The Dead Fish Museum (11 page)

The truck was loaded and we were off before dawn, while the women still slept. The sky was slate blue and brittle, and at one point I saw the green flare of a meteor burn out above a line of trees. It happened so fast that I doubted myself in the very moment of wonder, and, feeling sleepy and uncertain, decided not to mention it to anybody. I imagined that a kind of fraternal ridicule kept this group cohesive, and I didn’t want to become the scapegoat who helped them bond.

Mr. Jansen stopped for coffee at a filling station, where trucks and cars idled in the raw air, their headlamps lighting the tiny lot. Hunters were already heading back to the city with their kills. Nearly every car was tricked out with a carcass—a six-point buck strapped to the roof of a yellow Cadillac, the head of a doe lolling beneath the lid of a half-closed trunk.

Steve reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped a few loose and, turning to me, said, “Smoke?”

“Can’t you wait?” Lindy said.

“I’ll crack the window.”

“Fuck, just wait.”

“No, thanks,” I said, waving away the offer.

Steve had been the first up that morning, and he’d taken the time to shave. His red jowly face was smooth and smelled of lime. Below his ear a spot of blood had dried where he’d nicked himself. I’ve never really liked men on whom I can smell cosmetic products, and it was that morning, in the truck, so close to Steve, that I realized it had nothing to do with the particular soap or aftershave but with the proximity. If I could smell a man, he was too close. Now Steve lit a cigarette and inhaled with a grimace, relishing the pain.

“How’s things in insurance?” he asked.

“Good enough,” I said.

“You’re an adjuster, right? Claims?”

I nodded.

Mr. Jansen returned with the coffee. He poured a cup from the thermos, and we passed it around, heading up the highway.

We turned onto a narrow rutted road, which ended in a blinding expanse of white. A dirty beige Pontiac was parked next to a rotted fence—dark leaning posts from which coils of rusted barbed wire ran like stitching through the quilted fields of snow. We got out of the truck.

“Hey, Tennessee,” Mr. Jansen said. The man in the car rolled down his window. A cigarette hung from his lip and toast crumbs flecked his beard. He had hard blue eyes and a red scar along the side of his nose. A little girl slept next to him, wrapped in a blanket.

“Boys,” he said, with a faint nod. He gazed through the windshield, his eyes fixed on something distant and still. “Cleared off a patch in the snow and put down corn.”

Steve reached for his wallet. It was fat with credit cards, and an accordion of brittle plastic held photos of his wife and two kids. He leaned through the window.

“C-note?” he said.

Tennessee nodded.

“That’s a costly turkey,” Steve said.

Tennessee swallowed. “You only get one, I guess it might be.” He continued to stare through the windshield. He didn’t seem unfriendly, just far away, preserving his distance, as if he weren’t really a party to this. Next to him, his little girl turned in her sleep, and he adjusted the blanket over her bare legs. Steve handed him the money. Tennessee put the folded bill in his shirt pocket without looking at it and slipped the car into gear, easing through the dry snow.

When he was gone, Steve said, “Hard-up fucking hillbilly.”

Mr. Jansen was unracking the guns and gathering our packs. We wore bulky camouflage snowsuits, each the same pattern—dark branches on a white background. We had only three guns, and so I carried the decoy, a brown plastic hen with galvanized-steel legs. Thinking of Tennessee, I wondered if we were trespassing. I guessed that baiting was illegal but kept quiet. Despite myself, I was looking forward to the hunt, and I hurried along in step with the others, through the deep drifted snow until, at the edge of the field, we came to the blind.

“Jesus,” Steve said, after we’d crowded in. He pulled out a monogrammed silver flask and poured us each a jigger of Scotch, as “an eye-opener,” he said. He winked at me, and said, “Sitting all day in a blind with a bunch of liberals.”

“I think you’ll survive,” Mr. Jansen told him.

“If we got stuck here, I’d eat you. I’d have no problem with that.”

The blind was a small dark hut with a flat tarpaper roof and a packed-dirt floor and two rectangular holes cut in the weathered boards. It sheltered us from the wind, and our huddled bodies seemed to warm it somewhat.

“Ben Franklin wanted the turkey for the national symbol,” Lindy said.

