The Feather Merchants

by Max Shulman

  “This is where you come in. With your experience, of course, it will be very simple. As the highlight of the dedication ceremony, you are going to blow up the old bridge to make way for the new one.”

  I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew Mama was forcing a salami sandwich down my throat.

  “No!” I bellowed. “No! The whole thing, no!”

  They all drew back aghast.

  “Dan,” said Papa, “what’s the matter with you? What are you saying?”

  “He’s hungry, that’s all. He’s out of his head from hunger,” Mama offered.

  “I’m not hungry. I’m in my right mind. I absolutely refuse to do the whole thing. All of it. Any of it.”

  “Darling,” said Estherlee not too sweetly, “you’ve been modest up to now, and that was admirable. But now that your secret is out, there is no more need for modesty. After all, I want everybody to be as proud of you as I am.”

  “No.”

  “See here, Miller,” said Phyfe sharply, “I and His Honor Mayor La Hoont have gone to considerable trouble to plan these appearances. You can’t just say no.”

  “I’m saying it.”

  “But it’s all going to be in the paper,” said John Smith. “The paper will be on the streets in another hour. I wrote a long story about it. In free verse.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be back on classified ads,” wailed John Smith.

  “Insubordination,” Colonel Swatch hollered, pounding the floor with his walking stick. “Rank insubordination.”

  I shook my head stubbornly as they all talked at once.

  “Wait a minute,” said O. Merriam Phyfe. “Let me put it to him in another way. You may feel that you don’t have to do any more than what you did in the line of duty. You may think that because you’re in uniform you have no obligation to us civilians. Well, let me tell you, I’d give anything if I could join up, if I weren’t tied down in this essential work for His Honor Mayor La Hoont.”

  “If I hadn’t broken my arches doing an entrechat in the ballet at junior college, I’d be in myself,” said John Smith.

  “I’ve been waiting for them to come to their senses in Washington and put me back on the active list,” thundered Colonel Swatch. “I’m tough. Many’s the winter I’ve lived on buffalo chips and white-faced cattle.”

  “Say,” said Papa,” maybe you think I wouldn’t like to be in?”

  “There you are,” said Phyfe triumphantly. “We’d all like to be in service. I’m essentially employed, Mr. Smith is physically unfit, Colonel Swatch is past the retirement age, and I’m sure your father has some good reason for not being in uniform.

  “But we hide our disappointment. We go on with our work. And our work, in its way, is as vital to the war effort as blowing up bridges. I help carry on government without which the state would crumble. Mr. Smith keeps the people informed. Colonel Swatch interprets the progress of the war. Your father does whatever it is he does.

  “This is a total war, young man, as His Honor Mayor La Hoont often says. Each of us is a soldier. It isn’t easy for us at home, wanting all the time to be over there but forced to stay here and contend with the inconveniences of war on the home front—no gas, no tires, no steaks, no butter. Rising prices and dwindling supplies. And all the time the heartbreak of not being able to be in uniform. As all soldiers do, we simply make the best of things.

  “So when I ask you to make these appearances, it isn’t just for the amusement of civilians. It’s for the morale of an army! A home-front army!”

  Papa, Colonel Swatch, and John Smith shook Phyfe’s hand silently.

  Estherlee laid wet eyes on my cheek. Her arms around me were very soft and very smooth. The neckline on her dress was low. “You will, won’t you, darling?” she whispered.

  I collapsed miserably in my pillows.

  “He will,” she told everybody.

  “All right,” said Mama briskly, “Everybody downstairs for dinner. Dan, you get dressed and come down right away. Look how pale he is. He’s starving.”

  Glumly I watched them file out. Estherlee fended off Colonel Swatch with one hand and threw me a kiss with the other. “Tonight,” she called. “Canoeing. Full moon. Oooo.”

  As the door closed behind them I heard hoots of laughter outside my window and I saw Sam Wye hanging on the trellis. “I thought sure they’d see me when your father started unfolding that map,” he said, leaping into the room.

