by Tom Drury
Russell came out of his house with a shotgun and a box of doughnuts. He was a fat man, and in fact his nickname used to be Fat before he got to be chairman of the board of supervisors and received once again his given name. He was dressed in the mixed greens of camouflage.
He opened the door and slid into Dan’s police car. Dan could tell that Russell’s costume was stiff and new. “Brought you some breakfast,” said Russell.
“And I thank you,” said Dan.
“I wonder about this using the cruiser for off-duty.”
“My car is broke down,” said Dan.
“You always say that.”
“It always is.”
“Why don’t you take the thing to Ronnie Lapoint and have it fixed? Good God, you make twenty-two thousand dollars a year.”
“I’ve been thinking I could cut some corners by working on the car myself. I got a Chilton’s manual and a good ratchet set, but it seems like there’s always something to sidetrack a person.”
“I know that feeling,” said Russell. He looked around the car as Dan pulled onto the road going south. “I guess you don’t have a dog.”
“No. That’s true.”
“I would have thought for some reason that you had to.”
Dan took a bite of a doughnut. “Not if you have waders and the water isn’t deep.”
Russell shook his head and folded his arms with a great scratching of material. “See, there, I’m learning,” he said.
“I used to have a dog,” said Dan.
“That right?”
“His name was Brownie.”
“I remember that dog,” said Russell.
“He was good.”
“What ever happened to him?”
Dan slowed for a corner. “Well, that was a funny story. He ran away, and I never did find out where he went.”
“Isn’t that something.”
“He must have got in a car with somebody. Because you know dogs will always come home. I heard a thing on Paul Harvey the other day where a dog walked all the way from Florida to Quebec looking for his owner.”
“Quebec, Canada?”
“They just said Quebec. I assume it’s Canada.”
“If they didn’t say, it probably is Canada.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Son of a bitch. Now, that’s interesting. What did he do, take the interstate?”
Dan shrugged. “I don’t know. We also have the white dog on the farm. But he isn’t a retriever. I don’t really know what kind of dog he is.”
They parked on the southern end of Lapoint Slough and walked to Dan’s blind, a distance of about half a mile. They moved along with their guns resting on their shoulders. Russell was slightly ahead of Dan—he could not stand walking behind anyone. Rain drummed their hats. The sky was dark except for a line of red light on the eastern horizon. Grass batted their legs, the ground rose and fell beneath their boots.
“Be looking for a fence,” said Dan.
“What fence is that?” said Russell.
“Lee Haugen’s,” said Dan.
“That’s east of here. Way east.”
“No. We’re not talking about the same fence.”
“Hulf,” said Russell, or something like that, as he ran into the fence.
“That’s the one I mean,” said Dan.
Dan’s blind was a plywood shed separated from the water of the slough by a screen of marsh grass. He had decoys inside and with Russell’s help carried them down to the water.
Russell and Dan sat in the blind smoking cigars and watching the clouds turn gray and white. The rain seemed to fall a little harder as the light came up. Soon they could see across the water to the other side. Dan reached into the blind and brought out a bottle of blackberry brandy. They each had a drink and shuddered.
Dan laughed. “It is pretty bad,” he said.
“It’s bitter,” said Russell.
“That brandy belonged to Earl Kellogg. And I don’t think I’ve hunted with him in two years. Every now and then I’ll have a drink, but there always seems to be the same amount left.”
Russell took out a box of shells and loaded his gun, which was a twelve-gauge with a bolt action and modest carving on the stock. A good part of hunting’s appeal is loading the shotgun. The shell is very satisfying, its coppery base and forest-green plastic. The weight and balance seem natural, as if shells grew on vines.
“Where are the ducks?” said Russell.
“You have to be patient,” said Dan. “This is the time when you can sit and think. That’s what I like about duck hunting—the thinking.”
“That’s pretty deep,” said Russell. “What do you think about?”
