It was now eight-twenty-five on the morning of Monday, December second, and Stu was sitting in his kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee, watching Peter Callisher’s car pull up the drive, and thinking that 1687 might have been a very good year, but he was just about ready for a house built the day before yesterday with a whirlpool bathtub and vinyl on the kitchen floor. He’d been thinking this way for six months now, and working it out, and he thought he was set. If he had a good enough take during the Celebration, he could break ground, as soon as the frost began to ease, out on that same back pasture where his father had died. He sure as hell didn’t need the pasture for cows, because he didn’t have any cows. He didn’t have any sheep anymore, either, and he was just about ready to give up on pigs. The back fifty acres of this farm had returned to forest decades ago. Stu went out there whenever he wanted and bagged whatever deer he needed to keep himself in meat. He couldn’t see slaughtering a pig he’d known all its life or a lamb he’d helped deliver. It didn’t make any sense, and he knew it didn’t make any sense, but he couldn’t help himself. Sometimes, when he’d had a few beers or a very long day or a particularly awful run-in with the Environmental Protection Agency, he put his copy of The Deer Hunter in the VCR and tried to relate it all to his years in Vietnam. That, Stu had once told Peter Callisher, would be how he finally knew he was losing it. He’d put that damned movie in the VCR and sit down in front of it and, pow, life would start to make sense.
Peter Callisher had a Jeep Wagoneer, a little too country for his image, but at least not Japanese. That was one of the things that divided the flatlanders from the natives up here, and Peter was always careful to let the town know which side he was on. So was Stu, who had been Away himself, even if it was only to get shot at. Stu would rather have defected to the Viet Cong than let himself be anything at all like one of them.
Peter pulled the Wagoneer to a stop in the middle of the chicken yard—the chickens being safely in the barn for the winter—and Stu stood up to go out to him. Normally it would have been Stu’s wife who went out, and Stu’s mother who saw to the boiling water and the jar of instant coffee, but Liza (Stu’s wife) and Dinah (Stu’s mother) were both down in town setting up a stall in the food arcade and were going to be there for all of the rest of the day. Dinah even had a small second stall in the souvenir place where she was offering quilts for sale. There were six quilts priced at nine hundred dollars apiece, each hand sewn, each showing a picture carefully calculated to appeal to a flatlander’s idea of the Real Vermont. Flatlanders had very strange ideas about the Real Vermont.
Stu went out the kitchen door, through the gun room and to the back door that led outside. He looked up and down his racks of guns automatically, making sure every one of them was in place. Why they wouldn’t be in place, he didn’t know. Nobody came out here unless they had a reason to visit. Anybody who came out to visit would know better than to touch anything he didn’t have permission to touch. Stu had 122 rifles of every conceivable make, type and era. He had almost as many marksmanship medals, awards, trophies and citations. He had enough ammunition to restart the American Revolutionary War. Except for every once in a while, when those damn fools in Montpelier pulled something he really couldn’t make himself believe, Stu never even thought of using his guns for anything but deer or target practice.
Peter got out of the Wagoneer, came stomping across the yard, and climbed the short flight of wooden steps to the gun-room door. He passed between the door and Stu’s chest and looked around at the weaponry. Then he shook his head and went on through to the kitchen. Stu shut the outside door and followed him.
“I got that Winchester I was looking for,” Stu said. “Found it night before last in an antique shop down in Burlington. Damn idiots thought it was a decoration.”
“It ought to be a decoration,” Peter said. “I’ll never understand what you’ve got against a lot of poor, defenseless deer.”
“It was Bambi that did it to me,” Stu said seriously. “All that fire. All those gunshots. Bambi’s mother felled with a single shot. It got me hooked. I’ve never been able to stop. I’m powerless over my addiction. Maybe they’ve got a twelve-step program for it.”
Peter dropped into a kitchen chair and looked around for coffee. “Maybe they’ve got a shrink who wouldn’t go crazy trying to examine your head,” he said, “but if they do, he’s no one I ever met. Aren’t you interested in what got me out here?”