Vintage Ford (2 page)

“They always come November first,” Glen said.

“Are we going to poach them?”

“Does it make any difference to you,” Glen asked.

“No, it doesn't.”

“Well then, we aren't,” he said.

We walked then for a while without talking. I looked back once to see the Nash far and small in the flat distance. I couldn't see my mother, and I thought that she must've turned on the radio and gone to sleep, which she always did, letting it play all night in her bedroom. Behind the car the sun was nearing the rounded mountains southwest of us, and I knew that when the sun was gone it would be cold. I wished my mother had decided to come along with us, and I thought for a moment of how little I really knew her at all.

Glen walked with me another quarter-mile, crossed another barbed wire fence where sage was growing, then went a hundred yards through wheatgrass and spurge until the ground went up and formed a kind of long hillock bunker built by a farmer against the wind. And I realized the lake was just beyond us. I could hear the sound of a car horn blowing and a dog barking all the way down in the town, then the wind seemed to move and all I could hear then and after then were geese. So many geese, from the sound of them, though I still could not see even one. I stood and listened to the high-pitched shouting sound, a sound I had never heard so close, a sound with size to it—though it was not loud. A sound that meant great numbers and that made your chest rise and your shoulders tighten with expectancy. It was a sound to make you feel separate from it and everything else, as if you were of no importance in the grand scheme of things.

“Do you hear them singing,” Glen asked. He held his hand up to make me stand still. And we both listened. “How many do you think, Les, just hearing?”

“A hundred,” I said. “More than a hundred.”

“Five thousand,” Glen said. “More than you can believe when you see them. Go see.”

I put down my gun and on my hands and knees crawled up the earthwork through the wheatgrass and thistle, until I could see down to the lake and see the geese. And they were there, like a white bandage laid on the water, wide and long and continuous, a white expanse of snow geese, seventy yards from me, on the bank, but stretching far onto the lake, which was large itself—a half-mile across, with thick tules on the far side and wild plums farther and the blue mountain behind them.

“Do you see the big raft?” Glen said from below me, in a whisper.

“I see it,” I said, still looking. It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.

“Are any on the land?” he said.

“Some are in the wheatgrass,” I said, “but most are swimming.”

“Good,” Glen said. “They'll have to fly. But we can't wait for that now.”

And I crawled backwards down the heel of land to where Glen was, and my gun. We were losing our light, and the air was purplish and cooling. I looked toward the car but couldn't see it, and I was no longer sure where it was below the lighted sky.

“Where do they fly to?” I said in a whisper, since I did not want anything to be ruined because of what I did or said. It was important to Glen to shoot the geese, and it was important to me.

“To the wheat,” he said. “Or else they leave for good. I wish your mother had come, Les. Now she'll be sorry.”

I could hear the geese quarreling and shouting on the lake surface. And I wondered if they knew we were here now. “She might be,” I said with my heart pounding, but I didn't think she would be much.

It was a simple plan he had. I would stay behind the bunker, and he would crawl on his belly with his gun through the wheatgrass as near to the geese as he could. Then he would simply stand up and shoot all the ones he could close up, both in the air and on the ground. And when all the others flew up, with luck some would turn toward me as they came into the wind, and then I could shoot them and turn them back to him, and he would shoot them again. He could kill ten, he said, if he was lucky, and I might kill four. It didn't seem hard.

“Don't show them your face,” Glen said. “Wait till you think you can touch them, then stand up and shoot. To hesitate is lost in this.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll try it.”

“Shoot one in the head, and then shoot another one,” Glen said. “It won't be hard.” He patted me on the arm and smiled. Then he took off his VFW jacket and put it on the ground, climbed up the side of the bunker, cradling his shotgun in his arms, and slid on his belly into the dry stalks of yellow grass out of my sight.

Then, for the first time in that entire day, I was alone. And I didn't mind it. I sat squat down in the grass, loaded my double gun and took my other two shells out of my pocket to hold. I pushed the safety off and on to see that it was right. The wind rose a little, scuffed the grass and made me shiver. It was not the warm chinook now, but a wind out of the north, the one geese flew away from if they could.

Then I thought about my mother, in the car alone, and how much longer I would stay with her, and what it might mean to her for me to leave. And I wondered when Glen Baxter would die and if someone would kill him, or whether my mother would marry him and how I would feel about it. And though I didn't know why, it occurred to me that Glen Baxter and I would not be friends when all was said and done, since I didn't care if he ever married my mother or didn't.

Then I thought about boxing and what my father had taught me about it. To tighten your fists hard. To strike out straight from the shoulder and never punch backing up. How to cut a punch by snapping your fist inwards, how to carry your chin low, and to step toward a man when he is falling so you can hit him again. And most important, to keep your eyes open when you are hitting in the face and causing damage, because you need to see what you're doing to encourage yourself, and because it is when you close your eyes that you stop hitting and get hurt badly. “Fly all over your man, Les,” my father said. “When you see your chance, fly on him and hit him till he falls.” That, I thought, would always be my attitude in things.

And then I heard the geese again, their voices in unison, louder and shouting, as if the wind had changed again and put all new sounds in the cold air. And then a
boom.
And I knew Glen was in among them and had stood up to shoot. The noise of geese rose and grew worse, and my fingers burned where I held my gun too tight to the metal, and I put it down and opened my fist to make the burning stop so I could feel the trigger when the moment came.
Boom
, Glen shot again, and I heard him shuck a shell, and all the sounds out beyond the bunker seemed to be rising—the geese, the shots, the air itself going up.
Boom
, Glen shot another time, and I knew he was taking his careful time to make his shots good. And I held my gun and started to crawl up the bunker so as not to be surprised when the geese came over me and I could shoot.