  We discussed my plight as I chased him around the bed with a trench knife. “This should be a lesson to you, Roberto,” he said. “Remember what Ben Franklin said: The truth stands on two legs, a lie on one.’ Remarkable chap, Franklin. Had literally dozens of illegitimate children. ‘Old Lightning Rod’ they called him.

  “But this is no time to be moralizing. I’ve got to help you out of the mess you got yourself into.”

  I growled throatily.

  “No, don’t thank me,” said he. “My contribution will only be a small one. You’ve got to handle the women’s club, the radio address, the recruiting booth, and the baseball game by yourself. I’ll give you some assistance with blowing the bridge. Naturally I can’t be present at the bridge blowing itself, because I’m shipping out in two days. But I can teach you sufficient demolition before I leave.

  “Now, let’s see. Well have to practice at night. Tonight you’re going canoeing with Estherlee. Good night for it, too. Full moon. We’ll practice tomorrow night. All right?”

  “You bastard,” I snarled, and increased my speed.

  “With luck,” he continued, “you should be able to bluff this business out. In any case, you have no choice. If you spill the beans now, it’s Leavenworth. The Army, I’m told, gets pretty upset about soldiers posing as heroes.”

  I stopped. “Surely,” I cried, “you’re not suggesting that I go through with this thing?”

  “I can remember when you had a head on your shoulders,” he answered. “What else can you do? Look at it logically. Two courses are open to you: one, you can bluff the whole business out on the very real chance that they’ll never hear about it in Oklahoma, and two, you can make a full confession now and stand court-martial and make complete fools of your family.

  “And then there’s Estherlee. You’ve got her back now. Do you want to lose her again, lose her forever this time? Can you honestly face the prospect of no more Estherlee? Round, soft, supple Estherlee?”

  “You cut out talking like that. You know what it does to me.”

  “Smooth, fragrant, pneumatic Estherlee. The Earth Mother.”

  “But,” I wailed, “they’ll catch me anyhow, and it will go a lot harder.”

  “You’re the kind of guy who carries an umbrella on sunny days. Isn’t it worth taking a chance—and by no means a long chance—for Estherlee? So succulent, so resilient, so female.”

  I sat down on the bed. “Sam, don’t lie to me. Can you really teach me demolition in one night?”

  He slapped me on the back. “That’s the big boy, Roberto. I knew you’d come to your senses.”

  Then he looked at his watch and with a cry of “Buy bonds” leaped out the window and was gone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  One evening in late August 1823, according to a 75-page history of Minnesota compiled in 1937 by 30,000 men and women on a WPA writers’ project, a canoe stopped by the banks of the Mississippi where Minneapolis now stands. Three people got out—Otto de Fe, a trapper from Shreveport, Louisiana, his wife Euthanasia, and their fourteen-year-old boy, Emmett. They had left Shreveport several weeks before to visit in Covington, Kentucky, but had neglected to make a right turn at Cairo, Illinois, and had thus ended up in Minnesota. Otto, with masculine stubbornness, insisted all the way that he knew the river like a book and they could momently expect to run into a cutoff that would take them directly into the heart of Covington’s business section (the Casbah). After several days, however, he yielded to his wife’s whining and his son’s accusing stares and stoppe
d in Minnesota to ask directions of a group of Indians on the shore. The Indians promptly scalped Otto and Euthanasia. Emmett, who was somewhat hydrocephalic, they took back to the camp for laughs.

  In the following weeks Emmett won the affection of the tribe, and they allowed him to roam at will within the radius of the 120-foot rope by which he was tied to a tent post. Near the end of September the men of the tribe set out for the Dakotas to hunt bison. Emmett, pleading a sick headache, stayed behind with the women. One night when the women were all up in the trees for a better view of an early manifestation of Halley’s comet, Emmett seized his chance and escaped.

