Why Are We in Vietnam? Read online

  “Say, now,” says Rusty, “this is a guaranteed bear trophy hunt, now isn’t it?”

  “Well, sir,” says Big Luke’s Tour Guide Coordinator, Mr. Kenneth Easterly, who has met the group at the airport, and brought them along Airport Way to the motel, name now forgotten, Alaska Cavalier maybe, or Fairbanks Frontier Arms, some such (Fairbanks being near as flat-ass a city as Dallas has naturally lots of humper-dick in the names) “well, sir,” says Kenneth E who’s the olive oil in this operation, “you have a guaranteed bear trophy in the specifications of the safari contract—that’s for shit-and-sure,” says Easterly, cause people he’s addressing are Texans; if they was New York Jew ass Banker sportsmen, he’d say “certified.” Nods his head, as if he’s shaking his hand, “Yessir, there’s a rebate of five hundred per head if we neglect to get you in proper range for a shot at a visible grizzly, although I want to tell you, we’ve never had to rebate it.”

  “Everybody who’s taken your safari has gotten Mr. Grizzer,” asks Rusty, “or had a fair shot?”

  “No, sir. Not everybody. Some few do not have that peculiar good fortune. But they don’t want the rebate. After they see the way Big Luke and Big Ollie take them around through the Brooks Range—that’s wilderness, Mr. Jethroe—way they cook for ’em, tote for ’em, skin and pack, they’re feeling sufficiently good, they’ve had the kind of hunting experience the desire for which brought them out here in the first place.”

  Rusty just shakes his head. “I don’t believe I follow you, boy.”

  “Mr. Jethroe,” says Kenny E., “we have the best guide in Alaska, and the finest clientele. We’re here to take you around and give you proper hunting. We’re not in competition with the counters. There are counters out in that wilderness, hunters of medium income (and medium ability to stick the muzzles of their rifles into a muddy piece of ground) who have nonetheless saved their pennies to come here—it’s the experience of a lifetime for them, and as you know, sir, the experience of a lifetime excites greed in the common man and a terror of being cheated. So they are out to get everything they can. They count every last pelt, they’ll twist the tape measuring a Dall’s horn to get an extra quarter of an inch on the length of it, they’ll use handload cartridges make you gasp—it’s a wonder simple steel can stand it—they hunt from four in the morning to midnight before they get back to camp, up at four again, they bring out every last piece of meat they can tote, or they don’t even cut themselves a steak, just take the head and leave the flesh, imagine! and they maim, Mr. Jethroe, they maim game all over the damn place and then let them suffer. We ain’t like that. We have the finest people in America come to us, we wouldn’t even know how to advertise—we just hope too many people don’t hear about us or the simple fine standard of clientele we possess might be adulterated. Because we offer hunting which is reasonable, decent in its risk, fair to the game, and not utterly deprived of comfort. We do not consider it decadent to have a book or two in the bunkhouse, and if Big Luke knows how to make a mixed drink, well, whiskey sours sweeten the heart after a long day of hunting, I like to claim.”

  “That’s A-OK,” says Rusty, “but the bear is the integral part of this expedition.”

  “Yessir, it is,” says Easterly, “provided the bear is in a reasonable state.”

  “The bear are bad now,” says Big Luke.

  “What do you mean bad?”

  “Changing their habits,” Big Luke says. It comes out. All the good news. It seems there’s been too much hunting in the Brooks Range. That’s the confession of Kenny Easterly. The Moe Henry and Obungekat Safari Group (which is the exclusive George Humphrey special they are on right now) is no longer so alone in bringing its fine people up into that Arctic Circle, all the counter-type safari groups like Hunting, Ltd., and the Sam Sting Safari are pouring in too. The wild game is changing its psychology.

  Big Ollie speaks up—his first speech. He talks like a cannibal in a jungle bunny movie. “Brooks Range no wilderness now. Airplane go over the head, animal no wild no more, now crazy.”

  “Say, friends,” says Rusty, “I didn’t come to Alaska to debate the merits and vices of technological infiltration.”

