Книга - High Hunt

High Hunt
David Eddings


Now in ebook format.Down below in Tacoma, the group around Dan Alders' brother had been held together by a mutual taste for beer, spirits and endless arguments – with a little lying and wife-stealing on the side. But now, high in the mountains on a test of endurance, jealousy is tearing friendships apart.









David Eddings

High Hunt










Dedication


For JUFELEE

The more things change

The more they remain the same.




Contents


Cover (#ulink_f4902d50-46b8-55c8-8863-344a553cb910)

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

The Gathering

1

I guess that if it hadn’t been for that poker…

2

THEY weren’t ready to start processing us yet, so they…

3

A car pulled up outside, and Jack turned his head…

4

THE following Saturday I got out of the Army. Naturally,…

5

MIKE Carter and Betty, his wife, lived in a development…

6

IT wasn’t until Thursday that we finished up the deal…

7

ON Friday morning I went up to Seattle and picked…

8

“WHAT’S this doing here?” Clydine was standing over me the…

9

I worked—off and on—at the gun all the next week,…

10

I picked up Clydine about three thirty the next afternoon,…

11

THE following Wednesday, the first of September, we were all…

12

BY the next Saturday we were all getting things pretty…

13

ON Tuesday night we gathered at Sloane’s with all our…

14

IT rained all the next day. The sky sagged and…

The High Hunt

15

SLOANE’S Cadillac was still leading, and at the summit he…

16

IT took us the better part of an hour to…

17

ABOUT three thirty that afternoon we crossed the second ridge…

18

WHEN the gun went off I think we all came…

19

MILLER split us up then and sent us on back…

20

“TIME to roll out.” Clint’s head blotted out the looming…

21

“YOU see any with any size?” Miller asked when he…

22

I woke up the next morning before Clint came around…

23

“MAN!” Jack said when I got back down to camp,…

24

SLOANE was much worse the next morning. Much as he…

25

I got up at the usual time the next morning…

26

“DAN,” Sloan gasped when I got up to him, “I’m…

27

IT drizzled rain all the next day. Miller had told…

28

AFTER he got back from taking Jack and Lou up…

29

AT lunchtime I rode up the ridge to pick up…

30

CLINT woke me the next morning, and I rolled out…

31

I went straight on down into the ravine, leaving Jack…

32

I don’t think either Jack or Lou said more than…

33

“I don’t know how the hell we’re gonna get all…

The Parting

34

AFTER she left for class the next morning I called…

35

I didn’t see Stan until the next weekend. I’m not…

36

ON the first of October I moved to Seattle and…

37

I write a lousy letter. I always have. I knew…

38

AND so, after the holidays, Clydine Stewart, the terror of…

39

IT was a Thursday morning several weeks after Mother’s visit…

Epilogue

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by David Eddings

Copyright

About the Publisher




Prologue


WHEN we were boys, before we lost him and before my brother and I turned away from each other, my father once told us a story about our grandfather and a dog. We were living in Tacoma then, in one of the battered, sagging, rented houses that stretch back in my memory and mark the outlines of a childhood spent unknowingly on the bare upper edge of poverty. Jack and I knew that we weren’t rich, but it didn’t really bother us all that much. Dad worked in a lumber mill and just couldn’t seem to get ahead of the bills. And, of course, Mom being the way she was didn’t help much either.

It had been a raw, blustery Saturday, and Jack and I had spent the day outside. Mom was off someplace as usual, and Dad was supposed to be watching us. About all he’d done had been to feed us and tell us to stay the hell out of trouble or he’d bite off our ears. He always said stuff like that, but we were pretty sure he didn’t really mean it.

The yard around our house was cluttered with a lot of old junk abandoned by previous tenants—rusty car bodies and discarded appliances and the like—but it was a good place to play. Jack and I were involved in one of the unending, structureless games of his invention that filled the days of our boyhood. My brother—even then thin, dark, quick, and nervous—was a natural ringleader who settled for directing my activities when he couldn’t round up a gang of neighborhood kids. I went along with him most of the time—to some extent because he was older, but even more, I suppose, because even then I really didn’t much give a damn, and I knew that he did.

After supper it was too dark to go back outside, and the radio was on the blink, so we started tearing around the house. We got to playing tag in the living room, ducking back and forth around the big old wood-burning heating stove, giggling and yelling, our feet clattering on the worn linoleum. The Old Man was trying to read the paper, squinting through the dime-store glasses that didn’t seem to help much and made him look like a total stranger—to me at least.

He’d glance up at us from time to time, scowling in irritation. “Keep it down, you two,” he finally said. We looked quickly at him to see if he really meant it. Then we went on back out to the kitchen.

“Hey, Dan, I betcha I can hold my breath longer’n you can,” Jack challenged me. So we tried that a while, but we both got dizzy, and pretty soon we were running and yelling again. The Old Man hollered at us a couple times and finally came out to the kitchen and gave us both a few whacks on the fanny to show us that he meant business. Jack wouldn’t cry—he was ten. I was only eight, so I did. Then the Old Man made us go into the living room and sit on the couch. I kept sniffling loudly to make him feel sorry for me, but it didn’t work.

“Use your handkerchief” was all he said.

I sat and counted the flowers on the stained wallpaper. There were twelve rows on the left side of the brown water-splotch that dribbled down the wall and seventeen on the right side.

Then I decided to try another tactic on the Old Man. “Dad, I have to go.”

“You know where it is.”

When I came back, I went over and leaned my head against his shoulder and looked at the newspaper with him to let him know I didn’t hold any grudges. Jack fidgeted on the couch. Any kind of enforced nonactivity was sheer torture to Jack. He’d take ten spankings in preference to fifteen minutes of sitting in a corner. School was hell for Jack. The hours of sitting still were almost more than he could stand.

Finally, he couldn’t take anymore. “Tell us a story, Dad.”

The Old Man looked at him for a moment over the top of his newspaper. I don’t think the Old Man really understood my brother and his desperate need for diversion. Jack lived with his veins, like Mom did. Dad just kind of did what he had to and let it go at that. He was pretty easygoing—I guess he had to be, married to Mom and all like he was. I never really figured out where I fit in. Maybe I didn’t, even then.

“What kind of a story?” he finally asked.

“Cowboys?” I said hopefully.

“Naw,” Jack vetoed, “that’s kid stuff. Tell us about deer hunting or something.”

“Couldn’t you maybe put a couple cowboys in it?” I insisted, still not willing to give up.

Dad laid his newspaper aside and took off his glasses. “So you want me to tell you a story, huh?”

“With cowboys,” I said again. “Be sure you don’t forget the cowboys.”

“I don’t know that you two been good enough today to rate a story.” It was a kind of ritual.

“We’ll be extra good tomorrow, won’t we, Dan?” Jack promised quickly. Jack was always good at promising things. He probably meant them, too, at the time anyway.

“Yeah, Dad,” I agreed, “extra, extra, special good.”

“That’ll be the day,” the Old Man grunted.

“Come on, Dad,” I coaxed. “You can tell stories better’n anybody.” I climbed up into his lap. I was taking a chance, since I was still supposed to be sitting on the couch, but I figured it was worth the risk.

Dad smiled. It was the first time that day. He never smiled much, but I didn’t find out why until later. He shifted me in his lap, leaned back in the battered old armchair, and put his feet upon the coffee table. The wind gusted and roared in the chimney and pushed against the windows while the Old Man thought a few minutes. I watched his weather-beaten face closely, noticing for the first time that he was getting gray hair around his ears. I felt a sudden clutch of panic. My Dad was getting old!

“I ever tell you about the time your granddad had to hunt enough meat to last the family all winter?” he asked us.

“Are there cowboys in it?”

“Shut up, Dan, for cripes’ sakes!” Jack told me impatiently.

“I just want to be sure.”

“You want to hear the story or not?” the Old Man threatened.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Shut up and listen, for cripes’ sakes.”

“It was back in the winter of 1893, I think it was,” Dad started. “It was several years after the family came out from Missouri, and they were trying to make a go of it on a wheat ranch down in Adams County.”

“Did Grandpa live on a real ranch?” I asked. “With cowboys and everything?”

The Old Man ignored the interruption. “Things were pretty skimpy the first few years. They tried to raise a few beef-cows, but it didn’t work out too well, so when the winter came that year, they were clean out of meat. Things were so tough that my uncles, Art and Dolph, had to get jobs in town and stay at a boardinghouse. Uncle Beale was married and out on his own by then, and Uncle Tod had gone over to Seattle to work in the lumber mills. That meant that there weren’t any men on the place except my dad and my granddad.”

“He was our great-granddad,” Jack told me importantly.

“I know that,” I said. “I ain’t that dumb.” I leaned my head back against Dad’s chest so I could hear the rumble of his voice inside my head again.

“Great-Granddad was in the Civil War,” Jack said. “You told us that one time.”

“You want to tell this or you want me to?” the Old Man asked him.

“Yeah,” I said, not lifting my head, “shut up, Jack, for cripes’ sakes.”

“Anyhow,” the Old Man went on, “Granddad had to stay and tend the place, so he couldn’t go out and hunt. Dad was only seventeen, but there wasn’t anybody else to go. Well, the nearest big deer herd was over around Coeur d’Alene Lake, up in the timber country in Idaho. There weren’t any game laws back then—at least nobody paid any attention to them if there were—so a man could take as much as he needed.”

The wind gusted against the house again, and the wood shifted in the heating stove, sounding very loud. The Old Man got up, lifting me easily in his big hands, and plumped me on the couch beside Jack. Then he went over and put more wood in the stove from the big linoleum-covered woodbox against the wall that Jack and I were supposed to keep full. He slammed the door shut with an iron bang, dusted off his hands, and sat back down.

“It turned cold and started snowing early that year,” he continued. “Granddad had this old .45-70 single-shot he’d carried in the war, but they only had twenty-six cartridge cases for it. He and Dad loaded up all those cases the night before Dad left. They’d pulled the wheels off the wagon and put the runners on as soon as the snow really set in good, so it was all ready to go. After they’d finished loading the cartridges, Granddad gave my dad an old pipe. Way he looked at it, if Dad was old enough to be counted on to do a man’s work, he was old enough to have his own pipe. Dad hadn’t ever smoked before—except a couple times down in back of the schoolhouse and once out behind the barn when he was a kid.

“Early the next morning, before daylight, they hitched up the team—Old Dolly and Ned. They pitched the wagon-bed, and they loaded up Dad’s bedding and other gear. Then Dad called his dogs and got them in the wagon-bed, shook hands with Granddad, and started out.”

“I’ll betcha he was scared,” I said.

“Grown men don’t get scared,” Jack said scornfully.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Jack,” the Old Man told him. “Dad was plenty scared. That old road from the house wound around quite a bit before it dropped down on the other side of the hill, and Dad always said he didn’t dare look back even once. He said that if he had, he’d have turned right around and gone back home. There’s something wrong with a man who doesn’t get scared now and then. It’s how you handle it that counts.”

I know that bothered Jack. He was always telling everybody that he wasn’t scared—even when I knew he was lying about it. I think he believed that growing up just meant being afraid of fewer and fewer things. I was always sure that there was more to it than that. We used to argue about it a lot.”

“You ain’t scared of anything, are you, Dad?” Jack asked, an edge of concern in his voice. It was almost like an accusation.

Dad looked at him a long time without saying anything. “You want to hear the story, or do you want to ask a bunch of questions?” It hung in the air between them. I guess it was always there after that. I saw it getting bigger and bigger in the next few years. Jack was always too stubborn to change his mind, and the Old Man was always too bluntly honest to lie to him or even to let him believe a lie. And I was in the middle—like always. I went over and climbed back up in my father’s lap.

The Old Man went on with the story as if nothing had happened. “So there’s Dad in this wagon-bed sled—seventeen years old, all alone except for the horses and those two black and tan hounds of his.”

“Why can’t we have a dog?” I asked, without bothering to raise my head from his chest. I averaged about once a week on that question. I already knew the answer.

“Your mother won’t go for it.” They always called each other “your mother” and “your father.” I can’t think of more than two or three times while we were growing up that I heard either one of them use the other’s name. Of course most of the time they were fighting or not speaking anyway.

“Well, Uncle Dolph had loaned Dad an old two-dollar mail-order pistol, .32 short. Dad said it broke open at the top like a kid’s cap gun and wouldn’t shoot worth a damn, but it was kinda comfortable to have it along. Uncle Dolph shot a Swede in the belly with it a couple years later—put him in the hospital for about six months.”

“Wow!” I said. “What’d he shoot him for?”

“They were drinking in a saloon in Spokane and got into a fight over something or other. The Swede pulled a knife and Uncle Dolph had to shoot him.”

“Gee!” This was a pretty good story after all.

“It took Dad all of three days to get up into the timber country around the lake. Old Dolly and Ned pulled that sled at a pretty steady trot, but it was a long ways. First they went on up out of the wheat country and then into the foothills. It was pretty lonely out there. He only passed two or three farms along the way, pretty broken-down and sad-looking. But most of the time there wasn’t anything but the two shallow ruts of the wagon road with the yellow grass sticking up through the snow here and there on each side and now and then tracks where a wolf or a coyote had chased a rabbit across the road. The sky was all kind of gray most of the time, with the clouds kind of low and empty-looking. Once in a while there’d be a few flakes of snow skittering in the wind. Most generally it’d clear off about sundown, just in time to get icy cold at night.

“Come sundown he’d camp in the wagon, all rolled up in his blankets with a dog on each side. He’d listen to the wolves howling off in the distance and stare up at the stars and think about how faraway they were.” The Old Man’s voice kind of drifted off and his eyes got a kind of faraway look in them.

The wood in the stove popped, and I jumped a little.

“Well, it had gotten real cold early that year, and when he got to the lake, it was frozen over—ice so thick you coulda driven the team and wagon right out on it, and about an inch of snow on top of the ice. He scouted around until he found a place that had a lot of deer-sign and he made camp there.”

“What’s deer-sign, Dad?” I asked.

“Tracks, mostly. Droppings. Places where they’ve chewed off twigs and bark. Anyhow, he pulled up into this grove, you see—big, first-growth timber. Some of those trees were probably two hundred feet tall and fifteen feet at the butt, and there wasn’t any of the underbrush you see in the woods around here. The only snow that got in under them was what had got blown in from out in the clearings and such, so the ground was pretty dry.”

From where I sat with my head leaned against the Old Man’s chest, I could see into the dark kitchen. I could just begin to build a dark pine grove lying beyond the doorway with my eyes. I dusted the linoleum-turned-pine-needle floor with a powder-sugar of snow made of the dim edge of a streetlight on the corner that shone in through the kitchen window. It looked about right, I decided, about the way Dad described it.

“He got the wagon set where he wanted it, unhitched the horses, and started to make camp.”

“Did he build a fire?” I asked.

“One of the first things he did,” the Old Man said.

That was easy. The glow of the pilot light on the stove reflected a small, flickering point on the refrigerator door. It was coming along just fine.

“Well, he boiled up some coffee in an old cast-iron pan, fried up some bacon, and set some of the biscuits Grandma’d packed for him on a rock near the fire to warm. He said that about that time he’d have given the pipe and being grown-up and all of it just to be back home, sitting down to supper in the big, warm, old kitchen, with the friendly light of the coal-oil lamps and Grandma’s cooking, and the night coming down around the barn, and the shadows filling up the lines of foot-prints in the snow leading from the house to the outbuildings.” Dad’s voice got faraway again.

“But he ate his supper and called the dogs up close and checked his pistol when he heard the wolves start to howl off in the distance. There probably wasn’t anybody within fifty miles. Nothing but trees and hills and snow all around.

“Well, after he’d finished up with all the things you have to do to get a camp in shape, he sat down on a log by the fire and tried not to think about how lonesome he was.”

