Hunters (3 page)

Megan talked to the women more than she did
the men, in part because they were more responsive. Most of them
seemed nonchalant about entering a typically male world, and Megan
relished in their attitudes, jotting down their comments as fast as
she could. She quickly decided to slant her story towards them,
maybe call it "Women in the Woods," if Tom Hendricks, the editor,
approved.

One by one, sometimes in pairs, the hunters
moved into the woods in the gray darkness of early morning, trying
to find the right place to stop and wait before the sun rose and
the deer started to come out of their night havens. It would be
difficult, even with the thousands of acres of hunting land in the
county, to claim a place of one's own that would not be shared by
other hunters. The blaze orange patches were evidence of the
difficulties of solitude and the dangers of crowding.

Ned and Megan stood there in the chill dawn,
his arm around her shoulder, and watched the spots of orange vanish
among the trees, cold torches sinking into a brown-black sea.
"Well," he said, "I'd better go expose myself to gunfire and mayhem
for the next twelve hours. You gonna go back to bed?"

"No, I think I'll surprise Tom by being at
the office when he gets there for a change." She gave him a quick
kiss on the lips. "You be careful, okay?"

"Absolutely. See you tonight."

After Megan left, Ned unlocked the barrier and drove
up the restricted road that led to the heart of the game lands. He
passed only a few hunters on the way. Most of them had already
taken to the woods. Once, in his headlights, he had seen the golden
gleam of deer eyes, and glimpsed the flash of white tail as the
animal darted into the covering of trees.
Good luck, you poor
bastard
, he thought.
You're gonna need it today
.

S
heldon Lake had
read his horoscope when he got up. He couldn't remember exactly
what it said now, but it had been something about how today would
be a lucky day in unexpected ways.

He wasn't sure what that meant, but he
believed in astrology enough that he really wasn't concerned that
the blood tests would show anything bad. After all, his daddy had
been as healthy as a horse right up until the day he'd blown his
head off with a .12 gauge. And the Christmas card he got from his
mama each year proved that she was still alive and kicking. And
moving, since the postmark was always different.

It did seem peculiar, though, that Doctor
Barnes had wanted him to come in to the office to give him the
results. Peculiar, and a pain in the ass, especially on the first
day of deer season. Of course, Sheldon didn't have a license,
couldn't get one at all anymore because of what had happened with
that prick warden. But that didn't stop him from taking his daddy's
old Winchester and going out to Clyde Schwartz's farm.

Clyde didn't let most folks hunt there, but
he and Sheldon were old school buddies, and the game wardens hardly
ever set foot onto Clyde's land. All you had to do was wait till
dusk when the fuzzy bastards wandered into the fields to see what
was around to eat, and ka-
pwing
, venison through the winter.
Sheldon had gotten a buck and a doe the year before, butchered them
himself, and hadn't had to spend a cent on hamburger at Shop-Rite
until the following April.

Today would work out okay, though. Since
everybody wanted off at the pressed metals plant where Sheldon
worked, they were paying time and a half on Monday and Tuesday. So
Sheldon scored points with the boss for working, got an extra bonus
on his paycheck, even with the hour taken off to see the doc, and
could still get his deer at Clyde's later in the week.

He reached down and scratched the itch in
his leg through his blue jeans. There were more of those damn sores
now, and it was starting to piss him off. He'd gotten some cream
from the White Shield, but it didn't do any good. And that,
combined with the tired, dopey way he'd been feeling lately, had
driven him to the doctor for the first time since he'd gotten a
basketball physical in high school. The doc had poked and prodded,
taken some pee and some blood, and scraped a little bit of gunk off
one of his leg sores. He had noticed another sore on Sheldon's face
that Sheldon had thought was just a zit.

That was all last week. And now here Sheldon
was again. He hoped that the whole thing would cost more than a
hundred bucks. That way the plant could take care of part of
it.

The door opened and the nurse called
Sheldon's name. He tossed down the
Field and Stream
he was
half reading, and followed her back to an examination room. After a
few minutes, the doctor came in. He was smiling, but just a little,
like it wasn't comfortable on his face, and Sheldon really started
to wonder what the hell he had found.

