by Daniel Perry
“He works so hard. Don’t you think he could use a distraction?”
“Lower your voice,” she said. “He quit ball. You know how much he loved playing.”
“So, now — ”
“So now you and Ralph are putting all this pressure on him.”
“What — pressure?”
“It’s pressure. Everything else he’s doing is leading him away from here, don’t you see?”
“Well, sure, one day, but — ”
“Stay out of his way,” she said, then almost in a whisper, “He’s not like you.”
Spitting back the first words that came to mind would have started something to keep us up all night, so I didn’t do it. I rolled one way, Susan rolled the other, and when my alarm went off I crawled out of bed rested and ready for another day, three generations and all that. Mike said thanks for the coffee I handed him in the kitchen when he finally joined me, but that was it — nothing in the car, nothing before he grouped up with Ralph and Wally, who he’d be walking with this morning. I got into Gord’s truck and we headed around the block. We’d been walkers the last two days, so we were getting a turn to sit. It’s harder to walk every year, and in the last couple some of Ralph’s friends have thrown in the towel. Gord was sucking wind pretty hard the day before even if he wouldn’t admit it. He still says he prefers to walk, and maybe he does. It’s just his body doesn’t.
We shot four on the day, all from the blocker end. Mike must have been noisy crashing through the trees, because man did those beauties scatter. Gord got one, and two I took myself, so when the walkers showed up at the end of the afternoon we needed someone’s tag. Everyone kind of looked at each other but no one volunteered; if you don’t bag a deer in black powder week, your license stays valid to bow-hunt the rest of the winter.
“Mike?” Ralph said.
Without hesitating, Mike said, “Yeah, no problem.”
Ralph asked him and me to ride up front with him on the way back.
“Mike, you should have offered your tag,” Ralph said.
“I did.”
“He means before anyone asked you,” I added quietly.
“Uh ... Okay.”
He’s a sharp kid, I think he got it. I could have left it there.
Ralph couldn’t.
“You know, you’re the new guy,” he said. “You have to show everyone you want to be part of the team. They may not know what to think of you yet. You’ve got to integrate. Okay?”
“Okay,” Mike said again.
Ralph looked away from the road, at me. “I mean, you guys don’t even come for dinner. And Mike, these guys don’t know you at all.”
Mike snapped, “Nope, they don’t.” He didn’t even look sideways, just straight out the windshield.
“You made your point, Dad,” I said.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d called Ralph “Dad”.
Ralph let out a heavy breath and said, “All right. But come for dinner tonight, for Chrissakes. We got steaks.”
I thought Susan might kill us, but I agreed.
Mike didn’t say anything the rest of the way.
“SO IT ... IS ... pouring,” Wally said from the old brown couch in the basement. He was telling the story of the buck on the rainy day again. That beauty had kept getting bigger over the years, and the rain had kept falling harder. The legend had been growing since before I started hunting.
“You remember the big gully from Monday?” Wally asked.
Mike nodded. Someone had given him a beer that sat on the cement floor beside his armchair, almost out of sight. I pretended it was.
“Well, that’s where we were. The trees were a lot younger then, and the mud ran down the hill that much more, but them walkers, they were at least a little protected. Me, I was just sittin’ and gettin’ soaked, waitin’ around in weather people are usually too smart to go out in, never mind a fuckin’ deer.” He looked up at me after his F-word; I gave a small head-shake and smiled. “So anyway, I’m just mindin’ my own business. It’s still early in the mornin’, still practically dark, and this deer comes up out of nowhere — ”
“Like a ghost, right?” Big Al called over.
Gord said, taunting, “A will-o-the-wisp, maybe?”
Wally raised a finger and said, “You weren’t there.”
“Neither was that big buck!” Al shouted. Everyone laughed.
“Don’t listen to them, young fella.” Wally sipped his whiskey and fixed on Mike. “So like I said, this buck shows up, easily a twelve-point, rack wider than” — he spread his arms like a toddler who loves you this much —“and he just walks up and just stands there. I didn’t need to shoot, even, coulda just knocked him in the head with the gun stock. But he’s so close, I can’t even move — I’d scare him away, right?”
“What did you do?” Mike asked.
“Uh-oh,” Gord said just to me, smiling through his whiskers. “Kid’s hooked.” I took a drink from my glass of water. Wouldn’t matter what was in my hand, I’d drink it here.
“I just waited,” Wally said. “The rain’s comin’ down in fuckin’ sheets, big fat strips of it, mud every fuckin’ place, and all I can do is look at the thing. And he’s lookin’ back. We sit there, I don’t know, must be ten minutes, then he walks ahead of me, nice and slow. Just goes about his day like anybody else.”
“Here we go,” Ralph said, having just entered with a fresh bowl of chips.
“So finally I get out a cap as slow as I can and put it on the nipple. I cock the gun and I lift it up. He’s dead at twenty yards, nothin’ to it. I squeeze the trigger ... and just, click. Hammer hits the cap, but the damned thing doesn’t go off.”
“Seriously,” Mike said.
