The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Wait!” Bun cried anxiously, “Aren’t you going to put on the blanket and saddle?”

  “Naw,” I replied. “I’ll just ride him naked.”

  For those who may be unacquainted with the nuances of horsemanship, I should explain that riding a naked horse is much more difficult than riding one equipped with a saddle and blanket. I intended a brief ride, however, and in that case, a blanket and saddle are more of a hindrance than a help, or so I thought at the time.

  What prompted Huckleberry’s sudden and unprovoked display of athleticism, I will never know. As I was settling myself on his barren back, my legs splayed out over his barrel belly, the beast took off like Man o’ War out of the starting gate. We roared across the front yard, around the back of the house, jumped a plastic wading pool, and pounded full throttle down the pasture, myself now crouched like a monkey on his back, and still roaring, “Whoa! Whoa! You . . . !” Here I inserted some of the colorful words I had picked up from the old man who put the metal shoes on the creature. The words had no effect, as I should have judged from having listened to the old man.

  Suddenly, I remembered the steering lines. I let go of Huck’s mane, grabbed the lines, and hauled back on them. My effort had no effect. There was too much slack in them. The galloping had vibrated me forward! I was now bouncing up and down on the large bony bump that connects a horse’s neck to the rest of him. There was only one thing to do. I threw myself forward and grabbed the horse around the neck. Perhaps I thought I could choke him into stopping, I don’t know.

  We were now at the far end of the pasture, the fence between us and a busy road that we were approaching at incredible speed. For a moment, I thought Huck was planning to jump the fence, but at the last moment he made a right-angle turn at full throttle, something I later learned that quarter horses are trained to do. Actually, I don’t know if they are trained to cut sharp corners at high speed, or just make it up on their own, as a method of displacing cowboys. Whatever. In any case, the movement swept me around under the horse’s neck, his pounding front hooves now but inches away. He had not slowed his pace in the slightest. I somehow managed to get my legs clasped above his neck next to my clasped hands. Huck made another right-hand turn, perhaps thinking he could finish dislodging me in that manner, and headed back down the pasture. He slid to a stop right in front of Bun. I peered at her upside-down. She stood there as if frozen to the spot, mouth agape, eyes stricken.

  I unclasped my legs and swung to the ground. “What would you like to see now?” I said, turning to her. One thing about us cowboys, we know how to be cool in front of the ladies.

  The Tent

  S

  ome people are born brave. I am not one of them. During the summers I was twelve and thirteen, I started camping out a mile or so up a little creek that tumbled down out of a narrow canyon a couple hours hike from my house. I didn’t camp out alone, of course. I wasn’t crazy. Usually there were four of us, Reggie, Ernie, Herbie, and me. Reggie was our leader because he was tall, athletic, and had good hair. And he was brave.

  We all had a great deal of experience sleeping out from the time we were very young. But there is a big difference between sleeping out and camping out. Sleeping out is done in your backyard. Camping out is done off in the woods or mountains, well beyond the range of suddenly running into your house, as often happened with sleeping out. The difference between sleeping out and camping out was primarily one of distance.

  While sleeping out, a sudden retreat into the house was usually ignited by the amount of darkness in the world. You would be lying there in your sleeping bag looking up at the sky, the whole world filled with darkness, and suddenly the sheer vastness of the dark overpowered you. Many people who haven’t slept out don’t know that, but it’s true. Dark becomes an irresistible force, and your senses go on red alert. An ant tramping by or a mosquito’s cough could ignite a sudden retreat, but usually the alarm wasn’t so major.

  I should point out that no one actually slept while sleeping out. No matter how slight the sound, it would trigger some mechanism in your legs, and the next moment you would be hurtling through the back door of your house, your sleeping bag or blankets still fluttering to the ground.

  Camping out, on the other hand, left you imprisoned out in the wild, with great blocks of dark between you and your back door. Sometimes you would actually fall asleep while camping out, but usually not until the second or third night. I can still recall the wonderful relief of waking up the next morning still alive and in one piece. There is no more glorious sight to young campers than the first sliver of sun rising over a distant mountain.