"Mr. Lake," the doctor said. He called him
Mr. Lake
now rather than
Sheldon
. Sheldon liked that.
It made him feel like the old man's equal. "I have a personal
question for you. Please don't be embarrassed or angry. I'm your
doctor, and everything you tell me is confidential, all right?"

What the hell? "Sure...okay." Sheldon
nodded.

"First off, have you ever had a blood
transfusion?"

"You mean got somebody else's blood?
No."

Doctor Barnes looked down at the clipboard
in his hands. "You were in prison for a time, weren't you?"

"Yeah. Eight months."

"How long ago?"

"I been out six years now."

"While you were in prison...or anytime, for
that matter... did you ever have any homosexual relations, or—"

"
What?
" Sheldon felt his cheeks start
to burn.

"
Or
," said Doctor Barnes, holding up
his hand, "did you ever use IV drugs? Anything you injected?"

"No,
hell
no...and never any...any of
that other stuff, either! What the...what are you askin' me that
for?" And then Sheldon started to feel very cold, remembering some
of the things he had seen on TV, in the news and in movies. He'd
never even considered it before. How could something like that
happen to him? He wasn't a queer, and the only drugs he used were
joints every now and again.

"I hate to have to tell you this, Mr. Lake,
but your blood tests show that...you have acquired immune
deficiency syndrome."

Sheldon spelled it out in his head, but
couldn't bring himself to say the word. It was like the floor just
opened underneath him and he had fallen into a pool of ice water
that burned him as it chilled him. Then he remembered some other
bad letters, but not as bad as AIDS, and he had to try three times
before he got the words out. "You mean like that...what Magic
Johnson got? That HIV?"

The doctor shook his head sadly. "No. Well,
yes, but it's worse than that. HIV is the condition
before
AIDS. Apparently you've been HIV-positive for some time, because
now you have..." He paused for a moment. "You've got fully
developed AIDS."

Sheldon shook his head back and forth, back
and forth. "I don't know..." he started to whisper. "I don't know
how
..." And he didn't. During the eight months he had served
in prison, he had fought off the initial advances with such savage
success that the queers left him alone. He had his eyes open every
minute of the time, and had walked out of prison with his former
distrust of homosexuals transformed into an eternal hatred of
faggots.

"I'm sorry. I'm really very sorry, Mr. Lake.
But there are medications that can help, and there are support
groups."

"But
how?
" Sheldon asked, his eyes
pleading for an answer.

Doctor Barnes sighed. "There generally has
to be some contact with open wounds and blood or other bodily
fluids. Most often it comes from sexual contact or drugs, but there
are other ways."

"Other ways..." Sheldon remembered a night,
six years before. "Like...if I had a cut...and got some fag's blood
in it?"

Doctor Barnes looked at him sharply for a
moment, then nodded. "Yes. That could do it, I suppose."

"Even if..." He swallowed heavily. "...if I
hit 'im, and cut my hand on his teeth, and, and hit 'im again so
that the blood got in the cut? Could that do it?"

He looked up desperately at the doctor, who
now looked less sympathetically at him. "Yes," Doctor Barnes said
flatly. "That could do it."

Unable to meet the doctor's accusing stare,
he looked back down at the floor. "Damn it. God damn it."

"I'm going to refer you to a specialist,"
Doctor Barnes said as he wrote something on a piece of paper. "In
the meantime I'm putting you on some medication that should help
your listlessness and something for your Kaposi's sarcoma—that's
the sores. Now here's what I want you to do..."

Sheldon listened dumbly as the doctor went
over the dosages and called the specialist in Erie and made an
appointment for Friday afternoon. In another few minutes Sheldon
was back on the street standing next to his car. For a moment he
didn't know why he was there or what he would do next.

