32.
The distance between Besse and me now was so painfully apparent, though, that I knew Van was right – the only reasonable way to cross it was to increase it. A weekend away – at Friend’s Lake – seemed ideal. I didn’t own a bike or anything. I’d ridden Logan’s, but that was about it. Van said that was no big deal, there’d be plenty of bikes, and that wasn’t why I was going anyway.
We took off, around 7 that evening, about four hours early from work. I didn’t tell Besse I was going, though I did want to tell Elle. I secretly hoped still to do something with her that weekend. I would have bailed on Van and Friend’s Lake in a second to hang out with Elle. I never saw her though, and didn’t have the balls to walk into the new office building now and look for her.
“I didn’t tell anyone where I’m going,” I told Van.
“Ah, fuck it, kid,” he said. “One thing about women is the less you tell them, the easier it is for you. It’s like, what they don’t know don’t hurt them, but it’s more than that. The more they don’t know about you, the more interested they get in you. And that’s how you nail them. It ain’t no mystery. It’s easy.”
Van locked the factory behind us, like slamming a coffin shut, with a relaxed, certain authority. I slipped across the parking lot to my car. I wanted to hit the road before I got too scared to go. Things were bad between me and Besse now, but disappearing for a weekend, when Besse and I would have surely had to face and confront each other, hiding, instead of dealing with our problems, seemed sure to escalate them, to seal the tomb on the chances of our reconciliation. Van climbed on his Harley and kicked it on. The Buick roared to life in my hands, nearly as loud as Van’s bike. I’d be lucky if this thing made the hour drive north to Friend’s Lake.
Van sped out of the factory’s dirt parking lot, his leather jacket like a black hole in the moonlight as I chased him out of there.
I followed Van to Friend’s Lake, but I knew the way. Logan and I went there once, late in October, near last Halloween. Logan called me one Friday afternoon, and wanted me to go up there and stay at his uncle’s cabin and hunt. I needed to get out myself. A couple of weeks into that fall semester, right after Besse and I moved into the apartment together, Emily showed up, after all, for her courses. Her parents had paid the tuition and wouldn’t let her just quit. She moved in with me and Besse, using the tiny room, little more than a huge closet, really, between the bedroom and the living room. It would have been okay for the two of them, but it was tiny with all three of us, and Emily hated me being there and we argued all of the time. Besse was torn between us, especially at first, but after the car accident, it was like the two were really teamed against me. And Besse only really knew about the whole fucking car accident because Emily had ratted me out.
Emily began seeing Logan on and off again shortly after that, and the living room was a little too intimate for the four of us, it turned out. Tensions were high. Logan hadn’t realized Besse and I were living together, until he saw Emily again, and he was troubled by the fact. And Besse had never told Emily I was moving in when she bailed on the apartment at the beginning of the semester. Everybody was a little surprised to find all four of us suddenly jammed in that apartment together.
This is how I first learned that Besse’s fascination with keeping secrets rivaled mine.
Since Logan was messing around seeing both Emily and Michelle and neither were working out too well for him, he saw me as about his only real ally in the whole mess, whether it was true or not.
“Michelle and Emily are driving me nuts,” he confided as we drove up there in his Dodge late one afternoon, looking at the changing colors of the leaves on the thickly wooded roads winding their way from Still Creek to Friend’s Lake. “Shit, you got the only decent girl in the bunch.”
I didn’t have a lot of patience for this kind of shit from Logan. “You picked those girls, you cheated on them, it’s your fault.”
“What are you talking about?” he grumbled, scowling. “You just go out with my girlfriends’ friends, or with my girlfriend, for that matter. It’s not like you’re finding these women.”
“Let’s just say I’m not very jealous of you,” I told him. “And she wasn’t your girlfriend at the time,” I reminded him, talking about Michelle, which he still held against me.
“Whatever. Let’s just go hunting,” he snapped.
33.
