They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?, page 11
I had counted on Retch’s assistance in the show, but early on a rather distinguished-looking lunatic in a pinstripe suit tried to rush onto the set. The guy probably would have ruined the whole show if Retch hadn’t been able to get a half-nelson on him and wrestle him to the floor. There are some people who will do just about anything for a chance to clown around in front of a TV camera.
My most spectacular dish was the Flaming Bacon. It also provided me with the opportunity to demonstrate the proper procedure for extinguishing a small forest fire. I explained to the viewing audience that a shovel should always be carried for the purpose of smothering forest fires since one can’t always expect to find the jacket of a pinstripe suit out in the woods.
Just as I was finishing up “The Camp Chef,” my closing comments were practically drowned out by the sounds of sirens. As I told Retch while we were slipping out a back exit, you’d think television executives would wise up. Viewers are tired of all the violence on crime shows.
Several days later I happened to stumble across Fred as he was crawling under the front of my car with a hacksaw.
“Any idea when ‘The Camp Chef’ might be aired?” I asked him.
“Hoo hooo heeee haa hooo,” he replied.
I could tell ol’ Fred had been under a lot of strain lately. That television business can really take it out of a person.
“Listen,” I told him, “what you need is a good three-day fishing trip with me. Some of my camp cooking will straighten you out in nothing flat.”
Oh, I tell you, the look of gratitude Fred gave me would have wrenched your heart!
The Heartbreak of Astigmatism
When I was about fourteen the world turned fuzzy. I wasn’t particularly concerned with the phenomenon at first, attributing it to the lateness of spring that year or possibly the Communists. It was a history teacher, Mrs. Axelrod, who finally diagnosed my affliction. She asked me to step to the front of the room and, with a long wooden pointer, indicate on the wall map the region occupied by Gaul. Not knowing Gaul from my left elbow, I decided to take a random stab at it anyway, since I figured the whole world, including the map, had become so blurred that no one would know the difference anyway. Also, my walk to the front of the classroom would give me an opportunity to display the attitude of debonair nonchalance I had been attempting to perfect. Arriving at the front of the room, I directed the pointer to a likely little fuzzy blotch. This drew a good laugh from the other kids, which I immediately capitalized on by doing a Gene Kelly soft-shoe routine on the way back to my desk.
“All right, Fred Astaire!” the teacher snarled. “I want to see you dance yourself right back into this classroom immediately after school tonight!”
I was miffed. How could anyone mistake my Gene Kelly for a Fred Astaire? On the other hand, ever since the world had turned fuzzy, I myself was having trouble distinguishing the two of them even when they were forty feet high on the showhouse screen. Perhaps, I told myself, her faux pas was excusable.
I was hoping that by the time school was out, Mrs. Axelrod’s rage would have withered a bit, but I found it still in full bloom. There was a rumor going around that the history teacher could kill flies in mid-air with her sarcasm, but I doubted there was any truth to it. Sure, a few flies may have been stunned but certainly not killed.
“Ah!” Mrs. Axelrod exclaimed as I entered the classroom. “The master of comic impersonations arrives!”
“Uh, I’m really sorry about that little dance,” I apologized. “It was Gene Kelly, by the way.”
“Oh, I should have known!” she replied. “I do hope you will forgive me!”
I flicked a stunned fly off’ my shoulder. “No problem,” I said. “Anybody can make a mistake.”
“Has anyone ever told you how obtuse you are?” she asked.
“No,” I said, blushing, “but thank you very much. You’re not so bad yourself, no matter what the kids say.”
“Indeed!” she said, attempting to conceal her pleasure under a veil of wrath. “Well, now that the exchange of compliments is over, we are still left with the problem of Gaul.”
“Actually,” I confessed, “I didn’t have the foggiest notion of where Gaul was, so I just took a flying guess. What country did I get?”
“Oh, you didn’t get a country,” she said with what I thought I detected as a softening of tone. “You are apparently unaware that I also teach hygiene in this classroom. What you got was the bladder on an anatomical diagram of the human body!”
