Snapper (12 page)

Through binoculars I made out that what he carried was a small handheld crossbow. While I watched he raised it, squeezed the trigger, and a few feet away a large carp bellied up, already dead.

nabbed it.

As the bird flew away a line secured to the crossbow bolt
paid out; abruptly he found himself tethered to the man’s shorts at a distance of twenty feet. Both were reflected in the water from my vantage point, not mirrored images but separate conflicts, and while the eagle flapped to no effect, the possible outcomes multiplied. Perhaps the bird in the air would get a pair of shorts with his dinner. Perhaps the reflected man would grasp the line and haul, hand over hand, and receive a free bird with his fish. Perhaps the reflected bird would come to the aid of his companion, or perhaps the two men would begin to fight. Somewhere in the depths of a lake with no depths infinity contemplated itself, unwilling to decide. Perhaps the man would fly. Perhaps the bird would speak.

A belt loop gave up in despair.

I watched in horror as the man began reloading his crossbow and waded off in pursuit.

I scrambled down and ran around the rim of the lake toward the nest tree. The man was already aiming and I was fifty feet away.

“You could go to prison for that!” I yelled. He didn’t move.

perched on a low branch of the nest tree, tearing off strips of fish, most of which dropped in the water, but he looked unconcerned.

Contrary to popular conception, bald eagles have no diving scream. When you hear it in movies, it’s a dubbed recording of the noble red-tailed hawk.
, who must have been watching the whole time, plunged with full silence, speed, and fury; the man buckled under the impact but threw his free arm into the mud underwater and kept his feet. She sank her talons into both shoulders, and began to beat his head with her wings while craning her neck to beak his eyes from behind—a winged demon driving a mute hairless beast into the water. He threw his crossbow forearm up to his forehead
to spare his eyes and began to stumble ashore. She detached, ascended, wheeled, and dove again at speed, raking his back with her talons and thudding into the mud—where she stayed, trembling.

“Are you okay?” I said.

He grinned. “That was awesome,” he said. Perfectly circular holes like bullet wounds perforated his shoulders, and savage furrows ran down his back, blood streaming from all of them, but he was delighted.

“You could go to prison,” I said again.

“Fucker stole my fish.”

“It’s a bald eagle. It’s allowed to steal your fish.”

“Is that a bald eagle?”

“Does it look like a bald eagle?”

“I know what it looks like, that’s how come I didn’t pull. But we don’t get them around here.”

“Don’t you read the papers? Watch the news?”

He shrugged. “How come it’s just sitting there?”

“You’d sit there too if you hit the ground at twenty miles an hour.”

in his tree had stopped eating, but hadn’t moved.

“Is that all they can do? Twenty?”

“I didn’t clock her on the way down, okay? I think she was planning to brake by ripping immense shreds of flesh from your back.”

“Cool,” he said.

“We need to back away,” I said. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look terrible.”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I done broke my ankle a few years back and didn’t even know it till it was all healed up and the doctor X-rayed me for something else.”

We backed up but did not leave the area entirely in case
didn’t recover.

“I took a ricochet off concrete from a .22 in my leg once too; only thing hurt about that is I was holding the damn rifle at the time.”

Uh-huh.

“My basic rule of pain is, if it’s not a head injury, you’re okay.”

“She was after your eyes.”

“Or an eye injury. I’m Duane.”

He stretched out a hand the size of a dictionary, and true to form, crushed mine.

“Nathan,” I said.

Another twenty minutes passed before
recovered. In that time Duane never stopped talking. He told me, among other things, that Asian carp was okay if drenched in Tabasco, though paddlefish was best as bait, and that he had made his crossbow himself with a soldering iron, used car parts, and the rim of an old oil drum. He’d seen people out there with compound bows drawing eighty pounds like they thought there was deer down there. One time he made a recurve and strung it with braided dogbane just like the Indians done, trouble was it made a noise. He had hundreds of weapons, mostly homemade, if I’d like to see them sometime.

I said weapons weren’t really my thing.

I didn’t introduce them. It would never have occurred to me; besides, people in Jefferson don’t need to be introduced formally. Moreover, Dana seemed rather aloof whenever I saw her after our expedition together. I wondered if she was the sort of person who made confessions to friends she couldn’t later forgive them for hearing. Only when I saw her with Duane did I realize that she might have felt spurned. Area conservationists held a party in September when five of the
fledglings had left the area, banded by a team from Chicago wearing helmets and Kevlar (two of the fledglings had been struck by cars while feeding). Dana showed up with one hand in her jeans pocket and the other enveloped by Duane’s.

I didn’t immediately get a chance to talk to them—there were conservationists, concerned citizens, token politicians milling around with hot dogs and watermelon on a grassy slope above the Ohio. But I observed. Dana wore high-heeled sandals with straps around the calves she couldn’t have handled alone, jeans she couldn’t have zipped, and a blouse with buttons that had been abandoned at middle altitude. She even wore lipstick. She did the talking while Duane chafed in a collared blue shirt she must have made him tuck in. I overheard her discussing conservation with a D.C. congress-woman, and Dana made superior sound bites. I heard her talking to an eagle expert from Washington State, and Dana knew more than he did. I was not the only one watching her, everyone was, and I couldn’t catch her eye. Duane caught mine, though, and led her in my direction at the earliest opportunity.

“Thank God,” he said. “All these stiffs. Is this what you do too?”

“I didn’t know that you two were acquainted,” I said. I’d never reported the incident in case it caused Duane some trouble. “It’s not really what I do. What do you do, Duane?”

“I sorta been laid off,” said Duane.

“He means he was fired,” said Dana. “You don’t have to lie, Duane. I’m not your mother.”

“I’m starting a course to learn hanging drywall,” said Duane, and explained at length the abundant opportunities locally for a freelance drywaller to enrich himself. I never found out how they met. Duane asked if I liked bourbon, said his cousin Euble in Tennessee hand-delivered the special
sauce every couple of months, 95 percent sugar so it could pass for dessert, and he had some in his truck. Dana said she could use the fortification—“small talk is so exhausting,” she said—so we stood behind his truck, a sort of older, more organically decorated
Gypsy Moth
, and he tipped bourbon into her throat, handed the bottle to me, and took a modest sip for himself when I had finished.

“You should have invited your friend,” said Dana.

“My friend?”

“The girl who painted your truck.”

“She wouldn’t come to a thing like this,” I said. Dana arched her eloquent eyebrows, but didn’t comment.

I wondered what Dana would make of Lola, and vice versa; what they might find to talk about if Lola were there. By comparison, Lola seemed rather feckless. She belonged to that other, air-conditioned world; Dana understood the squalid and menacing nature of things, and Lola had never once worried about my safety. Dana understood the irretrievable moment, the snap of events; Lola’s independence was a vain, inglorious thing. If Duane could master lipstick, anything could happen between them—my own spotty intermittent affair with Lola struck me that afternoon as trivial, something that dropped out of my sleeve or back pocket, probably not worth picking up. I didn’t intend to fall out of a tree, of course, but that was beside the point.

Back among the heathen, we were quickly separated, and the mayor of Jefferson told me for a half hour what a wonderful town he ran, real business friendly. I wondered who he thought he was talking to, but I didn’t interrupt, just watched Duane holding Dana’s hand, with a pang of guilt and a twinge of envy.