From the top I saw Glen Baxter alone in the wheatgrass field, shooting at a white goose with black tips of wings that was on the ground not far from him, but trying to run and pull into the air. He shot it once more, and it fell over dead with its wings flapping.

Glen looked back at me and his face was distorted and strange. The air around him was full of white rising geese and he seemed to want them all. “Behind you, Les,” he yelled at me and pointed. “They're all behind you now.” I looked behind me, and there were geese in the air as far as I could see, more than I knew how many, moving so slowly, their wings wide out and working calmly and filling the air with noise, though their voices were not as loud or as shrill as I had thought they would be. And they were so close! Forty feet, some of them. The air around me vibrated and I could feel the wind from their wings and it seemed to me I could kill as many as the times I could shoot—a hundred or a thousand—and I raised my gun, put the muzzle on the head of a white goose, and fired. It shuddered in the air, its wide feet sank below its belly, its wings cradled out to hold back air, and it fell straight down and landed with an awful sound, a noise a human would make, a thick, soft,
hump
noise. I looked up again and shot another goose, could hear the pellets hit its chest, but it didn't fall or even break its pattern for flying.
Boom
, Glen shot again. And then again. “Hey,” I heard him shout, “Hey, hey.” And there were geese flying over me, flying in line after line. I broke my gun and reloaded, and thought to myself as I did: I need confidence here, I need to be sure with this. I pointed at another goose and shot it in the head, and it fell the way the first one had, wings out, its belly down, and with the same thick noise of hitting. Then I sat down in the grass on the bunker and let geese fly over me.

By now the whole raft was in the air, all of it moving in a slow swirl above me and the lake and everywhere, finding the wind and heading out south in long wavering lines that caught the last sun and turned to silver as they gained a distance. It was a thing to see, I will tell you now. Five thousand white geese all in the air around you, making a noise like you have never heard before. And I thought to myself then: this is something I will never see again. I will never forget this. And I was right.

Glen Baxter shot twice more. Once he missed, but with the other he hit a goose flying away from him, and knocked it half falling and flying into the empty lake not far from shore, where it began to swim as though it was fine and make its noise.

Glen stood in the stubby grass, looking out at the goose, his gun lowered. “I didn't need to shoot that one, did I, Les?”

“I don't know,” I said, sitting on the little knoll of land, looking at the goose swimming in the water.

“I don't know why I shoot 'em. They're so beautiful.” He looked at me.

“I don't know either,” I said.

“Maybe there's nothing else to do with them.” Glen stared at the goose again and shook his head. “Maybe this is exactly what they're put on earth for.”

I did not know what to say because I did not know what he could mean by that, though what I felt was embarrassment at the great numbers of geese there were, and a dulled feeling like a hunger because the shooting had stopped and it was over for me now.

Glen began to pick up his geese, and I walked down to my two that had fallen close together and were dead. One had hit with such an impact that its stomach had split and some of its inward parts were knocked out. Though the other looked unhurt, its soft white belly turned up like a pillow, its head and jagged bill-teeth, its tiny black eyes looking as they would if they were alive.

“What's happened to the hunters out here?” I heard a voice speak. It was my mother, standing in her pink dress on the knoll above us, hugging her arms. She was smiling though she was cold. And I realized that I had lost all thought of her in the shooting. “Who did all this shooting? Is this your work, Les?”

“No,” I said.

“Les is a hunter, though, Aileen,” Glen said. “He takes his time.” He was holding two white geese by their necks, one in each hand, and he was smiling. He and my mother seemed pleased.

“I see you didn't miss too many,” my mother said and smiled. I could tell she admired Glen for his geese, and that she had done some thinking in the car alone. “It
was
wonderful, Glen,” she said. “I've never seen anything like that. They were like snow.”

“It's worth seeing once, isn't it?” Glen said. “I should've killed more, but I got excited.”

My mother looked at me then. “Where's yours, Les?”

“Here,” I said and pointed to my two geese on the ground beside me.

My mother nodded in a nice way, and I think she liked everything then and wanted the day to turn out right and for all of us to be happy. “Six, then. You've got six in all.”

“One's still out there,” I said, and motioned where the one goose was swimming in circles on the water.

“Okay,” my mother said and put her hand over her eyes to look. “Where is it?”

Glen Baxter looked at me then with a strange smile, a smile that said he wished I had never mentioned anything about the other goose. And I wished I hadn't either. I looked up in the sky and could see the lines of geese by the thousands shining silver in the light, and I wished we could just leave and go home.

“That one's my mistake there,” Glen Baxter said and grinned. “I shouldn't have shot that one, Aileen. I got too excited.”

My mother looked out on the lake for a minute, then looked at Glen and back again. “Poor goose.” She shook her head. “How will you get it, Glen?”

“I can't get that one now,” Glen said.

My mother looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I'm going to leave that one,” Glen said.

“Well, no. You can't leave one,” my mother said. “You shot it. You have to get it. Isn't that a rule?”

“No,” Glen said.

And my mother looked from Glen to me. “Wade out and get it, Glen,” she said in a sweet way, and my mother looked young then, like a young girl, in her flimsy short-sleeved waitress dress and her skinny, bare legs in the wheatgrass.

“No.” Glen Baxter looked down at his gun and shook his head. And I didn't know why he wouldn't go, because it would've been easy. The lake was shallow. And you could tell that anyone could've walked out a long way before it got deep, and Glen had on his boots.

My mother looked at the white goose, which was not more than thirty yards from the shore, its head up, moving in slow circles, its wings settled and relaxed so you could see the black tips. “Wade out and get it, Glenny, won't you, please?” she said. “They're special things.”

“You don't understand the world, Aileen,” Glen said. “This can happen. It doesn't matter.”

“But that's so cruel, Glen,” she said, and a sweet smile came on her lips.