Snapper (8 page)

He took me out to shoot tin cans, not turtles. I sold the gun to a pawn shop a week later, but I did enjoy that afternoon.

“Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it,” he said.

I was hopeless, and hit about one in five. He shot left-handed and didn’t miss.

“You gonna bury that sign?” I said.

“Done that already.”

“What exactly did you tell them?”

“First they wanted to know if I was affiliated and I said I was not. Then they asked if I would like to be affiliated and I said I would not. They asked me to clarify my views on certain subjects and I told them to mind their own business.”

“They thought you had made your views pretty plain.”

“Only Yankees have
views
. Texans aren’t that self-righteous.”

There was no point arguing a proposition like that with Dart.

“Well, what did you say to the judge?” I asked.

“I promised him fried songbird,” he said.

“At least tell me what you said,” I insisted.

“I clarified my views like they asked. I said nothing but nothing matters to me except my family.”

I thought he was bound to miss the next shot under the influence of all that sincerity, but the last tin can proved me wrong.

“Set up some more,” he said.

Strip search, jumpsuit, interrogation: I got through all that okay. I got deloused. They gave me a private cell. All the cells opened onto a metal platform with stairs down to a huge living room with TVs and guys smoking pot, though it was only 7:00 a.m. There were even some books.

What freaked me out was the shadow in my cell door when I was inspecting the bed. I turned and faced a black man the size of a vending machine.

Oh shit, I thought.

Hey man, he said. You got a square?

I handed the whole pack over and he took a single Camel, said thanks, and wandered off.

It seemed like a breach of etiquette to stay in my cell with a book if it wasn’t lockdown. If I had known I’d be out the same afternoon I probably wouldn’t have gone down, but I did.

The black guy was all right. His black friends were all right too, even if they smoked all my cigarettes. A bunch of white guys were playing D & D. They wanted to know what I had done.

Student?

This was from a white guy with a gray goatee and a blond ponytail, rake-thin, or probably heroin-thin now that I think about it.

What you in for? he said.

Time like that, you want to earn some respect. I eighty-sixed my old man, you want to say. I been collectin’ teeth. This was the Bloomington city jail, though, and I didn’t know what you had to do to get there.

It wasn’t really my fault, I said.

That might work over dinner with friends, but a cell block is always hungry for stories.

This friend of mine. He was hitting a parking meter with a two-by-four.

They laughed.

You’ll be out later today, said the black guy from a corner full of black guys. Cool Hand Luke, said one of the D & D players, and he offered me a toke, but I declined. He was fat and he belonged on a Harley. He had done me a huge favor. You don’t choose your own prison name.

I don’t talk to my friend anymore. I Google him sometimes and find video clips of him singing songs about Nehemiah. He’s a big hit in some crazy religious sect out West, apparently. I can’t decide what’s worse: how he was, or how he is.

He was a soulful moper who played guitar in cafés and sang just about every song Bob Dylan ever wrote. About
three or four songs along he’d start crying—pretty funny if it was “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”—and just bawl and wail and strum for another hour, maybe finish with Neil Young. He was a popular act. Audiences assumed he was faking, and bars billed him as a comedy show, but the tears were genuine. That was his public self. In private he was always giving you his last beer or square or dime, but he never let you know it was the last.

And yet. His housemates had a restraining order against him. You put beer in this guy and he was okay, wine and he was negotiable. Give him a whiskey and he burned your favorite posters where they hung on the wall. No flowerpot, coffee cup, fruit bowl, or ashtray was safe. He smashed a sugar dispenser I purloined from Waffle House once, and for months afterward I had armies of tiny translucent ants scouring the kitchen floor.

Some people found this very entertaining, as long as it wasn’t their house. We’d go to parties, even though he hated parties, complained that there was more to life than mating. How anyone could deduce that living in Bloomington back then was a mystery to me.

He set off a fire extinguisher at a party once and a friend of mine blocked the spray with his body from hitting this girl. They had never even met and now they’ve got three kids. Another time at a barbecue he started throwing empty beer bottles at pedestrians. The girls all left and the boys started placing bets.

