Born to Fish Page 12

  But he was determined to keep climbing, even as the deer’s antlers poked him in the face, drawing more blood as he held the buck tightly in a headlock. The effort was excruciating. When he had the buck seven feet above the ground, he stopped. At least it’s out of the reach of coyotes, he thought. After weaving some branches between the deer’s legs to keep it from falling, he jumped back down to the ground and tried to catch his breath.

  What was he to do now? The snow lay knee-deep in places, and the day had turned bitterly cold as soon as the sun went down. He had sweated profusely as he hauled the deer into the tree, and now he felt chilled. And he hadn’t brought anything to eat. Where the hell am I? he thought. How the fuck am I going to get out of here? Moonlight reflecting off the snow provided some illumination, but there was nothing to follow. Just head downhill, I guess, and hope I run into a trail, he thought.

  When he finally stumbled upon an old logging trail, he followed it downward, hoping to find a way off the mountain. By this time, he was shivering uncontrollably. His clothing wasn’t warm enough to spend the night hunkered in the bushes, waiting for morning. He had to keep moving. But was he just going deeper and deeper into the mountains? The snowfall had covered his tracks so he had no way of knowing. He’d just have to stay on the trail and hope it led somewhere. No one would be out searching for him here—no one knew where he was. He hadn’t even told his friends which direction he was heading when he left the cabin, because he didn’t want them to know about the big buck.

  Greg sighed deeply as he looked up at the snow falling heavily down on him. He couldn’t quit now; he had to keep going, all night long if necessary, if he was to have any chance of surviving until morning. Slinging the rifle over his shoulder, he made his way along the logging road, which first took him uphill again. When he finally crested the ridge, he thought he saw a tiny glimmer of light far below, but after taking a few steps, he couldn’t make it out anymore. He began scrambling desperately in the direction he thought he had seen it, following the trail downward as it wound through the forest. And suddenly, there it was, emerging in a clearing up ahead—a tiny shack, perhaps only twelve by fifteen feet, with a camp lantern glowing inside. Greg pounded on the door.

  “Who the hell is it?” came a gruff voice from inside, and Greg heard the click of a pistol being cocked. Then the door opened.

  With his broken nose and the blood covering him nearly from head to foot, Greg must have looked like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from The Revenant after being mauled by the bear. The man instantly uncocked his gun and put it down.

  “Jesus! What the hell happened to you?” he said. “Come on inside and get warmed up.” Although he had a small camp heater blazing in the corner, it was barely any warmer inside than out, but at least it was out of the wind and snow. The man was older—in his early sixties and grizzled. He smiled at Greg and shook his head. “It’s damn lucky you found this place,” he said. “I built it four or five years ago and use it for deer hunting.”

  Greg began shivering uncontrollably as he sat down inside. “Let me get you some coffee,” the man said. He reached behind him, struck a match, and lit the burner on a battered Coleman stove perched on a shelf beside him. He had a percolator half full of old coffee, and he set it on the burner to reheat.

  “Thanks,” said Greg as the man handed him a cup of the bitter black brew. “I was up here hunting deer, and I had a little accident.”

  “It sure looks like it,” the man said, laughing. Greg told him about getting slammed in the face by the scope when he fired a shot. “You know, I never shot that rifle before. I bought it at a tag sale a couple weeks ago. The scope got all fogged up from the snow, so I had to hold it too close to my eye.” Greg didn’t tell him about killing the big buck and hanging it up in a tree. He didn’t know this guy and was worried he might go back and take his deer. But it must have been obvious Greg was covered with more than just his own blood.

  “Where you from, anyway?” the man asked, and Greg described the location of his cabin. “Holy shit! We’re ten miles from there! You walked all that way in the snow?”

  Greg nodded. He was so cramped and dehydrated, he could barely walk another step. The man offered to drive him home, and they trudged outside to his pickup truck. After quickly cleaning the snow off the windshield, he fired up the truck and drove down the mountain.

