Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing (6 page)

“One of my favorites,” I said, “but I've decided to fast this evening. Occasional fasting seems to give me increased energy and alertness.”

“Good,” she said. “I didn't want to cook anyway. I think I'll sit down with a nice bowl of raw carrots and watch some exercise programs on TV.”

“Don't tempt me,” I said. “Maybe I'll just take a little five-mile walk.”

I put on my trench coat and Scottish wool shooting hat. I pulled the hat brim down low over my eyes.

“Very dashing,” she said. “Nobody would ever recognize you in that getup.”

That was the idea. I would have worn my fake mustache, but I already had a mustache. Two mustaches are a dead giveaway.

There were spies everywhere. Informants lurked even among friends and relatives—particularly among relatives. If they detected your slightest deviation from the norm, it was instantly reported. You had to be careful, very careful. Times had changed.

I walked down the street, listening for the sound of footsteps behind me. I turned and pretended to be studying some of the bodybuilding machines arranged in the window of Joe's Body Shop. I could remember when body shops took the dents and bulges out of cars. Now, they took them out of people. I checked my rear. Well, too late for that. Good reason to wear a trench coat. I then checked the street. Nobody in sight, except for a solitary jogger. He loped on by, his legs pink and pebbly. Either he was wearing a pigskin bodysuit or he had been out in the cold too long.

Just past Verleen's Health Spa, I paused for a moment at Edna's Health Foods and glanced back. The coast was clear. I picked up my pace and turned into an alley, stepping over a derelict sprawled asleep on the concrete, an empty bottle of cheap carrot juice clutched in his grimy hand. I shook my head in disgust. Something had truly gone wrong with our society.

At the end of the alley I knocked three times on the red door. A gruff voice said, “Password?”

“Emerging Caddis,” I said.

The door opened. A beefy man stood there. He grabbed me by the lapel of my trench coat and pulled me up close to him. I could feel his eyes moving over the features of my face. Not a good feeling, a little too moist for my taste, and the eyelashes tickled. One of the worst cases of myopia I had ever encountered. The halitosis wasn't that great either.

“Okay,” he said. “You can go on up.”

At the top of the stairs, I came to another door. It was guarded by a mug wearing a long black coat, but the coat didn't conceal the bulge under his right arm. From the size of the bulge, I guessed an automatic, probably a 12-gauge with full choke, no plugs. This guy meant business. He gave a little toss of his head, indicating for me to go in. I opened the door.

The room was crowded with people from all walks of life, stockbrokers, carpenters, beauticians, hotel maids still in uniform, matrons with diamonds cascading from beneath their chins and dripping from plump earlobes. The room fell silent. The looks turned on me bristled with suspicion and, perhaps, even fear.

“He's okay,” a woman said. “He's one of us.”

I recognized the sultry voice of Evening Pale Blue Dun. She approached from across the room, weaving her way among the crowded tables, the occupants of which were once again engaged in a din of conversation. Evening Pale Blue Dun wore a shimmering blue dress that looked as if it had been painted on, one coat, no primer.

“Glad you could make it,” she said, her voice reminding me of a smoldering campfire that would burst into flame from the slightest puff of air. Her eyes turned hard for a brief instant.

“Do you always blow in people's faces?” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “It's an old camping habit.”

“You bring the goods?”

“Yeah.”

“Let's have it.”

I handed her a sheet of paper.

She stared at it. “What's this? ‘Cleaners, haircut, return books to library …'”

“Sorry. Wrong paper.”

I dug another sheet from my pocket and handed it to her.

Her face contorted in wild ecstacy as she scanned the paper. “Yes! This is it! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

I almost expected the earth to move. It didn't. Then, suddenly, her lovely hazel eyes became icy slits of suspicion.

“Are you sure this is authentic?” she demanded, thrusting the paper under my nose.

“I'm sure. It's Zumbo's secret recipe. I took notes while he was preparing it in a Wyoming hunting camp.”

“Does he know you have it?”

“No. And he'd better not find out, either.”

