Gun Guys (38 page)

I opened the piglet’s hide like a valise and sliced out the backstraps—the tender fillets that run along the spine. I didn’t enjoy the feeling. Where I came from, a carcass stripped only of backstraps was the work of a poacher.

All million and a half of Texas’s pigs lived within a mile radius of us, it seemed. As I packed up the fillet meat in a Ziploc bag, another clan came crashing out of the brush in a long line. Accustomed to quiet stalking and single-shot placement, I was amazed to see Casey take off after them at full tilt, firing into the underbrush as he ran. I caught up with him as, panting, he drew his pistol on a writhing pig. “I’m wasted on crosscountry!” he laughed, quoting Gimli from
Lord of the Rings
. “We dwarves are natural sprinters, very dangerous over short distances!” He leaned over and casually shot the pig between the ears.

I looked back as we walked away. The pig lay on its belly, looking comfortably asleep. Leaving a dead animal unprocessed: again, a strange feeling. We ran into another hog family down by the creek, and Casey killed two more before I could even raise my carbine to my cheek.

For about ten minutes, I stalked a deep rustling in the brush, until
a foot-long armadillo came waddling out, laughing at me. Then a big sow materialized from nowhere and, for once quicker on the drop than Casey, I took a shot and seemed to hit her; after some squealing and scuffling in the scrub, a deep moaning echoed through the woods. It was late now; the sun filtering through the oaks made long, spooky shadows. I couldn’t place the direction of the moaning, and as I crisscrossed the area, it stopped. Casey called to me to come on—there was one more spot he wanted to try before we lost the light.

My every impulse was to keep searching, with a flashlight if necessary. The worst thing a hunter could do, according to the hunting ethic I’d learned, was lose a wounded animal: It was cruel, it wasted meat, and it messed up game management, because no tag went on the kill. But, good Sunday school teacher that he was, Casey explained patiently and repeatedly: “That’s not what we’re about here.” To reinforce his point, he pulled me from the woods into a pasture thoroughly bulldozed by hogs. If it had been my pasture, I’d have wanted the hogs dead, too.

“It’s primal; we like to kill things,” Casey said of our species as we headed back to his cabin in the gloom. “You got to be careful how you say it, but it’s true. It doesn’t make us sick. It’s just the way we are. The reason I like pig hunting is, I get to kill a lot of pigs. It’s the distilled essence of the thing. If you told someone you went out and killed seven deer and let them lie there, they’d put you in jail. You tell them you killed and let lie seven pigs, they’re like,
‘Badass!’
”

My mistake may have been to think of Texas pig hunting on the same spectrum as Georgia or Montana deer hunting. All of the outward elements were there—tramping the woods with a gun, figuring out the nature of the quarry, reading sign, and of course the shooting and the blood. I’d started hunting because of the gun, but I realized with Casey that my reasons for loving the hunt had changed. For me, the shooting and the killing were no longer, as Casey would say, “the distilled essence of the thing.” I still loved being in the woods with a rifle in my hands. But for me, hunting was more about the unworldly relationship with one special animal that gives himself over in return for the care you’ve taken to understand him and his habitat. Then his flesh becomes your flesh, sealing the bond.

At the same time, though, I couldn’t find anything wrongheaded or immoral about the way Casey hunted pigs. Through carelessness, people had created the problem of the feral hog, and now it was up to people to ameliorate it. To focus on the cruelty of shooting individual pigs, when
we were ruining habitat and causing extinctions from the Arctic to the Great Barrier Reef, seemed a little silly. And a state dependent on agriculture couldn’t afford an overpopulation of flesh-and-blood bulldozers. Somebody had to kill them, and it made more sense to let sportsmen pay and enjoy it than to spend public dollars to have rangers cull the herd, as Rocky Mountain National Park had done recently to manage an oversupply of elk (to the outrage of Colorado hunters). The pity in Texas was that tons of useful protein—local, free-range, organic, lean pork—rotted in the woods because a raft of laws banned the selling of wild meat.

Gunning down Texas pigs with Casey was, in the end, a gas—the greatest moving-target shooting I’d ever done, even if it wasn’t, for me,
hunting
. It was more like football—our team against theirs, with a score posted at day’s end.

We walked on, doubling back past the spot where I’d lost my sow. A sinister rustling came from our right, and a dozen buzzards rose heavily into the treetops like a panel of black-robed judges. “They found your pig,” Casey said. “You can stop worrying about it now.”

