He had other unmerited blessings: son of Augustus Erickson, lawyer, state senator, later publisher of the Register; grandson of Olav, a Norwegian immigrant who’d ripped millions out of the northwoods by cutting them down; insufferably good-looking—six-three, with high, sharp cheekbones that lent an Ostrogothic tilt to his light-blue eyes. “A poster boy for Hitler Youth, a Nazi’s wet dream,” was how Tom had described him back then, smuggling a detraction into a compliment because he wasn’t handsome or a born jock; he’d had to sweat to make the varsity, had to sweat for everything, his father a mill hand at the Mead paper plant. But nature had compensated for Bill’s luck, making him heir to the family curse. Gus Erickson had been a legendary binger; his boy could down quantities of beer that would have left any other sixteen-year-old a puking mess, and because his capacity was coupled with a predilection for risk, the cool judgment he’d displayed on all those autumn Saturday afternoons often deserted him for the rest of the week. He liked to see what he could get away with. And he got away with quite a lot, thanks to his gift (for the gifted are usually forgiven their sins) and to his father, whose influence had been a Jaws of Life, extracting him from several wrecks. The most serious involved a certain girl in the senior class who was out of school for a few weeks after an operation, the nature of which was known but never mentioned, not in a small Midwestern town in 1972. It had been arranged and paid for by Senator Erickson.
The old man pulled Bill out of trouble; the task of preventing him from getting into it fell to Tom Muhlen and Paul Egremont, his closest friends, his blockers on and off the field. We assumed the role willingly. For one thing, it seemed natural; for another, it bought us dates with girls who otherwise might not have had anything to do with the sons of a mill worker and a hardware salesman: the daughters of Manitou Falls’s tight little aristocracy of bankers, doctors, and heirs to timber and mining fortunes. We were always welcome in the Ericksons’ seven-bedroom house on Michigan Avenue (which didn’t resemble its Chicago namesake but nonetheless served as the town’s gold coast) and were occasionally invited to stay for dinner, when we could listen to Mrs. Erickson chatter about the musical she’d seen on her last trip to New York or to the senator’s tales of skippering his yacht in the Mackinac Race. This was glamour and high society to our teenage, provincial minds, and what a privilege to share in it. So, yes, it was just fine with us to be the keepers of our fortunate brother.
We’d fallen down on the job only once, on a rainy night the summer after graduation. In Tom’s ’63 Chevy pickup—bought with earnings from his summer job at Mead—we’d crossed into Wisconsin to celebrate the news that Bill had won a full ride to Central Michigan. Enlightened Wisconsin, where the legal drinking age was eighteen. Somehow, Bill ended up behind the wheel on the return trip, and on a deserted stretch of Highway 35 he skidded into a ditch to avoid hitting a deer. The quart of Schlitz we’d been sharing sloshed all over us and the front seat. We climbed out unhurt and stood at the roadside to flag down a car. Two passed by; the third pulled over in a flashing of roof-rack lights. After smelling the interior, the Michigan state trooper ordered each of us to walk a straight line, then to close our eyes and touch our noses with our fingertips. Our performances made a Breathalyzer test superfluous. “Whose truck?” the trooper asked. “Mine,” Tom answered. License. Registration. “You were driving?” Tom and I waited half a beat for Bill to say something, but he had lockjaw. We knew what he was thinking, because it was what we were thinking: if he was convicted, his scholarship might be revoked. Not that he needed it. Tom slurred, “Yes, sir, I was,” and I confirmed the lie with an emphatic nod. Gus Erickson returned the favor by getting the charges dropped and picking up the tab for repairs to Tom’s truck.
3.
Before breakfast, practicing under Lisa’s supervision, I adulterate Bill’s orange juice with the Zoloft.
We load the GMC and drive north through Seney, past obsolescent logging and railroad towns, through spruce and tamarack bogs, gloomy as Saxon fens even on gorgeous days like this one. Across the east branch of the Fox River, the land rises gradually, topping out in a hardwood ridge from whose crest Lake Superior shows as a blue triangle wedged between the oaks and maples crowding both sides of the road that winds downhill into Vieux Desert. The whole town is easily encompassed by the eye from above, its clapboard and shingle-sided houses, its diner, IGA, gas station, two churches, and two bars crouched along its namesake bay, aquamarine in the brilliant October light. The big lake beyond is indigo, a mock ocean reaching toward the Canadian shore, two hundred miles away.
