by Brian Hodge
At the apex of each arc came a breathless moment when they hung weightless and suspended. In delirium, he shook her streaming hair from his eyes and thought he glimpsed shapes conjoined and set against the night above him—arms and legs entwined and rising into the sky, as though they belonged to those ascending cries he'd just heard—but before he could track them the swing plunged down and back, and he saw only ground again.
On the next ascent he could no longer find them, seeing only streaks of white light. Very little about this night could he begin to understand, at least until another burst of incandescence showered down and reminded him of what she'd said about fireworks that looked like sperm, and so he wondered if that wasn't somehow the key to the impossible.
We're being seeded, he thought, and breathed it in like spores and dust, and believed once more that he glimpsed bodies in the heavens. But by what?
She grew bolder by the moment, letting go of his shoulders and holding on only with her legs as she leaned away from him, head thrown back and arms flung wide as she soared, then curling to him once again, always just in time to keep from braining herself against the ground.
And then her mouth was at his ear and she licked at the lobe, and he felt her smile spread against the side of his throat.
"Do you trust me?" she asked.
He didn't know what to say, or if he even could. No answer seemed right. No answer seemed wrong.
"If you trust me…let go," she said. "You'll know when."
And it was madness, wasn't it? Of course it was. But since when had love and lust not been? Sometimes madness was all that could take the place of courage.
Yet she was right—when the moment came he knew it. As the swing reached one last zenith, he let the chains slip from his aching hands and for an instant it was like being a boy again, bailing from the swing on a playground dare, except this time two of them were launched out and up, and a moment later he came inside her in extravagant spasms and imagined droplets leaking free to rain back to the earth.
He waited for gravity to reclaim them but somehow its grip fell short, as he had hoped it might and as she must've sensed without doubt, a certainty without knowing how, in that mysterious way of women beneath the moon. She only clung to him gasping, laughing, and rode the crest of her ecstatic wave as they were born aloft, higher and higher still, trees beneath them and stars above, and the magic of rapture in between.
His fingers cupped her face and she shivered with everything there was to shiver against except the cold, as they tumbled upward like two bodies locked into eternal orbit.
It was everything that love should've felt like—and did, once—except now it felt as though it might last forever.
They were not alone up here, just as they hadn't been in the meadow below, but the company was fewer and even farther-flung. Bodies pale and dark were joined as pairs and triads and foursomes—neighbors, he supposed, the ones he'd never gotten to know, and out of a benevolence he hadn't felt in what seemed like a very long time, he wished them well.
The first distant scream came from far overhead, and each one after sounded that much closer, hurtling toward them from out of the heights and depths above. He watched it plummet and held her tightly to him as it neared, roaring now with the rushing sound of flames and a discordant cry ripped from two throats, its pitch the only thing that still climbed. It passed so close he could feel the heat blast across his skin, a fireball alive and twisting with a fused and blackened tangle of arms and legs thrashing from its center, and in its wake the stink of scorching meat.
He could not watch what happened when it struck the earth below.
"Don't think it," she said after a moment, the only thing to come from her tonight that seemed to have required real effort. "No. No."
And he knew, in that rare way of men beneath the moon, that while she may have talked a defiant game last week, she really must have been as lonely as he.
"No. It won't happen," she said. "We got a better start than any of them."
So he closed his eyes while on the rise, and prayed to never feel the fall.
WHEN THE SILENCE GETS TOO LOUD
My name is Greg, son of Jerry, who was son of Luther, son of Jefferson…
Ho.
Sounds like a laugh now, and I guess that's appropriate. The joke's on us, the new patriarchs. That's what we were going to be. Reclaiming what we'd lost, what we were all so eager to blame the well-meaning women in our lives for civilizing out of us.
But reclamation of any kind is too far beyond us now. All I have left is this testimony to the elemental man within, who must be quite amused by now, and to my own soul. At this point I can finally afford the honesty—it's cheap enough.