C
hrist almighty, the noise in the Benoit house as the kids got ready for school! Imagine four huge boys—Jackie, Robert, Paul, and Peter—tumbling out of bunk beds in their tiny room, clawing their way into clothes, and fighting to make it first down the narrow hall to the single bathroom. Then the girls, Jean and Judy, too young for school, jostled out of sleep by the tumult, standing in their cribs in the next room, loudly demanding their share of attention. Lucky for everybody, Dad was at his post office job before they all woke, leaving nothing but the smell of his cigarettes lingering in the family’s four rented rooms. He couldn’t stand too much noise, and his temper wouldn’t have done anyone good at seven in the morning. Somehow, with a baby on her hip and another yelling from a high chair, Mom would churn out enough pancakes to stoke the boys, and off they’d thunder to Fletcher Elementary School, smack between MIT and Harvard but culturally a million miles from either.

Cambridge in the 1960s was a rough-knuckled town full of undersupervised kids. By neighborhood standards, Peter was a pretty good boy. He helped out with the cooking, hauled the family laundry to the coin-op up the street, and accompanied his mom to Irish dances above the police station. Sure, he cut school sometimes, broke a few windows playing stickball, but it wasn’t like he was getting picked up for shoplifting. Somehow, though, Dad had it in for Peter special, and he was quick with the strap. Even after Peter was hit by a car walking home from the Laundromat and
was hobbling around in a cast, Dad didn’t let up. Peter suspected that Dad was toughest on him because he was the littlest boy; the bigger boys wouldn’t have stood for it. Benoits could be tough bastards.

It wasn’t that Dad was a drunk, or even particularly mean. He was just an old-school Catholic who demanded things his way, like a lot of the hardworking dads in Cambridge. He’d fought in the Battle of the Bulge and, along with bits of German shrapnel buried in his body, had a pile of German guns and bayonets in the back of a closet. He’d shown them to Peter a couple of times, but, at precisely the moment the boys got big enough to find weapons interesting, Dad sold them. Cambridge didn’t need the Benoit boys running around with a bunch of Lugers and Hitler Youth knives.

Although Peter was a minor track star in high school and got A’s and B’s, nobody talked to him about college—not his parents, not his teachers, not his guidance counselors. At Rindge Technical High School, victory amounted to getting a diploma and finding a job. Peter majored in auto repair, did a stint in the Marines, and came home to the neighborhood at loose ends.

The summer of 1980 was hot and dreamy. Peter hung out with his friends listening to Bob Seger, Van Halen, and Pink Floyd’s
The Wall;
going to see
The Shining
and
The Empire Strikes Back
. He was in a car wreck a couple of days before his twenty-first birthday, and his brother Robert cheered him up by finding a girl he thought Peter might like. He put a piece of paper in Peter’s hand with her name and address. “I met her over on Beacon. Happy birthday.” Peter had two black eyes from the wreck and looked like a raccoon, but he thought,
What the hell
. Robert didn’t often turn him on to girls; this one must be something. He walked over to meet her, delighted to find that her house lay in the morning shadow of Fenway Park. She stood out front, talking to an old man; she was tall, with wild reddish hair that stood up all over the place. She wore some kind of ankle-length tie-dyed muumuu and looked a little like Janis Joplin, truth be told, which ordinarily wouldn’t have been Peter’s thing, but something about her drew him across the street and into a conversation, and within two minutes Peter knew this girl was for him. She seemed to know it, too—he could tell by her eyes and the deep, comfortable register of her voice. Monica, her name was; Peter moved in with her that night.

He had never known anything like their immediate, intimate romance. It was as though they’d been looking for each other for years without
knowing it. Everything about being together was easy and pleasant; he wondered sometimes if they’d known each other in a prior life. And such an admirable person, holding down three different restaurant jobs—a breakfast place in Faneuil Hall, a lunch place in Kenmore Square, and a dinner shift at the Teak House, in Brookline. On top of everything else, Peter ate well.

Monica had endless energy. A bicycle trip up the coast of California? Who’d ever think of such a thing? But it was cool. They rode their bikes up Highway 1 to San Francisco, eating from the boxes of vegetables that farm trucks dropped along the way and making love in that magical Pacific fog.

