The Hunted

Soft, curling tendrils of cirrus filled the sky, clumping in places, spreading out and then balling up like a shoddy tinsel job. Christmas was a vague memory, however, it did not register - it was static crackle and the smell of pine trees - a New Year for regrets looming. He rested his back against the old oak, wrestling with it until he found a semblance of comfort.

Pulling a bent cigarette out of his pocket, he gazed across the water. Small bits of tobacco fell like cloned snowflakes - little brown specks expertly shredded - he found a box of matches with three sticks left in the inside pocket of his coat. The first one broke, but the second flared wildly in the breeze, just long enough. It didn't matter. It was the last cigarette.

He'd been running out. Of everything. He ran out of excuses and that led to running out of family. He ran out of money. He'd run out of his apartment when he heard the sirens. Now, he was out of cigarettes and, with one match and some pocket change to his name, he was running out of time.

A hawk skated lazily on the updrafts. He smiled. Then his stomach reminded him. There was nothing lazy about it. The hawk was hunting. The updrafts were life or death. Suddenly, he winced, thinking of the field mouse that would dash out from cover at the wrong time - the hawk's arrival seemed a bad omen, now. He knew what it felt like to be hunted.

He was tired of running, wolf-snap at his heels. Were they still coming? He knew they would never stop coming. He had left too much behind and there was nothing ahead of him save the game - the game he was growing tired of. The game that shook him ragdoll limp, that left him tasting his fatigue - a soft ugliness that grew with each step, throttled by the thirst. It tasted like ash and melancholy. He could smell it on the breeze, too. The lines were blurring - it was no longer clear where he ended and the world began.

For God so loved the world... He heard it. The refrain of years, incense sticks and slight of hand tricks. What kind of father gives away their son? He knew the answer. He could relate. He wondered if his boy would ever understand and accepted that he wouldn't. He would grow up chewing through stories that, combined, formed a collage that seemed noble and despicable at the same time. He would love his father - the one he would never remember - because no one else did. Because that contrary streak was legacy - the only thing he could leave his son aside from disappointment. Heart constricting terror - an anxiety that would follow him for the rest of his days. It didn't matter. The boy was young, and it was better this way.

He cast the smoking butt into the water in front of him, heard his grandfather's voice, chastising - he watched its progress through the riffles and wished he could take it back. Nothing mattered, but, somehow, this did. It was the biggest betrayal of all. He closed his eyes and tried to look inside his head, skull aching, wondering who would tell his son not to sully beautiful things. To stick by the ugly things if they were important enough. There was a sharp pain in his chest and his breath caught - why would the boy listen to a man he had been raised to hate? Even if he could deliver the message somehow? Deb would raise the boy to be everything he wasn't. And that was mostly good. For the best. Mostly.

He stood up and tightened the laces on his heavy work boots. One last look at the sky, ochre insanity - he gasped at the absurdity of it. Lurid. The woods had become silent. His motion stilled the birds and mice - the hawk was still hunting. And then he heard a whining sound from far away. He stood, motionless, as the drone swelled into siren song he knew too well. 

He hitched up his pants, tightened his belt, and filled the pockets with handfuls of pebbles. He filled every pocket in his coat and then shoved the remaining handful of rock and grit into his mouth. He walked into the water slowly but deliberately. The sirens were getting louder, but they would not succeed in their hunt. They would find only tiny flecks of tobacco where the man had been sitting. Footsteps to the water. They'd know he couldn't walk across it. Case closed.

The hawk stooped and fell on its prey, tasting the good blood taste, tearing with its beak and talons. 

Safe for another day.

Finally Bagged One

When I was young, the woods were my playground. I fished, burned things, made slingshots and bows. I used my scout knife to whittle absurdly sharp arrows that flew sideways and broke with astonishing ease. Which was cool. Because I liked whittling arrows.

I was a strange kid, which is kind of like saying 'I am a person who eats food', but it is true. I was a strange kid. I wanted, more than anything, to be rooted to a place. To not move all the time. And yet I was obsessed with birds. So, perhaps I just wanted to be untethered, but led by my own capriciousness, not the whim of the United States Government. 

I read about birds obsessively. I spent hours looking through my mom's old field guides and I looked for hawks everywhere I went. And I always saw them first. And my folks called me 'eagle eye'. And they were right. 

Raptors were my favorite. I stared at glossy pictures for hours. I can't remember what I thought about when I looked at the birds. Maybe I thought about nothing, which would certainly have been a relief. In hindsight, I worshipped hawks. They were beautiful, but strong. They were agile, but deadly. They were free to fly wherever they wanted, soaring on updrafts. They did not worry about where they would be moving next. They did not need friends. They were probably the closest thing to being free that my mind could comprehend at six years old. They were my heroes.