Dust spit up in clouds as I pulled into the gravel parking lot of Friend’s Lake Tavern behind Van. The sand and stone kicked up from his Harley poured through my missing window and collected on my lips and then my tongue, filled my nostrils and stung my eyes. I parked away from Van’s bike to make sure I didn’t knock it over. The parking lot was empty besides us. Van was already entering the tavern when I climbed out of my car. I wiped my face on my shirt, leaving a dirty smear across the stomach area of the fabric and went in behind him.
Van already had a Utica Club on the bar for me, and was talking to the bartender like an old friend. “This is Janie,” he told me.
“You boys better not raise no hell around here like you always do,” she said, turning to the register to put his money away. She was old – graying – and wrinkled around the mouth and eyes. Despite all the makeup she wore, she couldn’t hide the weariness of having worked in this bar for far too many years – couldn’t cover the stain of thousands of nights of cigarette smoke and the breath of alcoholics, but she did her best. She smiled even though she didn’t have the heart to mean it, at least not as much as she meant what she was telling Van. “The troopers were in here every day for two weeks trying to find out who you was last time. I can’t be having that for my business and I don’t like you enough to keep lying this time.”
Van just laughed. “Relax,” he told her. “We ain’t here to cause no trouble.”
She turned sharply back from the cash register, drawer still open, money still in hand. “Well, you probably weren’t here to cause no trouble last time either. But you did,” she snapped. “And you’re damned lucky I don’t just call them troopers right now.”
Van looked away from her, the grin falling off his face, his hands spinning his beer on the bar top. “I bought you a beer, boy,” he said to me as I fidgeted in my seat next to him.
I picked it off the bar, took a sip. It was warm but I drank it anyway. The tension in the room demanded I do nothing to increase it. Keep quiet. I couldn’t, though. “What the hell’d you do, Van?” I blurted out, setting the beer back down, eyeing him and the bartender carefully.
“I slept with some guy’s wife,” he said, looking down at the bar. “Started a fight.” He looked cautiously up at the bartender.
She slammed the register closed. “You didn’t sleep with some guy’s wife,” she shouted and then looked at me. I trembled underneath her angry eyes. “He done humped some piece of trash in the bathroom so drunk neither of them knew what they was doing. Her husband go looking for her and find her in the bathroom with this asshole acting like they making a movie or something.”
Van looked away from her again, straightened his head only long enough to slam the rest of his beer. She opened another for him without asking and set it down. “The husband come out of there just looking to kill and this drunk son of a bitch is itching for a fight. Next thing I know there ain’t a table or a chair in this place that ain’t been broke over somebody’s head, all these goddamned rednecks and bikers and assholes pounding the shit out of each other.” She paused to take a deep breath. “You gone and cost me a bunch of money, Van,” she said. “And leave me lying to the police for two straight weeks. Damned near killed that man.”
“I’m sorry, Ma,” Van said, grabbing the fresh beer and drinking it.
I saw the connection now. Van had Janie’s face, her eyes, even her characteristics. He was definitely his mother’s son. Van was a mama’s boy.
“Where you boys staying tonight?” she asked, sighing and relaxing some, perhaps accepting the apology.
�
�Out at the camp,” Van said, happy to be out from under the gun.
“Well I suggest you get your ass out there and stay out there,” she told him, grabbing his change off the bar to pay for the beer she just gave him. “You want another?” she asked me, setting one down before I answered. “You know them folks live around here and come in all the time, and I got to see them and tell them I got no idea when you’ll be back. I’m surprised he didn’t go right down to Still Creek and try to kill you. Some son you turned out to be. You’re going to get yourself right back in jail and I ain’t even going to care,” she promised.
I finished the first beer she gave me and picked up the second. She looked back at me. “What the hell you doing with this guy?” she asked. “You’re just going to get yourself in a boatload of trouble, I’m warning you. He ain’t good for nothing but breaking the law.”
“Alright, Ma,” Van said. “We get the picture. We won’t be hanging around here and we won’t be starting no fights.”
“In the goddamned bathroom!” she shouted at me. “Of all the filthy, dirty, lowdown places to fornicate!”