  One summer, Ernie’s parents came up with a brilliant solution to the dark. They bought him a little, white canvas tent. If the four of us slept side-by-side in it, no farther apart than bread slices in a packaged loaf, we fit nicely. I don’t remember if the tent was waterproof or if it kept the rain out, but it did keep most of the dark out. Being a small tent, it limited the dark to a few cubic feet, a couple dozen at most, but it established a limit. You no longer had the sense that the whole world was filled with dark. True, I did realize a grizzly could chomp down the whole tent and us as if we were nothing more than a bear-size taco, but grizzlies were nothing compared with limitless dark.

  Right here, I should mention that Reggie had a serious fault as a camping companion—he was fearless. One of us regular guys would hiss something like, “I just heard something!”

  Reggie would say, “It ain’t nothin’! Shut up and go to sleep!”

  I wanted so much to be like Reggie, to be brave and calm while camping out, and to actually sleep.

  This brings me to the night Reggie got up and left the tent to answer a call of nature. I know this sounds crazy to any former kid campers, but it’s true. That’s how fearless Reggie was. He thought nothing of getting up in the middle of the night and going outside the tent. Nature could have been shrieking in one of my ears and often was, and I would not have budged toward the limitless dark. I was so comfortable in the embrace of that little tent that I never even noticed Reggie’s foolhardy act and may even have drifted off to sleep.

  The next morning, Reggie insisted on relating his adventure to the rest of us. He told us how he had been standing alongside the tent during the night answering the call, and the moon was out, and he was listening to all the little night sounds and enjoying the moment when suddenly a huge bear ambled by on the other side of the creek. At that point, the creek was so narrow that the bear could have hopped across it without wetting a paw. I was so overwhelmed by Reggie’s report of his own nonchalance in regard to the bear as if it were something he experienced almost every day, his standing out there in the moonlight, calmly watching this huge, carnivorous beast lumber by. I was so envious I could hardly speak. Suddenly Ernie let out a yelp. “Hey! Who peed all over the side of my tent!”

  After that, I found myself much more comfortable, camping out with Reggie. He suddenly seemed a lot more like one of us regular guys.

  To Smoke a Steelhead

  A

  fter having been a steelhead fisherman for more than forty years, I recently confessed this aberration to my doctor. He said as deplorable and incurable as this condition might be, he didn’t think it would make me dangerous to myself or others and certainly not to steelhead. He himself is a chukar hunter, mostly on the steep breaks of the Snake River. So he should talk.

  The point of this essay is simply to provide instructions on how to smoke a steelhead. It is a step-by-step procedure based on my own recent experience of smoking a couple of large steelhead.

  The steelhead is a sea-run trout, as you probably know, an actual fish, although many anglers believe it to be a mythical creature, a cruel joke played on them by their friends and enemies to get them out on an icy river at the crack of dawn. There are fiends who will actually do this, and the rotten, no-good . . . but I don’t want to get carried away. Dedicated fishermen might go through a lifetime without hooking a single s
teelhead. It is, however, quite easy to pretend that you have caught numerous large steelhead, but that is a topic for another how-to piece.

  For the purpose of this lesson, I will use my own experience of smoking my two steelhead. (I have witnesses to the catching, although I would not believe any of them myself.)

  First, let me explain that most of my life I have been interested in preserving food by the process of smoking. As a child, I could never understand why my folks insisted upon preserving our own home-raised pork with curing salt rather than build a smokehouse. I can still remember rubbing curing salt into slabs of bacon. If my recollection is correct, my hands were better preserved than the bacon. My folks didn’t seem to mind eating deteriorating bacon around March or April, but what could you expect from persons who made and ate homemade blood sausage and headcheese? Homemade headcheese always reminds me that there is such a thing as evil in the world. My family could gross out the average civilized diner at a hundred yards.