  Greg’s friends were shocked when he walked in the door. Of course, they hadn’t called anyone to go searching for him. They’d all given up on deer hunting early in the day and come back to the cabin to start the drinking and partying they had really come there for. Greg told them he’d killed the biggest deer he’d ever seen after chasing it ten miles into the mountains. Their attitude was, “Yeah, right. Sure!”

  “Whatever,” he said. He walked back to his room and fell down across his bed, dropping into a deep slumber without even changing his clothes or washing the blood from his face. He slept for fourteen hours.

  The next day, Greg went back to get the deer, but he couldn’t find the place. All of his tracks had been covered by fresh snowfall and blowing drifts during the night. He spent all day hiking, searching for the buck, determined to find it. The weather was cold so the meat should be in good shape for days, he reasoned. It became an overpowering obsession.

  “I looked for that buck for months,” Greg told me. “But it wasn’t until the next spring that I finally found it. The only thing left was the spinal cord and head, with a massive rack on it. Something had pulled it down, and it was picked clean. It was just like in The Old Man and the Sea, when the man finally caught the big fish, and the sharks ate it. It was all my fault. I just went too far.”

  * * *

  After the Storm

  After graduating from Yale, Dave Myerson enlisted as an officer in the Marine Corps and was in the vanguard of Operation Desert Storm in 1990, America’s first Gulf War. Although Greg never let on to his friends and family, this was an incredibly stressful time for him. He was so worried that Dave might get seriously injured or killed that he thought about it all the time, whether he was working, fishing, or lying in bed, struggling to get to sleep. And then, six months after the war began, it was over, and the troops started coming home.

  Greg finally saw his brother on the day before Easter 1991, and went out to celebrate his return with several of Dave’s Yale friends. All of them knew Greg well. When he was still in high school, he had come to visit Dave and his friends often, and they had taken him under their wing. He would stay with them in their huge penthouse apartment on Chapel Street in New Haven whenever he was at odds with his mother about his wild behavior. They used to call him “the Townie” and let him help them with the pranks and mischief they pulled against other frat houses and colleges. They even helped him establish a fake identity as a Yale student so he could meet coeds.

  “They told me what to tell the freshman girls and gave me a whole Yale résumé to memorize, with classes I was supposedly taking and the professors’ names,” said Greg. “I had many Yale girlfriends thanks to them.”

  Greg had also helped them out on their graduation day. He had gotten dressed up and gone to Yale with his family. Everyone was there—his parents, aunts and uncles, and friends—all waiting to see Dave receive his diploma. But Dave didn’t show up. Herb finally pulled Greg aside and said, “Go find your brother.” So he ran down Chapel Street to their apartment and, since he had his own key, went right inside. The graduation was already in progress.

  “So I had to lead these six Yale students down the street, all disheveled and fucked up, to their graduation,” said Greg. “And they were drinking a bottle of gin as they were walking there. I was laughing and loving it, because I wanted to see the reaction of their families when they showed up. These guys were crazy.”

  Dave’s fraternity friends were a lot different now, all married and well-off looking—not the same wild bunch they had been just a couple of years earlier. But they decided to go out on the town and ge
t smashed for old times’ sake, and they took Greg with them.

  They all got staggering drunk, especially Greg, who felt such an intense sense of relief that his brother had returned unharmed from the war, he kept breaking down and crying most of the night. But on the way home he turned violent. Three people rode in the front seat of the car, so Greg and Dave had the back seat to themselves. Suddenly, without warning, they were brawling with each other, just as they’d done so many times as kids and later in high school, shouting and throwing punches. When they got to the place where Greg was living, he and Dave spilled out of the car together. Greg landed a final crushing blow, hitting Dave in the eye, almost knocking him unconscious. His friends got Dave back in the car and quickly drove him to his parents’ condominium.

