Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

The dogs came fast and hard. They got their teeth into him good, and in seconds, he was no longer in the barnyard under the mountains where a red sun was about to pull itself up and light the world with the hope of a new day, but in some other, dank, foul place, where his own failures seemed the most prominent landform, and the only mercy was bourbon.

“Well, Mister, nice of you to join us,” called Julie.

He looked at his wife, at her smile, which continued to dazzle him if even now there seemed a layer of fear behind it. He had seen her first on a cellophane-wrapped photograph that a young man had carried in his boonie cap in Vietnam, and maybe he had fallen in love with her in that second. Or maybe he fell in love with her the second the young man died and she was the only part of him still alive. Still, it took long years, many of them soaked in bourbon, before he’d finally met her and, by the odd twists that his life seemed always to take, ended up being the lucky jerk she took as her second husband. Yet now … was it falling apart on him?

“Daddy, Daddy,” yelled Nikki, eight, running to meet him. She grabbed his blue-jeaned leg.

“Howdy, honey, how’s my girl this morning?”

“Oh, Daddy, you know. We’re going to ride up to Widow’s Pass and watch the sun come across the valley.”

“We do that every morning. Maybe we ought to find a new place.”

“Honey,” said Julie. “She loves that view.”

“I’m only saying,” Bob said, “it might be nice to change. Forget it. It don’t mean a thing.”

He had more edge in his voice than he’d meant. Where had it come from? Julie shot him a hurt look at his harsh words, and he thought, Well, that’s fine, I deserve that, and he had himself in control, everything was fine, he was fine, it was—

“I do get tired of riding the same goddamn place every goddamn morning. You know, there are other places to ride.”

“All right, Bob,” she said.

“I mean, we can ride there, no problem. Is that where you want to ride, sweetie? If that’s where you want to ride, that’s fine.”

“I don’t care, Daddy.”

“Good. That’s where we’ll ride.”

Who was talking? He was talking. Why was he so mad? Where was this coming from? What was going on?

But then he had himself back and he was fine again and it would be—

“And why the hell is she riding English? You want her to be some fancy person? You want her to go to little shows where she wears some red jacket and helmet and jumps over fences and all the fags clap and the rich people come and drink champagne, and she learns her old man, who don’t talk so good and swears a mite, he ain’t up to them folks who ride English, he’s just an old farm boy from shit-apple Arkansas? Is that what you want?”

He was yelling. It had come on so fast, so ugly, it had just blown in, a squall of killing anger. Why was he so mad these days? It made him sick.

“Bob,” his wife, Julie, said with slow, fake sweetness, “I just want to widen her horizons. Open up some possibilities.”

“Daddy, I like English. It’s more leg than stirrup; it doesn’t hurt the horse.”

“Well, I don’t know nothing about English. I’m just a cop’s kid from Hick Town, Arkansas, and I didn’t go to no college, I went into the Marine Corps. Nobody ever gave me nothing. When I see her riding like that—”

He bellowed for a while, as Julie got smaller and smaller, and Nikki began to cry and his hip hurt and his head ached and finally Junior spooked.

“Oh, fuck it!” he said. “What the hell difference does it make?” and stormed back to the house.

He’d left the TV on, and sat before it, nursing his fury, angered by the terrible unfairness of it all. Why couldn’t he support his family? What could he have done different? What could he do?

After a bit, he turned and watched the two of them ride out through the fence and head up toward Widow’s Pass.

Good, that was fine. They could do that. He was better off alone. He knew where he wanted to go. He stood, raging with fury, and though it was early, turned and walked to the cellar door, went down into it. He’d meant to set up a shop here, where he could reload for next hunting season and work out some ideas he had for wildcat cartridges, new ways to get more pop out of some old standards. But somehow he’d never found the energy; he didn’t know how long they’d be here, he didn’t know if—

He went instead to the workbench, where a previous occupant had left a set of old, rusty tools and nails and such, and reached around to grab what was stashed there. It was a bottle, a pint of Jim Beam, subtly curved like a Claymore, with its black label and white printing.

The bottle had weight and solidarity to it — it felt serious, like a gun. He hefted it, went to the steps and sat down. The cellar smelled of damp and rot, for this was wet country, snowy in the winter and ripe for floods in the spring. He’d been so long in dry country, this all seemed new. Its smell was unpleasant: mildew, perpetual moisture.

He held the bottle in his hand, examined it carefully. Shifting it ever so slightly sent the cargo inside sloshing this way and that, like the sea at China Beach, where he’d gone on R&R one time or another, but he couldn’t say on which of his three tours.

His hand closed around the cap of the bottle, its seal still pristine. Just the slightest twist of his hand could open it, much less strength than that required to kill a man with a rifle, which he had done so many times.

He looked carefully at the thing. He waggled it just a bit, feeling the slosh of the fluid. Its brownness was clear and butterscotchy; it beckoned him onward.

Yes, do it. One sip, just to take the edge off, to make the bad pictures go away, blunt the worries about money and prying reporters and TV cameras, to retreat to some sacred, private land of blur and wobble and laughter, where only good times are remembered.

Drink to the lost. Drink to the boys. Drink to the dead boys of Vietnam, drink to poor Donny. Drink to what happened to Donny and how Donny haunted him, how he had married Donny’s wife and fathered Donny’s child and done what could be done to resurrect Donny, to keep Donny still on this earth.

Yes, drink to Donny, and all the boys killed before their time for Veet Nam to stop commu-nism.

Oh, how the bottle called him.

Fuck this, he thought.

I have a wife and a daughter and they are out on the range without me, and so I had best get to them. That is one thing left I can do.

He put the bottle back and climbed the stairs. His hip hurt, but what the fuck. He headed for the barn, his horse, and his wife and daughter.

They rode up through the meadow, found the track through the pines and followed that, always trending upward. The air was cool, though not really cold, and the sun’s presence in the east, over the mountains, gave the prospect of warmth.

Julie nuzzled her coat closer, tried to cleanse her thoughts of trouble and put her anger at her husband and what had happened to their life behind her. Her daughter, the better rider, galloped ahead merrily, the ugliness of the scene in the barn seemingly forgotten. Nikki rode so well; she had a gift for it, a natural affinity for the horses, and was never happier than when she was out in the barn with the animals, tending them, feeding them, washing them.

But Nikki’s happiness was also somewhat illusory. As they neared the treeline and the ride across the high desert toward Widow’s Pass and the trip to overlook the far valley, she drifted back to her mother.

“Mommy,” she said, “is Daddy sick?”

“Yes, he is,” said Julie.