We fill up at the gas station and buy staples at the grocery before heading toward camp along the road that skirts the bay. Superior’s shoreline, unlike Lake Michigan’s, hasn’t advanced. I’m pleased to see it where it’s supposed to be and that the town looks as charmingly shabby as it did last year and the year before and the year before that.
Bill’s cabin, built for his grandfather in the late 1920s by Finnish loggers—unemployed because nearly every profitable tree in the area had already been cut down—lies at the end of the two-track, on a low bluff above the Windigo River. Varnished cedar logs; pegged, not nailed. A barbecue grill and picnic table. An outhouse. A toolshed. All of it is surrounded by an incongruous lawn maintained by a caretaker.
Tom and I lug duffels up to the loft, its rail eye level with the head of an eight-point buck mounted above the stone fireplace. Smaller racks decorate the walls, along with trout and grouse and ducks caught or shot in the long ago and an ancient photograph of Bill’s grandfather, standing in the snow beside a felled white pine. The hewn trunk reaches to the top of his head, and he’d been over six feet.
In brush pants and hunting vests, we troop downstairs, where Bill is practicing gun mounts with his new 28-gauge side-by-side: a custom-made Arrieta with bouquet-and-scroll engraving on the receiver plates.
“Ready to roll, except for one thing,” Tom says. “The case of wine.”
Bill snaps the gun to his shoulder and swings the barrel smoothly right to left, left to right. “Bring it in.”
“Sure you’re cool with that?”
Bill lays the gun on his bunk, fetches the case, and sets it on the kitchen table. “Let’s go.”
Heading out, the crated dogs whine in anticipation. We feel it, too—the old quickening that I’ve stopped trying to explain or justify to my faculty colleagues, many of whom consider my fondness for blood sport a character flaw, if not downright criminal. Reminding them that their supermarket hamburger and chicken breasts once had heartbeats has proven futile; so now, when some politically correct tyrant asks how I can shoot innocent creatures, I answer, “Can’t help it. I’m less evolved than you.”
We park near a jack-pine plantation, facing a plain speckled with black-cherry thickets and islands of spruce and aspen. The dogs are off, the beeper collars on Tom’s Jasper and on my Erica squawking. Rory wears a bell collar because Bill is a traditionalist, even though his pointer makes long casts that take him out of hearing range. True to form, Rory sprints away, the bell’s sweet jingle fading off into silence.
“That dog should be issued a passport,” Tom mutters.
We find him stock-still at the edge of an aspen grove, outstretched tail rigid as a pipe. Jasper and Erica lope toward Rory and honor the point. Golden leaves trembling like candle flames, three dogs in tense arrest. It’s a sight I’ve seen a thousand times, and the effect never varies. My pulse rate rises; a slight quivering passes through my knees. We walk up, Bill’s long legs carrying him ahead. A woodcock pair whistles into the air, crossing left to right. He downs both. Rory retrieves the birds, and just as he drops the second at Bill’s feet, Erica freezes out in the open. Two more woodcock take off. Tom fires twice and misses; I hit one with my second shot and am walking to it when another flushes wild almost from underfoot and flies behind me. I spin, but Bill is in the line of fire, the woodcock streaking straight at him, as though it means to poke out an eye with its long beak. It pa
sses a yard over his head, and as it veers sharply to the left, he pivots, swinging the gun like it’s his arm, and I know the bird is dead before it tumbles, trailing brown feathers. It was a tough shot that Bill made look easy. He makes everything he does look easy, except one thing.
“Well, goddamn,” says Tom. “We haven’t been out twenty minutes and you’ve got your limit of woodies.”
“A flight must have come in,” Bill says, meaning migratory rather than local birds. “You’ll have plenty more chances.” He stuffs the woodcock into his game pouch with the first two. “Had your head off the gun. That’s why you missed.”
“Helpful hints from Heloise.”
