Nor would my skin flake, nor would I ever erupt in blisters when I stayed out in the sun too long, nor would I ever piss more than twice or thrice a day, and never at all at night, and I’d still be six-one by 180, and my eyes would still be 20/10, and I could still clean-and-jerk two hundred pounds from a standstill, and I’d be able to hit every clay off the trap within ten yards, and every grouse that ever flew, and cast a streamer—a 4/0 Lefty’s Deceiver—the length of a football field, with pinpoint accuracy.
With only one backcast!
And the wahoo would take it every time . . .
But none of the fish I caught would ever go belly up after the release.
Hell, I could fish and hunt and eat anything and everything any time I wanted in my heaven, drink and never get drunk, and win the Nobel Prize for medicine every Thursday.
This is pure shit: the pitiful idea of heaven. It’s way too soppy-wish-fulfilling-sentimental. Pitiable is the word. My life was better than this implies.
Prosit Neujahr!
At sunup the next day I woke on the deck at Palos Verdes. It wasn’t heaven. It was cold as an Inuit’s igloo. The Pacific boomed good morning. Spray leaped halfway up the cliff, waves receded, regrouped, charged again. The whole house shuddered. The rhythms of the sea. I was reeling, still half in the bag. Salt water corrodes. The alto sax lay there on a chaise longue, beaded with dew. I fetched a towel from the locker and wiped it down, pulled the reed, licked it clean. Then I stood there naked with the dawn at my back, salt wind in my face, shivering, and wailed “Koko” the way the Bird blew it back in the ’40s, that gutsy guttural line erupting into dazzle, hearing Diz on the trumpet in my mind’s ear bopping behind me all around the chords. I needed someone to lay down the beat—Max Roach, maybe, Art Blakey? No, too showy, I wanted Ben there, tapping a smooth round riverbank rock like he did on the Firesteel, ticking out insect riffs on an empty tin can, rattling a hollow log beside the campfire . . .
Where was he when I needed him?
I laid down the sax. The empty fifth of brandy and a half full bottle of Xanax stood on the table beside the chaise. I tossed them over the cliff. And went in for some clothes and my Rolodex.
Ben called me now and then, every four or five years was his schedule, usually late at night Wisconsin time, sundown in California, slurred and mawkish—he’d taken up booze. Big time. When was the last time he phoned? I flipped through the Rolo. I usually scribble in the dates. There it was—two years ago. Before the shit hit the fan for me, but he’d already had a face full.
Ben’s retired now too, from what sounds like a rollercoaster ride of a career as a building contractor. More downs than ups. Then his wife left him. That was what he called about last time we spoke. Lorraine was gone, after forty-six years of marriage. They’d been sweet on each other since high school. Lorraine, he often said, had an overdeveloped civic conscience. She was the kind of woman who, if she happened to run a red light and wasn’t ticketed on the spot, would turn herself in to the nearest police station an hour later, checkbook and driver’s license in hand, demanding instant justice.
“Lorraine’s a goodnik,” he’d say. “Unlike me, the ultimate no-goodnik.”
Why did she leave him? Men of our generation don’t ask questions like that. If a friend doesn’t volunteer how he got a broken arm or leg, you don’t ask him how it happened. Nor do you ask a friend about his sex life, or what he paid for a new car, or gun, or pair of socks, or even what he’s dying of. If he wants to tell you, he will. It’s a simple question of honor between men.
Lorraine’s living near their kids on the East Coast now Ben told me, somewhere below Philadelphia, and none of them will speak with Ben when he calls. He’s all alone in a big, empty house of his own construction in a priggish, sleepy little hick town, Bonduel, with only his dog Jake, an aging yellow Lab, for company.
The Korean war scarred him for life, I think: that wicked winter fight during the Chosin Reservoir campaign, and later along the thirty-eighth parallel the “Diesels” and “Mercuries”—assault raids on the Chinese lines and ambushes in No Man’s Land—it all must have left him with suppurating wounds, a lifetime of bitter flashbacks. The fact that we didn’t win that war was worse. It turned him sour, surly, hair-triggered. He’d never admit it though. Ben’s no whiner. But his life has been wasted. Now with his wife gone he drinks too much and eyeballs the gun cabinet—mon semblable, mon frère! All that keeps his finger from the trigger, he tells me, is the continuing love and presence of his dog. He figures that after Jake dies is time enough. All that keeps my trigger finger still—so to speak—is the memory of the Firesteel.
