Yet, once you really get to know Caleb you will see that he is not really a firebug. You will understand how disappointed he is when, instead of being cast as Clean Air in the Mt. Nebo school play, he is chosen to be Litter. You'll understand how ashamed he is when he finds he is too scared to ride the Ferris Wheel at the Lane County Fair and why he almost cries when almost no one votes for him as home room president.
Cal begins to feel he is not much good at anything and he begins to daydream during Social Studies. But what good is Social Studies? Social Studies doesn't get things done. Social Studies doesn't keep out the cold.
You are sure to understand that's why he dropped the book of matches in the wastepaper basket.
– for a mother may be ducking somebody.
Upstairs June Sunday Summer Solstice as my sweet Swallow of the Wire sails up to watch me type and the mud wasp in the wall whirs busily.
Had a fine day fishing. Colonel Weinstein showed up on the train last night with a surprise son from his first wife just Caleb's age; this morning early the four of us drive up the Willamette, then up little Salmon Creek, where I was able to sniff my way back to one of Daddy's favorite fishing holes – stop atop a rise, hike down through the brush and stickers to a spot where the Salmon banks off a sheer mossy cliff. Cool bluegreen pool the swirling potential of an expensive billiard table deepest felt. Any shot is possible.
Caleb and Weinstein's boy pull out a dozen cutthroats apiece while the Colonel and I share a bottle of cabernet and talk about Hemingway. I tell him about the Sex & Television fast I've vowed to maintain for six months.
"By Winter Solstice I expect to have my top and bottom chakras both scoured clean."
"What about the middle?"
"That's too submerged for me. Look! Your Sam has hooked into another one. He's doing real well for his first time."
"Your Caleb's teaching him well. Speaking of submerged, you know what it takes to circumcise a whale?"
"Nope."
"It takes four skin divers."
Almost thirty trout. We got back in time to ice them good so the Colonel and his son could take them back south on the train this afternoon. Returned from the train station to find Dorothy James, known as Micro Dotty for the painted VW bus she drives. She has driven up with some white snow and her red-haired overbudded fourteen-year-old ooh mercy daughter in gym shorts and man's short-sleeved dress shirt, collar turned up. The girl leans against their VW bus while her mom comes up to my office, chewing gum.
Dotty shares a couple doobies with me upstairs, and then I tell her Come on, I'll show you around. On the way down to the pond the daughter joins us. She has changed out of the shirt into a blue tubetop. She oozes along on my other side as I tell her mother about the farm. From the corner of my eye I can see the girl squeezing out of her tubetop like freckled toothpaste.
I introduce them both to Quiston down at the pond. He's casting after the bass, still griped that he missed out on the trip to Salmon Creek. The sight of all that red hair and squeezed skin wipes that gripe out of his mind immediately. He asks if she'd like to try a cast, that there's a Big One by the reeds if she's into it. Instead of answering Redbud oozes away to console the half dozen horny mallard hens, making it clear with a toss of hair that she wasn't into boys her own age or fish of any size.
"She's rather advanced," Micro Dotty whispers by way of explanation. "In fact she's been on the pill nearly a year."
Quis goes back after the bass, Dotty goes off to bother Betsy in the garden, I come back upstairs. The swallow watches from the wire. Quiston and Caleb head off across the field with Stewart to meet Olafs kid, Butch. The sun edges toward the end of its longest workday of the year.
The girl returns to the Microbus and gets a sleeping bag and a paperback by Anais Nin. Under my window she smiles up at me. "Okay with you if I nest down by your pond? I like to sleep under the stars and I might like a little sunset swim in the open. Know what I mean?"
"I do indeed," I tell her. Nest anywhere you choose; swim open as you please mercy yes. "Okay with me."
The swallow swoops. The wasp takes a break from his mud daubing to buzz out for a better look. Betsy and Dot go inside to cook sugar peas. The sun makes it to Mt. Nebo. I decide I better make the rounds, feed the ducks, check on the pond; don't want any sunset calamities.
She is sitting on the bank with her dripping arms wrapped around her knees, watching the ducks and being by them watched. She smiles. I hunker and toss the food into the water's edge. The ducks come gabbling after it. "Wheat?" she asks.
"Brown rice," I say. "We got two gunny sacks of it, left by some macrobiotics that lived with us. It was all they would eat."
"Ugh. Did they like it?"
"I don't think so. There used to be a dozen. Ducks, I mean, not macrobiotics. Something got the six drakes. A fox, we think."
"That's too bad."
"Nature," I say. "Red in tooth and claw."
"Still, it is sad. The poor lonely sweethearts…"
"Yeah."
The sky got gold and we watched the ducks for a long time without saying anything else. I felt good, virtuous, almost righteous, as that first day ended and I enjoyed the dawning realization that my dual fast was actually working: I hadn't gone near the TV and I didn't want to screw any of those ducks.