Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing (3 page)

“Y-yeah. Uh, I don't want you to get too scared, Pat. We b-b-better head on home.”

I started to push back from the ledge but my feet bumped into a rock. I moved my feet to one side to get around it. But the rock moved, too. This seemed a rather bad omen. I turned and looked up. Towering over us was—Rancid Crabtree!

What happened next was all kind of a blur. I do recall being snatched up by the back of my shirt, and I had this image of Eddie's legs running like crazy but unable to get any traction because they were way up in the air. And then something was pulled over my head and I was flipped upside down. The next thing I knew, I was being bounced
along on Crabtree's shoulder like a bag of grain. At one point I was dropped on the ground. I heard a paper sack being opened and then the rustle of waxed paper followed by chewing sounds. Crabtree was eating our lunch! Then I was hoisted back up and carted off again. Finally, I was dropped on a hard surface of some kind. All this while I'd tried to keep my breathing to a minimum so as not to call attention to myself, but now I stopped breathing altogether and listened for sounds of Crabtree. Silence. The odor was fading. The murderous old mountain man had probably left me in one of his secret places, intending to come back later and finish me off. And then I heard a muffled cry from Eddie.

“Help!”

A door opened.

“Help!”

“For heaven's sakes!” Mrs. Muldoon said. “What are you boys doing in those gunnysacks! How in the world? Why, the sacks are tied shut! And here's a note! I can barely make it out. Let's see: ‘Keep … these … younguns out of my … hair … or else! Yours truly … Rancid Crabtree. P.S. Thanks for … the lunch!' My goodness, what terrible spelling.”

“Forget the spelling, Ma,” Eddie said. “Get us out of these sacks.”

Mrs. Muldoon seemed to be thinking about what to do next. “Oh, I will, Eddie, I will. But first I think I'll make myself a nice cup of tea, put my feet up, and treat myself to a little peace and quiet.” The door closed.

“Geez, I don't know what gets into Ma,” Eddie said. “Well, I'll tell you one thing, Pat. Next time old Crabtree won't find us so easy to catch.”

“Next time! What do you mean, next time, Eddie? He catches us again, he'll kill us for sure!”

“Naw, this is great. See, if he was going to kill us, he'd have killed us this time. Instead, he just hauled us back home. He ain't as fierce as everybody thinks.”

“Yeah, well, next time you go without me.”

“C'mon, Pat, don't you want to learn to be a mountain man? You want to spend the rest of your life in second grade?”

One thing about Eddie, he knew how to push all the right buttons.

As punishment for “tormenting” Rancid Crabtree, both Crazy Eddie and I were placed under house arrest for a whole week. Talk about your miscarriage of justice. You'd think we'd stuck Crabtree in a gunnysack and kidnapped
him!

Under the terms of our parole the following week, Eddie and I were forbidden to associate with any dangerous and unsavory characters—namely each other—for an unspecified period of time. So our only means of communication was Morse code, blinked with flashlights at night across the fields between our homes. One night Eddie blinked out this message to me:
C-T-H-L-T-M-E-S-N-I-B
. I blinked back a terse reply:
B-I-P-F-O-G
. As Eddie often pointed out, one of these days we'd actually have to learn Morse code. That way the message wouldn't always have to be the same: “Meet me at the Big Tree.”

I slipped out my bedroom window and ran to the Big Tree, a solitary cottonwood in the middle of our hay field. Eddie was already there.

“I got our next raid on old Crabtree all worked out,” he said.

“What raid? You know we're not supposed to bother Crabtree anymore.”

“Us bother him? He's the one tied us up in gunnysacks and carted us home like a couple weaner pigs. It was just
like he kidnapped us, and our folks didn't even call the sheriff on him or nothin'. Shucks, I even heard Pa say he wished he'd come up with that gunnysack idea. Nope, we got to take revenge on Crabtree ourselves.”

“Revenge? Eddie, don't you understand? That old mountain man will kill us just for showing up, let alone us trying to take revenge on him.”

“Well, not revenge really. What we'll do is set a trap for him. See, I got it all drawn out here.” He turned his flashlight on a sheet of tablet paper. “This here is a wild-animal pit trap, just like the one we caught Pa in.”

“Eddie, besides your pa, all we ever caught in that trap was a little skunk.”

“Well, they was both wild, wasn't they? Pa in particular. Now, with this other trap, see, we bend a tree over and tie a snare on the end of it. When Crabtree steps in the snare, he gets jerked way up in the air. I seen it done in a movie and it worked great.”

