A Hunter's Tale

By LosRay Mitchell

On a chilly November day in 1962, two teens go deer hunting with their Air Force mechanic fathers. After the kills, the boys are left in the car while the dads enter a Black Hills bar to drink. As the day unfolds, the narrator will learn a lot about adults, kids, violence, race, sex and proving oneself. The book is narrated through the lead's lenses as a 13-year-old and as a mature adult thinking back. The story line features comic observations as well as painful experiences, including violence. The Cuban Missile Crisis, a Cold War event that nearly became a hot war, helps inform various characters' attitudes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781543935042

Book preview

7

Prologue

A solitary snowflake falls in graceful helplessness from a gray Rorschach cloud of countless tons of gravity-outfoxing water crystals and drifts gently onto the wing of a dark-eyed junco as the clever sparrow pulls a semi-dormant wood beetle out of an eroding deck board. The rush of winter vaporizes the frost chip whip snap flapping airborne just ahead of the claws-out leap of a battle scarred tom who’d crouched, ruthless eyes peeping, in a broken picnic basket while hunting a chipmunk which debated a forage mission to capture a heel of homemade bread moldering in a pale sun beam near crooked old stairs installed long ago by a thirsty Block Island born Sturgis bound handyman biker who’d financed Old West states wanderlust with odd jobs featuring cunning use of found materials from collapsing barn scrap for stairs to beer cans and baling wire for tail pipes.

Tavern raconteurs indifferent to witness testimony converted and yet convert the odd duck biker into a localized blue collar farce stock character and season by season enter the anecdote loop of liquor enhanced humorous story embellishments to tell suspect salty fish-on-a-bike tales substantively dependent on parodic accents – bah, cah, hahdee-hah-ha⟨r⟩h — to earn the vulgar laughter – sounds of dogs and pirates – as prized in smoky old dives as salvation’s lusted for in respectable churches.

At a 1953 gray paint and Rust-Oleum spotted Ford pick up’s bumper, a hound’s nose intrudes into the little failed Darwinian kabuki: sniiiiiifff, with a moistly soft retroflex approximate what’s all this, then? growl. The rodent trembles underground as the tattered old tom with the sour puss expression stalks along the boardwalk in the regal yea, be thou fornicated manner of felines. I wind down the squeaky window the better to hear the Davis Sisters sing I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know, a twangy juke box classic in an establishment unlikely to feature Chuck Berry. Or Gisele Mackenzie.

The hound yawns, the effect weird – like the old pooch daydreams of being a mythic creature who inhales the world — while less than three feet from the ramparts of my often assaulted ears husky blond annoyance incarnate practices calf sounds. Insults rise to my tongue tip and die in the knowledge that Pasiphae’s sophomoric bawling boyfriend’s capable of beating my often argumentative nates, so I merely comb my shiny black hair in the weak reflection in the other window and fantasize walking the earth a competent adult who speaks freely, behaves coolly and projects the threat of crushing harebrained offenders into serves-ya-right grease stains, but then, probably ninety percent of any adult population wishes to find a way to treat persecutors as mosquitoes or as victims of la strega invernale. Breathe the cold air. Ah. The eye that beholds the weltering sky finds the inner road that leads the troubled soul through sorrow’s vale – beyond both lies unattained if occasionally longed for (and weak flesh doubted) illumination.

Hmn. Adulthood. Although I still adore the pretty brunette junior who babysat two years ago and after a three hour conversation praised this boy’s intelligence to politely smiling, skeptical parents just home from the NCO club, my recent study of high school students leads me to conclude I loathe virtually every banal and repulsive aspect of teenybopperdom from the mindless bullying to the incessant gossip; from ego tripping power struggles to daft hormonal stupidity impulses; from often relatively useless homework to howled expressions of mandatory enthusiasm – led by modern versions of Artemis’s nymphs in bouncing sweaters with felted wool letters and pleated skirts — in pep ritual worship of the exploits of often gangly or acne afflicted kinesthesia warriors. I mean, the average teen boy mostly knows right from wrong, figures very basic algebra problems, offers moderately anodyne comments on writers as diverse as Chopin and Camus but regularly calibrates auto-hedonic success probabilities via tactile experimentation in places to place the magic boy wand. Nothing with soft folds or pleasant texture’s safe. On the other hand, many a human behaves in much the same manner in looking for a stimulating phenomenon to venerate. 

Then again, I’m now exfiltrating the preadolescent gulag of assumed general incompetence and forced sufferance of (we’re a) family (*&^%# it!) activities such as evenings of hideous LP recordings by bands which harry the ears in faux cool sax infusions of pickled snazz instead of soul tuning arrangements of blue cool jazz; or of mind killing TV shows (I remain afflicted with sort of a 5% nostalgic - 95% hostile memory of hours of forced exposure to the saccharin noise of the affable stiff from North Dakota or the sing-along schmaltz with the goateed chorus leader making upside down OK – or ha-ha arsehole — gestures while leading boisterous at-ease chaps belting out bouncing ball syllables with such masculine abandon as to homogenize most tunes and make many a listener long to trudge off to work… or to a tub. Perhaps with a radio. Or a toaster. And an extension cord). On the other hand, I’m departing the preadolescent realm of subversive acts of repulsiveness, such as the time cousins took turns sneaking over to sniff vinyl upholstered chair seats as adults departed for more beer; each cuz showed quizzical if hilarious wet eyed, flushed cheek expressions of amused disgust, apparently at the lingering fetor of departed pontificating grown up asshole-lee-oh-lee-ohhhs. 