I knew worse people. The difference is they were like that sober, too.

We were both nominally philosophy majors, and now and then we would light a fire on some decommissioned railroad tracks and argue ferociously for hours about what it is like to
be a bat. But mostly, I am afraid, I talked about girls and he drank. If I could go back I’d talk about Bob Dylan instead.

I am compressing a few years here. I hadn’t started birding yet, and my prebirding life consisted largely of skipping classes and donating blood for $10 twice a week and spending it immediately on pitchers of beer (any delay would eliminate the light-headed blood-loss bonus buzz). A few times a month I took some hardback books to the French guy who ran the secondhand bookstore and converted those into beer as well. I asked him once when I was studying French what beginner books he would recommend. He spoke several languages and I sometimes found him reading in Cyrillic.

Erotica, he said. You’ll never forget the word for
inner thigh
.

Several times during those years, and often after a few pitchers of beer, I found myself entangled with the wrong girl. Either she lacked conversational zing, or she was the sort of ferociously intelligent person who talked endlessly about animal testing and rainforests. There didn’t seem to be any variation on these two types in town except for Lola, and she got entangled with the wrong people too.

John had an even harder time than I did. Bloomington was and is a kind of intellectual mecca rising from the cultural wasteland of south central Indiana, so it was disappointing to learn that we had to share it with forty thousand students all as aimless as we were. In addition to the students and faculty, Bloomington supported a huge colony of people who never moved on—whose ambitions after graduation were no match for the town’s coffee shops, ethnic clothing boutiques, assorted Thai restaurants, and live music. So they hung around in underpaid or part-time jobs (standing behind the counter at a secondhand bookstore springs to mind) and they made every line at every bar in town that much longer. Eventually I became one of them—underpaid, anyway—and
spent my birding career passing through one quaint college town after another.

John’s booze supplies began to increase on our nocturnal rambles. A fifth wasn’t that much for him, especially after I’d had some. I took big swigs for his sake. He would just get a little restless. Soon he had whole pints with him. Still I thought he was safer with me as a brake than out smashing things.

That night we got through two bottles of red and one of Jack Daniel’s, after starting on beer at the Video Saloon. I am a little hazy on some of the other details. We built a fire because it was snapping cold and we talked for a couple hours.

I was planning to take a Greyhound down to Evansville to see Lola. She had already left for Thanksgiving break. I imagined that if I presented myself to her dashingly, flowers in one hand and wine in the other, speaking French perhaps, she’d agree to get married and the whole complicated script of our relationship would pull itself together, deep six the extras, and whiten our teeth.

John reminded me that she was profoundly unreliable. I reminded him that she had red hair and blue eyes and played the flute. Owns a flute, he said. You told me you never heard her play it. Give her time, I said. He reminded me that she had a boyfriend with a tattoo of a goat. I reminded him that hadn’t stopped her staying the night at my house a few times. I said she knew me better and had known me longer because we came from the same town.

I reminded him that her name was Lola.

See if I care, he said, but that was the whiskey. He was thinking about a Greyhound, too. To Utah or someplace. He said he felt trapped.

I reminded him that she had once picked me out of the crowd and held my eye while belly dancing.

He said just him and his guitar in the desert somewhere. Or maybe under a tree.

I said so long as you come back for the wedding.

He couldn’t really argue with that so he wished me luck and we toasted instead.

We were walking back into town when it hit him. You sit for a long time and you don’t realize how much you’ve drunk; move around a little bit and the booze circulates and you’re on the ground. Only in John’s case he was attacking a parking meter.

John, I said. That’ll never work.

I don’t know if it was really a two-by-four—it was the top beam of a sawhorse like you’d use to stop traffic. It was four inches across and two deep, but it was also six feet long. Whatever that makes it, I don’t know. He found it at the parking lot entrance. The point is that he was slugging that parking meter with it as hard as he could.

