“On three,” I said. It might as well be me. I was hoping Jack would win by some fluke. That might quiet things down.
I counted it off, and Lou won by a considerable margin.
“Now I guess we know who’s the best man.” He laughed.
“Big deal,” Jack said disgustedly.
Lou snapped the gun at him again. “Back in the old days, you’d be buzzard-bait right now, Alders,” he said. “Well, who’s next? Who wants to take on the fastest fuckin’ gun in Tacoma?” He stood at a stiff brace, his face fixed in a belligerent leer.
Jack dropped the gun belt back on the table. He was grinding his teeth together. He was really pissed. I knew I should have just let it die, but I couldn’t let that bastard get away with it. Goddamn McKlearey rubbed me the wrong way, and I didn’t like the way he’d put down my brother. I figured it was time he learned that he wasn’t King Shit. I stood up and strapped on the gun.
“Well, well,” he said, “the last of the Alders. I beat you and I’m top gun, huh?”
“That’ll be the day,” Stan said quietly.
“You don’t think I can?” Lou demanded.
I finished tying down the gun.
“Who’s gonna count?” Lou said.
“Never mind the count,” I said. “Just go ahead when you’re ready.” I wanted to rub his face in it, and I’d noticed that Lou always squinted when he started to draw. I figured that was about all the edge I’d need.
It was. I had him cold before he got the gun clear. I didn’t snap the trigger but just held the gun leveled at his face. He froze and gawked at the awful hole in the muzzle of that .45. I guess Lou’d had enough guns pointed at him for real to know what it was all about. I waited about ten seconds and then slowly squeezed the trigger. The snap of the hammer was very loud.
I spun the gun back into the holster, grinding him a little more. He was still standing there, frozen in the same place. He was actually sweating, and his eyes had a weird look in them.
“And that about takes care of the fastest gun in Tacoma,” I said, and I took off my gun belt.
Lou tried to get Sloane or Stan to draw with him, but they weren’t having any. Sloane and I put our guns away, and I figured we’d gotten past that little shit-pile. These guys weren’t kidding, empty guns or no. I think we were all starting to slip a few gears.
“I can still outhunt you bastards,” Lou said, his voice getting shrill again.
“You’ll have to prove that, too,” Jack said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll prove it,” Lou said. “Any bet you want. First deer, biggest deer, longest shot. You name it, and I’ll beat you at it.” He was pissed off now. He’d been put down, and no Marine can ever take that. What was worse, he knew I could do it again, any time I felt like it. Even that might help keep things under control. If he knew I’d be there and I could take him if I had to, it might just keep his mind off the goddamn guns.
“Hey, there’s an idea,” Sloane said. “Best deer—using Boone and Crockett points—the other guys pitch in and buy him a fifth of his favorite booze.”
“Why not a jug from each guy?” Lou said. “I can drink one jug in an afternoon.”
“All right,” Jack said. “One jug of Black Label from each guy, OK?”
“Why not?” Stan said.
“Sure,” I agreed.
Sloane shrugged. Money didn’t mean that much to him.
“And a little side bet, too,” Jack said. “Just between you and me, Lou. Ten bucks says I get a better deer than you do.” I don’t think he’d have made the bet if he’d been sober.
“You got it,” Lou said. “Anybody else want a piece of the action?” He looked around.
“I’ll cover you,” Stan said. I looked at him quickly. His face was expressionless. “Ten dollars. Same bet.” What the hell was this? I suddenly didn’t like the smell of it. Stan didn’t make bets—ever. How much did he know anyhow?
“You got it,” Lou said. “Anybody else.” He looked at me. I looked back at him and didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything to prove—I didn’t have a wife.
Sloane opened another round of beer, and we drifted off into talking about the trip and hunting in general.
“I think I’d better go,” Stan said. “I’ve got classes tomorrow, and it’s going to be a long night tomorrow night.”
“You got a point, Stan,” Jack said.