“He had those old dogs with him, didn’t he, Dad?” I asked, “and the horses and all? That’s not the same as being all alone, is it?” I had a thing about loneliness when I was a kid.

Dad thought it over for a minute. I could see Jack grinding his teeth in irritation out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t really look over at him. I had the deep-woods camp I’d built out in the kitchen just right, and I didn’t want to lose it. “I don’t know, Dan,” the Old Man said finally, “maybe the dogs and the horses just weren’t enough. It can get awful lonesome out there in the timber by yourself like that—awful lonesome.”

I imagine some of the questions I used to ask when I was a kid must have driven him right up the wall, but he’d always try to answer them. Mom was usually too busy talking about herself or about the people who were picking on her, and Jack was too busy trying to act like a grown-up or getting people to pay attention to him to have much time for my questions. But Dad always took them seriously. I guess he figured that if they were important enough for me to ask, they were important enough for him to answer. He was like that, my Old Man.

The wood popped in the stove again, but I didn’t jump this time. I just slipped the sound on around to the campfire in the kitchen.

“Well, he sat up by his fire all night, so he wouldn’t sleep too late the next morning. He watched the moon shine down on the ice out on the lake and the shadows from his fire flickering on the big tree trunks around his camp. He was pretty tired, and he’d catch himself dozing off every now and then, but he’d just fill up that stubby old pipe and light it with a coal from the fire and think about how it would be when he got home with a wagon-load of deer meat. Maybe then his older brothers would stop treating him like a wet-behind-the-ears kid. Maybe they’d listen to what he had to say now and then. And he’d catch himself drifting off into the dream and slipping down into sleep, and he’d get up and walk around the camp, stamping his feet on the frosty ground. And he’d have another cup of coffee and sit back down between his dogs and dream some more. After a long, long time, it started to get just a little bit light way off along one edge of the sky.”

The faint, pale edge of daylight was tricky, but I finally managed it.

“Now these two hounds Dad had with him were trained to hunt a certain way. They were Pete and Old Buell. Pete was a young dog with not too much sense, but he’d hunt all day and half the night, too, if you wanted him to. Buell was an old dog, and he was as smart as they come, but he was getting to the point where he’d a whole lot rather lay by the fire and have somebody bring him his supper than go out and work for it. The idea behind deer hunting in those days was to have your dogs circle around behind the deer and then start chasing them toward you. Then when the deer ran by, you were supposed to just sort of bushwhack the ones you wanted. It’s not really very sporting, but in those days you hunted for the meat, not for the fun.

“Well, as soon as it started to get light, Dad sent them out. Pete took right off, but Old Buell hung back. Dad finally had to kick him in the tail to make him get away from the fire.”

“That’s mean,” I objected. I had the shadowy shapes of my two dogs near my reflected-pilot-light fire, and I sure didn’t want anybody mistreating my old dogs, not even my own grandfather.

“Dog had to do his share, too, in those days, Dan. People didn’t keep dogs for pets back then. They kept them to work. Anyway, pretty soon Dad could hear the dogs baying, way back in the timber, and he took the old rifle and the twenty-six bullets and went down to the edge of the lake.”

“He took his pistol, too, I’ll bet,” I said. Out in my camp in the forests of the kitchen, I took my pistol.

“I expect he did, Dan, I expect he did. Anyway, after a little bit, he caught a flicker of movement back up at camp, out of the corner of his eye. He looked back up the hill, and there was Old Buell slinking back to the fire with his tail between his legs. Dad looked real hard at him, but he didn’t dare move or make any noise for fear of scaring off the deer. Old Buell just looked right straight back at him and kept on slinking toward the fire, one step at a time. He knew Dad couldn’t do a thing about it. A dog can do that sometimes, if he’s smart enough.

“Well, it seems that Old Pete was able to get the job done by himself, because pretty soon the deer started to come out on the ice. Well, Dad just held off, waiting for more of them, you see, and pretty soon there’s near onto a hundred of them out there, all bunched up. You see, a deer can’t run very good on ice, and he sure don’t like being out in the open, so when they found themselves out there, they just kind of huddled up to see what’s gonna happen.”

I could see Jack leaning forward now, his eyes bright with excitement and his lips drawn back from his teeth a little. Of course, I couldn’t look straight at him. I had to keep everything in place out on the other side of the doorway.

“So Dad just lays that long old rifle out across the log and touches her off. Then he started loading and firing as fast as he could so’s he could get as many as possible before they got their sense back. Well, those old black-powder cartridges put out an awful cloud of smoke, and about half the time he was shooting blind, but he managed to knock down seventeen of them before the rest got themselves organized enough to run out of range.”

“Wow! That’s a lot of deer, huh, Dad?” I said.

“As soon as Old Pete heard the shooting, he knew his part of the job was over, so he went out to do a little hunting for himself. The dogs hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before, so he was plenty hungry, but then, a dog hunts better if he’s hungry—so does a man.

“Anyway, Dad got the team and skidded the deer on in to shore and commenced to gutting and skinning. Took him most of the rest of the day to finish up.”

Jack started to fidget again. He’d gone for almost a half hour without saying hardly anything, and that was always about his limit.

“Is a deer very hard to skin, Dad?” he asked.

“Not if you know what you’re doing.”

“But how come he did it right away like that?” Jack demanded. “Eddie Selvridge’s old man said you gotta leave the hide on a deer for at least a week or the meat’ll spoil.”

“I heard him say that, too, Dad,” I agreed.

“Funny they don’t leave the hide on a cow then when they butcher, isn’t it?” the Old Man asked. “At the slaughterhouse they always skin ’em right away, don’t they?”

“I never thought of that,” I admitted.

Jack scowled silently. He hated not being right. I think he hated that more than anything else in the world.

“Along about noon or so,” Dad continued, “here comes Pete back into camp with a full belly and blood on his muzzle. Old Buell went up to him and sniffed at him and then started casting back and forth until he picked up Pete’s trail. Then he lined out backtracking Pete to his kill.”

Jack howled with sudden laughter. “That sure was one smart old dog, huh, Dad?” he said. “Why work if you can get somebody else to do it for you?”

Dad ignored him. “Old Pete had probably killed a fawn and had eaten his fill. Anyway, my dad kinda watched the dogs for a few minutes and then went back to work skinning. After he got them all skinned out, he salted down the hides and rolled them in a bundle—sold the hides in town for enough to buy his own rifle that winter, and enough left over to get his mother some yard goods she’d wanted. Then he drug the carcasses back to camp through the snow and hung them all up to cool out.

“He cleaned up, washing his hands with snow, fed the team, and then boiled up another pan of coffee. He fried himself a big mess of deer liver and onions and heated up some more of the biscuits. After he ate, he sat on a log and lit his pipe.”

“I’ll bet he was tired,” Jack said, just to be saying something. “Not being in bed all the night before and all that.”

“He still had something left to tend to,” Dad said. “It was almost dark when he spotted Old Buell slinking back toward camp. He was out on the open, coming back along the trail Pete had broken though the snow. His belly looked full, and his muzzle and ears were all bloody the same way Pete’s had been.”

“He found the other dog’s deer, I’ll betcha.” Jack laughed. “You said he was a smart old dog.”

Beyond the kitchen doorway, one of my shadowy dogs crept slowly toward the warmth of the pilot-light campfire, his eyes sad and friendly, like the eyes of the hound some kid up the block owned.

“Well, Dad watched him for a minute or two, and then he took his rifle, pulled back the hammer, and shot Old Buell right between the eyes.”

The world beyond the doorway shattered like a broken mirror and fell apart back into the kitchen again. I jerked up and looked straight into my father’s face. It was very grim, and his eyes were very intent on Jack, as if he were telling my brother something awfully important.

He went on without seeming to notice my startled jump. “Old Buell went end over end when that bullet hit him. Then he kicked a couple times and didn’t move anymore. Dad didn’t even go over to look at him. He just reloaded the rifle and set it where it was handy, and then he and Old Pete climbed up into the wagon and went to bed.

“The next morning, he hitched up the team, loaded up the deer carcasses, and started back home. It took him three days again to get back to the wheat ranch, and Granddad and Grandma were sure glad to see him.” My father lifted me off his lap, leaned back and lit a cigarette.

“It took them a good two days to cut up the deer and put them down in pickling crocks. After they finished it all up and Dad and Granddad were sitting in the kitchen, smoking their pipes with their sock feet up on the open oven door, Granddad turned to my Dad and said, “Sam, whatever happened to Old Buell, anyway? Did he run off?”

“Well, Dad took a deep breath. He knew Granddad had been awful fond of that old hound. ‘Had to shoot him,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t hunt—wouldn’t even hunt his own food. Caught him feeding on Pete’s kill.’

“Well, I guess Granddad thought about that for a while. Then he finally said, ‘Only thing you could do, Sam, I guess. Kind of a shame, though. Old Buell was a good dog when he was younger. Had him a long time.’”

The wind in the chimney suddenly sounded very loud and cold and lonesome.

“But why’d he shoot him?” I finally protested.

“He just wasn’t any good anymore,” Dad said, “and when a dog wasn’t any good in those days, they didn’t want him around. Same way with people. If they’re no good, why keep them around?” He looked straight at Jack when he said it.

“Well, I sure wouldn’t shoot my own dog,” I objected.

Dad shrugged. “It was different then. Maybe if things were still the way they were back then, the world would be a lot easier to live in.”

That night when we were in bed in the cold bedroom upstairs, listening to Mom and the Old Man yelling at each other down in the living room, I said it again to Jack. “I sure wouldn’t shoot my own dog.”

“Aw, you’re just a kid,” he said. “That was just a story. Grandpa didn’t really shoot any dog. Dad just said that.”

“Dad doesn’t tell lies,” I said. “If you say that again, I’m gonna hit you.”

Jack snorted with contempt.

“Or maybe I’ll shoot you,” I said extravagantly. “Maybe some day I’ll just decide that you’re no good, and I’ll take my gun and shoot you. Bang! Just like that, and you’ll be dead, and I’ll betcha you wouldn’t like that at all.”

Jack snorted again and rolled over to go to sleep, or to wrestle with the problem of being grown-up and still being afraid, which was to worry at him for the rest of his life. But I lay awake for a long time staring into the darkness. And when I drifted into sleep, the forest in the kitchen echoed with the hollow roar of that old rifle, and my shadowy old dog with the sad, friendly eyes tumbled over and over in the snow.

In the years since that night I’ve had that same dream again and again—not every night, sometimes only once or twice a year—but it’s the only thing I can think of that hasn’t changed since I was a boy.



The Gathering




1


I guess that if it hadn’t been for that poker game, I’d have never really gotten to know my brother. That puts the whole thing into the realm of pure chance right at the outset.

I’d been drafted into the Army after college. I sort of resented the whole thing but not enough to run off to Canada or to go to jail. Some of my buddies got kind of excited and made a lot of noise about “principle” and what-not, but I was the one staring down the mouth of that double-barrelled shotgun called either/or. When I asked them what the hell the difference was between the Establishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to Nam and the Antiestablishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to a federal penitentiary, they got decidedly huffy about the whole thing.

Sue, my girlfriend, who felt she had to call and check in with her mother if we were going to be five minutes late getting home from a movie, told me on the eve, as they used to say, of my departure that she’d run off to Canada with me if I really wanted her to. Since I didn’t figure any job in Canada would earn me enough to pay the phone bill she’d run up calling Momma every time she had to go to the biffy, I nobly turned her down. She seemed awfully relieved.

I suppose that ultimately I went in without any fuss because it didn’t really mean anything to me one way or the other. None of it did.

As it all turned out, I went to Germany instead of the Far East. So I soaked up Kultur and German beer and played nursemaid to an eight-inch howitzer for about eighteen months, holding off the red threat. I finished up my hitch in late July and came back on a troopship. That’s where I got into the poker game.

Naturally, it was Benson who roped me into it. Benson and I had been inducted together in Seattle and had been in the same outfit in Germany. He was a nice enough kid, but he couldn’t walk past a deck of cards or a pair of dice if his life depended on it. He’d been at me a couple times and I’d brushed him off, but on the third day out from Bremerhaven he caught me in the chow line that wandered up and down the gray-painted corridors of the ship. He knew I had about twenty dollars I hadn’t managed to spend before we were shipped out.

“Come on, Alders. What the hell? It’s only for small change.” His eyes were already red-rimmed from lack of sleep, but his fatigue pockets jingled a lot. He must have been winning for a change.

“Oh, horseshit, Benson,” I told him. “I just don’t get that much kick out of playing poker.”

“What the fuck else is there to do?”

He had a point there. I’d gotten tired of looking at the North Atlantic after about twenty minutes. It’s possibly the dullest stretch of ocean in the world—if you’re lucky. Anyway, I know he’d be at me until I sat in for a while, and it really didn’t make that much difference to me. Maybe that’s why I started winning.

“All right, Arsch-loch.” I gave in. “I’ll take your goddamn money. It doesn’t make a shit to me.” So, after chow, I went and played poker.

The game was in the forward cargo hold. They’d restacked the five hundred or so duffle bags until there was a cleared-out place in the middle of the room. Then they’d rigged a table out of a dozen or so bags, a slab of cardboard, and a GI blanket. The light wasn’t too good, and the placed smelled of the bilges, and after you’ve sat on some guy’s extra pair of boots inside his duffle bag for about six hours, your ass feels like he’s been walking on it, but we stuck it out. Like Benson said, what else was there to do?

The game was seven-card stud, seven players. No spit-in-the-ocean, or no-peek, or three-card-lowball. There were seven players—not always the same seven guys, but there were always seven players.

The first day I sat in the game most of the play was in coins. Even so, I came out about forty dollars ahead. I quit for the day about midnight and gave my seat to the Spec-4 who’d been drooling down my back for three hours. He was still there when I drifted back the next morning.

“I guess you want your seat back, huh?”

“No, go ahead and play, man.”

“Naw, I’d better knock off and get some sleep. Besides, I ain’t held a decent hand for the last two hours.”

He got up and I sat back down and started winning again.

The second day the paper money started to show. The pots got bigger, and I kept winning. I wondered how much longer my streak could go on. All the laws of probability were stacked against me by now. Nobody could keep winning forever. When I quit that night, I was better than two hundred ahead. I stood up and stretched. The cargo hold was full of guys, all sitting and watching, very quietly. Word gets around fast on a troopship.

On the morning of the third day, Benson finally went broke. He’d been giving up his place at the table for maybe two-hour stretches, and he’d grab quick catnaps back in one of the corners. He looked like the wrath of God, his blond, blankly young face stubbled and grimy-looking. The cards had gone sour for him late the night before—not completely sour, just sour enough so that he was pretty consistently holding the second-best hand at the table. That can get awfully damned expensive.

It was on the sixth card of a game that he tossed in his last three one-dollar bills. He had three cards to an ace-high straight showing. A fat guy at the end of the table was dealing, and he flipped out the down-cards to Benson, the Spec-4, and himself. The rest of us had folded. I could tell from Benson’s face that he’d filled the straight. He might as well have had a billboard on the front of his head.

The Spec-4 folded.

“You’re high,” the fat dealer said, pointing at Benson’s ace.

“I ain’t got no money to bet,” Benson answered.

“Tough titty.”

“Come on, man. I got it, but I can’t bet it.”

“Bet, check, or fold, fella,” the dealer said with a fat smirk.

Benson looked around desperately. There was a sort of house rule against borrowing at the table. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How about this watch?” He held out his arm.

“I got a watch,” the dealer said, but he looked interested.

“Come on, man. I got that watch when I graduated from high school. My folks give a hundred and a half for it. It’ll sure as hell cover any bet in this chickenshit little poker game.”

The fat guy held out his hand. Benson gave him the watch.

