all that kept him from shooting me. Finally, I dropped my dry pair of socks. I locked my knees—my bladder felt ready to give up its load—and held my hands up over my head because I didn’t know what else to do. The balled socks rolled over the dirt like a baseball.
“Don’t shoot!” I said. I sounded to myself like someone who had just had their tonsils removed.
Lane was crying now, without making any noises except ones I could hear, the way he did at night sometimes for no immediate reason. I wanted to say something, anything, it was up to me to tell him what he needed to hear, but my throat had seized up and the blue barrel of the Mauser with Tumpline behind it held me frozen in place while the fat hunter gaped and the blond one, Fields, chewed.
“It ain’t loaded,” Fields said calmly. “Nobody hikes with a loaded rifle.”
“How do you know?” Tumpline swung the Mauser around.
“Pick up your socks,” Fields said.
I dropped my hands. The Mauser swung back—I flinched, but nothing happened. Finally, Tumpline broke into a grin and set the butt of his rifle on the ground. Nobody hikes with a loaded rifle, I told myself. I picked up the balled socks and sat down by the firepit, but my fingers couldn’t figure out how to put the socks on. It didn’t matter—nothing mattered. Lane cried—it was something he did with his face, soundless, undetectable to the three hunters—and Tumpline balanced his Mauser against one of the tent lines, barrel up.
“What a fucked-up waste of time,” Fields muttered to the sky.
Tumpline only pulled at his bottom lip. “Is that yours?” he said to the fat hunter.
The fat one looked at my rod as if he had never seen it before. “Me?” he asked.
“Is it yours?”
“No.”
“Then put it down.”
He did, sheepishly. Then he stood with his hands at the small of his back.
Tumpline swung his pack up now. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “There’s nothing for us here, Private Fields.” He pulled the leather tumpline over the top of his head and anchored it just above his eyes, then picked up the Mauser.
“There is nothing here,” he repeated, as if it meant something to anyone but himself.
They drank from their canteens, cinched in their waistbands, took in the slack in their shoulder straps. Fields ejected his chew. The fat one spread bug juice over his cheeks and neck and now his raw skin glistened in the heat. They took their guns up.
“Be cool,” Fields said as they tramped past the firepit.
“Yeah,” the fat one echoed. “Be cool.”
Tumpline never looked at us. “You’re going to be dead,” he whispered to the ground.
Sticks and dry cones popped under their boots—stones skidded from the game trail above Lost Lake and gravel sprayed down through the thickets below the cliffs. One of them spoke, not words but a rumble, fading as it vibrated through the trees. Finally they went up over the cliffline, through the gap and into the dust path, and we stopped listening for them.
“Roy?” Lane whispered.
The forest was more silent than it had been, the trees more firmly rooted. Everything seemed solidly entrenched in the blue light of evening over Lost Lake.
“Let’s go home,” Lane said, trembling.
“What for?” I said.
“They might come back.”
“They’re not coming back.”
“They might. Those guys are crazy.”
“Get your shoes on,” I said. “And bring in some firewood.”
That night the weather finally broke. I woke three times to hear the west wind rippling our rain fly; the fourth time I lay back with my hands behind my head and rain popped against the nylon. Lane, burrowed down inside his sleeping bag, breathed in short gasps through his nose, sputtering and wheezing through his dreams. Gradually the sound of the rain hardened into a kind of shattering and the rest of the night sounds disappeared. I gave up listening for the three hunters; they wouldn’t move in the rain; they wouldn’t move anyway, I knew they had forgotten us, but I couldn’t forget them: Tumpline’s dark retracted eyes looking out from behind the barrel of his Mauser. I kicked my feet at his image but there was no solace in it. The rain gathered in a crescendo.
Asleep I waded downriver, fishing the untainted place again. Water broke around the backs of my knees as I fed line to the edge of the current. The only sound echoed from the river itself, a quiet thrashing. Then the line went taut, the rod bent double, the reel shrieked and ratcheted and a silver trout large as a seagoing salmon broke from the clear surface, dazzling in the sunlight.
She ran downstream, and the reel spool p
aid out line. I hauled back. The trout leapt fiercely, impaled deep on the slender hook, and from fifty yards I saw the blood foaming in her mouth.
The sky darkened as I brought her alongside. I slipped my finger under one gill cover. When I pulled her from the river, two feet long and fat, meaty, her eggs in their transparent mucus began to slip out of her—hundreds of them dripping down into the river and streaming away.
I didn’t want to keep her for some reason. Her great eye shimmered, distorted, miserable. I worked at the hook as delicately as I could, but I ripped her apart anyway and the dark blood streamed from the corner of her mouth. I began to shake and the rain came. When I set her down on the water again she sank gently, wobbling, and in a great curve foundered and came belly up, riding away forever on the river current.
