Texas Summer (4 page)

“Boy, I want you to rent me out a corner of that tree-house of yours,” he had said.

Harold had a notion of what he wanted to do, because he had heard his father say to Les Newgate even before the structure was finished: “I’ll tell you one thing — usin’ that open field straight ahead down there, this would make one hell of a deer-stand. A four-power scope an’ you could knock their ears off!”

And Les Newgate had looked it over and said: “Well, I reck-
tum.
”

“Now this deal is gonna be just between you an’ me,” his grandfather had explained. “You don’t need to say anything about it to your mother.”

Harold was surprised at the precaution.

“How come?” he wanted to know.

His grandfather, who often had a chaw of Red Man in his mouth, had given a long slow spit.

“Your mother,” he said quietly, “is a mighty fine woman, I reckon you know that?”

“Yes sir.”

“But there is one thing that she does not, to this very day, unnerstan’
whatsoever!
”

He paused, adjusting the chaw, pausing long enough so that Harold was obliged to look at him expectantly and even to ask, “What’s that?”

“That a
deer,
” the old man went on carefully, “is a
varmint.
”

“A varmint? You mean like a woodchuck or a possum?” His grandfather had nodded vigorously. “That’s right!” he said in the kind of barking tone he sometimes used for emphasis. “That’s right! They
will rob you blind!
”

As soon as the norther had let up, it had begun to snow — an icy mist of a snow, but enough to turn everything a shimmering white.

“Now be when he git the first deer,” C.K. said, “after he put out his
setup.
”

Between the tree-house and the pond was a stretch of unfenced field too rocky for pasture. A woodlot bordered the field, and it was there, on the edge of the woodlot, just into the field, that the old man put out his “setup” — which consisted of a bale of hay, a scattering of rotten apples, and, “just to be on the safe side,” he had said with a chuckle, a twenty-five-pound salt lick. Then he leveled his flat-shooting 243 Winchester, with his special hand-load, out the tree-house window, clamped it down, and zeroed in on the setup — firing at a dead branch he had stuck in the ground so that the end of it was about two feet above, and two feet to the side of, the salt lick. When he had adjusted and readjusted the windage and elevation so that he clipped the top of the branch three times in a row, he screwed the clamp down tight.

“That way he go for the heart-shot,” C.K. had explained. “He done study it out.”

“Well, how come you know so all-fired much about it?” Harold asked.

C.K. tilted his head back and half closed his eyes. “’Cause you see ah work on the setup a’fore now. You daddy use the setup onct a few years back. Ah hep with it. You wudn’t two, three year ole at the time. You gonna see some good shootin’, Hal, if he let us stay up here with him. They say you gran’daddy don’t miss.”

But Harold was not overly impressed.

“It don’t look all that faraway to me,” he said concerning the distance to the setup. “I bet it ain’t any farther than that hunnert-yard bull’s-eye target we used with the twenty-two.”

“Well, that’s as may be,” said C.K. with genial authority, “but your gran’daddy be goin’ for a
pre-
cise shot, you see — either to the heart or right behin’ the ear. He got to git ’im with jest one shot, you see.”

In exchange for their assistance — carrying out the bale of hay, the salt lick, and the bag of apples — and for their promise to help drag away the carcasses, his grandfather had let Harold and C.K. sit with him in the tree-house; in fact, he had encouraged them, to the great irritation of Harold’s mother, to spend the previous night, in order that the place would not be “colder than a witch’s tit” when he got there in the morning at slightly before dawn. And they had made a big thing of it, Harold and C.K., bringing pallets and blankets, and a Coleman lantern for warmth, camping out, with C.K. even wearing on his belt an old army canteen that Harold’s grandfather gave him for the occasion. So that what had begun as a mere notion — sitting with the old man during his vigil — had become something of an adventure: a winter night in a tree-house — quite an unheard of occurrence in these parts, but, as it turned out, most enjoyable; the Coleman lantern gave off a soft golden-orange glow of warmth. Outside, the night wind might whistle eerily in the branches of the tree all around them, and carry from afar the crazed threats of screech owl and coyote, but inside the golden glow of the tree-house, snug in their blankets, Harold and C.K. were feeling no pain.

“Mighty cozy heah,” said C.K.

