Cross Country Murder Song (4 page)

He spent three happy summers in this elite backwoods and whenever he returned after the break there would always be stories of late-season hunters lost out in the woods or of the police raiding the dope farmers who dotted the heavily wooded hills; everyone knew they were out there, but they were so deep in the firs that the authorities rarely bothered them. Occasionally, some inexperienced campers (the ones who thought the great outdoors was their friend) were attacked by bears, but mostly the bears wanted to be left alone unless they were hungry, though that was only in the winter and it was best to be off the mountain then anyway
.

Song 2: Deer

Bears, he said, lifting the peak of his cap with his thumb and tipping it back on his head, need your respect.

This time of year, he indicated the banks of muddy snow bordering the road with a wave of the petrol pump he was holding, they're foraging for food, they get – he paused – quite restless. He placed the fuel pump back into its holster and went inside the little gas station and rang up their bill on an antique register. It pealed into life as rows of coloured tabs with dollars and cents written on them sprang into view.

He had wondered about hunting so late in the season. It was getting colder and before bears went into hibernation they scavenged and hunted for food (he'd read in a magazine) with a sometimes startling ferocity. Lot quicker than you think too, the guy at the store had said, regarding their bright, newly-bought hunting tunics coolly. They left, gunning the engine on their hire car, and headed towards the town on the lake. The endless-looking lake actually spanned a time zone so that the ferry either deposited you on one side at approximately the time you left the other or threw you a little way into the future as you landed. The hunting was across the water in the forest of pine that covered the glacier, a dense blanket of uniform trees that changed from bottle-green to dark brown as it followed the lip of the mountain.

They'd flown north to an area outside of Waterloo that was dotted with private airstrips and exclusive golf resorts and offered weekend hunting packages for customers from the southern cities who wanted a taste of the wilderness. As they came through the clouds to land the airport looked like it was waiting just for them. It was hectic all summer long, though the miniature terminal felt like a ghost town after September. Waterloo was set on the lake, a small, idyllic-looking town that had grown up on the logging industry. These days the local kids were caddies on the weekend and skiing or snowboarding when winter came in. Waterloo had been made briefly famous in Steve Martin's Roxanne, his cinematic reworking of the Cyrano De Bergerac legend. On the first night there they'd had to get used to cab drivers and locals pointing out plastic awnings dotted on bar and hotel windows and telling them how and where they'd featured in the film.

Steve Martin, what's he like? He a dick? he'd asked one cab driver.

Uh-uh, he said with a firm shake of his head. Real gent, and he didn't acknowledge the pair again even as they left his car, pressing a generous tip into his hand.

Daylight hours were short so the next morning they set out early, catching the first ferry across the lake. Cars honked and queued below them as they sat on the deck admiring the view. Ahead of them gently sloping hills rose out of the water and disappeared into the low sky.

Dope farmers all along there, said his companion, gesturing with his arm towards the horizon made jagged by tightly packed fir trees.

Dope farmers? he replied. Who told you that?

A friend of my brother's used to work for the DEA, he replied. They would take small spotter planes and fly grid lines over the mountains trying to spot crops. They've got camouflaged fields up there, huge barns filled with lights, they give off heat, helps them grow.

Nah, he said, warming his hands on the cup of coffee he was holding.

It's true, said his friend, a passenger plane crashed up there last winter and they sent a team in to search for survivors and stumbled on a farm; they were threatened with guns. This guy, my brother's friend, his team went in and closed it down. The guy got ten years for growing all that weed.

What happened to the other farmers? he asked. He couldn't help himself, his interest was piqued; he imagined leaving his job in the city, casting off the shackles of corporate life (he wouldn't have been able to identify a shackle if someone held one three inches from his face, but his fantasies weren't there to be hindered by reality) and giving himself over to toiling his illegal acres, his one man crusade against the war on drugs. He imagined the sweet smell filling the air, fresh dope every night, strong coffee every morning. He pictured himself walking the hills carrying some kind of staff, ducking between barns, tending his crops, then the helicopters fanning out overhead, figures crashing through the undergrowth, throwing him to the floor, shutting him down, his face in the papers looking stoic but restless, the DEA agents grinning behind him like anglers measuring their haul.

They're still out there, said his friend. Those woods go on forever and the forest's so dense, he nodded at the impenetrable green in the distance, that it's near impossible to see them from the sky. They pulled my brother's friend out eventually: they were working in there for weeks and they still got nothing except for that one guy and his crop.

They burn the dope, he said, chuckling. Imagine sitting around that bonfire.

They picked up their truck on the far side of the water and drove a rutted, single-track road up into the mountains.

Feeling every fucking bump, he muttered, his hand drifting towards a radio that wasn't there. They reached a plateau that afforded them a view to the west of the glimmering surface of the lake being lit up intermittently by a pallid sun. The rest of the valley fell away below them, green, brown and black; there were patches of white, but the night's snow had barely settled up here. Occasionally there were sprays of birds that broke the spikes of pine and threw the horizon into chaos. They packed their rifles up onto their shoulders and made the descent into the copse, each heavy step a struggle through the slushy earth. It was cold, even through their gloves; their noses were bright and pink in the freezing air.

Hey, Karl, he said, you look like Rudolph. The cold was making his eyes moist and he couldn't stop blinking. His friend hushed him. Christ, he whispered, don't go mistaking me for a deer. They crouched in spite of themselves and moved slowly forward, eyes darting left and right, as they imagined professional hunters might. They'd been hunting together since they were in their teens, at first with his dad and then once with Karl's older brother. His father had impressed upon them the importance of the hunting season and the equilibrium of the land, how nature had to have balance. He'd come to understand that, though he'd still cried when his father had first shot a deer. For his part, Karl's older brother packed beer as a necessity for their trip and when he finally felled a doe he let out a yowl like he'd won the lottery. Later, his father asked him how the trip had gone and when he told him, his father had become so angry that he'd had to leave the room. His mother stood next to him at the window, her arm around him, as they watched his father crush an empty cigarette packet and then toss it to the ground before stomping around in small circles; his features were dark, his fists bunched.

Karl, he said, your brother still a dick?

Karl nodded. Still owes me money that I lent him at Christmas, he said.

It's almost Christmas now, he replied.

Last Christmas, said Karl, like the song.

The light through the fir trees was patchy and the going slow. They'd only seen one doe. In his excitement to signal the creature to Karl, first by waving animatedly and then with one final, defeated, hissed Karl!, he had scared it away. The doe's head had twitched into life and she'd sprung away on her elegant haunches. Karl glared at him as if he'd just fallen and plunged a knife through his boot.

You're so stupid that you'd make a wax effigy of yourself to poke pins in, he said. Karl had said it before, but not for a long time, not really since school. Their bags and rifles were heavy so they stopped and sat on a fallen tree and drank water and ate their food quickly.

Remember what the guidebook said, said Karl. The smell of food can attract bears. He regarded his tuna and sweetcorn roll and thought to himself that even though bears hunted for salmon, would they know or recognise tuna let alone sweet-corn? They both wolfed their food down and then sat momentarily as their stomachs grumbled at their haste.

Remember when we saw that cub? he said.

He was eleven, Karl a year older; his father owned a Winnebago (he'd told Karl once after his father's death how much his dad had loved that Winnebago, how he thought he was a frontiersman when he got behind the wheel) and they'd travelled into the mountains for the holiday weekend. They'd parked up, his mother on a lounger applying suncream to her forearms, stretching her fingers out, making the skin taut, his father rooting through the back of the truck for his fishing rod, talking to himself distractedly, the radio playing.