I was seven when my father picked me up from the Sunday school parking lot with a garbage bag of new long johns and camo gear. He had a plan for the following morning that was almost too perfect to believe. We would wake at an ungodly hour, playing hooky to drive out to public land in Virginia where 1,800 acres of dense forest teemed with white-tail deer. My mother would be starting her twelve-hour shift in the Emergency Department and my sister hadn’t been born, so there was nothing to worry about except for the cooler on the truck bench and the rattle bag in the flatbed.


October was nearing an end and acorns were dropping like rainfall from the oaks. More importantly, the rub lines from the bucks had gone cold and the rut had begun. Hunting meant hours in the amphitheater of a sloping valley, enforced solitude and the snapped-twig scurrying of forest critters. The prospect thrilled me for the same reason I loved the thirteen-minute car ride to Catechism lessons at Trinity Church: time alone with my father. I loved all of it except for the act of shooting. There’s a harshness to firing a gun that I never became accustomed to, something raw and visceral that felt better suited for the Redcoats in my elementary textbook than twentieth-century citizens. Thirty foot-pounds of recoil shunted on the shoulder joint. Fingers slick with sweat and residue. But worst of all was the blood. I’m still squeamish but was deathly so as a kid, bad enough that the sight of a 6-point buck strung up at the weigh station a year before had spiraled me into hours of retching on the side of the road. My father had grinned, his gold incisor glinting. “You’ll get used to it, bud.” But I didn’t.


The morning of the hunt, we staked out thirty yards from a rutted trail, inside a brush line. We climbed up into our tree stand and settled in. The setup wasn’t anything fancy. A large plywood platform was situated fifteen feet off the ground, enough that when we climbed we were granted a line of sight down a wooded funnel. I scrambled up to the perch and watched as he made his way up the ladder after me, moving like a man twice his age. Between the splitting migraines and the titanium rods holding together his leg, my father couldn’t work, not since he’d come home with a Purple Heart following a year of flying trash hauls in Da Nang.


He couldn’t do much of anything, really, besides laze in the recliner in our study where the light shone at an angle from above like church windows. He sat in that recliner day after wasted day like some overripe fruit rotting in the sun, spent endless hours watching Orioles games with a can of Schlitz clutched in his big hand. During the baseball offseason, he’d watch military documentaries with the volume turned off. “You weren’t there to see it, but I’ve done more for you than you can imagine.” He was fond of saying this when he didn’t want to help me with social studies homework or play catch in the driveway. I didn’t understand until many years later that he was referring to his service, that his twelve-month tour of duty weighed so heavily on him as to excuse him from parental or civic responsibility in perpetuity. “That’s who I was up against,” he’d say, aiming his remote at grainy footage of North Vietnamese rolling through Saigon. “And that’s not the half of it.” 


We waited for the rustle of leaves as the deer slunk away to their bedding areas after long nights of feeding. But there was nothing to see between our tree and the ridge crest two hundred yards below, not even after rattling antlers and scattering persimmon bait to draw out our targets. By sun-up my father began to work through a six-pack, pissing from our perch onto the forest floor, while I prayed the day would pass without having to fire a single round.


“Sip?” He wrestled the last can from the plastic ring and tossed the drink into my lap. “Better here with your old man than somewhere else.”


I picked up the can, turning it in my hand. I wanted to throw it into the thicket of ferns, somewhere he couldn’t find it. Then maybe he’d sober up and we could have a regular conversation. We could talk about my school projects, or the Yukon Golds that would be ready to harvest from the backyard in a week. Mostly, though, I tried to talk about things he liked. Replays of my twice-weekly coach-pitch practice, how I was doing my best but needed help with my throwing form. I wanted little more than to impress him. I fantasized about earning trophies and accolades, accomplishments so striking he had no choice but to pay attention, to kneel eye-to-eye and tell me he was proud. But I was skinny and pigeon-toed and unathletic. “Maybe later,” I suggested.


“The thing you need to understand,” he said, shaking his head, “is that other people won’t have your best interests in mind the way I do. They’ll start making decisions for you. Then you’re not writing your own story.” The liquid fizzed when he popped the tab. “One sip. With your old man.”


