He said okay and started moving off, with the warm water already up to his belly button. I pushed into the deeper water. It was like wading through a caldron of live bouillabaisse: blue-gills and tilapia spooked out of the weeds; shoals of minnows and darters fled from the bow wave of my chest.
For an hour we had splendid shooting. Never were there fewer than a hundred ducks in the air, often as many as a thousand—the Yeatsian antithesis, the tightening gyre: a dozen teal caught between the guns, their delicate formation shattered and shifting to the impact of our chilled shot, turning inward and inward until only three are left to wing it out low on the deck, dodging to safety through the reeds.
I watched my son take a final double—mallards, duck and drake—that swept in behind him as he retrieved a crippled teal. The boy heard their wing beats, that zipper rip of ducks in full flight, and wheeled to face them. The couple banked in panic, but it was too late. Pow, kapow! and they folded, bouncing and skipping upside down across the hard, flat water. The drake lay finally on his back, his orange paddles flailing good-bye to the sky. When I looked at him later, I saw that the shot had nipped off the top of his skull, exposing the minuscule brain, and his lower mandible dangled like a shoe tongue. The boy held him high and grinned at me.
Wading back to our camp, we stopped to rest on a dry, brush-grown embankment. The sun was sloping down toward the slumped shoulders of Mount Pyngyp, and we admired its light on the iridescent blue specula of the dead ducks. A long snake slithered past us—the longest snake I had ever seen, until I saw that it was actually two snakes, one in pursuit of the other. They were of the same species—about four feet long, with green and tan lengthwise stripes and black masks on their oval (nonpoisonous) heads. Ranera—frog snakes. As the first snake raced up the branch of a low bush, the second snake raced up the first snake’s back and locked its jaws behind the first snake’s head. Instantly the snakes coiled around each other. I looked down the twist of snake bodies and saw that one of the snakes had a little serpentine pecker about three quarters of an inch long sticking out of his belly. It was a hard-on, sure enough, and he was trying to stick it into the other snake.
But which snake was doing it to which? I went back up to the heads and traced down the body of the snake that was holding the other in submission. Wouldn’t you know it, he was the one with the pecker! He screwed for about ten minutes with slow, steady thrusts that sent undulations up his back clear to his jaws. When he came, a little ooze of snake semen bubbled out around his donglet. He released his partner, and she zipped away. The rapist shot his black tongue a few flicks and then did likewise. I sat there smiling, and then looked around to see how my son had taken it.
He had pulled a toy dump truck out of his game pocket and was vroom-ing it around in the mud, building a freeway around the butt of his shotgun where it leaned against a shrub.
8
IT WAS TOO HOT now for much travel during the middle of the day. The sun worked its way through the triple canopy of the rain forest like a gobbet of worms through a dung heap. The morning ground fog that turned the Hassayampa’s coils into a pearly Turner seascape was devoured two hours after dawn by the worming sun. The fog was our ally, and we walked through it beaded and cool, laughing at the sudden, shocking splat of the drops that fell on us from the waxy riverside trees. But the laughter was tinged with hysteria. Through the trees, we could see the river moving under the rainbow gray of the fog, carrying mute messages of upstream disaster. A fragment of thatching from a hut built too close to the eroding bank. A shattered sampan. A dog so bloated with death that it might have been an ox, with its stiff legs poking upward like the toothpicks in some obscene plate of canapés. Once a dead man in green military fatigues, gone almost black with the river water, an amphibious vulture riding his belly as pompous as a sea captain. Through the fog, this flotsam appeared magnified, distorted into things monstrous, and at first my son clung close to me as we walked. But when the fog lifted and the imagined monsters resolved themselves into the merely dead, he grew bolder. He forged ahead and scouted out a level piece of ground where we could lie up during the heat of the day.
Yet as we lay there, in some cool bamboo thicket, dozing or absently watching the trotlines, I often wondered what was going on deep down in his head. Was the trip really toughening him, as I hoped it would? Or was the mix of rot and beauty too strong for him—would it ultimately put him off of the wilderness for good? I would let the thought twist slowly in my mind, a philosophical spirochete common to the male human parent.