“Don’t forget our fuckin’ bet, Larkin,” Lou said. He went into the utility room and came back with that M & P .38 strapped on. He stood in the kitchen, snatching the gun out of the holster and putting it back. “Take that, you motherfucker,” he muttered, jerking out the pistol and snapping it. I had a vague feeling it was me he was talking to.
Sloane, Jack, and I went with Stan to the front door.
“That McKlearey and I don’t get along too well,” he said as he went out.
“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Stan,” Jack said. “I got a gutful of that bastard already, and we ain’t even left yet.”
“Maybe we can push him off a cliff,” I said.
“After he’s paid his share of the guide fee.” Sloane giggled.
Stan went on out to his car, and the rest of us went back into the house.
“Son of a bitch!” Lou’s voice came from the kitchen. We trooped in, and he stood there with blood dripping onto the tiles from a gash in his left hand. The stupid bastard had been trying to fan that double-action .38.
Hot-diggety-damn, this was going to be a fun trip!
14
IT rained all the next day. The sky sagged and dripped, and the trailer court was gloomy and sad. I tried sleeping, but after about eleven or so it was useless. I visited with Margaret, but she was drying clothes on a rack in the living room, and the place was steamy and smelled of wet clothes so badly that it made me even more miserable. Then a couple of her coffee-drinking friends came in and started the usual woman talk. There was nothing after that but to go to a tavern and drink beer. Clydine was busy registering for classes until about three or so.
The inside of my car felt damp and clammy as I fired it up, and the windshield fogged over immediately. I drove up the street to the Patio, listening to the hiss of my tires on the wet pavement. The parking lot was sodden and full of puddles. I ran inside to get out of the rain as quickly as possible, and sat down on a stool at the bar and ordered a beer. There were four other guys in the place, all about as dispirited as I was.
I sat at the bar, hunched over, watching the cars whoosh by with the spray flying and the windshield wipers slapping back and forth. By three I was so goddamn depressed I couldn’t stand myself. I called Mike from the bar and found out that Betty was better. He sounded pretty bitter about not being able to go with us as well as half-sick with worry over Betty, so I cut it pretty short.
I was still depressed when I got to Clydine’s place. She lived in a shabby little second-floor apartment with Joan—the usual stuff—old sofa cushions on the floor to sit on, posters on the wall, bricks and boards for bookcases. Joan had gone home right after she’d finished registering, probably to keep on the good side of her folks, so Clydine and I had the place to ourselves.
She’d been standing around in the rain, and her hair was soaked. She looked very young, sitting cross-legged on a sofa cushion as she dried her hair with a big towel—very young and very vulnerable.
“What’s the matter, Danny?” she asked me, looking up. I was slouched in their ruptured armchair with a sour look on my face, looking out the steamy window.
“The rain, I guess,” I said shortly.
“You’re living in the wrong part of the country if the rain bothers you that much,” she said.
“I don’t know, Clydine,” I said, “maybe it’s not really the rain.”
“You’re worried about this trip, aren’t you?” she said.
“I suppose that’s it,” I said. “Things got a little hairy last night.” I told her about it.
“Wow!” she said. ?
??It sounds like a bad Western.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” I said glumly. “The only way a bad Western can end is with a big shoot-out. You ever seen a Western yet that didn’t have a shoot-out?”
“Why don’t you just back out?” she asked.
I shook my head. “It’s too late for that. Besides, I really want to go; I really do.”
She shivered.
“Are you cold?” I asked her.
“I’ll warm up in a little,” she said.
“You little clobberhead,” I said. I went over, knelt down beside her, and felt her bare foot. It was like a dead fish. I ran my hand up her leg. Her Levis were soaked.
“Watch it,” she murmured.
I ignored that and slid my hand up under her sweatshirt. The little soldiers were clammy. “You knucklehead,” I said angrily. “You’re going to get pneumonia.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said, shivering again. “You’re just a worrier.”
