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Hunting With Carey

Eland D. Summers

    I had never been hunting before, but my anxiety passed as Carey’s truck jostled me over the lumpy, hilly ground that his family used to tend but now reserved for hunting. The sun was still not up, but I thought that I could see little orange flecks of light unravel the darkness. Carey and I drove in silence; I was still too tired to keep a straight head, and I was a little worried that talking would somehow break a rule of hunting: you don’t talk. I realize, now, that the truck would have not only muffled my words, but scared any deer off long before they even had a chance to see me sitting in the passenger seat. Still, my nerves were tight and taught, a result of the cold spring air. From what I know now, we weren’t supposed to be out hunting at that time of year, but Carey was never a man to give a damn about what the government said we could or couldn’t do. It was his land. Which, sitting in the passenger seat next to him, was good enough for me.
    I wasn’t really sure why I was there to begin with. I wasn’t actually going to do any of the hunting myself; I had asked Carey drunkenly the night before if I could tag along on one of his hunting trips, and suddenly Carey was standing at the foot of my bed at four-thirty in the mourning telling me that we were already late. Nothing wakes you up faster than a shadowed seven foot man who you’ve heard punched a bear in the face, telling you to “Get the hell up, already.” Of course, later, it was revealed that he never punched that bear, but it still scared me all the same.
    So I wasn’t hunting. I was just tagging along for the experience. I told Carey I wasn’t going to shoot a gun, that I hadn’t ever shot one before, and that I just wanted to know what it was like to go. I had no idea what to expect, and as usual, Carey didn’t provide me with any expectations beyond a steely cold glare that I had always hoped meant more that he liked me.
    As we bounced from one field to another, we’d pass by an old silo or deer stand and Carey would quickly remark something or other about family history and some uncle had died there, or was mauled by an animal there. We passed a shack that was rotten with moss and lichen, well hidden in the woods, I almost didn’t see it; Carey, tipped his head toward the shack and said, “My Uncle Bruce was shot by my Aunt Edna and buried in the back yard there. Edna hung around for another ten years before anybody figured it out, and she’s in a loony bin down somewhere in Arizona now.” And that was that; the shack was already gone, and Carey was looking out through the front of the windshield to the next patch of history that would come up, and that he would painfully deign to tell me.
    After we had bobbled a bit more on the black South Dakota soil, we rocked to a halt. I could feel Carey’s rust red truck settle into the frozen mire of dilapidated corn field. The trip there had been educational: I had learned that not only was Carey’s family well established in Eastern South Dakota’s agriculture, some hundred years of trying, at least, but also that they were violent, stir crazy, and generally ornery people. I was wondering if going hunting with Carey, alone on his land, in the dark, might have been a bad idea.
    Once we got settled, things let up a bit. It was still quite dark, but the sun was making more of an appearance on the horizon. Something that I had forgotten after moving away was that the sunrise can take such a long time, out here in the middle of nowhere. I rolled down my window to let some cool air in, and I was surprised to find that it was warmer than I had expected. A gush of warm wind, sweet with black soil and ozone, swept in and reminded me of spring, and that it was happening. Carey smoked a cigarette and looked out, wistfully, over his family’s land with his 32-20 Winchester tucked to the side of his knees. I felt glad that I could come out. I had always wanted to be an early riser, beat the sunrise, drink my coffee black, eat a stack of flapjacks at once, call pancakes flapjacks, and be a general man’s man. As a child I had wanted to be an old-fashioned gunslinger, and maybe sitting there with Carey as he was waiting to find a deer to shoot was the closest thing that I had ever gotten to being that gunslinger. Now I realize that I don’t ever want to point a gun at another person, and that if I was put in the position to I’d probably piss myself and run away.
    Carey seemed to relax a bit as well. He started to make little chit chat, under his breath. I kept thinking that we were going to scare away the deer, but I didn’t really want to see a deer get shot. I wasn’t sure I could handle all of the guts and blood spilling out of the carcass, the black marble eyes staring into the woods like it was thinking just a little bit further and I would have made it. He talked about silly things, things that I wouldn’t have expected Carey to want to carry on about. “Margarine, not the stuff you buy on the shelves, a more basic formula that didn’t have yellow food coloring in it, was once used to feed turkeys, but it made the turkeys go nuts. They would eat and eat and eat, but never get the nutrition that they needed, so they’d slowly starve on all of the calories. Had a few that went rogue, ate another turkey to make up for the slow starvation. Saw one once standing over its kill, covered in its own kind’s blood. That’s when I shot it. Turkey fed turkey that had been eating the margarine-feed was a pretty bad meal, if you ask me.”
