“OK, you guys, spread out and dump out your gear,” Sloane said. For some reason he reminded me of a scoutmaster with a bunch of city kids.
“Sleeping bag,” Sloane said.
Each of us pushed his sleeping bag forward.
“Gear-bag — or clothes bag, or whatever the hell you want to call it.” He looked around. We each held up a sack of some kind. Looky, gang, Daddy’s going to take me camping. “OK, now as we check off the items of clothing and what-not, stow them in your sack, OK?”
He went down through the list of items — clothing, soap, towels, everything.
“OK,” he said, “that takes care of all that shit. You’ll each be wearing your jackets and boots and all that crap, so we’re all set there. Now, have you all got your licenses and deer-tags?”
“I’ll pick up mine tomorrow,” Lou said.
“McKlearey,” Jack said angrily, “can’t you do one fuckin’ thing right? We were all supposed to have that taken care of by now.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Lou said. “Just don’t worry about me, Alders. I’ll have the fuckin’ license and tag.”
“But why in hell didn’t you take care of it before now, you dumb shit?” Jack shouted. “You’ve had as much time as the rest of us.”
“All right,” I said. “It’s no big deal. So he forgot. Let’s not make a federal case out of it.”
“Dan’s right,” Sloane said. “You guys are touchy as hell tonight. If we start off this way, the whole thing’s gonna be a bust.” He could feel it, too.
“Let’s get on with this,” Stan said. “I’ve got to get home before too late.”
“Keepin’ tabs on that high-class wife of yours, huh?” Lou snickered.
“I don’t really see where that’s any of your business,” Stan said with surprising heat. I guess that McKlearey had been at him before Jack and I got there.
“McKlearey,” I said, trying to keep my cool and keep the whole thing from blowing up, “you’re about half in the bag. You’d be way out in front to back off a little, don’t you think?”
“You countin’ my fuckin’ drinks?” he demanded. “First your shithead brother, and now you, huh? Well, I can get my own fuckin’ license, and I sure as hell don’t need nobody to count my fuckin’ drinks for me.”
“That’s enough,” Sloane said sharply, and he wasn’t smiling. “You guys all got your rifles with you?”
We hauled out the hardware. Sloane had the .270 he’d tried to sell me, Stan had the Remington, Jack had that Mauser, Lou had a converted Springfield, and I had the gun I’d been working on. All the rifles had scopes.
“Two boxes of ammunition?” Sloane asked. We each piled up the boxes beside our rifles.
“Hunting knives?”
We waved our cutlery at him.
“I guess that’s about it then.”
“Say,” Jack said, “how about the handguns?”
“God damn” — Sloane giggled —”I almost forgot. I’ve got them in the closet. Let’s see. Dan, you and Stan each have your own, don’t you?”
Stan nodded. “I have,” he said quietly. He reached into one end of his rolled sleeping bag and after some effort took out a snub-nosed revolver. He fished in again and came out with a belt holster and a box of shells. Somehow the gun seemed completely out of character. I could see Stan with a target pistol maybe, but not a people-eater like that. And he handled it like he knew what he was doing.
“Christ,” I said, “that’s an ugly-looking little bastard.”
“We had a burglar scare last year,” he said, seeming a little embarrassed.
“What the hell can you hit with that fuckin’ little popgun?” Lou sneered.
“It’s a .38 special,” Stan said levelly. “That’s hardly a popgun. And I’ve had it out to the range a few times, and I cm hit what I shoot at.” He gave Lou a hard look that was even more out of character.
Lou grunted, but he looked at Stan with an odd expression. Maybe the son of a bitch was thinking about how close he’d come to getting a gutful of soft lead bullets for playing silly games with Monica. I hoped he’d get a few nervous minutes out of it.
“You got yours, haven’t you, Dan?” Sloane asked.
I nodded. I’d rolled up the gun belt, holster, and pistol and brought them over in a paper sack. I pulled the rig out and laid it across the sleeping bag. The curve of the butt and the flare of the hammer protruding from the black leather holster looked a little dramatic, but what the hell?
