by Daniel Perry
He calls the next name: Nancy. We’ve made her bunt a lot this season — it’s the only way to get her on base, and the twins ahead of her are fast enough they can usually move over. She looks at me and waits for the usual sign, but I don’t tap my belt buckle. We exchange a glance.
Fuck him. Swing away.
The first pitch is good and Nancy rips past it wildly. She cuts again at the second, a mile outside, grinning as she does. She connects on the third, in on her wrists, and lamely pops the ball up to the catcher. As usual, the bench greets her with half-hearted “Good try” and “You’ll get her next time,” which we taught the girls to say after a bad out, when there’s nothing to say at all. Nancy takes her seat at the end of the bench, beside Stacey.
Melissa hits next, and she doesn’t even look at me. She swings through three straight, and so does Samantha. Blue hustles off. Six of our girls retrieve their gloves and take the field. The other four stay glued to the bench.
Melissa’s green eyes gleam.
“You can’t sit us all,” she says, taunting Hank.
Bill the umpire calls, “Hurry up, yellow team!” Hank grunts and sends everyone but Stacey out, playing one short to make his point. In his haste, he sends Nancy to centre field, and as if they’re aiming at her — which they well might be — Blue’s players pound ball after ball over her head. Eight runs come in, the limit for the inning, and after Waubnakee goes down in order in the top of the second — three more swinging strikeouts — Blue scores the maximum again. We get nothing in the top of three: long fly out for Rebecca, strikeout for Stacey, and a popup to the pitcher by Nancy. Blue scores a quick four runs in the bottom.
20–5.
Bill waves a hand at Hank.
“Mercy rule,” he announces. “Game’s over.”
Blue cheers and rushes from their bench. Hank leaps off ours and kicks the bat rack off the fence. He throws everything he can find onto the field: batting helmets, spare gloves, the scorebook, more, and he stomps toward the parking lot. Shawn and I line our girls up for the handshake. Blue gets the trophy, and afterward, the Waubnakee parents greet their daughters in the bleachers, where they put hands on shoulders and sigh and walk together to their cars.
Nancy helps me retrieve the team gear from the field, and at the shed we find Shawn unlocking it for Bill, who takes a hammer and walks back to the diamond, where he begins moving the bases back for the men’s final.
Shawn asks Nancy, “Think you’ll be back next year?”
She stares through him and doesn’t answer.
“It’s all right,” he says. “I’m not sure either.”
Nancy and I say goodbye to him and we follow the third-base line out of the park. We turn down the backstreet. We cross the tracks. From our lawn we still hear Hank cursing in the parking lot. I picture the twins and Jane in the minivan, rigid in their seats and making sure to not look out the door at him. In his tirade he yells Jessie’s name over and over, and I wonder how far she’ll get this time.
Young Buck
IKNOW WHY Mike didn’t take the shot.
It had been coming all week. It had been coming fifteen years.
Susan and I had raised him on venison hunted five days every November, when a dozen guys turn off the world and take their muskets to Ralph’s place, filling the spare rooms and the pull-out couches in the basement. When there were more of us we needed air mattresses on the living room carpet, too. For the most part, the guys are Ralph’s age, so complaining about your back hurting from where you slept is part of the fun now. You bitch about the cold, the rain, the mud and all the bushwhacking; how you’re too old to walk so far, how your wife said you might think about skipping the deer hunt this year — fat chance, you said — and about the farmer who somehow hasn’t taken his corn off yet, how it hides the deer from view till it’s too late, till they’re practically on top of you and already running full speed before you see them.
The guys barbecue all week now that Anne has left Ralph. She used to put a roast in the oven some mornings, make a stew others, spend hours peeling potatoes. The guys never complained about the food, and still don’t — just about the smoke, saying it screws with their musk and scares away the deer. Soap’s easier for them to avoid than spare ribs.
I’ve been the youngest in the group since my brother Richard quit hunting two days after he started. Everyone else is Ralph’s friend, on a week’s holiday from the wife — a few miles away at most, but still away. I use a week’s vacation from the plant for this every year but I don’t stay the nights, don’t even stay for dinner; I go home and get caught up on Susan’s day at the bakery, and Nancy’s good-but-not-that-good grades, and Mike, too, though after dinner he tends to just do his schoolwork and ignore us. I’m not allowed into the bed or to even sleep on an old blanket on the couch without showering, and when I show up in the mornings at Ralph’s it doesn’t matter that I haven’t shaved or that I’ve worn the same clothes every day: I still take flak for being the prettiest. That was set to change when Mike came along, though. He was starting to grow but nowhere near needing to shave, not even the few dark hairs above his lip.