“Give you five bucks.”

“Bullshit! That watch is worth a hundred and a half, I told you.”

“Not to me, it ain’t. Five bucks.”

“Fuck you, Buster. You ain’t gittin’ my watch for no lousy five bucks.”

“I guess you better throw in your hand then, huh?”

“Christ, man, gimme a break.”

“Come on, fella,” the fat guy said, “you’re holdin’ up the game. Five bucks. Take it or leave it.”

I could see the agony of indecision in Benson’s face. Five dollars was the current bet limit. “All right,” he said finally.

He bet two. The dealer raised him three. Benson called and rolled over his hole cards. He had his straight. His face was jubilant. He looked more like a kid than ever.

The fat guy had a flush.

Benson watched numbly, rubbing his bare left wrist, as the chortling fat man raked in the money. Finally he got up and went quickly out of the cargo hold.

“Hey, man,” the fat dealer called after him, “I’ll give you a buck apiece for your boots.” He howled with laughter.

Another player took Benson’s place.

“That was kinda hard,” a master sergeant named Riker drawled mildly from the other end of the table.

“That’s how we play the game where I come from, Sarge,” the fat man said.

It took me two days to get him, but I finally nailed him right to the wall. The pots were occasionally getting up to forty or fifty dollars by then, and the fat man was on a losing streak.

He had two low pair showing, and he was betting hard, hoping to get even. It was pretty obvious that he had a full house, seven and threes. I had two queens, a nine and the joker showing. My hand looked like a pat straight, but I had two aces in the hole. My aces and queens would stomp hell out of his sevens and threes.

Except that on the last round I picked up another ace.

He bet ten dollars. I raised him twenty-five.

“I ain’t got that much,” he said.

“Tough titty.”

“I got you beat.”

“You better call the bet then.”

“You can’t just buy the fuckin’ pot!”

“Call or fold, friend.” I was enjoying it.

“Come on, man. You can’t just buy the fuckin’ pot!”

“You already said that. How much you got?”

“I got twelve bucks.” He thought I was going to reduce my bet so he could call me. His face relaxed a little.

“You got a watch?” I asked him quietly.

He caught on then. “You bastard!” He glared at me. He sure wanted to keep Benson’s watch. “You ain’t gettin’ this watch that way, fella.”

I shrugged and reached for the pot.

“What the hell you doin’?” he squawked.

“If you’re not gonna call—”

“All right, all right, you bastard!” He peeled off Benson’s watch and threw it in the pot. “There, you’re called.”

“That makes seventeen,” I said. “You’re still eight bucks light.”

“Fuck you, fella! That goddamn watch is worth a hundred and fifty bucks!”

“I saw you buy it, friend. The price was five. That’s what you paid for it, so I guess that’s what it’s worth. You got another watch?”

“You ain’t gettin’ my watch.”

I reached for the pot again.

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” He pulled off his own watch.

“That’s twenty-two,” I said. “You’re still light.”

“Come on, man. My watch is worth more than five bucks.”

“A Timex? Don’t be stupid. I’m giving you a break letting you have five on it.” I reached for the pot again.

“I ain’t got nothin else.”

“Tell you what, sport. I’ll give you a buck apiece for your boots.”

“What the fuck you want my fuckin’ boots for?”

“You gonna call?”

“All right. My fuckin’ boots are in.”

“Put ’em on the table, sport.”

He scowled at me and started unlacing his boots. “There,” he snapped, plunking them down on the table, “you’re called.”

“You’re still a buck light.” I knew I was being a prick about it, but I didn’t give a damn. I get that way sometimes.

He stared at me, not saying anything.

I waited, letting him sweat. Then I dropped in on him very quietly. “Your pants ought to cover it.” Some guy laughed.

“My pants!” he almost screamed.

“On the table,” I said, pointing, “or I take the pot.”

“Fuck ya!”

I reached for the pot again.

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” His voice was desperate. He stood up, emptied his pockets, and yanked off his pants. He wasn’t wearing any shorts and his nudity was grossly obscene. He threw the pants at me, but I deflected them into the center of the table. “All right, you son of a bitch!” he said, not sitting down. “Let’s see your pissy little straight beat a full-fuckin’ house!” He rolled over his third seven.

“I haven’t got a straight, friend.”

“Then I win, huh?”

I shook my head. “You lose.” I pulled the joker away from the queens and the nine and slowly started turning up my buried aces. “One. Two. Three. And four. Is that enough, friend?” I asked him.

“Je-sus Christ!” some guy said reverently.

The fat man stood looking at the aces for a long time. Then he stumbled away from the table and almost ran out of the cargo hold, his fat behind jiggling with every step.

“I still say it’s a mighty hard way to play poker,” Sergeant Riker said softly as I hauled in the merchandise.

“I figured he had it coming,” I said shortly.

“Maybe so, son, maybe so, but that still don’t make it right, does it?”

And that finished my winning streak. Riker proceeded to give me a series of very expensive poker lessons. By the time I quit that night, I was back down to four hundred dollars. I sent the fat guy’s watch, boots, and pants back to him with one of his buddies, and went up on deck to get some air. The engine pounded in the steel deck plates, and the wake was streaming out behind us, white against the black water.

“Smoke, son?” It was Riker. He leaned against the rail beside me and held out his pack.

“Thanks,” I said. “I ran out about an hour ago.”

“Nice night, ain’t it?” His voice was soft and pleasant. I couldn’t really pin down his drawl. It was sort of Southern.

I looked up at the stars. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been down at that poker table for so long I’d almost forgotten what the stars looked like.”

The ship took a larger wave at a diagonal and rolled with an odd, lurching kind of motion.

“You still ahead of the game, son?” he asked me, his voice serious.

“A little bit,” I said cautiously.

“If it was me,” he said, “I wouldn’t go back no more. You’ve won yourself a little money, and you got your buddy’s watch back for him. If it was me, I’d just call ’er quits.”

“I was doing pretty well there for a while,” I objected. “I think I was about fifteen hundred dollars to the good before I started losing. I’ll win that back in just a few hours, the way the pots have been running.”

“You broke your string, son,” Riker said softly, looking out over the water. “You been losin’ ’cause you was ashamed of yourself for what you done to that heavyset boy.”

“I still think he had it coming to him,” I insisted.

“I ain’t arguin’ that,” Riker said. “Like as not he did. What I’m sayin’, son, is that you’re ashamed of yourself for bein’ the one that come down on him like you done. I been watchin’ you, and you ain’t set easy since that hand. Funny thing about luck—it won’t never come to a man who don’t think he’s got it comin’. Do yourself a favor and stay out of the game. You’re only gonna lose from here on out.”

I was going to argue with him, but I had the sudden cold certainty that he was right. I looked out at the dark ocean. “I guess maybe the bit about the pants was going a little too far,” I admitted.

“Yeah,” he said, “your buddy’s watch woulda been plenty.”

“Maybe I will stay out of the game,” I said. “I’m about all pokered out anyway.”

“Yeah,” he said, “we’ll be gettin’ home pretty quick anyway.”

“Couple, three days, I guess.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m gonna turn in. Been nice talkin’ to you, son.” He turned and walked off down the deck.

“Good night, Sergeant Riker,” I called after him.

He waved his hand without looking back.

So I quit playing poker. I guess I’ve always been a sucker for fatherly advice. Somehow I knew that Riker was right though. Whatever the reason, I’d lost the feeling I’d had that the cards were going to fall my way no matter what anybody tried to do to stop them. If I’d have gone back the next day, they’d have cleaned me out. So the next day I watched the ocean, or read, and I didn’t think about poker.

Two days later we slid into New York Harbor. It was early morning and foggy. We passed the Statue and then stacked up out in the bay, waiting for a tug to drag us the rest of the way in. We all stood out on deck watching the sun stumble up out of the thick banks of smoke to blearily light up the buildings on Manhattan Island.

It’s a funny feeling, coming home when you don’t really have anything to come home to. I leaned back against a bulkhead, watching all the other guys leaning over the rail. I think I hated every last one of them right then.

Two grubby tugboats finally came and nudged us across the bay to a pier over in Brooklyn. Early as it was, there must have been a thousand people waiting. There was a lot of waving and shouting back and forth, and then they all settled down to wait. The Army’s good at that kind of thing.

Benson dragged his duffle bag up to where I was and plunked it down on the deck. I still hadn’t told him I had his watch. I didn’t want him selling it again so he could get back in the game.

“Hey, Alders,” he puffed, “I been lookin’ for you all over this fuckin’ tub.”

“I’ve been right here, kid.”

“Feels good, gettin’ home, huh?” he said.

“It’s still a long way to Seattle,” I told him. His enthusiasm irritated hell out of me.

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“You think maybe they might fly us out to the West Coast?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I expect a nice long train ride.”

“Shit!” He sounded disgusted. “You’re probably right though. The way my luck’s been goin’ lately, they’ll probably make me walk.”

“You’re just feeling picked on.”

Eventually, they started unloading us. Those of us bound for West-Coast and Midwest separation centers were loaded on buses and then we sat there.

I watched the mass family reunion taking place in the dim gloom under the high roof of the pier. There was a lot of crying and hugging and so forth, but we weren’t involved in any of that. I wished to hell we could get going.

After about a half hour the buses started and we pulled away from the festivities. I slouched low in the seat and watched the city slide by. Several of the guys were pretty boisterous, and the bus driver had to tell them to quiet down several times.

“Look,” Benson said, nudging me in the ribs. “Eine amerikanische Fräulein.”

“Quit showing off,” I said, not bothering to look.

“What the hell’s buggin’ you?” he demanded.

“I’m tired, Benson.”

“You been tired all your life. Wake up, man. You’re home.”

“Big goddamn deal.”

He looked hurt, but he quit pestering me.

After they’d wandered around for a while, the guys who were driving the buses finally found a train station. There was a sergeant there, and he called roll, got us on the train, and then hung around to make sure none of us bugged out. That’s Army logic for you. You couldn’t have gotten most of those guys off that train with a machine gun.

After they got permission from the White House or someplace, the train started to move. I gave the sergeant standing on the platform the finger by way of farewell. I was in a foul humor.

First there was more city, and then we were out in the country.

“We in Pennsylvania yet?” Benson asked.

“I think so.”

“How many states we gonna go through before we get back to Washington?”

“Ten or twelve. I’m not sure.”

“Shit! That’ll take weeks.”

“It’ll just seem like it,” I told him.

“I’m dyin’ for a drink.”

“You’re too young to drink.”

“Oh, bullshit. Trouble is, I’m broke.”

“Don’t worry about it, Kid. I’ll buy you a drink when they open the club car.”

“Thanks,” he said. “That game cleaned me out.”

“I know.”

We watched Pennsylvania slide by outside.

“Different, huh?” Benson said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “More than just a little bit.”

“But it’s home, man. It’s all part of the same country.”

“Sure, Kid,” I said flatly.

“You don’t give a shit about anything, do you, Alders?” Sometimes Benson could be pretty sharp. “Being in Germany, winning all that money in the game, coming home—none of it really means anything to you, does it?”

“Don’t worry about it, Kid.” I looked back out the window.

He was right though. At first I’d thought I was just cool—that I’d finally achieved a level of indifference to the material world that’s supposed to be the prelude to peace of mind or whatever the hell you call it. The last day or so, though, I’d begun to suspect that it was more just plain, old-fashioned alienation than anything else—and that’s a prelude to a vacation at the funny-farm. So I looked out at the farmland and the grubby backsides of little towns and really tried to feel something. It didn’t work.

A couple guys came by with a deck of cards, trying to get up a game. They had me figured for a big winner from the boat, and they wanted a shot at my ass. I was used up on poker though. I’d thought about what Riker had told me, and I decided that I wasn’t really a gambler. I was a bad winner. At least I could have let that poor bastard keep his pants, for Christ’s sake. The two guys with the cards got a little snotty about the whole thing, but I ignored them and they finally went away.

“You oughta get in,” Benson said, his eyes lighting up.

“I’ve had poker,” I told him.

“I don’t suppose you’d want to loan me a few dollars?” he asked wistfully.

“Not to gamble with,” I told him.

“I didn’t think so.”

“Come on, Kid. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Sure,” he said.

The two of us walked on down the swaying aisles to the club car. I got myself about half in the basket, and I felt better.

In Chicago there was another mob of relatives waiting, and there was a general repetition of the scene on the dock back in New York. Once we changed trains though, we highballed right on through.

I spent a lot of time in the club car with my heels hooked over the rung of a bar stool, telling lies and war stories to a slightly cross-eyed Wave with an unlimited capacity for Budweiser and a pair of tightly crossed legs. At odd moments, when I got sick of listening to her high-pitched giggle and raucous voice, I’d ease back up the train to my seat and sit staring at North Dakota and Montana sliding by outside. The prairie country was burned yellow-brown and looked like the ass-end of no place. After a while we climbed up into the mountains and the timber. I felt better then.

I had a few wild daydreams about maybe looking up the guy Sue had told me about in her last letter and kicking out a few of his teeth, but I finally decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort. He was probably some poor creep her mother had picked out for her. Then I thought about blousing her mother’s eye, and that was a lot more satisfying. It’s hard to hate somebody you’ve never met, but I could work up a pretty good head of steam about Susan’s mother.

I generally wound up back at the club car. I’d peel my cockeyed Wave of whomever she’d promoted to beer-buyer first class and go back to pouring Budweiser into her and trying to convince her that we were both adults with adult needs.

Anyhow, they dropped us off in Tacoma about five thirty in the morning on the fourth day after we’d landed in New York. My uniform was rumpled, my head was throbbing, and my stomach felt like it had a blowtorch inside. The familiar OD trucks from Fort Lewis were waiting, and it only took about an hour to deliver us back to the drab, two-story yellow barracks and bare drill fields I’d seen on a half dozen posts from Fort Ord to Camp Kilmer.

They fed us, issued us bedding, assigned us space in the transient barracks, and then fell us out into a formation in the company street. While they were telling us about all the silly-ass games we were going to play, my eyes drifted on out across the parade ground to the inevitable, blue-white mound of Mount Ranier, looming up out of the hazy foothills. I was dirty, rumpled, hung over, and generally sick of the whole damned world. The mountain was still the same corny, picture-postcard thing it had always been—a ready-made tourist attraction, needing only a beer sign on the summit to make it complete. I’d made bad jokes about its ostentatious vulgarity all the way through college, but that morning after having been away for so damned long, I swear I got a lump in my throat just looking at it. It was the first time I’d really felt anything for a long time.

Maybe I was human after all.




2


THEY weren’t ready to start processing us yet, so they filled in the rest of the day with the usual Mickey-Mouse crap that the Army always comes up with to occupy a man’s spare time. At four-thirty, after frequent warnings that we were still in the Army and subject to court-martial, they gave us passes and told us to keep our noses clean. They really didn’t sound too hopeful about it.

I walked on past the mob-scene in the parking lot—parents, wives, girlfriends, and the like, crying and hugging and shaking hands and backslapping—and headed toward the bus stop. I’d had enough of all that stuff.

“Hey, Alders,” someone yelled. “You want a lift into town?” It was Benson naturally. He’d been embarrassingly grateful when I’d given him back the watch, and I guess he wanted to do something for me. His folks were with him, a tall, sunburned man and a little woman in a flowered dress who was hanging onto Benson’s arm like grim death. I could see that they weren’t really wild about having a stranger along on their reunion.

“No thanks,” I said, waving him off. “See you tomorrow.” I hurried on so he wouldn’t have time to insist. Benson was a nice enough kid, but he could be an awful pain in the ass sometimes.