“Alright, Ma!” Van said again, louder this time. “If you don’t drop it, I swear to God I’ll sit right here all night waiting for that dumbass redneck to show back up here and this time I’ll fix him for good.”
“This boy’s going to be the death of me,” she said aside to me. “I swear. And he ain’t going to be nothing but trouble for you.”
The door flew open behind us and a guy in jeans and a leather vest and with tattoos up and down his arms stood silhouetted in a front of a cloud of dust in the parking lot. “Who the hell’s Buick is that?” he shouted, making me choke as I tried to swallow my beer.
I nearly dropped the bottle setting it down, my hand trembling so much.
“I swear to God that used to be my car!” he announced. “I want to buy that owner a drink! Or hell, I’ll buy anybody a drink that’ll listen to me talk about that car.”
“Tyler Johnson, you scoundrel!” shouted Van’s mother. “You just turn your ass right back around and get the hell out of my bar!”
“Tyler!” Van shouted, jumping up. “What’s going on?”
Van leapt across the bar and shook Tyler’s hand, and then they pulled each into an embrace, only one arm around each other, patting one another on the back just briefly. “Grab another beer, Ma,” Van ordered, excited, while his mother shook her head in hopeless exasperation.
“I want you to meet an old buddy of mine,” Van said, leading Tyler across the bar to me.
“That your Buick out there?” Tyler asked me.
I nodded my head, shaking his hand firmly. A lot of men judge you by your handshake alone. Too little is too insincere, too much is too excited. It’s a firm grasp, a shake, and eye contact. No more, no less. Or at least that’s the kind of guy Tyler Johnson was.
“I swear to God I used to own that car.”
34.
My father did his year in Viet Nam. He never talked about it, he didn’t seem to have any lingering psychosis. I never had any sympathy for all of the fuck-ups that couldn’t get over Viet Nam. My old man did what he was asked to do and I assume it was hell. But he lived, he came home, he married, he had children, he got a job for a freight company, he worked it for the rest of his life. He never got a thing for serving, he never mentioned it again, he never cried, he never bitched, he never said he fought for my freedom.
My uncle rode with a local chapter of the Hells Angels in those years and followed the Grateful Dead on his bike. He swallowed mescaline and wore a spiked metal helmet compliments of my grandfather’s tangle with the Third Reich, a souvenir he brought home from his vacation in Europe in the early 40’s – the one every man in his generation went on. I think, in his own way, my uncle fought as hard for freedom as anybody did. But he didn’t talk about those years either.
I’ve never thought right and wrong were all that clear cut. Going to Viet Nam was the right thing to do for my father. He couldn’t have lived with himself if he hadn’t. He wasn’t drafted, he registered. He figured they’d get him anyway, but also that he had a duty. No one understood the level of threat of the spread of Communism at the time, at least not amongst just common people living everyday lives; Viet Nam was part of World War III for all anybody knew. My father believed we had to fight. It’s much easier to look back on it now, in the context of paranoia and the political and economic profitability of war and see other reasons we may have been there, but who could have known it then? When my dad was just another woodchuck from the sticks of Central New York?
Not going to Viet Nam was the right thing for my uncle. He probably wouldn’t have lived if he did. This always made perfect sense to me, even though it divided an entire nation once. I don’t get caught up in bigger moral issues. One time something is right, another time the same thing is wrong; or it’s both wrong and right for different people at the same time. This is less mysterious than it sounds if you don’t cling to a bunch of rigid ideas. I always did what I felt was right at any given time, and I didn’t expect much else from anybody else. If I was wrong, I’d obscure it as long as I could, and fess up if I had to. Maybe I’d never even agree I was wrong. If I had done something wrong, I believed it was important to understand everything that led up to it, though. To see why maybe it hadn’t seemed so wrong at the time. Once you’ve done something that’s probably wrong, and you have to accept it to live with yourself, you’ve killed the whole idea of right and wrong anyway. You don’t just stop living because you did something bad. It’s a genetic thing, a matter of survival, and survival always trumps morality.
