Perfectly Good White Boy (9 page)

Eddie could barely make it up the deer stand. It was kind of hilarious, when I thought of of Hallie doing it in no time flat. Eddie and all his swimming and lifeguarding and caring about his clothes and how tan he was, losing his mind when he broke a pair of his expensive sunglasses. He'd wanted to go hunting with my grandpa and me forever.

Once we got up top, Eddie was still winded. And he looked freaked. Normally, deer hunting was no big thing; we went, tried to fill our tags—sometimes succeeding, sometimes not—and my grandpa did all the field dressing and then we'd haul it out and go have a big breakfast somewhere and then he made it all into venison and that was awesome. We'd eat venison all winter long. But I hadn't really ever given much thought to the details until Eddie asked me all these questions today. But now he wasn't talking. Just breathing his frosty-ass breath out, looking around the fields. Like it wasn't deer coming but some kind of enemy.

I ran my hand down the stock of the shotgun my grandfather had given me for today. It was a nice gun, a 12-gauge, better than the .410 he'd given Eddie. But I had the M16, the Marine-issue rifle, on the brain. I'd watched a show about the history of Marine snipers, and it was pretty cool, what they could do, the scout snipers. The M16 was a pretty sweet-looking gun, too. I liked the scope especially. It was sort of a little-boy idea, but I wished I had it now, since shotguns, having no range, don't have scopes. At least I didn't have the goddamn .410. Eddie seemed unlikely to fire it, though. He held it too tight, for one thing. Like it made him nervous. At least the safety was on. I told him I'd tell him when to take it off. I really didn't want him shooting at shit up here, when I thought about it.

Guns didn't make me nervous, for some reason. I got how they worked. Pretty simple, really. Not a lot of time for dicking around when it came to guns. You cleaned them, you loaded them, they worked.

“I don't see your grandpa,” Eddie said, looking through the binoculars.

“Give it a while,” I said.

“What do we do? What if you see one?”

“You don't have to take any shots,” I said. “It's fine. It'll be over pretty quick, anyway. If it happens at all.”

“Oh.” He breathed out a long, visible exhalation.

I'd figured Eddie wouldn't like hunting, but we hadn't done anything together, with no girls at least, in a long time. I just wanted to be normal with him again. Do stuff. Get past the whole broken-nose thing, the whole ignoring him all summer for Hallie thing. We'd picked him up in my grandpa's Suburban at three thirty in the morning, and Eddie's mom had been standing on the doorstep in her bathrobe, handing him a little tiny cooler and his backpack, as if he was going to kindergarten or something. She looked at us, all decked out in blaze orange, like we were nuts. Eddie's dad had been there, too, in his windpants and stocking cap, smiling and putting his earbuds in like he was about to go out for a run. Eddie's dad was pretty fit, he ran marathons and stuff, but he was the kind of dude who got his hair cut every week and liked to golf for fun, not kill things in the woods. And Eddie had two sisters. It wasn't a big man cave, Eddie's house.

“Why do you want to kill a doe?”

“I don't,” I said. “Brad's the one with the doe tag.”

“But why would you want to do that in the first place? Don't you want the mothers to live and have more baby fawns and stuff?”

“There's too many of them, bucks and does, in the first place,” I said. “That's the point of the hunting season. To reduce the population. Too many deer, and they'll starve. The cute little fawns won't have anything to eat.”

“What if the doe is pregnant?”

“She won't be now,” I said. “That's not till spring. Jesus Christ. How come you don't know all this shit? This is like Science 9 shit, Eddie.”

“It's just weird, is all.”

“Why would you want a doe, though? What's the big deal with a lady deer? Doesn't Brad want, like, a giant trophy head with antlers and stuff?”

“Shh,” I said. Because I could hear something. That little picky sound deer made. Skittering over stuff. Deer were dumb. They didn't know how to keep their steps quiet.

We kept listening, and then soon enough, I could see something. I pointed.

“Where?” Eddie said, reaching for the binoculars.

“Shh,” I hissed at him. I wondered if Neecie'd be able to hear this. Probably not. Neecie wouldn't be a hunter, if we were cavemen. Some giant creature would probably have eaten Neecie, with her bad ears and all, if she'd been alive back in the Stone Age.

