by Bill Heavey
We rose at the same moment, but by the time the butt of my gun reached my shoulder, Jody’s had fired three shots. I remember seeing two of the ejected shells still tumbling end-over-end in midair in my peripheral vision. Two birds had already fallen and the third hit the water an instant after the third shell. The remaining ducks had flared to the sides and were gone before I thought to aim. Jody immediately apologized for his inhuman speed and lethality. “I’m sorry, Bill. I just get so excited when they coming in purty like that. Did you see ’em when they set their wings? Man, those were some purty ducks.” I told him they were indeed pretty and not to worry. The scenario repeated itself a few minutes later and quickly became the norm. Jody saw the ducks first, told me to be still despite my not having moved, yanked and called like a man possessed, and then shot. It was as if he and the ducks had reached an understanding long ago. He shot, they fell. I have been around some good waterfowl shooters, and even a well-shot duck often struggles to stay aloft for a few last wing beats before it falls. A duck thus wounded often flew in a manner similar to the damaged fighter planes you see in clips of actual combat from World War II, the pilot coaxing the last bits of flight from his doomed aircraft. But Jody didn’t so much shoot ducks down as expunge them. He erased them from the sky. One second they were flying along fine, the next they were plummeting down like the inanimate objects they had just become. And then Jody would apologize once more for having taken all the ducks. After five or six times, we had a limit. I think I might have put a few pellets into one or two birds, but they were probably ones that Jody had already killed and were on their way down.
We were on our way out of the swamp by ten o’clock. As we paddled around a bend in the trail through the reeds, a harsh squawk rent the air and a big yellow-crowned night heron helicoptered itself awkwardly up from a low branch. “Gros bec, Bill!” Jody blurted, and caught himself, gun halfway to his shoulder. He stopped, shook his head, grimaced, and finally grinned as he watched the bird disappear. “Federally protected,” he said with a rueful shake of his head. “It’s a $450 fine to shoot that bird, and I’m on the town council now. But I tell you what: I grew up on ’em. Best-tasting bird you ever had.”
Was he serious? I’d never even heard of anybody eating a heron. For starters, the bird looked to be nothing but beak, sinew, and bone. There couldn’t be much meat on one, and what little there was would be stringy. Worse, herons were fish-eaters, a trait generally associated with game birds you didn’t want to eat. But Jody was adamant. “Oh, no, Bill,” he said. “They’re delicious. All they eat is crawfish, you know. Better ’n any duck. Hoo!”
It was November, and I was anxious to get home for deer season. But I felt that I’d just scratched the surface of this world. I asked Jody if I could come back and see what crawfishing was like when he started up in the spring. “You’re welcome anytime, Bill,” he said. “Come ’bout the end of March and I’ll take you frogging, too.”
I did want to get back for deer season, but deer weren’t all I was interested in. I also wanted to get back to Michelle. I’d been thinking about her a good deal since that day at Druid Hill Park and our e-mails about my lawn salad. We’d been e-mailing regularly since, and with each new one she sent, I had a growing feeling that maybe the age gap wasn’t as big a deal as I’d thought. Or maybe that I’d finally reached the point when being immature for your age had an upside. When I got home there was an e-mail from Michelle saying that she was teaching foraging classes the next weekend at a primitive skills gathering. She’d have her boys—Luke, eight; and Adam, four—with her. She had committed to teaching one three-hour class per day and we wouldn’t have much, if any, time to ourselves. But she thought I might enjoy it. I said I’d be delighted to come. And the truth was that I liked the idea of seeing her with her boys and other people around. I was in no particular hurry. I wanted to get to know her, and seeing her in this setting would, in its way, be more relaxed than seeing each other one-on-one.
