The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [80]
The boy sits shivering in the wood. Ah'm fugged if Ah'll wait for any ole deer. Ah'm gonna track 'em.
He stalks through the forest with the wind on his face. It's dark, and the trees are silver-brown, and the ground is a deep-olive velvet. Where is that ole deer? He kicks a twig out of his way, and stiffens as a buck goes clattering through the brush. Goddam! Ole deer is fast.
Next time he is more cautious. He finds a deer track, kneels down and traces the hoofprint tenderly, feeling a thrill. Ah'm gonna track this old deer.
For two hours he creeps through the forest, watching where he places his feet, putting his heel down first, then his toes before he shifts his weight. When the dried thorny branches catch in his clothing, he pulls them free quietly, one by one.
In a little clearing he sees a deer and freezes. The wind is blowing gently against his face, and he thinks he can smell the animal. Goddam, he whispers to himself. What a big ole bastard. The stag turns slowly, looks past him from a hundred yards. Sonofabitch cain't see me.
The boy raises his gun, and trembles so badly the sights waver. He lowers it, and curses himself. Jus' a little ole woman. He brings it up again, holding it steadily, moving the front sight over until it points a few inches below the muscle of the foreleg. Ah'm goin' to git him through the heart.
BAA-WOWWW!
It is someone else's gun, and the deer drops. The boy runs forward almost weeping. Who shot him? That was mah deer. I'll kill the one sonofabitch who shot him.
Jesse Croft is laughing at him. Ah tole you, boy, to set where Ah put you.
Ah tracked that deer.
You scared that deer into me. Ah yeard ya footing it from a mile away.
You're a liar. You're a goddam liar. The boy throws himself at his father, and tries to strike him.
Jesse Croft gives him a blow across the mouth, and he sits down. You ole sonofabitch, he screams, and flings himself at his father again.
Jesse holds him off, laughing. Little ole wildcat, ain't ya? Well, you got to wait ten years 'fore you can whop your pa.
That deer were mine.
One that wins is the one that gits it.
The tears freeze in the boy's eyes and wither. He is thinking that if he hadn't trembled he would have shot the deer first.
"Yes, sir," Jesse Croft said, "they wa'n' a thing my Sam could stand to have ya beat him in. When he was 'bout twelve, they was a fool kid down at Harper who used to give Sam a lickin'." (Scratching the back of his gray scraggly hair, his hat in his hand.) "That kid would lick Sam every day, and Sam would go back and pick a fight the next day. Ah'll tell ya, he ended up by whoppin' the piss out of that kid.
"And then when he was older, about seventeen maybe, he used to be bustin' horses down to the fair in August, and he was known to be 'bout the best rider in the county. Then one time a fella all the way from Denison came down and beat him in a reg'lar competition with judges and all. I 'member Sam was so mad he wouldn't talk to no one for two days.
"He got good stock in him," Jesse Croft declared to his neighbors. "We was one of the first folks to push in here, must be sixty years ago, and they was Crofts in Texas over a hunnerd years ago. Ah'd guess some of them had that same meanness that Sam's got. Maybe it was what made 'em push down here."
Deer hunting and fighting and busting horses at the fair make up in hours a total of perhaps ten days a year. There are the other things, the long flat sweeps of the terrain, the hills in the distance, the endless meals in the big kitchen with his parents and brothers and the ranch foremen.
There are the conversations in the bunkhouse. The soft reflective voices.
Ah tell ya that little gal is gonna remember me unless she was too goddam drunk.
Ah jus' looked at that nigger after that, an' Ah said, Boy, you no-good black bastard, an' Ah jus' picked up that hatchet an' let him have it right across the head. But the sonofabitch didn't even bleed much. You can kill an elephant about as fast as you can kill a nigger in the head.
A whoor is no damn good