And uh-one and uh-two.

Frickin’ bubbles. At least I no longer believe, thanks to an appreciation for ethnic music, that shooting an accordion player ought to be classified as no more than an aggravating misdemeanor (but the designation’s fine for, say, a paint ball shot to the head of a donor zombiefied politician).

Roll the window up, monkey nuts.

Nothing. Nothing. Nasal exhale. Seat creak. Squeakety-squeak-zhuuooop. Pinched and twisted lips.

The sorry hound with the bad hips carelessly drives the beetle groggily waving spindly antennae and legs into the moldy bread and shambles like a canine version of a crucifixion bound victim up the rickety stairs toward old foggydoggydom on the boardwalk.

Sarcastic calf sound.

1

Son and I hunker in a white ’59 Bel Air sedan with orders to stay bunkered while our R n’ R needful, post-near Apocalypse fathers imbibe Hamms on tap on high stools amongst alcohol and nicotine lovers in a barn board and corrugated steel Black Hills honky tonk with eerie neon beer names inciting thirst in the dirty windows. The Chevy’s parked on a glacial gravel lot strewn with brown pine needles and punctured by dead reclaimant blue grama spears next to a shabby boardwalk outside a side entrance with a poorly mended squeaky pinewood screen door that offers reductionist comments on entering and exiting patrons. The bar sort of squats into a granite hillside near an occasionally one acre, stream-fed pond in a glade between hills crowded with pines — soft and endlessly messy trees that smell like heaven’s perimeter membrane. Recreationalists, sportsmen and -women, workin’ folk and teeth skinners who always find just enough often soiled cash for liquor and cigarettes keep the bar in business.

Nearby stand or sag opportunistically built aging wood and scrounged junk buildings huddled to form not a town but an accidental settlement of mostly low rent white folk with enough property to claim self-respect and enough survival skills to claim self-reliance. Just about every soul in the vicinity drives through life with a manual mental tranee gear shifting thusly: 1st— aggression against acquaintances; 2nd— aggression against competitors; 3rd — aggression against family; 4th—aggression against nature; 5th— aggression against the Hated; R— withdrawal from either end of the sure foot-in-mouth or likely bone-in-ham situ. Pretty much every person over ten participates in some phase of game processing.

Various inhabitants first arrived as GI’s and now exist in 20-‘n-out redneck paradise retirement, with shaky marriages or peripatetic domestic arrangements the norm, and most mmmn-gettin’-alongers engage in favor exchanges or boost incomes in weekend hobby shops, volatile games of chance, or seasonal blue collar day jobs – many off book — in ambitiously named boroughs within a gallon or two’s winding jaunt.

Easily disparaged in our current materialistic paradise, the subsistence folk might riposte, At least we ain’t like most slobs who walk around with corporate semen running down quaking legs or big government titty juice running down chinny chin chins since World War Two established our big sloppy assed – and corporate owned – sacred cow government as parents and gods. On the surrounding federal lands various affably hard assed cowpokes run Herefords, Angus, black baldies, even some Galloways. With or without permits.

Old timers say in the early 1870’s, a wandering alcoholic crank of a miner squatted to move bowels at the site of the current body shop but proved so fearful of imagined hostiles the silly grizzled coot scuttled around aiming a temperamental Colt .44 until fear generated a vision of Crazy Horse lurking sneaky dang savage-style amongst the pine tree shadows. The hyperventilating fool grunted a cubit-long slider into his own gold pan and dang near shot his mordantly hee-hawing donkey – the cantankerous critter later suffered accidental dispatchment near Lead when the scandalized miner fired at a local ostler’s tetched mid-teen scion (sort of a Dakota iteration of the hapless horndog of a leviticussedly punished Puritan herdsman, Thomas Granger, the name beastly ironic) who teetered pants down and lard smeared in a crude wheelbarrow behind the hobbled, snorting jenny. The non-deadeye miner’s shameless wails after the tragic fact of the treasured ass’s passing supposedly penetrated two draws and a holler.

Locals call the settlement Sorry Ass Luck or just Sal. Nobody ever put up a plaque or historical marker. Six winters after the pathetic dump, an aging Deadwood dolly on hiatus with a dose found the well knifed miner’s carcass clutching a pouch with an ounce or so of gold dust in the muck behind a saloon that later burned down in a snowstorm. The dust paid an evidently bipolar mortician with man crushes on gun fighters to pine box and return to the earth under Mt. Moriah’s ponderosas the 99% unlamented and 90% unwashed hard