“Gee,” I said, stunned. “It’s a good thing you didn’t ask me to point out Rome. We all would have been embarrassed.”
“No doubt,” she replied. “Are you by any chance having some trouble seeing clearly?”
“Not at all,” I replied, gallantly scooping her folded coat up off her desk and helping her on with it. “Why do you ask?”
“Just a woman’s intuition,” she replied. “And little observations, such as the way you just now helped me on with the American flag.”
“I did?” I said. “Well, to tell the truth, you look pretty good in stripes. Besides, it’s so blurred that nobody would even guess it’s a flag. Surely, you’ve noticed how fuzzy the world has become lately. I think it’s the Communists doing it.”
“My dear young man,” she said. “I have some news for you. The world has not become fuzzy. Only you have become fuzzy. You need glasses!”
I was stunned. People had said a lot of bad things to me in my day, but this was the worst. I hadn’t expected even Mrs. Axelrod to stoop this low, mean as she was. Didn’t she know that I was famous for my vision, that my friends all called me Hawkeye. My gosh! Glasses! Spectacles! What was she saying? My mind reeled; my body beaded with sweat. If what Mrs. Axelrod said was true, that the world was not blurred, then my whole career was finished. No professional big-game guide could wear glasses! Jeez, could you imagine what one of my clients would think if I told him, “All right, we know the rhino’s wounded and is going to charge as soon as we go in after him. But don’t worry, I’m backing you up with my double-barreled elephant rifle. Before we start in, though, let me wipe the dust off my spectacles because I want to be able to see him real good.”
And my squint! All the years I’d been practicing my squint, and now it was down the drain. A squint just doesn’t look right behind a pair of glasses.
I tried to swear Mrs. Axelrod to secrecy, but she would have none of it. You probably have never met a person as mean as Mrs. Axelrod, so you may find it hard to believe the next thing she did. She called my parents and told them I needed glasses.
My folks wasted no time in hauling me down to an eye doctor to get me outfitted with spectacles. I did not go easily. My rage was such that it even worried the doctor. At one point he said to my mother, “Would you check his ropes again please? I think he’s starting to work them loose.”
Well, as I always said, you can buy a kid spectacles, but you can’t make him wear them. I wore them only when my folks were around, and the rest of the time I carried them stuffed in my pocket where they stood a good chance of being broken. Then one day I was out in our pasture target practicing with my .22 rifle. After I had put ten successive shots right in the bull’s-eye, the thought occurred to me that maybe if I wore my glasses I could hit a smaller bull’s-eye, one less than three feet across. First, I made sure that no one was in the vicinity, a precaution I accomplished by shouting out “Hello! Anybody around!” Then I slipped the glasses out of my pocket and put them on.
The world snapped into focus. I could see mountains, trees, barns! I could see flowers and blades of grass and even ants crawling on the blades of grass. I hadn’t seen ants in a year. I thought they had become extinct. It was … fantastic!
So after that whenever I went out into the great outdoors I wore my glasses, but only when alone. The real problem came when I was with the other guys. When we would go fishing, for example, I always had to pretend that I was clowning around.
“Hey, look at ol’ Pat, he keeps casting his fly across the crick onto the sandbar! Ho, ho! That ol’ Pat, he’ll do anything for a laugh!” So then I’d have to go along with the gag and put on my hyena grin and wear my hat upside down. It was a real pain.
One day when my friend Peewee Thompson and I were sitting in my bedroom, I decided to sound him out on what he thought about people who wore glasses.
“Say, Peewee,” I said. “You know that kid in the school band, Marvin Phelps, the one with the glasses, what do you think about the way he looks? He’s a pretty good-looking kid, don’t you think?”
Peewee gave me a nervous, sidelong glance. “I got to go home,” he said.
“No, you idiot, what I mean is, do you think wearing glasses makes him look, uh, kinda funny?”
“Heck no. He’s always worn glasses. He would look funny if he didn’t wear them. He wouldn’t even look like Four-Eyes Phelps if he didn’t wear glasses. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” I said. “Just forget it.”
