by Chris Lynch
Real men eat in diners.
We stopped somewhere off of U.S. Route 1, halfway to where we were going, and only seven or eight twists off the main road. Gunnar drove it like it was where he stopped for breakfast on his way to work every day. It was actually almost beautiful, in its own Li’l Abner kind of way. Bright shiny polished stainless steel, the whole place was no bigger than a tractor trailer, and shaped like a hot dog. There were small neon signs in the windows and on the roof that just said EAT, as if we were going to pull in, sit down, and then not know what to do with ourselves once we got there.
There were eight men in there already, all of them hunched over at the counter, and all of them wearing hats. The ones with the plaid, ear-flap hunter hats were obviously the local brainy guys. You could tell that right off because the others, with the baseball caps, had their brims all covered in ketchup from swooping too low into the luncheon specials.
But who could blame them?
“Venison croquettes for me,” Wolfgang crowed. “And a cup of moose-face chowder.”
Ling looked to the brothers. “What is their water source here?”
“Artesian well,” Lars answered.
“I’ll have an apple and a glass of water. No ice.”
“Party on, Ling-Ling,” Steven said. “Myself, I’m having the bison balls. Care to join me, Jerome?”
I could not respond. I mean, physically, I couldn’t speak, even if a response had been necessary. Which it certainly shouldn’t have been. I pointed to the spot on the menu where the safe-looking haddock special was.
“Jerk chicken,” Gunnar blurted.
“Huh?” his son asked.
“Jerk chicken,” Gunnar repeated, as if that said it all.
“Jerk chicken,” Lars chimed in. “There’s a man’s dish for ya.”
And so it went. But that was all beside the point anyway. The point was not the entree, but the side dish.
Beans.
That’s right. Beans. The musical fruit and good for your heart and all the other crudities that describe what happens to a person who overindulges in them. That’s what we all had for lunch. The haddock luncheon special? A piece of spongy yellow flesh the size of a deck of cards, a piece of corn bread the same size, and an ocean of oozy brown and sludgy baked beans. Jerk chicken? Little chicken boat, corn bread, floating on bean tide. Bison balls? Use your imagination.
But we all ate without incident, and without words. We were men on a quest here, fueling up for the deep-woods expedition, no time for chitchat. Like tiny midget sword fights going on in a church, the place was spooky with the sound of cutlery and nothing else.
Until, that is, Gunnar sounded the horn. He announced the official end of the gathering with a belch that exploded the calm, tipped over a water glass, and brought the waitress with the check.
I saw, briefly, the wince of embarrassment on Steven’s face as the brothers Lundquist laughed their way into the parking lot. It occurred to me that Gunnar treated his son no differently than the rest of us, except maybe he ignored him a little more.
“Can I ask you something, Steven?” I asked cautiously.
“You want to know what bison balls taste like, right? Well, actually they’re made out of moose burger, but bison balls just sounds cooler.”
“Oh, for sure,” I said. “But no, I wanted to ask about you and your dad.” As I said it, I was thinking of my own father, who I admired from afar. Afar, far, far, but never quite far enough, to tell the truth. “How do you feel about—”
“Jerk chicken,” Steven said, as if that covered it. Which, I guess, it did.
4 If and When
I BARELY SURVIVED THE rest of the ride to Moosehead. Stephen King wouldn’t even write about what went on in that disgusting cheesewagon of a truck for the last two hours of the trip.
“Oh my god, who did that?” I gasped.
Everybody made gagging noises. Wolf laughed like Woody Woodpecker.
“Jeez, Wolf, be a human, will you? Open your window.”
He did, but he continued to laugh about it. Then, it came across from the other side of me.
“Steven,” I barked. “Open that window right this minute. Really, you guys, just because we’re on an all-male outing to the woods does not mean—”
Right here was where it went from mere bad taste to a public health problem. As I spoke to my troops, the windows that had gone down mysteriously went back up again.
“That’s not funny, Wolfgang,” I said. “Put the window back down.”
“I didn’t do it,” he said.
