Diary of a Witness (13 page)

He nodded, like he agreed. But he still looked worried.

Much as Will loved to fish for trout, the hunting issue would not go away.

It actually took us two days. One to teach me to shoot and for Uncle Max to satisfy himself that we understood gun safety, and another to actually go out in the woods and find a deer.

The morning Uncle Max took us up into the forest was Christmas morning. And it was snowing. And early, and cold. But there was something about being outdoors on a morning like that, on a white Christmas in California, just being out in the middle of that perfect, untouched blanket of snow. It also made it almost impossible to get lost. We could always follow our own footsteps back to the truck.

This’ll sound weird, but Will and I were tied together. Uncle Max tied a short piece of rope through my belt loop and then Will’s. He took our safety pretty seriously. And if we could never get more than about a foot apart, it would be nearly impossible to shoot each other.

It took us over an hour and a half to find a deer. When Will spotted a young buck, we were comfortably tucked behind a boulder, where he wasn’t likely to spot us back. Uncle Max was about twenty paces back, just making sure we were okay.

I looked at the buck, and I was just blown away by how beautiful he was. And how much I didn’t want to shoot him. Which is funny, because I was blown away by how beautiful trout were, too. But I caught them anyway. But trout were different. They breathed water. They were coldblooded. They didn’t have warm fur and warm hearts and draw breath through perfect black nostrils.

We didn’t dare say a word, but I made a gesture to say, You. You take him. After all, Will is the one who loves to hunt. But he shook his head and handed it back to me, all without a word. After all, he was introducing me to hunting, and the least he could do was let me give it a try.

I raised the rifle and peered at the buck through the scope. He was no less beautiful. I could feel my hands shake a little bit. Then I raised the muzzle of the rifle a hair higher and purposely fired a shot over his back. The shot slammed through the cold air and echoed around again. I
dropped the rifle and watched the buck leap away. Well, leap anyway. He leaped into the air, and then a second shot hit my eardrums. The buck just seemed to freeze that way for a split second, a foot or two above the snow. Then he fell onto his knees and crumpled onto his chin, his eyes open.

We ran through the snow to him, but it wasn’t easy, because we were still tied together. We found him bleeding into the snow from a perfect round red hole in his shoulder. Will was a good shot.

“I missed,” I said.

If Will knew I missed on purpose, he never said so. He might’ve known, though.

Will ran a hand down the buck’s side, like he was worshipping something. The blood steamed when it hit the snow.

I’m never going to be a hunter, I know that now. I don’t know why it should be so different. Like Will said, I eat meat. But if I had to look into its big, wet-looking dark eye and then shoot it first, I’d live the rest of my life on peanut butter, pasta, and fish. I just admired the deer too much.

I felt Uncle Max’s hand on my shoulder. “Good shooting on someone’s part.”

“It was Will,” I said. “I missed him.”

“Excellent job, Will.”

Will turned to Uncle Max and threw his arms around him, half dragging me along. I didn’t know if it was because
he took us hunting, or because he told Will he did a good job on something. I’m not sure anybody ever tells Will that. I’m not sure anybody ever did.

Uncle Max was surprised. He’s not a real touchy-feely kind of guy. Then again, neither is Will. At first Uncle Max just stood there with his arms at his sides. Giving me this look, like, What did I say?

Will said, “Thank you for this vacation.”

Uncle Max clapped him on the back and said, “You are very welcome.”

Then he handed Will his hunting knife and untied the rope that held us together, and they wrestled the buck over onto his back. Will made a big cut down the middle of his belly. I heard a rush of warm air, and smelled blood, and watched a cloud of steam rise.

At first I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. It was life. After all. So I watched him pull out the stomach and guts, and cut out the area under his tail, and leave all that in the snow for whatever animals would come along. I watched him reach up for the lungs and heart, pushing back his sleeves and getting bloody to the elbows.

“I don’t like liver,” he said to Uncle Max, holding it in his hands.

“I’ll eat the liver.”

“I don’t have anything to put it in, though.”

“Put it back in the body cavity when you’re done.”