The bus crawled slowly toward Tacoma, through a sea of traffic. By the time I got downtown, I’d worked up a real thirst. I hit one of the Pacific Avenue bars and poured down three beers, one after another. After German beer, the stuff still tasted just a wee bit like stud horsepiss with the foam blown off even with the acclimating I’d done on the train. I sat in the bar for about an hour until the place started to fill up. They kept turning the jukebox up until it got to the pain level. That’s when I left.

The sun was just going down when I came back out on the street. The sides of all the buildings were washed with a coppery kind of light, and everybody’s face was bright red in the reflected glow.

I loitered on down the sidewalk for a while, trying to think of something to do and watching the assorted GI’s, Airmen, and swab jockeys drifting up and down the Avenue in twos and threes. They seemed to be trying very hard to convince each other that they were having a good time. I walked slowly up one side of the street, stopping to look in the pawnshop windows with their clutter of overpriced junk and ignoring repeated invitations of sweaty little men to “come on in and look around, Soljer.”

I stuck my nose into a couple of the penny arcades. I watched a pinball addict carry on his misdirected love affair with a seductively blinking nickle-grabber. I even poked a few dimes into a peep-show machine and watched without much interest while a rather unpretty girl on scratchy film took off her clothes.

Up the street a couple girls from one of the local colleges were handing out “literature.” They both had straight hair and baggy-looking clothes, and it appeared that they were doing their level best to look as ugly as possible, even though they were both not really that bad. I knew the type. Most of the GI’s were ignoring them, and the two kids looked a little desperate.

“Here, soldier,” the short one said, mistaking my look of sympathy for interest. She thrust a leaflet into my hand. I glanced at it. It informed me that I was engaged in an immoral war and that decent people looked upon me as a swaggering bully with bloody hands. Further, it told me that if I wanted to desert, there were people who were willing to help me get out of the country.

“Interesting,” I said, handing it back to her.

“What’s the matter?” she sneered. “Afraid an MP might catch you with it?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Forget him Clydine,” the other one said. That stopped me.

“Is that really your name?” I asked the little one.

“So what?”

“I’ve just never met anybody named Clydine before.”

“Is anything wrong with it?” she demanded. She was very short, and she glared up at me belligerently. “I’m not here for a pickup, fella.”

“Neither am I, girlie,” I told her. I dislike being called “fella.” I always have.

“Then you approve of what the government’s doing in Vietnam?” She got right to the point, old Clydine. No sidetracks for her.

“They didn’t ask me.”

“Why don’t you desert then?”

Her chum pitched in, too. “Don’t you want to get out of the country?”

“I’ve just been out of the country,” I objected.

“We’re just wasting our time on this one, Joan,” Clydine said. “He isn’t even politically aware.”

“It’s been real,” I told them. “I’ll always remember you both fondly.”

They turned their backs on me and went on handing out pamphlets.

Farther up the street another young lady stopped me, but she wasn’t offering politics. She was surprisingly direct about what she was offering.

Next a dirty-looking little guy wanted to give me a “real artistic” tattoo. I turned him down, too.

Farther along, a GI with wasted-looking eyeballs tried to sell me a lid of grass.

I went into another bar—a fairly quiet one—and mulled it around over a beer. I decided that I must have had the look of somebody who wanted something. I couldn’t really make up my mind why.

I went back on down the street. It was a sad, grubby street with sad, grubby people on it, all hysterically afraid that some GI with money on him might get past them.

That thought stopped me. The four hundred I’d won was in my blouse pocket, and I sure didn’t want to get rolled. It was close enough after payday to make a lone GI a pretty good target, so I decided that I’d better get off Pacific Avenue.

But what the hell does a guy do with himself on his first night back in the States? I ticked off the possibilities. I could get drunk, get laid, get rolled, or go to a movie. None of those sounded very interesting. I could walk around, but my feet hurt. I could pick a fight with somebody and get thrown in jail—that one didn’t sound like much fun at all. Maybe I could get a hamburger-to-go and jump off a bridge.

Most of the guys I’d come back with were hip-deep in family by now, but I hadn’t even bothered to let my Old Lady know I was coming back. The less I saw of her, the better we’d both feel. That left Jack. I finally got around to him. Probably it was inevitable. I suppose it had been in the back of my mind all along.

I knew that Jack was probably still in Tacoma someplace. He always came back here. It was his home base. He and I hadn’t been particularly close since we’d been kids, and I’d only seen him about three times since the Old Man died. But this was family night, and he was it. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have driven a mile out of my way to see him.

“Piss on it,” I said and went into a drugstore to use the phone.

“Hello?” His voice sounded the same as I remembered.

“Jack? This is Dan.”

“Dan? Dan who?”

Now there’s a great start for you. Gives you a real warm glow right in the gut. I almost hung up.

“Your brother. Remember?” I said dryly.

“Dan? Really? I thought you were in the Army—in England or someplace.”

“Germany,” I said. “I just got back today.”

“You stationed out here at the Fort now?”

“Yeah, I’m at the separation center.”

“You finishing up already? Oh, that’s right, you were only in for two years, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, only two,” I said.

“It’s my brother,” he said to someone, “the one that’s been in the Army. How the hell should I know?—Dan, where are you? Out at the Fort?”

“No, I’m downtown.”

“Pitchin’ yourself a liberty, huh?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’ve only got three more days till I get out, and I think I’ll keep my nose clean.”

“Good idea—hey, you got anything on for tonight? I mean any chickie or anything?”

“No,” I said, “just kicking around. I thought I’d just give you a call and let you know I was still alive, is all.”

“Why don’t you grab a bus and bag on out? I’d come and pick you up, but Margaret’s workin’ tonight, and she’s got the car.”

“Your wife?”

“Yeah—and I’ve got to watch the kids. I’ve got some beer in the fridge. We can pop open a few and talk old times.”

“All right,” I said. “How do I find the place?”

“I’m out on South Tacoma Way. You know which bus to take?”

“I think I can remember.”

“Get off at Seventy-eighth Street and come down the right hand side. It’s the Green Lodge Trailer Court. I’m in number seventeen—a blue and white Kenwood.”

“OK,” I told him. “I’ll be out in a half hour or so.”

“I’ll be lookin’ for you.”

I slowly hung up. This was going to be a mistake. Jack and I hadn’t had anything in common for years now. I pictured an evening with the both of us desperately trying to think of something to say.

“Might as well get it over with,” I muttered. I stopped by a liquor store and picked up a pint of bourbon. Maybe with enough anesthetic, neither one of us would suffer too much.

I sat on the bus reading the ads pasted above the windows and watching people get off and on. They were mostly old ladies. There’s something about old ladies on buses—have you ever noticed? I’ve never been able to put my finger on it, but whatever it is, it makes me want to vomit. How’s that for an inscription on a tombstone? “Here Lies Daniel Alders—Old Ladies on Buses Made Him Want to Puke.”

Then I sat watching the streets and houses go by. I still couldn’t really accept any of it as actuality. It all had an almost dreamlike quality—like coming in in the middle of a movie. Everybody else is all wrapped up in the story, but you can’t even tell the good guys from the bad guys. Maybe that’s the best way to put it.

The bus dropped me off at Seventy-eighth, and I saw the sickly green neon GREEN LODGE TRAILER COURT sign flickering down the block. I popped the seal on the pint and took a good belt. Then I walked on down to the entrance.

It was one of those “just-twenty-minutes-from-Fort Lewis” kind of places, with graveled streets sprinkled with chuckholes. Each trailer had its tired little patch of lawn surrounded by a chicken-wire fence to keep the kids out of the streets. Assorted broken-down old cars moldered on flat tires here and there. What few trees there were looked pretty discouraged.

It took me a while to find number seventeen. I stood outside for a few minutes, watching. I could see my brother putzing around inside—thin, dark, moving jerkily. Jack had always been like that—nervous, fast with his hands. He’d always had a quick grin that he’d turn on when he wanted something. His success with women was phenomenal. He moved from job to job, always landing on his feet, always trying to work a deal, never quite making it. If he hadn’t been my brother, I’d have called him a small-time hustler.

I stood outside long enough to get used to his face again. I wanted to get past that strangeness stage when you say all kinds of silly-ass things because most of your attention is concentrated on the other person’s physical appearance. I think that’s why reunions of any sort go sour—people are so busy looking at each other that they can’t think of anything to say.

Finally I went up and knocked.

“Dan,” he called, “is that you? Come on in.”

I opened the screen door and stepped inside.

“Hey there, little brother, you’re lookin’ pretty good,” he said, grinning broadly at me. He was wearing a T-shirt, and I could see the tattoos on his arms. They had always bothered me, and I always tried not to look at them.

“Hello, Jack,” I said, shaking his hand. I tried to come on real cool.

“God damn,” he said, still grinning and hanging onto my hand. “I haven’t seen you in three or four years now. Last time was when I came back from California that time, wasn’t it? I think you were still in college, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said.

“You’ve put on some beef since then, huh?” He playfully punched me in the shoulder. “What are you now? About a hundred and ninety?”

“One-eighty,” I said. “A lot of it’s German beer.” I slapped my belly.

“You’re lookin’ better. You were pretty scrawny last time I seen you. Sit down, sit down, for Chrissake. Here gimme your jacket. It’s too fuckin’ hot for that thing anyway. Don’t you guys get summer uniforms?”

“Mine are all rolled up in the bottom of my duffle bag,” I told him, pulling off the jacket. I saw him briefly glance at the pint I had tucked in my belt. I wasn’t trying to hide it.

He hung my blouse over a kitchen chair. “How about a beer?”

“Sure.” I put the brown-sacked pint on the coffee table and sat down on the slighly battered couch. He was fumbling around in the refrigerator. I think he was a little nervous. I got a kick out of that for some reason.

I looked around. The trailer was like any other—factory-made, filled with the usual cheap furniture that was guaranteed to look real plush for about six weeks. It had the peculiar smell trailers always have and that odd sense of transience. Somehow it suited Jack. I think he’d been gravitating toward a trailer all his life. At least he fit in someplace. I wondered what I was gravitating toward.

“Here we go,” he said, coming back in with a couple caps of beer. “I just put the kids to bed, so we’ve got the place to ourselves.” He gave me one of the cans and sat in the armchair.

“How many kids have you got?” I asked him.

“Two—Marlene and Patsy. Marlene’s two and a half, and Patsy’s one.”

“Good deal,” I said. What the hell else can you say? I pushed the pint over to him. “Here, have a belt of bourbon.”

“Drinkin’ whiskey,” he said approvingly.

We both had a belt and sat looking at each other.

“Well,” I said inanely, “what are you up to?” I fished out a cigarette to give myself something to do.

“Oh, not a helluva lot really, Dan. I’ve been workin’ down the block at the trailer sales place and helping Sloane at his pawnshop now and then. You remember him, don’t you? It’s a real good deal for me because I can take what he owes me out in merchandise, and it don’t show up on my income tax. Margaret’s workin’ in a dime store, and the trailer’s paid for, so we’re in pretty good shape.”

“How’s the Old Lady? You heard from her lately?” It had to get around to her sooner or later. I figured I’d get it out of the way.

“Mom? She’s in Portland. I hear from her once in a while. She’s back on the sauce again, you know.”

“Oh, boy,” I said with disgust. That was really the last damned straw. My mother had written me this long, tearjerker letter while I was in Germany about how she had seen the light and was going to give up drinking. I hadn’t answered the damned thing because I really didn’t give a shit one way or the other, but I’d kind of hoped she could make it. I hadn’t seen her completely sober since I was about twelve, and I thought it might be kind of a switch.

“You and her had a beef, didn’t you?” Jack asked, lighting a cigarette.

“Not really a beef,” I said. “It just all kind of built up. You weren’t around after Dad died.”

“Naw. I saw things goin’ sour long before that. Man, I was in Navy boot camp three days after my seventeenth birthday. I barely made it back for the funeral.” He jittered the cigarette around in his hands.

“Yeah, I remember. After you left, she just got worse and worse. The Old Man hung on, but it finally just wore him down. His insurance kind of set us up for a while, but it only took her a year or so to piss that away. She was sure Mrs. High Society for a while though. And then, of course, all the boy-friends started to show up—like about a week after the funeral. Slimy bastards, every one of them. I tried to tell her they were just after the insurance money, but you never could talk to her. She knew it all.”

“She hasn’t got too much upstairs,” Jack agreed, “even when she’s sober.”

“Anyway, about every month, one of her barroom Romeos would break it off in her for a couple of hundred and split out on her. She’d cry and blubber and threaten to turn on the gas or some damned thing. Then after a day or so she’d get all gussied up in one of those whorehouse dresses she’s partial to and go out and find true love again.”

“Sounds like a real bad scene.”

“A bummer. A two-year bummer. I cut out right after high school—knocked around for a year or so and then wound up in college. It’s a good place to hide out.”

“You seen her since you split?”

“Couple times,” I said. “Once I had to bail her out of jail, and once she came to where I was staying to mooch some money for booze. Gave me that ‘After all, I am your mother’ routine. I told her to stick it in her ear. I think that kind of withered things.”

“She hardly ever mentions you when I see her,” Jack said.

“Maybe if I’m lucky she’ll forget me altogether,” I said. “I need her about like I need leprosy.”

“You know something, little brother?” Jack said, grinning at me, “you can be an awful cold-blooded bastard when you want to be.”

“Comes from my gentle upbringing,” I told him. “Have another belt.” I waved at the whiskey bottle.

“I don’t want to drink up all your booze,” Jack said, taking the pint. “Remember, I know how much a GI makes.”

“Go ahead, man,” I said. “Take a goddamn drink. I hit it big in a stud-poker game on the troopship. I’m fat city.” I knew that would impress him.

“Won yourself a bundle, huh?”

“Shit. I was fifteen hundred ahead for a while, but there was this old master sergeant in the game—Riker his name was—and he gave me poker lessons till who laid the last chunk.”

“How much you come out with?”

“Couple hundred,” I said cautiously. I didn’t want to encourage the idea that I was rich.

“Walkin’ around money anyway,” he said, taking a drink from the pint. He passed it back to me, and I noticed that his hands weren’t really clean. Jack had always wanted a job where his hands wouldn’t get dirty, but I saw that he hadn’t made it yet. I suddenly felt sorry for him. He was smart and worked hard and tried his damnedest to make it, but things always turned to shit on him. I could see him twenty years from now, still hustling, still scurrying around trying to hit just the right deal.

“You got a girl?” he asked.

“Had one,” I said. “She sent me one of those letters about six months ago.”

“Rough.”

I shrugged. “It wouldn’t have worked out anyway.” I got a little twinge when I said it. I thought I’d pretty well drowned that particular cat, but it still managed to get a claw in my guts now and then. I’d catch myself remembering things or wondering what she was doing. I took a quick blast of bourbon.

“Lotsa women,” Jack said, emptying his beer. “Just like streetcars.”

“Sure,” I said. I looked around. The furniture was a bit kidscarred, and the TV set was small and fluttered a lot, but it was someplace. I hadn’t had any place for so long that I’d forgotten how it felt. From where I was sitting, I could see a mirror hanging at a slant on the wall of the little passage leading back to the bedrooms. The angle was just right, and I could see the rumpled, unmade bed where I assumed he and his wife slept. I thought of telling him that he might be making a public spectacle of his love life, but I decided that was his business.

“What’d you take in college anyway?” Jack demanded. “I never could get the straight of it out of the Old Lady.”

“English, mostly,” I said. “Literature.”

“English, for Chrissake! Nouns and verbs and all that shit?”

“Literature, Stud,” I corrected him. “Shakespeare and Hemingway, and all that shit. I figured this would be the issue that would blow the whole reunion bit. As soon as he gave me the “What the hell good is that shit?” routine, he and I would part company, fast. I’d about had a gutful of that reaction in the Army.

He surprised me. “Oh,” he said, “that’s different. You always did read a lot—even when you were a kid.”

