by Wingshooters
But that’s not what Earl Watson was thinking. Jake got up off his stool and followed Earl out the door, my grandfather an arm’s length away from him. I stood and walked over to the doorway. And from that proximity I could see the look on Earl’s face, the sheer and open hatred. His eyes were narrowed and his lips pressed tight, and a small spot appeared in the center of his cheek, stark white against the darkening red. His fists opened and closed and I could feel the tension radiating off his body.
Mr. Garrett must have felt something, too, for now he looked across the street and saw us there. And he must have seen me first, because his face softened a bit—but then his eyes settled on Earl. I don’t know if he knew who Earl Watson was, if he knew this was Kevin’s father. But the hostility in Earl’s face was unmistakable. Mr. Garrett looked at him for a long, hard second. Then he nodded slowly—an acknowledgment more than a greeting—and continued down the street.
The next Wednesday after school, I took my bike from the garage and headed out into the country. It was dreary outside, cold but not unbearable, the beginning of the long haul into winter. The trees seemed worn and tired; the fallen leaves had all turned limp and brown. The ground was muddy from a recent rain, and the cold had caused the mud to coagulate into hard brittle lumps, which made for a bumpy ride. I’d left Brett at home—this was something I needed to do by myself, and besides, I wasn’t going to the park. Instead, I rode all the way out to the satellite clinic, where I knew Mrs. Garrett worked on Wednesdays. I didn’t know why I wanted to see Mrs. Garrett; I just knew that I had to go there, had to see her after the Saturday stare-down between Earl Watson and her husband.
The clinic was in a building that had once been a package store next to the original highway. When the old highway became obsolete with the opening of Route 5, the store, without its main source of customers, had failed. This all happened long before my time, but I knew that the store had tried to revive itself at various times as an auto supplies shop, a feed store, and even a bar, until finally all commercial efforts stopped and the building was left to deteriorate. I had passed it occasionally on my rides into the country, and I had never, in my short time in Deerhorn, known it to be anything but a boarded-up place with empty beer cans strewn in front and tall weeds sprouting up through the cracks in the stairs.
But as I approached the old building—which was about half a mile east of Route 5 on Besemer Road—I was amazed by the transformation. The boards had been replaced by plain but functional windows. The cracked stairs had been removed, replaced by new stairs with metal railings. The old wooden sign, which had been painted over countless times to reflect the building’s different incarnations, was gone, and in its place was a brand-new sign, with bold red and black letters, that said, Deerhorn-Central Wisconsin Satellite Clinic. And for the first time in all the times I had seen this place, there was evidence of people—cars in the parking lot; two mothers talking at the bottom of the stairs while their children played peek-a-boo around their legs; figures moving behind the new windows. It was a remarkable change. The building didn’t look very big from outside, and I couldn’t picture how it might have been laid out. But it was bustling with activity. I noticed, through the wide front window, a row of people in what must have been the waiting room, and as I stood with my bike at the edge of the parking lot, several more people came out the door. I recognized Sammy Tyler, one of the trailer children and a third grader who got marched to the showers with Billy Coles every week. I wondered what might have been wrong with him, remembering the strange growth on his cheek, his graying teeth, the spots of thinning hair. As the Tylers moved to the end of the parking lot and walked down the road, I realized why there were so few cars for the number of patients waiting inside—because not many of the country people owned them.
Good things were happening here; even I could see that. I wanted to take a peek inside of the building, so I slowly walked my bike closer and looked around the corner. There was another door and a window maybe five feet off the ground, with a pile of cinder blocks nearby. I was standing there thinking about moving the blocks closer to the window when the side door opened and Mrs. Garrett stepped out. She didn’t see me at first—she looked tired and preoccupied—so I watched as she closed the door behind her, pulled her blue coat shut against the cold air, and leaned heavily on the railing. Then her eyes met mine, and she jumped.
“Goodness, Michelle, I didn’t see you there,” she said, as casually as if she talked to me every day.
