And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  “No, you didn’t,” he said.

  “I’m pretty sure I did,” I said.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  I don’t know if it’s because I generally have a guilty conscience or if it’s because my first instinct in almost any situation is to apologize, but I’ve always been amazed by some people’s knack for delusional deniability. Had I been on the other end of this call, my first instinct would probably have been to apologize profusely then begin immediately trying to make amends. But not Joel. No sir. It had to be my fault. No way had he not missed a phone call. No way was it his fault. I could feel my blood pressure rising like the thermometer in one of those old Saturday-morning cartoons when an ill-meaning and inept cat is goaded into eating a hot pepper by his intended prey—a small, sarcastic bird with a superiority complex and questionable sexual predilections. It was genuine anger, true, but also a sense of dread, a feeling that I had actually somehow screwed up. I wanted to reach through the phone and grab Joel’s tongue and say something to the effect of:

  “Listen you cousin-loving bastard of an excuse for adulthood, I absolutely did call you and you damn well know that you got the message. And if you don’t get your drop-out ass up here in the next five minutes to fix my ceiling and floors, my wife is going to have hell to pay for me which can only mean that I will be well within my rights to come to your single-wide, tear up your collection of White Snake and Lynard Skynard commemorative beer coozies and use your syphilitic three-legged dog as target practice before setting the whole thing up in flames in a vengeful conflagration against you and all the other dim-witted self-absorbed jackasses who have ever screwed me over. Believe me you, buster.”

  Of course I actually said none of that. What I said was something much more benign and in keeping with my long history of timidity in time of conflict. Something like, “Gosh, this is a real pickle. Any chance we can schedule something when it’s convenient for you?”

  “Let me check my messages to see if you called and I’ll call you back,” he said.

  “Okey-dokey.”

  Had I thought about it, I might have realized the evidence of Joel’s lying that he had just presented. He was going to check and be sure that I had called on Monday? Hadn’t he just returned my message from earlier that morning? He called back moments later.

  “Well, I still didn’t get no message, but I suppose I can squeeze you in tomorrow,” he said in that way that the self-satisfied have, as if he were doing me a favor at great personal expense and expenditure of effort. I could not believe he was acting like he was doing me a favor. This was not our first issue with Joel, who had done a subpar job recaulking our bathtub once and had sent my wife off into a near-apoplectic rage. She yelled at me to yell at him. Clearly she is more comfortable with confrontation, but when it comes to dealing with Joel and our landlords, she prefers confrontation by proxy. I did my best to get answers from Joel, but all I managed was a weak-tea apology and the implication that my time would be better spent by engaging in a vigorous—if not physically challenging—sexual act elsewhere. I ended up recaulking the tub myself and while I wouldn’t say I did a better job, it was certainly no worse.

  All this—the caulking memory, the tongue lashing, and Joel’s behavior—was in the back of my head when I accepted his offer to come out the next day, then took off for work in such a frenzy and with such rapidity it was almost therapeutic.

  That night, traffic on my evening commute was worse than normal. The twenty-seven-mile drive usually takes just over an hour in the evening, but took nearly twice that because of a couple of accidents. I was late getting to Dylan’s birthday dinner, which earned me a doleful look from my loving wife, who took me aside to complain—not at me but to me—about the situation with Joel. It was her position that I needed to be stronger with him and if I really cared about my family and the condition of the home they are living in, I would have no problem finding that strength. I kissed her head and hugged Dylan, sang Happy Birthday, then grabbed Jack, went home and changed, and took him to a Cub Scout meeting.

