High Hunt

“Ah-ha!” Sloane said. “Pawnbroking without a license!” He giggled.

“It’s got a holster and belt—the whole bit,” I said. “I’m going to have to pick up all that junk anyway. I’ll bring it on down.”

“I’d like to see it,” Jack said, “and Sloane here knows about guns—he takes in a lot of them in pawn—he ought to be able to tell you what it’s worth.”

“Sure,” Sloane said, “bring it in. Maybe we can dicker.”

“Hey!” Mike shouted suddenly. “Shut up, you guys. I just thought of something.” He leaned forward, his slightly round face suddenly excited. “How about the High Hunt?”

“Are you kiddin’?” Jack demanded. “You really want to try the ‘Great White Hunter’ bit?”

“What the goddamn hell is the High Hunt?” McKlearey demanded harshly.

“Early high Cascade Mountains deer season,” Mike said, his eyes gleaming in the firelight.

“—In some of the roughest, emptiest, steepest, highest country in the whole fuckin’ world,” Jack finished for him.

“It’s not that bad,” Mike said.

“Aw, bullshit!” Jack snorted. “The damned boundaries start right where the roads all end. And do you know why the roads end there? Because there’s not a fuckin’ thing back up in there, that’s why. Man, most of that country’s above the timberline.”

“All alpine meadow,” Mike said almost dreamily. “It gets snowed in so early that nobody ever got a chance to hunt it before they opened this special season. Some of the biggest deer in the state are up there. One guy got a nine-pointer that when four hundred pounds.”

“Eastern count, I’ll bet,” Jack said.

“Eastern count my ass. Full Western count—the number of points on the smallest side not counting brow tines. Eastern count would have gone twenty—maybe twenty-one points. That was one helluva big deer.”

“And the guy got a hernia gettin’ it out of the woods.” Sloane giggled.

“No—hell, they had horses.”

“… and guides,” Sloane went on, “and a wrangler, and a camp cook, and a bartender. Probably didn’t cost more than a thousand a week for two guys.”

“It’s not all that much,” Mike said tentatively. “I know a guy—a rancher—who’ll take out a fair-sized party real reasonable. You could get by for fifty bucks apiece for a week—ten days. Food extra, of course. He’s tryin’ to get into the business, so he’s keepin’ his rates down for the first couple years.” Mike’s voice was serious; he wasn’t just talking. He was actually proposing it to us as a real possibility. His face had a kind of hunger on it that you don’t see very often. Mike wanted this to go, and he wanted it badly.

“Who the fuck wants to pay to go up in the boonies for ten days?” McKlearey demanded harshly, putting it down.

It hung there, almost like it was balanced on something. I knew that if I left it alone, McKlearey’s raspy vote for inertia would tip it. At that moment I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to go up into the high country, but I was sure of one thing; I didn’t much like McKlearey, and I did like Mike Carter.

“It’s what we’ve been talking about for the last hour,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “All you guys were so hot to trot, and now Mike comes up with something solid—a real chance to do some real hunting, not just a little Sunday-morning poaching with a twenty-two out of a car window—and everybody gets tongue-tied all of a sudden.”

“Didn’t you get enough of maneuvers and bivouac and shit like that in the Army?” McKlearey demanded, his eyes narrowing. I remembered what Jack had told me about crossing him.

“I did my share of field-soldiering,” I told him, “but this is hunting, and that’s different.”

“Are you gonna pay to go out and run around in the brush?” He was getting hot again. God, he was a touchy bastard.

“If the price is like Mike said it was, and if we can work out the details, you’re goddamn right I will.” A guy will make up his mind to do something for the damnedest reasons sometimes.

“You’re outa your fuckin’ skull,” McKlearey said, his voice angry and his face getting kind of pinched in.

“Nobody’s twistin’ your arm, Lou,” Jack said. “You don’t have to go no place.”

