Allegheny Front

IN THE SECOND DISTRICT

BLACK SMUDGE ON BOULDERS WIND-SCOURED THE color of bone.

Through riflescopes, the two of us watched the bear cross the saddle. She — a sow black bear for sure — poured her body through the laurel with a loping, liquid gait. Then hounds in chase, driven on lean, pumping haunches. She picked up speed and split through the timberline, where the krummholz lifts in mangled postures. A bear’s ungainly way of moving is an illusion. You’d never outrun one. Far behind, hunters dragged themselves up the mountain. They tripped and slid over scree and snow. I counted seven, almost our entire party, a pair of them with an obvious lead. I couldn’t tell who they were. Three hundred yards? I’m not good at judging distance. I eased crosshairs onto the dogs, adjusted the parallax. Shades of hide flickered in and out of focus: Plotts and blueticks, redbones and Treeing Walkers. The sow made the rocky heights, a plateau hovering at four thousand feet.

The rifle was ice against my cheek. In town, the Union Bank clock said twelve degrees. I had no idea how cold it was up here on Dolly Sods. The wind brought tears to my eyes.

A lone birch sapling quivered, a wild clean miss. Someone was shooting. The sow charged through a deadfall. I heard it: limbs snapping against her. And bawling of dogs.

“That’s Shovel,” my stepbrother said. “He ends on an up note. You hear that?”

He — Conner — wanted a pup out of Shovel’s line.

“When will you get one?”

Conner said, “Oh, I don’t know. Andy’s real jealous of Shovel’s pups. Real jealous. Now Shovel come out of Banjo. Now that was a singing dog. That’s a redbone.”

Even in a moment like this, my stepbrother and I weren’t quite sure what to say to one another. We lived in a state of familiar embarrassment.

Another shot. I saw a Plott’s stout neck, the head square as a file. Nipping at the bear’s ears and ankles, hounds scurried around dolmens of limestone and dipped out of view behind truck-sized boulders. Treble cries clattered on the landscape. Each yelp and bay was distinct. Old men claim the cold does something to it, that singing sounds best come December. The bawling rose in pitch.

We sat in the snowy truck-bed, using the side as a rest. Really, it was the best day Conner and I ever had together, or so it seemed at the time.

Conner tried to hand me a beer, and I said no, thank you. He kept it for himself. It was nine in the morning. The wind had chewed his face red. “Sorry,” he said. “I forget.” I was probably the only one he knew between eighteen and eighty who didn’t drink. People assume you’re in AA. I sometimes say I have a stomach condition.

Conner said, “I feel like Patton up here. Or Robert E. You can see it all.”

I tuned the scope to 10x. I’d never watched from this angle. We were late for the hunt — Conner put his truck in the ditch on that icy Laneville Road, we had to winch it out — so we drove up Cabin Rock to watch the spectacle unfold. We’d meet up later with the others. The CB crackled in the cab.

The sow forded a run with three great waltz-steps. Hounds swam the chilly water and hit the bank shaking their hides, bodies steaming. I shivered reflexively. Conner laughed at this.

“Rose, you need you a little firewater,” he said, draining his beer. (My name is Roosevelt Daugherty.) “Can’t hack the cold without it. Makes you feel like a true-blue mountaineer.” He struck a heroic pose, the Great Hunter. “We make them northeast libs shiver the night before a presidential election,” he said, in a creaky old-timer voice. “Make them shake like a dog shitting razorblades.”

I laughed, despite my feelings. He learned that silly voice off my dad. The CB gave out snarls of English, quizzical Chinese, a squall of pink noise. That morning in a strip-mall parking lot, I saw the Chinese merchants from Pittsburgh who huddled around a Chevy Blazer. They sipped tea from Styrofoam cups, listening to a scanner. The bear’s gallbladder is said to be an aphrodisiac. They pound the organ into a greasy, yellow concoction and sell it for thousands. Wise fellows, banking on the black market and backward countrymen. Their children graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and Carnegie Mellon. More power to them.

I said, “I can’t see it anymore.”

“Me neither. They’ll pop back up.”

