Roscoe and Junior out for a Hunt

A Story by ZackOfBridge

Roscoe and Junior McCoy lay belly to the ground, their lips puffed out where they had stuffed a dip of chewing tobacco. They spat their lip juices onto the tall grass around them and their rifles; the tobacco juices leaked from their mouths like grasshopper spit-up. They were smoking men too, but the critters they were waiting to shoot would smell the smoke against the pines. The pines were green, seeing as how they were evergreen, but the red and yellow leaves on the forest floor were warming up to the cooling of fall. The brothers taking their Remington’s out for another day of silently bonding in a brush.

The brothers wore matching red and yellow camouflage vests and thick Alaskan fur hats to blend in with the changing of the season. The two told each other they needed to match their gear to keep the deer from noting any inconsistencies on the ground, but honestly, they wanted to match for the sake of being brothers. And it had worked for the two of them. They were claiming a deer just about every time they could get out into the woods for hunting. The two would count off and tug the trigger at the same time, with a two bullets ripping through the animals broadside and into its heart, the deer couldn’t do much else but to buckle in its knees and die. The brothers would take turns dragging it to the bed of the truck and then they would haul it to town and dump it in their driveway.

Their families had plenty of venison packed on ice and on the dinner tables. In fact, Roscoe had Junior and Junior’s girls over for dinner the night before; Roscoe’s wife had cooked some Bambi-steaks for every plate. Skeet sat at the end of the table underneath his prized buck wall mount. The buck watched the dining table with frozen, lamented eyes. His single antler grazed the ceiling and hung over his head like a descending crown. His other antler had been grinded down into nothing. He was killed with a belly full of grass. Now the image of a family chewing at the rough, but rich sirloin of his kind reflected from his glossy, unlit eyes.

“We’re not here to shoot deer, Junior,” Roscoe said turning away from the narrow scope of his rifle, tobacco spit dripped from his mouth, black track split his bottom lip.

“What is it were hunting then, Scoe?” Junior whispered, his words disfigured from the chew in the dip of his lip and the deer-jerkey on his teeth. Junior kept his eye in the guidance of his scope and his scope on the bait in the clearing. If he saw the broadside of a deer he was going to shoot. If his brother wanted to game something else he wouldn’t argue, but he wasn’t going to pass on a deer grazing in the bait.

“Bear. We’re going to nab a bear.” Roscoe set his hand on Junior’s shoulder; Junior flinched his back and propped himself onto his side as to face Roscoe. His brother smelled of cheap, canned beer and smoke and his beard parted for his open smile. Junior’s constant look of confusion and anxiety deepened. His brother jabbed him with a drunken finger. “You’re going to nab a bear.”

“We can’t drop a bear with these,” Junior said, shuffling the rifle in his calloused hand. He’d have to shoot it square in the throat and severe its vertebrae. He couldn’t even get a buck by its skull. He took a long drag from his beer; there was a sweet taste of Copenhagen spit mixed with the dulling brew. He took another pull, beer dripped from his wiry beard, “I cant.”

“You need to get out of this funk brother,” Roscoe started, he lit a cigarette to satisfy a drunken desire. He placed a cigarette in Junior’s gaping mouth; it was backwards. Junior plucked it and set it right. Roscoe squinted, a trail of smoke had pinched his eye,“And Junior, this kind of bear is different.”

“How do you mean?” Junior said. He ran is fingers through his moist beard and sucked at his orange cigarette filter. The smoke lifted over his thick eyebrows, his eyes followed the smoke into the air, an arrow of ducks winged above. He thought about how pretty things could be when you weren’t shooting them, and then thought about how he must be drunk.

“You’ll see brother, and you’ll forget all about the buck.” Roscoe said and dumped the smoking butt of his cigarette in Junior’s beer. “It’ll come out before the sun is down.”

So they waited. Their beer disappeared and their stomachs, in the grass, bloated out. Junior’s fingers had gone nearly numb from clenching the checkerboard grip of his gun. Deer had crossed the clearing, but Roscoe pushed the barrel of Junior’s gun into the grass and shook his head. The sun was dropping low, the shadows of the trees were elongating and the sky was scaled pink like salmon. Junior was ready to pack it in and catch the trail to the truck while he could still see it in the light. And then there it was, walking on two feet in the clearing, a small fuzzy thing, with a beady eyes and a button nose. Roscoe pushed his elbow into Junior’s ribs, “There it is like I said. Shoot it brother.”

“The hell, Scoe?” Junior said, watching the little beast from the black crosses of his scope. It had sat itself down in the clearing, “Is that a teddy bear?”

“Who cares what kind of bear it is, shoot the damn thing.” Roscoe pointed his finger to the clearing and curled his finger to shoot an imagined gun.

There was a little smile stitched under its brown protruding nose. “I don’t know Scoe, my girls have got Teddy Bears, I don’t know if I can.” Junior said with his eyes down casted.

“You shoot that thing in the eye or I’m going to and I’m going to stuff it and mount it on my wall across from the buck you couldn’t hit neither,” Roscoe snapped and looked through his scope. He angled his gun at the clearing.

Juniors eye twitched in the scope. He saw the buck again, he saw the scope on its eye and he felt his finger tug at the trigger. And then the bucks antler shattered at its base, he had missed and Roscoe gave it one in the neck. Every visit to Roscoe’s house, Junior sat across from that mounted Buck with its ground down antler to remind him of his mistake. He saw the teddy bear, its button eye in the crosshairs and its smile facing the muzzle of the gun. A gunshot echoed harshly from the brush.

. . .

Junior and his girls went over to Roscoe's house for Bambi-steaks like they did each week. They sat at the dining table, the buck watched the dinner and the conversation from his mount on the wall. Junior’s youngest needed two seats at the table, one for herself and one for her new friend. He had a shattered eye and was sewn up in the back, but he smiled, frozen in the chair. He peeked over the table with a glossy eye.