The Hunter and the Stag

The Hunter and the Stag
by Astrid Julian

The jeep led the little press convoy across the bridge and into the town. Papa sat alone with his M-1 in the back, barrel chest and thick legs and arms filling the entire seat. His khaki shirt was soiled and the sleeves were too short, but he hid this by wearing a fleece-lined flight jacket taken from a captured Nazi.

The jeep's driver, a small, redheaded private, drove past the stopped column of military vehicles and personnel. He found the head of the column in the market square of St. Hubert, and pulled the jeep over.

The driver lit a cigarette while the passenger, a middle-aged war correspondent, stretched and yawned. "So where the hell are we, Archie?"

"We crossed the border into Belgium a few hours ago, Papa."

"Any more of that schnapps?"

The driver passed a half-empty bottle into the backseat. The correspondent poured schnapps into his mouth, swished it around, and spat it out into the street. "Back to work," he said, and climbed out of the jeep.

The morning sun fell into the alleyways between the ruined buildings and lit the fountain in the center of the market square with frosty pink light. Three officers in disheveled uniforms stood there smoking cigarettes. Papa introduced himself as the correspondent from Collier's magazine and unfolded a military map.

The men were with the 4th Division. American forces in the area were converging on Aachen to cut off the fleeing Germans. The men told Papa that his friend, Colonel Buck Lanham, and the 22d Infantry Regiment were camped close by, in the forest near Bastogne. Papa was surprised, but pleased to hear this and decided to travel on and join Lanham. He folded up the map and slipped it into the inside pocket of the flight jacket. Clouds hid the sun as he walked back to his jeep.

He waved to the other men in his party. The Brazilian and the reporter for the London Daily Mail got back into the Mercedes Benz Papa had captured from the enemy. No doubt they were writing reports to the Inspector General of the Army. Fucking snitches. So what if he'd decided to remove his correspondent's insignia? His shirt needed to be washed, God damn it. And so what if a bunch of irregulars called him Colonel? Aren't all Kentuckians called Colonel? As for interrogating prisoners, no one else in Papa's party knew enough German to get the job done.

Jean Décan, Papa's bodyguard, started the BMW motorcycle at the rear of the little press convoy. About five miles on the other side of St. Hubert, Papa's group joined a group of French irregulars in setting an ambush for the retreating Germans. Papa was hoping to capture a motorcycle sidecar so he could ride with Jean Décan. He also collected guns for his personal collection, and German potato-masher hand grenades which he passed on to the French irregulars. They could be thrown more accurately and had more explosive power than American-style pineapples.

They set the trap at a fork in the road. Papa pushed his helmet up at an angle. The gray stubble on his cheeks made him look untamed. His round brow creased with apprehension and his eyes became sharp, like an eagle's. Killing was a serious business to him. It made him feel alive. He ordered the men to back their vehicles into a stand of large oaks about sixty yards from the road. Then the men, together with their small arms and fifty-caliber machine guns, hid in the hazelnut bushes to the west of the fork.

Papa loved killing. He had watched 1500 bulls die before he wrote Death in the Afternoon. But the joy of watching a bullfight was nothing compared to the joy of doing the killing himself. And killing man was more exciting than killing stag or lion, because man could kill him back. Killing Germans, he would tell a friend many years after the war, provided the greatest thrill of all. He felt no guilt about the 122 Germans he had killed personally, nor about those killed by his comrades. The way he saw it, every German killed helped save the lives of American and French soldiers.

A few wan, dry snowflakes brightened the gray day. Papa heard the farm dog down the road barking. Someone was coming. The men stopped their whispering and joking and waited.

A soldier in a German uniform and helmet was riding a bicycle along the road. The weight of the radio strapped to his back made him wobble from side to side. He stopped at the fork to check his map.

One of the machine-gun operators jammed in a fresh belt and took a bearing on the messenger.

Papa signaled him not to shoot. "There might be others with vehicles behind him," he said. "Don't want to spook them by firing a fifty." Papa patted the M-1 slung over his shoulder and grinned at Jean Décan. "Thirty francs says I drop him with the first shot."

Whispered wagers rustled through the trees like dry leaves.

Papa walked out into the street. Just then the German turned around and saw him. He jumped onto the bicycle and pedaled like mad, but it was all in vain.

Ernest Hemingway was a crack shot.

On October 23, 1995, Béla Rósza took a last walk through his west-side Cleveland home. Starter home, the real estate lady had called the house, but for him it had also been a completer home. At eighty-seven he hadn't thought he'd ever be selling it, but now his wife, Martika, had found peace and forgiveness at last with her beloved Lord Jesus. And once Béla heard about the shepherd and his magic tilinkó flute back in Hungary, he suddenly had places to see and things to do.

Béla's two-bedroom house was on West 143rd, just south of Puritas. He liked to think it was the prettiest house on the street. The front yard was fenced in by chain-link that Béla had erected in 1963, three weeks after he'd brought home the German shepherd puppy, Gladys.

Blossoms still dotted the hedge of tea roses growing inside the chain-link. The tips of their red petals had been burnt brown by chafing October winds. On either side of the front gate, white clematis grew up into an arch that had welcomed both the mailman who brought Martha her seed and plant catalogs and the UPS man who brought Béla his books.

Uncle Béla, or Béla-bacsi, as he was known to his younger neighbors, smiled as the arch welcomed him home a final time. He could still remember filling the watering cans for Martika when she planted the vines.