I picked up the cell phone, punched in his number, and flicked it to speaker mode.
Brrrring . . . Brrrring . . . Brrr . . .
I set the sax to my mouth.
“Yeah?” His voice was thick, blurred, drowning in phlegm, though it’s already midmorning in Bonduel.
I wailed a line from “Salt Peanuts” . . .
A long pause, then:
“Well, you old son of a bitch! Long time, no hear. How the hell are you, Hairball?” He was suddenly awake.
“I have only one word for you, pal. Firesteel.”
Another silence, then:
“You know, I think about it too, more and more these days.”
“How is the old river?”
“I haven’t been up there in—Christ, must be ten or twelve years. And then only to fish the estuary. You know, that lower run by the Haystack? But it was still good, Harry. Damned good. Since they put those Pacific salmon in the Great Lakes, there’s plenty of action year round. Kings, silvers, steelhead, you name it.”
“What about the upper river where we took those big brookies?”
“I don’t know firsthand, but it shouldn’t be too fucked up yet. Most of the city folks want lake property, and the state’s kept the rivers up north pretty clean since the loggers cleared out.”
“How about the bird hunting?”
“Still good. Woodcock are falling off, thin on the ground these past few years, but that’s true everywhere. Habitat loss, I figure. Everything growing up to climax again. But this should be a peak year for ruffs, top of the cycle. And there’s Huns now up on the Firesteel. Not to mention ducks and geese.”
We were quiet for a moment. Then I said, “Kate’s dead.”
A long beat . . .
“Oh, shit, Harry. I . . . What can I say?”
“Look, let’s do that trip again. What do you think? I could fly into Green Bay tomorrow, we’ll buy ourselves a new canoe, Kevlar, light and strong, my treat. We’ll outfit the bastard, and hit the Firesteel all over again.”
“What did she die of?”
“Death,” I said. “A stroke. It was quick, thank God for that.”
“If it had to happen . . . ”
“It happens.”
I heard him cough, clear his throat.
“The Firesteel,” he said. “One more time . . . What did that Greek guy say? ‘You can’t step into the same river twice’?”
“Fuck him, Ben. He’s long dead. Don’t mean nothin’. Drive on.”
Ben laughed. “Why not?” he said. “It was a great trip, ‘the worst trip I’ve ever been on,’ I guess. We’ll name the canoe Sloop John B. We were young then, guy—Great Lakes Beach Boys, strong and ignorant, not a clue to what was lying just down the pike. And maybe we’ll finally catch that muskie.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
The rest of the conversation was details. I’d bring my sixteen-bore Purdey and a trout rod or two. Ben had a tent, sleeping bags, and plenty of camp gear. We’d worry about food later, after I got there.
“You bringing that saxophone of yours?” he asked. “Your ax, as you always called it?”
“Couldn’t die without it,” I said.
He laughed. Then he started coughing, another gobbet of gunk . . .
“Frog in my throat,” he said at last. “Too many cigars, I guess.” Then, “Hey
, Hairball! I’ll carve me up some drumsticks, special for this jaunt! Shagbark hickory, there’s a tree in the backyard I’ve had my eye on. Jake’s been pissing on it for eleven years now so the wood’ll be cured to a fare-thee-well.”
Jake would come along, of course. A great last hunt for a great gundog, and perhaps a great trip for both of us as well. Maybe it could be a new beginning. Or a fitting finale.
3
PREPARATIONS FOR GETTING UNDER WAY
You move when the mood is upon you. That night I caught a red-eye out of LAX for O’Hare, then galloped the length of the airport to connect with a puddle-jumper that got me into Green Bay at midmorning. The flight north was high and smooth. Lake Michigan sprawled slate blue, flecked with whitecaps beneath us. Off the port wing the Wisconsin countryside was going gold and red to the touch of approaching autumn. Milwaukee came and went, the story of its life. Lakes winked in the morning sun, and slow brown rivers seamed the flats. Then, ahead to the northwest, I saw Lambeau Field. I could swear I smelled bratwurst and sauerkraut as we banked, swept the fields, and landed. Austin Straubel International Airport—its name is longer than its runways.
