Snapper (14 page)

“You must spend a lot of time out here,” he said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“So you could at least tell me where you’ve seen people searching for morels.”

Any direction would do. I pointed vaguely east.

“But now does that mean I should follow them since that’s where the morels are at? Or does that mean they’ve already cleaned that quadrant out?”

“You might scare them if you follow,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“Most mushroom pickers don’t carry guns.”

He laughed, with yellow inconsecutive teeth.

“Mushroom ain’t got much defense,” he said. I couldn’t help picturing him taking aim at an unsuspecting fungus.

“You could come with me,” he added. “They’ll never see you coming. Them other mushroomers. They might smell you, though.” He clapped my shoulder and grinned.

“I’m afraid I have work to do,” I said.

“Don’t they have birds where the morels is at?”

“Yeah, but not my birds.”

“Your birds?”

“Yeah. I keep track of the same ones, more or less.”

He pondered that. “So if they run into trouble you help them out?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t interfere.”

His forehead knotted and his eyebrows formed a single gray line.

“You spend all your time on one bird and then it meets a snake and you just watch?”

“I’m not usually around,” I said. “I look every day to see if a snake’s been visiting.”

“Bird ain’t got much defense,” he said. Against my better judgment I felt pulled into the argument.

“They can fly,” I said.

“Eggs can’t fly,” he said. “Not no more than mushrooms can.”

I couldn’t think of a refutation for that. I peered at him
and he at me and it seemed we had reached our first major disagreement.

“They both fry pretty good though,” he exclaimed, clapping my shoulder again.

“I used to dress just like you,” he added, stepping closer so that I was pinned against the bank of the ravine. “I trained in North Carolina near Asheville. Thrash around in the mud three times and clip some rhododendron on your helmet, you’re ready to roll.”

I knew that he was telling the truth. I have been to North Carolina near Asheville, where the rhododendron is an ecological catastrophe.

Abruptly he stepped back. “But you don’t want to hear all that,” he said, and changed the subject. “I don’t even like morels. But where else am I going to find twelve dollars a pound just lying around?”

“Out of interest,” I said, “where would you sell them?”

“Restaurants. Buddy of mine did it last year. What I really want to do is go to restaurant B with a hatful and tell ’em what restaurant A offered. See if I can work up a bidding war.”

“Well,” I said. “Don’t try west, I guess. Younger trees.” We were surrounded by enormous pin oaks and poplars, but some sections of the forest had been logged during the Depression. They were mature now but less favorable, I thought, to morels.

“Do you like your job?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Pay’s a joke, but I enjoy it.”

“I’m fixin’ to retire,” he said. “Look at these hands.” He held them out splayed, palms down, and I could see that they were scarred horribly to the wrist, as if he had plunged them into a bucket of glass shards long ago. I thought this might have something to do with what came after that training in
North Carolina, which made me uneasy at the likely turn of conversation. But he surprised me.

“Recycling,” he said. “See, you have a good job. I had skills like yours once, but people want to know if you can touch type or drive a forklift. I wound up sorting through people’s beer bottles and pizza boxes for a living. I can tell you how far away a man is if I can work out his height. That don’t shift mortgages or televisions, though, does it?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, and I didn’t want to know, but professional pride intervened. “Triangulation,” I said. “I do that, too.”

“I bet you do. That’s why I said it.”

“How long have you had your recycling job?” I said, getting anxious.

“Twelve years. I moved up from garbage collection. I can tell you the average width of a human head and the average length between two average human shoulders, too.”

I did not want to know why he knew these things, so I tried again to change the subject.

“I’m not particularly suited to any other trade, myself.”

“I’m sure you got a college degree,” he said. “Can’t study birds without a college degree.”

“It helps,” I said.

“If you wanted a job stuffing envelopes in the bank they’d give it to you. You could tell all the bankers about your bird job and they’d lap it up.”

“I guess I’m glad to have my office out here,” I said.

“I didn’t study birds, that’s my problem. I studied little gremlins in black pyjamas, straw woks upside down on their little heads. Studied ’em real good, too. Forty-six of ’em. Bankers aren’t interested in that kind of thing.”

I had expected something like that, and I began to look
around frantically for a bird doing something that I should observe. But as he had earlier, he switched tactics on me abruptly.

“Do you have a favorite bird?” he said.

“Wood thrush, I suppose.”

“They’re real pretty. Beautiful song,” he said. “I bet I can tell you something about birds you don’t know.”

I waited.

“In British India three hundred years ago it was the highest distinction in marksmanship to hit a snipe. If you could do that you got the softest bed in the barracks and the biggest bowl of soup in the mess hall. You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I told you something about birds that you didn’t know,” he exclaimed, clasping my shoulder again.

I felt that further conversation, further intimacy, would lead to disclosures I did not want to hear, troubles I could not understand, and horrors I did not want to contemplate.

“Thank you, but I have work to do,” I said. I pulled a notebook and pen from my shirt pocket and pretended to consult it.

Daily skirmishes between RV4 and NC22
, I read. This had resulted in RV4’s death a month previous—the RV, or red-eyed vireo, is a small and feeble if spirited bird; and the NC, or northern cardinal, is fierce. But I studied my page as though some mystery lay therein, and the hunter fell silent.

“Well, I don’t want to trouble you,” he said eventually, and the friendliness was gone from his voice. “You got a good job. You get on with it.”

He began to walk down the ravine in the direction I’d come from.

“I just come for the mushrooms,” he called over his shoulder.

I was back in my truck driving home hours later when a memory overwhelmed me with shame. I am not normally given to shame, by the way. And I do not know why this memory took so long to surface when so many things he had said might have triggered it.