I hadn’t expected the event to be so big. There were several hundred people at the summer camp that had been rented for the occasion. And she had been right about our having limited time alone. We never managed more than a few minutes at a time. And yet, looking back, I’d date the start of our relationship from that weekend. It hadn’t seemed that way the time. In hindsight, I saw that what I’d really been doing that weekend was courting her indirectly, at one cool remove, mostly by hanging out with her boys. Adam, the younger, was a force of nature, a law unto himself, a stranger to the notion of self-doubt. If he wanted to wade into the shallow pond after a butterfly on a lily pad, he went, and Michelle patiently waded in after him. She wanted to be close for safety’s sake but otherwise let the boys discover the world on their own. If you told Adam “no” and he didn’t want to hear it, he had a way of looking right through you. He liked me for his own solid reasons: I made good paper airplanes and would swing him around in circles like an airplane. My initial take was that he was very intelligent, charismatic, and intentional. I thought he would either end up running General Motors or in jail.
Luke reminded me of myself at that age. He was smart and too sensitive for his own good. At eight, he already worried a lot and became discouraged if he couldn’t do something perfectly the first time. Maybe I was projecting, but I saw a boy carrying burdens he wouldn’t be aware of for many years. Michelle had told me little of her breakup other than to say that she’d stayed as long as she could for the boys’ sake before realizing the situation was hopeless. Her ex had kept the house, cut her off financially, and, she feared, said things to the boys no child should ever have to hear. Luke, like any child, was confused by the split and felt responsibility for it. The vibe I got was that he wanted to like me but feared being a disloyal son. I knew too well the responsibilities often borne by the oldest boy in a troubled family. My parents actually had a good marriage, but there had been strong disagreements about how the children were to be brought up, and my sister and I both rebelled in our own ways. My father had been an army brat who idolized his father but didn’t see that much of him. He believed in discipline and saw the world as a place where something was either right or wrong. My mother was nearly the opposite and there were times when she considered leaving him. If Luke was anything like the boy I’d been, it had fallen to him to be his parents’ conciliator, the loyal son, the glue that held things together. Such expectations are never articulated. They don’t need to be. I wanted to tell Luke that he was the one who got to decide whether he liked me or not, and that it would be all right if he didn’t. But you can’t say something like that to a boy you’ve just met. All you can do is let him know that you’re available and interested and wait for him to make the first move.
There was, however, a rather large chink in Luke’s armor, which I intended to exploit. Luke had never caught a fish but was convinced, as only a boy can be, that there was one swimming around down there with his name on it. Michelle, knowing nothing of fishing but wanting to encourage her son, had picked up a fishing outfit at Walmart on the way there to use in the little pond behind the shower house. I asked to see the outfit. She pulled out a purple Dora the Explorer combo, with a banana-yellow push-button reel shaped like a chocolate egg. The thing was still in its plastic clamshell, along with an assortment of tiny bobbers and hooks. The rod was thirty inches long and would break the first time you snagged your hook on a bush and gave it a good tug. The bright yellow reel was absurd, with a functional life unlikely to exceed fifteen minutes. There were actual stickers on the rod and reel: daisies, the ever-smiling Dora herself, as well as Boots, her beloved blue monkey.
“Good God, woman,” I sputtered. “Are you afraid your son might not turn out to be a homosexual?” Michelle flushed, momentarily looked as if she might kill me, but eventually decided that I might just be yanking her chain, and wordlessly ascended the steps into her cabin, the screen door slamming softly behind her.
With Mom out of the
way, I motioned Luke over for a man-to-man. I got down on one knee so we were at eye level with each other. “Luke,” I said with utmost seriousness, “we don’t need Dora the Explorer. We’re gonna make our own rods. And tonight, after dinner, you and I are gonna catch you a fish. Okay?” His eyes got big and he froze for a moment. He nodded once, solemnly, just the downward part of the nod. Then he ran away.
I am painfully aware of my limitations as a parent. I frequently hear myself being overly demanding and critical with Emma and it stings. I know that I’m replicating the very same behavior that I resented in my own parents and vowed I would never inflict on a child of my own. And yet, more often than I care to admit, I find myself unable to not do it. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely blind. I recognized that getting the chance to put a boy onto his first fish was as great a privilege and trust as a man is vouchsafed in this life. And it was something I knew how to do.
