up or went bad.
He saw in the mirror that he looked old. He glared at his reflection and asked, “Where’s your medicine bottle and sweater?” He thought of his mother who sat for years in the rocker, her thick, ginger-shellacked cane hooked over the arm, and fled into his books, reading until his eyes stung and his favorites were too familiar to open. The heavy autumnal rain hammered on the trailer and stripped the leaves from the trees. Not until the day before deer season was he well enough to drive up to Stong’s feed store for more books.
He went through the familiar stacks gloomily, keeping his weight off the bad leg and hoping to find something he’d overlooked among the stacks of fine-printed agricultural reports and ink-stained geographies.
He picked up a big dark album that he’d passed over a dozen times. The old-fashioned leather cover was stamped with a design of flowing feathers in gold, and tortured gothic letters spelled “Family Album.” Inside he saw photographs, snapshots, ocher newspaper clippings whose paste had disintegrated, postcards, prize ribbons. The snapshots showed scores of curd-faced Stongs squinting into the sun, Stong children with fat knees holding wooden pull-along ducks, and a black and white dog Hawkheel dimly remembered.
He looked closer at one snapshot, drawn by something familiar. A heavy boy stood on a slab of rock, grinning up into the sky. In his hand a fishing rod pointed at the upper branches of a spruce where a bobber was hopelessly entangled in the dark needles. A blur of moving water rushed past the boy into a black pool.
“You bastard,” said Hawkheel, closing the album on the picture of Stong, Bill Stong of years ago, trespassing at Hawkheel’s secret pool.
He pushed the album up under the back of his shirt so it lay against his skin. It felt the size of a Sears’ catalogue and made him throw out his shoulders stiffly. He took a musty book at random—The Boy’s Companion—and went out to the treacherous Stong.
“Haven’t seen you for quite a while, Leverd. Hear you been laid up,” said Stong.
“Bruised my knee.” Hawkheel put the book on the counter.
“Got to expect to be laid up now and then at our age,” said Stong. “I had trouble with my hip off and on since April. I got something here that’ll fix you up.” He took a squat, foreign bottle out from under the counter.
“Mr. Rose give me this for checking his place last winter. Apple brandy, and about as strong as anything you ever tasted. Too strong for me, Leverd. I get dizzy just smelling the cork.” He poured a little into a paper cup and pushed it at Hawkheel.
The fragrance of apple wood and autumn spread out as Hawkheel tasted the Calvados. A column of fire rose in the chimney of his throat with a bitter aftertaste like old cigar smoke.
“I suppose you’re all ready for opening day, Leverd. Where you going for deer this year?”
“Same place I always go—My Place up on the Antler.”
“You been up there lately?”
“No, not since spring.” Hawkheel felt the album’s feathered design transferring to his back.
“Well, Leverd,” said Stong in a mournful voice, “there’s no deer up there now. Got some people bought land up there this summer, think the end of the world is coming so they built a cement cabin, got in a ton of dried apricots and pinto beans. They got some terrible weapons to keep the crowds away. Shot up half the trees on the Antler testing their machine guns. Surprised you didn’t hear it. No deer within ten miles of the Antler now. You might want to try someplace else. They say it’s good over to Slab City.”
Hawkheel knew one of Stong’s lies when he heard it and wondered what it meant. He wanted to get home with the album and examine the proof of Stong’s trespass at the secret pool, but Stong poured from the bottle again and Hawkheel knocked it back.
“Where does you fancy friend get this stuff?” he asked, feeling electrical impulses sweep through his fingers as though they itched to play the piano.
“Frawnce,” said Stong in an elegant tone. “He goes there every year to talk about books at some college.” His hard eyes glittered with malice. “He’s a liberian.” Stong’s thick forefinger opened the cover of The Boy’s Companion, exposing a red-bordered label Hawkheel had missed; it was marked $55.
“He says I been getting skinned over my books, Leverd.”
“Must of been quite a shock to you,” said Hawkheel, thinking he didn’t like the taste of apple brandy, didn’t like librarian Rose. He left the inflated Boy’s Companion on the counter and hobbled out to the truck, the photograph album between his shoulder blades giving him a ramrod dignity. In the rearview mirror he saw Stong at the door staring after him.
Clouds like grey waterweed under the ice choked the sky and a gusting wind banged the door against the trailer. Inside, Hawkheel worked the album out from under his shirt and laid it on the table while he built up the fire and put on some leftover pea soup to heat. “‘Liberian!’” he said once and snorted. After supper he felt queasy and went to bed early thinking the pea soup might have stood too long.
In the morning Hawkheel’s bowels beat with urgent tides of distress and there was a foul taste in his mouth. When he came back from the bathroom he gripped the edge of the table which bent and surged in his hands, then gave up and took to his bed. He could hear sounds like distant popcorn and thought it was knotty wood in the stove until he remembered it was the first day of deer season. “Goddammit,” he cried, “I already been stuck here six weeks and now I’m doing it again.”
A sound woke him in late afternoon. He was thirsty enough to drink tepid water from the spout of the teakettle. There was another shot on the Antler and he peered out the window at the shoulder of the mountain. He thought he could see specks of brightness in the dull grey smear of hardwood and brush, and he shuffled over to the gun rack to get his .30–.30, clinging to the backs of the chairs for balance. He rested the barrel on the breadbox and looked through the scope, scanning the slope for his deer stand, and at once caught the flash of orange.
He could see two of them kneeling beside the bark-colored curve of a dead deer at his Place. He could make out the bandana at the big one’s neck, see a knife gleam briefly like falling water. He watched them drag the buck down toward the logging road until the light faded and their orange vests turned black under the trees.
“Made sure I couldn’t go out with your goddamned poison brandy, didn’t you?” said Hawkheel.
He sat by the stove with the old red Indian blanket pulled around him, feeling like he’s stared at a light bulb too long. Urna called after supper. Her metallic voice range in his ear.
“I suppose you heard all about it.”
“Only thing I heard was the shots, but I seen him through the scope from the window. What’d it weight out at?”
“I heard two-thirty, dressed out, so live weight must of been towards three hundred. Warden said it’s probably the biggest buck ever took in the county, a sixteen-pointer, too, and probably a state record. I didn’t know you could see onto the Antler from your window.”
“Oh, I can see good, but not good enough to see who was with him.”
“He’s the one bought Willard Iron’s place and put a tennis court onto the garden,” said Urna scornfully. “Rose. They say he was worse than Bill, jumping
