found myself disliking both of them, and I began to wonder whether that made me a racist. Truman was an obnoxious fool, and B.J. was just weird. But then, I also disliked Pelletier, for his chain-smoking bossiness. I probably would have disliked his wife, too, if she’d ever noticed me.
Every day that passed at Rum Pond I felt more and more disillusioned and lonely. I don’t know what I had expected-something out of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, maybe. I thought I’d have some free time to canoe or fish or hike. And I did have time, but I was almost always too exhausted to make use of it. All I wanted to do was sleep, but even that was impossible since my father and Truman stayed up just about every night past midnight, drinking.
After dinner, I would walk back to my father’s camp in the half-light, bone-weary and stinking of sweat from my day’s work, and I’d find them there on the porch or in front of the fire. I tried to ignore them and just go to sleep, but they wouldn’t let me. The more they drank, the more they wanted me to join them.
“Do you know what I think?” said Truman one evening-it must have been three weeks or so after I arrived, sometime in early July. It was a cool night and therefore not so buggy, and we were all sitting in Adirondack chairs on the deck. I wanted to go to sleep, but I knew their laughter and loud conversation would keep me up, so I was doing my best to humor them by having a beer. I guess I also thought that this was what my father expected of me, and I hadn’t yet given up trying to please him.
“I think Mike has a secret admirer,” said Truman.
“And who would that be?” asked my father.
“He knows who.”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Is it you, Truman?” asked my father. “Come on, you can confess your true feelings.”
“Me!” He threw back his head and let out a laugh so loud it stirred up one of the loons out on the lake. “No. B.J.! I think she has a crush.”
My father lighted a cigarette and shook out the match. “Hey, Mike, you know what that stands for-B.J.?”
“She’s just a little girl!” I said.
Even Truman made a displeased, grumbling noise. “That’s not funny.”
“You’re a prissy one, aren’t you?” My father took a sip of his beer. “How’s your mother, anyway?”
He had asked me this question ten times since I arrived here, always when drunk. “You know how she is.”
“How’s my buddy Neil?”
“The same.”
“Fucking lawyer. Drives a Volvo.”
“Yuppie,” said Truman with disgust.
“So what do you think of Rum Pond?” my dad asked me for the umpteenth time. He always fell back on the question when he could think of nothing else to talk with me about.
“It’s all right.”
“Did I ever tell you about the Nazi who escaped from the POW camp?” He gestured with his cigarette in the general direction of Hobbstown.
“You told me when we went on that trip to Spencer Lake, remember?”
I became aware of a soft sound, a faint almost insect-like buzz. It grew louder and louder. In the purple sky above the hills I saw the red lights of a very small airplane, equipped with pontoons instead of wheels, flying lower than any plane I had ever seen.
“Son of a bitch,” said my father.
“Who’s that?”
“Game warden. Charley Stevens.”
Truman spit over the rail. The airplane darted across the lake and then turned and disappeared over a hill.
“You know why he’s doing that, don’t you?” asked my father. “He wants to let us know he’s watching us. Like he’s daring us to try something.”
“He’s a game warden and a pilot?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“And he flies at night?”
“You just saw him.”
“Must be pretty dangerous.”
My father sat up in his chair and pointed a finger at me. “You ever meet a warden?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. They’re arrogant bastards, is what they are. You won’t think they’re so cool when they take you to jail.”
I finished the last foam in my beer. “I’m going to bed.”
“Who’s stopping you?”
Inside my cabin I undressed down to my undershorts and climbed into my sleeping bag. As always, my feet overhung the end of the child’s mattress. I could smell their cigarettes through the screen and heard them talking for a while in unusually hushed tones. After a while, I heard the Ford truck start up and saw the white headlights cutting through the unchinked slats between the logs of my cabin. Then they were gone, and all I heard was the wind moving through the tops of the pines and, every now and again, one of the loons calling out on the lake.
I dozed fitfully, whether because of the single beer I had drunk or because I sensed that my father and Truman had gone off to make trouble of some kind.
But several hours later-it might actually have been less-I was awakened by the sound of the Ford returning. At first I was disoriented because there were no headlights shining into my cabin. Then I realized that they’d driven up with the lights off. I heard the doors slam and the pickup gate thrown open and harsh whispers and grunts and Truman breaking into a fit of giggling. Heavy boots sounded on the deck. As their shadows passed my screen I saw that they were dragging something big into the kitchen cabin.
I pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and went barefoot outside. A propane lamp fizzled on in the kitchen, throwing light onto the deck. Through the screen door I saw the carcass of a big deer, a doe, spread across the table and my father and Truman standing over it drinking thirstily from cans of beer.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
They both jumped at the sound of my voice.
“Christ,” said my father.
“Where did you get that deer?”
“Hit it with the truck.”
“You did not.”
My father threw away his empty beer can. It clattered off one wall. “Come inside and shut that door.”
I stepped in and pulled the door shut behind me. “You jacked that deer. That’s against the law.”
My father and Truman looked at each other and started laughing.
“Kid,” my dad said. “You don’t know how funny you are. Come on. I’m going to show you how to butcher a deer.”
I remembered all those solemn lectures my father used to give me on poaching-how he only took illegal game out of necessity, that it shamed him to have to do it, but he had a hungry family to think of. Now here he was laughing about it.
I glanced at the window. “What about the warden?”
“Screw him.” He removed his hunting knife from his belt. “Grab that old blanket. We’ll need it to catch the blood.”
I watched my father slit open the deer. He spread the doe on her back along our breakfast table and inserted the blade down below her rib cage and began working backward, using his fingers to open the cavity. Then he tied off her anus and vagina with a pigging string and, climbing up on the table and straddling the deer’s leg, pulled out the entrails. As a child, I remembered watching my father field dress a deer but never with this kind of speed. My father did all the cutting while Truman caught the organs in a five-gallon pail.
“Here,” said my father, tossing something at me suddenly.
I caught a small piece of metal in my hand. It was the mushroomed bullet that he’d dug out of the doe’s heart. For some reason I didn’t drop it but instead squeezed it tight in my fist.
Truman cocked his head. “Oh, shit,” he said.
