You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

  Phil sells almost nothing. He doesn’t even advertise. But over the years, the word has spread among the fraternity of hard-core anglers for thirty miles and more in every direction that if you want your gear fixed and can’t wait three months for the factory to do it, bring it to Phil. He can fix any reel ever made. If he doesn’t have the part, he’ll make it for you.

  And the prices aren’t just good; they’re damn near ridiculous. Phil charges $1.50 for a new rod tip, $8 to rewrap a guide. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Phil tries to change with the times. He just does it at his own speed. Just this year, he bumped the minimum charge to work on your reel one whole notch, from $5 to $6. I ask when he last increased the price, and the blue eyes narrow as he thinks back. “In 1988,” he says after a while. Then the eyes crank up again, and he grins like an unindicted coconspirator. “But you oughta come in here on a Friday afternoon. Hundred-dollar bills all over the place. Have to get the snowblower out just to round ’em up.” It’s as if his lack of material success amuses him. As if he knows something you haven’t figured out yet.

  Even the guys behind the tackle counter at the sporting juggernauts have a soft spot for the guy. Bring an unhappy reel in, and some of the nicer ones will palm you Phil’s phone number.

  Once I was out fishing with a buddy who sands floors for a living and whose philosophizing seldom goes deeper than a theory that canned beer causes tooth decay. “Hey,” he said, “sounds like you lost the squeak in that reel.”

  I told him I’d just picked it up from Phil. He nodded, cast out, and said: “Phil’s as close to being in a state of grace as any man I’ve ever met.”

  Then he didn’t speak for an hour. I was stunned. He’d found the exact words to describe the guy. Phil, who quit school in the eighth grade (“Oh, I was a bad kid” is all he’ll say) before going back to get his GED and take some college courses, is the most unprepossessing man I know. He’s unfailingly upbeat, owns and eats little, covets nothing. In the winter, he wears a brown sweater with a hole under one arm. In the summer, he wears shorts and dark knee socks.

  Behind his counter is one of those hokey signs: an old fisherman lives here with the catch of his life. Only it doesn’t seem hokey with Phil. The woman is Pearl. They live together in a few rooms above the shop. The two of them go out on the river in his canoe on a nice evening and fish. What does a guy who fixes tackle all day fish with? A five-foot, make-do fiberglass ultralight he cranked out one afternoon from spare parts. It’s devoid of ornamentation, has four different makes of guides, and carries an aged Mitchell 308 that ticks like a foot-powered sewing machine. “Love that big face on those old reels,” he says. “The line really behaves.”

  Tacked to a bulletin board above the desk in the back of his shop is a yellowed newspaper clipping, his mother’s obituary. And, in tiny handwriting where he can see it without raising his eyes, a quote from Pindar, the Greek philosopher: “Deeds of No Risk Are Honorless.”

  A guy in a Stetson and a nylon jacket comes in with an old Abu Garcia 5500 D on a rod with frayed guide wrapping that he picked up at a yard sale for two bucks. “Like to fix ’er up,” the guy says. “But . . . I dunno, maybe I got more money than brains.” Phil cranks the reel a few times to get a feel for where she sticks. “Well, most people do,” says Phil. “Maybe I can help you balance the two out.” The guy looks dumbstruck for a moment, then starts to laugh. He’s apparently just met Phil. But already he knows he can trust him.

  It’s a joke only an honest man would make. In the background, the Sons of the Pioneers are singing “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”

  TREE-STAND DAY

  Don’t ask me how, but the moment Snoop sees me padding downstairs in slippers and bathrobe she knows that today’s the day. Erupting into pure dog joy, she does twenty seconds of rapid-fire tap-dancing on the kitchen linoleum, dashes into the living room for a victory lap around the coffee table, then roars back into the kitchen. Forgetting that dogs can’t stop on linoleum, she runs headlong into the trash. It’s an ugly one-dog pileup: yesterday’s coffee grounds, old salad, a long smear of strawberry yogurt. She tries to look sorry but is too excited to hold the expression for more than five seconds before breaking back into her wolf grin. “I guess you’re right, girl,” I tell her. “I guess it’s Tree-Stand Day.”

