You Only Get Letters from Jail Read online

  “You think you can get up that early, Robbie, or should we leave you in camp?” Shirley asked. I didn’t know if it was the beer and a half in my head or just the way the wind carried, but it sounded like a dare.

  “I’ll be ready,” I said.

  “Jesus, I can’t eat out here. Fix this fire, Nick.”

  Uncle Nick took down a six-pack and I managed three more by drinking fast and staying in the shadows. Shirley was either a messy cook or she did it on purpose, but the tiny kitchen in the camper looked like a pipe bomb had gone off, and when I started trying to wash things Shirley told me that water wasn’t free up here, what we had had to last us, and she made me heat water a little at a time, wash everything first, rinse fast, and then she told me that the dishes weren’t clean enough and maybe I could do a better job tomorrow. She reached for a bag of marshmallows and a box of graham crackers and began stepping down out of the camper.

  “Whatever,” I said low and under my breath—it seemed like it was the way she and I communicated—and she turned fast and grabbed my arm up high, dug her bony fingers between the bicep and bone.

  “What did you say to me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You know, I am no dummy. I know how teenage boys are—lazy, mouthy, dumb. Nick has a big heart and when the phone rang, he couldn’t say no. Me, I said why in the hell do you need to rescue your sister’s boy when she couldn’t take care of her own? And she sure as hell couldn’t, could she? But Nick thought he could do something for you. Make things better. I told him that he couldn’t. So watch it. I have a lot of leverage around here and all I have to do is tell Nick three words—I am done.”

  I didn’t sleep that night. I tried, but the makeshift table bed was too short and unless I kept my knees slightly bent or slept with my legs at an angle so they hung over the side, I couldn’t fit. I felt claustrophobic and smothered. I could hear Uncle Nick breathing, falling in and out of snoring like a lawn mower that’s sputtering on fumes, and I could hear Shirley, her sounds of sleep quieter but sharp, and the air in the camper was too hot and there was not enough oxygen to go around. I stared out the little window and watched the oval piece of sky where the stars were bright white and there were too many to count and wondered if this was my life. When I was sitting in the hospital after they wheeled my mom away, the county people came and asked questions, made the call to Uncle Nick. They asked how long my mother had been dead and I had to explain to them that I really didn’t know for sure. I turned over on the too-short bed and tried to remember how my old house looked when I used to walk in the front door. I was forgetting things. When the alarm went off I was relieved because my eyes were already open and I had been waiting for a long time.

  Shirley made coffee in the percolator on the tiny stove, and I stepped outside to dress. It was cold and the cold was an edge against my skin whenever a section was exposed. I dressed fast, dressed in layers, the way that Uncle Nick had said I should. We filled canteens from the water jugs, put a few granola bars and sandwiches in a small pack that Shirley carried, and then the three of us slipped on bright orange vests and took our oiled rifles, one by one, from the rack in the truck—Shirley’s Browning A-Bolt and two Remington 700s, one for me and one for Uncle Nick—his a brand-new one he bought so he could pass me down his old. I looked out at the forest around us and tried to adjust my vision, but there was no hint of morning in the sky and we struck out in a darkness like full night.

  “Keep your muzzle down,” Uncle Nick said, and we formed a line behind him, Shirley in the middle and me in the rear, and the cold in my fingers crept up my arm and I was a little bit sorry that my pride was too big to let me stay in camp, where I could be warm, try to sleep, be alone.

  We walked in silence, Uncle Nick holding a short Coleman flashlight to spot the ground, the only noises the snap of sticks under our boots and the sound of fabric rubbing. I was wide awake for a while, breathing through my nose, and my eyes feeling too big for my head, and then I started sleeping on my feet and followed along while time passed without much notice. Uncle Nick had found an area of thick scrub that he wanted to get to when the sun came up so we could be waiting if a herd came down to nose at the dew. We wound around the thick brush, climbed over boulders, and slid over the backs of dead logs, and suddenly morning came like the flick of a switch so that what was impossible to see before was now in sharp relief, and the sky lightened from black to gray and we moved faster up the mountain. In the dark we had gone slow and stayed on the flat ground, moving between trees and turning sideways to slide through bushes. I could smell the green of broken branches and split leaves, but in the darkness I could not see them as we passed, and I was careful to look down a lot and watch my feet in the back splash of light.

