The booster club got the pallets from the Agway and loaded them into the band van, carried them across town to the football field. When Tim Miller was growing up, it was all cornfields and a long skinny strip of thicket where they would run beagles after rabbits. That was back when they wore plaid vests, red.
Tim Miller never got to play football because he was born with a hole in his heart but he loved the game with what heart he had left. He made marks in the margins of the sports section his whole life. When Tim Sr. died and left him all that corn, the timing worked out. He hated to see that corn standing, and it got hard to make the walk to where the old ball field was, so he gave it all to the school on condition they put the new field on it. That was going on 40 years ago now. The south endzone comes up to his backyard. The north endzone is way out there in the middle of where the corn stood. As a kid Tim used to make up all sorts of things that might be waiting back there in the far endzone, back when it was corn. He’d have bad dreams until the combine would go through every fall. He was happy to trade stalks for painted grass, scarecrows for halfbacks.
***
Dan Boller wasn’t going to the bonfire. He wasn’t going to the football game on Friday either. He was sitting in school study hall balling up little pieces of paper with his red, sweaty hands. He never shaved his neck and it itched like hell. He tried not to itch it because when he did a storm of dead skin fell off his face and covered his shirt. A million little cells embedded in the fibers of his flannel. He didn’t want her to see that.
Sarah Morris was tall for a girl. Real dark. Her hair was dark and she wore white skirts that made her legs a problem. She wore skirts all year, even winter. He loved to see those legs, Dan Boller did. He loved to see them so much he hated her for wearing those skirts and letting everybody else see them too. She caught him looking and then he caught her eyes and turned red. But she was sweet, she didn’t like to see him embarrassed like that. She knew what she was, what she had. She went over to him, smiled.
“Hey Dan,” she said. “You going to the bonfire?”
“Naw.” He turned to his pieces of paper, crumpled them further with busy digits. His ticker fluttered and he fought the blood that was pooling in his face. “Busy.”
“Aw. Well, have fun.” She turned and floated away. The other girls cast ugly eyes in his direction and covered their giggles with little hands.
Dan Boller lived up town in a modular home his dad bought when he first married his ma. A big truck brought it in two pieces and put it together on the quarter acre parcel. It had an old porch out front that the mailman wouldn’t come up anymore. Dan’s room was back of the kitchen. He got home from school that Thursday and rushed to get his deer rifle from under the bed. His ma stood at the sink hunched with watersoaked fingers.
He came in and she turned to him and said, “Hey Danny, how was school?”
Dan went past her. He didn’t tell her how school was. He went right back to his room, got down on the carpet and felt under the bed for his gun. He pulled it out and a week’s worth of rigid socks came out with it. He went to his closet and took a box of .243 shells. Winchester, 150 grain. He put on his bright orange jacket and a ball cap that read:
FRANK’S DELI
HUNT SAFELY.
He kept on the blue jeans and work boots he wore to school every day. Most guys wear coveralls when it’s cold like this but Dan Boller liked to still hunt from the ground. He didn’t hunt from a treestand, he never did, cause Dan Boller’s dad never did. He hiked up into the woods and sat for a while and listened. Then he hiked a little more and sat again.
The rifle he carried came from the big county fair 20 years ago this past August. His dad was there with Dan’s grandad showing off their hogs. He liked them hogs, Dan Boller’s dad did. Took a lot of pride in the blue ribbons he got for em. A whole slew of em were tacked to the wall in the finished side of the basement. But they’re covered in dust. He stopped collecting them after he married Dan’s ma and bought the house in town.
That day at the fair 20 years ago, Dan’s dad asked Dan’s grandad if he could leave the show barn and walk around the fair. He went to meet up with Dan’s ma, who at the time was in the running for county Dairy Princess. She didn’t win but Dan’s dad was awful happy about having a girl in the running for himself, and he held her around the waist so tight as they walked that her gait changed but she didn’t mind. She liked being held.