  Big Luke presents the case: “In August, three grizzly been wounded by other safaris in our hunting range. They get told not to move in but they move in. They, like you, sir, thought I’m the one to call the tiger so they hunt near me. They wounded and they neglected to follow up, and they left us three very mean grizzly, right in our own hills and lands up there. Now consider. A mean grizzly has only to smell a man and he is half-crazy. He does not come forward half-nice, half-mean, to take his look, nor does he go the other way—he thinks of how to kill. He circles, he stays downwind from the hunter. He remembers the bullet, that bullet maybe tore his intestine, that is a terrible pain. A bear feeling such pain, sir, is in my opinion, struck as if by lightning and so picking up in certain ways the intelligence of man.”

  “I see,” says Rusty, “you’re going to keep us well up above timber so no bear can sneak near on us. We’ll have to spend our week climbing rocks just to get a shot at five hundred yards down on some mountain goat across a canyon.”

  “I’ll give the best hunting for conditions,” says Luke.

  “Let’s specify,” says Rusty.

  A sad-ass show. It flickers off, on, off, for ninety minutes, a muted hot shit hurricane. Finally, Big Luke hints that Rusty can have his rebate now, his deposit, his contract and his week, and that is the end of the first contest, for if there is one thing worse than coming back with no bear, it is coming back a rejectee and rebatee from the Moe Henry and Obungekat Safari Group. If they could satisfy Old General George C. Marshall in his hunting days, who is Sir Jet-Throne to complain? Now he saves face. He compromises, he agrees Luke will give the word on when they go for grizzer. Say. They all go to bed in rooms with a foam-rubber mattress, pink-tile bathrooms, and Venetian blinds, and in the morning, load gear and all ten men into three Piper Apaches with amphibian floats and take off for the Brooks Range where each plane makes a tasty light water-slap of a landing in a lake, Dolly Ding Bat Lake, where there’s an M.H.O.S.G. (for Moe Henry, et cetera) bunkhouse on the shore which is a pine forest so full of boon in the smell it could make you a religious nut, except D.J. does not dig pine resin out of sight—he likes something a hint more funky if he is entering concupiscent relations with the penumbra of the Lord, ho, ho, but this bunkhouse which is a pâté foie of an Alaska bunkhouse is not theirs for long—they unload the planes, then load up on packhorse, and work up a trail all afternoon, a dog ass trail which gets dull and then monotonous dull cause it’s pine forest and dwarf birch and not spectacular for being up above the Arctic Circle, Rusty is commenting it’s just as dull as all of Canada, and then colors start to dim which gives a hint of some kind of North, cause the rocks have a thin gray, and the bark is gray on the trees and there’s a pinched look beginning to appear in the turf, a mossy mean turf like dry bog crusts, the trees get more individual, they have a continuing life story now with the wind. Then timberline. Final timberline, sharp and clean, a little park of grass. They’re up high on gray domes looking across to other gray domes, and rising further until even the fold of the canyon is dry of moss, and the packhorses are hawking their breath, and Big Luke finally picks on a shielded-in kind of square saddle between some hunched-up bare knolls, Big Luke calls it a basin, near to a black-ass basin by the time they get there, and put up the tents, Ollie makes the fire, et cetera, roast beef hash with dehydrated pears, good by God! on a white gasoline cookstove. D.J. and Tex exhausted by the dialectic of the night before fall out into dead-ass air mattress sleep with the smell of the North on a September night, a tricky clean smell, like a fine nerve washed in alcohol and lightly powdered to get the rut of flesh off.