  To Greg—and perhaps Dave as well—this was no big deal. Greg had obviously been dealing with a lot of stress worrying about his brother, and ironically, he ended up relieving the stress by pummeling him. (Perhaps only Dave was capable of understanding that.) The next morning when he arrived for Easter dinner at his parents’ condo, he didn’t even suspect anything might be wrong.

  “Hey, Mom, happy Easter!” he said. His mother glared at him and turned away, furious, and his aunts wouldn’t even look at him.

  “So what’s up?” he asked.

  Diane turned and shouted in his face: “Your brother fights in a war for six months and comes out without a scratch. And then you almost beat him to death? What kind of animal are you?”

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “You make me sick!” She turned away in disgust and left the room.

  Greg walked downstairs to his father’s living quarters. Herb, no longer able to get up by himself, was sitting in the special chair that could lift him to standing position. Dave lay passed out on the downstairs couch, his black eye showing. Herb stared up at Greg as he walked past but didn’t say anything. Greg went to the couch and stood over Dave, looking down at his bruised face. He started poking him in the ribs to wake him up. As Dave opened his eyes, Greg loomed above him, his fist cocked, ready to punch him in the face. Dave just smiled, closed his eyes, and rolled over.

  “He knew I was just fucking around, you know,” said Greg. “That’s the way we were; we were brutal. We were both linebackers, for Christ’s sake. My brother used to say these wrestling terms or names of famous wrestlers, and that would set us off. We’d be in the middle of a family function or something, and all of a sudden he’d say something like, ‘The Anvil of Death will get you.’ And he’d jump on me or pile-drive me into the ground, or break the table or something, sending food flying everywhere. My mother would be screaming,” he said, laughing. “It was really fucked up.”

  * * *

  Wounded Tiger

  Maybe it was inevitable that Brian Jackson and Greg would tangle someday. Their history just went back too far—back to the days in grade school when Brian would torment and torture his younger brother Scott and Greg, often slapping them around and taking their money. Tall and powerfully built, he had been a bully his entire life, and he was fearless, instantly ready to fight with anyone, no matter how the odds might be stacked against him. As bad as he was to Scott and Greg, Brian was ten times worse to other people. His ferocity was legendary around town. One night when Greg was sixteen, he and some friends went to East Rock Park—a popular hangout overlooking Yale and all of New Haven, where people went to drink and party—when he saw Brian get in a fight with another man even larger than him. The guy pulled a knife and slashed Brian’s abdomen wide open, but it only made Brian more dangerous, like a wounded tiger, enraged and terrifying in the intensity of his attack. With blood streaming from his wound, he pummeled the man with his fist again and again and again, turning his face to pulp, while holding his guts in with his other hand. Later, it took more than 175 stitches in the emergency room to close the knife cut in his abdomen.

  Brian spent a good part of his life behind bars. It didn’t have to be that way—he was a truly talented athlete, the best baseball player Greg had ever known. He played in the Babe Ruth League with Dave when they were growing up and was a fabulous hitter. Everyone said he could easily have played in the major leagues. And he was handsome. Standing six foot four and weighing 250 pounds, he bore a striking resemblance to the actor Matt Dillon. Diane Myerson had always taken an interest in Brian and encouraged him to strive to be something better, just as she had pushed Dave and Greg. But it was no good. Brian seemed to have a chip on his shoulder against the whole world. He went through life perpetually in trouble, and brought trouble to everyone around him. As a teen, he was always getting arrested and sent to juvenile detention, and when he reached adulthood, he was in and out of prison. He would get busted for burglary, drugs, fighting, robbery, muggings—whatever. There was nothing he wouldn’t do.

  Growing up, Greg had tried to avoid crossing Brian, but by his early twenties something had changed. He’d become tougher and harder. Maybe it was the frustrations in his life: watching his father slowly waste away; being nagged by his mother; losing his scholarship at the University of Rhode Island; or the effects from years of playing football in high school and college. And he’d been in several particularly brutal fights, like the brawl at the frat house in college. He felt immune to pain and was absolutely convinced he was much tougher and more dangerous than anyone else.

