by Bill Heavey
“Cool,” says the customer. “I want to get into waterfowl calls next. ’Course, anybody with a lathe wants to turn out waterfowl calls. Do you all teach a class on that or anything?”
Flohr says he doesn’t know of one. Then he reads from a script that has evidently been distributed in advance of my coming to Grand Island. “We have a special guest on the line today, a writer from Field & Stream magazine, Mr. Bill Heavey. He’d like to talk to you if you don’t mind.” Suddenly, I’m on the line. And on the spot. I make the mistake of saying what I’m thinking. “Uh, sir, I could be wrong about this, but it sounds to me like you don’t have enough to do.” Flohr looks away, claps a hand over his head, and shakes his head. I am, evidently, not CRA material.
“I got plenty to do,” the customer says, bristling. “What are you doing at Cabela’s?”
“Just hanging out,” I tell him. I change directions, asking if he finds the people who answer the phones here helpful. “Most of the time, yeah. Every once in a while you get somebody who’s not that good, but usually they’re pretty helpful.”
Flohr comes to my rescue, interrupting the heavy silence that has fallen on both ends by thanking the customer and telling him that for talking to me today, he is being offered his choice of a free year’s subscription to this magazine or a twenty-dollar Cabela’s gift certificate. “I already get Field & Stream,” he says. “I believe I’ll take the certificate.”
“Heck, get two copies,” I blurt out. “One for upstairs, one for downstairs.”
“We’re already stocked with Charmin,” the guy says, “all we need.”
Flohr reaches over and unhooks my headset from the jack. It is evidently time for me to leave the call center. Outdoors, the Nebraska sun is blindingly bright and hot. It feels great to be outside again.
THE WILD CARD
When I phoned Richard Stucky with the news that I’d drawn a Kansas archery tag and would be showing up at his house for another deer season, he was in his truck outside the Krispy Kreme on West Central Avenue near Wichita. “Ham on uh meck, Buh,” he said. I heard chewing, gargled coffee, and a deep sigh. “Oh, man. Just out the fryer.” Richard and Connie live in Pretty Prairie, thirty-two miles from the Krispy Kreme. But sometimes Richard will be out on an errand and the next thing he knows his truck has driven itself there.
By the time I showed up in mid-October, Stucky had already staked out several bucks. One was the same eight-pointer I had seen and could have killed three times the previous year with a gun. I’d gotten a good look at him through my 8x50s. He was a honker.
The patterns had changed this year, Stucky said, because of what had been planted and where, but he’d seen “my” buck, now a wide, tall ten, as well as a couple of new guys. I’d learned the hard way that bucks in flat farm country are not the slam dunk many big-woods hunters imagine. Sure, crop fields are deer magnets. But the endless seas of shoulder-high grass that spring up on uncultivated Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land are as good as the thickest swamp for sanctuary. And food everywhere means a pressured buck has no reason to budge before it’s thick dark. I keep showing up, however, on the theory that there’s got to be a big Kansas buck dumber than I am.
The first morning, I watched the sun come up from a ladder stand tucked into a thirty-foot-wide shelterbelt. To the east lay 140 acres of CRP land. To the west, an irrigation circle of picked corn and sprouting turnips where the deer fed heavily at night. It was bright and blustery, each gust sending stand, tree, and hunter on a shaky little polka. A 360-degree field of view and the knowledge that deer seldom show from the predicted direction soon had my head doing laps around my neck. By 10 a.m. I had seen exactly one deer: a small doe sneaking into the CRP field four hundred yards to the south. I was about to climb down so that I could check out what kind of sign was around, when I caught a flicker of movement in the shelterbelt just to the north. It was an ear. The ear was attached to a head. The head belonged to a bedded buck with the biggest rack I’d ever seen. I sat back down. I didn’t know if he’d sneaked in or been there all along. It didn’t matter. He was certainly there now, just over thirty yards away. Observing the unwritten laws of deer hunting, he lay in my one obstructed quadrant. No lanes.
I watched him for ninety minutes. I figured trying to rouse him by grunting or rattling this close would cause him to bolt, and that the smart move was to wait him out. He’d eventually stand, and if he moved five yards to either side I’d have a shot. All the while, my brain kept telling me to calm down. And my adrenal glands kept advising my brain to go to hell. He was just too damn big and too damn close. Worse, he seemed to be making full use of that psychically disruptive force field that surrounds exceptional beasts. I was a wreck.
At 11 a.m., Richard rolled up in his truck to get me, passing within feet of my quarry. You would not have wanted to play poker with this deer. With his sworn enemy just steps away, the deer studied his cards, motionless. Though frantic, I dared not gesture broadly. Richard squinted while I put on a little puppet show with my fingers, finally took the hint, and motored slowly away.
Half an hour later, the buck lumbered to his feet, peed, and scratched his ear with his hind hoof. He looked around and moved to the right and away a few steps. He was quartering away more severely than I would have liked. He looked as if he were going to head up the thicket edge. It was now or never. I drew, aimed just to the rear of his rib cage, and released.
The buck took off, his gait showing no telltale hitch or wobble. I felt like a placekicker who puts one wide with no time left and his team down by two. Richard rumbled up five minutes later. “Staked out the road where I figured he’d cross if you didn’t kill him outright,” he said. “He was carrying the mail when I saw him. Flying. That’s the one you were on last year. He was a big ’un all right.”
I put my bow behind the seat and got in the cab. Understanding the healing properties of coffee and a couple of glazed chocolate donuts, Richard gave the truck its head, and it went straight to the Krispy Kreme. I had a sneaking feeling that a) the deer in Kansas hadn’t gotten appreciably dumber over the course of one year, and b) I hadn’t gotten appreciably smarter. On the other hand, I discovered that three or four Krispy Kremes washed down with a bucket of coffee is the strongest pain reliever you can get short of a doctor’s prescription.
GOOD GRIEF
The guy who usually draws me looking like an idiot on this page every month had lost the dog he was counting on having at his side as he pushes the odometer on his own hunting legs. Jack Unruh comes from good stock; his mom is ninety-six and still “feisty,” as they say down South. But no man’s days afield are endless. The sudden and unexplained death of Annie, a young shorthaired pointer, on a quail hunt in West Texas had hit him hard.
The email from Jack’s wife, Judy, said he’d been hunting with a friend of many years. The day before, they had found a rusty pickax atop a small rise in the middle of nowhere. They’d joked about it being a sign that their days were numbered. Now they hunted it up to dig Annie’s grave. Judy had hinted that Jack wasn’t sure he’d still have his hunting legs by the time he got another dog made—let alone the inclination to risk that kind of heartbreak again.
Jack lives 1,500 miles away, and we rarely get together. But a guy who sees right through you and likes you anyway is a guy you hang on to. (The one time I grumbled to Jack about depicting me as an idiot, he cut me off, saying, “Heavey, you do the idiot part yourself. I’m just trying to keep up.”) So I called to offer up the empty words one says in these situations. Since Jack wasn’t home, I waited for the beep. And then I encountered the passing strangeness of the human heart: Six seconds into my semi-rehearsed lines, I found myself choking up, warm tears taking toboggan rides into my mouth. This was not in the plan. I wasn’t speaking to Jack. Hell, it wasn’t even my dog. It was all I could do to choke out a few words of apology before hanging up.
Ten years
ago, I’d have been embarrassed by my tears. I’d have felt like a wimp. But among the many things the years change are your ideas about manhood. I’ve come to accept my impulse to tears as just another act of fate, not much different from tornadoes, tomatoes, or ingrown toenails. Like these things, tears themselves decide when to visit. They aren’t particularly worried about whether the timing is convenient.
Every man totes around his own invisible boatload of heartbreak—that steady accretion of loss (the deaths of parents and friends), regret (failed relationships, things done and left undone), and self-assessment (those long nights when you try to square who you are with who you hoped you’d be). This ship of grief that we usually keep under such tight wraps never stops loading cargo. Every so often it slips its moorings and goes where it pleases, reminding you that sometimes you’re more cabin boy than captain.
I’ve always liked Norman Schwarzkopf’s statement: “A man who doesn’t cry scares me a little.” I like it because there are times I cry like a damn baby. I think it’s genetic hardwiring. I cried recently at a kids’ movie, The Water Horse. I was once overcome in the car of a friend by nothing more than hearing Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” a song about the friendship between a boy and an old man.
But nothing infiltrates a man’s defenses like the untimely death of a dog. All of us, men and women, carry the imprint of—and the craving for—the unconditional love we received as children. As a child, you may puke on your parents at the start of a long airplane trip, knowing they’ll cheerfully receive your vomit in their cupped hands. Then they’ll clean you up, feed you the same food all over again, let you repeat the performance, and still love you as much as ever when you finally land.
Our protestations to the contrary, adult love is never unconditional, never absolute. Screw up bad enough or long enough, and love folds its tent. That’s why we need dogs. You could axe-murder everybody in your office, carjack your own mother, and plow into a crosswalk full of schoolkids while fleeing the police. But when you pull into the driveway two days later, your dog would still shiver and whine with uncontrollable joy, in effect saying, Boy, did I miss you!
If the loss of that kind of love doesn’t make you cry, then I agree with Stormin’ Norman: You scare me, too. So if, like me, you find yourself ambushed, find yourself crying at things you don’t understand, you may not be completely normal. On the other hand, I’d like you to know you’ve got company.
A SINKING FEELING
It’s hotter than two mice in a wool sock right now, and the heat makes a man do strange things. After years of eyeing a cattail pond—really more of a marsh—two miles from my house, I’ve decided it’s time to fish it. A forgotten little triangle of urban wetland, it’s hemmed in by an interstate highway, the parking lot of a six-story office-condo complex, and an asphalt bike path. The county refers to it as a “park,” but you never see anyone inside.
Although the area is 90 percent swamp, there’s an arm of open water forty feet long. I’ve seen mallards putting about here, turtles sunning themselves, and ripples from what are almost certainly rising bluegills. Bluegills, of course, are reason enough for a fisherman. And where there are bluegills, there may be bluegill-eating bass.
Waiting until dusk to avoid the worst of the heat, I biked over carrying my pack stuffed with chest waders and a four-piece five-weight. Even at six thirty, it was still in the mid-90s, and I showed up dripping sweat. It was the strangest suburban park I’d ever seen: no trails, no trash, no evidence of anybody ever having been inside. I might as easily have walked into a coat closet and emerged in Narnia. I wouldn’t have been surprised to look up and find a talking centaur advising me that an Orvis Enrico’s Turbo Frog Popper was his go-to lure this time of year. The untended greenery was as thick as any jungle. It took me twenty minutes to crawl, slash, and bull my way to the water’s edge.
Once there, I saw that getting into position to make a cast required wading out about thirty feet through cattails, spatterdock, hydrilla, and God knows what else. With my first step, I sank up to my waist and got a good whiff of the gym-bag-from-hell odor that any marsh emits in summertime when disturbed. At least that’s what I told myself. Surely, I thought, they’d have had to put up signs if this was the local Superfund site. With my next step came the realization that I had yet to touch bottom; I’d been walking on matted vegetation. The good news was that it appeared to be holding my weight.
In this case, the distance from “so far, so good” to “so what the hell did you think was going to happen?” was exactly two steps. It was at that point that the vegetation decided it had supported me long enough. My feet punched through and I sank right down to my clavicle. I remember thinking of the word clavicle at the time because I had the odd feeling that the water level had sought out the slender, horizontal bones at the top of my chest to draw attention to the fact that I was now within six or eight inches of having my nose and mouth submerged, at which point it would become challenging to continue the breathing process that had become habitual with me.
Meanwhile, my waders were shipping water just below my armpits. This was not an unpleasant sensation, as it cooled me off and restored some brain function, at which point my interest in fishing decreased dramatically. My revised goal for the evening was to avoid drowning. I attempted to turn around but found that my feet, sunk firmly in the muck, were uncooperative. I suddenly recalled reading an obituary of a well-known flyfishing writer some years ago who had perished in the spring flow of his favorite trout stream. His death had been a great loss, the fishing community agreed, but many had found consolation in the fact that he had passed away doing what he loved. This rationale irritated me even then. He didn’t die fishing; he died drowning: choking and flailing against the overpowering force of water.
Now highly motivated, I heaved my body shoreward, attempting to spread my weight out evenly over the matted weeds, like a man negotiating thin ice. This worked briefly, allowing me at last to free my feet and establish a higher center of gravity in relation to the water. But then the mat gave way and I began to sink again, the difference being that I was now arranged horizontally, like a swimmer too heavy to stay afloat. It occurred to me that my death would be rationalized in a different vein than the flyfisherman’s. I could see people shaking their heads and thinking, That idiot drowned in downtown Arlington, Virginia, at rush hour, people within a hundred yards of him in all directions, in a grubby little hole nobody in their right mind would have fished. They would sigh, shrug, and say, “Tell you the truth, I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did.”
I grabbed at the plants ahead, pulling carefully so as not to break any of them. Inch by inch, I hauled myself into the shallows. I’d never even assembled my rod.
Wet but alive, I rode home, enjoying the cooling effect of water evaporating from my clothing. As I coasted into my driveway, a neighbor saw my rod tube and asked, “How’d you do?” I smiled at him and said, “Pretty good, actually.” And for once, a fisherman was telling the absolute truth.
I’VE BEEN CAUGHT
Online dating being pretty much the freak show you would imagine, I didn’t rush to join. And when I finally did decide to put together a profile, my first move was to see how other guys chose to misrepresent themselves. Reading just the first two—YOUR MOM WILL LOVE ME! and PARTNER SOUGHT FOR DANCE OF LIFE—convinced me that against this kind of fake sincerity, my only hope was to take the low road. REDUCE YOUR EXPECTATIONS AND WE’LL GET ALONG JUST FINE was what I ran with. I figured it would weed out any woman who expected me to wear a tie.
I had lots of encounters in which, five minutes into a lunch date, my soul got up and left, leaving me behind to explain what I’d meant in my profile when I wrote, “Would rather pound nails into my head than shop.” Then, quite recently, I found a live one. Which is why I am standing by a river with my canoe hauled halfway up the shore so that the woman in question may enter witho
ut getting her feet wet. She seems to have bought new Italian backpacking boots for the occasion—Zamberlan Tundra GTs, if I’m not mistaken. It’s a gesture I know I should appreciate. She is a city girl, after all, but game. Curmudgeon that I am, the thought that crosses my mind is that short of steel-toed logging boots, you could hardly pick worse canoe shoes.
I initiated contact with this woman by sending a note saying that I liked her smile and was grateful to find one person whose favorite things to do had not included long walks on the beach. “You strike me as either an unusually honest man or a total whack job,” she wrote back. After our first date—coffee in a well-lit café with multiple exits and a uniformed security guard—I asked if she’d reached a decision. “Jury’s still out,” she said. But then she gave me a smile I haven’t been able to shake. That was two dates and five phone calls ago. And I now find that she occupies more of my mental hard-disk space than I care to admit.
Keep your damn mouth shut about the shoes, I tell myself.
On our last date I had confessed a predilection for moving water and smallmouth bass. I told her that fishing had helped me get through some of the rougher patches in my life, that it was the one thing I could count on for temporary relief from the guy between my ears, the guy whose job is to observe and criticize every single thing I do. She’d listened. She’d nodded.