Hunters (17 page)

Jim turned and saw three more people coming
up through the open area by the stream. It surprised him that two
were women, and that fact made him feel even more uncomfortable.
The conversation had been cryptic so far, and Jim felt that there
was something underlying it that he might not want to know about.
Hunting different things? What the hell was
that
supposed to
mean?

"Ahoy, campmates!" the big man shouted. "I
was just talkin' to Jim here. He's the only one who killed a deer
so far. Everybody else is out huntin'." He turned back to Jim and
said, more softly, "It's just Jim and us."

Jim Lincoln knew something was very wrong
then. He was standing right by the open door. If he managed to get
through it and slam and lock it, he could maybe get the handgun
that he had brought up for plinking soda cans. But then what? Load
it before they smashed through the door? And where the hell was it?
And where were the bullets?

It seemed he couldn't remember anything, and
while he was making his plans, the big man stepped right up next to
him and put a gloved hand on his shoulder, and Jim knew it was too
late for any plans. "Why don't you invite us all inside?" the big
man said.

Jim eyed the three newcomers. They looked
scary to him. The taller of the two women would have been beautiful
if not for the grim expression on her face. Her glance kept
flicking back and forth between the hanging buck and Jim, and he
didn't like what he saw in her narrowed eyes. Her thick-lipped
mouth was clamped so tightly that the skin around it was white, and
she held her rifle as though she couldn't wait to use it.

The face of the man standing next to her was
vacant. Jim could read no emotion in it at all. The shorter of the
women, however, wore a broad, close-mouthed smile that nearly
sliced her rosy face in half. When he looked at her, she giggled,
and though he wanted to read her laughter as friendly, he couldn't.
There was something about her eyes and her smile that made him
think she might be crazy.

His gaze held on her in spite of himself, and
she said, "It's really cold out here, man. We'd appreciate getting
warm," and giggled again.

Jim backed through the door, afraid to turn
his back on any of them. He set his hand on the door and thought
about taking a chance and slamming it shut, but the big man shook
his head. "Man, don't even think about it. It would really be dumb,
and it would kind of annoy us." Jim dropped his hand and kept
walking backwards into the cabin.

The four followed, the big man first, then
the two women and the other man, who closed the door behind them.
The big man went to the table, pulled out a chair, sat down, and
looked at the tall woman. "So what's the agenda, Jeannie?...sorry,
Jean?
"

The woman didn't look at the big man. She
kept her gaze fixed on Jim, and didn't speak. "Look," Jim said,
trying to sound calm and reasonable, "who are you folks?"

"Yeah," the shorter woman said, "we oughta
introduce ourselves. I'm Samantha, but my friends call me Sam.
You
can call me Sam."

He tried to smile. His throat felt dry as
dust. "Hi, Sam."

"Hi, Jimbo. And this is Jean, and this is
Michael, and this crazy guy is Chuck." She went to the table, put
her arms around the big man's neck from behind and chanted, "Chuck
Chuck bo-buck banana fanna fo-fuck...
Chuck!
" She giggled
again.

"Why do you hunt?"

The question, asked in a dull, flat tone,
jerked Jim around to face the woman called Jean. He thought he had
heard her correctly, but he didn't know what to say, didn't know
what she wanted to hear.

"I asked you why you hunt," she said. "You
killed that deer outside, didn't you?"

He cleared his throat. "Yes."

"Why?"

"I...I've hunted for years. With my father.
Ever since I was a boy."

She sneered at him. "I didn't ask for your
life history, I asked you
why!
Why you do it."

What the hell was this? Why were they all out
here, and what did they all have guns for if they weren't hunters
themselves? He strove desperately to answer a question that he had
never asked himself. It was like asking why you got up every
morning and went to work, or why you ate, or why you breathed. It
was just something he did. "Well...for the, the food, um, for the
friends, uh, the sport—"

"The
sport?
" The word shook him. He
felt as though he had just been caught by the teacher doing
something he should be ashamed of. "You call that a sport? Just
standing around until a beautiful creature like the one outside
comes walking by and then you just
shoot
it? And then you
rip it open and pull out its guts and put its head on your wall to
show what a brave hunter you are? That's sport?"