  I share the den leader responsibilities with another dad in the group, which meant that after the meeting I took Jack home and made sure everyone was in bed before heading out to meet with the other leader to plan out our meeting schedule. I had quickly earned the ire of the type-A suburban moms in our den by not having a full and comprehensive schedule prepared by our first meeting. How could they manage the next nine to eleven months of their sons’ lives properly with such an imbecile at the switch? I had sensed an impending mutiny—after just a single meeting—and my wife said an e-mail campaign had been launched demanding greater accountability. She recommended that I plan through May, just to get the ladies off my back.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept having these terrifying visions of being late for work, hearing a clap of thunder and looking up to see the ceiling collapse and hundreds of blond crows in Dolce & Gabanna sunglasses flying through the hole to peck away at my flesh, with my wife standing by telling me that if I had just cared more, none of this would have happened. I went out onto the couch and flipped through the nine-hundred-odd channels of our cable service, finding nothing but infomercials and reruns of bad shows from the 1990s—and just who exactly wants to watch old episodes of Blossom at two in the morning? I turned off the TV and sat quietly in the dark for ten minutes before I saw a flash out the window and heard the patter of rain on the roof, at which point I fell right to sleep.

  Thursday came early, with Dylan tugging on my shoulder a half hour before dawn. The hole in the ceiling had gotten worse overnight. I got out of bed, put some coffee on, and situated our biggest sauce pans under the ceiling so they would catch a majority of the still-dripping water. I made breakfast, got everyone ready and out the door, and even dropped Dylan off at school. Joel and the woman from our landlord’s office showed up within fifteen minutes of on-time and Rebecca stayed in the bathroom while they scanned the floor and ceiling, the screen door we had told them needed to be fixed four years earlier, and pretty much everything else we have ever complained about in roughly the time it took me to have a sip of coffee. They then spoke in hushed tones as if I weren’t standing right in front of them and were gone before I knew what happened.

  “What did they say?” asked Rebecca, toweling off her shower wet hair.

  “Not much,” I said. “Joel said he’d call later.”

  He did, later that day, and told me that they were going to replace carpet padding but not the carpet itself, put a veneer over the cracked kitchen floor and talk to the condo association about fixing the source of the leaky roof. Not exactly the cure-all we had in mind, but it was a start. I moved all the furniture out of the dining and living rooms, then went to work, promising myself that I was going to do whatever was necessary to get us out of renter’s hell and soon.

  As you can probably imagine, the repairs were hasty and the process a clusterfuck of incompetence and disappointment. (I’ll note here that more than four months later, the hole in the ceiling has not been patched, though the leak did mysteriously stop.)

  I needed to leave. I needed some distance. I’d been carrying a lot of extra water at work, taking on side jobs to help make ends meet, and with everything going on with our stupid ceiling, it was just time for me to go. Lucky for me, I was leaving the next day.

  The night before I left, I didn’t sleep a wink. Too much pressure. Too many frayed nerves.

  “What are you doing?” Rebecca has a way of snapping at me when I wake her up late at night.

  “I can’t sleep,” I whispered. “I’m going out on the couch. Just go to sleep.”

  I don’t generally like being awake at four in the morning. My dad does it every day. So does my friend John. Both engineers, both grew up in the rural Midwest. Must be something in all that rusty water that makes them believe this is an appropriate time for a human being to be awake. It patently is not. I flipp
ed on the television in our dark living room and for a moment the light burned my eyes. There is something absurd about television at this time of night. With a thousand channels constantly angling for the most engaging prime-time programming, I wonder why they never consider the early riser or late-night watcher when they force-feed infomercials for the next miracle abdominal exercise machine and the get-rich-quick real estate moguls hawking their wares. I have a hard time imagining my midsection will end up trim if only I make three easy installments of $39.99 and am willing to attach a car battery to my navel. I also have a hard time believing that a man making $25,000 a year was able to pay off his thirty-year mortgage in nine months without robbing a bank.

  Had it not been such a bad week, I might have been giddy with anticipation when my plane landed in Portland, Maine, as I arrived for my L.L.Bean workshop. But, as it was, my nerves were fried. I was tired of the stress at home, tired of the hassle of traveling—who wouldn’t be with a two-hour layover in Baltimore?—and I found myself getting short with my wife on the phone while I was waiting for my bag to come out of the carousel. It was almost midnight. No sleep. I just wanted to get to my room and go to sleep.