“Seriously. So I don’t know, I think it’s a bad cap, maybe wet from the rain. I take out another one, put it on, aim and shoot again. Nothin’. So now what — I’ve got to disassemble the gun and pull the ball.” Wally laughed a little. “Can’t do it there, though.”
“Shit,” Mike said softly. I heard him, but I wouldn’t say anything anymore.
“That’s not even the best part,” Wally said.
Gord laughed. “It’s the best part that actually happened.”
“It’s all true, Michael,” Wally said.
Gord again: “Nah it ain’t!”
“I’m telling you, Michael: my buck looked back at me and he winked before he walked away. Didn’t even run — just sauntered off like he had all day.” Wally started to laugh, then. “He takes two or three steps out and I just hear, BLAM!”
Ralph started laughing, too, eyeing Mike a second then pointing up at the wall over the chalkboard. There’s been a deer skull mounted there as long as I can remember, with a tiny set of antlers, four points, maybe — a young male, but still a male. Mike stood up and squinted at the gold-coloured plate on the wood backing.
It reads: “Wally’s Buck.”
“It was a different deer,” Wally said.
“Yeah, the hell it was!” everybody chorused with Ralph.
I knew this was coming, of course. They had choreographed the routine for me when I was Mike’s age but I had taken it differently: I was embarrassed and angry at how they had strung me along. But in all the years since, I hadn’t gotten to use it on Rich or anybody until Mike. From the chair I was in tonight, it was a hell of a lot of fun.
Mike took it in stride, I think. “It’s like fishing stories,” he said with a shrug on the ride home. “They’re always bullshit.”
I felt myself smiling. I thought maybe he was even enjoying this.
FRIDAY, AS THE day wound down. Mike hadn’t been gung-ho in the morning, but had soldiered on after all last night’s schoolwork. Ralph had assigned him to block, separating me and Mike again, but before we split up at the edge of the woods I said, “Dammit, Ralph, I brought my son hunting and I haven’t spent a minute with him yet.” Ralph said, kind of huffy-like, “All right, block with Mike.” He lifted one leg and bent his knee a coup
le of times. “Yeah, I can walk today,” he added. He had to get his dig in somewhere.
From where we set up we could see a farm in the distance and beyond that the 401— far enough away that we probably couldn’t put a ball through anyone’s window or worse, but I reminded Mike nonetheless: “We take sure shots here.” We took up separate positions maybe fifty yards apart in the long grass, facing the point where the bush met the field. Half the corn crop still stood, too underdeveloped after a cool summer to finish harvesting. Deer love it, but none came that morning — or maybe they did, we just couldn’t see them. They don’t know they’re hiding when they go to feed. Noon had passed and I had eaten my sandwich before two streaked out from the stalks, broadside to us and well under seventy yards away. They slowed a little and down the line of blockers from the left, three shots banged. I was fourth. The startled deer high-tailed it farther to the right and into the woods. I listened for Mike, next in line.
No shot.
From my left the guys stepped out of the brush into the field. You have to talk about the action anytime you get any, and while you do the rest of the deer in the woods laugh at you then run the other way. Killing the deer might be the least important part, though.
I looked right. Mike still hadn’t emerged. I called his name and finally heard a slight rustle. He pushed his way out of the weeds, not even bothering to bring his gun. He scratched his neck with one hand. He looked into the distance a minute, at the farm we all hoped was far enough away.
“You get a shot?” I asked, but I knew the answer.
“Didn’t like the look of the house behind,” he mumbled.
Wally joined us from the station left of me.
“You’ll get ’em next year.” He laughed. “Mine’s still out there, too, y’know.”
“Yeah,” Mike said.
I nodded and said, “Right choice,” but I had seen Mike like this so many mornings just after he had woken up: the droopy face, the dopey voice, I recognized it all. He had to have known I knew, too, but I never did mention it. He’d never get Wally’s buck — none of us would — and he’d decide against hunting the next year, too, saying he couldn’t miss school. In the end he’d never come with us again. For now, though, till the sun went down, there was still a little time: a couple more hours with the bullshit, and Mike was starting to get the hang of it.
Swept Up
I.
ISIGNED UP FOR drama because it’s the one class where they don’t teach anything. I knew I’d have to do the play in late spring, but I didn’t care because no one I knew would come see it. We were doing Our Town and when I asked Mr. Lenders why he cast me as the Stage Manager character who narrates most of the show, he said he thought I could do it, but much more importantly, that I would do it. A couple of guys hated me for it because they were already playing the achievement game, investing heavily in local renown and expecting it to pay out. The part could have helped them meet a girl and get married, have kids and get divorced one day or not but be miserable regardless.
DAD HADN’T SAID much the last few months, and all Mom was saying lately was that driving into Currie four nights a week to pick me up from rehearsal was a pain. I was staying late even on the days when my scenes weren’t scheduled, but I had to know what tone was being set before I walked on. If that sounds like I committed, you’re right. I did. When I first announced the part to Dad, his glare made up my mind.