“I just let my mind wander,” said Dan. “But I’ll tell you what you should think about, and that’s making Paul Francis a constable.”
Russell ignored this. “Tell me what we do when the ducks come in.”
“Don’t get flustered. Don’t turn your safety off until you’re shouldering the gun. If you think something is too far away, you’re right—it is.”
A flock came in after a while with beaks and webs reaching for the water. Dan and Russell stood and fired. They got three, and Dan waded into the slough to retrieve the birds. There were two males, with green velvety heads and copper breasts, and a speckled brown female. All the wings had traces of blue. These were mallards, and Dan felt the exhilaration and sadness of having killed them, as if he were a wheel in the machine of the seasons.
Then a long time passed with no action, although they could hear gunfire from other places around the slough. Russell clipped his fingernails, Dan laid his gun down and leaned back on his elbows. He thought about Louise. She was two months pregnant, and according to a book they had, the baby was an inch and a quarter long and the heart was beating. Dan considered for a moment the outlandish fact of reproduction, and it struck him that even Russell had been a fetus at one time, hard to visualize as this might be. Then Dan thought how one day his and Louise’s child would be as old as Russell, who had to be at least sixty, and that by then he, Dan, would probably be dead, and Louise probably would be as well, and he hoped that the child would not be too upset at their deaths—wouldn’t turn to booze, or get gouged by the funeral men. A plain pine box would be fine with Dan. He considered the large number of people who would be satisfied with a plain pine box versus the fact that he had never seen such a box, let alone seen anyone buried in one, except in historical dramas on television. In this county even paupers went to their graves in a coffin that looked like it could withstand rifle fire.
Dan decided to get away from this line of thinking by lobbying for the hiring of the pilot Paul Francis as a constable.
“In the first year this would cost us twelve thousand seven hundred dollars,” said Dan. “That includes thirteen hundred for state police training school in Five Points, eight thousand for estimated part-time salary, twenty-one hundred dollars for flight insurance, and approximately thirteen hundred for medical insurance.”
“This is just the kind of thing that I’m always railing against. What in hell are we doing paying medical insurance for a constable?”
“This is a very conservative policy,” said Dan. “He has to be dying, practically, before it kicks in.”
“So why have it?”
“The state requires it.”
“That fucking state,” said Russell, and then he ranted about the state for a while.
“The way it is now, we can’t fly anywhere,” said Dan. “We used to be able to fly, but the insurance company has now decided that they will not insure our flights because Paul is freelance. So we would be able to fly again, and sometimes we need to fly. Secondly, Earl, Ed, and I all work at least sixty hours a week, without overtime. Now, for me, that’s not really a problem, because I’m management. But if AFSCME were to find out about Ed and Earl, they would definitely have a grievance, and defending that, as you know, would cost a lot more than hiring Paul Francis and giving t
hese guys some relief. Now, I’m not going to call AFSCME, but can I guarantee they’ll never find out? No, I can’t. And the third point is, once Paul is licensed to fly as a constable—and I checked into this, so I know—he will be able to fly for other county functions too. Say you want to go to, I don’t know, a conference in the Ozarks. Well, you jump in the Piper Cub and Paul Francis takes you down there. Sounds kind of nice, doesn’t it?”
“I just cannot see adding a constable when all the county towns are getting police of their own.”
“You’re wrong about that, Russ,” said Dan. “Five of the towns don’t have any police coverage at all. Ever.”
“The trend is toward town police.”
“Like where? Grafton?”
“I’m not talking about Grafton, or Boris, or Pinville, or any of those ghost towns—Lunenberg is another—where they can’t sell houses.”
“We are in those towns all the time,” said Dan. “They are the county.”
