George sighed, annoyed that Toivo’s whining was cutting into the game.
“You just drank too much,” he said. “I told you sausage doesn’t soak up beer in your belly—that’s a wives’ tale. And it’s cold in here because it’s November, you idiot. Put on a third sweater if you’re cold.”
Toivo burped. “A grown man can never drink too much.”
Arnold laughed. He was seated at George’s right. Arnold—or Mister Ekola, as he had been known when George was a kid—had been coming here longer than any of them, had once shared this place with his grade school friends. Now his son Bernie did the same, the tradition passed down from one generation to the next.
Arnold’s friends had died off over the years, the victims of age, heart disease, cancer… whatever the Grim Reaper could come up with, really. Creeping middle age made George realize, more and more every day, that the same fate awaited he, Jaco, Toivo, and Bernie. Many winters from now, which one of them would be like Arnold?
“Well, Toivo, then maybe you aren’t a grown man,” Arnold said. “Now be quiet so I can take these losers’ money. I know when my son is bluffing.”
“Screw you, Dad,” Bernie said.
Toivo put his face in his hands. “Oh, jeeze… maybe I should go to da hospital.”
George lowered his cards. “Sure, Toivo. That little access road outside is snowed shut, so you can’t take the truck. Hell, M-26 is probably snowed shut, too, so how about you take the snowmobile and drive to Lake Linden? Should only take you an hour and a half.”
“Dress warm,” Arnold said. “About ten below out there, eh?”
Jaco snorted. “Ten, hell. More like thirty with wind chill.”
“Thirty easy,” Bernie said. “And if you drive that Arctic Cat off da trail, snow’s at least four feet deep. Hey, Toivo—if you get stuck and die, can I have your thirty-thirty? That’s a nice gun.”
Toivo stared at each of the four men in turn. “You guys are dicks,” he said, then put his face back in the bucket and threw up again.
George decided to risk his three kings against whatever Jaco had. Arnold’s wrinkled old fingers were holding his cards an inch from his face, so close his bushy eyebrows almost brushed against the five faded logos of a white “G” inside a yellow oval set against a green background. Arnold didn’t like wearing his glasses at deer camp, unless they were actually out hunting, which meant he almost never wore them. His glasses—much thinner than Jaco’s heavy frames—lay folded up in front of his can of Pabst.
This scene: the game, the people, the beers, the cabin, the freezing cold, Toivo over-imbibing like he did every year, it was all part of a grand tradition. If they counted Arnold’s glory years, this group had been coming to this shack in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—the U.P., or “da Yoop,” as the locals called it—every November for over forty years. Unless any of them visited Milwaukee, which wasn’t that often, this annual two-week trip was the only time George saw his childhood friends and the only man who had bothered to teach him right from wrong. So many little rituals, from the cheap beer to cases of ammo that were never used, from opening-night bratwurst to the closing-day cleaning party, it was all to be celebrated and treasured.
Maybe George had moved on in life, sure. Maybe he’d worked to get rid of his Yooper accent, learned to say “the” instead of “da,” “yes” instead of “yah,” because in the big city he thought that made him sound dumb. Just because he felt the need to change, though, didn’t mean he thought his friends should. Bernie, Toivo, and Jaco looked a little older every year, but to George they would be forever ten, forever fifteen, forever eighteen, forever the ages they’d been as—together—they had discovered who they were.
But as kids or adults, what they weren’t were good card players.
George stared at Arnold, trying to pick off Arnold’s tells. Unlike Jaco, though, Arnold was damn near unreadable. He might have a full house, he might have crap—there was almost no way to tell.
Bernard smacked his cards down on the table again. “Dammit, George, you going to play or what?”
George was. These boys were about to learn a valuable—and extremely costly—lesson.
“Okay, Bernie,” George said. “I’ll see your five—” George took a five dollar bill off his pile and set it on top of the stack of money at the table’s center “—and let’s send the kiddies home so the adults can play. I’ll raise you ten.”
Arnold’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “I’m out,” he said. He tossed his cards down.
“Dammit, Dad,” Bernie said. “It’s my bet, you’re supposed to wait for me and Jaco to go before you fold.”
Arnold stood, hitched up his flannel long john bottoms by yanking up on the red suspenders attached to them. “I’m retired,” he said. “I don’t wait for shit, eh?”
He glanced up at the ratty cabin’s peaked wooden ceiling, eyes squinting as if he were looking for something. His hand blindly felt around the table for his glasses. Then, George heard something—the same sound Arnold must’ve heard seconds earlier: the distant, deep roar of a jet engine.
Arnold put on his glasses. “Assholes,” he said. “That’s all we need is some damn plane spooking the deer.”
Jaco giggled. There was no other way to describe the sound: Most men “laughed,” Jaco made a noise that would have been more at home in the body of a twelve-year-old girl showing off a tea party dress than a forty-year-old man wearing the same snowsuit he’d had on for five straight days, taking it off only to handle his business out in the woods.
“Deer should be scared of something,” he said. “They sure aren’t scared of us. Are we going to at least try to hunt this year?”
Arnold grabbed his can of Pabst. “If we run out of beer before the snow stops falling and the plows pass by, sure. Good thing we got twenty cases, eh? I’m going to take a leak. Jaco, try not to freeze to death, you damn pansy.”
The old man opened the cabin’s rickety door and stepped out into the winter night, letting in a strong gust of crisp wind and a scattering of blowing snow.
Jaco shivered. “See what I mean? Freezing my balls off when we could be somewhere insulated.”
“What balls?” Bernie said.
Jaco had more money than the rest of them combined. Every year for the last three or four deer seasons, he’d begged to get a better cabin. He even offered to pay the difference. But straying from the path was not allowed—since George and Jaco and Bernard had been old enough to drink they had come here with Arnold, and here they would continue to come when their own sons were old enough to join, and keep coming until they either died or grew so old they couldn’t handle two weeks of bitter Upper Peninsula cold.
Bernie scratched at his beard. Not even a week in and it was damn near full. The guy had some kind of mutation, of that George was sure.
“Bernie, put up or shut up,” George said. “Ten dollars to you.”
Bernie reached for his money, then paused—he looked up to the cabin’s thin, peaked roof, just like his father had moments earlier. Jaco did the same, as did George. That jet had grown louder. Much louder.
The empty cans of Pabst started to rattle like ominous little tin chimes.
“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “My head hurts so bad it’s roaring.”
The cabin door opened and Arnold rushed in, stumbling from the long johns pulled halfway up his thighs, the suspenders flapping wildly.
“Get down, eh? It’s right on top of us!”