“I suppose you’d go along, too, huh, Alders?” For some reason, McKlearey was getting madder by the minute. He was twisting around in his chair like a worm on a hot rock.

“You damn betcha,” Jack said. “Just give me ten minutes to pack up my gear, and I’ll be gone, buddy—long gone.”

“Shit!” McKlearey said. “You guys are just blowin’ smoke outa your fuckin’ ears. You ain’t even got a rifle, Alders. You sure as shit can’t go deer huntin’ with a fuckin’ shotgun.”

“I could lend you guys rifles from the pawnshop,” Sloane said very quietly. He was leaning back, and I couldn’t see his face.

Mike swallowed. I think the hope that it would go had been a very faint one for him. Now, a strange combination of things had laid it right in his lap. “I’d better get a piece of paper and figure out a few things,” he said.

“The bugs are about to get me anyway,” Sloane said. “Let’s take the keg into the kitchen.”

We carted it inside and sat down around the table in the breakfast nook to watch Mike write down a long list with figures opposite each item.

McKlearey straddled a chair over in the corner, scowling at us.

Mike finally leaned back and took a long drink of beer. “I think that’s it,” he said. “Figure fifty for the horses and the guide—that’s for a week or ten days. Food—probably twenty-five. License, ammunition, stuff like that—another twenty-five. Most of us probably already have the right kind of clothes and a guy can always borrow a sleeping bag if he don’t already have one. I figure a guy can get by for a hundred.”

We sat in the brightly lighted kitchen with the layer of cigarette smoke hovering over our heads and stared at the sheet of paper in front of Mike.

I glanced out the window at the rusty glow of the dying fire. The hills over on the peninsula loomed up against the stars.

“I’m in,” I said shortly.

Mike scratched his cheek and nodded. “A man owes himself one good hunt in his life,” he said. “It may start a small war in the Carter house, but what the hell?” He wrote his name and mine on the bottom of the paper. “Jack?” he asked my brother.

“Why not?” Jack said. “I’ll probably have to come along to keep you guys from shooting yourself in the foot.”

Mike put Jack’s name down on the list.

“God damn!” Cal said regretfully. “If I didn’t have the shop and the lot and—” He paused. “Bullshit!” he said angrily. “I own them; they don’t own me. Put my name down. I’m goin’ huntin’. Piss on it!” He giggled suddenly.

Mike squinted at the list. “I’m not sure if Miller—that’s this guy I know—will go along with only four guys. We might have to scrounge up a few more bodies, but that shouldn’t be too tough. You guys might dunk about it a little though. I’ll call Miller on Monday and see if we can’t get together on the price of the horses and the guide.”

“Guide?” Jack yelped. “Who the hell needs a goddamn baby-sitter? If you can’t find your own damn game, you’re not much of a hunter.”

“It’s a package deal, shithead,” Mike said. “No guy is just gonna rent you a horse and then point you off into the big lonely. He may not give two hoots in hell about you, but he wants that horse back.”

Jack grumbled a bit, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. It was going to go; it was really going to go.

Mike called a guy he knew and found out that the season opened on September 11, just about a month away. “At least that’ll give us time to get our affairs in order.” Mike laughed. “You know, quit our jobs, divorce our wives, and the like.”

We all laughed.

Suddenly McKlearey stood up. He’d been sitting in the corner, nursing his beer. “Where’s that fuckin’ paper?” he demanded.

Mike blinked and pulled it out of his shirt pocket.

McKlearey jerked it out of his hand, picked up the pencil Mike had been using, and laboriously wrote along the bottom.

“Louis R. McKlearey,” he wrote.

“What the hell—” Jack said, stunned.

“Fuck ya!” Lou snapped. Then he leaned back his head and began to laugh. The laugh went on and on, and pretty soon the rest of us were doing it too.

“Why you sneaky son of a bitch!” Jack howled. “You bad-mouthed the whole idea just to get us all hooked. You sneaky, connivin’ bastard!”