We hunt through the morning and into the afternoon. A flight has indeed come in, riding a nor’wester down from Canada. I get my limit of woodcock, but Tom’s slump continues. He practices a lot on the skeet range, labors at his shooting as he did at high school football, in the expectation that he’ll one day shoot in the field like Bill, not only with accuracy but with style. On the hike back to the truck, Bill repeats his critique: “You’re not tight to the gun! Damn, do you want me to shoot your limit for you?” Tom snaps that he sure as hell doesn’t, and, in an anger born of frustration, finds the competence he’s been seeking. When Rory points a double, he cracks both and snorts, “Shoot my limit for me, Jesus Christ.”
* * *
At the cabin, we clean and pluck the birds and listen to a Green Bay game on the radio. “Favre rolls out of the pocket … Connects to Driver … But Driver is dropped two yards short of a first…” Tom groans. He’s got a hundred on the Packers and three points with a friend back in Lansing, but now, late in the fourth quarter, they’re losing by seven to the Giants.
“Favre will pull it out,” Bill says confidently. “The last-minute miracle man. He gets better every year.” There is a wistfulness in his voice.
He hadn’t fulfilled expectations at Central Michigan. A concussion and a back injury benched him for one season and part of another. He healed in time but never recovered his former brilliance. I wonder, listening to his praises of Brett Favre, if he’s thinking about might-have-beens. Might have been drafted into the pros. With his telegenic looks, a career as a commentator might have followed. Big money and TV glamour and no worries about squeezing a profit out of a hick newspaper with a declining circulation.
Gus Erickson, widowed and dying of liver cancer, had summoned his son from California back to Manitou Falls eight years ago to help save the Register from bankruptcy. I guess Bill answered the old man’s call because he’d been at loose ends out on the West Coast—Joanne had left him and he’d left the Navy, having put in his twenty and been passed over for promotion twice. The senator died, and the paper fell into Bill’s hands. He was going to sell it and give California another try, until a woman named Lisa Williams came to his office looking to take out a full-page ad announcing the grand opening of the Northern Suns casino. She changed his plans. When McNaughton Media offered to buy the Register and to keep him on as editor in chief, he said yes.
He phoned Tom and me down in Lansing to tell us that he’d returned. We were surprised to hear that the Gulf War hero, the seagoing flyboy who’d sent postcards from places like Bangkok and Naples, had moved back to our old hometown. After all, the whole point of our young lives had been to get out and stay out. We didn’t see him until the following year, at our twenty-fifth high school reunion. There he was in the hospitality suite of the Holiday Inn, his new wife at his side. He looked a little abashed, as if he thought that his repatriation had diminished him in our eyes. Or maybe the diminishment was in his own eyes. He’d lived large; now he was living not so large, a Midwest burgher with all of burgherdom’s required badges—Rotary, Lions, VFW. Still, much of his old magic remained; ex-teammates and cheerleaders, now in sagging middle age, flocked to him, Tom and me among them. We relived our youths, that time when we were all bulletproof and everything seemed possible. Tom mentioned that he and I got together to hunt birds every fall, and the next thing we knew, we invited him to join us the next season.
Adolescence is a condition no one recovers from completely. You’ve probably heard a story about ex–high school sweethearts who meet decades later, discover that the emotions of first love haven’t faded, divorce their spouses, and pick up where they left off. In the same way, Tom and I found that our relationship with Bill hadn’t changed. We fell right back into our guardian roles. For a week of nights for six autumns in a row, we made sure he didn’t do grievous harm to himself, dragged him out of bars, waltzed him into bed. It got on our nerves but was nothing we couldn’t put up with.
Things got more complicated after last year’s outing—we bought a stake in Bill’s reformation.
I was in my office, advising a student who’d made a hash of a paper on Notes from Underground, when Lisa phoned. It seemed that a week earlier, at a Miami conference for the satraps in McNaughton’s media empire, Bill had guzzled too many vodka martinis during a poolside party and toppled into the deep end, whereupon he called for others to come on in, the water was fine. It seemed that when no one took him up on it, he climbed out, scooped the female editor of another paper into his arms, and leaped in with her, showering several onlookers. They weren’t amused. Nor was she. Well aware of Bill’s problem, Four-M summoned him the next morning and said that the only reason he didn’t sack him on the spot was the difficulty of finding a replacement—who would want to relocate to the Upper Peninsula? Bill could spare him the trouble and keep his job if he, one, apologized to the woman, and two, committed himself to rehab.