My name is Greg, father of Kyle.
In all honesty I can say I don't hate him.
Not yet, at least.
Give me another hour, once the cords have cut into me a little deeper, and then we'll see how I feel.
*
September weekend in the Minnesota woods: They had chosen the dates as though possessed by the foresight of visionaries. The days bright, the weather fair, the nights dry. Roughing it had never been so pleasant.
Eight fathers and eleven sons, daughters left behind to tend hearth and home. Leave them to the kitchens with their mothers, while men and man-children communed with the timeless, to discover the unifying ancient within them all. Better the boys seek it now, at the threshold of puberty and younger, than to find themselves wandering emasculated through the ripening fields of young adulthood.
It was the least fathers could do: steer their sons from the missteps that had so handicapped themselves. The bibles of these patriarchs were newer tomes: Iron John and Fire In the Belly, read and reread aloud to one another during weekly groups held in basements like tribal councils, and if a passage of great personal relevance brought a lump to the throat or a tear to the eye, that was well and good. Better still, a blessing. For they were men, and they were there for one another.
Minnesota woodland beckoned cool and pure, and they rolled in behind the wheels of 4x4s and SUVs. The rowdy youngsters, all between six and eleven, were gangly raw bundles of energy and nerves, tipped with burning fuses of caffeinated sodas and their healthy love of sanctioned mischief and a break in routine—their fathers had pulled them out of half a school day of Friday classes.
Greg Fischer walked among the newly disembarked sons with a canvas bag held open wide. "Okay, turn 'em off. No more Gameboys until we head back Sunday evening. Drop 'em right here, that's it."
The order was at best grudgingly accepted, as if to merely contemplate the severance brought on withdrawal symptoms. Kyle, ten, surrendered his most willingly, looking at his father and the bag with nonchalance that approached defiance. Saying, as it were, See Dad, it doesn't hurt. The boy had been like that all his life. After spankings, even. A kindergartner at stiff attention, glaring through brave tears like some proud five-year-old POW, announcing that it hadn't hurt because he'd tightened up his bottom.
Supplies were unloaded and tents pitched beneath pines that towered with stately dignity and utter indifference to time. So lofty over men and boys and their air of the moment, breathe it quickly or it'll grow stale.
Evening was quick upon their heels, then a night whose depth they never saw from their front doors. Theirs was a view fit to be witnessed from the mouth of a cave, the forest gripped by a deeper chill, dry and crisp, lit by the moon and the cool suns of other worlds, while nightbirds called and nocturnal paws were heard, never seen. They were surrounded, and all was holy, and they knew they were its masters.
They dined on steaks grilled over an open fire, and foil-wrapped potatoes thrust into the glowing embers. Sodas for the kids, beer for the fathers, and if the boys begged for a taste of the brew—forbidden at home by their mothers—out here it was okay. Out here there were no rules but instinct. They drank eagerly, then tore the cans away from grins wide or hesitant, and seemed more proud of the resultant water
y belches than anything.
"All right guys, listen up," said Charlie Draper. "This next part is one of the most important rituals we'll be doing this weekend." In the workaday world Charlie tested eyes and fitted contact lenses. "We call this The Naming of the Lineage. Because I tell you this, guys: If you don't know where you've come from, you can't ever really know who you are."
"And if you don't know who you are," added Zack Deitz, "then how you gonna know where you're going? Am I right?"
They ringed the fire with their bodies. Some standing, some squatting, some sitting on camp stools or lawn chairs brought from home. The fire and its steady crackle a beacon for their hearts, their souls. Fathers' eyes wide as they beheld it like an oracle, and so mesmerized, they began:
"My name is Charlie, son of Mitchell, son of Dean," said Draper.
"Ho!" cried the rest, a deep bark of masculine approval, and then Charlie laid a soft hand on his nine-year-old's shoulder, nodded down to him.
"My name is Chris, son of Charlie…son of Mitchell, um, son of Dean."