“It gives me a substitute for my own slightly screwed-up life.”

“You gonna teach?”

“Not right away. I’m going back to school first.”

“I thought the Old Lady told me you graduated.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m going on to graduate school.”

“No shit?” He looked impressed. “I hear that’s pretty rough.”

“I think I can hack it.”

“You always were the smart one in the connection.”

“How’s your beer holding out?” I asked him, shaking my empty can. I was starting to relax. We’d gotten past all the touchy issues. I lit another cigarette.

“No sweat,” he said, getting up to get two more. “If I run out, the gal next door has a case stashed away. We’ll have to replace it before her old man gets home, but Marg ought to be here before long, and then I’ll have wheels.”

“Hey,” I called after him. “I meant to ask you about that. I thought your wife’s name was Bonnie.”

“Bonnie? Hell, I dumped her three years ago.”

“Didn’t you have a little girl there, too?”

“Yeah. Joanne.” He came back with the beer. I noticed that the trailer swayed a little when anyone walked round. “But Bonnie married some goof over at the Navy Yard, and he adopted Joanne. They moved down to L.A.”

“And before that it was—”

“Bernice. She was just a kid, and she got homesick for Mommie.”

“You use up wives at a helluva rate, old buddy.”

“Just want to spread all that happiness around as much as I can.” He laughed.

I decided that I liked my brother. That’s a helluva thing to discover all of a sudden.




3


A car pulled up outside, and Jack turned his head to listen. “I think that’s the Mama Cat,” he said. “Sounds like my old bucket.” He got up and looked out the window. “Yeah, it’s her.” He scooped up the empty beer cans from the coffee table and dumped them in the garbage sack under the sink. Then he hustled outside.

They came in a minute or so later, Jack rather ostentatiously carrying two bags of groceries. I got the impression that if I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have bothered. My current sister-in-law was a girl of average height with pale brown hair and a slightly sullen look on her face. I imagine all Jack’s women got that look sooner or later. At any rate Margaret didn’t seem just exactly wild about having a strange GI brother-in-law turn up.

“Well, sweetie,” Jack said with an overdone joviality, “what do you think of him?”

I stood up. “Hello, Margaret,” I said, smiling at her as winningly as I could.

“I’m very happy to meet you, Dan,” she said, a brief, automatic smile flickering over her face. She was sizing me up carefully. I don’t imagine the pint and the half-full beer can on the coffee table made very many points. “Are you stationed out here at the Fort now?” I could tell that she had visions of my moving in on them as a semipermanent houseguest.

“Well,” I said, “not really what you’d call stationed here. I’m being discharged here is all. As soon as they cut me loose, I’ll be moving back up to Seattle.” I wanted to reassure her without being too obvious.

She got the message. “Well, let me get this stuff put away and then we can talk.” She pulled off the light coat she was wearing and draped it over one of the kitchen chairs.

I blinked. She had the largest pair of breasts I’ve ever seen. I knew Jack liked his women that way, but Margaret was simply unbelievable.

“Isn’t she something?” Jack said, leering at me as he wrapped a proprietary arm about her shoulders. The remark sounded innocent enough, but all three of us knew what he meant.

“Come on, Jack,” she said, pushing him off. “I want to get all this put away so I can sit down.” She began bustling around the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers. The kitchen area was separated from the living room by a waist-high divider, so we could talk without yelling.

“Dan just got back today,” Jack said, coming back and plunking himself on the couch. “He’s been in Germany for a couple of years.”

“Oh?” she said. “I’ll bet that was interesting, wasn’t it, Dan?”

“It’s got Southeast Asia beat all to heck,” I said.

“Did they let you travel around any—I mean visit any of the other countries over there?”

“Oh, yeah. I visited a few places.”

“Did you get to London at all? I’d sure like to go there.” Her voice sounded a little wistful.

“I was there for about ten days on leave,” I told her.

“I never made it up there,” Jack said. “When I was with the Sixth Fleet, we stayed pretty much in the Mediterranean.”

“Did you get to see any of the groups while you were in London?” Margaret persisted. She really wanted to know; she wasn’t just asking to have something to say.

“No,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that groups weren’t particularly my thing. She might think I was trying to put her down.

“My wife’s a group-nut,” Jack said tolerantly. “That one cabinet there is stacked full of albums. Must be twenty of the damn things in there.”

“I dig them,” she said without apologizing. “Oh, Jack, did you get the kids to bed OK?”

“All fed, bathed, and tucked in,” he told her. “You know you can trust me to take care of things.”

“Patsy’s been getting a little stubborn about going to bed,” she said. “She’s at that age, I guess.”

“I didn’t have no problems,” Jack said.

“Are you guys hungry?” she asked suddenly. Woman’s eternal answer to any social situation—feed ’em. It’s in the blood, I guess.

“I could eat,” Jack said. “How about you, Dan?”

“Well—”

“Sure you can,” he insisted. “Why don’t you whip up a pizza, Mama Cat? One of those big ones.”

“It’ll take a while,” she said, opening herself a beer. She turned on the overhead light in the kitchen. She looked tired.

“That’s OK,” he said. “Well, Dan, what are you going to do with yourself now that you’re out?” He said it as if he expected me to say something important, something that would impress hell out of Margaret.

“I’ll be starting in at the U in October,” I told him. “I got all the papers processed and got accepted and all by mail. I’d have rather gone someplace else, but they were going to bring me back here for separation anyway, so what the hell?”

“Boy, you sure run rampant on this college stuff, don’t you?” He still tried to use words he didn’t know.

“Keeps me off the streets at night.” I shrugged.

“Dan,” Margaret said. “Do you like sausage or cheese?” She was rummaging around among the pots and pans.

“Either one, Margaret,” I said. “Whichever you folks like.”

“Make the sausage, sweetie,” Jack said. He turned to me. “We get this frozen sausage pizza down at the market. It’s the best yet, and only eighty-nine cents.”

“Sounds fine,” I said.

“You ever get pizza in Germany?” Margaret asked.

“No, not in Germany,” I said. “I had a few in Italy though. I went down there on leave once.”

“Did you get to Naples?” Jack asked. “We hauled in there once when I was with the Sixth Fleet.”

“Just for a day,” I said. “I was running a little low on cash, and I didn’t have time to really see much of it.”

“We really pitched a liberty in Naples,” he said. “I got absolutely crazed with alcohol.” We drifted off into reminiscing about how we’d won various wars and assorted small skirmishes. We finished the pint and had a few more beers with the leathery pizza. Margaret relaxed a little more, and I began to feel comfortable with them.

“Look, Dan,” Jack said, “you’ve got a month and a half or so before you start back to school, right? Why don’t you bunk in here till you get squared away? We can move the two curtain-climbers into one room. This trailer has three bedrooms, and you’d be real comfortable.”

“Hell, Jack,” I said, “I couldn’t do that. I’d be underfoot and all.”

“No trouble at all,” he said. “Right, Marg?”

“It wouldn’t really be any trouble,” she said a little uncertainly. She was considerably less than enthusiastic.

“No,” I said. “It just wouldn’t work out. I’d be keeping odd hours and—”

“I get it.” Jack laughed knowingly. “You’ve got some tomato lined up, huh? You want privacy.” I don’t know if I’d ever heard anyone say “tomato” for real before. It sounded odd. “Well, that’s no sweat. We can—”

“Jack, how about that little trailer down the street at number twenty-nine?” Margaret suggested. “Doesn’t Clem want to rent that one out?”

He snapped his fingers. “Just the thing,” he said. “It’s a little forty-foot eight-wide—kind of a junker really—but it’s a place to flop. He wants fifty a month for it, but seeing as you’re my brother, I’ll be able to beat him down some. It’ll be just the thing for you.” He seemed really excited about it.

“Well—” I said doubtfully. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be that close to my brother.

“It’ll give you a base of operations and you’ll be right here close. We’ll be able to get together for some elbow-bendin’ now and then.”

“OK,” I said, laughing. “Who do I talk to?” It was easier than arguing with him. I hadn’t really made any plans anyway. It was almost as if we were kids again, Jack making the arrangements and me going along with him because I really didn’t care one way or the other. It felt kind of good.

“You just leave everything to me,” Jack said importantly. He’d always liked to take over—to manage things for people—and he’d always make a big deal out of everything. He hadn’t really changed at all. “I’ll check it over from stem to stem and make old Clem give you some decent furniture from the lot—He owns the place where I work as well as this court. We’ve got a whole warehouse full of furniture. We’ll put in a good bed and a halfway decent couch—we might even be able to scrounge up a TV set from someplace.”

“Look, Jack,” I said, “it’s only going to be a month or so. Don’t go to any special trouble.” I didn’t want to owe him too much. Owing people is a bum trip.

“Trouble? Hell, it’s no special trouble. After all, you’re my brother, ain’t you. No brother of mine is going to live in some broken-down junker. Besides, if you’ve got some tomato lined up, you’ll want to make a favorable impression. That counts for a lot, doesn’t it, Marg?”

“You really will want some new stuff in there,” she agreed. “Nelsons lived in there before, and Eileen wasn’t the neatest person in the world.” Now that I wasn’t going to move in with them Margaret seemed to think better of me. I could see her point though.

“Neat?” Jack snorted, lighting a cigarette. “She was a slob. Not only was she a boozer, she was the court punchboard besides. Old Nels used to slap her around every night just on general principles—he figured she probably laid three guys a day just to keep in practice, and usually he was guessin’ on the low side.”

“How would you know about that, Mister Alders?” Margaret demanded.

“Just hearsay, sweetie, just hearsay. You know me.”

“That’s just it,” she said, “I do know you.”

“Now, sweetie—”

There was a heavy pounding on the side of the trailer. I jumped. “OK, in there,” a voice bellowed from outside, “this is a raid.”

“Hey,” Jack said, “that’s Sloane.” He raised his voice. “You’ll never take us alive, Copper!” It sounded like a game that had been going on for a long time.

A huge, balding man of about forty came in, laughing in a high-pitched giggle. His face was red, and he wore a slightly rumpled suit. He looked heavy, but it wasn’t really fat. He seemed to fill up the whole trailer. His grin sprawled all over his face and he seemed to be just a little drunk. He had a half-case of beer under one arm.

“Hi, Margaret, honey,” he said, putting down the beer and folding her in a bear hug. “How’s my girlfriend?”

“Sloane, you drunken son of a bitch,” Jack said, grinning, “quit pawin’ my wife and shake hands with my brother Dan. Dan, Cal Sloane.”

“Dan?” Sloane asked, turning to me. “Aren’t you Alders’ college-man brother?”

“He went in the Army after he got out of college,” Jack said. “He’s out at the separation center now.”

“You on leave?” Sloane asked, shaking my hand.

“I told you, Cal,” Jack said, “he’s at the separation center. He’s gettin’ out. Why don’t you listen, you dumb shit?” The insults had the ring of an established ritual, so I didn’t butt in.

“Hey, that’s a reason for a party, isn’t it?” Sloane said.

“Isn’t everything reason enough for you?” Jack demanded, still grinning.

“Not everything. I didn’t drink more than a case or two at my Old Lady’s funeral.”

“Dan here’s been drinkin’ German beer,” Jack boasted. “He can put you under the table without even settlin’ the dust in his throat.”

“Didn’t we meet a couple times a few years back?” Sloane asked me, pulling off his coat and settling down in a chair.

“I think so,” I said.

“Sure we did. It was when Alders here was still married to Bonnie.” He loosened his tie.

“Yeah,” I said, “I believe it was.”

We talked for about an hour, kidding back and forth. At first Sloane seemed a little simple—that giggle and all—but after a while I realized that he was really pretty sharp. I began to be very glad that I’d called Jack and come on out here to his place. It began to look like I had some family to come home to after all.

About eleven or so we ran out of beer, and Sloane suggested that we slip out for a couple glasses of draft. Margaret pouted a little, but Jack took her back into the hallway and talked with her for a few minutes, and when they came back she seemed convinced. Jack pulled on a sport shirt and a jacket, and Sloane and I got ourselves squared away. We went outside.

“I’ll be seeing you, Margaret,” I said to her as she stood in the doorway to watch us leave.

“Now you know the way,” she said in a sort of offhand invitation.

“Be back in an hour or so, sweetie,” Jack told her.

She went back inside without answering.

We took Jack’s car, a slightly battered Plymouth with a lot of miles on it.

“I won’t ride with Sloane when he’s been drinking,” Jack said, explaining why we’d left Sloane’s Cadillac. “The son of a bitch has totalled five cars in the last two years.”

“I have a helluva time gettin’ insurance.” Sloane giggled.

We swung on out of the trailer court and started off down South Tacoma Way, past the car lots and parts houses.

“Go on out to the Hideout Tavern,” Sloane said. He was sprawled in the back seat, his hat pushed down over his nose.

“Right,” Jack said.

“I hear that a man can do some pretty serious drinking in Germany,” Sloane said to me.

“Calvin, you got a beer bottle for a brain,” Jack told him, turning a corner.

“Just interested, that’s all. That’s the way to find out things—ask somebody who knows.”

“A man can stay pretty drunk if he wants to,” I said. “Lots of strange booze over there.”

“Like what?” Sloane asked. He seemed really interested.

“Well, there’s this one—Steinhäger, it’s called—tastes kind of like a cross between gin and kerosene.”

“Oh, God”—Jack gagged—“it sounds awful.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “it’s moderately awful, all right. They put it up in stone bottles—probably because it would eat its way out of glass. Screws your head up something fierce.”

We wheeled into the parking lot of a beer joint and went inside, still talking. We ordered pitchers of draft and sat in a booth drinking and talking about liquor and women and the service. The tavern was one of those usual kind of places with lighted beer signs all along the top of the mirror behind the bar. It had the usual jukebox and the usual pinball machine. It had the uneven dance floor that the bartender had to walk across to deliver pitchers of beer to the guys sitting in the booths along the far wall. There were the solitary drinkers hunched at the bar, staring into their own reflections in the mirror or down into the foam on their beer; and there was the usual group of dice players at the bar, rolling for drinks. I’ve been in a hundred joints like it up and down the coast.

I realized that I was enjoying myself. Sloane seemed to be honestly having a good time; and Jack, in spite of the fact that he was trying his damnedest to impress me, seemed to really get a kick out of seeing me again. That unholy dead feeling I’d been fighting for the last months or so was gone.

“We got to get Dan some civilian clothes,” Cal was saying. “He can’t run around in a uniform. That’s the kiss of death as far as women are concerned.”

“I’ve got some civvies coming in,” I said. “I shipped them here a month ago—parcel post. They’re probably at the General Delivery window downtown right now.”

“I’ve got to run downtown tomorrow,” Jack said. “I’ll stop by and pick them up for you.”

“Don’t I have to get them myself?” I asked. “I mean, don’t they ask for ID or anything?”

“Hell, no,” Jack scoffed. “You can get anybody’s mail you want at the General Delivery window.”

“Kinda shakes a guy’s faith in the Hew Hess Government,” I said. “I mean, if you can’t trust the goddamn Post Office Department—say, maybe we ought to take our business to somebody else.”

“Who you got in mind?” Sloane asked.

“I don’t know, maybe we could advertise—‘Deliver mail for fun and profit’—something like that.”

“I’m almost sure they’d find some way to send you to Leavenworth for it,” Jack said.

“Probably,” I agreed. “They’re awfully touchy about some things. I’d sure appreciate it if you could pick those things up for me though. If you can, dump them off at a cleaner’s someplace. I imagine they’re pretty wrinkled by now.” I emptied my beer.

“Another round, Charlie,” Sloane called to the barman. “Put your money away,” he told me as I reached for my wallet. “This is my party.”

