by Wingshooters
I wanted to hurl those rocks until there was nothing left to throw. I wanted to get out whatever was inside me. Because throwing those rocks, like biking—like the running and lifting and hiking I do now as an adult—was not only about working the body, but exhausting the mind. And my mind was filled with things I didn’t want to think about. My father had been planning to visit for Thanksgiving, and now he wasn’t coming. He was supposed to come and get me, but he wasn’t going to. All of the hope and anticipation I’d felt over the last few weeks was collapsing under the weight of itself. I didn’t know what to stand on; I didn’t know where to turn, and I had nothing left now to look forward to.
On top of that, even the things that had felt like solid ground were shifting beneath my feet. I had just biked away from Charlie and Pete; for the first time I was running away from them. This was new, because in the past I had always wanted to be near them; there was no better place to be than in their company.
But in the last few weeks their company had begun to feel less safe. What I had always seen as their strength and fortitude had crossed over into something different, unfamiliar. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t go out to the country; I could not figure out where to be. And so I stayed in the park hurling rocks at the trees until I was too tired to think anymore.
Deer hunting season only lasted three weeks, but that fall it felt more like three years. My grandmother kept me from taking the bike out after school and on weekends, wisely preventing me from heading out to the woods where the shooting seemed to go on day and night.
But this was the worst possible time for me to be trapped inside. I couldn’t sit still with the news about my father; I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t stand to look at his postcards, either, so I took them all down, hiding them in the back of my shirt drawer. If he wasn’t coming back to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving, then when was he going to come? Why was he headed out west again? Did it have something to do with my mother? This possibility was the only thing that helped ease my disappointment. I held on to a sliver of hope that maybe this was all a part of a bigger plan. But in the meantime, the days I was stuck indoors were a slow, cruel torture.
Throughout those weeks my grandfather was gone more than usual, spending time at Earl’s gun shop before he came home for supper, and hunting on the weekends when his friends were off work. When he was home, he tried to entertain me—telling me stories of hunting adventures from seasons past, letting me sit on the end of his couch while he poked me with his feet. But none of this could break through my somber mood. Every day I wondered if there’d be word from my father, a call or letter saying where he’d settled for the moment, some indication of what would happen next. But there was nothing, and Charlie’s efforts to cheer me up didn’t help, and as much as I wanted to go to him, to give over to his caring, something was holding me back.
He could sense this, I think. Sometimes I’d look up at him and find him staring at me intently. But if he knew my disappointment was about more than my father, if he sensed that I was feeling uneasy even there, with him, he didn’t mention it. The only thing that gave me comfort through this time was Brett, and he definitely knew that something was wrong. He was even more attached to me than usual; he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. When I was sleeping he would curl himself around my head, and now, when I opened my eyes in the morning, I’d find him already awake, looking down at me with his ears perked—worried, protective—until I rubbed his head and told him good morning, and that he was a good dog, and that everything would be all right.
In mid-November, on the last Friday of deer hunting season, Jim Riesling came over as always. We had just settled down in the living room—except my grandmother, who was finishing up the dishes—when the telephone rang. She came out of the kitchen to answer it, wiping her hands on her apron. When she picked up the phone and heard what the caller had to say, she bunched the apron in her fist.
“Charlie,” she said, “you’d better come here. This is Ray, and he’s over at the clinic. They’ve got Kevin Watson—he was taken there this afternoon—and now they’ve called in social services.”
Charlie pulled himself up off the couch and went into the dining room, looking so angry that I shrank back in my chair. Jim kept his eyes on the television screen, wearing an expression I couldn’t decipher. After my grandfather took the receiver, he stared down at the desk where the telephone was and mostly listened to Ray, sometimes breaking in with things like “When?” and “What now?” and “Why can’t you do something about it?” He stood through the entire conversation, one hand clenched around the receiver, the other curled into a loose fist that he tapped lightly on the desk. I saw the tense muscles in his arms, in his back, and now, thinking of my grandfather, of what he was like, I imagine how hard it must have been for him—a man so used to solving things with his strength and his will—to be confronted by something he couldn’t solve physically. Then he was off the phone and he kept looking at the desk for a minute, until my grandmother asked, “Charlie, what happened?” I had come into the dining room, and Jim had stood up, and Charlie turned slowly to face us.
“Earl took Kevin to the clinic this afternoon, the emergency room. And somehow things got twisted around and they called in social services.”
Jim’s face was set, his voice even. “And then they called the police?”
Charlie shook his head. “No, that’s the thing of it. They didn’t call Ray. They called the county sheriff.”
Jim looked beyond Charlie, somewhere past his shoulder. “Well, the clinic is a county operation, even if it’s in town. So maybe they always deal with county law.”
Charlie shook his head. “It’s plain disrespectful to the local police for the county to butt in that way. They flat-out bypassed Ray and his men.”
“Maybe it was because they knew that Ray wouldn’t do anything about it.”
There was an edge to Jim’s voice I’d never heard before, and Charlie must have noticed it, too. He looked at the younger man and asked, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
But Jim just raised both hands and turned away. In the silence left by his refusal to talk, my grandmother asked again, uncertainly, “What happened?”