They walked around the fair and held each other and sweated in the August sun. Dan’s dad would sometimes catch guys looking all over Dan’s ma’s body when they walked. He’d stare a crater through em. If they made eye contact Dan’s eyes told them to watch their damn gaze. They all did.
They got to where the gun club had a stand. They were raffling off an armory over there. Guy had a lever action 22, a pump 20, a double barrel 12, a single shot .410, and a bolt action .243 with a five round magazine. Dan’s dad stood there at the booth and looked em all over, blued barrels, brand new guns. Wooden stocks that looked oiled. He’d never had a brand new gun.
“What I gotta do to win that one?” Dan’s dad asked the man.
“This one? Or this one?”
“That one,” he said, “the bolt action.”
The man grabbed a deck of cards half gone and fanned them out.
“Pick a card. Then you rip it in half. Keep one half. We’ll draw when the deck’s sold and they’ll announce winning cards over the speaker.”
“Shit,” Dan’s dad said. “I want that gun. How much?”
“Five doller.”
Dan’s dad turned to Dan’s ma. She shook her head.
“No one ever wins these things Tommy,” she said.
Dan’s dad smiled. “Not without luck they don’t,” he said. “I think I’m awful lucky.”
She smiled back, rolled her eyes playful like. Dan’s dad gave him the fiver. The man held out the cards. “Pick one for me,” Dan’s dad said. She drew one and showed it.
***
Dan’s dad taught him how to hunt. He’d come home with a buck every year, and prop little Dan up on the ungulate’s body to better feel the horns. And then he stopped bringing home deer, he stopped hunting at all. He wasn’t home much. It started with Dan’s dad staying longer hours down at the plant. They made gunpowder. Dan’s dad said with the towelheads acting up over there, production tripled. “What they oughta do,” Dan’s dad said, “Is turn that whole fuckin place to glass and be done with it.”
Dan’s ma got older quick. He overheard her crying at night and during the day she had big puffy eyes that leaked out over dark hanging eye skin. The one night Dan’s dad came home real late and he heard him crashing around in the hall. He heard his ma come out the bedroom. She tried to whisper but Dan could hear her through those thin walls. A few whispers passed and were replaced by a thud against the floor. After that it was just sobs. Big drooly sobs pooling into the carpet.
Dan’s dad left most of his stuff. He left the rifle. Dan visited his dad at the Motel 6 where he lived with a woman called Ms. Candy. She was a lot younger than Dan’s dad, and they all three sat around in the little room and watched TV. She barely wore any clothes and Dan’s dad would run his hands all over her legs and then they’d go to bed. Then Dan’s dad stopped living down at the Motel 6, and Dan stopped seeing his dad.
***
Dan came out his room with the rifle and his jacket zipped up and went past his ma who was pulling a cigarette out of a pack at the kitchen table while the last one sat smoldering in the tray.
“You going hunting?” she asked him.
“What’s it look like,” he said.
He drove past the football field on his way to the woods. The pallets were all piled in the grass. People were milling about. He recognized them all. They wore orange letter jackets with hands stuffed in the pockets.
He got up past the field and took a left onto a dirt road that no longer had a sign. He got up there about a mile and pulled off. The sun was still up there, somewhere, but it was on its way toward giving up for the day. He grabbed the rifle and headed up the hill through a patch of briars where the only way to get through is by following the game trails left by life better suited.
Dan got up on a rock and sat down. He held the rifle up and through the scope he made note of shooting lanes. He slipped off the safety out of habit and imagined deer stepping out into these premeditated spaces and landing heart first on his crosshairs. He put deer in his sights and he made a decision about what he’d do if the circumstance arose. He thought about those deer dropping dead in their tracks, that first incision of a field dress, the warmth lifting off the opening.
He sat back on the rock and thought about their patterns, the way they move. The rut was over. Old and young bucks now spent the day looking to fill up empty bellies or died from their condition. For the doe their suffering was only beginning. Those bucks would charge through miles of briars and swamps and gunshots just for a whiff of tail and sometimes not make it out the other side. Dan figured he would too.
