And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  “Hello?” I called, my gun held firmly in both hands, my right thumb on the safety and my fingers covering the trigger guard. “You okay?”

  His feet appeared at the front of the truck. I could see them from the back as he hopped down from the front bumper and stepped around the driver’s-side door. He was tall and lanky, dressed head to toe in camo coveralls. His boots were worn and black, the kind that reminds me of those worn by the guys working the quick-change oil, lube, and filter on a Saturday morning. His bottom lip protruded with a massive wad of chewing tobacco, and he grabbed the dog leash from the front seat and yanked his yipping puppy along with him as he stepped toward me with purpose and without hesitation.

  “My fuel pump is going on me,” he said, abruptly turning and jumping back into the cab of the jacked-up old Ford, and he began cranking the engine. With each successive turn of the key, the engine’s effort to come alive was shorter, more spluttering and desperate.

  “It sounds like you could use a jump. Do you want one?” I still had both hands on my gun, but the grip had relaxed a bit.

  “That would be really great,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  Am I sure I don’t mind? This wasn’t the kind of thing I expected him to say. I expected him to spit at my shoe and say something along the lines of “fuck yes I need a jump. Take yer preppy ass L.L.Bean shoes and go get yer car.” He was so polite. So desperate, I kind of felt a little bad for being as ready to shoot him as I was. Maybe he was changing my mind about the NRA guys, those yokels at the truck stop debating the true meaning of “first cousin,” and all the other dirty, aggressive people I’ve been silently judging for so long. Maybe, with this man’s help, I could learn to appreciate NASCAR as something more than loud things turning left. Maybe I’d even begin to understand Toby Keith and American beer. Maybe, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m parked a couple fields over. Give me a few minutes to get back. Do you have cables?”

  “I’ve got cables. Thank you so much, sir.”

  The sir, I think, was the reason my grip tightened once again on the gun. No one calls me sir. No one. And not in that every-time-you-call-me-sir-I-look-for-my-father kind of way. They don’t call me sir because there is nothing about me that would give a person reason to call me sir. I quickened my pace back around the trees, taking away the direct line of sight to my back that might give him a clear shot if he were reaching for a rifle while I had my back turned, and hustled along the tree line back to my car. Sir. Hmmm. Was he buttering me up? Lulling me into a false sense of security and genuine appreciation? Or was he simply doing his best to be polite? State law dictates that you can’t drive around with a loaded shotgun in your backseat, so I popped the shells out and laid the gun broken open across the rear seat, holding two shells in my left hand just in case I got back there and this guy’s intentions with regard to ending my life had changed. I opened my bird-hunting knife and put it in the pocket of the driver’s-side door for quick access. And I pulled up slowly when I got back to where the truck remained unmoving, a deep sense of suspicion conflicting with my genuine longing to help.

  The dirt road was narrow and this guy’s truck was parked directly in the middle, so I was forced to pull onto the shoulder and drive through low-hanging branches in order to get around it. I pulled past and watched my rearview for anything suspicious as I went up the road to turn around. I pocketed the open knife when I got out and unlatched the hood. My new friend was waiting with jumper cables already attached to his dead battery when I got my hood open, and he immediately began hooking the other ends to my battery. I got back in my car, shotgun shells palmed, knife ready, and started it, hoping it would provide a quick jump and we’d soon be on our separate ways.

  The man, whose name I never asked in an uncharacteristic sign of my unease, tinkered with the wires and tried several times to get his old truck running. After nearly ten long and anticipatory minutes, he unhooked the cables and closed both hoods.

  “I’m pretty sure my fuel pump is dead,” he said, and I replied something nervous about it being better that he discovered it with people around instead of by himself, trying to subconsciously remind him that I was a person and not a meal. The day before, I had driven Jack and Dylan to play laser tag with Rebecca’s brother and his girlfriend and Jack’s booster seat was still in the back of my car, my gun on the floor in front. I tried to subtly draw attention to this, to remind this guy that I was a father and thereby had something to live for, something to fight for, something to, and the means with which to, kill for.