Which meant probably she wouldn't be a Marine. Couldn't pass the physical requirements. They'd talked about that in the sniper-scouts show. You had to pass a vision test, so for sure you couldn't be a Marine if you couldn't hear. For some reason, as I raised my shotgun and exhaled, the way Grandpa Chuck had taught me, I was bummed out for her.

Then the deer stepped into view, right in front of me: a buck, not a big one, but big enough, judging from the size of its rack. And then, in that weird slidey way deer have, instantly there was another beside it. Like a magic trick, like it had slipped out of the other deer's pocket. Then another. Three of them, pausing in a row. Like they thought it'd be sneakier if they were hiding behind each other or something.

“Right there,” I said as quiet as possible. Pointing.

“Where?” Eddie looked panicked. Like they were going to attack us or something.

“Shh,” I said again. And then, as if they'd heard him, they were running across the cornfield, kicking up frost and dirt, and Eddie was about to say something but I didn't hear it because that's when I unloaded the 12-gauge, all five shots.

“Jesus Christ!” Eddie said. He'd been knocked with the brass as they'd been spent. I wanted to laugh. The 12-gauge's trigger was slicker than normal; most guns, you squeeze the trigger, you don't pull it. But the 12-gauge was especially light; the barest squeeze made a pretty damn loud shot.

“What the hell, Sean!” Eddie said. He looked like he might have shit his pants. Which made me laugh. That, and I was happy. It looked like I'd got at least two of them. Maybe even all three of them. Two bucks and maybe a doe. Unless it was a first-year buck. We'd need to get closer to see for sure.

I put the safety on, nudged Eddie to start moving. But he just sat there, his breath coming out of his mouth, all dumb.

“Seany, you do all that shooting?” My Grandpa Chuck, calling up.

“Yeah,” I said. “There were three of them. I got at least two. Maybe all of them.”

“No shit,” my grandpa said. “That's unbelievable.”

“I know.”

“What if they're not dead?” Eddie whispered.
Now
he was whispering. Like it still mattered.

“If they're not, they'll be soon enough,” I said. “Doesn't take long for them bleed out.”

“God,” Eddie said, looking sick. Like he didn't want to come down from the tree.

Eddie had no idea how lucky this was. Not just one good shot, but two or three? If I'd got them all, then I'd filled almost all our tags. Something Brad couldn't say this year. Or last year, either. I mean, I wasn't happy to make things dead. But what did people do before, when there were no grocery stores and stuff? This was how you ate. This was how you lived. It wasn't like we were doing it to be mean. If you wanted meat, well, you had to deal with deadness.

“Where's Brad at?” I asked my grandpa once Eddie and me were both on the ground.

“Should be along soon, I'd guess.”

My grandpa looked thrilled; his face was bright red and smiling. He was old, in his late sixties, I think, his face was all leathery and wrinkled, and he didn't have any hair anymore, even white hair, but he didn't seem so old when we were hunting. He had a full kit of good gear he wore; he wasn't all sloppy like you'd expect an older guy to be; he rocked the high-tech stuff: wrap-around anti-fog Oakleys, layers of Under Armour, waterproof Gore-Tex, that kind of thing. He made the rest of us look like kinda bad, actually, amateurs tossing blaze orange vests over our chests. Brad in his stupid duckhunter's camo, me in my old Carhartt coat and Eddie in his snowboarding jacket. But I liked how serious my grandpa took it, hunting; I liked that he was always trying new things every year, not just being crabby and traditional about things. He was always reading stuff about it. He'd been a veterinarian before he retired, so animals were kind of his thing. That was another part of this; it wasn't so much about killing things, hunting. It was doing stuff with my grandpa. He'd always taken us hunting. My dad never went with us; he had some hang-up about guns or hunting. Or maybe he was just being pissy about Grandpa Chuck; he and his dad didn't get along that good. But me and Brad had been going hunting with our grandpa since we were little. Grandpa Chuck had been the one to sign us up for gun safety classes, taught us how to shoot tin can targets out at his house in the country. I'd got my first doe when I was thirteen.

“Let's get to it, then,” my grandpa said. He put his arm around Eddie's neck and started telling him about field dressing as we hiked out to see my kill. I was trying not to run toward it, be so obvious and proud, but goddammit, I couldn't wait to see my brother's damn face when he strolled up.

