The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

kitchen—all of which opened onto a plank deck with cedar rails. The whole affair was raised on stilts above the floor of the forest, and a steep set of stairs tumbled down the hill to the gravel beach below. There was no electricity, only propane gas for the lights, stove, and fridge, and no plumbing, just a two-seater outhouse behind the woodpile.
    My “room” was the middle cabin. A plastic-coated mattress, taken apparently from a child’s bunk bed, had been laid out in a corner, but aside from that, my father hadn’t made any effort to clean up for me. Empty beer cans lay scattered about the floor, amid water-warped issues of
Fur, Fish, and Game
. The roof, I later learned, leaked just about everywhere.
    What Pelletier had told me about my role as camp serf proved to be an understatement. When I wasn’t washing dishes, I was sweeping out cabins or splitting firewood or clearing brush. Enviously I watched the fly fishermen, affluent men and sometimes women from Massachusetts and Manhattan outfitted with the best Sage rods and Simms waders, head out in canoes in the morning. In the eve ning, I had the privilege of filleting the trout they had caught for lousy dollar tips. Groups of them came and went, but to me they were always the same insufferable rich people.
    My father didn’t seem particularly interested in spending time with me, either, as it turned out. In fact, I saw more of Russell Pelletier and even his wife, Doreen—a hard-faced, unhappy woman who was only at the camp on weekends—than I did my dad, who always seemed to be off somewhere in the woods or running errands out to Flagstaff.
    The person I spent the most time with was Truman’s daughter, B.J., who worked in the kitchen with me. She was a strange, silent girl. From Pelletier, I learned that her mom had died of alcohol poisoning some years earlier. The two of them—Truman and B.J.—had lived in the same cabin at Rum Pond ever since, spending each winter with relatives on the reservation at Indian Island in Old Town.
    The fact that Truman and B.J. were actual Penobscot Indians seemed exotic at first. After a while, though, I found myself disliking both of them, and I began to wonder whether that made me a racist. Truman was an obnoxious fool, and B.J. was just weird. But then, I also disliked Pelletier, for his chain-smoking bossiness. I probably would have disliked his wife, too, if she’d ever noticed me.
    Every day that passed at Rum Pond I felt more and more disillusioned and lonely. I don’t know what I had expected—something out of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, maybe. I thought I’d have some free time to canoe or fish or hike. And I did have time, but I was almost always too exhausted to make use of it. All I wanted to do was sleep, but even that was impossible since my father and Truman stayed up just about every night past midnight, drinking.
    After dinner, I would walk back to my father’s camp in the half-light, bone-weary and stinking of sweat from my day’s work, and I’d find them there on the porch or in front of the fire. I tried to ignore them and just go to sleep, but they wouldn’t let me. The more they drank, the more they wanted me to join them.
     
    “Do you know what I think?” said Truman one evening—it must have been three weeks or so after I arrived, sometime in early July. It was a cool night and therefore not so buggy, and we were all sitting in Adirondack chairs on the deck. I wanted to go to sleep, but I knew their laughter and loud conversation would keep me up, so I was doing my best to humor them by having a beer. I guess I also thought that this was what my father expected of me, and I hadn’t yet given up trying to please him.
    “I think Mike has a secret admirer,” said Truman.
    “And who would that be?” asked my father.
    “He knows who.”
    “No, I don’t,” I said.
    “Is it you, Truman?” asked my father. “Come on, you can con-fess your true feelings.”
    “Me!” He threw back his head and let out a laugh so loud it stirred up one of the loons out on the lake. “No. B.J.! I think she has a crush.”
    My father lighted a cigarette and shook out the match. “Hey, Mike, you know what that stands for—B.J.?”
    “She’s just a little girl!” I said.
    Even Truman made a displeased, grumbling noise. “That’s not funny.”
    “You’re a prissy one, aren’t you?” My father took a sip of his beer. “How’s your mother, anyway?”
    He had asked me this question