  “Do you need a ride?” I asked and almost regretted it the second it came out of my mouth, but that’s what happens when you start helping someone—you become responsible for them, like spaying the feral cat you gave milk to once on a whim. Once you start, you really should go all the way. You are, in fact, somehow obligated to go all the way.

  “I don’t live very far and I’d sure appreciate it,” he said and quick as a flash went back to close up his truck and scoop up his puppy. I unlocked the door and cleared a couple things off the passenger seat before he got in. “Yeah, I noticed the fuel pump starting to go bad on me yesterday and I guess I just hoped it would last a little longer. I was just hoping to come out and work my new dog a little, get him to chase some squirrels and make him a squirrel dog.”

  He didn’t live far, just ten minutes away, and I drove the unfamiliar roads trying to remember every turn, every name of a street not only to find my way back to Valhalla, but just in case I was in the early stages of a kidnapping and, upon the event of an escape, I needed to lead the police to the scene of the crime. It turned out the guy was pretty nice. He was a longtime hunter and friend of the county’s wildlife officers. He liked hunting and eating squirrel—something I tried not to judge him for—as well as deer, pheasant, and the occasional grouse. He liked to fish too and told me, after I made some inane comment about the expense of fly-fishing, that he had tried it the summer before and really liked it. We wound our way down twisting country roads and into a small town where he directed me down a wooded street toward a trailer park. This has to be it, I thought. This has to be his place. Turned out I was right.

  “Good luck; I hope you get something,” he said.

  “I’d better get something soon,” I said, feeling relieved that I was dropping him off safely, but also a little sad that I’d been so quick to assume he was a bad person by the way he dressed and treated his puppy. “Or else my wife will think I’m cheating on her.”

  He shook my hand and laughed. “That’s funny,” he said. “Maybe next time I’ll tell the old lady I’m out hunting. Thanks for the ride.”

  And with that he was out of my life forever. I tried not to squeal my tires as I pulled out of the trailer park and realized that, try as I did to pay attention, I had no real idea where I was going. I knew we had gone generally west and a little north, so I looked for opportunities to head south and east.

  As I dead-reckoned my way back to Valhalla, I began feeling pretty good about myself for helping out a man in need, for stifling the part of me that had been afraid and doing the right thing. I was in full self-righteous mode when I began to fantasize about returning to the field and dropping a bird. I believe I even muttered a few words about karma under my breath and my hands turned the car automatically and, surprisingly, down the right streets taking me back to the place where we’d left the man’s truck as if by rote. I parked in the turnaround on the southeast corner of Valhalla and retrieved my gun from the backseat. I reached absentmindedly in my pocket and felt my still-open pen knife. I nearly lopped my finger off, but managed to retrieve and close it without serious injury.

  Dropping a couple of shells into my gun, I began walking north, along the eastern edge of the field through the row of millet. I was walking at a pretty good pace, sloshing and slapping my way through the thigh-high plants and making
a lot of noise. My hope was that I would scare a bird into flight, but when I got to the corner and turned west as the planted row followed its tracklike route around the field, I slowed down. I was thinking again about the whole karma thing and dismissing it as self-congratulation. It’s pretty pompous to think that God or the Universe or Almighty Thor will repay you for simply doing the right thing. Still, I knew it would make a pretty good story if it happened. Just about then, an errant twig lodged itself in my boot laces and I stopped to remove it. When I bent down to pick it out, I heard a little rustling in the bushes just ahead of me. I stood back up and saw a brown bird a little bigger than a New York City pigeon waddling through the brush three or four feet in front of me. I took a step and it waddled a little more. I stopped and it slowed.