  He plunged into the thick forest west of the river and ran until he reached a lake several miles away. Here he knelt and drank thirstily. He slept there that night, thinking to move on in the morning, but when he awoke, the serenity of his surroundings, the lush grass, the cool trees, the near, sweet water, made him loath to leave. The long blue lake dotted with many green islands promised haven and security. “Lake of the Isles,” he said, “here I am and here I will stay.”

  He stayed there for many moons. The Indians came looking for him a few times, but he concealed himself well in evergreen thickets along the shore. At length they stopped coming. Emmett knew then that he was safe if he did not stray from Lake of the Isles, and he was well content to stay there.

  The winter passed and spring came, and Emmett observed the birds and beasts about him and, without precisely comprehending, was moved to a condition of mysteriously acute longing. His needs, which in that spring of his fifteenth year daily became more persistent, were presently fulfilled. A girl named Griselda, herself in her fifteenth year, came into his camp, a truly amazing coincidence.

  Griselda was Emmett’s blood cousin, although neither ever knew it. She was one of the relatives in Covington, Kentucky, whom he and his family were on the way to visit when they got lost. Griselda’s father, Minor Clendenning, had become worried when Emmett’s family had not arrived in Covington. He waited a week or two and then sent a dispatch rider to Shreveport to find out whether they had left. The dispatch rider found out from their neighbor, an early linotypist named Schnecken, that they had left weeks ago. He returned the intelligence to Clendenning.

  “Something must have happened,” said Clendenning. “I think I’ll mosey down the river and see what I can find out.”

  “Take me with, Pa,” entreated Griselda, who was a great one for gadding about.

  “No,” said Clendenning. “The last time I took you down the river you ran off with a peddler.”

  “Take me, Pa,” she pleaded. “I won’t do anything this time.”

  The hell she didn’t. When her father left her in the boat at Cairo, Illinois, while he went about to make inquiries, she immediately ran off with a fur trader named Harold Swebb. They went up the Mississippi to Minnesota, and life was satisfactory enough for Griselda. But in Minnesota he suddenly became all business. Instead of passionate overtures, he gave her otter pelts to clean. At night he spurned her, telling her to go away, she smelled gamy. She stood all she could and then left. That is how she came upon Emmett.

  Emmett and Griselda were very happy for a few months with their idyl on the banks of Lake of the Isles. But as summer drew to an end, things began to pall on fun-loving Griselda. One night as they sat on the shore, their feet dangling into the water (Emmett’s second greatest pleasure), she complained, “My God, ain’t we ever gonna leave this place? I ain’t seen another living soul in months.”

  But Emmett, who cared not at all for venturing out and getting caught by the Indians, answered, “Patience, my own. There’ll come a day when many canoes will pass on Lake of the Isles.”

  How prophetic he was. That night when Estherlee and I went canoeing you could have walked across Lake of the Isles on the tops of canoes. The dark shores that had given Emmett refuge provided a superb setting for the activities of young lovers. The lake was long, and except on Saturdays and the nights before holidays, there was plenty of room for all. We sat patiently until the canoe jam dispersed toward the shores, and then I paddled out to the far end of the lake.

  Estherlee trailed her hand in the water as we glided along. “See darling,” she said, “a full moon. Just as it said in the paper.”

  “You mustn’t place too much faith on things you see in the paper,” I said.

  She laughed lightly at what she assumed was a joke. She had changed her disturbing dress of that afternoon for a white linen sports dress, this one not cut so low but even more enticing in the perverse manner of women’s clothes. She wore no stockings, and her soft white toes stuck out through open-toed sandals. (Is there something wrong with me? Toes excite me.) She leaned back easily on the cushions in the prow, her white arms resting gleamingly on the gunwales. I reached the shore at the end of the lake, and after a brief tussle with my animal self I turned the boat around and headed back. This was no time to get further wrapped up in my tissue of lies.

  “Dan,” said she, surprised, “why are we going back?”

  “I’ve been waiting so long to get my hand on a paddle that I just want to row and row,” I answered.

  “I know, darling,” she said, “out there in the desert you must have been simply mad to get back on a lake again.”

  “Yes,” I said, not pleased.