  Next morning, on a light windless dawn, Tex and D.J. get out of bed, start to brush their teeth in a rill of a stream coming up out of a mountain spring, that water presenting itself to the teeth like sunlight on sn
ow, and Tex saw, just then, a wolf standing and pointing a half mile above the timber, just standing there and studying the dawn in a wolf silence like he had come to some conclusion about the problems of life and occupation, near-relatives, in-laws, phratries, associates, herbs, roots, and grubs. Tex took him down with a shot into the gut and at first he could have been there dead, the animal fell and for an instant the hills clapped together. Down at timberline trees shifted, air moved in the wave which follows a breaking of glass, and then the wolf was up and running, but with a sick ass lunge like a broken fly, and then slowed, stood still, bore off at a bleeding ass walk back to the woods, and Tex run after him and got him at two hundred yards; one miss, one hit into the back of the shoulder and the lungs. The look on Big Luke’s face was amiable like any boy who could hit a wolf at four hundred yards was not totally undeserving of guided service. Well, he got down and gave us each a cup of blood to drink and that was a taste of fish, odd enough, and salt, near to oyster sauce and then the taste of wild meat like an eye looking at you in the center of a midnight fire, and D.J. was on with the blood, he was half-sick having watched what Tex had done, like his own girl had been fucked in front of him and better, since he had had private plans to show Tex what real shooting might be, and here was Tex, King Front Sight Indian Hunter, Killer of Wolves. D.J. next thing was on his hands and knees, looking into that upper Yukon wolf mouth, those big teeth curved like tusk, and put his nose up close to that mouth, and thought he was looking up the belly of a whale, D.J. was breathing wolf breath, the just dead air from the dead interior, but raucous breath, all the fatigue of the wolf running broken ass to the woods and the life running the other way from him, a crazy breath, wild ass odor, something rotten from the bottom of the barrel like the stink of that which is unloved, whelp shit smell, wild as wild garlic, bad, but going all the way right back into the guts of things, you could smell the anger in that wolf’s heart (fucked again! I’ll kill them!) burnt electric wire kind of anger like he’d lived to rip one piece of flesh from another piece, and was going to miss it now, going to miss going deep into that feeling of release when the flesh pulls loose from the flesh, and there D.J. was sweating, cause he was ready to get down and wrestle with the wolf, and get his teeth to its throat, his teeth had a glinty little ache where they could think to feel the cord of the jugular, it was all that blood he’d drunk, it was a black shit fuel, D.J. was up tight with the essential animal insanity of things.

  That, friends, was the beginning of the hunt. Not so bad. Big Ollie came up, asked Tex if he wanted the wolf for a trophy. Tex gave a blow of breath to his front sight. That’s all the tension he was going to show. “I don’t want no wolf for a trophy,” he said. Ollie then studied the animal, nodded, suddenly dipped his finger in the blood, sucked it with a quick-popping sound of his cheek like a cook testing a cake batter, then took out a knife and cut the wolf’s head off, one twisting cut of the knife for the vertebra at the neck, one long sawing swinging cut for the rest. Then he gave the head to the boys for a look. There were two eyes open on El Lobo, both yellow coals of light, but one eye was Signor Lupo, the crazy magician in the wolf, and his eye had the pain of the madman who knows there’s a better world but he is excluded, and then the other eye, Willie Wolf, like a fox’s eye, full of sunlight and peace, a harvest sun on late afternoon field, shit! it was just an animal eye like the glass they use for an eye in a trophy, no expression, hollow peace maybe, and Big Ollie dug a shallow pan of a hole with his knife in the crust bog tundra, whatever that dry shit moss was, and set the wolf’s head in it, muzzle pointing to the north, and covered it over. Then he took a broken twig and laid it in a line with the end of the muzzle, but pointing further North, then got down on his hands and knees and touched his nose to the stick and said nothing for a moment.

  “Always remember, boys,” said Rusty, who had come up at the end to be part of our blood drinkers’ breakfast group and coffeeclutch, “you don’t get your proper paganism until you pay these dee-luxe prices.”

  “What he up to, Mr. J.?” said Tex.

  “Well, you’re looking at him, Indian to Indian, Tex, and don’t forget ah got a drop of the fucking redskin elixir too, he’s telling that wolf he respects him and not to spread the word, not to get grizzler turned on. I bet Ollie’s telling him not to forget that when he was alive, he and Big Grizzler were not rushing to be asshole buddies, so please don’t start a union now.”

