And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  I went over to the carcass as the others returned to the cars. I wanted to touch it for some reason, to feel the furry feathers, to see the beak and tails I had thus far only seen in pictures. Then it occurred to me to remove the tail feathers. They made for great fly-tying material should I ever decide to pick that up. But more than that I would have at least something to show my wife and kids for all the trouble of coming out here. I picked the bird up by its feathers, and I could still feel heat coming from the body—moist heat like a baggie of jelly fresh from the microwave and wrapped in one of those boas women get at Mardi Gras–themed parties. I grabbed the tail feathers tightly in my right hand and pulled much harder than I needed to. They came off cleanly and I stuffed them into the slot on the chest of my hunting vest that allows you to put birds into the game bag, which hangs from the back, without reaching around. I hoped no one would see me do it. I felt like a fraudulent brave scalping a victim that wasn’t mine. But if they did, I’d use the fly-tying excuse. Hopefully they’d buy that.

  We decided to take a break for lunch and drove back into Thornton’s block-long central business district and pulled into spots in front of the only business with its doors open and lights on inside, an establishment known only as “The Bar,” a name both accurate and appropriate in a one-horse town like this one. Inside it was dark, with the majority of the light coming from a cheap flatscreen hung over the bar and neon promotional signs from the kind of beer companies you only buy from in the suburbs as a gag gift or because you’re in college and value quantity over quality. The small windows in the front of the narrow, long room offered nothing by way of illumination or view, and we helped ourselves to a table in the back—like one of those tables you find in a school cafeteria with the cheap metal, padded chairs. Our server offered us sticky, laminated menus, and one glance at the offerings made me love this place instantly. It was hearty food. The kind your grandmother makes for you. The kind she would describe as sticking to your ribs. Chili. Cheeseburgers. Stew. Not a salad in sight. Homemade soup was available some days, and the chili had been made the day before so it was just getting good. Since I’m a sucker for this kind of place and since I can’t possibly turn down a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich whenever I’m in Iowa, I ordered that.

  We chatted benignly about work and Iowa sports as we waited for our food and about the food as we ate it. My sandwich was as close to perfect as you can possibly get. The tenderloin was pounded flat, breaded, and fried and was roughly three times the size of the bun it was served on. Pickles, a little mustard, a slice of tomato. It doesn’t get a whole lot better than this. I’d take this sandwich and an iced tea over just about any meal I’ve ever had anywhere, except maybe that lobster club back in Maine. That was the best sandwich I’ve eaten in a lifetime of eating sandwiches. But this tenderloin was awesome too. This with a side of shrimp lo mein would be my death row meal (again, if the lobster club is off the table). It was that good. Feeling full and refreshed, I had a renewed sense of optimism.

  Screw what had happened earlier. So what if I made a mistake? It was my first time getting the drop on prey. A rookie mistake. I could learn from it and move on, right? I could still prove my manliness to these guys, still be a hunter, right? It’s amazing what a belly full of food does for me. My wife knows to put a sandwich or leftovers in front of me if I’m in a sour mood. It seems that my emotional state is directly tied to how full or hungry I am. If I were to fall on hard times and find myself starving, I would probably end up being the most miserable bastard in the world.

  I’m pretty sure a Cheshire Cat smile curled over my lips as we drove back out to the second field we were going to hunt. I was eager. I was ready. I was, I’ve got to say, pumped up. Rob and his friend had to leave before lunch, which left Ben and his friend, Mark, Tom, Tom’s friend, and me to hunt this second piece of land. Mark opted for the warmth of his truck and the Iowa State game on the radio, sending us whippersnappers off to hunt this tiny, triangular spit of long grass in the middle of a three-hundred-acre, black-as-night cornfield. We were piling out of the trucks and readying our guns. Tom was getting Zeke out and Ben and his friend were putting their guns together and giving Ava some water. I stepped in front of Mark’s truck, my gun assembled and broken for loading. I was just pulling shells from my pocket when Mark yelled “rooster!” out the window. I looked up to see a rooster thirty or thirty-five yards off rising from the scrub along a fence line and hightailing it toward the piece of property we didn’t have permission to hunt. I may have had a shot, had my gun been loaded, but the bird was just too quick on the draw for me.

  No problem. Just bad timing. I didn’t do anything wrong, right? Besides, a bird popping up this early could only be a sign of good things to come. Surely there would be more in this tiny stretch of land than there were in the 140 acres we had hunted earlier in the day. And to be sure, there were more birds. Six or seven to be exact and all of them as female as Gloria Steinem. I saw all of them, up close.

  After walking across a quarter mile of Iowa soil—which is a lot like walking through a foot-thick layer of pulverized Oreos—we came to the arrowhead-shaped piece of land we were going to hunt. The wind had picked up significantly since lunch. The sun was high and bright, the sky clear, but the wind made the day feel heavy. And as if walking into a stiff wind weren’t enough, the grass was chest high and thick. Ten feet into the small field, I was breathing like a fat man climbing the Statue of Liberty.

