Muck

When Gerald returned from the Gulf War only a part of him came back. That part that brought with him a part that had not existing before. In the war he had been a sniper. His honed skill was finding and, at a distance from in hiding, killing other men. It was a tough skill set to repurpose and his first few months were spent in bars and behind them in small towns across Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. He was tough and troubled, vulnerable and angry. Cathy, a nurse, both loved the excitement and drama of it and thought that she could save him from his demons. They married after three days and had three boys. Her father hated him.

He was best able to stay out of trouble and employed if he stayed away from people and kept his hands busy with physical labor. He poured concrete, worked in a brick factory, and loaded delivery trucks. He preferred to work alone. Having a co-worker would slow him down because no one ever worked as hard or as fast. Someone who will work to exhaustion will always be in demand somewhere and will always rise to a position of responsibility. Gerald never wanted that because it inevitably meant having to deal with people, people for whom the world was clean and simple, people who thought they understood the universe and had opinions about it that mattered. People who were nothing like him. When he was promoted to a position in which he could no longer just do his work and ignore everyone else, he’d quit within days and start again somewhere else in the lowest, hardest job he could find. Eventually he found a place as a ranch manager on a ranch in Idaho. The ranch-hand’s cabin was fourteen miles from the road, which was 25 miles from the closest town.

By this time his boys, now 12 to 9, were old enough to work and the job was completely a family affair. For Gerald it was perfect, he thought at the time. For Cathy it was hell. The open spaces were vacuous. The house was sparse and cold. She was a nurse, not a rancher. They had no cell signal and no phone. She saw neither Gerald nor the boys from before sun up until after sundown. When they were at the house, and not asleep, the talk was always of the fences to be fixed, the outbuildings to be built, taking feed to the cattle, hauling rock, cutting firewood, or one of the other hundreds of jobs that kept the boys busy all day.

After two years Cathy left. Her note said only that she was going home. He wrote her and asked her to come back, promising to change, assuring her that the boys needed their mother. And sending her money. Within a year, she was back and stuck it out for two more years and, after another absence, two more after that. The last time she left she promised it was the end. Gerald knew it to be true. He decided to give her some time and then to pursue her as hard as he had ever pursued anything. He gave the ranch owner notice, bought a new truck, loaded up the three boys, the oldest now nearly twenty, and rented dilapidated house just outside the small Kansas town where Cathy’s parents lived in their retirement. He got a job at a local slaughterhouse on the killing floor and soon persuaded the owner to hire his two younger boys, both slow and neither with social skills to speak of—one as a janitor and one to work the retail meat counter out front. The oldest boy stayed in Kansas only a few days an then, with his clothes and few possessions, disappeared.

Gerald’s plan was to prove to Cathy that he could be what she needed; that he could live in a community without his days of drunkenness and brawling returning. He aimed to prove to her that he had finally grown up and he loved her enough to give up his isolation for her. He started going to church with his boys and the community there took him in. His plan was not to contact Cathy, but to simply to live there until he got noticed; until Cathy heard in a conversation someplace about a man who had moved to town with his sons and to woo back his wife, who was stable, hardworking, and kind.

Cathy heard. She heard, but it was far too late. It had been a twenty-year mistake and she had not the littlest twinge of wanting to extend it a second longer. Her father visited Gerald to give him the message. He should leave. He should leave, make his life elsewhere, and forever leave Cathy alone. Forever.

There was a darkness in Gerald that was Cathy no doubt knew well. But there was also a rigid determination and iron will. Maybe the darkness and the iron will were the same thing, or maybe they were simply woven together. He knew that the message was genuine. He knew that Cathy had every right to take the position she did. And he knew that she meant exactly what her father had reported. So Gerald’s iron will turned to the question of what he was going to do next. Now in his early 40s he did not want to spend the rest of his life working on a slaughterhouse killing floor. He decided to do what he had dreamed of doing off and on since he went to war.

