We neared the confluence of the two rivers, where green and blue churn and roil to create the reeking brown sludge that eventually becomes the Mississippi—or where, Dana said, the sultan Ohio impatiently awaits his Wabash concubine. On a small sandy strip of desolate shoreline Dana said she would like to swim. Would I turn around while she undressed? I did.
“I don’t wear things with buttons or laces,” she explained, but several minutes passed before she called out okay.
She was twenty feet out, shoulder deep in a wavering brocade of sunlight and water, laughing, blighted hands invisible.
“You could join me,” she said, and turned to face the river. At first I hesitated, and then I didn’t; she was too demure and too damaged for it to be anything other than a friendly invitation, and there was no one around but the bright blue Ohio and us.
Bowfishing, at least as practiced in Southern Indiana, combines hunting and angling while eliminating the need for the skills of either. You sit in a rowboat firing arrows at large targets three and four feet away in three feet of water. It’s considered a good date in Jefferson: a lady can work on her suntan while her gentleman kills things, and the only expense is beer. Nest 2, the cypress nest and archaeological site, was subject to infrequent human contact in the form of bowfishing expeditions.
The eagles at Nest 2 observed these hunters closely.
seems skeptical of human techniques,
I wrote.
The dominant species in that lake are paddlefish, a large silver animal unsurprisingly shaped like a paddle, and Asian carp, an invasive species. Each year the Jefferson Anglers Association bestows an award on the member who has caught the most illegal immigrants. You wouldn’t especially want to eat either one; you shoot them for sport.
I was in my own nest reading Dr. Zhivago a few days later when I became aware of a man in the water, carrying in one hand what looked like a piece of machinery he had wrenched from an old clock. He was knee-deep, alone, clad only in jean shorts, with strange coils of cord through his belt loops. He was facing away from me, moving deliberately but without obvious direction. He had immense linebacker shoulders and short military hair.
Through binoculars I made out that what he carried was a small handheld crossbow. While I watched he raised it, squeezed the trigger, and a few feet away a large carp bellied up, already dead.
nabbed it.
As the bird flew away a line secured to the crossbow bolt paid out; abruptly he found himself tethered to the man’s shorts at a distance of twenty feet. Both were reflected in the water from my vantage point, not mirrored images but separate conflicts, and while the eagle flapped to no effect, the possible outcomes multiplied. Perhaps the bird in the air would get a pair of shorts with his dinner. Perhaps the reflected man would grasp the line and haul, hand over hand, and receive a free bird with his fish. Perhaps the reflected bird would come to the aid of his companion, or perhaps the two men would begin to fight. Somewhere in the depths of a lake with no depths infinity contemplated itself, unwilling to decide. Perhaps the man would fly. Perhaps the bird would speak.
A belt loop gave up in despair.
I watched in horror as the man began reloading his crossbow and waded off in pursuit.
I scrambled down and ran around the rim of the lake toward the nest tree. The man was already aiming and I was fifty feet away.
“You could go to prison for that!” I yelled. He didn’t move.
perched on a low branch of the nest tree, tearing off strips of fish, most of which dropped in the water, but he looked unconcerned.
Contrary to popular conception, bald eagles have no diving scream. When you hear it in movies, it’s a dubbed recording of the noble red-tailed hawk. , who must have been watching the whole time, plunged with full silence, speed, and fury; the man buckled under the impact but threw his free arm into the mud underwater and kept his feet. She sank her talons into both shoulders, and began to beat his head with her wings while craning her neck to beak his eyes from behind—a winged demon driving a mute hairless beast into the water. He threw his crossbow forearm up to his forehead to spare his eyes and began to stumble ashore. She detached, ascended, wheeled, and dove again at speed, raking his back with her talons and thudding into the mud—where she stayed, trembling.
“Are you okay?” I said.
He grinned. “That was awesome,” he said. Perfectly circular holes like bullet wounds perforated his shoulders, and savage furrows ran down his back, blood streaming from all of them, but he was delighted.
“You could go to prison,” I said again.
“Fucker stole my fish.”
“It’s a bald eagle. It’s allowed to steal your fish.”
“Is that a bald eagle?”
“Does it look like a bald eagle?”
“I know what it looks like, that’s how come I didn’t pull. But we don’t get them around here.”
“Don’t you read the papers? Watch the news?”
He shrugged. “How come it’s just sitting there?”
“You’d sit there too if you hit the ground at twenty miles an hour.”
in his tree had stopped eating, but hadn’t moved.
“Is that all they can do? Twenty?”
“I didn’t clock her on the way down, okay? I think she was planning to brake by ripping immense shreds of flesh from your back.”
“Cool,” he said.
“We need to back away,” I said. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look terrible.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I done broke my ankle a few years back and didn’t even know it till it was all healed up and the doctor X-rayed me for something else.”
We backed up but did not leave the area entirely in case didn’t recover.
“I took a ricochet off concrete from a .22 in my leg once too; only thing hurt about that is I was holding the damn rifle at the time.”
Uh-huh.
“My basic rule of pain is, if it’s not a head injury, you’re okay.”
“She was after your eyes.”
“Or an eye injury. I’m Duane.”