Deer thoughts gave way to other thoughts, and he followed them until he couldn’t remember how he got there. He figured he was pretty close to town, and if he was right he had himself just down the backside of the hill town was built into. He got up from his rock and continued up the mountain, the peak of it just up there, and the field and the kids and the bonfire tucked into the valley at the bottom. He went sideways up the hill so as not to lose footing.
He went up and over the other side and from a clearing he could see them all, the little groups of lively pliant people piled in their own way like communal insects. The tips of the flames dancing, dancing upward. He found a downed log and perched behind it. He saw the figures but he could not see the faces, he could not see Sarah Morris. He pulled his rifle up and used the log as a bench to steady his field of vision. He turned the scope all the way up and faces materialized before him. He scanned, scanned. They held red cups and laughed. Boys had their arms around their girls just the way Dan Boller figured he would if he had a girl. Then there she was. Sarah Morris in her white skirt, shifting just so to generate heat, leg to leg, across from a pair of running backs who the paper said could clip 1,000 yards each this season. He watched the one come across and hug Sarah Morris, and when they released that boy kept his hand around her waist.
He moved his scope down just a notch, a microscopic shift downward to get a better frame of her legs. Those legs, heavenly, perched under the perfect white skirt, bending intermittently at naked knees. The sun had gone down and its light trailed it, replaced a moment at a time by the fire which whipped in long orange and red tendrils upward. He would sit there and watch her for the rest of his life if she were to hold still that long. He’d stay right there, skip all the meals and wither away to nothing as long as she would let him. Never shoot another deer if he could just switch spots with the boy that had her. Dan Boller tugged loose his belt and pulled down his blue jeans. He let Sarah Morris fill his scope in its entirety, the crosshairs resting on the belt line of her delicious white skirt-covered waist.
He focused on steadying the scope as he went at it. His shoulder slipped a bit when he reached forward with his unoccupied hand to adjust the rifle and when he did it went off and a loud boom echoed across the earth and a high-pitched whine tattooed inside his ears. The crowd stiffened their spines, tightened their necks. The ringing noise drowned out every noise around him, the soft crumble of the woods he sat in, the muffled music still playing over the speakers. They drew closer, as if their numbers alone might be a defense from whatever it was out there, in the last touches of the quickly fading daylight. Dan Boller looked back into the scope. He searched for a leg, even a shoe, but she was completely covered. He watched them, watched their faces. Fear painted across heads like from some painting, the border of his optics the edge of the artwork.
Once when Dan Boller was real little, he went hunting with his dad. It might have been his first time in the woods. They sat up on a big rock on this very same mountain. It was cold, so cold that Dan Boller’s dad had wrapped the boy up in a sleeping bag just to buy more time in the woods. He fell asleep and his dad nudged him awake, pointed down the hill. In the clearing on the flat stood a herd of shoulder to shoulder deer, picking through the dead leaves for acorns and beechnuts. They moved like one thing, all piled together. Every now and then one would pick its head up and look up the hill in their direction. Dan watched his dad’s unmoving eyes, wide and wet and blinkless. His own heart thumping, he couldn’t take the wait. He finally whispered to his dad, “What do we do?” His dad flashed him a closed mouth grin, flicked off the safety, leaned into the scope.
***
On Friday night Tim Miller filled his old thermos with the steaming brown liquid. He put on his coveralls and his warmest jacket, an old hunting coat he wore afield long ago. He sat on the back porch and waited but the game never started, the bleachers never filled. Lately Tim Miller had found himself standing in rooms, mouth open and tongue dry, not knowing where he was. Sometimes he’d go out on the back porch and wonder when the corn came off. He got up tepid from his chair and went inside and grabbed the paper, flipped to the sports section. Out in his backyard the football field stood empty. It was as quiet and still as it ever had been back when it was corn and a young Tim Miller would imagine all sorts of terrible things that might be way out there in the middle of it.
--Chuck Strange writes stories that take place in the Northeast, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He doesn't know what else to do so he's thinking about making a Substack.