“Eddie, we've never caught anything in a snare, either. Well, sure, your pa, but he's easy—he isn't a mountain man. Mountain men know all about snares and are watching out for them. Besides, what would we do with Crabtree after we caught him?”

“You're so dumb sometimes, Pat. The whole idea is, we don't release him until he promises to teach us how to be mountain men.”

“I don't know, it sounds awfully dangerous to me, Eddie.”

“Yeah, don't it! I can't wait!”

It took us several days to get our traps set for the mountain man. The tricky part was coming up with the bait for luring Crabtree into our traps. But at last we were ready.

Crouched in the woods at the edge of Crabtree's clearing, we waited for him to emerge from his cabin.

“I always thought mountain men got up at the crack of dawn,” Eddie said. “It's already almost noon. Oh, look, he's coming out.”

Crabtree strolled from his cabin, stretching and yawning. Suddenly, he stopped and glanced about, as if his keen mountain man senses detected intruders nearby. Then he reached down and picked up the note Eddie had left on his chopping block. The note said: “We've come for our revenge, Mr. Crabtree. If you know what's good for you, you'll surrender. We're waiting for you on the trail. Eddie and Pat.”

Eddie nudged me in the ribs. “I bet he'll get a big kick out of our note. Any second now he'll burst out laughing.”

The mountain man wadded up the note, threw it on the ground, jerked his ax from the chopping block, and came striding right toward us.

“Then again, maybe not.”

Forsaking dignity for haste, we retreated to our observation post up the hill on the far side of the creek. It was pretty clear Eddie had been wrong about Crabtree. He was just as dangerous and crazy as we'd been told. We watched as he approached our snare. Suddenly he stopped and peered at the ground ahead of him.

“A peanut butter and jelly sandwich!” he roared, glaring this way and that into the woods. “You miserable little tadpoles thank a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is any way to bait a snare fer me? It's a gol-dang insult, thet's what it is! And Ah s'pose you thank thet puny tree you bent over is gonna snatch me up in the air? Wahl, Ah'll show you somethin'! Ah'm gonna jump right in the middle of your snare and squish thet sandwich flat!”

He put his feet together and hopped into the middle of the snare.

“Gollll-dannnnnggg!
”

“It worked!” Eddie cried.

“Wow, neato!” I said. “That was a really great idea. Eddie, hiding the pit trap under the snare!”

We raced down to the pit and peeked over the edge. Crabtree sat in the dirt at the bottom. He glared up at us.

“We got you now, Mr. Crabtree,” Eddie told him.

“Looks thet way,” Crabtree growled. “You done fooled me. Ah surrenders.”

“Good,” Eddie said. “I hope you didn't get hurt.”

“Nope. Jist skeered me a bit. Fer a second thar when Ah was droppin', it flashed through maw mind you might've put sharpened stakes in the bottom of the pit.”

“Oh, we wouldn't do that,” I said.

“Naw,” Eddie added. “We didn't want to kill you. That way you wouldn't be able to teach us how to be mountain men.”

“Mighty kind of you. Now, what's this about me teachin' you to be mountain men? What's them?”

“Well, like you are. We want to be just like you.”

“You
do?
Wahl, thet's the fust time Ah ever heard thet from anybody!”

“See,” Eddie explained, “we want you to teach us how to hunt and trap and fish and how to live off the land like you do.”

“Ah guess thet won't be too hard, larnin' to live off the land. Fust thang you gots to do is get yourselves the right tool.”

“Great! What's that?”

“A can opener! Ah can teach you somethin' about pit traps, too.”

“Really?”

“Yep. You gots to dig them deeper.” Crabtree stood up. The top of the pit trap came only to his waist.

“Oh, that,” Eddie said, a bit miffed at the criticism.

“Well, we didn't want you to break a leg or nothin'.”

“Downright thoughtful of you.”

“We got tired of digging, too,” I said.

“Thet's what Ah figured,” Crabtree said, climbing out of our trap. “So you pups wants to be jist like me. Mebby you two ain't so bad after all. Ah likes to see thet kind of ambition in a couple younguns. But it ain't gonna be easy. We can start right now. Fust thang you do is go dig me some worms, so Ah can catch me some fish fer breakfast. Then Ah got to go lay down and rest. Ain't used to all this excitement so early in the mornin'.”

Rancid kept his word, too. Over the years that followed, he taught us everything he knew. But it wasn't enough. Much to my regret, we never did get to become mountain men.

