JUSTIN

Justin’s father fills his backpack and Graham’s with Nalgene water bottles, bags of trail mix, peanut butter sandwiches, a first-aid kit, waterproof matches, a poncho, a compass, bungee cords, Bushnell binoculars. Justin will carry the Gerber Reserve Insulator, a bulky, many-pocketed backpack full of freezer bags and freezer packs, to collect and keep cool the meat they hope to harvest. Years ago, they never would have needed it, since by October a thin blanket of snow inevitably covered these mountains. He remembers icicles dangling like blue fangs from tree branches and rock overhangs. Frost ornamenting pinecones. The river clotted up with ice. This afternoon the temperature will rise into the seventies. Meat will spoil quickly.

His father pulls from his rucksack three blaze orange caps and tosses them to Justin and Graham and they try them on and then take them off to adjust their plastic bands and fit them snugly onto their heads. They pull on vests of a matching color. “The pumpkin brigade,” Justin’s father calls them.

Justin finds the bottle of Hawaiian Tropic his wife packed and splats a dollop into his hand. He dips his thumb into this and dots Graham on the forehead, nose, cheeks, and ears, and tells him to rub it into his skin, while Justin makes the same pattern on his own face. The smell of coconut fills the air and Boo trots over to sniff them. Justin offers the sunscreen to his father but he refuses it. “For kids.”

Just as they are about to sling their packs onto their shoulders and set off into the woods, they startle at a noise—the burst and scree and tinkle of broken glass. It comes from the far side of the meadow, where a man moves among the tractors carrying a crowbar. Justin’s father brings his hand to his forehead and makes a visor of it, watching the man climb onto the yellow hood of a bulldozer and cock his crowbar and swing and shatter the windshield so that the glass rains all around him and catches the light. He knocks the crowbar around inside the frame of the bulldozer, removing all the stray teeth of glass that have not come loose with his initial hit. Then he swings his crowbar in a half circle, as though it were a samurai sword, and pretends to sheathe it. He goes to the bright blue outhouse and gives it a shove. It rocks one way and then the other, teetering, finally toppling over with a thunk and shoosh when he heaves his weight against it a second time. Beyond him, through the trees, sits a cherry red pickup with jacked-up tires and a smiling silver grill.

Without a word, Justin’s father snatches up his rifle and starts across the meadow at a fast clip. Of course he does not slow when Justin calls out to him. What choice does Justin have—now and so many times before—but to follow? His rifle rests on a log, as though sunning itself. His hand hesitates before grasping it. “Stay here,” he tells Graham and then throws the strap over his shoulder, rather than carrying the rifle diagonally, as a soldier would, as his father did.

He recognizes the man—the cashier from the gas station. Seth, his name tag had read. Like the noise the snake in their tent made. Sethhhh. He remembers his arms, their surging muscle seemingly capable of cracking the bones that held them in place. He had obviously felt a lot of anger toward them, just as he had obviously gotten a great deal of pleasure out of frightening Justin, when he leaned across the counter with a forbidding look on his face. Perhaps now, watching them approach him, he is pleased again.

When they hurry their feet through the grass, it makes a whispering sound, as if the forest is, blade by blade, stone by stone, tree by tree, turning its attention to them. His father is breathing loudly, perhaps out of anger or perhaps out of exhaustion, winded by his fast pace and the thin mountain air. And then they are upon Seth, who waits with a guarded expression.

“Howdy,” Seth says, wide-faced and staring hard at Justin’s father and his rifle. He wears a red tank top and tight blue jeans, his muscles unnaturally large and defined, like a grotesque anatomy lesson. He has hopped down from the bulldozer and leans against his crowbar as if it were a cane.

A dripping sound comes from the fallen outhouse and fills the silence. All around them glass sparkles in the grass like glitter. On the bulldozer, where the windshield should reflect the orange glow of midmorning, a shadow lies instead, like an empty eye socket.

“You enjoying yourself?” Justin’s father says in a joking, angry way.

Seth smiles and gives a slow-motion swing of his crowbar. “As a matter of fact.”

All the joking has fallen out of Justin’s father’s voice when he says, “Get out of here.”

“Funny, I was going to tell you the same thing.”

Justin is standing a little behind his father, but he steps forward now. “I got a kid here.”

“You think I care, Bend,” Seth says. And Justin sees how it is: he is not a person, he is a stand-in for a community, a way of life that seems foreign and intrusive to so many who grew up around here. “I don’t.”

Justin’s father lifts his rifle and draws a bead on Seth’s chest. “I said get out of here and I meant it.”

