Town Burning (26 page)

“That’s good,” John said quickly, surprised at his sudden, almost paternal reaction. It was paternal. It must be. God knows he had never felt
that
before. For Franklin it was a declaration of friendship—almost of faith, and he had no real desire to dodge Franklin’s claim.
I
believe the way you do….

Billy waited in his old truck, parked carefully off the widened end of Maple Street on the edge of the brushy pasture that covered the town side of Pike Hill. He sat upright, the windows of the cab closed as if he were ill at ease so close to the houses, the lawns and hedges of the residential neighborhood. John pulled in behind the truck, and Billy watched through the rear window of the cab, a quizzical, disappointed expression on his face as he tried to make out who Franklin was. John walked over and opened the truck door.

“Hi, John,” Billy said. “Who you got with you?”

“Just a friend of mine, Billy. You come and meet him.”

Billy climbed out and saw Franklin, who stood hesitantly beside the car.

“Billy, this is Frank Persons. He’s staying at our house.”

“Weill” Billy said. “I says who in hell can that be with Johnny? How’re you, Frank?” He seemed relieved to find that it was only a little boy he had to meet. They shook hands, Franklin trying to smile, his eyes going up and down as he tried to take in all of the tall, big-handed man. Billy grinned ferociously and let Franklin’s hand go. Franklin flexed his fingers.

“You ain’t got much of a handshake, Frank. Felt like a handfulla fishworms. Try her again! That’s better. Didn’t hurt none, did it? I never meant to squash you the first time, Frank.”

Franklin nodded, smiling uncertainly, and put his hands in his pockets.

“You git the beer, Johnny? How much it cost you?” Billy took out four dollars and a fifty-cent piece and slapped the pile into John’s hand.

“Wasn’t that much, Billy.”

“Near enough. Now we’ll go up to my house and have a couple, O.K.? Best you ride up front next to me, Frank. You’re liable to git throwed off the truck bed.”

The truck ground and jumped ruts in low-low most of the way. John stood balanced behind the cab, which twisted back and forth, alarmingly independent of the truck bed. Leah flattened out below in its valley.

They passed the old Huckins graveyard on the height of the land and turned around into the tall pines near Billy’s shack. The wind in the broad pines hissed steadily, audible even above the unmuffled coughing of the truck. Occasional hardwood leaves, blown a long way up the hill, flattened against the trunks and hung fluttering, meshed in the long needles of the pines.

A hundred yards from Billy’s shack, the truck stopped. John looked in through the back window to see Billy pointing excitedly. Billy turned around and spoke in a high voice John could hear tinnily through the window: “See! See! See the deer!”

At first he saw nothing but the dark pines and a few red stalks of blackberry bushes, but then the deer appeared plain and whole through a clump of little birch. A doe, it lifted a big head, enormous ears veed, and watched them. The neck thinned almost to nothing below the head, then thickened toward the brisket. The whole body presented itself, then faded; then in a blink became vivid and enormous. The white along the belly of the deer and along the inside of the legs seemed the whitest white he had ever seen. It made the birches look gray, it was so white and clean. Big eyes were black and deep, the darkest points among the trees. Then the doe turned one ear halfway around, raised her head and flicked her white flag before taking one huge, graceful bound in which she seemed suspended in thick, slow air. When she came to the ground again she froze, this time completely in the open—even the black hooves and dewclaws were visible, even the thin whiskers along the face, small and black as spider legs. So much tension, such cocked, springing energy in that neck and along that sharp ear! John felt that if he were to touch the deer he would be electrocuted.

The doe looked quickly back into the murk of the brush, turned her head to examine the truck with her other eye, then moved her head again, ears turning and quivering slightly as the truck’s engine creaked and cooled. John leaned tensely across the top of the cab, trying to breathe slowly, trying to keep his nostrils from moving as he breathed. One second the deer was plain and clear, the next only a pair of ears and a shaft of smooth brown neck faded to the grayness of the million-lined brush—one black eye at a great depth of grayness. Then a white flag bounded silently past trees. Two more flags appeared beside it, one much larger than the other two: a buck and another, smaller doe, perhaps one of this year’s skippers, had been watching too.

The truck started and lurched forward. Billy parked next to his shack and jumped out, the case of beer in his arms. “Did you see the buck? Oh,
Johnny!”