The smell of beer in the cold made me nauseous. I ate a burning handful of snow. This was in my vague year between college and law school. (I had not yet been accepted and was nervous, though everyone else was sure I would turn out okay. Why so sure? I wondered.) Conner was five years younger, but our roles seemed reversed. When I was home on break, he made an effort to take me fishing and hunting. Family was sacred to him. Like all sentimental people, he would mine that vein till there was nothing left: nothing but bare, scraped rock.

“If you get a shot,” he said, “lay down a field of fire. They can take a lot of lead.”

I said I would.

“Don’t forget,” my mother would tell me, “that you are a Methodist.”

She repeated this like a koan, to help me through that listless, frustrating year. I worked with my dad and lived with her, an arrangement I definitely preferred. Dad was a small-town lawyer, semisuccessful, and chair of the county Democratic Party, garrulous and hard-drinking and loved by all, a keen mimic, quick with a story. (My mother, chief operating officer at the hospital, is successful without caveat.) I organized for the party in that election year. When I had a free moment, Dad sent me round to the local faithful to gauge their mysterious wants and concerns. I met these sweet old men and women who offered me coffee and pie. In turn, I asked my question. The sweet old woman would say, “I really think the state legislature needs to bring back the death penalty.”

That, or reining in the gays, or instituting Castle Doctrine, or plugging the donut hole in Medicare Part D. I loved hearing about that donut.

He sent me to the hard cases, it’s true. He acted as if I had forgotten West Virginia. I had gone to Vanderbilt for a year, didn’t care for it, and transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont, which I did care for. But I knew our district. I’d grown up hearing it from blowsy pols, union reps, the coal miners, the Democratic Women’s luncheon, just as I was forever being handed that same plate of potato salad. They beat it into you at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. Dad convinced me to enter law school at the state university, his alma mater, because it would prepare me for life here, for joining his practice. “The Ivy League’s a waste,” he said. “You can’t meet nobody to help you down here, and you’ll never come home.” But this year was to be my true education: “It’s getting hard to hold District Two,” he said. “Here’s your dance card. Get ready to twist.” He lived to set me up for state legislature and then, some distant day, Congress. My grandfather, “The Coal Miner’s Friend,” represented the Second District for twenty-three years. In his cups, Dad would say, “I could’ve done it, but these voters won’t elect a divorced man. I did what I could for the party, and I think I did it well.” No one could argue with that. He died before I could add another disappointment to his disappointed life. After that, the thin tether between my stepbrother and I fell away.

It’s so tawdry and plain it hardly merits telling — unless it’s your own true life. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and Dad married his secretary as soon as the ink was dry. Yet Mom and Dad took pains to keep a cordial relationship. Even when his drinking and Conner’s evils took Dad to his lowest level, Mom would defend him.

The secretary, a brassy country girl from up Birch River, came with a son of her own, Conner. “Instant family, just add water,” his law partner fumed. Conner’s biological father was a redneck called Shade Tree — as in shade-tree mechanic — and I never knew his real name, Ronzel James Mavety, for ages. Then it clicked. Ronzel, the police-blotter celebrity. Every small place has a family like the Mavetys, known not so much for the ferocity of their crimes but for the regularity of them. They pitch their trash over the hill, jacklight deer, coach their healthy children on how to bilk SSI payments from the government and fool the flintiest social worker. Someone is always pregnant. “Constituents, too,” Dad would say. “The lumpenproletariat.” So we were as surprised as anyone when Dad rented on Church Street, in full view of everyone we knew, and moved in the secretary and her son. I had trouble imagining what life was like in that alien house. But no one could hold it against Dad forever. Not even my sister, the last holdout. He was the silver-tongued devil, then, and handsome, too.

Conner was silent in class to the point of being thought retarded, but loud and nasty in the hall. I tried to feel for him. I trod the gouged path of my mom’s family, ardent Methodists to the marrow: “Your opponent is not your enemy.” Mom was sent to England for a conference on the National Health Service — this about the time the Clintons botched their healthcare thing — a trip sponsored by the incorporeal think-tank people that essay our politics. When she returned, she taped a picture to our refrigerator, to face me down whenever I craved something cold to fill my belly. It was a snapshot of what she mistook for John Wesley’s gravestone, a chiseled memorial in a country churchyard:

LORD LET ME NOT LIVE TO BE USELESS

“Do you hear that Plott?”

