The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig (A Love Story)

by Don Zolidis

  “There’s a lot of reading I need to get to—in preparation for—”

  My dad interrupted. “You can do that on your own time after we’re done hunting. You’ll like it. It’ll make you a man.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s just a biological process, Dad. It’s probably inevitable—”

  “Craig—”

  “He should go,” chipped in Kaitlyn, eager to see me suffer.

  There was no way out. If I wanted three hundred bucks I was going to have to sit in the woods and murder Bambi the way God intended. And then I realized I had one last chance—

  “College visit! I need to go on a college visit. So sorry. So very sorry. Can’t make it this year.”

  Dad’s scalp wrinkled in annoyance. Victory.

  “I know,” said my mom, grinning. “You can do a college visit right after hunting! So you can have more time together.”

  Damn it.

  “Fine,” I said. “But I’m not killing anything. Intentionally.”

  So that’s how I ended up deciding to visit a college named GACK.

  Okay, it wasn’t actually named Gack. It was actually GAC, but that doesn’t sound as funny.

  That’s just an acronym, though, for Gustavus Adolphus College, which was apparently named for a Swedish dude with a luxurious mustache. It was located in bustling Saint Peter, Minnesota, which was a quaint collection of houses that had no business calling itself a town. It was close enough that we could drive there, and far enough that it didn’t feel like home.

  “This one, huh?” said my dad, examining the pamphlet like he was deciphering hieroglyphics.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This is the one,” he repeated, smoothing out his mustache.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay then. Okay.” He took a deep breath. “They got a price tag on here?”

  “It’s probably like a million dollars.” I watched as his soul cracked a little bit. “I’m kidding. It’s probably slightly less than that.”

  Dad dropped the pamphlet on my bed and stood there for a second, looking around. “Maybe we can sell some of these comic books.” He retreated to the door. “But, uh…if that’s what you want to do, then we’ll go check it out. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, what the hell is the point of me working all the time if you can’t go to school, right?”

  “Thanks.”

  I have to admit, it wasn’t what I expected from him. But there was still the matter of deer hunting, which was going to occur immediately before our trip to Minnesota. If only there was some way to get out of the hunting portion. I had developed a new plan: convert to Buddhism. I had the conversation ready in my mind:

  ME: Dad, I have to tell you something.

  DAD: What is it, son? And might I remind you that before we visit that fruity college in Minnesota you will become a man.

  ME: Right. Well, I need to tell you something. I’m a Buddhist now.

  DAD: The hell you say?

  ME: I no longer believe in hell. I’m a Buddhist.

  MOM (shouting from somewhere else in the house): What’s Craig saying?

  DAD: He’s got a butt fetish!

  ME: Buddhist, Dad. Buddhist.

  DAD: Oh.

  ME: I’m following the noble eightfold path to enlightenment.

  DAD: Shit. Well, you’re still going hunting.

  ME: I’m spiritually conflicted about that.

  DAD: I’m not.

  Even in my imagination, the plan failed.

  Honestly, though, I couldn’t even get into it. I was too wrapped up in Amy. We didn’t have any classes together. But we talked every night on the phone, and I felt like I had been granted entrance to an entirely separate universe that existed parallel to my own. A universe that had always been there, side by side with mine, and yet was totally foreign. We made out all the time. Pretty much, whenever anyone left the room, we were sucking face. I won’t go into too much detail about it except to say that a lightbulb popped over my head, and I realized that this must be what everyone else is doing with their lives all the time. Like, everyone was just waiting for me to leave the room and then leaping on each other in the most glorious party imaginable. And until this point, I had never been invited. Maybe I had just never felt like I had permission to join the party.

  My fantasies spun into the future; what Christmas would be like, what would we do on spring break, the amazing night we would have together at prom when she would glide down the stairs in some kind of shimmering dress and I would spontaneously learn how to dance. My whole senior year lit up like a glowing map.

  Life was great.

