Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing (7 page)

“You bet. Now stop your yapping at me and let's go.”

“Oh all right,” I said. “While you're walking out to the car I'm going to have only another cup of coffee or two and maybe read the newspaper. So you'd better get started.”

“I've been started for the past five minutes. Shows how observant you are!”

I drove the Old Man over to my house and managed to kill a little time there while my wife. Bun, babied him and fed him sponge cake with huckleberry sauce and whipped cream. She doesn't permit me to have whipped cream, a good indication of how much she prefers the Old Man over me.

I got my own gun and a vest full of shells, and considered whether to take the dog's shock collar. The collar works wonders for instilling obedience, but I wasn't sure how it would affect his pacemaker.

I finally extracted the Old Man from the fawning attention of Bun and inserted him back into the car.

“That's a fine woman,” he said, licking remnants of whipped cream from his mustache. “She married?”

“You know she is,” I said. “To me.”

“You! What a waste!”

I drove out to one of my secret grouse woods and put the Old Man on a stand well out of range of my car. He sat down on a stump with the gun across his lap and a dead cigar clamped between his teeth.

“This is a good grouse woods,” he said. “It's a little blurry but it smells right. You're too ornery to find me a nice clear grouse woods, but at least you found one that smells right. It sounds okay, too.”

“Good,” I said. “I'm going to circle around through the woods and see if I can flush some grouse toward you. Don't shoot anybody.”

“I'm glad you mentioned that. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known. If a golf comes by, I might try for it, though. How much lead on a golf?”

“A couple of feet if it's driving a cart flat out. If it's walking or running, you can pretty much hold right on. But there's a big fine if you shoot one.”

I strolled off through the woods, enjoying it, absorbing it, feeling the press of birch leaves under my boots, listening
to the rustle of small wild lives dart unseen for cover, smelling all the pungent smells of a grouse woods in late fall. I shot my first grouse in this same woods when I was about twelve, an amazing shot that would have been even more amazing if the grouse had been flying, instead of sitting on a limb. I was hunting all alone, the hand-me-down 12-gauge shotgun big as a howitzer, and both barrels had gone off simultaneously and knocked me flat on my back, skinned up my trigger finger, and bloodied my nose. I thought the gun had exploded, and was glad still to be alive, but it had shot true and killed the grouse stone dead. My mother was enormously pleased with the grouse, marveling that her son had brought home wild game, and she cooked it in a gravy to pour over rice, and that one grouse could have fed twenty people, with some left over for the dog. I forgot to mention to anyone that the grouse had been sitting on a limb, but a kid can't be expected to remember everything.

I walked all the way through the woods and came out near a road on the other side, and by then I had three grouse, enough for my mother to have fed an army. All three shots were amazing, all wing shots, too, with the grouse
burrrring
off through the trees, but none so amazing as the shot that took that first grouse fifty years ago. Did I say
fifty?
Surely I meant twenty. Yes, it couldn't possibly have been more than twenty years ago.

“How'd you do?” the Old Man asked me. “I heard a dozen shots. Even you must have got something with a dozen shots.”

“Three grouse,” I said. “How about you?”

“I did fine,” he said. “None for none. It was a good hunt. This is a great grouse woods. By the way, what does that sign say over there? I been thinking about walking over so I could read it, but then I figured I might not make it back before dark.”

“That sign. Oh, it just says, ‘Private Property. No Hunting.'”

“Is that all?” the Old Man said. “I thought it might be something important.”

On the way back to town, the Old Man mentioned that he'd got hungry from all his exertion. “Let's stop and get a bite at Gert's Gas 'N' Grub.”

“You want to
eat
at Gert's Gas 'N' Grub?” I said. “Why, you must be half starved, and crazy besides!”

Gert herself came out to visit with us, and all the waitresses gathered around and made a big fuss over the Old Man, and he ate it all up, along with a chicken-fried steak and hash browns with gravy poured over them. He joked with the waitress and tried to pinch Gert on the behind, but she was too quick for him, as was almost everyone. Then a couple of the local boys joined in the festivities, and after a while one of them asked what we'd been up to.