About a half hour later, a kind of hard-faced brunette came in. She hurried across to the booth and sat down beside Cal. She glanced back at the door several times and seemed to be a little nervous. “Hi, Daddy,” she said. She made it sound dirty.

“Hello there, baby,” he said. “This is Alders’ brother, Dan. Dan, this is Helen.”

“Hi,” she said, nodding briefly at me. “Hi, Jack.”

I looked carefully at her. She had makeup plastered on about an inch thick. It was hard to see any expression under all that gunk. Maybe she didn’t have any expression.

She turned back to Sloane with an urgent note in her voice. “Baby’s got a problem, Daddy.” It still sounded dirty. I decided that I didn’t like her.

“Well, tell Daddy.” Sloane giggled self-consciously.

She leaned over and whispered in his ear for a moment. His face turned a little grim.

“OK,” he said shortly, “wait in the car—drive it around in back.”

She got up and went out quickly.

“Dumb bitch!” Sloane muttered. “She’s been gettin’ careless and her Old Man’s suspicious. I’d better get her a room someplace until he cools off.”

“Is he pretty steamed?” Jack asked. “You’ve got to watch yourself with that husband of hers, Cal. I hear he’s a real mean mother.”

“He just wants to clout her around a little,” Sloane said. “See if he can shake a few answers out of her. I’d better get her out of sight. I’ll have her swing me by your trailer lot, and I’ll pick up my car. Then we’ll ditch hers on a back street. I know a place where she can hole up.” He stood up and put a five-dollar bill on the table. “Hate to be a party-poop but—” He shrugged. “I’ll probably see you guys tomorrow. Drink this up on me, OK?” He hurried across the dance floor and on out, his hat pulled down low like a gangster in a third-rate movie.

“That dumb bastard’s gonna get himself all shot up one of these days,” Jack said grimly.

“He cat around a lot?”

“All the time. He’s got a deal with his wife. He brings in the money and doesn’t pester her in bed, and she doesn’t ask him where he goes nights.”

“Home cookin’ and outside lovin’?” I said. “Sounds great.”

Jack shrugged. “It costs him a fortune. Of course, he’s got it, I guess. He’s got the pawnshop, and a used car lot, and he owns a piece of two or three taverns. He’s got a big chunk of this joint, you know.”

“No kidding?”

Jack nodded. “You wouldn’t think so to look at him, but he can buy and sell most of the guys up and down the Avenue just out of his front pockets. You ought to see the house he lives in. Real plush.”

“Nice to have rich friends,” I said.

“And don’t let that dumb face fool you,” Jack told me. “Don’t ever do business with Cal unless I’m there to keep an eye on him for you. He’ll gyp you out of your fillings—friend or no friend.”

“Sure wouldn’t guess it to look at him.”

“Lots of guys think that. Just be sure to count your fingers after you shake hands with him.”

“What’s the deal with this—baby—whatever her name is?”

“Helen? She’s married to some Air Force guy out at McChord Field—Johnson, his name is. He’s away a lot and she likes her nookie. Sloane’s had her on the string for a couple of months now. I tried her and then passed her on. Her Old Man’s a real mean bastard. He kicked the livin’ shit out of one guy he caught messin’ with her. Put the boots to him and broke both his arms. She’s real wild in the sack, but she’s got a foul mouth and she likes it dirty—you know. Also, she’s a shade on the stupid side. I just didn’t like the smell of it, so I dumped her in Sloane’s lap.”

“You’re a real friends,” I said.

“Sloane can handle it,” Jack said. He looked warily around the bar and then at the door several times. “Hey, let’s cut out. That Johnson guy might come in here, and I’d rather not be out in plain sight in case he’s one or two guys behind in his information. I think I could handle him, but the stupid bastard might have a gun on him. I heard that he’s that kind.”

“I ought to be getting back out to the Fort, anyway.”

“I’ll buzz you on out,” Jack said, pocketing Sloane’s five.

We walked on out to the parking lot and climbed into Jack’s Plymouth. We were mostly quiet on the way out to the Fort. I was a little high, and it was kind of pleasant just to sit back and watch the lights go past. But I was a little less sure about the arrangement than I had been earlier in the evening. There was an awful lot going on that I didn’t know about. There was no way I could back out gracefully now though. Like it or not, I was going to get reacquainted with my brother. I almost began to wish I’d skipped the whole thing.




4


THE following Saturday I got out of the Army. Naturally, they had to have a little ceremony. Institutions always feel they have to have a little ceremony. I’ve never been able to figure out why really. I’m sure nobody really give a rat’s ass about all that nonsense. In this case, we walked in a line through a room; and a little warrant officer, who must have screwed up horribly somewhere to get stuck with the detail, handed each of us a little brown envelope with the piece of paper in it. Then he shook hands with us. I took the envelope, briefly fondled his sweaty hand, walked out, and it was all over.

“You sure you got my address, Alders?” Benson asked as we fished around in the pile for our duffle bags.

“Yeah, kid, I got it,” I told him.

“Les-ter,” a woman’s voice yodeled from the parking lot.

“That’s my mom,” Benson said. “I gotta go now.”

“Take care, kid,” I told him, shaking his hand.

“Be sure and write me, huh? I mean it. Let’s keep in touch.”

“Les-ter! Over here.”

“I gotta run. So long, Dan.” It was the only time in two years he’d ever used my first name.

“Bye, Les,” I said.

He took off, weighted way off-balance by his duffle bag. I watched him go.

I stood looking at the parking lot until I located Jack’s Plymouth. I slung the duffle bag by the strap from my left shoulder and headed toward my brother’s car. It’s funny, but I almost felt a little sad. I even saluted a passing captain, just to see if it felt any different. It did.

Jack was leaning against the side of his car. “Hey, man, you sure throw a sharp highball.” He grinned as I came up. “Why didn’t you just thumb your nose at the bastard?”

I shrugged. “He’s still in and I’m out. Why should I bug him?”

“You all ready? I mean have you got any more bullshit to go through?”

“All finished,” I said. “I just done been civilianized. I got my divorce papers right here.” I waved the envelope at him.

“Let’s cut out, then. I’ve got your civvies in the back seat.”

I looked around once. The early afternoon sun blasted down on the parking lot, and the yellow barracks shimmered in the heat. It looked strange already. “Let’s go,” I said and climbed into the back seat.

There was a guy sitting in the front seat. I didn’t know him.

“Oh,” Jack said, “this is Lou McKlearey, a buddy of mine. Works for Sloane.”

McKlearey was lean and sort of blond. I’d have guessed him at about thirty. His eyes were a very cold blue and had a funny look to them. He stuck out his hand, and when we shook hands, he seemed to be trying to squeeze the juice out of my fingers.

“Hi, Dogface,” he said in a raspy voice. He gave me a funny feeling—almost like being in the vicinity of a fused bomb. Some guys are like that.

“Ignore him,” Jack said. “Lou’s an ex-Marine gunnery sergeant. He just ain’t had time to get civilized yet.”

“Let’s get out of here, huh?” Suddenly I couldn’t stand being on Army ground anymore.

Jack fired up the car and wheeled out of the lot. We barreled on down to the gate and eased out into the real world.

“Man,” I said “it’s like getting out of jail.”

“Anyhow, Jackie,” McKlearey said, apparently continuing what he’d been talking about before I got to the car, “we unloaded that crippled Caddy on a Nigger sergeant from McChord Field for a flat grand. You know them fuckin’ Niggers; you can paint ‘Cadillac’ on a baby buggy, and they’ll buy it.”

“Couldn’t he tell that the block was cracked?” Jack asked him.

“Shit! That dumb spade barely knew where the gas pedal was. So we upped the price on the Buick to four hundred over book, backed the speedometer to forty-seven thousand, put in new floor mats, and dumped it on a red-neck corporal from Georgia. He traded us a ’57 Chevy stick that was all gutted out. We gave him two hundred trade-in. Found out later that the crooked son of a bitch had packed sawdust in the transmission—oldest stunt in the book. You just can’t trust a reb. They’re so goddamn stupid that they’ll try stuff you think nobody’s dumb enough to try anymore, so you don’t even bother to check it out.

“Well, we flushed out the fuckin’ sawdust and packed the box with heavy grease and then sold that pig for two and a quarter to some smart-ass high school kid who thought he knew all about cars. Shit! I could sell a three-wheel ’57 Chevy to the smartest fuckin’ kid in the world. They’re all hung up on that dog—Niggers and Caddies; kids and ’57 Chevies—it’s all the same.

“So, by the end of the week, we’d moved around eight cars, made a flat fifteen hundred clear profit, and didn’t have a damn thing left on the lot that hadn’t been there on Monday morning.”

“Christ”—Jack laughed—“no wonder Sloane throws money around like a drunken sailor.”

“That lot of his is a fuckin’ gold mine,” McKlearey said. “It’s like havin’ a license to steal. Of course, the fact that he’s so crooked he has to screw himself out of bed in the morning doesn’t hurt either.”

“Man, that’s the goddamn truth,” Jack agreed. “How you doin’ back there, Dan?”

“I’m still with you,” I said.

“Here,” he said. He fumbled under the seat and came out with a brown-bagged bottle. He poked it back at me. “Celebrate your newfound freedom.”

“Amen, old buddy,” I said fervently. I unscrewed the top and took a long pull at the bottle, fumbling with my necktie at the same time.

“You want me to haul into a gas station so you can change?” he asked me.

“I can manage back here, I think,” I told him. “Two hundred guys got out this morning. Every gas station for thirty miles has got a line outside the men’s room by now.”

“You’re probably right,” Jack agreed. “Just don’t get us arrested for indecent exposure.”

It took me a mile or two to change clothes. I desperately wanted to get out of that uniform. After I changed though, I rolled my GI clothes very carefully and tucked them away in my duffle bag. I didn’t ever want to wear them again—or even look at them—but I didn’t want them wrinkled up.

“Well,” I said when I’d finished. “I may not be too neat, but I’m a civilian again. Have a drink.” I passed the bottle on up to the front seat.

Jack took a belt and handed the jug to McKlearey. He took a drink and passed the bottle back to me. “Have another rip,” he said.

“Let’s stop and have a couple beers,” I suggested. I suddenly wanted to go into a bar—a place where there were other people. I think I wanted to see if I would fit in. I wasn’t a GI anymore. I wanted to really see if I was a civilian.

“Mama Cat’s got some chow waitin’,” Jack said, “but I guess we’ve got time for a couple.”

“Any place’ll do,” I said.

“I know just how he feels, Jackie,” Lou said. “After a hitch, a man needs to unwind a bit. When I got out the last time in Dago, I hit this joint right outside the gate and didn’t leave for a week. Haul in at the Patio—it’s just up the street.”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed, “seems to me I got all juiced up when I got out of the Navy, too. Hey, ain’t that funny? Army, Navy, Marines—all of us in here at once.” It was the kind of dung Jack would notice.

“Maybe we can find a fly-boy someplace and have a summit conference,” I said.

Jack turned off into the dusty, graveled parking lot of a somewhat overly modern beer joint.

“I’m buying,” I said.

“OK, little brother,” Jack said. “Let’s go suck up some suds.” We piled out of the car and walked in the bright sunlight toward the tavern.

“This is a new one, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Not really,” Jack told me, “it’s been here for about a year now.”

We went inside. It was cool and dim, and the lighted beer signs behind the bar ran to the type thet sprinkled the walls with endlessly varying patterns of different colored lights. Tasteful beer signs, for Chrissake! I laid a twenty on the polished bar and ordered three beers.

The beer was good and cold, and it felt fine just to sit and hold the chilled glass. Jack started telling the bartender that I’d just got out, and that I was his brother. Somehow, whenever Jack told anybody anything, it was always in relation to himself. If he’d been telling someone about a flood, it would be in terms of how wet he’d gotten. I guess I hadn’t remembered that about him.

Lou sat with us for a while and then bought a roll of nickels and went over to the pinball machine. Like every jarhead I’ve ever known, he walked at a stiff brace, shoulders pulled way back and his gut sucked in. Marine basic must be a real bitch-kitty. He started feeding nickels into the machine, still standing at attention. I emptied my beer and ordered another round.

“Easy man,” Jack said. “You’ve got a helluva lot of drinkin’ to do before the day’s over, and I’d hate to see you get all kicked out of shape about halfway through. We’ve got a party on for tonight, and you’re the guest of honor.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, Jack,” I said. What I’d really meant to say was that I wished to hell he hadn’t.

“Look,” he said, “my brother doesn’t get out of the Army every day, and it’s worth a blowout.” I knew there was no point arguing with him.

“Is Marg really waiting?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “She’s got steak and all the trimmings on. I’m supposed to call her and let her know we’re on the way.”

“Well,” I said, “we shouldn’t keep her waiting. Hey, Jack, who’s this McKlearey guy anyway?” I thumbed over my shoulder at Lou.

“He works at Sloane’s used car lot. I knew him when I was in the Navy. We met in Yokosuka one time and pitched a liberty together. He’s got ten years in the Corps—went in at seventeen, you know the type—washed out on a medical—malaria, I think. Probably picked it up in Nam.”

“Bad scene,” I said. “He seems a little—tight—keyed-up or something.”

“Oh, Lou’s OK, but kind of watch him. He’s a ruthless son of a bitch. And for God’s sake don’t lend him any money—you’ll never see it again. And don’t cross him if you can help it—I mean really cross him. He’s a real combat Marine—you know, natural-born killer and all that shit. He was a guard in a Navy brig one time, and some poor bastard made a break for the fence. McKlearey waited until the guy was up against the wire so he couldn’t fall down and then blasted him seven times between the shoulder blades with a .45. I knew a guy who was in there, and he said that McKlearey unloaded so fast it sounded like a machine gun. Walked ’em right up the middle of the guy’s back.”

“Kill him?”

“Blew him all to pieces. They had to pick him up in a sack.”

“Little extreme,” I said.

“That’s a Gyrene for you. Sometimes they get kill-happy.”

I finished my beer. “Well,” I said, “if you’re done with that beer, I think I’m ready to face the world again. Besides, I’m coming down with a bad case of the hungries.”

“Right,” he said, draining his glass. “Hey, Lou, let’s go.”

“Sure thing,” McKlearey said, concentrating on the machine. “Just a minute—goddamn it!” The machine lit TILT, and all the other lights went out. “I just barely touched the bastard,” he complained.

“We got to go, anyway,” Jack said. “You guys go on ahead, and I’ll give Marg a quick buzz.”

Lou and I went back on out in the sunlight to Jack’s Plymouth and had another belt from the bottle.

“I’d just hit the rollover,” Lou said, “and I had a real good chance at two in the blue.” His eyes had the unfocused look of a man who’s just been in the presence of the object of his obsession.

“That pay pretty good?” I asked.

“Hundred and sixty games,” he said. “Eight bucks. Goddamn machines get real touchy when you’ve got half a chance to win something.”

“I prefer slots,” I said. “There was this one over in Germany I could hit three times out of four. It was all in how you pulled the handle.”

He grunted. Slots weren’t his thing. He wasn’t interested.

“She’s puttin’ the steaks on right now,” Jack said as he came across the parking lot. He climbed in behind the wheel. “They’ll be almost ready by the time we get there.” He spun us out of the nearly empty lot and pointed the nose of the car back down the highway.

We pulled in beside his trailer about ten minutes later and went on in. Margaret came over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. She seemed a little self-conscious about it. I got the feeling that the “cousinly” kiss or whatever wasn’t just exactly natural to her. “Hi, Civilian,” she said.

“That’s the nicest thing anybody ever said to me,” I told her, trying to keep my eyes off the front of her blouse.

