Snapper (10 page)

“Get you a coffee?” said Maud, and I accepted.

I sat in the booth nearest the door, where I could watch Ernie working in the improbable shade of Father Christmas. I could also see across the room to an enclosed area with pool tables and pinball machines and an immense silent jukebox. There were pictures of cars in there, too, but they were modern sports cars with blondes in bikinis draped over the hood. I surmised that Ernie ran the game room and Maud the restaurant.

I had some work to do that I had brought in with me. Finding nests and counting eggs was only half the job; crunching numbers like nest heights and terrain slope was the other half. My topographical maps were slathered in square root calculations. When I started I could always get Gerald to correct
my errors, but working freelance I had to be careful. I spread one of these maps over the table to assess my finds that morning.

“I’d get lost with a map like that,” said Maud, delivering coffee. She had a big canvas bag marked U.S. Postal Service over her shoulder. “I’d wander around looking for the number two.”

“Thanks for the coffee,” I said. “Sometimes I get lost too,” I added, to be polite.

“What kind of birds do you watch?” she said.

“All of them. I try to see how they interact. Some get along fine and some don’t.”

“I noticed that,” she said. “I seen crows and blue jays give a hawk a hard time.”

At that time I was most interested in brown-headed cowbirds, but Maud had a point.

“Same principle,” I said. “Different birds.”

“Mind if I join you?” she said. Every other table was free but I guessed she didn’t get much conversation out there.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m Nathan.”

“Maud,” she said. She had a sizable middle and settling into the booth with that canvas bag took a while.

“Don’t let me trouble you though,” she said. “I’ve got some work of my own.” She extracted a clutch of envelopes from the bag along with a pen and some stationery.

I returned to my map. I had been calculating slope between two nests, but I had fluffed a cosine. I realized that I had left my pocket calculator in the
Gypsy Moth
.

Ernie was halfway underneath it already inspecting the gas pipe.

Across the table Maud began writing something. The envelope she had opened lay facing me. It was addressed to
Santa Claus, Indiana, 47579. The other, unopened envelopes I could see bore the same address.

Maud noticed my curiosity. She might have been waiting for it. “We’re the only postally recognized Santa Claus in the world,” she said. “Come December I’ll have five or six of these bags. We send a handwritten reply to each one.”

“Just the two of you?”

“No,” she said. “The whole town chips in.” There are a couple of houses and a convenience store where Santa Claus is marked on the map, a mile and a half east of Maud’s truck stop. In other words, it was just the two of them. “Been running since 1912 or 1914, depending who you ask.”

I suppose most letters to Santa wind up in the dead letter office, but these were smart kids, dedicated kids: they looked him up. They figured Santa would never stay at the North Pole when he could move to a
real
wasteland. I looked at the return addresses. Most of them were from the United States but I spotted some eye-catchers, too: Farleigh Wick, England, and Hamamatsu, Japan, and Canberra, Canberra. That got me wondering who paid the reply postage. I never found that out.

“What do you write?” I said.

“Whatever we want. We ain’t paid and we aren’t the federal government. Ernie had a letter from a little boy last week calling his sister a bitch. Ernie wrote back, said it must run in the family. I got one here from a girl who says Santa always please wear your slippers and drink lots of orange juice.”

“So what are you writing?”

“Santa will if you will,” said Maud.

The door swung open and Ernie yelled, “I need baling wire!” Maud extricated herself from the booth, but left her letters and the canvas bag. “Take one,” she said. “Write a reply if you want.”

I folded my map. I preferred to do square roots at home with a beer anyway. I selected one pale blue envelope with a return address in Seminole, Texas.

I didn’t open it immediately, though. I watched an eighteen-wheeler roll to a halt outside. It had artwork on the cab door that contrived to combine the Confederate flag, the Grim Reaper, and Lady Luck, just about free of her leather bikini. The man who got out was shirtless, in shorts and sandals. I couldn’t have said which was more noticeable, his tattoos, all akin to the illustration on the door, or the billows of sweaty flesh around him that were trying desperately but unsuccessfully to drip down below his hips. That said, in a red suit and beard he could have done the town proud.

Maud checked him at the door.

“No shirt, no service,” she said.

“Hell, Maud. Nice to see you too.”

“No shirt, no service,” she repeated. As an afterthought she added, “Bob.”

Bob went back to the rig to fetch a shirt and Maud brought me a ham sandwich and two jelly doughnuts. I panicked.

“I can’t pay,” I said.

“I can’t sell it,” she said. “Bread’s old, ham’s past the date on the package, and I’m not sure about the doughnuts. Shouldn’t hurt you, though.”

That sandwich was delicious. I read my letter while I ate. It was from Peter, who asked if Rudolph really fired lasers from his nose to protect the North Pole.

Bob’s shirt was a hideous Hawaiian thing and he was talking to me before I finished the second doughnut.

“Maud got you workin’, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, Ernie is fixing my truck.”

“That your truck?”

I don’t know what Ernie was doing or why, but outside the
Gypsy Moth
was spewing black exhaust. She had never done that before.

“That’s real pretty,” said Bob. “I like that mermaid.”

I managed to say thanks.

“Thing is,” he said, frowning, “I thought the gypsy moth was a kind of pest. Eats all the trees and stuff.”

“I never thought of that,” I said. “I think my girlfriend just liked the name.”

“Okay,” he said. “Uh-huh. Now that I can understand.” He looked around the room. “Where’s she at?”

“Afraid she moved on.”