  Until the father-son trip of death.

  I realize “hunting trip of death” is a little bit redundant, as the entire purpose of hunting is to cause death. It’s like saying the road trip of driving or something.

  Anyway, as the day of our trip grew nearer, I began feeling claustrophobic and started sweating at inappropriate times. I was distracted in class; instead of taking notes (or secretly writing Amy’s name, like, four hundred times because I was an idiot), I started drawing pictures of deer with little captions, like “Don’t kill me, please” or “Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine” or “Just try it, mofo.” I wrote a lot of things from the deer’s perspective.

  There’s a concept in Wisconsin called deer widows, which is basically when all the menfolk leave town to go on their trips and the women are left behind, bewildered and confused, to do whatever it is women do without men. (Celebrate.)

  We set off on a Monday for the north woods; my dad had packed the car with supplies from the secret gun room, including thirty-four pounds of beef jerky, which would provide for the bulk of our sustenance. I brought along a rat-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov and some stationery.

  “You’re not gonna need any of that,” my dad said, shaking his head.

  “We don’t read or write while hunting?”

  Dad’s eyes narrowed, and I’m sure the thought of Where did I go wrong? reverberated through his mind (like usual). This was going to be a tough week for him.

  We had worked through seven pounds of beef jerky by the time we reached the cabin that would be our new home without womenfolk. My dad liked to hunt with a cadre of ex-military bastards whom I will now painstakingly describe, as I spent three days with these creatures in a tiny cabin in the north woods.

  Chester. I didn’t catch Chester’s last name. Chester smoked Marlboro reds and wore a giant puffy coat and spat a lot. He spoke in a mumble, and no one could understand him. He was generally perceived to be the smartest and nicest human of the group.

  Buck. I am not making this up. The guy’s name was Buck, and he was hunting for bucks. Buck’s favorite words were god damn it, and sometimes he could create entire sentences out of only that sentiment.

  Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim was seventy-six years old, as thin as a cardboard box, and had a mustache like a giant caterpillar had died below his nose. He could barely see, which was a really helpful quality for a person wandering through the woods with a rifle. Uncle Jim took a shine to me right away.

  Poole Tom. Why was he called Poole Tom? You would have to ask Poole Tom’s mother. It was also possible that Poole Tom had no mother and was, instead, an Italian sausage that had been struck by lightning or had fallen into a vat of mysterious chemicals. Poole Tom was 272 pounds of solid fat, Green Bay Packers trivia, and bratwurst. Poole Tom was everything you imagine Wisconsin to be, wrapped up into a greasy package and equipped with enough firepower to break into Fort Knox.

  And, of course, me and my dad. They called my dad “Handy” for some reason that I did not want to understand. My dad went all in on the whole hunting ensemble. He looked resplendent in his puffy orange coat, as if someone had coated the Michelin Man in Cheez-Its and popped a Green Bay Packers hat on its head. The hat covered up his gleaming bald dome, which was normally his most pronounced feature, but he made up for i
t with a powerful reddish mustache. I guess you could call his mustache auburn, if that color were ever applied to mustaches. The rest of him was wiry and tough; he had smoked for most of his adult life (he quit shortly after the last of our pets died, which made him cranky), and the years of nicotine had sunk into his skin.

  Let’s talk about how awful deer hunting is for a minute.

  Imagine it is twenty-six degrees outside. There’s a light freezing drizzle in the air, the kind that gets inside your clothes and makes you feel like a corpse. You are in the woods. That part is kind of nice. Your objective is to remain completely still as long as possible.

  So you’re there, crouching, because you must crouch; you have to pee; your thighs—which were never terribly strong to begin with since you don’t do a lot of exercise—are burning with the heat of a thousand suns; and the cold drizzle is sneaking down the back of your spine and finding its way to your crotch region, which is only making the need to pee worse. In your hands is a rifle. Why is there a rifle in your hands? Because your objective is to wait until beautiful nature creeps into view and SHOOT THE HELL OUT OF IT.