In this moment Justin has the sudden sense of the world shifting, of morals and laws and civilized human behavior knocked out of place, vanishing in the stead of something wilder. He’s reminded now of Katrina. When the levees broke, so did social order. Rape. Pillage. Burn. Fire a .22 from your roof. Check the pocket of a dead man for his wallet. Doesn’t take much to take us there, Justin thinks. Is his father capable of killing someone? Undoubtedly yes.

“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off of Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

“Come on and try.”

“You’re so full of it.”

Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says. Then, without even a glance, he walks away. He climbs into the cab and the engine roars to life. He crushes the accelerator and kicks up a plume of cinder and the sunlight twinkles off his side mirror when he retreats from them, lost finally among the trees.

Justin’s father lowers his rifle. “I think I won that conversation.” He is smiling. He is proud of what he has done. Sometimes Justin wonders if he sees his fellow humans as anything more than complicated animals, not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design.

They set off with their rifles strapped to their backs. They hike along the South Fork—past where it tears along in white rapids, groping at the boulders and logs, trying to carry them downstream—until it widens and calms and goes glassy with eddies in which pine needles pool.

Boo climbs out onto a scarred jawbone of a rock and drinks messily from the river before sniffing at its muddy banks where the tracks of a toad shorten and then vanish, surrounded by the fern-like impression of wings, where an owl swooped down to make its breakfast. They pause here to drink from their Nalgene bottles and while Graham studies the tracks in the mud Justin says to his father, “I don’t know how I feel about leaving our camp unattended.”

“Even if he did come back, which he won’t, what’s he going to do? Break one of our pots? Piss on our sleeping bags? Big deal.”

“You pointed a gun at him.”

“Ah,” he says. “That kind of shit happens all the time out here. It’s no worse offense than giving somebody the finger.”

They step over roots and rocks and through the bright shards of sunlight lying like jigsaw pieces all over the ground. Every now and then a cloud passes over the sun at the very moment Justin steps into one of these jigsaw pieces so that its light goes out suddenly. One moment he is stepping into a square of brightness; the next he is pausing in a sudden dark. Camp-robber birds hop and flutter through the woods around them, unseen, like something pacing them.

Justin’s father stops before a tree with a jagged black vein running down its middle. “You know the Indians used to douse their arrowheads with rattlesnake blood and charcoal taken from a tree struck by lightning.” He licks his thumb and runs it across the trunk. It comes away black. He traces it along the lip of his rifle, as if it were a crystal he wants to bring a sound from. Then he faces Graham and stabs his thumb against his forehead, pushing him back a step and leaving behind an inky smudge. “Now we’re ready.”

They continue forward, stepping over fallen pinecones and branches, the litter of last night’s storm. Chipmunks dart forward to investigate their presence, then scatter into the underbrush. Every now and then his father pauses to study some tracks on the trail, rain-blurred but recent. They see the places where the deer have peeled away strips of bark from the river willows, where they have left their stool, where they have bedded down.

Justin catches Graham looking off into the woods, as if sensing something, maybe worrying over the man with the crowbar or the story his grandfather shared with them last night.

The basalt walls are pitted with holes from wind erosion or from the bubbling of gases long ago. These holes catch the shadows and look like the eye sockets of the earth. They follow a zigzagging series of switchbacks toward the top of the canyon, and as they do, sagebrush replaces bear grass and the soil steadily loses its moisture and around their boots the dust hangs in heavy clouds. His father casts a great shadow that Justin steps on when following him up and up and up.

Finally they gain the rim of the canyon. Here the ground is cobbled with black lava rock that falls off into the long, wide, thickly wooded gulf. They stand gazing out over it. The sun has not reached a high enough angle to illuminate its bottom. It is a little like looking into the future, looking into the canyon. While they stand fully exposed in the daylight, below them it is already night. Or always night.

The wind rushes fast-moving clouds through the sky and makes a hissing sound in the branches. It whips their clothes tight against their bodies and traces patterns in the dust, making the ground seem alive with its subtle movement. Justin misses the calmness at the bottom of the canyon and wishes the wind would stop. It feels intrusive, almost threatening, like some heavy-pawed beast blundering through the woods, rustling bushes and straining the branches of trees in its hurried passage.

They continue along the edge for a good hundred yards until Justin’s father stops next to a stone cairn. Justin imagines he is studying it and conjuring in his mind the pioneer or Indian who has piled the stones one on top of the other, while perhaps fancying that he sees some part of himself in them, trekking into an uncultivated territory to leave his mark with a bullet, and later, a building.

Justin doesn’t say, “Dad?” for another few seconds until he notices his face has gone deeply red, approaching a sort of blackness, infected by shadow. Justin hurries to his side.

