Snapper (23 page)

“Eric is so passionate and exuberant,” she said. “Some people don’t understand that.” This of an insurance salesman.

Slumming it is easier for me than for Lola. I can dribble grease from my chin and afterward I will still be the same
man. I can wear a baseball cap backward and chew tobacco and play air guitar. Lola has fought hammer and claw for her respectability and every move she makes is a sort of habitual recoil from her origins. I’m proud of her, too. But as I sat watching the sham facade she presented to me I was simply angry. Who do you think you are talking to? I wanted to demand. I felt no shame over what I had said before her first marriage. I had said it not from spite, but from ravening jealousy, and I told myself, cramming a fistful of fries into my mouth, that no word is shameful spoken in love.

But why oh why are you hiding from me?

That question answered itself as I listened. She spoke in radiant terms about Eric’s first wife, but I could tell she didn’t like her very much. She praised Ann Arbor for unlikely things like its proximity to Canada, and she was valiant in fending off enemies like those pretentious and polyamorous grad students. Gradually I understood that she was making a stand—again—against the whole grasping past, all those stepfathers and boyfriends and me. She loved Eric and she would stay true at any cost to herself. Even the fact she had come to see me implied the depth of her resolve.

I’ll never say she lacks pluck. But I will say that some day she will see that bare foot in the Christmas photo exactly the way I do.

When we had finished she insisted on paying. She made the standard noises about keeping in touch and bestowed a chaste kiss on my cheek. Then she made her measured way back to her rental car.

Outside, the waitress and the busboy were smoking cigarettes together. I overheard him telling her he’d read all the Harry Potter books in Spanish.

“Nick Casi Decapitado just doesn’t sound as good as Nearly Headless Nick,” he said.

Behind a defensive curtain of long brown hair, she giggled.

A vagrant gull wheeled over the Ohio, and a barge laden with washed gravel cleaved senselessly on.

Squiring Annie through Indiana was embarrassing at first. She was six months pregnant and learning things about me she hadn’t known. I’d point out the car window and say without thinking that I had spent a night in the jail opposite, for example.

“Don’t tell Peach that!” she said. Peach is what we called the lump in her belly when he was a corresponding size. When it was time to fill in the birth certificate, we settled on Shane.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said, and I explained the whole incident. She seemed unconvinced.

“The inmates were really nice,” I added.

Every half hour or so the car radio played advertisements for Fast Eddie’s in Evansville, a couple of hours’ drive away. He had devised a new Kinky Karaoke night (“Sing a Song in a Thong”) that would surely flop in a lesser man’s hands.

“I know the guy who runs that,” I said.

“Planning to visit?” she said. “I think I’ll pass.”

We passed the house in Hickory where the postman had once delivered a pound of marijuana. I had to explain that, too.

“Obviously,” said Annie, “I would like Peach to take after you as much as possible. But I’d be happier if he skipped a few of your younger years.”

Annie is English, which means she’s easily charmed by red barns, covered bridges, log cabins, and the like. She was delighted by the thirty-foot concrete statue of Santa Claus on the side of Highway 41. We almost stopped to help Maud write some letters. To me these things were too familiar—though I had been away for six years—to hold any special attraction. Some of them were too familiar for me to speak openly about to Annie. She knew about Lola, but she didn’t need details.

This was our last excursion before Peach arrived, and she wanted to see where I grew up. When I told my parents by phone to expect a grandchild, they flew immediately to our house in Vermont and helped us with all the nesting we had to do. The prospect energized them more than I had thought possible. I think they had learned to lower their expectations—they were merely hoping I wouldn’t disrupt their dotage with more scrapes, misadventures, accidents, and injuries. They had a wonderful ability to forget my mishaps. I told them about Peach and instantly my mom produced a wealth of things new and old: baby clothes, blankets she crocheted, toys and books she had loved as a child in Texas. My dad began telling stories, reminded me again and again how, at the age of three or four, I had run screaming and terrified from a docile old cow that got lost near a stripper pit where he used to fish.