“It’s deep. Throaty.”

“That’s right,” Conner said. “I could get you one, if you wanted.”

I took the scope from my eye. “That would be awesome,” I said, and it would be. I loved the dogs — Conner felt obvious glee in how closely I listened to them sing. We liked Shovel best, a redbone named for his triangular head. He tracked by scent, huge ears flapping in the wind, driving air and stench to his nose like a set of bellows. So did the German Plotts. The others were strictly sight-hunters with jaws like vises; once such see a bear they don’t let up until they die or are wrenched off. Their bravery gives you the luxury of distance, of safety. Unless you chase a bear into the rocks. You want a bear to tree, not cave. That’s when accidents happen.

The sow doubled back. She couldn’t outrun them. She dropped her shoulder and struck a bluetick. It rolled twice and gathered itself up. The pair of hunters in the lead picked over the boulders, trying to make firing range, orange jackets as bright as fires against the rock.

“See them teeth flashing?”

“The dog or the bear?”

“Hell, the both of them,” Conner said with a grin. “You having a good time?”

“I’m having a great time.”

He asked me his question in such a plaintive voice — you couldn’t help but feel a stab of love, remembering he was seventeen. He knew nothing of the world outside the county. It made me feel awful — a knife in my guts — for the embarrassment I felt for Dad’s second family.

You’re not supposed to glass people through a riflescope, but our guns were unloaded. The two hunters turned out to be a young boy and a red-bearded, fat fellow.

“It’s Bud and Andy.”

I didn’t know them. The boy lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Conner cheered, “Good work, Bud!”

The wide black rump came wallowing out of the brambles. The sow dragged a hind leg. The bullet had licked her. She dove into a shallow cave. Dogs boiled at the mouth. A paw reached from a crevice and swatted one down. Bud and Andy stood less than fifty yards from the cave. They angled for that snappish ball of animals.

“Oh man, Bud’s in for it. He never done this before. I hope Buddy took him a good dump this morning, else he’ll shit himself for sure. See its head pop out? You see?”

I did. “They’re going into the cave,” I said.

“Wow.”

A hesitation, a stutter. The boy didn’t move. Another hound was slapped, hard. Shovel, the redbone. My stomach roiled.

I could see the man, this Andy, gesturing with a shiny pistol. The hounds spun in tight circles, tilting their wattled throats to heaven. I imagined one torn apart, its body broken like a cigar. They are killed sometimes. Skulls bitten. Rib cages winking out.

The boy wouldn’t go in after the crippled bear.

Conner said, “My God, what a pussy. I heard him talking big the other night. I’m going to rag him. Aw, Bud! He won’t live it down. That’s for sure.”

Why not let it go? This was the brutal affect he shared with my dad. Both could say things that stunned me, that made me feel slow. When I’d told Dad I was going bear hunting, which I once heard him call “the white trash Olympics,” he said, “You need to mix with people like that. Someday you’ll have redneck friends to vouch for you. Makes a good ad.”

My left eye began to twitch. On the mountainside, Andy pushed the boy out of the way with a big, square hand. The rocks swallowed up his blazing jacket.

Conner said, “Gun in one hand, flashlight in the other. I been there a few times myself. You should smell it in there. A bear is rank. I about pissed myself the first time. I’m lying. I did!” Conner leaned back and sipped another beer. “You only get so many shots in your life. Especially your first. Took me four years. I’ve got two bears, almost three. I’m pretty lucky. You’ll get yours someday, Rose. Buddy fucked himself over. It’s one thing to get fucked by somebody else!”

“How old is he?”

“Bud? Oh, I don’t know. Thirteen, fourteen. Guess his balls ain’t dropped.”

We heard Andy drain the clip. Popopopopopopopop. Pop. Pop. The cave muffled the sounds and amplified them at the same time — it’s hard to describe. You have to hear it for yourself.

We waited. We waited. Even the dogs hushed. Andy didn’t come out.

Conner slapped my arm. “Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.” We ran to find them, sliding down the mountain, down to whatever horror below.