  Intro Beep 5

  That’s it about a High-Grade A.H.—they can surprise you by times. D.J. is thus proud of his dad for filling Tex in that he could almost revise his opinion of Rusty if it wasn’t for his Big Daddy’s shit-licking propensity to have a chameleon pussy sphincter changeling of a voice—get Rusty out in the woods and he’s Texas ass, man, common as dirt, hard as nails, he could crunch a clamshell with his asshole, rolls his prejudices around in his throat like a fat cricket in honey—but insert him behind a dinner table with candles, tablecloth, nubian black-ass Washington, D.C. type Pullman Porter butlers (Hallelujah actually has one working steady which leaves most of the North Dallas hostesses stricken into electrified shit, for, man, they got a scale for how rash and rough and poor white redneck raw yore lady’s ass still is, and Hallelujah obviously got skin on her butt as sweet as the average plump dear woman has on her full sail of tits.) Yeah! Butter wouldn’t melt in Hallelujah’s butt, and you could think Rusty was buttering his bread in the same ingredient at a dinner table (where this reminiscence of hunting began sometime ago to run in narrative form) because, Repeat, all you deficient heads out there and nascent electronic gropers, memory is the seed of narrative, yeah, and D.J. grassed out at a formal dinner in his momma daddy’s Dallas house with Tex in white smoking jacket across the table has brought back gobs of Alaska hunt memory two years before including the critical contrast in Rusty’s voice between down home talk (biggest Texas ass accent in the corporation) and Cosmo high-fashion dinner talk, gentry ass style, no ideas, but a thousand fine names. Tonight they’re entertaining the ex American Ambassador from Bringthatpore, shit! old lover of Halleloo’s and various North Dallas matrons (street names on request) who got a Roman candle up their ass on what might come up in Death-row Jethroe’s southern manse this eve. This is two years later, right now, but the inside of the brain is always the present even if it is memory two years old, and wolf blood drunk that morning like wine is the up and Adam of D.J.’s racing or expiring consciousness up now right in the Brooks Mountain Range, and what has happened after the wolf is that one of the medium assholes, Pete, in fact, has just wounded a caribou, right where they’re all standing looking at Signor Lupo’s old magician wolf grave, and he has done it with a horror head of a gun and cartridge, wait and hear, and everybody’s ass is now triple slung, cause they got to get up from the wolf without breakfast and track that wounded caribou. Poor Medium Asshole Pete.

  Chap Five

  Well, now here, let’s give a rundown on the guns for those good Americans who care. And those who don’t, shit, they still get the chance to encounter a lot of meaningless names and numbers which they can then duly repeat at cocktail parties for new name grabbers.

  Rusty, well now he’s got, well you be sure Rusty is holding, in fact D.J. is now canny to save him for later. So here’s Luke and Ollie. Luke got a Model 70 Winchester .375 Magnum restocked (with maple Japanese Shigui finish) and remodeled by Griffin & Howe with a Unertl 2½ × scope, and that little rifle and cartridge could knock down anything but an elephant, and if the elephant had just gotten fucked, it would knock him down too. Luke don’t need that gun, he could hit and take and flatten anything he wanted in Alaska with his second gun, old Swedish Husqvarna .30-06, restocked and remodeled, also Unertl 2½ × scope (Luke was agent for Unertl for a while) which handles a 180-grain bullet on a very flat trajectory, a real 300–400 yard bap of an ice picker, extra high up over 3 thou in velocity delivered at the muzzle. Whereas Ollie has the same gun D.J. has, a factory-bought Remington 721, and both he and D.J. hav
e worked the stock themselves. Ollie has all kinds of ivory totems and taboos inset in his grip and comb, including a profile of wolf head (hot shit and coincidence, Claudia!) and he got a nice Lyman Alaska 2½ × scope. D.J. on his side has just done a little stupid ass inconclusive whittling into his Rem 721 stock—in truth it’s a mess—forget it! Scope? He got a nice Stith Bear Cub 2½ × scope with Stith mounts.

  Tex has a factory-bought Winchester .270 Model 70 with a Weaver K-3 Tilden mount, neat as that. If he was a fink, D.J. would whisper that the first 400 yard shot which hit the wolf, considering it was done with a good .270 like the Winchester 70, was nothing truly spectacular, for Tex had set his Weaver K-3 for 250 yards the day before when they crossed timberline. So, at 400 yards, even with a big 180-grain bullet (and the corresponding big-ass load of powder) he knew he wouldn’t drop twenty inches below the cross hair, never, at four hundred yards, so it wasn’t that hard to put the dot a bit above wolf’s back and hit in eight inches or ten inches below his spine. Anyway the whole fucking kill was unaesthetic, cause a 180-grain bullet which lets a wolf walk away after hitting him must hit no closer than a red-hot poker along his ass. Fact, that’s what on examination the first shot proved itself to be, for the weight and hard nose of the bullet (bought to penetrate a grizzly hide) went right through the wolf’s two legs, breaking only one. Well this fine critique ain’t just piss grapes from D.J., because proof is that he is now repeating Tex Hyde’s very own critique of his own shot. “If I hadn’t been fever ass,” says Tex, “I’d have taken the time and got the 100-grain soft nose magazine into Winnie, and I could have torn a hunk of old Wolf right out of his heart so he didn’t have to suffer and we didn’t have to chase. I can hit anything with the hundred grain. That was a fink and fuckup kill, D.J.”