Wingshooters (21 page)

And this too: he didn’t see that people treated the Garretts the same way they’d treated my mother—and me. He didn’t see that I had as much in common with them as I did with him and my grandmother. For a while, he’d been able to separate me out—to ignore or disregard an entire half of who I was and still hold me close to his heart. But he couldn’t recognize that the kind of difference he’d rejected in the Garretts was also what he looked past in me. And in his failure to see, he showed me something that I should have known already—that in America, in 1974 and even today, blood does not run thicker than color.

But I couldn’t fully grasp or articulate these thoughts, so I stopped talking altogether. It was more than a year before I opened my mouth again. Then my grandmother, who had moved into a senior facility, would pick me up once a week and take me to the Grimsons’ diner, where we’d have halting conversations about my schoolwork (I was being taught at a special school now for emotionally disturbed children) and about her plans to sell the house. We’d never had much to talk about, my grandmother and me, and without Charlie there the talk was even harder. At the end of the visits she’d take me back to the group home and give me an awkward hug. I think we were both relieved when they were over.

There is one memory of my grandfather that sifts itself out from all the hours and days that I spent with him. It was from one of the first times we went driving together. I had arrived fairly recently and I was still getting used to the town, and to life without my parents. Charlie had been taking me around—to the coffee shop, to church, to the gun store—and introducing me to his friends. Even with my shyness and still-halting English, I knew that he was showing me off.

But this day was different. This day we went out to the country, just the two of us, with the dog stretched out across the backseat. “Just wait, just wait,” he said grinning, when I asked where we were going. Finally he slowed the car down and pulled over to the side of the road. We parked on a patch of gravel and walked into the woods. Charlie was carrying a fishing rod and he made me take one too; I’d already learned that catching fish was mostly an excuse for being out in quiet, beautiful places. We made our way along a leaf-strewn trail through stands of birch and cedar, the dog running back and forth in front of us. After what seemed like an eternity, we came upon a lake—one of those clear, pristine lakes that are like hidden treasures, more valuable because you have to earn them. Above us, the sky was light blue with a few high clouds; around us, birds were calling out their greetings. Two deer stood on the opposite shore, gingerly sipping the water. They lifted their heads and saw us and then lowered them, unconcerned.

My grandfather turned to look at me. “What do you think?”

What did I think? I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. The sun was shining at such an angle that the lake was like a mirror, and we could see the reflection of the trees. There was a huge boulder in the middle that I wanted to swim out to. I couldn’t understand how such a place could be so secret, so untouched. I looked up at my grandfather and asked, “How did it get here?”

Charlie threw his head back and laughed. He had planted the end of his fishing pole down on the ground and he held it upright with one hand. “Well, it wasn’t an accident,” he said. “You see how nice it’s set out here in these woods where no one but us could find it? It was done on purpose,
all
of this was done on purpose, and it was God that done it, see? God put this here, and when He does work like this, it’s up to folks like you and me to come find it.”

My grandfather went to church regularly like everyone else in Deerhorn, and said his prayers at night. But I never really knew that he believed in God until that morning in the woods. At home, in church, his words were dutiful and expected. It was only here he spoke with such reverence.

“What’s the name of it?” I asked.

“What’s the name?” Charlie repeated. He scratched his head. “Why, I don’t believe it
has
a proper name. I found it back when I was a boy, and I’ve never told anybody, not even Jim or Earl, not even your pop or your grandma. No one knows about it except you and me.” And now he put his hand on my shoulder and shook me a bit, grinning ear to ear. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s call it Lake Mikey. How does that sound? Lake Mikey, as named by Charlie LeBeau.”

It sounded great. But what makes that day stand out so vividly wasn’t the naming of the lake or even the lake itself. It was the way I felt with Charlie. Out of all the things I had to get used to in Deerhorn, this was the most surprising and wonderful: that this strong, handsome man whose company everyone desired seemed to want nobody’s company more than mine. I was not an afterthought or a bother, as I often felt with my parents; I did not have to compete for his attention. In his eyes, I was good enough, complete, and worthy of his love, just as I already was. Even now, no one else has ever made me feel this way. No one else has ever looked at me with such obvious delight.