The front porch had been swept for the winter, the flower boxes and furniture wrapped in plastic and stored in the garage. His arthritis would be grateful he wouldn't have to do that job again.

Inside the house, the walls had all been painted white and the wood floors scrubbed. Not as clean as Martika would have liked, but good enough.

The new owner loved the wood floors. Béla wondered what the neighbors would think of him. Performance artist, the young man had called himself. Strange that he should have wanted to live in the plain-Jane West-Park area instead of in Cleveland Heights or Ohio City with the other young artists and poets. He liked the young man. He wasn't full of himself like the young people Béla saw on the news and on TV shows.

Béla had been amused to watch him skate into the backyard on his light green Rollerblades. His blue and black spandex leggings and the palm-sized tattoo of a Chinese dragon on his bare chest had nettled the real-estate lady, though. She wasn't willing to risk a sale by being rude, but the smile faded from her eyes and hovered over her lips like overpriced department store perfume.

From behind silver-blue Razor Blade sunglasses, the young man looked down at the real estate lady in her very beige suit. His head was shaved except for a long dark ponytail that hung over his left ear. The ponytail bounced back and forth as he talked, and from time to time it caught on a ring he wore in the top of his ear, or on one of the five earrings that hung suspended from his earlobe. Hemingway had worn earrings too, Béla remembered. Or at least he'd wanted to. To ensure that the son of his African wife, Debba, would be born healthy.

Not having had grandchildren of his own made him more tolerant of young people, Béla-bacsi thought. He never felt threatened by new ways. He actually enjoyed helping this modern-day Visigoth to invade the westside. The members of the Buckeye Hungarian Veterans Club would be shocked that he could sell his house to such a person, but really, his appearance wasn't much stranger than the Hungarian Boy Scouts with their flowered hats, black boots, and brightly embroidered aprons.

He walked through the empty living and dining rooms. All the furniture had been sold to a secondhand store. Martika's favorite china, a pink and white breakfast set imported from France, was still in the built-in china cabinet. Some day, Béla thought, when the young man grew bored with trying to shock the world, he might enjoy having a young lady to dinner.

The crude, colorful peasant china, Martika's folk-dancing costumes, her Hungarian novels and song books, even old family photographs, had all been donated to the ethnic museum in Olmsted Falls. He had kept only the photo of Martika as a young woman standing with Attila, their son, in the prewar Szeged market.

He walked through the kitchen. He and Martika had had a long, happy life here. Too long, Martika used to complain out loud, but Béla knew what Martika left unspoken. She shared his terrible but undeniable secret: that the death of their young son hadn't prevented either of them from gradually starting to enjoy life again.

Martika's kitchen things, her blue enameled pots, the wooden spoons blackened by years of stirring fish soup, had been the hardest to dispose of. Béla couldn't imagine selling them to be used by a faceless stranger. In the end, he'd left the lot in the cupboards, hoping the young man would find them useful.

It had taken only one rainy afternoon to pack up his own Hemingway collection and drive it to a used bookstore downtown, but it hadn't been easy. Béla had spent a lifetime collecting Hemingway's novels, short stories, and newspaper articles, but the shepherd's letter had underlined that he must sell or give away everything. It was strange to walk into the sunroom that had stored his collection and to see empty pine shelves.

Martika's priest had been amused by Béla's obsession with Hemingway. Béla himself was hard-pressed to explain, except that as a young man, when the land owner hadn't needed his help herding the horses, Béla had hired out as a guide for wealthy Italian tourists who hunted and fished the marshlands along the Tizsa. For him, Hemingway captured the thrill of the outdoors and of the hunt like no one else. He was a man's man. At least that was what Béla had told the priest. Secretly he had to admit his collecting was a compulsion he couldn't control. He craved knowledge of Hemingway the way other men craved booze or big-chested women.

When Hemingway's fiction and semifiction no longer satisfied, Béla collected secondary materials: books with beautiful photographs of Hemingway's houses and animal trophies; biographies, and Hemingway pastiches.

Now there was only one thing left for Béla, only one loose thread in his life: his son, Attila. Thinking about Attila had kept Béla alive as he marched on Stalingrad with the Second Hungarian Army; and then at Voronezh where forty thousand of his comrades were killed in battle and seven thousand more froze to death; then again during his initial five years as a prisoner of war in the coal mines of the Urals. All he thought of was seeing Attila once more. And when Stalin needed still more slave labor, during the show trial which declared Béla a war criminal and sentenced him to an additional eight years hard labor in a logging camp in Siberia, his thoughts were all Attila and how hard it would be for the nineteen-year-old to take care of Martika, his mother, all alone.

Then, at the end, there had been a long train ride home at the end of which he'd expected to be greeted by the 27-year-old Attila and maybe a grandchild or two, but he'd been greeted instead by a country occupied by the Russians, a people in rebellion, and news of a son eleven years dead.

None of Martika's letters had reached him. When the compulsory draft was introduced late in the war, she hadn't let Attila be sent into Russia like his father. Martika's own mother had been German and so she sent Attila south, to the Germans. At first, she had been afraid he would be put into the Prinz Eugen Division and kept in Yugoslavia. She had heard that the Partisans took no prisoners. But soon after Attila's training as a dispatch rider and radio operator in the signal corps, he was sent to France. Martika was delighted that he could be on the western front where soldiers fought like gentlemen.

Now learning how his son Attila had died was all that kept Béla going. Had Attila managed to die well like a true Magyar warrior? What kind of gentlemen killed sixteen-year-old boys? These questions needed answering. This was Béla's last duty as a father.