  My particular dog’s version of Christmas comes in midsummer, nearly three months before the start of deer season. For Snoop, the brown-and-white foxhound mutt who adopted us at the animal shelter, it’s a triple play. She gets sprung from the prison of the backyard for a whole day of following scent streams in the woods. She gets to stink up my car and ride with her head out the window down Route 66. And tradition dictates that she gets a Double Whopper for lunch.

  Tree-Stand Day generally falls in the second half of bass season. Its exact date is a complex calculation involving moon phases, how my back feels, and how willing I am to get a good dose of poison ivy. I descend into the basement to gather two hang-on stands, gloves, a backpack full of screw-in steps, a safety belt, and a folding saw. Forty-five minutes later, high on expectation, we glide into the Burger King. Less than a minute later we’re back on the road with Snoop’s head out the window.

  Then we are in the woods, loud with bees and mosquitoes, choked with honeysuckle and briers, full of hunting potential. I actually hunt more from my climbing stand than from these fixed ones, but deer season starts long before opening day, and this ritual is as important as scouting or sighting in a bow. Your choice of fixed-stand locations is your annual declaration of who you are as a hunter and how you interpret the lay of the land—your feeling about where the big one can be ambushed this time. You fix your stand and your heart high in the very same tree.

  The first stand goes up in a logical place: an oak stand, interspersed with pines, set on a gentle hillside. I find a pine tree with good covering branches twenty yards downwind of the biggest oak.

  The second stand’s placement is more complicated: an ancient tulip poplar near a cedar bottom where the deer love to hide. The textbook says bottoms mean swirling winds and a place for your scent to collect. But the idea has been worming its way into my head for better than half a year, and I’m giving it a shot.

  The place is so overgrown I have to cut brush for ten minutes just to get to the base of the tree. Snoop watches from a makeshift lair under a bush as I ascend into the sky, probably wondering why I’m wasting my time in a tree with no squirrels in it. I’ll have to hunt high here to have any chance, and it takes me forty minutes and fifteen steps to get to thirty feet. Finally I get the stand in, sit down, and practice drawing my imaginary bow.

  By the time I wade back to the trail, I’ve ripped a gash in my nose on a brier, several kamikaze bugs have flung themselves deep into my ears at full speed, and there’s a tear in my pants in a spot that will keep me from stopping in public places on my way home.

  Snoop raises a rabbit on the way back to the road and takes off. A minute later, she’s again at my side, grinning proudly. I know she came nowhere near catching the animal, but she seems proud to have reaffirmed her standing as a dog. She grins encouragement at me the whole way home, as if to say, We’re gonna get ’em this year, pal.

  The season has begun.

  FINALLY . . . UNCLE DANNY

  “Least experienced” was an understatement about where I stood in relation to the other hunters in camp that year down in Mississippi. Uncle Danny had persuaded my father to send me south in late March to begin my indoctrination into the manly art of turkey hunting. Nobody there enlightened me when I talked about a gobbler’s beard hanging off his chin, the way mine might in a few years. It wasn’t until one of the older hunters showed me a gobbler laid out in the bed of his truck with nine inches of coarse hair sprouting from its chest that I knew the truth.

  “You guys’ve been having a real good time playing me for a fool,” I blurted out at dinner that night,
my lower lip stuck out so far I’d have tripped over it had I not been seated.

  “Heck, Billy, you played the fool on your own,” drawled one of my elder cousins (he must have been all of sixteen). “We just been enjoying the puhfomance.”

  Everybody laughed that much harder. I was thirteen, something of a mama’s boy, and teetering on the high, narrow bridge between childhood and the unknown territory beyond. It seemed nothing short of stupefying to me that, far from being sorry, they actually seemed to be enjoying my anger. Clearly hunting camp rules were different from those governing the other parts of my life. It took every ounce of determination I had to squinch back the tears.

  Uncle Danny was my lifeline in that camp. He had longish white hair and blue eyes and looked pretty much the way I imagined God would if He had a potbelly and one bad leg. The first was the result of too much Cajun cooking, the second from his last bull ride back in his rodeo days. It was well known that Uncle Danny had a seven-foot-long necklace of turkey spurs. His own father had started carrying him into the woods at the age of five, and there was nothing he didn’t know about hunting and fishing.

