A Hunter's Tale Read online

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  ISBN: 9781543935042

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Prologue

  A solitary snowflake falls in graceful helplessness from a gray Rorschach cloud of countless tons of gravity-outfoxing water crystals and drifts gently onto the wing of a dark-eyed junco as the clever sparrow pulls a semi-dormant wood beetle out of an eroding deck board. The rush of winter vaporizes the frost chip whip snap flapping airborne just ahead of the claws-out leap of a battle scarred tom who’d crouched, ruthless eyes peeping, in a broken picnic basket while hunting a chipmunk which debated a forage mission to capture a heel of homemade bread moldering in a pale sun beam near crooked old stairs installed long ago by a thirsty Block Island born Sturgis bound handyman biker who’d financed Old West states wanderlust with odd jobs featuring cunning use of found materials from collapsing barn scrap for stairs to beer cans and baling wire for tail pipes.

  Tavern raconteurs indifferent to witness testimony converted and yet convert the odd duck biker into a localized blue collar farce stock character and season by season enter the anecdote loop of liquor enhanced humorous story embellishments to tell suspect salty fish-on-a-bike tales substantively dependent on parodic accents – bah, cah, hahdee-hah-ha⟨r⟩h — to earn the vulgar laughter – sounds of dogs and pirates – as prized in smoky old dives as salvation’s lusted for in respectable churches.

  At a 1953 gray paint and Rust-Oleum spotted Ford pick up’s bumper, a hound’s nose intrudes into the little failed Darwinian kabuki: sniiiiiifff, with a moistly soft retroflex approximate what’s all this, then? growl. The rodent trembles underground as the tattered old tom with the sour puss expression stalks along the boardwalk in the regal yea, be thou fornicated manner of felines. I wind down the squeaky window the better to hear the Davis Sisters sing “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” a twangy juke box classic in an establishment unlikely to feature Chuck Berry. Or Gisele Mackenzie.

  The hound yawns, the effect weird – like the old pooch daydreams of being a mythic creature who inhales the world — while less than three feet from the ramparts of my often assaulted ears husky blond annoyance incarnate practices calf sounds. Insults rise to my tongue tip and die in the knowledge that Pasiphae’s sophomoric bawling boyfriend’s capable of beating my often argumentative nates, so I merely comb my shiny black hair in the weak reflection in the other window and fantasize walking the earth a competent adult who speaks freely, behaves coolly and projects the threat of crushing harebrained offenders into serves-ya-right grease stains, but then, probably ninety percent of any adult population wishes to find a way to treat persecutors as mosquitoes or as victims of la strega invernale. Breathe the cold air. Ah. The eye that beholds the weltering sky finds the inner road that leads the troubled soul through sorrow’s vale – beyond both lies unattained if occasionally longed for (and weak flesh doubted) illumination.

  Hmn. Adulthood. Although I still adore the pretty brunette junior who babysat two years ago and after a three hour conversation praised this boy’s intelligence to politely smiling, skeptical parents just home from the NCO club, my recent study of high school students leads me to conclude I loathe virtually every banal and repulsive aspect of teenybopperdom from the mindless bullying to the incessant gossip; from ego tripping power struggles to daft hormonal stupidity impulses; from often relatively useless homework to howled expressions of mandatory enthusiasm – led by modern versions of Artemis’s nymphs in bouncing sweaters with felted wool letters and pleated skirts — in pep ritual worship of the exploits of often gangly or acne afflicted kinesthesia warriors. I mean, the average teen boy mostly knows right from wrong, figures very basic algebra problems, offers moderately anodyne comments on writers as diverse as Chopin and Camus but regularly calibrates auto-hedonic success probabilities via tactile experimentation in places to place the magic boy wand. Nothing with soft folds or pleasant texture’s safe. On the other hand, many a human behaves in much the same manner in looking for a stimulating phenomenon to venerate.