“Let me tell you something, Dan,” said Russell. “Twenty years down the road, there won’t be a sheriff’s department as we think of it now.” And as he said this he made a slashing gesture with his right hand. “There might be a sheriff, and I say might, but he’ll be mostly a figurehead. And this was ordained many years ago, when Otto Nicolette had the opportunity to solve the Vince Hartwell murder but could not before the Morrisville police stumbled on the weapon by pure chance. Ever since that time, the sheriff’s department has been like, like, well, you know what it’s like. And I don’t mind telling you that, because I said the same exact thing when you first ran for sheriff back in… whenever it was.”
“You and that Hartwell business,” said Dan. “Living in the past.”
“Don’t slight the past. People were better back then. I remember those times with great fondness. Today I look around me and I don’t see much. By the way, did you know that Johnny White is thinking about running against you next year?”
“Good,” said Dan. “He’s not much of a threat.” This was a fairly common opinion to have about Johnny White. When you looked at his experience it was hard to see what it was that might justify his being sheriff. He had run that restaurant in Cleveland that went bust. He had been an assistant in the county clerk’s office. And he now ran the Room, but he didn’t get much respect for this position of authority because his father, Jack White, was on the board of directors and provided a lot of the money to run the thing.
“Well, Jack is a friend of mine,” said Russell. “We often play pool together at the cigar store in Chesley. Eight-ball, last-pocket, scratch-you-lose. He may seem scattered, but I wouldn’t sell him short.”
“You mean Jack.”
“Yeah,” said Russell. “You’re right, by and large, about Johnny. He was a file clerk for the county there for a while, and I happen to know that some pretty important papers have yet to turn up. But he’s not doing that anymore. He’s leading that group of addicts called the Wall or the Hall or something. They have taken the abuse issue and are running with it.”
“The operation seems pretty specious,” said Dan, “but who knows? Maybe they do some people good.”
“They do Johnny good,” said Russell. “You know who his partner is over there, don’t you? Tiny Darling.”
“I’ve heard that,” said Dan.
Probably they should have left earlier than they did. That’s easy enough to say in retrospect. Either way, everything would have been all right had Russell followed Dan’s advice about not shooting at distant targets. After the first few passes by the mallards and teals, the banks of the slough were more or less exploding with gunfire, and no duck with any instinct at all was going to come near the water until sundown. But unable to leave well enough alone, Russell raised his gun to the sky and fired at something overhead, then swore that he had brought a duck down at the curve of the slough to the north of them.
Dan was skeptical. “It would just fall,” he said.
“No, it coasted.”
“Then you didn’t hit it.”
“I’m pretty sure I did.”
“If you hit it, it would fall.”
They retrieved the decoys, put them away, gathered their things, and went looking for the duck that Russell claimed to have hit. They never did find it, but they did scatter a dozen or so red-winged blackbirds and a large and unfortunate waterfowl, which got up with a slow and graceful ripple of wings only to have Russell Ford shoot it.
“Russell, quit shooting.”
“Got you, son of a bitch.”
“Don’t shoot anymore.”
Russell walked over to the bird and picked it up by the neck. It was gray and brown with a long body, reedy legs, a black patch on the head. “It’s a goose,” guessed Russell.
“I don’t think so.”
“It might be in the goose family.”
“It’s a crane, I’ll bet you anything.”
Russell folded the bird carefully in his arm. “You’ve been hard to get along with this whole trip,” he said.
There was nowhere to go now but the Leventhaler farm. Bev and Tim lived in a cedar house on Route 29 north of the slough. They were very proud of their house, and when they invited you there they would mention it specifically, as if it were something marvelous that had just appeared one day.
The rain had stopped and the sun was coming through the clouds in discernible rays. The Leventhalers had just got back from church. They attended the Methodist church in Margo. Their children were running across the wet grass in green and red coats.
Being the county extension woman, Bev was practical and utilitarian, but she loved birds with a passion. It was brave of Russell to go to Bev with an illegal kill, but she was the only one Dan or Russell could think of who would know the species.
