Sloane and Claudia drifted in about eight with some more beer and Sloane’s ever-present jug of whiskey.
“Hey” — he giggled —”is this where the action is?” He bulked large in the doorway, the case of beer under one arm and his hat shoved onto the back of his head. Claudia pushed him on into the room. They looked odd together. She was so tiny, and he was so goddamn gross. It dawned on me that she was even smaller than my little radical cutie. I wondered how in the hell she’d ever gotten tangled up with Sloane.
With him at the party, of course, any hope of quiet conversation went down the drain. He was a good-natured bastard though.
“Wait till you see what Dan’s done with the rifle you unloaded on him,” Mike said.
“Get it done, old buddy?” Sloane asked me.
“Not quite,” I said.
“Bring it around when you get done with it,” he said. “I might just buy it back.”
“I believe I’ll hang onto this one,” I told him.
Stan and Monica came a little later, and I could see the icicles on her face. She clicked that smile on and off rapidly as I introduced them to everybody. Stan seemed ill at ease, and I knew she’d been at him pretty hard again.
“I thought Stanley said there were going to be six of you on this little expedition,” she said brightly. “Somebody must be missing.”
“McKlearey,” Jack said. “He’s pretty undependable. Likely he’s in jail, drunk, or in bed with somebody’s wife — maybe all three.”
“Really?” she said with a slightly raised eyebrow. She looked around the room. “What a charming little house,” she said, and I saw Betty’s eyes narrow slightly at the tone in the voice.
So that was her new gimmick. She was going to put us down as a bunch of slum-type slobs and make Stan feel shitty for having anything to do with us.
“It’s a lot more comfortable than the trailer the ‘great provider’ here has me cooped up in,” Marg said, playing right into her hands.
“Oh, do you live in one of those?” Monica asked. “That must be nice — so convenient and everything.”
I ground my teeth together. There was nothing I could do to stop her.
“Sometimes I wish we lived in one,” Claudia’s low voice purred. “When your husband needs a living room the size of a basketball court to keep from knocking things over, you get a bit tired just keeping the clutter picked up.”
I knew damned well Claudia wouldn’t be caught dead in a trailer, but she wasn’t about to let this bitch badmouth Betty and Marg.
“Oh,” Monica said, “you have a large house?”
“Like a barn.” Sloane giggled.
“I just adore big, old houses,” Monica said. “It’s such a shame that the neighborhoods where you find them deteriorate so fast.”
Jack laughed. “Sloane’s neighborhood up in Ruston isn’t likely to deteriorate much. He’s got two bank presidents, a mill owner, and a retired admiral on his block. The whole street just reeks of money.”
Monica faltered. Certain parts of Ruston were about as high class as you were going to get around Tacoma.
Sloane giggled again. “Costs a fortune to live there. They inhale me every year just for taxes.”
“Oh, Calvin,” Claudia said suavely, “it’s not that bad, and the neighbors are nice, they don’t feel they have to ‘keep up’ or put each other down. They don’t have this ‘status’ thing.”
Monica’s face froze, but that put an end to it. Claudia had real class, the one thing Monica couldn’t compete with. The little exchange had backfired, and she was the one who came out looking like a slob. She hadn’t figured on Claudia.
Then Lou showed up. He was a little drunk but seemed to be in a good humor. “Hide your women and your liquor,” he announced in that raspy voice of his. “I’m here at last.” A kind of tension came into the room very suddenly. McKlearey still seemed to carry that air of suppressed violence with him. Maybe it was that stiff Gyrene brace he stood in all the time.
Why in hell couldn’t he relax? I still hadn’t really bought that quick changeover of his on the night when we’d first started talking about the High Hunt. I’d figured it was a grandstand play and he’d back out, but so far he hadn’t. One thing I knew for sure — I’d have sure felt a lot better if he and Jack weren’t going up into the woods together. Both of them could get pretty irrational, and there were going to be a lot of guns around.
“Where in hell have you been McKlearey?” Jack demanded. “You’re an hour late.”
“I got tied up,” Lou said.
“Yeah? What’s her name?”
“Who bothers with names?” McKlearey jeered.
I saw Margaret glance sharply at Lou, but his face was blank. She was actually jealous of that creepy son of a bitch, for Chrissake!
“Let’s all have a belt,” Sloane suggested. He hustled into the kitchen and began mixing drinks.
I sat back, relaxing a bit now that all the little interpersonal crises were over for the moment. I think that’s why I’ve always been kind of a loner. When people get at each other and the little tensions start to build, I get just uncomfortable as hell. It’s like having your finger in a light socket knowing some guy behind you has his hand on the switch. You’re pretty sure he won’t really turn it on, but it still makes you jumpy.
I glanced over at Claudia. I liked her more and more. I wished to hell I didn’t know about Sloane and his outside hobbies.
Stan caught my eye with a look of strained apology. He, of course, had been on to Monica’s little performance even more than I had. I shrugged to him slightly. Hell, it wasn’t his fault.
Sloane distributed the drinks and then stood in the archway leading to Mike’s dining room. “And now,” he announced, “if you ladies will excuse us, we’ll adjourn to the dining room here and discuss the forthcoming slaughter.” He giggled.
“Right,” Jack said, getting up. “We got plans to make.” He was a little unsteady on his feet, but I didn’t pay much attention just then.
The rest of us got up, and we trooped into the dining room. I saw Monica’s face tighten as Stan got up. She didn’t want him out of sight, not even for a minute.
“Now,” Mike said after we’d pulled up the chairs and sat around the table, “I’ve made the deal with this guy named Miller in Twisp, so that’s all settled.”
“Where in hell is Twisp, for Chrissake?” Lou demanded.
Mike got a map, and we located Twisp, a small town in the Methow Valley.
“How’d you get to know a guy way to hell and gone up there?” Sloane asked.
“I’ve got a cousin who lives up there,” Mike said. “He introduced me to Miller when I was up there a year ago.”
“What kind of guy is he?” Jack asked.
“Rough, man. He tells you to do something, you damn well better do it.”
“He better not try givin’ me a bad time,” Lou said belligerently.
“He’d have you for breakfast, Lou,” Mike said. “I’ve seen him, and you can take it from me, he’s bad.”
“Yeah?” Lou said, his jaw tightening.
“Knock it off, McKlearey,” Sloane said; he wasn’t smiling. Lou grumbled a bit, but he shut up.
“Anyway, this is the deal,” Mike went on. “It’s fifty bucks each for ten days. He’ll buy the food, and we’ll pay him for it when we get there. He figures about thirty bucks a man. It would usually be a helluva lot more, but, like I told you, he’s just getting into the business, and so he doesn’t want to charge full price yet.”
“How the hell is he gonna feed us on three bucks a day each?” Jack demanded, taking a straight belt of whiskey from Sloane’s bottle.
“We’ll eat beans mostly, I expect,” Mike said. “I told him we weren’t exactly rolling in money, and not to get fancy on the chow. He said we could get by with a little camp meat to tide us over.”
“Camp meat? What the hell’s mat?” Lou asked. He was being deliberately dense.
“He’ll knock over a doe once we get up into the high country,” Mike explained. “We’ll eat that up before we come out. All the guides up there do it. I guess the game wardens don’t much care as long as you don’t bring any of the meat out — or if they do, there’s not a helluva lot they can do about it.”
“Good deal,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
“Now,” Mike went on, “he said we’ll each need a rifle, one box of shells, a pair of good boots, a good warm coat, several pair of heavy sox, a couple changes of clothes, and a good sleeping bag. Oh, one other thing — he wants us to put our clothes and stuff in some kind of sack so we can hang them here and there on the packhorses.”