  When the sky was bright enough to define distance, Uncle Nick came to a stop and we stood beside him and looked out at the forest in front of us. “Let’s divide up,” he said. He was breathing hard and it was difficult for him to whisper. “Shirley, you head out to the left, not too far, but so that you can cover some ground between us. Robbie, you go right. Remember—no rack, no shot. And try to be quiet. There’s a clearing about an hour and a half up from here, wide open for about two hundred yards, so just keep moving east and when you get to the clearing, we’ll come back together and take the north trail.”

  We each took a sip of water and then fanned out, left, center, and right. I found a thin break in the weeds and thought it might be a game trail, and I watched for signs that I was moving in the right direction. I wanted a deer. The feeling came on me all at once—ten minutes ago I didn’t give a shit if I shot a deer or got blisters on my feet or walked off the edge of a cliff. I had gone limp, and I was just dragging along at the end of their lead. They moved the flashlight, and I took the direction. But now I wanted one. I wanted to be the first one, beat Shirley, make Uncle Nick proud, be somebody different than I was. I liked it in the woods—I liked the smells and the sounds and the sharp ends of sticks poking into me whenever I tried to pass through. I tried to remember everything that I hadn’t paid attention to during hunter’s safety when we learned about game hunting. Deer, pheasants, ducks, dove, quail. I closed my eyes and tried to relax my eyelids so that my eyeballs wouldn’t jump around behind them.

  Bitterbrush, mountain mahogany, tall sagebrush. I didn’t know what any of it looked like, but I knew it grew dense and the deer would gather there and these were good places to wait and watch. I kept moving east, or what I guessed was east based on where the light was thickening. I walked quietly, tried to make my boots light and my steps weak so I didn’t step all the way through to the ground, break the pinecones, crush the things that might make noise. I imagined myself depending on the kill. My hands started to sweat against the gun and I thought I heard something and my heart stopped. I froze in place and waited. There was something to my right and I followed it and raised the rifle so that it was closer to my body and closer to my chin so that if I lifted my arms the barrel would be in a straight line with my sight. I tried to slow my breathing down, concentrated, and walked on slowly, waiting for the brush to part.

  In the mountains, sound echoes and travels at strange angles. I heard the gunshot but could not tell the direction—for a second I thought that it was in front of me, but then the reverberation bounced back and I knew it came from my left, somewhere ahead. It was a strange sound—a sharp crack and then a hushing sound afterward, like the sound running water makes when it moves fast, and then the sound trickled out and died. I waited for a second shot, but there was nothing. I waited for my deer in the brush, but there was no more movement, and I realized that whatever had been there had been small and close to the ground and for the past ten minutes I had probably been tracking a squirrel. Then I thought that maybe the gunshot had come from Uncle Nick or Shirley—probably Uncle Nick more than Shirley, based on what she had accused him of—buck fever—not a sickness, but a weakness, she said. A jumpy hunter whose excitement got the better of him when
the game stepped out from the trees.

  I started walking toward the sound of the shot and figured that even if I came up on other hunters I was moving in the right direction instead of ranging wider to the right. I didn’t want to be the last one to the clearing, make Shirley wait, take the accusation of her glare for the rest of the day. I needed the first kill and I hoped if another group had taken a deer it meant that a herd was moving down the mountain, that maybe there were more and they were coming my way.

  I kept moving left and forward, walking over downed limbs and rotten wood. The sunrise had brought smell back to the forest as the air warmed, and everything was rich and deep like broken dirt. Ahead of me I could see a flash of orange between the thick trees, and then I saw more orange and I kept moving forward until the orange took shape and I could see two vests, one up and one down. I started walking faster and thought that maybe Uncle Nick had finally taken his deer and I almost yelled out but then I thought maybe I was coming up on other hunters that I didn’t know and yelling might startle them and get me shot or scare something important or just make me look like an idiot.