Mom’s reaction was to giggle condescendingly and remind me how, just a few years before, I hadn’t even wanted to walk across the stage at Grade Eight graduation. She got that wrong: I hadn’t wanted to go at all. It wasn’t an achievement, and neither was Our Town; to get the course credit, everyone had to do the show, just like it had been when Mom was in school. Her class had done The Crucible, and she had wanted to play Elizabeth Proctor. On one of our rides home, she told me it was just as well that she hadn’t gotten the role, as her Proctor was a jock who had a girlfriend already and on top of that, by the time she went on stage her pregnancy weight was helping fill out her baggy costume as Tituba, the servant she was cast to play in blackface in the opening scene. Mr. Johanssen — my principal, her history teacher — burst into the classroom where the girls were changing minutes before the first show and forbid Mom to wear the dark makeup, though the way she saw it, Johanssen was just trying to see the girls in their underwear. She said she flubbed her opening line because of all the commotion, as though Johanssen was the one who had cost her the chance to get out of Currie Township and as far away as her talent would take her, which in my estimation then was about fourteen kilometres down 402, not even to London, pulled over on the shoulder with a flat. But these are the grudges we hold.
Mom was happy I was doing the show. Anytime we talked about it front of Dad, though, he flopped his wrist in front of his chest and lisped dramma like it rhymed with grandma. I didn’t bother correcting him, there was no point anymore. His gibes at me were the most he said to anyone.
II.
I HAD THE biggest part so I was last in the curtain call, and the crowd — eighty people opening night, it felt like the whole town — stood and clapped its loudest for me before giving us all an ovation. I doubt we deserved it, but in the front row were the students’ council try-hards who had witnessed this behaviour a week before when they scammed their way onto our class trip to Death of a Salesman at the Grand Theatre in London. Mr. Lenders told us he thought Death had more to say and that he’d have mounted it were the cast not so small; he didn’t want us drama students building sets and rigging lights in place of shop class co-ops, though they just dicked around and called us fucking queers most of the time, anyway.
MR. LENDERS HAD changed the script so that our town wasn’t in New Hampshire anymore, but right here in Currie, and these weren’t the only notes on my script; every rehearsal, I had marked up not just lines but actions along with them: Take two steps. Raise arm. Pause for laugh. Sometimes my private stage directions even covered intonations. Wistful. Sigh. Deadpan. The only way I knew to conjure he who wasn’t me was to use consistent, planned actions, like checking off a list, an approach rendered useless in the third act when Stella Callaghan, in the role of Emily Webb, started actually crying. For three months of rehearsal she’d tried to squeeze out just a tear or two when her character had to finally leave Grover’s Corners Currie behind, only to be surprised that first night when a flood of them finally came. My volume fell along with her faltering voice, as did the rest of the cast’s, while black-clad Lenders nearly tugged his earlobe off at the back of the gym repeating the universal sign for Can’t hear you. I don’t think the back rows knew how the play ended but in front they ate it up, hence the ovation. The lights came on and Mom and Dad rose from somewhere in the middle, applauding and cheering, and in the car on the way home they told me I’d been fantastic and that they hadn’t realized, even Mom, just how many lines I had and how I must have programmed every step, every pause, every everything. I shrugged them off and said Mr. Lenders was a good teacher, when really I had learned from the masters: here they were praising me together at the right moment, choosing their words and facial expressions and tones of voice to show a united front.
Or maybe they just got swept up in it.
III.
DAD LEFT ONE week after the play closed, on a Saturday afternoon while I was working my new job at the Price-Mart. Our family of four stayed up late the night before in the lawn chairs around the backyard fire pit where nothing burned tonight. Dad broke the news, and when Nancy started crying Mom led her to the house. It was just me and Dad then, and I had gotten too old: he would have to explain. He lit up a cigarette and offered the pack.
“No thanks,” I said, though I could have used one.
He laughed.
“Already smarter than me,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
“Why should I have to be?”
He avoided my eyes.
“You know, your mother and I,” he began. “We didn’t reall
y choose this.”
“No,” I said. “You’re leaving her.”
He put his hands together then spread them apart, finishing with his arms wide.
“I mean this,” he said. I looked at him but he still wouldn’t look back. “Mortgage, family, booster shots, grass to cut — it all just sort of happened.”
My eyes stretched. Blood rushed to my face.
“You’re saying you never wanted us?”
He didn’t answer.
“Goddammit! Why won’t you look at me?”
He faced me and his stare was empty.
“You can at least be a man about it,” I said. “Look me in the eye and say you don’t want me.”
He cleared his throat.
“Your mother ...”
“Me!”
“You, and your sister, and your mother,” he said, “are the best thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t choose it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want it.”
“You just don’t anymore.”
“I just want to choose,” he said, finally making eye contact. “I choose you, I choose your sister. I want to stay in your lives and everything — ”
He looked at the ground.
“But?”
“But your mother ...”
I turned away and let slip a loud disgusted breath.
“I never said no to her once in my life,” he said. “Since we rode the school bus together, since she tried her damnedest to tutor me. She pulled me along the whole way. So when things fell apart with your father ...”
“You’re my father.”
He smiled.
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
“You taught me how to field a ground ball, and how to chop wood with an axe, and ...”
“You’ll never need those things,” he said. He shook his head.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You already know there aren’t many options here.”