Bev and Tim asked Russell and Dan into the kitchen for waffles and coffee. The waffles were from a real iron—Bev showed how easy it was to keep the batter from sticking and burning. Tim, a serious-looking young man with wire-rim glasses, was known as the Tile Doctor, because he ran crews who installed drainage tiles in fields around the state. He spoke about the uncertainties of the tiling business and about a kid who had mashed his fingers between two tiles not that long ago but was back in school and playing the clarinet in the University of Wisconsin marching band.
Then Russell said, “Bev, we got a problem. There’s something in the trunk of the car. Well, it’s a bird. There’s a bird in the trunk of the car that perished by accident.”
Bev wiped her mouth with a red and white napkin. “What happened?”
“I shot it,” said Russell. “I think it’s a goose. I hope it’s a goose.
I don’t know what it is. Dan doesn’t agree with me. We need to get some kind of ID on this bird. So naturally we thought of you.”
Bev’s radiant smile had faded, making everyone sad. She left the room. Tim said, “Where did this happen?”
“At the slough,” said Dan.
“Maybe I’ll call the kids in,” said Tim.
“Why not,” said Russell.
Bev came into the kitchen with a bird book and an old sheet, and they all went outside. Dan opened the trunk. The lid came up with a soft whoosh. The bird did not look bad. A shotgun from medium range often does little apparent damage.
“It’s a great blue heron,” said Bev.
“It doesn’t seem that blue,” said Russell.
Bev sighed. “They’re not.”
“Well, what’s the sense of that?” said Russell. “Why call something blue if it isn’t? I mean, I should have known. I should have made sure. I’ll admit that. But it’s not like I went out of my way to shoot a great blue heron.”
“They’re really beautiful when they fly,” said Bev. “The neck folds into an S, and the wings move so slowly you can’t understand what keeps them in the air. Do you know what I mean?”
“It was over in a heartbeat,” said Russell.
“They are just intensely beautiful birds.”
“All right. I fucked up.”
“Shh,” said Bev. She wrapped the bird in the sheet. “We’ll bury him underneath the willow tree. There’s a shovel by the side door of the garage.”
“I’ll grab it,” said Russell. He hurried off.
“Well, I guess I’d better report this,” said Dan. “I mean, you can’t not report it because it’s Russell Ford, can you? There are game laws and that’s that. Maybe I should take the bird for evidence.”
“Oh, Dan, no,” said Bev. “I mean, no. And what? Put it in a room, on a table, with a bright light? No.”
So they buried the heron under the willow tree at the Leventhaler farm. Dan and Russell drove away without talking. The day had been a fiasco. On the radio Todd Rundgren sang “Can We Still Be Friends?”
Russell pleaded not guilty to killing the heron. He said it was an accident, and that the county had no case without intent. The law did not require intent, but Russell didn’t care; he had public relations in mind. He said he and Dan had been searching for wounded game when the heron burst from the grass. He said he had merely raised his gun as any sensible hunter might have, positioning the animal in his sights in case it was something legal to shoot, and that his gun somehow went off, fired itself, an accident. People were doubtful. “A gun just doesn’t up and fire itself,” said Mary Montrose. “No gun I’ve ever seen.” A hearing was scheduled for February.
This would be, as it happened, Russell’s second prosecution in the many years that he had been a supervisor. The first was in 1970, for assaulting a young teacher whose political opinions Russell did not agree with. Russell had a restaurant in Stone City at the time, and the teacher, Mr. Robins, and a seventh-grade class were picketing the restaurant for using paper napkins with blue dye, which would pollute the water when the napkins were thrown away, instead of white napkins with no dye. Russell ended up paying a seventy-five-dollar fine on that one.
Both of these cases were embarrassing to Russell, and one might wonder why they were allowed to proceed, since he was such a big shot. But people in Grouse County have an enduring mistrust of those who would put themselves above others, and they are vigilant. There used to be a saying painted on the railroad bridge south of Stone City: “Better to be Nobody who does Nothing than Somebody who does Everybody.” And it was only in the last ten or twelve years that this had faded so you couldn’t read it.