You Only Get Letters from Jail (10 page)

“Me and Shirley have been married . . . let's see . . . five”—I could see him mentally ticking off numbers and changing his mind—“no, six years. Six years in August.” He picked up a fistful of fries and put them all in his mouth.

An El Camino full of teenagers pulled into the gravel parking lot and I turned to watch the girls get out while the driver gunned it once, twice, turned the stereo louder for a minute to blast the chorus on a song I didn't know, and then cut the car to silence with the turn of the key. The girls were tall and long-legged and there were three of them and the driver looked as though he either really didn't care that he was chauffeuring three girls or was doing a good job at pretending not to. I had never ridden in a car with that many girls. I could've had my learner's permit last month but I had never taken the class for the certificate or the test for the paper and we didn't have a car anyway because my mom was busy dying. I sometimes thought about what it would be like to drive, have my own car, maybe chauffeur three girls out to burgers on the way home from school, but I couldn't even see that desire as more than a dream because from where I stood now that reality was not even in the distance.

“So Shirley, she's taken a deer every damn year that we've been together,” Uncle Nick said. “Me? I've taken zero. No deer in six years. I call that shit luck.” He had a piece of lettuce stuck to the front of his teeth but neither of us pointed it out to him.

“Buck fever,” Shirley said. She was a skinny woman without a defined age—she could've been thirty or fifty—and she had wiry blond hair that she kept pulled back off her face with a
black headband. I don't know if she had ten headbands or just the one, but she was always wearing it no matter what time of the day it was. She had faint freckles on her face, like splatter from a flicked brush, and she chewed slowly, took forever to get through half a burger, and had one breast—the other one had been cut off because of cancer the year before she met Uncle Nick. When I came in the house and met her for the first time, she had walked to the doorway and given me a stiff and lopsided hug and when she stepped back to look at me, she held out her arms and said, “I've only got one boob,” and glanced down toward her chest where her T-shirt rose and fell like a hill butted up against a valley. “But I'm a survivor, so you better think twice before cracking a joke,” she said, then picked up my bag and walked it to the back bedroom of what my Uncle Nick had been busy convincing me was
my new home
. That was all she said to me.

“Tough as nails,” Uncle Nick had said and shook a cigarette from the soft pack in the breast pocket of his denim work shirt.

The wind made a halfhearted gust and tried to pick our grease-stained burger wrappers from the table. We all reached for them, but Shirley had those bird hands that could dive out of nowhere and managed to shove them all under her soda cup before I could get my hand down. She gave me a sideways glance out of the corner of her eye and said something under her breath, something at me, but the wind was rattling the bent rain gutter on the burger stand and I couldn't hear her. It looked like her mouth said
you suck
, but maybe I was wrong.

Uncle Nick didn't notice anything. He just kept forklifting fries to his mouth, five or ten at a time so that he had to chew while he talked. “Buck fever, my ass,” he said. “Bad luck is more like it. I never get a clean shot.”

“He always misses,” Shirley said, and she didn't smile as she said it.

Uncle Nick and Shirley had deer tags for zone X-4, which Uncle Nick informed me contained the prime spots—Crater Lake, Eagle Lake, Antelope Peak, Harvey Mountains, Upper Hat Creek Rim, Butte Creek Rim, Ladder Butte, Negro Camp Mountain, Black's Ridge—and was one of the most sought-after zones in the state. Deer tags for X-4 were only awarded by a drawing in June after all interested hunters applied, but Uncle Nick called it a lottery, as in he and Shirley had won it along with 413 others, and they were determined to both take deer this year,
bucks
, and Uncle Nick had already been scouting the zone, had decided on where to camp and where to hike and where to hunt, and he thought himself crafty because he had found an area that was hard to get to, out of the way, and went against the grain of deer-hunting success tips, which suggest that deer are more dense in less forest, and not the other way around. We rose in elevation and small green signs by the roadside announced the change—2,240 feet, 3,180, 3,540. Shirley turned in her seat and told me to stop chewing my gum like a cow—she could hear me chewing over the sound of the truck—and when we finally stopped climbing we went down a dirt road, and another dirt road, and the truck bounced over rocks, gullies, washouts, and Uncle
Nick turned the hubs to four-wheel drive so we could climb out of mud tracks and low spots until the ground evened out again. The trees came up thick and tall and crowded the road that wasn't really one until the road faded out altogether and Uncle Nick rolled to a stop and said, “We're here.”

