Bob went back to the rig to fetch a shirt and Maud brought me a ham sandwich and two jelly doughnuts. I panicked.
“I can’t pay,” I said.
“I can’t sell it,” she said. “Bread’s old, ham’s past the date on the package, and I’m not sure about the doughnuts. Shouldn’t hurt you, though.”
That sandwich was delicious. I read my letter while I ate. It was from Peter, who asked if Rudolph really fired lasers from his nose to protect the North Pole.
Bob’s shirt was a hideous Hawaiian thing and he was talking to me before I finished the second doughnut.
“Maud got you workin’, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, Ernie is fixing my truck.”
“That your truck?”
I don’t know what Ernie was doing or why, but outside the Gypsy Moth was spewing black exhaust. She had never done that before.
“That’s real pretty,” said Bob. “I like that mermaid.”
I managed to say thanks.
“Thing is,” he said, frowning, “I thought the gypsy moth was a kind of pest. Eats all the trees and stuff.”
“I never thought of that,” I said. “I think my girlfriend just liked the name.”
“Okay,” he said. “Uh-huh. Now that I can understand.” He looked around the room. “Where’s she at?”
“Afraid she moved on.”
“Ah. Uh-huh. Okay. Sorry to hear that. Let me lighten your load a little bit.” He took a handful of letters from the mail bag and shuffled off to a booth across the room. Maud had a coffee on the table before he sat down, and he hadn’t had to ask.
I wrote back to Peter. I told him to keep quiet, because little boys who provoke Rudy get zapped. I hope his mom made him look up “provoke.” I was going to try my hand at another but I got distracted.
Outside, Ernie had opened up the back and climbed in where the mattress was. There was nothing functional back there and I couldn’t see why he would do that. Moreover, I had certain personal things back there I’d rather he didn’t go through. My wallet, for example. In particular I had three pictures and one painting of Lola that I didn’t want him to see. She had participated in a Bloomington exhibition of women photographing, painting, and sculpting other women. Men were barred from this exhibition, but afterward Lola had given certain artistic shots of herself to me. I didn’t think Ernie would understand the context and I hated the thought of him perving out on the woman I loved.
But since he was already back there I couldn’t do anything except hope that he kept his eyes on the job in hand.
A motorcycle cop pulled in. He had a handlebar mustache and aviator sunglasses, the kind of cop who thinks he’s a film star. I hoped I hadn’t eaten his doughnut.
“Afternoon, Maud,” he said, then stopped at my table.
“Afternoon,” he said. “Mind if I take a few of these letters?” I slid the bag his way and he grabbed four or five envelopes, then went wordlessly to another booth. I guessed Maud would provide pen and paper.
I thought about some of the hippies and jazz poets and film studies faculty I encountered sometimes in university towns: people who deplored this other Indiana outside their own incestuous enclaves. And they didn’t know the first thing about it. I wanted to stand Lola’s new man with his self-indulgent potter’s wheel next to Bob and watch him wilt. Bob promised bicycles for Christmas on his lunch hour. Ernie was pure hot sauce and Maud was sheer gravy.
Bob’s truck had Georgia plates. Crackling CB radios in every semi truck for two hundred miles must swap stories of good times at Maud’s and the charming letters to Santa they had read. Highway patrolmen put in for waiting lists to work this patch of turf. All the lonely retrograde denizens and misfits of the Great American Highway converged here every winter to play an unlikely but heroic role in the lives of millions of children. I half expected to see ZZ Top roll up in the Eliminator, their famous red beards dyed Santa white.
“This is extraordinary,” I said, when Maud came to refill my coffee. “Just great. Do you get the Hells Angels in here sometimes all writing letters?”
“I don’t know about Hells Angels, but we get motorcycle clubs sometimes.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. I should have stopped, but I liked Maud, and I felt that she liked me. But I had spent too much time in university towns, and I stepped over the mark. “I mean do you get big hairy men, ex-convicts from Tennessee? Do you get the hell raisers and beer drinkers and longhair metalheads and good ol’ boys playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox while they’re writing those letters from Santa?”
“What are you getting at?” said Maud.
“I just love it,” I said. “You could get the local Grand Dragon in here writing letters to black kids.”
Maud gave me a level glare.
“We don’t ask,” she said. “We welcome anyone who comes through that door.”
I didn’t get any more coffee the rest of the afternoon.
For a couple months after that day, the Gypsy Moth was a pleasure to drive. She purred when she idled, and she took every rut, rock, and country road I threw at her with an eagerness I never knew she had.
“I won’t explain what I done,” said Ernie. “You prolly wouldn’t understand it anyway.”
That was a fair point. It was his other, next, and last comment as I sat at the wheel and prepared to drive away that felt like retaliation for my comments and questions to Maud.
“Nice pictures you got back there,” he observed. “You ought to send them in to Readers Wives.”
