Jordy’s mom was asleep.
“I think that sounds pretty nice,” Jordy said real quiet.
• • •
Jordy’s friend Goldie, the host of that night’s party, lived in town, in a house near the bowling alley. He shared it with an older guy named Cliff Fuzzing who was super into home microbrewing and made a really hoppy IPA that he was always forcing on people. Goldie had been living there since he got out of the navy. Now he worked security at Treasure Island, spending all day watching busloads of bluehairs spend their children’s inheritance on slot machines, and at night tried to make his house the party capital of Dakota County.
As Jordy pulled his Buick into a parking spot on the street, he saw Mandy and a cute friend of hers, though not as cute as Mandy, walking toward Goldie’s house. He couldn’t believe she’d actually showed up. He tapped his car horn to get the girls’ attention. Then he remembered that it was busted. The girls turned and saw him. The horn went Blrnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Mandy, smiling at first, frowned as the horn continued to blare. The other chick never smiled at all.
“What the fuck’s your problem?” the other chick said.
Jordy rolled down his window. “It’s fuckin’ busted,” he shouted, pounding on the steering wheel with his fists. The horn stopped. Then started again, Blrnnnnnnnnnnnnnn, without Jordy even touching it. He reached behind his seat, grabbed a socket wrench, and whaled on the steering wheel until the mindless whine finally died.
The other chick turned to Mandy. “Red flag,” she said loudly, as Jordy ambled in their direction, a twelve-pack of Coors Light under his arm. He was trying to act relaxed and cool, which for him was pretty much impossible anyway, but really fucking hard after beating the shit out of something.
“Hey, how’s the Jetta?” he asked Mandy.
“Holding up, thanks,” she said, smiling. “How’s your mom?”
“OK,” Jordy said. “My aunt Melanie’s over.”
“Oh, hey, this is Emilee.” The other chick gave Jordy a halfhearted wave.
“Hey,” Jordy said.
“Oh, and hey,” Mandy said, reaching into her purse, pulling out his mom’s shirt, which was rolled up like a burrito. “I washed it and everything.”
Jordy pushed the shirt back into her hands. “No, it’s yours. My mom wants you to keep it. Seriously.”
Jordy could hear that EDM shit blasting from Goldie’s house. He hated EDM, but chicks liked it, so whatever. Emilee said she was just gonna go ahead and go in. Mandy said, no, I’ll go with you, put the shirt back in her purse, and said thank you to Jordy.
• • •
Goldie was slumped across a beanbag chair but rose to his feet when he saw Jordy and the girls enter, and he introduced himself to them as Mark Goldsmith, like he was a Realtor or a pastor or someone respectable. Cliff Fuzzing entered from the kitchen when he heard the women’s voices. He was dressed in his usual faded Pink Floyd T-shirt and was drinking from a brown bottle with a home-printed sticker that said CLIFF’S EDGE IPA. He told Jordy that Coors Light was not allowed in his house. Then Scotty’s hot but annoying girlfriend, Micayla, walked up to Jordy and asked him straight up if he brought any of his mom’s Oxy.
“I’m not giving away my mom’s fucking pain medication,” Jordy said.
Then there was Scotty, drinking from a red plastic cup, standing outside the closed bathroom door. “You owe my dad six hundred bucks for the garage,” Scotty said. “Fuckin’ psycho.”
• • •
Jordy’s head hurt real bad. There was a ringing sound. He had a hard time breathing through his nose. The air smelled like blood. There was that ringing sound again. He felt like he was in his bedroom at his mom’s place. He was. He rubbed his eyes. There was dried blood on his hands. That ringing sound again. It was his phone. On the edge of the desk by his head. It said DAD. His ride north.
“Oh shit,” Jordy said.
“I’m downstairs,” his dad said. “You ready to go?”
Jordy looked at his phone. It said 8:26 a.m.
He’d called his dad yesterday to get a ride up to their hunting grounds on Uncle Hobie’s land in Pine County. And here was Dad. Picking him up.
“Oh, shit, give me five minutes.”
“Did I wake you up?” his dad asked.