  Then again, I’m now exfiltrating the preadolescent gulag of assumed general incompetence and forced sufferance of (we’re a) family (*&^%# it!) activities such as evenings of hideous LP recordings by bands which harry the ears in faux cool sax infusions of pickled snazz instead of soul tuning arrangements of blue cool jazz; or of mind killing TV shows (I remain afflicted with sort of a 5% nostalgic - 95% hostile memory of hours of forced exposure to the saccharin noise of the affable stiff from North Dakota or the sing-along schmaltz with the goateed chorus leader making upside down OK – or ha-ha arsehole — gestures while leading boisterous at-ease chaps belting out bouncing ball syllables with such masculine abandon as to homogenize most tunes and make many a listener long to trudge off to work… or to a tub. Perhaps with a radio. Or a toaster. And an extension cord). On the other hand, I’m departing the preadolescent realm of subversive acts of repulsiveness, such as the time cousins took turns sneaking over to sniff vinyl upholstered chair seats as adults departed for more beer; each cuz showed quizzical if hilarious wet eyed, flushed cheek expressions of amused disgust, apparently at the lingering fetor of departed pontificating grown up asshole-lee-oh-lee-ohhhs.

  And uh-one and uh-two.

  Frickin’ bubbles. At least I no longer believe, thanks to an appreciation for ethnic music, that shooting an accordion player ought to be classified as no more than an aggravating misdemeanor (but the designation’s fine for, say, a paint ball shot to the head of a donor zombiefied politician).

  “Roll the window up, monkey nuts.”

  Nothing. Nothing. Nasal exhale. Seat creak. Squeakety-squeak-zhuuooop. Pinched and twisted lips.

  The sorry hound with the bad hips carelessly drives the beetle groggily waving spindly antennae and legs into the moldy bread and shambles like a canine version of a crucifixion bound victim up the rickety stairs toward old foggydoggydom on the boardwalk.

  Sarcastic calf sound.

  1

  Son and I hunker in a white ’59 Bel Air sedan with orders to stay bunkered while our R n’ R needful, post-near Apocalypse fathers imbibe Hamms on tap on high stools amongst alcohol and nicotine lovers in a barn board and corrugated steel Black Hills honky tonk with eerie neon beer names inciting thirst in the dirty windows. The Chevy’s parked on a glacial gravel lot strewn with brown pine needles and punctured by dead reclaimant blue grama spears next to a shabby boardwalk outside a side entrance with a poorly mended squeaky pinewood screen door that offers reductionist comments on entering and exiting patrons. The bar sort of squats into a granite hillside near an occasionally one acre, stream-fed pond in a glade between hills crowded with pines — soft and endlessly messy trees that smell like heaven’s perimeter membrane. Recreationalists, sportsmen and -women, workin’ folk and teeth skinners who always find just enough often soiled cash for liquor and cigarettes keep the bar in business.

  Nearby stand or sag opportunistically built aging wood and scrounged junk buildings huddled to form not a town but an accidental settlement of mostly low rent white folk with enough property to claim self-respect and enough survival skills to claim self-reliance. Just about every soul in the vicinity drives through life with a manual mental tranee gear shifting thusly: 1st— aggression against acquaintan
ces; 2nd— aggression against competitors; 3rd — aggression against family; 4th—aggression against nature; 5th— aggression against the Hated; R— withdrawal from either end of the sure foot-in-mouth or likely bone-in-ham situ. Pretty much every person over ten participates in some phase of game processing.

  Various inhabitants first arrived as GI’s and now exist in 20-‘n-out redneck paradise retirement, with shaky marriages or peripatetic domestic arrangements the norm, and most mmmn-gettin’-alongers engage in favor exchanges or boost incomes in weekend hobby shops, volatile games of chance, or seasonal blue collar day jobs – many off book — in ambitiously named boroughs within a gallon or two’s winding jaunt.

  Easily disparaged in our current materialistic paradise, the subsistence folk might riposte, “At least we ain’t like most slobs who walk around with corporate semen running down quaking legs or big government titty juice running down chinny chin chins since World War Two established our big sloppy assed – and corporate owned – sacred cow government as parents and gods.” On the surrounding federal lands various affably hard assed cowpokes run Herefords, Angus, black baldies, even some Galloways. With or without permits.