Living with someone like Conner: You arrive slowly at your destination, where you have a life and he’s in the penitentiary, completely estranged, having given out suffering to everyone he knows and many strangers besides, but in the meantime you must live through the agony, pretending this time, this time, he’ll set himself right. (“Destination”: I despise Calvinism and it reduces me to use the word. Conner made choices. I tell myself this. I tell the world this.) For Dad, it felt like being skinned. Soon, even magistrate friends and a helpful sheriff couldn’t slow it down. He loved Conner in a way he couldn’t love me; Conner needed saving. Those last three years, Dad was bloated and puffy, “from the medication,” he said, but you could see the red-rimmed eyes sloshing around his head. He shuttered his office.

Sometimes I tell my wife, “It’s not right that I look down on them.”

This after I wire a couple thousand dollars without telling her. Purely out of shame, at the pride I feel in not sharing a drop of blood. Conner needs to make bail. He is surely guilty. We don’t have that money to spare. She is heavily pregnant, her belly bowed out, the prow of a ship. I tell myself this is the last time.

She says, “They should be looked down upon. That’s what scares you.”

When these feelings well inside me, I drive up Dolly Sods. Come a winter I put chains on the tires to handle that wicked Laneville Road.

Dolly Sods is a lost tundra, a sliver of Canada sixteen hundred miles below where it ought to be, left there when the glaciers took their tall walk north, scrawling rivers on the land. Windswept boulderfields and twisted aspen, tannic rivers and sphagnum bogs, reindeer moss and snowshoe hares. Spruce trees gnarled and flagged by the winds. Carnivorous flora: pitcher plants and sundews, uncanny and Pliocene. Flies slip down gullets, or feel the snap-embrace of sticky tentacles. In summer, it’s all flaming azaleas and larkspur, but winter turns it cold and hard as a forged blade. In the distant past, a German and his Huguenot wife tried eking out a thin sustenance on the plateau, clearing a few slashes of pasture — sods — for sheep and cattle. Nine feet of snow fell that winter, foundered the herds, and drove them back to the valley, but the name persists. Since we can’t read, write, or talk, Johann Dahle’s pasture became Dolly Sods. No one lives here. It’s so desolate that the army practiced artillery here for the European Theater. Hikers find live shells that rust in the rocks. The army returned in the Clinton years and detonated fifteen. When I was young, we climbed up here to gather huckleberries and watch from arm’s length as strange birds bathed themselves like mice in the dust of boulders. My grandfather lifted one blinking in the cup of his palm. Did that really happen? It’s what I remember. We hiked to the Roaring Plains. Wind snapped our clothes. Sun and clouds, raptors kiting in the thermals as if tethered with wire. We watched eagles a thousand feet below. My grandfather took my little hand in his. He pointed out the features: the Canaan Valley, the Blackwater River, the shuttered Poor Farm, the grade school named for him, the strip mines, the quarry, the Coastal Timber yard, Highway 33, Moatstown with its dwindling black community, Circleville née Zirkelville, Snowy Mountain, Mare Camp Knob, the fields chalked with grazing sheep, the Daugherty Home — ours — and so much else. “It gave me the grandest pleasure to serve the people of these counties. In times of fear and uncertainty, this place sustained me. In the Philippines or Washington or anywhere.” It’s the only memory I have of him.

Andy — Andy Mavety, I suppose — staggered from the cave on his son’s shoulder. His voice slurred a little, he seemed almost drunk, hopping on one leg. Thin lines of blood trickled from the corners of his mouth, as if he’d tried to swallow a spoonful of paint. He dabbed at his lips. With the full authority of my Eagle Scout first aid, I made him sit on a flat rock and open his mouth. He had bitten deep the tip of his tongue.

Andy was trying not to cry. His face was red as his beard. Gingerly, Conner unlaced Andy’s boot and slipped it off him.

His son should have done that, I thought. Bud stood there, abashed, rifle slung.

The foot flopped about in a way it shouldn’t. The ankle was broken — you imagined you could hear the bones scraping together. Andy was a tough old bird. No, he said, no ambulance. They’d never make it up here, and even if they did, he didn’t want to pay the bill. “Somebody just drive me after we skin it out, is all I ask.” Beads of sweat formed on his forehead and face. He seemed to flutter in and out, like to fall off the rock. “I hate sitting in that fucking emergency room. Keep you for hours.”

