The Floatplane Notebooks (13 page)

The hunt was exhausting, and I got to shoot a gun. Meredith, Thatcher, Bobby Simms, and I were at the meeting place, standing around after hunting all day, when Meredith says, “Don't you want to shoot my gun?”

“No. Doesn't it hurt your shoulder?”

“Not if you squat down and lean back on your heels. Look, here's all you do.” He squatted, leaned back, brought his gun to his shoulder. “Boom. Nothing to it. I'll put a tin can on that stump. You can shoot it.”

“I don't think so.”

“Look, if you come hunting you've got to shoot a shotgun, at least once.”

“You promise it won't hurt my shoulder?”

“I promise. You just hold it real loose. Here, come over here.”

“Thatcher, will it hurt?”

“Oh no. Not if you squat like that. Aim down the barrel at the tin can.”

I don't know why I didn't see it coming. I did everything just like Meredith said. Thatcher, Meredith, and Bobby Simms stood back. I squatted, leaned back on my heels and when I pulled the trigger there was a terrible kick to my shoulder and I of course toppled right back onto my behind. They all laughed.

It was an interesting experience all in all, and I'm glad I went, but it takes more stomach than I've got to shoot birds over and over all day long, some of the birds being only wounded when they fall. And sometimes one will be shot down and can run, but not fly, and it won't be found.

On returning, I cleaned only one bird, then Mildred and I went in the house. I took a wonderful hot bath and went to bed early. Tired as I was, I couldn't go to sleep for a long time.

When we get back, Meredith and I put up the dogs. They are tired. I pour the stale water out of the pail which sits just inside the pen gate, rinse away the little bit of fungus, then fill the pail with fresh, cold water. I pat Joe on the shoulder and talk to him a little bit. He did great.

Meredith says, “Next time we're here at the same time might be five or six years from now. We'll be married and have kids.”

“Naw, we can get leave and come down here together and hunt. If I can get stationed at Homestead, or McGill, it'll be close. And you might be down this way. Somewhere close—for a while anyway.”

“What if this was the last time we hunted down here. Hell, we might be dead next year this time.”

“That's crazy, Meredith. The chances are very slim. Very slim.”

“I think about it.”

Uncle Hawk comes with dog food in a bucket and portions it out into seven dog pans. The dogs stand back. Prancing in place, saliva stringing from their mouths, they look at Uncle Hawk. He stands for a few seconds, then suddenly shouts, “Eat!”

They jump to it, eating in big gulps.

Meredith and I stay and watch them for a few minutes, then we walk to the table under the shed behind the store. Uncle Hawk has already dumped birds out on the table and started cleaning them. He picks up a bobwhite, pulls feathers from the wings and tail, pulls off the head, and then tears a little hole in the breast skin and skins it, as if ripping off a sweater right down to the feet. Then he breaks off the legs. He picks the feather stubs left at the wings and tail, knifes smoothly upward between the breast and backbone, reaches up and in with two fingers, pulls out the guts and the tiny brown-purple heart and liver, and flings the insides down into a paper sack. He scrapes inside the bird with the knife, dips the headless and naked thing down into—and back up out of—a big pan of reddish water, scrapes it inside again with the knife, then turns it loose into the water where it sinks, wing stubs outstretched, to the bottom of the pan, underwater with the others.

“Simple as pie,” says Uncle Hawk to Bliss.

I pick up a bird, another bobwhite, and hand it to Bliss. She looks at it, turns it around. I pick up another. Its head is turned to one side, stiff, matted. I hold the little hard knob and pull. It holds. I pull harder and it begins to string loose, then separates from the body. I drop the head, a fuzzy marble, into the paper sack.

“Here,” says Meredith to Bliss. He takes her bird. “Let me show you. Like this. Just stretch the wing out and you can grab the feathers and pull them out. See?”

I straighten a wing. The feathers fan out, overlapping, creating a design. They are hard to pull out—not like the tail feathers, which pop out softly.

“Now tear open the skin at the breast,” Meredith says to Bliss.

“What's that soft spot in there?” she asks.

“That's the craw. Now look here, you can pull that right on out. Look a there. Peas. Now just skin him.”

