by Bill Heavey
The real, the artificial, and the artificially real coexist happily here. A hundred-pound alligator snapping turtle born sometime in the 1800s lies motionless in a tank near Marine Accessories. It holds its breath forever, seldom moves, and consequently doesn’t quite look real. But something inside you knows that it is, knows it could take your hand off at the wrist and not even feel bad about it. The four-story waterfall with headwaters near the in-store McDonald’s tumbles past trophy elk and mountain goats and the live snake exhibit near Triple Play Sports Collectibles ($1,300 for a signed Michael Jordan jersey), then spills into a reflecting pool where dark catfish motor endlessly beneath the paddling feet of teal and wood ducks. A little farther on, the reflecting pool turns into a 64,000-gallon aquarium housing all manner of freshwater fish. The star here is Gertie, a nineteen-pound largemouth bass believed to be the biggest in captivity. Every day except Christmas, a scuba diver descends into the tank for the fish-feeding show, while visitors watch from the Uncle Buck Auditorium through Plexiglas. After the show, the faithful nuzzle up to the glass to pay homage to Gertie. She’s a few pounds shy of the holy grail of bass fishing, the 22-pound, 4-ounce monster that was caught by George Washington Perry in Georgia back in 1932. Guys have come close to the magic number in recent years, mostly in a few lakes around—of all places—Los Angeles. There is general agreement that the record breaker is even now finning its way around out there, swallowing ducklings, water snakes, and smaller fish whole. She (girl bass get bigger than boy bass) may even be showing up now as a blip on some angler’s sonar.
The fish that breaks the record that has stood for more than half a century will be worth a million bucks to its owner in product endorsements alone. It will be a bittersweet victory in some ways. Bass anglers take a perverse pride in knowing that all our high-tech boats, tackle, and electronics don’t impress the fish. We like it that the world record was taken by a guy who built his own skiff with seventy-five cents’ worth of scrap lumber, using a $1.33 rod and a wooden Creek Chub Wiggle Fish with glass eyes. Still, you have to admit that Gertie is one boss hawg, a Rubenesque beauty of a bass. Any fisherman worth his salt would gladly pawn his wife’s engagement ring for a shot at a fish like that.
Outdoor World is founded on the golden rule of retail: The longer you entice people to stay in the store, the more likely they’ll open their wallets. But after three hours, I find the opposite is happening. I’m paralyzed by the abundance. Numbly strolling through the crankbait aisles, I come upon an old standby bass lure, the Rat-L-Trap. When I started fishing, it came in two sizes and three colors, I think. Now it comes in six sizes and forty-seven colors, from Bleedin’ Shiner to Firetiger. If you bought one in each size and color, your boat would sink, all the lures would catch on your clothing, and then they’d drag you down to Lunker Land.
I slide over to soft plastics, another huge market segment. There are Super Squirts, Squirmin’ Squirts, Sparkle Squirts, Lightning Squirts, and (my personal favorite) Squirmin’ Jerks. There are tackle boxes small enough to slip into a shirt pocket and others big enough to use as a life raft. There is braided fishing line and mono fishing line, stuff that glows fluorescent yellow in the water and stuff that turns invisible. I can’t keep up with all of it. Maybe I’m the Squirmin’ Jerk.
Over in Hunting, it’s the same, but more so. Every garment comes in fleece, cotton, and cotton-polyester blend and in twelve shades of camouflage. Do the deer and turkeys and ducks appreciate the subtle differences between Apparition and Mossy Oak, Realtree X-tra Brown and Blaze Camo? I’m drawn by the sound of falling water into the Gore-Tex section, where a mannequin stands in a shower stall beneath a perpetual jet of water wearing that company’s waterproof laminate in his parka, boots, and pants. You want to throw him a towel and give him some hot soup. I listen to two guys debating the purchase of a video called The Magic of Squirrel Hunting. A guy blows into a bull elk grunt tube that is big enough to unclog a toilet. It sounds sort of like it’s trying to warn all the other toilets in the area. At the gun counter, I pick up a rifle stock with a twelve-power scope on it, damn near as big as the Hubble, and aim it down the aisle. I see a gob of flesh and realize it’s the earlobe of a woman standing eighty feet away. She sees me, too. Sees me pointing a rifle stock her way. I put the gun down, smile sheepishly, give her a little wave. She is not amused.