The sun was rising, hot and white, when we got to the kill site. Sure enough, there were three of them. All three tags, in one go, still steaming in the morning chill. I couldn't believe it, all over again. Grandpa slapped me on the back.

“Think this time you'll want to field dress them?”

“Hell no, Grandpa.”

“Chickenshit,” he said. Laughing.

“Hey!” I said. I was smiling like crazy. “You expect me to do everything around here?”

I got closer to see where I'd hit the deer. Two in the chest, one in the neck. One was still alive, its hooves wavering in the air. That was the doe. The other two were bucks, their racks sticking into the mud. My grandpa knelt beside the doe, put his hand on her chest, and pulled out his field kit, laid it on the ground. Then he pulled a knife from it and slit the doe's throat. Her hooves stopped moving pretty quick then.

“Whoa,” Eddie whispered to himself, stepping back, his eyes on the blood puddling in dark lines in the corn rows.

My grandpa put his gloves on, started on one of the bucks.

“Jesus,” Eddie muttered, his hand over his nose, when my grandpa made the first cut, breastbone to balls. The guts started tumbling out of the white-fur belly, all vivid red and blue, and Eddie stepped back from the smell. I started breathing through my mouth, swallowing a lot to avoid the stench; my grandpa had taught me and Brad that.

“First time's the hardest,” my grandpa said, glancing at Eddie, who looked like he wanted to barf all over his shoes. I tried not to laugh, for Eddie's sake. “This one's a second-year buck, Sean,” Grandpa Chuck added.

“Sure that's a second-year buck?” Brad, adjusting his ball cap, out of breath from running. “Looks like a first-year. You should have stayed up in the stand. Waited for more.”

I didn't say anything. Saying anything would give him something to argue with. And right now, Brad couldn't argue with shit. I'd filled my tag, plus his damn doe tag, plus Eddie's. If he wanted to sit around and try to fill the last one, he could do it himself.

“More than enough work, dressing these three,” my grandpa said. He glanced back at Brad. Brad put his hands on his hips in a kind of bitchy way.

“Are you . . . is that normal to do that? Cutting around the asshole?” Eddie asked my grandpa.

Grandpa Chuck didn't even look up. “You don't want to nick the intestines; you'll ruin the meat.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie said, his face squinching up like he was trying to hold in puke. But he didn't stop looking.

“There's a little creek down a ways,” Brad said. “Saw some tracks over there from last night's snow. Might be another place to check out.”

The buck's gut sack slid out then on the ground, the blood in the dirt thick as oil. Eddie stared at it like he was hypnotized.

“Be a waste not to try,” Brad continued.

“Are you just going to leave all that . . . all that stuff, here?” Eddie pointed to the innards my grandpa had just removed from the first buck. “Just let it sit here? On the ground?”

“That's what ravens and buzzards are for,” Grandpa Chuck said. “Think of it this way: everything living's just waiting for the dinner bell.”

“I mean, I could go next weekend too,” Brad said. “But Krista's got the weekend off so we can do this wedding thing . . .”

I wondered how long he was going to talk to himself. It made me feel even better, for him to sit there babbling to himself about his unfilled tag.

“Do you skin the fur off, too?” Eddie asked.

“Some people do,” my grandpa said. “I like to take the hide off once I'm back home. It's a little easier at home, in my shed. I've got all the equipment. It's not as cold, either.”

“It's twenty-nine degrees, are you kidding?” Brad asked.

“Wind's coming up,” my grandpa said, moving on to the next deer. “Eddie, will you get that tarp out? We'll need to wrap that one before we tie it up.”

Eddie squatted beside my grandpa and got to work.

“So, we gonna keep going or what?”

My grandpa sat back on his heels, looked up at Brad, put on his fancy mirrored Oakleys, the expensive-but-cheesy kind the hockey players at school always wore. For some reason, they didn't look douchey on my grandpa's face, though.

“I'd say we pack it in, son,” Grandpa Chuck said. “Gonna be more than enough work getting these out of here. Seany blew his wad early, but we still have to haul everything out. Might as well do it and then go get some breakfast.”