“Just skin him?”

“Just skin him.”

I'm skinning mine. I tear a tiny hole at the breast and the skin and feathers pull away easily—down to the legs. I break away the legs. They snap like wet wooden matches. I run a finger across the bare flesh. It is cool, dry, smooth.

On the trip back to North Carolina, Rhonda keeps calling Bliss “the great white hunter.” Part of the time Rhonda sits between Meredith and me in the back seat. Sometimes her leg is pretty tight against mine, and I remember standing beside her in the bar at the Club Oasis, and I wonder if she ever told Meredith about us going skinny-dipping or the time way before that when she unbuttoned her blouse in the barn with those little kittens crawling all over her.

One summer, a long time ago, Rhonda's family moved into the house out across the field behind my house, the field full of green vegetables that Uncle Albert was raising—low-growing vegetables like peas and snapbeans, no corn that
year. You could see straight across the field. I would look across the field through the clear, wavering heat dancing up from the green vegetables. At one time, for a while, I had played over in her yard with her brother, Terry, but had to stop after Mother brought me out in our backyard one day to hear Mr. Gibbs's loud, drunk voice, floating over to us, over the yellow butterflies darting above the vegetables.

Then Mother, standing in the kitchen, turning chicken in flour—talked to me about Mr. Gibbs. “He's an evil man, Mark—that Randall Gibbs. Coming home all hours, drunk. It's the work of the Devil. I don't want you over there around it. You understand?”

I saw the Gibbs house—full of all the Gibbs—sinking into the ground and going on down and down, finally landing in the firelakes of hell where it burned, with all the Gibbs in it, flames licking through and around it, for eternity.

“Mark, do you understand?”

“Yes ma'am.”

She wrapped me in her arms—her white, floured hands not touching me—and prayed out loud that I would all my life shun the temptation of drink.

And then the skinny-dipping—the summer before I started at East Carolina, four years ago. Meredith had dropped out of Listre Community College and started to work as a lineman.

One night I park at the Club Oasis, in the dirt parking lot full of big, washed-out holes. I'm driving the Ford, which is dressed in a chrome tailpipe extension and the hubcaps that Meredith and I worked on in the shop.

Over the side entrance to the old brick school building is an unlit, broken neon sign:
CLUB OASI
.

I walk through the open doorway. There is a table and chair just inside the door, but no one is there. The hall has a wooden floor, and gives off echoes of my footsteps. The classrooms are all closed except the last one, the bar. I look in: red lights. Someone is moving boxes. I walk straight ahead through swinging saloon doors into the auditorium. The seats have been removed and there are little holes in the floor where screws once held down rows of seats. There is a stage, without a curtain, and a row of empty sockets for footlights.

A member of the band, The Sierras, is setting up equipment.

“I guess I'm the piano player,” I say. “I'm supposed to sit in for Rodney.”

“Great. I'm John. You're Mark?”

“Right.”

“You work with the tapes?”

“Oh yeah. I think I got everything worked out.”

“Great. Listen, would you go back out to that car beside the door—blue Chevy—and get that amplifier in the back seat? I'll get us a beer. They're free for the band.”

My mouth opens. I am saying no thank you. Mother is saying no thank you. I'm five or six, lying on a blanket in the yard with Mother on a moonless night when the sky is clear and the stars are thick, and she talks about God and the heavens and the millions and millions of stars, and how it will be wonderful when I'm old enough to learn to play the piano. She will buy a piano and I can learn to play from Mrs. Thompson and I will always be glad I learned because I can play hymns at church, and at other times when people are together and need a piano player. And I may grow up to be a concert pianist and dedicate my body and mind and soul to Christ.
Clean living and performing for the glory of God. And I visualize the white and black keys of a piano, my hands on the keys, moving, making the sounds, the clear sounds of a song.

My Sunday school teachers—Mr. Tillman, Mr. Stokes, Mr. Umstead—are saying no, no thank you, no beer, no alcohol. My Sunday school students—Kenny Clere, Tom Dunn, Phil Register—aunts, the Bible, Jesus, Paul, Peter, Doubting Thomas, and God are all saying no thank you. But there is no sound. Only the noise of a box sliding across the floor in the bar.