Then I watched Will go in under the hip bone, going
after the bladder. Not that I knew what he was going for. But Uncle Max asked if he knew to be careful how he cut and how hard he pulled, and Will smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s not like I’ve never gotten a face full,” and Uncle Max smiled.

I felt like they were speaking a language I couldn’t understand, and it made me feel left out and sad.

Then they cut a long branch and tied the buck’s legs together, and slid the branch through and hoisted it up on their shoulders, and we all hiked back to the truck. Silent, not saying a word. Not needing to.

I was clumping along behind, thinking, That’s really
my
uncle Max. Not yours. But it was a little like the giant brown trout. Will had so little. Not that it meant I should give him my uncle Max exactly. But it wouldn’t kill me to loan him out for a while.

Good thing I came to that conclusion, because it took them two and a half hours to finish dressing that thing out and cutting it up. I heard Will skinned it, too, and hung the skin in the shed, so it wouldn’t draw animals in the night. I heard he was going to tan that skin and keep it. But I didn’t see any of it with my own eyes. I chose not to watch. I knew we’d be having venison for dinner, and I’d seen enough of the insides of that buck. I passed on seeing the skinned flesh.

Besides, I did enough to help. I loaned him my uncle
Max. I practiced tying flies for two and a half hours and stayed out of their way.

That night Will and I pulled lounge chairs out on the back deck and lay on them in sleeping bags, looking up at the stars. It was a perfect, clear night. I’d told Will I bet he didn’t even know how many stars there really were, and he had no idea what I meant, so we lay out there and shivered in our sleeping bags and took it all in.

Will was being quiet, but in a good sort of way. I knew he felt good. Settled. In a way I could never understand, he found himself in the hunting. I didn’t feel it, but I didn’t mind if he did. He didn’t get that many chances to find himself, or to feel good.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s maybe four times as many stars as I thought.”

“It’s the city lights. They fade out the sky. Plus it’s a really clear night.”

“It’s not completely clear. There’s that little soft band of cloud right along there.”

“That’s the edge of the Milky Way.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“That band there?”

“Yup. The edge of our galaxy.”

He drifted back into that satisfied silence.

I let that ride for a couple of minutes. Then I said, “Are
we ever gonna talk about Sam?” Surprised the hell out of myself. I had no idea I was about to say that.

He didn’t answer for a long time, and I didn’t look at him. I was thinking maybe it was a mistake to bring it up. After a time I heard a sniff, and I knew he was crying. At first I felt really bad, but then I thought, All that stuff is in there anyway. It might as well come out.

“I’m sorry if it’s a sore subject,” I said. “I just keep thinking that if you could talk about what happened, then you wouldn’t have had to do something terrible to yourself to get help. I mean, do you still feel like it was your fault?”

Another long silence. Oh well, I thought. At least I tried. Uncle Max would say, Then that has to be enough.

“I do and I don’t,” he said, and it surprised me. “I know I didn’t mean for it to happen. I never meant any harm to the kid. But I should’ve sat up when you said to sit up. I mean, I had that ling on the stringer. And I had the stringer wrapped around my hand. He wasn’t going anywhere. All I had to do was sit up until the swell passed. And then go back to cutting him loose again. I think about that when I go to bed at night. And I wake up at night thinking about it. I have dreams, too. In my dreams at night I hear you saying, ‘Will, sit up, there’s a big swell coming.’ Sometimes I dream it out a different way, where I sit up. And the swell just kind of splashes us, and then I bring the fish in, and we catch a bunch more. And then we motor back to shore, and Sam is fine, and everything’s fine. And I finally caught that big ling,
and my father’s boat isn’t gone, and he doesn’t have to go to jail. And my mother doesn’t have to come live with me and bring that creep with her. And I don’t have to try to kill myself and you don’t get pitched down the stairs while I’m gone. And it’s just all okay. It could’ve been that way. I know now what I had to do to make it be that way. And it’s so easy. Just sit up. And now I want to, like … I want to rewind to that moment and do it right. How do you do that, Ernie? How do you rewind life?”