Charlie took a moment to gather himself and stop glaring at his friend. “Well. Those social workers talked to Kevin I guess, and the sheriff’s deputy talked to Earl, and they decided that it was all a whole bunch of nothing and released Kevin back to his dad. But they kept the boy there for hours. Scared the hell out of him, it sounds like. Ray got wind of it sometime in the afternoon and went over to talk everyone down.”
“So it turned out all right?” my grandmother asked. And I knew this was what she really wanted to know—that everything would be all right; that nothing terrible had happened; that her life and Kevin’s life and the life of the town would go back to the way it had been. Her world did not include things like fathers being questioned by the law and children talking to social services. It had barely expanded enough to include a grandchild like me.
“Yeah, everything’s all right,” my grandfather said. “Ray said Earl was heading home, so I’m going to go over to meet him. Mike, get in the car. Maybe you can keep Kevin company while I talk to Earl and Alice. Jim, do you want to come with us?” He was looking at his friend as if this wasn’t a real question, as if of course Jim was going to come with us.
But Jim just shook his head. “I’ll pass on this one, Charlie.”
Charlie glanced at him, his open mouth betraying his surprise.
Jim asked, in a soft voice, “What happened to Kevin, anyway?”
Charlie looked the younger man straight in the eye. “His arm,” he said. “He broke his arm.” Then he turned and headed out to the car.
The Watsons lived on the other side of town, way out on Warren Road, past the restaurants and stores, beyond the theater. Their family, like my grandparents’, had moved in from the country, although their arrival in Deerhorn preceded the Wilkes’s and LeBe
aus’ by a generation. Earl and my grandfather had always been close, and Charlie considered Earl the toughest of his friends—the best bow hunter, which required more endurance, skill, and stealth than hunting with guns; the least affected by the elements; the most impervious to pain. Earl’s toughness, Charlie said, had been honed by his time in the military and his years of trying to live up to the demands of his stern, exacting father. But by the time I knew him, Earl’s life seemed pretty good. He and his family lived in an area of sprawling two-story houses set on parcels of three or four acres. His house was bigger than my grandparents’, with an extra bedroom here, a family room there, and a wraparound porch where the men would drink beer in the summer after a long day of fishing at Treman Lake. When we pulled into the driveway and parked—Earl’s car was not yet there—I really looked at the house for the first time. It was immaculate—the grass and bushes clipped, the picket fence freshly painted, the concrete driveway long and new-looking, without the cracks that split the driveway at my grandparents’ house. And yet the light that shone from its windows and from the front porch seemed cold somehow, not warming. The place looked cheerless and official, almost too carefully presented. It didn’t suggest safety, but enclosure.
My grandfather had brought Brett and me along but didn’t speak to us as we waited. I don’t think he really expected me to keep Kevin company—he knew we weren’t friends, and neither of us was easy with other people. I think he just wanted me with him. In this, he treated me like I too was a faithful dog—a companion whose presence was desirable but didn’t warrant conversation. I don’t know if he wondered what I thought of what was happening, or if it occurred to him that I might have an opinion at all. He did assume—and he was right—that I’d never talk about what we did or saw, not even to my grandmother. My allegiance to him was complete.
After we’d waited about twenty minutes, Earl’s gray Buick pulled into the driveway, passed us, parked up closer to the house. Earl got out slowly and Charlie met him between the cars, on the edge of the well-kept grass. From the quickness of his movements, it was clear—as I’d thought—that he expected me to stay in the car. So I sat in the backseat with my arm around the dog and cracked the window so I could hear. Because the porch lights were bright, like the lights of a prison yard, I could see everything that was happening.
Kevin stayed in his car, too. His profile was just visible through the dirty back window, and he sat there looking neither upset nor excited, just waiting for whatever would happen next. And as I looked at his round cheeks and his too-long hair, I found myself suddenly feeling angry at Kevin, annoyed that his problems had upset everybody and pulled my grandfather into this mess. It was not his fault, I knew that; I knew he was being hurt. But I wished—and I was also ashamed of this wish—that the Watsons’ problems had been kept to themselves.
Earl’s expression was hard and resolute, prepared to take whatever my grandfather said. Which was: “You all right? Ray called me from the clinic.”
Earl’s face relaxed a little and he ran his hand over his bald spot. He must have known that it was far past time for pretending everything was normal.
“Yeah, I’m all right. They ask so many damn questions, try to make you feel like a crook. And they scared Kevin half to death.”
Charlie grunted and the two men stood together, as firm and steady as a couple of oaks. “Last I checked a man had a right to take his son to the doctor without throwing people into a panic about it.”
Watson pulled out a cigarette and lit it; the red tip bobbed up and down as he spoke. “That’s right,” he said. “The boy had an accident. You know how clumsy he is. Can’t walk across the room hardly without bumping into something. And today, Alice was out somewhere, and he fell down the porch stairs.”
“Broke his arm, Ray said?”
“Yep, broke his arm. A clean break. They put a cast on him, should be healed up in a couple of months. Then he’ll be good as new.”
