Blood Sport Read online

  My uncle and I had hunted birds and deer up here when the farms were still working. He knew many of the farmers and had defended them in court back in the days when the railroad was trying to buy up the countryside along the Hassayampa in anticipation of a major China trade. My uncle claimed that he had won nearly half the suits, and in the other half had usually gotten the farmers a better-than-average settlement for their land. Then one night a railroad goon squad had caught him on the River Road and broken his leg as an earnest of their belief in monopoly rights.

  “They built a roadblock that consisted of an old LaSalle sedan and six railroad ties,” he told me. “I was too dumb to double back, and when I stopped they didn’t even wait to talk. They dragged me to the railroad ties, laid my ankle over the top of them, and cut loose with a tire iron on my kneecap. Fortunately, it was my right leg they hit, so when I dragged myself back into the car I could still lay the weight of my foot on the gas pedal and work the clutch and the brake with my left. That got me home, and it kept me out of court against the railroad from then on.”

  It seemed to me my uncle had said that the leader of the goon squad had worn a fur coat . . . Ratanous? I could not be certain of my memory, but if it had been Ratanous, that would place him on the upper Hassayampa after my first encounter with him. A chilling thought. I threw some more floorboards on the fire and took comfort in reason: how could I be certain it had been Ratnose? I might very well have added the fur-coated goon leader to my uncle’s story; childhood memories are imprecise; they overlap and cross-fertilize one another; there is no Ratanous, only my imagination.

  But then, why do I have this clean, hard certainty that I must kill him?

  12

  WE WERE LONELY now. Two weeks on the river with only ourselves for company—it was time for a town and some different people. We broke from the river and hiked north over the Porcupine Mountains, a day’s march. From the height of land that formed the watershed, we could see a big lake spreading like a rain cloud and the town flashing its windows at us in the late-afternoon sun. The woods gave way to pastures, then to barbed wire and surly polled cattle. We thumbed a ride into town in the back of a pickup truck that smelled of pigs, but to our socially deprived nostrils it was the best of domestic cologne. “Do you know where Hasslich lives?” I asked the farmer when he let us off. “Otto Hasslich, the old Kraut?”

  “Yeah,” the man said, “but you’re bound to find him in Tilly’s over there.” He pointed to a tavern just up the main street. “Hasslich’s always in there on a Saturday night.” We hadn’t known it was Saturday. We walked over to the tavern. Two dogs were screwing in the parking lot, and the male—a scruffy-maned orange chow—looked over at us and rolled his eyes, his purple tongue lolling happily out of his grin. It was the first time I had ever seen a chow smile. My son asked me what they were doing and I replied with the Noel Coward line: “The one in front just went blind, and its friend is pushing it to the eye doctor’s.”

  The tosspots in the alehouse were watching a rerun of Green Acres, scratching their asses and yukking it up. Hasslich was at the end of the bar trying to make out with a woman the size of a steamer trunk. His clean, ruddy, ancient face gleamed with sincerity, only to be called a liar by his weedy white moustache. The woman chuckled at his pleas and removed his horny hand from her crotch as if she were discarding a Tampax. I slapped Hasslich on the back and asked him how were his Wie geht’s. “Na ja, der junge Gracchus!” he cried, “what brings you again to the North Country?” I told him that my son and I were prospecting for uranium—Oranien—up in the Porcupines, and that we’d come into town to register a tailing we’d found. “No money in uranium,” he said with a sniff. “Have a beer! Better yet, have a shot and a beer!”

  Otto had been a boatswain in the Kaiser’s navy during the Great War, and later was briefly married to my mother’s mother. Perhaps he had not actually been married to her, but everyone in the relationship maintained that he had. They remembered him as a cruel, miserly autocrat whose favorite admonition to my mother and her sister and brothers was: “Ich bin der Baas; du bist die Rotznase.” I’m the boss; you’re the snot-nose. Too mean and nasty to be tolerated in a city, Hasslich had built himself a cabin in the woods on the edge of the Porcupine forest. I had visited him there years before. The interior of the cabin resembled the crew’s quarters in his old ship, the battle cruiser Frauenlob: tidy, compact, smelling of clean steel and the onions festooned on the ceiling (Otto was boss now only to the onions and spuds he raised in the sour soil of the Porcupine watershed). He had a hammock; a table that folded neatly against the bulkhead; an icebox chilled by gritty blue blocks of ice which Otto himself sawed out of a nearby pond. At the top of a ladder leading to an alcove at one end of the compartment was a wooden crapper with a galvanized tin bucket under the hand-carved wooden seat. Otto was a firm believer in the utility of night soil. Though he was nearing eighty, he still came to town once a month to get laid. “Draws off the poison,” he said with a wicked little smile.

