by Chris Lynch
Steven didn’t respond, not even with a facial expression. He wore a glaze, like one of those war heroes in the movies who doesn’t want to talk about his experiences.
“I think that’s a bird, right there,” Ling said. “Can I shoot? Can I shoot now?”
Gunnar laughed. “Well, for one thing, that is a butterfly you see down there, so no, don’t shoot it. And for another thing, there’s a very important rule when we’re hunting.” Gunnar snapped his fingers.
“Johnny Chesthair always takes the first shot,” Steven said on cue.
“But Steven said he doesn’t want to shoot.”
“He’s not Johnny Chesthair,” Gunnar said indignantly. “He’s Johnny Junior. I’m the original Johnny.”
So, once we had the rules straightened out, it was a simple matter of waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
Wolf nodded off in his chair, with the rifle Lars gave him tucked safely under his arm. Gunnar passed much of the time showing Ling what to do when the moment arrived.
“You’re a big boy, so you’re carrying the big stick,” Gunnar said. “This here’s a 454 Casull with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel and a scope by Pentax—you know, the company that makes those really nice cameras. This boy’ll bring down anything that can live in these woods. You feel it?”
Ling nodded, staring at the huge gunk of blue metal in his hand.
“No, son,” Gunnar stressed. “Do you feel it?”
This time Ling responded by lifting the gun up higher, bouncing it lightly in his hand, pointing it into the distance and peering over the barrel as he had seen the brothers doing.
“It’s okay,” Gunnar said. “Safety’s on.”
You could see Ling growing, in strength, in courage, in lust, as he got more familiar with the thing in his hand. He aimed it in all directions, with his one eye closed and the other frozen into that Pentax scope. He trained it on trees, on passing birds. He aimed it at the wind. Then he aimed it at the water hole.
“Let me remind you,” Lars interrupted, “that you want to hit him in one of a couple spots …”
Without looking away from the target area, Ling pointed at the spots on his own neck and shoulder that Lars had pinpointed earlier.
“This one’s ready,” Lars said to his brother.
“Yes, he is,” Gunnar said. “And I tell you what, Ling. I like you. You got gusto. So, special today: as long as the first thing that comes along is not a moose or an elk, it’s all yours. And you won’t have any problem, neither: if it’s in that scope, you ain’t gonna miss.”
Ling stayed focused, stayed ready. That was his way of saying thank you.
“What about you?” asked Lars, trying to work a pistol into my hand.
“No, no thank you,” I said. “I have some rules myself. I only kill what I intend to eat. And unless there’s some wild macaroni or wild potato chips roaming these woods, I’m all set.”
“And you … Stevie?” Lars taunted. “Come on now. You done it before, surely you can do it again. Show the boys how.”
“Sure, Lars,” Steven said. “Only, I dropped a quarter and it rolled down the hill. I think it landed right near the water hole. Could you trot down there and grab it for me while I load up?”
Lars shook his head at his nephew. “I don’t know, Steven. I think you’re getting even worse. I think there’s a little bit of sweet b—”
A shot, like a car hitting a telephone pole, cracked the mountain practically in half and made me jackknife up off the ground. Wolf burst out of his deep sleep, dropped the gun to the ground, and started wheeling himself frantically backward.
“First shot!” Gunnar whooped, slapping Ling on the back.
Ling remained in position, facing downhill, as if he had not already taken his shot. Gunnar, looking off in the same direction, pulled up even closer to Ling’s side, to make some important points.
“See there, the only thing is—and this is worth noticing for next time—that if you got a bullet that big, with an animal that small, what happens is that the shot just blows right through her. See”—he pointed—“see that there, how she’s doing that thing in a circle, she’ll do that for a while now because you didn’t hit the brain or the spine. It’s ironic, but the bullet that would bring down a Cape buffalo instantly with the proper placement, that same bullet takes quite a while to finish these little fellas. Funny, huh?”
Nobody there seemed to think so, except Lars, of course. Steven, who hadn’t even flinched at the sound of the shot, stared down at the swirls he was drawing in the dirt. Wolf slowly wheeled himself up to take a look at the scene down below. I wasn’t even curious.