Papa stood in the bathroom doorway of his Ritz apartment. Outside, Paris still lay in ruins. There was little to eat and even less to keep warm with, but here in the Ritz it was warm and safe. And the champagne was plentiful.

Mary Welsh was lying on the bed reading. Papa finished buttoning a clean white shirt and tucked it into his pants. The buckle on his belt, a trophy taken earlier that year, was a soft gold color with the words Gott mit uns cast in a circle around an eagle's head.

Steam whooshed out of the bathroom radiator, filling half the room with hot white fog. Papa watched as the steam coalesced, becoming denser and whiter until it looked like a huge white stag. The stag walked up to Papa, sniffed his beard and his belt, then pushed by him and walked into the bedroom.

What was going on? Papa wondered if he'd gotten hold of some bad booze. Easy now, calm down, Mountain, he told himself. Check with Mary. If his lady love could see the stag, then it wouldn't be a hallucination. He had to be careful, though, if he acted too weird it might frighten off the woman he had chosen to become his fourth wife.

Papa followed the stag out of the bathroom and stood in front of the window, next to the huge beast. "Bob Chance and Buck Lanham are stopping by for a visit," he said to Mary, hoping she would look up. "Maybe you can knock on the Kraut's door later on and see if she wants to come out and play."

Mary looked straight past the stag. "Actually, I asked Marlene up already. She said her cold is getting worse. She's going to spend the day in bed."

Papa watched Mary's face carefully. She couldn't see the stag!

His drinking had been getting out of hand, Papa thought. Suddenly he felt a little woozy. Papa walked across the room and to lay on the bed next to Mary.

The stag trotted to the desk and began munching on the white crocuses Hemingway had given Mary for Valentine's Day.

Papa rose, picked up the pot of flowers and put them on the fireplace mantle. What would Mary think if she found the crocuses half-eaten? He walked back to the bed, fluffed up the enormous pillows and sat glaring across the room at the stag.

It seemed unconcerned. A wine glass half filled with champagne stood on the desk. The stag lapped it up with a long, dark gray tongue.

Papa ignored the stag. Mary wouldn't notice champagne disappearing from a forgotten glass.

There was a knock at the door. Colonel Lanham and Colonel Chance arrived with gifts for Papa. Lanham sprawled into one of the three brocaded easy chairs. Chance sat at the table and unwrapped the two German machine pistols and enough ammunition to last for a year's worth of shooting sharks from the flying bridge of the Pilar, Papa's boat in Cuba.

Papa was careful to cross in front of the stag as he poured his guests champagne spiked with brandy. Lanham and Chance couldn't see the stag either! Papa drained his own glass with one long pull.

The stag was at the fireplace munching on the crocuses.

Papa ran his fingers over the smooth steel of the machine pistols. He watched the stag chewing on the crocuses, took aim with one of the machine pistols, and clicked the trigger.

The stag lowered his antlers and stamped his front hoof.

Papa hurriedly loaded the pistols, ignoring the worried looks of Mary and Lanham. The stag dissolved into shimmery white fog again.

Papa thought he heard antlers scraping against wood. He shushed Mary. Yes. It was coming from the bathroom. The stag stuck his moist gray nose back through the doorway into the bedroom. A single dark brown eye blinked at Papa.

Papa started marching around the room, slowly working his way to the bathroom.

Papa's friends protested loudly, urging him to unload the pistols and put them down. Hemingway pooh-poohed their concerns for the safety of people in adjoining rooms and even the danger to themselves from ricocheting bullets.

Just as Papa entered the bathroom, the stag dissolved again and reappeared back at the desk.

Papa stalked back out. The stag wandered back to the fireplace. He would trick him this time, Papa thought. No dumb animal was going to get the best of Ernest Hemingway. In fine Hemingway-goofing-around-style, armed with the German machine pistols, he goose-stepped to the fireplace, but instead of shooting the stag right away, he put one of the pistols on the mantle, and picked up a photograph.

He turned to face Mary and the others. Someone was behind him. Lanham. Mary and Chance sat on the bed. Papa heard the pistol being unloaded. He whirled around in time to see Lanham replace a magazine on the desk. He had hidden the pistol under the latest issue of Collier's.

Hemingway shoved the photograph in Lanham's face, then waved it at Chance. "My rival for Mary's affections," he announced. "Bugger won't give her a divorce." He looked at the picture himself. "Doesn't he have the goddamned biggest ears you've ever seen? Bugger should be shot for having such big ears." He put the picture into the fireplace and brought up the pistol, staring at the stag all the while.

Lanham and Chance screamed their protests. The stag dissolved again. Quick as a grizzly snagging salmon, Hemingway grabbed the photo and ran into the bathroom. "Got you now, you bastard," he said to the stag, as he slammed the door behind him. No one could see them now.

Papa took aim. He hadn't left the stag enough time to dissolve away. The stag lowered his antlers and charged, pinning Hemingway's pistol arm against the door.

Papa heard Mary pounding on the door and the men urging her to step away so she wouldn't be hit by a ricocheting bullet. He pounded his free fist into the stag's neck. Then, just as the stag was beginning to dissolve, Papa aimed an enormous kick at the stag's flank. The foot met no resistance. Papa's whole body arched up into the air and he landed on the ceramic floor with a heavy thud.