  Uncle Danny and I hunted together. His approach was to set up, call sparingly, and wait the bird out. My job was to sit absolutely still while he called. It was the hardest possible way for an overeager boy to hunt, but the image of that spur necklace was burned into my mind. Uncle Danny had said that you never knew when a turkey might come in, and missing a bird because I’d yielded to an itch or an ache was a fate to be avoided at all costs. More than anything else—even, perhaps, more than a big gobbler turkey—I wanted to go home carrying the trophy of Uncle Danny’s approval. Sometimes I’d set up comfortably, only to find after five minutes that I’d committed myself to having a tree knob in the small of my back or an acorn under my thin foam pad. No matter.

  By the morning of the last day, we had not seen a turkey. We set up with our backs to a tree commanding a clearing of clover surrounded by pine trees, and he began calling. Twenty minutes in, a yelp came back to us. A minute later, a male came hesitantly into view fifteen yards out, and I began to shake.

  “Wait,” he breathed. “Might be a jake.” The bird turned, and I could see its short beard jutting out almost perpendicular to the ground. It was indeed a jake. It didn’t see us, but it didn’t see a hen, either. The bird reversed direction and left. We didn’t see another all morning.

  Back at camp, as I sat inside stuffing clothes into my suitcase, I heard one of my cousins ask, “Well, Dan, how’d the boy do?”

  “I wouldn’t say this to his face for fear of spoilin’ him,” answered Uncle Danny, “but that boy sat still as a cigar-store Indian. Never saw anything like it. He’s gonna show us all up someday.”

  I was airborne on praise long before the plane took off. And it was years before I figured out that Uncle Danny had meant me to hear every word.

  We never got to hunt together again. He went to bed one night the following July and never woke up. But I still love that man. And every time I take a child hunting or fishing, I find a way to praise that kid to the skies.

  SUDDENLY, SHE WAS GONE

  It is the unthinkable, every parent’s nightmare, the world turned upside down. The death of a child plunges you into a parallel universe of loss where the old assumptions about everyday life—that a spouse going to the store for milk will return, that a teenager headed off to school will still be alive when school lets out, that a child put down for a nap will indeed wake—no longer obtain. You can’t stay in this place, of course. Your new knowledge is simply too horrible to bear. Eventually, after much despair and grief, most of us claw our way back to normal lives. We learn to forget some of what we know to keep going. But we never forget and we’re never the same. For the rest of our days, an otherwise arbitrary date cuts our lives into “before” and “after.” For me, that date is June 16, 1999.

  When the plane had reached the gate and the captain had turned off the seat belt sign, the stewardess came on the intercom and said. “Mr. William Heavey, please see the gate agent for a message.” I was impressed. Jane had said she would try to pick me up at the airport when I returned from an editorial meeting of a magazine I write for, but didn’t know if she’d be able to get the baby from daycare in time to make it. I figured she’d gotten someone at the airline to have me paged with the news I should get a cab home, no small feat of persuasion. But when I introduced myself to the woman with the clipboard, she said, “Follow me, please.” After four days of meetings and hotel food, I wasn’t in the mood to follow anybody; I just wanted to get my damn message and see Jane and Lily. When I asked her what it was, she glanced back over her shoulder and said, “I don’t know.” She opened a locked door to a cement stairwell and began to lead me down. After the first set of stairs a beefy guy fell in two steps behind me. He was wearing small gold insignia on the shoulders of his white shirt. I thought I caught a glimpse of a badge. I glanced back, and he nodded once, his eyes noncommittal. We went through another door to what seemed like a secure area with a series of small offices. He began poking his head into one after the other, evidently looking for an empty one. At last he said, “Could you give us a minute here?” to the guy inside one. He slipped out past us and disappeared. The man led me into the tiny space, motioned me into a wooden chair, and shut the door. I was scared. I couldn’t remember having committed any crimes recently, but this was not where they took you for good citizenship awards. I still can’t remember what he looked like, though I realize now I was staring him in the face the whole time. He told me a name and said he was with the Arlington Fire Department. Sometime that afternoon at daycare, my daughter had gone into cardiac arrest. They had called an ambulance and rushed her to Arlington Hospital. The doctors had done all they could, but they couldn’t get her heart started again. Lily, my baby girl, the perfectly healthy child we had adopted just ten weeks ago, was dead. My wife and stepdaughter, Molly, were at the hospital now. He would drive me there to be with them. Someone would collect my luggage and take it home.