  My dad and Mark tell a story about a fall trip to Canada for some late-season fishing and black bear hunting. The story goes that they were walking along an old logging road back to where they had parked a truck when they came across a young boy walking with a shotgun. He had a couple of grouse stuffed into a bag tied to his belt. They chatted him up for a couple of minutes and soon a grouse crossed the road ahead of them. The boy raised his shotgun and blasted the bird before it had a chance to fly.

  “Why do you shoot them on the ground?” Dad asked.

  “Why not wait for them to flush?” Mark added.

  The boy, a local kid who was obviously hunting for dinner and not sport, cocked his head at the two dumbass Americans and said, “ ’Cause they’re easier to hit on the ground.”

  This story flashed into my mind with each cautious step in pursuit of the bird walking like a geriatric through the brush ahead of me. After four or five steps, I raised my shotgun and aimed at it. It would have been easy to shoot it on the ground. Really easy. I removed the safety and had my finger on the trigger, about to pull, but decided against it. It would have felt cheap, like I was somehow cheating. I was desperate to get a bird, but I knew I would remember my first for a very long time, maybe even forever, and shooting a bird on the ground four feet in front of me would have been like losing my virginity while black-out drunk. That didn’t mean I was going to let this particular bird get away. Not by a long shot. It just meant I would have to figure out how to inspire it to take to the air before I lost it.

  I stalked it for another ten feet or so, gun at the ready on my shoulder, safety on. I thought, maybe, that if I paused for a moment then made a quick movement, it might get confused and fly away. I hardly noticed that I was standing in the exact spot where the five grouse had flushed almost exactly twenty-four hours before when I stopped for a short count of two Mississippi then made a two-footed set jump forward about three feet.

  It worked like a charm.

  Not only did the bird I had been following fly, but so did four others—perhaps the exact same five birds from the day before. And just like the day before, two of them took off in front of me. One went to the right into the woods. One went to the left deeper into Valhalla, and the last went straight back over my head. But my eyes never left the one I’d been following. My physical movements were textbook. First my left hand followed the bird’s trajectory, then my right moved the butt of the gun to my shoulder. My weight flowed like water onto my front left foot, and my right heel came off the ground. Exactly as I had been taught at L.L.Bean two months prior, exactly as I had not done the day before. I didn’t even notice the end of the gun as my eyes focused clearly on the bird. My cheek hit the stock at the exact moment my right thumb flicked the safety forward and in one fluid, smooth-as-silk and picture-perfect motion, I exhaled and squeezed the trigger without having to remember not to jerk. The bird, all browns and white, tumbled to the ground a millisecond after I heard the shot and twenty yards in front of me.

  I had pulled the trigger a second time before I saw the bird go down, so my gun was empty and I flipped the barrel release switch with my right thumb, breaking open the action and digging into my pocket for two more shells as the spent ones ejected and flew past my head. I was walking now. A purposeful walk. A measured walk. An even gait right toward the spot where the bird had fallen. I got to the place I had marked in my mind and looked around, expecting to see the pound-and-a-half bird lying where it fell. I was just starting to believe in the power of karma, just starting to believe in the innate justice of the world when I realized something—the bird wasn’t there.

  Immediately, I went into a frantic search. The gun was by now loaded and closed, the safety returned to the proper position. My head swiveled back and forth. My steps—moments before even and smooth—became clipped and frantic, like I was trying to guard Isaiah Thomas in a game of one-on-one. Where the hell was the damned bird?

  Pausing to look back at the spot where I had seen it fall, I caught something out of the corner of my eye, something that, had I not been so hyperaware and jacked up on adrenaline and prehistoric instinct, I probably would have missed entirely. A tall stalk of a thornbush jerked to my left in a direction inconsistent with the movement of the wind. The little grouse was on the run. Any vestiges of the coolheaded resolve I’d demonstrated in wounding the bird was gone. Suddenly I was in the final scene of a Benny Hill Show episode. I could almost hear “Yakety Sax” playing as I bobbed and weaved, walking smack into thornbushes and trying to keep up with the bird’s frantic and erratic run for life. It was like that scene in Rocky, when the grizzled old trainer makes the young boxer chase a chicken through a Philadelphia alley to improve his agility. Only I was no fighter, this was no chicken, and as evidenced by the slaps to the face I was taking from the prickly flora, this was no alley.