Lou laughed even harder. Maybe the others accepted Jack’s easy answer, but I wasn’t buying it. Not by a damn sight, I wasn’t.

After that, things got noisy. We all got to hitting the keg pretty hard, and it turned out to be a pretty good party after all.

I guess it was almost three in the morning by the time we got Mike home.

“I was gonna take you by to see Sandy,” Jack said as we drove back to the trailer court, “but it’s pretty late now.” His voice was a little slurred.

“Sandy? Who’s that?”

“Little something I’ve got on the side. She’s a real fine-lookin’ head. Tends bar at one of the joints. You’ll get a chance to meet her later.”

I grunted and settled down in the seat. I realized that I didn’t know this brother of mine at all. I couldn’t understand him. A certain amount of casual infidelity was to be expected, I guess, but it seemed to him to be a way of life. Like his jobs and his wives, he just seemed to drift from woman to woman, always landing on his feet, always making out, always on the lookout for something new. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t so worked up about Lou and Margaret. I guess the word I was looking for was “temporary.” Everything about him and his life seemed temporary, almost like he wasn’t real, like nothing really touched him.

I drifted off to thinking about the hunt. Maybe I was kind of temporary myself. I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have a girl, and I didn’t have a job. I guess maybe the only difference between Jack and me was that he liked it that way, and I didn’t. To him the hunt was just another thing to do. To me it already seemed more important. Maybe I could find out something about myself out in the brush, something I’d sure as hell never find out on a sidewalk. So I sat musing as the headlights bored on into the dark ahead of us.

6

IT wasn’t until Thursday that we finished up the deal on the car I was buying from Sloane’s lot. I guess I got a pretty good deal on it. It was a ten-year-old Dodge, and I got it for a hundred and fifty. One of the fenders was a little wrinkled, and the paint wasn’t too pure, but otherwise it seemed OK. Jack assured me that I wouldn’t have been able to touch it for under three hundred anywhere else on the Avenue.

It was cloudy that day, one of those days when the weather just seems to be turned off—not hot, not cold, not raining, not sunny—just “off.” I kind of wandered around the car lot, kicking tires and so forth while McKlearey finished up the paper work in the cluttered little shack that served as an office. I hate waiting around like that, I get to the point where I want to run amok or something. It wasn’t that I had anything to do really. I just hated the standing around.

Finally Lou finished up and I took the paper and the keys from him.

“Be sure to keep an eye on the oil,” he told me.

“Right.”

“And watch the pressure in the right rear tire.”

“Sure thing.” I climbed in and fired it up. Lou waved as I drove off the lot. I didn’t wave back.

There’s something about having your own car—even if it’s only four wheels and a set of pedals. You aren’t tied down any more. You’re not always in the position of asking people for a lift or waiting for buses.

I drove around for an hour or so through the shadowless light, getting the feel of the car. It was still fairly early—maybe then thirty or eleven in the morning—and finally it dawned on me that I didn’t have anyplace to go really. Jack was busy at the trailer lot, and I hate to stand around and watch somebody else work.

I thought about taking a run up to Seattle, but I really didn’t want to do that. None of the people I’d known would still be around. Maxwell had taken off and Larkin, too, probably. I sure as hell didn’t want to look up my old girlfriend; that was one thing I knew for sure.

Larkin. I hadn’t really been thinking at all. Last time I’d heard from him, he’d been teaching high school here in Tacoma someplace. I guess I’d just associated Tacoma with guys like my brother and McKlearey and Carter—beer-drinking, broad-chasing types. Stan Larkin just didn’t fit in with that kind of picture.

Stan and I had roomed together for a year at the university. We didn’t really have much in common, but I kind of liked him. There are two ways a guy can go if he’s a liberal arts major—provided, of course, that he doesn’t freak out altogether. He can assume the pose of the cultured man, polished, urbane, with good tastè and all that goes with it. Or he can play the role of the “diamond in the rough,” coarse, even vulgar, but supposedly intelligent in spite of it all—the Hemingway tactic, more or less. Larkin was the first type—I obviously wasn’t.