The most we could get out of Susan for Mike was Monday, Wednesday and Friday off school, and even that took all we had. She knows better than to complain about the full freezer every winter, but she’s never liked that I hunt — never liked that since I was fifteen I’ve been soaking up all the bullshit the guys sling all week in Ralph’s basement, or that for quite a while I soaked up all the rum or whisky or whatever was in the room at the time, too. The guys claim they used to party hard every hunting week, but I realize now that by the time I was old enough to drink they had pretty well settled down — that by the time I quit drinking for good, I was the only one partying every night, the only one bleary-eyed the next morning who might join late and not fully know where in the bush everyone and his muzzleloader were, or just miss the whole day struggling between bed and the toilet.
I stopped spending nights at Ralph’s the first November after I quit drinking, and I’d go straight home at the end of the day to help feed and change Mike, help put him to bed. When the night would go quiet and Susan would turn in early I would sit up and read: mysteries, outdated Macleans, even Susan’s Danielle Steel collection — whatever I could get my hands on. It was a lot like how I used to drink. I missed the guys at Ralph’s, but I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t believe they were really what I missed.
MIKE HAD ALWAYS been in the background with the hunting party, all of them asking all the time, “How long till he gets out here with us?” It was Ralph who asked most, complaining that he barely saw his grandson given all the time he spent on the job in Alberta. The other guys sometimes said the gang could use some new blood, some young legs among the walkers, the guys who fanned out through the trees to sweep the deer toward the blockers waiting at the far edge of the woods to pick off the fleeing beauties.
Mike was in the background with Susan every year, too, who insisted that she didn’t want her son involved with guns or stinking up the house Anne had kept so nice or absorbing the so-called wisdom of Ralph’s best buddies — so naturally, Ralph just showed up at our door one spring day after Mike turned fifteen, one hand holding the Ministry of Natural Resources license application Mike would need to fill out and the other taking an envelope of cash from his lumberjacket for the safety course fee. I could see Susan’s jaw clench when Ralph pushed the money into Mike’s hand and said, “Happy birthday.” She shot me a look that boiled with hate. Ralph promised Mike a barely used gun was waiting in the cabinet for him in the fall.
Susan and I didn’t argue about it after. We didn’t need to. Once Ralph got involved in something it happened regardless of whether she or I approved. Mike took the course on Saturdays in August, not seeming to feel her chill in the house those hottest days of the year, and if Susan said anything to him on the weekends she had to drive him, neither of them mentioned it to me. To her credit, I only saw her disapproval in
front of Mike once: a rigid “Ask your dad” when he asked her to write him a note for the three days of school he’d miss.
Later, Susan reminded me that I hadn’t thought this through, hadn’t pictured this fifteen-year-old kid with just a signed piece of paper in his knapsack being sent on his own to explain to a vice-principal why tromping through the bush with a bunch of old farts set on killing deer was a better idea than showing up to math, science or for Chrissakes even English class. I admitted I hadn’t considered it. As I had quit school by his age, hunting season hadn’t caused a problem for me. I told her I’d call in if Mike got any static from the VP, but good man, he didn’t.
WHY NOVEMBER? IT’S because the deer overpopulate in the summer and breed like rabbits — breed like deer. They gorge on farm crops until the harvest, but then in winter there’s not enough food for all of them. We say if they’re going to wind up dead and frozen anyway it may as well be in our freezers.
Logic doesn’t help the weather, though. It’s always cold, wet with rain or snow or mud, and as daylight savings ends the week before, we leave home in the dark in the morning to rally at Ralph’s before we drive over the river out of Currie Township and into the neighbouring county, where the deer are penned between the water and the 401.
Ralph hosts something of a meeting the Sunday night before we start, where on the chalkboard on the basement wall he draws a crude map of the next day’s terrain. The long arrows from one side represent the walkers, and Xs on the opposite end are blockers. Mike and I missed this, of course — Susan put her foot down about Mike keeping up with school work and sleeping enough to make up for the extra-early mornings in the coming week — but it didn’t really matter. I’ve walked this gully a dozen times, and Monday morning, Ralph made Mike a blocker one station over from himself and said he’d give Mike any help he needed. Then he laughed and said, “Unless we’re staring down a big buck. If we’ve both got a shot, let your old gramps have first crack, would ya?” The poor kid said, “Okay,” and I realized no one had really yanked his chain before — at least not the way these guys do it, all of them erupting in laughter when Mike took the bait. Big Al Johnson said after they quieted down, “Don’t listen to this blind old bastard. Shoot the fucking thing and put its rack on your wall.”
We loaded up three trucks, Mike riding bitch between me and Ralph while four more guys huddled under the topper in the back. We all wore the orange hats and coats the law requires and camo otherwise, Mike’s outfit made up of faded and stained pieces other guys got too fat for over the years. We parked at the end of a long dirt lane in a field of corn stubble beside an all-but forgotten cemetery, tiny when seen from the road. There was no snow but the ground was hard, a little white with frost. There’d be mud later.
Ralph went over the plan while we leaned on tailgates and the graveyard’s rusty fence. No one needed to hear it except Mike, the first new guy since Richard — or given how that went, the first new guy since me. We split up and I watched Mike ride off with Ralph to set up at the far end of the block. I uncased my gun, its brass patchbox and kickplate still dull on the wooden stock. It only gets used in November weather; I can’t be bothered to take apart every piece and polish it like some guys do when the season ends.
