The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  Two

  Hello, Winter Maker

  I called Mom the day after I talked with Dad. Joe had already mentioned the deer camp to her. I told her I didn’t want to go to this hunting camp because I didn’t want to endorse one of Dad’s fake reinventions.

  “Well, it’s the only thing he can think of that you boys will care about,” she said. “If he just showed up in New York you’d be mad at him.”

  “Right, and that would be appropriate. But he doesn’t want to face that. He wants to hide in the woods and have us come to him.”

  “But it’s also how he signals that he feels bad,” said Mom. “He wants to give you something that he knows you’re going to love. He just assumes that everything you love is outside somewhere. Bruce taught me that there are a lot of beautiful places in the mountains and on the ocean out West that I never would have seen. I didn’t leave home looking for those places—I probably never would have left Holland if it weren’t for him—but you boys were looking to get into the outdoors from the minute you were born.

  “You remember when your father and I split up the first time, it was the fall of 1975 and we were in the house by Crooked Lake: What was the first thing Bruce did? He sent you out into the swamp to start a trap line.”

  We lived in the country and there were farm fields and wetlands everywhere, places people would drive by without even noticing. We were trapping for muskrats; a trap “line” meant that we set the steel-jawed traps in a kind of line or sequence across the marsh so that we could easily check them all in about an hour every morning.

  “It was the dead of winter,” Mom continued. “He knew he couldn’t be at the house with you and thought it would be fun for the two of you. You were eleven years old, a mile away in the swamp, in your waders, in the dark. You loved that. I hated it, but you loved it.”

  “Right. He helped me set it up, but then he left me out there.”

  “Well, okay, this is the problem.”

  “I did it all by myself most of the time, in the freezing cold dark, because I didn’t want him to be mad.”

  “And I didn’t like that. But the original idea of it was good.”

  In 1975 they had split up for what would turn out to be three years. A couple of weeks in, Dad bopped over and announced in a rush of excitement that he and I would set up a trap line to catch muskrats. Deep emotional trouble meant swamp time. This was the Kuipers Way. I didn’t know any other kid in my school who trapped, but they all knew what it was: there were swamps and culverts in every direction and trapping was not uncommon. We lived in rural Michigan, whose history had been shaped by the fur trade. There were brokers in town who’d buy pelts. In my dad’s family, lots of people trapped. Dad had a plastic milk crate full of steel long-spring traps he had used in Crooked Lake by our house, but I had never had my own line. The fierce Michigan winter was coming on, and I thought it was a beautiful idea.

  I imagined we’d get rich off furs. Trappers in our area who were serious about it could make money. Muskrat pelts were worth about five dollars each that winter. Winter was fur trapping season, when the muskrat kits were mostly grown and the ’rats maintained open runs of water around their domed stick houses and were easier to find. Our friend Pat DeBoer gave us access to her family’s property on a shallow wetland called Pine Island, maybe a mile west of our house on the other side of Crooked Lake. The place was dotted with muskrat houses, and when we waded into the canary grass, there were plenty of signs that the houses were being used. After it iced over that November, Dad and I went out and hung a few number-one-size traps on stakes knocked in among the cattails and snow-bent reeds, and baited them with field corn.

  Dad was in great form that day, singing funny songs and laughing. At eleven years old, I didn’t have enough forearm power to squeeze the stiff springs of the trap and set them—it’s hard to do even as an adult—so I had to slosh around looking for a log or a piece of dry ground to put the trap on so I could stand on the spring. I’d slip off and the trap would jump up and the finger-crushing jaws would snap at the air like a wolf, with Dad shouting gleefully, “Ach du lieber!”—a shortened version of the Dutch expression “Ach du lieber himmel” (“Oh, for the love of heaven”). But even though I was having some trouble setting the traps, he didn’t step in and do it for me; he just let me figure it out myself.