  I pushed through another tangle of brush and saw that Shirley was standing on the edge of a gully—the ground dropped off in front of her and didn’t reappear again until it was a good eight feet away—and Uncle Nick was on the other side but half out of view because only the top of him was out of the gully.

  Shirley heard me coming and turned to me and her face was white. I had heard about faces going white—white as a sheet, white as a ghost, but I had never truly seen it happen. One time my friend Eddie drank half a bottle of Strawberry Hill and turned waxy yellow, but this color wasn’t the same. Shirley was white, and I stopped where I was as if her face had froze me.

  “It’s bad,” she said and she turned back toward the gully and I waited for Uncle Nick to gain the high ground on the other side, but he wasn’t moving. His arms were above him and his rifle was over the edge of the gully, out of reach. He looked like he had stretched out and gone to sleep in the sun.

  Shirley slid down our side of the gully and I realized that it wasn’t that deep, maybe three or four feet, and then she was crouched next to Uncle Nick, touching him, rocking him from side to side. I stepped all the way out from the trees and went to the edge of the gully, dipped to the bottom, came up the embankment on the other side and looked down at Uncle Nick. His right cheek was pressed to the ground but his left eye was open and looking at me and around me, but he did not blink. “He’s dead,” Shirley said, and she started rocking him again, pushing his arm with the palm of her hand so that he tipped up a little on his side and came down flat again.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He’s dead. That’s it. I don’t mean anything else.”

  She wasn’t crying and I’m not sure what I expected, but I watched a lot of TV and I knew that sudden death was tragic and full of hysteria and women had a tendency to scream, oftentimes in some sort of disbelief, and there was crying and a lot of shouting of the dead person’s name and a demand that he wake up. Wake up right now.

  But Shirley just rocked him with her hand, and then I knew what she was doing and I didn’t want her to do it, but she was faster than me and just as I reached down to make her stop, she put her weight into the rocking and got enough leverage to roll him over and then he was staring straight up at the sky and there was still only one eye that was trying for focus. The right side of his face was no longer a face, and I needed only a quick glance down to know that he had been shot and it had taken the right side of his face and the back of his skull and he was like a monster in a B horror movie, divided down the center of his head, left side normal, right side bad—corn syrup and food coloring everywhere.

  “What happened?” I don’t know why I asked it. There was only one answer with no mystery behind it.

  “He got shot,” Shirley said. We both stood there trying to find someplace else to look. Shirley was staring back over her shoulder at the bank behind us, and I was looking out at the forest, at the trees and the grass and the rocks.

  “Did you shoot him?” I asked.

  Shirley didn’t say anything for a minute, but she did not turn to look at me. “He shot himself,” she said.

  A squirrel came out of the underbrush up ahead, and then another one followed it and they both scrambled up a tree in chase. Uncle Nick’s friend Bob hadn’t been a bad hunter’s safety teacher. He was funny and told us jokes about Helen Keller that made me ashamed for laughing, and he was patient mostly, able to go over the same material again and again until there were no more questions and he was satisfied that we understood it, would remember it, could maybe even recall it later when the time came that we needed it—The Ten Commandments of Firearms Safety, number seven: Never climb a fence or tree or jump a ditch with a loaded gun. All of us repeating it in unison and then Bob pausing for a minute and already smiling before he could finish: So, why did Helen Keller’s dog try to kill itself?

  There was blood. The dirt was dark and the blood didn’t stand out in contrast to the ground, but there was a thickness under him, under his head, and when I could look closer I saw that there were pine needles stuck to the side of his face, or what wasn’t his face anymore, and the blood held them like glue. Nothing moved around us; the squirrels were gone and there were no birds. There was real silence now and nothing broke it.