  This is what our forefathers did, I imagine my dad saying.

  Our forefathers also had no teeth, painted themselves blue, and danced naked in the woods.

  Then, after twelve or fourteen or nine thousand hours of this, you go back to a “shack,” which is a marginally heated cabin in the woods in which you all sleep in the same room for camaraderie or some other insanity. You bring along giant industrial sleeping bags meant to keep people warm on Mars, and then you lie down on the floor in a big room where Poole Tom falls asleep first. Do you think an animated Italian sausage named Poole Tom snores? Would you like to take a guess? Just take one little guess.

  THE MAN SNORES LIKE AN ATOMIC BOMB GOING OFF EVERY SEVEN SECONDS.

  Oh, and, hey, do you think it smells nice in there?

  “You don’t want to shower on these trips,” said Uncle Jim. (He’s not my uncle, by the way. I don’t know why he was called Uncle Jim.) “Deer can smell soap from a mile away. And that fruity dandruff-shampoo shit? Fuck that.” Uncle Jim was a sweet old man who dripped death from his fingertips.

  All right. I’m calming down. I must remind you that people are doing this for fun. They look forward to it all year. Like, the rest of the year they’re just sleeping in their pansy-ass beds, and using their pansy-ass shampoo, and just dreaming of the day when they can leave that all behind.

  I imagine Uncle Jim, retired, sitting around and looking at the sunset with his wife. “This November, Martha, I’m gonna sit around in the woods and not shower.”

  And she’s probably thinking, Don’t come back.

  Day one. Dad and I were in the woods. It seemed like my dad’s enthusiasm for the trip had been blunted by the realization that he had to go on the trip with me. He’d been a little glum the whole time.

  “You’re gonna like this,” said Dad, smoothing out his mustache. On deer hunting trips he never shaved, so the rest of his face had begun to grow a salt-and-chili-powder sea of stubble.

  “I’m not gonna shoot my gun,” I said. “If I see a deer, I’m not going to kill it. I’ll give it a massage.”

  “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do.” My dad had a lot of faith that I would spontaneously mutate into a Man, and he was pretty sure it was going to happen on this trip.

  “I know what I’m gonna do. I’m not gonna shoot. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

  “All right, son,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “You think that now, but when you see a deer…you’ll know what to do.”

  “Pretty sure I won’t.”

  “Pretty sure you will.”

  “Pretty sure I won’t.” Seriously, Dad, I can do this all day long. The deer will hear this stupid conversation and stay the hell away.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said, trying a different tactic. He crouched kind of low, his back against one of the pine trees. “I’ve been coming to this cabin with these guys for twenty-three years. I have not missed a time. When your mom was nine months pregnant with you and your sister, you know what I did?”

  “You went hunting?”

  “I went hunting.”

  “Was Mom pissed?”

  “Women get pissed about all kinds of things. It’s best not to even think about it. Now, normally, I would tell you not to use the word pissed. But we’re in the woods, and we’re men. And we can use the word pissed.”

  “Can I use the word fuck?”

  “Can your mom hear you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, there’s your answer then. Out here in the woods we will swear like men.” I have to admit that Hunting Dad was a lot more relaxed than Regular Dad. “Anyway. Twenty-three years. You know how many deer I’ve shot in twenty-three years?”

  I knew.

  “Zero,” he said, putting his gloved fingers up to make a zero. “You know how many times I’ve fired my gun? Nineteen. I’ve missed every time. But I took the shot.”

  “Is there some kind of life lesson here, Dad? ’Cause I’m missing it.”

  “You gotta keep shooting. Even if you miss.” He nodded sagely, staring off into the woods.

  We saw no deer on day one, so we didn’t need to shoot. The reason we saw no deer might have been that I was purposefully jumping up and down, waving my arms, snapping twigs, and playing a game of “Nobody kills Bambi on my watch.” That might have had something to do with it.