I never thought he was a bad person. He drank too much but he didn’t seem to understand any other way of life. What bothered me was the way he seemed to retreat inside of himself in my presence. I wanted his full attention. Sometimes I liked to imagine him when he was younger. He told the story of his accident with gusto, like one of those megachurch pastors. The smell of petrol as the bullet-riddled fuselage sent his transport helicopter into a tailspin. How the rotor blade sliced open six inches of flesh between his cheekbone and jaw. How they plunged into the grove of tamarinds and hurtled through the canopy, the hardwood knocking loose an incisor and mangling his leg. Ninety seconds that spelled the end of Airman Gene Cauley as he once was. Not that he’d ever been ever known for his bubbly personality, if you listened to his church buddies. He fancied himself after the Rough Riders he read about, Roosevelt and his pack of mustachioed cowboys charging into battle with a Cuban between their lips. But I can’t help thinking that the accident changed him, turned him further inward like some dark magic.


A few weeks earlier, I’d found an Amberg box filled with old Polaroids and letters tucked behind a pile of worn-in loafers in the back of my parents’ closet. Snapshots of monotonous war, of tropical jungles, of my father’s life before he was a father. I’d been tucking one of the photographs in my back pocket wherever I went, a sun-flared moment at Cam Ranh Bay, my baby-faced father decked out in green army fatigues and toting a leather valise down the Pan American’s blue plywood ramp. He was young with a shit-eating grin. In the tales I spun to my classmates, my father’s stoicism emanated from fighter plane gunning and Viet Cong butt whooping. GIs were as good as superheroes to a seven-year-old. The handsome, loose-cannon archetype you might find commandeering a fighter jet in Top Gun or hunting Nazis in a Spielberg film. While I carried it, at least, that’s what I thought I saw.


***


When the black bears came up the ridge later that day my father nudged me awake with the toe of his boot. At first, I thought we were packing our things to leave and so I stood up, stretching my arms overhead. Then I saw the cubs.


“Might not harvest a single deer,” he said, “but at least we’ve got some entertainment.”


There were three of them, a few hundred feet upwind, play-fighting in the wet leaves by the creek. I surveyed the surrounding timber, scanned the riverbank. But their mother was nowhere in sight. I’d seen a segment on the morning news no less than a week before about a wayward hiker who was mauled when he left out the gristle from a camping stove overnight. I thought about the beers and the piss and suddenly sweat was pricking my palms. I hoped my father would know what to do if we ran into trouble but he was so Zen I wondered whether the alcohol had rendered him catatonic. Or maybe his mind was somewhere else entirely, back piloting a Hercules over the Mekong Delta.


That’s when the wind shifted. A flick of my father’s head indicated the black mound charging through the undergrowth, making a beeline for our stand. “We’re square between the sow and her cubs. Nothing but a threat to mama right now. Stay calm and we’ll be fine.” A flock of mallards squawked overhead, flying due south. He lowered his rifle barrel, lifted his eyebrows. “Capiche?”


I knew killing the beast was out of the question. Illegal, at least. Immoral, most likely. Bear hunting season was restricted to a six-week period in early autumn. The Department of Natural Resources published an entire treatise on the topic that I read in its entirety on the drive north from Maryland, preferring to bury my head in the document than endure the charged silence hanging between us. But the bear was at the base of our tree, its claws scrabbling on bark, and at that moment I didn’t care about federal authority or getting sent to hell. My father saw me squirming and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Deep breath, bud. In and out.”


The quarter-ton sow shot up the trunk, close enough that I could see her nostrils flare, flush with our scent. We had no bear spray, no air horn. My father dragged me out into the woods and I felt he’d left me defenseless, that he didn’t care enough to lift a hand. It made no difference to me that nonintervention was the right thing to do. I was terrified and wanted protection, wanted to be made safe. I snatched the sidearm from his shoulder holster and scrambled away from him. I needed both hands to lift the gun. He held out his palm, his voice a low rumble. “Put the gun down before I take it from you.”


“She’s not leaving.” I could’ve reached out and touched her snout. Held my hand to her throat and felt the rumble of her warning grunts.


“She’s just curious.”


“Or maybe she wants to eat us.” I disengaged the safety like he’d taught me.


“I’m not asking you for a second opinion.”


But I was already looking through the peep sight. One shot through the upper chest and we’d be safe. The shot rang out in the valley. I’d aimed ten feet over the bruin’s head, a warning shot out into the overstory. Almost instantly she scampered back down the tree, lumbering off to round up her cubs.


My father exhaled and snatched the Magnum from my hands. He managed a grin as he pulled the cylinder latch and emptied the chambers. “Suppose that’s your lesson for the day,” he said. My ears were ringing and I could taste ammonia in the back of my throat.


In the years after I would wonder if I was obeying his orders or was simply scared. Either way, the muzzle flashed.



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