I start to speak again. Then I figure I will just let the beer sit there. No need to say anything. I turn and walk out of the auditorium, down the hall, staring straight ahead—through the far open door at the clear, yellow horizon.

I come back with the amplifier. Two cold, sweaty, heavy cans of Budweiser beer are on the edge of the stage.

“We're really glad you could make it,” said John. “Piano players are hard to come by, ‘less it's some girl or something.” He walks to the edge of the stage, stands beside the cans of beer. I am standing down on the auditorium floor. He sits down on the stage, picks up his beer and takes a swallow. “I didn't ask what you wanted. Hope a Bud is okay.”

“Yeah. Fine.”

I look around at all the space in the open auditorium, the empty corners, floor. Just a swallow, I think; I can just try it. I won't have to drink it all. I can just taste. It won't hurt me just to taste it. It certainly won't make me sick. I can leave the rest of it sitting here. Just a taste. I look around the auditorium again, pick up the can quickly, put it to my lips, turn it up, back down. The taste is metallic, carbonated, cold, strong.
Not so bad. Not so bad. It is all right. It is okay to taste it.

“That'll help you tickle them ivories,” says John.

At ten forty-five we stop for our second break. I've finished four beers. The very top of my head is somehow dizzy, my eyes feel strained in a comfortable way, and my cheeks are beginning to numb. I watch the people on the dance floor move toward the bar. I know Meredith isn't coming tonight. He, Thatcher, and Uncle Albert are at the races in Franklinton. I scan for Rhonda but don't see her. I think about the time she unbuttoned her blouse. I walk to the steps at the edge of the stage, stop and look again, walk down the steps, onto the dance floor and into the bar.

Suddenly a hand is resting just above my left hip, one finger through a belt loop. I turn my head, look into Rhonda's eyes, speak from a dream: “Well, well, howdy. Good afternoon.”

“Howdy. I, I didn't think we was ever going to get here. I come with Snodie Smith. Did Meredith go to the races?”

“Oh, yeah.”

We fill an empty space at the counter.

“I might need a ride home,” she said. “I don't know yet. If I do, can I ride with you?”

“Sure. Sure. That'll be fine. Just dandy.”

“I'm going to sing in a band myself,” she says. “I've already started. We been practicing. We already got a piano player, though. I wish we didn't. Danny Driscoll. You know him?”

“Yeah, I know Danny.”

We stand at the bar. Her finger rests in my belt loop. “Have you all played ‘I Need Your Loving Every Day'?” she asks.

“Not yet, but we're ‘pose to.”

“I love that song to death.”

“I'll personally see iss de'cated you.”

“You will?”

“Sure will. Now what did you say your name is?”

We laugh, heads falling back, as Rhonda presses—from hip to knee—against me. I take a deep swallow of beer, and Rhonda, bright-eyed, blond, red-lipped, holding the rim of her beer can against her teeth, looks at me with what I believe is, and fear is, and know is—and far away inside pray isn't—lust and hope.

After the last song, the band members tell me I've done a great job. I thank them. It was wonderful. I want to do it again. I tell them I'd love to play again—anytime. I look around for Rhonda but don't see her. I am very dizzy. Then I see her come through the swinging saloon doors with a beer in her hand. She looks up at me, walks up the stage stairs, over to me and grabs my shirt at the elbow. “Snodie Smith said you are as good as Jerry Lee Lewis.”

“Well. Well, well.”

As best as I can, I help the boys pack up the band equipment. Rhonda helps.

We walk to the Ford. It's a hot night.

“God,” says Rhonda, “I could use a swim. Where'd you get them hubcaps?”

“Bought them.” I don't tell her they're the ones that came with the car, and Meredith and I sanded the black paint from every other little pie-slice section and painted them white.

“They're snazzy.”

I open her door.

About a mile down the road, Rhonda slips over against me. “Do you mind if I sit a little closer?” she says.

“I don' mind.”

She leans over into the back seat. “God, it's hot,” she says, and as she rolls down the window behind me, her breast moves steadily, warmly, heavily against my shoulder. “I wouldn't mind taking a little swim,” she said. “How about you?”

“I don' mind.”