Jim knew he shouldn't allow himself to get
angry, but he couldn't help it. Who the hell was she—who were any
of them—to tell him what to do? "It's not that easy," he said.
"There's a lot more to hunting than that. You don't just walk into
the woods and get a buck."

"You want meat," the man called Michael said,
"go to the supermarket. You want friends, join a club. You want
sport, go play racquetball."

"Yay, all
right!
" Sam said, clapping
her hands.

"You all...the four of you," Jim said,
"You're not hunters, are you?"

"'Take up your guns and follow me,'" Chuck
misquoted, "'and I will make you hunters of men.'"

"What gave us away?" said Jean dryly.

Words were not in Jim's purview, so he
searched for them in a near panic. If these people were really
hunters of men, his life might depend on what he said. "Because you
don't understand. You don't know what hunters...do for wildlife
management."

Chuck leaned his chair back on two legs.
"Uh-oh. I feel a sermon comin' on."

"It's not a sermon, it's the
truth
.
Hunters got to thin the herd. If they don't, more deer would starve
to death during the winter than already do."

"That's bullshit," said Jean. "I've heard all
that crap before. 'Harvesting the herds,' they call it. Like
wildlife is one more crop like wheat or corn. Well, it isn't. No
one grew deer. They were here long before the Europeans ever got to
this continent."

"And if those early Americans hadn't hunted
deer, young lady," Jim said, "none of us would be here today."

"Don't you patronize me," Jean said. Her
anger seemed to have suddenly increased so much that Jim was afraid
she would bring the gun up. "Don't you call me young lady or miss
or
anything
, you understand?"

"Okay. Okay, I'm sorry."

"I'm through talking to you. You don't have
any idea of why you do what you do, I'll tell you. You hunt because
it makes you feel like a big man."

"Yeah, Jimbo," Sam added, "and your gun's
your dick because you probably can't get it up." She giggled again,
and the sound made Jim's already flushed face even redder.

"Shut up, Sam," Jean said, and Sam giggled
again, louder, as if to challenge the other woman, but Jean ignored
it. "But what she said is true. Your rifle's an extension of your
penis. Now you'd deny that, but that's just because you've never
looked at it that way, and if you did, you could never admit it to
yourself."

"Look," said Jim, "I like to hunt, that's
all. There's no big mystery about it. I use the meat—"

"You hunt because you ain't
got
the
meat, Jimbo," Sam said, and buried her face in her hands and
laughed.

"I got another theory," said Chuck. Jim saw
the commanding look that Jean shot at him, but Chuck ignored it. "I
think that you got a lot of anger in you, Jim, that you're pissed
off at your wife, at your job, at a lot of things, but you can't do
a damn thing about it. So you come on out here and you shoot a
deer, and you go, 'Hey, Mister Deer, take that...hey boss, bite on
that
bullet, hey wife, suck on
this
,' see what I
mean? You don't have the stones to do it in your everyday shitfull
life, so you take it out on the poor dumb deer. And I think that's
what all you hunters do. And that ain't right, Jim. You think
that's right?"

"That's not the way it is. You don't know
what you're talking about."

"No." Jean shook her head. "
You
don't
know what you're talking about. And I don't want to hear any more.
Now take your clothes off...
Jim
."

"Take my...what?"

"Get undressed."

"Yeah," said Sam. "
Buck
naked!" Her
giggle was supplanted by a laugh that Jim thought sounded mean.

"No," Jim folded his arms. He had had enough.
If they wanted to hurt him, well, let them do it.

"
Do
it!" Jean's rifle came up so that
the round black eye of its barrel stared at Jim.

"What the hell do you people want?" Jim said,
dropping his arms and forming his hands into fists.

Jean advanced upon him and jabbed the rifle
barrel into the small of his throat so that he gagged. "We just
want to convince people that it's not such a good idea to hunt deer
in northern Pennsylvania. Now
strip
."

He pulled away from the gun and felt his back
bump against the wall. "The hell with you. If you're gonna shoot
me, go ahead and do it. I'm not taking my clothes off." He was
willing to die rather than do what she said. He thought that they
would kill him anyway, and he would not give this woman the
perverse pleasure of humiliating him as well.