The hardest thing about suffering a terrible loss is that you usually survive it. The absence of the thing you loved intensifies and grows until it isn’t something inside of you, but something that contains you, that you inhabit and can’t escape, like a nightmare. And if you are able, through dint of effort and the instinct for survival, to wrestle it down and stuff it back inside, it hardens and scars so brutally that your heart cannot open again.

And if you had something to
do
with that loss, if you had any part in making it happen, then resuming your life is all the more impossible. I’m the one who opened the car door for Brett. I’m the one who let it slip that Mrs. Garrett was alone. I’m the one who drew my grandfather into the clearing, where he made the choice that led to his death. I did these things; I set off these events; I planted the seeds of my own despair. I carry my loss as well as my own culpability, and no matter how much I might want to sometimes, I cannot let go; I can’t die of it. So I have to do something much worse—I have to live with it.

When I was emancipated from the group home at age eighteen, I moved out to California. Supposedly I came here to look for my parents, but other than checking the phone listings in all the big cities, I didn’t make much of an effort. The truth is, I didn’t come here to search for my parents. I came to get away. And after a couple of years of working in Sacramento and saving my money, I went to college and got my degree. I work now in Los Angeles at an alternative high school for troubled kids, and it would be easy to say I’m doing this because of my own life—because of Kevin Watson, and the Garretts, and because I went to special schools myself. But I don’t work there out of the goodness of my heart. I work there to try and shove down my anger and bitterness, which, if unmanaged, would eventually consume me.

People sometimes make assumptions because of my job, my race, and the neighborhood I live in. Most people in L.A. have no idea of where I spent my childhood, and those who do see it as a quaint pastoral episode without connection to my current life. A few months ago I was driving in Central California with a woman who was trying to love me. In the foothills just outside of Sequoia National Park, we came across a field trial competition. Even from the road, I could see some of the action: dogs running out to flush planted birds, and then retrieving them when they were shot. I’d never seen a field trial before and I insisted we pull over. When we got out, I talked excitedly to a couple of the spectators about where the dogs had come from and how they’d been trained, what the best guns were for wingshooting now, in 2011. The woman watched my excitement with growing dismay and finally pulled me back to the car. She couldn’t believe I was so intrigued by a competition that simulated hunting. This, after she’d already been upset with me the week before for skipping a fundraiser to go to a Dodgers game, and for showing up to a fancy brunch in a wifebeater. She sat seething in the passenger seat of my Pontiac Grand Am—I’d refused to make the trip in her BMW—and rolled her window up to shut out the sound of gunfire. “I always forget,” she said, arms crossed and cheeks flushed with anger, “that you’re half-Japanese and half-redneck.”

And so I live by myself, in the city, with its noises and traffic, its unending procession of people. The asphalt landscape of Los Angeles could not be more different from the open fields of Central Wisconsin. Every day my eyes and ears are assailed by the signs of urban life—the gaudy billboards, blaring car alarms, ringing cell phones; the intensity and rush of the city. And maybe this is what I wanted: to live in a place where there is always so much coming at me that it’s impossible to think. But sometimes, on spring nights—it is always on spring nights—I lay awake in my bed with the windows open, and sleep will not find me, and there is something about the quality of the late-night air that takes me back to Deerhorn. It could be that the warmth of April and May holds the suggestion of the greater heat to come. It could be that the wind stirs the trees in a way that reminds me of the trees in the country. It could be that the birds, which sing here through the night, remind me of what it’s like to live in a place where
their
voices, and not the voices of people or cars, are the music of the world.

