Deer Season (2 page)

“Whataya gonna do?” asked Zack.

“Scare the hell out of those fuckers.” Clay disappeared into a back bedroom and emerged a few moments later carrying a worn shotgun.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” begged Zack.

Clay ran from the house, leaving the front door open. As he raced toward the road, his gait unsteady, he yelled, “What are ya doing?” He stopped and raised the gun over his head in a menacing gesture. In his intoxicated state, he saw a vision of Rambo, glistening with sweat, bandoliers hanging across his naked chest, defiantly shaking his gun at the entire Red Chinese army.

Car doors slammed and the car sped away, fishtailing wildly on the snow-covered road.

An explosion jarred Clay just as he reached the side of the road, the tan plastic mailbox a few feet to his right tearing open and flying apart. Momentarily stunned, he staggered onto the road. He saw the brake lights of a car flash on. The car had reached the end of the road and would have to come back his way. “What are you doing?” asked Zack.

“They cherry bombed our mailbox.”

“Get rid of the gun.”

“No, I want to scare them.”

As the SUV came back in their direction, four headlights blazing in the blowing snow, Clay stood in the center of the road and raised the heavy weapon over his head so they could see him clearly. He was Rambo again, a squadron of black helicopters descending upon him.

All at once Clay felt himself being hauled backwards off the road. He stumbled and fell backwards into the snow. “Why did you do that?” he demanded as he scrambled to his feet.

“Getting your ass out of the way so you don’t get flattened,” Zack yelled.

The large vehicle went flying by, throwing a thick sheet of slush in their direction. Clay ran back out onto the road, waving the shotgun, Zack grabbing Clay’s arm just as he aimed it at the receding taillights.

The gun kicked violently as he fired both barrels.

“You’re crazy,” Zack yelled.

“I didn’t know it was loaded.”

“What if you hit them?”

“I didn’t. I was aiming way off to the side.”

“That sounded like a war. Sure as hell one of your cranky old neighbors is gonna report the gunfire. The sheriff is going to be out here.”

“It’s hunting season.”

“It’s bow season, asshole. You can do the talking when the cops get here. I’m taking Drew home.”

Clay didn’t offer to help as Zack half-carried Drew to his rusting pickup. After they were gone, Clay collected the beer cans scattered around the living room and tossed them in a black garbage bag that he pitched near the sink before crawling into bed.

3
Donna Bateman stood behind the bar at the Last Chance looking through one of the large windows on the opposite wall. Beyond the windows, snow swirled through the beams of the floodlights in the parking lot. And much to her surprise and relief, the three old timers who spent almost every evening at the Last Chance nursing a few beers—Willie, Ken, and Franklin—headed out into the storm soon after the eleven o’clock news. She cleared their bottles and glasses, wiped the bar and the counters. Then she locked the front door to prevent any more customers from coming in for a nightcap, not that there was much chance of that late on a stormy weeknight. She emptied the meager contents of the till into a zippered bank bag and locked it in the safe in the small office next to the kitchen. Then she turned down the lights and went into the back kitchen area to do some final cleaning and washing up.

“The first snowy night,” she said, as she wiped and dried the long stainless steel counter. She hadn’t seen her longtime lover, Dirk Lowther, the one constant man in her life, in months. But he had promised he would see her the night of the first big storm, sort of an anniversary. And it would be so easy tonight; her current companion, Gavin, was in the U.P. hunting. She wouldn’t have to lie about why she was late coming home.

Their last assignation had been in late August on the beach at Otter Creek; it was one of the warmest nights of the summer. The encounter followed a pattern she had known for more than half her life. Usually they’d have a few quick drinks followed by torrid lovemaking. And then he would be gone with no contact for six weeks, or sometimes six months. And this arrangement had continued over the years, uninterrupted by romances, affairs, or marriages.

Their first tryst had taken place in the back seat of the big maroon Pontiac he drove back then. She had been baby-sitting the two small children he had had with his first wife. That night Donna could tell the couple had both been drinking heavily when they returned from the party. The woman asked her husband to drive Donna home, saying that she was too drunk to get behind the wheel. In the course of the evening Donna had been doing some drinking of her own, helping herself to small glasses of Baileys Irish Cream. There was always an open bottle in their refrigerator, and they never seemed to notice that any was missing.