"All right, Jim," Jean said, dropping the
barrel slightly. He could see in her furious eyes that her will was
as great as his. "Make you a deal. Your son Ben's going to be back
here sometime. Now if you don't cooperate with us, we can do some
things to Ben that no father should see happen to his son, you see
what I mean? Samantha here can make Lorena Bobbitt look like a
surgeon."

The shorter girl nodded vigorously. "I can,
Jimbo. The messier the better, far as I'm concerned."

"You bitch...don't you touch him. Keep your
goddam hands off my boy..." He moved toward her, but Jean raised
her rifle again, and Sam reached into her coat and came out with a
long-bladed hunting knife.

"Relax, daddy," Sam said. "And drop them
duds."

Jean nodded. "I mean it, Jim. You don't do
what I say, we'll not only kill your son, but we'll hurt him bad
before we're through."

Jim stood there for a full minute, trembling
with fury and embarrassment. Then he reached up and slowly began to
unbutton his red wool hunting shirt. His fingers felt huge and
leaden, and the buttons seemed a foot wide and the buttonholes only
an inch long. He wondered if Ben or one of the others would return
soon. With luck, several might come in together. He hoped for it
even as he feared it, and wished there were some way to tell them
to just stay away, stay in the woods until he was beaten or dead
and these maniacs were gone and it was all over.

"All right," Sam said. "I dig a man who wears
those cool long underwear tops."

"Be quiet, Sam," Jean said, and Sam snickered
in response. "Keep going."

Jim unlaced his shoes and kicked them off,
then unbuckled his belt and opened his trousers. At the table,
Chuck gave a whistle through his teeth, which set Sam giggling
again. Jim could feel his cheeks suffuse with blood. He thought of
Ben, and dropped his pants. The socks and long johns followed, and
now he stood there shivering in his boxer shorts.

"Ooo, I see goose pimples," Chuck said.

"You sure that's not just his dick?" Sam
replied, and the two of them laughed.

"I'm disappointed, Jim," Chuck said. "I
thought you'd have underwear with them little hearts."

Jean gestured toward his midsection with the
gun barrel. "Get it off."

"Christ, Jean," the man called Michael
said.

"What?"

"Give him a little dignity, that's all."

"Did he give that animal hanging outside any
dignity?"

"I don't understand," said Jim. He could feel
tears trickling from the corners of his eyes, but was powerless to
stop them. "Why are you doing this to me?"

"Because," Sam said, "it's easier to gut you
if we don't have to undress you first."

"Gut...gut me?" Jim felt as though he wasn't
even there anymore, as though he were dreaming it, or watching it
all on TV. Things like this didn't happen.

"Jim," the man called Chuck said, "I just got
one question that'll wrap this all up. How old are you?"

He would have told them anything they asked
at that point. His mind was on overload, running on automatic
pilot." "Fifty-two," he said dully.

"That's old enough," said Chuck, and he
brought up his rifle and pulled the trigger.

Jim didn't hear the sound of the shot, but he saw
what seemed like a wisp of flame lick from the muzzle, and just
before the bullet struck and ended everything for him, he thought
that he had never actually seen the end of a firing muzzle before,
and how he would have to tell Ben about.

"'T
hat's old
enough!'
Did you love that or what?" Chuck Marriner threw
back his head and bellowed a laugh. "I thought that was one helluva
line myself, that was a real
Ah-nult
line. 'Dot's oalt
enuff,'" he said, in a passable Schwarzennegger accent. "And
ka
boom
. Classic."

"What the
hell
did you do that for!"
Jean shouted.

"Shit, Jean, what were
you
gonna do,
look at his dick and let him go? I'm your soldier, babe. Your
Class-A numero uno death machine. You point, I shoot. I mean, you
did want him dead, yes?"

"Not...like that."

"Look, babe, I'm straight. I only sexually
torture women, okay?"

Sam giggled again, and Jean gave her a look,
then turned her attention back to Chuck. "Did it ever occur to you
that
I
might have wanted to do it?"