At Justin’s touch he hunches forward, his knee knocking the stones loose from the cairn to scatter all over the ground, and when Justin says, “Dad?” again his father does not respond, lost in his private pain. One hand clutches his thigh and the other beats at invisible things in the air. He seems suddenly to lose weight, so that his coat hangs around his shoulders rather than hugging his broad back tightly. His skin goes from red to brown to gray-yellow in the space of a few seconds, those seconds like the turning of seasons, wintering his appearance.

And then he’s better. He shakes his head as if to free some water from it, to clear his vision, and then he smiles weakly. “Just a little engine trouble. All better now.” He takes a deep breath and then another and this seems to inflate him. “All better.” He stands up straight, then hunches forward slightly, weighed down by pain or weakness.

“Look at me,” Justin says. “Dad?”

His eyes are empty, his pupils dilated like bullet holes entering into the blackness of his skull. Graham grabs Justin by the shirtsleeve and says, in a choked voice, “What’s wrong with Grandpa?”

“Everything’s fine. Just shut up for a second.” He shakes off his son, who reaches for him again, before withdrawing.

Justin calls out to his father several times before his body stiffens and he pushes Justin away, saying, “I’m here, I’m here.”

“Should I call someone? I think I should call someone.”

He raises his hand; it says as clearly as words, Don’t.

“You’re sure?”

“The day I come and ask you what needs to be done, you’ll know you’re grown up enough to tell me.”

“Dad. Quit it. I need to know you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.” Whatever has been bothering him—a clot that temporarily left him lightheaded or a lazy stretch of pumping from his ventricle—his shoulders have squared against it. It is gone. Boo whines and approaches him with his tail hesitantly wagging and Justin’s father gives him a pat and says, “Good boy. Daddy’s okay.”

He then restacks the stones into their original design and forces a smile at Graham, who stands there wavering in his stance and moving his lips as if to say something. Then Justin and his father look at each other and look away and settle their eyes on the only thing moving, a distant hawk doing broad slow turns in the sky, hunting, suspended above them like a drifting flake of ash.

They rest awhile, drinking water and eating fistfuls of trail mix. Justin watches his father intently during this time and after a few minutes withdraws his cell phone. He doesn’t know if it will work here or not. It is more of a gesture to partner his question: “Are you sure?”

He answers by giving Justin a flat look of finality and rising to his feet and clapping the peanut dust off his hands and readjusting his rifle and continuing down the trail, not looking behind him to see if they will follow, knowing they will.

A small fire not long ago burned through this plateau, making the trees sharp and black at their tops like diseased fangs. When Justin brushes against a pine, its shadow sticks to him. Boo races here and there, stirring up black dust and sniffing at invisible tendrils of scent. And then, as if they have stepped from one room to the next, they are past the scorched section of forest, walking again in the shade of red-barked ponderosas and lodgepoles.

A basalt cornice juts from the canyon wall and his father climbs out on it. Far below him, in the spots the sunlight has not yet warmed, vapors float up and finger the air. The trees down there appear so thickly huddled, the river scribing between them a silver path scarcely visible. His father coughs something from his lungs and spits it over the edge and follows its fall and laughs softly.

“Please come away from there, Dad.”

As if on cue, his father’s boot scuds against a knob of rock. He stumbles toward the edge, then jerks his body backward and finds his balance. He does not cry out. He does not retreat from the crag. He simply clears his throat and brings the rifle to his shoulder to glass the canyon below. He is so natural and fearless, standing casually at the edge of a two-hundred-foot drop, peering through his scope and cursing the big stags for hiding from him, the goddamned chickens.

“Would you come away from there?” Justin says.

“Why?”

“Because you’re making me nervous. And because there’s a better place over there.” Justin points to a nearby shady spot, a collection of boulders arranged in a kind of half-moon shape with several feet between them, where they could rest their rifles. “How about we go over there? Please.”

Sometimes dying in bed seems like the only thing that scares his father. He acknowledges what Justin said with a sigh and retreats from the ledge and tramps toward the boulders, where he says, “Now this is a good spot,” as if it were his discovery.

For the next hour they crouch behind the boulders, bracing their rifles upon them, glassing the canyon floor. Every now and then Justin glances at his son, sometimes reminding him to be careful, to keep his finger off the trigger unless he plans to shoot. “Do I look stupid?” he says to Justin and Justin says, “No. You look twelve.”