I gripped my handlebars and fought the urge to pedal away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oh, so you do talk.” She smiled, and her face seemed warm and open. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, neat bun, and as she turned her head I saw again the structure of her cheekbones, the full lips, the confident set of her jaw. “Park your bike,” she said now. “Come over and sit with me.”
And even though I’d biked out there specifically to see her, even though I’d made the trip for the purpose of talking to this woman, the invitation to actually do so put me into a nervous fright. This was typical of me at nine years old, and is still typical of me now: I want to understand and experience things, but only from a distance; only while I still hold a part of myself away. I did what she instructed, though—rested my bike up against the wall and went over to the stairs. She sat down on the top of the steps, but I stood there at the foot of them, hand curled over the rail.
“So what brings you out this way?” Mrs. Garrett asked.
I looked at her hands. They were graceful, able hands, impossibly long. On one finger there was a wedding ring, and on her other hand a heavy ring that looked like my father’s ring from college, which my grandmother had kept as a testament to his unfulfilled promise. And I had the strangest sensation, then, of wanting to feel those hands upon me. But all I did was shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“It’s at least three miles from town,” Mrs. Garrett said. “That’s quite a trip for a girl your size.”
“I do it all the time,” I said, my pride flaring suddenly. “I go out to the state park almost every day in the summer.”
Mrs. Garrett smiled, glad to get a rise out of me. And she probably knew full well why I was there. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “It probably keeps you out of trouble.”
A car pulled into the parking lot, and we both watched as it kicked gravel up and turned into a space. Then Mrs. Garrett fixed her eyes on me. “How long have you lived here, Michelle?” she asked. “Have you been here your whole life?”
“No,” I said, letting go of the railing and hugging myself against the cold. “I was born in Japan. I just moved here last summer. Well, I guess the summer before last.”
“Japan! That’s quite a ways away. And you live now with your grandparents?”
I nodded.
She seemed to hesitate before asking the next question. “And where are your mother and father?”
To my surprise, I felt my eyes fill with tears. “They’re not here,” I said. I looked at her shoes, the door, my bicycle. “My mother left, and my father went out to look for her. But he’s on his way back now. He’ll be here soon.” I made it sound like she’d just gone up to the market and hadn’t returned in the expected time. But three years had passed now since my mother had left, and more than a year since I’d last seen my father.
Mrs. Garrett nodded as if this story was not surprising to her. “I lived with my grandparents, too,” she said. “My father worked for the railroad, and my mother was a live-in maid, and so my grandparents had to take care of us. My parents would come and stay with us whenever they could.”
“Why did you come here?” I asked suddenly, and I realized that this was something I’d been wondering for weeks. Mrs. Garrett looked taken aback for a moment, but then her expression turned thoughtful.
“I had a chance to make a difference here, with the clinic growing and the new nursing school. Also, I like the man I’m working for, Dr. Gordon. I knew
him before, in Chicago. When he asked me to help him, it was too good a thing to pass up.” She laughed. “I never thought Joe and I would end up in Central Wisconsin, but I suppose you didn’t, either.”
“But,” and now I ventured a look at her, “a lot of people here don’t like it.” As I said this it occurred to me that she was the only woman I knew who wasn’t a housewife, or a teacher, or a grocery clerk. There must have been other nurses at the clinic, of course, but I didn’t know who they were. And Mrs. Whipple, the nurse at school, seemed more adept at applying bandages and administering hugs than providing any substantive care. Plus, Mrs. Garrett had been brought specially; she’d been handpicked by the head of the clinic. She seemed above the other nurses, more important. And from the vantage point of adulthood, I wonder now—was part of the town’s animosity toward the Garretts related to their jobs? It was bad enough, in people’s eyes, that a black couple had moved to Deerhorn at all. How much worse was it that the Garretts did not conform to their ideas of what black people could be? That they were professionals, with more education and skill than almost all the white people in town?