  But still—Brian Jackson. You fight him, you fight to the death—his or yours. Everyone knew that. There was no halfway in dealing with him.

  It all came to a head one night when Greg’s brother was on leave from the Marines and the two went out together. They had gone fishing earlier in the day and were sitting at a local bar when Brian walked in. They were surprised to see him—he’d been in prison for the past couple of years. He spotted Greg and Dave right away and walked up to them.

  “Hey, Greg, where the fuck’s that money you owe me?” he asked.

  Greg and Dave ignored him. Brian ordered a double Scotch and flirted briefly with the barmaid.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Dave, and laid some money on the bar to pay for their drinks. They walked out to the parking lot, but Brian followed them outside.

  “Don’t be fucking with me, man. I want my money,” said Brian.

  Greg wasn’t having any part of it. Brian was always hitting Greg and other people up for money like that, claiming they owed him. It had been that way as long as Greg could remember, and he’d had it.

  “Fuck you!” said Greg. “I don’t owe you shit.”

  Greg and Dave had driven separate vehicles to the bar, so Dave got in his car as Greg opened the door of his pickup truck and stepped inside. It was only a two-minute drive to Greg’s apartment, just down the road in Morris Cove. But Brian opened the passenger door and climbed in beside Greg.

  “Look, fucker, I want my money,” he said.

  A feeling of scary calm descended over Greg. He glared at Brian. “I tell you what,” said Greg. “We’ll straighten this out in a minute when I get to my place.”

  By the time Greg pulled into the parking lot at his apartment, Dave was there, as well as several other people from the bar. It was just after 2:00 a.m., and the bar had just closed. Greg got out and walked around to the other side of the truck where Brian stood waiting. Without warning, he slammed his fist into Brian’s face with all his might, knocking out several teeth and sending him reeling backward ten feet, then crashing flat on the ground. Despite the crushing blow, Brian burst up instantly, lunging at Greg, who punched him again and threw him hard against the side of the truck. Brian spotted the bag of golf clubs in the bed of the pickup, grabbed one, and swung it hard at Greg’s head, missing by a quarter of an inch with a great whoosh as Greg dodged. Brian swung the club wildly again and again, with all the speed and power of a major league batter, as Greg backed up, frantically trying to avoid being hit, which would probably have killed him.

  Then Greg spun around with a roundhouse kick, his foot connect­ing hard with
Brian’s face, sending him sprawling to the ground again. Before he could get up, Greg grabbed him by the hair and lifted his head up, then punched him repeatedly in the face—wham, wham, wham! By this time the other people in the parking lot were trying to break up the fight.

  “Look, Greg, someone’s going to get killed here,” Dave yelled. “It’s not worth it.”

  “Get the fuck away from me!” shouted Greg as he punched his brother in the face. Then he took a couple of swings at other people. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Dave was furious. “Shit, I’m out of here,” he said. “I don’t want to be here when this ends, Greg. I don’t want any part of it.” Dave and the others went back to their cars and drove away. Greg looked back at Brian, lying in a pool of blood on the asphalt, and figured the fight was all over. He left him and walked into his apartment. Greg’s friend Verne was asleep on the couch in his living room and woke up as he walked inside. He saw the blood all over Greg.

  “What the hell happened?” asked Verne.

  “I just beat the living shit out of Brian Jackson,” he said.

  Bang! A loud smash echoed through the apartment as something slammed against the front door. Then Bang!—a few seconds later another. Greg peeked out the window and saw Brian throwing a huge cinder block at the door, trying to break it down. Greg walked to the back of his apartment, slipped quietly out the sliding glass door onto the deck, and then snuck around to the front. He watched as Brian picked up the cinder block again and hurled it against the door. Then Greg leapt out at him, striking him with a devastating blow against the side of his head. This time when Brian went down, Greg was on him, pounding him again and again and again until blood was splashing up all over Greg, and still he hit him until he was too exhausted to lift his arms.