“Cherokee didn’t need no fucking hunting license,” he’d say.
What was the Trail of Tears like, I wanted to ask. Had that been hard, watching all his people die of the measles? But also, I wanted to believe. It was a story our grandmother had told us about being descended from a Cherokee chieftain, a version of the same fairy tale told to most poor whites and blacks across the South, a way of making us feel better about genocide and gambling. I’d heard that such blood could earn me a college scholarship, which I believed was my passage out of this alien land, while Bird used this story to explain his preternatural desire to learn things about animals by smelling their feces.
“What are you doing?” he said, while I was still in the tree.
“Unloading my gun,” I said. One did not merely shimmy down from three stories up with a loaded gun on his back. One took precautions.
We’d both attended a hunter’s safety course that summer, mandated by law. Pop and Bird were nonplussed. What could some game warden with a college degree in wildlife management teach us about the sporting life? It was an insult to them. But I liked it. I was curious as to what other men might teach me, particularly men who may have written books on such matters, or at least men who had read those books, or perhaps any book.
I learned, for example, that it was preferable to shoot a deer in the heart, and not from a moving vehicle, or the window of one’s home. I also learned first aid, in case the massive deer we’d just shot was actually a family member, and that it was best not to strap a dead deer to the hood of one’s truck, a common sight at our club, as the heat of the engine had been known to cook the deer, which would bloat the carcass, which would prevent the hunter from actually seeing the road in front of him, which might result in the additional slaughter of animals and people. I also learned about the horrors of hypothermia and how one might grow disoriented and fall into a river and never be heard from again, and how to build a fire so as not to die from exposure, and how, in order not to fall out of a tree, one might tie oneself to said tree with a rope or harness, as though one were about to be launched into space.
Pop nodded in general approval of these lessons, though I suspect that, to him, tying oneself to trees seemed a bit womanish.
“Let’s go,” Bird said.
“Where to?”
He turned and stared into the trees, as though he had heard something I didn’t, perhaps deer, or distant gunfire, or merely the ancient spirits in his head.
He walked. I followed.
I was not to ask questions. We were still in the woods, still hunting. He crept forward noiselessly on the roadbed, gun drawn, while I trailed behind. This is what he called “stalking.”
Pop did not approve of stalking, but Bird didn’t care.
Stalking deer is not unlike stalking a human, in that both involve mobility, concealment, and a mild psychosis brought on by the inability to experience human love. I kept accidentally snapping twigs, making Bird turn and scowl.
“Watch where you step.”
It was hard to explain that my excess of garments prevented me from actually controlling the movements of my legs.
“Don’t be such an idiot,” he said.
“Yes, okay, sorry.”
He was fearless. He would just hit people. He would laugh big bellowing laughs that frightened small animals. He would blow a snot rocket right there in the middle of a baseball field, a jet of mucus erupting from a single nostril with enough force to clear his sinuses and disorient the batter. He was a badass. He had balls. Literally. He had shown them to me. They were enormous.
Would mine ever be that big, I wondered? What did it feel like to be a man?
He looked so good in his hunting outfit. Jeans. Field jacket. Tall. Thin. Like a J.Crew model, if they wore bowie knives. How could he get away with wearing so few clothes? Was he simply unafraid of the cold? Or did he lack the necessary nerve endings? And why did he insist on smelling everything?
Bird was led by native spirits, but what led me?
Suddenly, he pulled up his gun and shot into the woods. But I had seen nothing.
“It was a deer,” he said.
It may also have been a hallucination. He wanted deer that badly. You had the feeling he would just punch a deer in the face if he got the chance.
That’s when we saw it.
Actually, all we could see were its handlebars.
Bird’s three-wheeler had fallen in a deep mud hole cut by a pulpwood truck and was now mostly underwater. This is what he wanted me for. His plan was for me to get in and push, since I had fat rubber boots, while he would help from dry ground, where it would be easier to laugh.
“It’s too cold,” I said. I was thinking of our hypothermia lesson. They had showed us an instructional video, but the man in the video, he died.
“Just stand in the shallow part,” Bird said.
I guess I was tired of seeming like a big fat baby, or maybe the air temperature had briefly frozen my brain. Whatever it was, I stepped in.
What happened next would likely be described by medical professionals as “drowning.” The water was five feet deep where I’d gone in, and I went under. I sort of bobbed and floundered there for a second, like a buoy, owing to the many layers of clothing, which proved astonishingly impermeable to water.
I managed to scramble and hurl myself onto the edge of the pool, that carpet of pine needles that served as my own private Normandy. When the mud drained from my ears, I could hear Bird laughing the loudest laugh that had ever been laughed outside of a mental hospital, so loud that any nearby deer would have mistaken it for a distant car accident involving cattle.
“You got a little wet,” Bird said.
I wanted to ask him: What does it feel like not to have a human heart? Is it fun?
My gun lay against a tree several yards away. I briefly considered the moral implications of fratricide. Nobody would know. Hunting accidents happen all the time. A gun can slip, fall, accidentally discharge six or seven times in one’s brother’s face.