  While Otto talked of the onion crop and refought the Battle of Jutland, I sipped my brandy and beer, enjoying as always the easy hopsy atmosphere of a Saturday-night saloon. My son munched a cheeseburger and watched teevee. The woman’s name was Helgard the Laundry Widow. “My Kinder all went off to Ishpeming,” she related with an air of regret. “My husband sawed a tree down on himself.” The Germans will have even their tragedies in the proper order. But she was a handsome woman, though over fifty—solid and ripe, with a scent of laundry soap and woman sweat, and her mammoth tits looked as firm as a brace of biceps. “Show him how you box with them,” said Otto proudly. Making sure the bartender wasn’t looking, she lifted her blouse and threw a jab with her left tit, then a quick right cross with the other. A few long black hairs fringed the aggressive aureoles. I felt my pecker stiffening: we’d been in the woods too long. “I saw a stripper once in Saint Louis who could counterrotate her tits,” I told the woman, “but I never saw anything like that. What else can you do?” Otto said that she could shoot a Ping-Pong ball clear across the street if you aimed her cunt properly. She blushed but didn’t deny it. I had a sudden dark image of Otto aiming her like the Kaiser’s cannon.

  Drunk enough and lonely enough, one will diddle anything, so after a few more brandies and beer I found myself bird-dogging Otto’s old lady. “Listen,” I said finally, “why don’t we go over to Helgard’s laundry and have us a little orgy?” I pronounced it with a hard g so that they would understand. Otto seemed doubtful. “Look,” I told him, “you’re too old to make it more than once, if that. If I’m along, we can at least give her, you know, a decent hosing.” We left the boy watching the tube and walked over to the laundry, which was just across the street from the movie theater. Billy the Kid Meets Frankensteins Daughter. I belched and tasted the beer bubbles in my nostrils; the brandy roughhoused behind my eyes. The laundry smelled warm and fresh, illuminated by the hard white light of the marquee across the way, the shirts and sheets and pillowcases on the sorting table filigreed with indecipherable blue shadows. Helgard stripped and lay back on the table, her firm, broad cheeks glowing red as Otto messed with her muff. I sat on a mound of gravy-stained business suits and sipped from the pint of peppermint Schnapps we had brought along.

  Otto was having an old man’s problem getting it up, but then he took a boatswain’s pipe from his shirt pocket and began blowing reveille. Tooo-eee . . . tooooooooo-eeeeeeeeee-ooooo . . . As his pecker slowly awoke from its wrinkled lethargy (“What the fuck’s happening?—I ain’t got the watch until the four-to-eight”), I noticed that it was tattooed like a barbers pole. It expanded further and I recognized the faded, frowning visage of Lloyd George tattooed on the glans.

  Then Otto removed his shirt and I saw that he had a hunter tattooed on his chest. The hunter was leaning over Otto’s shoulder and shooting down his back at a tattooed rabbit which was just about to disappear down Otto’s asshole. The rabbit gazed apprehensively at the muzzle of the s
hotgun.

  When Otto finally came, the shotgun went pow! and the rabbit tumbled dead and kicking onto the laundry table. At the report, placid Helgard flew into a rage. “I tell you how oft not to do that?” she shrilled as she thrust the old man away from her. “Now you mess up my shirts and linen again!”

  Thus ended our orgy.

  We left Helgard muttering, elbow deep in suds and wet wash. As we walked back to the saloon, Otto handed me the dead rabbit as a consolation prize. Its face bore an uncanny resemblance to the late Admiral Beatty, Victor of Jutland. A few droplets of blood were beaded on the whiskers, and the face looked ineffably sad, with inky little wisdom wrinkles weeping from the eyes. “Who did this tattoo work?” I asked Otto. “It’s damned good.”

