Little Wolves

BOYS AND GUNS





It took Grizz an hour of searching through the brushy hillside before he found the gun, the barrel speared into the dirt. The dusty coating couldn’t hide the weapon’s beauty, a burnished walnut stock trimmed with silver etching, the scope powerful enough to draw down stars from the night sky. A Colt Sauer 30-06. If Lee had hit him, he would have put a good-sized hole in his chest. The boy must have stolen it from his father’s gun collection. A single round was still housed in the chamber, and Grizz levered it shut once more with a satisfying click. Even in the heat, the rifle was a cold deadweight in his grasp.

The farm boys in this stretch of country grew up with guns. Hunting was one of the rituals that gave fall meaning, a release from the hard work of the harvest. Farm boys here grew up shooting sparrows from the telephone wire with pellet guns, learning a steady aim from targeting squirrels at the bird feeder, or practicing on rabbits that invaded their mothers’ gardens. They grew up with guns and became teenagers who shot at street signs from moving cars or shot loads of buckshot straight up into the sky and then scurried for cover before the deadly lead rained down. They grew up, and as they grew bigger the guns grew with them. A .410 could take down a coon or even a small deer at close range; a 20 gauge could pluck a fleeing pheasant or goose from the blue. Shot or slug, steel or lead, they could cite velocities and tell stories of the improbable kill or the one that got away. They ate what they killed, mostly, but sometimes they killed out of boredom, a long-legged gray heron that wandered into range on a fall day, the red-tailed hawk circling ducks in a pond, kills they later mourned but could not undo. Every boy, every one, Seth constantly reminded him. Every boy but his. Other than the .22 rifle that Grizz kept behind the seat in his truck, little more than a varmint gun, they didn’t own guns on the Fallon farm. They did not hunt, did not trap, did not kill, except for stray foxes or predators. And when Seth asked him, begged him, for a gun of his own, he had held off as long as he could, until last Christmas when he bought his son the twelve gauge, hoping that the promise of hunting the next fall would keep the boy in school and out of trouble.

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE hunting season his mother, Gail, had chased his father across the front lawn, slashing at him with a big kitchen knife until he sheltered amid a canebrake of raspberries. Grizz saw this happen from his spot on the porch, where he was whittling a new walking stick with his pocketknife. Gail went in after his father, cursing, and the raspberry bushes lashed and fell as they struggled. Grizz heard shouts and whimpers of pain, but a few minutes later they emerged from the canebrake, both scratched and bleeding, his mother disarmed. They went inside, his mother still shouting something about him “catching worse if she heard he’d been around that woman again.” A few minutes later his younger brother Wylie came out and joined Grizz on the porch.

“They at it again?”

Wylie nodded, his eyes huge. Even from out on the porch they heard curses and breaking furniture.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Grizz said. Sometimes, he felt like he was the one raising Wylie, that he was more a father than an older brother.

As they went down to the lower meadow, Wylie started to tell him about the pageant this coming year, and Grizz let him chatter, grateful for the distraction. “The real Hiawatha is nothing like the one in the play.”

“Yeah?” The tall meadow grasses heaved and tossed like a green sea in the wind. There would be enough wind to keep off the mosquitoes, a fine fall evening. If their parents were still at it when they went home, “making up” noisily in the bedroom, Grizz would walk with his little brother into town and buy them a burger and shake at the pool hall.

“The real Hiawatha was a Mahican, not Ojibwa. He was a warrior, a cannibal. He would have eaten a poet like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for breakfast.”

“I bet it would have given him indigestion.”

“What would?”

“Eating a poet with a name like that.” Grizz burped to prove his point.

Wylie laughed. The play wasn’t until spring, but the kids from the middle school auditioned for it in fall. It was the biggest event of the year. Everyone in town gathered on picnic blankets on the grassy hill above the amphitheater at the start of summer. People drove all the way out here from the Cities to see it. There would be beer for the adults, popcorn and Cokes for the kids. Longfellow’s famous Song of Hiawatha broadcast in an abbreviated monologue from grainy speakers while actors pantomimed the drama on the stage below. This year, Wylie had been selected for the lead part and couldn’t stop talking about it. At the finale, Hiawatha lit a flaming arrow that he shot in a beautiful arc into the black waters below before diving off a steep rock into the waiting pool. His little brother, the hunter in white doeskin. He was going to redeem the family name. They would no longer be the son of a poacher and drunkard, the children of a broken woman, whom people whispered about in the streets. Wylie, his lucky, good-natured little brother, was going to be a hero.

