knew that if I left it alone, McKlearey’s raspy vote for inertia would tip it. At that moment I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to go up into the high country, but I was sure of one thing; I didn’t much like McKlearey, and I did like Mike Carter.
“It’s what we’ve been talking about for the last hour,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “All you guys were so hot to trot, and now Mike comes up with something solid—a real chance to do some real hunting, not just a little Sunday-morning poaching with a twenty-two out of a car window—and everybody gets tongue-tied all of a sudden.”
“Didn’t you get enough of maneuvers and bivouac and shit like that in the Army?” McKlearey demanded, his eyes narrowing. I remembered what Jack had told me about crossing him.
“I did my share of field-soldiering,” I told him, “but this is hunting, and that’s different.”
“Are you gonna pay to go out and run around in the brush?” He was getting hot again. God, he was a touchy bastard.
“If the price is like Mike said it was, and if we can work out the details, you’re goddamn right I will.” A guy will make up his mind to do something for the damnedest reasons sometimes.
“You’re outa your fuckin’ skull,” McKlearey said, his voice angry and his face getting kind of pinched in.
“Nobody’s twistin’ your arm, Lou,” Jack said. “You don’t have to go no place.”
“I suppose you’d go along, too, huh, Alders?” For some reason, McKlearey was getting madder by the minute. He was twisting around in his chair like a worm on a hot rock.
“You damn betcha,” Jack said. “Just give me ten minutes to pack up my gear, and I’ll be gone, buddy—long gone.”
“Shit!” McKlearey said. “You guys are just blowin’ smoke outa your fuckin’ ears. You ain’t even got a rifle, Alders. You sure as shit can’t go deer huntin’ with a fuckin’ shotgun.”
“I could lend you guys rifles from the pawnshop,” Sloane said very quietly. He was leaning back, and I couldn’t see his face.
Mike swallowed. I think the hope that it would go had been a very faint one for him. Now, a strange combination of things had laid it right in his lap. “I’d better get a piece of paper and figure out a few things,” he said.
“The bugs are about to get me anyway,” Sloane said. “Let’s take the keg into the kitchen.”
We carted it inside and sat down around the table in the breakfast nook to watch Mike write down a long list with figures opposite each item.
McKlearey straddled a chair over in the corner, scowling at us.
Mike finally leaned back and took a long drink of beer. “I think that’s it,” he said. “Figure fifty for the horses and the guide—that’s for a week or ten days. Food—probably twenty-five. License, ammunition, stuff like that—another twenty-five. Most of us probably already have the right kind of clothes and a guy can always borrow a sleeping bag if he don’t already have one. I figure a guy can get by for a hundred.”
We sat in the brightly lighted kitchen with the layer of cigarette smoke hovering over our heads and stared at the sheet of paper in front of Mike.
I glanced out the window at the rusty glow of the dying fire. The hills over on the peninsula loomed up against the stars.
“I’m in,” I said shortly.
Mike scratched his cheek and nodded. “A man owes himself one good hunt in his life,” he said. “It may start a small war in the Carter house, but what the hell?” He wrote his name and mine on the bottom of the paper. “Jack?” he asked my brother.
“Why not?” Jack said. “I’ll probably have to come along to keep you guys from shooting yourself in the foot.”
Mike put Jack’s name down on the list.
“God damn!” Cal said regretfully. “If I didn’t have the shop and the lot and—” He paused. “Bullshit!” he said angrily. “I own them; they don’t own me. Put my name down. I’m goin’ huntin’. Piss on it!” He giggled suddenly.
Mike squinted at the list. “I’m not sure if Miller—that’s this guy I know—will go along with only four guys. We might have to scrounge up a few more bodies, but that shouldn’t be too tough. You guys might dunk about it a little though. I’ll call Miller on Monday and see if we can’t get together on the price of the horses and the guide.”
“Guide?” Jack yelped. “Who the hell needs a goddamn baby-sitter? If you can’t find your own damn game, you’re not much of a hunter.”
“It’s a package deal, shithead,” Mike said. “No guy is just gonna rent you a horse and then point you off into the big lonely. He may not give two hoots in hell about you, but he wants that horse back.”
Jack grumbled a bit, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. It was going to go; it was really going to go.
Mike called a guy he knew and found out that the season opened on September 11, just about a month away. “At least that’ll give us time to get our affairs in order.” Mike laughed. “You know, quit our jobs, divorce our wives, and the like.”
We all laughed.
Suddenly McKlearey stood up. He’d been sitting in the corner, nursing his beer. “Where’s that fuckin’ paper?” he demanded.
Mike blinked and pulled it out of his shirt pocket.
McKlearey jerked it out of his hand, picked up the pencil Mike had been using, and laboriously wrote along the bottom.
“Louis R. McKlearey,” he wrote.
“What the hell—” Jack said, stunned.
“Fuck ya!” Lou snapped. Then he leaned back his head and began to laugh. The laugh went on and on, and pretty soon the rest of us were doing it too.
“Why you sneaky son of a bitch!” Jack howled. “You bad-mouthed the whole idea just to get us all hooked. You sneaky, connivin’ bastard!”
Lou laughed even harder. Maybe the others accepted Jack’s easy answer, but I wasn’t buying it. Not by a damn sight, I wasn’t.
After that, things got noisy. We all got to hitting the keg pretty hard, and it turned out to be a pretty good party after all.
I guess it was almost three in the morning by the time we got Mike home.
“I was gonna take you by to see Sandy,” Jack said as we drove back to the trailer court, “but it’s pretty late now.” His voice was a little slurred.
“Sandy? Who’s that?”
“Little something I’ve got on the side. She’s a real fine-lookin’ head. Tends bar at one of the joints. You’ll get a chance to meet her later.”
I grunted and settled down in the seat. I realized that I didn’t know this brother of mine at all. I couldn’t understand him. A certain amount of casual infidelity was to be expected, I guess, but it seemed to him to be a way of life. Like his jobs and his wives, he just seemed to drift from woman to woman, always landing on his feet, always making out, always on the lookout for something new. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t so worked up about Lou and Margaret. I guess the word I was looking for was “temporary.” Everything about him and his life seemed temporary, almost like he wasn’t real, like nothing really touched him.
I drifted off to thinking about the hunt. Maybe I was kind of temporary myself. I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have a girl, and I didn’t have a job. I guess maybe the only difference between Jack and me was that he liked it that way, and I didn’t. To him the hunt was just another thing to do. To me it already seemed more important. Maybe I could find out something about myself out in the brush, something I’d sure as hell never find out on a sidewalk. So I sat musing as the headlights