“Yeah, sorry. Just give me five minutes, I’ll be right down.”
“Take your time,” Jordis P. Snelling the Second said. “Hobie’s gonna be mad we’re late for lunch. But whatever pisses off your liberal uncle is OK with me.”
“I’ll be right down,” Jordy said, and hung up.
• • •
At least all of his hunting gear and his Mauser were in one corner of the closet. He put his right foot down and felt something. Dan Jorgenson was sleeping on the floor next to his bed, curled up on his side, in his jacket, dirty jeans, and holey white socks. Dan must’ve brought him home again. He didn’t even remember Dan being at that party.
Jordy slid off the foot of his bed and walked straight into the attached bathroom, but didn’t turn on the light. He had dried blood around his lips and his nose. A big bruise on his goddamn cheek. Christ, his arms hurt. He took a piss and wiped the blood off of his face with a black bath towel and piled up all his hunting gear into a black garbage bag and grabbed his rifle and cell phone charger.
• • •
His brother Adam was sitting at the dinette table, typing on his laptop. He said he’d come down every weekend during deer season so Jordy could go hunting with their dad and uncles. Jordy wasn’t presently working himself, which meant he could be with their mom a lot, but it was crucial to have a break. The first day of opening weekend was the best day of the year.
“Holy crap, what happened to you?” Adam said when he saw his brother.
“I have no fuckin’ idea. I gotta go, Dad’s downstairs, he’s givin’ me a ride to Hobie’s.”
“Christ, you look like shit,” Adam said.
“How’s Mom? Is she up?” Jordy asked, looking in the direction of the easy chair. His mom’s weird CPAP mask was on, and she was snoring softly.
“She’s sleeping.” Adam winced, looking at him. “Are you wearing one of her shirts?”
Jordy looked down at himself for the first time that morning. He had on his mom’s blue denim shirt over his clothes from last night. There was blood on the front of it. “Fuck,” Jordy said, taking the shirt off. One of the buttons was missing and it was ripped near the collar. “I gotta get it fixed and cleaned,” he said.
He put the shirt into the garbage bag with his hunting gear, and then dragged his ass back into the kitchen and started mixing up some Gatorade powder with Mountain Dew instead of water.
“Eva’s not here?” he asked.
“No, her cousins are in town. They’re prepping for one of her big dinners next weekend. But she says hi.”
“Does she know you’re going through a divorce?”
“Yep, she knows all about it.”
“Has she met your kids?”
“Nope, not yet,” Adam said, not looking up. This was probably a sore subject for him. Even though he was the one who got cheated on, Octavia had hired an expensive lawyer and got a restraining order against him. It was some real bullshit, what she did to him. Jordy figured it was because Octavia came from money and those people can never be kind to poor people for very long, not in Jordy’s limited experience.
“Christ, my fuckin’ head is fuckin’ killing me.” His left hand, his shooting hand, also still hurt, but not worse than yesterday. Between that and his head, though, he felt almost too fucked up to go hunting.
“You should take one of those, ha,” Adam said, pointing to their mom’s pills on the table, the OxyContin.
“I don’t know.” He knew how huge these pills were in the local party scene. It wasn’t really his thing, though. He’d never even tried it
once.
“One won’t kill you.”
Jordy opened the bottle. “She only has like eight left.”
“I’ll get it refilled today,” Adam said. He was a kind, responsible guy; if he said he’d do something, it would happen.
“I guess, then,” Jordy said, took a pill, and washed it down with his Mountain Dew and Gatorade mix. He walked over and checked on his sleeping mom, then set his car keys down on the dining room table by Adam’s computer. “Hey. I told the hospice nurse she could use my car. Call me if she comes by and picks it up.”
“OK,” Adam said, not looking up from his computer screen. “Oh yeah, and Aunt Melanie told me to tell you that she drank the rest of your margarita mix last night with Mom. But she’ll get you a new bottle.” Melanie was nice about coming down on nights when Jordy went out so someone would at least be there. Often she crashed on the couch because she was an even bigger lush than his mom.