We walked down Main Street in our packs in the rain, and when we passed the Game Department office I mentally cursed Neil Reuthens, the Game Department man. Neil Reuthens didn’t count now—I knew that. The bastards, I kept saying to myself, because the three hunters had come back to town with me when I had tried to leave them at Lost Lake; the bastards, the bastards, and the phrase fell evenly inside the rhythm of my walk as I stamped home through the patter of the rain.
It was Sunday. A State Patrol cruiser, muddy at the rear, sat in front of the Elk Lounge. A few cars were angle-parked in front of the Shop-Rite, and one at the Premier Realty office, but otherwise there was only the rain. Things looked the way they always looked—silent, bored and unchanging. Nothing seemed to move except the puddles, and they only popped when the rain hit them, settling and stirring beneath a thin, gray sky.
The bastards, the bastards, the sons of bitches … my lips moved in this cadence but it didn’t help, nothing helped: I couldn’t get that vision of Tumpline’s dark retracted eyes out of my mind.
Main Street, wide and desolate, merged into Highway 26 before us, beyond the town limit, at the bridge over the Little Nelson River. We turned into Kiksiu Street with the backs of our necks to the sky—dead box elder leaves ground into bleak mush by the rain swamped the gutters—and cut through the thistle and high weeds to our house. Our mother’s dark blue Pinto sat in the yard, its rear end rusted orange, the hood held down with chicken wire. Dick Gleaton’s cats had pushed the lids off the garbage cans again.
“Don’t tell her about yesterday,” I told Lane—but I didn’t know I wouldn’t tell her myself. “She doesn’t have to know about it, okay?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything, peckerwood,” Lane said.
“Who’s the peckerwood?”
“You are.”
But she wasn’t home, predictably, and the heat was on too high; rain drummed against the windowpanes and the screen door clattered in the wind. An odor of rotting fruit rose from the garbage bin next to the sink, a sweet sickly humid smell that permeated everything. Lane switched the television on immediately and sat down in front of it. Grown men were bowling on the screen, eying the pins heroically over the tops of their balls and following their casts through with absolute mechanical precision.
I went into the bathroom, to the mirror, to myself. The bastards, I said silently, staring at my face, the bastards, the bastards, but when I came out nothing had changed. Lane had fallen asleep before the television.
I went into the kitchen and took down a tall can of chili and a bag of rolls, but the garbage smell was too strong and I took the bin outside into the rain. I went around to the front and fixed the screen door so it wouldn’t batter the siding all night and then, for some reason, I pitched a stone at my mother’s Pinto, denting the side wall by the back fender.
“Bastards!” I said out loud, and the rain swallowed the empty word quickly. Kiksiu Street, empty itself except for the rain and the box elder trees, looked dismal and small beneath the sharp wall of green firs that buttressed the mountains to the north.
In the kitchen again I poured the chili with its ring of orange fat into a pan and lit the old gas stove. Standing in the refrigerator door I took a long pull from a carton of milk patiently going sour on the upper shelf. The milk tasted slightly rancid. A wilted-looking pineapple had rolled over onto its side down below. I drank off part of the syrup from a large can of Freestone peaches and as I stood there with the metal fruit can in my hand the compartment light suddenly flickered out, throwing the back of each shelf into darkness. I reached in, sliding one of the freestone halves into my mouth at the same time, and broke the bulb with my fist, and then, as I drank off more of the peach syrup, my mother slipped in through the back door, quietly.
“Back from the wilds,” she said, and sat down, wet and flush-faced, and threw her purse easily on the kitchen table. Unconsciously, by force of habit, she plugged the coffee pot in.
“Back from the wilds,” I said.
“Any luck?”
I shook my head grimly. “Where have you been?” I asked her.
My mother turned and folded her coat across the back of the chair with careful deliberation. Then she looked me in the eye, evenly.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
I ran a spoon through the chili. “Nothing,” my voice said. “There were these hunters up by Lost Lake. Three of them. They gave us a bad time.”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“Not really,” I said. “One of them pointed a rifle at me—he was a crazy bastard.”
“Jesus Christ,” my mother answered, and all of her fierceness began to display itself now; her black eyes went steel and her mouth narrowed. “Did you know your daddy did that to me, Roy? Aimed his rifle at me? Did you know that?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, and I looked back down into the pan of chili.
“He did,” my mother’s hard voice said. “He aimed his rifle at me. Drunk and brave and home from the hills. Right here in this kitchen.”