  “I think they’ve got tunnels through this crap,” yelled Tom. He was off to the right, walking the fence line. And he was right. Running beneath and through the dense vegetation were Viet-Cong-style tunnels. Every few steps you could see them, openings to a network of tunnels that ran along the ground, weaving in and out of the plants. I had no way, of course, of knowing whether or not these were made or used by pheasant, but it seemed pretty logical to me. The species is threatened by birds of prey—hawks, owls, hell, probably even eagles—which tend to sit high up in trees and take their meals by air. If a pheasant never flies, never exposes itself to the very birds that want to kill and eat it, it has a better chance of living. I secretly hoped they had built the tunnels. I liked the idea of an animal taking its safety into its own hands—not when I was the one trying desperately to kill it, but you get my point. I liked these crafty Chinese sons of bitches more and more by the second.

  It took maybe twenty minutes to cover the field, and there was nothing fun about it. The tall grass was so thick, we had to stop a few times to try to find the dogs; so deep and thick in fact that I hardly noticed when a deer stood up less than ten feet in front of me and casually walked off. Ben pointed it out. He was maybe twenty yards away and saw the doe’s ears bobbing as it hopped off toward safety and comfort someplace else.

  I kept my gun loaded and ready as we walked along the fence line, hoping, no wishing, no praying that I would get one last shot before we were done for the day. I did not.

  The day had not gone as I had so long imagined. When I began planning this trip, I had pictured myself coming home from our hunt with a couple of roosters in my game bag and sitting on a chair outside, sipping gin and cleaning my haul as Tommy told me his favorite jokes. I’d then spend an hour or two in the toasty warm interior, checking my roasting birds, applying additional bacon strips for added fat content and chopping up some vegetables for the roaster. There would, of course, be more gin and by the time I served a beautiful meal to my expectant family, I’d be Thanksgiving drunk—just enough to endure extended periods of family time, but not so much that you can’t carve a bird—and swelling with pride.

  As it was, however, I found myself sitting in my car, talking to my wife on the phone, and waiting to pick up the pizzas I had ordered in lieu of providing the evening meal with my quick shot instincts and guile.

  “So did you get anything?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, a bit of shame in my tone. “But I came close,” I added opt
imistically.

  “What the hell? You drove all the way out there for nothing?”

  “There’s still tomorrow,” I said.

  “Well, hurry up and get something, will ya?”

  As we devoured taco pizza and a dessert pie, Mark tried to comfort me for my mistake earlier in the day. “Rookie mistake,” he said, and “it’s better that you walk around with the safety on than to get a bird or accidentally shoot someone. Everyone came home safe, that’s the important part.” Plus, there was always the next day. Maybe I’d be better then.

  We talked until late and until I got a phone call from Rebecca. She was crying. Being in our small condo with the kids, after my in-laws had gone home, and trying to keep them occupied with no backyard, no basement, and a downstairs neighbor who had already twice tried to get us in trouble for noise—apparently she could hear the kids walking from the living room to the bedroom and it disturbed her smoking and watching television with the bass turned to max volume—had gotten to Rebecca. For nearly ten years, we’d lived like single people in small places. We got married young. Had kids young. We had yet to put down any real roots. Not having a house was getting to her worst of all. She could deal without having a ton of extra money and extra things, but she wanted our kids to have a house, a backyard, a basement, a reasonable expectation that they could walk from the living room to the bedroom without risking eviction. And I did too.

  When you’re a journalist, you understand that you won’t make as much money as an engineer or a financial planner. You understand this as a teacher too. But when you’re a journalist who marries a teacher for the money and are surrounded by engineers and financial planners, it’s like being locked in a candy store and only being able to buy brussels sprouts. It’s not that you envy the people who can have candy, it’s that you get tired of feeling like you can’t. We had made a lot of sacrifices to follow our dreams and to raise our kids, to be able to have Rebecca stay home, and the one that we felt so close to overcoming after a decade of it being a pipe dream was owning a home in the town where we lived.

  Rebecca cried for a half hour and we talked for another one after that. I lay in Will’s bed and wondered if I were doing the right thing. Wouldn’t my time have been better spent delivering pizzas at night or working at a bookstore on weekends to save up our down payment a little more? Probably. But I was here now, lying on a bed in Iowa and thinking about what was to come. I did my best to comfort my wife and put her mind at ease, bidding her a fair night’s sleep and going to bed thinking nothing about the next day’s hunt.

  Sunday morning came with a little less fanfare. I was up before Mark knocked on the door, then dressed and ran into town for a cup of coffee, which Mark and Linette don’t keep in the house. That morning had been the fall time change, so my system, already set for Eastern time in this Central time state, was two hours ahead of the clock. I sipped my coffee and read the morning paper, waiting for the others to get up. We had cereal for breakfast and drove down to the farm in Thornton without stopping at the gas station for drinks. Ben and his friend had gone back to Waterloo the day before, leaving me, Mark, Tom, Rob, and his friend and his friend’s young son to work the dogs and hike the fields. The wind was a lot stronger that second morning and the conversation thinner while we watched Jaeger and Zeke do their best to pick up scents in the rapidly moving air. It felt different from the day before. The expectation and excitement were gone. I knew long before the end of the day that I probably wouldn’t get a bird. I had had my chance the day before and blown it. But I tried to remain vigilant.