“I just saw him at the end,” John said.

“Oh, I seen him! You see the doe look around at him? Two, three times. Looked straight at him. I seen him clear. Eight pointer. Seen him before. Wasn’t that something now, Johnny?”

“Was that a wild deer?” Franklin asked.

“Wild as wild,” Billy said. “Frank, you saw something! Lot more’n most goddam hunters see. Warn’t that doe nice and fat? Hundred, hundred-ten pounds dressed out. Buck’ll go two hundred. I seen him around all summer. You see him, Frank?”

“I saw something run off after the first one went,” Franklin said.

“Sure you did. You picked him out! Oh,
Jesus!
Johnny, you see him?”

“I’m glad Frank saw them too,” John said.

“So am I,” Franklin said.

“I
love
deer,” Billy said. “I just
love
deer. There ain’t
nothing
I love better than deer. I love to see, shoot and eat deer! There ain’t nothing better than a deer. I love to gut ’em and skin ’em. Prettiest thing there is on earth. By far. Ain’t
nothing
can match a deer! I see a deer, I feel good all day. Just to see it. Don’t care if I shoot it or not, now or later. I love deer.”

They went into Billy’s little yellow house. Billy cleaned off the one chair and set a box on end for Franklin. “Sit down,” he said. “By God I How about you, Frank? You like beer?”

“I never had any,” Franklin said, looking at John as if to ask permission.

“Give him a little to try it,” John said.

“Hell, here’s a can, Frank. You don’t finish it, I will. You don’t care for it, don’t drink it. I recall when Johnny, here, when he was a little older than you, he used to come up and see me once in a while with some of the boys. He couldn’t stand beer, you could tell, but by the Jesus he’d stuff her down. Look like he’d rather suck woodpecker eggs. You got to learn to like it.”

Billy settled back on his cot and loosened his overall suspenders, laughing and burping.

Franklin held his beer stiffly in front of him, smelled it but didn’t drink until John did. Then he took a small sip.

“You like it?” Billy asked, about to grin.

“It’s not as bad as it smells,” Franklin said.

Billy leaned back to laugh. “You know, Johnny,” he said finally, “it sure is funny, now, a boy about Frank’s age. How old are you, Frank? About twelve?” He winked at John.

“Ten,” Franklin said. “That’s all.”

“Well, now. Thought you was older than that.” He winked at John again. “Anyways, you take your average, normal, regular boy of ten, twelve, fourteen. He just naturally don’t care for beer. Give him a couple years and by the Jesus you got to watch him he don’t drink anything’ll run downhill!” He leaned back again and laughed and laughed. Franklin evidently thought that was pretty funny, too. He took a larger, longer pull at his can.

“That deer, though,” Billy said. “Frank, you don’t git to see a deer that close to, once a year. You can see them in the fields at night with your headlights, or early in the morning ‘way far across, next the woods. You don’t seldom come across deer like we done today. Johnny, you recall that fall you come home from service? We hunted some that year.”

“I’ll never forget that time, Billy.”

“I guess not. Well, Frank, I met Johnny out in the woods—Cascom side of Pike Hill, it was. First day of the season, first of November. Warm day, wet and quiet—been raining for two days and everything was soaked clean through. Quiet. So quiet I seen Johnny ‘fore I heard him, scratching right through all them blackberry bushes under the apple trees….”

He had been particularly fed up with Bruce, with his mother and father and the town of Leah, and it was one of those times when he didn’t have enough money to take off. His discharge hadn’t come yet. He was on terminal leave, and somehow his pay and the few hundred dollars he’d saved were snafued up with his discharge. He’d spent his travel pay and he had nothing he could do but wait until the Army got around to straightening things out. Hunting licenses were free to servicemen, so he went hunting. He could have borrowed a few dollars from his father, but this time his own money was coming and he waited for it, too broke even to buy beer. Just to get away from the town he took his rifle and climbed Pike Hill, slowly worked his way through the abandoned, grown-over Huckins farm, not really trying to hunt, but going as slowly and silently as possible, out of habit.