The black powder deer hunt is an old-fashioned thing, which for all we piss and moan is what I think we like about it. We’d fill a lot more freezers if we brought our thirty-thirties, but as the province wants population control — not extinction — we set out with our muskets and our bulging canvas bags slung over our shoulders, most of which are just as beat up as the one I’ve carried since I was Mike’s age, when it was new and had yet to take on the vinegary smell of the powder in the rectangular can with the red-tipped spout that gets tilted into a small brass cylinder measure and filled to seventy grains. You stand the gun stock on your foot and send the charge down then take the ramrod from under the barrel and tamp inside till you get a light bounce: packed tight. Next is an oily fabric patch, laid flat atop the bore, then the lead ball on top, then the wooden knob of the ballstarter, which you hit a couple of times before you shove the load to the bottom with the ramrod again.
“Ready?” Gord Roberts asked through his big grey beard. He’d be my partner today, as he had been the last few years. I set the cock to half and made sure there was no percussion cap — no spark — waiting to be struck on the nipple. Caps were in a zipper bag in my satchel to keep them dry. I looked up and said, “Yeah, ready.”
We were usually quiet on our way to the bush but today Gord talked some.
“Good to see your boy out.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Three generations of Carrions — that’s somethin’.”
“Huh. Suppose it is.”
“Is he ready?”
I had to think about it. Loading the gun in the right order was complicated enough, never mind shooting safely and all Ralph’s diagrams and separating the bullshit from the buckwheat with these old coots.
“Hope so,” I said. But there was a lot to remember.
I DIDN’T SEE Mike till lunch and even then I didn’t talk to him, I only saw him sitting listening to our oldest guy, Wally Leitch. Ralph was nodding, arms folded, raising a sandwich to his mouth occasionally while Wally rambled. All I could think was, I hope Mike didn’t screw up. The guys don’t go in for surprises. That’s what happened with Richard: he took a shot he shouldn’t have. Ralph says he heard the ball whizz. It was a short walk that morning, a half-day stalk, and in miserable fog Rich took aim at the first deer he saw — one Ralph had flushed out by himself but hadn’t shot at, having the sense to wait till it cleared the brush so as not to hit a blocker. The cleankilled doe didn’t matter. At lunch Ralph charged at Rich and with one punch knocked him to the ground.
I hadn’t asked Ralph, hadn’t thought about it, but it was Rich’s gun he lent to Mike. Ralph had bought two on my fifteenth birthday — one for me and one to give to Rich when he was old enough. The twin muskets were a big gesture, part of some Mice and Men dream Ralph had briefly had about living off the land or something. He took some time off from the pipeline job and said he was going to spend more time with me and Rich, but he was back out west just two years later. It doesn’t make me as angry as it used to — since I quit drinking I’ve never gotten as angry as I used to — but I think Rich held onto it. He finally moved away two years ago. Nobody seems to have his new number.
WE SAW NO deer before lunch but in the afternoon we heard some rustles, spotted a white tail springing up, bouncing away, a doe with no rack but as Gord’s always said, “They’re all venison to me.” It ran the right way, straight ahead, and a few minutes later it ought to have cleared the woods — God, I hoped it cleared the woods — because I heard a shot a good distance ahead. We hustled after it, like we always do when we hear fire. Every man’s license lets him tag one deer on the week. We always want to know who’s using his.
We emerged from the trees between Mike and Ralph and I called, “Who got that?”
“Not sure,” Mike said. He waved his left hand. “That side of Ralph, though.”
It was after four and already the sun was setting. One of the guys gathered around had already said he could use a beer and others chimed in that they were up for a whisky, a smoke, dinner, a piss — it all comes out when it’s nearly too dark to keep going, sore legs and wet socks and grumbled somethings with too fuckin’ old in them somewhere.
Wally arrived dragging the carcass and in the fading light stuck his knife into the doe’s gut to field dress it. Mike turned his face away. In the truck on the way home he said, “That part was disgusting.”
“Didn’t they teach you in your course?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I guess didn’t think about it — the knife or the blood or what entrails actually are.” He looked a little pale.
“When it’s your own deer you won’t mind.”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking out the window.
WEDNES
DAY, MIKE DIDN’T want to get out of bed. After school the day before, he had worked his shift at the ValuGas then come home and showered and done homework till I don’t know when. He was always at the computer in the dining room at night, its one-colour screen lighting his face green and his fingers clicking away at something. Susan said he had some book report due in a week. When I said, “It’s still a week away. What’s he worried about?” she scowled.
“You and Ralph are asking a lot of him,” she said as she pulled the sheets back on the bed.
“We’re not asking anything,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s just doing this to make you happy.”
“That’s ridiculous. He wants to do this.”
She laughed.
“He’s near the top of his class in school. He needs to make grades, not to mention money for university. This stupid hunting is a distraction.”