The primitive skills movement, not surprisingly, draws more men than women. An attractive, friendly woman like Michelle got lots of attention in the camp’s mess hall. I spied her talking to a guy in a cowboy hat and red kerchief. He was smiling and leaning in a little more than he needed to be. I approached and tapped her on the shoulder. “Ready to eat?” I asked brightly. She later said she’d felt that I had given the guy a pretty obvious hands-off signal. “You think?” I answered. “I was afraid I was being too discreet.”
After dinner, I found a plastic half-gallon milk bottle from the trash, sliced the bottom off with my knife, and gave it to Luke. “You’re in charge of getting bait, bud,” I said. I told him that I’d seen some damp ground by a seep just below the pond. “I bet if you dig around under those leaves, you’ll find plenty of worms.” I retrieved some loose hooks from the Dora the Explorer clamshell. The outfit must have spent time in a hot container somewhere between China and the Walmart, because the monofilament line on the reel broke at nothing more than a good tug. In the parking lot I had seen a number of pickup trucks with fishing gear in the back. I told Michelle to find one of these. “We need about fourteen feet of line. Flirt with the owner if he’s around. Steal it if he isn’t. You got a knife?” She didn’t, so I gave her mine. I retrieved a multi-tool from the glove compartment of my car and went looking for the nearest bamboo. I had long ago come to believe that a man should always know where the nearest bamboo is. I’d used lengths of it to retrieve Frisbees from roofs and trees, to drape Christmas lights, and to knock down all manner of fruits and chestnuts from trees. I found a stand sixty yards from the pond and cut a ten-foot length, then stripped the branches off.
By the time I got to the pond, Luke was proudly holding the jug, which now contained a great deal of dirt and a few worms. Michelle presented the fishing line. It was ridiculously heavy stuff for our purposes, probably from a catfish angler, as it was at least forty-pound test. I had to shave the first foot of it thinner with my knife to be able to thread enough of it through the eye of the hook to tie a knot. We were just about ready.
“What about a bobber?” Luke asked anxiously. “Aren’t you supposed to have a bobber?” It was clear that he had had a preconceived idea of how his fishing pole should look. And a bobber was most definitely part of the picture.
I again got down on one knee so we were eye-to-eye. “Luke,” I said, “I’m going to tell you a secret. You’ll catch more fish without a bobber. It stops the worm when it should be falling. That makes the fish suspicious. And suspicious fish don’t bite.” At last he nodded.
I threaded a worm onto the hook. As I handed him the rod, I realized it was too unwieldy for a boy his size. I’d been thinking about getting the bait out to where the fish were, not about how much rod Luke could handle. “We’ll do this together, okay?” I said. Standing behind him, I put my arms and hands around his, and then, four-handedly, we swung the bait back and out into the watery world. The worm landed all of eight feet from the water’s edge and had just begun its slow free fall through the water when a little bluegill darted out of nowhere and nailed it. Luke, as focused and spring-loaded as any first-fish boy I’d ever seen, yanked—hard. The fish exited the water like a missile, flew straight up and back over our heads and landed flapping in the grass behind us. And then were whooping and pumping our firsts like a couple of fools. I got the hook out and let Luke touch the fish before releasing it. We caught two more bluegills and one tiny largemouth bass before it began to get dark and they stopped biting for the night.
“You’re a darn fishing machine, bud,” I said after we called it a night. He beamed. Michelle looked at me with undisguised gratitude. “Thank you,” she mouthed, not wanting Luke to hear. That was our most intimate moment together of the whole weekend. On Sunday afternoon, having loaded up my car, we said our good-byes and I gave her an awkward peck on the cheek.
Three days later, the phone rang. Michelle said she just wanted me to know that since Sunday, Luke had taken to telling everyone he met—including total strangers, like the cashier at the supermarket—that he was about to share a true secret about fishing with them. “If you’re trying to catch a fish, you do not want to use a bobber.”