Donna remembered how snowy it was that night, the first storm of the season. Halfway down the long drive, he turned off the lights and stopped the car. He grabbed her, pulled her over to him, and kissed her hard. It wasn’t her first sexual experience; she’d lost her virginity the summer before ninth grade. But somehow this was so much more exciting than anything that had happened before. She kissed him back, pushing her tongue deep in his mouth, and then plunging it into his ear. She knew that made her boyfriends go crazy. He didn’t have to undress her, she tore off her clothes and helped pull him out of his.

Hours later, when she was home in her own bed in the old farmhouse that had been in her family for three generations, wide awake, her body still tingling, she tried to remember everything that happened, the chronology, all the things he’d done to her and had her do to him. She wished they could have spent the night together, nothing had ever felt so good, none of her boyfriends had ever given her that kind of pleasure.

And that was the start; all these years later it was still the same. And it was their secret; she had never told anyone, not even her closest girlfriends. And she knew he never would. And even in a small town where secrets are hard to keep and tongues are quick to wag, she didn’t think there was the slightest suspicion that there was anything between them.

And there was one more part of this secret that she had never shared, the truth about her son’s paternity, conceived a year after their first encounter. Donna stopped her cleaning for a moment, thought about her boyfriend at the time, dear sweet Herbie. When she got pregnant he assumed that he was the father. She remembered Herbie talking about “honor” and not wanting his child to be considered a “bastard” by everyone in town. “Herbie.” She said his name out loud. She liked saying his name. He wasn’t a bad guy, and for a couple of years he worked hard to support them and help with the baby. And she tried hard to love him and be faithful, not that she was very successful. Her grief was real when Herbie died, less than a mile from their home, colliding with a deer late one night as he was coming home from work, his damaged Harley and mangled body ending up in the woods a few dozen yards off the road.

Donna closed her eyes for a second. She could see the whole scene again. The flashing lights in the fog, Herbie’s lifeless body on a gurney, the rumble of the engines running at idle, the faces in the crowd lit by pulsating strobes.

The next day, as her mother looked after her toddler, Donna walked back along the highway where the accident took place. In the silence of a radiant autumn afternoon, she walked the area. Donna could see the skid marks, the path through the brush the bike had created as it careened off the road, breaking saplings until it stopped against a large red oak. Near the bottom of the tree the bark was battered and torn, showing the force of the impact. She knelt in the grass and could see small pieces of glass reflecting back the soft autumn sunshine in the sandy soil close to the tree.

And although Donna was not given to introspection, she stayed there a long moment, wondering what she was supposed to be feeling. Wanting to be able to look down upon the whole scene and perhaps get some understanding of the meaning of Herbie’s death, she wandered up the hillside. Near the ridgeline she found the deer, a buck, the shattered ends of a bone sticking through the skin of a deformed rear leg, its flank torn, flies working the open flesh. She knelt near the head of the animal and reached out and touched an antler. She ran her hand over the hard, bony surface.

The sound of an engine and the slamming of a car door, followed by a sharp rap on the steel back door, interrupted her thoughts. She peered through the peephole and undid the lock and deadbolt. It was the first snowstorm of the season.

As he drove east on Route 2 in the swirling snow toward Saint Ignace, Gavin Mendicot could see the lights on the bridge glowing across the dark tumult of waves funneling through the Straits. Snow and cold had taken away his passion for bow hunting, and now he was trying to beat the storm.

* * * * * *

Gavin pushed a half empty bottle of Glenfiddich from view just before he reached the tollbooth. Then he pulled behind an eighteen-wheeler and crept across the bridge. At Gaylord he pulled off the interstate and slowly worked his way back to Cedar County on snow-covered, two-lane highways, consuming the rest of the scotch along the way.

When Gavin finally reached the Last Chance, the lights were out in the bar and the parking lot was empty. He plowed through the heavy snow in the parking lot to the back of the building to see if Donna was still finishing up. He stopped just short of crashing into a sheriff’s car, parked just behind Donna’s battered pickup.