Mrs. Garrett nodded and sighed, and just for a moment the lines deepened around her eyes. “I know, but we couldn’t let it stop us, Michelle. If you only do things to make other folks happy, pretty soon you’ll end up doing nothing.” And now her face took on a defiant expression that reminded me of her husband. “Besides,” she said, “we’re not just rolling over for these people. The more they push, the more determined we are to stay.”
I looked at her and wondered if she really knew what she’d gotten into. “Aren’t you scared?” I asked her.
“Aren’t you?”
I thought about that for a moment. I thought about what I’d just said—that people didn’t like that the Garretts were there. The same thing had been said about me, I knew, and also about my mother. Had she been scared, discouraged, and was that why she hadn’t come back? Had she felt a level of hatred and threat that was greater than what I’d experienced? Even with the dirty looks and harsh words I’d endured, even with the fights and the rocks, there was something that kept me from thinking that I was ever in real danger. Maybe it was because I knew that as much as people might disapprove of me, their actions stopped at a certain point because of Charlie. But there’d been nothing protecting my mother, and there was nothing protecting the Garretts, and I knew that better than anyone. I was a daily witness to the hatred they inspired, which was both similar to and more intense than the hostility directed at me.
Just then, the door opened and a middle-aged man came out. He was wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard, and he moved so quickly that both of us snapped to attention. “Hello,” he said absently in my general direction, not really seeing me. Then he turned to Mrs. Garrett. “Betty, we need you in here. There’s a kid with a 103-degree fever.”
“Well, looks like my break’s over,” said Mrs. Garrett, standing up. She smiled at me. “Nice talking to you, Michelle.”
SEVEN
On the first day of deer hunting season, my grandfather’s alarm went off at three-thirty. I wasn’t going with him—he didn’t want me out in the woods on opening weekend, which attracted so many of what he called “drunk once-a-year hunters” who were trying to get away from their wives—but I still got up to watch him get dressed. He pulled on his camouflage jacket, which was covered with dark green splotches that looked like wet leaves, his lace-up hunting boots, and a thick orange cap. In a leather bag he carried over his shoulder he packed binoculars, knives, a compass, rope, his lunch, and ammunition—cylinders, encased in bright red plastic, that were longer and thicker than my fingers. He opened the gun cabinet and took out his deer hunting rifle and some heavy rope to reinforce the stand. Charlie seemed agitated this morning, not exhilarated like he usually was before a hunt. I wanted to ask what was wrong but there was something in his demeanor, in the way he threw his gear around, that made me afraid to bother him with questions. I knew, though, that any anger he felt was bad news for the deer. At four o’clock he left to meet his friends.
All day my grandmother worked the house, worrying. Charlie had been shot once years back, by a hunter who mistook his movements for a deer. He was proud of that scar, pulled up his pants leg and fingered it sometimes when he had too much to drink. My grandmother washed the dishes extra hard that afternoon, vacuumed like she was punishing the carpet. At lunch she even opened a can of beer and drank it out of a juice glass. She kept looking at me like she was about to say something, but then appeared to decide against it. I didn’t know why she was acting so strange. I stayed up in the attic with Brett and did my best to stay out of her way.
A little before three p.m. a loud honk announced the return of the hunters. My grandmother and I rushed outside just in time to see Uncle Pete’s brown pickup truck pull into the driveway, followed by my grandfather’s Pontiac. In the bed of the truck two deer were laid out on their sides, back to belly. Uncle Pete and Earl got out of the truck, looking more businesslike than happy; Jake was with them but he stayed inside the cab. Ray Davis and Jim Riesling were in Charlie’s car; they tipped their caps at us as they got out and made their way over to the truck bed. My grandfather rushed into the garage to lay newspaper on the floor while Pete and Earl dragged out the first deer. Uncle Pete grabbed its front legs and Earl its hindquarters, and they both swore at the flies that swirled around the carcass as they shuffled with it toward the garage. It was a midsized young male. Two small horns protruded out of its head with three points each, like a series of bent, twisted fingers. Even from the steps I could see its open brown eyes, the tuft of white in its tail, the soft black velvet nose. I could see the dark red blood, vivid and obscene against its golden fur. Every two feet a drop of it hit the pavement.