We all had another drink—whiskey and water this time—while Marg finished fixing dinner. Then we sat down to the steaks. I was hungry and the food was good. Once in a while I’d catch myself looking at McKlearey. I still didn’t have him figured out, and I wasn’t really sure I liked him. To me, he looked like a whole pile of bad trouble, just looking for someplace to happen. Some guys are like that. Anyway, just being around him made me feel uncomfortable. Jack and Margaret seemed to like him though, so I thought maybe I was just having a touch of the “first day out of the Army squirrelies.”

After dinner Marg got the kids up from their naps, and I played with them a little. They were both pretty young, and most of the playing consisted of tickling and giggles, but it was kind of fun. Maybe it was the booze, but I don’t think so. The kids weren’t really talking yet, and you don’t have to put anything on with a kid that age. All they care about is if you like them and pay attention to them. That hour or so straightened me out more than anything that happened the rest of the day. We flopped around on the floor, grabbing at each other and laughing.

“Hey, Civilian,” Jack said. “Let’s dump your gear over at your trailer. I want you to see how we got it fixed up.”

“Sure,” I said. “Uncle Dan’s gotta go now, kids,” I told the girls. Marlene, the oldest—about two—gave me a big, wet kiss, and Patsy, the baby, pouted and began to cry. I held her until she quit and then handed her to Marg. I went to the door where Jack was waiting.

“You guys go ahead,” Lou said. “I got my shoes off. Besides, I want to watch the ballgame.”

I glanced at the flickering TV set. A smeary-looking baseball game was going on, but I’d swear he hadn’t been watching it. I caught a quick glance between him and Margaret, but I didn’t pay much attention.

“You guys going to be down there long?” Margaret asked.

“We ought to unpack him and all,” Jack said. “Why?”

“Why don’t you put the girls out in the play yard then—so I can get the place cleaned up?”

“Sure,” Jack said. “Dust McKlearey, too—since he’s a permanent part of that couch now.”

Lou laughed and settled in a little deeper.

“We’ll take the jug,” Jack said.

“Sure,” Lou answered. “I want to rest up for tonight anyway.”

Jack and I put the little girls out in the little fenced-in yard and drove his Plymouth down the street to the trailer I’d rented. We hauled my duffle bag out of the back seat and went in.

It was hot and stuffy inside, and we opened all the windows. The trailer was small and dingy, with big waterstains on the wood paneling and cracked linoleum on the floor. Jack had been able to scrounge up a nearly new couch and a good bed, as well as a few other odds and ends of furniture, a small TV set, dishes, and bedding. It was kind of a trap, but like he said, it was a place to flop. What the hell?

“Pretty good, huh?” he said proudly. “A real bachelor pad.” He showed me around with a proprietary attitude.

“It’s great,” I said as convincingly as I could. “I sure do appreciate all you’ve done in here, Jack.”

“Oh, hell, it’s nothing,” he said, but I could see that he was pleased.

“No, I mean it—cleaning up the place and all.”

“Margaret did that,” he said. “All I did was put the arm on Clem for the furniture and stuff.”

“Let’s have a drink,” I said. “Christen the place.”

“Right.” He poured some whiskey in the bottom of two mismatched glasses and we drank. My ears were getting a little hot, and I knew I’d have to ease up a bit or I’d be smashed before the sun went down. It had been a real strange day. It had started at six that morning in a mothball-smelling barracks, and now I’d left all of that for good. Soon I’d be going back to the musty book-smell and the interminable discussions of art and reality and the meaning of truth. This was a kind of never-never land in between. Maybe it was a necessary transition, something real between two unrealities—always assuming, of course, that this was real.

We hauled my duffle bag and my civvies back to the tiny little bedroom and began hanging things up in the little two-by-four closet and stashing them in the battered dresser.

“You gonna buy a set of wheels?” he asked.

“I guess I’d better. Nothing fancy, just good and dependable.”

“Let’s see what we can finagle out of Sloane tonight.”

“Look, Jack,” I said, “I don’t want to cash in on—”

“He can afford it,” Jack interrupted. “You go to one of these two-by-four lots on the Avenue, and they’ll screw you right into the wall. Me and Lou and Sloane will put you into something dependable for under two hundred. It may not look too pure, but it’ll go. I’ll see to it that they don’t fuck over you.”

I shrugged. Why fight a guy when he’s trying to do you a favor? “OK,” I said, “but for a straight deal—I want to pay for what I get.”

“Don’t worry,” Jack said.

“Where’s the big blowout tonight?” I asked him.

“Over at Sloane’s place. Man, wait’ll you see his house. It’s a goddamn mansion.”

“McKlearey going to be there?”

“Oh, sure. Lou’ll show up anywhere there’s free booze.”

“He’s an odd one.”

“Lou’s OK. You just gotta get used to him is all.”

“Well,” I said, depositing my folded duffle bag in the bottom of the closet, “I think that’s about got it.”

“Pretty good little pad, huh?” he said again.

“It’ll work out just fine,” I said. “Hey, you want to run me to a store for a minute? I’d better pick up some supplies. I guess I can’t just run down to the friendly neighborhood mess hall anymore.”

“Not hardly.” He laughed. “But, hell, you could eat over at my place tomorrow.”

“Oh, no. I’m not fit to live with until about noon. Marg and I get along fairly well, and I sure don’t want to mildew the sheets right off the bat.”

“What all you gonna need?”

“Just staples—coffee, beer, aspirin—you know.”

“Get-well stuff.” He laughed again.

We went out and climbed into his car.

“Hadn’t you better let Marg know where we’re going?” I asked him as he backed out into the street.

“Man, it’s sure easy to see you’ve never been married. That’s the first and worst mistake a guy usually makes. You start checkin’ in with the wife, and pretty soon she starts expectin’ you to check in every five minutes. Man, you just go when you want to. It doesn’t take her long to get the point. Then she starts expectin’ you when she sees you.”

The grocery store was large and crowded. It took me quite a while to get everything. I wasn’t familiar with the layout, and it was kind of nice just to mingle with the crowd. Actually, I wound up getting a lot more than I’d intended to. Jack kept coming across things he thought I really ought to have on hand.

“Now you’ll be able to survive for a few days,” he told me as we piled the sacks in the back seat of his car.

We drove back to my trailer, unloaded the groceries, and put the stuff that needed to be kept cold in the noisy little refrig beside the stove. Jack picked up the whiskey bottle, and we drove his car back up to his trailer. We got out and went up to the door. The screen was latched.

“Hey,” Jack yelled, rattling the door, “open the gate.”

Lou got up from the couch, looking a little drowsy and mussed. “Keep your pants on,” he said, unlocking the door.

“Why in hell’d you lock it?” Jack asked him.

“I didn’t lock it,” Lou answered. “I dropped off to sleep.”

“Where’s Marg?”

“I think I just heard her in the can.”

“Marg,” Jack yelled, “what the hell’d you lock the front door for?”

“Was it locked?” Her voice was muffled.

“No, hell, it wasn’t locked. I’m just askin’ because I like the sound of my own voice.”

“I don’t know,” her voice came back. “Maybe it’s getting loose and slipped down by itself.”

He snapped the latch up and down several times. It seemed quite stiff. “It couldn’t have,” he yelled back at her, “it’s tighter’n hell.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I latched it myself from force of habit.” The toilet flushed, and she came out. “So why don’t you beat me?”

“I just wanted to know why the door was latched, that’s all.”

“Lou and I were having a mad, passionate affair,” she snapped, “and we didn’t want to be interrupted. Satisfied?”

“Oh,” Jack said, “that’s different. How was it, Lou?”

“Just dandy,” Lou said, laughing uneasily.

“Let’s see now,” Jack said, “am I supposed to shoot you, or her, or both of you?”

“Why not shoot yourself?” Margaret suggested. “That would be the best bet—you have got your insurance all paid up, haven’t you?”

Jack laughed and Margaret seemed to relax.

“Where’d you guys take off to in the car?” she asked me.

“We made a grocery run,” Jack said. “Had to lay in a few essentials for him—you know, beer, aspirin, Alka-Seltzer—staples.”

“We saw you take off,” she said. “We kinda wondered what you were up to.”

“Hey, Alders,” Lou said, “what time are we supposed to be at Sloane’s?”

“Jesus,” Jack said, “you’re right. We better get cranked up. We’ve got to pick up Carter.”

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“Another guy. Works for the city. You’ll like him.”

“We’ll have to stop by a liquor store, too, won’t we?” I said.

“What for? Sloane’s buying.”

“Sloane always buys,” McKlearey said, putting on his shoes. “He’d be insulted if anybody showed up at one of his parties with their own liquor.”

“Sure, Dan,” Jack said. “It’s one of the ways he gets his kicks. When you got as much money as old Calvin’s got, you’ve already bought everything you want for yourself so about the only kick you get out of it is spendin’ it where other guys can watch you.”

“Conspicuous consumption,” I said.

“Sloane’s conspicuous enough, all right,” Jack agreed.

“And he can consume about twice as much as any three other guys in town.” Lou laughed.

“We’ll probably be late,” Jack told Margaret.

“No kidding,” she said dryly.

“Come on, you guys,” Jack said, ignoring her. We went out of the trailer into the slanting late-afternoon sun.

“I’ll take my own car,” McKlearey said. “Why don’t you guys pick up Carter? I’ve got to swing by the car lot for a minute.”

“OK, Lou,” Jack said. “See you at Sloane’s place.” He and I piled into his Plymouth and followed McKlearey on out to the street. I knew that my brother wasn’t stupid. He had to know what was going on with Margaret. Maybe he just didn’t care. I began not to like the feel of the whole situation. I began to wish I’d stayed the hell out of that damned poker game.




5


MIKE Carter and Betty, his wife, lived in a development out by Spanaway Lake, and it took Jack and me about three-quarters of an hour to get there.

We pulled into the driveway of one of those square, boxy houses that looked like every other one on the block. A heavyset guy with black, curly hair came out into the little square block of concrete that served as a front porch.

“Where in hell have you bastards been?” he called as Jack cut the motor.

“Don’t get all worked up,” Jack yelled back as we got out of the car. “This is my brother, Dan.” He turned his face toward me. “That lard-ass up there is Carter—Tacoma’s answer to King Kong.”

Mike glanced around quickly to make sure no one was watching and then gave Jack the finger, “Wie geht’s?” he said to me grinning.

“Es geht mir gut,” I answered, almost without thinking. Then I threw some more at him to see if he really knew any German. “Und wie geht’s Ihnen heute?”

“Mit dieses und jenes,” he said, pointing at his legs and repeating that weary joke that all Germans seem to think is so hysterically funny.

“Es freut mich,” I said dryly.

“How long were you in Germany?” he asked, coming down the steps.

“Eighteen months.”

“Where were you stationed?”

“Kitzingen. Then later in Wertheim.”

“Ach so? Ich war zwei Jahren in München.”

“Die Haupstadt von the Welt? Ganz glücklich!”

Jack chortled gleefully. “See, Mike, I told you he’d be able to sprechen that shit as well as you.”

“He’s been at me all week to talk German to you when he brought you over,” Mike said.

“Man”—Jack laughed—“you two sounded like a couple of real Krauts. Too bad you don’t know any Japanese like I do. Then we could all talk that foreign shit. Bug hell out of Sloane.” Very slowly, mouthing the words with exaggerated care, he spoke a sentence or two in Japanese. “Know what that means?”

“One-two-three-four-five?” Mike asked.

“Come on, man. I said, ‘How are you? Isn’t this a fine day?’” He repeated it in Japanese again.

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” I said, letting him have his small triumph.

He grinned at both of us, obviously very proud of himself. “Hey, Mike, how’s that boat comin’?” he asked. “Is it gonna be ready by duck season?”

“Shit!” Mike snorted. “Come on out back and look at the damn thing.”

We trooped on around to the back of the house. He had a fourteen-foot boat overturned on a pair of sawhorses out by the garage. It was surrounded by a litter of paint-scrapings which powdered the burned-out grass.

“Look at that son of a bitch,” Mike said. “I’ve counted twelve coats of paint already, and I’m still not down to bare wood. It feels pretty spongy in a couple places, too—probably rotten underneath. I’m afraid to take off any more paint—probably all that’s holding it together.”

Jack laughed. “That’s what you get for doin’ business with Thorwaldsen. He slipped you the Royal Swedish Weenie. I could have told you that.”

“That sure won’t do me much good right now,” Mike said gloomily.

We went into the house long enough for me to meet Betty. She was a big, pleasant girl with a sweet face. I liked her, too. Then the three of us went out and piled into Jack’s car. Betty stood on the little porch and waved as we pulled out of the driveway.

Jack drove on out to the highway, and we headed back toward town through the blood-colored light of the sunset.

“You have yourself a steady Schatzie in Germany?” Mike asked me.

“Last few months I did,” I told him. “Up until then I was being faithful to my ‘One and Only’ back here in the States. Of course ‘One and Only’ had a different outlook on life.”

“Got yourself one of those letters, huh?”

“Eight pages long,” I said. “By the end of the fourth page, it was all my fault. At the end of the last page, I was eighteen kinds of an unreasonable son of a bitch—you know the type.”

“Oh, gosh, yes.” Mike laughed. “We used to tack ours up on a bulletin board. So then you found yourself a Schatzie?”

I nodded. “Girl named Heidi. Pretty good kid, really.”

“I got myself tied up with a nympho in a town just outside Munich,” Mike said. “She even had her own house, for God’s sake. Her folks were loaded. I spent every weekend and all my leave-time over at her place. Exhausting!” He rolled his eyes back in his head. “I was absolutely used when I came back to the States.”

I laughed. “She had it pretty well made then. At least you probably didn’t get that ‘Marry me Chee-Eye, und take me to der land uf der big P-X’ routine.”

“No chance. I said good-bye over the telephone five minutes before the train left.”

“That’s the smart way. I figured I knew this girl of mine pretty well—hell, I’d done everything but hit her over the head to make her realize that we weren’t a permanent thing. I guess none of it sunk in. She must have had visions of a vine-covered cottage in Pismo Beach or some damned thing. Anyway, when I told her I had my orders and it was Auf Wiedersehen, she just flat flipped out. Started to scream bloody murder and then tried to carve out my liver and lights with a butcher knife.”

They both laughed.

“You guys think it’s funny?” I said indignantly. “You ever try to take an eighteen-inch butcher knife away from a hysterical woman without hurting her or getting castrated in the process?”

They howled with laughter.

I quite suddenly felt very shitty. Heidi had been a sweet, trusting kid. In spite of everything I’d told her, she’d gone on dreaming. Everybody’s entitled to dream once in a while. And if it hadn’t been for her, God knows how I’d have gotten through the first few months after that letter. Now I was treating her like she was a dirty joke. What makes a guy do that anyway?

“I had a little Jap girl try to knife me in Tokyo once,” Jack said, stopping for a traffic light. “I just kicked her in the stomach. Didn’t get a scratch. I think she was on some kinda dope—most of them gooks are. Anyway she just went wild for no reason and started wavin’ this harakari knife and screamin’ at me in Japanese. Both of us bare-assed naked, too.”

The light changed and we moved on.

“How’d you get the knife away from the German girl?” Mike asked.

I didn’t really want to talk about it anymore. “Got hold of her wrist,” I said shortly. “Twisted her arm a little. After she dropped it, I kicked it under the bed and ran like hell. One of the neighbor women beaned me with a pot on my way downstairs. The whole afternoon was just an absolute waste.”

They laughed again, and we drifted off into a new round of war stories. I was glad we’d gotten off the subject. I was still a little ashamed of myself.

It took us a good hour to get to Sloane’s house out in Ruston. The sun had gone down, and the streets were filled with the pale twilight. People were still out in their yards, guys cutting their lawns and kids playing on the fresh-cut grass and the like. Suddenly, for no particular reason, it turned into a very special kind of evening for me.