VI
Bang Bang
There are three ways to inspect a bald eagle’s nest. You can climb the nest tree, which is somewhat hazardous if the bird is sitting. You can stand in a rowboat—they usually build over water—and try to maintain your balance while with your left hand you maneuver a telescopic pole and with your right train your binoculars on a small mirror mounted at the top. The binoculars should protect your eyes but you may need another hand to defend your back and shoulders from raking talons. Or you can climb nearby trees to a height of forty-five or fifty feet with a line of sight to the nest, which is usually between thirty and forty feet up. Bring a book. The bird may not stir for hours.
The only reason you would do this twice daily at multiple sites is if the federal government paid you for it. That is no longer likely, but at one time there was great public anxiety about reintroducing the birds to habitats and locales from which they had long vanished. They were endangered, and if they thrived again it would prove, or at least imply, that calamitous American stewardship of the wilderness was not beyond redemption.
It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces.
I spent a summer observing three pairs of birds in the ten-mile triangular mudscape between the Wabash and Ohio Rivers in southwestern Indiana. There’s a fleck of a town called Jefferson there and a hamlet called Solitude. Otherwise there is not much reason to visit. The Ohio is good for skinny-dipping despite the chemical-industrial waste; I had one nest on that shoreline. Try the same in the much smaller Wabash and you will emerge fully clothed in green slime. I had another nest there. The land between the rivers is not always flooded, but some perverse reverse percolation occurs underground that keeps it from drying even in intense heat. Artifacts from a prehistoric settlement periodically ooze to the surface. Sometimes I’d see archaeologists. My third nest was inland over a shallow lake dotted with cypress.
The heat and humidity in
summer are overwhelming; you move through aqueous air and elongated time. It’s a relief to climb fifty feet up where you might, on occasion, catch a breeze.
Initially my field notes were very straightforward. Here is an example:
The likeliest impediment to their reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst.
I began to embellish my notes—partly because nothing was irrelevant, but mostly because I was bored.
I e-mailed my field notes once a week to my liaison in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office, a man I knew slightly named Travis who liked to fish on the job and brag about it too, the standard work ethic in Jefferson. Whenever I had visited the office I found him ogling lures on a dial-up connection, and I had no idea he worked with someone else. I was certain he wouldn’t read my notes; they were just an indication that I wasn’t idle, too. On reflection, it couldn’t have been his idea to check nests twice a day, but that did not occur to me at the time.
One evening I received an e-mail from someone named Dana Bowen at the same office.
Dear Nathan,
I’m enjoying your colorful commentary immensely, but it may not sit well in government documentation. Could you please adapt accordingly?
Kind regards,
Dana Bowen
I replied immediately.
Dear Dana,
Thank you for your message. I did not realize that my field notes were to be published.
Kind regards,
Nathan Lochmueller
And almost immediately I received a reply.
Not exactly. They become public record subject to public scrutiny. Some of your material must be redacted and it is easier for you to do this than for me. There are a lot of crazy taxpayers out there. Regards, Dana
I wrote straight back.
Good Lord, I’ll be impeached! I can change the wording, but the birds’ diet & demeanor may not sit well in any kind of documentation. Best, Nathan
She replied:
No apology necessary. I know about the birds. I used to have a job like yours. Dana
I wrote:
Until you discovered modern air-conditioning? If not an apology, my thanks for the warning. Nathan
And she replied:
Until I met the wrong kind of tick. Perhaps you would show me the nests? I don’t drive. Dana
Fearing some kind of audit, I picked her up outside the Fish and Wildlife office two mornings later. She was younger than I expected—thirty-three or thirty-four, the traditional age for a Jefferson girl to become a grandmother. She was very pretty, though severe and mandarin: black curls scraped back from a pale face with elegant black brows, a wide mouth, and a soft chin; she was dressed for bugs despite the heat in a long loose shirt and long trousers, with exemplary posture like a yogi’s or a soldier’s, arms folded across her chest.
I had neglected to mention the Gypsy Moth in our e-mail exchange. She seemed alarmed when I pulled up and began speaking to her.
“Nathan Lochmueller,” I said through the window.
“You drive a magic bus,” she said.
“Have to get around somehow,” I said. “It’s the Gypsy Moth, as you can see.”
“Did you paint it yourself?”
“A friend did it for me.”
“You must like your friend,” she said. “A lot.”
And you don’t make friends easily, I thought.
“Dana Bowen,” she said. “Would you mind putting my telescope and tripod in the back?” They lay on the sidewalk beside her but she didn’t gesture toward them, just stood with her arms folded, calling things by their full names. When I had done that she asked me to open the passenger door for her too, and she walked around in the same strange chess piece pose, and climbed in without using her hands. I had never heard of a condition that pinned your arms to your chest. I had covered the seat in towels and blankets, because it was coated in ancient unidentifiable gunk.
“I don’t wear a seat belt,” she said.
“That’s good, ’cause the Gypsy Moth hasn’t got one anymore.”
