The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  We stayed long enough for Bernard to have a drink and we toasted Grousehaven’s fiftieth anniversary. Then we were back in the car drubbing over the confusing tangle of narrow two-tracks with the headlights playing across the hard, cold darkness.

  “I don’t know why Dad didn’t want to meet those guys,” I said.

  “You go easy on him, he worked hard to get you here,” said Bernie.

  “Yeah. He seems mad about something.”

  He looked at me. “Is it him who’s mad or you?”

  “He didn’t say one word all day.”

  “And look at what you learned. I heard you back there. Your dad’s a hell of a guy and the two of you will figure it out.”

  When we hit the two-lane blacktop, he said, “You write all this down. We’ll stop at the grocery and get you a notebook and you make notes. You and your dad come back every year and you keep track of what happens. Pretty soon you’ll have a good story about this place and everything in it, and you’ll have a good story about yourself, too.”

  By the second summer of Mom and Dad’s separation, when I was thirteen, I started keeping my shotgun propped up in the closet with two shells handy in the fold-down writing top to my dresser. The house was getting weird. Joe had horrible screaming nightmares about giant spiders, and if you went into his room to wake him he’d fight you like you were one. He had taken to sleepwalking, too: I’d be reading on the couch downstairs at night and Joe would float down like something I saw on Shock Theater, his eyes wide open but blued by another world. One time he sat down in front of the TV, which was turned off, and just flipped the knob through the channels. I said, “What you watching, Joe?” and he turned and looked at me with eyes that turned my skin cold. Then he got up and peed on the doors to the downstairs closet.

  Men would show up at the door looking to talk to Mom. Word had gotten out that she and Dad were split, and no Olivia-Newton-John-looking lady was going to go unnoticed in tiny Texas Corners. Some of them were the fathers of my schoolmates, and even though I wasn’t the man of the house, I was the man who was there.

  I had a full-time summer job on a gladiola farm down in Three Rivers and to get there Dad had bought me a used Kawasaki 100 enduro, street legal, and through my workplace I got a farm license so I could ride on the road. Since I had a license, Mom would also send me to the store in her ’69 Chevy Nova. Dad had finally sold the VW bus, which Mom had hated, and bought this Nova off a hot-rodder who had lifted it in the back and put on big slick tires. It would idle at about forty miles per hour, and I could barely see over the dash to drive it.

  I came blazing home on the Kawasaki one late afternoon, and you could hear me coming from a mile away. I’d yanked the baffles out of the muffler when they got gummed up with carbon, so the bike whined like a deranged lawnmower; tests a few years later would show it cost me 30 percent of the hearing in my right ear. There was a strange car in the driveway, so I parked in the yard and banged through the screen door from the garage to find the father of one of my eighth-grade friends sitting with Mom at the kitchen table. She was demurely holding her shirt closed at the neck with one hand, and he had a cup of coffee in front of him. His ugly mug was frozen in a kind of rictus smile, but his eyes were darting around like he was about to jump out the window. The loud bike had given him plenty of time to escape.

  “HEY JEFF!” he shouted, not getting up from the table. “I JUST STOPPED BY TO SEE YOUR MOM, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT?”

  “Hey,” I said, putting my thermos and lunch box down on the counter. “I’m just getting home from work.”

  He was yelling because he was nervous, and we all knew I could bust him. I hung out with his kids and his wife all the time at his house. I knew he wasn’t sleeping with my mom, but something drove him to knock, to come in, to ask for a cup of coffee. He was sniffing around.

  But that was enough for me. I was filthy from dusty farm work in my greasy Irish Setters, jeans with the knees torn out and a Mattawan football T-shirt, and he could see from the look on my face I already knew enough to be a threat.

  “JUST TO SEE IF SHE NEEDS ANY HELP WITH ANYTHING.”

  “Well, thank you, that’s nice.”

  “PRETTY MOM LIKE THAT.”

  I jerked open the door to the refrigerator. If I had been one of the Dutch kids from the Netherlands who worked on the flower farm, I could grab myself a beer. They were my age and their dad bought them a case of Budweiser every weekend. I slammed the door and looked at him. He had become my problem.