The machine pistol slipped out of Papa's hand and went off. Marble walls amplified the gun's metallic purr into a roar. The toilet shattered. The picture of Mary's first husband lay in a puddle of water.

When he realized the stag had dissolved for good, Papa laughed like a hyena. When the hotel staff arrived to investigate complaints of flooding from other guests, he berated them loudly. How dare they advertise their hotel as luxurious, Ernest Hemingway told them in angry French. His friend General Buck Lanham, liberator of Paris, survivor of many skirmishes against the Germans, etc, etc, had wanted only to relieve himself in comfort, when BOOM, the toilet exploded. They would have to repair it immediately.

The incident at the Ritz had begun by frightening Papa, but in the end the story of the exploding toilet became one of Papa's favorites. Almost as good as the one where Papa beat the rap when the Inspector General of the Third Army hauled him into Allied Headquarters for violating the Geneva Convention. God-damned Brazil Nut. Headquarters should have spotted him for the troublemaker he was straight off.

The plane landed in Zürich shortly after two in the afternoon. In Béla-bacsi's pocket next to his American passport was $565.00 in cash for travel expenses and a bank draft for $87,000. It represented everything he'd ever owned except for the clothes on his back. One thousand dollars for every year of his life.

On the floor under his airplane seat was a plastic J.C. Penney's bag containing the borrowed uniform and black boots of a Hungarian hussar. The century-old black wool pants and jacket belonged to the museum back in Olmsted Falls. Béla had felt bad about lying when he promised the curator to return the uniform in a week. He could easily have bought it from the museum, but the shepherd had been adamant. The less Béla owned when he threw the last piece of clothing into the river, the stronger the magic would be.

Béla checked into a hotel next to the train station, then hurried into the Banc Suisse. There he sold his bank draft for one-hundred-thirty-three one-ounce gold ingots. He waved off the manager's attempts to provide him with an escort and walked back to the hotel. Safely back in his room, he rang the concièrge for a sewing kit. It probably would have been easier to buy an ermine coat from some Paris designer, but gold was the hard currency of magic in every folk tale Béla had ever heard. He wasn't about to take chances.

Shortly before dawn the next morning, after three stuck fingers and much cursing of his failing eyesight, Béla-bacsi had sewn all 133 gold ingots into the jacket and pant linings of the hussar's uniform. He left a wake-up call with the concièrge and lay down to sleep until his train was ready to leave.

The uniform jacket fit well around Bela-bacsi's waist, but the braid trim puckered at the buttons across the chest where the wool had shrunk from many washings. When he tied the big black bow around his neck, he was startled to see how his eighty-seven years had faded his skin until now it was almost white like an infant's.

The light blue shirt and beige pants he had worn on the plane were neatly folded in the J.C. Penney's bag together with his shoes. He picked up the photograph of Martha and Attila from where it lay on the bed pillow.

Béla-bacsi couldn't remember exactly how old Attila was at the time of the picture, perhaps ten or eleven, but he remembered the occasion. That morning Attila had helped drive the horses to market for the first time.

How Béla had loved watching him gallop across the puszta on his black gelding, cutting away the horses to be sold. His white pantaloons had fluttered along the horse's flank. The horse's hooves had churned the soil into a dusty cloud. Attila's chin strap came loose and his black hat fell back onto his shoulders, but he kept on with his work. It was the day Béla had first called his son csikós.

Béla stared at the photo, remembering how proud the little Magyar boy had been to be counted among the horsemen. How straight he had stood beside his mother, coming almost to her shoulder. He put the photograph in the bag with his old clothes, tucked the bag up under his arm, and left the room.

As he walked through the hotel lobby and into the barber shop to have his black boots shined, whispers and smiles of amusement followed Béla-bacsi. He ignored them. After leaving an outrageously large tip with the shoe-shine man, he hurried off to the station to catch the train for Vienna, Budapest, and Szeged.

The stag next appeared in Luxembourg where Papa Hemingway spent December of 1944 in the house of a priest who had been arrested for collaborating with the Germans. The name of the town was Rodenbourg.

It was too warm when the stag materialized again. He let his tongue hang out, like a dog on a hot summer day. It didn't help. Heat in December? His antlers brushed against something smooth and solid. He was indoors again and there was a fire in the fireplace. He could smell it. That's why it seemed so warm.

The stag tried to turn his head. The room was too small. He was in some kind of foyer. His antlers made a horrible scraping sound as they knocked into the wall.

The door creaked open and Ernest Hemingway stooped to pass through the low doorway. In each hand he carried a large wine bottle. He seemed quite pleased with himself until he looked up at the stag.

"Shit!" Hemingway staggered backwards to the door without taking his eyes off the stag. He uncorked one of the wine bottles with his teeth, spat the cork out, and drank. "Bwe-ech." He spat the liquid back out and threw the bottle on the floor. It smashed in front of the stag's hooves.

When the stag stepped back, Hemingway slid back through the doorway and slammed the door shut. The stag listened to Hemingway's feet pounding down the stairs, then looked down at the label on the broken bottle. It read "Schloss Hemingstein, 1944." He smelled the liquid. It was urine. The old man had pissed into a bottle. So, the stag thought, Hemingway thought he was too good to go out and use the outhouse like everybody else. What an animal!

Before he could stop himself, the stag's forelegs buckled. His body twisted until his back was lying in the urine. He felt an almost irresistible urge to roll in it. The stag was in rut. Forcing himself to stop, he wished himself away, but just as he started to dissolve, he felt his own bladder empty. He couldn't keep himself from covering Hemingway's scent with his own.

