Dead End in Norvelt (7 page)

When he returned from West Virginia she ambushed him in the kitchen, and after she gave him a tongue lashing a second time around I knew he’d be seeing me next. And then he walked down the hall, one loud footfall after the other in a very deliberate way, as if he was letting me know in advance that he had no choice but to do the awful thing he had been told to do.

My room was as small as a monk’s cell. I had a single bed, a dresser with an attached mirror, and a small closet, but I didn’t have a Bible. If I did have a Bible I would have been down on my knees and reading it with an angelic look on my face. The only religious book I had in my collection was the Landmark biography
Jesus of Nazareth
. I had it on my lap when Dad pushed open my bedroom door. He quickly stepped into my room and roughly closed the door behind him. But he didn’t look angry. It seemed to me that he had willingly retreated to my room after the scolding Mom gave him about the corn and airplane. He took a deep breath and slowly ran his hand back and forth across his mouth as if he were trying to erase it and the lecture he was supposed to deliver.

Before he could get the first word out I sat up and asked, “Hey, Dad, how come we don’t have any good information on the boyhood of Jesus?” I held up the book I was reading so he could see what I was talking about. “I mean, it seems that outside of the fact that he was entirely Jewish, we know that he didn’t have to go to school and study because God funneled all his preaching knowledge directly into his brain.”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and pulled up a short stool. “I wasn’t around back then. But I wish I could cram some knowledge directly into your brain.”

“I guess that would take a religious miracle,” I ventured.

“I didn’t come in here to talk about Jesus,” he said, trying to sound stern. “I came in here to talk about gun safety.”

“What about the corn?” I asked.

“Your mom will handle that beef,” he said. “I’m here because she told me about you firing off the Jap rifle, and that’s
my
beef with you.”

“It was an accident,” I explained. “Honest. I didn’t know it was loaded.”

“Don’t you remember last winter when we went deer hunting and I taught you about gun safety?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t you remember anything I teach you?”

How could I forget?

*   *   *

It was the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Deer hunting was popular in our area because shooting and dressing a deer provided a lot of winter food for a family, so we had school off for the first day of hunting season. Through one of his friends Dad had bought me a secondhand camouflage hunting coat, pants, face scarf, and gloves so that if I stood next to a tree you would never see me—which was not good because people sometimes shoot on impulse when they hear something move, and that
something
could be a person.

“Itchy trigger fingers,” Dad had said, aiming his trigger finger toward me and giving it a pull, “and stupidity is what gets people killed.” So in order for people to see me and not shoot me he had also bought me a large blaze orange cap which kept slipping down over my face. I just hoped there wasn’t some hunter who mistook me for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and let me have it.

We got into Dad’s truck when it was pitch black out. He was eager to get to our tree house in the mountains because sunrise was when the hunting officially started and he wanted to get the jump on the other hunters.

On the moonlit drive through the shadowed mountains he said to me, “I think you are old enough to do this. But I’ll teach you all about gun safety, because no matter what, gun safety is the number one concern when out hunting. Of course, good hunting skills are important too. But safety is tops.”

“Sure,” I said, full of enthusiasm. “Safety first.” He smiled, and it made me happy to say things I knew he liked to hear.

“Once you load a rifle,” he explained, “and have a shell in the chamber, you always keep the barrel pointed toward the ground.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And when you are just learning about guns always keep the safety on too,” he added.

“Okay,” I said. “But what do you do when you see a deer?”

“You won’t see one unless you are totally quiet,” he said firmly.

I held my pointer finger up to my lips. “Shhhh,” I whispered.

“No sneezing,” he said.

“Okay.”

“No coughing.”

“Yep.”

“And here is a little-known fact, but good hunters believe it is absolutely essential,” he stressed.

“No fake deer talk?” I guessed.

“Yes, that too,” he said impatiently. Then he leaned toward me and quietly said, “No
farting
.”

“What?” I asked. I hadn’t expected him to say that.

“Do you know what that word means?” he asked.