“OK, later.” Jordy threw the garbage bag over his shoulder, picked up his rifle case, and hauled ass down to the parking lot, his head throbbing.
• • •
Jordy threw his stuff into the backseat of his dad’s black Chevy Silverado and brushed a bunch of empty Marlboro Red packs to the floor of the car before he sat down in the passenger seat. He lit a cigarette of his own.
“Whoa. How’s the other guy look?” his dad asked when he saw Jordy’s face.
“I have no fuckin’ idea who the other guy was,” Jordy said. He noticed the dome light and the car horn were missing; where they used to be, there were just open holes with a couple of wires. “What happened in here?”
“It’s where the government puts sensors, in your dome light and car horn. For tracking.”
“Ah,” Jordy said.
“Did you get that e-mail I forwarded you? If you don’t consent to live in a police state, you should take yours out.”
“Well, I took out my car horn.”
“Good. You gotta think for yourself.”
“I don’t know what I fuckin’ think.”
Jordis turned on his radar detector and turned up the volume on his AM talk radio, where some guy on Off the Grid with Buzz Morgenstern was saying something about the connection between drug abuse and gun control, of all things. “Then listen to this,” his dad said. “What they’re saying is the truth. The pharmaceutical industry is working with the government to keep us doped up and docile. And who’s for gun control, besides weed-smoking hippies and doped-up seniors and worried moms on antidepressants? Think about what’s in that stuff. Think about it. Makes sense.”
“Can’t rule anything out,” Jordy said.
• • •
The painkiller rolled over his brain like waves of sunlight. The armrest set into the passenger door began to tingle beneath his fingers. He took a long shot of whiskey from the flask in his pocket, and his head slowly lifted, for the first time in a long-ass time, into a place where he didn’t hurt anymore.
• • •
Rifle season in Minnesota begins at sunrise on either the first or second Saturday in November, and for the past thirteen years, ever since he was twelve years old, Jordy had been waking up at 4:30 a.m. on that day so he could be in his deer stand, locked and loaded, when first light rose over his uncle Hobie’s farm.
Jordy had the entire ride north to fuckin’ stress out about how he packed his charger but not his phone, and got no sympathy from his dad, Aunt Trudy, or his uncles Hobie and Langford, most of whom didn’t even have mobile phones and saw no truck in them, as Langford put it.
“What if you break down on the side of the road?” he asked them over Friday night’s pot roast.
“You fix it,” Hobie said.
“You don’t travel with tools?” Langford asked.
“I traveled with a tool,” his dad said, pointing his thumb at Jordy.
• • •
He slept for maybe five hours, and not just because Hobie and Trudy’s downstairs bedroom smelled like cat piss, or because he was freaked out by the giant picture of a younger Hobie and Trudy posing with Bill Clinton in 1992. He went over and over in his head what he remembered from Thursday night, which wasn’t fuckin’ much. He remembered Mandy looking at him with grave concern and saying, “Look at me,” while holding both his shoulders, but he wasn’t sure whether that happened or if he just imagined it. One thing he didn’t remember at all was how he came to be wearing his mom’s blue shirt over his clothes. That’s what bothered him the most. Dan could tell him what happened, but he didn’t know Dan’s number by heart, so he couldn’t even call him from his uncle’s house phone. He wondered if Mandy ever came and borrowed his car. Adam hadn’t called yet, but he would.
• • •
Jordy had made the ladder to his deer stand himself about ten years ago by nailing some flat pieces of pinewood into the side of a tree. It was just light enough out that he could see it without a flashlight. He climbed the fourteen feet to his stand and settled in. Mandy must’ve come by to pick up his car, he figured. Adam probably just couldn’t find Langford and Trudy’s phone number. Adam never once came hunting, or ever came up to Hobie’s farm without the rest of the family, so no way he’d know it. Jordy put his ass down on the cold wood and waited, with nothing else to think about.
Deer are nocturnal, so there was a real good chance of getting one if you were out early enough on opening weekend. And sure enough, maybe fifteen minutes in, Jordy heard a blam and a blam from north of his position. Hobie.