    Carey pulled us up a black path in the clustered dead weeds, up to a small hill and onto an acre that wouldn’t be tended to for another month or so. Broken alabaster feed-corn stalks that had lost their color made little triangles on the dewey black soil below us. I remarked about how it was warm for that time of year. Carey said nothing and pulled a plug of tobacco from a pouch with an Indian on it. I thought about asking him for a plug, but I didn’t really like chewing tobacco. I had done it a few times before, and the effects weren’t worth the taste or sick that usually came with it. I had also heard that there was fiberglass in it, which wasn’t appealing either. Carey turned off the truck and we waited.
    We sat as the sun crept; I wanted to ask all sorts of questions, but since we had parked Carey had been silent and still, signaling that he was busy. We were parked about fifty yards away from a few clumps of trees that blocked a small creek that had been dried up, the mud steaming. His window faced the creek and the woods, and mine faced the pasture and the sun.
    By the time the sun was half exposed, a red current of clouds ran down through the sky, Carey rolled down his window and the gun cracked a bullet through the air. I was surprised at how loud the gun was: it cracked a couple of more times as he discharged the hot shells behind the seat and the glass of the windows rattled. Without looking at me he said, “Put your arms down,” and turned on the engine and shifted directly into second gear. I realized that after the first shot I had braced myself against the ceiling, pushing my palms into roof of the cab. I relaxed and we sped off to the trees and approached the deer that Carey had shot which was now lying on the ground. I thought about it, and I couldn’t remember seeing the deer before he had shot it. Carey hopped out of the cab and, before I had gotten to him, he had already started opening it ass to belly. Before I looked away, which was pretty quick, I looked at the thing’s eyes. They were brown and almost human except for the long black pupil, like the black center had bled when Carey had shot it. They moved, darted, then slowed. Its mouth moved a bit after everything else, then I guess I looked away. At first I thought Carey had just started tearing it open as it lay there alive and dying, but as he tied it to his hood, which I didn’t think hunters still did, I noticed the cut in its throat, the red-black blood staining the bit of white fur that led to its belly. He had taken the time to bleed the deer out before he butchered it, and at the time I figured it was a small kindness. That was the last time I felt any human connection to Carey. Again, after the fact, I realized it was because he didn’t want the deer to kick him as he cleaned the body, which just proves to me now that Carey was always unsavory in one way or another, even if just for pragmatism.
    I don’t know how he saw him, as we tusseled on the dirt path on our way back to the highway, but Carey shot out another round from his window without stopping the car. As we barrelled along I thought I saw antlers fall beneath the orange dawn and into the darkness of the highway, but it’s one of those images that come up after the actual event, in the sour note of a memory tieing pieces together. Your eyes, in their perifery, can’t see everything; your brain makes up the rest. Once we got to the highway, Carey pulled over, knife in hand, and approached the body. I wasn’t going to get out of the cab, but Carey just stood there, in the waning darkness. I got out too, wondering what Carey was thinking. I was half expecting him to hand me the knife, but when I got there I realized the barbarity of that gesture; I had, deep down, hoped that Carey would have me skin the deer. But, as I got out of the cab, and I heard the garbled bellow echo out of the dark pavement, that dream vanished. I knew that sound. We all do, we’ve all made it before. Lying in the dark, was a boy crumpled over his bicycle, wearing a back pack and an orange helmet with antlers fixed on the sides. Carey and I stood over him as he held his chest, choughing up blood, eyes frantically darting. Crying in between the pained coughs to get the blood out of the way. The eyes were wide; they locked with mine, for a second, black iris swimming in a blue-white pool. Then they stopped, and the boy died.
    Carey and I stood there as the sun rose, a bit too far before we realized that we had something to do, that we had a dead body and we had choices to make, and potentially those choices meant not being seen with a dead boy who was supposed to be riding his bike to school. Carey, without saying anything, swept him up in his arms. The little boy’s frame contrasted Carey’s, thin little arms that hadn’t had time to properly develop, probably small for his age. I remember that he was wearing a black down coat, North Face probably, but with gym shorts, and I thought that as he died he probably had been pretty cold; why would a child who had to ride 5 miles in to school be wearing shorts at this time of year? And so the questions began.