  “WELL, I BETTER BE RUNNING! REAL GOOD TO SEE YA!”

  I told him to say hi to his kid who was in my class. He brushed past me, and within fifteen seconds his car was lurching out of the driveway with the tires squealing.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” Nancy said wearily. “What was I supposed to say to him?”

  “How about: ‘You can’t come in.’”

  “It’s fine. I can handle it,” she said.

  There were plenty of others, and we knew it wasn’t Mom’s fault; like dogs they homed in on the scent from everywhere in southwest Michigan—neighbors, friends of Dad’s, guys who knew us from school or sports teams or cub scouts. And of course, sadists and psychopaths. Mom had not started dating, but she was thirty-three and blue-eyed and wanted to be as pretty and desirable as any other modern lady, and things took a bad turn.

  For quite a while Mom had a regular phone caller, a man we knew and who knew she lived alone with her kids and made all kinds of threats about what he was going to do to her. Even worse, he would mutter, “Do you know who your husband is sleeping with tonight?” and spew out names. He knew things that only a real stalker could know. Sheriff’s deputies told her to leave the phone off the hook and put pillows over it to drown out the “hang up” beeping. But, they said, unless he came to the house and tried something, there was nothing they could do. I was not a violent kid and I had never once been in a fight, but I used to pray that God would give me one clean, twenty-gauge shot at this guy.

  Mom was no stranger to violence and predation. At Osco Drug she worked at the service desk in the evenings, handling the money. One night a man came in and put a pistol to her head and made her empty the safe and then ran off into the night.

  She seemed to weather this okay, but that’s because it was clearly about the money. All he wanted was to rob the store. The idea of the Phone Caller coming to her house, where her kids were, had her jumpy and sleep-deprived, constantly peeking through the curtains. One night she was in hysterics and ran around the house turning all the lights on and waking us all up, shoving shoes on our feet, and walking us down Q Avenue to the home of our friends Jack and Kay Brininger to spend the night. She wouldn’t tell us what she saw, but it must have been an imminent threat because she herded us down the shoulder of the road like a mother duck.

  “Mom, my gun,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “NO!”

  I needed that gun, but Mom knew better. She knew if the Phone Caller pulled up to us I would not hesitate to give him a face full of pheasant load, and then what are you? A teenaged killer. Mom couldn’t live with that. She didn’t want any of this to affect her kids, even though it obviously already had. It wasn’t long before she started thinking about taking Dad back.

  Other than not being permitted to shoot the stalker, I was treated like an adult. I got up at four A.M. every day and Mom made me breakfast, and then I drove south to the flower farm, where I set irrigation and built bulb-drying boxes and crawled along mile-long rows of gladiolas on my knees pulling nutgrass. Because I had a job, Dad treated me differently. Offered me coffee instead of milk. Took me to a bar on the WMU campus called Waldo’s, where we could look at the waitresses and play pool after work.

  That summer I started having sex, too. Mom hired a high-school-aged woman to look after Joe and Brett when she had to work at night, because I was desperate to see my fr
iends at the lake and I was unreliable as a babysitter, anyway. One night after the sitter put them to bed, I was in my room in my robe listening to records and she just slid into bed with me and after talking for a minute put her hand in my underwear, and when she felt what was going on there she said, “I knew it. Horny as hell,” and proceeded to shimmy out of her skintight jeans. I think I helped a little. She showed me what to do, but I don’t believe I said a word. I was thirteen and she was probably fifteen or sixteen and I know these things would be seen differently now, but I was neither scared nor sorry. She was kind and seemed to delight in showing me the ropes, despite my sweaty silence, and I was as grateful as a puppy pulled from a well. I was sure she’d forget about me afterward, but she didn’t. For a few months, it became a regular thing. Mom would make me my breakfast and I’d casually ask, “We have a babysitter tonight?” and if we did I’d dream about that all day.

