“You don’t think Dougie could get our check for himself somehow, do you?” he asked. “Like maybe he’s blowing us off while he’s planning a trip to Disney or something? It’s been months since Dad died. If he's stalling us while he's plannin' something for my money, I'll kill him.”
I noticed he said 'my' money instead of 'ours', but let it pass. Instead I told him we were getting down to the bottom of the freezer on food. “We’ll be down to ice chips soon.”
Jason nodded and paced as he sipped the black coffee. He was excited, which made me nervous. “We’re goin’ huntin',” he said finally.
My head came up. “For Dougie?”
“No, numbnuts. He says the insurance money is all about red tape and channels and shit. Fine. He wants time to make our payday happen? That’s fine, too. We’ll give him some time, but in the meantime, we gotta eat. Deer meat will fill that freezer. A man doesn’t need a grocery store.”
“We really don’t have enough from the dole to get some groceries?”
“Don’t call it the dole.” His eyes were glassy. I knew not to push back when he was like this. Jason had a special knack for twisting my arm up behind my back until I thought my shoulder would pop out of its socket.
“Deer meat!” he bellowed. “The woods are full of groceries. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
My brother hadn’t tried the pop socket trick since the funeral so I went along with his hunting idea. I didn’t have a plan then. I had a lot of time to think about what I did before I did it, true. But I wouldn’t exactly call it premeditated, either. My crime is one of opportunity, so don’t go thinking you’re better than me. Don’t jump to that too fast.
Jason pulled Dad’s old iron sight hunting rifle from the footlocker by the furnace. Using something that belonged to my father seemed wrong even though he wasn’t around to ask permission.
Jason had tagged along when Dad hunted sometimes but I had refused. Some particularly hot summers, when the water dried up in the backwoods, the deer would come closer to civilization to drink from the stream behind our house. They traveled in little families and, in the field behind us, the tall grass would be matted down where they slept at night. In our backyard the deer stretched their necks to eat from the apple tree. I saw my father shoot a deer out back once. I was on the back step, still as a stone, watching four deer pick apples with their teeth. Dad shot a doe from the upstairs bathroom window. When it was gutted, dressed and decapitated, the doe’s eyes still looked just the same as when she was alive. They were black and wet, looking at me. I wanted nothing to do with killing a deer.
Instead of saying no to Jason, I told him about my earliest memory: a white goat with little curled horns hangs upside down. Its tongue hangs out, eyes like marbles. I felt the animal’s fur beneath my fingers. My hand came away wet. Then I saw the red slash of gore at the goat’s throat and the blood clinging to my hand. It wouldn't shake off. I cried. Men laughed behind me. No. I think they
cackled
.
Jason told me I was remembering a fragment of a day at our grandfather’s farm. It must have happened just before Mom’s first heart attack because she was still strong enough to carry me. I could also remember my mother’s fat, bosomy softness against my cheek as she scooped me up into her arms.
I watched Jason's fat greasy fingers fumble to load the rifle with old brass shells. The dead goat is an anchor for my memory, but Mom was there, too. In bad moments, I often reach for that feeling of being carried.
Jason's rictus grin split his face as he hoisted the rifle. “Dad said, ‘God took Mom. The bank took the farm. Then granddad took himself away. Did it with this .30-30. Get your school backpack. Leave the house unlocked. We’ll only be a few hours.”
I asked Jason if he cleaned the barrel. He shrugged and said he could still smell gun oil so it was probably fine. He slung the rifle into the crook of his elbow and walked off toward the woods. I carried the pack, heavy with Jason’s beer. He didn’t have a hunting license. “Shouldn’t need one when you can get to the woods from your own back step,” he said.
“Even the weather’s all fucked up,” Jason said. “When Dad was a kid, there was always at least a little snow on the ground by November first for the opening of deer season. We’ll have to look for tracks in the dirt instead of snow.”
It was as if we had slipped winter’s notice and fall had decided to hold on until the seasons found their proper order. The Indian summer had stretched out so long this year that there were plenty of leaves still clinging to the trees even now. Last week's Halloween was the warmest I had ever known in Poeticule Bay: a few local kids had found our door, but they all wore their masks on top of their heads, their little faces shiny with sweat.