    “What the fuck are you doing out here?” Carey asked. Angered, he dumped the body into the back of his pickup, antlers and all. “Get the bike. Who fucking rides a bike to school at dawn with antlers on his head?”
    I got the bike and put it over the boy’s body in the back. Carey pulled a tarp over both. “Where do we take him?” I asked.
    “Take him? Like we’re dropping him off at school, you dumb fuck. We’re dumping him. Why would I go to jail for him?”
    “Wasn’t it an accident?”
    “Not with the history my family’s got, it’s not.”
    “Shouldn’t we find his wallet or something? Something that has his name on it, like an assignment?”
    “I don’t care who he is. He’s river boy, for all I care, cause that’s where he’s going.”
    Carey got out his knife and hesitated for a second before cutting the deer off his hood, throwing it on the road where the boy had been. As we left, Carey backed over the body a few times, grinding it into the road. As we sped off down the highway we passed a truck that Carey seemed to recognize, raised a single finger from the wheel to wave, but everybody does that around here, regardless if you know them or not. Under his breath, as we passed, Carey muttered, “Fuck fuck fuck,” like it was someone he was expecting slow and stop, force us to chat, to ask why we had blood on our hood, who I was, and what good game he had under that tarp in the back. But we passed like it was nothing and I sighed with relief. Carey must have heard because he shot me look like he was saying, “Yeah, you and I are fucking lucky.”
    Every now and again, on our way to the river, I thought I could hear the boy cry, and I’d look out through the back at the tarp, which flappled idly in the wind, the boy and the bicycle inanimate beneath it. I barely recognized the drive back, black dirt illuminating the bleach white stalks of broken corn punctuated by silos, ranch houses with lights just turning on, and abandoned houses with sunken roofs. At one of the houses I saw an old man standing with his hips on his hands, staring into the sun as it rose, spitting on the ground. Something like, “fuck this earth,” I could hear him saying through his thick tobacco filled drawl. But he zipped by like everything else. We must have been moving fast if something as far away as that man could have traveled by so quickly. Again, I can only see him standing there after the fact; I’m not even sure I saw him.
    Time, as I remember it, breaks in images, flashes of things where the perspective has warped it. Like: once we got the river, Carey drove the back of his truck up to the beached dock. No one was around, with good reason: the river was mostly frozen. The ice was thin, but enough so nobody cared to come out and bother with. Carey got out and pulled the tarp off of the boy and his bike. Again we stood there and just looked at him, under his little broken bicycle, legs all torn to shit from the fall and from having been tangled in the spokes and the chain. Carey took the bike off of him and threw it into the river, crashed through the shards of ice and fell beneath. Carey then grabbed the boy and held him against his chest like he was asleep, the boy’s head resting on his shoulder, looking small and frail. The boy must have been at lest thirteen, but the way I remember it he was tiny, like a six year old or something. It makes it harder to remember him that way, a child that we had killed, about to be dumped in the icy river, mother and father coming still eagerly waiting for him to come home from school. His first year of school. But then I remember he was riding his bike to school, at least five miles out, and maybe his parents never noticed, bad enough already to make him ride a bike in gym shorts just out of winter, five miles in the cold. Regardless, I remember him being tiny; Carey using only one arm to prop him up, the other hand carying a shovel to break the ice. I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, but as Carey got to the water, he used the shovel to crack through the ice and he walked into it, water soaking up through his green khaki pants, filling his shoes with ice. Once he was far enough out there he threw the shovel back on to the shore and held only the boy. He lowered him, held his face in front of his own, and mumbled something. He seemed to look into the boy’s face for an eternity before suddenly the boy was already half in the water and under the ice. Then it was just the antlers that Carey held, pushing the boy off under the water to be pulled away with the current.
    Carey’s return to land was a slow one, one that took much longer than going out. He seemed to trudge, hitting every piece of ice, like he was freezing with it, binding with the ice. He pulled his feet out and onto the gravel of the land, pants black, tipped with white frost around the thighs. He bent down to grab the shovel and he stood back up and approached me and the truck, back turned to the nameless boy somehwere in the river, floating down the Missouri.



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