The hunters winced at the sight of it. Already beginning to darken, the ankle would be ratsnake-black within the hour. Conner moved it. Andy sucked in a sharp breath. He’d slipped and fallen as the dogs swarmed about in the cave, gun kicking in the darkness. “Couldn’t see the fucker,” Andy said. “Should’ve took a flashlight.”

“You didn’t have a light?”

“Stupid of me. I forgot. Too old for that kind of shit. Young man’s game.”

I asked, “How’s it feel?”

Conner snorted. “Shitty, I bet.”

Andy began to protest he was just fine. He looked over at his sheepish son. “Twisted, is all. I’ll be running laps tomorrow.” He smiled for Bud’s benefit. Bud wouldn’t meet his gaze.

Someone I didn’t know, a man about thirty, stripped off his jacket and flannel and gave me the t-shirt beneath. The man’s torso was awfully pale, and tattoos shined bluely from his skin. All the fellows looked to be state-pen alumni — oxycodone people. I cut the shirt and made a wrap, as you would for a sprain. Now I know that was the wrong thing to do. All I did was ratchet up the pain.

Andy was given a couple fat white pills to get him through.

The dog you couldn’t do much for. Shovel’s ear was torn almost in two, ghastly, flapping like a piece of lunch meat. I tried scratching Shovel’s bony skull to calm him, but even then, he was proud and aloof, like the cotton-field debs I met at Vanderbilt.

Conner took Shovel’s head roughly in hand. The dog yelped and bled in earnest now. He frowned at the claw-tattered ear. Someone produced a medical kit, no bigger than a flask. Conner asked me to hold the dog, which whined and shivered in my arms. Conner stitched the ear together the best he could with a steel needle and gut. It wasn’t Conner’s dog, but he liked doctoring, perhaps because he’d failed biology three semesters in a row. Dad had to browbeat him to stay in school. The fights were epic howlers. You’d think he was sending the kid to Bergen-Belsen.

Conner looked at me. Gruffly, he said, “You look like you got something to say.”

He meant, as he always did, You’re not any better than me.

“Not really,” I said.

“There’s amoxicillin in the box.”

He forced a pill down the dog, clamping its mouth, massaging its throat. Shovel walked away on unsteady legs. The doctoring didn’t look sound, but I held my tongue.

We young fellows went into the cave. Bud fell in to help. Neither Conner nor I mentioned what he’d done, the way he refused to go inside and kill the bear. If not for me, the others might never have found out at all.

The cave smelled of grease and afterbirth, though she seemed to be a barren sow. The flashlight beam picked up a glint of light like a scrap of aluminum foil. I scooped up Andy’s pistol — an off-brand.40 S&W — out of the mud and stuck it in my pocket. The smell shifted to rancid milk: the gut-shot bear. In those confines, it was enough to make you ill.

A backbreaker dragging her out. We propped her on rocks, blood dripping from the muzzle. The dogs milled obsessively about her. She stood five-ten, my height, and maybe two hundred pounds before dressing: very good for West Virginia. It would’ve been a fine first bear for Bud. For anyone. I felt a twinge of jealousy. I worked out the claws and whistled. I wished it were mine. Conner opened the jaws wide and stuck his neck in between, feeling the yellow fangs on his neck. Everyone laughed.

“Christ,” Conner said, pulling out and letting the mouth snap shut. “Teeth stinks.”

A fellow said to Bud, “Hell of a bear. You ought to be proud.”

Bud stood there, frozen, unanswering, just a bashful, quivering smile.

Andy said, “You done good, pal. You can brag on that one.”

Andy was telling us that Bud had killed it! He didn’t know Conner and I had seen it all. Conner looked at me, muttering something obscene.

The lie made me unspeakably angry. I hated that lying child.

The shirtless, jailbird-looking guy (who had since pulled on an open jacket that read NOTHING FINER THAN A PIPELINER in stylized letters) took out a cell phone and snapped a picture of the bear. I remember that because no one here had cell phones in those years; the county didn’t even have a tower. Never would, until the ski resort demanded one. That was the first phone I encountered that could take pictures. Prideful, he showed us how it worked.

