“What?” he asks the empty room.
Nothing.
Jonesy steps out of his office, closes the door, and tests the lock.
In the comer of his door’s bulletin board is a blank white card. Jonesy unpins it and turns it over. On the flip side is the printed message BACK AT ONE-UNTIL THEN I’m HISTORY. He pins the message side to the bulletin board with perfect confidence, but it will be almost two months before Jonesy enters this room again and sees his desk calendar still turned to St Patrick’s Day.
Take care of yourself, Henry said, but Jonesy isn’t thinking about taking care of himself. He is thinking about March sunlight. He’s thinking about eating his sandwich. He’s thinking he might watch a few girls over on the Cambridge side-skirts are short, and March winds are frisky. He’s thinking about all sorts of things, but watching out for Mr Gray isn’t one of them. Neither is taking care of himself
This is a mistake. This is also how lives change forever.
Part One
CANCER
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
Chapter One
McCARTHY
1
Jonesy almost shot the guy when he came out of the woods. How close? Another pound on the Garand’s trigger, maybe just a half. Later, hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the horrified mind, he wished he had shot before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman’s vest. Killing Richard McCarthy couldn’t have hurt, and it might have helped. Killing McCarthy might have saved them all.
2
Pete and Henry had gone to Gosselin’s Market, the closest store, to stock up on bread, canned goods, and beer, the real essential. They had plenty for another two days, but the radio said there might be snow coming. Henry had already gotten his deer, a good-sized doe, and Jonesy had an idea Pete cared a lot more about making sure of the beer supply than he did about getting his own deer-for Pete Moore, hunting was a hobby, beer a religion. The Beaver was out there someplace, but Jonesy hadn’t heard the crack of a rifle any closer than five miles, so he guessed that the Beav, like him, was still waiting,
There was a stand in an old maple about seventy yards from the camp and that was where Jonesy was, sipping coffee and reading a Robert Parker mystery novel, when he heard something coming and put the book and the Thermos aside. In other years he might have spilled the coffee in his excitement, but not this time. This time he even took a few seconds to screw on the Thermos’s bright red stopper.
The four of them had been coming up here to hunt in the first week of November for twenty-six years, if you counted in the times Beav’s Dad had taken them, and Jonesy had never bothered with the tree-stand until now. None of them had; it was too confining. This year Jonesy had staked it out. The others thought they knew why, but they only knew half of it.
In mid-March of 2001, Jonesy had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Cambridge, not far from John Jay College, where he taught. He had fractured his skull, broken two ribs, and suffered a shattered hip, which had been replaced with some exotic combination of Teflon and metal. The man who’d struck him was a retired BU history professor who was-according to his lawyer, anyway-in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, more to be pitied than punished. So often, Jonesy thought, there was no one to blame when the dust cleared. And even if there was, what good did it do? You still had to live with what was left, and console yourself with the fact that, as people told him every day (until they forgot the whole thing, that was), it could have been worse.
And it could have been. His head was hard, and the crack in it healed. He had no memory of the hour or so leading up to his accident near Harvard Square, but the rest of his mental equipment was fine. His ribs healed in a month. The hip was the worst, but he was off the crutches by October, and now his limp only became appreciable toward the end of the day.
Pete, Henry, and the Beav thought it was the hip and only the hip that had caused him to opt for the tree-stand instead of the damp, cold woods, and the hip was certainly a factor just not the only one. What he had kept from them was that he now had little interest in shooting deer. It would have dismayed them. Hell, it dismayed Jonesy himself. But there it was, something new in his existence that he hadn’t even suspected until they had actually gotten up here on November eleventh and he had uncased the Garand. He wasn’t revolted by the idea of hunting, not at all-he just had no real urge to do it. Death had brushed by him on a sunny day in March, and Jonesy had no desire to call it back, even if he were dealing rather than receiving.
3
What surprised him was that he still liked being at camp-in some ways, better than ever. Talking at night-books, politics, the shit they’d gotten up to as kids, their plans for the future. They were in their thirties, still young enough to have plans, plenty of them, and the old bond was still strong.
And the days were good, too-the hours in the tree-stand, when he was alone. He took a sleeping bag and slid into it up to his hips when he got cold, and a book, and a Walkman. After the first day, he stopped listening to the Walkman, discovering that he liked the music of the woods better-the silk of the wind in the pines, the rust of the crows. He would read a little, drink coffee, read a little more, sometimes work his way out of the sleeping bag (it was as red as a stoplight) and piss off the edge of the platform. He was a man with a big family and a large circle of colleagues. A gregarious man who enjoyed all the various relationships the family and the colleagues entailed (and the students, of course, the endless stream of students) and balanced them well. It was only out here, up here, that he realized the attractions of silence were still real, still strong. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence.
“You sure you want to be up there, man?” Henry had asked him yesterday morning. “I mean, you’re welcome to come out with me. We won’t overuse that leg of yours, I promise. “’Leave him alone,” Pete said. “He likes it up there. Don’t you, Jones-boy?”
“Sort of,” he said, unwilling to say much more-how much he actually did like it, for instance. Some things you didn’t feel safe telling even your closest friends. And sometimes your closest friends knew, anyway.
“Tell you something,” the Beav said. He picked up a pencil and began to gnaw lightly at it-his oldest, dearest trick, going all the way back to first grade. “I like coming back and seeing you there-like a lookout in the crow’s nest in one of those fuckin Hornblower books. Keepin an eye out, you know.”
“Sail, ho,” Jonesy had said, and they all laughed, but Jonesy knew what the Beav meant. He felt it. Keeping an eye out. Just thinking his thoughts and keeping an eye out for ships or sharks or who knew what. His hip hurt coming back down, the pack with his shit in it was heavy on his back, and he felt slow and clumsy on the wooden rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple, but that was okay. Good, in fact. Things changed, but only a fool believed they only changed for the worse.
That was what he thought then.
4
When he heard the whicker of moving brush and the soft snap of a twig-sounds he never questioned were those of an approaching deer-Jonesy thought of something his father said: You can’t make yourself be lucky. Lindsay Jones was one of life’s losers and had said few things worth committing to memory, but that was one, and here was the proof of it again: days after deciding he had finished with deer hunting, here came one, and a big one by the sound a buck, almost surely, maybe one as big as a man.
That it was a man never so much as crossed Jonesy’s mind. This was an unincorporated township fifty miles north of Rangely, and the nearest hunters were two hours” walk away. The nearest paved road, the one which eventually took you to Gosselin’s Market (BEER BAIT OUT OF STATE LICS LOTTERY TIX), was at least sixteen miles away.