The Things I Want Most (18 page)

By the time the two of us actually saw each other again, it was late in the afternoon of the next day, long after she had had to wrestle with this new demon in Mike's room all alone, long after I had shot a ghost outside the beaver pond, and long after a hundred or so men had trooped up out of the darkness.

It was as if I had advertised the deer, when in fact I hadn't
told anyone—not even my boys. The only announcement I made at all was to hang the deer up under the big hemlock in front, the one you can back a truck up under, the same tree the boys had had four deer hanging from by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.

Every one of the men got out of his car or pickup truck and walked up to look at it, using the exact same words: “Oh, my God, I never saw anything that big. Did you get him, or was it one of your sons?”

I felt a tad guilty about that. The boys were the ones who had really worked for a trophy. The ending days of their hunt together this autumn could have been torn from the pages of
Leatherstocking Tales
. By sunset Saturday they had hiked more than fifty miles around and over those fractured ridges, shot three bucks, and then, despite the fact that dawn Sunday saw the sky choked up with low clouds—cold, sopping-wet cotton pods that drenched the mountain in black, freezing rain—they scrambled back up Shawangunk again and shot one more in the laurel.

Brendan was the last to leave. He came into my room Sunday night. I sat up straighter and put my book down as he said good-bye and asked me if I was going to hunt at all. I said yes, of course. I had blocked out some time and earlier puzzled out the route of a large herd of does that seemed to be visiting various bucks. “Don't worry. I'll be out there,” I said.

“Okay, Dad,” he said, questioning, concerned about my lying there, and as he walked out added, “I'll call you during the week.”

And then on Wednesday afternoon he did call.

“I shot a pretty big deer,” I said slowly.

“Really. How big?”

I stumbled over an answer. Rick Stevens, the conservation biologist who is a guest here, had tried to score it by eye. Then he had come into our rooms and told Mike and Liam, “Your
dad should be careful with that buck. It might be the biggest one in New York State this year.”

But I had a hard time believing it, so I didn't want to repeat what Rick had said. I just said, “Big.”

He asked if it was as big as Henry's ten-pointer. Reluctantly I had to say, “Bigger, much bigger.”

“
Okay
, Dad,” he said, excited. “Way to go!”

When I got off the phone and walked back outside to talk to yet more hunters driving in, I realized that my having trod a sorcerer's line in the woods was profoundly affecting Mike. He was wide-eyed, peering out the windows, walking inside and out, hiding in his room and then coming back out again to find Sue and drift along behind her.

“Who are all these people?” he kept asking. “What do they want? Are they going to go away?”

“They'll leave after they see the deer you helped me with,” I said, watching him, thinking of the deer, thinking of the Mike we had seen that afternoon.

A mountain wight, the buck had been glimpsed by other hunters earlier that year and during the year before, but had always vanished like a ghost before anybody got a shot or even a good look at him. Old and wise, he was a master at using the secret, hidden places on the mountain in order to stay alive. And in this, the last year of his life, he had grown into a monster, the best of the gene pool, with enormous dusky shoulders and a huge basket rack of antlers chipped and scarred from subduing other males, stained with the juice of roots. This giant, aged male couldn't, with his molars worn to the gumline, ever feed again; he only cared now for his few short, last weeks of autumn dominance.

I was watching a young male in the stream when he appeared in order to drive the other animal away, and without my seeming to will it, the rifle fired and he vanished.

By noon I had just about given up trying to find him, so I called Susanne's husband, David.

When David arrived, I stood in front of him exhausted, covered with mud, soaking wet, dripping puddles of filthy cold water on the clean kitchen floor. “Dave,” I said, “this was the biggest deer I ever saw in my life. This was
the
deer.”

David looked at me carefully “Are you sure you hit?”

“Dave, it was a long, long way to fire, but it was a perfect sight picture. I fired, he was knocked down for an instant, got up, ran ten paces, and then disappeared.”

David smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. “Okay, I'll be on it all day if you want. Now, show me where he was when you shot.”

I went back to the beaver pond with him, walked him to where the buck was when I shot and said, “I lost sight of him right here”

David looked back to where the buck had been standing, then shaded his eyes and peered off for a long, long minute toward the spot from where I had fired, shaking his head. “That's an impossibly long shot.” But when he went to move, he looked down at the ground at his feet and caught his breath.

There he was, dead, facedown in a hole clogged with tiny willow, with just the gray hump of his enormous shoulders pushing up through dead leaves. Right next to him were a dozen sets of tracks from my gum boots. I had been walking past him all morning, looking ahead instead of down.

“Damn,” was all I managed to say, almost falling down. “Wait until the boys see this!”

David cracked such a wide grin it looked like the top of his head would fly off. “So much for their theory that Dad can't shoot any longer!”

We could barely wrestle him out of the hole, but it was too wet to get a truck back there, so we tried to drag him.
Eventually, David fell on his back, laughing. “We need help—I feel like I'm pulling a car sideways.”

It was getting colder again, with afternoon shadows seeping out into the field. I looked at my watch. “It's well past three. Liam and Mike will be at the house.”

“Mike?” said David. “I don't know. Remember Thanksgiving. You know how he is about animals. You'll have to clean it with him watching. Then you'll have to think about what The Harbour Program will say if he's involved.”

I shook my head. I was ready to give up on any calculation of Mike's emotional dewpoint, but I did have left a flickering hope that somewhere within Mike's snarly bundle of contradictions was, as in most boys, the one clear thread of an appropriate little savage.

As for The Harbour Program, I knew, of course, that they'd much rather our family didn't hunt, that Mike not be exposed to any aspect of the violence of it. I knew a growing segment of the population shared the same ambivalence, but from my sardonic and irreverent perspective the alternative was blandly despicable. Most children now are far too bleakly segregated from life; they operate in a world of video arcades and television and mind-numbing mall jaunts, isolated schools, and insipid, un-meaningful “meaningful activities.” Few of them ever seem to read a book, stake long it is left to us, is the last activity I can think of that still bridges the gap between what men and children do. And it's all about family. It's not something you send your sons to do while you watch, but rather something they begin to assume responsibility in at an early age, tutored by a grandfather or an uncle or a father, and then involving other uncles and brothers and cousins, and then finally teaching younger cousins, nephews, and children. And all of that is ever so much more than a brief season in the autumn. Hunting extends itself throughout the entire year
in preparation and practice, in game meals and in a thousand stories—most particularly in stories. Stories are what you are, were, and will be. And Mike is one of the “will bes” around here now.

So for all of those reasons and because I knew that with Sue gone seeing clients, Mike would be alone in the house, I said to David, “No, we need his help. Leave it up to him. Let him come to us out here in the field if he chooses.”

David set off, and five minutes later I heard the distant slam of the kitchen door, then Mike shot out of the house, his blond hair flashing like a mirror under the shadows of the trees as he ran down and down and then out to where I was standing. He still ran with an awkward, toe-in gait, one shoulder stumbling forward and the other lurching for balance. But he ran on and on, laughing when the dogs caught up with him.

As he ran I remembered Joanne reviewing his medical records, picturing the seventy-pound, nervous little waif that he was in the spring and saying, “I don't think he'll ever be able to walk long distances. He may never be strong.”

When Mike got there, he danced like a young Iroquois warrior around the buck. “You did it! You did it!” He laughed and laughed. “This is bigger than
Brendan's
, bigger than
Frank's
… it's bigger than
Henry's?

Impressed and perplexed in spite of my earlier thoughts, I sighed. This was a brighter, shinier piece in the ragged, fractured ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that was Mike, but I didn't know whether it was a piece of blue sky, a piece of the mountains, or maybe a corner. I didn't know what the picture of Mike was supposed to look like when it was finished.

