by Jim Dodge
In thirty-two Sundays of hunting, they found Lockjaw twice. The first time, Fup's crazed quacking scared him up early, and Tiny only had time for a single shot at 250 yards. At the sound of the rifleshot, Lockjaw went rolling down the hill. But when Tiny and Fup finally worked their way over to where they'd seen him go down, there was no sign of Lockjaw. No body, no blood. Fup picked up the trail immediately but lost it at the bottom of the draw where it hit McKensie Creek. They searched up and down the creek on both sides till well after noon but found no sign. Fup was so exhausted Tiny had to carry her home.
The second time they saw Lockjaw, Lockjaw had seen them first, circled back on his tracks, lay down to wait in a tanoak thicket, and when they passed, he charged, slashing at Tiny's legs and missing, but knocking him down, and literally running over Fup, smashing one of her webbed feet so severely Tiny had to carry her home again. But he'd gotten a clear-if quick-look at Lockjaw just before he'd been bowled on his ass, and he reassured Fup as he packed her along that Lockjaw couldn't last forever, that he seemed to be slowing down, looked a mite skinny, appeared to be missing a tusk, and definitely had a matching set of.243 holes in his ears.
Granddaddy met them at the kitchen door. "You don't even have to tell me you saw that pig… I know you did."
"What makes you so sure?" Tiny asked.
"Because every time you see him, you come home carrying Fup."
Fup hissed.
Tiny glowered, then smiled.
Granddaddy hooted.
Lockjaw, tired with the exertion, picked his way along the creek to the tangle of dug-out redwood roots where he enjoyed snoozing on hot afternoons. He gave a few deep grunts along the way, sounding his satisfaction. Being pursued by a huge strange duck and a giant kid every seventh day was an annoyance, but not very dangerous. Of course, as Granddaddy Jake would've had it, nothing is very dangerous for an immortal. They survive by definition, one way or another.
4 The Second Heart
Although he never said anything, and used his need for sleep and sweet dreams as his excuse, Granddaddy Jake didn't like the Sunday morning pig hunt, didn't like it at all. It bothered him that Tiny was becoming obsessed with killing Lockjaw. Hunting was one thing, killing another, and obsession in any form was, to Granddaddy's experience, utterly treacherous; you couldn't be born if you wouldn't let go, and very few people could deliver themselves of obsession. The tight excited flash in Tiny's eyes disturbed him with its helplessness. He blessed Fup for accompanying Tiny, for despite her intensity she was slow, and together they only covered about an eighth as much territory as he could have alone or with dogs. Granddaddy, in his innermost heart, didn't want Lockjaw killed; he firmly believed that Lockjaw was the reincarnation of his old friend Johnny Seven Moons. This belief constantly surprised him, since he generally held that reincarnation was a pile of horseshit five feet deep.
Johnny Seven Moons was the only man besides Granddaddy who had ever taken a drink of Ol' Death Whisper without flinching. Granddaddy had first met him shortly after he'd given up gambling in favor of the still life. He'd been sitting on the front porch sampling his fifth batch when he saw an old Indian man coming across the yard wearing a battered cowboy hat and a black serape. Although he's never seen him before, Granddaddy Jake recognized him from stories as Johnny Seven Moons, an old Pomo that wandered the coastal hills without an apparent home or source of income. According to some of the stories Granddaddy had heard, Johnny Seven Moons had trained as "doctor" or medicine man before the crush of white civilization had disrupted tribal ways. Johnny Seven Moons was widely suspected of conducting extensive sabotage on local fences and heavy equipment, and he generally wasn't welcome in the area. However, he was always spoken of with a strange respect-he was always polite and soft-spoken, and with his shamanistic past came a rumor of powers… nothing ever specific… just a sense.
Granddaddy had sensed it before Johnny Seven Moons reached the porch, asking if he might do a chore or two in exchange for something to drink, preferably whiskey. They sat on the porch and drank whiskey for two days and well into late evening of a third. Grand-daddy Jake found him to be an excellent companion, for in that time Johnny Seven Moons didn't utter a word-just sat sipping from his jar, gazing at the day, the night, calmly and extremely still.