“Grouse hunting,” the Old Man said.

“Get any?” Red Barnes asked.

“I only got three,” the Old Man said. “The boy here, he didn't get none. Did a lot of shooting, though, so he had some fun. It was a good hunt.”

“Well, I guess your eyes are still plenty sharp then,” Gert said.

“Yep,” the Old Man said. “Mighty sharp for a man my age—thirty-nine and some. Well, we best be going. Pay the bill, boy, and leave the girls a big tip.”

We didn't get back to the Old Man's cabin until after dark, and he was pretty well tuckered out, although still smiling over all the attention heaped on him by the girls at Gert's. “I guess I still got it,” he said.

“Yeah, right,” I said. “It's just that you've got so old the women know you're harmless. First you get harmless, then you get lovable. That's the way it works with women.”

“You're just jealous,” he said.

I helped him to his cabin and was about to close the door behind him when I suddenly remembered. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You left your gun in the car. I'll go get it.”

“Naw,” he said. “Keep it. Save us both the trouble of you stealing it from me later. That was a fine grouse woods. Mighty fine. I'd thank you for taking me there, but it'd just give you a big head.”

I drove on home, happy in a way about the gift of the gun, but also not so happy. When you get right down to it, a gun is only a gun. I was glad it had been a good hunt, though, and I was even more glad that I had lied about the sign next to the grouse woods. What it actually said was, “Future Site of the New Grouse Haven Golf Course and Condos!”

The great fish came to me in a dream.

I was ten years old and fishing was practically my whole life, all else mostly filler. At the moment, I was trapped, perhaps terminally, in fourth grade. The only thing that could save my sanity was Opening Day of Trout Season, and it lay far off in the future, somewhere beyond eternity. And then came the dream. It went like this:

It is spring, Opening Day of Trout Season, and I'm down on the creek in the eerie light just before dawn. I see the fishing hole as clearly as if I'm actually there, it's all so real. The weather has been cold, must have been cold, because the melt-off in the mountains hasn't come yet. Otherwise, the creek would be running high on Opening Day of Trout Season—up near the top of the banks, the water
the color of a chocolate shake, and about as thick. But in the dream, the creek flows low and clear.

I am familiar with this particular hole, have fished it often in real time. The creek divides around a little willow-clad island at this spot, a narrow stream going down one side of the island and the main stream down the other. The main stream ripples across a gravel bed, then deepens into the hole, a dark placid pool beneath an overhanging stump at the end of the island.

A log crosses the small stream, a convenience supplied by the dream to keep me from getting my feet wet in the icy water as I cross over to the island. The dense willows on the island prevent me from approaching closer to the hole, just as it does in ordinary life, but a tiny protruding gravel beach provides me a place to stand for a straight shot at the hole, a drift of about fifty feet. I prefer fishing a much shorter line, and although I don't think so at the time, it seems to me now that the dream, which had been rather accommodating so far, would have provided me with a little closer access.

I remove the sinkers from my leader so as to get the necessary drift without hanging up, and then send the worm on its mission. This is no ordinary worm, but one chosen for its strength, courage, and intelligence, the Sir Lancelot of Worms. I feed the line bit by bit from my level-wind reel, which no longer level-winds, because in an earlier and frightening part of the dream, I have taken the reel apart and cleaned it. Not likely! But this, of course, is only a dream, and one does foolish things in dreams, like cleaning a reel the week before Opening Day of Trout Season.

Through my dream's omniscient vision, I see the great fish lurking in dark depths beneath the stump, surrounded by bare, hook-hungry roots, the roots apparently supplied by the dream for the purpose of suspense. Peeking over the Cabinet Mountains, the sun suddenly rolls a shower of diamonds
flashing across the creek, and at that very moment the great fish glides out from among the roots and sucks in the worm. The rod twitches ever so slightly. I heave back, arms straight and quivering above my head. Beads of water fly sparkling from the line as it snaps taut in the air, and I feel for the first time in my life the surging power of a truly big fish, a fish that will not surrender to the indignity of being flipped ignominiously back over my head and plopped on the bank, my standard method of landing fish.