  Through the lens of hyperrealism, the chase felt like it took hours, though I’m sure—judging by the meager distance actually covered—that it was over in thirty seconds. The bird changed direction one time too many and found itself coming straight back toward me. I had the gun to my shoulder, stalking it like a SWAT officer storming a meth lab, and was ready to fire when once again I thought of the young boy in my dad’s Canadian story. I stamped my boot down six feet in front of its beak and it made a weak attempt to fly—more of a hop than anything. It was, perhaps, eight inches off the ground and less than two yards in front of me when I pulled the trigger for a final time. It went down immediately and twisted and writhed for a couple quick seconds before settling down, wings over its head and claws splayed behind it as if tragically failing an attempt at a cartwheel, for the final time.

  In the immediate aftermath of my first kill, I was awash in conflicted feelings. I stood stock-still, only moving to flip open my gun and allow the single spent shell to arc behind me, removing the unfired one and stuffing it into my pocket. If I’m honest, I was a little scared. The way the thing flopped and writhed in its final moment of life freaked me out. I didn’t want to get too close, let alone touch it, for fear that it might spring to life and make one final, desperate lunge at me. I know. I’ve seen too many horror movies where the killer is believed to be dead, only to pop back out of the water and drag a freshly deflowered teenager with him to the deep. But it was a strange thing to see, especially that close and in the three dimensions and Technicolor majesty of a crisp winter morning right in front of me. I wondered if I felt guilty, if I had any remorse about taking another creature’s life with such wanton eagerness, but was able to answer my own question: No. I didn’t feel bad that the birdie had died and I had been the one who made it do so. I did feel a strange pang of anticlimax, though, like I should have felt more victorious than I did. I did not feel like I had conquered nature. I did not feel like Francis Macomber dropping the wildebeest. I felt more like I had conquered man, actually. Like I had stepped up and done something hard.

  It was a similar feeling to the one I had after I took Rebecca’s parents out to lunch and asked for their daughter’s hand in marriage. It was something I had been dreading. I knew I loved her and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but it’s never easy for a guy to conf
ront a girl’s parents and ask for their blessing to take their baby girl away. Just like then, I had spent a long time preparing, getting ready for any situation or question. I had rehearsed what I was going to do and practiced how I was going to behave. And when the moment came, it turned out to be not as hard as what I had built up in my head. That lunch was easy. A few questions about my career prospects, a few wise words about the relationship between love and commitment. I picked up the check and it was done. It was the same with this. A few rough experiences and a few thoughts of failure, but then the moment came and I did exactly what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. I got the bird to fly, shot it, and stalked it until it was dead. It wasn’t like climbing Everest or any other feat requiring a tremendous amount of physical skill and mental experience. And when it was done, I felt a weight had lifted, like I had confronted something tough and made it out alive.

  I still didn’t want to pick the damned thing up though. That was the hardest part. When I was sure that its tiny heart had made its last beat, when I was sure that it didn’t have any fight left in it, I walked over slowly and squatted down, catcher style, with it between my boots. There was a small amount of blood, about as bad as when you cut yourself shaving and dab it off with some toilet paper, on its wing. I poked at it at first, flipping it over with the tip of my gloved finger and revealing the damage that had been done. My intention was to shoot it in the head, knowing full well that the meat, such as it was, was in the breast and thighs. I had missed by an inch or two, blowing the upper half of the breast, neck, and throat completely off. The small head was attached by the spine and a little skin wrapped around it. Nothing more. With a little more confidence, I picked up a claw between my thumb and forefinger and flipped it over. It was stunningly light and my gun, which was a twelve-gauge and much too big for such a small bird at such close range, had made it all the more so.