  He sighed and smiled. “Some old Chink on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg,” he said. “You can’t get a good military tattoo anymore, and that’s a rotten shame. With good art, there is no defeat.”

  Back in the saloon, my son was leaning with his elbows on the bar writing something on the back of a napkin. He had the stub of a black cheroot in his teeth and a glass of draft beer in front of him. His cap was cocked over his eye like a pool-hall tough’s. “I was thinking about when I caught my first bass, and how it nearly pulled me into the pond, and how Uncle Henry helped me land it,” he said. “Then I got thinking about how the Visigoths killed Uncle Henry and I wrote down this poem.”

  Silens is not much of a city.

  Not like the city of laghter

  Or the city of noise.

  But silenc is dieing.

  Noise and laghter are taking over.

  Silens is Bleak jagged peaks,

  Dull grey colors.

  But once it was noisy,

  Then it died.

  But silence is getting rare.

  I told him it was a nice poem. “Yeah,” he said.

  13

  WE SPENT THE NIGHT in Hasslich’s barn, warmed by burlap sacks in the hayrick, and awoke to the calling of bobwhite quail at daybreak. Otto was already out in the onion fields. We could see him scuttling erratically along the rows, a blueblack insect working a weedy menace through the light ground fog. While I fried the rabbit on Otto’s wood stove, my son split pine chunks in the barnyard, pausing between strokes of the ax to whistle back and forth with the quail. Bob-white! Bob-bob-white! Then the flash of the ax blade, and the white wood opening as easily as a prayer book.

  This was the loneliest morning of the trip so far. I had dreamed of home, and awakening, I felt my guts jellied with the memory. The heads of animals adorned the walls—a waterbuck from Africa, an elk from Montana—staring down dolefully, forever, the essence of homecomings gone. A bright morning outside, with birdsong and the trout moving in the stream behind the house, rising now and then to a wayward fly. In the dream, I could hear the garden growing: bush beans, kohlrabi, dill, beets, sorrel, peas, radishes expanding toward the cracking point underground. The weeds taking over. My asparagus patch, dug at such great sweat, stalking uncut toward the sky. My wife, in league with other women, was letting it all go to seed.

  She had said, when we left: “I know you can’t take me along, but why not take your daughter? She loves to fish; she can shoot a gun; she loves the woods and the river.”

  I could not answer her with logic. I muttered something about the “dangers” of the river and then turned ferocious to prevent further questioning. But I remembered an incident that made it clear, in my own mind at least, why my lovely, learned daughter could not make the trip.

  It was a sunny, dry morning, first light, and my girl was only three. She woke up and saw the day, and she wanted to get out into it. My wife and I were sleeping, so she chose not to disturb us. She opened the front door of the house and walked out into the morning. I can imagine it: a low and silvery sun, the dew cool on her bare brown feet, birds racketing in the early light, and the land empty, sleeping all around. But when she returned to the door, it was locked. She could not get back in to bed and love . . .

  I woke up that morning hearing her sobs outside the door. At first I couldn’t tell what it was—a strange bird singing? But I went to the door and found her there, crying sadly to herself on the front porch, certain that she had locked herself out of heaven forevermore. I picked her up and said some hearty things. I fixed her a good breakfast—but it was too late. From then on she was tied to the house, to her room, to her dolls and toys and records and her womanness.

  Another time, fishing, she had hooked herself on a lure, through the skin of her thigh. I pushed the hook through and clipped it off at the barb. She never cried through the whole ordeal, but she looked at me gravely. She lived in her own world, and it was not the world of the Hassayampa. . . .

  And at this moment, the world of the Hassayampa looked pretty frightening to me, too. This would be a good time to turn back. After all, we had killed enough fish and game to justify the journey. I was lonely for my wife and my daughter, for my house, my trophies, my garden. I was even lonely for my dogs—the big yellow retriever with his happy grin and my stupid, quick pointer with his empty eyes and his liver-colored nose that could tell where I had been, could interpret every meal I had eaten, by a simple sniffing of my moustache after a week-long trip. I wanted it all, now. Bed, talk, hugs, kisses, pats on the head, possession, the foods we all liked together, the roles we so enjoyed playing with each other: daddy, mommy, loving daughter, faithful son, honest servant, even though canine. Ahead there was none of that.

