Read Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing Online
Authors: Patrick F. McManus
Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing
Patrick F. McManus
Sam Potts
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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Also by Patrick F. McManus
Never Cry “Arp!” How I Got This Way The Good Samaritan Strikes Again Whatchagot Stew
(with Patricia M. Gass)
Real Ponies Don't Go Oink The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs The Grasshopper Trap Never Sniff a Gift Fish They Shoot Canoes, Don't They? Kid Camping from Aaaaiii! to Zip A Fine and Pleasant Misery
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Patrick F. McManus
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2004
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APERBACKS
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Designed by Sam Potts
Manufactured in the United States of America
11Â Â 13Â Â 15Â Â 17Â Â 19Â Â 20Â Â 18Â Â 16Â Â 14Â Â 12
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
McManus, Patrick F.
Into the twilight, endlessly grousing / Patrick F. McManus.
p.  cm.
1. American wit and humor. I. Title.
PN6162.M34896Â Â 1997
813â².54âdc21Â Â 97-23502
CIP
ISBN 0-684-84440-0
0-684-84799-X (Pbk)
eISBN 13: 978-1-439-12733-9
ISBN 978-0-684-84799-3
Permissions appear on page 221.
Sam Spud and the Case of the Maltese Fly
Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing
INTO THE TWILIGHT, ENDLESSLY GROUSING
Sometimes I'd take the boy fishing. He was not my boy but somebody else's, and that was good, his appetite and the cost of food being what they were. Mostly, I used him to hold down the bow of my canoe, instead of the bags of lead shot I usually employed for that purpose. He was smarter than the lead shot but not so much you would notice.
“I wonder what causes the tides,” he said once.
“The moon,” I told him.
“The moon!” he cried, doubling over with laughter. “You expect me to believe that? You must think I'm stupid!”
I treated myself to a thoughtful pause.
“The earth is round,” I said.
“So?” he said. “Everybody knows that.”
“Just checking,” I said.
The boy was about sixteen that year, the year I used him for lead shot. Whenever he ran out of money, which was often,
he would come over to my cabin on the river and work for me. Mostly, I would have him dig holes in the ground. When you own a cabin on a river, you always have need for lots of holes in the ground. I enjoyed listening to him complain about the pay, because then I knew I wasn't paying him too much. I prefer to err on the side of not enough, because it is wrong to spoil youngsters by paying them too much.
Whenever he complained about the pay, I would tell him about my first job. I was fourteen and worked for a farmer all one summer digging holes in the ground. The farmer was so cruel and sadistic that he had probably once been a commandant in charge of a slave labor camp. But I was the only one who suspected his previous employment. Everyone else thought he was a fair and decent and good-hearted man. But they didn't dig holes for him.
“Vork! Vork!” the farmer would scream at me.
About once a week I would get mad and resign my position. Then the farmer would come and tell my mother what a fine worker I was and that he wanted me back to dig more holes. He told her that my work habits had improved greatly under his supervision, and now my pace was such that he could often detect movement with the naked eye. So Mom would make me go back to digging holes.
“Vork! Vork!” the farmer would scream.
By the end of summer, I hadn't earned quite enough money to buy my first deer rifle. The farmer gave me a bonus to make up the difference! I was astounded. Furthermore, I became the only person he would let hunt deer on his property, because I had been such a good and loyal worker and also because there were no deer there.
“So,” I said to the boy, “do you see the moral to this story?”
“No,” he said. “It's a boring story and I don't want to hear it ever again.”
“Vork! Vork!” I shouted at him.
Sometimes, when the fishing was good, I would go out in the canoe almost every morning. I would get up very early and rush down to the river still buttoning my shirt, but the boy would be there already, waiting. I suspected he slept in the canoe, just so I couldn't slip away without him. We would paddle off to fish the channels that flowed between the islands where the river merged with the lake. As we paddled along we would exchange our theories about the purpose of human life. My theory was that the purpose of life was to perfect ourselves through learning and discipline in order to fulfill our cosmic responsibilities as part of the self-consciousness of the universe. He thought the purpose of human life was for him to buy a car.
At the beginning of summer, the boy knew nothing about fishing, but by July he knew everything and had begun to advise me.
“That fly you're tying on is too big,” he'd say. “Better go to a sixteen. And switch to a black gnat.”
“How do you know all this?” I said.
“It's easy,” he said. “I think like a fish.”
“I can't argue with that,” I said.
He enjoyed teasing me, because now he almost always caught more fish than I did. I would chuckle good-naturedly, swack the water just so with the paddle, and soak him to the skin.