On the third evening he took a deep breath and turned to Jake: "Let me tell you about my name, Seven Moons. I added the Johnny when the white man came because I thought it sounded young and sexy, but it didn't seem to do much good. I think it's bad now to just make up names, but I keep it to remind me you must live with your mistakes. I earned my name Seven Moons when I trained as a doctor. I went away alone to find my name in a vision. I wandered and sought without food for three days, a week. Nothing happened. On the seventh day, as the sun touched the sea, I came across a group of maidens from another village out on a foraging trip for reeds and berries. It was a warm fall night. They were camped along a stream, cooking a fat salmon, and had acorn bread and berries. Have you not found in your life that hunger becomes most intense near the point of imminent satisfaction? I joined them, and we feasted. And that night, as the full moon traveled the heavens, I made love with every one of them, and with each I felt the full moon burning in my body, a great pearly light exploding inside my head. Seven Maidens. Seven Moons." He paused, smiling in the dusk. "Your whiskey… four moons, maybe five."
From that first visit until he died six years later, Johnny Seven Moons dropped in on Jake about every two months, and while Jake enjoyed his usually silent companionship, he relished the rare utterance. Seven Moons, whether out of a reverence or distrust for language, never said much, but when he did, he always said something. Jake could remember a few in particular. Once, as they'd watched the sun go down over the ocean, Seven Moons had said with the sweet weariness of constant marvel, "You know, I've seen 30,000 sunsets, and no two that I can remember have ever been the same. What more can we possibly want?"
Another time, he'd swept his hand across the landscape, and said, "Yarrrg, you white men did a lot to take it from us, but nothing to deserve it. You desire to tame everything, but if you just stand still and feel for a moment you would know how everything yearns to be wild." He spat. "And all these people with fences, fences, fences. Isn't the whole point to keep nothing in and nothing out? But I know you understand this Jake, for you have no fences, and devote your life to making whiskey and keeping still, and those are noble activities, worthy of a man's spirit."
The statement had haunted Jake when Tiny started building fences. But when Tiny had turned his hunt for Lockjaw into an obsessive ritual, what haunted Jake to his core were the last words he remembered Seven Moons saying to him.
Jake had walked out the ridge with him to say goodbye, and just before they'd parted Seven Moons had pointed at some fresh pig rooting and flashed a stupendous smile: "Ah, there we see hope-the domestic gone wild. Pigs are so lovely. Their bodies are made to hold up the sky. I wouldn't mind being a pig sometime… a big ol' crazy boar. That would be great."
Granddaddy Jake couldn't get it out of his mind, so he finally told Tiny what he thought might be the case, that Lockjaw was the reembodied spirit of Johnny Seven Moons, and that maybe he should think about that before he got too fixed on killing him.
Tiny adamantly shook his head. "It's just not true, Granddaddy," he replied, almost pleading, "when people die, they're gone. Gone. And that's all."
So Granddaddy Jake let it drop. There was no point. His notion wasn't as strong as Tiny's need. He'd said his piece, and in doing so satisfied what he felt was his responsibility both to his grandson and his old Indian friend. Johnny Seven Moons, in whatever form his spirit had taken, would have to look out for his own ass. And so would Tiny, wherever his spirit was taking him.
A few nights later, out for his nightly stroll, Granddaddy Jake met Lockjaw on the old saddletrail that ran out to the Claybourne place. They met blindly at the top of a rise; both recoiled for an instant, then charged. Gran
ddaddy was knocked high in the air, did a splaying one-and-a-half somersault, and smacked down on the rain-softened earth like guts on a slaughterhouse floor. Fortunately the only thing he broke was the jar of Death Whisper in his overcoat pocket, and though Lockjaw made a few jaw-popping lunges, slashing at Jake's ribs, the fumes from the spilled whiskey soon had the mammoth boar staggering, his jowls streaked with tears from his burning eyes, mucous bubbling in his ravaged snout. He lurched off into the brush, leaving Grand-daddy Jake to assess the damage to his person. He felt himself all over, methodically, expecting to find himself torn to shit and bleeding, but all he found were a couple of patches of slobber along his right side. And it came back to him then through the shock: the sight of Lockjaw looming above him, hooking with his head, huge in the dark, but old, he was old, the sag of skin, the ripple of ribs, both tusks missing, snapped off at the jaw line or else fallen out.
