Wingshooters (13 page)

Good things were happening here; even I could see that. I wanted to take a peek inside of the building, so I slowly walked my bike closer and looked around the corner. There was another door and a window maybe five feet off the ground, with a pile of cinder blocks nearby. I was standing there thinking about moving the blocks closer to the window when the side door opened and Mrs. Garrett stepped out. She didn’t see me at first—she looked tired and preoccupied—so I watched as she closed the door behind her, pulled her blue coat shut against the cold air, and leaned heavily on the railing. Then her eyes met mine, and she jumped.

“Goodness, Michelle, I didn’t see you there,” she said, as casually as if she talked to me every day.

I gripped my handlebars and fought the urge to pedal away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Oh, so you
do
talk.” She smiled, and her face seemed warm and open. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, neat bun, and as she turned her head I saw again the structure of her cheekbones, the full lips, the confident set of her jaw. “Park your bike,” she said now. “Come over and sit with me.”

And even though I’d biked out there specifically to see her, even though I’d made the trip for the purpose of talking to this woman, the invitation to actually do so put me into a nervous fright. This was typical of me at nine years old, and is still typical of me now: I want to understand and experience things, but only from a distance; only while I still hold a part of myself away. I did what she instructed, though—rested my bike up against the wall and went over to the stairs. She sat down on the top of the steps, but I stood there at the foot of them, hand curled over the rail.

“So what brings you out this way?” Mrs. Garrett asked.

I looked at her hands. They were graceful, able hands, impossibly long. On one finger there was a wedding ring, and on her other hand a heavy ring that looked like my father’s ring from college, which my grandmother had kept as a testament to his unfulfilled promise. And I had the strangest sensation, then, of wanting to feel those hands upon me. But all I did was shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“It’s at least three miles from town,” Mrs. Garrett said. “That’s quite a trip for a girl your size.”

“I do it all the time,” I said, my pride flaring suddenly. “I go out to the state park almost every day in the summer.”

Mrs. Garrett smiled, glad to get a rise out of me. And she probably knew full well why I was there. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “It probably keeps you out of trouble.”

A car pulled into the parking lot, and we both watched as it kicked gravel up and turned into a space. Then Mrs. Garrett fixed her eyes on me. “How long have you lived here, Michelle?” she asked. “Have you been here your whole life?”

“No,” I said, letting go of the railing and hugging myself against the cold. “I was born in Japan. I just moved here last summer. Well, I guess the summer before last.”

“Japan! That’s quite a ways away. And you live now with your grandparents?”

I nodded.

She seemed to hesitate before asking the next question. “And where are your mother and father?”

To my surprise, I felt my eyes fill with tears. “They’re not here,” I said. I looked at her shoes, the door, my bicycle. “My mother left, and my father went out to look for her. But he’s on his way back now. He’ll be here soon.” I made it sound like she’d just gone up to the market and hadn’t returned in the expected time. But three years had passed now since my mother had left, and more than a year since I’d last seen my father.

Mrs. Garrett nodded as if this story was not surprising to her. “I lived with my grandparents, too,” she said. “My father worked for the railroad, and my mother was a live-in maid, and so my grandparents had to take care of us. My parents would come and stay with us whenever they could.”

“Why did you come here?” I asked suddenly, and I realized that this was something I’d been wondering for weeks. Mrs. Garrett looked taken aback for a moment, but then her expression turned thoughtful.

“I had a chance to make a difference here, with the clinic growing and the new nursing school. Also, I like the man I’m working for, Dr. Gordon. I knew him before, in Chicago. When he asked me to help him, it was too good a thing to pass up.” She laughed. “I never thought Joe and I would end up in Central Wisconsin, but I suppose you didn’t, either.”

“But,” and now I ventured a look at her, “a lot of people here don’t like it.” As I said this it occurred to me that she was the only woman I knew who wasn’t a housewife, or a teacher, or a grocery clerk. There must have been other nurses at the clinic, of course, but I didn’t know who they were. And Mrs. Whipple, the nurse at school, seemed more adept at applying bandages and administering hugs than providing any substantive care. Plus, Mrs. Garrett had been brought specially; she’d been handpicked by the head of the clinic. She seemed above the other nurses, more important. And from the vantage point of adulthood, I wonder now—was part of the town’s animosity toward the Garretts related to their jobs? It was bad enough, in people’s eyes, that a black couple had moved to Deerhorn at all. How much worse was it that the Garretts did not conform to their ideas of what black people could be? That they were professionals, with more education and skill than almost all the white people in town?

