The Farewell Feast
Steven Bird
Decker killed the motor. I rolled the window down. The crew riding the back seats waited in dust mote silence while we coasted the van down the winding logging road, turned a bend and eased to a stop beside a grassy clearing in the firs. Across the road from the clearing is a broad view of the distant valley, the river coursing through. I shoved the barrel through the window frame and rested my elbow on the door to steady the 30-30, brought the bead in line with the rear sight notch, inhaled, squeezed the trigger –
The rifle shot concussion hammered everybody’s eardrums. They strained against the windows to see the yearling waver, drop to its knees, struggle to regain its legs, then fall again.
“Got im Willy,” Decker affirmed the kill.
I swung the door open – the boys knew the drill and went straight to work unloading the tree bags and planting hoes from the tool compartment in the back of the work crummy.
The little spike buck lay next to a cedar stump, blood seeping from a tiny hole at the base of its skull. A wild trillium bloomed by the stump, immaculate white, the perfect trinity of its flower, holy. I got down on my knees and slit the buck’s throat. Thank you for your life. Blood coursed onto the fresh spring grass and washed over the pure white flower. Forgive me.
The strange mournful feeling came to me. Get it every time I kill an animal. There is melancholy, always, entwined with jubilation for the kill. I slid the rifle under the seat.
The boys hurried the deer over to the van, stuffed it into the tool compartment and piled the tree bags and planting hoes back on top of it.
It was our last day of planting trees near Thompson Falls, Montana. Forest Service job. Big timber sale. Clear-cut. Good ground – slashed, burned, just enough slope. We attacked it like maniacs, running. Pumped in a million seedlings on an 8x8 spacing. Job looked like a giant checkerboard grid covering most of a mountain when we were done.
We’d been driving by for a week and, most days, it was there. So, somebody suggested we shoot the buck and have a party to celebrate the end of the season. Everybody else agreed it was a good idea. I said okay I’d shoot it if it showed on the last day of the job, though I wasn’t really that hot on the idea. But I was the only one who’d brought a rifle, and if I hadn’t done it, one of the other guys would have borrowed the gun and shot the deer anyway.
We always looked forward to the jobs over in Montana. We loved the wild places, the mystic spacious quality that serves to loosen inhibitions and inspire sublime adventure. We liked the old taverns with their Victorian bars. In Montana, we’d seen tavern girls fill with inspiration, become adventurous, abandon inhibitions, dance on tables. That was the kind of thing you could just about expect to happen in Montana. Kind of thing we loved. In the Big Sky State: a wolf calls from blue mountain ranges risen like the last serrate margins of real. A spotted trout slides through spotted convergences of shadow and light. A rifle shot echoes across clean desolation. And young hearts beat.
We liked the people. Self-reliant, Montanans had a distinctive way of letting problems work themselves out. Just prior to our arrival at Thompson Falls, one of the local girls did in fact suffer, and from a familiar problem: The guy was an asshole. And a vicious drunk. Used his fists on her pretty often. Kicked her. Gave her a nasty bite one particularly bad night. Everybody in the area knew the situation. They all knew what happened: He’s drinking up the grocery money. She’d come to pick him up from the tavern. They’re in the pickup out in front of the bar and they’re having a few words and, he starts wailing on her. Closed-fisted punches. She felt herself going under. He’s going to kill her. So she’s desperate and able to grab his deer rifle off the rear window gun rack – she knew he kept it loaded –
The first shot blew him out of the truck. The second one blasted him across Route 200, where he collapsed in the weeds, dead, by the Northern Pacific railroad tracks.
She never spent a minute in jail.
The local cops knew her situation and were glad the problem had taken care of itself. They wrote it up as self-defense. Called one of her friends to come drive her home. No more black eyes, fat lips or bites. One less drunk driver on the road.
The Webfoot Reforestation crew filled all the cabins at the Rainbow Motel on the east end of Thompson Falls. Across the road, beyond the rail tracks, an expanse of the Clark’s Fork River winks, inviting through the cottonwoods. Some big trout in that section of river. Browns and bull trout. And a good stonefly hatch – big, orange salmonflies... In those days I was never without a flyrod while away on the jobs. The rod got a lot more use than the rifle. And, actually, I’d secretly hoped that the buck wouldn’t show, so I could just slip across the road after work, and fish by myself. But the boys were bent on celebration. And they had me fully engaged in preparation for it, at the motel.