Gavin’s synapses, which for most of the day been slowed by alcohol and weed, were now firing rapidly, albeit haphazardly, driven by the continued ingestion of amphetamines as he drove south. Pausing, he looked at the police car and the dark building, his damaged brain still functioning well enough to understand what was happening.

Slowly he backed up. His first impulse was to ram the police car and drive it into Donna’s pickup. Then he remembered the last time he had crashed into a police car. The lawyers hired by his trust were barely able to get him out of the charges; a conviction would have led to his being declared a habitual offender.

Gavin drove around for a while, finally pulling into a space at the far end of the Village Market parking lot. He got out and climbed into the rear of his vehicle, pushing clothing and gear out of his path. He kicked off his boots and slowly pulled himself into his sleeping bag. As he squirmed to find a comfortable position, he settled against something sharp. He pulled one arm out of the bag and fished around for the offending object. His hand surrounded the cold surface of his composite bow. “Fuck,” he said, tossing the weapon toward the front seat.

4
Late night calls usually meant something was seriously wrong; it wasn’t that the watch command and the available personnel couldn’t handle such situations, but Ray had made it clear from his earliest days as sheriff that he wanted to be kept abreast of any significant events involving the department.

“Sheriff, Lisa, dispatch,” came the voice on the other end of the phone.

Ray pulled himself awake. “Yes, go ahead.”

“We have a shooting, male, late teens. He’s currently at the medical center. I’ve dispatched two cars to the center.”

“Where did the incident take place?”

“Don’t know. We just got a call from the ER saying they had a shooting victim. He came in by car with a couple of other kids. I have no other information.”

“Who’s there?”

“Lawrence and Reilly are en route.”

“How are the roads?” Ray asked.

“It’s slow going. They’re doing their best to keep main roads open,” came the response.

“I’m on my way,” said Ray. “I’ll let you know when I get there.”

Ray pulled himself out of the chair in which he had fallen asleep and switched on the light. He picked up a now cold mug of herbal tea from the table next to him, drank the last of it, and stopped at the bathroom. After pulling on a well-used pair of duck boots and a heavy jacket, he headed toward the garage. Ray carefully maneuvered the winding, snow-covered road down the highway, then switched on the overhead flashers and headed for the Cedar Bay Medical Center, a place where earlier in the fall he had spent several weeks recovering from a serious gunshot wound.

Ray pulled into a parking place at the ER entrance. There were two patrol cars but no other emergency units. Mort Loftman, known to everyone as Doc, dressed in green scrubs, no coat or hat, was standing outside, just beyond the perimeter of the emergency entrance, smoking. As Ray approached, Doc said, “Don’t say a goddamn thing, I get to do this when I need to.”

“What do we got?”

“It could have been worse. A teenage boy with shotgun pellets in his arms, neck and head. He also has some facial lacerations from flying glass.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Just got bits and pieces. The victim and a couple of friends were driving around. God only knows what they were up to— teenage boys cruising at night, never a good thing. They did something or were just in the wrong place and someone shot at their car. The kid riding in the back seat is the one that got hit. Guess the other two thought he was kidding when he said he was shot. When they figured out he was really hurt, they brought him here. We probably got him twenty minutes after the shooting.

“The kids are from Sand River,” Doc continued. “I just got off the phone with the parents of the injured boy. The other two kids are okay, one of your guys is talking to them.”

Ray followed Doc into the building. He found his deputies with two teenage boys in the otherwise vacant ER waiting room.

Ben Reilly was sitting with the boys at a table and filling out an incident report. Detective Sue Lawrence was standing on the perimeter, following the interview. Ray could see the two boys answering Reilly’s questions. He walked to Sue’s side and looked at the kids; one was lank and wiry with thick brown hair, a thin face and delicate nose; the other boy was brawnier—big shoulders, a thick neck, and a solid visage. Both were wearing maroon jackets with the raised letters “SR” on the right side. Gold footballs were pinned at the intersection of the S and R on each jacket.