At seven, I’m out front to meet Jane. In six hours at Outdoor World, all that I have purchased is a dark green Redhead chamois hunting shirt. It’s a discontinued color, marked down from $24.95 to $9.99. The outer lobes of my brain are on the blink, leaving only the reptilian core functioning. But I’m still a sucker for a deal. When I get in the car, she looks at my face, sees it’s drained of color.
“Too long in Disney World?” she asks.
I nod. I feel as if I’m five years old.
A MORNING IN THE BLIND
The sun is little more than a reddening inflammation in the east, the clouds low and scudding over the Chesapeake when Charlie Laird spots the ducks, spots them so far out they look like motes floating across my eyes, which are tearing up from cold.
“Don’t move,” he tells the three other men in the blind. Not moving is the easy part. There are mummies wrapped in fewer layers than I am. The interesting part is whether I can raise a 12-gauge to eye level.
“Canvasbacks,” Charlie confirms happily when they’re still three hundred yards out. “Remember, one apiece,” he says.
The last thing he wants is some itchy out-of-towner—me—going home with a bad taste in his mouth and a hole in his wallet. Scott, the local warden, is one of our party, enjoying a rare couple of days of hunting ducks instead of poachers at the tail end of the season. Charlie and Scott have been friends for years. And they both know Scott would have his pen out to write up the violator, no matter who it is, before the second duck hit the water. (“It’s a real small world down here,” Scott says of the Eastern Shore. “You lose your reputation once, you’re over.”)
The cans, numbering about twenty, come by high and purposeful, like they’ve got someplace else to be. But there’s something about the lay of the dekes that gets to them. They fly past, bank right, do a figure eight that brings them back for another look, and head down the shank of the hook to the calm water in front of the blind. You can see the chestnut red of the drakes’ heads and necks, hear the hissing of their wings as they descend. Charlie waits until the birds at the bottom tier of the flock have their landing gear down. Then he calls, “Take ’em.” Scott immediately knocks down a drake. Bob and I each need two shots to tumble a bird, a drake for him, a hen for me. It’s all over in seconds. “Hold up!” shouts Charlie. The danger of overshooting past, his voice returns to normal. “Nice shootin’, guys.” While he gets the boat to pick up the ducks, the rest of us just grin at each other. It’s not fifteen minutes into legal light and we’ve already limited out on the fastest-flying, best-eating duck there is.
“They don’t come to the ’coys any prettier’n that,” says Bob, who manages an insurance agency up the road.
“Boy knows his stuff,” agrees Scott.
Charlie’s knowledge of the marsh is bred in the bone. The Lairds have been living here for five generations, no great stretch of time by local standards. Some folks trace their line back to the English colonists who waded ashore nearby at St. Mary’s City in 1634. For generations men molded their lives to the rhythm of the seasons along the Indian-named rivers—Nanticoke, Wicomico, and Big Annemessex. They netted the running fish in spring, farmed the loamy soil, tonged oysters, and set crab pots in the summer, hunted ducks, geese, and deer in the fall, trapped muskrats and coons in the winter. You didn’t get fat at this life, but it worked its way into you the way salt rubbed into a ham works its way to the bone. After a while, you weren’t fit for life anyplace else. And you didn’t care to be.
The old way is disappearing faster than a falling spring tide. The estuary the A
lgonquins called Chesepiooc, Great Shellfish Bay, now produces a tiny fraction of the protein it did two generations back. Small farming makes the state lottery look like a prudent use of your money. Many families have done the arithmetic and moved to take indoor work in Baltimore, Norfolk, or farther. Then there are guys like Charlie, too in love with the marsh or just too proud to be the one to break the chain.
“I learned these marshes the same way my daddy and his daddy did. Got my first pair of hand-me-down hip boots at seven, started trapping at eight. Got my older brother’s .410 and a .22 the same year. Always had a boat, always had a dog, spent all summer getting ready to duck hunt. My dad would have to chase me down and throw me in the shower every so often just to get the mud off. How you gonna leave a place like that?”