  “Sweetheart, would you like to tell me about it? About the bridge and everything? It might help if you told somebody.”

  “No, Estherlee, I’d rather not.”

  “I understand, dear. You don’t have to talk about it unless you want to.”

  “Thank you,” I said simply.

  I paddled on past the sounds of face slappings and giggling along the shore. Estherlee smiled. “You can’t blame them on a beautiful night like this, can you? I can’t.”

  “This canoe sure is yare,” I said.

  “I love the way you handle a canoe. I love the way you do everything—the way you walk and talk and dance and move. In fact, I love you.”

  I almost lost the paddle.

  “I’ve never stopped loving you since that night when—that night. When I broke with you, it was just because I loved you. Can you understand that? It was you I loved, the real you, the fine man who left me last year to do whatever was necessary to save his country.” She lowered her eyes. “The man for whom I did everything I could.” She took a deep breath. “The man for whom I would do the same thing again.”

  The paddle did not fall into the water. It jumped halfway across the lake. “Oops,” I said foolishly. Luckily there was a spare. I took a good interlocking grip on this one.

  “Naturally, my sweet,” she continued, “I understand what you did when you told me you were in Oklahoma. It was a magnificent thing. Because you are so modest and because you didn’t want me to worry, you told me that you were safe and sound. You created another, a false, Daniel Miller for me. But don’t you see, precious, the false Daniel Miller was a man whom I could not love? He was a despicable creature—sitting there in a sheltered office while others were dying for his cause. I could never love a man like that.”

  “Office workers,” I piped, “are very essential in this war. You don’t know how much paper work is necessary—”

  “Dan,” she interrupted, “you are so kind and generous that you think the best of everybody.”

  “—how much detail and tabulation must be gone through before any fighting units—”

  “It’s so like you to have kind words for men who were sitting in perfect safety while you risked your life fighting their war.”

  “—can reach the front. Records, data, filing systems are what keep the Army from being a—”

  “I don’t see how they dare wear the same uniforms as men who fight.”

  “—disorganized mob. The whole machine would bog down, collapse, if it weren’t for the—”

  “I just seethe inside when I think of all the men holding down soft jobs while you dodge bullets.”

  “—desk soldiers. Let
me tell you about logistics. That’s the science of moving troops and—”

  “Naturally I understand that they must stay in this country until they are trained, but after that, let them fight their war.”

  “—supplies to the places where they are needed. It’s a fantastically big job.” I finished rapidly while she lit a cigarette. “The men who run the war must have records, statistics, papers in order to know where and how much to send. Records of the disposition of all troops and all supplies must be in front of the generals before they can make a move. Without the records, costly blunders could be committed, lives could be needlessly lost. The man who keeps the generals informed is doing an indispensable job. Records, as much as bullets, are weapons.”

  We were at the other end of the lake. “Dear,” she said, “have you paddled all you want now?”

  “Huh? Oh no. Not yet. I think I’ll go back to the other end again.”

  “Dan, you’re not angry with me for the way I’ve acted?”

  “Oh no. Not a bit.”

  “You’re sweet. I thought maybe you might be because you won’t stop paddling.”

  “No. It just feels so good to get a paddle in my hands again.”

  “I’d like to get you in my hands again,” she said. She stretched out her arms and smiled. Her toes curled.

  “Dear,” I said thickly, “would you mind putting something over your toes?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have worn open-toed shoes. I have such ugly old toes.” She took off her shoes, lifted her legs, and wiggled her toes. “Such ugly old toes. But you’ll have to take them, darling. They’re part of me, and I’m all yours.”

  The second paddle went into the drink.

  There was nothing I could do now as the tide washed the boat inexorably in to the shore. “Come sit next to me, sweet,” she said.

  “Is there room?”

  “There always has been, hasn’t there? Oh, I know I’ve gotten terribly fat.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I said truthfully as I moved into the cushions beside her.

  “What would you say?”

  “I’d say let’s have a cigarette,” I said brightly.