As I got older, I got better at making bows. I learned to make thicker arrows that flew straight because I notched feathers into the butt ends. When I was ten or so, I asked Santa Claus for a real bow. A compound bow that would send arrows into the heavens, straight and fast, plunging back to earth like a Peregrine Falcon.

My Dad bought me a BB gun. I don't know why. I really wanted a bow, but I was not disappointed for long. I was too young to understand that guns could be anything other than fun. And I was a good shot. Eagle eye, they called me, remember? I made a shooting range in our garage and it was a good BB gun. Pretty soon, I could shoot the flame off a candle. 

My sister was older than I was and she did not want to fly; she wanted to find a book that never ended. A wonderful book that would stay with her, day after day. Year after year. She did not understand that her spastic brother, four years junior, just wanted to talk to someone. She was the only one who was experiencing anything close to what I felt. But she did not want to talk. She wanted to read and to be left alone.

There were many things that I considered a game that my sister did not. I wanted someone to play with. She did not. I wanted someone to tell me that it sucked that we had to move so much. She wouldn't. I was annoying. She knew how to stop it. Fast. My stomach still clenches when I think about it. 

I loved the gun. I loved the gun because I was a good shot. I loved the gun in that way young boys have of imagining things that will never be. Things that I didn't even want. Things I thought I should want. 

I shot through BBs by the hundred. I also clipped Q-tips in half so I could shoot the gun inside. Tamped down the end of the barrel, ten pumps, that Q-tip would fly a good twenty feet. And it would fly straight, especially when wetted with Juicy Fruit spit. 

So, I shot Q-tips at my sister. It wasn't a cool thing to do. It didn't hurt, but it violated a lot of things. It involved pointing a gun at my sister. It was wasteful. It was immature. It was everything that I was not supposed to be. It was careless.

I don't think my sister ever said anything because I don't remember getting in trouble, and I still have the gun. It would have been taken. No doubt. I don't know why my sister didn't tell anyone. Maybe for the same reason I never said that every argument ended with me in the fetal position crying, the ache inside me spreading.

Things escalate. That would be a pretty good subtitle for the autobiography I will never write. The story of JD Mader - "Things Escalate". 

I never had a pet when I was a kid and I didn't really like animals without wings. I mean, I didn't dislike them, but I also didn't feel bad shooting my neighbor's cat in the ass. One pump. Cat took off like a bottle rocket. I never would have hurt an animal. I shot myself point blank with one pump all the time. In the foot. The stomach. Sometimes the temple. The eyelid, once. I knew the cat would be fine. It's not one of my prouder moments, but I wasn't one of those kids who tortured animals. There was enough torture going around.

I don't remember when I started shooting at the grackles and black birds that sat in the top of pine trees, level with my bedroom window on the second floor. I shot at them with Q-tips and they rarely moved. Sometimes, I would get close enough that they would flap away, indignant. I only did this when my parents were gone. I'd smoke cigarettes on the roof and shoot Q-tips out my window. 

I have no idea what compelled me to load the gun with BBs. I suppose, since I had never come close with a Q-tip ... maybe I didn't make the connection. Maybe the candle flames had been snuffed in my mind as they had been in the garage. All I know is that, one day, I loaded the BB gun, pumped it ten times, aimed at a black bird high in the tree and barely visible - an impossible shot - and I pulled the trigger. Just as I had been taught to do. Just how I'd practiced. I held my breath with one eye closed and gently squeezed.

When the bird fell, I was dumfounded. It spiraled to earth like the ducks on Duck Hunt. My heart stopped. I dropped the gun and ran to the yard as fast as I could. The bird was still alive. I had hit it in the eye, and it was bloody, gasping. Suddenly, the boy that I thought I was evaporated. Because the boy that I thought I was would never have shot a bird. And if he did, and it didn't die, he would have put it out of its misery. Like a man.

The boy that I was did something I will never forgive him for. He ran inside and got two plastic bags. He put the bird in the bags. He watched it open and close its beak, making intricate patterns in the blood that smeared the inside of the plastic. 

The bird wouldn't die. 

I didn't know what to do. The gun was upstairs. I was in the yard, tears streaming down my face, a dying bird suffocating in my hand. I remember thinking how beautiful the ink black feathers were. 

I dug in the dirt with my hands, frantic. I tore my fingernails and pulled roots and stones from beneath my mother's favorite bush. I put the bird inside the grave, still alive when I put it in the ground. Still alive when I scooped handfuls of dirt on it. Still alive when I went upstairs and washed my hands and put the BB gun in the back of my closet. I knew I would not get caught and that was the worst part. 

I know the bird died eventually, but in my mind, it will always be under eight inches of dirt, gasping, eyeless, with it's head pressed against bloody Zip-Lock.