“I’ll tell you though,” Peewee went on. “I sure wouldn’t want ol’ Four-Eyes Phelps backin’ me up if I was goin’ into the bush after a wounded rhino.”
“I SAID FORGET IT!”
My greatest dread was that Rancid Crabtree would find out about my spectacles. If there was one thing Rancid respected in another outdoorsman, it was keen vision. His own eyesight was superb. He was always the first to spot deer on a hunting trip. Pointing to a line of dots moving through the snow on the side of a mountain, he would say simply, “Deer.” Then, while the rest of the hunters were straining to make out the dots, Rancid would say, “Mulies.” The other hunters would stare at each other in disbelief. “Looks like they’s all does, though. No, by gosh, one of ’em’s a little spike buck!”
Rancid was the last person in the world I wanted to find out that I wore glasses. He wouldn’t have any use for me after that.
One day we were in Rancid’s old pickup truck on our way out to do some fishing, and, in his usual fashion, the old woodsman was pointing out distant sights to me. “Look up thar on thet side hill! Huncklebarries! Two or three of the little buggers are startin’ to tarn color. Won’t be long till they’s ripe!”
I stared morosely off in the general direction he was pointing and tried to penetrate the green blur. “Yup. They sure do look like they’re ripening up.”
“Say, look at the size of them deer tracks crossin’ the road. The deer thet made them was a biggun. Come fall, you ’n’ me, we’s gonna come up hyar an’ look fer him, Ah kin tell you thet!”
“Yup,” I said.
“What’s wrong with you?” Rancid said. “You sound about as happy as a badger in a bees’ nest.”
“Nothin’,” I said.
It was shortly after we got started fishing that Rancid began acting peculiar. Right at first he suggested that I fish upstream and he fish downstream.
“That’s no fun,” I told him. “We always fish together.”
“Yeh,” he said sheepishly. “Oh, all right, c’mon!”
The only good thing about my impaired vision was that I could see perfectly up to a range of two feet. I therefore had no difficulty tying on the tiniest flies in my book, which I instantly deduced were the only flies likely to take trout in that particular time and place.
In the next twenty minutes or so I caught half a dozen fish. Rancid didn’t get a single bite. “How come you don’t change over to one of these little white flies?” I kept asking him. “That’s what they’re taking.”
“Shoot,” Rancid said. “Ah got this big ol’ Grasshopper already tied on. Ah’ll fish it.”
Now this was totally unlike Rancid. I knew he didn’t care all that much for work, but changing a fly didn’t require any great effort. Usually he would have tried a dozen different flies by the time we got our feet wet. Then a whooper cutthroat (one that causes you to whoop, as distinguished from a mere whopper) smashed into my white fly. It took me a couple of minutes to land the fish.
“Wow, it’s a beaut!” I whooped, thrashing my way across the creek to show Rancid the fish. When I was close enough, within two feet of him, I could see that his little eyes were bugged out in their comical fashion, as was their habit whenever he got excited.
“Gol-dang, thet’s a purty fish!” he said, almost trembling. Instantly, he became stern. “You got any more of them itty-bitty white flies? All I brung with me was these big ones.”
“Sure,” I said, and handed him a couple.
Then Rancid did a remarkable thing. He reached into his pants pocket and hauled out a pair of spectacles, the kind you buy off the counter in a variety store. He put the glasses on, snipped the big fly off his tippet, and tied on the tiny one. Then he leveled a fierce glare at me.
“Wipe thet smirk off yer face,” he snarled. “If you so much as open yer yap, I’ll …”
I stepped back and thrust my hand into my pants pocket, took out my own glasses, and put them on. The stubby whiskers on Rancid’s face snapped into focus. They quivered for a moment, then rippled out into the great crescent-shaped waves of his grin.
Neither one of us in all the years after that moment ever said a word about glasses. There was no need.