Mrs. Garrett nodded and sighed, and just for a moment the lines deepened around her eyes. “I know, but we couldn’t let it stop us, Michelle. If you only do things to make other folks happy, pretty soon you’ll end up doing nothing.” And now her face took on a defiant expression that reminded me of her husband. “Besides,” she said, “we’re not just rolling over for these people. The more they push, the more determined we are to stay.”

I looked at her and wondered if she really knew what she’d gotten into. “Aren’t you scared?” I asked her.

“Aren’t
you
?”

I thought about that for a moment. I thought about what I’d just said—that people didn’t like that the Garretts were there. The same thing had been said about me, I knew, and also about my mother. Had
she
been scared, discouraged, and was that why she hadn’t come back? Had she felt a level of hatred and threat that was greater than what I’d experienced? Even with the dirty looks and harsh words I’d endured, even with the fights and the rocks, there was something that kept me from thinking that I was ever in real danger. Maybe it was because I knew that as much as people might disapprove of me, their actions stopped at a certain point because of Charlie. But there’d been nothing protecting my mother, and there was nothing protecting the Garretts, and I knew that better than anyone. I was a daily witness to the hatred they inspired, which was both similar to and more intense than the hostility directed at me.

Just then, the door opened and a middle-aged man came out. He was wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard, and he moved so quickly that both of us snapped to attention. “Hello,” he said absently in my general direction, not really seeing me. Then he turned to Mrs. Garrett. “Betty, we need you in here. There’s a kid with a 103-degree fever.”

“Well, looks like my break’s over,” said Mrs. Garrett, standing up. She smiled at me. “Nice talking to you, Michelle.”

SEVEN

O
n the first day of deer hunting season, my grandfather’s alarm went off at three-thirty. I wasn’t going with him—he didn’t want me out in the woods on opening weekend, which attracted so many of what he called “drunk once-a-year hunters” who were trying to get away from their wives—but I still got up to watch him get dressed. He pulled on his camouflage jacket, which was covered with dark green splotches that looked like wet leaves, his lace-up hunting boots, and a thick orange cap. In a leather bag he carried over his shoulder he packed binoculars, knives, a compass, rope, his lunch, and ammunition—cylinders, encased in bright red plastic, that were longer and thicker than my fingers. He opened the gun cabinet and took out his deer hunting rifle and some heavy rope to reinforce the stand. Charlie seemed agitated this morning, not exhilarated like he usually was before a hunt. I wanted to ask what was wrong but there was something in his demeanor, in the way he threw his gear around, that made me afraid to bother him with questions. I knew, though, that any anger he felt was bad news for the deer. At four o’clock he left to meet his friends.

All day my grandmother worked the house, worrying. Charlie had been shot once years back, by a hunter who mistook his movements for a deer. He was proud of that scar, pulled up his pants leg and fingered it sometimes when he had too much to drink. My grandmother washed the dishes extra hard that afternoon, vacuumed like she was punishing the carpet. At lunch she even opened a can of beer and drank it out of a juice glass. She kept looking at me like she was about to say something, but then appeared to decide against it. I didn’t know why she was acting so strange. I stayed up in the attic with Brett and did my best to stay out of her way.

A little before three p.m. a loud honk announced the return of the hunters. My grandmother and I rushed outside just in time to see Uncle Pete’s brown pickup truck pull into the driveway, followed by my grandfather’s Pontiac. In the bed of the truck two deer were laid out on their sides, back to belly. Uncle Pete and Earl got out of the truck, looking more businesslike than happy; Jake was with them but he stayed inside the cab. Ray Davis and Jim Riesling were in Charlie’s car; they tipped their caps at us as they got out and made their way over to the truck bed. My grandfather rushed into the garage to lay newspaper on the floor while Pete and Earl dragged out the first deer. Uncle Pete grabbed its front legs and Earl its hindquarters, and they both swore at the flies that swirled around the carcass as they shuffled with it toward the garage. It was a midsized young male. Two small horns protruded out of its head with three points each, like a series of bent, twisted fingers. Even from the steps I could see its open brown eyes, the tuft of white in its tail, the soft black velvet nose. I could see the dark red blood, vivid and obscene against its golden fur. Every two feet a drop of it hit the pavement.

They took it into the garage. There they tilted it, hindquarters up, while my grandfather tied a thick rope around its legs and strung it up from a wooden beam. It swung back and forth, its front legs extended as if reaching for the floor. The three men smiled now and wiped their hands on a towel; they looked at the deer with expressions of satisfaction and power and something very close to lust. My eyes traveled down the length of the deer’s body to the paper on the cold cement floor. The blood dripped in slow-spreading circles.