“Yep,” Harold agreed, but added a minute later: “That dang screech owl is sure close, ain’t he?”

“Now, Hal, don’t start up,” said C.K. “Them is jest night sounds. Screech owl be lookin’ for his supper. He lookin’ for squirrel an’ mouse...an’ for little snake...” He laughed softly. “And coyote lookin’ for him.”

Although the tree-house had been carefully and sturdily built, its construction was such that there were enough cracks between the boards to afford a good view of whatever might happen in the distant field. And after Harold’s grandfather had arrived and sat down behind his Winchester, they did not have long to wait. The layer of fine white mist that shrouded that part of the field where the enticements had been placed had gradually drifted away as the morning light grew stronger; and what was revealed at once, as though it had been standing there all along, standing on a stage, waiting for the curtain to rise, was a magnificent male deer — a large buck that stood with raised head, its nostrils flared and releasing small puffs of steamed breath into the cold morning air — nostrils that appeared to have a fix on the pungent aroma of the putrefying apples, or perhaps the sweet crisp delicacy of the baled alfalfa. Harold watched as the deer started to move forward, slow and tentative, like an undecided dancer, very careful, as if aware of a certain vulnerability. Inside the tree-house the click was audible when his grandfather moved the safety on the gun, and the shot, two seconds later, was deafening. The deer collapsed, its legs simply folding beneath it.

“Mighty fine shot, Mistuh Steven,” C.K. was the first to say.

“It sure was, Granddad,” said Harold, unsure what to say, this being his first experience in such a matter.

By the time they reached the deer, it was lying on its side, its legs now straight out. Harold had been the first down the tree and he was the first to reach the deer. While still some distance away, he had made out the rising steam, created, as he knew, by breath from the deer’s mouth and nostrils — but when he got much closer he saw that it was also coming from somewhere else. The deer was lying on its right side, so that the side its heart was on was up, toward the sky, and there, on the deer’s chest, just behind the upper foreleg, was the hole made by the bullet; and blood was pumping out of the hole — rising an inch or so in small regular spasms, each creating a puff of steam when it hit the cold air.

Harold stayed a few feet away, resting on one knee, waiting for the others to arrive, which they did almost immediately. C.K. dropped down beside him and his grandfather paused there as well, breathing hard after his brisk walk from the tree-house.

“Ain’t a bad-lookin’ buck, is he?” he said. “Eight-pointer, I reckon...” And he crossed over to it, knelt down, leaned forward, and put his mouth over the blood-flowing wound. “You don’t git too many like this,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You gotta take advantage.” He gave them a sly grin. “C.K., you wantta bring your canteen cup over here.”

“Yes suh,” said C.K., removing it from his belt as he took it over.

The blood, which still rose out of the wound in rhythmic surges, had slowed noticeably, but the old man was able to half fill the canteen cup before it stopped. He handed the cup to Harold.

“Old Indian custom,” he said. “Ain’t no taste like it.”

Harold put the cup to his lips and tilted it. He had already decided he did not want to swallow it no matter how it tasted. Truth to tell, he did not even want to taste it, but he could see there was no getting out of that. He tried to hold the liquid against his upper lip, letting only the smallest sip into his mouth, hoping it would look like a respectable swallow. The taste was warm, sick-sweet, and salty at the same time. Instead of swallowing it, he tried to just keep it somewhere in his mouth, under his tongue and around his gums. And he passed the cup to C.K.

While C.K. was still dealing with it, Harold’s father and Les Newgate had come up, each wanting a sip; Harold’s father had one, and passed it to Les.

“Is she still hot, Les?” the old man asked.

“Yep,” said Les, finishing it off in a gulp and wiping his mouth. “No taste like it. That boy git any?”

“Sure as hell did,” said the old man, sounding proud of it. “An’ C.K. too.”

Harold’s father laughed. “Well, C.K.,” he said. “You may be the only nigger in this county to ever taste hot deer blood.”

C.K. laughed aloud at the notion. “I reckon you may be right about that,” he said.

“I’ll bet he’s the best one too,” said Harold, uncomfortable that his father had used the word.

“Boy, I know that,” said his father in a flash of irritation. “Why hell, C.K. is family.”