Gunnar then raised his rifle, and took aim. “What you need,” he said, just before pulling the trigger, “is a hollow-tip or soft-cased bullet. That’ll expand inside the critter and mess some stuff up in there once and for all so she doesn’t flop around down there all day long.”
Bang.
Once and for all.
“You want me to go bring it back, Gunnar?” Lars asked.
Gunnar was already reloading. “Nah. Not with two holes in it. That’s nothing to show off back home.”
“Who’s next?” Gunnar asked.
Nobody answered. It was clear by now that Steven and I weren’t going to do it, and now both Wolfgang and Ling looked petrified. While the men were moving on with things as if nothing much had happened, their apprentices stared down over the hillside. As if something had.
“Well … okay then, I guess,” Gunnar said, looking at the sky. “We did get a late start here, and it’s probably been a lot for you guys for the first day. We’ll head back then, and tomorrow we’ll get the big stuff going.”
Wolfgang turned a tight circle and headed out behind me and Steven. We weren’t waiting for the adults to pack up, and they didn’t seem to mind.
Although I wanted to get away from there as fast as I could, I couldn’t help holding back when I realized Ling was lagging. I waited up, and as he got close, I saw his face, which was always extra white to begin with, but now was as drained and lifeless as fax paper.
And as shiny. Ling’s face was so covered with his famous tears, it was as if he’d been crying out of every pore on his forehead.
“I’m sorry, Jerome,” he said, as if he honestly needed to apologize to me. “I’m sorry … she had fur on her, you know, and she looked soft. And she moved slow, like a queen. She looked like Bambi’s mother, Jerome.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say, and was afraid I’d start bawling myself if I tried. So I just let him pass me, and walked slowly behind him, keeping myself between him and them.
7 Slugfest
LATER, WHEN WE SAT in the campfire circle, there was an actual campfire in the middle of it. In fact the only light left in the day was that popping, sparking flame that Lars had started by twisting a stick back and forth, creating friction in a bed of stones at the center of a blanket of dry leaves and kindling (and then drowning it all in lighter fluid and flicking his cigarette ash on it).
We cooked hot dogs on sticks. Lars and Gunnar cooked big fat bloody beefsteaks. We drank water from the stream that we passed around in one community pan. They kept right on drinking out of that coffee flask.
“This, children, is what happiness is,” Lars said, stretching out before the fire and patting his belly. “This is where a man achieves happiness.”
“Don’t be a sap, Lars,” Wolf said. “There is only one thing that buys happiness, and everybody knows it’s money.”
Gunnar reached back behind him, tipped up a rock, and lifted out a slug.
I jumped to my feet, took ten steps, and made sure the roaring fire was between myself and that wild slug. Don’t laugh. They can be very poisonous.
Gunnar impaled the creature on a pointed stick and began roasting it over the fire. Then he extended the stick to Wolf.
“Okay, happiness,” Gunnar said. “I’ll pay you five dollars to eat this.”
“Don’t you worry there, Swimmer, there’s plenty more sluggerinos when this one’s gone. Don’t get greedy now.”
Wolf didn’t look his normally cool self as he stared nose to nose with the quick-fried and newly bug-eyed slug. But he wasn’t about to give in, either.
“What, no Grey Poupon?” Wolf asked, acting totally disgusted. “What do you think I am, a savage?”
“I thought you were the tough one,” said Lars. He pointed at Ling. “I bet he’d eat it.”
Gunnar stuck the slug kabob under Ling-Ling’s nose. “How ’bout it? Wouldja?”
Ling looked down at the oozing thing, then back at Gunnar calmly. “Well, I would have eaten it. But not now that you’ve had your hands all over it.”
All three remaining He-Men joined in a big laugh at that. Ling, who at first hadn’t realized he’d even made a joke, cracked us a smile. The brothers Lundquist were not amused. They did not appreciate being topped. Not by boys. Not in their woods. Not at night.
“So, you run outta nerve?” Gunnar asked in a less friendly tone, actually touching the tip of Wolf’s nose with the creepy crawler.