Is my son a coward?
Why do you ask?
Because perhaps I myself am a coward?
How can you be a coward with all the chances you take?
Don’t cowards often throw themselves in front of buses?
My son lies naked on his sleeping bag, his head propped against his pack frame, his body stained with fly dope and ridged with thorn cuts, lumpy with bug bites. But the disfigurations of the moment cannot disguise the fact that he is handsome.
The spirochete wriggles another quarter of a turn.
Too handsome?
Thick, dark hair that falls well below his ears in the androgynous style favored by his generation. Large, dark eyes. Long lashes—woman’s lashes? A straight, almost delicate nose, over a cupid’s bow mouth. The chin is strong enough; the neck long and thick; the shoulders wide; a flat, hard chest. Only a hint of the baby belly—a memory long gone before this trip is out? No hips to speak of, and well hung for his age. Long, straight legs that give promise of a man of size—legs strong enough to walk me into the ground.
Too handsome? Too graced, too blessed with the cosmetic virtues of this cosmetic age?
Will the women of his life murmur at his knees?
The sun crawls slowly over the river. The shadow of the bamboo crawls slowly over my son’s sleeping body. What do I want him to be? I want him to be tough. Tough as well as beautiful. Is there a contradiction there? The bamboo is tough and beautiful. . . .
My son rolls over and wakes up. He listens to the Hassayampa gurgling at the edge of the bamboo, then walks over and urinates into the river. He stretches. He pulls in the trotlines and unhooks a string of peacock bass, caught on salamanders that he captured under the rotting logs of the riverbank.
“Why don’t you clean the fish right now?”
“Naw,” he says, yawning. “I’m still sleepy. All this heat, it really knocks me out. Anyway, I hate to put a knife in them when they’re still fresh and flipping.”
The first hint of a late-afternoon breeze is whispering upstream, a taste of walking weather. I open my knife and clean the fish. My thumb and fingers work deep into the gills, holding the fish in submission as the knife does its bloody work.
“Goddammit,” I say to him, “I want you to brush your teeth— and right now!”
9
THE MORE I THOUGHT of it, the more certain I became that I had indeed once met Ratnose—that, in fact, I had helped a friend of mine to kill him.
That was back in the old days, when I used to trap this stretch of the Hassayampa. It wasn’t big-time trapping, of the sort one still finds in Canada and the mountain West, but it helped me to flesh out my fantasies. The only furbearers we took were muskrats, raccoons, opossums, and sewer rats. My trapping partner was a kid named Ron Fertig, a dirty-minded youth whose father was a renowned gynecologist. In those days, Ron and I always had sex on our minds. We lay in wait like tomcats for a chance to peek into one of his father’s medical textbooks: flip it open to any page and there was a shaggy slot staring you in the face. All the women in the pictures, of course, were pregnant, and the contortions of their faces were those of labor, not lust. But we weren’t looking at faces. “I Learned to Masturbate From a Medical Textbook!”
Trapping, I suppose, was our surrogate for snatch: we took pelts, literally. Mainly we trapped the sewer outlets of one of the Hassayampa’s tributaries, the Menomonee. We looked for fresh sign in the mud at the culvert�
�s mouth and then set a No. 1 or a No. 1V2 steel trap along the run, covering the boiled steel with leaves that took no scent from our smoked leather gloves. During the noon hour we ran down through the fields from school and checked the traps. If there was an animal in the trap, we clubbed it to death with the nearest branch and skinned it out right there. Often the male raccoons would undergo an orgasm while they were being clubbed. The opossums and muskrats were too stupid to get any sexual thrill from death. The raccoon was the most consistent of the animals we trapped in biting through its own leg to escape. Ron and I both developed an affection for raccoons. Since it was impossible to release them, because of their ferocity, and since we caught more raccoons than any other furbearers, we soon gave up trapping.