  I stood on the edge of the gully and watched a small breeze shift the tops of the trees. My legs were tired and my feet felt like blocks in my boots. I was suddenly aware of my rifle and I didn’t want to hold it anymore. I bent over and set it on the dirt beside me.

  “You should unload it,” Shirley said without looking at me. I ignored her.

  Despite the circumstances my stomach started growling and I wondered what time it was. Uncle Nick had a watch but I didn’t want to know the time that badly.

  “Well,” Shirley said, “this isn’t good.”

  I almost wanted to laugh. We were in a forest on a mountain, miles from the truck and even more miles from a town, and it didn’t much matter the distance because I had no idea of the direction. But laughing would’ve been a bad thing and I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t care, because I did.

  “We’re gonna have to pack him out,” I said.

  Now Shirley did laugh and I was startled enough to jump and loosen the dirt under my boots and send a tiny avalanche toward Uncle Nick’s left hand. “You want to try lifting him?” she said. “Because you weigh what, one sixty? One seventy?”

  “One sixty-six,” I said.

  “Okay, one sixty-six. Me, I’m pretty much pegged at one ten—I used to be closer to one twenty before the cancer, but Nick,” she looked down at him and her voice softened a little. “At Nick’s last doctor’s appointment he came in at two eighty. Now that was about a month ago and if anything he’s gone up because the doctor said he shouldn’t, so he’s pretty much me and you added together, plus change. You want to try to lift him?”

  “You could take his legs and I could take him under the arms,” I said. “We could take a lot of breaks.”

  “Robbie, we couldn’t get him to the other side of this ditch even if we took a week of breaks. You ever heard of the term ‘dead weight’?” She was still staring off into the distance, at the gaps in the trees, at everything that was nothing. I shook my head but she didn’t see me. “It means that when a person dies they really weigh more—maybe not on the scale, but in the fact that when the life goes out of them, everything settles. What you could’ve maybe lifted before becomes impossible after.”

  “So one of us goes for help. One of us stays with him and one of us goes back.”

  “Do you have the map?” she asked.

  “Map?” I hadn’t seen so much as a state park brochure since we left the house.

  “The map in Nick’s head.”

  I started cracking my knuckles. It was a bad habit, and I had been told to stop a hundred times but I could not quit.


  “You see, it’s kind of funny,” she said. “Directions were Nick’s thing. I was in charge of food.”

  I finished up with my left hand and started on my right, folding each finger over and pushing the joint with my thumb. “We came from that way,” I said. I jerked my head toward the trees.

  “And then?”

  “I came from the right, followed the gunshot to my left. So if I go to the left I should find my way down.”

  “To where exactly?”

  “I guess to where we split up.”

  “And then which way do you go from there? We spent over an hour in the dark, following Nick and a goddamn Coleman light.”

  I was quiet for a minute. “Maybe things would look familiar.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  There was dirt in Uncle Nick’s hair and on his scalp. “How were we going to get a deer back then, if we couldn’t carry one?”

  Shirley finally turned and looked at me and I realized that she had an age and it was older than I had figured, and there were lines in her face that I had never seen before. I knew that under her vest she was wearing a pullover sweatshirt, and under that was probably a T-shirt, and under that was a long-john shirt, and under that was where cancer had left its mark, and I wondered what her chest looked like, if she was scarred badly.

  “We field dress a deer,” she said. “Cuts its weight down and two of us could trade off packing it.”

  I didn’t want to think what I thought, but I did and I couldn’t help it, and I hated it when my mind made me see things that were not right to see—Shirley’s cancer chest, my mother and Tyler doing it in the back bedroom, Uncle Nick gutted and hog-tied to a pine pole so me and Shirley could hike him out.

  Shirley bent down and unzipped the pack around Uncle Nick’s waist. Inside were a coiled and knotted piece of clothesline, a Hefty bag, a Ziploc freezer bag, a bundle of twine, and a blue rag. She pulled the things out one by one and set them on the dirt beside him. When she was finished she unsnapped the sheath on his belt and laid the knife with everything else.