“Smart birds, no doubt about that,” Steve said. “Wily.”

Mr. Jansen brought out the thermos of coffee.

“How about a toast?” he said.

My own silence was making me increasingly self-conscious, and I felt an old inadequacy, not joining in on the banter.

“Whose property is this?” I asked.

“Some union big shot in Detroit,” Mr. Jansen said. “Tennessee’s the caretaker.”

“You wouldn’t think a couple of Democrats would go in for poaching,” Steve said. “But I guess turkey hunts make for strange bedfellows. Like politics.”

I couldn’t follow the drift of his political beliefs, the precise arrangement of bigotries that he used to sort the world, but I raised my cup with everyone else.

Lindy said, “To a big fat tom.”

The coffee and the Scotch parted ways immediately, one warming my stomach, the other rising in a vapor to my head.

“Daly,” Mr. Jansen said, “why don’t you set the decoy?”

“Sure,” I said, glad for something to do, a small role.

Outside the blind, the snow spun like shifting sand. I planted the decoy off to the left of the corn, driving the steel legs into the frozen ground. I squinted across the white moving expanse, and my eyes ached. Everything was either black or white, flat or upright, reduced to the stark lines of winter. I couldn’t believe this plastic turkey had a prayer, it looked so obviously counterfeit. I looked back to the blind, wondering if my snowsuit disguised me at this distance. Steve Rababy’s head was squarely framed in the window. His face was round and ruddy, blown up in some beefy sated English way. In the asperity of early winter, he seemed grossly overfed.

“Who wants to call?” Lindy asked as I was crawling back in.

“More important,” Steve said, “who gets first crack at him?”

“I thought we’d let Daly have the honor,” Mr. Jansen said.

“I think we should draw lots,” Steve said. “That’s tradition.”

Before I could say “Leave me out of it,” Mr. Jansen said, “Okay, choose a number between one and ten.”

“Five,” Lindy said.

“Three,” Steve said.

I chose nine, and Mr. Jansen said, “Nine it is.”

“Fuck you it’s nine,” Steve said.

Mr. Jansen laughed heartily while Steve removed his mittens and worked the call, rubbing the wooden slat over the box. A dry squawking was carried downwind from the blind. He waited a short while and then, leaning one ear to the instrument, like a violinist, gave the call another grating, followed by a couple of percussive clucks. The call was faint, unequal to the wind, the gusting snow. It sounded lost and weak, too plaintive, and it was hard to imagine the sort of hunger that would mishear these false notes.

“With steel shot,” Lindy said, “you’ve really got to call them in. Killing range isn’t the same as lead.”

“Use my gun,” Steve said. He blew on his freckled red hands. “I’ve got some old lead shot in there. I packed a couple of those babies last night.”

“I don’t know about a ten-gauge,” Lindy said. “You get some extra distance, but you pay for it in recoil.”

“I don’t like to be undergunned,” Steve said.

Lindy said, “Choke matters more.”

“That’s full,” Steve said. “Pretty tight. The pattern density’s fine at forty yards. I just tested it.”

“What Steve’s doing,” Mr. Jansen explained, “he’s trying to imitate a hen and draw a gobbler out of the trees. He’ll keep calling until he gets an answer.”

Steve said, “Right now I’m telling him there’s a chance for poon out here, so he’d better get his ass out of the woods while the gettin’s good.” He looked away from his post to see if I was listening. “After we spot him—way out there on the edge of the field—I’ll space out the calls. That’s my style. I like to let the silence draw the bird in. Turkeys are skittish—they’ve got amazing hearing and eyesight—but they’re curious, too, and that’s their doom.”

“Killing range is anywhere inside forty yards,” Mr. Jansen continued, “but let’s try to hold off until Steve gets him to more like twenty.”

“You’ll probably feel a little hot,” Steve explained, “and your face’ll flush. That’s turkey fever. But just recognize it and relax and breathe deep and blow out and squeeze. You don’t want to do what most guys do, you don’t want to flock shoot. Aim—aim for the neck and head, not the turkey.”

Mr. Jansen lit a cigarette. He said, “You want to kill it without pumping the meat full of lead.”