It was too tense now. We all froze, except for Ling, who was chopping tree limbs into firewood, firewood into kindling, kindling into splinters, and splinters into oblivion with his hatchet.
“Five dollars?” Wolf asked, sniffing at the slug as if he found it appetizing. The thing was glistening, bleeding some gooey liquid like a badly cut infected finger.
“Five dollars,” Gunnar answered.
Wolf held out his open hand. “Hand it over.”
“Well, I don’t have it right here on me,” Gunnar said.
“Whatever. You ain’t got the money, then you eat the slug.”
I had been all set to cover both eyes with my hands, but this I could watch.
“It’s in my other pants.”
“Well, so are your—”
“Watch it there, junior,” Gunnar said. But he had been trumped, and everybody knew it.
Out came the five-dollar bill.
In went the slug.
“Oh my god,” I said, turning away a fraction too late. Wolf played it up, rolling the thing around in his mouth, rubbing his belly, moaning yummy-yummy noises.
The brothers were whipped, soundly. And like the fine sportsmen they were, they stood and tromped off to their private camp without saying another word.
This was big, a major moment in He-Man history, and we all knew it. The three of us—Steven, Ling, and myself—stood and approached Wolf, who sat in his chair, smiling. Like a pope, he nodded and quietly accepted our congratulatory handshakes as we filed by one at a time.
As soon as the men were clearly gone, and the receiving line had passed, Wolf opened his mouth and let the fat oozy bug roll off his tongue, down his shirt front, and onto his lap. Then he feverishly rubbed the inside of his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.
“You know,” Steven pointed out to him, “it probably would have been less disgusting to just swallow the thing and get it over with, instead of holding it in your mouth all that time.”
Wolf nodded, looking pensive. “You have a point there, Steve-o. But then if I swallowed it, I wouldn’t be able to use it again … later.”
Wolf smiled, most sinister, at Steven.
Gradually, Steven got it. “Jerk chicken,” he exclaimed, pumping his fist.
“Any of you other game animals up for a little wild woods adventure?” Wolf offered. “I do believe I feel a revolt coming on. Who wants to be revolting with me?”
Ling looked up from his busy wood-chopping. He still had on his paintballed shirt, which was now stuck like wallpaper paste to his belly. “I think maybe I will, yes,” he said, splitting a branch.
“Jerome?”
I paused. I sure would have preferred a diplomatic solution to all this. “Maybe we don’t have to revolt, exactly,” I reasoned. “Maybe if we just wrote out a list of our grievances, then sat down and went over it with them point by point …”
“Or would you rather just be hunted for sport all weekend, Underwear Boy?” Steven asked.
Oh ya. I’d almost forgotten.
“Let’s do it,” I said, joining the newly mobilized He-Man Women Haters Club for high fives around the campfire. “And when they come crawling to me looking for an extra pair of shorts, see if I give them anything.”
“Easy there, tiger,” Wolf laughed.
8 Lundquist Lodge
THE RAIN HAD PUMMELED us all night, right through the waterproof Eddie Bauer tent. It continued to pummel me through my True Value green lawn-and-leaf bag raincoat the next morning, as I leaped through the trees like a shiny deranged forest gnome.
“Gunnar, Gunnar, Gunnar, Gunnar, Gunnar, Laaaarrrrssss!” I yelled as I burst through the clearing into their camp. “Gunnar, Gunnar, Gunnar, Gunn—”
My plan was to go right on screaming, but I was stopped dead by the vision of their camp. I stood, staring.
It was no wonder they didn’t want anyone seeing their setup. Steven had filled us in on their indoor version of outdoors, but he could not have prepared me for Lundquist Lodge.
“You call this camping?” I said right out loud. “You call this the great outdoors?” They sure slept warm and dry through the monsoons, in their forty-foot trailer with the generator pumping away behind it and the tin chimney puffing out a very comforting-looking wisp of gray smoke.