For more than thirty years, I carried on a love affair with—how shall I put it?—an object of my affection. But my wife. Bun, intolerant of such matters, finally issued an ultimatum. “Get rid of that sop or else!” she said, without bothering to mince a single word. “Sop,” S.O.P., was her abbreviation for “stinky old pipe.”

There were a couple of dozen sops in my life, all loved passionately, but Bun always referred to the many as if they were one. That pipe! That stinky old pipe! In regard to the word “stinky,” I must point out that “stink” is a relative term. What is stink to one person is heavenly aroma to another, particularly a pipe smoker or, possibly, a junkyard dog, whose discriminating tastes some think I share.

What has got me to thinking about pipes today is that I have just read
The Ultimate Pipe Book
by Richard Carleton
Hacker. True, Mr. Hacker does have an unfortunate last name for the author of a book on pipe smoking, but it is his real name, and he is not about to conceal it behind a sissy pseudonym merely to escape an irony. Mr. Hacker is a fine writer and writes of pipes with a devotion that can be appreciated only by a person of great passions, namely a pipe smoker, past or present.

I don't know Mr. Hacker, but I imagine him in a smoking jacket, seated in a paneled, book-lined study, puffing contentedly away on an elegant briar or meerschaum as he pens his next scholarly work on, yes, pipes. His thoughts and the aroma of his English tobacco blend as one as he searches through his vast reservoir of knowledge on the culture and history of pipes and pipe tobaccos, seeking that next perfect but elusive sentence. Well, I, too, have a pipe history, and I hereby offer it up to Mr. Hacker to add to his next tome, should he so choose.

My introduction to smoking occurred at age seven. Crazy Eddie Muldoon and I had pursued our innocent hobby of collecting cigarette butts from along the highway for several months, with no particular use for them in mind. Then one day it occurred to us, like a bolt out of the blue, that we might actually
smoke
the butts! We had stored them in, appropriately, a cigar box. When we had accumulated a sufficient supply, namely a full cigar box, we went up on the mountain near our homes, found comfortable seats on the edge of a rock cliff, and gazing happily out over the checkerboard landscape below, smoked up almost our entire collection in about an hour, although the amount of elapsed time is rather vague to me now (as it was then, for that matter). I don't know about Eddie, but as for myself, I never again smoked a cigarette, nor have I had any desire to do so. Perhaps it was because of the odd sensation of having an ice pick driven through my
head from one temple to the other. Or perhaps it was fright over the pale, greenish blur that had become Eddie's face, as he lay on his back moaning something about his imminent death, thereby removing from the realm of idle speculation my last doubt that my own demise was close at hand. I will spare the reader graphic details of our illness, except to mention in a general way that four or five times we were turned inside out and back again. Eddie went home in such a confused state that he forgot to get himself turned right side out and gave his parents a tremendous shock. (There's nothing more disgusting than an inside-out person.) As for myself, anytime I was jostled during the next week, a little puff of smoke went up.

I took up pipe smoking, at age twenty-four, mostly for the sake of appearance. Even Bun said the pipe gave me a look of scholarly distinction. It was fortunate that it did, because shortly after taking up the pipe I was hired as an instructor at a university. Looking back, I believe that the chairman of the English Department must have hired me solely on the basis that I smoked a pipe, for that was about my only qualification. The chairman smoked a pipe, too. A distinguished scholar himself, he must have felt that my pipe was evidence of great but as of yet undetectable professorial potential. The pipe carried me all the way through to full professorhood, without anyone ever discovering the truth. Oh sure, there were suspicions, but nothing was ever proved.

In addition to contributing to success in one's career, the pipe is a wonderful instrument for the enhancement of fishing. It is an especially useful accessory for fly-fishing, in that its mere presence in the mouth suggests to one's fellow anglers an easy competence. Even though my own fly casting has been said to resemble an old lady fighting off a bee with a broom handle, I discovered that merely by my hauling out
a pipe, lighting up, and puffing out great clouds of smoke, other anglers on the stream were instantly impressed and would begin asking technical questions of me. Oh, not about fly-fishing, but other things, such as did I know who hit the most home runs in the 1952 World Series, stuff like that. I suppose they might even have asked me about fly-fishing, except for my occasionally getting my pipe caught in the line. I once cast one of my favorite briars halfway across the Madison River and received a round of applause from the other anglers, but that is something that shouldn't be attempted by beginners. Practice at home first.