The Rainbow was a relic from the earliest days of motels. Six separate clapboard cabins arranged in a row; the place was pleasantly run-down, offered dirt-cheap rates and deep, old-fashion clawfoot bathtubs with wrap-around shower curtains. The larger cabin at one end was the housekeeping unit with stove and refrigerator that I shared with Jerry and Burrito.
Jerry and I were old friends and neighbors from northeastern Washington and we always roomed together when we worked away from home. Webfoot operated out of Oregon. Ernie Britto, our roommate, like most of the Webfoot crew, was from Eugene. Everybody called him Burrito.
Burrito was possessed of a quiet, esoteric nature. A spiritual guy. When not working he was often seen carrying or reading a book titled: Serving Humanity. It had to do with ascending levels of Attainment and devoting oneself to Service. I tried reading it, but the author’s sentence constructs were so long-winded and convoluted I couldn’t get through it.
We were all seekers then, of sorts, though most of the planters were blatant and committed Hedonists, adventurers of the tactile, existential world, raging, passionate, burning their youth with about as much concern as they had using up a butane lighter. I was slightly less of a partier than most of them, and somewhat of a philosopher when the company was right, so Burrito and I got along pretty good. He usually stayed with me and Jerry if it was three to a room.
Sometimes we’d lay on our beds in the dark, bodies ringing with the perfect exhaustion that comes after running across mountains all day with a sixty-pound bag of trees strapped to your body, running to get them planted, straining with all your might to get lighter, bending, running and bending every eight feet, swinging that hodag, working that hoe a thousand plunges a day or more; the full blade breaking open a yellow smile of mineral earth to receive the dripping root, then the blade again, then the boot, and you would be one tree lighter. We’d lay there not able to sleep yet, coming down from the adrenaline, talking about divinity, expressing with the fervent surety of young men our ideas about how and why things are, until it is was very late, suspended in the lucid alpha, between the world and dreams.
This world was created from dreams.
Burrito had recently become a macrobiotic vegetarian. He did all of his own cooking in a set of cast-iron pots and pans he carried in a war-surplus G.I. pack. The pans had never known meat, not even the innocuous just-this-once hamburger patty or slice of ham. The pans were sanctified and free of any death karma and, Burrito said, they’d have to be thrown away if they ever had any meat, or meat-product, cooked in them.
Webfoot owner Gus Shartz once said to Decker, his crew boss – “You see a guy eating carrots for lunch: I want you to fire him, Decker. Fire his fuckin ass an make him walk home.”
But, Burrito was a good planter, a “stepper”. One of the hammerheads capable of heeling in a thousand trees a day on slopes so steep an average person would need climbing equipment to traverse them. He’d been with Shartz for many seasons and had earned a solid position on the Webfoot crews. Shartz, in spite of his own culinary prejudices, tried to accommodate Burrito with housekeeping quarters when we were on the road so he could prepare the special diet.
So there we were headed toward Thompson Falls with a poached deer stashed under the tree bags, everybody in a fine mood. Finishing the unit on a Saturday was an option, we had enough crew to cover it, so Burrito took the day off to go for a hike up the Thompson River. We made a stop at the store in town where we loaded several cases of beer on top of the buck. We hadn’t really thought the plan past the procurement stage. Hadn’t precisely clarified in our own minds, or to each other, where we’d have the barbeque once we shot the deer. Of course, it was well known that Jerry and I were staying at the housekeeping unit with Burrito. It had a stove. And if not ample, there was at least enough room to squeeze in fifteen or so crewmembers. So it was tacitly decided to take the deer over to our cabin at the Rainbow.
We backed close to the door, and when we thought no one is watching we snuck the body inside and flopped it into the bathtub. It had to be the tub. There wasn’t any other good place.
Everybody had a beer open, crowding in and out of the bathroom, checking out the kill reclining lasciviously in the bathtub with its legs spread, tongue out, eyes glazed. The little hole in its head. A good thing, we all agreed.
Baggs was stationed at the table wearing the blue ballcap bearing his statement on the class struggle: PO FOKE, the embroidered inscription announced. He had his bhong-pipe and stayed busy filling the bowl and passing it around.