  I never sleep all that well on the road. Uncomfortable beds, strange sounds. I was in Freeport, Maine, the place where I proposed to my wife, the place I held up so highly in countless memories from childhood and college road trips. And yet, I woke up to a drizzling sky and a knot in my neck. I worried that my class was going to be canceled, so I grabbed some coffee and headed over to the home of the L.L.Bean Outdoor Discovery Schools, a small farmhouse set on the other side of I-295 called the Fogg House.

  I arrived a half hour early and was met by one of my instructors, Amy. She was a ponytailed blonde in a khaki-colored hat, shooting shirt, field khakis, and thick hiking boots. She was younger than I would have assumed—I’d place her in her mid to late twenties—and a third-grade teacher. She also happened to be the Maine state sporting clays champion. Friendly and broad-smiled, she was the very picture of the L.L.Bean woman—happy, outdoorsy, free of makeup and pretense. We made small talk in the front room of the old farmhouse, and she greeted the nine other students in the class as they rolled in and we busied ourselves sipping supplied coffee, signing release forms, and ordering sandwiches for lunch to be delivered to the shooting range later in the day.

  We were introduced to the other two instructors. Bernie was a retired field scientist from New Hampshire and a passionate hunter. He spoke with professorial confidence and ease and, with his cargo pants, shooting shirt, Bean boots and jacket, and khaki hat, he looked every bit the wise woodsman. John was tall and oddly symmetrical. Standing around six foot four in the same outfit as Bernie, he was a skyscraper of a man. Salt-and-pepper hair, a Down East accent, and a broad smile. He’s a math teacher. Was Amy’s math teacher in fact. And between the three of them, they have twelve years’ experience teaching this course.

  After an introductory safety meeting, we all pile into our cars and drive to the back of the property where, set in a clearing surrounded by thick stands of pine and balsam, is the shooting range. Five small covered stands in a row looking out onto a mud and grass field a hundred yards deep and speckled with blaze-orange specks of broken clay pigeons. The sky is low. Wispy strands of clouds like an artificial ceiling that seems almost close enough to touch. We meet under a tent on picnic tables, where Amy gives us more safety instructions and admonishes us to never, under any circumstances, shoot at an animal that may wander onto the range. Groundhogs, deer, moose, maybe even a bear. They’ve all found their way onto the live range at one point or another, and L.L.Bean takes its responsibility to conservation very seriously. We get more instruction from Bernie about the proper operation of the school-supplied shotguns and are quickly broken up into two groups of five. My group—composed of myself, a fellow Ohioan named Mike, a recently civilianized navy pilot named Matt, a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout named Ed, and Ed’s dad, Tom—heads to the stand on the far right with John. The rest go to the far left with Amy. Bernie, the senior instructor, is going to roam in between, acting like an art teacher who watches his students mold pots, interrupting only to offer experienced advice.

  At first, I’m tense. I’ve never shot in front of people other than my relatives. I’m also still tired and feeling the effects of the previous week. We start with some easy comers—targets launched from the other side of the field at an upward angle. The clay pigeon comes toward you, reaches an apex, and pauses for a moment before falling more or less straight to the ground. I’ve shot enough that this should be easy. With shotguns, we’re told, it’s all about the mount. Once you have the gun tucked into the pocket of your shoulder and your cheek is firmly on the comb of the stock, you don’t need to aim. Just focus on the target and track its movement with your front arm. Don’t look at the end of the gun, just the target. Focus on the target and your body will move in one smooth motion. You pull the trigger when you see the target the best. That moment is the apex, when the clay disc pauses before succumbing to gravity and falls to the ground.