Then, from the driver’s seat, Gunnar turned briefly to grin at us. “Sorry, boys. Part of the rite of passage. Can’t very well call yourselves He-Men if you let a little wind blow you down. Only wimps open the windows at a time like this.”
“Oh my god!” I repeated, and climbed over Steven to get at his electric window button. I pecked and pounded on the control, but it was no use. Gunnar had the master controls, and he’d locked the windows from up front.
“This’ll make men outta ya,” Lars laughed.
“I don’t want to be a man anymore,” I yelled. “Let me out.”
“Hah,” Gunnar snapped. “I knew it. The ol’ gas chamber does it every time, smokes out the weenies.”
“I am not—”
“Tell you what,” Gunnar offered. He extended his hand into the backseat without taking his eyes off the road. “I’ll give you the control. You just pull on my finger there, and that makes the window go down.”
They all started laughing then, and chanting me on. “Pull it. Pull it. Pull it.”
“I will not,” I said, crossing my arms.
Somebody erupted. Somebody else then.
“Oh my god.” I uncrossed my arms, and covered my mouth and nose with my hands.
“Do it,” Gunnar and his finger urged me. “It’s the only way.”
It was ghastly. You could feel the pressure building in the truck, like the cabin of a descending airplane.
I had to. I pulled it.
You think you know what happened then, don’t you?
Uh-uh. It was much, much worse. This Gunnar was no ordinary man. He could make onions cry. He was a professional. Clearly, that finger had been pulled before.
When we finally pulled into the campsite, I staggered out of the Starship Stench, wobble-legged and dizzy. The other guys were yukking it up. What is it about intestinal failure that makes guys happy? Is there an intoxication effect? Is it like a stun-gun reaction?
“That doesn’t bother you?” I asked Steven as he dragged a tent to a smooth piece of ground.
“What doesn’t bother me?”
“That. That … nerve-gas bomb. And getting sealed inside the truck with it like lab frogs.”
“What, that? That’s nothing. You better toughen yourself up there, Jerome. He hasn’t even cracked open his big jar of pickled eggs yet. Whoo boy, wait’ll …”
It didn’t even matter whether or not he was just pulling my leg. I held my stomach with one hand and my mouth with the other, and backed away, leaving him to pitch our tent alone.
We were broken up into twos. Steven and I in one tent, Ling and Wolf in a second, and the brothers Lundquist… hey, where were they off to?
“Too crowded over here,” Gunnar said. “We just need to spread out a bit. Lars and me will be right over that way, about thirty yards over, in the next clearing.”
“Thank god,” Steven muttered.
“Oh my god,” I gulped. “Like … here alone by ourselves?”
“What’s with you, Underwear Boy?” Gunnar asked. “You gonna miss me or somethin’?” He laughed.
“Well, no, it’s not that. It’s just—”
“Now, don’t let us catch you tiptoeing over to our camp in the middle of the night there, Underwear Boy,” Lars added, raising his hunting rifle. “I hear twigs crackling in my sleep, I’m comin’ up blastin’.”
The brothers Lundquist were by now har-har-harring so har
d at everything they themselves said, it was like they had a TV laugh track following them around.
“Ya, you get lonely in the middle of the night, go find the Swimmer there.”
Swimmer was Gunnar’s nickname for Steven, because Steven was on the swim team. Gunnar apparently didn’t think very highly of the swim team, or anyone who might be on it.
“And if my wheels get stuck, then you have to push me, right?” Wolf was saying to his new roommate, Ling, as Ling grappled with the tent alone.
“Sure, Wolf,” Ling answered evenly.
“And if the terrain becomes impassable, then you have to piggyback me and tow the chair behind you until we reach better ground. Ling, you ever see the ape movie Mighty Joe Young? He could do stuff like that. And you remind me of him, Mighty Joe.”
“I saw the movie,” Ling said.
“Mighty Joe Ling,” Wolf said. “How’s that sound?”
Ling stood up straight, tall … and big.
“Not too good, Wolf,” Ling said, his quietly nutty face staring Wolf down. “Doesn’t sound too good to me. You know?”