If a man like Rancid could wear glasses, I figured there couldn’t be any shame in my wearing them. So the very next time I went out fishing with the guys, I showed up with my glasses on. The guys were all lifelong friends of mine, fellows I’d suffered with on a hundred camping trips. We had shared each other’s triumphs and defeats, happiness and sorrows, the sweet and the bitter. When they saw me for the first time wearing my glasses, I learned once and for all the true meaning of friendship. It is that you don’t thrash your friends within an inch of their lives if they laugh themselves silly when you show up wearing spectacles.
“What the heck,” Peewee said later, after he had stopped pounding his thighs and had wiped away the tears of his mirth. “We ain’t likely to run into a wounded rhino in this part of the country anyway.”
Sneed
Back in the shadows of time when I was a youngster, a man by the name of Darcy Sneed lived in our county. I don’t think I ever heard anyone say a kind word for Sneed, and I’m sure nobody ever heard me say one. He was always showing up without notice when and where he wasn’t wanted and causing folks grief. Several times he scared the daylights out of me, catching me alone out in the woods, but except for one time I always managed to escape. As far as I know, Sneed never smiled nor cracked a joke. He was cold and hard and tight-lipped and generally unlikable. Besides that, he was the game warden.
Now, the truth is I seldom broke the game laws, not because I had any love for rules and regulations but because it seemed unsporting. Once, though, my friend Retch and I did sneak down to the creek early one morning three days before the opening of fishing season. We hid in some deep brush along the bank and at the first hint of dawn cast our salmon eggs out toward a logjam, where we knew some cutthroat had to be waiting. But I was so filled with dread and guilt that I couldn’t enjoy fishing, and I knew that if I caught anything it would just compound the existing dread and guilt. Retch, on the other hand, didn’t seem burdened by any doubts and was intently working his line so the eggs would drift under the logs. Somehow, I had to impress upon him that what we were doing was wrong. I searched for the right words, the kind of words that would convey to him the deep moral and ethical implications of our action. Then I thought of them.
“Sneed’s comin’!” I hissed at him.
Retch instantly grasped the deep moral and ethical implications and reeled in his line so fast only its being wet saved it from instant combustion. We stashed our rods under a log and beat it out of there, hurrying down the creek trail. Retch was in front. As he rounded a bend, he turned his head slightly and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Good thing you seen him comin’.”
“Who?” I said, already having forgotten the lie.
“Sneed,” he said.
And there was Sneed, striding purposefully toward us down the trail.
“Howdy, Mr. Sneed,” we said politely.
Sneed didn’t say anything for a moment. He just let his glare rove over our quaking carcasses. The seconds passed, ticked off by the sound of our dripping sweat.
“What you boys doin’ here?” he demanded finally.
We answered simultaneously: “Lookin’ for a cow.” “Pullin’ up thistles.”
Sneed didn’t smile at these contradictory explanations. He was not a fun-loving man.
“I’m going to ask you boys one more time, what you doin’ here?”
By now I had forgotten who had told him what, so I nudged Retch to go ahead and answer, he being the more experienced and polished liar. But Sneed’s glare had penetrated Retch’s brain and tangled his speech mechanism.
“We was just pullin’ up cows,” he said.
Sneed replied with another long silence. Then he said, “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You two were down here on the crick at five in the morning pullin’ up cows, is that correct?”
Right then I figured Sneed was going to throw us in jail, and for what? Not being able to think of a decent lie when we had to.
Sneed reached out and thumped a bony finger on Retch’s chest. “I know and you know that you boys were down here fishin’, gettin’ a jump on the season. I’d arrest you both, but I didn’t catch you at it. Next time I will.”
Sneed knew how to put fear into a person. If he didn’t manage to keep people from breaking the game laws, he at least kept them from enjoying it. He never forgot me after that morning on the creek, having filed me away in his memory bank as a person who took the game laws lightly and who bore watching.
Sneed was not one of those game wardens who come semi-attached to the seat of a pickup truck; he knew how to walk and was infamous for suddenly materializing in remote and roadless places. There was a friend of our family who was widely regarded as the best trapper in our part of the state. During the winter he would snowshoe far back into the high country to work his trap line. “It’s real nice to be up there alone in the winter,” he told me once. “There’s just you and the silence and the snow and Sneed.”