“Yeah. I got it right on my spelling test,” I remarked, trying to make a joke.

“Well, don’t fart or you’ll scare the deer,” he continued seriously. “They have very sensitive noses and ears.”

“Okay,” I said.

“When I was a boy,” he continued, “my dad coated me with deer gland scent so they couldn’t smell me because I couldn’t hold my gas.”

“Where do you get deer glands?” I asked.

“From between the toes of dead deer,” he explained. “I smelled awful. So for now,” he cautioned, “just be quiet and think about what I said. When we get to our deer-spotting tree house I’ll go over everything again.”

“Sure,” I replied, trying to sound respectful, but not as intense as he was.

After that we drove in silence as the sky blued and the few big clouds showed their low gray bellies. We turned off a main road and onto a smaller road and then onto a narrow trail where the long leafless branches of the trees scraped jaggedly against the sides of the truck as we plowed roughly through the heaving snow. Finally we entered a small clearing. We were the first truck there and instantly Dad was in a good mood. He checked his watch. “Ten minutes till sunrise,” he said. “I think this is going to be my lucky day.”

I threw on an orange backpack, which was stuffed with dry socks, dry gloves, and two Thermoses full of hot coffee. Dad put on his orange hat and vest and we started to trudge up a tree-covered hill. Right away he turned toward me with his finger over his lips, and then he pointed toward the snow where the wind had blown it skin-thin. There were fresh deer tracks. I smiled and he smiled back and gave me a big thumbs-up. We kept climbing, one silent step after the next, and before too long we reached a colossal tree. Dad stopped and pointed skyward. About ten feet above the ground was a tree house platform with low sides. There was no roof. There were ladder slats nailed to the trunk of the tree. Dad brushed the snow off the slats with his gloves and then noiselessly climbed up, and I climbed up after him.

Without talking we cleared snow from a corner of the platform and got our gear settled. Dad opened a Thermos and poured us a cup of coffee. He took a sip then passed it to me. As I took a sip he carefully slipped a brass and copper shell into the chamber of his deer rifle and pushed the bolt forward and over. The keen
click-click
of metal against metal was like a vault locking. We were loaded and there was no way out until he got his deer. “Remember everything I said about gun safety,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered back, and gave him the last bit of coffee.

“No accidents,” he reminded me, and tightly puckered his lips to remind me about the unwanted bodily noise.

“Total silence,” I vowed, and extra quietly screwed the top back onto the Thermos.

He raised the rifle and rested the stock on the half-high wall of the tree house. I squatted just behind him, and as his head turned to scan for deer within range, my head turned so I could see exactly what he was seeing—cold black tree trunks, the yellow-lichen-covered tops of frost-gray rocks, and wind-carved waves of white snow. Our heads swiveled back and forth for what seemed like an hour. And then suddenly Dad stiffened. I did too. About fifty yards ahead a white-tailed deer was slowly picking his way across the snow-covered rocks and roots.

As soon as I saw him I knew instantly that I didn’t want him to die. He was so beautiful and at ease in the woods. This was his home, not mine, and I suddenly felt like a killer who had broken into his house and was about to shoot him. I watched and held my breath. He would stop and turn his antlered head to listen and then raise his dark nose to sniff the air, and then he would nibble on the tender bark of a thin tree, and then lick some snow, and then take a few more careful steps. The fur under his neck looked so soft, like the neck fur of a cat I had before it went out one night and never came back. I felt as if Dad and I were going to murder nature’s tame pet. What I really wanted to do was to go down and stroke his golden brown fur, and name him and give him something to eat and make him see I was not there to harm him.

But we
were
there to harm him. We were going to kill him and gut him and skin him and cut him up and eat him. I turned to maybe say something of what I was thinking when Dad mechanically rotated the rifle in the deer’s direction and pressed his eye against the rubber end of the telescopic sight as if he were getting ready to shoot his old WWII enemy. Hitting the deer would be about as easy for Dad as standing at our kitchen window with a target pistol and picking off the finches and cardinals at our window bird feeder.