There were no normal trees, nothing with which to carry out the bear. Instead, we made a harness of rope and skidded it into a draw with road access. The exertion cut the cold. Andy hobbled behind, wincing, leaning on Bud. We hoisted the bear over the embankment with one final groan and onto the road. Eyes gone blue. Body stiffening. The hounds followed, leaping to lick blood from the coat. Conner socked them back with the ball of a fist.

When I looked at Bud, the inexplicable anger returned. The cold poison flooded me — the cold poison that is my life.

Thirty minutes later, we had a circle of trucks. We fixed a log-chain around the bear’s neck and made a gallows from a stout limb. As I cranked the winch, the chain yawned and tightened as it drew out the slack. The bear levitated as if wanting to stand again. Someone backed Andy’s truck under so we could stand in the bed and gut her deftly. The innards fell with slapping sounds on a garbage bag and steamed.

Crawling uphill in the Blazer, the Chinese came, and we got ready to split the bear: head and hide to the one who killed it, the meat divided equally among us, the gallbladder to the lead-dog’s owner, to defray the possible cost of death. Casting glances for game wardens, the Chinese weighed the gallbladder with scales and paid Andy a thin stack of fifty-dollar bills. The last warden used to take a little taste, but he had retired and times had changed. They slid the gallbladder into a Mason jar. It was a greenish-black sac, heavy with bile and big enough to fill my palm. Frowning, Andy held up the money.

This female bear, said the Chinese, isn’t as valuable. Andy said they were fucking liars. They’ll say it’s male anyhow. With a smile, he demanded full market value.

The bartering seemed to soothe his pain, but really, the synthetic morphine was in his bloodstream now.

A middle-aged Chinese man in a really nice Filson jacket approached me. He was handsome and dignified, the color of magnolias, and had no accent. In fact, he sounded more American than any of us locals, us who had no ties to any other land, with our twang that people at college — even my professors — made fun of behind my back, even when I took pains to lessen it.

The well-spoken Chinese said, “This is a fine bear, truly.” Her body swayed and drooled redly in the snow. “Particularly for a female.”

For some reason, I felt an urge to talk with him, which I always do with foreigners here, to show them we are good people. “She run the dogs hard,” I said, “this one especially.”

Then I realized two things: that I was just more white trash to him, and that he was a hired interpreter for the other Chinese.

“My name is Jimmy Carter,” he said. “It is a pleasure meeting you.”

“Holy shit!” Conner cried out, slapping his knee. “We got us a commander in chief.”

“You were ahead of your time,” I told the man. “America wasn’t ready for you. They weren’t right to make fun of your malaise.” In the waiting room of Dad’s practice, there was a handshake picture signed to Carter’s “friend in the mountains,” George Daugherty, “with the greatest of thanks.”

I expected the Chinese man, this Jimmy Carter, to laugh, but he didn’t respond at all. He seemed to have no idea of the displaced magic of his name. Grinning in a blank way that rattled me. Maybe the man was stolid, or had picked the name out of the Yellow Pages. Conner’s face said, Get a load of this crazy-ass chink. The other Chinese stood listening in the snow. Shovel wormed his head into my lap.

Finally I asked him, “Are you doing good business?”

“Oh yes. A great season in the Smokehole Canyon.”

“We heard on the radio.”

“Yes, four hundred pounds. A monster! John McCrory there told me a joke. He said, ‘What do you call a farmer who raises goats and sheep?’”

“What?”

“A bisexual.”

We laughed. I said, “I thought you were going to say, ‘A bigamist.’”

Jimmy Carter let out a great air-rattling belly laugh. “Oh my,” he said, wiping tears with the heel of his hand. “That’s good. Like a Mormon. Who killed this bear?”

I would reveal the boy’s lie. Or make his father deny it. Shovel began to tense and whimper in my arms. I nodded my head at Andy, about twenty feet away. “Guy over there on the tailgate,” I said to Jimmy Carter. “The fat one in the orange. He went into a cave after it.”

Andy could hear. He shot me a frightened look. He knew.

“You don’t say?” Jimmy Carter asked. “Which one? I want to congratulate him.”