Back in Boston, Monica came up with another of her wild ideas.
Let’s move to New Orleans; it’ll be fun
. Peter thought,
What the hell
. Boston winters were getting old. So off they went, Monica finding no end of restaurant work and Peter laying carpet, earning enough to buy a splintery house on St. Roch Avenue for $36,000. Peter loved New Orleans—the food, the music, the booze, the easygoing fuck-up lifestyle. He didn’t have to worry about his working-class Boston Catholic accent, because white working-class New Orleanians had a meaty Irish-tinged accent a lot more like his than like characters in
Gone with the Wind
. The only weird thing was having to change how he said his last name. He’d always pronounced his name
Ben-noyt
. When he’d spell it in New Orleans, though, people would say, “Oh! Ben-wah!” So that’s how he started saying it—a new place, a new life, a new name.

Monica had enough energy at the end of her restaurant shifts to work with Peter, cleaning the carpets he laid. It was a nice domestic life—maybe too domestic for a Benoit boy newly transplanted to the City That Care Forgot. In 1987, Monica invited him on another bicycle trip, through Italy to visit her relatives, and Peter said,
Nah, you go. I’ll stay here and keep the money coming
. The minute he put her on the plane, he bought a motorcycle from a tattooed drifter at a wacky three-house commune on Mandeville Street, and while making the transaction, caught the eye of a cute black-haired girl who called herself Kalisch. When Monica got back in September, she took one look at him with his new motorcycle, tattoo, mustache, and that black-haired girl hanging on him and she was out of there. The love of Peter’s life: gone.

Without Monica, Peter spent the next two years wallowing in the hippie and biker scenes, hanging at the commune on Mandeville, getting
drunk or high, and grooving on an endless parade of colorful drifters. He hung a lot with a big, tough biker named Greg who was the walking embodiment of the bad boy Peter imagined himself to be; Greg wore a leather motorcycle jacket, inhaled beers by the can, and seemed ready at any moment to tear somebody in half. It was fun, and shit, man, he was about to turn thirty, so why not have a little fun? Pretty soon he’d have to settle down anyway: Kalisch was pregnant.

One of the crazy dudes from the commune, Harold, came up with a funny idea one weekend in 1988:
Let’s drive to the Metairie gun show!
Guns didn’t interest Peter much, but the show would be amusing. They piled into Harold’s old car and toked up as they trundled along Veterans Highway. At the show, they grooved on the old fat white guys drooling over firearms. It was a riot. Trolling the tables, Peter spotted a neat little .38 revolver with a seventy-five-dollar price tag. He stopped and picked it up. It felt good in his hand. “Fifty dollars out the door,” the old man behind the table said, and Peter thought,
What the hell
. Lots of bad shit was happening in New Orleans. He was going to have a family to protect. A gun might be a good thing to have around. He laid his money down, and the man asked if he needed ammo.

“Sure.”

“Plus-P? Hollow-point? Full metal jacket?” He gestured toward a stack of colorful boxes.

“Whatever’s cheapest,” Peter said.

The vendor threw in a little zippered case.

Harold thought it was hysterical: Peter Benoit buying a gun. And when Peter took it home and showed it to Kalisch, she giggled, too. A gun! He loaded it, then thought,
No, I’ll be safe
. He pulled out one cartridge—the one that would move under the firing pin when the cylinder rolled clockwise. That way, if one of their drunk or stoned friends picked up the gun and pulled the trigger, that empty
click
would give him a chance to think twice. He zipped the gun into its case, put it in the top dresser drawer, and forgot all about it.

Kalisch delivered Callan, a healthy boy, on Peter’s thirtieth birthday, in 1989. It didn’t much slow them down. Callan slept most of the time, and he didn’t seem to mind the rock and roll, the rumble of motorcycles revving, or the heavy musk of incense and weed. But something was changing between Peter and Kalisch. They bickered, and grew more distant. Peter started wondering whether they’d make it, or whether he’d be one
of those guys who never sees his kid. On November 29, they put five-month-old Callan to bed and had a few drinks. Peter did a couple of lines of coke, but they were both in a bitchy mood and argued. They went to bed and lay back to back, quietly seething. Peter, never one to hold a grudge long, started drifting off to sleep. But then the bed moved, and he realized Kalisch was up. He heard her moving in the dark, heard the top drawer open, heard the sound of a zipper.
Fuck
, he thought.
She’s getting the gun
. He threw off the covers, walked across the rolling wooden floor, and turned on a light. Sure enough, Kalisch was standing next to the open dresser drawer, the revolver in her hand. He threw out his arms and thrust out his chest. “What are you going to do, shoot me?”