And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (19 page)

The stop at Indianapolis had put me slightly behind schedule. I had told Uncle Mark and Tom that I would arrive midafternoon Iowa time—early enough that I could spend some time outside with my cousin before it got dark. So I decided not to stop at my favorite Iowa diversion—the previously mentioned world's largest truck stop—and continued north from Iowa City through Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Nashua, and on to Mason City.

When I pulled into Mark and Linette's driveway, I was startled by a large man in cowboy boots and jeans, a T-shirt stretched over broad shoulders and a thick chest. Had I not known I was in the right place, I might have thought I was at the wrong house. The man turned around and to my great surprise, he looked an awful lot like my youngest cousin, who I had seen just four months before.

“What's up, cuz?” he asked.

“Tommy?”

“You made good time,” he said. I could not believe my eyes. Mark would tell me later than Tom had grown six inches and gained thirty pounds of raw muscle in less than a calendar year. It was like looking at the Incredible Hulk when you expect to see Bruce Banner. Shocking, and for a moment I felt old. Here was the youngest member of my generation in the family and he had gone from a cute, soft-about-the-edges preteen to a full-grown, corn-fed man in roughly the same amount of time between the All-Star Game and the World Series.

After we unloaded my gear, I told Tom—it felt strange calling him Tommy given his adult frame—that I needed to buy a hunting license, and he recommended we go to a store called Fleet Farm to get me legal before our hunt the next morning. If you have never been to a Fleet Farm, as I hadn't, the best way to describe it is by imagining that a farmer is given magical powers to create a one-stop shop for every single masculine need he might have, save anything to do with sex or church. Though, now that I think about it, there were condoms in the toiletries aisle and I'm pretty sure I saw a few New Testaments on a bookshelf, wedged between the latest editions of
Modern Woodworking
and
Soldier of Fortune.
If Ted Nugent and Bob Villa were stocking a fallout shelter that they planned to share in the event of nuclear attack, it would look very much like Fleet Farm. The store starts in a front corner, where the clothing section is stocked almost exclusively with tough canvas coveralls made by Carhartt and emanates from there in aisle after aisle of goods designed to set a man's heart atwitter. Hardware, hunting, horticulture (this is Iowa after all), and husbandry seem to be the name of the game. Home decor? Well, they've got some industrial-sized cans of paint. Food? There's an entire row of shelves dedicated to jerky. This was no Walmart or Target. None of that sissy stuff at Fleet Farm. No, this was a store for the red-blooded, God-fearing American male.

I liked it instantly.

In the forty or so minutes Tom and I spent wandering, I saw enough power tools, duck decoys, and pickup truck bed liners to last a lifetime and not a single greeting card in sight. Though, to be fair, we only covered perhaps two-thirds of the store in three-quarters of an hour, so they may have been tucked back behind last year's machetes and chain saws. I had not brought the proper ammunition for my shotgun and needed to pick out some different shells. Iowa, which literally lives and dies by its soil, had implemented stringent regulations regarding the materials hunters may use when hunting on public land in recent years. Lead shot, over time and given enough of it, can damage soil as pellets oxidize and disintegrate, changing the pH levels of the dirt. It wasn't likely that we'd be hunting public land, but Tom thought it would be a good idea to look for a deal on some steel or composite shells to be safe. Not finding one and not wanting to leave any of the three—yes, three—aisles devoted to ammunition of all stripes empty-handed, I bought some new lead shells designed for felling pheasant and offered to buy some for Tom, but he demurred, assuring me that between him and his dad, they had plenty. Then he led me to the customer service desk, where a short, thin woman with leathery skin, feathery hair, and an orange employee vest began walking me through the process of buying a nonresident small-game license.

“What's your zip code?” she barked in a scratchy, I've-been-smoking-since-I-was-nine voice.

I told her.

“And how do you spell your last name?”

“It's Heimbuch,” I said. “H. E. I. M, as in Mary. B, as in boy. U. C. H.”