I didn’t know why or how, but those words ambushed me. They pierced some restricted area, someplace shuttered so long ago I’d forgotten it existed. I was stunned to find that tears were rolling down my cheeks and over my lips. I have since tried to parse that moment. Maybe in guiding Luke to that fish, I’d ministered to some wound of my own. Maybe it was awe at realizing how the depth of influence—for good or ill—a man could bring to bear on the soul of a boy. I did know one thing: something long locked inside me and in dire need of redemption had just received it.
“Are you still there?” Michelle said. I turned my head away from the phone and only then trusted myself to open my mouth. I tried to clear my throat.
“Yeah,” I was finally able to say. “Truck just went by.”
After the weekend at the primitive skills gathering, despite having hardly a private moment together, Michelle and I had begun thinking of ourselves as a couple. The following weekend, when neither of us had children, we made up for lost time. It was then that Michelle told me that she didn’t know how I’d managed it but that I’d slipped through her defenses—the ones so deftly deployed that most people never knew they were there—as no one else ever had. I told her that the same went for me. For me, that moment had come weeks earlier, when, almost in passing, Michelle had mentioned my “anhedonia,” a fancy word to describe people who have difficulty experiencing pleasure from the things that give most people pleasure. That stopped me cold. This recurring affliction—along with the depression and despair that occasionally overtook me, bleeding the colors out of life and leaving me stranded in the bleakest of places—was one of my deepest secrets. I’d been convinced that I hid it pretty well. Certainly no one else had ever remarked on it to me. That Michelle had noted it was both extraordinary and somewhat alarming. That she’d noted it so casually—something to be acknowledged rather than dwelled upon, as if it were just another feature of my personal landscape rather than its most salient fact—amazed me. Like everybody, I’d spent much of my life wanting to be seen for who I was and loved in spite of it. A much smaller percentage of humanity ever realizes that wish. To me falling in love with Michelle felt like the few times I’ve been thrown out of a boat in white water. It started with a loss of balance and then I was roiled by the hydraulics of fear and gratitude, anxiety and relief. I had never met anyone like Michelle. The last time I had felt so alive and vivid was when, as a child, I had had the most powerful squirt gun of any kid on the block. This was even better.
I decided that it was time to tell Michelle about the other woman in my life. I said that Paula and I shared a love of the outdoors, a fascination with deer, a deep affection for fishing, and a core belief that “No Trespassing” signs didn’t apply to us. On the other hand, I said, she was also a bit eccentric. She habitually dressed in men’s c
lothing, had a morbid fear of being stuck in rush hour traffic even though she didn’t drive, and was incapable of refraining from graphic profanity even when around children. This close friend also considered me essentially incompetent except when it came to making smoked herring. I also mentioned that she shared a house with Gordon, twenty years her senior. Theirs was an unusual arrangement by societal standards, but it was hard to imagine having any other kind with somebody like Paula. They seemed to have arrived at a sort of campionable arrangement. Both were boathouse regulars, liked the outdoors, and they often fished together. By this time, as a unit, they had become like family to me. I checked up on them every week or so whether I saw them or not, and they checked up on me. I had no idea of their relationship when they were alone and felt no need to know. But they were important people in my life and I wanted them to meet Michelle.
We invited them over for dinner at my house on Saturday night. I hadn’t expected to be nervous and was surprised to realize that I was.
But Michelle and Paula seemed to hit it off within minutes. Shortly after I served drinks—sparkling cider for Paula, cocktails for the rest of us—the two of them were out back, where the barbecue was already going, so that Paula could smoke. Gordon and I talked as I dry-rubbed a venison tenderloin (salt, pepper, paprika, five-spice powder, garlic, onion, flaked cayenne, dried parsley, celery seed, and a bit of brown sugar). Meanwhile, I caught snatches of the girls’ conversation through the screen door. It concerned the finer points of upright freezers versus chest freezers, which fruits and vegetables were better canned and which frozen, and which apples made the best pies. Paula, naturally, did most of the talking. A while later, as Paula realized that Michelle knew more about apples than she did, I actually heard Paula ask Michelle for information about a certain variety of apple. That was a first.