Charlie works a full-time job as a guard at the prison nearby, raises nearly a million chickens a year with his brother and sister, rises at four each morning to check traps for coons and muskrats. On top of that he takes about one hundred clients a year waterfowling or bowhunting for deer on 1,300 acres of land he leases. He doesn’t log a lot of sack time, wouldn’t know Seinfeld from a signpost, doesn’t get to take his fiancée and her three boys out to eat as much as he’d like. But he counts himself a lucky man. He loves his work, and it shows up in repeat customers. In seven years, he’ll have his twenty in as a guard and with the pension as backup, figures he’ll be able to guide full-time. “If I can show folks how beautiful this place is, put them on to the birds, and make ’em feel they got their money’s worth, I’m happy,” he says.
The next day brings sleet but no wind. But the serious business of hunting ducks gives you license to build forts with the fervor of a six-year-old, and Bob and I throw ourselves into the task. We heap armfuls of cordgrass until the walls are so high you have to stand up to shoot out of it. Then we sit inside and feel the intimacy of the blind sneak up on us, stripping away the layers of modern life that conspire to keep one man separate from another. It’s a magic that never gets old.
Prompted by no one, Bob starts telling how he and his wife of twelve years are headed for a divorce. They still talk on the phone each day, even go to church together, but he has moved out of the house. The counseling didn’t seem to take. They’re trying to make it easy on the kids. He talks as if the whole thing were a moving train and he just happens to be a passenger on it. I don’t say anything, because all I can think of are the pat words that carry no meaning. Hey, it happens. Rough on everybody concerned. Way of the world.
But Charlie is made of sterner stuff, doesn’t look up or down to anybody, doesn’t set much store by “tact” when it’s truth a guy needs to hear. He looks Bob straight in the eye. “Listen,” he says abruptly. “I ain’t known you but two days and I can read you like a book. You’re a nice guy, anybody can see that. And just from hearing you talk, I know you got a good woman. But you’re stubborn and selfish and you got your priorities backwards. And you’re both hurting and drifting into a divorce neither of you wants.” He scans the sky for birds and turns his attention back to Bob. “I’m not sayin’ this outta meanness, and I’m not looking for a policy discount.”
Bob manages a little laugh. “I know you’re not,” he says softly. But Bob’s eyes are widening and a little glassy.
“How old are you, thirty-four, thirty-five?”
“Thirty-six,” Bob says, blinking.
“How old your little ones?”
“Six and nine.”
“I’m three years younger’n you and I’m telling you: You’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life. You think you’re gonna be happier without her. It don’t work that way. It ain’t even about sex. It’s about being connected to somebody. I was married to a girl everybody warned me about and I didn’t listen. She drank and ran around and had a mouth on her to make a waterman blush. We got divorced, and I’m still paying for it. But now I’m engaged to a girl with three kids and I love ’em like they’s my own.” He shrugs his shoulders, sending melted sleet off his poncho, and thinks. “I seen a lot of my family die,” he says at last. “Uncles and all. And as they got near the end, all of ’em said the same thing: All you got is family. Not a one of ’em wished they’d had more women or made more money or killed more ducks.”
Bob looks down at his hands, watches the sleet beading up on his gloves. But Charlie isn’t done. “Look at me. I’m a big, macho guy. Six four, played catcher four years, and I guarantee you anybody ever ran into me at the plate got the short end of it. And every time I talk to my fiancée on the phone, I tell her I love her. Every time. ’Cause you never know when it’s gonna be the last.” Charlie gazes at a few flecks of pepper wandering across the horizon. “Blacks,” he says. “Guys’ll come by the house when I’m folding laundry or vacuuming and say, ‘C’mon, man, we’re gonna go watch the game and pound a few. That girl’s leadin’ you around by the nose.’ I just tell ’em to go on. Because you know what? Every one of them guys is a loser. So the question is, do you love her?”
“Yeah,” says Bob. “I do.”
“You ever tell her that?”
“Hell, yeah. Say it all the time.”
“That ain’t what I meant. When was the last time you looked her in the eye and told her she’s the most important thing in your life and the only woman you want and you’ll do whatever it takes to keep her?”