He stretched out a hand the size of a dictionary, and true to form, crushed mine.
“Nathan,” I said.
Another twenty minutes passed before recovered. In that time Duane never stopped talking. He told me, among other things, that Asian carp was okay if drenched in Tabasco, though paddlefish was best as bait, and that he had made his crossbow himself with a soldering iron, used car parts, and the rim of an old oil drum. He’d seen people out there with compound bows drawing eighty pounds like they thought there was deer down there. One time he made a recurve and strung it with braided dogbane just like the Indians done, trouble was it made a noise. He had hundreds of weapons, mostly homemade, if I’d like to see them sometime.
I said weapons weren’t really my thing.
I didn’t introduce them. It would never have occurred to me; besides, people in Jefferson don’t need to be introduced formally. Moreover, Dana seemed rather aloof whenever I saw her after our expedition together. I wondered if she was the sort of person who made confessions to friends she couldn’t later forgive them for hearing. Only when I saw her with Duane did I realize that she might have felt spurned. Area conservationists held a party in September when five of the fledglings had left the area, banded by a team from Chicago wearing helmets and Kevlar (two of the fledglings had been struck by cars while feeding). Dana showed up with one hand in her jeans pocket and the other enveloped by Duane’s.
I didn’t immediately get a chance to talk to them—there were conservationists, concerned citizens, token politicians milling around with hot dogs and watermelon on a grassy slope above the Ohio. But I observed. Dana wore high-heeled sandals with straps around the calves she couldn’t have handled alone, jeans she couldn’t have zipped, and a blouse with buttons that had been abandoned at middle altitude. She even wore lipstick. She did the talking while Duane chafed in a collared blue shirt she must have made him tuc
k in. I overheard her discussing conservation with a D.C. congress-woman, and Dana made superior sound bites. I heard her talking to an eagle expert from Washington State, and Dana knew more than he did. I was not the only one watching her, everyone was, and I couldn’t catch her eye. Duane caught mine, though, and led her in my direction at the earliest opportunity.
“Thank God,” he said. “All these stiffs. Is this what you do too?”
“I didn’t know that you two were acquainted,” I said. I’d never reported the incident in case it caused Duane some trouble. “It’s not really what I do. What do you do, Duane?”
“I sorta been laid off,” said Duane.
“He means he was fired,” said Dana. “You don’t have to lie, Duane. I’m not your mother.”
“I’m starting a course to learn hanging drywall,” said Duane, and explained at length the abundant opportunities locally for a freelance drywaller to enrich himself. I never found out how they met. Duane asked if I liked bourbon, said his cousin Euble in Tennessee hand-delivered the special sauce every couple of months, 95 percent sugar so it could pass for dessert, and he had some in his truck. Dana said she could use the fortification—“small talk is so exhausting,” she said—so we stood behind his truck, a sort of older, more organically decorated Gypsy Moth, and he tipped bourbon into her throat, handed the bottle to me, and took a modest sip for himself when I had finished.
“You should have invited your friend,” said Dana.
“My friend?”
“The girl who painted your truck.”
“She wouldn’t come to a thing like this,” I said. Dana arched her eloquent eyebrows, but didn’t comment.
I wondered what Dana would make of Lola, and vice versa; what they might find to talk about if Lola were there. By comparison, Lola seemed rather feckless. She belonged to that other, air-conditioned world; Dana understood the squalid and menacing nature of things, and Lola had never once worried about my safety. Dana understood the irretrievable moment, the snap of events; Lola’s independence was a vain, inglorious thing. If Duane could master lipstick, anything could happen between them—my own spotty intermittent affair with Lola struck me that afternoon as trivial, something that dropped out of my sleeve or back pocket, probably not worth picking up. I didn’t intend to fall out of a tree, of course, but that was beside the point.
Back among the heathen, we were quickly separated, and the mayor of Jefferson told me for a half hour what a wonderful town he ran, real business friendly. I wondered who he thought he was talking to, but I didn’t interrupt, just watched Duane holding Dana’s hand, with a pang of guilt and a twinge of envy.
VII
Squander Indiana
Shane once hitchhiked across Indiana for a weekend visit. He had welts on his hips from his backpack and blistered feet from his boots. The trek involved more hiking than hitching, he said. Drivers stopped but they proved to be drunk or deranged. One mustachioed driver in a Toyota Corolla coolly placed his free hand on Shane’s thigh for twenty minutes while opining on the merits of various handguns. When he pulled in for gas, Shane fled. An older man in a pickup truck had been jolly and full of good stories, but he was also three-quarters into a bottle of Dark Eyes. They got lost on a gravel road, to Shane’s relief. He offered to drive and the man got angry, so Shane struck off on foot through a cornfield in heavy November rain. Twenty minutes later a clarinettist from Ohio took pity on him and talked about his wife’s leukemia for thirty miles, until grief overwhelmed him and he couldn’t drive either. Shane offered to drive or at least keep him company but the clarinettist just asked to be alone.
“And the moral of the story,” said Shane, “is that I hope you have some beer.”
“Maybe you should have used your other thumb,” I said. I took every opportunity to remind him of that absurd turtle. By then all you could see on Shane’s thumb was a broad white ring of scar tissue.