It was a rare treat to see Wolf shrink a little. “Sure,” he said. “Fine. Ling. Ling-Ling sounds good to me.”
Ling nodded and went back at the tent. I went over and helped him, closing my eyes and clutching the stakes as he hammered away with the blunt end of the hatchet.
When the two tents were set up, and we had our backpacks and bedrolls stowed, I looked around to survey, drink it in. To get it.
It certainly was beautiful. We were perched about a third of the way up a medium-size hill, but with a straight-on view of a maximum-size one just on the other side of the lake. Though it was spring, and warm even up here, we could see snowfields and bright white trails cutting out of the pines, spread out all over the top half of that mountain and all its smaller buddies beyond. There wasn’t a soul we could see or hear, as if the entire mountain, the entire lake, the entire state, belonged to just us. The surface of the water was still and unbroken, like a tremendous oval looking-glass reflecting the clear powder blue of the sky above us, and the flock of Canada geese arrowing across it.
I found the other guys staring and listening, just like I was, at the same time.
Hooooo was the sound that broke it.
“Wow,” I said. “An owl. That’s so—”
“It’s daytime, ya sap,” Wolf shot. “It couldn’t have been an owl. It was a coyote.”
“A what?” I backed quickly away from Wolf, as if he were the coyote.
“It was a loon,” Ling said.
“You,” Wolf said, pointing and grinning at Ling, “are the loon.”
“Shaddup, all of ya,” Steven crowed.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re not the boss around here.”
“Sorry, boss. Go ahead, boss us.”
They all turned to me. I wasn’t fooled; it was mock respect.
“Well,” I said. “I suppose … we should … do something, now that we’re here.”
“Let’s go kill something for supper!” Ling charged, waving his hatchet high.
“Ya,” Steven seconded. Wolf was already fish-tailing into the woods.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s go get Lars and Gunnar first.” I started off down the narrow path where the blond barbarians had disappeared a short while before.
“No!” Steven yelled, grabbing me by the shirt-tail.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked as I neatly tucked the shirt back in again. Just because we were in the woods was no reason we had to be savages.
“Because they don’t like it when you go to their side. It’s forbidden.”
“Verboten?” Wolfgang asked. I saw it, actually saw his pointed little ears prick up. “Awesome, let’s get on over there.”
Steven made no attempt to stop him, other than to point out, “They will actually shoot at you, Wolf.”
Wolf stopped short, trying to gauge Steven’s bluff. Then he started again. “You’re snowing me, Steven.”
Steven whistled, rolled up his sleeve, and gathered us all around him. He pointed to a fleshy spot way high up on his shoulder. It was a good-size mark, some sort of scar, though it seemed to cut in all different directions like the points of a star.
“Oh, that’s a vaccination,” Wolf sniffed. He wheeled away again while He-Man Ling and I continued to examine the injury.
“I was six at the time,” Steven went on. “He told me to let him sleep in until ten that morning, but he had all the food and I was hungry. He said I was lucky I was blood related so he only winged me.”
“Good enough for me,” Ling said. “I’m going hunting without them.” And just like that, he stalked through the young scrubs on the edge of our camp and disappeared down the hill.
I looked at Steven. Steven looked at me. There was nobody big left in our camp.
We took off after Ling.
When Wolf—who was wheeling suspiciously slowly to begin with—saw us leaving, he reversed. The next thing we knew he was barreling over the edge of our site, cresting, then hitting high gear down the forty-degree grade of the hill straight for us.
“Yeeee-hahhhh!” he whooped. “But you boys better be ready to catch me.”
“Catch you?” I asked as we all stepped aside and let him whizz on past.
Bumpety-bumpety-bump, Wolf went, bouncing, jolting, ricocheting down the hillside, bouncing off forgiving soft birch trees, nearly tipping, righting himself—he was good, more like a rodeo rider than a slalom guy—then giving in to pure speed and uneven terrain as he sideswiped a boulder, spun around backward, then flew in reverse down the last ten yards of slope and into the brook with a dramatic splash.
