In the Loyal Mountains (15 page)

 

Meanwhile the valley flowered. Summer stretched and yawned, and then it was gone. Quentin brought his children out early the second fall. Zim didn't make the trip, nor did I spy any of the skin magazines. The kids, two girls and a boy who was a younger version of Quentin, were okay for a day or two (the girls ran the generator and watched movies on the VCR the whole day long), but little Quentin was going to be trouble, I could tell. The first words out of his mouth when he arrived were “Can you shoot anything right now? Rabbits? Marmots?”

And sure enough, before two days went by he discovered that there were fish—delicate brook trout with polka-dotted, flashy, colorful sides and intelligent-looking gold-rimmed eyes—spawning on gravel beds in the shallow creek that ran through the meadow. What Quentin's son did after discovering the fish was to borrow his dad's shotgun and begin shooting them.

Little Quentin loaded, blasted away, reloaded. It was a pump-action twelve-gauge, like the ones used in big-city detective movies, and the motion was like masturbating—
jack-jack boom, jack-jack boom.
Little Quentin's sisters came running out, rolled up their pant legs, and waded into the stream.

Quentin sat on the porch with drink in hand and watched, smiling.

 

During the first week of November, while out walking—the skies frosty, flirting with snow—I heard ravens, and then noticed the smell of a new kill, and moved over in that direction.

The ravens took flight into the trees as I approached. Soon I saw the huge shape of what they'd been feasting on: a carcass of such immensity that I paused, frightened, even though it was obviously dead.

Actually it was two carcasses, bull moose, their antlers locked together from rut-combat. The rut had been over for a month, I knew, and I guessed they'd been attached like that for at least that long. One moose was long dead—two weeks?—but the other moose, though also dead, still had all his hide on him and wasn't even stiff. The ravens and coyotes had already done a pretty good job on the first moose, stripping what they could from him. His partner, his enemy, had thrashed and flailed about, I could tell—small trees and brush were leveled all around them—and I could see the swath, the direction from which they had come, floundering, fighting, to this final resting spot.

I went and borrowed a neighbor's draft horse. The moose that had just died wasn't so heavy—he'd lost a lot of weight during the month he'd been tied up with the other moose—and the other one was a ship of bones, mostly air.

Their antlers seemed to be welded together. I tied a rope around the newly dead moose's hind legs and got the horse to drag the cargo down through the forest and out into the front yard. I walked next to the horse, soothing him as he pulled his strange load. Ravens flew behind us, cawing at this theft. Some of them filtered down from the trees and landed on top of the newly dead moose's humped back and rode along, pecking at the hide, trying to find an opening. But the hide was too thick—they'd have to wait for the coyotes to open it—so they rode with me, like gypsies: I, the draft horse, the ravens, and the two dead moose moved like a giant serpent, snaking our way through the trees.

I hid the carcasses at the edge of the woods and then, on the other side of a small clearing, built a blind of branches and leaves where I could hide and watch over them.

I painted my face camouflage green and brown, settled into my blind, and waited.

The next day, like buffalo wolves from out of the mist, Quentin and Zim reappeared. I'd hidden my truck a couple of miles away and locked up the guest house so they'd think I was gone. I wanted to watch without being seen. I wanted to see them in the wild.

“What the shit!” Zim cried as he got out of his mongo-tire jeep, the one with the electric winch, electric windows, electric sunroof, and electric cattle prod. Ravens were swarming my trap, gorging, and coyotes darted in and out, tearing at that one moose's hide, trying to peel it back and reveal new flesh.

“Shitfire!” Zim cried, trotting across the yard. He hopped the buck-and-rail fence, his flabby ass caught momentarily astraddle the high bar. He ran into the woods, shooing away the ravens and coyotes. The ravens screamed and rose into the sky as if caught in a huge tornado, as if summoned. Some of the bolder ones descended and made passes at Zim's head, but he waved them away and shouted “Shitfire!” again. He approached, examined the newly dead moose, and said, “This meat's still good!”