  The days belonged to Fred W. Nagle and Sons, flower farmers, but the nights were mine. I would drive the Kawasaki down to Crooked Lake and float around with friends in flotillas of boats and look at the fuzzy stars, or dodge the drunken dads cruising the lake on their pontoon boats shooting bottle rockets and black powder cannons at one another. The adults behaved much worse than we ever would. I was not in love with the woman I was having sex with, and she wasn’t in love with me, either, and I was a little relieved we didn’t run in the same circles, but the summer air felt better because she was out there somewhere.

  The neighbors across the street, the Stevens, had a two-hundred-acre farm, and I took to walking their vineyards at night. They wouldn’t care; their mom, Judy, was like a second mother to me. They had five kids and their oldest, Matt, was one of my best friends. I’d go over to their place in the mornings before school and sometimes eat a second breakfast, and Judy always seemed delighted to see me there. I felt good walking onto their place at night, and I especially loved going way to the back of their farm, near the center of the block under towering red oaks and maples. It was buggy but cool, and there were always deer back there. In September the grapes would be ripe, and it would smell like you fell into a vat of nirvana. Even Dad used to laugh at how much I craved that smell every fall; I’d ride in his car with my head out the window gulping at the air. The grapes were destined for the Welch’s plant in Lawton, where they were made into grape juice, and sometimes they’d stay on the vine into October for added sugar. I’d walk through the vineyard in the dark with my mouth open like I could taste every berry.

  I was secretive about my aesthetic and sensual fixations. If I went walking with other people in the grapes, it inevitably turned into a grape fight, and I didn’t need that. I didn’t want people to know about the babysitter. When guys in school talked about scoring with this girl or that girl, I would cringe, even though I would have loved to have been doing the same. I didn’t want their beauty cheapened. The girl they’d be talking about would have a little thing about her that I absolutely adored, like the smell of her hair or her laugh or the way her jeans looked on her hips. I couldn’t stand it when people fought. I couldn’t stand it when someone went out of their way to run over a possum, or when hunting and fishing were regarded as an excuse for promiscuous violence or savagery. One of my best friends in school was a foaming fanatic about hunting, and one Monday he swung into the school hallways yelling and laughing as he told the story of his first deer over and over, how “I saw horns across the field and I started gunning with that twelve-gauge, BA-WOOM! BA-WOOM! And I hit it, and blood was flying up, and it got up and I was running and reloading! BA-WOOM! And I was falling down in the field and it was falling down and I thought I was never going to kill it!” Everybody was laughing as the BA-WOOM echoed down the hallways and I was laughing with them, and I hated this story so much. He told it for years afterward and I moaned every time. “What’s the matter, Kuips?!” he’d roar. “You don’t like the blood and guts?!” I didn’t want my good friend to sound like a slob. He made hunting sound like it was all about frenzy and bloodlust and testosterone, like it was a revenge killing. I wanted it to be holy.

  Sitting in the dark at Card’s had raised a feeling in me and I hunted it everywhere. It was a complete picture made of black. I could think differently out there, experience a kind of wholeness, because the thoughts weren’t all mine. Only a couple of them were mine. Maybe Dad was so quiet in the blind because he was listening to those outside thoughts, too. The thoughts belonged to the world. It was a feeling that everything out there owned pieces of my imagination. I couldn’t disrespect them—trees, stars, mosquitoes, grapes, dirt—because they formed my own thoughts. I didn’t have good enough words for it. It was an ecology of mind.

  In the inky darkness, a noise like a heavy footfall shook the forest floor. And then another, with a shock like a tree slamming to earth, a thud I felt in my chest. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I picked up my deer rifle.

  I peered through the scope and saw pure black. It was my third year at Card’s and my first sitting in a blind alone. In the dense dark, branches were snapping. Thud. The ground under my boots quaked. Even a huge bear would not stomp that hard. My heart was pounding as I took little sips of breath.

  The trees were rattling and the stomping accelerated. Smash thud thud. The thing was charging, it was coming like a storm, all fang and claw, Thud THUD thud thump-th-thud. I twisted the little latch on the door to the blind, hands shaking, and hauled myself outside so I wouldn’t be just a snack in a sheet-metal box. I raised my gun to the darkness.

  Thud whump thud—Chok!

  What the hell?