I watched my grandfather absorb this; watched him decide it was true. And from the distance of adulthood, I wonder if his reaction was connected to what had happened with my father. Because whatever Earl may or may not have done, at least he had stuck around. At least he was here with his family. Charlie stood still for a minute, then nodded, and the two men were one—of a piece and of the town, against whatever outside force might threaten them.
I wanted to tell my grandfather to step away from Earl. I wanted him to come back to the car so we could turn around and go home. And then suddenly I remembered something from the previous fall, one of the times that Charlie and Pete had taken me bird hunting. Somehow we’d gotten separated and I’d ended up with Pete; Charlie was nowhere to be found. But then we heard a stirring in the tall grass ahead of us; Pete cocked his gun and Brett ran forward for the flush. Instead of pheasants, though, a strange man emerged from the grass, and the unexpected sight of him way out there in the marsh so startled me that I almost turned and ran. He wore a tan barn jacket and carried a shotgun, and I didn’t recognize him until Uncle Pete lowered his gun and said, “Holy Christ, Charlie. I almost fired.”
That night, at Earl’s house, I had the same disorienting feeling—my grandfather was right in front of me, but I didn’t know him.
“Who got it into his mind to call the sheriff?” he asked now.
Earl shook his head and spat out a mouthful of smoke. “Who do you think did it, Charlie? Who the hell do you think? It was that black bitch married to the schoolteacher.”
Charlie looked at his friend with a new intensity. “I thought she worked out at the country clinic.”
“She does, but only on certain days. Rest of the time she’s at the main shop.”
Charlie put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “You didn’t see her when you took Kevin in?”
“Hell no,” Earl said. “If I’d a seen her, I would’ve made somebody else look after him. But they sign you in at the front desk of the emergency room and then they take the patients into the back. They made me stay in the waiting room, and I didn’t know what was happening until the sheriff’s deputy came out and talked to me. The only reason I know it’s her is that I saw her later—she stood behind the glass window and pointed me out. The bitch was looking at me, Charlie, like she had something to say about it. And Kevin told me it was her who examined him.” He took a deep breath and clenched his shoulders. “They shouldn’t have let her, not after what the husband did. The two of them have got it in for me.”
This new information made my grandfather raise both his arms like he wanted to grab somebody and shake them. I thought of him again on the phone a bit earlier, my sense that he didn’t know what to do with his body. I saw a light go on from inside the Watsons’ house, and then the figure of Mrs. Watson looking out the window. The two men stood frozen in their tableau until Charlie said, “We’ve got to do something about this.”
Earl nodded. “Damn right we’ve got to do something,” he said. “It’s bad enough those niggers are here at all. But now they’re messing with my family.”
They stood silent for another minute. Then the front door opened and Alice Watson stuck her head outside. She was still a pretty woman, or you could see that she had been, but the years of worry and silence had worn her away, like a house grayed by the buffeting winds. She wasn’t from Deerhorn but from Wausau, sixty miles away, and now I wonder if even that slight displacement made her feel too isolated to stand up to her husband. The age difference might have made things difficult for her, too. Earl had married late, when he was almost forty, and Alice was nearly twenty years younger; she seemed even smaller in her husband’s presence than my grandmother did in Charlie’s. But I couldn’t believe that she’d approve of his behavior. Now she said, “Earl, why don’t you bring Kevin inside. I’m sure you’re starving and I’ve got supper ready.”
With that the men parted ways, after a last promise from my grandfather that they’d “figure something out.” Earl walked over to his car, pulled open the
door, and said, “Come on, boy,” and Kevin slowly got out of the passenger’s seat. And at that moment I wondered what it must have been like to be Earl Watson’s son—to be the gentle, drawn-in child of one of Deerhorn’s most prominent men. There were so few models, such strict expectations, for the boys and men in town. The most admired, like Earl and Charlie, were strong, fearless, and totally sure of themselves, without a hint of complication or softness. Here and there was an exception—like Darius Gordon, who was more genteel than the norm but whose athletic and hunting credentials placed him well beyond reproach. But that was about the extent of the acceptable variations. It wasn’t clear what happened to other men and boys who diverged from the town’s standards. Like Kevin, like the boys and men who lived out in the country trailers. And also like my father.
I don’t know if Kevin realized I was there but he avoided looking in my direction; he moved slowly with his head hanging down. I saw the cast on his left arm, the sling over his shoulder. I saw how small he looked next to his father. I saw how he tried to hold his body away from Earl, even as he got within his reach. And I saw how Earl touched him—not with a comforting hand on the shoulder or a guiding touch on the back, but with his fingers gripped around the back of Kevin’s neck. He led his son up the driveway like he was dragging an er-rant pup, and Kevin looked just that helpless. I felt another wave of annoyance then, followed by a thought so clear and troubling that it made my stomach hurt. I realized that Kevin’s weakness didn’t stir compassion, but contempt—from his father, from other kids, even from me. And this realization moved me to anger—toward Kevin and toward myself—as I understood how vulnerable this made him. I wondered what Kevin was thinking as he walked toward the house. I wondered what he was walking back into.