Ruston perches up on the side of the hill that rises steeply up from both sides of Point Defiance. The plush part, where Sloane lived, overlooks the Narrows, a long neck of salt water that runs down another thirty miles to Olympia. The Narrows Bridge lies off to the south, the towers spearing into the sky and the bridge itself arching in one long step across the mile or so of open water. The ridge that rises sharply from the beach over on the peninsula is thick with dark fir trees, and the evening sky is almost always spectacular. It may just be one of the most beautiful places in the whole damned world. At least I’ve always thought so.

Sloane’s house was one of the older places on the hill—easily distinguishable from the newer places because the shrubs and trees were full grown.

We pulled up behind McKlearey’s car in the deepening twilight and got out. Jack’s Plymouth and McKlearey’s beat-up old Chevy looked badly out of place—sort of like a mobile poverty area.

“Pretty plush, huh?” Jack said, his voice a little louder than necessary. The automatic impulse up here was to lower your voice. Jack resisted it.

“I smell money,” I answered.

“It’s all over the neighborhood,” Mike said. “They gotta have guys come in with special rakes to keep it from littering the streets.”

“Unsightly stuff,” I agreed as we went up Sloane’s brick front walkway.

Jack rang the doorbell, and I could hear it chime way back in the house.

A small woman in a dark suit opened the door. “Hello, Jack—Mike,” she said. She had the deepest voice I’ve ever heard come out of a woman. “And you must be Dan,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.” She held her hand out to me with a grace that you’ve got to be born with. I’m just enough of a slob myself to appreciate good breeding. I straightened up and took her hand.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Sloane,” I said.

“Claudia,” she said, smiling. “Please call me Claudia.”

“Claudia,” I said, smiling back at her.

We went on into the house. The layout was a bit odd, but I could see the reason for it. The house faced the street with its back to the view—at least that’s how it looked from outside. Actually, the front door simply opened onto a long hallway that ran on through to the back where the living room, dining room, and kitchen were. The carpets were deep, and the paneling was rich.

“You have a lovely home,” I said. I guess that’s what you’re supposed to say.

“Why, thank you, Dan,” she said. She seemed genuinely pleased.

The living room was huge, and the west wall was all glass. Over beyond the dark upswell of the peninsula, the sky was slowly darkening. Down on the water, a small boat that looked like a lighted toy from up there bucked the tide, moving very slowly and kicking up a lot of wake.

“How on earth do you ever get anything done?” I asked. “I’d never be able to get away from the window.”

She laughed, her deep voice making the sound musical. “I pull the drapes,” she said. She looked up at me. She couldn’t have been much over five feet tall. Her dark hair was very smooth—almost sleek. I quickly looked back out the window to cover my confusion. This was one helluva lot of woman.

There was a patio out back, and I could see Sloane manhandling a beer keg across the flagstones. McKlearey sprawled in a lawn chair, and it didn’t look as if he was planning to offer any help. Sloane glanced, red-faced, up at the window.

“Hey, you drunks, get the hell on out here!” he bellowed.

“We’re set up on the patio,” Claudia said.

“Thinkin’ ahead, eh, Claude?” Jack said boisterously. “If somebody gets sick, you don’t have to get the rug cleaned.”

I cringed.

“Well,” she said, laughing, “it’s cooler out there.”

“Which one of you bastards can tap a keg?” Sloane screamed. “I’m afraid to touch the goddamn thing.”

“Help is on the way,” Mike called. We went on through the dining room and the kitchen and on out to the patio through the sliding French doors.

“I’m sure you fellows can manage now,” Claudia said, picking up a pair of black gloves from the kitchen table and coming over to stand in the open doorway. “I have to run, so just make yourselves at home.” She raised her voice slightly, obviously talking to Sloane. “Just remember to keep the screens closed on the French doors. I don’t want a house full of bugs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sloane yelped, coming to attention and throwing her a mock salute.

“Clown,” she said, smiling. She started to pull on the gloves, smoothing each finger carefully. “Oh, Calvin, I finished with the books for the car lot and the pawnshop. Be sure to put them where you can find them Monday morning—before you swandive into that beer keg.”

“Have we got any money?” Cal asked.

“We’ll get by,” she said. “Be sure and remind Charlie and Mel out at the Hideout that I’ll be by to check their books on Tuesday.”

“Right,” he said. He turned to us. “My wife, the IBM machine.”

“Somebody has to do the books,” she said placidly, still working on the gloves, “and after I watched this great financier add two and two and get five about nine times out of ten, I decided that it was going to be up to me to keep us out of bankruptcy court.” She smiled sweetly at him, and he made a face.

“I’m so glad to have met you, Dan,” she said, holding her hand out to me again. Her deep musical voice sent a shiver up my back. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again.”

“I’d hate to think we were driving you out of your own house,” I said sincerely.

“No, no. I have a meeting downtown, and then I’m running over to Yakima to visit an aunt. I’d just be in the way here anyway. You boys have fun.” She raised her voice again. “I’ll see you Monday evening, Calvin.”

He waved a brusque farewell and turned his attention back to the beer keg.

She looked at him for a moment, sighed, and went smoothly on back into the house. I suddenly wanted very much to go down to the patio and give Sloane a good solid shot to the mouth. A kiss on the cheek by way of good-bye wouldn’t have inconvenienced him all that much, and it would have spared her the humiliation of that public brush-off.

I went slowly down the three steps to the patio, staring out over the Narrows and the dark timber on the other side.

There was a sudden burst of spray from the keg and a solid “klunk” as Mike set the tap home. “There you go, men,” he said. “The beer-drinking lamp is lit.”

“Well, ahoy there, matey,” Jack said, putting it on a bit too much.

The first pitcher was foam, and Sloane dumped it in the fishpond. “Drink, you little bastards.” He giggled.

Somebody, Claudia probably, had set a trayful of beer mugs up on a permanently anchored picnic table under one of the trees. I got one of them and filled it at the keg and drifted over to the edge of the patio where the hill broke sharply away, running down to the tangled Scotch-broom and madrona thicket below.

I could hear the others horsing around back at the keg, but I ignored them for the moment, concentrating on the fading line of daylight along the top of the hills across the Narrows.

“Pretty, huh?”

It was Sloane. He stood with a mug of beer, looking out over the water. “I used to come up here when I was a kid and just look at it. Weren’t many houses or anything up here then.”

Somehow I couldn’t picture Sloane as a kid.

“I made up my mind then that someday I was gonna live up here,” he went on. “Took me a long time, but I made it.”

“Was it worth it?” I couldn’t resist asking him. I didn’t like him much right then.

“Every lousy, scratching, money-grubbing, fuckin’ minute of it,” he said with a strange intensity. “Sometimes I sit up here lookin’ out at it, and I just break out laughing at all the shit I had to crawl through to get here.”

“We all do funny things,” I said. Now he had me confused.

“I’d have never made it without Claudia,” he said. “She’s really something, isn’t she?”

“She’s a real lady,” I said.

“She was hoppin’ tables in a beer bar when I met her,” he said. “She had it even then. I can meet guys and swing deals and all, but she’s the one who puts it all together and makes it go. She’s one in a million, Dan.”

“I can tell that,” I said. How the hell do you figure a guy like Sloane?

“Hey, you bastards,” Jack called to us, “this is a party, not a private little conflab. Come on back here.”

“Just showin’ off my scenery,” Cal said. The two of us went back to the keg.

Sloane went over and pawed around under one of the shrubs. “As soon as you guys get all squared away,” he said, “I’ve got a little goodie here for you.” He pulled out a half-gallon jug of clear liquid.

“Oh, shit!” Jack said. “Auburn tanglefoot. Goddamn Sloane and his pop-skull moonshine.”

“Guaranteed to have been aged at least two hours.” Sloane giggled.

“I thought the government men had busted up all those stills years ago,” Mike said.

“No way,” Jack said. “Auburn’d blow away if it wasn’t anchored down by all those pot stills.”

McKlearey got up and took the jug from Sloane. He opened it and sniffed suspiciously. “You sure this stuff is all right?”

“Pure, one-hundred-per-cent rotgut,” Sloane said.

“I mean, they don’t spike it with wood alcohol, do they?” There was a note of worry in Lou’s voice. “Sometimes they do that. Makes a guy go blind. His eyes fall out.”

“What’s the sense of poisoning your customers?” Sloane asked. “You ain’t gonna get much repeat business that way.”

“I’ve heard that they do it sometimes, is all,” McKlearey said. “They spike it with wood alcohol, or they use an old car radiator instead of that copper coil—then the booze gets tainted with all that gunk off the solder. Either way it makes a guy go blind. Fuckin’ eyes fall right out.”

“Bounce around on the floor like marbles, huh, Lou?” Jack said. “I can see it now. McKlearey’s eyes bouncin’ off across the patio with him chasin’ ’em.” He laughed harshly. He knew about Lou and Margaret, all right. There was no question about that now.

“I don’t think I want any,” McKlearey said, handing the jug back to Sloane.

“Old Lou’s worried about his baby-blue eyeballs,” Jack said, rubbing it in.

“I just don’t want any. OK, Alders?”

“Well, I’m gonna have some,” Mike said, reaching for the jug. “I cut my teeth on Auburn moonshine. My eyes might get a little loose now and then, but they sure as hell don’t fall out.” He rolled the jug back over his arm professionally and took a long belt.

“Now, there’s an old moonshine drinker,” Jack said. “Notice the way he handles that jug.”

We passed the jug around, and each of us tried to emulate Mike’s technique. Frankly, the stuff wasn’t much good—I’ve gotten a better taste siphoning gas. But we all smacked our lips appreciatively, said some silly-ass thing like “damn good whiskey,” and had a quick beer to flush out the taste.

McKlearey still refused to touch the stuff. He went back to his lawn chair, scowling.

“Hey, man,” Jack said, “I think my eyes are gettin’ loose.” He pressed his fingers to his eyelids.

“Fuck you, Alders,” Lou said.

“Yeah.” Jack said. “They’re definitely gettin’ loose—oops! There goes one now.” He squinted one eye shut and started pawing around on the flagstones. “Come back here, you little bastard!”

“Aw, go fuck yourself, Alders!” Lou snapped. “You’re so goddamn fuckin’ funny!”

“Oh, Mother,” Jack cried, “help me find my fuckin’ eyeball.” He was grinding Lou for all he was worth.

Lou was starting to get pretty hot, and I figured another crack or two from my brother ought to do it. I knew I should say something to cool it down, but I figured that Jack knew what he was doing. If he wanted a piece of McKlearey, that was his business.

“Hey, you guys,” Mike said, inspecting Sloane’s substantial outside fireplace, “let’s build a fire.” It was a smooth way to handle the situation.

“Why?” Sloane demanded. “You cold or something, for Chrissake?”

“No, but a fire’s kinda nice, isn’t it? I mean, what the hell?”

“Shit, I don’t care,” Cal said. “Come on. There’s a woodpile over behind the garage.”

The four of us left McKlearey sulking in his lawn chair and trooped on over to the woodpile.

It took us a while to get the fire going. We wound up going through the usual business of squatting down and blowing on it to make it catch. Finally, it took hold, and we stood around looking at it with a beery sense of having really done something worthwhile.

Then we all hauled up lawn chairs and moved the keg over handy. Even Lou pulled himself in to join the group. By then it was getting pretty dark.

Sloane had a stereo in his living room, and outside speakers as well. He was piping out a sort of standard, light music, so it was pleasant. I discovered that a shot of that rotten homemade whiskey in a glass of beer made a pretty acceptable drink, and I sat with the others drinking and telling lies.

I guess it was Jack who raised the whole damned thing. He was talking about some broad he’d laid while he was on his way down to Willapa Bay to hunt geese.

“… anyhow,” he was saying, “I went on down to Willapa—got there about four thirty or five—and put out my dekes. Colder’n a bastard, and me still about half blind with alcohol. About five thirty the geese came in—only by then my drunk had worn off, and my head felt like a goddamn balloon. Man, you want to see an act of raw courage? Just watch some poor bastard with a screamin’ hangover touch off a 12 gauge with three-inch magnum shells at a high-flyin’ goose. Man, I still hurt when I think about it.”

“Get any geese?” I asked.

“Filled out before seven,” he said. “Even filled on mallards before I started back—a real carnage. I picked up my dekes, chucked all the birds in the trunk, and headed on back up the pike. I hauled off the road in Chehalis again and went into the same bar to get well. Damned if she wasn’t right there on the first stool again.”

And that started the hunting stories. Have you ever noticed how when a bunch of guys are sitting around, the stories kind of run in cycles? First the drinking stories—“Boy did we get plastered”—then the war stories—“Funny thing happened when I was in the Army”—and then the hunting stories, or the dog stories, or the snake stories. It’s almost like a ritual, but very relaxed. Nobody’s trying to outdo anybody else. It’s just sort of easy and enjoyable. Even McKlearey and Jack called a truce on the eyeball business.

I guess maybe the fire had something to do with it. You get a bunch of guys around an open fire at night, and nine times out of ten they’ll get around to talking about hunting sooner or later. It’s almost inevitable. It’s funny some anthropologist hasn’t noticed it and made a big thing out of it.

We all sifted back through our memories, lifting out the things we’d done or stories we’d heard from others. We hunted pheasant and quail, ducks and geese, rabbits and squirrels, deer and bear, elk and mountain lions. We talked guns and ammunition, equipment, camping techniques—all of it. A kind of excitement—an urge, if you want to call it that—began to build up. The faint, barely remembered smells of the woods and of gun-oil came back with a sharpness that was almost real. Unconsciously, we all pulled our chairs in closer to the fire, tightening the circle. It was a warm night, so it wasn’t that we needed the heat of the fire.

“You know,” Jack was saying, “it’s a damn shame there’s no season open right now. We could have a real ball huntin’ together—just the bunch of us.”

“Too goddamn hot,” Lou said, pouring himself another beer.

“Not up in the mountains, it’s not,” Mike said.

“When does deer season open?” Sloane asked.

“Middle of October,” Jack said. “Of course we could go after bear. They’re predators on this side of the mountains, and the season’s always open.”

“Stick that bear hunting in your ear,” Mike said. “First you’ve got to have dogs; and second, you never know when one of those big hairy bastards is gonna come out of the brush at about ten feet. You got time for about one shot before he’s chewin’ on your head and scatterin’ your bowels around like so much confetti.”

“Yuk!” Sloane gagged. “There’s a graphic picture for you.”

“No shit, man,” Mike said. “I won’t go anywhere near a goddamn bear. I shot one just once. Never again. I had an old .303 British—ten shots, and it took every goddamn one of them. That son of a bitch just kept comin’. Soaked up lead like a blotter. The guys that hunt those babies all carry .44 magnum pistols for close work.”

“Hell, man,” McKlearey said, “you can stop a tank with a .44 mag.”

Mike looked at him. “One guy I talked to jumped a bear once and hit him twice in the chest with a .300 Weatherbee and then went to the pistol. Hit him four times at point-blank range with a .44 mag before he went down. Just literally blew him to pieces, and the damned bear was still trying to get at him. I talked to the guy three years later, and his hands were still shakin’. No bears for this little black duck!”

“Would a .45 stop one?” I asked.

“Naw, the military bullet’s got a hard jacket,” Mike said. “Just goes right through.”

“No, I mean the long Colt. It’s a 250-grain soft lead bullet.”

“That oughta do it,” Jack said. “Just carryin’ the weight would slow him down enough for a guy to make a run for it.”

“I’ve got an old Colt frontier-style stored with my clothes and books in Seattle,” I said, leaning over and refilling my beer mug.

“No kiddin’?” Jack said. “What the hell did you get a cannon like that for?”

“Guy I knew needed money. I lent him twenty, and he gave me the gun as security—never saw him again. The gun may be hot for all I know.”

“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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