If there is any absolute truth about this kind of stuff at all, I was certain it was an ugly truth.
The gun in my hand felt awkward and clumsy that night I went coon hunting with Logan out by Friend’s lake. I wore a red plastic helmet with a headlight on it to guide my way, but I couldn’t see that well. Running with both hands clutching even a light .22 caliber rifle changes your whole equilibrium.
Logan was still angry from our conversation earlier, but I knew the true source of his anger was that I was living with Besse, and Emily for that matter, and he hadn’t even known all of that was going on until he saw Emily again for the first time. He was determined to take it out on me in the hunt, I suspected. We had two hounds, a Blue Tick named Kentucky and a German Plott we called Radar. They raced through the dark woods surrounding the lake hundreds of feet ahead of us, periodically letting out a yelp to tell us where they were. Logan listened carefully to them, steered us roughly toward them. I could never have figured out where they were.
Eventually, one caught a live scent and they both howled and bayed excitedly, and the hunt was on. The dogs launched into a full gallop, howling at the top of their lungs and we joined them in the chase, bursting into full sprints to catch them. After a pounding run through the woods, the dogs treed the coon and we hauled our asses through the brush and the trees over there to shoot the coon down while the dogs kept it pinned in the tree. The hounds jumped and scampered up the tree side, desperate to climb it, to lay their teeth into the vermin. Raccoons are vicious animals and could have seriously messed the dogs up if they fought.
Once we reached the tree we shined our lights up into its branches until we caught the glare of the raccoon’s green eyes in our beams. It was time to shoot the bastard down. The raccoon knew it was in trouble with the hounds baying at the foot of the tree and some bigger, harder to understand animal shining lights on its nocturnal self. And this knowledge existed without even an understanding of the deadly, long range power we held in our hands, something no animal could grasp. The coon could hide in a tree, just following its most natural defense mechanism, but we could still kill it in a second. If it knew that, it never would have given chase, it would never even have bothered. They weren’t hard to kill this way, after all.
If the Soviet Union had known communism could never have outlasted capitalism, maybe it never would ha
ve bothered to take Southeast Asia. If America had known communism couldn’t survive, it probably would have still treed it and gunned it down.
My father hunted coon his whole life. Maybe that’s why Viet Nam wasn’t so hard for him to swallow psychologically. He didn’t talk about it much, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Logan was a lot like my dad and always thought about joining the army, but only if there was a war. He didn’t want to join for no reason, he said. There was the Iraq war, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, but it just didn’t last that long, and there wasn’t any real sense of urgency about it. We kicked their asses. All the wars were like that these days.
I stared at the glare of the raccoon’s transfixed eyes and snapped my rifle up. I tilted the fore stock in my hands and shifted the stock itself against my shoulder, trying to line the sights up, but they never really aligned, or I never held still long enough to be sure I was doing it right. Logan snapped his own gun up and took aim. “Just a second,” I said, shifting again.
He dropped the rifle. I steadied the barrel, looked into the coon’s masked eyes. My hands trembled and I never knew when I was going to shoot exactly, so when I did, it took me by surprise and I jerked the rifle high. The coon’s eyes vanished and I thought I hit it anyway.
“Jesus Christ!” Logan shouted. “Get a fucking move on!”
The hounds leapt into action, chasing the fleeing raccoon again, who was out of the tree in a flash and racing off through the woods in a mere second, using the distraction of the rifle shot to slip out of our sight, right under the dogs’ noses. But not for long – they loped after him almost immediately, barking crazily to no rhythm except that of the hunt. I sprinted wildly off after Logan. Branches whipped me in the face, roots and rocks twisted my ankles, but I stumbled blindly on. My elbows scraped against trees, my clothes clung to prickers, I tripped and nearly fell and tripped again, but kept up after Logan, who was moving much more gracefully through the dark woods. My helmet slid over my eyes and I bounced off a maple tree and landed on the ground. I used my rifle to stand up, scrambling to catch up with Logan. But he’d stopped too.
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