  Old timers say in the early 1870’s, a wandering alcoholic crank of a miner squatted to move bowels at the site of the current body shop but proved so fearful of imagined hostiles the silly grizzled coot scuttled around aiming a temperamental Colt .44 until fear generated a vision of Crazy Horse lurking sneaky dang savage-style amongst the pine tree shadows. The hyperventilating fool grunted a cubit-long slider into his own gold pan and dang near shot his mordantly hee-hawing donkey – the cantankerous critter later suffered accidental dispatchment near Lead when the scandalized miner fired at a local ostler’s “tetched” mid-teen scion (sort of a Dakota iteration of the hapless horndog of a leviticussedly punished Puritan herdsman, Thomas Granger, the name beastly ironic) who teetered pants down and lard smeared in a crude wheelbarrow behind the hobbled, snorting jenny. The non-deadeye miner’s shameless wails after the tragic fact of the treasured ass’s passing supposedly penetrated two draws and a holler.

  Locals call the settlement Sorry Ass Luck or just Sal. Nobody ever put up a plaque or historical marker. Six winters after the pathetic dump, an aging Deadwood dolly on hiatus with a dose found the well knifed miner’s carcass clutching a pouch with an ounce or so of gold dust in the muck behind a saloon that later burned down in a snowstorm. The dust paid an evidently bipolar mortician with man crushes on gun fighters to pine box and return to the earth under Mt. Moriah’s ponderosas the 99% unlamented and 90% unwashed hard luck scrabbler with a dirty paint and cracked Heronian triangle shingle ephemerally memorialized as “Lost Soul Unknowed Save 2 X.”

  Air Force brats, Son and I live in households where a midair “How high?” remains the appropriate answer to “Jump,” but where a. non-Southern dependents rarely call breadwinners who work for a living “sir,” and b. boys grow up expecting to prove manhood potential in sports, fights, and proper deeds of disobedience contextualized by swift and certain acts of corporal punishment. People call our dads sarge or sard’n or sart’n, as in Sart’n Stone or Sard’n DeAngelo, and on our SAC base’s flight line, no airman and few officers cross the sarcastic man-talking, job error intolerant mechanics who can guarantee the air worthiness of a B-52 or a KC-135.

  Almost every day, the sergeants unwind after hours, knocking down brews in the stag lounge of the Ellsworth AFB NCO club with cronies who rip the crape diem’s sons of bitches while listening to what my Cole-, Clooney-and Sinatra-loving mom calls “belly ache music.”

  On today’s alcohol respite from the ardors of Black Hills venation (a $10 word for hunting) I will learn to hunt connections and bag deals.

  Inside the bar Hank Snow sings “A Fool Such as I.”

  My need for cleanliness trumps the easily revised or modified Fourth Commandment, so I gather a rag and a bar of soap and sprint across the lot to a tap outside a retired old dog’s hobby tinsmith shed in order to wash my faintly bloody hands, dirty face and the cavity of a rabbit I soon wrap in newspaper. Back in less than five minutes, a recently begrimed boy changes behind an open trunk into a clean kid who cocoons into a blue wool blanket in the back seat. I know how to wait: watch thoughts like aquarium fish.

  Grandma Carmen, an acidic complainant in a block of perlato, a woman suspected of some level of Latin blood given the sly old gal’s love of rum and the saucy dowager’s somewhat Puerto Rican pronunciation of certain Italian words, spoiled the father I call FHB (Fair Haired Boy) without sparing the rod and failed to stop the development of a willful personality eventually offered the choice of military service or a juvenile detention center. FHB’s taciturn old man for fifty-three years rises to eat wheat germ on oatmeal, frame houses and then returns to the homey bosom to enjoy a two-hour bottle of ‘gansett while playing schmaltzy radio and adequate if uninspired pinochle at the kitchen table. The flint eyed poppanonno’s nerves created temper explosions with a thick belt (but the early teen FHB survived two thrashings with a phone book in his pants before the raging crank of a disciplinarian got wise…and laughed at the cleverness shown by a “hot sketch”). The government hating (“This morning — Social Security; next week – zzzt! communism!”) old paesano retires with the birds, scowls at children who make annoying sounds – such as speech — and will die spanking spit out of his harmonica on his sixty-ninth birthday. The Lord knows how such an uninteresting man helped to produce a character like FHB.