The weather had only begun to shift this morning. For the first time that autumn, I could see my breath hang in the air when I exhaled. I pretended to smoke, but quickly grew bored of it. I was too old for pretending. Some of the guys and a bunch more girls in my class already smoked real cigarettes. They all would have laughed had they spotted me trailing after my brother, miming drags on a cigarette and blowing plumes of steam.
The chill cut at my lungs and I hoped the sun would warm us and make the slow uphill climb more pleasant. The forest went quiet as we stepped into the tree line. A minute later, a squirrel rattled an alarm and skittered away as we pushed through a weave of dogwood. The glass bottles clinked as I walked. We hiked to the old logging road where trees close in to bow and touch overhead. Grass filled the middle of the logging road so high, and the ruts cut so deep, the trail looked less like a road and more like two narrow paths running parallel by coincidence. Jason put a finger to his lips. Staying quiet was all Jason knew about hunting. I tried to tread carefully so the bottles wouldn’t knock against each other. When I began to fall behind, my brother looked back, mouthing curses.
As the rising sun burned off the gray cloud cover, trees cast another forest of tangled shadows on the ground, adding another thickness and plane to the landscape. The pack straps pulled at my shoulders. Despite the sun and the cold air’s green taste, my footsteps became heavier as we pushed on and up. The sweat trapped under the backpack sucked my shirt to my skin. My breathing became heavier. We walked another half hour past where I thought I was too tired to trudge up the slope. Salt sweat burned my eyes before I ramped up the courage to complain. “We’re going too far, Jason.”
“Wuss.” He pointed ahead with the rifle barrel. “I was thinking we’d go there.” The clear cut loomed above us, a ragged oval where trees used to be.
Out west, they would call Hanley’s Mountain a big hill, but this was Maine. Here, every wide spot in the road has a name and we call every ground down hunk of Appalachia a mountain. Sometimes ill-mannered tourists point this out. “They used to be taller than the Rockies,” we say. New Englanders — Mainiacs, I call them — are obsessed with what was. The future is for everyone else, people from Away.
Poeticule Bay locals complained about the clear cut, of course —“The Scar” some call it, or just “eyesore.” It stood directly behind the town, a mark in the side of Hanley’s Mountain. The storeowners even worried the summer people would bypass the town. They would take one look and motor on in their houseboats and yachts, pushing south to Boston or north to Halifax or Mahone Bay or Lunenburg.
“Even if you get a deer up at the Scar, how you going to get it back down?”
Jason shrugged. “It’s downhill. No biggie,” he said. His eyes were glassy so I didn’t argue.
By noon, the trail angled up so sharply I had to lean forward under my burden, the weight on my toes. “Enough,” I said. “We’ve gone way too far.” I let the pack slip from my shoulders and sat on a small boulder to the side of the trail. I pulled out a Coke and a ham sandwich.
Jason watched me for a moment, deciding whether this act of insubordination was worth a thumping. I didn’t dare look in his eyes. I’ve heard that about animals, too, how if you look them in the eyes it’s a challenge and they’ll attack. I kept eating, but braced my leg muscles, ready to throw myself into the brambles if he took a swing at me. Jason walked over and stood too close to me, pausing long enough to make me feel the fear. With less than a foot between us, there was no way I could dodge a blow.
“You want something?” I asked. “You’re not my type.”
He laughed at that and reached past me into the pack. He yanked out a bottle of beer. I watched his hands. “I’ll help you lighten your load, little brother.”
He wiped dribbles of beer from his chin with the back of his hand. “I could get used to this unemployment thing,” he said. “We could really make the insurance money last, you know? You think walking around up here with a pack is work? Try digging around somebody’s attic for a wire and a junction box covered in itchy pink insulation. Man, you don’t know what work is.”
A chickadee sang its sweet persistent song, oblivious.
Jason fished out a couple Mars bars he'd hidden in a side pocket. He offered me neither and ate both at once, mouth open as he smacked and sucked down the chocolate. Watching him eat, I knew why Jason’s love life was a series of first dates. Some women don’t mind a man with a temper, but who could sit across from that noisy mess at a dinner table and keep an appetite?
“What’s on your mind, sunshine?”
I said nothing.