As soon as the men turned to go back out to the truck, my grandmother went inside. I stayed on the stairs, though, inching closer to the driveway. As Jim and Ray pulled the second deer out of the bed, a doe, their expressions were much more sober. I remembered then one of my grandfather’s steadfast rules: never hurt anything female. He must have known I was thinking this, because he came toward me as his friends lugged the body to the garage. “Earl got her by accident,” he said. “He was aiming for the buck, but once he hit her, we had to take her down.”

His face stayed impassive as they carried her by. She was smaller than the buck, with lighter hair, a smear of blood against her shoulders and flanks. They were holding her upside down, waist level, and there beneath her tail I saw the vulva, exposed, each fold open and distinct in the afternoon sun. They strung her up by her hind feet, next to her mate. I didn’t want to look at this, so I glanced back into the bed of the truck, where bits of fur and blood and feces were crusted onto the metal. Some blood-soaked newspaper fell out of the back and fluttered noisily away toward the street.

The other men left then, all except for Pete, who always stayed behind to help gut the deer. Usually I liked to be there when Charlie did this kind of work. I’d sit for hours next to his work table down in the cellar, watching him pluck feathers off of ducks, bone and clean fish, slice up rabbits and deer for freezing. (And now, when I see signs up in deer hunting country for
processing deer
, I feel like the hunters are cheating, not abiding by one of Charlie’s other cardinal rules: you should always take care of what you kill.)

But that afternoon, something didn’t feel right. My grandfather was always happy this time of the day, tired but still full of energy. He loved to come home after a successful hunt, loved the transformation of his kill into food. Today, however, he was somber, and his mood seemed to be about more than the fallen doe. While Pete stayed in the garage to set up buckets for the blood, I followed Charlie down to the cellar. He washed his hands in the sink, dried them, and then opened his storage cabinets, pulling down three carving knives and placing them on his work table. Then he glanced up and saw me and gave me a sad smile. “You want to help us out with this, Mike?”

“Can I just watch?”

“Sure. Sure you can.” He looked down, and he seemed to be avoiding my eyes. That scared me, so I finally asked my question.

“Grandpa, what’s wrong?”

He fiddled with the handle of one of his knives and tilted his head, not quite looking at me. “Well, Mike. Well. We got a letter from your dad yesterday.” He put the knife down and scratched at something on the table. “He said he left Missouri and was headed west again. He was in Denver, on his way out to Fresno. He said the job in Springfield didn’t work out, so he had to get back to where he had some contacts. He told us to say …” he trailed off, and I knew what was next.

“He isn’t coming, is he?”

Charlie looked me full in the face. “No, Mike,” he said. “No, he isn’t.”

I just stared at him, and he kept looking at me sadly. We stayed like that for several seconds. Then he reached out with one hand and tried to pull me toward him. I wriggled out of his grasp and shook my head no.

I had to get away, I had to get out of there, so I ran up the stairs and out the front door. My bike was lying in the front yard where I’d left it earlier in the day, and I bolted down the driveway and picked it up. I started to pedal away without knowing where I was headed. I couldn’t go out into the country, which would be over-run with hunters, so I rode up to Buffalo Street. But there were plenty of hunters right there in town, their pickup trucks taking all the parking spots in front of the coffee shop and gun store. I veered off of Buffalo and over to the park by the church, figuring correctly that it would be empty. And there I picked up rock after rock and threw them as hard as I could. When I saw the flicker of a squirrel’s tail high up on a branch, I started throwing at the squirrel, not really to knock it down, not really to hit it, but because it gave me a place to aim.

I wanted to hurl those rocks until there was nothing left to throw. I wanted to get out whatever was inside me. Because throwing those rocks, like biking—like the running and lifting and hiking I do now as an adult—was not only about working the body, but exhausting the mind. And my mind was filled with things I didn’t want to think about. My father had been planning to visit for Thanksgiving, and now he wasn’t coming. He was supposed to come and get me, but he wasn’t going to. All of the hope and anticipation I’d felt over the last few weeks was collapsing under the weight of itself. I didn’t know what to stand on; I didn’t know where to turn, and I had nothing left now to look forward to.

On top of that, even the things that had felt like solid ground were shifting beneath my feet. I had just biked away from Charlie and Pete; for the first time I was running away from them. This was new, because in the past I had always wanted to be near them; there was no better place to be than in their company.

But in the last few weeks their company had begun to feel less safe. What I had always seen as their strength and fortitude had crossed over into something different, unfamiliar. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t go out to the country; I could not figure out where to be. And so I stayed in the park hurling rocks at the trees until I was too tired to think anymore.