  I’m grateful when the castle master rumbles home with a grouchy beer buzz instead of a savage whiskey attitude. FHB’s kids treat the violent if sentimental lord the way small mammals estimate a bear’s mood, gauging safety levels of proximity and communication and usually anticipating escape paths.

  My foolish younger brother Kevin earned no sympathy when one blue aired eve the panicked recipient of the night’s rage dove under a bed (no escape, genius), and FHB poked the will out of him with a broom handle while promising to kill him when the little bastard found the balls to crawl into the light of day and face the music like a man — despite clichés and mixed metaphors, the rant sounded pretty dramatic in the passionate tones of kick ass Italish.

  My red-haired mother, Rosa Ayn, Irish-Spanish-Russian, frequently offers stinging criticism of her Marcello Mastroianni looking — in an Ernest Borgnine-ish way — husband. Pretty in makeup and – though taller than FHB — adamant about going dancing on Fridays, Mom fights the good fight of military wives.

  In addition to some height and an eye for absurdity, her contribution to my pheno-genotype includes the power to sincerely rationalize one’s own cow’s inferiority while unashamedly praying the neighbor’s cow dies. Most of Mom’s surplus energy hums into traditional feminine channels: quilting, sewing, pottery (she made our ordinary plates, cups and bowls; I made the troglodytic ash trays). And she reads lots of romances and crime thrillers. Something about Cinderella fantasies and noir simple justice, I suppose, but Mom’s a good critic who can first praise and then rip a text to shreds as if in a room full of lupine grinning English majors.

  The family’s women know gardens. Once, told beets would make my blood more powerful, I ate a dolomite plate of the tedious but nutritious vulgaris betalains. When I later howled at the sight of red piss exiting the boy, Grandma Carmen burst into the bathroom and laughed like a bawdy peasant as I held my piece and burned rubicund.

  In truth, I believe most moms and dads drink secret potions that make the aging conundrums demented guardians and walking cautionary tales. To a parent, a child exists as another annoying cross to bear, a useful prop at gatherings, a source of groan or chuckle-prompting anecdotes, or an unrefined bundle of appetites and impulses to mold into sufficient likeness with sarcasm and brutality. It’s so much better now that experts inflate esteem to empower (one of the most pathetically overused words in the automumbo section of the psychobabble gramarye) — or administer drugs to modify the behavior of each unique and self-evidently wor
thy little snowflake of a hominin — with highly scientific sounding diagnoses, say, attention deficit/oppositional defiant/intermittent explosive disorder or other $100 words in some pharma dharma dependent, pathology-based gold plated rationalization and entitlement warrant.

  Inside the bar, Eddie Arnold sings “Cattle Call.”

  A black Fairlane crunches over the gravel and parks parallel to the Bel Air. Inside, an Elvis man with a modest pompadour makes out with a bespectacled honey pie in a look-at-me! bee hive. Son in the front seat and I on the rear bench watch silently, sort of the dumb way most first-time farm visitors observe brutes mate, but we look away when the doors open.

  Pretty indifferent to the chill in the November air, Pompy tucks in his black shirt, wipes his mouth on a hanky, fixes a tooth pick in the corner of a fishy cupid’s bow mouth and saunters inside, the pine door issuing a squeaky sort of well-well-well of welcome. Honey Pie checks her lipstick, looks about, solves the problem of bunched undies under her pale yellow Brentshire shirtwaist, adjusts the convertible collar, dons an imitation fur, touches up the hive, high heel spears the apparently resigned bug into the bread (but shakes off the wasted daily crust like a heifer kicking off mud), and – slightly bow legged – mounts the stairs (hips motating in probably habitual ooh-la-la voila l’femme pantomime) to stroll, with the door offering a ridiculous fanfare, into the hazed conversation in the bar. I guess I’m as invisible as the persistent chipmunk who watches that damn bread in the zen still if more or less OCD manner of animals seeking dinner.

  Son is two years older than me, and like many an adolescent male likes to share alimentary sounds and odors with targets deemed worthy of Nietzschean condescension. Of course the predictably angry young man makes speeches disparaging his dissension intolerant father, who is intelligent, satiric-minded and cruel.