Steve Hamilton - The hunting wind

Randy pulled out a roll of bills. “Let me give you some money for what you’ve done so far,” he said.

“You don’t have to do that now,” Leon said.

“I insist. You’ve already been working on this. You shouldn’t have to wait. A couple hundred? Five hundred?” He started ripping off twenties and throwing them on the bed.

“Stop, already!” Leon said. But I knew he had earned that money. I wasn’t going to stop Randy from greasing him.

“How about you, Alex?” Randy said.

“I haven’t done anything,” I said. “And if I go down there and help you, I’m going to do it for the hell of it, you understand? You’re not paying me any money. If you were paying me, that would mean I’d have to take orders from you.”

“I’m a great man to work for,” he said. “Just ask my ex-wife.”

I was saved by Leon’s two kids in the doorway. Leon Junior and Melissa, nine and eight years old, respectively. They stood there looking at Randy with big eyes, until finally Leon Junior said, “Were you really a major-league baseball player?”

“Sure was, kids,” he said. “Come on in.” A half hour later, we were all eating pizza around Leon’s bed. Eleanor and the kids, Leon in the middle, spilling pizza sauce on himself, all listening to Randy tell his story again.

And me, not quite listening, wondering what the hell I was doing there, why I would be going down-state the next morning to help Randy find this woman, driving down like the northern wind, “the hunting wind,” as the Ojibwa call it, hunting for the lost love of his life.

Jackie was right. I am the biggest sap on the planet.

It was dark by the time we left. If Randy was cold, he didn’t show it. He was humming to himself all the way out to the truck.

“You guys really have casinos up here?” he said. “Real casinos?”

“The Indians do,” I said. “The Sault tribe has the Kewadin here in town, and the Bay Mills tribe has a couple out on the reservation.”

“What do you say we stop in for a little bit?”

“We’ve got to get up early tomorrow,” I said.

“Come on, Alex. I’m feeling homesick here. I love driving across the desert to Vegas. I do it all the time.”

“These casinos are nothing like Vegas,” I said.

“One bet,” he said. “One bet for luck.”

One bet, my ass. Two hours later, he was still ruling the crowd at the craps table. I gave up and went over to the bar for a drink. The bar they’ve got in the Kewadin looks as long as a football field. It’s supposedly one of the longest in the country. To go with the long runway at our airport, I guess.

I sat there and nursed a scotch and water that was heavy on the water, wishing that the bar had a television so I could see if the Tigers were losing again. Three games into the season and they already had the look of also-rans.

But no. No televisions in there. Nothing to remind you that there was an outside world and it was almost midnight. Just table games and slot machines, and a lot more people than you’d expect on a cold April night.

Another hour passed. The crowd around Randy’s table got bigger. I could hear them all the way over at the bar.

When he finally came over to me, he had a sheepish look on his face. I had a sudden flashback of seeing that look before. After all these years, even with the mustache and goatee he was sporting now, the look was the same. When he would shake off a sign and challenge a batter, if the batter ended up taking him out of the ballpark, I’d throw a new ball out to him while the batter rounded the bases, and Randy would have that look on his face. Most guys are mad at themselves then. Hell, every other pitcher who ever played the game is mad at himself then. But Randy would just look at me like the dog who’d crapped on the new carpeting.

“Sorry, partner,” he said. “I got on a little roll there.”

“How much did you win?” I said.

“I was up three thousand dollars,” he said. “And then I gave it all back.”

“Ouch.”

“No problem, right? It’s house money.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

He was quiet for a while, all the way down 1-75 to M-28. When we got into the heavy pine trees, he started humming again. A few minutes later, he was laughing. “This is gonna be so great,” he said. “It’s like a big adventure.”

“Randy, let me ask you something,” I said. “Have you thought this through all the way to the end? Let’s say you find out where she lives now. You go up to her door and knock on it. With what, flowers in your hand? She opens the door, and behind her you see her three kids, and her husband at the table, eating dinner. What are you gonna say?”

He looked out the window at a large doe that was standing beside the road. The white on her tail flashed in the headlights. “Hey, a deer,” he said.

“Randy, what are you gonna say?”

“If she opens the door and I see three kids and a husband, I’m gonna say, ‘Hello, remember me? I never got to give you these flowers at your wedding.’ And then I’ll ask her to introduce me to him, and to her kids.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good.”

“But you know what?” he said.

“What.”

“It’s not gonna be like that. She’s gonna be alone.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know it.”

“Oh Randy. For God’s sake.”

“I’ll bet you,” he said. “That three grand I just lost. I’ll bet you she’s alone right now.”

I shook my head. There was nothing else to say.

“You want to stop at Jackie’s place for a nightcap?” he said.

“We gotta get up early,” I said. “And I want to take this snowplow off before we go.”

“Why do you leave it on so long?” he said. “When’s the last time it snowed?”

“The day I take it off,” I said. “It’ll snow within twenty-four hours. Guaranteed.”

“So leave it on.”

“I’m not hauling a twelve-hundred-pound snow-plow all the way to Detroit and back.”

“So take it off.”

We took the snowplow off. In the light from a single bulb outside my cabin, we took the snowplow off and left it sitting there in its springtime resting place behind the little utility shed, a block of wood holding the mount off the ground and a big plastic tarpaulin covering the whole thing.

By the time we got to bed, the snowflakes were already flying.

The next morning, eight inches of new snow lay on the ground. After Randy got done rolling around in it, he helped me put the plow back on the truck, which only takes about forty times as much effort as taking the damned thing off the truck. You have to line it up just right, because technically I don’t have the right kind of front mount to carry that plow. After an hour of monkeying around with it, we got the stupid thing on and plowed the road. Then we tore the stupid thing off again and put it back in its spot behind the shed. The sun was just coming up by then.

“Come on,” I said when we were all done. “Let’s get out of here before it starts snowing again.”

“Don’t you want some breakfast?”

“We’ll grab some on the way,” I said. “We got old flames to find, remember?”

We jumped in the truck and gunned it through Paradise. The sun shone on the new snow and blinded us. “Snow in April!” Randy said. “I love it!” And then he started singing again. “L’amour, l’amour… Oui, son ardeur… Damn it, Alex, what is the next line to that song?”

“You just keep singing the one line you know,” I said. “All the way down to Detroit. That’ll make me very happy.”

We made Mackinac by 9:30, rolled through a McDonalds, where we picked up breakfast and hot coffee. Then we settled in for the long haul on 1-75, right down the middle of the Lower Peninsula. Ten minutes south of Mackinac, all the snow was gone.