“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.”