"Ho!"
Turning back to his father, then, both of them beaming from myopic eyes. On around the circle:
"My name is Greg, son of Jerry, son of Luther, son of Jefferson." The names became words from a conjuring spell, spoken amongst the assembly with a reverence that gave them power. While they had always meant something to Greg, bordering on the sacred, there was no denying that out here under trees and night they meant even more.
"Ho!"
The pride became a living entity that he could feel in his chest, his throat. Even before he had identified this longing, all he'd ever really hungered for, of lasting significance, was to pass down his heritage to a succeeding generation.
He had sired well…this seed before him, grown so tall. Made so like him in his own image. And then again, so not. He was his own young man.
Greg nodded.
"My name is Kyle, son of Greg, son of Jerry, son of Luther, son of Jefferson."
"Ho!"
On around the assembly it went, names pealing like the chimes of bells, in voices high and low. Once the patriarchal roads that had brought them all to this night had been named, several of the fathers went to the vehicles to retrieve the drums and brought them round the fire.
Cheaply made, most of them. Inferior hide stretched taut over inferior hollows, then lashed firm with rawhide. Men who, in their family lives, were more at home in offices and stockrooms, garages and boardrooms, sat joyfully in the dirt, bellies full of warm meat and cold drink, and pounded out simple rhythms in celebration of the night and of themselves.
Greg looked up from his drumming to grin at Kyle, who rolled his eyes as he watched his father leap up. Thrusting the cudgel at his son, passing the torch, then sitting him at the drum to carry on while Greg massaged kinks from his lower back, then hurled himself toward the fire. Arms and legs in abandon, to tread a shuffling path around the blaze with the boldest of the others.
He found the dance to be a language beyond race, beyond time. So human, on fundamental levels best left open to hear the whispers and roars of the divine.
Greg just hoped his knees would hold out.
For tomorrow would be grand.
Tomorrow they would hunt.
*
It comes upon you when you're out like this, away from the city, or even the smallest of towns: the sense of walking through something ageless, that you'll never understand. And in its eyes you're no more than a maggot, squirming in the home you've made in the carcass of what used to be more wilderness, and has since become pavement and tract housing.
I suppose, as fathers go, I'd been lax about exposing Kyle to this other world. Always figured there'd be time. Sure, we'd driven past it, and I'd turn around and chew him out from behind the wheel if he pitched trash out the window. Sure, he'd seen it on TV, in movies. But never first-hand.
So I have to wonder if maybe, after ten years, the first time a kid comes face-to-face with unspoiled wilderness he isn't hit a lot harder than his old man.
And, since there's less wilderness each passing year, if whatever spirit it is in the forest that makes us feel so humble gets a little more concentrated for every acre it's forced to retract in upon itself.
It's a theory, at least.
*
Morning found grumpy risers among fathers and sons alike. Coffee was passed around with a value greater than gold. Bacon and eggs sizzled in skillets while, hunters all, they dressed for the day.
Zack Deitz was the unofficial leader of Saturday's hunt. He owned the most guns.
"We're going after deer today," he called out to the boys. "And I bet cash money not a one of you fellows has ever stalked a deer before. Am I right? Lemme see the hands of my experienced hunters."
None rose.
"Do squirrels count?" asked one boy, finally.
Zack grinned, his fist over his heart. "You bet they do. But a deer's different. Squirrels, they don't look at you with big brown eyes, and I don't want any mama's boys crying about Bambi, you hear me? Used to, the man was the hunter of the family. If the man didn't go out and bring back the meat, his own went hungry. Now we can buy it all nice and bled clean for us, cut and wrapped in plastic and kept nice and cool...but it's not the same. Boys, I tell you…it's getting so I can't even bring myself to eat a package of meat my wife brings home from the supermarket. Just doesn't taste right anymore. 'Cause nothing tastes better than your own kill. That's why we're here. So we can remember what it's like to be hunters."
One tentative hand went up. "Sir?"