  Eventually, at about age thirty-five, I finally made enough money to buy a hovel of my own and move my little family into it. It was sort of a small, suburban farm on which I thought we might be able to become self-sustaining by growing our own food and such. (Writers have such weird ideas.) One of my first tasks was to build, at long last, my own smokehouse. It was about two feet square and six feet high, and made of used cedar boards. I drilled a hole in the door and inserted the long proboscis of a meat thermometer through the hole, so I could keep track of the temperature inside. About six feet away, I dug a hole in the ground and lined it with bricks. I ran a sewer pipe underground from the hole over to the smokehouse. (I recommend that if you build your own smokehouse of this design, you buy a new section of sewer pipe.)

  Thus I could build a fire in the hole with, say applewood or alder, and the smoke would cool as it flowed through the sewer pipe to the smokehouse. I could control the temperature by sliding a large flat rock back and forth over the fire hole. It was a very nice setup, except for the fact that visitors often mistook the smokehouse for a privy. This can be a real downer, especially for a person who loves his smokehouse.

  I smoked all kinds of things in my smokehouse. For example, I once made antelope sausage, stuffing it in casings my wife, Bun, sewed from muslin. Even though the smoked links in no way resembled an antelope, my young daughters, still enamored of Bambi, refused to eat them.

  Another time, I smoked some carp and took it to a party. I explained that it was salmon. The guests loved it, including two airline stewardesses who gorged themselves on the “salmon” to the extent that they became quite ill and were out in the yard . . . well, I won’t go into that. They no doubt would have been much sicker if I had told them they had been eating carp.

  Perhaps the most startling of my smoked creations was a turkey. I had forgotten to tie down its wing and legs, and it came out looking like a fat, brown Superman preparing to leap from a tall building. After laughing themselves sick, the girls refused to eat any of it.

  For all these years then, I have been smoking various foods—mostly fish—but occasionally jerky. I once took some of my smoked jerky on a backpacking trip with a professor friend of mine, who referred to the gnarled little black pieces as resembling something that might be found in the vicinity of a small camel. He nevertheless ate a considerable quantity.

  I should point out that I no longer use a smokehouse but a product called Little Chief. I don’t usually name products, but as I view the Little Chief as one of the greatest inventions in the whole history of the civilized world, I do so here. Now at last, here is how to smoke a steelhead, with detailed instructions based on my own recent experience.

  First, you go out to your garage and lay a sheet of plywood or perhaps an old door across two sawhorses. This will make you an adequate filleting table.

  Do not—I repeat, DO NOT—attempt to fillet the steelhead in the kitchen. This can be dangerous to your health. I don’t think an explanation is necessary.

  Once you have the filleting table set up, take the fish from the cooler in which you transported it home. The fish will be bent in the shape of the letter C. That is because the cooler was too small for the steelhead. In my case, the cooler was very large, but I still had to bend the fish to get it to fit. I had covered the fish with ice obtained from a hotel ice machine. I can’t recommend using hotel ice. It has no ill effects on fish but a good deal on hotel managers. Maybe you should go to the store and buy a couple bags of ice.

  You might wish to speed up the process of straightening your steelhead. I recommend that you arrange the fish so that the bent part is facing up. Then you place a newspaper over the bent part and place a bag of lead shot on top of the newspaper. It has been many years since I’ve purchased a bag of lead shot, and I don’t know how much it costs now. I would not recommend that you run out at this time and buy shot. It is better to substitute some other object, such as a heavy car jack. This will cut in half the time required to straighten your fish.

  Once your fish has straightened out, you can begin the filleting process. First, remove the lead shot or car jack. Then take your fillet knife and—wait, I should say a word about fillet knives. Years ago, I bought a large fillet knife. Its blade is at least eighteen inches long and—in theory, at least—it allows you to slice off a large fillet from each side of your fish in a single graceful motion. The knife was very expensive but worth every dollar. For example, one of my sons-in-law once said to me, “Wow! What do you use a knife like that for?”

  I said, “For filleting large steelhead and salmon.” See, the knife paid for itself right there.