I stood up and went into her dinky little bathroom. I dumped all the dirty clothes out of the bathtub and started to fill it with hot water. I went back into the living room and snapped my fingers at her. “Up,” I said.
“What?”
“Up. Up. On your feet.” I wasn’t about to take any crap from her about it. She grumbled a bit but she got up. “Now march,” I ordered, pointing at the bathroom.
“This is silly,” she said.
I swatted her on the fanny. Not too hard.
“But the bathroom is such a mess,” she wailed.
I pushed her on inside. The tub was almost full. I turned it off and checked it out. It was hot but not scalding.
“Strip,” I said.
“What?”
“Strip! Peel. Take it off.”
“Danny!” She sounded horribly shocked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Look, Rosebud, you’ve been running around my place wearing nothing but your sunny smile for weeks now. This is no time to come down with a case of false modesty.”
“But not in the bathroom!” she objected, still in that shocked tone of voice.
Women! I reached out and very firmly pulled off her sweatshirt.
“Danny,” she said plaintively, “please.” She crossed her arms in front of her breasts. She was blushing furiously. I sat down on the toilet seat and hauled off her soggy Levis.
“Danny.” Her complaining voice was very small.
Then I took off her panties. They were wet, too. She went into the “September Morn” crouch.
“All right,” I said, “in the tub.”
“But—”
“In the tub!”
“Turn your head,” she insisted.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I turned my head.
“Well,” she said defensively, “it’s in the bathroom. Ouch! That’s hot!”
I looked at her quickly.
“You turn your goddamn head back where it was, you goddamn Peeping Tom!”
I looked away again.
“All right,” she said finally in that small voice, “I’m in now.” She was all scrunched up in the tub, hiding all her vital areas.
“Sit tight,” I told her. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Where are you going?” she yelled after me as I hurried out. I didn’t answer. I clumped on down the steps and went out in the rain to my car. I had a pint of whiskey in the glove compartment, and it was about half full. I got it and went on back up to her apartment.
“Is that you?” she called.
“No, it’s me,” I said. Let her figure that one out. It’d give her something to do. “Not in the bathroom”—for Chrissake! I heard a lot of splashing.
“Stay in the damn tub!” I yelled in to her.
“I am,” she yelled back. “I don’t know why you got so bossy all of a sudden.”
I mixed her a good stiff hot toddy. As an afterthought, I mixed myself one as well. I carried them into the bathroom.
She’d poured about a quart of bubble bath in the water and had stirred it all up. She was in suds up to her chin.
“Well,” she said in that same defensive tone, “if you’re going to insist on this ‘Big Brother is washing you’ business, at least I’m going to be decent.” She sounded outraged.
“Drink this,” I said, handing her one of the cups.
“What is it?”
“Medicine. Drink it.” I sat back down on the john.
“Boy, are you ever a bear,” she said, sipping at the toddy. “Hey, I like this. What is it?”
I told her.
Somehow in the interim she’d tied her hair up into a damp tumble on top of her head. She looked so damned appealing that I got a sudden sharp ache in the pit of my stomach just looking at her.
We sat in silence, drinking our toddies.
“Oooo,” she finally said with a long, shuddering sigh, “I was cold.”
“I don’t know why you gave me so much static about it,” I said.
“But, Danny,” she said, “it’s the bathroom. Don’t you understand?”
“Never in a million years.” I laughed. “And don’t by to explain it to me. It would just give me a headache.”
We sat in silence again.
“Danny,” she said tentatively, studying the sudsy toe she’d thrust up out of the water.
“Yes, Blossom?”
“What we were talking about before—this hunting thing. You said you really wanted to go.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I really do.”
“It just doesn’t fit,” she said. “You aren’t the type. I mean, you’re not some fat forty out to assert his manhood by killing things.” She’d never talked about it before, but I guess it had been bothering her.