Didn’t have to look for a knife. We all had them. The favorite was the Buck Folding Hunter. It had a good all-purpose blade that folded into a flat-sided wooden handle with brass bolsters, and fit snug in a discreet leather holster worn on the belt. The Buck knife was hard to put an edge on, but held one pretty good once you did.
“Let’s cut that liver out an get it fryin,” Polock urged from the doorway, tilting his beer toward the carcass while Jerry and I gathered the ticks trying to clamber out of the slippery tub fleeing the cold host, abandoning ship. We pinched the ticks and threw them in the toilet. Didn’t want them getting into the room, the beds. Ticks in that area carry the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever bacillus. Makes you violently sick and can even kill you.
“We need some onions a fry with that liver,” somebody said.
I stuck the knifepoint into the soft skin at the back of a hind leg, cut around the asshole and pecker, zipped open the cavity, reached in and cut the liver free. Nice. Nice looking liver. I put it in the sink.
“Hey ! One of you guys have a frying pan?...”
Ten or twelve guys looked at each other, shuffled, examined the floor, looked at each other again... . Can’t buy one in little Thompson Falls. You’d have to drive all the way to Missoula for a goddam pan... .
“Fuck. Me. Runnin.” Decker invited, throwing himself in front of the stampeding dilemma. “Doesn’t Burrito have a set of pans for cooking his sprouts and seaweeds?”
Jerry gave me a look. I could read his eyes, he’s wanting to know if we’re going to fall off the horns...
The motel had no barbeque facility. We had to cook all the meat. No way to keep it. Couldn’t waste it. No. Occasional poaching aside, we held to a certain standard of ethics, and none of us would consider wasting any meat. It was generally understood that you had to eat what you killed.
“Burrito would be upset if we use his stuff...” I said, peeling back the hide.
Pollock offered a pretty good, but not bulletproof plan: “Let’s just cook all the meat, real quick, scrub the pans, an put them away like we never used em. He won’t know.”
The only flaw we could see in the plan was: that Burrito might walk in at any time and catch us in the act. Nobody knew when he’d be back...
Lee Baggs, a pragmatist and natural-born arbitrator, came forward with what seemed like a reasonable theory and a way toward a solution to the frying pan problem: “Burrito would want us to use those pans,” Baggs maintained, “Burrito is our brother. He’d help us out – you know it. He won’t care. Really. He’d do it for us. Besides, we can ante up enough to buy him a new set. He’d be happy with a new set.” Baggs made a convincing argument.
Burrito would want us to use his stuff. The whole crew thought so.
Jerry was no help, ambiguous, as usual, staying out of the decision-making, silently working on the butchering.
They all looked toward me. It was generally felt that I had the tightest relationship with Burrito, hence, in his absence, I should have the final word on the matter.
“...well...” It just came out and was immediately interpreted to be a “yes”.
Before I could stop them the boys had everything out of Burrito’s pack, all four burners on the stove lit and covered with the requisite cast-iron vessels. Pollock took charge of the liver. Somebody found a couple of onions among Burrito’s stash of veggies in the refrigerator. “Burrito would want us to use these onions.” (The rest of the vegetables remained unmolested.)
We had the venison rendered off the bones and cut into frying-sized pieces stacked in a pyramid rising above the bathroom sink. Polock kept it moving from the pile to the stove and the place filled with the savory bouquet of frying venison, and onions.
So. The bathroom was a blood-splattered nightmare, the Bates Motel bathroom in the movie Psycho – after the murder. In addition to the copious blood, the tub contained the head, hide, bones and guts. A considerable amount of guts. Jerry, always resourceful, solved the solid-waste problem by peeling the cases off the motel pillows and stuffing them with the leftover parts. He slipped out to the dumpster with them, obscene bleeding bags, hair sticking out of the tops. We used the bathroom towels on the blood. Little extra something for the maids.
Webfoot had two eight-man crews staying at the Rainbow and most of them were crowded into our cabin – the cabin of the poached deer lying in the bathtub – slouched on the beds and furniture in their muddy logger clothes; dirt clods loosened from lug-soled boots crunching on the worn linoleum. The beer flowed like a babbling brook. A lot of beer. Everybody enjoyed the fresh venison. Self-serve. You stick a piece out of the pan and eat it off your knife. No messy plates. Basic. What could be better?