But not before we had trapped the Hassayampa itself. Having heard that there were mink and otter in plenty along the big river, we took a week of Christmas vacation to pack in and trap there. Neither of us read the newspapers much at that time, but if we had we might have known there would be trouble—human trouble—along the middle reaches of the Hassayampa. This was in the winter of a war year, and the government was still cleaning up on the warlords and bandits whose last stronghold was the mountainous watershed of the river. A few bands of outlaws had drifted down to the wild, impenetrable bottoms of the Hassayampa not far from where we were trapping.
We first became aware of the bandits late one gusty afternoon while tending our traps along the river. The sunset, obscured by fast, lean clouds, had turned the snowy woods red and black. We were wet and cold, our hands stiff as we prized the warm bodies of mink from the steel. Then we heard horses snorting and stamping. There were six of them, scrawny pinto ponies carrying scrawnier men dressed in cotton quilting and rat skins, their rifles—those skinny, long-barreled Jap .25s—slung muzzle down like broomsticks on their backs. On one of the packhorses sat a prisoner, a dark and flat-faced man with a bloody rag tied over one ear under his leather cap. His hands were chained to the high wooden pommel. Our only weapon, a .22 Colt Woodsman, was back at camp—Ron was afraid of losing it in the river— and it was toward our camp that the horsemen were proceeding.
“Maybe they won’t see the camp,” Ron whispered. “And even if they do, maybe they won’t find the pistol. I left it under my sleeping bag.” We cached our mink in a hollow tree, pissing on the trunk and the ground around it to warn curious animals away. Then we followed up the bandits’ trail. They had found our camp all right, and we watched from the woods, belly down in the snow, as they devoured our furs, which had been scrupulously salted down and were drying on willow stretchers near the fire. The hungrier bandits ate the stiff hides fur and all, while the more finicky shaved off the hair with their machetes. “Listen,” said Ron: “they haven’t looked in the tent yet. While they’re still eating, I’m going to sneak into the tent and get the pistol.”
It was getting dark fast now, and by using the available brush and snowdrifts to good advantage, Ron made it to the back of the tent. Then he pulled his hunting knife and cut a slit in the tent wall just opposite the head of his sleeping bag. He groped for a long moment, and I saw that he had the gun. What he did next I wasn’t prepared for: after checking the magazine and pulling the slide to put one round in the chamber, he stepped out past the side of the tent and leveled on the bandits. He had the lanyard around his neck and the pistol extended at full arms’ length, both hands white-knuckled on the grip and the bead smack on the forehead of the bandit leader.
“All right, you gooks!” he said. “Drop those furs and put your fucking hands on your fucking heads.” The leader’s jaw dropped open, his wispy beard quivering with outraged disbelief. He had only one eye, but it pierced us like a javelin. A few slippery clots of mink fur spewed from his lips as he tried to speak. “Feelthy gringos!”—and he started to rise. Ron popped him through the throat (he hadn’t followed up the man’s rise fast enough), and the bandit leader fell backward over the log, vomiting mink the way a cat might a bloody fur ball. Ron popped the next man through the forehead. I ran over and grabbed one of the rifles stacked near the drying rack to cover the others, checking the Mauser action quickly and surreptitiously to make sure I understood it. The flat-faced prisoner still sat his horse, hands chained to the pommel and immobile except for the flapping of his hat brim in the wind.
“You speak English?” Ron asked him. “You want get freedom?” He pronounced the last word in two gong-like syllables. The man said yeah, he wouldn’t mind getting loose, and that the bandit leader had the key to the lock in his upper breast pocket. I fetched the key; the bandit leader was nearly dead now, and besides puking blood all over his shirtfront, he had crapped his pants: the inoffensive little .22-caliber hollow soft point bullet must have fragmented on his neckbone and sent a needle of lead up into that portion of the brain that controls evacuation. Perhaps, in his last moments, he was reassuring himself with memories of the outhouse. I unchained the prisoner and handed him a rifle. He smiled briefly, flexed his wrists, and then shot one of the bandits through the lower abdomen. The bandit stepped back, hip-shot, and then sat down in the mud around the campfire, hissing softly. The remaining bandits tensed up, their eyes dancing away from the muzzle, then back to it again. “We’d better, you know,” said Ron. We gunned down the rest of them then and there.