That night Zim and Quentin worked by lantern, busy with butchering and skinning knives, hacking at the flesh with hatchets. I stayed in the bushes and watched. The hatchets made whacks when they hit flesh, and cracking sounds when they hit bone. I could hear the two men laughing. Zim reached over and smeared blood delicately on Quentin's cheeks, applying it like makeup, or medicine of some sort, and they paused, catching their breath from their mad chopping before going back to work. They ripped and sawed slabs of meat from the carcass and hooted, cheering each time they pulled off a leg.

They dragged the meat over the autumn-dead grass to the smokehouse, and cut off the head and antlers last, right before daylight.

I hiked out and got my truck, washed my face in a stream, and drove home.

They waved when they saw me come driving in. They were out on the porch having breakfast, all clean and freshly scrubbed. As I approached, I heard them talking as they always did, as normal as pie.

Zim was lecturing to Quentin, waving his arm at the meadow and preaching the catechism of development. “You could have a nice hunting lodge, send ‘em all out into the woods on horses, with a yellow slicker and a gun.
Boom!
They're living the western experience. Then in the winter you could run just a regular guest lodge, like on
Newhart.
Make ‘em pay for everything. They want to go cross-country skiing? Rent ‘em. They want to race snowmobiles? Rent ‘em. Charge ‘em for taking a
piss.
Rich people don't mind.”

I was just hanging back, shaky with anger. They finished their breakfast and went inside to plot, or watch VCR movies. I went over to the smokehouse and peered through the dusty windows. Blood dripped from the gleaming red hindquarters. They'd nailed the moose's head, with the antlers, to one of the walls, so that his blue-blind eyes stared down at his own corpse. There was a baseball cap perched on his antlers and a cigar stuck between his big lips.

I went up into the woods to cool off, but I knew I'd go back. I liked the job of caretaker, liked living at the edge of that meadow.

That evening, the three of us were out on the porch watching the end of the day come in. The days were getting shorter. Quentin and Zim were still pretending that none of the previous night's savagery had happened. It occurred to me that if they thought I had the power to stop them, they would have put my head in that smokehouse a long time ago.

Quentin, looking especially burned out, was slouched down in his chair. He had his back to the wall, bottle of rum in hand, and was gazing at the meadow, where his lake and his cabins with lights burning in each of them would someday sit. I was only hanging around to see what was what and to try to slow them down—to talk about those hard winters whenever I got the chance, and mention how unfriendly the people in the valley were. Which was true, but it was hard to convince Quentin of this, because every time he showed up, they got friendly.

“I'd like that a lot,” Quentin said, his speech slurred. Earlier in the day I'd seen a coyote, or possibly a wolf, trot across the meadow alone, but I didn't point it out to anyone. Now, perched in the shadows on a falling-down fence, I saw the great gray owl, watching us, and I didn't point him out either. He'd come gliding in like a plane, ghostly gray, with his four-foot wingspan. I didn't know how they'd missed him. I hadn't seen the owl in a couple of weeks, and I'd been worried, but now I was uneasy that he was back, knowing that it would be nothing for a man like Zim to walk up to that owl with his cowboy pistol and put a bullet, point blank, into the bird's ear—the bird with his eyes set in his face, looking straight at you the way all predators do.

“I'd like that so much,” Quentin said again—meaning Zim's idea of the lodge as a winter resort. He was wearing a gold chain around his neck with a little gold pistol dangling from it. He'd have to get rid of that necklace if he moved out here. It looked like something he might have gotten from a Cracker Jack box, but was doubtless real gold.

“It may sound corny,” Quentin said, “but if I owned this valley, I'd let people from New York, from California, from wherever, come out here for Christmas and New Year's. I'd put a big sixty-foot Christmas tree in the middle of the road up by the Mercantile and the saloon, and string it with lights, and we'd all ride up there in a sleigh, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, and we'd sing carols, you know? It would be real small town and homey,” he said. “Maybe corny, but that's what I'd do.”

Zim nodded. “There's lonely people who would pay through the nose for something like that,” he said.

We watched the dusk glide in over the meadow, cooling things off, blanketing the field's dull warmth. Mist rose from the field.

Quentin and Zim were waiting for money, and Quentin, especially, was still waiting for his nerves to calm. He'd owned the ranch for a full cycle of seasons, and still he wasn't well.