A FEW DAYS LATER the boys went deer hunting with their father. The only time they did not need to fear Dermot Fallon was during hunting season. The ritual of blood and violence calmed him. For days afterward he didn’t need to drink. He didn’t lay a hand on any of them.

It was still dark outside when they stepped toward the mountain. Their father had warned them about staying away from the road. Deer-hunting season didn’t technically start until the next weekend, but their father was not above poaching when it suited him. “What’s on this land belongs to me,” he often told them.

They positioned themselves at the edge of the woods, the father choosing one tree and the sons choosing another on the opposite sides of the meadow. These were old outposts; lumber handholds nailed into a tree trunk led up to a shelf of plywood amid the lower branches. The brothers climbed up and waited for the deer to come down to the meadow and feed at first light. Grizz loved it, the crisp October air, the flashlight carving a wispy trail through the dark. He loved the stillness and the cold and the creepy primeval screech of night birds making one last sweep through the woods.

Together in their tree house, the boys watched and waited. When first light came and went and nothing stirred, they whispered back and forth. Grizz taught Wylie what he knew about the world, which wasn’t much. Hang your coveralls in the barn the night before a hunt so the deer can’t smell you coming. You got to walk like this, on the balls of your feet, so the branches don’t crackle. Injuns don’t drink no water when they hunt; water makes a body weak. Crush a leaf in your fist and let it go so you know which way the wind blows. Don’t kiss any girls French style because it makes you go cross-eyed. Not even pretty Jean Fletcher; I seen how you look at her in church. Sure you say that now. What? The French style is when people get down on all fours like a dog. Sh! Quit your jibbering. Didn’t you hear that? A crow only caws twice like that when there’s something near.

They waited all day and didn’t see much more than a few squirrels scampering in the woods. A couple of times their father came over, and they walked the stretch of woodland nearest the river to see if they could chase anything up. The last time, as evening fell, their father passed his flask around. Grizz refused, but Wylie tried a few sips, wincing when the whiskey hit his throat. Their father roared. “Look at him,” he said. “Shit. The boy’s getting a taste for it.”

Both Grizz and his father were big men, broad shouldered. Only sixteen years old then, Grizz already had hair on his chest. Wylie, three years younger, was small and wiry, a dark-haired serious boy.

When Grizz said nothing, his father slapped him in the mouth. “Answer me when I talk to you.”

Grizz swallowed his blood and rubbed his chin. His father usually didn’t hit them like this when they were out on the hunt. The slap, the ringing sting of it, caught him off guard.

“You aren’t going to cry, are you? Big blubbering baby. I heard about you in town. They’re all talking about you and that little girl. She’s just a child in pigtails for Chrissakes.”

“She’s in high school, same as me. Shut up about her.”

His father slapped him again, harder. Grizz tasted his own blood, and he spat it out.

“They better just be stories, boy. She’s not for you.”

“This sure tastes good, Pop.” Wylie spoke up, playing the fool. “Better than Coca-Cola.”

“Damn straight. You’re more a man than your p-ssy older brother.”

Wylie pretended not to hear. “I feel it right down to my toes.”

He laughed, took back his flask. “Save some for me.”

The three walked home following a slough. The heat of the day buzzed in Grizz’s skull, and he was sweating inside his coveralls, drowsy from waking up before dawn. Grizz and Wylie came along one side, their father on the other, a small canyon of fetid water and cattails between them. Grizz dreaded what was going to happen when they got home. No animal blood spilled out here meant blood would be spilled in the house. Gail, the boys’ distant mother, had wires in her jaw to support the bones that had been broken. Her nose still sat slightly crooked on her face. Grizz wouldn’t touch liquor, not at that point in his life, seeing what it did to his father, but the old man was already corrupting Wylie, turning his spirit dark.

