Snapper (3 page)

I didn’t think I should share this information with Gerald.

Virgil materialized at the sound of food rattling into his bowl. I don’t know where he had been, but he paid no attention to us.

“Where does she work?” Gerald said, much more to the point. I’d bet whole oil wells on Gerald finding the female of any other species. But she didn’t exactly work. She’d received several grants and fellowships throughout her academic
career—she was an exceptional student. She also collected small fees for nude modeling sessions at the local Arts Center, and managed to live on them in summer. I didn’t share this with Gerald, either.

In any case, she would have fed Virgil.

“She didn’t plan to be away,” I said.

“How do you know that?” he said.

“I mean you’re right. She would have asked me to feed the cat.” I didn’t mean to be a bitch. It just happened.

The front door opened, and Lola appeared there with one arm around an embroidered silk shirt and lavender corduroys flared above the pointiest black boots I had ever seen. I didn’t recognize the man inside them, but that was unimportant. We were all interchangeable anyway. He could be Nashville or he could be Memphis or he could be Hamamatsu, Japan. Let X = job, let Y = hairstyle, let Z = favorite film. Lola’s whim was axiomatic, verging on proof. Lola stared at me, her mouth a perfect O. She hates to be discovered. I searched for something caustic to say, but Gerald spoke first.

“We were just feeding the cat,” he said.

Lola launched into an unbearable display of gratitude and pleasant surprise, and she chirped introductions as though none of us had the least thing in common (his name was Darian, almost as pretentious as those jester boots. I decided he was someplace scummy and dull like Indianapolis). Virgil began to insult us by rubbing his sides on those corduroys.

“Wasn’t that storm just thrilling?” said Lola.

“Awesome,” said Darian.

“Nathan was out in it,” said Gerald.

“Awesome,” said Darian.

“We watched through the window of the Square Knot Café,” said Lola. That was an extremely stupid thing to do,
and I nearly said so. Instead I said, “Awesome,” but she missed my point entirely. She was adroit like that, and this charade could have gone on indefinitely without some decisive action on my part. Her laughter, which usually had for me a quality of an elixir escaping a vial, seemed abruptly like an aerosol can aimed at my face.

“Gerald,” I said. “Let’s go to your place. I have a question about square roots.” He followed me out and back to his front porch, where we sat for a half hour without speaking. He was the more forlorn, because at least I should have seen it coming. I stood up to go but had a second, better thought.

“Gerald,” I said. “When was the last time you went out and got blind drunk?”

He peered at me as though he had just spotted a Lesser Mississippi Mud Thrush, last verified nearby in 1936. I would need to coach him on technique.

I doubt anyone outside Southern Indiana knows what a stripper pit is. They don’t exist anywhere else. This is sometimes embarrassing for me in conversation, if I say I spent many happy adolescent hours there. People think I’m talking about Thong Thursdays at Fast Eddie’s. The British Broadcasting Corporation once sent a reporter by boat to Evansville to investigate the wild ways of the inhabitants—the kind of thing they used to do in “deepest Africa,” I think. We are Hoosiers after all.

On a technical level a stripper pit is what remains of a bituminous coal mine, but strip mining is not like other mining. Picture vast granite cliffs topped with coniferous trees, deep lakes of calm cerulean blue—imagine a majestic Norwegian fjord somehow misplaced among rolling cornfields—that is what a stripper pit looks like. At the bottom of those lakes
you’ll find old refrigerators and stolen cars and bags of kittens. It is Southern Indiana.

Before the mining company got to it, it was woodland or farmland or, in some cases, small towns. The beauty of strip mining, if you’re a mining company, is that you don’t have to dig for your coal: you just scrape everything off the top for several surrounding square miles. Then you scrape yourself a lucrative pit where the bituminous is piled deepest. Some people will tell you it’s anthracite, but they’re wrong: even the coal around there is second-rate.

The only downside to this kind of operation is that even Hoosiers won’t tolerate the total obliteration of the landscape for long.

So if you were a strip mine in about 1973 you found yourself suddenly filled with water and stocked with fish. Your hillsides were covered in alien trees—the mining company was footing the bill and they weren’t fussy. Overnight you got used to deer and raccoons and possums, rattlesnakes and songbirds and foxes, wild dogs and butterflies. Not long after that you lost count of the hunters and anglers and campers and delinquent kids setting fire to things.

I used to go to various stripper pits in Warrick County with my friend Shane in his ’79 Chevy Silverado. His dad still keeps it running. Shane’s dad is a poet. Hoosier poets aren’t like other poets. Last time I saw him the three of us pinned a beer can to a tree and threw knives at it all afternoon. Shane and I, with our “scientifically-balanced” mail-order throwing knives, began to get the hang of it after a couple of hours. Shane’s dad, a big man with a snowy beard that makes you think of Poseidon, stood twenty feet away with a rusty old kitchen chopper and he nailed it every time.
Underhand
. Poets in New York and San Francisco can’t do that.

My dad was a mathematician, and he shared an office with Shane’s dad. That tells you something about the University of Evansville back then. It’s better now; it has to be. There’s a new one on the other side of town.

Our dads got along very well, made jokes about how writing a sonnet and proving a theorem were essentially the same thing. They weren’t sociable after hours, though. My dad stayed home reading cheap thrillers he got from the library by the armful. My mom read Book Club books. Shane’s dad liked to take his wife skinny-dipping when the kids were out. Shane told me this, not his old man. You still notice the way those two look at each other, and they’re both north of sixty now.

Our families in general weren’t that close, not back then. All kinds of convoluted things happened later between my brother and his sister and me and his other sister. Shane made jokes about marrying
my
sister. But the time I am talking about, when I was sixteen and he was a year older, it was just us, and we spent a lot of time at the stripper pits, as I said.

