Peter Geye - Wintering

“It’ll take some time for everything to catch up with Charlie. Lots of folks will need to have lots of conversations about lots of different things. In the meantime, Charlie sure ain’t gonna sit on his hands down in Gunflint.”

“Charlie’s coming after you?” Gus ventured. “After us?”

Harry took hold of Gus with his stare. “Likely he’ll pay us a visit, yes. If he can find us, which he’ll try pretty hard to do.”

Now it was Gus’s turn to walk over to the window. “Why would he come here?”

“Whether it’s brothers on the Burnt Wood River or generals on a Pacific island, boys will always be looking for a place to tangle.”

Gus turned back to his father. “ How could he find us?”

“There’s nowhere to hide from what needs to come, bud. We’re here because whatever finds us needs to end after it does. This business between me and Charlie would never have a chance of ending in Gunflint. It needs this place. Needs winter, which is soon to get here.”

Gus was then acutely aware of his own anger, both at himself for being so green and at his father for withholding so much. “I can’t believe this. Are you out of your mind?”

“Charlie knows only one way. His way. He thinks the world is simple, but it isn’t. He thinks people are simple, but they’re not. Just he is.”

“This is bullshit,” Gus said, and he could feel his voice quaver.

“No, it’s not, Gus. This is life. Come back over here. Sit down.”

“No.”

“Bud, there’s nothing to be afraid of. The thing isn’t what is a man capable of, it’s what he’s able to do. In town, with all his cronies, Charlie is able to do a whole lot. He’s obviously capable of anything. Anywhere. But out here, he’s got no advantage. He could bring his ten best hunting buddies and we’d still outnumber them.”

They stared at each other for a long time across the candlelit shack, Gus growing furious. He took one step forward and two steps back. He cleared his throat. “How could you drag me into this?”

And Harry smiled. Not a mocking smile, but one that conveyed a kind of pity. Or at least that’s how Gus understood it. “You were in this even if you didn’t know it. There’s no two ways about it. To Charlie, we’re the same person. He hates you as much as he hates me. He hates that you’re my son.” His smile was gone now. “But do you know whose sons aren’t in this? Charlie’s. Of all the differences between me and him, that’s the biggest. That’s my advantage.”

GUS WOKE in the morning to the sound of his father’s razor on the strop. Harry stood at the window in his underwear and socks, his face lathered up, looking at his reflection in the glass. He must have heard Gus stir, because his gaze shifted from his own face to Gus’s. He brought the razor up his chin, rinsed it in a bowl of water, shaved another swath, and paused to look at Gus over his shoulder. He pointed to the stove with his razor. “There’s coffee,” he said.

“It’s still dark out,” Gus said.

Harry turned his attention back to shaving. “It’s damn near six.” He took another stripe of his stubble with the straight blade.

“I’m not getting up yet.”

“You won’t sleep at all if we’re freezing our balls off.”

Gus rolled over. “No more telling me what to do. I don’t even want to talk to you.”

“You’ll be a lonely son of a gun up here, you quit talking to me.”

“Right. Because your stories are so good.” Gus kicked free of his sleeping sack and stepped from the bunk. He went right past his father and out the door to take a piss and came back in while his father was finishing on his neck.

“Don’t be a pantywaist, Gus. We’ve got work to do. You could wake up tomorrow with a foot of snow on the ground.”

Gus poured himself a cup of coffee and watched as his father toweled his face.

“Get back at those birches, eh?” Harry said. He pulled his pants on over his union suit.

Gus took a sip of his coffee and offered his father a gallant and challenging stare. “I’ve told you there will be wood. I’ve told you ten times. But I’m not going over there in the dark. It’s pointless.”

Harry hung the towel from its hook next to the window. “You’re afraid of the dark now, too?”

“What else am I afraid of?” Gus shot back.

Harry was deliberate in his response. He put his shirt on before he spoke. He sat down to tie his bootlaces. “Far as I can tell, you’re afraid of what’s true.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of,” Gus said. “I’m afraid I’m in the middle of nowhere and my dad — who tricked me into coming here — is going nuts. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“You’re not seeing things right.”

Furious, Gus couldn’t stand the ridiculous expression on his father’s face. “You were just standing at the window there, staring at yourself. What did you see?”

“An old fool, that’s what I saw. But an old fool who’s ready, which is more than you can say. I saw an old fool who understands what’s coming.” He donned his sweater and his red hat and stood over his pack. He pulled out the Ruger in its holster and ran his belt through the loop. “You had any sense, you’d start looking for what’s coming, too. And it might not be the worst idea to train your eyes to see in the dark.” Then he walked calmly out the door.

Gus went to the window and watched his father’s shadow move around the shack. He wanted to follow him. To assault him. To scream. To do some goddamn thing. But he stood at the window instead, drinking his coffee and waiting for the light.

—

But he was back under the bur oaks before the sun was up. He’d left the saw and hatchet at the shack and had the Remington over his shoulder. The gun was loaded and he had six cartridges in his jacket pocket. His hunting knife hung from his belt. The book of maps was in the leg pocket of his army pants.

On the edge of the stand, he found a pile of deadfall and made it his blind. A breeze came through the trees onto his face. He scanned the clearing and watched it fill with the morning’s light. He kept his ear cocked to the wind, the Remington leaning against the tree trunk.

Then he studied the maps one at a time. There was nothing in them to remind him of the miles and lakes and rivers that had led them to the shack. The memories of traversing the borderlands were already disappearing. It would be years before they would return to him with any sort of fluency, and by then he was certain that in the decades between that morning in the bur oaks and the present day his memory had reshaped some of the facts. He was just as sure that his memories had failed him altogether in other respects. But certain memories were not prey to fallibility. That morning in the bear blind was one of them.

He spent a long time in the blind parsing their situation. He admitted his fear because he could feel it so plainly. And it was worse now, with the threat of Charlie Aas imminent. The pistol on his father’s belt was as frightening as any white water they’d had to paddle, as ominous as any wind-torn night. But he felt something else accompanying the fear, something transformative, a certain firmness of spirit. His shoulder muscles danced.

He remembered looking back through the woods, back toward the shack, and thinking that the pistol seemed ludicrous. Like maybe his father thought he was still in Luxembourg and the Huns were about to step out of the forest to besiege their fort. He remembered thinking that his father was a fool.

But if he was a fool, he had no advantage on Gus. At least not on that day.

Who could say how much time had passed in the blind? An hour, maybe two? But when the bear emerged from the darkness of the woods, when she buried her snout in the fallen leaves and acorns and sat on her fat haunches and ate like a glutton, when she moved from one spot to another and another and several more, Gus watched from the blind, and when he got up and stepped over the deadfall and walked toward the sow, the wind blowing in his face so she had no scent of him, the Remington still leaning in the notch against the tree, one step farther behind him with each stride he took, when all this had passed and finally she looked up and fixed him with her soft eyes and stood on all fours, and when he moved toward her like maybe they were grappling partners, him smiling and rubbing his hands together like it was time to get at it, when that bear snorted once and huffed once and turned and hurried back into the darkness she’d come from, after all of this Gus stood there yowling like a madman and felt certain that facing the old sow had its provenance in his own ancestral blood.