The trip was for my benefit, too. For several years and for
many reasons I had struggled to put Indiana behind me. Every time I returned, some galling change had occurred—the destruction of old shipyard ruins to make room for a floating casino, for example. I had moved to Vermont to take a job in a raptor rehabilitation center there, and I stayed. Some people think it’s very glamorous and interesting to work in a “hawk hospital,” but chopping up rats and mice is not rewarding work, and neither is cleaning cages. Still, it was the only work I was cut out for. I was able, after a two-year apprenticeship, to take on school visits and demonstrations—I write “falconer” on my tax returns now, and I should make senior falconer any day. I do enjoy it. But what I thought about during those long years of decapitating rodents beneath the lab’s halogen lighting was my time wandering vast tracts of Indiana woodland and riverbank, taking orders from no one, chronicling the lives and births and deaths and domestic disputes of forest songbirds for biology departments and government agencies. I reveled, like Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and Thomas Say and, of course, John James Audubon, two hundred years before me, in the same extraordinary beauty and variety there—reduced, every day, by human encroachment, but resilient and resplendent nonetheless.

Some people go ga-ga for an owl or an eagle—it’s my job to encourage that now. And it’s a good thing. But privately, I prefer a bird that doesn’t shit in its own nest. I had grown more bitter with every clump of severed tails I threw in the trash can.

We passed through a place called Story. When I knew it, it was a beautiful hamlet unchanged since the Depression. Now Indianapolis entrepreneurs have transformed it into an unbearably chic place to have lunch with your in-laws on
Sundays. They installed an immense parking lot next to a barn where Lola and I had once spent the night illicitly, and it was full of sparkling new SUVs. I drove on.

We stopped in Nashville, which at one time was the kitsch capital of the universe. It had warehouses devoted exclusively to garden gnomes and shops specializing in the kind of interior decor that moves—airbrushed waterfalls that flowed when you plugged them in. The important thing is that the townsfolk had no sense of irony about it. A morbidly obese blond woman there tried ten years earlier to sell me some “topless slippers”—slabs of vaguely foot-shaped rubber that adhered somehow to the bottoms of your socks or your bare feet.

“I’m the sole distributor in the Midwest,” she claimed, and she wasn’t making a joke.

Nowadays Nashville has an opera house, and every restaurant has a clutch of stars by its name. I drove on.

I was afraid to find out how Gnaw Bone or Bean Blossom had changed, so I skipped them altogether. Popcorn, Pinhook, Buddha, and Birdseye—all you’ll find in those places now is a lone Dairy Queen on the highway, staffed by surly pregnant teens.

I met Annie at the hawk hospital. She was a volunteer, and she drove a van. The director suggested that she might like to help with transporting injured birds, and she agreed. I showed her how to put an eagle in a cardboard box. She was a lithe blonde who seemingly always wore black or gray, but with some little touch like flamboyant embroidered boots she had bought in Sweden ten years before. She would blend into a crowd, but once you had noticed her you wouldn’t look at anyone else. Later I accompanied her on recovery trips.
She’d drive to wherever an injured raptor was reported to be, and we’d talk in the van. One evening she asked if I’d like to come for dinner sometime.

Two days later I stood in her elegant dining room in the top-floor apartment of a Brattleboro brownstone. She fetched a sherry glass from an antique sideboard and served me a dry sherry. A couple of Waterhouse prints hung on the walls. There were some bookshelves I browsed when she vanished into the kitchen. I saw several books by Peter Taylor, whose stories about Tennessee have given me more satisfaction than any other thing I have read. Next to them were the works of Katherine Anne Porter, and that is where I would have put them, too. She had a bird guide: Sibley, not Petersen, so I thought she might need some guidance. That’s like preferring David Magarshack to Constance Garnett. But when I began to look through it I discovered that I had been a little too quick about Sibley.

She came back in with deep-fried catfish and corn on the cob and succotash.

“That looks a little Southern,” I said.

“Close,” she said. “Southern isn’t quite what I was aiming for.”

“What gave you the idea?”