  Day two. Dad and I were in the woods again. The other guys had heard about what happened on day one and stayed away from us.

  The weather was horrible. It warmed up a bit, which was the bane of all deer hunters, because it meant that it would be raining and not snowing. The rain fell in huge, icy drops, slapping the undergrowth like a squadron of bombers.

  My wool coat was less than useless in the rain, and it soaked up the ice water like a sponge. I shifted back and forth like I needed to pee, my hands shoved deep into my pockets. The rifle was pinned between my arm and my chest, which was a damn stupid way to hold a rifle.

  “Hey, Dad, maybe we’re going to get pneumonia.”

  “We’re not getting pneumonia. That’s an old wives’ tale.” Dad had no time for fancy diseases when there was killing to be done.

  “I’m freezing out here.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have worn that dumb-ass coat. I told ya.”

  “I know.”

  “You want to look like a poet, you’re gonna suffer like a poet.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Our ancestors survived weather like this. They didn’t complain, either.”

  “Our ancestors are all dead. Probably from pneumonia. Maybe I’ll write a poem about it.”

  My dad cracked a smile. Maybe the first one the whole trip.

  “Maybe that’s what I could major in. Poetry writing. Hey, that’s where your money could go. Sending your son to school to study fruity pneumonia poems.”

  “You’re killing me.” He chuckled. “Ah, shit, Craig. Study what you want. I mean, I’m pretty sure you’ve got no future working with your hands. I figured that out when you were about six and you sat on that guinea pig. So you better be able to work with your brain.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Better that way, anyway. Used to be…I started working at Parker Pen out of high school. You could get a decent job then without a college education. Get benefits, pension, the whole bit. But, uh…it’s not that way anymore. It’s never gonna be that way again, so…so maybe there’s a future in poetry, what the hell do I know? Not much.” His eyes drifted off into the woods. “You think you know how something’s supposed to work. How life’s supposed to go and then…then things change.”

  Change is good, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

  We saw no deer on day two.

  When we got back to the hut, Buck had got a buck. It was worth fifteen points. It took me a long time to figure out that the points system only
referred to the number of points that were on the buck’s antlers, which made sense, I guess. I had always figured that there was some giant scoreboard somewhere.

  “Goddamn it!” he shouted, apparently happy. “God-damn-it.”

  “Wow,” said Dad, trying not to be jealous.

  “Goddamn it,” said Buck, thoughtfully.

  When you kill a deer, you strap it to the top of your car, and you go home, laughing and crying and confident in your manliness. The rest of us stayed on.

  The last day. There was an odd look in Dad’s eyes today. I would call it defeat. There had been twenty-three years without deer. He had only managed to bring his son hunting twice in that time, and here I was, acting like a complete donkey out in the woods. I had my reasons, of course, namely that I was responsible for the death of enough innocent animals and didn’t want to be the cause of any more.

  So, anyway, before we went out at dawn (oh, that reminds me of another reason hunting sucks: you need to go out just before the sun comes up), I heard him in the other room talking with Uncle Jim. I only heard the last line of the conversation when Uncle Jim said, “I’ll fall on that grenade.”

  Then Uncle Jim came over and told me I was going out in the woods with him today.

  Being with Uncle Jim was slightly less fun than being with my dad, which is to say that it was negative fun. Uncle Jim was all business all morning long, but after it became clear that the deer had learned to stay away from the moron in the trench coat, things lightened up a bit.

  “Craig,” he said, after we’ d had our daily lunch of beef jerky.

  “Yeah?”

  He ran his hand over his big, fluffy mustache.

  “Are ya gay?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Everybody’s a little bit gay?”

  “Maybe ten percent then?” I was just ballparking that. I was probably 0 percent gay, but I didn’t want to contradict him.

  Uncle Jim nodded. “You going to college next year?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gonna be a gay college?”

  “I’m not sure they actually have gay colleges, but I’m open to the possibility.”