The straining leader cuts a slow arc in the surface of the pool, the fish not giving an inch, taking its time, contemplating its next move. The submerged roots are dangerously close. I haul back hard on the line, but I can't hold the fish away from those gnarled and grasping tentacles an evil tree had sent down into the earth a century ago for the sole purpose of depriving me of the great fish.

And then, as if the beckoning roots aren't bad enough, the worst possible thing happens. Mrs. Smithers, our fourth-grade teacher, rudely awakens me with some stupid question about the capital of North Carolina! Just as if that were something I might be expected to know! What could she have been thinking of? As Mrs. Smithers taps angrily on a map with her pointer, the great fish swims into oblivion, about halfway between Greensboro and Winston-Salem.

Later, I tried to pick up the dream where it left off, to see how it turned out, but I never could.

Around the end of May each year, cutthroat would come up the creek to spawn, and that would be my one chance to catch really big fish. The water, typically, would be swift and murky and high up on the banks, and for about a week I could catch cutthroat up to maybe eighteen inches, and sometimes did. But then the water would recede, the cutthroat with it, and the resident brookies and I would be left to contend with one another over the summer.

That was the problem with the dream fish. Because of its size, I was almost certain it had to be a spawning cutthroat. But that particular hole couldn't be fished on Opening Day, when the cutthroat were running, because the water was always too high for me to reach the island, the willows too thick to permit access from the far bank. But it had been only a dream. A dream can do anything that suits its fancy.

I made the mistake of telling Retch Sweeney about my dream fish.

“So?” he said. “What's your point?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But don't you think it's interesting?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess you had to be there.”

“Don't put me in your dreams, I'd die of boredom. You want dreams, I'll tell you dreams. Make your hair stand on end!”

“But don't you see, Retch? Maybe the dream was trying to tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“It could be trying to tell me to fish that hole on Opening Day.”

“It could be trying to drown you, too. Ain't no way you can get near that hole on opening day.”

I had a little better luck telling my dream to the old woodsman Rancid Crabtree.

“Now, thet is interestin',” he said, biting off a chaw of tobacco. “Ah'm purty good at interpretin' dreams. Maw momma taught me how to do it. You see, a dream never comes at you straight on. Nothin' in a dream is what it seems to be but always somethin' else. And once you figger out what the somethin' else is, then you gots to go along with it.”

“Really, Ranee? Can you tell what my dream means?”

“Jist hold yer hosses, boy, it's startin to come to me.
Now, the way thet fish pole of yourn was choppin' up and down, Ah suspect it was really an ax. Yep, thet's it, an ax. Now, thet big stump, it's got to mean wood of some kind—firewood! Gots to be firewood. And the big strong handsome fish, thet gots to be me.”

“But what does it mean?”

“It means you should go out thar in the yard and chop me up a big pile of firewood. Ain't no doubt about it.”

I preferred to interpret the dream for myself. It was less work. I knew what it meant, anyway. It meant that I was supposed to fish that hole on Opening Day, no matter what.

The rest of the school year crawled by with ever-diminishing momentum. I began to fear that it would stop entirely and I would be trapped forever in fourth grade, a fear not without basis. But with a sudden burst of energy in the final weeks of school, I learned the capitals of all forty-eight states, conquered long division, learned to multiply and divide fractions, and memorized the Gettysburg Address. Contrary to all my expectations, school finally ended for the year, and I was promoted to fifth grade with what Mrs. Smithers described as a “photo finish,” whatever that meant. And now a whole endless summer of fishing stretched before me. It was, after all, a perfect world.

Shortly after the passing of eternity, Opening Day of Trout Season Eve finally arrived. I went to bed at eight, my plan requiring me to be on the creek no later than five. I set the alarm clock for four-thirty. But the clock was a treacherous and evil thing. It could be depended upon to awaken me for school without fail, but it had no regard for fishing. It couldn't care less if I went fishing or not. I lay awake worrying about the treachery of the clock.