Shane thought he’d be a poet, too. He’s now a librarian with three kids, but back then people laughed at him a lot. He would stare dreamily skyward and someone would say, “Look, guys. Craddock wants to be a bird.”

His shoulder-length hair and gypsy earring didn’t help.

It was the same kind of ribbing his dad must have endured when he went through college on a football scholarship. He’d sit on the bench during games reading Shakespeare. Nobody pushed either of them too far, though. Shane and his dad are both well built.

I was going to be a philosopher. The university had one, and he spent most of his time buying drinks for flouncy co-eds. That was probably the best career plan I ever had.
Ecology and the study of songbird decline came later. Philosophy might have been more cheerful, because at least it is already dead.

We stuck close together at school, as you can imagine, and in the evenings and on weekends especially we’d kick around in the stripper pits. Sometimes we took fishing gear, but we never caught much. We built fires and talked and ate beans from the can using a bowie knife as a spoon. We skipped a lot of stones. We skipped
a lot
of stones. Thirty-four hops was my personal record. I have very long arms.

We’d see people sometimes and say hi, but never stop to talk. I am eternally grateful we never encountered Shane’s parents in the nude. They must have known some smaller, more secluded pit.

Shane had a tendency to talk rhapsodically about
The Faerie Queene
and other things I’d never heard of. I thought my job was simply to argue with anything for the sake of arguing. He felt that he was communing through the ages with the great spirit of Edmund Spenser, and I told him he was full of it. These sessions probably did us both good. For two summers running we went out there almost daily, and our parents didn’t make us look for jobs. They must have thought it was doing us good, too.

“Just don’t step in anything,” my dad said.

We found an old green aluminum rowboat upside down on a hillside and covered in last year’s leaves. If it had been near the water we might have left it alone, but the hill and the leaves suggested it had been abandoned, or so we said. The owner couldn’t possibly hope to find it again except by accident. We stowed it where we could get to it, bought some cheap plastic oars, and started to take it out now and then.

We didn’t talk so much in the boat. Talk echoed, and it was
mesmerizingly still if you stayed quiet. We were “encircled by the hem of heaven,” Shane declared once. If you stayed absolutely still the lake reflected the cliffs and trees and sky so faithfully you felt you were sitting in the center of a globe comprising two identical but separate worlds.

Shane picked me up one morning and he had someone else in the cab, which surprised me. I knew him by sight from school but I didn’t realize that he knew Shane, and I couldn’t see why Shane had brought him along.

“Name’s Eddie,” he said, holding a hand out for me to shake. I shook it.

“Name’s Nathan,” I said.

We talk about firm handshakes and limp handshakes and so on; Eddie had the handshake of someone who is genuinely glad to see you. It’s a trick I think politicians must have, and it’s rare. Eddie was handsome, with an angular jaw and dark floppy hair and the sort of crooked grin I used to practice in the mirror but never mastered.

Instantly I knew something was awry, because Shane didn’t say anything. Ordinarily he could be facing a firing squad and he’d still offer you a cigarette. I didn’t know a thing about Eddie then, so I couldn’t figure it out.

He’s now very wealthy, even famous as the proprietor of Fast Eddie’s. I have never been there myself, but I can recap the national scandal he caused. His is nominally a dining establishment, full name Fast Eddie’s Burgers & Beer, but he inaugurated a thong contest in which lady customers participated for free drinks and dinner. You would have thought that only in Evansville would they take him up on it, but after the first furor he was copied everywhere. For professional titillation he would have needed a license, but by outsourcing it to the customers he made a mint.

The dictionary definition of
Hoosier
is “a native or resident of Indiana.” The commonest usage in all four states bordering Indiana, and even as far west as St. Louis, is as a synonym for
idiot, redneck, lowlife, loser, bumpkin
. Reviled on all sides, Hoosiers do not make much of their distinctive name, nor generally think much of their native state. Indiana is rural, agricultural, and surrounded by bully states with great confidence in their own sophistication.

The origin of the word is unknown. Silly stories abound about the sound of someone calling “Who’s there?” through the door of a log cabin in pioneer days, and of bar brawls followed by inquiries into whose ear lay on the floor. One of the more reasonable theories is that the name stems from a shipping magnate from the nineteenth century. “John Hoosier’s men” referred to a number of notorious roughnecks who plied the Ohio River on flat log rafts near Evansville, and who may have given the state denizens their nickname and a precursor of their reputation.

And yet: if Indiana is the bastard son of the Midwest, then Evansville is Indiana’s snot-nosed stepchild. A bend in the river—causing it to stretch a mile wide at some points—gives the area other peculiarities, which may have some bearing on its residents’ eccentricities. To the west of the city of Evansville lies the northernmost cypress grove of its kind in the country, a miniature swamp where bald eagles nest and paddlefish flash in the sun. To the east of the city, as you approach the stripper pits, lies the northernmost pecan grove of its kind, somewhat less picturesque. Ecologically speaking it is as though two slender Southern fingers were reaching up to pinch Evansville and spirit it back to Dixie, or at least
back to northern Kentucky. It was near Evansville that the Confederates made their only raid north of the Ohio. The local speech has inflections that are closer to the mellifluous twang of Kentucky than the harsh bland nasalities of Indiana proper. Kentucky, of course, would rather move en masse to Mexico than claim any kinship with Evansville, but its likeness is undeniable.

I talked to Shane’s dad about this once. He makes great company over a pitcher of beer and a pool table.

“Neither North nor South nor fish nor fowl,” he said.

“I guess that makes it red meat,” I said.

“It’s peculiar,” he said. “But it’s not all bad. You know the Whirlpool factory?”

That was a rhetorical question; it was one of the city’s largest employers. It’s closed now; the operations were moved overseas.