"Yeah, Bobby?"
"Deer season doesn't start for another few weeks."
"The deer doesn't know that." Zack Deitz grinned with wicked arched eyebrows and patted the stock of his Remington. "Neither does this rifle." He shook his head, spat tobacco juice over one shoulder. Getting deadly serious again. "You think the Indians used to care if it was deer season or not? The hunters that used to live in caves, you think they cared about some rule called deer season? That's the problem today, too many rules about things that got no business having rules made about 'em. You can't put a rule on hunger. Can't put rules on eating. It's not natural. So we're here because we obey a law that runs a lot deeper than any rule some game warden says."
They were off in a quarter-hour, some with rifles, others unarmed and tramping along for the thrill of the hunt. It was a miracle that this platoon did not drive away all wildlife far in advance of its own footfalls. But at last:
The sighting of the white bobtail flashing through the trees, strong thin legs bounding with a grace bestowed only by nature…and slain with speed so remote and fierce it could only belong to man. Heavy recoil of rifles into shoulders, rolling crack of the shots and the powder smell thick in their nostrils, gunsmoke wreathing heads like victory laurels.
All life in the forest came to a hush as the deer paused, stunned, wounded above the front shoulder. It staggered forward, once, twice, its hesitant attempts to walk reminiscent of a fawn's, then it buckled onto its side with twitching legs. Its bowels jetted mortality and the deer fell still. The hunters gathered, holy mass in a green cathedral.
Zack Deitz slit the animal's throat with a heavy knife, then pulled the delicate triangular head back to widen the slash so the blood could spill rich and hot.
As one by one, the boys lined up to have him trace a bold streak of red along each cheek.
*
Victors, they returned to camp with the field-dressed deer lashed to a stout greenwood branch borne on shoulders. Men and boys alike stepped jauntier than they had hours before, little weariness left considering their hours of tramping through the woods.
"Dad?" said Kyle, walking alongside him. While the deer was being gutted he had amused himself by borrowing a knife to sharpen a branch into a crude spear, and now carried it back to camp. Point up, but there would be no chastisements. Don't carry it that way, you'll fall and put an eye out—these were words left at home.
&
nbsp; "Yeah?" said Greg.
"Did the deer hurt much?" He spoke with a ten-year-old's clinical fascination with mortality. Kids could so often distance themselves at that age.
"Some. But not for long. It was over quick."
"Do you think it minds that we'll eat it?"
Greg smiled, his sense of fatherhood warming over an entirely new fire, too rarely stoked: he, a mentor whose wisdom was sought to make sense of a world where the two classes were victor and vanquished. "It doesn't think that way, like we do, Kyle. Out here almost everything's food for something else. There's a balance and a perfection in that. And if that's the fate an animal meets, well, most of the time it'll give up. Instinct tells it to accept."
Walking side by side, Kyle turned this over in his mind. Then: "Do I have to wash the blood off my face when I get home?"
Greg nodded. "I think your mom would appreciate that, don't you?"
"How come? If I bring something home from school—a paper or like that?—she sticks it on the refrigerator. How come this is different?"
Greg laughed. At Kyle's age they all had a concept of logic and justice that was so simple. Wonderful in theory, essentially unworkable in its purity. "It just is. Moms don't understand things like getting blooded after your first hunt."
"So…if we don't get to look any different when we go home…what's the good of coming out here at all?"
Greg patted him on the chest, then had to look twice at him. Such a change, the addition of two streaks of red on his cheeks. Above them Kyle's eyes were an older boy's, and it was not such a welcome sight after all. The first true foretaste Greg had had of someday being handed his walking papers.
How bitter, how sweet. To do your job right meant to strive for your own eventual obsolescence.
He patted Kyle's chest again. "So you can feel it in here. Where it really counts."
Kyle nodded, reluctant, anything but convinced. He found a scattering of fallen leaves, kicked them with petulance. "Sucks," he said quietly.