Rain threatened the sunshine city on the morning Béla Rósza arrived in Szeged. A massive dark gray pillar of water was moving up from Yugoslavia. Béla in his black wool hussar's uniform welcomed the rain's promise to end the summerlike heat, even though it meant his arthritis would be acting up again. Carrying around fifteen pounds of gold made him feel twenty years older.

An old man slept on a bench inside the train station. His jacket was folded up under his head. His shoes were placed neatly under the bench. Béla put the plastic bag containing his old clothes on top of the man's shoes.

The humid air outside the train station was saturated with the smell of paprika. Béla remembered the paprika factory and research greenhouses behind the train station as he headed toward the ring road with its grandiose cathedral and the statues and fountains celebrating the river Tisza.

At the bus depot, he couldn't resist a last glass of Tokay and plate of veal paprikás before boarding the bus to Mindszent.

The stag found Hemingway arguing with magazine editors in New York City, hunting lions in Africa, and fishing for marlin in Cuba.

As the years passed, it grew harder and harder to wish himself into Hemingway's company. People things were unimportant and hard to focus on. Stag life flourished. Hemingway had married four times and had numerous affairs. The stag had gathered together his own harem of eight does.

Once when the stag arrived in Finca Vigia, he'd found a worried Hemingway asking his Cuban doctor to pierce his ears. While in Africa with Mary, the fifty-four-year-old Hemingway had married Debba, the young daughter of a chief. Wakamba folklore had it that the father of an unborn child had to wear gold rings in both ears in order for the child to be born safely.

A horse and a wagon with rubber car tires waited in Mindszent. The clacking of a lone stork not yet departed for Africa saluted Béla and his driver as they rode into a wetlands game preserve ten kilometers north of town.

The shepherd stood on the shore of the Tisza next to a small rowboat. The evening sun dyed his sheepskin orange. He extended a hand and waved.

As Béla walked toward the shepherd he began to have doubts. He was too young. The long-haired bunda coat was the only sign of the traditional shepherd-magician. Instead of black boots, he wore white leather high-tops. Jeans replaced the pleated white pantaloons.

The shepherd laughed when he saw Béla's uniform. "Did you think you were going to a ball at the Monsieur le Baron's country estate?"

Young people were such barbarians, Béla thought. He felt a momentary pang of regret for having left Martika's things with the other young barbarian back in Cleveland. Béla handed him his passport.

The shepherd flicked through the pages of the American passport, holding a page up in front of the sun to check for the watermark. His grin showed a missing front tooth.

"Good. This will do," he said and put the passport into the back pocket of his jeans. "You brought the money?"

Béla nodded. "In gold. Sewn into the uniform."

"You've sold everything?" the shepherd asked, as if he didn't believe Béla.

Béla nodded. The passport wasn't enough, this man wanted all his money too, he decided. He had no magic. Béla wanted to leave.

"The uniform is yours?" the shepherd asked him.

"No, it's borrowed."

"You must want something awfully bad. Get in the rowboat. I'll shove off."

Béla grew frightened. Was the man planning to drown him and steal his gold once the boat reached the middle of the Tisza?

"What will happen?" he asked the shepherd.

"I don't know. It's different for everyone. Let the music and the river into your heart. The puszta will give you what you need."

He held the boat steady for the old man to climb in. "The oars are under the middle seat," he said. "Can you row out to the current?"

Béla nodded, then stepped into the shallow water next to the boat and climbed in. The dark green water was turning black in the failing light.

The boat swayed unsteadily at first, then smoothed itself out as it drifted into the current. Béla was both dismayed and relieved when the shepherd didn't climb in. Rowing was easy once the movement of the Tisza caught the little boat.

"Row out further," the shepherd yelled at him, as he ran along the shore, trying to keep up. Once the boat slid into midstream, the shepherd began playing gentle folk melodies on his tilinkó. Only starlight was reflected on the dark water. The shepherd had insisted his magic worked only during a new moon.

The boat slowed then stopped. Béla watched the Tisza foam up into white swells on either side of the rowboat as the river water parted.

Béla wondered if the shepherd hadn't placed something in the river to make the rowboat stop exactly there. Something that would later help him to find the gold sewn into Béla's coat and pants.

Béla took off his boots first, filling them one by one with water and watching them as they slipped out of sight under the dark water. Then he untied the bow at his neck and opened the buttons of the coat and put it into the water. It slid under rapidly, weighed down by all the gold. The pants followed.

The Milky Way washed the Tisza with soft silver light. Here, on Hungarian puszta, where it shone brighter than anywhere else in Europe, it was called the Warrior's Skyway. Béla was grateful for the night, as he stood in the starlight, alone and naked, an old man feeling ridiculous and trying to keep his balance in a wobbly rowboat.

For five minutes while the shepherd played, Béla stood, hands hiding his genitals from the shepherd's gaze. What a foolish old man he was, he thought. How could he have believed? There was no magic in the world, just as there was no justice, not even for little boys who rode horses like the wind.

"It's not working," the shepherd called out to him.

No. Of course not, Béla-bacsi thought. Now the shepherd will come up with excuses, and the tourists will laugh when they find him naked walking along the shores of the Tisza tomorrow morning. And the shepherd would hide and in a few weeks he would row out into the river and steal Béla's gold.

"Are you sure you've thrown everything into the water? Check under the seat. Maybe something fell out."