“I noticed that you never talk about Vermont. Which is good. I don’t know any moose recipes.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Do I talk about Indiana a lot?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. Topic’s exhausted inside of five minutes.”

“Oh, I enjoy it. Though I sometimes wonder why you are here.”

“Well, why are you here?”

“I married young,” she said. “I was nineteen. My husband brought me here and set about exporting maple syrup to England.”

I looked around, alarmed. “I didn’t know you were married,” I said.

“I’m not. We divorced four years ago. But I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Why are you here? You do seem rather bored with it.”

“I kind of like to be bored these days,” I said.

“Great,” she said. “After dinner we can do some knitting together.”

Annie was thirty-six when we met, thirty-eight when Shane was born. I like to think that had we met earlier, we would have a whole squealing, squalling brood. But I’m happy, and so is she—so is Shane, for that matter. Only two, he makes abstract shapes from plastic blocks and says, Look, Daddy. I made a beautiful dinosaur and a washing machine.

Annie is from Devon originally—where the cliffs gnash at the sea and the hills are dotted with wind-blasted sheep. It’s very beautiful and very much to my taste. Yet you could never ever convince yourself, anywhere on that ancient isle, that your foot was the first to tread somewhere; and you do not often encounter a tree two hundred years old, a tree that might have met Audubon personally in its youth.

Annie noticed the anti-abortion billboards before I did. Perhaps I was subconsciously blocking them out. There’s a new one every three to five miles on every highway in the state now.

“You don’t see those in Vermont,” I agreed.

“It’s odd,” she said, “how all the important national debate here is carried out on bumper stickers and highway signs.”

There was a coordinated range of billboards depicting babies and toddlers of carefully distributed ethnic representation.
From half a mile away they were adorable; from three hundred feet you could finally make out the caption:
ABORTION IS MURDER. STOP THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST
. Between these were other signs presumably financed by other groups, with different slogans and blacked-out silhouettes within crowds of smiling children.

“I wouldn’t say it rises to the level of debate,” I said.

“I think it’s good,” she said. “People, well, voters, ought to think about such things. But these are disturbing.”

We were approaching a sign, thirty feet long and fifteen high, with a picture of an embryonic scan, much like the pictures we had at home of Peach. Below it a caption read
KILLING A BABY IS A BAD CHOICE
in a blood-splatter font that you would expect on a horror flick from the seventies.

“Whoever dreamed up that sign has a diseased mind,” she said.

We both fell silent, thinking of Peach.

Any time Lola met my parents, she became so nervous that her cup rattled in her saucer as she spoke (my mom still puts cups in saucers). With Annie it was difficult to tell who charmed whom more. I found it dull at times; real grown-ups making practical plans for the care and growth of a small child. I didn’t understand the pace of parenting yet; I thought he’d arrive one day and start filling out university applications the next. What was even more evident, though, when Mom brought out photo albums and Dad told the story of me running at a flock of geese and them running at me and then him running away—leading by example, he called it—during these exchanges there was a palpable sense that Annie was eager to join this family, and that Mom and Dad were eager to take her in; the past was rewriting
itself somehow to point at this moment, and, most important, there was a curiously Nathan-shaped role developing, a kind of home. Variables might rearrange themselves. Obviously Peach would attend Princeton on a full scholarship, but until then in order to support a family I might need to go into pest control, where the money is. (This colloquy was strictly in my imagination, of course; Mom and Annie were talking about naps and breast-feeding). Such variables could shift in countless ways, but there was an essential equation forming in which I was a constant; I had been assigned an irrevocable value. Meanwhile the three of them were plotting a line between my own childhood and Peach’s, and even to Dad’s (I learned that as a teenager he once caught and roasted a rattlesnake, said it wasn’t very good). It was as though they had formed a little conspiracy, but one so natural you wouldn’t think to call it that—though Lola might. I did, sometimes, watching Annie interact with my parents, remember Lola doing the same, her voice a little too strident, her smile fixed.

“I hadn’t realized,” said Annie to Dad and me one evening in Evansville, “that you two had spent so much time in the woods together.”