Deer hunting season only lasted three weeks, but that fall it felt more like three years. My grandmother kept me from taking the bike out after school and on weekends, wisely preventing me from heading out to the woods where the shooting seemed to go on day and night.

But this was the worst possible time for me to be trapped inside. I couldn’t sit still with the news about my father; I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t stand to look at his postcards, either, so I took them all down, hiding them in the back of my shirt drawer. If he wasn’t coming back to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving, then when was he going to come? Why was he headed out west again? Did it have something to do with my mother? This possibility was the only thing that helped ease my disappointment. I held on to a sliver of hope that maybe this was all a part of a bigger plan. But in the meantime, the days I was stuck indoors were a slow, cruel torture.

Throughout those weeks my grandfather was gone more than usual, spending time at Earl’s gun shop before he came home for supper, and hunting on the weekends when his friends were off work. When he was home, he tried to entertain me—telling me stories of hunting adventures from seasons past, letting me sit on the end of his couch while he poked me with his feet. But none of this could break through my somber mood. Every day I wondered if there’d be word from my father, a call or letter saying where he’d settled for the moment, some indication of what would happen next. But there was nothing, and Charlie’s efforts to cheer me up didn’t help, and as much as I wanted to go to him, to give over to his caring, something was holding me back.

He could sense this, I think. Sometimes I’d look up at him and find him staring at me intently. But if he knew my disappointment was about more than my father, if he sensed that I was feeling uneasy even there, with him, he didn’t mention it. The only thing that gave me comfort through this time was Brett, and he definitely knew that something was wrong. He was even more attached to me than usual; he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. When I was sleeping he would curl himself around my head, and now, when I opened my eyes in the morning, I’d find him already awake, looking down at me with his ears perked—worried, protective—until I rubbed his head and told him good morning, and that he was a good dog, and that everything would be all right.

In mid-November, on the last Friday of deer hunting season, Jim Riesling came over as always. We had just settled down in the living room—except my grandmother, who was finishing up the dishes—when the telephone rang. She came out of the kitchen to answer it, wiping her hands on her apron. When she picked up the phone and heard what the caller had to say, she bunched the apron in her fist.

“Charlie,” she said, “you’d better come here. This is Ray, and he’s over at the clinic. They’ve got Kevin Watson—he was taken there this afternoon—and now they’ve called in social services.”

Charlie pulled himself up off the couch and went into the dining room, looking so angry that I shrank back in my chair. Jim kept his eyes on the television screen, wearing an expression I couldn’t decipher. After my grandfather took the receiver, he stared down at the desk where the telephone was and mostly listened to Ray, sometimes breaking in with things like “When?” and “What now?” and “Why can’t you do something about it?” He stood through the entire conversation, one hand clenched around the receiver, the other curled into a loose fist that he tapped lightly on the desk. I saw the tense muscles in his arms, in his back, and now, thinking of my grandfather, of what he was like, I imagine how hard it must have been for him—a man so used to solving things with his strength and his will—to be confronted by something he couldn’t solve physically. Then he was off the phone and he kept looking at the desk for a minute, until my grandmother asked, “Charlie, what happened?” I had come into the dining room, and Jim had stood up, and Charlie turned slowly to face us.

“Earl took Kevin to the clinic this afternoon, the emergency room. And somehow things got twisted around and they called in social services.”

Jim’s face was set, his voice even. “And then they called the police?”

Charlie shook his head. “No, that’s the thing of it. They
didn’t
call Ray. They called the county sheriff.”

Jim looked beyond Charlie, somewhere past his shoulder. “Well, the clinic is a county operation, even if it’s in town. So maybe they always deal with county law.”

Charlie shook his head. “It’s plain disrespectful to the local police for the county to butt in that way. They flat-out bypassed Ray and his men.”

“Maybe it was because they knew that Ray wouldn’t do anything about it.”

There was an edge to Jim’s voice I’d never heard before, and Charlie must have noticed it, too. He looked at the younger man and asked, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

But Jim just raised both hands and turned away. In the silence left by his refusal to talk, my grandmother asked again, uncertainly, “What happened?”

Charlie took a moment to gather himself and stop glaring at his friend. “Well. Those social workers talked to Kevin I guess, and the sheriff’s deputy talked to Earl, and they decided that it was all a whole bunch of nothing and released Kevin back to his dad. But they kept the boy there for hours. Scared the hell out of him, it sounds like. Ray got wind of it sometime in the afternoon and went over to talk everyone down.”