Béla did as he was told and groped under the seat. Nothing. When he pulled his left hand back out, it shone white in the starlight. There was a glint on his finger. Yes, of course: his wedding ring.

He stopped himself from taking it off. This was the very last thing he owned. The first thing Martika had given him at the beginning of their long life together. Should he give the last remembrance of a normal life to the charlatan on the riverbank?

A fine mist from the river wet Béla's legs and belly with tiny droplets. His shoulders slumped with resignation as he worked the ring off past knuckles grown thick with arthritis and callouses. "Here," he yelled at the shepherd as he held up the ring. "I found it."

The shepherd began playing again. His melody merged with the sound of running water. Béla shivered as he let the ring fall into the dark water.

The water around the boat churned and splashed up onto Béla-bacsi's thin white legs. The rowboat teetered unsteadily in the swell. Wind whipped the river's spray up into the old man's face and onto his chest. Cold black water sloshed up over the sides of the rowboat.

The waves next to the boat glowed with a green light so pale they were almost white. Something was moving under the surface. Many somethings were moving, encircling the boat, swimming faster and faster, higher and higher until golden-winged helmets broke the surface of the Tisza. Hundreds of them. Too many for Béla-bacsi to count.

An army of men on horseback splashed through the whitecaps. Horses kicked at each other as they snorted and thrashed their way up out of the water. The men were small and dark, different from the modern European-looking Hungarians, more like the old Asian Magyarok in the stories of Béla-bacsi's childhood. They wore golden armor. Short bows were slung over their shoulders and golden quivers hung from their saddles.

The boat rocked violently, as the warriors rode out of the Tisza and through the air around the old man. Water sloshed over the sides until finally Béla was tipped into the black river.

The cold was an icy dagger plunging into his throat, grabbing onto his fingers and legs, paralyzing him. Every nerve screamed with shock. Several seconds passed before he remembered to tread water. He swam toward the light, losing many more seconds before he realized he was diving deeper, that the light was a second horde of golden warriors on the river bottom. He gambled and swam toward the blackness of what he prayed was the surface. Caught up in the surge of warriors, he found himself being carried faster and faster through the current. He shot to the surface gasping for air in the churning water.

Hundreds of horsemen pranced across the surface of the Tisza. Two warriors rode matching black stallions. Slowly the horses unfurled giant wings and caught the wind. Hunor and Magyar, the sons of Nimrod, leaders of the brother tribes that founded Hungary, led the golden horde up from the Tisza and into the sky toward the Warrior's Skyway.

The horsemen had dimmed to points of light only slightly larger than the stars themselves and the water had smoothed into a stillness like a sheet of glass when Béla realized he was exhausted. He thrashed about in the river until he spotted the capsized rowboat. He reached out to catch it and rest a minute.

The hand that reached out for the boat looked like a white hoof. The hoof knocked against the wood of the boat, pushing it further out of reach. As Béla realized the hoof was his, he screamed, swallowing water. He screamed again, but the only sound coming from his mouth was a weak, tortured-sounding bleat.

Panicking, Béla churned through the river water. His arms and legs were ineffectual at carrying him forward. His head felt heavy and hard to balance and he could only see ahead by turning his head either right or left and looking through one eye at a time.

He thought then that he would drown, and wondered why the shepherd would go to so much trouble just to rob an old man of his gold. He wished he were on the shore, so he could teach the shepherd a lesson, and suddenly, Béla felt a surge of energy. His body lifted out of the Tisza, and like the Magyar warriors, he rode the wind to the shore, landing with a thud on the grassy bank.

The shepherd, still playing his tilinkó, turned away from the Skyway and stared at Béla. He looked frightened.

Béla was surprised that his arthritis didn't bother him after the rough landing. He momentarily forgot his anger and walked back to the riverbank. Lightning flashed as he peered down with one eye at his watery reflection.

A white stag with twelve point antlers looked back at him. A stag like the one that had guided Hunor and Magyar from Asia into the puszta. How was this possible? How would this help him? He turned his great dark eye to the shepherd.

The shepherd pulled the tilinkó away from his lips and backed away.

Béla smelled a metallic tang in the air. Fear, he was smelling fear. The shepherd was afraid of what he had unleashed. Béla watched him trip over a rock trying to get away from the white stag.

"What's happening?" Béla asked. The words sounded garbled, but the shepherd understood.

"I don't know," the shepherd answered. "A bald man wants hair, so he throws a gold brush in the river. When a woman wants children, she fills a blue glass bottle with river water to bewitch her husband. Then they go home. I've never seen anything like this. What did you wish for?"

So, the shepherd was a fraud. Béla lowered his antlers. His tongue felt thick and too long. His mouth had too many teeth. He stared at the shepherd, wondering if his hands were salty and what it would be like to lick them. Concentrate, he told himself. What did he want the magic to do? The answer to that was an old one.

There had never been any doubt what Béla wanted the magic to do. He pushed his thick tongue down, back behind his teeth. "AHHHHH-I-I- want r-rreevenge," he told the shepherd.

"God help you!" the shepherd whispered. His fraudulent, tennis-shoe-clad presence irritated Béla. The stag stamped his foot and nudged the shepherd with his antlers. Further and further, until finally the shepherd turned and ran back to the rubber-wheeled wagon with its cringing driver.