I knew I couldn’t grab Dad’s rifle because it would be bad gun safety so I came up with another idea. I thought that if I could silently pass gas I would scare off the deer. But it would have to be silent so Dad wouldn’t hear it, and it was hard to tell if it would be silent because I was squatting down. I could think it was going to be silent but then it might suddenly be really loud. You could never be sure. But I couldn’t take a chance with Dad because he wouldn’t think it was funny. He didn’t even want me to breathe. He sure didn’t want me to pass deer-spooking gas.

I saw his finger slowly curling around the trigger and it was trembling like a snake about to strike. He kept his eye pressed against the sight as he tracked the deer between the crisscrossing tree trunks, and all I could think about was my twitching sphincter. I was trying to open it just a tiny bit so a whisper-thin stream of gas would noiselessly escape into the air and stealthily warn the deer without Dad knowing it was me. I looked at Dad’s tightening trigger finger and the side of his face where his cheek muscles were knotted up as he intently followed the deer and waited for a good chest shot that would cleanly pierce the heart. I knew I only had a moment to act if I wanted to save the deer’s life. I took a deep breath, squatted down a bit, and relaxed my bottom. But nothing happened. I took another deep breath and pushed out.

“Come on,” I said to myself, “get inspired. You have to save the deer! Think of something.”

And just at that tense moment when I was afraid Dad was going to pull the trigger and shoot the deer, a thought shot even more quickly into my mind—a very inspiring thought. I had been reading a great book about ancient explorers before Columbus, and there was a Chinese explorer, a Buddhist monk, who sailed a Chinese junk to the Aleutian Islands by Alaska and landed on an island that was populated by a primitive tribe of people who just happened to be called the Hairy Ainus People. That name alone almost made me howl with laughter, but I kept telling myself not to laugh through my mouth, but out the other direction. I really hadn’t planned to think about the Hairy Ainus People, but there I was up in a tree house in the freezing cold and squatting down when my thoughts of the Hairy Ainus combined with a gut desire to save the deer gave me just enough oomph, and I let out a thin stream of gas which sounded roughly like the slow opening of a creaky coffin lid that had been closed for a thousand rusty years. Instantly the deer swiveled his pink ears toward us and cocked one of his strong rear legs as if he was about to bolt.

“What was that?” Dad hissed under his breath and pulled his eye away from the sight.

I didn’t answer him because I knew the answer would arrive without me speaking a word. Once that creaky coffin door had opened, the smell of a thousand years of rotting death drifted out through the thick woven fabric of my clothing.

When I saw Dad’s nose twitch I knew his question had been answered. Quickly, he pressed his eye back against the sight but I could tell by the way he jerked the barrel to the left and right that the deer had vanished. I had saved his life.

“Good timing,” he said sarcastically without even looking at me.

I didn’t say a word. I could have said it was an accident but I didn’t feel like lying. I wasn’t sorry the deer escaped and Dad could see I wasn’t sorry.

“You know,” he said irritably, “the deer really hasn’t escaped. This just means some other guy will bag him.”

I hoped not. And even if my hope was false hope, it was better than shooting him ourselves.

“Well, back to gun safety,” Dad said, and pulled back and down on the bolt and removed the unused shell from the chamber of the rifle. “You understand never to play with guns, right?”

“Right,” I replied, and I meant it. I really did. “Can we go home now?” I asked.

“Are you cold?”

I wasn’t. I just didn’t want to fake being happy if he shot a deer. I didn’t want to see the blood and guts hanging out and everything else. “Yes,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

“Good enough,” he said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

I knew he didn’t mind taking me back home early since now he knew he could hunt more easily by himself for the rest of the season. Then we climbed down from the tree and I walked behind him toward the car. It was cold and the snap of each twig breaking sounded like tiny hunters firing tiny rifles at tiny imaginary deer. When we got to the clearing a panel truck full of Norvelt Gun Club hunters pulled up. The driver stuck his head out the window.

“How’d it go?” he asked too loudly, and even from a distance I could smell whiskey on his breath.