But something automatic took over, and he
got in the car and drove to the drug store, where Ed Lawrence
filled his prescription. He thought that Ed looked at him a little
funny when he read the slip, and later when he handed over the
package. It wasn't until he got out on the street that he realized
it was because Ed knew damn well what was wrong with him, and it
wouldn't be long before Ed started blabbing and everybody would
know—

Oh yeah, Sheldon Lake? He got that AIDS.

That homo disease?

Yeah, musta picked it up in the joint, I
guess.

Hell, Sheldon never seemed like a queer to
me.

Never know what people'll do in prison. And
he never got married either.

Point...

Sheldon slammed his fist down on top of the car, and
tried hard not to cry. Then he looked at his fist. It was his damn
fists that had gotten him into this in the first place. He knew
when it had happened. Six years before, when he got out of
prison.

H
e had served his
full time, and there was no parole, so the first thing he did was
go home, get his car back from Clyde, and drive all the way up to
Bradford, where nobody knew him from Adam. He got a room at a cheap
motel, and went to a bar within walking distance so that he
wouldn't have to drive back drunk. The bar was pretty nice, one of
those sports bars. They had free baskets of peanuts and pretzels on
the bar, and you could just toss the peanut shells on the floor.
There were two TV's going, one with baseball, and one with
basketball.

Sheldon watched the basketball. Even though
the blacks had taken it over, there was a helluva lot more action
than the Pirates game, and he used to play basketball. He kept
drinking beers, determined to keep slugging them down until he was
wasted, then maybe try and pick up one of the few women in the
place.

He had just downed his eighth draft, and was
thinking about the rock hard, weight sculpted faggots in jail who
would try and make you blow them just because they could. He
hadn't, though. He hadn't touched anybody's dick or let anybody
stick it in him or let anybody touch his.

The first time one of them had tried,
Sheldon had cold-cocked him with a vicious right to the temple.
Because he was thin and didn't have muscles to compare with their
free weight pecs, they'd guessed him for an easy mark. But they
didn't know that his thinness hid muscles like wires, and that tall
lankiness disguised a man who would fight to the last to save his
butt. And he was quick too. Quicker than any of them. Weight
lifting bulked you up, but it slowed you down, and the man who was
fastest with a kick or a fist or a shank was the man who walked
away.

"Hey, how ya doin'?" Sheldon looked away
from the TV and into the face of a man who wouldn't have lasted a
night in prison. He was short and slim, and his face wouldn't have
been unpleasant on a woman. His longish hair was combed straight
back, and was a yellow color that Sheldon figured must have come
out of a bottle. His shirt was open two buttons too far, and his
stonewashed jeans were so tight that Sheldon could have seen the
shape of his equipment if he cared to look.

Sheldon nodded at him, but didn't smile. The
man, who introduced himself as Terry, started talking about the
basketball game and the players. Sheldon said as little as
possible. By now he was pretty drunk, and had come to the
conclusion that this man was a queer and was trying to pick him up.
Twice Terry had put his arm on Sheldon's shoulder, and one time he
patted his leg as if to emphasize a point.

When Sheldon looked around he saw that some
of the other men in the bar were looking at him and the queer, and
he could swear that they were talking about him, maybe betting to
see if he'd leave with this guy Terry or not.

Goddam fags were the same everywhere, prison
or the streets. Works like hell to save his ass, and as soon as
he's out another fag starts hitting on him.

Hitting on him.

Sheldon turned to Terry and tried to smile.
It felt lopsided, but he held it anyway. "Hey," he said. "You wanta
leave?"

"Leave?" Terry said with a look of insincere
innocence.

"Yeah, leave. You wanta go back to my
place?"

Now that he knew he wasn't being
told
to leave, Terry smiled honestly. "Yeah. I'd like that."

"You want to, uh, pay for my beers?" Sheldon
asked. Might as well get the icing with the cake.

Terry shrugged. "Sure." He called the
bartender over, raised his eyebrows slightly when the man told him
Sheldon's total, but paid it with a twenty.

"You know, we could go back to my place,"
Sheldon said when they were out in the parking lot, "but I don't
think I want to wait that long. How about you?"