Alone at last, Béla nibbled on some grass shoots and thought and thought. How could being a stag help him avenge his son's death? He scratched at a patch of grass with his foot as he concentrated. His front hoof struck stone. A shower of golden sparks swirled up to encircle first his hooves, then his body, and finally his antlers. Béla felt himself float up into the air. Faster and faster, further and further away from the marshy ground. The evening became morning again, then night, then day. Faster and faster, until night and day blurred as Béla, the stag, floated through the sky.

Béla fell back to Earth on all four legs. A snowflake drifted onto his warm wet nose. He stretched out his tongue to lick it away. When he looked down, his forelegs seemed to blend into the whitewashed wall of a barn. Somewhere nearby, a dog was barking. As he slowly turned his head, the antlers were so heavy he felt as if he were carrying all fifteen pounds of gold on top of his head.

A flash of movement to the side caught his attention. Béla was surprised how far his peripheral vision extended. A tinny, whirring sound came from the street. Béla spun his head around.

There was Attila in a German uniform, radio backpack and helmet, riding a bicycle. It must have been shortly after his transfer, because Attila still wore the Edelweiss patch of the German mountain guerilla on his right shoulder and the hooked diamond, symbol of the German peasants' revolt, on his collar.

As Attila stopped to check his map, Béla's ears caught a metallic snick-snick. He stood tall, straightening his twelve point rack and flicking his ears. Snick-snick. A hunter came out of the woods carrying a rifle. "A-a-tti-i-i-la," Béla-bacsi screamed, but the stag's long tongue perverted his warning into a high-pitched bleat.

Attila turned to look at his father. Disbelief shimmered over his features. He crumpled to the ground. His body jerked forward as the bullet entered his lower spine. The weight of the radio pulled him facedown into the gravel.

The smell of gunpowder stung Béla's soft moist nose. He rammed his antlers into the barn wall.

"Cover me," Hemingway said to Jean Décan and the French irregulars. He ran quickly into the street. When he reached the center, he heard a scraping sound coming from the farm. He froze, then whirled toward the old timbered barn. The wall seemed to shimmer. A stag, a white stag, was standing there. Papa blinked and the wall looked normal again. He was tired, Papa decided. Someone else should finish this raid. If only there were someone else to do it.

He ran the rest of the way to the German and was joined by Jean Décan a few seconds later. The Brazilius was busy taking notes for the Inspector General of the Army, Hemingway noted. Well, fuck the Geneva Convention anyway. He was wasn't going to get anybody killed because the fucking officers didn't know shit about conducting a raid. It took a real man to give orders, not fancy insignia and titles. When the two men got close enough to search the body, Papa saw that the German was still alive.

"Shit," Hemingway said, as he looked into the soldier's face. He looked to be about 15 or 16, the same age as Papa's own son, Patrick. He saw that the bullet had come out through the liver.

"You couldn't have known, Papa," Jean Décan tried to console him.

There was nothing to be done. Décan helped Papa take off the heavy haversack containing the radio, and together they dragged the boy behind some bushes so the trap could be set again.

Papa pulled his own morphine tablets out of his shirt pocket and handed them to the boy along with some quick German instructions in their use. The boy didn't seem to understand. Ernest waved the pills at him until the boy took them.

"Danke, Herr General," the boy said. Hemingway wondered why it was that the closer a German was to death, the higher the rank they accorded to him. Especially during an interrogation. It was as if their prissy little Prussian minds couldn't conceive of being shot to death by a sergeant, let alone a war correspondent from Collier's. The captured Germans had taunted him, said he didn't have the guts to violate the Convention. He'd shown them. Fuck the Convention.

Papa felt someone tap him on the shoulder. "Pardon, monsieur." It was a boy, perhaps two or three years younger than the German.

"Yes?"

"The Germans, they have taken my bicycle."

Jean Décan looked at the big Américain. "Why not?" Papa said. The boy grinned and picked the bicycle up from the road. "Now get the hell out of here," Papa told the boy. Then he and Décan ran back across the street. They handed the messenger's radio over to the French irregulars and reset the trap.

Béla wished himself next to Attila. He lowered the heavy head until the muzzle could smell Attila's darkening shirt. The wet spot was rapidly expanding from the shirt down onto pants that were at least two sizes too big. Décan and Hemingway had taken his belt.

Hemingway! Now at last Béla understood his compulsion to read everything by and about Hemingway. How could he have gotten it so wrong? Béla, the man, had lived his life admiring the great author and hunter. Now as he looked down at his dying son, Béla, the stag, vowed he would live to see the great hunter die.

Attila's breathing was slow, as if each breath required a great deal of concentration. Why didn't he take the morphine? Béla nudged the hand holding the morphine tablets with his nose.

Attila looked up at Béla, not at all startled to see a wild creature in the middle of so much destruction. "Szervusz Szarvas," he greeted him. "Vigyél haza!" Take me home, Stag. The boy held onto his pants and tried to stand in order to mount the stag, but fell back onto the ground.

Béla didn't know what to say to Attila. He was suddenly grateful for his animal form. His son would never know that he had lived to be an old man of 87 without him. He was ashamed that he and Martika had learned to enjoy life again after Attila's death.

"Take me home," the boy said again.

"S-s-soon," Béla twisted his long tongue to say the word. He had always assumed Attila had died quickly with a clean shot through the head, or at least that he had died in a hospital surrounded by kindly nurses and doctors. He was glad he and Martika had never known how lonely their little boy's death was. Béla lay down on the grass beside Attila and waited. His son wouldn't die alone.

It took five hours. Hemingway and his crew of correspondents and irregulars had long since moved on.