She clutched the paper to her ample bosom. “Oh, this is so wonderful! Jim Zumbo's own secret recipe for chicken-fried elk steak!”

She took me by the arm and led me to the table. “This little offering buys you membership in the Chicken-Fried Club.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I figured it would.”

As I pulled out a chair and joined a couple of other diners, the lady bent over and whispered huskily in my ear. “But where can I find an elk?”

“That's your problem, Evening Pale Blue Dun,” I said, and it wasn't all that easy to say, either. Even if I'd known where to find an elk, I certainly wouldn't have told her.

The occupants at the table introduced themselves: Wooly Worm and Hare's Ear, their code names, I assumed.

“March Brown,” I said, shaking hands.

They went back to their plump, juicy, golden chicken-fried steaks. “The waiter will bring yours in a minute,” Hare's Ear said. “There's no limit, either. Eat all you want.”

“The hash browns look delicious,” I said. “They have that nice sparkling sheen of hot grease, so essential to true hash browns.”

“I see you're a true connoisseur of fat,” Wooly Worm said. “By the way, old man, sorry for the cold reception you got when you first came in. We thought for a moment you might be with the Fat Police. You can't be too careful these days.”

“I know,” I said. “They're everywhere.”

Just then a waiter came around with a huge serving tray stacked high with steaming chicken-fried steaks. I took only a couple, in order to leave room for a substantial load of mashed potatoes and gravy. The coffee was dark and rich, fairly sizzling with caffeine. I dribbled thick cream into it.

“I can't begin to tell you how delighted I was when Evening Pale Blue Dun invited me to join the Chicken-Fried Club,” I said.

“You were most fortunate,” Wooly Worm said. “We'd just had a sudden opening among the membership.” He and Hare's Ear bowed their heads.

“Yes, poor Black Gnat,” Wooly Worm said. “He was sitting right there in your chair, matter of fact. Suddenly just flopped over, his face in his mashed potatoes.”

“Good heavens,” I said. “Sounds like a cardi—”

My companions spewed food all over the table. Almost ruined my appetite.

“Never speak that word in this room!” Wooly Worm hissed. “You'd be ejected immediately! And rather forcefully, you can be quite sure!”

“Sorry,” I said, glancing about. “I only meant to say ‘cardigan,' the sweater, you know. Cardigans can be quite deadly.”

Wooly Worm and Hare's Ear regained their composure.

“Yes, quite right, old man,” Wooly Worm said. “Cardigans must be avoided.”

As I was leaving, Evening Pale Blue Dun came up and took me by the arm once again.

“That was a very nice gift,” she said. “I hoped you enjoyed yourself.”

“It was terrific,” I said. “By the way, since you're the one who runs this club, I was wondering if by any chance you're into fly-fishing?”

“Hardly,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Be back next week?”

“Sure. After all, this is the last place in the country where you can get chicken-fried steak.”

She turned those warm, inviting eyes on me. “Anything special I can do for you next time, big boy?”

I thought for a moment.

“Yeah, there is,” I said.

“What's that?”

“Biscuits and gravy.”

She smiled and winked.

I opened the door, paused for just a second, then looked back at that shimmering vision that was Evening Pale Blue Dun.

“
Sausage
gravy.”

The Old Man was sitting across from me at the kitchen table in his cabin, polluting the air to lethal levels with a large illegal cigar someone had smuggled in to him and that his doctor had ordered him to stop smoking anyway.

“I know Doc ordered you to give up those cigars,” I said. “Your smoking them is bad for my health.”

“That's because you're a pantywaist,” he said. “This is a fine cigar, and if you had any taste at all, you'd appreciate its lovely aroma. Hemingway always brought me a couple boxes from Cuba when he came up to hunt with me in Idaho. Now, there was a man! They don't make men like Hem anymore, yourself being a case in point.”

“I've heard all your Hemingway stories and don't believe a one of them,” I said. “But they've improved over the years.”

“Practice makes perfect,” he said. “I ever tell you the time I outshot Hem on a grouse hunt? He wouldn't speak to me for two days afterwards, he was so mad. So then I let him beat me in arm wrestling, and then he was okay. I loved grouse hunting best of all. Almost best of all. Say, I got an idea. Let's go grouse hunting.”