The three of us ran down to the water, but slowed down when Wolf proved not to be dead. He sat up, propped up on a rock in the shallow stream, and made a whew! sound, like he was just stepping out of a nice hot shower. Ling was retrieving the wheelchair for him.
“Hey, no way,” Wolf said, wagging a finger. “I’m going again. You guys want rides, you have to wait in line, and they’ll cost you five dollars a throw.”
Steven shook his head, then helped him out of the water and into the chair. “You’re not even hurt, Wolf?”
“Oh please,” Wolf sneered. “What, with this wimpy soft Maine water? And mountains? You call these mountains? Where I come from we’d call these foothills. Or bumps.”
The big voice rained down on us from the campsite high above.
“Can’t turn our backs on you children for a second, can we?” Gunnar called. “You guys are so lame, except maybe for the cripple guy. Get on up here.”
Ever try to push a wheelchair up the side of a rocky hillside? The Lundquist men sat down after ten minutes of the struggle, laughing and sharing their coffee flask as the He-Man Women Haters struggled to haul one of their own back into camp. Wolf was laughing too. Every couple of minutes I’d catch him waving to the men and making what a bunch of dipsticks-type gestures at his laborers.
“Oh, this is just stupid,” Ling declared, halting the process.
“No, no,” said Wolf. “You guys are doing swell. You’re almost there. Stroke! Stroke!”
Swell. Is there a more ridiculous word? When a guy uses the word swell with you, it’s a clear sign that he’s sticking his finger up your nose.
“That’s it,” said Ling, who also recognized the sign. And in one mighty swoop—and despite the subject’s struggling—he lifted Wolf right out of the chair, slung him over his shoulder like a sack of baseballs, and hauled him up the hill. “See if you two can manage the chair,” Ling said. He wasn’t joking, because he doesn’t know how.
The brothers were applauding when we all gathered up at the top. Steven and I got there just in time for Mighty Joe Ling—don’t tell him I said that—to dump Wolfgang into the chair.
“So we’re learning, brother,” Gunnar said to Lars. “So far we learned that this one’s got guts,” he pointed at Wolf, “and this one’s got muscle.”
Ling-Ling was unmoved. Wolf was something else. “So, what’s the news there? It took you two brain surgeons this long to find out that Ling-Ling’s a bear and ol’ Wolfgang’s tougher than you’ll ever dream to be?”
Gunnar roared. He couldn’t get enough of Wolf. Myself, I could, but anyway …
“You’re right, boy,” Gunnar said. “We know all that for a fact. Now, what we don’t know about …”
Slowly, dramatically, as if they had been choreographing this moment, they all turned to Steven and me.
Oh no.
“We don’t know nothing about the Swimmer and the underwear guy, do we, fellas?”
Oh my gooooooood …
“Well,” I said, hoping to head this off, “my name is Jerome, and I like hockey and rollerball, and when I grow up I want to be a Navy SEAL or a baker. I became a member of the He-Men at its inception and ascended to its leadership faster than anyone else in—”
“Shaddup, you,” Steven said to me, while staring at his father. Then, to Gunnar: “Come on, Dad. You’re not going to start this.”
The father reached behind him and grabbed the green canvas bag that was hanging over his shoulder. It looked like a baseball team equipment bag, only it appeared to have just one bat in it.
Now, why would a man bring a bat on a camping trip?
But of course.
It was no bat. It was a rifle. Sort of. It was a pistol. Sort of. It was in between a rifle and a handgun, but it didn’t look quite like anything Clint Eastwood ever waved around. It had some long tanklike cylinder sticking out from the handle like an exhaust pipe, and as Gunnar’s red-rimmed eyes focused—sort of—on me, he was attaching some kind of canvas balloon to another pipe sticking up out of the barrel. The more familiar gunnish qualities of the thing were: It was long and black and steely and had a big ol’ handgrip and a scope. If Clint Eastwood played Robocop, this is what he’d carry.
“Jeez, Dad, no,” Steven pleaded.
“Better start swimming,” Gunnar said.
Boy, did I not like the sound of this.
“Let me see that,” Ling said, desperate for it. “Come on, come on.”