Grizz walked slowly, his brother weaving from the whiskey, when the biggest buck the Fallons had ever seen rose up from the water where it had been hiding, belly deep in the mud. Years later, standing on this mountain with a dead man’s gun in his grasp, Grizz could still see it.

His father reacted instantly, the butt of his twelve gauge finding a groove in his shoulder, his finger squeezing the trigger. It didn’t matter that the boys stood on the opposite side. It didn’t matter that if he missed he would have killed one of them. All this he realized later. What he remembered came in fragments: Wylie going down in the grass, Grizz raising his own shotgun, sweat stinging his eyes, the form of the deer blurring, the shadow of his father on the other side. He pulled the trigger over and over, jacking out spent shells into the grass around him, the gun slamming against his shoulder.

When he was done shooting, he saw the buck as it bounded away, each leap covering twenty feet, a beautiful stag with a massive rack of antlers, the trophy deer their father longed for, with enough meat to smoke and make into sausage to feed them in lean winter months. The buck stopped at the edge of the woods and looked back at Grizz as if to share the joy and surprise of still finding fire in his veins.

Smoke spiraled from his gun. Wylie stood again, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He’d been bent over vomiting up the whiskey. “Did you hit it?”

Grizz shook his head, his mouth dry. The opposite bank, where their father had stood, was empty. “Wylie,” he said. “You wait here.”

“Where’s Pop?”

Grizz slid down into the murky water of the slough, the shotgun held above his head. Wylie called for their father, but there was no answer. The muddy water sucked at Grizz’s boots, and it took all his strength just to cross the slough and climb the slick canary grass on the other bank.

Dermot Fallon was not difficult to find. He was still alive, his body shuddering, the grass flattened all around him. The slug had burrowed into his belly, and he was trying to push his guts back inside. A matting of red, the cattails splattered. A smell like brimstone, something sweet and charred, drifted in the air. He moaned and pounded the ground with his fists. Then Wylie rushed past Grizz and knelt beside their father. The boys’ father tried to sit up, but the pain brought him low. He looked up at Grizz, he looked up at him in his blood, and said, “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Run get help!” Grizz told his little brother.

Wylie climbed to his feet. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Oh, Jesus.” He stopped to retch again in the cattails.

“Hurry,” Grizz said to him.

When his brother was gone, Grizz made sure to kick away his father’s gun, where he couldn’t reach it. It didn’t matter by then. The man’s breathing had grown labored, his eyes rolling back in his head.

“It hurts,” he said. “Hurts worse than I thought it would.” His voice softening. He waited for his father to curse him, waited a long time before there were sirens in the distance. Volunteer paramedics. Sundown. The sky violet, then deepening into indigo. Geese going overhead, racing the falling night. A long time more before the paramedics walked out here from the road. The grass turning brittle with cold. There was an aurora that night, the sky ablaze with energy, green and red lights reaching down like burning fingers, as if the universe were tilting to show some molten secret.

At the house that night, the sheriff interviewed both boys in the kitchen. Grizz told the same story over and over. A deer rising up between them. The slug. It must have ricocheted. An accident. It had been an accident, right? He hadn’t meant to do it. A deer, a beautiful buck. Both his brother and mother weeping. He hadn’t known until then. Hadn’t realized they loved his father. They loved him even though he was a monster. And Grizz? What did it make you, if you were the one who killed the monster? What he felt in that moment was a profound sense of calm, of relief. He was glad his father was dead and could not hurt any of them again. Yet it had not mattered. Within ten years both Wylie and Gail were dead. The sheriff taking notes, glancing from older son to mother. That terrible scar along her jaw.

“You don’t seem too upset,” he said to Grizz.

“It won’t help him to cry now.”

The sheriff nodded, closing up his notes. He was so young then, with daughters Grizz’s own age. His wife had left him a few years back, run off to California with another man. He knew the boys’ father, knew this whole family. “What’s done is done,” he said. Sheriff Steve had suspected Grizz all along and despised him for it.

GRIZZ THOUGHT FOR A long time what to do with the gun Lee had left on his property. When he came down from the mountain, he carried it with him.