  Dad gave no sign that day that he didn’t live with us anymore. Maybe he didn’t believe it himself. He let his silly side run wild. He was quoting from The Cat in the Hat and other Dr. Seuss books he loved to read to us as kids, and singing Loudon Wainwright’s song about the dead skunk in the middle of the road, yelling out the end of the chorus, “Stinkin’ to HIGH heaven!” When he was in good spirits, he took on a kind of antic persona I associated with the Beatles movies, like A Hard Day’s Night, and he would make a madcap dash across the ice at any moment just to be funny. When we carefully lowered a set trap into the icy water he hissed like a comic villain, “Yassss. Oh yassss!” With his longish 1970s hair and his bright onyx mustache, he looked like a Beatle, maybe George because he was long and lanky, though Bruce had fierce eyebrows forming a V at the top of his face that made even his resting expression look like fury. Dad’s skin was also dark in a way none of ours would ever be; some of our relatives said there must be some Spanish in our Dutch blood, for he was olive-skinned like his dad, my grandpa Henry. When Bruce was a kid, he would tan so dark that he was sometimes mistaken for one of the Mexican migrants he worked with in the onion fields by his house. Dad was six foot three and a regular in a game of pickup basketball down at the Texas Corners Volunteer Fire Department, a man hardened by swinging a hammer and shockingly strong for his thin build. All that fall he had been tiptoeing around Mom, but I was glad to be out in the frozen swamp with him on a day when he could be goofy and happy again.

  And then our line was set, and we had to wait. I was religious about checking my traps. I’d get outside on winter mornings at about five thirty A.M., in full darkness, and put on Dad’s size twelve hip waders and thunk-a-chunk my yellow Cheater Slick bicycle around Crooked Lake wearing a ski jacket and gloves. We had to be on the school bus by seven. When there wasn’t snow clotting the air, there was the constellation Orion sinking into the southwest, the figure the Ojibwa (Chippewa) in Michigan call the Winter Maker. I must have learned that name when I was very young because all my life, when it was hunting season or ski season, I’d look up in the sky and see Orion’s drawn bow and say, “Hello, Winter Maker.” I waded into the marsh and plowed through the thin ice to check my sets, and if I had to change a bait or reset a sprung trap, I shucked my coat and rolled my sleeves way up because otherwise my clothes would freeze solid while I rode home.

  Mom didn’t like it. “Bruce, he’s just little and he’s out there in the freezing cold water in the middle of the night! He might go in over his head! You should go with him,” she said.

  “He’s fine. He has to learn how to do it himself,” Dad replied quietly.

  Trapping season was already over in March before I figured out that Dad’s idea of running the trap line “together” meant that I did it alone. He couldn’t get out to our trap line in the mornings from his new apartment on the edge of Kalamazoo and didn’t want to anyway. He thought I’d rather do it alone because that’s how he’d rather do it; he was sure his kid wouldn’t want his dad looking over his shoulder.

  I finally caught one sweet muskrat, which I admired greatly, with its beautiful chocolate-milk fur and soft little mitts, and even though I’d been around dead deer hanging in garages in our neighborhood and ate piles of pheasants and stringers of fish, I went through paroxysms of guilt that I’d drowned it. I decided it was wrong to kill something we weren’t going to eat. Dad didn’t seem that happy it was dead, either, like he’d kind of gone off the whole project, but he was proud of me for getting it. I sold it to a fur buyer for five dollars, which was a bag of groceries or a tank of gas for Mom. At that time, she worked as a bookkeeper and night mana
ger at Osco Drug, and without Dad in the house money was tight.

  That one muskrat was like an offering on the family altar. I was still too young to hunt, but like every fish I’d ever caught, this trap-line catch instantly reactivated the dialogue among the Kuipers clan. My uncles, aunts, and cousins on the Kuipers side were almost uniformly fanatical about the outdoors. Dad and his brothers, in order from oldest to youngest, were Dale, Ron, Vern, Bruce, Jack, and Mike. Even though Dale lived in Manitoba and Ron lived outside Washington, D.C., when they called on the phone they’d ask to be passed to me, and the grilling would start: “How many ’rats you got now?” they’d query. “Where in the run are you putting your sets? How often are you checking ’em? Are you changing the bait? How thick is the ice?”