Next to him Les Newgate was still licking his lips. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” he drawled, looking at Harold with a crazy grin. “They say a man can git
right drunk
on hot deer blood!”

That use of the tree-house as a sort of backyard deer-stand marked the beginning of its decline. Harold’s mother, ordinarily a woman of placid temperament, was upset.

“What if Aunt Flora had been here?” she had demanded, referring to her sister from Dallas who sometimes came for a visit. “And little Caddy? What would they have thought about luring deer up like that, with a salt lick and so on, and then killing them?” When she inadvertently heard about the hot-deer-blood incident, she just said, “Good Lord!” and did not want to hear any more about it.

So after getting a second deer, and filling their locker with venison, Harold’s grandfather took the salt lick back to the barn. The hay and the apples soon disappeared, bringing to a close the days of the setup. Harold overheard his grandfather explaining it to Les Newgate: “The boy’s mother was havin’ a tizzy-fit about twice a day. I finally threw in the goddam towel.”

“Reckon she’ll change her mind,” said Les, “when they’s no more apple fer her pies.”

“That’s right, that’s right!” the old man barked and slapped his leg.

But even in the absence of inducements, deer would occasionally cross the field, presenting those rare targets of opportunity, so much more dramatic and tempting than the ones at the County Fair shooting gallery, and indeed Harold did finally succumb — shooting his birthday .22 rifle out of the tree-house window and making a good shot, but on what proved to be a pregnant doe — resulting in much hullabaloo and chastisement.

Not long after that misfortune, Harold and Big Lawrence, his friend from in town, had been horsing around inside the tree-house, wrestling and shoving and pummeling each other, not in anger but with great enthusiasm, and Harold had fallen, out the door and all the way to the ground. One of the lower limbs of the tree fortunately broke his fall, but also his left arm. At that point it had been decided that, all things considered, the tree-house might be a bad influence on a growing boy, and it was dismantled.

Now, almost five years later, the events were like a hazy afterglow to Harold as he and C.K. walked back toward the house, the big marijuana plant stashed in the sycamore behind them.

“Listen, Hal,” said C.K. about halfway on, “ah tell you right now, you don’t wanna say nothin’ ’bout this to nobody up to the house. Or to Big Lawrence or any you other frien’ in town.”

“You mean ’cause it’s against the law?”

“That’s right,” said C.K.

As they walked on, Harold tried to read C.K.’s face for something beyond his answer, but could see nothing. They walked in silence.

“Listen,” Harold finally said, “is your brother still in jail?”

C.K. didn’t answer at once, just looked at Harold without expression, then nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come he’s in the dang jail!”

“He ain’t in the jail — he in the road gang.”

“That’s the same thing, ain’t it?”

“Worse.”

“Well, how come he’s there? What’d he do?”

“Nothin’.”

“Bull,” said Harold, kicking at a rock. “I heard he
killed
somebody...for messin’ around with Cora Lee Lawson.”

C.K. gave him a dull look. “Well then, you know so much about it, why you ask me?”

“’Cause I just
heard
it — I never said I knowed it for sure.” He waited. “How long is he in there for?”

“Oh, he in there for a
long
time,” said C.K. He chuckled. “They may of throwed away the key on ole Big Nail.”

“Well, how come he’s there in the first place?” Harold demanded.

C.K. sighed. “Well, he there mainly ’cause of bad luck, that’s how come he there.”

The boy scoffed. “‘Bad luck’ — you call killin’ somebody ‘bad luck’?”

“No, the bad luck was when the sheriff come along — jest after it happen. Ain’t nobody call the sheriff, he jest come along...by bad luck.” He looked at Harold to see if he understood, then added: “It weren’t no white folks’ business, you see, them fightin’ like that. The sheriff got no business comin’ in there. He jest passin’ by in his car, then he see somethin’ goin’ on, an’ come in — but he got no business there.”

“Shoot,” said Harold, “he’s the dang
sheriff,
ain’t he? I reckon he can make it his business to go wherever he wants to.”

C.K. shook his head firmly. “Nope. Not in there he cain’t — not in the Paradise Bar.”

Harold had heard this sort of crazy talk before, about how the Paradise Bar was somehow outside the law, or should be.

“You’re lucky they don’t shut that place down,” he said.