"Gawddamn," Granddaddy moaned, staggering to his feet, "good thing it was a fair fight-don't think I coulda held my own if he wasn't already worn down about as much as me." He scraped off the mud as best he could in the darkness then headed on out toward the Claybourne's. He was glad now he hadn't pursued it with Tiny, trying to make him see that Lockjaw might be Seven Moons, because now he wasn't so sure that such was the case. The Johnny Seven Moons he remembered would have stopped to lick up that spilled whiskey.
He didn't tell Tiny. After thinking on it for three afternoons, mulling it with that slow, voluptuous thoroughness that is a reward of the still life, Jake reaffirmed his neutrality. He wouldn't tell Tiny anything about Lockjaw, and he wouldn't tell Lockjaw anything about Tiny. That decided, he turned his attention to other pressing matters, like teaching Fup to fly.
* * *
He'd been sitting on the porch one afternoon letting his mind wander as usual, taking a sip now and then, pouring a little into Fup's saucer, when he'd suddenly realized he was already getting bored with immortality. He needed a task, a task that would not only challenge his wisdom, but enlarge it: he needed to teach something he didn't know. A pupil, fortunately, was near at hand. Reaching down and stroking her sleek neck, he said coaxingly, "Fup, I think you should learn to fly. It'd do wonders for your social life. Hell, maybe you could pick up a husband-or at least zoom off for a quickie in the cattails with some emeraldheaded stud. Tiny and I have talked some about getting you a mate, but the truth of it is I ain't got an ounce of pimp in me… and anyway it would be an insult to your good looks."
Fup looked at him without a sound and wearily tucked her head under her wing.
"Good Christ, sweetheart," Granddaddy persisted, "just think about it-you could fly from here to Mexico, just soar along looking down on it all and give it a great big quack!"
Fup removed her head from under her wing, and in a voice strong, deliberate, and not without a hint of mockery, responded "Quack… Quack… Quack." Then hissed a bit, and stomped around. Granddaddy Jake took it as a beleagured agreement.
But Fup did not agree at all to the diet. Tiny had agreed only with great reluctance, noting, correctly, "She's not going to like it."
"If you want to fly," Granddaddy argued, "you got to make sacrifices. How's she gonna get off the ground with all that weight?"
"She's just big for her age," Tiny defended. "It's all in proportion."
"Tiny, she's not just big for her age, son; she's enormous for maturity. I've seen millions of mallard ducks in my time, and Fup is not just a touch bigger, or a wee bit bigger, or half-again, or twice: she's about seven times the size of whatever's next. Now I don't think she's grotesquely fat or nothing like that-just a bit too heavy for flight is all. Hellfire, we'll still feed her, just not as much."
But Fup wanted as much, and when she didn't get it, she sulked. She examined the portions as if straining to see them, then, spotting food, gulped it in a frenzy of false gratitude, turned her back, and shit in the dish. She kept to her daily routine, somewhat sustained by the extra goodies Tiny slipped her at work, but she pouted and languished at every opportunity. She was seriously pissed, a disposition hardly improved by Granddaddy's teaching techniques.
At the most marginal of opportunities, Jake was fond of telling anyone within earshot the three great secrets of how to proceed when you don't have the vaguest idea what you're doing. The secrets, in the order he invariably listed them, were intuition, reason, and desperation. His intuition as a flight instructor persuaded him that it would be best to simply seize Fup, take her out in a nice open spot, and fling her up in the air. She would probably be startled at first, but instinct would no doubt make her open her wings, and from that point she would surely get the idea.
Fup, without the slightest flap of her wings, hit the earth like a sack of cement, flopped once or twice weakly, then lay still. Sweet Jesus, I killed her Granddaddy thought to himself as he ran to her, but at his approach she was instantly on her feet, her bill snapping open and shut with a sound like a speedfreak playing castanets; she took a dead bead on Granddaddy Jake, then charged. Granddaddy, cupping his gonads with both hands, took the sharpest angle to the porch, but he wasn't fast enough: Fup hit him like a pulling guard on a blindside trap, hard and low. As he woozed to his feet, reeling, cursing the lunatic soloist playing the gongs in his head and thinking that he was sure taking a beating from the animal kingdom lately, Fup wheeled and started back. Immediately, and wisely, Grand-daddy Jake surrendered.