“You’re labeling again,” I said. “Oh sure, I’ve seen the type you’re talking about—probably more of them than you have, but that’s not the only kind of guy who hunts. For one thing, I eat everything I kill. That kind either gives it away or throws it in the garbage can. I don’t give game away either. If I don’t like the taste of an animal, I won’t hunt it—I won’t butcher for somebody else. And I don’t collect trophies—not even horns. People who do that are disgusting. They have contempt for the animal they kill. They want a stuffed head around to prove to their friends that they’re smarter than the deer was. Well, big goddamn deal!” Suddenly I was pretty hot about it.
“Well, don’t get mad at me,” she said.
“I’m not mad at you, kid,” I said. “It’s just that it burns me to think about it. The beery blowhard with the broad ass and the big mouth is the picture everybody’s got of the guy who hunts—probably because he’s so obnoxious. He’s the shithead who litters the woods with beer cans and poaches a big buck before shooting time, and wastes game, and hangs mounted heads all over his wall, and pays his dues to the NRA, and calls himself a ‘sportsman,’ for God’s sake—like hunting was some kind of far-out football game.”
“And he probably belongs to the John Birch Society, too,” she added.
I let that go by.
“Well, I know why he’s trying to be a mighty hunter,” she said, splashing her feet under the slowly dissolving suds, “but you still haven’t told me why you are.”
I shrugged. “I have to,” I said. “It’s something I have to do. That’s the thing the Bambi-lovers can’t understand. They simper about ‘immaturity,’ and ‘man doesn’t need violence toward his fellow creatures,’ and ‘let’s have a reverence for life and keep our forests and wild life just to look at—as nature intended.’ I get so goddamn sick of the intentional fallacy. Whatever the hell some half wit decides is right is automatically what nature or God intended. Bullshit! Preserve the pheasant from the bad old hunter so that the fox can tear him to pieces with his teeth. Preserve the cute little bunny so the hawk can fly him up about a thousand feet and drop him screaming to the ground. You ever hear a rabbit scream? He sounds just like a baby. Preserve the pretty deer—Bambi—so he can over-multiply, overgraze, and then starve to
death—or get so weak that the coyotes can run him down and start eating on his guts while he’s still alive and bleating.
“Nature isn’t some well-trimmed little park, Flower Child. It’s very savage. These idiots get all mushy and sentimental about our little furry friends, and they get upset when a grizzly in the Yellowstone chews up a couple kids.”
“You sound like you hate animals,” she said. “Is that it?”
“I love animals,” I said. “Nobody who hates animals hunts. But I respect the animal for what he is—wild. I don’t try to make a pet out of him. When I go into the woods, I’m going into his territory. I respect his rights. Am I making any sense?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But you still haven’t told me why you like to go out and kill things.”
I shrugged again. “It’s something I have to do—every so often I have to go out. It’s not the killing—that’s really a very small part of it. It’s the woods, and being alone, and—well—the hunting. That word gets misused. Actually, it’s going out, finding the animal you want in his own territory, and then getting close enough to him to do a clean job. He deserves that much from you. Call it respect, if you like. Anybody who gets all his kicks out of the killing has got some loose marbles.”
“I don’t understand,” she objected, “I don’t understand it at all.”
“You’re not a hunter,” I said. “Very few people really are.”
“Of course not,” she said sarcastically, “after all, I’m a woman.”
“I’ve met women who were hunters,” I said, “and damn good ones, too.”
“Is it—well—now don’t get mad—sexual?”
“You’ve been reading too much Hemingway.” I laughed. “People use sexual terms to describe it because that’s about as close as you can get to it in everyday language that nonhunters would understand. Hemingway knew the difference, and he knew other hunters would, too, and he knew they’d excuse him.”
“You make it all sound awfully exotic,” she said doubtfully.
“It’s not,” I said, “actually, it’s very simple. You just can’t explain it to people, that’s all.”
“Are you a good hunter?” she asked.
“I try,” I said, “and I keep on learning. I guess that’s about all any guy can do.”