I think liberal arts majors are all automatically defensive about it, probably because we’re oversensitive. The dum-dums in PE with their brains in their jockstraps, the goof-offs in Business Administration, the weird types in the hard sciences, and the campus politicians in the social sciences, have all seen fit at one time or another to question the masculinity of any guy in liberal arts. So we get defensive. We rise above them, like Stan does, or we compensate, like I do. It kind of goes with the territory.

Anyway, Stan had spent a year picking up my dirty sox and dusting my books, and then he’d given up and moved back to the dorm. Even our literary interests hadn’t coincided. He was involved with Dickens, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Pope, while I was hung up on Blake, Donne, Faulkner, and Hardy. It’s a wonder we didn’t wind up killing each other.

I’d dropped him an occasional postcard from Europe, and he’d responded with the beautifully written letters that seemed, to me at least, almost like my picture of Stan himself—neat, florid, and somehow totally empty of any meaning.

At least he’d be somebody to talk to.

I wheeled into a tavern parking lot, went in and ordered a beer. I borrowed a phone book from the bartender and leafed through the L’s. He was there all right: Larkin, Stanley, and right above it was Larkin, Monica. Same address, same number. I remembered that he’d mentioned a girl named Monica something or other in a couple of his letters, but I hadn’t paid much attention. Now it looked like he was married. I don’t know why, but he’d never seemed to be the type. I jotted down the number and the address and pushed the phone book back to the bartender.

I finished my beer and had another, still debating with myself, kind of working myself up to calling him. I have to do that sometimes.

“Hey, buddy, you got a pay phone?” I finally asked the bartender.

He pointed back toward the can. I saw it hanging on the wall.

“Thanks,” I said and went on back. I thumbed in a dime and dialed the number.

“Hello?” It still sounded like him.

“Stan? I didn’t really think I’d catch you at home. This is Dan—Dan Alders.”

“Dan? I thought you were in the Army.”

“Just got out last weekend. I’m staying here in town, and I thought I’d better look you up.”

“I guess so. It’s good to hear your voice again. Where are you?” His enthusiasm seemed well-tempered.

“Close as I can figure, about eighty-seven blocks from your place.”

“That’s about a fifteen-minute drive. You have a car?”

“Just got one. I think it’ll make it that far.”

“Well then, come on over.”

“You sure I won’t be interrupting anything?”

“Oh, of course not. Come on, Dan, we know each other better than that.”

“OK, Stan.” I laughed. “I’ll see you in about fifteen minutes then.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

I went back to the bar and had another beer. I wasn’t sure this was going to work out. I wouldn’t mind seeing Stan again, but we hadn’t really had a helluva lot in common to begin with, and now he was married, and that along with a couple of years can change a guy quite a bit.

The more I thought about it, the less I liked it. I went out and climbed in my car. I pulled out of the lot and headed off toward his house, dodging dogs and kids on bicycles, and swearing all the way. It had all the makings of a real bust.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t. Stan had aged a little. He was a bit heavier, and his forehead was getting higher. He was combing his hair differently to cover it. He was still neat to the point of fussiness. His slacks and sport shirt were flawlessly pressed, and even his shoe-soles were clean. But he seemed genuinely glad to see me, and I relaxed a bit. He showed me around a house that was like a little glass case in a museum, making frequent references to Monica, his wife. The house was small, but everything in it was perfect. I could almost feel the oppressive presence of his bride. The place was so neat that it made me wonder where I could dump my cigarette butt. Stan gracefully provided me with an ashtray—an oversized one, I noticed. He obviously hadn’t forgotten my slobby habits. He had changed in more ways than just his appearance. He seemed to be nervous—even jumpy. He acted like somebody who’s got a body in the cellar or a naked girl in the bedroom. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

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