We had the door closed and there was a good accumulation of smoke: venison, tobacco, dope. Darrell Crow and Joe Jumpoff from Cooper’s crew came in with two local girls in tow. Both girls were a little on the plump side, but pretty, both sporting Farrah Fawcett hair. They were quiet, and conferred in whispers only to each other. They looked like they were scared shitless, and I doubted they were legal. “Smelt the venison clear down at the tavern,” Darrell Crow said. Everybody called him Crow. He wore a long ponytail with a raven feather plaited into it, and the Oregon tree-planter uniform of hickory shirt, suspenders, 88 jeans frayed to the boottops by slash and brush. “Heard we’re havin a party. Heard Willy jacked that little buck.”
Who knows how these things get around?
Bagg’s boom-box blasted Howlin Wolf – we be down by da fiiiyahouse shakin dat wang dang doodle... All-you-can-eat venison. Feelings of comradery filled the gathering. Everybody talked at once, wall-of-sound talking, excited, buzzed. They’d be going home on Monday. Shartz would have the pay envelopes ready tomorrow, and we’d be done with another planting season.
We broke the legs off the wooden table. Arm wrestling. We propped it up and it still held beers okay, just couldn’t arm wrestle on it anymore.
Decker, his belly full, heart warming with the fourth beer, expressed his love and concern for Burrito: “I don’t know how Burrito can live on that shit. You can only live on moss an grass for so long. I wish he was here right now – I know he’d eat some of this good venison with us. I know he would. Damn straight he would. Hey? Don’t you think Burrito would eat with us, Willy?”
“I guess he would. Maybe. I don’t know.” I said.
As was the way, our voices rose to outdo each other recounting the tales of our own renown. Legendary stories of glorious deeds and debauchery. Stories about Gus Shartz were always popular, everybody knew them, yet they were retold and listened to with relish. Jerry told a favorite about the planter Shartz hired in Coos Bay: “...After working only two days, the kid hits Shartz for a draw. Shartz gives it to him. Couple hundred bucks. It’s a work night. The kid goes out, gets hammered, then doesn’t show at the rendezvous in the morning. Shartz is pissed. The guy has a motel room, so we drive over to the room. When we get there Shartz jumps out of the van an walks right through the guy’s door. One of those hollow doors... but still...he didn’t open it first. Didn’t get a run at it an bust the door down. Nope. Just fuckin walked through it. Walked through... Next thing you know Shartz comes back out through the splintered hole carrying the guy under his arm – he’s actually bigger than Shartz – it doesn’t matter. The dude is naked except for the purple bikini briefs...strap up the ass...oh baby – an Shartz throws him in the van. Shartz turns around walks back through the hole, then comes back out with Bikini Boy’s boots an clothes, throws them in on top of his ass, an jumps back in the van. Never said a word.”
( Bikini Boy from Coos Bay worked his draw and motel bill off that day and we never saw him again after that.)
The story produced a giggle from the Thompson Falls girls.
Crow took a long pull from his beer. “Man that was a nasty motel in Coos Bay. I stayed there that trip – and I’m laying there on the bed staring at the wall...and I notice something... its tiny...so I look real close...and there on the wall in the smallest letters you could possibly draw with a sharp pencil...so small you could barely see it, a line of writing... and it reads: Pink Stinky the Two Hoofed Dirty Pig.”
The girls glanced at each other, suddenly worried again.
The bhong got knocked off the couch arm. Bummer. No problem though, the upholstery soaked up the mess. Things couldn’t have been better, the party rolling along nicely, when – Knock. Knock. Knock. There came three equally spaced loud knocks on the door –
I opened the door to find myself staring into the lawful blue eyes of a jar-headed Montana State trooper. A cloud of illegal smoke rushed from the room and knocked the trooper back a step. I saw the Smokey Bear hat actually slide back on his head.
Silence crashed the party. The conversation ducked for cover.
“Aw shit.” A lone voice groaned behind me.
“Okay,” the trooper starts, “I know that you are smoking weed in there. You guys are leaving Monday – right ? Here’s the deal: Do not shoot any more deer. If I come back here I’d better not smell any more dope or poached venison frying in there. And I don’t want to see you guys around any women. Connie, Trixie, you two get on home.” That said, he turned, got into his cruiser, scrubbed out of the driveway and never came back.