• • •
Everyone met at Hobie’s mark. Beautiful eight-point buck. Trophy rack, no points broken. First shot was by the book; behind the shoulder, into the lung. Second was a Texas heart-shot, up the ass, which Hobie said was a mistake. Langford asked him why the second shot, and Hobie said that the deer took off, and he’s not chasing a blood trail for a mile. In other words, he was just being lazy.
“And at least now the deer won’t suffer as much,” Hobie added.
“Bleeding heart,” said Jordy’s dad.
Langford laughed, and even Hobie did a little.
Jordy didn’t see what was so damn funny. “It’s probably gonna ruin the meat,” he said, and that was definitely a possibility.
• • •
Once the lungs and guts were removed and tossed aside, where they’d probably be gone in twelve hours, due to coyotes or maybe black bear, the rest of the guys dragged the buck to the ATV and trailer they kept parked at the edge of the woods and threw it on a plastic tarp. Trudy came out to the garage, helped them lay cardboard on the floor, and watched as they strung up the buck by its hind legs. His dad and Langford argued about farm subsidies before commencing their usual feud about how long the deer should hang before processing. Langford always insisted on at least a week, but this wasn’t his year; it was still too warm out, and it wasn’t supposed to get below freezing again until Monday. This deer and any others they shot today would hang a couple days, tops.
• • •
A few flakes of snow were starting to fall. Even though it melted when it hit the ground, this was like sleigh bells on a roof on Christmas Eve. There was something about the first snow that made deer freak out and get real about mating, which meant that they’d be out in force. Jordy said he was going to go back out before it got too bright. He’d only bought one tag, so might as well use it now.
He left the ATV by the garage and walked to his dad’s stand, which was the closest one to the house, and the nicest, with seat warmers, a cup holder, and a wood platform at elbow level. He couldn’t smoke out here—white-tailed deer could smell it from two miles away—so he drank. You had to do something.
• • •
Mandy had definitely grabbed his shoulders and told him, “Look at me,” with grave concern at some point Thursday night. He was sure of it now. She hadn’t seemed angry, more worried. He didn’t remember what he
said next, or what she did next, or anything. But there was at least a moment where she was concerned and not mad.
A snowflake landed right on the tip of his left thumb. It seemed to look back at him as it dissolved. Behind it, directly behind it, in the distance, there was a fluttering. He lifted his binoculars. It was a doe, walking toward him. How much closer would it get before it picked up his scent? He was fourteen feet up, and the wind was to his face, so he could stand to be patient. He checked to see if he’d chambered a round; yes he had. Thank Christ for that. A sound, any sound in the world, and they can just take off. This one kept coming, like it was being led to him, and even paused broadside to his stand. He lined up its shoulder in his sight, just as it raised its head and looked straight at him. It couldn’t see him. He knew that. Their vision was terrible. But he saw its eyes as he pulled the trigger, and the vermin doe stumbled and ran. He’d nailed it.
He chambered a second round before climbing down. He found the doe only a few hundred feet away from where he shot it, skinny rear legs twitching. He was lucky; often they go much farther. As he took out his knife to cut its throat, he felt like he was being watched. But from where? If it was his dad or his uncles, he would’ve heard the steps. Then he saw it. A little guy. With little nubby horns. Why hadn’t he seen the fawn before? It was right in its mother’s footsteps. It just stood there, looking at him, and then down at its mother. It didn’t know any better.
Jordy would’ve shot it. It’s technically legal to shoot fawns. He just didn’t have a second tag. These things were rats. This little guy would grow up and eat gardens and kill motorcyclists. He knew that.
“Get!” Jordy said. Instead it came closer. It sniffed the back of its mother’s head. Maybe he could shoot it and ask his dad for his tag. His dad would hate wasting his tag on a fawn, though.
He took out his Buck knife to start field dressing. The little guy was watching him. Jordy decided he didn’t want the fawn to watch while he slashed its mother’s throat. Vermin or not, it creeped him out. He raised his hands above his head and yelled, “Raaaahhrrr!” and finally the little guy ran off a few yards.
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