I had done my own training in North Carolina at the age of seventeen—a year younger than he was, I suppose, and I didn’t know then that it was training. Moreover, he was probably drafted, while my parents paid handsomely for my own experience: I spent twenty-eight days in the same mountains outside Asheville with twelve other teenagers as part of an Outward Bound course; hiking and orienteering through the same rhododendron thickets, so dense they resembled an Asian jungle, and learning field skills that proved handy much later. I could make a perfect coffee with even rudimentary equipment afterward, and, of course, I still can. I capsized a canoe in white water twelve times in two days, but that is a mistake I have not repeated since. I led all twelve of my companions in the wrong direction and bivouacked late at night near a fetid stream from which we drank, cooked, and washed dishes while our adult instructor chuckled nearby; in the morning we all had diarrhea. Trying desperately to redeem myself, I led everyone straight over a ground hornet’s nest, and though I was unscathed one girl proved allergic. The instructor required me to administer the syringe myself. In another ill-fated expedition a companion and I decided to “scout ahead” in the twilight; he fell twelve feet down a cliff face of about sixty, fortunately fetching up on a narrow ledge. I had to find the group and return with rope later. The same companion stepped on something on a gravel road near midnight; shining my flashlight
down we saw that the heel of his boot had broken a cottonmouth’s jaw.

Outward Bound still operates, of course, but I suspect within much stricter parameters.

One of our twenty-eight days was set aside for a service project. It was the only day we saw structures with roofs and walls. (There are scattered hiking pavilions and other crude structures in the area, but we were not permitted to use them, regardless of weather. The instructor boasted that he had not slept under a roof for twelve years, himself).

I suppose that Outward Bound still runs service projects, too, but my own experience was one that no parent would wish on a child, and I suspect that these have changed, too.

We were taken in a muddy white van to the Vet Center in Greenville—a ramshackle complex where veterans could seek counseling, claim benefits, look one another up for coffee, and so on. Attached to this complex was a sort of rest home or sanatorium with a permanent population of about twenty, all suffering to various degrees from wounds or trauma incurred in service to the United States Armed Forces.

I was assigned for the day to a quadriplegic named Darby. We were not given instructions of any kind; our mission was to provide “companionship” for six hours. You could see that Darby had once been handsome: his hair was still jet black and his square jaw was at odds with the mound of flesh that occupied his wheelchair. One arm of that wheelchair had an ashtray affixed to it with a cylindrical cigarette holder inside and a tube with a mouthpiece that rested over Darby’s shoulder when not in use.

“Hi, Darby,” I said as brightly as I could. “I’m Nathan.”

He did not reply.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” I said. He said nothing.

“It’s a nice day,” I added.

“I do not want to go for a fucking walk,” he said.

“Well, we could play checkers,” I said. “I can move the pieces for you.”

“I do not want to play fucking checkers,” he said.

I changed tactics. I sat down. I tried to read from the newspaper but he cut me off.

“I do not want to hear about the fucking government.”

“How about the sports page?”

“Fuck off.”

“What do you want to do, Darby?”

“I want you to light a cigarette and hold it up to my lips,” he said. Almost as an apology he added, “I hate this damn tube.”

I lit one of his Lucky Strikes and held it to his mouth. He inhaled deeply, held it in, and then spoke with smoke seething from his lips.

“Nurses get uglier every year. This is all I got left.” He inhaled again. “And why did they give me your skinny ass and not that little girl with big tits?”

I wheeled him onto a sort of screened front porch. Outside, the girl allergic to hornets, whom Darby probably had in mind, was playing Frisbee with her own veteran. He had no right arm, but she was gamely playing with her left. It meant he had to fetch every throw but he didn’t seem to mind. Darby watched them closely.

For the rest of the afternoon, we sat like that, with me lighting up intermittently and holding the cigarette to his lips. After two hours he instructed me to smoke one myself; he didn’t say so but that was the only gift he could give. Often he didn’t feel like talking: sometimes he was lost in a private reverie, and other times he was absorbed in the Frisbee game or some other frolic occurring outside.

I did gather from his occasional terse disclosures that he
had been a chopper pilot assigned to evacuate a squad of fellow marines from an unwinnable firefight in Vietnam. He got nine of them on board when an RPG struck his helicopter. The only things that survived were his brain, heart, and lungs, and Darby didn’t want them anymore.

That is the memory that overcame me as I drove: of Darby, telling me to hold the cigarette up to his damned lips. I turned the truck around and drove back to the forest, but when I followed his tracks away from the ravine I saw that the hunter had gone directly back to his car, leaving nothing behind but an imprint of his tire tread in the mud.

Years ago I carved Lola’s name into dozens of trees throughout Indiana. They were healthy, mature hardwoods: pin oak and poplar and sycamore, and by my inexpert estimate none less than eighty years old, all clustered deep in national forest. The blade I used was a gift from Lola herself—a bowie knife with a buffalo-bone handle, antique but superior to anything manufactured since. Still, it was long, slow, and arduous work. They are called hardwoods for good reason.

“In case you run into a bear or some ninjas,” Lola had written on a small tag tied to the handle. She liked to tease me about the dangers of my job—I had no practical need for such a knife.

My objective in defacing these trees was to eliminate certain small spray painted dots used by the U.S. Forest Service to indicate that a tree was scheduled to be felled. I
turned those dots into the
o
in Lola and worked out from there. Then—in case they simply logged every tree marked “Lola”—I engraved surrounding trees, too. Many of them would be cut down anyway to make room for logging vehicles, but it would be unclear to an untrained eye what the targets were to begin with.