Whatever the reason, there are nights when I leave my bed at two or three in the morning and step out onto the patio. And then suddenly I am there again, I see it all again—the yard where Charlie and I played catch, the baseball fields in autumn, the trails where Brett and I wandered for miles, his feet silent on the carpet of leaves. I see the cornstalks high and green in the heat of late summer, the geese arcing in jagged V’s across the sky, the deer stomping in irritation before they take off in their compact bursts of flight. I see how the landscape reinvented itself with the changing of the seasons—spare brown to lush green to blanketing white. I remember the quiet of Deerhorn, the deliberate slowness of days in which every moment could be felt and appreciated. And I want it back then, I want it all back, the silence and the beauty, that faded world.

But then I remember what happened there and I know I can never return. Deerhorn has changed now, it’s a different place, and even if it looks exactly the same, it can never be what it was for me when I was a child, what it was in 1974. It can never be that because of what happened, and because I chose to leave. And when you leave something you love you can never go back, for you have so damaged and altered both that thing and yourself that what you had before can never be recovered. And the child who lived in Deerhorn and was once a version of me is dead, or must be dead, in order for the grown-up to survive. In order for the grown-up to tolerate the life that her decisions have forever confined her to.

And yet that child isn’t dead, not really. For while I will not, cannot return to that town, no city will ever contain me. I walk now in a different place, the Sierra Nevada, with another dog—a young liver-and-white springer spaniel named Netty. Netty and I hike for days between the high alpine lakes, living off the trout that I catch, and it’s so quiet up there it almost stills the roaring in my heart.

But no matter how beautiful the Sierra lakes are, I can never forget about Deerhorn. I can never forget that quiet place that has made quiet places so necessary. Still, being up there in the mountains with my sweet, hardworking dog (she, like Brett, flushes grouse I don’t shoot) is the only time I feel anything that’s even close to peace. The high, pine-scented mountains of California aren’t the lush countryside of Wisconsin; Netty’s not Brett, and fishing trout by myself is not the same as fishing bluegill with my grandfather. But it’s the closest I can get with the way my life is now. It’s enough; I have to make it be enough.

My grandfather was buried in the Deerhorn Cemetery on a small rise under a cedar tree. He did not leave much by way of earthly possessions—just the house, which went to my grandmother, who eventually sold it. But he left other things. He left me his love of dogs and of the natural world. He left me his impatience with pretense of any kind, with immodesty or self-importance. He left me with the knowledge of what it is to be loved, to be chosen first among other people. (At his funeral, Uncle Pete came to me with tears in his eyes and said, “
You
were his child, Mike.
You
were.”) And he left me with the harder knowledge that love is not enough; that it’s those you love the most who are most likely to hurt you, and whom you are most likely to betray.

I still own the gun that killed Earl Watson. I keep it in a box on a shelf in my living room, across from the picture of my grandfather’s baseball team. Sometimes I take it out and hold it to feel the weight of its history. I don’t really know why I do this, or why I keep it at all—the gun’s not loaded and I have no ammunition. But it’s important for me to keep it close, close enough to see and touch. Because that gun ended more than the life of a man who deserved his punishment. That gun put an end to my childhood, and broke apart what was left of my family.

About five years after I moved out to California, I got a phone call from my father. It took me several minutes to get over the shock of hearing his voice, and only then could I make sense of his words. He was sorry, he said, for not being in touch for so long. He was in New Or-leans now, with a different woman, and he hadn’t seen my mother in years. Then his voice got low and awkward and he managed to say that he’d heard about what happened with Charlie.

“He harassed that poor couple and then shot somebody, right? He always was a stubborn old bigot.”

My face flushed and I said before I slammed down the phone, “You don’t know a fucking thing about him.”

Sometimes I dream of Charlie and it is always the same. We are driving in a car on a two-lane highway somewhere in Central Wisconsin. The windows are all open and Brett is in back, holding his head up to catch the wind. My grandfather sits easily with one hand on the wheel, his elbow slung out of the window. He looks at me and grins and says, “Should we push it faster, Mike?” And I say yes, yes, and feel the wind on my face and I know he will be with me forever.