The trailer looked so showroom-new that its whiteness practically gave me sun spots, even in the rain. I crept closer, growing more mystified with every find. A pizza box. How in the world did they get a pizza delivered up here? Two chaise lounges, the kind you bring to the beach. A gas grill big enough to roast a bison on. And … no, no way. Could that possibly be an eighteen-inch RCA satellite dish on the roof? I crept up to the window, peeked inside to where the two of them were flopped across a couple of mighty cozy-looking—and dry—cots in front of… yup, a TV. Chips and dips and humongous beer steins with hats on them and a whole box of Yankee Doodles, and is that Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey I see? Well, sure, there’s the refrigerator-freezer over there under the wet bar, silly old me.
The dirtbags. You know what they left us to have for breakfast? A paper bag full of onion bagels that were already stale before we went to bed and soaked to mush by the time we got up, a bunch of jelly packets lifted from the diner, and one plastic knife.
I had had my doubts about the Plan before, but not now.
I was going to enjoy this.
“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” I screamed, running in great circles around and around the trailer, slapping at the aluminum sides with my palm until it hurt, then with a big stick.
“Steven’s missing! Hellllp! Gunnar! Lars! Helllllp!” I yelled. “Steven’s lost!”
I ran and I screamed and I slapped and pounded.
And I stopped.
I peeked in the window again. Neither one had woken up. I crept in through the unlocked door, went right up to the portable stereo with microphone and karaoke feature, and I turned it on.
“Help help help help! Steven’s gone gone gone gone!”
The echo feature made for a pretty dramatic effect.
“What?!” Lars yelled, jumping up out of bed, falling on the floor, climbing back up just in time to get run down by his stampeding white-rhino brother.
“What?” Gunnar demanded, grabbing me by my shoulders and shaking me. “What, kid? What are you talking about?”
I made an effort to sound weak and scared and helpless, which was really no effort at all with him rattling my bones like that. “S-S-S-Steven went out last night, for a walk, he said. To get a drink at his favorite stream, he said. Said he knew the area well, he said, so it seemed fine. None of the rest of us wanted to go with him because, well, you know, we’re not the kind of outdoorsmen you guys are …”
“So, what happened?” He shook me harder, as if my batteries were run
ning down and he had to get to the end of my tape before I conked.
“And we woke up this morning and he wasn’t there. He never came back.”
“Oh, lord,” Lars said, automatically scrambling to gather up some weaponry.
“‘Oh, lord’ is right,” Gunnar said, doing likewise. “His mother is gonna kill me.”
Touching, isn’t it?
While the concerned adults mobilized, banging around the confines of their small palace, I cooled my heels, warmed my hands by the crackling wood stove, helped myself to a couple of foot-long pretzel rods.
“Got any sparkling water?” I asked.
“Don’t be a—” Lars started saying until his brother cut him off.
“There,” he said, pointing without looking. “In the fridge.”
They dressed so much alike it was almost cute. Fishing vests, rubberized fishing hats with flies and hooks dangling, Wellington boots, and New England Patriots windbreakers.
“Let’s go,” Gunnar ordered, hunting rifle in one hand, coffee canteen in the other.
Ling stood on the edge of our camp, overlooking the slope and the stream below. The weather was no problem for him. In his bright orange poncho, black boots pointing out east to west, and his Gorton’s of Gloucester fisherman hat coming to a fine point on top, he looked like a human pylon.
“What’s the word, what’s the word?” Gunnar said, stepping up behind Ling. “I want some answers.”
Ling turned around, his face wet with rain—he’d been staring straight into the wind. He shrugged, then turned back to staring.
Wolf came wheeling up.
“What do you know?” Gunnar snapped. “Huh? Huh?”
“I don’t know nothing,” Wolf said grimly, shaking his head. His wheels rutted in the mud. He backed up, surged forward, got stuck again. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have to get back into the tent. Look at this.” He gestured to where water was pooling up in his lap. “How you guys doing there? You hold up okay last night, hmmm?”
“Huh,” Lars said, distracted. “Oh, ah, ya. We held up okay.” He looked over to me. I reassured him with a wink. Your secret’s safe with me, ya rat.