It is not easy pointing a high-powered rifle at a person you don’t know, a person who you hold no opinion about at all, and pulling the trigger. At the moment the time came he was able to focus on the mechanics of the act, the keeping camouflaged, the steadying of the barrel, the aim, the gentleness with which he needed to pull the trigger. In the moment after, his focus was on keeping perfectly still and remaining undetected. But in the hours that followed the image of the man that had been in his gun-sight revisited him as did the question of who he had been, what, if anything, he had done, whether he was married and whether his mother was still alive. He would wonder after each shot whether the soldier had voluntarily enlisted, as he had, or whether he had been conscripted and, if conscripted, at what age, and with what training. What did each bearded boy really believe? What did he believe about Gerald? What kind of person did he think this was, somewhere in the dim morning killing his friends one by one as they darted through the open spaces between buildings, walls, and bunkers.

It was easier to think of them, his targets, as bears and himself as a hunter. Here were creatures powerful, strong and smart, who, given the chance, would tear him to shreds but who, instead, he stalked. They had every natural advantage. This was their wilderness. They knew everywhere to hide. He was merely a weak human. They were mighty beasts. And yet, weak though he was, he was the one doing the stalking. And if he could take down a bear, that made him something stronger than a bear. If he could take down ten, it made him stronger than ten.

Now that Gerald faced the question of what do with the rest of his life, the answer came to his mind easily. He was going to become a true-to-life bear hunter, a professional guide in the Alaskan wild, leading men of means on treks deep into enemy territory, following the clues, and selling them the thrill of conquering monsters.

Becoming a professional bear hunting guide is not an effortless endeavor. Few licenses are awarded and the competition for them is fierce. The state of Alaska is divided into regions and you test for a license within the particular region you choose. The testing is not merely over the rules of safety, the skills of tracking, and the maze of regulations. You also must demonstrate that no matter where you are in the thousands of square miles, you are not lost. That you know where each stream can be found, where the nearest trail is and where it leads, where there are houses, lakes and settlements. For each and every hill you must know what is on the other side. The terrain needs to reside in your head. Few people will develop such a command of a landscape. Gerald was one who had the determination and drive to do so. He acquired topographical maps, trail maps, trail maps, and geological surveys and spent hours, days, weeks and months memorizing them, testing himself over them, and correcting his errors until he could draw his own maps and until he could build a miniature version of the landscape on his kitchen table, a precise recreation of a place that he had never actually visited.

He took the test three times. On the third attempt he passed it. With that he moved to Alaska and operated a guide service.

That was several years ago.

I remembered in the midst of Christmas-eve service that I had first met Gerald in just such a service and I wondered what had become of him. Through the power of the Internet I discovered that he had had a series of troubles all seemingly arising from a failure to take the hunting regulations seriously, sometimes leading to a web of deception during investigations of the incidents and eventually leading to the lifetime revocation of his master guide license. The databases that let you find someone’s history of residences gave a dozen or more addresses and a series of aliases. One provided a telephone number for a cell phone with an Alaska area code.

I sent a text: “Gerald, is this your number?”

I got this response:

OMMGGGGGG
SHUT THE FUCK UUUUP
IM NOT GERALD
TELL EVERYBODY CAUS Y’ALL MUTAFUCKSA KEEP ASKIN. HOW MANY PEOPLE GOTTA ASK FOR GERALDS NUMBER TO WHERE HE JUST SAYS FUCK IT AND STARTS GIVING PEOLE MY NUMBER
FUCK GERALD
ASSHOLE

I considered not responding. Instead, I just wrote what came to mind:

“I know that, like many of us, Gerald has left destruction and injury in his path,. Perhaps he has done that more than most, I’m sorry you are among those affected, Unfortunately I can’t pass the word that this number isn’t him. The internet lists your number with his name, But I won’t bother you again. I hope that you find joy tonight. Merry Christmas.”

A few minutes later, a ding.

“Lol okay, thanks you too”