He was “in denial,” Lisa reported, resisting the second step: a month in the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota. Would Tom and I please, please, come on up and help her talk him into it? And so we did, the weekend before Thanksgiving. A root canal would have been more fun. After she’d shown him the encouraging brochures—We don’t just treat addictions; we restore and transform lives—he accused her of betraying a confidence by dragging us into their private affairs. Thanks but no thanks, his life didn’t need restoration or transformation. Goddamn if he would ever submit to the ministrations of some therapist. This went on until Lisa threatened to walk out, which prompted him to punch a wall, fracturing his knuckles. She started crying. Bill embraced her, blubbering, “Oh, baby, I’m sorry.” Tom said, “Fuck this and fuck you,” and went outside. Lisa followed him and was getting into her car to go who knows where when Bill ran into the chilly night, calling, “For Chrissake, Lisa! Tom! All right! I’ll do it!”
* * *
Tom stuffs the woodcock with grapes, bastes them in garlic butter, and slaps them on the grill with the dramatic professionalism of a cooking-show chef. At dinner in the cramped kitchen, under the light of a propane lamp, we talk about the dogs: the prancing setters, the sinewy pointers, the well-trained, manageable ones, and the great ones that were just this side of out of control, with a spirit and a character that training could never develop. Rory belongs to that class, his passion for the hunt bred in the bone, the look of the wolf in his eye.
Bill repeats the previous night’s performance, cordially topping off our wineglasses, drinking water himself, and then tipping the empty wine bottle into an empty glass. He notices me looking at his trembling hands and is embarrassed. Long ago, his effortless proficiency drew me to him; now it’s something else—the peculiar magnetism generated by the opposing poles of his mastery and this one vulnerability. I silently encourage him: C’mon, anyone who can shoot the way you did today and who flew off aircraft carriers can do this.
* * *
He sparkles like a showroom car the next morning, opening the propane fridge with cries of “Fuzz cutter! Bill want fuzz cutter!”
“Right there,” I point at a striped glass on the table. I’d gotten out of bed early and crept down from the loft to mix the antidepressant screwdriver.
After bolting down Tom’s Denver omelets, we set out into a crisp morning, hoarfrost sheathing the tree branches, shoot
a few grouse, and return in the late afternoon, when the low, slanting light makes the birch and maple leaves glow neon.
The next two days are just as splendid. On the fifth, the wind shifts, cracking out of the northeast. Clouds bruise the sky, and it begins to rain. The rain turns to sleet, sleet to snow. Soaked and shivering, we shamble in early from the field. The drenched dogs flop down in front of the fireplace, where Bill builds a conflagration, whistling some Irish ballad. In his pre-rehab days, his Scandinavian ancestry notwithstanding, he would sing rousing IRA songs or melancholy airs about the green glens of Antrim as if he were an immigrant homesick for the old sod.
Amid the smells of wet clothes, wet gundogs, woodsmoke, and boot oil, we kill time playing five-and seven-card stud for quarters, enjoying the snugness of the cabin, the maple logs popping and snapping in the fireplace while the wind rattles the window frames.
“So much for global warming,” Tom says when a flurry smacks the glass with a sound like spent birdshot.
“Don’t start that again,” Bill says.
I deal the next show cards. “Seven to the lady, no help … Pair of eights on the board … and a five to my six, possible straight. Eights are high.”
Tom tosses two blue chips, representing fifty cents, into the pot and throws a challenging look at both of us. I fold. Bill stays in, draws a five, Tom a third eight. The hand progresses, and when the final hole card is dealt, Tom has the three eights and a six on the board, Bill a ten, a five, and a seven with the queen. Tom taps his skull with a forefinger while he considers if Bill, veteran of shipboard poker games, is bluffing or sandbagging him with a hidden hand. But he can’t fold now and goes all in. Bill sees the bet, pushing his chips into the middle of the table. The eights are all Tom has. Bill flips his down cards. Two are queens.
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