  Jane and I were in our forties when we met in 1995. Like most single men of that age, I had definite ideas about what I wanted: someone a few years younger, never married, certainly without a child. Then I met Jane, who was none of these things. But she was beautiful, hardheaded, honest, and scrappy. I fell in love and gave Jane the engagement ring that my great-grandmother had bought in Paris in 1901. Molly—then nine—was part of the package: a bright, affectionate girl with dark hair and her mother’s will. I fell in love with Molly, too. Two years later, she was the flower girl at our wedding. When Jane and I watched from the altar as she walked down the aisle of the Bethlehem Chapel in the National Cathedral, smiling at friends and family on both sides, we had marveled at how luminous she looked. Jane and her ex, John, have worked hard to have a good divorce and remain friends. Molly sees both of them nearly every day and spends half her nights at his house and half with us. I love Molly like a daughter, but she already has a dad and the two are immensely loyal to each other. Besides, I wanted the full taco platter of fatherhood—baby giggles, a tiny fist tight around my little finger, baby puke on my shirt, the sound of “da da” spoken for the first time.

  Like many parents who eventually adopt, Jane and I first spent a couple of years and tens of thousands of dollars trying to have our own biological child. We’d traipsed through the well-appointed offices of cheerful area specialists who rattled off success percentages for various procedures as if handicapping hedge funds. I’d learned to make love to plastic cups under the fluorescent lights of clinic bathrooms so my sperm could be clocked for speed and endurance in the 40-micron dash. I’d jabbed needles dripping hormones into my wife’s purple-bruised backside every night for a month on three occasions to ready her womb to receive an egg fertilized in a petri dish. A guy so cheap he tries to haggle with the ladies at Goodwill over shirt prices, I’d willingly written the biggest checks of my life outs
ide of buying a house in hopes of fathering a child. The doctor had told us the odds of Jane getting pregnant with the procedure were 43 percent. I’m not a gambling man. I look at a casino and see a well-oiled machine founded on human weakness that separates people from their money the way Eli Whitney’s cotton gin separated cotton and seeds. But when it came to my dream of fatherhood, I was a willing mark. I thought that Jane and I were somehow special, different, that we’d beat the odds. Well, we weren’t. We didn’t.

  When the first transfer failed to take, I’d burst into tears after getting the news. After the second, hardened by disappointment, I’d shrugged. After the third, the doctor had called us in for a consult. “It’s unusual,” he mused. “You should have gotten pregnant by now.” It was an abstract problem for him, an equation that should have worked out. He pointed out that we could always try again. But the drugs were an emotional roller coaster for Jane, each failure added another layer of despair to our search, and I was running out of money. It was his detachment that I resented the most. Standing in his office with the framed photos of babies and gushing testimonial letters, I imagined punching his stylish little eyeglasses down his throat.

  In the firefighter’s car, I was vaguely aware of the highway rolling by and the hazy June light outside. The highway was jammed with people jockeying for position as if it were just another day. I heard the man’s voice saying something about how he’d talked to the people at the hospital and heard that my wife, like me, was bearing up. An involuntary hoot of laughter started to rise in my throat. I wasn’t bearing up; I was disappearing. This was happening to my stand-in, my stunt double. I had gone off some distance to watch. I noticed tears and that my vision seemed to be collapsing around the edges. I thought I might keep the world from dissolving entirely by focusing on its navel, which at the moment happened to be the glove compartment latch, two feet away. Lily, the child who cooed in delight when slung round my shoulders and twirled while I sang her nonsense songs in the dining room, was dead. Tomorrow was to be her four-month birthday. Say the magic word and a baby appears. Say it again and—poof!—she’s gone. It couldn’t be true. It was true.