The Things I Want Most (19 page)

When we arrived, Mike followed me into the brightly lit studio and then drifted off by himself, quietly walking from mount to mount, studying the displays while Curt and I talked about how he would do the deer.

Later on we stood at the counter while I wrote out a check and Curt looked down at Mike. “Hey,” he said, smiling, “your dad tells me you're in karate.”

Mike looked back, and the interested, relaxed expression on his face fled.

Back in the truck, I probed. “Mike, you are thinking about quitting karate, aren't you?”

“I'm not a quitter. I'm not quitting!”

“Okay, if you're not quitting, are you still worried about the test?”

“I don't care about the stupid test!”

“Okay,” I answered, honestly confused.

Then Thursday night came, and after an early dinner Sue asked me to go find out whether Liam and Mike were ready for karate. Liam was getting his uniform on, but Mike was downstairs in the barroom, watching TV.

“Mike, are you going to get ready for karate?”

A moody, cutting look away. “No. I'm doing hunting now.”

“Huh?”

He glared around his shoulder at me. “I'm
hunting
. I talked to all those people. That's what I'm doing new.”

“New?”

“I mean now.”

“Mike, the other night you said you weren't quitting.”

Silence.

“Mike, you shouldn't let a test stop you, and as far as hunting goes, you don't own a gun or any equipment, you're too young, and besides, it's not deer season any longer.”

“I hate this whole—”

“Don't you dare say that word!”

“—fucking family!” He jumped down, knocking over the barstool. “I want to go to a
good
family.”

I left him there, yelling at my back. Then I went and collected Liam and drove him to karate. But afterward I took a long drive alone, back through New Paltz, down Route 208 through Gardiner, and then down to a white frame house just outside the Shawangunk Prison. I saw the lights were on, got out, and walked up the back path to the kitchen door.

The next day I was home from work and waiting when Mike got off the school bus.

“Mike, I have to talk to you.”

“I'm hungry.”

“Fine, you can have something to eat after we talk.”

He followed me into my room, making exaggerated dragging gestures.

“Mike, I want to talk to you about hunting.”

“Boring.”

“Mike, you said you wanted to hunt. I have to explain to you what's involved.”

“Boring.”

I set my teeth. “Mike, we can sit here all afternoon, all evening.”

He sat down, cupped his chin in both hands, and stared at the ceiling. “So talk.”

I was getting angry, my jaw still clenched and a little muscle working furiously away in my face. But I forced myself to calm down and tried to begin reasonably

“Mike, what do you think hunting is?”

A long silence. Then he said in the tone one would use to talk to a moron, “You take a gun and go out and catch a deer.”

“And then?”

He stamped his foot. “And then people come to the house and talk to you about it. They put your picture in the paper and then you go to the taci, the taxi—”

“The taxidermist.”

“Yes, the taxidermist.”

“And,” I said in an offhand manner, “that's all there is to it?”

He shrugged.

“But you want to do hunting?” I asked.

“I
am
doing it,” he answered. “I'm good at it”

“What are you good at?”

“I talked to all those people.”

I tried to be as gentle as I could. “Mike, you were great at talking to those people. You did a real good job. But there's something you don't know about that.”

“What?”

I stood up and took out a box I had retrieved from the storage area. Inside were hundreds of loose photographs.

“Mike,” I said, “these are all the pictures that aren't in the photo album.” Then I started to shuffle through them and flip prints out on the bed. “Here, look at these.”

Mike got up, slouched over, and angrily picked up the photographs as I tossed them out.

After about five minutes I stopped and walked around behind him. By now he was holding a stack of twenty or thirty
photographs. “Here,” I said, pointing at the first one. “Do you know who those people are?”

“No.”

“Well, Mike, that's me and Bill Allen, a friend I used to hunt with. Bill moved to California in nineteen seventy-two. That picture had to be taken in sixty-nine or seventy. Now, look at this—it's me standing with Henry next to a deer I shot. Henry is only four or five there, so how old is that photograph?”

“I don't know.”

“Henry is twenty-four now, so how much is four subtracted from twenty-four?”

“Twenty?”

“Right,” I snapped, “so this photograph is twenty years old. Now, how about this one from nineteen sixty-eight…. Here's one from 'eighty-seven with Craig Erhorn. Look, look, this one is from only two years ago.”

I went through about half of them, naming the years.

“I don't care about any of this stuff.” Mike grated his words.

“How long have I been hunting, Mike?”

“I don't know.”

“Look at these photographs and tell me how long.”

“A long time,” he mumbled.

“Thirty years,” I said. “Thirty years. Now, how many times a year do I go out in the woods to hunt or scout?”

“I don't know.”

“Mike, maybe forty times during the course of a year. Not forty full days, but at least thirty scouting walks and ten times hunting, even just for an hour or so. So how much is forty times thirty years?”

“I dunno.”

“Yes, you do. How much is forty times thirty? You can do that in your head.”

Grudgingly, “Forty times thirty is one thousand two hundred.”

“Right,” I said. I sat down on the bed and pulled him over to me so that I could look into his eyes. “I went out one thousand two hundred times over the course of thirty years. Now, Mike, I want you to listen very, very carefully to what I'm going to say next.”

“What?” he said, dropping the photographs on the bed and struggling out from under my arm.

“Mike, in all those times out, in all those thirty years, this is the first time any people have ever come to my house to look at the deer I've shot.”

Silence.

“Mike, did you understand that?”

“Why?” Now he didn't seem so angry. “Why didn't the people come?”

“Because, Mike, that deer was a once-in-a-lifetime deer. People can hunt every day of their lives and maybe only once, if then, get a chance to take a deer like that.”

He shrugged.

“So, Mike, talking to people has very little to do with hunting. Being able to is great—you have a great command of yourself in front of a crowd and you can use that well later on in life—but that's not what hunting is about.”