Ben was waiting at the arrivals gate, tall and gaunt, paler than I’d ever seen him in his youth. The last time I’d laid eyes on him was in the early ’70s, before gas prices skyrocketed from 35 cents a gallon to their present stratospheric altitudes. He and Lorraine had driven out to California and we’d spent a week in my ketch, cruising the Santa Barbara Channel, fishing albacore and tuna, and diving for abalone in the kelp beds off Catalina Island. He was tanned, fit, and happy then. Now he looked like he’d spent the past quarter century hiding under a cesspool lid. But he grinned his old, wry grin when he saw me, and his grip was still strong. He wore the old timer’s uniform of the day that’s become de rigueur in contemporary society—Air Jordans, sag-rumped black sweats, and a Packers ball cap. His white hair spilled over his ears—no, make that his ear. The left one was gone, sheared off by a mortar frag up near a town called Kotori. That was during the Chosin campaign. The scar tissue gleamed like a snail track.
“Baggage claim will take half an hour at least,” he told me. “It may be a small airport, but its motto is ‘Slow Is Beautiful.’ Let’s grab a Milwaukee orange juice while we’re waiting,” and he steered me to the cocktail lounge. The barkeep knew him, plunked down a boilermaker and his helper before we’d even got seated. Dickel and draft—Leinenkugel’s. The barkeep, whose nametag proclaimed him “Red,” raised an eyebrow at me. He wasn’t a man to waste words, unlike the rest of the Badger State’s population. “I’ll have the same,” I told him. Ben took a sip of his beer and poured the bourbon into the glass. I tossed my shot back neat, gagged, then drank half the beer in two swallows. “At this rate,” I said when my gorge had settled, “we’ll be lucky to find Lake Superior, much less the river.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve become one of those Californicated pussies,” Ben said. “All mesclun and balsamic vinegar, designer fizzy water? You haven’t wussed out on me, have you, Hairball?”
He took off his cap and I saw that he was bald as the proverbial billiard ball, apart from the shoulder-length white fringe that masked his missing ear.
“Jesus, Ben, I just flashed on our old pal Curly. He wore the same kind of hairdo you’ve got. You’ve got to give me your stylist’s name.”
Ben downed his beer and tapped the empty glass on the bar top—ordering up another. “Just the Dickel this time, Red,” he said.
How many had he downed before I got here?
I’d packed light this time, the shotgun and rod cases, the horn, and my old Navy seabag full of outer and innerwear. Thinking ahead, I’d brought along a cache of drug samples to treat anything that might ail me during the course of the trip, with heavy emphasis on some new pills called Micturatrol to calm my nervous bladder. Prolonged use of them might fuck up my plumbing, but I was damned if I’d embarrass myself in front of my boyhood chum. Picture us halfway down a run of whitewater with me yelping, “Hey Ben, pull over to the bank—I gotta shake hands with the mayor!”
Anyway, long-term effects were not a concern of mine.
Ben slung the seabag over his shoulder and I carried the rest of my gear. We walked out to his truck, a rust-scabbed black Ford F-250, vintage ’92, I’d guess. The short-bed model. We stowed the gear under a tarp and headed northwest.
Ben’s place, a split-level ranch built of Lannon stone, stood on the crest of a low hill just north of Bonduel (pop. 1,210). To the north lay the Menominee Indian reservation. The driveway was lined with Norwegian pines, the lawn needed mowing. Old Jake ambled out from the backyard to greet us, a big yellow Lab who’d gone bonewhite around the muzzle. He sniffed me up and down, then caught a whiff of the gun case. Now he looked up at me and grinned, a sparkle in his rheumy brown eyes. His thick otterine tail thumped hello. Hunters always sniff one another out.
“Woof,” he said. You’ll do.
Ben opened the garage door. Inside sat a boat trailer with a canoe on it, already loaded. “A Mad River, from Vermont,” he said. “Kevlar, just like the doctor ordered. Sixteen foot of it. I thought of getting a Mackenzie boat, but they didn’t have any in cedar.”
“I told you I wanted to buy the canoe.”
“What, you’re going to paddle it back to California? I’m not dead broke yet, Hairball.”