I lowered the flame and went over to the table, where my mother picked bitterly at a thumbnail, and I sat in the chair across from her.
“Mom?” I said.
She looked up, but her eyes gave nothing. They were like shields.
“I can’t stop thinking about them,” I told her. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about them and I can’t stop.”
My mother glared down at her thumbnail again and made a show of complete concentration.
“There are evil men in the world,” she said. “Do you think you can change that, Roy?”
American Elm
I grew up in Wilkes, Rhode Island, where the light in early winter seems to roll off the backs of the clouds and ignite along the waters of ponds and millstreams, and the cold rot smell of the barren forests comes ghostly out of the tough earth, and the gold air and sky have a muted volume of both space and spirit broken only by the reach of church spires, soft-white and giant against the slow maple hills. My father, gaunt-cheeked and patient of hand, was proprietor of the Wilkes Bakery, a dark windowfront on Main Street with a faint, tarnished sleighbell tied inside its door and a deep odor of hot glaze and butter gentled by the calm warmth of its ovens and the soft silver of its racks and pans. Rooted in his quiet kitchen my father worked like someone in a dream, wasting no part of himself on hurry, imparting the meditation of his work to the familiar recipes so that what came forth from his hand carried with it, in its cast on the lips and tongue, a residue of his inner peace. At dawn, in the first pale light, my sister Ruthie and I chipped and scrubbed the long baking sheets and yellow mixing bowls. My mother stood behind the cash register, hair bound to the top of her head with dark pins, and bagged Persian buns and fried doughboys for the early millworkers who were our neighbors, the people of Wilkes. We lived over the bakery in rooms of aged and intricate woodwork, and the warm air of the ovens floated up through the floorboards, and there were lace doilies shaped like snowflakes on all the tabletops, and an oak rocker by a tall window through which that spacious light swarmed in early winter, a tender, fragile light that no longer seem
s to be in the world I live in today, though perhaps it is here and I no longer know how to look for it or see it, twenty years and thousands of miles from Wilkes as it once was.
In the summer of that year I write of now I made bales in the hayfields all up and down the township, and in the fall, my first of no school, I felled black oaks and sugar maples along the backsides of pastures, making firewood in the sharp sun while twisting leaves blew past the long arc of my splitting maul. In November, when north winds rattled away the last leaves and sent them skittering across the ploweddown fields, I found a new job in the Burrillville Sanatorium. Here, from eight until five, I washed the hands and feet and faces of the old of our township, and fed them cream of wheat and beet soup from small spoons pressed against their lips; I carted dinner trays and spray-cleaned bedpans and, bundling them up against the frost and cold, wheeled the old ones out to the riffled shore of Harrow’s Pond where they would look out over the water and trees and sky in ponderous silence while I watched for shiners or for the ripple of bass in the marsh and lily pads.
It was eight miles from Wilkes and the bakery if you cut from the main route and, following the millstream, trudged your way over the Quampus Lake Road to Harrow’s Pond and the border with Massachusetts, where the Burrillville Sanatorium lay shadowed in a thicket of pines. It was three and a half miles if, lighting out true north from directly behind the Wilkes Baptist Church, you took to the woods and pastures and, keeping your bearing accurate, twisted among the etched and lifeless trees and hopped the strewn rock walls dividing nothing any longer in the gray pallid light of the forest until, traversing a gradual knoll overgrown with furrowed slippery elms, you walked out onto the frosty, ordered grounds beyond the conclave of high brick buildings that housed the sanatorium.
Following quietly the mist of my breath I hiked with my lunch bucket each morning through the thickets and fields, the flaps of my duck hunter’s cap turned over my ears and my compass inside my left glove. I scared up pheasants—a wicked, stick-crackling, wing-filled explosion out of deep brush that stopped your heart, and then a drilling, a buzz, as the fiery bird spluttered its way through trees to a deeper hollow. Without stopping for a moment I threw stones to crack the ice in ravines I crossed, and slipped under fences to walk the empty hayfields and silent apple orchards, swinging my black bucket as I went. At the sanatorium I hung my mackinaw over a hook, tucked my lunch in a corner, and ran warm water over my fingers before going up to the rooms and wards where the old people waited in the soft, waxen light that filtered through the pines beyond their windows. Afterward, in deep dusk—the woods too black to walk in—I rode back to town with Sam Mathers in his chopped and blocked blue-waxed Ford, slapped up the stairs behind the darkened bakery to eat supper with my family while the stars blinked on and spread themselves out across the valley and the white North Star, already steadfast over the steeple of the Wilkes Baptist Church, pointed the way back again to the Burrillville Sanatorium and the waters of black Harrow’s Pond.