She punched some keys on the computer behind the counter. “Have you ever had an Iowa hunting license before?”

“No.”

“And what's your zip code?”

Hadn't I just told her that? I told her again and she typed furiously on the keyboard.

“And you've never hunted with a license in Iowa before?”

“No,” I said and it was followed by way too much typing. Was she writing a novella while doing this? E-mailing her best high school friend?

“And your last name, how is that spelled?” She had asked me more than a half-dozen questions relating to exactly three pieces of information and with every answer, her fingers flew across the keyboard. And with each subsequent asking, her voice grew increasingly terse. I tried to image the fields on the form she was filling out.

Zip Code:

Last Name:

Ever Had an Iowa License?:

Brief Description of General Demeanor in No Fewer Than 700 Characters:

Zip Code (in Roman Numerals):

Ever Had an Iowa License?:

If You Could Be a Kitchen Appliance, What Would You Be and Why?:

Last Name (in Pig Latin):

The woman asked to see my driver's license and as she was entering the information into the computer (information, incidentally, that included the spelling of my last name and zip code), she casually asked me for my hunter's ID number.

“I'm sorry, my what?” I asked.

“Hunter's ID number,” she, well, retorted is the only word for it. “You have taken a hunter's safety class haven't you? They have those in Indiana?”

“Ohio.”

“What?”

“I'm from Ohio, not Indiana,” I said.

“This says your zip code is in Indiana.”

“But I'm from Ohio,” I said. “My license is from Ohio. My home is in Ohio.”

“Hold on. What's your zip code again?”

After several whole minutes, we finally established that I do live where I have always thought I lived and she again asked me for my hunter's ID number. I pulled the card they had given me when I finished my hunter's safety course from my wallet and handed it to the woman.

“What's this?”

“That's what they give you in Ohio when you pass hunter's safety.”

She began looking at the card skeptically. On one side was a photo of a hunter emerging from the woods with the seal of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. On the other was a statement signifying that I had passed the class, signed by head instructor Arthur—that crazy son of a gun—and myself. But no number.

“This can't be all they gave you,” she said. “You have to have a number.”

My heart began to pound. Had I really just driven the better part of seven hundred miles and spent nearly a year preparing only to be shut down at the last second by inconsistency in bureaucratic record-keeping? Then I remembered it. A receipt. Arthur had given me a receipt along with my card, and I distinctly remembered packing it along with my books about pheasant hunting and one called
Field Dressing and Butchering Small Game and Upland Birds: An Illustrated Guide
into my work bag, which was in the backseat of my car in the parking lot.

“I think I have it in my car,” I said. “Can I just run out and get it quick?”

The woman rolled her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “Fine,” she said. “We've got to have that number, but you better run because this thing times out in three minutes and I'd hate to have to put all that information back in again.”

Tom waited at the register and I took off at a dead sprint out the automatic doors and across the busy parking lot, unlocking my car door with the remote fob and tearing into my work bag with reckless abandon. I couldn't remember exactly what it looked like, but I knew the receipt was yellow and roughly half the size of a sheet of printer paper. It was one of those carbon copies; I knew that because Arthur had taken extra care to print heavily—and slowly—on it. I went through everything. Notebooks. Books. Old receipts for work that I had never turned in and made a mess of my backseat before giving up and walking slowly back inside, my head hung in shame. I was nearly inside, when I remembered that I had created a profile on the ODNR website that stored all the information about my activities so that I could retrieve them later. Maybe it was in there? I was doing a bit of frantic iPhone googling as I stepped back in the store at roughly the pace of an earthworm loaded up on Tylenol PM. It must have appeared as if I had some sort of disability or was engaged in some sort of performance art, but I didn't stop. Forward progress was progress and I was hoping to find the number before stepping back up to the customer service desk now backlogged with a line.