I ankled over to the canoe and eyeballed the supplies. Much of the space was taken up by a nylon sack full of waterfowl decoys, but the rest was as I remembered it: sleeping bags; cook pots and fry pans; a box of sulphur-tipped kitchen matches; a blue-and-white-speckled stoneware coffee pot full of aluminum knives, forks, and spoons; two pairs of swim fins and face masks; a spear gun; a roll of mosquito netting; and a leather-sheathed cruising ax. I hoped it wouldn’t need sharpening this time. Somewhere he’d even scrounged up a few orange crates and filled them with the foods of yesteryear—Hormel chili, Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs, Quaker Oats, Dinty Moore beef stew, and a mason jar full of brown sugar. Elsewhere in the load I spotted tins of Carnation milk, Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, a tub of crunchy Skippy’s, and three loaves of Wonder Bread. Up in the bow, where I usually paddled, sat a big gift-wrapped box, tied with a broad pink silk ribbon.
“Open it,” Ben said, deadpan.
“What the fuck?”
Brisling sardines, bread-and-butter pickles, Ritz crackers, strawberry jam, mayonnaise, anchovies . . . and a new addition, a magnum jar of pickled herring in sour cream.
“Oh, darling,” I said. “You remembered!”
We went inside for a look-see. The living room was hung with the heads of deer Ben had shot over the years, the best of them a twelve-pointer with brow tines as long as an elk’s. Above the limestone fireplace hung a steelhead the length of my forearm. “From the Firesteel,” Ben said. “That trip I told you about, back in ’85. I took her on a duplicate of our Cannibal-Killer, best I could remember it. Maybe a bit more orange in the tie.”
This is getting creepy, I thought. The poor old bastard lives in the past. What a memory, though. I couldn’t have retied that fly on a bet. But what the hell, how many times have I redreamed the Firesteel? Every night of my life, or so it seems of late.
“Hey, Benjamin, I almost forgot. I brought you something from the Quaking Smog.” In my carry-on I had a cedar box of Rey del Mundo Coronas, and now I presented it to him. “You said you were into cigars these days, didn’t you?”
“Christ, Harry, these are Cubanos.” He plucked a fatboy from the carton, sniffed it, and grinned. “Where the hell do you get them?”
“Same place I get my Cuervo Especial.” Of which I presented him a bottle. “My ‘Mexican connection.’ The barkeep at Hussong’s Cantina, down Ensenada way. No big deal in the Land of the Big Enchilada. They trade with the Beard all the time. Getting these smokes back into the States is the problem. But until recently I had a boat.”
And a wife, I thought.
He must have read her in
my face. He clipped the corona and lit up. The smoke wafted blue and fragrant across the room. Then he cracked the Cuervo. He looked over at me, no pity in his eyes, just the naked truth.
“This is my life since Lorraine left me. Booze and brown weeds.” He raised the bottle.
He smiled all the sadness in the world.
“Skoal, partner.”
By high noon, with Jake wagging between us, we were pouring north—toward the Firesteel and our fate.
Despite my globe-trotting and seeming sophistication, I retained a fondness for Wisconsin. There’s always something left for the place you grew up in. To be sure it was Hicksville, a tiny, stale little swatch of flyover country, smelling of cheese-heads and crackers. The big timber, its only redeeming feature, had been cut off long ago. Oh sure, the good burghers still make the best beer in America and they have an interesting football team, the Green Bay Packers, but their minds are as stumpy as their long-gone trees. Love and religion, family chicken dinners, bowling alleys, bratwurst and pretzels. Beer and brandy and well-coached bowels. Most of the folks Ben and I were raised among were of German origin, still others from the eastern reaches of the old Austro-Hungarian empire.
When I was growing up there were still some very old people—smelly geezers who’d lost at least partial control of both sphincter and bladder (my future in six or eight months, if I should live so long), gimpy hausfraus with only two or three gold teeth remaining in their dry, pinkgummed mouths—who crossed themselves or indeed shed salty tears at the mention of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo back in 1914. The old women would say, “How schweet she vass, his vife die Erzherzogin, riding dere in da carritch mit him. Vy did that madman haff to shoot her?”
After stopping in town to pick up my nonresident licenses, we headed north, following the same route that I’d driven in college and med school—ah, that sleek old Studebaker ragtop of mine, a ’48 she was, battleship gray, with a spaceship’s nosecone worthy of reentry, but slow as redemption when it came to pickup)—avoiding the new interstates that would have saved us hours of driving time. Ben’s V-8 Ford ate up the road.
The Run to Gitche Gumee Page 17