The boy had a talent for getting on my nerves. I could remember how peaceful it had once been, when I was a solitary paddler, slipping quietly along the channels between the islands, doing everything just right, becoming one with nature and the mosquitoes and deerflies. But now the boy was always there, yakking, advising me on fishing technique, philosophizing about cars, complaining about the lunch I'd brought along and the pay he was getting for digging holes.
And then one morning he wasn't waiting for me at the canoe. He didn't come the next morning either. Or the following week. It was a relief. I was glad to be rid of him. Having nothing else to do, I asked around about him the next time I was in town. Most folks had no idea who he was, but the lady who runs the grocery said she thought he lived out on such-and-such road. Still having nothing else to do, I drove out the road and found an ancient mobile home approaching terminal depreciation, under some scraggly pines. No one was home. A man stood watching me over a nearby fence.
“They's gone,” he said. “Just packed up and left one day. Headed for Oklahoma. I'm from Oklahoma myself.”
“Oklahoma,” I said. “Any fishing there?”
“Good fishin'.”
“I'm glad to hear it.”
I went out fishing the next morning but it wasn't the same. A boy works a whole lot better than bags of lead shot for holding down the bow of a canoe, no question about it.
About a week later, another boy showed up at my cabin, apparently having heard I was short a boy. He was a redheaded kid with glasses that kept slipping down his freckled nose.
“I hear you got some work here,” he said.
“I do,” I said.
“What's the pay?”
I told him. He managed to stifle any hint of elation.
“What's the work?”
“I got all these holes I need filled up.”
“I guess I can do that.” He watched me for a moment, pushing his glasses back up his freckled nose. “What you doin' there to your canoe?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “Just removing some bags of lead shot from the bow.”
After hours of prospecting highway ditches, Crazy Eddie Muldoon and I hit the mother lode of empties. We had been working the ditches along the highway, picking up singles here and there and the occasional double. At half a cent a beer bottle, though, we were still well short of the eighteen cents we'd need for two tickets to the Saturday matinee, to say nothing of five cents each for popcorn. Then Eddie came up with one of his fabulous ideas.
“I got an idea, Pat. Let's go check out Lovers Leap. It's a parking place up on top of Nob Hill.”
“Lovers Leap?” I said. “I wonder why they call it Lovers Leap.”
“Don't you know nothin', Pat? Lovers go up there to leap off.”
“You mean they kill themselves!”
“The leap ain't that high. I 'spect about all they'd do is break a leg.”
“Lovers must be pretty strange.”
“Yeah. Love drives 'em crazy. Good thing you and me are going to be mountain men. We won't have to put up with all that dumb love stuff.”
Fortunately, there were no lovers at Lovers Leap when we arrived, although neither Eddie nor I would have minded seeing one or two of them fly off into space. What we did find were dozens of beer bottles scattered all over the place. Eddie said maybe the lovers didn't leap from the knob at all. Maybe they just got drunk and fell off.
After filling our gunnysacks with empties and loading the sacks on Eddie's wagon, we still had enough time to exchange our loot for hard cash and make it to the Saturday matinee if we hurried. The two-mile hike to town was hot and dusty, and by the time we came to Pig Weed's Saloon, we were dying of thirst. The sounds of laughter and honky-tonk music drifted out, beckoning in the sinful.
“Sounds like the folks in Pig Weed's are having a good time,” Eddie said.
“My mom says all kinds of evil stuff goes on in there,” I said.
“You ever seen any evil, Pat?”
“Naw. You?”
“Nope. Boy, Ma would tan me good if she ever caught me in Pig Weed's Saloon.”
“Mine, too!”
Jake was tending the bar when we hauled our wagon through the saloon's swinging doors. “Hey, if it ain't Pat and Eddie!”
We parked our wagon and climbed up on bar stools.
“Hi, Jake,” Eddie said. “We brought you some more empties.”
“I can see that. Looks like you hit the jackpot this time. What'll it be, boys?”
“The usual, Jake,” I said.
“Let's see, that's two double shots of whiskey with beer chasers, as I recall.”
“You bet,” Eddie said.
Jake reached into a cooler, hauled out two icy bottles of Orange Crush, and set them on the bar in front of us. “It's on the house.”
“Thanks, Jake.”
Miz Weed came out of her office smoking a cigar. “Oh
bleep!
” she rasped. “Not you two twerps again! Pat and Eddie, how many times I got to tell you, sell your empties someplace else! Your mothers would skin both you and me alive, they ever catch you in here.”