Obviously, the intuitive approach wasn't working too well, if at all, so Jake effortlessly shifted to reason and the mechanical beauties of logic. He wasn't the least bit disturbed that his intuition had been wrong: intuition often missed, sometimes spectacularly, but when it connected it saved so much time that the spirit leaped forward… and, of course, there was no use denying the basic human delight in being right the first time. Reason was more reliable, but slow. But then patience is not a luxury for immortals. There is time to get it right.
But first, after reasoning that a happy duck would make a better pupil than a spiteful one, he abolished Fup's diet, and even gave her a little more than her normally opulent rations to make amends. He was quickly restored to her good graces, and Tiny was tremendously relieved.
With her respect and affection renewed, he worked out the premises and mechanics, then started from what reason told him was the beginning: if you wanted to fly, you had to flap your wings.
So every afternoon except Sundays, facing each other on the porch, Granddaddy Jake tried to teach Fup to flap her wings. It wasn't easy. She would stretch them out as if airing her underwings, and sometimes tried a desultory flurry, but she didn't seem interested in any sustained flapping. He persisted. Standing in his stockinged feet on the porch, flailing the air with his bony arms, he promised her, with each beat of his wings, the raptures of flight; promised her it was better than coming all night with a sixteen year old creamette from the Iowa farm country; better than sourdough bread and drippings; better than moonlight falling on the silver firs and vanilla leaf; better than an explosion of blossoms in the brain's core-that flight was all you could eat, all you could want-great freedom and grand fun. An hour a day till his arms ached and his face turned a cloudy purple, yet going on, sputtering the incoherent secrets of an ecstasy that, without knowing it himself, he had the faith or foolishness to promise.
After two stubborn months of teaching, one day Fup began flapping her wings in concert with his mad flailings. Granddaddy Jake rejoiced.
When Fup had the flapping down pat, Granddaddy reasoned the next step was the takeoff, and to practice that they moved into the front yard. Jake made a few short half-speed runs across the yard to demonstrate the basic technique. Fup understood immediately, and soon they were both hauling ass downhill toward the pond, their wings and arms respectively pounding the air for lift-but though flight whispered to their bodies, beckoning, neither quite left the ground on the first couple of tries. On the third attempt, as Jake let go for all he was worth, legs pumping, his arms flailing wildly, he felt the f
irst tremor of ascent break loose within him; like any good teacher would, he looked back for a moment to see if Fup was airborne yet, and in that slight split of attention he ran full-tilt into the walnut tree and got knocked colder than absolute zero.
When he came to, strangely calm, Fup was waddling around him quacking with concern. He reached out a hand to comfort her, sat up, and began to assess the damage, an act, he thought, that was beginning to recur with depressing regularity. His nose was broken or loosened up good. His upper lip was split pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as it had been when Alma May, his third or fourth wife, had hit him with a potato masher when he'd suggested doing it dog-style on the kitchen table. The lip, like the nose, would heal. But it depressed him to discover that he'd knocked out the last two teeth that met, and as he dully ran his tongue over the tender, salty sockets, he felt a melancholy weariness seep through his blood. To spend eternity toothless was a dismal prospect-but who could tell, maybe after a couple of hundred years his gums would get tough enough to work over a rack of ribs. You just had to be still and have faith, that was the main thing. There was no heart in giving up. But he was glad that tomorrow was Sunday and he wouldn't have to give Fup her flying lesson. He was tired. He felt a powerful need for rest. He was getting the shit knocked out of him something fierce lately and he needed to think on it, figure out what in the name of heaven was going on. Something was, that was for sure. But he was also sure that he would probably never understand it, and that contributed heavily to his sense of exhaustion. It was a puzzle where not all the pieces fit. He knew he'd better get used to it if he was going to be serious about immortality. He was nearly a hundred years old now. He was almost out of teeth and running low on breath; and, he thought to himself, if things kept on like that, it wouldn't be long before he'd need a whole new body just to keep up with his spirit.