“Ah. Uh-huh. Okay. Sorry to hear that. Let me lighten your load a little bit.” He took a handful of letters from the mail bag and shuffled off to a booth across the room. Maud had a coffee on the table before he sat down, and he hadn’t had to ask.

I wrote back to Peter. I told him to keep quiet, because little boys who provoke Rudy get zapped. I hope his mom made him look up “provoke.” I was going to try my hand at another but I got distracted.

Outside, Ernie had opened up the back and climbed in where the mattress was. There was nothing functional back there and I couldn’t see why he would do that. Moreover, I had certain personal things back there I’d rather he didn’t go through. My wallet, for example. In particular I had three pictures and one painting of Lola that I didn’t want him to see. She had participated in a Bloomington exhibition of women photographing, painting, and sculpting other women. Men were barred from this exhibition, but afterward Lola had given certain artistic shots of herself to me. I didn’t think Ernie would understand the context and I hated the thought of him perving out on the woman I loved.

But since he was already back there I couldn’t do anything except hope that he kept his eyes on the job in hand.

A motorcycle cop pulled in. He had a handlebar mustache and aviator sunglasses, the kind of cop who thinks he’s a film star. I hoped I hadn’t eaten his doughnut.

“Afternoon, Maud,” he said, then stopped at my table.

“Afternoon,” he said. “Mind if I take a few of these letters?” I slid the bag his way and he grabbed four or five envelopes, then went wordlessly to another booth. I guessed Maud would provide pen and paper.

I thought about some of the hippies and jazz poets and film studies faculty I encountered sometimes in university towns: people who
deplored
this other Indiana outside their own incestuous enclaves. And they didn’t know the first thing about it. I wanted to stand Lola’s new man with his self-indulgent potter’s wheel next to Bob and watch him wilt. Bob promised bicycles for Christmas on his lunch hour. Ernie was pure hot sauce and Maud was sheer gravy.

Bob’s truck had Georgia plates. Crackling CB radios in every semi truck for two hundred miles must swap stories of good times at Maud’s and the charming letters to Santa they had read. Highway patrolmen put in for waiting lists to work this patch of turf. All the lonely retrograde denizens and misfits of the Great American Highway converged here every winter to play an unlikely but heroic role in the lives of millions of children. I half expected to see ZZ Top roll up in the
Eliminator
, their famous red beards dyed Santa white.

“This is extraordinary,” I said, when Maud came to refill my coffee. “Just great. Do you get the Hells Angels in here sometimes all writing letters?”

“I don’t know about Hells Angels, but we get motorcycle clubs sometimes.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. I should have stopped, but I liked Maud, and I felt that she liked me. But I had spent too much time in university towns, and I stepped over the mark. “I mean do you get big hairy men, ex-convicts from Tennessee? Do you get the hell raisers and beer drinkers and longhair metalheads and good ol’ boys playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox while they’re writing those letters from Santa?”

“What are you getting at?” said Maud.

“I just love it,” I said. “You could get the local Grand Dragon in here writing letters to black kids.”

Maud gave me a level glare.

“We don’t ask,” she said. “We welcome anyone who comes through that door.”

I didn’t get any more coffee the rest of the afternoon.

For a couple months after that day, the
Gypsy Moth
was a pleasure to drive. She purred when she idled, and she took every rut, rock, and country road I threw at her with an eagerness I never knew she had.

“I won’t explain what I done,” said Ernie. “You prolly wouldn’t understand it anyway.”

That was a fair point. It was his other, next, and last comment as I sat at the wheel and prepared to drive away that felt like retaliation for my comments and questions to Maud.

“Nice pictures you got back there,” he observed. “You ought to send them in to
Readers Wives
.”

There are three ways to inspect a bald eagle’s nest. You can climb the nest tree, which is somewhat hazardous if the bird is sitting. You can stand in a rowboat—they usually build over water—and try to maintain your balance while with your left hand you maneuver a telescopic pole and with your right train your binoculars on a small mirror mounted at the top. The binoculars should protect your eyes but you may need another hand to defend your back and shoulders from raking talons. Or you can climb nearby trees to a height of forty-five or fifty feet with a line of sight to the nest, which is usually between thirty and forty feet up. Bring a book. The bird may not stir for hours.

The only reason you would do this twice daily at multiple sites is if the federal government paid you for it. That is no longer likely, but at one time there was great public anxiety about reintroducing the birds to habitats and locales from
which they had long vanished. They were endangered, and if they thrived again it would prove, or at least imply, that calamitous American stewardship of the wilderness was not beyond redemption.

It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces.

I spent a summer observing three pairs of birds in the ten-mile triangular mudscape between the Wabash and Ohio Rivers in southwestern Indiana. There’s a fleck of a town called Jefferson there and a hamlet called Solitude. Otherwise there is not much reason to visit. The Ohio is good for skinny-dipping despite the chemical-industrial waste; I had one nest on that shoreline. Try the same in the much smaller Wabash and you will emerge fully clothed in green slime. I had another nest there. The land between the rivers is not always flooded, but some perverse reverse percolation occurs underground that keeps it from drying even in intense heat. Artifacts from a prehistoric settlement periodically ooze to the surface. Sometimes I’d see archaeologists. My third nest was inland over a shallow lake dotted with cypress.

The heat and humidity in summer are overwhelming; you move through aqueous air and elongated time. It’s a relief to climb fifty feet up where you might, on occasion, catch a breeze.

Initially my field notes were very straightforward. Here is an example: