The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories

by Patrick F. McManus

  Exercise addicts are bad enough, but the pushers are worse. Everywhere I turn, somebody is trying to get me to take up jogging, bodybuilding, isometrics, yoga, kung fu, karate, or some other form of premeditated self-destruction. I tell them I’m an outdoorsman and just being an outdoorsman is adequate exercise.

  Take, for example, my experience of loading a canoe on my car rack the other day. Knowing how even the slightest breeze can foil the success of this maneuver, I sacrificed one of my few remaining hairs to a test of wind velocity. The hair drifted quietly to the ground. Thus assured, I grabbed the canoe and, with a movement so smooth and graceful the vessel scarcely grazed my protruding eyeballs, snapped it straight up over my head.

  At that instant, there arrived on the scene the strongest gust of wind recorded in our state in over half a century. The canoe sailed over the top of my wife’s rose garden, mowed down a picket fence, ricocheted off a telephone pole, and turned end over end twice before starting to skitter across the street. At that point, and none too soon, I managed to release my grip on the thing and narrowly avoided being run over by the Avon lady.

  My injuries were confined to an imaginative but tasteful reordering of my skeletal structure and a bad bruise on my leg where an unsuccessful attempt had been made to substitute a canoe thwart for a left femur. In those thirty seconds, I had enough exercise to last the average person for five years, but I can’t seem to convince anyone of the fact. If you don’t spend two hours a day running around in a sweatshirt, health addicts think you’re either courting thrombosis or deliberately trying to antagonize the deodorant companies.

  A while back I was slumped over the breakfast table performing my usual morning ritual of gluing my psyche back into some semblance of a human consciousness with caffeine, nicotine, cholesterol, and the headlines of the morning paper, when I happened to glance out the kitchen window and catch sight of my neighbor running down the alley in what appeared to be his pajamas. Now, Al Finley, a rather portly chap, is a member of the city council but is otherwise of good reputation. He usually conducts himself in a dignified and rational manner, so it was natural for me to assume that he was being pursued by someone, probably one or more of his dissatisfied constituents. While I was still pondering the vagaries of the political life, he ran by again, this time in the opposite direction.

  By gosh, I said to myself, there must be more than one after him, because somebody obviously headed him off at the end of the alley and drove him back this way. After he made a couple more passes up and down the alley and was beginning to show signs of exhaustion, I decided to do what I could to save him from the mob. I stepped out on the back porch and yelled, “Jump the fence, Finley, and I’ll hide you in the coal bin! I don’t care what it is you’ve done.” He gestured weakly at me in a manner I can describe only as unappreciative and kept on running.

  “All right!” I shouted after him. “Let them get you. It’ll serve you right!”

  As I was walking by his house on my way to work an hour later, he emerged unscathed from his front door. He said he hoped he hadn’t offended me by rejecting my offer of sanctuary. I said that it was all right, and you couldn’t expect a person to be civil when he was running for his life.

  “I wasn’t running for my life,” Finley replied. “I was jogging.”

  “Jogging? What on earth for?”

  “I’ve already lost two inches around my waist,” he said.

  “I see,” I said, deciding not to pursue the subject. It was clear the strain of fleecing taxpayers over the years had undermined his sanity, and I had no wish to nudge him further into the abyss. Nevertheless, he chose to explain.

  “Have you forgotten hunting season is coming up in less than two months?” He gave me a look of having made everything clear. “You ought to do some jogging yourself.”

  “Look, Finley,” I said gently. “I’ve hunted deer since I was twelve years old, and not once in all that time has a situation arisen requiring me to jog after them. Besides, the deer don’t like it, and it makes the other hunters nervous.”

  He stared at me vacantly, then got in his car and drove off shaking his head. It was a sad spectacle to witness, even in a politician.

  As if I hadn’t had enough trouble already for one day, when I arrived at the office somewhat later than usual, my secretary was a picture of torment: legs and hands clamped together, teeth clenched, eyes bulging, face the color of an overripe pomegranate.

  “Uh, sorry I’m so late, Midge,” I said. “If you need to step out for a moment, I’ll answer the phone.”

  “Whew!” she said, sagging into her chair. “I was just doing my daily isometrics.”

  “That was my impression,” I said, “but I’d prefer you not do one in the office.”

  “Isometrics are an exercise for toning up the muscles!” she snapped.

  Actually, I knew all about isometrics. I told Midge about the time my friend Retch Sweeney caught the exercise bug, and how, before he recovered his senses, it cost him a good deal of embarrassment and nearly his life. Once, when returning from a fishing trip, Retch stopped at a little roadside diner conspicuous for its total lack of other patrons. The steak he ordered and the price of it aroused in Retch the suspicion that the place was run by a combination of highwaymen and horse thieves.

  After the main course and while waiting for his dessert, Retch decided to pass the time profitably by performing isometrics, an exercise he hoped would convey the impression that he was a physical fitness buff and could turn deadly should the gang attempt to rob him. As it turned out, the cook and the waitress had never heard of isometrics but were well practiced in the latest first-aid procedure for saving a person strangling on his dinner. The cook caught Retch in a crushing bear hug from behind, driving all the wind out of him with sufficient force to blow all the flies off a mound of hamburger ten feet away.

  “Say your name!” the cook shouted, driving his balled fist into Retch’s solar plexus. “Say your name!”

  As soon as Retch recovered enough to speak, be blurted out, “Retch! Retch!”

  “It ain’t working,” shouted the waitress. “He’s still retching!”

  By this time, the cook was using Retch’s rib cage as an accordion, squeezing out, among other things, a tune Retch thought he recognized as either “Turkey in the Straw” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  Just before the waitress made a last-ditch effort to reach down Retch’s throat with a pair of spaghetti tongs, Retch managed to clear up the misunderstanding. The cook and the waitress had themselves a good laugh and as a gesture of goodwill allowed Retch to leave the premises without committing further assault on his person.

  Although I generally question the veracity of Retch’s stories, I told Midge that I thought this one was true. She said she didn’t believe a word of it and that Retch and I had probably made it up, simply to poke fun at the new health fads. As a card-carrying health sadist herself, she took the opportunity to express her opinion that I could use a bit of exercise myself.

  “Ha!” I said. “Hunting season is coming up. That is all the exercise I need.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “Listen, you spend a lot of time running around in the woods all by yourself. Have you ever stopped to think what would happen if you suffered a fatal infarction way off in some wild place?”

  Up until that point, I hadn’t even realized infarctions could be serious, let alone fatal. Since Midge reads health magazines all the time, though, I figured she must know what she’s talking about. With the acumen of a life-insurance salesman, she had succeeded in igniting in me some doubt about the length of my longevity. I sat around the rest of the morning, enveloped in a heavy gloom relieved by occasional twinges of fear. I thought about suffering a fatal infarction on my next hunting trip, and how my companions would grieve, sitting around the campfire talking about what a great guy I had been, and how out of respect to my remains perhaps they should cut the hunting trip short by a day or two, depending on t
he weather and if anyone had turned up some really fresh signs.

  OK, I thought. So maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of exercising to get ready for the hunt, even though it was a couple months away.

  During my lunch hour, I slipped down to the public library and checked out an armload of books on various kinds of exercise. I asked the librarian if she had a book titled The Drinking Man’s Exercise. I vaguely recalled having heard of such a book, and supposed that it would deal with such things as elbow bending, bellying up to the bar, and tossing down shots. She said she had never heard of it and wouldn’t order it if she had. She did suggest an alternative, but I told her I was interested in improving my physique, not my character. I immediately discovered that reading exercise books can be dangerous to your health. Plowing through the first one, Let’s Put the Fit Back into Fitness, I narrowly escaped being bored to death, and as it was, went about four days afterward with the distinct sensation of having my brain submerged in a tuna casserole. The one sound bit of information I managed to extract from the book was some advice to the effect of this: Before undertaking any program of strenuous exercise, one should obtain a physical from a medical doctor. I was in complete agreement with this suggestion. Doctors are by far the best people to get a physical from, if for no other reason than they don’t laugh and poke fun at you when you take your clothes off. This is not to say that they are not above cracking a joke or two at your expense. While I was explaining to my own doctor that I was planning to undertake some serious exercise, I happened to mention that I thought I had lost quite a bit of weight since my last physical.

  “You didn’t lose it,” he said. “It just slipped around to your rear where you can’t see it.” Personally, I think it is particularly bad for doctors to laugh at their own jokes and even more so in front of their naked patients. It tends to undermine one’s confidence in the medical profession.

  A physical from my doctor, old Fred, is such an ordeal that you need to get a physical to prepare you for the physical. He tops it all off by hooking you up to an electrocardiograph machine and making you run on the treadmill. After a few minutes on the treadmill, I was dripping with sweat, gasping for breath, and buckling at the knees. I knew I couldn’t last much longer.

  “How am I doing?” I asked Fred.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Now let’s try it with the treadmill turned on.”

  He revved up the machine to about thirty miles an hour. My legs instantly dissolved into molten lead, but I had to keep running to avoid being slurped down into the treadmill innards. All the while, old Doc Fred stood there munching on a doughnut and drinking a cup of coffee.

  “I don’t think you understand, Doc,” I finally croaked. “I’m going to shoot a deer with a rifle, not run him down on foot and strangle him with my bare hands.”

  “Stop whining,” he said kindly. “You’re nearly finished.”

  “You’re telling me,” I gasped.

  When the physical was completed, he fed all the information into a computer, which spewed out a stream of paper filled with a mass of graphs. Then he sat down to interpret the results for me.

  “Oh, oh,” he said frowning. “A&P Iron has dropped thirty points. I’d better schedule you for a couple of operations.”

  “What? What!” I exclaimed. “Does that mean I’m done for?”

  “No, it means I am. This is a report from my stockbroker. Now let’s take a look at your printout. Ah, I see you have some squiggles here in the cardiovascular section.”

  “Uh, are squiggles serious, Doc?”

  “I’ve never had anyone die from squiggles, but we’d better keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t develop into doodles. Actually, I have to say you are in excellent condition, even for a man twice your age.”

  “Great!” I said.

  “Of course that doesn’t mean you couldn’t drop dead stepping over the cat.”

  “But I wanted to run up and down mountains, camp, hunt, fish!”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Just don’t step over any cats.”

  After receiving a clean bill of health and another bill I interpreted as an attempt to recoup his stock market losses in one fell swoop, I immediately started shaping up for the impending hunting season.

  The first exercise program I tried was from a book called, simply, Yoga. I chose it because yoga could be performed in the privacy of one’s own home and didn’t require making a public spectacle of one’s self, as did, for example, jogging. Somehow Finley heard I had taken up exercising and kept glued to the window hoping to catch me in the act.

  In my first yoga posture, I attempted something called the Lotus, from which posture I was finally able to extricate myself by snagging a cane from a corner next to the door and prying my legs apart. It was then that I perceived yoga would be an absolutely useless exercise when it came to shaping up for the hunt. No, there had to be something else. I quickly reviewed all my hunting experiences and immediately came up with the perfect exercise for hunters: standing still!

  People who are not outdoor sportsmen don’t realize how much time is spent standing still while hunting. Very often, a hunter will stand still behind a tree, while a mile away a deer also will choose to stand still. The first one to move loses. Brilliant! I immediately got up off the floor and stood still in front of the television for thirty minutes straight. It was exhausting, but one must do what one must do in order to shape up for the hunt.