  Alas, in this instance, the knife would not penetrate the skin of the steelhead, and I had to resort to the small knife I used for cleaning and skinning perch. Once the fillets had been whittled off, I attempted to remove the skin from the fillets. Neither my large knife nor the small one allowed me to slice between the skin and the fillet itself. So I simply cut the fillets into three-inch-square chunks ready to go into the brine. I knew that after smoking, the skin would slip right off. Actually, it’s quite a bit of fun, peeling the skin from pieces of smoked steelhead, provided you have a low entertainment threshold.

  Once you have your steelhead fillets cut into chunks, just place them in a large bowl and pour two cups each of brown sugar and non-iodized salt over them. Then—well, in my case, I discovered at that point that I had only one cup of brown sugar. So I drove to the store and bought another package. The trip took scarcely more than an hour and $15 in gas. I poured the second cup of brown sugar over the fish and started to add the salt. It was at that point I discovered our salt was iodized. So I drove back to the store for non-iodized salt. This trip took scarcely more than an hour and $20 in gas. (The price of Regular gas had gone up in the meantime.) I poured the salt over the steelhead. This is a very simple method of making brine because salt and sugar will draw the juices out of the fish and provide the curing liquid. Because we usually eat the smoked fish within a day or two, I’m not sure about the degree of curing. You’re on your own there.

  I like to let the fish remain in the brine for eight hours. Because it was now two in the afternoon, the fish would be ready for the Little Chief by ten in the evening. Because I let it smoke for six hours, this meant by four in the morning my smoked steelhead would be done. I checked the TV guide for late-evening and early-morning shows.

  And that’s all there is to smoking a steelhead. Well, first you have to catch one. So while you’re sitting there on your patio, watching your Little Chief puff sway, you may recall that the last time you were in a fish shop, fillets of smoked salmon were going for $20 a pound! You smile to yourself, knowing that this is your own steelhead you’re smoking, the one you caught yourself. Indeed, you chortle out loud, thinking about all the people who choose to take the cheap way out. Ha! A mere $20 a pound! Those pikers!

  The Teachings of Rancid Crabtree

  T

  he first time Rancid Crabtree came to visit at our farm, m
y mother called me in to meet the old man. I thought of him as old, even though he probably was no more than forty.

  “Mr. Crabtree,” Mom said. “This is my son, Patrick.”

  “How old is it?” Rancid asked, as if considering the purchase of some meat of questionable quality.

  “Ten.”

  “Don’t have no dad, you say?”

  “No, his father died when Patrick was very young.” Both of them looked at me as if I were to blame.

  Then Rancid asked me the question that grown men in that time and place used to size up a youngster. “Gotcher deer yet?”

  “Sure,” I replied, modestly scuffing a black mark in the kitchen linoleum with my tennis shoe. “Got him in the head with my .25/20 at 100 yards, a four-point muley. . . . ”

  Rancid nodded approvingly. “He might do,” he said to my mother.

  “Oh, pshaw!” Mom said. “He’s never even fired a gun, let alone killed a deer. He tells stories like that all the time. Land sakes, he keeps me at my wits end . . . . ”

  “Yup,” Rancid said. “He’ll do. Shucks, ah couldn’t lie like thet till ah was twice his age. Yup, he’ll do . . . . ”

  Those were the first words of encouragement I had heard in all my ten years. I felt the need to express my gratitude to the old man.

  “Dressed out upward of a hundred pounds,” I said.

  Mom rolled her eyes, but Rancid nodded in appreciation.

  Until Rancid came along, I resided in a jungle of apron strings, those of my mother, my sister (the Troll), and my grandmother (Gram). Outnumbered three to one, I had fought diligently against this female conspiracy, whose stated objective was to turn me into a civilized young man, a creature never before seen in our part of the country, at least, to my knowledge. Since none of the conspiracy had ever seen a civilized young man as far as I knew, it was unlikely they would recognize such a thing if they saw one. It became increasingly clear to me that what they were trying to do was turn me into a civilized young lady, and I would have none of it. Still, there was some evidence they might succeed. One day, I even washed my hands before supper without being threatened. I was unnerved for hours afterward. The lapse shook my confidence.