The Generation of Hunters

Southern California flashes constant warnings to you about your body stenches, and ignores its own. In a bar in San Diego, on your way to be interviewed for a job you don’t really want, there is always this marine: heavy-fleshed, loquacious, his uniform immaculate, still on top of his liquor, nameless as all Bobs and Jimmies are nameless.

He’s been around. He doesn’t mind that you’re drinking Canadian Club — he likes the ads — but he’ll stay on beer. Sure, he knows Kenora and the Whiteshell, anybody from Duluth way does. Man, he’d like to get back there; he’s been on a bad detail, for a year, escort for the dead. But it gets him around, it gets him around. Fresh back from Tennessee yesterday. On detail. A punk. Just a punk. Who wrapped his Chevy around a pole on the way to Mexico. After whores. But the body returns home with escort.

Now they’re getting some real heroes though, that’s one thing you can say for Vietnam. He doesn’t have a lot to say for Vietnam; unlike many he avoids the regular terms of hate. When his memory of change within his life comes out it’s a neat well-packaged story, an accepted memento; like a St. Christopher medal wound about with Saran Wrap against a time of fear, or simply protected against the grit that enters the cleanest of pockets. He speaks his story without a slur, with mere traces of a rapid-fire stuttering.

We had always been bothered by bears while berry-picking. That year my father left me with the .306 and just four shells. “Don’t waste anything you don’t have to,” he said. “You’re in a war.”

That war had been going on for what seemed forever to me. As soon as it was over I was going to get to practise real shooting again, instead of just sighting and squeezing. As soon as it was over, I told myself, a lot of things would change. It was 1943; I was fifteen years old.

“Take care of yourselves,” my father said.

Ginny cried some. The other girls were older.

“Don’t tire yourself out on the drill floor,” my mother said to him.

Which wasn’t what she meant. In late summers like this, when the blueberries came ripe, we would go to my father’s hunting shack for what my mother called a shit-and-haddock vacation. “Shit-and-haddock vacations,” she would say, “are what you get when you marry a drill sergeant instead of a pilot lieutenant.”

Aunt Virginia had married a bush pilot from Duluth who was now overseas and sending back more money than enough. She got around all the bars in Duluth and told tales to my mother. “What he’s drilling during the day,” she would say, “may be wearing pants; but let me tell you honey, at night the drilling ain’t through khaki. Cotton, or maybe silk. Midnight black or sintime red. Better believe it, honey.”

Out on the blueberry hills at least we kept to our own schedule. We escaped the driving rages my father brought home from the drill hall. We escaped the bitterness my mother mortared back at him. Early in the morning we found a rich area and picked until noon. Then we went back to the shack for lunch and sorted the berries into two grades. In the afternoon we would sometimes go out again for more. Or swim in the river.

With the .306 in my hands, I didn’t feel like a picker. I was the sentry and there were Germans everywhere. Always four of them. I would get the first three quick, always in a vital. Instantaneous death. Heart or head for hellshots; legs tor the lazy; stomachs for sadists. I didn’t even know what a sadist was. I was a hellshot.

Except if I didn’t pick, my mother drove Ginny and the other girls something terrible. It was her only way of getting to me.

“Come on, general,” she would say. “We need one man, at least.”

I would lay the .306 nearby and pick, with my eyes roving through the woods like a searchlight. Or so I thought. We weren’t bothered until the Saturday of the third week. My father was due Sunday morning. The two cubs and the old lady had got halfway to the big bush we were working on before I saw them. It was almost like I had planned. I moved off from the bush to keep my line clear. My stomach was on the moss; my elbows on flat granite. I remembered everything my father had showed me those years before the war, when he knew the war was coming and didn’t know how long it would last and wanted me to be a hellshot before shells got too rationed.

I hit the first cub clean, and while the old lady bent over him, I hit the second one clean. And she roared at that, a sound like a dog trying to say ground. She came toward the sound of the gun; stood up on her back legs to see where I was. So I got her in the stomach. It wasn’t where I’d wanted to, but it was where I’d hit her. I could almost see her pain. Like the first time I’d had beer. She went back to the cubs and then she went back to the woods. Loping like a man hid in a gorilla suit.

I knew she wouldn’t go far, which was my mistake. Because I could have got her in the head, through the back of the brain, easy enough. But I wanted to have that fourth shell still there when my father got back, and instead it was a week and a day before we found that old lady. Alone, I lost her even before it got dark.

All that next Sunday my father made me walk with him and didn’t say a word, so that I felt like I lived in a house with a stopped-up toilet. Which was what he wanted. All that week I didn’t pick because I was sure I could find her, but I couldn’t.

And the next Sunday, when we did find her, I found out what my father meant about gut-shots, about stomachs for the sadists. She was in a little swampy hollow. “Any animal goes low to die,” my father said. And she was covered with swarms of blackflies; so that trying to see her was like trying to get to your bed in a strange room. My father took out the skull and cleaned it. The stench made me want to be sick, but I knew what he would say. I got the gun ready. For then he did what I knew he would do. He set the skull up at 100 yards and made me put the shell I’d thought I’d saved into it, into the shattering bone and brain matter.

“Sometimes you have to waste something,” he said.

When the war was over, my father left for Oregon. “Your mother can look after the girls,” he told me. “You’ll be okay on your own.” I knew I would be.

When Aunt Virginia’s husband came home from the war, he was an alcoholic and he died slowly under government care in a VA hospital. The government took care of our needs too, because my father had been a soldier in both wars, even if just a drill sergeant in the second one. I signed up myself in ’49. Been in ever since. I guess you must have done your bit a little later?

Above the bar where we drink, the big Coors ad, of fireworks bursting across a four-by-three square of plastic night, continues its cycle in many colours. If you have the patience, or the desire, you can figure out the cycle. This next one will be red, you can say, of the imitation Roman candle that arches its way into nothingness. Yellow. Blue. Green. Yin. Red. Blue. Yang. The sun which pales. There are times when you seem conscious of observing inevitability.