  A Bit about My Writing Life

  I

  have just taken the measure of Mark Twain’s autobiography, the edition published in 2010. Despite small type, it is two and three-quarter inches thick. My own autobiography, which I am starting at this moment, twenty minutes after two, the ninth of January, 2011, a snowy afternoon, will not be so thick. Its main advantage over Twain’s is that it can be read in a matter of minutes as opposed to years. As with Twain, I will not let facts stand in the way of a good story, but for the most part will stick to the truth as I know it. In regard to pertinent events that occurred before I was born, all that would be hearsay. I cannot vouch for any of it. Much to my disappointment, my family apparently contained no known bandits, murderers, pirates, bank robbers, or even any common criminals.

  Counting my own father, we did have a couple of war heroes. The other one was my great-grandfather, Archibald Hall, who fought for the North during the Civil War. One of the interesting things about him is that he was wounded during one of the many battles in which he was a participant. I was perhaps only six or seven when my grandmother told me about her father’s getting wounded in the Civil War. Needless to say, I instantly became enormously proud of my great-grandfather. Later, however, Gram told me the wound consisted of getting one of his big toes shot off! This struck me right away as a suspicious wound. Think about it. There are the big toes, tramping along in the dirt and mud, and one Confederate soldier says to another, “Bart, I bet you can’t shoot off one of that Yank’s big toes.” Well, it would be an impossible shot. Also, had I been in my great grandfather’s shoes at that moment, with a whole army shooting at me, I can tell you my two big toes would have been moving very fast. They wouldn’t be standing around just waiting to get shot off. Then there was the possibility that if you got a big toe shot off, you would be sent to the rear, to a hospital, or even all the way home. Getting a big toe shot off would be like having one of the Rebs do you a favor. Big toes aren’t of that much use anyway. All my pride in that wound evaporated. A big toe! Years later, when I was doing some research on my ancestors, I discovered that my great-grandfather wasn’t in the infantry but the cavalry! His big toe was way up there on the side of a horse and easy to pick off. Furthermore, I learned that Archibald Hall fought in nearly every major battle of the Civil War from beginning to end. He apparently wasn’t someone to be bothered much by the loss of a big toe. Anybody named Archibald, of course, learns to be a fearless fighter early on.

  My grandmother told these stories sitting in the dark by our old wood-b
urning stove whenever the electricity went off and the lights out, her rocking chair squeaking away as she created magical pictures in the dark.

  During World War I, my father, Frank McManus, received a commendation from his commanding officer, Major Douglas MacArthur, chief of staff of the Rainbow Division during the war. The commendation was for defending a particular hill. When I was six, he died of cancer, which I believe was the result of his having inhaled a dose of mustard gas during the war.

  My mother, Mabel, was a country school teacher. She earned $75 a month teaching all eight grades, putting on plays for parents, Christmas parties for the pupils, cooking the hot lunch at noon and serving it, getting our drinking water out of a creek, hauling in the firewood, and keeping the old barrel stove going, its sides eaten through by heat and rust, but the holes putting on a wonderful light show across the ceiling during the dark of night.

  This was at the old log school house far back in the woods near Priest Lake, Idaho. The two years we spent at that school pretty well shaped my approach to life. I ran free for two whole years, when I should have been in first and second grade. Mom never paid much attention to my education, her time and energy used up on the pupils she was paid to teach, so I was allowed to run wild along Goose Creek and in the surrounding woods and mountains whenever I wanted, which was most of the time. During winter, I went to sleep every night listening to wolves howl as they made their nightly hunt along the ridge above the school. “Send Pat out!” they seemed to be howling. “Send Pat out!”

  Mom flunked me in second grade. I once heard her tell friends that her daughter, Patricia, six years my senior, was very smart, but Pat was “slow.” Many years later, we came across my second grade report card in her papers. Under the part that said “Reason for Failure,” she had written, “Too many absences.” When you think about it, that is a remarkable achievement, for someone who lives at the school. As I say, those two years at the little log cabin school shaped all of my future life. From then on, my major goal was to achieve as much freedom as possible. Rich was OK, but I could live without it, as long as I was free.