“You're too old and almost blind,” I said, kindly. “You can't see more than ten feet ahead of your nose. How are you going to shoot grouse?”

“You leave that to me,” he said. “Now don't just stand there with your mouth hangin' open. Get me down one of my shotguns. The French twelve-gauge side-by-side will do.”

“You gave that gun away years ago,” I said.

“Well, that was a durn fool thing for me to do. Who'd I give it to?”

“Me.”

“You! I would never give you a shotgun. You must have stole it.”

“Nope, you gave it to me. It's mine now, and I'm keeping it. Anyway, it's much too fine a shotgun for a dirty old man like yourself. It's a gentleman hunter's gun. It's surprising any decent gun dealer would sell a fine instrument like that to an unsavory character such as yourself.”

“Interesting you should say that,” he said. “I tried to be a gentleman hunter once, but it didn't take. Belonged to one of them elegant shooting clubs. Had to dress up like we was going to an afternoon tea rather than on a hunt. They had all these pheasants penned up like a bunch of chickens, and whenever we got ready for a hunt, one of the hired hands let a hundred or so of them loose and we'd go out and shoot them. The pheasants was tame, of course, so we'd practically have to kick them up in the air in order to get them to fly. So one day I says to the president
of the club, I says, ‘Howard, this is a big nuisance, hunting pheasants this way. Why don't we just shoot them in the pens and be done with it? Save both the pheasants and us a lot of bother.' Well, that made Howard and some of the other gentlemen mad, and they booted me out of the club. So I quit the club right then and there. Figured it would teach them a good lesson.”

“Served them right,” I said.

“I thought so. Now, stop standin' around jawing at me.

If we're gonna go grouse hunting, we got to get to it. Fetch me the little Brit twenty-gauge.”

I went to find the 20-gauge. It was as fine a gun as I'd ever seen. The Old Man had been rich once, his guns now the only evidence of that former wealth. I figured he'd become rich by accident or inheritance, because as far as I knew he'd never worked. He was not the sort of man who would waste much effort on becoming rich. It had been a long time since he'd outlived his wealth, along with all his friends and enemies. “Mostly I did it to spite my enemies,” he'd say, “but it got my friends, too.”

He was very old now, ninety at least, maybe even a hundred; it was hard to tell, because he lied about everything, particularly his age. He was one of those peculiar old men who somehow managed to spend their entire lives enjoying themselves. He'd done just about everything there is to do, and what he hadn't done, he simply lied and claimed to have done that, too. He was a very irritating old man, and I couldn't understand why I put up with him. I handed him the gun.

“Good,” the Old Man said. “I was worried that you might have stole this one, too.”

“Just an oversight,” I said. “I'll come back and get it some night when you're asleep.”

“Ha!” he said. “That will take some doing. I ain't slept
in twenty years. Now, here's my idea. We'll go out to that good grouse woods behind Jake Gregory's farm, and you can flush some birds toward me, and I'll snap shoot them as they pass through my field of vision.”

“Can't,” I said. “Jake Gregory's woods is now a golf course.”

“A golf course! They turned a good grouse woods into a golf course? I hate golfs! Well, we can go out there anyway, and you can flush some golfs toward me. How about that?”

“I don't think so.”

“I know. We can go out to the mountain where Rance Crabtree used to live and—”

“A shopping mall.”

“A shopping mall! Good gosh a-mighty, what's a shopping mall doing way out in the country?”

“It's not way out in the country anymore. It's in town.”

“They moved the mountain into town?”

“No. They moved the town out to the mountain. They've got condos all over the mountain.”

“Condos? They good to eat?”

“Kind of tough and not much flavor. Taste a lot like golfs.”

“Hunh. I don't like shootin' stuff ain't fit to eat. Unless, of course, it gets to be a nuisance. Let that be a lesson to you. Ain't there any good grouse woods about no more?”

“I know a couple spots. But I like to keep them a secret. I show them to you, you'll be sneaking out there and shooting all my grouse.”