In a minute or so David and Liam showed up, David shaking his head at the sight of Mike and Liam grinning. Then, with the four of us huffing and puffing, we got the animal back to the house and used a car hitch to pull him up into the hemlock.

An hour later the vehicles started pulling into the drive.

And a couple of hours after that I was standing there in the barroom looking at Mike and remembering the deer, remembering how Mike had acted that afternoon.

“Rich, there are more and more of those people coming,” Mike said now.

I groaned. All I wanted was to shower, eat, and lie down. “Mike, you go out and talk to them if you want to.”

He took a step forward and then a step back. “
Me?”
He trembled as if with an electric shock.

I hadn't really been serious, but when I saw something work its way into his face I said, groping my way, “Answer their questions, Mike.”

“Can I have a flashlight?” he yelled at me.

He looked like a hound chafing at the leash, and I was startled. “Uh, sure—there's one behind the bar.”

A short time later I was coming out of the shower in my robe when Sue came in and grabbed my arm. “Do you know what you started?”

“Huh?”

“Don't turn any lights on. Just walk into the office and take a look outside.”

I could hear a strange, loud voice before I even put my head close to the window. A dozen men were outlined in the headlights from their cars and trucks, others were pulling in, and Mike was standing in front of them, gesticulating like an impresario as he swung the beam of the flashlight upward, emphasizing various points about the deer. His frosted breath was puffing white in the hazy darkness, and although typically loud, it was a relaxed and totally new voice. No tension, no stress, the words fluid and clear. “My dad shot this. This is the biggest deer in America, even in the whole state. He shot it with one shot even though it was almost a mile away. I helped him bring it home, and David helped, and …”

All those fears bundled up inside that strange little person,
and yet the commonest of fears, that of getting up in front of a group of new people and talking, wasn't numbered among them.

Then I thought I understood. “Mike's not afraid of or angry with strangers—only with people he has a relationship with.”

“
Yeah
,” Sue said slowly, “you're right. It's creepy. It's exactly backwards, isn't it?”

Where had I just heard that?

Then I remembered—and also what I had neglected to tell Sue the day before. “I think I might know what's been bothering him.”

“I hope so,” she said, hunched up and looking through the window. “The little wretch should've been sent to us with an instruction manual.”

We were standing knee-deep in pre-Christmas litter in the barroom. Dusty boxes with newspaper-wrapped Santa Clauses and ornaments, many little decorations various kids had made over the years in grammar school or Boy Scouts. Where to put the large antique crèche scene that Aunt Alice had given us years ago? It takes fifteen or so square feet to set up, and if one of the pieces got smashed, Sue would be heartbroken.

“How's your karate practice going?” I asked her. Her response to my theory that it was the karate test that was bugging Mike had been disbelief, followed by a vow to help him practice, if that really was the issue. (“Hey, I've seen all those Bruce Lee movies….”)

Now she was picking the odd piece of last year's tinsel off her sweater. “I haven't done anything. He's been real good in the morning ever since he got involved with you and that deer, so I've just let it go. His problem probably wasn't karate at all. If anything, he acted up because we've been so busy lately and he felt pushed out of the way.”

“Sue,” I said doubtfully, “I don't think that was it.”

“Rich, don't worry. Tomorrow's Tuesday, karate day. I'm sure he'll go.”

But Mike didn't go. He found out I was going down to the taxidermist that night and begged and begged until Sue and I agreed he could go along.

The taxidermist was a young guy named Curt Cabrera who had just opened a business called the Wild Art Studio in Highland. Tony Tantillo from Sunset Sporting Goods had recommended him. “This guy just won the nationals,” Tony told me. “He does incredible work. Go see him.”

So Mike and I trucked on down there, a frosty, clear night with the stars like diamond shards overhead as we quietly swept past the views of the Hudson, the only sound in the truck cab the soft hum of the heater fan.