  Chok chok chok chok, came a chalky cackle like the low talk of a giant chicken.

  An idea slowly formed in my mind: turkeys! The gun shook as I held it up.

  All around me in the moonless dark, wild turkeys jumped down from their roost in a tree right over my head, awkwardly cracking off small limbs on their way down with wings too wet to fly, maybe forty or more twenty-pound birds each landing heavily on the ground with a rubbery bounce. Thump. Whump. I could hear them flapping and clucking in the darkness.

  Adrenaline boiled in my body, and I started to laugh out loud. I rushed over to a tree and took an urgent shit. The darkness around me sparkled with frost and magic. Why were these birds jumping down in the darkness? They usually waited until daybreak. Maybe they didn’t like roosting over me; maybe I had called them down. I thought I knew what to expect in the woods, but this discovery took my breath away: a piece of pure imagination had become real. The monster under the bed had turned out to be a turkey. What else was out there? Or, rather, what else was in there? The thoughts inside me were somehow related to the reality outside me. They manifested one another. They made one another.

  That night, Dad said he heard someone laughing in the woods when they were all trying to be quiet, and he wondered if it was me. I said yeah. “What was so funny?” he said, irritated.

  “I got scared by turkeys,” I said, and told him the story.

  He and Jim laughed so hard I thought they would fall over.

  Dad wanted to move back in with us. He hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place. He wanted to have his wife and kids but also other ladies on the side. Sally kept lobbying on his behalf and Grandma Gertrude also put in a call or two. Men run around, they said. Don’t split up the family. The whole time he and Mom were separated, Dad would come over to the house quite a bit. Sometimes they would disappear into the bedroom and I thought they were having sex and maybe they were, but then you’d hear their voices rise and they would be having a fight. He would be begging Mom to take him back and she’d be saying no. Joe sometimes stood with his ear to the door of their bedroom. Brett and I didn’t want Dad to come back, but Joe did. Dad whipped open the door once, and Joe was standing there and said to Dad, “Why are you crying?”

  “It’s okay for dads to cry sometimes,” Dad said.

  Joe and Brett didn’t have much of a relationship to Dad at that time, because he’d
been put out the door when they were five and six, respectively, and gone for three years. Lots of times, he didn’t know what we were laughing or fighting about, and when we did fight he wanted to immediately snuff the conflict with violence. Brett hit Joe once when Dad was around and Joe started to cry, and our father pounded down the stairs in his pointy-toed Tony Lamas and kicked Brett in the stomach, lifting him off the ground. He kicked the wind right out of him and Mom screamed that he might have broken Brett’s ribs, but Dad just pounded back upstairs and prowled the hallway up there, stewing.

  He started taking Joe and Brett to the North Branch of the Manistee during those years, but I didn’t go because I had started working. My fishing abilities fell off for a few years, but Joe and Brett got quite expert. There was nothing else to do but get expert: Dad didn’t go fishing with them, just like he didn’t go hunting with me. We had to teach ourselves. It was more like dropping us off and hoping we got something out of it while he struggled with his own relationship to the Other.

  He was gone for three years, and for two and three-quarters of those years, Mom never went on a date. She worked and took care of us and worried about the Phone Caller. Then she started talking to Tom, the wine rep who serviced the Osco where she worked. He was extraordinarily kind, athletic, mustachioed, single. He had been a high school tennis star. He made her laugh. He worked for Paw Paw Distributors, an influential beverage company run by a family in one of Michigan’s few wine towns, and shortly after they met he invited Mom to the wedding of one of the owners’ children. It was a strange first date, but she was intrigued and had a good time, and even danced with David Braganini, the president of St. Julian’s winery.

  Somehow Dad got word of this and rushed over to Vern and Sally’s and collapsed. They talked for hours, and then he got angry and called Mom and she agreed to let him come over. He was as straightforward as only a true shit-heel can be. He never apologized for any of his infidelities or even acknowledged they’d happened, but said he absolutely would not stand for her to be out in public trying another man. He bullied her, and she wasn’t going to be bullied. Everybody in town knew about his pussy palace. She told him to leave. And went on another date with Tom. But Dad kept coming back.