“Funny,” he said flatly.
I did have some beer—though I hadn’t known he was coming—but we didn’t stay up long. He was bone-weary and hadn’t arrived until almost eleven on a Friday night. We agreed I’d lend him the fare for a Greyhound home on Sunday. He fell across the couch and drifted off while I was still talking. The rain had followed him and battered my windows as if angry that he had got away.
In the morning we decided to smoke banana peels. The weather remained foul and the bars weren’t open yet. Shane said he was just curious to see if it really worked. In high school we smoked tea leaves once for the same reason. On another occasion he made a sextant from a compact disc, some Legos, and a compact makeup mirror just to prove it could be done. (It was adequate to show that you were somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.) I’m pretty sure he had hitchhiked just to see if that worked, too. I couldn’t match his enthusiasm, but I enjoyed laughing at him. He had brought The Anarchist Cookbook with him, damp around the edges despite the protection of his backpack. Among the instructions for credit card fraud and nail bombs it contained a recipe. It explained that bananadine, harvested from the skins, is a mild, short-lived psychedelic. We set off for the grocery store in my truck.
We caught up as I drove. Shane was pursuing a master’s degree in library science. He hated it. He wanted to work with books, but was compelled instead to study “information architecture” and all manner of new technology.
“One of the professors called the phone book a database with limited search functionality the other day. With a straight face. That’s when I decided to take a break.”
I had my own database woes. The results of fieldwork I did in spring and summer had to be compiled in fall and winter. At the time I was studying variations in migration times. The Eastern phoebe has kept the same schedule for one hundred years—clearly a form of climate change denial. The yellow warbler, on the other hand, had begun to freak out, showing up early by a matter of weeks. Other migrants fell somewhere on a spectrum between them. I was trying to figure it all out in a rented one-bedroom apartment in Richmond, where I didn’t know anybody. Or almost nobody. I also explained to Shane that I had been seeing a woman named Emma who got fed up with me for talking constantly about Lola. I took her exasperated advice and rang Lola up; she came for a weekend visit the next day. When I told Emma she threw her high-heeled shoe at me outside a café.
Fifteen pounds of bananas was all the grocery store had in stock and more than I could fit in my freezer (the Anarchist Cookbook recipe does not call for the fruit itself). The cashier peered at us quizzically.
“I got a gorilla,” said Shane, and she didn’t pursue the subject.
On the way home Shane tried to start a game. State licence plates then all read WANDER INDIANA across the bottom in bold black lettering.
“Squander Indiana,” said Shane.
“Okay,” I said. “Ponder Indiana.” It was weak but the best I could come up with.
Shane went quiet for a while. “Launder Indiana?” he said, and the game was over before it ever got off the ground.
The stringy pieces inside the banana peel are what you’re after. They’re thin and sparsely distributed, which is why you need so many bananas. We sat in the kitchen peeling them and began talking about another game we used to play.
In high school we had made up book titles that people we didn’t like might write. How to Look Down Your Nose at People Taller Than You, for example, by Shane’s sniffy though beautiful neighbor Carol Arbuckle. Shane suggested that we compare our predictive titles with real results.
Somehow we were unable to laugh. The author of Same Size Dick & Brain had recently played Russian roulette alone, nobody knew why. He had removed five bullets from his revolver and left them standing in a neat row on his coffee table. His body was discovered two days later by his girlfriend, and we cringed to recollect that she wrote I Floss My Ass Twice a Day. That casual, youthful malice of ours was embarrassing in hindsight. Meanwhile, the author of 80 Greatest Bloodlines: My Family Tree was selling real estate in Boonville. That co
uld not be a full-time job. The girl who wrote How to Suck a Golf Ball Through a Garden Hose was in rehab for the third time, and her twin daughters were wards of the state because nobody knew their father’s whereabouts. The handsome baritone who got all the leads in school plays and musicals worked in a video rental store. We couldn’t remember what he wrote.
We had given each other titles, too. Shane wrote Am I Wishy-Washy? Or Just Equivocal? while apparently I penned Droll Sneers of Self-Defense.
“I’m updating yours,” said Shane. “You’ll fill a bookshelf seven feet long with twenty-two volumes all called Lola.”
Once you have scraped out your peels with a sharp knife, you boil the scrapings in a large pot until it obtains a solid paste consistency. We stood over the pot, stirring and exchanging further bulletins on mutual friends. These tidings were not as grim, but more touching, because we liked these people.
Our friend Matt had finished his PhD in biology and found a job—after all, he wrote Mister Spock Got Nothin’ on Me—but already his academic career was in jeopardy, because he had become involved with an undergraduate. There was no question of wrongdoing on his part, we thought, but in those PC panic years it seemed he might have to seek tenure elsewhere. Apparently—Shane heard from his dad, who was still on the academic grapevine—Matt had proposed to the girl shortly after receiving a letter from his dean. It carried a whiff of Matt attempting to do some desperate and unnecessary version of the honorable thing.
I told Shane that Sam, who wrote I Will Tie My Own Shoes Before I Reach Thirty, had been indicted for tax fraud.
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