“You scared I’m gonna hit you?”
“Some.”
“That don’t need to happen no more,” he said. “Brothers can be hard on each other, but I’m the new boss man now. Doin' it right.”
“Hard
on each other
, yeah?” I said. “I don’t remember me being hard on you. The beat-down train only ever runs in one direction as I recall. When do I get to be hard on you?”
Jason sighed and lowered himself stiffly until he was cross-legged in the soft, tall grass in the middle of the logging road. He cradled the rifle like mothers hold babies. “Check the safety. Pull the bolt.” He relished the rifle shell’s sunlit gleam before slamming the action back. Clack-clack! “I love that sound. It just sounds...right.” He opened the breech and slammed it shut again.
He belched and let sour air hiss out between crooked teeth. “Ate too fast,” he said, grimacing and patting his stomach. Instead of opening his next beer, he held the sweating glass to his forehead. “Got to slow down. That chili you made last night isn’t sitting right.”
“Complain to the guy who put the chili in the can, not to the guy who put it in the pot for you.”
“Fair enough.” My brother frowned as he surveyed the woods. “According to Dad, if you shoot a deer in the heart, it’ll jump straight up in the air before it falls down dead.”
“Yeah? You believe that?”
“’Course.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jason belched loudly and gave me a tight smile. “Dad told me he got buck fever once. He was hunting deer with Granddad. They’re at the edge of this field and out from the woods come five deer. This would have been Dad’s first kill. Granddad hands him his rifle with a scope on it so he lies down, lines up his shot. There’s a big twelve-point buck out front. Dad follows this buck through his scope an’ he starts to sweat bullets instead of firin' 'em. Then he starts to feel it.”
“It?”
“Buck fever starts with a little shake in the hand. The shakes snaked up his arm until he’s shakin’ like a seizure.”
“He get the deer?”
Jason shook his head. “Fired five shots and none of the deer even felt the wind of a bullet. Not even close, even by accident. Dad said he had to work up to it. The next year he shot a couple partridges and that next winter he bagged a couple rabbits. The next time he had a deer in his sights, he knew not to think about it too long. He said he felt a little shake in his trigger finger and before it could get worse, he pulled it quick. Bang! Bagged his first doe.”
Jason opened his beer, took a swig and squinted at me as if guessing my weight. “Dad said when you got a problem, it’s better not to think too long. That’s your problem, Joey. You think about things too much. You got a problem? Just rip that Band-Aid right off. Stop tryin’ to worry it off. And do something about your acne. It’s makin’ me sick.”
Jason bobbed his head and raised his beer can high in a toast, our meeting adjourned. Before he could bring the bottle to his lips he grimaced again, one hand to his stomach. “Hoo. Goddamn chili.”
I watched his face. Beer kills too slow, I thought.
Norman Rose— “Chief” to everybody in Poeticule Bay — was both police and fire chief. At that moment, he must have been looking at his watch, sausage fingers hovering above a button. I never actually saw it, but I always pictured a big red button, like the president must use to launch nuclear missiles. The fire hall’s siren rose up in one long wail as it did every weekday. I called that daily rising and falling blast the audible comma; all of Poeticule Bay paused at noon. That siren was my secret reminder that I was supposed to live somewhere too big to need to test the siren; New York fire stations don't need to test their sirens. Their sirens go off all the time and nobody needs a reminder that the day is half-done and things are changing. New Yorkers are busy living and changing all the time. But Bayers don’t change. They’re allergic to change.
Though I had no money to go anywhere, some of my classmates would escape to universities and bigger towns. Most would join the family business and fish or farm. A few of the most desperate would go into the military. I didn’t want to join the Perma-war, though. The TV said the army was fighting for freedom. From where I stood, America must be losing. Freedom is only among strangers. There is no freedom where there is no anonymity. Growing up in a small town didn’t teach me much, but I got that lesson. Here, I would always be Darren Kind’s son or Jason’s little brother. They didn’t know what was going on behind my father’s eyes — or mine, either — but they all thought they did. Small town people act as if they own you by the power of two accidents: birth and geography. Unhappy accidents, like a drunken brother or a father chewed up by saw blades or a town so small it strangles? That shit can define you forever.