I didn’t think of it then, but at 4:30 a.m. that kind of thing is really loud.

Still, the parking lot was next to a local history museum. The place was dead asleep even during the day, and it didn’t occur to me that we were in any danger.

John, I said. There’s easier ways to get spare change. The campus had lots of fountains and if nobody had soaped them lately you could just go wading for it. I bought a lot of beer that way.

John just kept hammering that parking meter. He knew it wouldn’t break, but he put his whole body into it just to show it who he was.

I learned from the cops later that an old lady across the street had called. I looked in the daylight and decided she must have been in the little white ranch house with a prim garden.

The whole parking lot washed red and blue. They didn’t turn on their sirens until they had us in sight, and they shouldn’t have done that. Woke the whole street up.

I was tall, thin, and very drunk, and I tried to hide behind a telephone pole.

John, I later learned, dashed over something and through something and climbed up something else. He lost his glasses, but drunk as he was, he even outran the hound dogs.

My arresting officer, Gene, was pretty amused with that telephone pole.

Don’t worry too much about these, he said, cuffing my hands behind my back. They’re more a formality.

He read me my rights while I fidgeted in the backseat of his prowler, and he sounded pretty bored. He perked up when we got to talking though. It was Gene who told me about the old lady’s phone call.

You were two blocks from the station and it’s four thirty a.m. Otherwise I think you could have gotten away with it.

He didn’t ask me anything about John. I’m sure he knew at first glance I was a student, and he didn’t ask about that either.

You guys been out drinkin’, huh? I can smell it.

I said yeah. I didn’t mention the railway fire since there’s probably a law against that. It’s perfectly safe, though. There are no trains anymore and you can flip it onto the gravel instantly, stamping on the scattered embers afterward.

Don’t worry too much, said Gene. Happens a lot more than you think.

The parking meters?

No, said Gene. Drunk kids. I dress like a cop but half the time I’m just a babysitter. No offense.

None taken.

When my boys reach your age I don’t want to know what they get up to. I do not want to know.

After that night I used to look in every squad car I saw to check if it was Gene behind the wheel. I could have bought him a coffee and asked about his kids, I thought. I never saw him again.

At the station, which sits directly under the jail, there was a fat cop and a wiry one with a mustache. Actually there were cops everywhere—doing the delousing and the strip search and handing over my jumpsuit. Most of them were like Gene—they didn’t apologize or anything, but they made it clear that these were all formalities, nothing personal, no offense.

Fat cop and mustache man, on the other hand—I think they were paid some kind of asshole commission.

Says here you hid behind a telephone pole, said mustache.

I guess that was kind of dumb, I said.

We call it resisting arrest, said fat cop.

Says here you were hitting a parking meter with a two-by-four, said mustache.

It wasn’t actually me. I am not sure it was a two-by-four.

You’re still an accessory to destruction of municipal property, said fat cop.

And attempted theft, said mustache.

And attempted theft, said fat cop. You could tell he wished he had thought of it first.

Tell us your friend’s name and address.

Not sure, I said. I just met him.

Now we got you on obstruction of justice, said mustache. I don’t think fat cop liked it. Mustache was stealing his thunder.

Aiding and abetting a fugitive from the law, he added.

This went on for a while. Every time I avoided a question I got another count of obstructing justice and a couple more charges besides. In hindsight I think they were bluffing.

I figured it wasn’t my fault to begin with, so I gave him up. Name, address, hometown, drinking habits.

I was allowed one phone call. Bail was one hundred dollars. The list of people I knew with cash reserves was a null set, but my friend Flynn had a new girlfriend who drove a red convertible. Flynn grew up in Evansville and had been a model of personal responsibility since the age of six. I prepared to grovel.

It turned out John had been busy. He never went home, just in case I squealed. Instead he had gotten onto every mutual friend we had, never mind the hour, begging for bail. Flynn knew about it already. No, he hadn’t talked to him personally, no, he didn’t know where he was. Sometime later he’d come down with the money if he could get it.