  “Let’s eat,” my son said, slamming the ax into the chopping block. “Time’s a-wastin’, and the river is a long way off.” We ate the rabbit and left the stack of firewood as repayment to Otto for his hospitality. The quail sang as we walked away.

  14

  WE ANGLED up through the Porcupines on an old mining road, aiming to rejoin the Hassayampa far to the west of where we had left it, thus avoiding the crags and billygoat trails of the Hsien-ho Gorges. As a boy I had often canoed this stretch of the river during the spring runoffs. My friends and I would take our departure from the railhead at Boxley, on the Buffalo River southwest of the Gorges, then drop down the Buffalo under the dripping limestone cliffs and flurries of falling dogwood blossoms until we reached the Hassayampa just above the beginnings of white water. It took half a day to run the Gorges—a wet, cold millrace in the shadow of the crags with tombstones under the eyelid and flashes of sunlight splintering on the mica as we skidded our way through the rapids—but it took three days to line our canoes back up. I had no desire to walk those slippery cliffs again, even without a canoe to drag behind me. Our return trip would be another matter. Perhaps we could trade for a canoe or a bullboat up near the Hassayampa’s headwaters. Even a light sampan would do if the water was high enough.

  The mining track we followed over the Porcupines had eroded in places into matching, man-deep gullies; catbrier and popple had reclaimed much of the road where it ran through the wet bottomlands. We jumped a few ruffed grouse dusting in the warm, dry ruts on the sunny slopes, and my son dropped two of them for our supper: clean kills as the birds rose roaring from the dust with that sprint-car acceleration that stops the heart and then folded to the report of the 20-gauge, tumbling with legs and primary feathers agrasp as if to clutch for the last time some invisible ladder in the air. I picked up one of the birds and pressed my face into the hot bronze-and-gunmetal feathers of its ruff, inhaling the last of its energy. “Sometimes when you’re hunting without a dog you can smell them before they jump,” I told the boy. “It’s a hot, musky smell like someone sweating from hard work, only drier. As if all that potential energy created a kind of aura, and when you walk into the edges of it you can feel the hair rise on the back of your neck.” The boy looked at me: Wow, the old man is really queer for birds. To confirm his suspicions, I licked a drop of blood from the down-curved beak.

  With the black-barred grouse fans tucked into our hatbands to dry, and the skinned carcasses of the birds themselves cooling as they dangled fro
m our belts, we hiked on, two lummoxes playing at Mountain Man. That night, leg-weary and crisp with a caking of dust and dried sweat, we camped on the banks of a stream that drained into the Hassayampa. We stoned ourselves on its icy water, then stripped and swam away the day’s grime. My son found a cartridge case wedged in the rocks on the bottom of our camp pool: a .44 Magnum. “Who the hell would shoot that heavy a round in this country?” he asked as we warmed up again beside the campfire. A potful of grouse and rice stewed on the dingle stick.

  “There used to be wild cattle in this country,” I told him. “Not the longhorns that you still find out West, but the giant aurochs—the ancestor of all our domestic cattle. They stood about ten feet tall at the shoulder, and you needed a big soft bullet with plenty of foot-pounds to drop them. Back before the uranium miners came into this country, there was still a good-sized herd of them in the Porcupines. I had a buddy named Moonbeam whose folks had a cabin up here, over near Kurlander, and we used to hunt them.

  “Moonbeam was a big kid, about six foot three, with kinky hair and a wide, I’m-a-dummy grin plastered on this round face of his and . . .”

  “Yeah-yeah,” said my son. “Get on with the hunting part. You’re like a war movie where they give you all the training and character development and love interest and then only ten minutes of action at the end.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t have to tell you this story at all. That’s the trouble with you kids today—you want instant action, and when the world gives you a little bit of detail around the action you get bored and start shooting up. You think that killing is a simple act. The right weapon at the right place in the right cause. Well, it isn’t. Killing is one of the most difficult things you can do—even more complex than love, because with love you create the potential for more love. With killing, the whole affair takes place in a few moments—a whole life in the crack of a trigger. Okay, end of editorial. Where was I?”