  Vern and Jack lived nearby, in the farmlands west of Kalamazoo, and they’d run by now and then to see where I was trapping. They’d just drive by to look at the swamp. If their nephew was trapping there, it took on a new significance. I found it hard to judge Dad’s interest in trapping—he was only out in the swamp with me a handful of days—but Dad’s youngest brother, Mike, is a legendary trapper, and he assured me Bruce knew what he was doing.

  “Mink are my life, and what your dad taught me about mink, when I was a little kid, is that they lived in the water like a pike,” said Mike. “The lake by your house would be frozen like a brick, and there’d be muskrat houses and he would have traps in the runs between houses and catch mink. Once I got to know trappers and I could buy books, I was told they were like a raccoon: they lived along the shore right where the water meets the land. Anyhow, after thirty years and really learning about mink, I agree with your dad now. I treat them as though they are a pike. The deeper the water, the better, and they live on the bottom like an otter. And I always think of your dad.”

  Dad never told me these things. But I guess I didn’t ask. I was wary of him being around too much, because of what was going on between him and Mom. But Dad had information that I desperately needed.

  “You have got to come home and see Joe now,” said Mom, after our discussion of the trap line. Her voice on the phone turned clipped and serious. She is a small person, five foot three, blonde and blue-eyed with anxious hands, but she could summon a fair amount of maternal authority. “You have to. I am saying this as your mother. He needs you.”

  “Where is he? I can’t ever get him on the phone. He doesn’t still live with you, does he?”

  “Well, he still comes here,” she said, exasperated. “I mean, I keep his room for him.”

  I’d left home when Joe and Brett were twelve and fourteen; I had no picture in my head of their lives at ages eighteen and twenty. I knew that Brett worked part-time with Dad’s steel building contracting company, Delta Design, in order to pay for college, driving materials around on the company stake-bed truck and doing some construction work, and that Mom called him anytime around the clock when she needed help with Joe. Brett had spent a lot of his life taking care of Joe, and the fact that Brett and I didn’t talk much just indicated to me he was trying to squirrel away as much time for himself as all this allowed. I knew, at least abstractly, that Joe was on a nonstop vodka bender. I had rarely seen him drunk, but then I rarely saw either one of them. I’d see them on once-a-year fishing trips Dad organized to one of Michigan’s good rivers or a ski trip to Steamboat or Killington, but I wasn’t up to speed on their emotional and chemical lives. I enlisted Nancy’s help in tracking them down, but she was way ahead of me. She saw this deer camp idea as a catalyst for getting some help for Joe, who was slipping far beyond her motherly abilities.

  “Where does he go the other nights?” I asked.

  “Well, he and Cassie broke up, so not over there anymore.”

  “Oh, really? They’ve been together, what, about five years?”

  “Five years, on and off. More on than off.”

  “So he’s living with someone else? Or he’s just out crashing around?”

  “Well, I think he still has that apartment where he stays sometimes. And then he could be staying at your father’s place.”

  “Never. Dad says he’s over there with you.”

  “Joe calls me sometimes when he’s in trouble and I just go get him. Or Brett does. Usually in town somewhere. I don’t ask about much because I just want him to come home,” she said.

  Joe himself told me he was getting into LSD. Nancy was not naive about partying, but she never knew he was on acid. She spent a lot of nights swabbing Joe’s head with a cool washcloth while he lay on the floor of their apartment, begging to die. She handed out the water and aspirin or coffee, and then she had to go work: in late 1987, about a year before she divorced Bruce, she got an amazing new job as an executive secretary to one of the bigwigs at the accounting firm Plante Moran, and she loved this job. It had probably saved her life. She’d come home late and Joe would be gone. Once in a while he’d work for Dad, too, cleaning up a jobsite or delivering lumber, but when he went out at night it wasn’t to work. He drove a brown VW Rabbit with an added toggle switch on the dash that read warp drive.

  “I don’t know where he is most of the time, I guess,” Mom said. “But I really wish you’d come out here and see him. He needs his big brother.”

  “He needs something more than me.”

  “He needs you guys.”

  After a lot of ringing at Mom’s house, I got Joe on the phone and asked him if he was going to Dad’s deer camp. He didn’t even hesitate. “Oh, hell yeah. I’ll go,” he said.