I started to shake. Bird attempted to reach his handlebars from dry ground, while I lay there and tried to remember the various stages of hypothermia, which started at anxiety and ended in what I vaguely recalled as “feelings of unreality” and then “death.”
“You look a little pale,” Bird said.
“What color are my lips?”
“Green,” he said.
“I’m going to die.”
Thankfully, I was wearing cotton, which was very good at holding water next to the skin, speeding up the dying process. I began to disrobe, first my boots, then my coveralls, then various inner garments. My book fell out.
I had forgotten about my book.
I’d gotten the idea the previous hunting season, as a way to cure the endless boredom. I had been careful not to say anything. Pop would be upset. He’d said to keep reading books, but books had their place, and guns had theirs. Now they’d know why I hadn’t killed anything. Literacy was to blame.
“What the crap is that?” Bird said, looking down at the wet paperback.
“A book,” I said, teeth chattering. “It’s got all these words in it. You should get one.”
He was shocked. He might as well have discovered me carrying a gymnastics brochure. It was Watership Down, a book about communist rabbits who worship the sun.
“What’s it about?”
“Hunting,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said.
“Don’t tell Pop,” I said.
Most of my clothes were now in a pile, and my exposed skin burned. The man in the video said you could die in just an hour or two.
I needed to go. Where to, I didn’t know.
The best thing about dying from exposure is that it gives you time to reflect. I walked deeper into the woods and thought a lot about my situation and my family and my brother and father and this ridiculous childhood. Why couldn’t I have been born to a man who loved circuses, or museums? Where was my mother,
at that moment? Strolling down the cereal aisle, I guessed, humming a happy song. In her hands, she would have the coupons I’d helped her clip the previous Sunday afternoon. She was my people. Her father loved movies. He’d run a film projector at the Joy, a movie house in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Every Saturday, he took Mom. She stayed there all day, watching westerns and monster movies and Gone with the Wind about a million times, which I guess is a kind of torture, but it sounded dreamy, sitting alone in the balcony while one’s father sat a few feet away threading reels and smoking cigarettes and reading the funny papers. The Joy was her Jitney Jungle. Her father was to her what she had become to me.
Right about then, my book was beginning to chafe.
The feelings of unreality came quickly.
What I thought was, I should get back to my stand and just wait like nothing happened and maybe Pop won’t notice that I’ve lost all my clothes. I walked, and walked: Up trails, around bends, through forks, taking rights, taking lefts: I saw visions of darting brown things. I found myself stopping for no reason, turning to look into the woods. Had I seen something move?
What in the hell was I doing?
What I was doing, I guessed, was hunting.
I looked for the sun, but the sun had wrapped itself in a warm envelopment of clouds. My face felt like the surface of a refrigerated ham. I came to understand how rabbits might worship it.
I could always start a fire, which the video had explained was a way to save my life and also burn down the forest. Since then, I’d taken to carrying matches, which I transported in a small black watertight film canister.
I found a small clearing by the trail and gathered twigs and leaves. I crouched, lit the pile. The fire caught and spread, a very successful fire, and I wondered: When does a fire in the forest become a forest fire? It was an interesting question. And if forest fires are wrong, why does this one feel so right? Is this what they meant by feelings of unreality?
He did what, they would say.
Started a fire, they would say. Because he thought he was going to die.
And they would laugh and laugh.
I put the fire out and kept moving.
I knew what I had to do.
I had to find my father.
I came to a fork, and went toward where I thought he might be.
I put a round in the chamber. Yes. I was hunting now.
Pop had said he was going to the Cutover, a desolation in the very center of these woods, a clearing approximately the size of Central Park and created, not by thoughtful urban designers, but by paper companies who took all the trees and left a bare gray landscape that looked like somewhere you’d find a mass grave or an art project about mass graves.
I walked along the edge of it for a hundred yards or so, and I saw him in a tree. And despite that I had lost my hunter’s orange vest somewhere up the trail, he saw me. He waved. I waved back. But no, he wasn’t waving. He was gesturing. Pointing at something out in the Cutover, something he wanted me to see.
I saw it. A deer. No. Two.
About two hundred yards away, grazing, heads down. Big one, small one. No antlers.
Seeing anything in the wild got the heart pounding. Spit fills the mouth. Blood heats. Intestines tumble. There was no question of my not shooting.
It would be an easy shot, as they were not moving.
So, my first deer would be a woman. Okay, I guess. That was fine. This is what he wanted. I put the bead of my iron sights where the heart was.
Bang.
I pulled up and looked with both eyes. The deer had not moved.
Two hundred yards was far.
Bang.
More nothing.
Bang.
Additional nothing. Three murderous shots and they hadn’t moved. It was like they hadn’t even heard the gun. Were they deaf? Was I shooting a family of disabled animals? Was that even legal? I looked at Pop, who gave me a thumbs-up.
I put the gun to my shoulder again. I was fine with missing, really. They were so far away. Pop would understand.