  I’m second in line. Matt, the pilot, goes first. He’s just been told that he’s left-eye dominant. A lifetime as a righty and now the instructors want him to shoot from the left shoulder. He does what they say and misses the first couple of targets before getting the hang of it and breaking two out of the last three. I step up into the stand, and John covers the things Bernie told us about safety and pointing (not aiming) a shotgun. He loads a shell into the bottom barrel of the twelve-gauge over-under I’ve been assigned (the only one big enough for my outsized frame) and tells me to call the “pull.” I call it and am trying to remember everything I’ve been told all at once. My focus is back and forth. Front of the gun, edge of the target. I’m trying to remember to be smooth, and it only makes me jerky. My left eye blinks uncontrollably as I pull the trigger and I miss. Then I miss again. Then I miss again. And again, and again. All the hours in Grandma’s back acres in Iowa amount to nothing. I feel incapable of hitting a clay pigeon and am suddenly struck that it is going to be a very long day.

  We try a few different targets as the morning goes on. One that launches from behind us, some that come in from the side, even one shot across the ground that they call a rabbit. I am consistently inconsistent and have hit perhaps 15 percent of those clay pigeons I have called for before lunch. The ones that I did hit were usually the second target of a double—when two pigeons are launched simultaneously. You have time to find the first one and track it, but the second one is already midflight by the time you turn to shoot. The second shot is instinctive. You don’t have time to do much thinking or preparing. It’s turn your head and shoot. Bernie tells me that most times the second shot of a double is better than the first because you don’t get to think. Shotgun shooting is about instinct and trust. It’s about blocking out all your thoughts and emotions and concentrating on nothing but the edges of that target.

  I am thinking too much. I am too worried I will do something wrong, trying too hard to do it perfectly. And that’s why I’m missing. It is the story of my life. I worry about things I don’t need to, analyze things better left unanalyzed, think when I should act.

  After lunch, I try to convince myself not to think, which only makes me think harder. As all the other students in my class are demonstrating marked improvement, hitting more targets, I am stalled. I stumble my way through crossing shots and more doubles. I feel comfortable and yet uneasy. Mac had promised me this was fun, but for some reason, I am not having much. It’s no fault of the instructors. They are doing a fantastic job, but with every missed target, with every jerky motion or switched focus, I feel an opportunity missed. I feel myself thinking about being away and feeling guilty. I feel the pressure of providing for a family and the need to fix any problems that might be waiting for me at home. And the more I think about this stuff, the more I try to write that narrative in my head, the less clear it becomes.

  Fi
nally, we reach the last hour of the class. As a whole, we’ve done well. I’ve gotten a little better, but many of my classmates are ten times the shooters than they were at the beginning of the day. As a reward, Bernie offers us a game of five stand.

  Now, assuming you have no idea what five stand is—as I did not—here’s a primer. Each shooter takes a position at a stand. They are numbered one through five. Hanging to the right of the stand is a metal sign with three lines on it marked “Single,” “Report,” and “Simo.” Each of these lines has one or two numbers next to it corresponding to the number of the launchers that will be used during that particular round. The launchers are spread around the range, each offering a different kind of shot—comers, goers, crossing left-to-right, crossing right-to-left, and a rabbit. There are three rounds at each stand—the aforementioned “single,” which is the first round and consists of a single target being launched from the specified launcher; “report,” which launches the first target on the shooter’s call and the second on the sound of the first shot; and “simo,” which launches two targets from two launchers simultaneously. Each stand has a different combination of launchers for every round. When all the shooters have shot from their first stand, they rotate to the right. The one on the far right rotates to the one on the far left. But in every round, the person who started on the far left is the first shooter, regardless of position. So with five targets at each of the five stands, a full game is completed when every shooter has shot at twenty-five targets.

  Believe me, it seemed a lot more complicated at the time. Because there were ten people in the class and only five people could participate in the game—one shooter for each of the five stands—we were broken into two groups. I was in the second, which meant I got to sit in the drizzle for a half hour while the first group played the game. I watched as the first shooter called nervously for the first target and joined the cheering as shooters eventually settled into a groove. Tom, the Boy Scout’s father, was the first to hit a target and the first to break both clays of a double. The women in the class shot really well, and all earned a hearty whoop from Amy when they broke clay. Watching them, all the people of the first group, I felt a little weight lift from my shoulders. When they hit something, they smiled. When they didn’t, a look of determination came over their faces. I found myself smiling for them, becoming determined on their behalf.