We got out, one by one, and I tried to shake the pins and needles from my legs. Uncle Nick put his hands on his lower back, stretched and belched. Shirley dusted off her hands even though they were clean, and walked around the back of the truck so she could lift the latch on the cabover camper and open the door to make camp.

I had never been in the mountains before, and I had not realized that there was so much quiet. It was a quiet that wasn't without noise, but the noise was a hushing sound, the wind up high bending the pine trees, and there were the sounds of birds, but a different sound than in the city, not a call of warning and near misses, but maybe real communication and happiness, and somewhere above us I could hear a woodpecker. The air was clean, but I could not describe what I meant by that, only recognize that it was.

Shirley set up chairs and Uncle Nick had me find big rocks so we could make a fire pit. He said we were lucky that it wasn't fire season or we'd be freezing our asses off at night, and we made a makeshift circle, stacked the rocks and then gathered dead wood and made a pile. By the time we were done with that, Uncle Nick was huffing and puffing and said we'd done enough manual labor for one day and it was time to drink beer. He got comfortable in a chair and talked me through how to build a fire—pine needles,
bark, and scraps, a lot of blowing, stack the wood in a tepee to let the air circulate and don't let the flames get too high. He drank and pointed. When I was done he handed me a Coors and we sat in the last patch of light, drinking.

“You excited about tomorrow?” he asked. He had already folded and crushed three empty cans and was cracking open a fourth. He put a cigarette in the crease of the corner of his mouth and tilted his head back to look at the clear sky between the trees.

“I'm nervous,” I said.

“Well, you're gonna be the spotter, keep your eyes peeled, but if you get a clear shot I want you to take it and we'll just put my tag on it and take it home. What the hell—it might be the closest I get to taking a deer this year anyways.” He tried to sound hopeful but did a bad job at it. He would be disappointed if I got the deer. He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and held it between the first two fingers of his right hand, against the side of his beer, and it was hard to remember that it wasn't lit. “Just remember that we're looking for forks—forks and bigger—no rack, no shot, right?”

I opened the ice chest and reached for a Pepsi, then decided to test it and took another Coors instead. Uncle Nick didn't notice, or didn't care, and he raised up out of his chair and tossed a mossy chunk of wood onto the fire so that there was a whole lot of smoke until the fire could stutter back again. Shirley came out of the camper and I sat down and hugged the beer can between my thighs so she couldn't see the label. She handed us bowls of spaghetti and pulled up a chair of her own.

“Goddamn this fire is smoking, Nick.” She coughed and waved her hand back and forth in front of her. “Robbie, you got dish duty and cleanup tonight.” She said it without looking at me. “Four tomorrow?” she said to Uncle Nick.

“Sounds good. Up at four. Up the trail by four thirty. Take the early movers.”

“You think you can get up that early, Robbie, or should we leave you in camp?” Shirley asked. I didn't know if it was the beer and a half in my head or just the way the wind carried, but it sounded like a dare.

“I'll be ready,” I said.

“Jesus, I can't eat out here. Fix this fire, Nick.”

Uncle Nick took down a six-pack and I managed three more by drinking fast and staying in the shadows. Shirley was either a messy cook or she did it on purpose, but the tiny kitchen in the camper looked like a pipe bomb had gone off, and when I started trying to wash things Shirley told me that water wasn't free up here, what we had had to last us, and she made me heat water a little at a time, wash everything first, rinse fast, and then she told me that the dishes weren't clean enough and maybe I could do a better job tomorrow. She reached for a bag of marshmallows and a box of graham crackers and began stepping down out of the camper.