“Jesus,” Sloane said, almost reverently, “look at that big bastard.”
Nothing would do but to pass the guns around and let everybody fondle them.
“You got ours here, Cal?” Jack asked. He sure seemed jumpy about it — like he wasn’t going to relax until he got his hands on that pistol.
Sloane got up and went out of the room for a minute. He came back with three belts and holsters. The .357 Ruger of his was almost a carbon copy of my old .45, a little heavier in the frame maybe. His holster and belt were fancier, but the leather was new and squeaked a lot. McKlearey’s .38 M & P had a fairly conventional police holster and belt, but Jack’s .45 auto was in a real odd lash-up. It looked like somebody had rigged up a quick-draw outfit for that pig. I don’t know how anyone could figure to get an Army .45 into operation in under five minutes, but there it was.
We sat around in a circle, passing the guns back and forth. My .30-06 got a lot of attention. Sloane particularly seemed quite taken with it.
“I’ll give you a hundred and a half for it,” he said suddenly.
“Come on, Cal,” I said. “You can get a brand-new gun, scope and all, for that. You couldn’t get more than a hundred and a quarter for that piece of mine, even if you were selling it to a halfwit.”
“I don’t want to sell it,” he said. “I just like the gun.” He swung the piece to his shoulder a couple more times. “Damn, that’s a sweet gun,” he said.
Stan took the gun from him. “You did a nice job, Dan,” he said.
“Poor Calvin figures he got royally screwed on that deal,” Jack said, laughing.
“No,” Sloane said, “it was my business to look at the merchandise before I set the price. I screwed myself, so I’ve got no bitch coming.”
Lou went out and got another beer.
Jack held up his rifle. “This thing’s a pig, but it shoots where you aim it, so what the hell?”
“That’s all that counts,” Stan said.
McKlearey came back.
“We’re all pretty well set up,” I said. “I was about half afraid somebody’d show up with a .30-30. That beast’s got the ballistic pattern of a tossed brick. About all its good for is heavy brush. Out past a hundred yards, you might as well throw rocks.”
“And we’re not likely to be in brush,” Jack said. “You get up around the timberline and it opens up to where you’re gettin’ two- and three-hundred-yard shots.”
“Miller says we’ll be camping just below the timberline,” Sloane said, “and we’ll be riding on up to where we’ll hunt, so it’ll likely be pretty soon.”
“Good deal,” Lou grunted. “I’ve about had a gutful of fuckin’ jungle.”
“Air gets pretty skimpy up there, doesn’t it?” Jack asked.
“At six to eight thousand feet?” Sloane giggled. “You damn betcha. Some of you flatlanders’ll probably turn pretty blue for the first couple days.”
We carried the gear into Sloane’s utility room and piled it all in a corner and then went back into the breakfast room just off the kitchen. Sloane opened another round of beers, and we sat looking at a map, tracing out our route.
“We’ll go on up to Everett and men across Stevens Pass,” Sloane said. “Then, just this side of Wenatchee, we’ll swing north on up past Lake Chelan and up into the Methow Valley to Twisp.”
“I thought that was Mee-thow,” Lou said.
“No,” Sloane answered. “Miller calls it Met-how.”
Lou shrugged.
“Anyhow,” Cal went on, “if we leave here at midnight, we ought to be able to get over there by eight thirty or nine. Some of those roads ain’t too pure, so we’ll have to take it easy.”
“We’ll be leaving for camp as soon as we get to Miller’s?” Stan asked.
“Right. He said he’d feed us breakfast and then we’d bit the trail.”
“Gonna be a little thin on sleep,” I said.
“I’m gonna sack out for a few hours after work,” Jack said.
“Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for all of us,” Sloane agreed.
We had a few more beers and began to feel pretty good. The grouchy snapping at each other eased off. It even seemed like the hunt might turn out OK after all. We sat in the brightly lighted kitchen in a clutter of beer cans and maps with a fog of cigarette smoke around us and talked about it.