I’ve thought of this moment lately, of what I should have said — or more appropriately, not said. At the time, I couldn’t have known I would drop out of law school, answer the call, go to seminary. My church is in walking distance of the building in which I once read law before throwing it over. When I made a name for myself, the conference gave me a large church, passing over older clergy, for which I’m not loved. Now I’m caught in the same snarls I would have been had I become a politician: Dad’s revenge. I didn’t know it until my trip to Dallas. I went there to argue with the troglodytes, southern bishops who would defrock us. The issue was homosexuality; some of us had presided over such marriage ceremonies, against official policy, admittedly making a spectacle of ourselves. I hadn’t done so myself — not brave enough — but I was there to advocate for those who had. I stayed in a brightly lit hotel. I told the kindly people of Texas, No, I have not yet seen the grassy knoll. Across the table, these men hated me. Useless. Dad would have charmed them, accomplished something. My failure is punishment come down upon me.

“Guy with the red beard,” I said, gesturing. “He killed it.”

Andy sat back on the tailgate. The blush returned to his face. He looked at me. He looked at Conner. Jimmy Carter made a beeline for him.

Turning to me, Conner gave out a clipped, mirthless laugh. “This’ll do,” he said. “This’ll do.” I saw the flashing in his eyes. He approved.

Andy was saying miserably, “No, no, my son got it.”

“Oh, my apologies. They say you shot it.”

“Well.” Andy looked at his ankle as if it would speak. “I don’t know.”

“My apologies.” Turning now to Bud, Jimmy Carter said, “Congratulations on your first bear. This one is truly impressive. It is a great beginning. Second-nicest we’ve seen today.”

Bud mumbled his thanks.

“You went into that cave?” Jimmy Carter asked. “You bear hunters are crazy. You could have been killed! Tell the story. Go ahead.”

When Bud didn’t respond, Jimmy Carter thought he’d insulted the boy. He backed up, gesticulating. “No, I do not mean to say you are stupid or anything, necessarily. I am floored by your bravery. I could never do a thing like that. Truly. I am.”

Tossing a beer can in the snow, Andy spoke up. His face was pinched. He gave his son a look that could chisel granite.

“Yeah, that’s right. By God, he risked his ass.”

The other hunters passed one another glances. Miners, mechanics, outlaws. They were realizing the truth of the matter: a whisper in the blood told them so. They could break down engines, run bulldozers, live with comfort in their own skin. I wasn’t one of them, with their easy aggression, their jokes, their settling of scores. It’s no wonder I prefer the company of women. The dam of ice had breached inside. Immediately I felt regret.

My stepbrother called out, “You done a good job, Buddy!”

Shoulders hunched, the boy crammed himself into his person. Dissolving.

Jimmy Carter saved the day, asking mildly, “Do you plan on hunting tomorrow?”

“Not now,” Andy said, then cussed his ankle and his luck. “I got work tomorrow. Boss is gonna flip. Don’t even want to think about it. These boys will all be out.”

“Yeah, I got to get me a bear this season,” Conner said. “Heading overseas and all. I’m going into the Marines.”

This was news to me.

Jimmy Carter wished him the best of luck. “Speaking as one who chose his citizenship, I can say I appreciate your service more than most.”

The first flag-waving year of that televised war, before it soured, when the scene was grim for our party. Dad sulked. “Start a war, win elections. Might as well not field a candidate. Just take our ball and go home.” Several months after the hunt, when Conner was still skulking around the county, I asked my dad about it. Dad said, “My God, how your brother lies. Can you imagine him listening to a superior? He’s a little chickenshit chickenhawk. I finally drove him to the recruiter. He wouldn’t get out of the car.”

Conner shook Jimmy Carter’s hand and said he appreciated the hell out of it. “I need to do me some fucking before I go. Patriotic, are you? Got any daughters?”

Jimmy Carter laughed again. “Only sons.”

“Are they pretty?”

Andy hooted. “I’d give a arm and a leg to be that age again. I’d hop after them on the bloody stumps.”

After bidding the Chinese goodbye, we skinned the bear down to red flesh and white sinew, soon to be rendered into hams. A naked bear is too human for words. We lifted yellow blankets of fat and piled them, where the hounds rolled and gobbled and burrowed in the mounds. Bud threw in and worked hard, trying to make up for being himself.

I hated to pull my red arms from the carcass, because it warmed them so. Soon we’d saw off the head, and the sow’s body would drop into the bed with an axle-shaking thump.