Steve coaxed a steady confab of calls out of the box, playing the wooden tongue back and forth. To my ears, the sound remained ugly and discordant, certainly not musical and harmonious in the way of the passerine birds, like finches or warblers, with their contralto trilling in spring. Mr. Jansen seemed content to be out early, away from the women, with a drink in his hand and plenty more in the flask. Lindy was crouched in the corner, sunk into himself. He’d shown no real animation since we’d arrived.

“It wouldn’t do to eat the national symbol,” I said, trying to pick up the conversation where Lindy had left off. I felt instantly that I’d made an awkward, pointless comment. “Taboo,” I added, trying to cover myself.

“Daly here is an RC,” Mr. Jansen said.

“You eat your Saviour every Sunday,” Steve said. “Isn’t that what those crackers are?”

“Beth Ann was Catholic,” Lindy said. He ran his finger in the dirt floor, drawing a cross. He pinched some of the dirt and threw it at the walls of the blind. “She wanted a Catholic funeral, and that’s what she got.”

Steve Rababy and Mr. Jansen averted their eyes, staring vacantly at different walls, as if trying to keep the separate lines of vision from tangling. Lindy looked at each of us, a soft well of tears pooling in his eyes. He rubbed a thick mitten across his face.

“I never converted,” he said, in a very small voice. “At the funeral, it was like a foreign language. They were saying goodbye to my wife, using words I didn’t understand.”

“Get over it,” Steve said. He had stopped working the call, but now he leaned out the window, scraping the wooden tongue over the box.

“That’s a little cold,” I said.

“Well,” Steve said, “we’ve heard all this. We heard it yesterday and the day before and the day before that. We drove up goddam I-75 singing this song.” He aimed a hard stare at Lindy. “It was almost a year ago. It’s just sentimental bullshit at this point. It’s fucking weak.”

“Take it easy, Steve,” Mr. Jansen said. He helped himself to another cup of hot coffee, cooling it with a measure of Scotch. “Everybody has their own time, Lindy most of all.”

“She knew everything about me,” Lindy continued, as if he hadn’t heard Steve. “Everything.” Tears streaked shamelessly down a face that crying contorted and turned ugly, a squalling baby’s face that was not sympathetic in a grown man. “Now no one does.”

“No one ever does,” Steve said. “You know, here’s your goddam marriage. All right? Okay? Let me recap. For thirty-five fucking years I listened to you bitch and moan about Beth Ann. All right? Every afternoon at the bar, starting the day after you came back from your honeymoon. Five o’clock and I could fucking count on it. How she didn’t give it up enough, how she wouldn’t swallow, how she didn’t look young anymore, blah blah blah”—with each “blah,” he swiped a strident cluck from the call—“on and on and on. And now she’s dead and it’s like, mamma mia, she’s some kind of fucking saint.”

“Lucy knows everything about me,” Mr. Jansen offered. It seemed a silly, conciliatory remark, not at all the kind of thing my wife’s father believed.

Steve called him on it. “Yeah, right—I know more about you than she ever will.”

Steve continued to scrape the call, but the wind had blown the horizon blank and there was no sign of a bird.

“And both of you know a fuck of a lot more about me than Sandy does,” he said.”The way I see our marriage is, like, finally, after thirty-nine years, we understand we don’t understand each other. We finally got that cleared up.

“Give me another drink,” he said, beating senselessly on. “She could give a rat’s ass about hunting—sitting out here in this box would seem stupid to her.

“Forget the turkey,” he said. “I have a mind to shoot myself.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

Steve barked a frantic, nearly hysterical call, working the tongue rapidly, like honing a knife against a whetstone.

“You don’t like me, do you? You got a problem with me.”

“Jesus, how’d we end up here?” Mr. Jansen said. “Let’s just everybody shut up for a minute.”

Steve said, “There’s key shit Sandy doesn’t know and never will. Stuff about Katrina, and that whole saga, right?” He sniffed, then spat through the window. “And yeah, every Friday about eleven, twelve o’clock you could always find Lindy’s car parked outside the massage parlor on Warren. Those Oriental girls, they look like teenagers until they’re forty, eh Lindy? And you,” he said, turning on my father-in-law. “You—”