  “Really? What, just to make him feel good?” I said.

  “No, I want to go hunting again.”

  It had been a few years: like all of us, Joe had gone up to Mr. Card’s place with Dad every fall, but then he was caught getting naked with the daughter of one of the other guests in the cabin. They were both sixteen, and Joe decided it would be too embarrassing to Dad if he ever went back to Bernie’s place.

  “But doesn’t it make you feel bad when you sit there for days and Dad never talks to you?”

  “Well, he never talks to me anywhere. At least I get to sit in the woods,” Joe said.

  “But do you think he really cares about having us with him out there?” I asked. “Or is it some kind of ego thing, like not wanting to look bad in front of Vern and Jack?”

  “It could be that, but you don’t know how it’s been around here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For a while, Dad would call the apartment every night, sobbing,” Joe said. “I mean, he was bawling his eyes out.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “‘You gotta come back. You gotta come back to the house. Tell your mom to call me.’”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah, shit.”

  “What’d you say to him?”

  “I’d say I’ll tell Mom and then try to hang up. But I wouldn’t tell her most of the time.”

  “Dude!”

  “Well, fuck that. Big fuckin’ baby.”

  Mom insisted I come out, so I did. It was late summer 1989, only a few weeks after Dad had originally called me about the camp. Mom was happy I was there. I saw her nice little two-bedroom apartment in Texas Corners, part of a series of fourplexes standing in what used to be a cornfield behind the Texas Take Out liquor store. It was less than a mile from where we’d lived by Crooked Lake. There wasn’t much in Joe’s room but a single bed, sheets thrown on the carpet, and a few clothes wadded up on the floor of the closet. Nothing on the walls.

  Mom looked good. She wore her hair in a short, highlighted new ’do that was smart and unfussy for the offices of Plante Moran, and she’d lost the pallor she’d taken on while living on the couch. The skin around her eyes had filled out, and she looked healthy. But she had always been anxious, and she was a little fidgety when she talked about Joe.

  “I think it would be a good idea if you took Joe to the big lake,” she said to me. “Someplace you both feel good.” I ran that by Joe, and he said he didn’t have anyth
ing else to do.

  Joe and I drove out to South Haven and sat on the sand on the shore of Lake Michigan in the middle of the night. The bright curl of the waves lit by streetlamps leaped up out of the black-green expanse of the big lake as it sighed and whispered its troubled decay. The water smelled faintly of rot, as if the millions of sardine-like alewives that used to wash up on the shore when we were kids were still detectably putrefying under the sand. The state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) had planted so many Chinook salmon in the lake they’d about eliminated the alewife, and Joe and I were fine with that; now there were more big salmon to catch. The night was perfumed with the thrill of death, and we were laughing our faces off.

  Because he didn’t die, Joe’s stories about life as an alcoholic were funny, and he used these tales to stave off his own imminent toodle-oo as he talked, tears running down his sunburned face. There he was, after all, alive on the sand, not in a car wreck, not bludgeoned by some lady’s husband, apparently not brain-damaged by drink. Joe had started drinking casually at fourteen, after I was already away at college, filching a couple of beers here and there like kids did at our rural Class C school, Mattawan. But it fed a profound loneliness in him and turned him into a lover and a clown, and his drunken antics made him popular. He was handsome and dimpled and a big-time baseball star, a left-handed pitcher and a switch-hitter with power going both ways—that is, before he decided sports were stupid and he got too drunk to turn up for games. He was voted “Best Smile,” and by the time he was sixteen, in his sophomore year, he was grinning in the face of full-blown alcoholism. He told me later he was drinking “a fifth of vodka a day” and keeping it “in my locker.” He got busted only once, when he and Steve Lee drank a fifth of Jack Daniels on the bus on the way to school in the morning and arrived shit-faced, for which they were hauled straight to the principal’s office. He had to serve a three-day suspension in the office, and showed up freshly dressed every day and easily dispatched with his homework and made such a good impression that someone on the office staff wrote a note to Mom remarking that Joe was a great kid. It was already apparent that he was the brightest of the three of us kids. What he needed was someone to notice. But no one did, so he went straight back to guzzling.