But no. They just stood there. Daring me to do the thing that everybody said would make me a man. But I didn’t want to be a man. I could settle for being a child forever, or maybe a woman, or a librarian, or anything that didn’t have to kill things.
Five rounds left, one bullet for each stage of grief.
Bang. Denial. My gun was broken.
Bang. Anger. I hate my family, and I hate these deer, even if they are deaf.
Bang. Bargaining. Okay, Jesus. Remember how I said I would become a preacher if you let me kill a deer today? I’ll do you one better. Not only will I stop touching my penis, except to wash it and dry it, which I think you are probably okay with, but I will become a missionary to some dangerous and alien land, like Java, or Atlanta. Yes. I will serve you. Just please let me explode this deer’s head off its body. Also, I will be nicer to old people. Amen.
The deer had moved a little, but continued to graze, unperturbed. Two shots left.
Bang, another miss. Depression. I should do us all a favor and turn this gun on myself, although I would probably just miss.
One shot left. What would this come to? Would I have to charge at them with a stick? Would Pop come down and hand me his gun? In that moment, if I thought it’d have made him proud, I would have thrown a grenade at a whole damned family of deer.
Now Bird had found us. He had heard the shooting. He watched.
One more. Make it count.
A short, naked tree stood nearby. It looked dead. I walked to it, and placed my rifle in the crotch of a low branch. I aimed. Help me, Jesus.
Bang.
I stood ten yards away from the larger deer. It was still breathing. I’d hit her in the gut, but she was not dead. Bird and Pop stood behind me, watching. This was my kill. Becoming a man was complicated, filled with decisions. Such as: Do I just stand here and let it suffer?
“Shoot it again,” Bird said.
Pop said nothing. He merely surveyed the fact of what was happening.
But I couldn’t do it. How close do you stand to it? Do you put the barrel against its head? I had to work up the courage. This was supposed to be the easy part. It was lying right there. I usually kept one or two rounds in a pocket, just in case. I found one. It was wet. Could I use it? Should I? Would it misfire? Explode? Blind me?
While I was vocalizing some of these questions, my brother shot the deer in the head.
And that’s when we saw the other deer, the baby one.
A yearling. The saddest part is how it just stood there, watching, almost leaning into the clearing where we all stood, as though it wanted to run to its mother, but didn’t know if it had permission.
For some reason that I’m not sure I know even now, this only embarrassed me further. I had killed this animal’s mother. I tried to tell myself that the fawn was not thinking about its dead mother, that when it went to bed that night, deep down in some secret thicket, it would not feel alone for the first time in its life. And that is what made me sad, and I was embarrassed that I was sad, which made the moment even sadder.
Was I reading too much into the animal? Had I read too much into every animal? What was it with me and animals? Why was I reading a book about talking rabbits? Why did my mother give me books that made me feel feelings, and why did my father give me guns that made me hurt the feelings of animals, by wounding them, and their mothers? Even then, I felt there was great portent in this particular moment, that something important had or was happening in real time, and that it had something to do with me and this deer and its mother and my mother and my father. The air around us all was burdened with meaning.
The small deer turned its head, and that’s when I saw that the right side of its face was mostly gone. Its muzzle was split in two, bleeding, its teeth and jawbone exposed, the flesh of its jaw a haze of gore. I had done this. But how? Was this the ghoulish result of the final bullet, ricocheting off some dead tree? It would take a long time for this a
nimal to die. It would starve. Get an infection. Die of shock. Never grow up.
It turned and walked away, slowly, into the Cutover, and was gone.
That was the last time I went hunting, or rather, the last time I tried to shoot anything. For five more years, I would get up on so many mornings in November and December and January in the coldest part of night, only this time I made sure to bring books. I read without ceasing, Tolkien and Verne and Dickens and Twain and Poe and Hemingway and Steinbeck, and then moved on to the weird stuff, the Asimov and Koontz and King and Dune and Clan of the Cave Bear, yet another book given to me by Mom, about a Cro-Magnon girl who wanders the wilderness and is adopted by a violent clan of Neanderthals with a limited vocal apparatus, which reminded me of so many of my brother’s friends.
These stories were hearty distractions from the horror.
Pop knew. It was our agreement. I would not resist the hunting, and he would not resist the reading, and every deer season, as if by miracle, my standardized test scores would improve, bringing me closer to such time as I might get my paper, as he occasionally reminded me was how not to be a slave to lesser men.
It was that day, I think, when I finally stopped trying to be like my father and my brother and be a different kind of man, the kind who was more like a woman, which is to say my mother. Yes, the kind of man who only climbed trees if being chased by a lion.
Besides, I’d killed a deer. I’d done my part. Really, I’d killed two. There had been no fanfare. Pop had taken no pictures, sent them to no magazines, put them up on no general store walls. They didn’t even make me drink the blood. I hardly remember the gutting.
I just kept reading and didn’t think about it.
When I finally did go to college, Pop kept asking me to come home and hunt, and I had all sorts of new excuses: that I needed to study, or work, or was planning to have blood in my stool this weekend and couldn’t make it. Eventually, he stopped asking.
The World's Largest Man Page 8