A little something—peace?—would do him good. I could see that Christmas tree all lit up. I could feel that sense of community, of new beginnings.

I wouldn't go to such a festivity. I'd stay back in the woods like the great gray owl. But I could see the attraction, could see Quentin's need for peace, how he had to have a place to start anew—though soon enough, I knew, he would keep on taking his percentage from that newness. Taking too much.

Around midnight, I knew, he'd start smashing things, and I couldn't blame him. Of course he wanted to come to the woods, too.

I didn't know if the woods would have him.

All I could do was wait. I sat very still, like that owl, and thought about where I could go next, after this place was gone. Maybe, I thought, if I sit very still, they will just go away.

M
Y GIRLFRIEND AND I
drove my uncle around the Texas hill country during what was to be the last year of his life. We did not know then that they were his last days—though he did, I think—and we always had a good time.
I
'm married now, and this girl we drove around with, Spanda, is not my wife, and I was never fooled into believing that one day she might be. All this happened a long time ago; I have been saying it's been ten years for so long that by now it is truthfully more like twenty.

Uncle Zorey was single and had never been married, never had children. It's possible that he spoiled me. Zorey owned a machine shop, and custom manufactured large cranes and bulldozers, and he always had money, unbelievable amounts of it. My father and mother used to laugh about it, because he never seemed to know how to spend it. My father was a professional golfer of sorts. He was thirty-eight years old then, and still trying to make it on the big circuit, the tournament circuit, and he and my mother traveled a good bit. I was their only son, and I stayed with Zorey when they went on the road. My father and mother were very much in love, and loved to travel. There was not the least bit of resentment from them that Zorey was so rich, while we were not. The fact that they enjoyed his company so much was one of my favorite things about him.

I had been born with one leg a few inches shorter than the other—a cruel joke, because it threw my golf swing way off—and understandably, my father gave up on my chances of becoming a pro by the time I was seven or eight. He had the grace, perhaps given to him by sport, not to push me. He had compassion for people weaker than himself. Although my father loved golf, he was a better person than he was a golfer. But he was still a very good golfer, just not among the best, and he'd won or finished high often enough to raise me and to support my mother.

My father had, and still does have, a bad back, and I remember that my mother was always rubbing it. After a match, when my father limped home, she massaged it with a rolling pin. In school I was teased about my father—this was in Texas, back in the sixties. It was widely believed that golf was a sissy's game, with the manicured greens, the caddies, the little electric golf carts, and the natty way of dressing. For a while I tried to convince the other kids in school that my father's nickname was Mad Dog, but it never caught.

When he was home, my father walked around the house with a plastic jug of aspirin in the pocket of his robe, and he was always opening the jug and shaking a few out, swallowing them dry. He wouldn't let himself take anything stronger. I would never ask him how he was feeling—I thought it might remind him of his back pain, if he had somehow managed to put it out of his mind.

 

I remember Uncle Zorey coming over to our house for dinner whenever my parents got back from one of their road trips. It would be a feast, a kind of reward for his watching after me. Mom would do all the cooking, but because Uncle Zorey was an outdoorsman, and because he liked wild game best, he would bring over the food: pheasants and grouse from hunting trips he'd gone on in South Dakota, and venison roasts, and fresh fish he'd caught from one of the many lakes north of Houston. My uncle was a pilot, and often flew by himself to one of these lakes, landing at a grass airstrip outside a tiny backwoods town. He'd give one of the local men a hundred dollars or so for the use of a boat and go out on the lake and catch fish. Sometimes the local man asked to go with him, but my uncle always wanted to be alone. He was a good fisherman, and a good shot. His freezer was always full of fish and game.

At dinner we talked about my school, my fathers golf game, or my uncle's recent fishing trips. We also talked about things my mother was interested in—politics, wars, morals—and about her childhood, which she missed. My mother came from a large family, and grew up on a farm in Missouri. She loved talking about that farm and about the things her brothers and sisters used to do—there were nine of them in all—and the trouble they used to get into. She talked about cold mornings, about doing the laundry by hand, and about what a thrill it was to get new shoes—all the old things. She was reliving her history, and we listened to her with awe.