“Craig!” Tom yelled, snapping my attention to where he stood with Old Leatherface, and both were waving at me. Tom's wave was excited, hers had about as much enthusiasm and disdain in it as the nod someone might give to a dentist to proceed with the removal of a bad tooth after the dentist had already removed all the good ones by accident. To her I was an idiot. An out-of-town idiot.

“I'm just going to use your zip code,” she told me, and her longing to simply be rid of me was palpable. “I'm not supposed to do this, but if you get stopped, just tell the wildlife officer what happened.”

Wait. You mean the number doesn't have to be real? All this time I could have just spouted the first numbers that came to my head? And how was it that now she wasn't asking for my zip code when minutes before I had to repeat it three times while she was looking at my driver's license where it was printed in bold, clear type?

“Thank you so much,” I said. “I really appreciate what you're doing.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “That will be $128.”

“How much?”

“A hundred twenty-eight even.”

“Is that a lifetime pass?” I asked.

“Nope, just the few days you'll be here.”

“And it's $128?”

“Yup.”

“Are the pheasant in Iowa made of gold?” I asked. The price really astounded me.

“Nope, but you're from out of state, so it's more expensive.”

I turned to Tom. “How much was yours?”

“Ten bucks for the year,” he said.

I handed the woman my American Express and did a silent calculation. With gas, the cheeseburger, coffee, ammunition, and the license, I was already $300 into my hunting trip and the shotgun had never left the case. I couldn't remember the last time I had spent $300 on myself in a day without getting so much as a T-shirt. So far, I had twenty shotgun shells, a piece of paper, a sore ass, and a higher cholesterol count.

“My dad came in while you were working on your phone,” Tom said. “He walked right by you and neither of you even noticed.”

And it's true, we had not noticed. But then I was preoccupied with my frantic search for a fake number, and Mark had a few other things on his mind. He was in the midst of helping Will (Tom's older brother) get out of a little bit of trouble he was having at school. I won't get into the details here, but let's just say Will—the smart, quiet one—had a run-in with the authorities, the kind of run-in you only have when you're underage and in a collegiate environment, and Mark was less than happy.

That's the big difference between Mark and my dad. My dad has this quiet resolve. Life is a series of problems to be solved and the only way to solve them is to think through them dispassionately. Consequently, I can think of only one time in my entire life when my dad has yelled at me. Mark, on the other hand, tends to parent more by gut than guile. If Will or Tom screw up, they will know it in the volume of his voice. He'll yell. He'll rant and scream. But unlike Dad, who tends to help solve something and then simply melt away, Mark never seems to get off the phone with his kids angry. Or, he may be angry, but he doesn't seem to let that be the last thing they hear.

I didn't hear him yelling at Will (though Tom would later report that it was Vesuvian and pretty awesome to behold), but I did hear him asking if Will was okay and tell him that he loved him. I can sometimes have a temper. Not a big one, but a temper, and all I can hope is that as my children grow up, my kids know that no matter how mad I may get, I love them with all my heart. I get the sense that Will and Tom know that, that Mark makes sure that they do. And I hope that no matter what Jack, Dylan, or Molly do, I never forget to end every conversation the way I've always seen Mark do it.

Though, as far as reunions go, this wasn't the best I've ever had with Mark. He looked tired, physically worn out and emotionally wrung through. I shook his hand, gave him a hug, and followed as he and Tom went back to look for more deals on ammunition.

We parted ways leaving Fleet Farm. Mark had to run some more errands in town, and Tom and I were heading back out to the house.

“Leave it to me,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “I come all this way and forget to bring my hunter's ID number.”

“That was pretty dumb,” Tom said, his mouth splitting open into a broad-toothed smile.

“It's just my kind of luck,” I said.

“Yeah, rookie mistake.”

“We don't need to make a big deal about it though, right?” I said, trying to stave off future embarrassment.

“I'm pretty sure everyone will find out sooner or later,” he said. “Besides, you don't know if you'll get anything tomorrow. This could all be good for the book.”