“Y’all shot like a coupla ’ole grandmas,” Renard said, disgusted, shaking his head.
“Fuck you,” my father said calmly, and snapped his beautiful Italian gun shut in a menacing way. His blue eyes widened, then narrowed, and I believed he might point his gun at Renard Junior. White spit had collected in the corners of his mouth, and his face had gone quickly from looking engaged to looking pale and damp and outraged. “If I need your services for other than calling, I’ll speak to your owner,” he said.
“Speak to yo’ own owner, snooky,” Renard Junior said, and when he said this he looked at me, raised his eyebrows and smiled in a way that pushed his heavy lips forward in a cruel, simian way.
“That’s enough,” my father said loudly. “That is absolutely enough.” I thought he might reach past me and strike Renard in the mouth he was smiling through. But he didn’t. He just slumped back on his peach crate, faced forward and held his newly reloaded shotgun between his knees. His white-and-black shoes were on top of his overcoat and ruined. His little pink carnation lay smudged in the greasy mud.
I could hear my father’s hard breathing. Something had happened that wasn’t good, but I didn’t know what. Something had risen up in him, some force of sudden rebellion, but it had been defeated before it could come out and act. Or so it seemed to me. Silent events, of course, always occur between our urges and our actions. But I didn’t know what event had occurred, only that one had, and I could feel it. My father seemed tired now, and to be considering something. Renard Junior was no longer calling ducks, but was just sitting at his end staring at the misty sky, which was turning a dense, warm luminous red at the horizon, as if a fire was burning at the far edge of the marsh. Shooting in the other blinds had stopped. A small plane inched across the sky. I heard a dog bark. I saw a fish roll in the water in front of the blind. I thought I saw an alligator. Mosquitoes appeared, which is never unusual in Louisiana.
“What do you do in St. Louis,” I said to my father. It was the thing I wanted to know.
“Well,” my father said thoughtfully. He sniffed, “Golf. I play quite a bit of golf. Francis has a big house across from a wonderful park. I’ve taken it up.” He felt his forehead, where a mosquito had landed on a black mud stain that was there. He rubbed it and looked at his fingertips.
“Will you practice law up there?”
“Oh lord no,” he said and shook his head and sniffed again. “They requested me to leave the firm here. You know that.”
“Yes,” I said. His breathing was easier. His face seemed calm. He looked handsome and youthful. Whatever silent event that had occurred had passed off of him, and he seemed settled about it. I thought I might talk about going to Lawrenceville. Duck blinds were where people had such conversations. Though it would’ve been better, I thought, if we’d been alone, and didn’t have Renard Junior to overhear us. “I’d like to ask you …” I began.
“Tell me about your girlfriend situation,” my father interrupted me. “Tell me the whole story there.”
I knew what he meant by that, but there wasn’t a story. I was in military school, and there were only other boys present, which was not a story to me. If I went to Lawrenceville, I knew there could be a story. Girls would be nearby. “There isn’t any story …” I started to say, and he interrupted me again.
“Let me give you some advice.” He was rubbing his index finger around the muzzle of his Italian shotgun. “Always try to imagine how you’re going to feel after you fuck somebody before you fuck somebody. Comprendes? There’s the key to everything. History. Morality. Philosophy. You’ll save yourself a lot of misery.” He nodded as if this wisdom had just become clear to him all over again. “Maybe you already know that,” he said. He looked above the front of the blind where the sky had turned to fire, then looked at me in a way to seem honest and to say (so I thought) that he liked me. “Do you ever find yourself saying things in conversations that you absolutely don’t believe?” He reached with his two fingers and plucked a mosquito off my cheek. “Do you?” he said distractedly. “Do ya, do ya?”
I thought of conversations I’d had with Dubinion, and some I’d had with my mother. They were that kind of conversation — memorable if only for the things I didn’t say. But what I said to my father was “no.”
“Convenience must not matter to you much then,” he said in a friendly way.
“I don’t know if it does or not,” I said because I didn’t know what convenience meant. It was a word I’d never had a cause to use.
“Well, convenience matters to me very much. Too much, I think,” my father said. I, of course, thought of my mother’s assessment of him — that he was not better than most men. I assumed that caring too much for convenience led you there, and that my fault in later life could turn out to be the same one because he was my father. But I decided, at that moment, to see to it that my fault in life would not be his.
“There’s one ducky duck,” my father said. He was watching the sky and seemed bemused. “Fabrice, would you let me apologize for acting ugly to you, and ask you to call? How generous that would be of you. How nice.” My father smiled strangely at Renard Junior, who I’d believed to be brooding.
And Renard Junior did call. I didn’t see a duck, but when my father squatted down on the dirty planking where his topcoat was smeared and our empty shell casings were littered, I did too, and turned my face toward the floor. I could hear my father’s breathing, could smell the whiskey on his breath, could see his pale wet knuckles supporting him unsteadily on the boards, could even smell his hair, which was warm and musty smelling. It was as close as I would come to him. And I understood that it would have to do, might even be the best there could be.
“Wait now, wait on ’im,” my father said, hunkered on the wet planks, but looking up out of the tops of his eyes. He put his fingers on my hand to make me be still. I still had not seen anything. Renard Junior was blowing the long, high-pitched rasping call, followed by short bursts that made him grunt heavily down in his throat, and then the long highball call again. “Not quite yet,” my father whispered. “Not yet. Wait on him.” I turned my face sideways to see up, my eyes cut to the side to find something. “No,” my father said, close to my ear. “Don’t look up.” I inhaled deeply and breathed in all the smells again that came off my father. And then Renard Junior said loudly, “Go on, Jesus! Go on! Shoot ’im. Shoot now. Whatchyouwaitin’on?”
I just stood up, then, without knowing what I would see, and brought my shotgun up to my shoulder before I really looked. And what I saw, coming low over the decoys, its head turning to the side and peering down at the brown water, was one lone duck. I could distinguish its green head and dark bullet eyes in the haze-burnt morning light and could hear its wings pinging. I didn’t think it saw me or heard my father and Renard Junior shouting, “Shoot, shoot, oh Jesus, shoot’im Buck.” Because when my face and gun barrel appeared above the front of the blind, it didn’t change its course or begin the backward-upward maneuvering I’d already seen, which was its way to save itself. It just kept looking down and flying slowly and making its noise in the reddened air above the water and all of us.