We were the Kings of the Woods. Right? Damn straight. We were invincible. Even the cops left us alone.
“Shoulda offered him a beer an a piece a meat, Willy.”
“Willy has no manners.”
“Willy needs to develop his social skills.”
“Can you believe that shit?...”
The stories of our deeds, in a very short span of time, would grow to mythic proportions.
But the visit from the law did sort of throw a wet horse blanket on the party, and things were winding down when Burrito showed. I heard him exchange greetings with a couple of the boys outside. He walked in smiling – then noticed his pots and pans in greasy assemblage on the stovetop, with meat still in them. The smile dissipated. His lips moved to produce words, then tightened into a straight papercut. He had no words for us. There were no words to be wasted on the conniving, disrespectful likes of us.
Everyone rushed to the cause, plying Burrito with beers, weed – an offering of meat from Decker made things even worse – I tried to give him the hundred bucks we’d collected to cover ruining the pans – but he wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t even look at me when I lamely offered it. He wouldn’t look at any of us. We couldn’t get near him, the vibe was so repellent, a crackling force against us.
I could tell he was on the verge of tears and, I knew, probably better than anybody, it wasn’t about the pans. He’d walked in on naked betrayal, pure and simple.
Burrito packed his duffle and split. Left the cookware. Took off hitch-hiking toward Oregon that afternoon.
Most of the crew woke with hangovers on Sunday. We trickled in for coffee and by mid-morning the local café was filled with freshly showered tree-planters. Shartz held accounts at one of the tables. He’d been staying over in Plains, and if he knew anything about the party and Burrito, he kept it to himself.
Me and Jerry came over to the job in my pickup and were going to leave for Washington as soon as we got paid. We shook hands all around and said our good-bys to the boys. Decker wanted to know if we’d be back next year. I told him, “Sure. I’ll call you, man.”
The rest of the guys would ride back to Oregon in Webfoot’s three crew-vans. Burrito would have been riding with Decker if he hadn’t got pissed-off and hitchhiked.
I knew that stretch of road very well. We all knew it. The road is narrow, bending, between Thompson Falls and Sandpoint – Jerry and I passed through on our way home – the tight curves as you drive through the gap in the Cabinet Mountains, with the Shed Roof Range a white-capped tidal wave to the north. I’ve driven it many times, to and from planting jobs, sometimes on fishing excursions into Montana. The country is steep and heavily timbered. A traveler might see an eagle circling above the Pack River valley.
Passing through, there is the chance you will startle a bear or even a moose attempting to cross the road and send it hustling back up the embankment. A group of elk grazing on the bottomland pasture may stop their feeding to watch you pass. And if your eyes are sharp, you might catch a glimpse of the pale trickster coyote slipping like a gray spirit toward the forest shadows beside a certain bend in the highway.
The crew got an early start, eager to be on the road, happy to be going home. Baggs sat in the seat Burrito usually rode in. The Oregon boys are used to hauling ass on country roads, and they were jamming through those curves near the Pack River when the deer jumped out. They should have hit it. It would have been better if they’d just slammed into it and destroyed the front end of Shartz’s van. I wish they’d hit that deer, but they swerved to avoid it, traveling too fast, and the god of inertia seized hold of them, weighed them on the balance, this way, that way, then hurled them away – they flipped, rolled over twice then plowed into a stand of tamarack on the edge of a meadow.
All eight of the friends riding in the van were injured. Decker and Baggs, not wearing seatbelts, were thrown out when it rolled and died in that place, crushed under the tumbling van.
My friends, the world knew you before you knew the world. The gods in their boyish, brutal games bore you like a torch, recklessly over the heavens, to the glance of the one God. I gazed through the window to the vacant sky, fierce, while Shartz gave me the news about the boys over the phone.
That’s how I found out that Burrito had good luck hitch-hiking. He’d been almost instantly picked up by Miriam, a nice hippie girl from Eugene who’d been visiting her sister attending the university in Missoula, and was on her way home to Oregon. She gave Burrito a ride to his door. Then spent that night with him. A year later they were married, and last I heard they were still happy. I never worked in Montana again. Never planted trees again. It was a long time ago. And that was the last deer I ever jacked.