Bob stares at his feet. Charlie looks over at Scott. “You know him better’n me. You think I’m telling him true?”
“Every word,” Scott says. “But he’s down to his last card. Bud, you got to do something before it’s too late.”
Bob looks up, blinking hard. “So what do I do?” he asks in a small voice.
Charlie tells him. “You got to do it your own way. But if it was me, soon as I got off this marsh, I’d buy two dozen roses and get myself over there. You take her by both hands and get down on your knees—I’m serious—on your knees. And you tell her you don’t care about your job or your deke collection or how much money she’s spending. You tell her you love her and if you’re speaking from your heart, I guarantee you’ll be crying. And that’s okay, you just go ahead and cry.”
“I’m half crying now,” Bob says. He looks around. “Those black ducks?” he says of birds far out over the bay.
Charlie looks. “Cormorants,” he says. Nobody says anything for a while.
Scott says Bob may need to do something dramatic to show his wife he’s not just talking. “She knows you love those decoys you got. If it comes to that, you just sweep ’em off the mantel and throw ’em out the front door,” he tells his friend. “Decoy ain’t but so much wood.”
Bob sighs. He thought he’d gone duck hunting to get away from his problems and finds he has walked straight into them. But he knows what Charlie’s saying is true and vows he’ll try. He looks like he understands what’s at stake. He’ll chuck the dekes if that’s what it comes to.
Two hours later, we’re heading for our cars. I feel lucky just to have been here, lucky to have limited out on friendship. “Well,” I say to Bob. “I hope it works. You’ve got three guys pulling for you.”
“By the way,” Charlie says, “whereabouts you live up that way?”
“Why?” asks Bob.
“I was thinking I might take a drive up there tonight and be standing outside your door just to make sure none of them ’coys gets hurt when they fall.”
Scott, Charlie, and I crack up. At last Bob does, too.
ALONE WITH A PRETTY WOMAN
IN A SMALL ROOM
WITH A BIG MIRROR
My dance instructor, Miss Harris, has just introduced me to a move in the hustle called the back pass, a tricky little maneuver in which the beginner must avoid slamming into the nose of his or her partner. Done properly, at the last moment you miss, pass each other, the Lady catches the Gentleman’s hand, and he twirls her as if lazily shaking the curl
from a ribbon. Just as I am getting to the point where I’m pretty sure that neither of us will disfigure the other, Mr. Dutcher, the head of the studio, brings over an attractive pupil, introduces her to me as Miss Brady and invites me to try the step with her.
“Sure, Mr. Heavey,” pipes up Miss Harris. “You can do it!”
At that instant, unbeknownst to the three of them, I am transported from the Arthur Murray studio back in time to the following moment: I am ten years old, sent off from home for the first time to summer camp in the White Mountains. The boys stand in a line on the side of the room nearest the dark pine trees, and the girls face them from the dying light on the lake. There is music playing on a phonograph. A pretty girl, slightly taller than I, with freckles and downcast eyes, dutifully allows herself to be led opposite me by her counselor. One of my own counselors tries to tug me forward by the elbow. I freeze. There is a chaos of music; motion and lights are all around me. In that instant, I know but one thought: I will not dance. They will stick my arm in a fire before I will go out on that floor. I cannot look at the girl. I begin to cry and run out of the building and into the night.
Miss Brady, of course, knows none of this and is waiting politely for me to start breathing again. We do the step, mangle it, I murmur my apologies. Both instructors applaud and say, “Good job.”
But I have done it. It is over. And forcing my body to do the back pass in the hustle with a stranger has made me recall a moment I pushed from my memory years ago.
Over the years I have become rather accomplished at not dancing. As early as the tenth grade, I developed a routine where, after my parents dropped me off at a weekly “cotillion” run by a menacingly correct woman named Mrs. Shippens, I would open the door to the building, wave goodbye to the receding station wagon, and spend the hour and a half in a nearby burger joint making chains out of straws. At parties in later years, the sound of furniture being pushed back in living rooms became my cue to fade into the kitchen. I remember actually leaving one party over the back fence rather than face the music.