Attila was such a strong boy. Csikós. Too strong. And so young. Béla tried not to hear the final wheezing in Attila's throat, as his lungs struggled to keep breathing.

Night fell. Béla didn't know how long he sat staring at Attila's body before he finally forced himself to stand up. The boy's face was no longer contorted with pain. The stag stretched his heavy head down and pushed the eyelids closed with his nose. He looked asleep. Béla could still pick out the innocent baby Attila in the teenage features. The painful death had softened into a bad dream Béla was powerless to comfort. He plodded across the road into the forest.

From behind the hazelnut bushes, the stag swung his huge rack around a final time. Two Magyar warriors on winged black horses drifted onto the road in a shower of sparks. The horses galloped toward Attila's body.

One of the warriors leaned down across his horse's neck and slashed Attila's left cheek with a knife. Attila rose on shaky legs, the blood dribbling down his cheek past his chin. Not a cry escaped his lips. Such brave boy he was. A true Magyar. The second warrior reached down, pulled the boy onto his horse, then followed the first back into the night sky, up to the Warrior's Skyway.

Attila looked back down at the earth and at the stag, then rapidly became a tiny sparkle in the Milky Way.

The stag shuddered to think of his son spending eternity with those hard men. Attila would never look down into the adoring eyes of an infant son of his own. He would never know the soft touch of a woman.

Béla, the stag, hunted Hemingway in Paris and Luxembourg and Africa and finally in the American West. Finding fodder, especially during winter blizzards, kept the stag from concentrating on his hunt. Twice when it looked like he wouldn't make it, he'd been able to remember enough people things to wish a barn door open and have a bale of hay fly out to himself, his harem, and their youngsters.

The stag had fathered sons again. Many fine sons. What mattered most now was finding enough food, keeping warm, and the rut. Though as he watched his youngest run across the Idaho plain a few miles away from Sun Valley, he couldn't help remembering the son who had ridden horses like the wind.

On Christmas night, 1960, the stag stopped to drink from a river not yet frozen shut. His rack was enormous. Lowering his head to drink required such great strength that the stag realized this year's rut might well be his last. Alongside the river was plenty of shrubbery, but it had been picked over. Halfway up the hill to the north of the river was a house with some choice bushes. He wandered up the hill.

Light from the house lit the snow. The room was filled with people and there was a Christmas tree. Sitting alone on a sofa in front of the window was the hunter. As he recognized him, the stag was flooded once again with people memories.

He remembered the Christmas laughter of his wife and son, and being so full he couldn't eat another bite. He remembered also the shepherd in Hungary, and why he had sold his comfortable starter home in Cleveland to a young barbarian. He remembered why he had become a stag and followed the hunter all those years.

That winter and on into the spring, the stag watched the house, biding his time, waiting for the hunter to be left alone. From the way the curtains would be drawn quite suddenly, the stag knew the hunter could see him. Twice the hunter was taken away for a period of several weeks. Finally, at the beginning of July, the stag could feel the rut coming on him. He knew he had to make his move soon, or he would be caught up in stag things again.

Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, the stag watched the hunter move about the house. Mary must still be asleep. He decided to take a chance and wished himself into the house.

The hunter sat on the living room sofa, holding his head in his hands, when the stag rematerialized.

"You!" he said when the stag stomped a hoof on the wood floor.

"Akarod hogy meg öljelek." The stag had forgotten how hard it was to make the his tongue speak.

The hunter stared at him.

English, idiota, the stag chided himself. "You want me to kill you, don't you? Do you know why?"

The hunter looked frightened. For a few seconds, the stag was afraid he would call for Mary. He had to work quickly. The key. Yes. He'd read in one of the biographies the key to the gun cabinet was on the kitchen windowsill. He wished it down into the basement where the guns were stored. A few anxious moments went by before the stag heard the thumping on the basement stairs of what he hoped was the Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifle, the hunter's favorite, and the one with which he had already practiced suicide many times.

The hunter stared at the gun as it flopped onto the sofa next to him. The stag wished open the drawer in the end table. Two cartridges floated out and over to the sofa as the rifle snapped open.

There was something the stag had to tell the hunter before he died. If he could just think human. The family photographs on the end table reminded him. "A-a-ttila," he said. The tongue felt as if he were trying to talk with a snake in his mouth. "Attila Magyar, Attila nem . . . Attila, you killed Attila. Attila was not a piece of German shit. He was a good boy. A good Hungarian boy."

Anger steeled the stag. No pity. Not now. How could a man place a bet on a human life? The stag flicked his ears as he listened to the rifle click shut. He thought he would enjoy the fear in the hunter's eyes, as he backed into the foyer, but it reminded him too much of how Attila had died.

The rifle butt gently drifted down onto the foyer floor. Don't stop now, you old fool, the stag told himself. The hunter tried to keep from touching the rifle, but the stag's need for revenge was stronger. The hunter's robe fell open as he gripped the barrel in both hands. He opened his mouth in horror and before he could shut it again, the stag wished the end of the barrel to push up against the hunter's soft palate.

"Come on, old man," the stag jeered. "You know how this is played. Remember, how you used to scare Dr. Ortega back in Cuba with this game?" He wished the hunter's bare foot up in the air. "Good. That's the way." The big toe slipped over both triggers. The stag wished the hunter's foot down hard.

Delicately nudging with his hoof the bloody pulp that had once held the mind of a man, the stag wished himself away a final time, to the shores of the Tizsa where the scent of a doe in heat drifted through the cattails.

**Lost?**