Near some apple trees several partridges zoomed up and whistled through the branches, down across the bushes and out of sight before he got near enough to find them on the ground. The leaves underfoot were so quiet he began to suspect the birds had been jumped by something or somebody else. He searched carefully, trying to find one on the ground, trying to pick out one of the straggly little jack-in-the-box heads. There were many partridges that year; bunches of seven or eight fed together. Nearer the apple trees he saw one bird nervously walking and ducking around in the blackberries, and he waited for a clear shot at its head. A body-shot with the .30-.3O and the plump bird would explode into fragments of torn pink flesh and brown feathers. Yet the head, the size of a quarter on a neck thin as a pencil under the fluffed feathers, never came clearly in sight. The partridge strutted, skulked and bobbed along in its apparently aimless, idiotic fashion until it was securely out of sight in the brambles. A moment later he heard it flush out and skim away.

All this time Billy had been watching him, standing in plain sight, laughing silently. Finally, Billy sucked in air and let out a long, rolling belch. John moved his head slowly—something he was thankful for when he saw Billy. Instead of the kidding he expected, Billy nodded his head.

“Well, Johnny,” he said, “maybe you’ll make a hunter someday after all.”

“I sure thought there was a deer made that noise,” John said.

“Could of been. Sounded just like a deer. I got a deer to come to me once, making that same, identical noise.” He tried it again. “Dang hard on the tonsils, though.”

The sun came out in the fresh, washed air and the apples on one tree shone as red as the glass balls on a Christmas tree; on another they were waxy yellow, striped with pink. Billy threw a stick into the branches, and four yellow apples came bouncing down. He picked one up and snapped his fingernail on it. The frost had not softened it. It made a noise like a tight little drum.

“I got to pick them apples tomorrow,” Billy said, tossing it to John. The apple was ice-cold, sweet and puckery, leaving a taste in John’s mouth clean as spring water.

“Peach apple,” Billy said. “Late, though. This here tree’s always late.” He took a bite, chewed out the juice and spat out the meat. “You know, Johnny, sometimes I don’t go hunting at all, just mosey around the woods from apple tree to apple tree, tasting. I’ll bet you I know about every apple tree in the woods. Beech trees—when there’s beechnuts sometimes I just grub around all afternoon eating beechnuts. Same in spring. I act just like a bear. First strawberries, then raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cranberries, checkerberries—I even like juniper berries. I love buttnuts, too. Sometimes I act just like a bear.”

“You eat ants and grubs?”

“Haw HAW
Hell
no!” Billy yelled, raring back, his eyes watering. Then he looked sham-thoughtful. “Though I got a mind to. I don’t imagine grubs would be too bad, fried up nice.” He nodded his head, mock-serious, then burst loose and roared for a while. Then he picked up his rifle and handed it to John.

“This here’s Old Bungaloo, Johnny. You ever see her before?”

He had never seen the rifle in Billy’s shack. He shook his head.

“You ding-dang right you never! I keep her out of sight in case somebody comes around I ain’t home.”

John put down his little .30-.30 and hefted the heavy rifle.

“It must weigh ten pounds,” he said. It was an old Winchester ‘95 lever action, heavily breeched and rugged as a club. “Some piece,” he said. “Old Bungaloo?”

“That’s what my dad called her.” Billy turned Old Bungaloo upside down and pointed to a line of little dents along the stock.

“Twenty-nine deer been shot with Old Bungaloo, and that don’t count the ones I shot with her—ten, fifteen more. I never made no notches.”

“Why not?”

“Tell the truth, I forgot the first couple times. Seemed afterward it warn’t right to go notching in cold blood, so to speak. We going hunting?” Billy looked at the sun, watched the leaves for wind, and nodded his head. “You want to git a deer Johnny? You do what I say and maybe we can show you one. I ain’t going to shoot it for you.
Now.
You go slow and easy back down to the crick. You know where that great big hemlock fell across?”

He did all that Billy told him to do, and late that afternoon he killed his first deer. He’d been walking some, standing still most of the time, or sitting. For once he was not impatient, not looking over the tops of rises or around the edges of thick brush tangles as if he could, by seeing more places, by covering more of the space of the woods, find the standing, clearly outlined deer the impatient hunter always sees in his mind.

This time he did not expect to see a deer at all. He followed Billy’s instructions as he might have followed the steps of an old ritual, and the ritual itself occupied all of his attention; he hardly had time to look for deer, so carefully he moved and placed his feet.