He turned away and went back down the walk to the sidewalk, filled with an unfocused yearning that was neither regret nor nostalgia. Rather, a sense of incompletion.
Ten minutes later a teenager in a pickup truck stopped for his raised thumb. The boy had an acned chin and a spiky yellow cellophaned Laurie Anderson haircut, but he talked of the hunting season with the reverence usually reserved for religious beliefs. The inevitable gun rack held an 1897 Winchester 30–30 lever-action carbine, the old one with the hexagonal barrel.
“That takes me back,” said Runyan, sounding momentarily old even to himself. “I killed my first buck with one of those old Winchesters.”
“Me too,” said the boy. “Last fall. First one.” His warm brown eyes shone at the memory. “Me’n my dad...”
The pickup dropped him and rattled off along the country blacktop. Runyan started across a stubble field toward low hills covered with hardwoods, oaks, and elms and a few birch, not yet leafed. Twenty minutes later, memory bursting upon him, he swerved to a brush pile and kicked it.
A cottontail bounced out, jinking away in terrified delight, and in his memory Runyan raised the long-barreled .22 Colt Woodsman and snapped off a single shot. The rabbit tumbled over, throwing up a spray of snow. Today’s rabbit zipped under another brushpile and was gone.
Runyan went on into the marshy triangle at the foot of the hill. When he stepped on a tussock of winter-dried grass, a hen pheasant burst out in a rush of wings to angle up and away like the ringneck 15 years before, in full plumage, long tail fluttering and stubby pheasant wings beating to raise his heavy gallinaceous body. Runyan raised the .22 and fired a single shot. The pheasant took a heart-stopping pinwheel tumble to land a hundred feet away with an audible thud. The hen set her wings and glided into safe cover in the hedgerow at the far edge of the marsh.
Runyan nodded slightly to himself, then went on. Ten minutes later he came out of the woods to the narrow drive meandering up through the hardwoods. Now he strolled uphill as then he had walked up the slight rise in the cemetery to the open grave. He’d been in hunting clothes and had carried the fresh-shot rabbit and pheasant. Snow had fallen from a leaden sky.
The other mourners had departed but the casket was still above the open grave on its slings. Runyan laid the rabbit and the pheasant on top of it, disturbing the snow as little as possible. The blood, fur, and bright feathers were very vivid against the white. He stood with his bared head lowered.
Goodbye, Pops. Goodbye to deer-shining out of season in the hardwood belt across the creek. Goodbye to jump-shooting mallards down in the river bottoms. Goodbye to woodsmoke and mellow bourbon by firelight and all the things that made a part of you mine. The part they could never get at.
A long time ago, almost in another life; a life of primary colors which had long since faded. Then he thought of Louise, and wondered if his losses were more in memory than in fact. Only time would tell.
He rounded the final bend at the edge of the trees and got his first glimpse of the old-fashioned white two-story frame house set in among the oaks. He went up the turn-around, past the kennels where memory foxhounds bayed and wagged their tails and leaped around the young Runyan and Pops in hunting clothes and cradling cased shotguns in the crooks of their arms.
Runyan turned away. The kennels were empty and weed-grown, the dog houses half rotted away. So were the bird feeders in front of the house, though he almost heard the clamor of the chickadees and juncoes as Pops put out a mesh bag of suet and ten pounds of cracked corn.
The doors were locked, so he continued on around the house to the corner downspout that once had been his nocturnal route to adventure. It seemed as sturdy as ever; he started up, jamming stiffened fingers into the space between the spout and the siding, his body angled out from the wall.
At the second-floor level, he reached over and pushed up the unlocked window of what had been his folks’ room. He swung himself from the drainpipe right in through the window, landed off-balance on a rag rug, slid across the polished hardwood floor and crashed into a table by the far window. A typewriter fell into his lap as a snow of papers blizzarded in all directions.
Runyan sat on the floor and laughed. “Watch that first step, it’s a bitch,” he said aloud.
The room was essentially unchanged. Same old faded family portraits on the walls, his mother’s old-fashioned tortoiseshell toilet articles on the dresser top, the double bed with the brass bedstead and the quilt his mother had made...
He remembered his father dying in that bed, his arm hanging limply over the edge, smoke from his cigarette running up to the ceiling in a thin unwavering blue line. That arm, unable to hold a cigarette up in the air, gave Runyan the same wrench as finding a good foxhound that had gotten mixed up with a bobcat.
Runyan righted the table and put the typewriter back. He had just collected the scattered papers when he heard cars coming up the drive. More than one of them. He folded the papers over and stuffed them almost absently into his pocket.
Through the front window he watched a current Caddy stop at the foot of the front walk. Art got out. Runyan’s lips twitched. Trust Art to drive the biggest, gaudiest thing Detroit currently produced.
As a woman got out of the second car, Runyan crossed to the door and stepped out. A complex of conflicting emotions made his inner compass spin. From below drifted up the sound of the front door opening distantly, the woman’s voice demanding sarcastically, “What’s the matter, Art, did you think I was going to sneak out here and steal the silver or something?”
Runyan opened the door of the study and went in, shutting off the voices and sounds from below.
Chapter 32
“I don’t understand you any more, Louise,I don’t understand you any more, Louise,” Art said coldly. “You fucking got what you went after, why did you come back?”
He was in the middle of the front room, between her and the stairs. It was an old-fashioned room with an overstuffed leather couch and chairs of rosewood and needlepoint seats. On one wall was The Dying Indian hunched on his pony, feet hanging, head drooping, warlance angled down in defeat.
Louise, reeling with fatigue, knew just how he felt. Despairing. She had driven all night, had stopped off at Art’s office to tell him she was going out to the house for just a minute, and now this.
“I came to get my stories, Art,” she said in a tired voice. “My typewriter. Small things, but my own. So if you’d just kindly get to hell out of the way...”
Art, his face ugly with emotion, said, “Why bother? Now you can buy a thousand fucking typewriters.” He added bitterly, “How much did you work him for, baby?”
She stared at him, astonished.
“Is that what this is all about? I told you on the telephone, I just wanted—”
“Oh, don’t give me that shit, Louise. When you called me that last time, I knew he was getting the diamonds and you were getting a share. You saw your chance and took it. I don’t blame you. But you knew I really needed that money to pay off the union pension fund before the audit. Shit, they’re going to indict me! How could you—”
“Art...” Then she paused. What was the use? He wouldn’t believe whatever she told him anyway. Maybe she should just turn around and walk away.
Up in his father’s den, Runyan was walking slowly around, touching things, looking at things, remembering. He could almost see Pops and him across the big hardwood desk from each other, feet up, sipping bourbon.
Remember, boy, you can do things you can’t walk away from.