“Whatever,” I said low and under my breath—it seemed like it was the way she and I communicated—and she turned fast and grabbed my arm up high, dug her bony fingers between the bicep and bone.

“What did you say to me?”

“Nothing.”

“You know, I am no dummy. I know how teenage boys are—lazy, mouthy, dumb. Nick has a big heart and when the phone rang, he couldn't say no. Me, I said why in the hell do you need to rescue your sister's boy when she couldn't take care of her own? And she sure as hell couldn't, could she? But Nick thought he could do something for you. Make things better. I told him that he couldn't. So watch it. I have a lot of leverage around here and all I have to do is tell Nick three words—
I am done
.”

I didn't sleep that night. I tried, but the makeshift table bed was too short and unless I kept my knees slightly bent or slept with my legs at an angle so they hung over the side, I couldn't fit. I felt claustrophobic and smothered. I could hear Uncle Nick breathing, falling in and out of snoring like a lawn mower that's sputtering on fumes, and I could hear Shirley, her sounds of sleep quieter but sharp, and the air in the camper was too hot and there was not enough oxygen to go around. I stared out the little window and watched the oval piece of sky where the stars were bright white and there were too many to count and wondered if this was my life. When I was sitting in the hospital after they wheeled my mom away, the county people came and asked questions, made the call to Uncle Nick. They asked how long my mother had been dead and I had to explain to them that I really didn't know for sure. I turned over on the too-short bed and tried to remember how my old house looked when I used to walk in the front door. I was forgetting things. When the alarm went off I was relieved because my eyes were already open and I had been waiting for a long time.

Shirley made coffee in the percolator on the tiny stove, and I stepped outside to dress. It was cold and the cold was an edge against my skin whenever a section was exposed. I dressed fast, dressed in layers, the way that Uncle Nick had said I should. We filled canteens from the water jugs, put a few granola bars and sandwiches in a small pack that Shirley carried, and then the three of us slipped on bright orange vests and took our oiled rifles, one by one, from the rack in the truck—Shirley's Browning A-Bolt and two Remington 700s, one for me and one for Uncle Nick—his a brand-new one he bought so he could pass me down his old. I looked out at the forest around us and tried to adjust my vision, but there was no hint of morning in the sky and we struck out in a darkness like full night.

“Keep your muzzle down,” Uncle Nick said, and we formed a line behind him, Shirley in the middle and me in the rear, and the cold in my fingers crept up my arm and I was a little bit sorry that my pride was too big to let me stay in camp, where I could be warm, try to sleep, be alone.

We walked in silence, Uncle Nick holding a short Coleman flashlight to spot the ground, the only noises the snap of sticks under our boots and the sound of fabric rubbing. I was wide awake for a while, breathing through my nose, and my eyes feeling too big for my head, and then I started sleeping on my feet and followed along while time passed without much notice. Uncle Nick had found an area of thick scrub that he wanted to get to when the sun came up so we could be waiting if a herd came down to nose at the dew. We wound around the thick brush, climbed over
boulders, and slid over the backs of dead logs, and suddenly morning came like the flick of a switch so that what was impossible to see before was now in sharp relief, and the sky lightened from black to gray and we moved faster up the mountain. In the dark we had gone slow and stayed on the flat ground, moving between trees and turning sideways to slide through bushes. I could smell the green of broken branches and split leaves, but in the darkness I could not see them as we passed, and I was careful to look down a lot and watch my feet in the back splash of light.

When the sky was bright enough to define distance, Uncle Nick came to a stop and we stood beside him and looked out at the forest in front of us. “Let's divide up,” he said. He was breathing hard and it was difficult for him to whisper. “Shirley, you head out to the left, not too far, but so that you can cover some ground between us. Robbie, you go right. Remember—no rack, no shot. And try to be quiet. There's a clearing about an hour and a half up from here, wide open for about two hundred yards, so just keep moving east and when you get to the clearing, we'll come back together and take the north trail.”