Jonathan looked to Conner. “It’s been a while. How’s Madison and the kids?” Conner had a son one year younger than Jacob, a daughter and another on the way.
“I coached T-ball this past spring,” he said. “Fourteen little kids trying to run around the bases. It was a bit of a nightmare. Aria is starting school next year.”
“Madison make up your mind for you to do that?” Jonathan caught himself being an asshole for no reason.
Conner smiled slyly and drank his beer. He was the most successful of them all, which made sense. He lived in a large house atop a hill in town with isolated and sweeping views. Madison was the archetypal suburban mother and wife, a woman from a moneyed family, who left her nursing job to raise the children, creating a life that was by the book, directly out of a magazine or a made-for-television movie. She determined life should be as proscribed by Redbook and planned accordingly. She stayed attractive enough to put on a black dress and wow businessmen at company dinners and fierce enough to run the Parent Teacher Association. Even when they were dating the world could see where Conner’s life was leading.
“When’s the last time you went out?” Michael said.
Jonathan stared long and hard at Michael. “I haven’t hunted in ten years, Mike.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Conner said.
“I didn’t stop,” Michael said. “It wouldn’t make a difference either way.” He shifted in his seat, rocking back and forth slightly like a child grown excited. “Got an eight-pointer last year up at the Gunderson property.”
Jonathan and Conner grunted an approval. It wasn’t the hunting he missed; it was the way things were before. It soured in his stomach.
Jonathan said, “So what the fuck are we doing here, anyway?” He looked from brother to brother. “This can’t just be to catch up. ’Cause, honestly, it’s been a long day and we could do this anytime – if we actually wanted to.”
Conner and Michael went silent and solemn. They touched their beers with light, pensive fingers, eyes cast downward.
“We need to make a trip,” Conner said. “To the Adirondacks. Coombs’ Gulch. Opening day of this year.”
Jonathan looked from one to the other and then back to Conner, incredulous and growing angry.
“No, and get the fuck out of here.” Jonathan moved to get up out of the booth, but Michael reached out and grabbed his arm. It was a hard grip, filled with desperate energy and perhaps rage. Jonathan stared down at Michael for a moment, hoping the larger man wouldn’t stand up and make it official. He looked up to the bar. The dying, pale eyes were staring again, watching this little drama unfold. The owner crossed his arms, waiting to see what happened.
Jonathan looked back at Conner, whose eyes were now pleading. “Just hear me out,” he said. “It’s important. I wouldn’t have asked you here if it wasn’t.”
Jonathan waited and then slowly eased back into the booth. Michael’s grip on his arm loosened.
Jonathan poured another beer and Conner looked like he’d just come from the grave.
“There’s a road being built,” he said, and Jonathan knew what was coming next.
“The state is building a new route off the interstate, trying to connect the towns. They’ve sold off ten thousand acres of state forest to private developers for motels, gas stations, stores – all that shit. My company is underwriting the insurance plans. That’s how I found out. The project starts this spring and it’s going right through Coombs’ Gulch.”
Chapter Three
Jonathan’s bachelor party ten years ago was a small affair – just the four of them heading deep into the Adirondack Mountains. They were searching for someplace ‘real’, a place where they weren’t bagging juvenile whitetail with only two nubs protruding from the top of their heads, like they had in the small, heavily hunted forests around Harwinton. They couldn’t afford a trip out west to Montana or Wyoming, but the upstate mountains offered thousands of square miles of pure, untouched forested mountains. A place where they could truly be men, communing with nature, hunting, killing together like a pack of wolves. A place where a hunter could lose himself. The long, toothy mountain range was like a rip in time, a place where the past could be glimpsed, where it would seem wholly reasonable for a T. rex to wander out from the tree cover. It was perfect to them – big deer, moose, bear and mountain lions; no need for passports; no trying to pack rifles on a plane. They rented a cabin far outside the small village of Pasternak, a town built in shadow, at the edge of a massive swath of state forest and valley known as Coombs’ Gulch.
Jonathan didn’t know the trip was coming. He and Mary had rented a hall for their wedding, which was scheduled for the fifteenth of November. It was one of those places that provide a classy-looking venue to churn out two weddings a day, but was really just a money-making machine. It didn’t matter to Jonathan. These were things that had to be done. Mary was happy with it, and once all the requisite hoops were jumped through they could finally settle into their life together and let the rest of the world slowly fall away. They were the first of the group to get married, and it became an affair of friends, a celebration of that first leap into true adulthood. Seemingly everyone was involved on some level. Madison and Annie were bridesmaids, Michael and Conner groomsmen. Gene, in all his bumbling around town hall, had managed to become a justice of the peace and would