He shrugged again a little bit more helplessly. Was I making my point?

“Another thing,” I said, standing up and walking over to my desk. “Last night after I dropped Liam off I went over to a farmhouse by the prison where the local firearms safety instructor lives, and I picked this up for you.” Then I handed him a legal-sized piece of paper covered with type.

“What's this?”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “That, Mike, is the fifty-question test you have to pass to get your hunting license.”

Mike held the page in one hand, staring at it, and his hand,
his arm started to tremble. He got a helpless, lost look, which turned to anger, little red splotches on his face, and his eyes closed.

“I can't do hunting.” It wasn't a question; it was a raspy statement.

“No, Mike, not now.”

“I want to go to another family.”

“Mike.”

I saw movement and turned around. Sue was in the room. I didn't know how long she had been there or how much she had heard. But she didn't look very pleased.

The next morning was Saturday, two weeks till Christmas, and Mike's behavior when we woke him was more disturbing than it had been at the beginning of the month. He wasn't screaming or cursing, he didn't fight; he just refused to react. He got out of bed, took a shower, dressed, and went back into his room. He wouldn't talk, nod his head, or look anyone in the eye.

And it was the same again the next day.

After dinner that Sunday evening Sue was reading the paper and drumming her fingertips on the table at the same time. “Rich,” she said without looking up, “there had to be a gentler way to make your point about hunting than shoving that written test in his face … and anyway, he's an emotionally disturbed boy. You could have let him pretend a while longer, at least until we were past Christmas. Now it looks like we're either going to have Mike the monster or Mike the zombie in that room in the morning—all morning, every morning—for a long time.”

“Sue,” I protested, “he was off on a tangent, and I wanted to bring him back to his problem with the karate test. That's what's been causing this behavior; that's what he has to come to terms with.”

“No,” she said quietly, “no. I've spoken to him endlessly today and yesterday about that, and I'm still not convinced karate's
the problem. Mike is afraid of that test, but when I offer to talk to Bob and let him skip it or take the test another time, he's just as upset. So there's something else there—something deeper, that I can't understand.”

Then she did look up. “So he needs some professional help. It's gone beyond the anger and depression or whatever is going on in his head emotionally. He's not sleeping anymore, he staggers through each day burned-out and groggy—he might even be losing some of the weight he gained.”

I didn't know what to say.

Sue put one hand to the side of her head and looked back down at the paper. “But that's not something we can get done by tomorrow, or even in the next week or so.” Then she was silent a long time before saying in a low voice, “Before all this started I had a heart-to-heart talk with Mike about Christmas.”

“And?”

“Well, I almost had to cry. One thing he mentioned several times was that he had never given anyone any real Christmas presents, that more than anything else he wanted to buy some Christmas presents for the brothers, as he calls them, and for us, and for his sister and brother, and so on.”

“We can handle that, Sue,” I said quietly

“Yeah, well, I don't think it's going to happen now. I think he's going to slide right on by us on Christmas.”

Sometimes the hand of providence becomes discernible, like a wisp of pale smoke caught in a sudden beam of sunlight. This was the case when a pile of unforeseen work sailed into Sue's office the following week and she said, “Rich, you do the cluster meeting tonight. I can't get away”

“Ugh.” Once a month Harbour sponsors an evening get-together for the parents of the program. Sometimes there's a class on paperwork or medical aspects; sometimes it's just a relaxed forum for exchanging notes.

But there are far too many females there.

“Listen,” I said, “when General Douglas MacArthur was running Japan just after the second world war, he changed the Japanese constitution to allow women the vote. His reasoning was that women were more inclined than men to address social concerns.”

“So?” and her foot was tapping.

“So,” I said plaintively, “that's exactly the problem: they address them and address them and address them and address them …”

“Rich, just shut up and go.”

So I went, and after half an hour I was bored and hadn't much to do but listen when two women next to me began a private conversation.

“We've involved John in a half dozen different activities,” said the first woman, “Boy Scouts, 4-H, the after-school book club, horseback riding, and none of them have worked out. Each time he comes to the point where he has to go it on his own or turn in a project, he just automatically drops out, and if we try to encourage him, he gets unbelievably angry and starts to act out his fears. We keep praising him, we keep trying to build up his self-esteem, but he just doesn't have the basic confidence …”

“Yes,” said the other parent, “Joey's exactly the same way in school. We do everything we can to build up his self-esteem, but it's awfully slow going. I don't know why—the children's home told us he participated in many different activities—but now that he's with us, we just can't get him to stay with one.”

Off on a train of furious thought, I spoke to some other people there—a
lot
of the other people there. It was after midnight when I walked into Sue's office.

“Sue, I know it's not early, but can we talk?”

“Okay. I'm through, anyway.” Click, snap, click; she shut the computer down and killed the power. “What?”

I hesitated. I knew she was still angry with me for the way I
had talked to Mike about hunting. And that crack about women hadn't helped.

“Sue, I learned something tonight.”

“See,” she said with sweet, sticky sarcasm, “I knew all those nasty, nasty ladies wouldn't hurt mummy's little boy.”

“I learned that they're all the same way.”

“Who's all the same way?”

“The Harbour children,” I said. “Most of 'em, it seems. Mike's not really all that much of an exception. They all pretty much overreact when their parents involve them in long-term activities.”

Sue groaned, flipped her pen over her shoulder, and began to look around the office for something else to do. Then she said something else under her breath I couldn't quite make out-something about not letting “him” out again.

Finally she looked up at me, biting her words. “You sound like you were hatched out of an egg a couple of hours ago. I mean, where have you
been
for the last eight months? Of course all the children are the same, you idiot. That's what The Harbour Program is, a refuge for the same type of children— emotionally disturbed children”