  We stopped among a stand of pine trees on the leeward side of a small hill and took a break from the wind. Mark, Rob, and his friend started talking Republican politics, while Tom, the young boy, and I watched the dogs.

  The conservatism that tends to run in my family is nearer libertarianism than anything that comes out of the GOP headquarters. Especially with the men. Mark and Rob covered a lot of ground—guns, resource management, education, the deficit—but the central theme was that government should stay out of their minds, their hearts, their wallets, and their gun cases. I’ve never been one to talk a lot about politics. Maybe it was my early training as a newspaper reporter on government beats that made me realize nothing good can ever come from spouting off. Rail against taxes, and the Democrats you cover will clam up. Rail against Wall Street, and the Republicans link you to the “liberal media.” Plus, I’ve never been sure enough in my beliefs to come out of the closet as a moderate Democrat among those I love. My cousin Heather is a flaming liberal, as flaming a liberal as Mark is a staunch conservative. And when they talk, they both hold their ground. I can’t imagine doing that. I’m just wired to be conciliatory, to avoid a fight when a fight is coming. So I didn’t chime in as Mark, Rob, and his friend talked about deregulation and the welfare state with a tone suggesting they had just bitten into a chocolate cake and gotten a mouth full of lemon juice. Instead, I just took it all in.

  There’s something beautiful about wide-open spaces, something people don’t often get when they live their lives in the suburbs. I was standing on a two-rut road that hadn’t been used in years, near a small grove of short, dense trees and looking out across a nearly endless expanse of Iowa. From an elevation of no more than thirty feet, I felt like I could see sixty miles. No interstates. No subdivisions. No office buildings or on-ramps. Just space. The sky felt low with blue-gray clouds that looked stitched to the brown and black earth. I thought about how lucky some people are to have all this, the waving grain, the long blowing wind, the subtle undulations of earth as it meets sky in their backyard. And I thought about what it would be like to move there. When he was alive, Uncle Don always made a point of telling me about opportunities in Iowa. He’d help bankroll me if I came out and bought a small weekly newspaper with a circulation of roughly ten that was having trouble keeping the lights on. Or wouldn’t I be interested in taking a job as the lifestyle columnist for the Mason City Globe Gazette? And I think part of me always thought I might enjoy that. But I couldn’t live out here, not with a wife and kids and job that I love in Cincinnati. Rebecca would go crazy being out here, I thought as I watched the seemingly endless clouds roll over my head. Plus, how would I ever really make a living?

  I considered the life of a country gentleman for a few minutes until the boys decided they’d had enough politics talk and were ready to get back to the hunt. We followed the same track we had the day before only in reverse. As we walked, I paid close attention to the dogs as they worked back and forth and especially when they stopped moving. Every time our line of walkers paused, my thumb instinctively flipped the switch on the safety and I shifted my weight in anticipation of a bird popping up before me. It never did. While I heard Rob at the other end of the line call out a few hens, I never actually saw one, and when we finished up and headed home, I knew my first hunting expedition was over.

  I would not kill anything in Iowa that year.

  I felt an odd numbness heading back to Mark and Linette’s. I felt like I had studied really hard for a test and showed up to find out it had been taken the day before. But any feeling of sulk, any self-pity, was quickly erased when, after the noontime meal (which is called “dinner” in Iowa and on Sunday is the biggest meal of the weekend), Tom offered to take me out back shooting for the afternoon. Mark and Linette had to go out of town unexpectedly for the afternoon, so my youngest cousin loaded up four or five .22-caliber rifles and handguns into the bed of Mark’s pickup and we drove across the enormous lawn to shoot.

  You’ll think I’m padding the numbers, but Tom and I managed to shoot almost a thousand rounds of .22-caliber long-rifle ammunition in under two hours using a five-shot rifle, a nine-shot semiautomatic pistol, and a nine-shot revolver. Had you been listening from across the street, you might have imagined a war was taking place in the backyard. One of us was shooting as the other was loading and vice versa. I liked shooting Tom’s small r
ifle and even one of the semiautomatic handguns, but it was the nine-shot revolver, the one I had shot with my uncles Mark and Roger, that took my heart. It felt good in my hand and, unlike any of the other guns, I was able to hit targets with it.

  Later that evening, when Tom and I were retelling our afternoon to Mark, he got a glimmer in his eye as I mentioned the revolver.

  “Well, I think you should buy it then,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. I had not really considered buying a gun before (except briefly when Mark had mentioned it to me back at the family reunion). I knew I needed one for hunting, but that was a shotgun, not a revolver, and I ended up having one of those given to me.

  “I’ll cut you a deal,” he said, and when he offered me a very reasonable price and offered to throw in a case, I was sold. I gave him all the cash I had as a down payment and promised to send the rest the next time I got paid. I loaded the gun, case, and box of ammunition into my backpack and put it in my trunk. I had just bought my first gun. And I figured having a handgun in the house would be good for the day when Molly started dating. I left early the next morning and had put Mason City long in my rearview before the sun came up.