“Sorry you didn’t get yours,” Conner told me after. “Keep the faith. You’ll get him. This storm coming, we’ll call it a day. Andy like that, too.” Soon he’d fly across the waters and become a russet smudge on the sands, his face a void. Eyes, gone. Jaw, gone — at least, that’s what I pictured at the time, before I knew it was just another lie. I wanted to tell him not to go. Maybe he should have gone. Get him away from this tar pit of a place. Could the military have fixed him? Yet I preach that war is unspeakably wrong. He grabbed up the leg of a yelping bluetick and examined the paw. “Cut all to hell. This hard crusty snow is like knives on their pads.” The dog licked its feet, which had turned the snow to a pink slush, as if we’d broken a watermelon for lunch.

I checked Shovel’s stitches and noticed him bleeding a bit about the ears, but then he ran off to slurp some snow. I was ready to go home. Someone shot a whiskey bottle sitting in the ditch. It disappeared in a cloud of glass and a cheer went up.

When it happened, we were discussing who’d take home the tenderloin, the finest meat. You take it. No, you. Shovel whimpered at my boots, fell, and began to seize.

I clamped my hands on the dog’s head and called out. Warm blood trickled over the webs of my fingers. I used my thumbs to parse the skin. Shovel shrieked in a way you don’t expect from a dog. He bled from the mouth and the nose. A swollen brain, something ripped and bleeding beneath the skull, where the bear’s teeth had punched through. Shovel bucked, eyes rolling. Something so disturbing about the sick-animal thrash against my arms.

Andy hollered, “Where’s my gun?”

It took me a second. I took out the pistol and handed it over. I had forgotten I had it.

With the heel of his hand, Andy slid in a fresh magazine with an oily click. He staggered off the tailgate, moving somehow on that broken peg of a foot, and held the pistol out to Bud.

“Your bear,” he said. “Your job.”

Bud didn’t move.

“Come on,” Andy said, seething now. “Time you done some growing up.”

Bud’s voice wasn’t as steady as it should have been. “I’ll take him to the vet. I’ll pay for it, I’ll use my own money.”

The men jeered, spitting on the snow, telling him to suck it up. I watched the kid choke something back, swallowing it slowly, barely, like a peach pit.

He took the pistol and held it, doing nothing.

Shovel whined in an awful, wounded way, like we were cutting his tail off.

Conner shouldered up. “Do it, damn it. He’s in pain.”

I turned away. I didn’t want to see Shovel’s face break open. A moment later, I heard the distinct crack of a dry-fire. I turned and looked.

Conner said, “You got to put a bullet in the chamber, genius! You little liar. Give me that shitty fake Glock.” He jerked the live pistol from the boy’s hand. He pulled up a round and swung on Shovel’s brain.

I had forgotten to check the barrel for mud and snow.

A metallic belch and the pistol split its length in a flash of fire. Conner dropped to his knees. Everyone shouting. The dogs were silent. I remember how chilling that was. I was afraid to look.

The gun had exploded in his hand. Conner unclenched his fingers. He gazed at his hand in wonder. There was no flurry of blood and bone, only the gun barrel in many slivers upon the snow. It should have taken off his arm. He was lucky then. He looked again and again, for the slightest nick, the slightest flaw. You could have done it a thousand times over, and it wouldn’t have happened this way.

It took me a while to register the dog was dead at our feet. No one would touch it.

There is a little white house outside of town. It stands away from the road. All alone. You can just see the driveway and a red hint of door through the laurel.

There is no death penalty in this state, but if there were, Conner and his friend, the one who stripped off his shirt that day, surely would have gotten it. They emptied her medicine cabinet for pills. They took less than fifty dollars from her purse. It was night. They beat her to death with their hands. Eighty years old. They beat her with a savagery no one could understand. Why did he kill her? He didn’t have to. In a just world, lightning or flood would level that place. I drive by it again and again.

This is one of many houses.

Her name was Angela Sayles. One of those old sweet women I visited on my rounds. She had, I remember, skin so white and clear, like cigarette paper. You could see the bones fluttering in her hands. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose and a pleasing loud laugh you couldn’t imagine from her slight body.