I shut her door and climbed in on my side, wondering where to begin.
“Of course I agree with you completely,” she said as I started the engine. It caught on the fourth attempt. “They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd. But thank you for taking me to see them.”
I glanced at her in profile. She was even lovelier, with a high forehead, a long pale neck, and lashes like arrows beneath her black brows. The fingers of her right hand clenched her left elbow, nothing about them obviously deficient.
I drove to Nest 3 on the Wabash first to give us time to get acquainted, and I tried making jokes to put her at ease.
“First time I heard the term apex predator I thought it was a car alarm or a video game,” I said.
“You are exactly like your field notes,” she said.
“There is some walking at the end of this drive. At all the nests, actually. It’s not really walking, it’s squelching. Will that be a problem?”
“I’m looking forward to it,” she said. “My problem is that I have very limited control of my arms and hands. I am like a marionette at the mercy of a sadistic two-year-old.”
“Why?”
“Nerve damage. Every six months my doctor tries something new. It’s like an election. Nothing changes. Maybe some symptoms get rearranged. Mercifully my feet, knees, and hips are afflicted with only intense intermittent pain. Walking is not a problem.”
Although I contracted Lyme disease later myself, it is treatable in its early stages. Hers, she said, had gone undetected for years. The kind and extent of nerve damage it can cause is not predictable or well understood.
“My case is like chronic epilepsy of the arm,” she said.
“Are you married? Do you live alone?”
“I have a lot of plastic dishes.”
At the nest I put her telescope on her tripod (“I can’t use binoculars,” she said), but before I had finished she spotted one of the blinds I had built at a vantage point.
“What is that?” she said.
I had lashed several sturdy sticks together with bungee cords between three thick branches of a tall cypress. It was makeshift, but safe. Perhaps makeshift is an understatement. It would have made a bald eagle blush. I explained.
She turned and leveled her black brows at me.
“You can invoice us for climbing equipment and protective gear,” she said.
“It’s safe,” I said.
“I insist.”
On the way back to the Gypsy Moth she slipped in the mud. For an awful moment she lay on her back in dire convulsions, unclasped arms shaking violently from the shoulder, as though transplanted from an old crone, a parody of ecstasy she ended quickly by clutching her elbows again with difficulty. I helped her up by the shoulders. She blushed and looked down.
“Don’t you dare get that mud on my truck,” I said, and at last, she laughed.
At Nest 2 we examined small piles of rocks the archaeologists had made. I held them up where Dana could see them while she stood in her strange figurine stance, but we didn’t know what we were looking for. The settlement is thought to be four thousand years old, built by people so lost in time that we don’t know their name—they’re simply called the Caborn-Welborn culture after their discoverers.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” said Dana.
“No,” I said.
“I think a Tarzan like yourself should have a little Jane,” she said.
“You just made a joke,” I said.
“I sometimes do.”
/>
“I’m more of a St. Francis,” I said. “Anyway, the girl who painted my truck. She’s very independent.”
“And you resent that.”
“Resent is the wrong word,” I said.
“You should resent it,” she said. “I was too independent once, and now I’m too needy.”
“Is that your assessment or someone else’s?”
“Whatever their faults,” she said, “at least eagles mate for life.”
As we continued, I learned that she had been engaged until her fiancé developed an interest in healthier specimens; that she had studied woodpeckers on the Mississippi (which she called “a vast national sow prone to rolling over her young”), even claimed to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, often called Elvis in feathers less for his gaudy plumage than for the regular sightings of him since he was declared extinct in 1944. Her job was “doing all the things Travis is supposed to,” making calls through a speakerphone and answering e-mails with voice recognition software. She was lucky to have the job, would never declare herself disabled provided she could still find a way to work, had been in Jefferson only three months, and had begun chipping away at a paralegal qualification in the evenings.
At Nest 3, both of us drenched in perspiration and covered in mud, I held a water bottle for her to drink from, and she announced that she would like to continue; see whatever else there was to see. I led her downriver to a lock and dam the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers laid across the Ohio fifty years before, and we stood on top watching blue catfish four and five feet long batter the concrete below with their armored heads. It’s unsettling to watch, and nobody knows why they do it.
“Simple,” said Dana. “The dams age. The fish breed. Check back in two hundred years.”
We found a molting copperhead on a flat rock, and keeping well away, admired the hourglass pattern on his shining back while he glared at us, half-dressed.
Downstream from that lay the wreck of a steamer that ran aground in 1934. Later the U.S. Navy attempted to salvage it, resulting in a U.S. Navy salvage boat wrecked alongside. Both wrecks teem with frogs, thousands of frogs gorging on the millions of bugs clouding the air. In chorus they sounded like the rumbling of a great riverine intestine. I felt like a demented tour guide; everything I showed her was vaguely revolting. She loved it, she said, and thought me foolish and fortunate in equal measure, and said she hoped I wouldn’t fall out of a tree.
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