Still, it didn’t bring back our mink pelts. The bandits had swallowed or badly gnawed every one of the hard-won furs before Ron got the drop on them. We dragged the bodies down to the Hassayampa, where the skunks and the crows would make short work of them before winter was out. The Indian told us his name was Johnny Black—Timmendequas in his native Wyandot: Black Lightning—and that the bandits had jumped him while he was jacking deer two days before up the river. “Obviously they heard the shot when I nailed a plump little doe,” he said, “and tracked me back to camp. Since I knew the country, they decided to keep me for a guide rather than kill me out of hand.” He paused and poked the fire, where a kettle of hunter’s stew was simmering, then smiled rather playfully. “They weren’t bad guys, you know. They were the enemies of the Chinese Communists—real believers in the free-enterprise system. They sure had an appetite for mink. And free-dom.”
Ron’s mouth dropped open, just as the bandit leader’s had before Ron shot him.
“Cripes,” he said, “I thought all bandits were Commies.”
We turned the ponies over to the Indian. He told us to drop by and see him anytime, he was beholden, and then we headed for home. The minks we had cached in the hollow of the tree had been discovered by a bold and voracious skunk; nothing was left but a few grease spots and a scattering of rich brown fur. All told, the expedition had proved unprofitable. We had not a single hide to show for our frigid work, and for months afterward I shot bandits in my dreams, bandits who refused to die. Worse yet, even the medical textbooks had lost their prurient charm. My sexual fantasies turned to slim teen-aged girls, where they lie, locked and writhing, even today.
10
A READING from Myerson’s History: “The collusion of officialdom both here and abroad in keeping the mysteries—nay! the simple but delightful truths—of the Hassayampa from the public extends a civilized mans concept of modern criminality beyond the point of rupture. This marvelous river, marvelous in the true sense of the word, in that its indigenous wildlife far exceeds in variety and antiquity any existing on the Earth’s other waterways, is denied even its proper name on the maps of the world’s so-called ‘geographical’ societies. Peiping, though it admits the existence of a river called the H’sa Yang Po (Hassayampa) rising from the Kunlun massif, shows that river on its maps as a mere tributary of the Yangtse. No mention is made of the exotic reptilian life known to exist on the upper Hassayampa, nor of the immense profits which, according to the reports of the few European travellers who have penetrated beyond ‘the forbidding face of Mount Pyngyp,’ may be derived from the drugs and ivories extricable from the carcases of those ‘dragons.’
“A recent enquiry dire
cted to the League of Nations regarding the indefensible and no doubt calculated obscurity of the Hassayampa’s promise elicited the following response: ‘We have not been able to determine the location of the Hassayampa River, no more than we have that of the so-called South African Diamond Fields, lately so much in the news.’ Proof enough of collusion!”
11
THE WOODS along here were filled with the ruins of failed farms. Every mile or so we spotted a barn, leaning red and rickety in on itself, its roof cocked sideways, the tarred shingles flapping in the wind. Nearby would be a cellar built of fieldstone, with an iron stove flaking away its rusty half-life amid the shards of polished random-width floorboards. We often camped in an abandoned farmyard. There was an abundance of firewood, for one thing, and depending on the time of year, we might find asparagus or stray tomatoes—the latter sometimes green but still delicious when sliced and fried; or sweet corn that had outlived its planters ambition; sometimes potatoes; and, in the fall, usually apples or pears, runty and worm-eaten but sweet. Woodchucks felt the same way we did about the abandoned orchards, so now and then we shot a couple under the trees where they rooted in the buzzing fruit rot and had roast groundhog for dinner, stuffed with sliced apples. We always built our fire in the lee of a stone wall, and leaned back in the reflecting heat while the meat popped and sizzled over the burning floorboards. I wondered about the women who had polished those floors and sweated their dainty sweat into them year after mindless year: perhaps the fire burned blue and brighter because of that salty, pointless effort.
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