“Um. You don’t.” Should I have backed up and corrected that part about getting pitched down the stairs? I don’t know. I just know I didn’t.

“Right. You don’t. Why didn’t I sit up? Am I just stupid? Or am I a little bit crazy like everybody says?”

“I don’t think either. I just think when you really love to fish like we do, your brain sort of locks up at that big moment. You know you caught something good, and it’s like an obsession. Your brain locks on it, and you just can’t think about anything else.”

We were quiet for a long time. I felt small looking up at the stars. The world looked so big, and Will and I were just like nothing. In the whole big scheme.

Then he said, “See, this is why you’re my best friend, Ernie. Because you get it. You actually get what I mean. Other people just look at me like I’m nuts.”

I was struggling with how to take a compliment, but then it didn’t matter, because he just kept going.

“Sometimes I think it’s not even that moment I blame myself for. It’s more like everything before it. I was so hateful to him. It’s like when he was born. As soon as he was born, I hated him. Because I already had nothing. I mean, whatever you’re supposed to give a kid so he can grow up, I had nothing. And then this little snot-nose comes along and I’m supposed to divide nothing in half and share it with him? And that was when he was born. Later it got even worse. When I found out he was cuter, and they were going to like him better than me. I know he was a really bad, snotty little kid. But sometimes I think, What if I hadn’t been so hateful to him? What if I’d acted like he was really my brother? Maybe he would’ve turned out all different.”

I don’t really think you can blame yourself for what your brother grows up to be, but I never had one, so I didn’t feel qualified to say.

“It does help to talk about this,” Will said.

But we didn’t, after that night.

We spent another week like that, catching our limit every day. Will tanned his deerskin and made a bunch of venison jerky. Froze what he didn’t dry. We made fires in the fireplace at night, and Uncle Max would come out of his room and tell us stories about his travels. He writes nonfiction books about other countries, so he can tell you things like what Afghanistan was like long before the Russian invasion,
long before the Taliban came in and we chased them out again. He can tell you what Iran was like back when they called it Persia.

I could listen to him all night, but I thought it was just me. But Will could listen all night, too. I think something shifted in Will when he found out Uncle Max didn’t hate him. Will thinks everybody hates him. Unfortunately, he’s usually right.

Will loved trout fishing so much that he even learned how to tie flies.

But by the time we had to go home, whatever good had come out of him seemed to go back into hiding again.

On the drive home he was quiet. Too quiet. Something about his face seemed dark. He never once talked on the ride home. Uncle Max would say things to try to get him to chat, but all he would do was grunt.

When we dropped him at his house, there was no one there. He had to go in with a key, and we helped him carry in all his stuff, and all his packages of frozen venison, wrapped in white butcher paper, that we brought back in Uncle Max’s cooler. And the packets of jerky. Only about two-thirds of the frozen stuff would go in their freezer, though, so he gave some venison to Uncle Max and some to me.

And then we just left him there. What choice did we have?

I guess maybe he was happy to be home alone. I mean, if he had to be home at all. But he was definitely feeling moody, and I know we were both worried about him.

As soon as we walked out of his house, Uncle Max said, “Anything happen I don’t know about? What’s so terrible that all that good mood just disappeared?”

I said, “It’s nothing you don’t know about. He just didn’t want to go home.”

“Oh.”

“I thought it would really help him to take him up there and let him have a vacation and be happy. You know? And he really was. But now that he knows what it’s like to be happy, I think it might be even harder for him to go back to his life.”

“He must’ve been happy sometime.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said.

Actually, I’m pretty sure. I think he never was.

January 5
th

Today was our first day back at school. Call it denial, but I really wasn’t braced. I mean, I hated to be back. But I didn’t expect things to fall apart so fast.

Because, you know, before we left for vacation, things were pretty quiet. Will was still all brittle, and nobody wanted to be the one to break him for real, and everybody pretty much stayed out of our way.

And also, I know this sounds stupid, but I really thought it would be better in that jacket. I thought I’d be something a little different. A little more. I know it’s weird to think like that, and looking back on it, it seems like a stupid way to feel, but that’s how I went into the day.