He remembers lying in bed with Karen, so many years ago, both of them naked and bathed in moonlight. At the time she was seven months pregnant and they were sweating, breathing heavily, having just made love. He was curled around her back, still inside her. One of his hands gripped her swollen breast and she grabbed it and pulled it down to her belly. “The baby,” she said. He felt a flutter beneath his palm and imagined the baby floating inside her, encased in a watery sac, its little hands and feet fighting against it. He was not a religious man, but in the dark, with the baby moving and the warm buzz of sex playing through his veins, he could believe in anything, so he offered up a prayer for his son. He prayed that nothing would ever harm him, that the boy would grow into a happy, healthy man. He hopes the prayer somehow imprinted itself into his bones and blood, like something Karen consumed, its nutrients broken down and filtered through a cord into Graham, helping him along, even now.

The sun continues its slow path across the sky and casts its light into the canyon at such an angle that the west side is bathed in crisp yellow light, the east as dark as night. Through Justin’s scope, among the columns of light between the shadows of the trees, he spots a buck, his color blending so perfectly with the stone and dirt Justin can only see him when he moves. There is great beauty in the way his muscles work under his hide. He is feeding at the edge of a meadow, and when he angles into it, Justin gets that feeling you get before you kill. Twitchy. His skin tingles. He experiences a warm rush of blood behind the eyes that feels a little like an erection. Everything in the world goes blurry except for his target, so distinct he can see every hair and sharp-edged horn. He could squeeze the trigger now, but something makes him pull his face away from the scope, wanting to share the moment with his son.

Here he is, expecting to advise Graham, maybe put an arm around his shoulder and guide the line of his rifle. But the boy has already spotted the deer. Justin can tell from the stillness of his body. He is like a hawk on a telephone pole, staring through his scope with utter attentiveness.

Justin watches him in silence. There is something in his son’s face. A tightening of his jaw and a flaring of his nostrils that foretells what will come. He isn’t going to ask permission. He is going to shoot. It makes him seem faraway and unfamiliar. He is so enchanted by the desire to kill—the same acute and forceful feeling that drove primitive man to bring a blade of obsidian to a stick and sharpen it—that his current life, his school and his bicycle and his bedroom with the desk scored from the snarl of his pencil and the giant beer mug filled with brown pennies and the movie-monster posters hanging on the wall, has become nothing but a tiny black fly he brushes aside with his hand before bringing it to the stock and tightening his finger around the trigger.

Earlier, his grandfather explained to him the importance of accuracy. “One shot,” he said. “One kill.” If you don’t kill the animal straight off, it would twist and cry out and bound off into the woods and you would have to follow the puddles of blood until at the base of some tree you would find it, its eyes looking at you, asking why?

Justin expects him to miss. It is, after all, more than a two-hundred-yard shot, downhill. Justin again sights the buck with his scope and brings that faraway world closer and waits for the crack of the rifle. Before he hears the bullet, he witnesses its destination, as the buck jackknifes in the air, and, after it lands, takes off running in a crooked way. The gunshot follows, loud like the kind of sound the sky would make if it broke open.

“You got him,” Justin says and puts his hand in Graham’s hair, proud and saddened.

“I killed it?”

“We’ll see. You got him. I know that much.”

Maybe it is a trick of the light, a shadow thrown by the pine boughs that reach over them, but his face seems to have subtly darkened. He says, “But it kept running.” Justin can’t tell if Graham is bothered more by the possibility of its escape or its imminent death.

“That’s the way it works.” Justin explains that if he got in a good shot, the deer will run only a little while and then collapse and flop a few times before quitting. It strikes Justin as backward, explaining death to someone after giving them permission to kill. Not for the first time, he hopes he hasn’t made a mistake, bringing the boy.

Justin’s father stands beside them and scans the canyon below. “Somebody tell me exactly what happened.”

“Graham shot a buck. Five-pointer, I think.”

His father scratches absently at his belly. His mouth widens and tightens and can’t seem to settle on a single emotion, expressing at once his elation and perplexity. “I didn’t see anything.”

“It was there. He shot it.”

“So you saw it, too?” This seems to almost anger him. “Why didn’t I see it?” A gust of wind comes along and pops his hat off his head. It rolls a few feet from him before he retrieves it and fits it back in its place. “I wish I had seen it.”

“It’s gone now.” Graham raises the rifle so fluidly to scan the canyon, it is like a natural extension of his body.

The first time Justin killed anything—a robin with a BB gun—he felt a black stone in his throat and wetness in his eyes. He studies his son now. What Justin witnessed before in his face—hunger—has vanished, but Graham doesn’t look as though he is going to cry. If his eyes are wet it is only from the wind. He looks pale and deflated and a little disappointed in himself, like a man who has run over a dog, who has listened to its body crumple moistly beneath the tires of his truck and now realizes he must park on the roadside and drag its body into the ditch.