They took it into the garage. There they tilted it, hindquarters up, while my grandfather tied a thick rope around its legs and strung it up from a wooden beam. It swung back and forth, its front legs extended as if reaching for the floor. The three men smiled now and wiped their hands on a towel; they looked at the deer with expressions of satisfaction and power and something very close to lust. My eyes traveled down the length of the deer’s body to the paper on the cold cement floor. The blood dripped in slow-spreading circles.
As soon as the men turned to go back out to the truck, my grandmother went inside. I stayed on the stairs, though, inching closer to the driveway. As Jim and Ray pulled the second deer out of the bed, a doe, their expressions were much more sober. I remembered then one of my grandfather’s steadfast rules: never hurt anything female. He must have known I was thinking this, because he came toward me as his friends lugged the body to the garage. “Earl got her by accident,” he said. “He was aiming for the buck, but once he hit her, we had to take her down.”
His face stayed impassive as they carried her by. She was smaller than the buck, with lighter hair, a smear of blood against her shoulders and flanks. They were holding her upside down, waist level, and there beneath her tail I saw the vulva, exposed, each fold open and distinct in the afternoon sun. They strung her up by her hind feet, next to her mate. I didn’t want to look at this, so I glanced back into the bed of the truck, where bits of fur and blood and feces were crusted onto the metal. Some blood-soaked newspaper fell out of the back and fluttered noisily away toward the street.
The other men left then, all except for Pete, who always stayed behind to help gut the deer. Usually I liked to be there when Charlie did this kind of work. I’d sit for hours next to his work table down in the cellar, watching him pluck feathers off of ducks, bone and clean fish, slice up rabbits and deer for freezing. (And now, when I see signs up in deer hunting country for processing deer, I feel like the hunters are cheating, not abiding by one of Charlie’s other cardinal rules: you should always take care of what you kill.)
But that afternoon, something didn’t feel right. My grandfather was always happy this time of the day, tired but still full of energy. He l
oved to come home after a successful hunt, loved the transformation of his kill into food. Today, however, he was somber, and his mood seemed to be about more than the fallen doe. While Pete stayed in the garage to set up buckets for the blood, I followed Charlie down to the cellar. He washed his hands in the sink, dried them, and then opened his storage cabinets, pulling down three carving knives and placing them on his work table. Then he glanced up and saw me and gave me a sad smile. “You want to help us out with this, Mike?”
“Can I just watch?”
“Sure. Sure you can.” He looked down, and he seemed to be avoiding my eyes. That scared me, so I finally asked my question.
“Grandpa, what’s wrong?”
He fiddled with the handle of one of his knives and tilted his head, not quite looking at me. “Well, Mike. Well. We got a letter from your dad yesterday.” He put the knife down and scratched at something on the table. “He said he left Missouri and was headed west again. He was in Denver, on his way out to Fresno. He said the job in Springfield didn’t work out, so he had to get back to where he had some contacts. He told us to say …” he trailed off, and I knew what was next.
“He isn’t coming, is he?”
Charlie looked me full in the face. “No, Mike,” he said. “No, he isn’t.”
I just stared at him, and he kept looking at me sadly. We stayed like that for several seconds. Then he reached out with one hand and tried to pull me toward him. I wriggled out of his grasp and shook my head no.
I had to get away, I had to get out of there, so I ran up the stairs and out the front door. My bike was lying in the front yard where I’d left it earlier in the day, and I bolted down the driveway and picked it up. I started to pedal away without knowing where I was headed. I couldn’t go out into the country, which would be over-run with hunters, so I rode up to Buffalo Street. But there were plenty of hunters right there in town, their pickup trucks taking all the parking spots in front of the coffee shop and gun store. I veered off of Buffalo and over to the park by the church, figuring correctly that it would be empty. And there I picked up rock after rock and threw them as hard as I could. When I saw the flicker of a squirrel’s tail high up on a branch, I started throwing at the squirrel, not really to knock it down, not really to hit it, but because it gave me a place to aim.