We fanned out and moved as quietly as we could in the brush. Bohemian waxwings had gathered in a wild crabapple tree, and some jacksnipe probed around the muddy creek. I was pleased to hear the sounds of children at the grade school a short distance away.
“Come here,” called Jinx. I had to look carefully to see her about twenty yards away in her nearly camouflaged clothes. I started that way. “I’ve got her.” When I reached Jinx, she was holding the goshawk by the corners of her wings. She had been shot.
Jinx said, “You’re just bad luck.” I felt, and must have looked, quite crestfallen because she put her arm around my waist and said she was sorry about my hawk.
We went to breakfast at a café by the switching yard, thinking we’d beat the morning crowd, but we didn’t and had to wait for a table. The ambient noise, a miasma of voices and silverware, was substantial. Desperate-looking waitresses navigated the crowd with plates aloft. I got a few stares but had been getting used to that. Quite soon, four ranchers rose and walked past us to the cash register picking their teeth, and we took their table. They wore the big Stetsons they would replace with billed caps as soon as they got home. Three of the ranchers faced the cashier, but one had turned to look at me. “A splendid bird like that,” said Jinx. “Someone just couldn’t stand the pressure. I’m glad I don’t know who it was. It might be someone I delivered and I’d just hate myself for missing my chance.” I compulsively did the math: Jinx was a bit over forty, with enough years of practice in the community to have delivered someone now armed.
When she was indignant, her eyes flashed; she had beautiful eyes. Even when we had both grown old I was fascinated by them. She once said, “My eyes and my ass are my long suits. I’m no sweater girl and without emphatic breasts life in the U.S. can seem quite proscribed.” That had been at one of our wine-soaked dinners at my house at which I grew so alarmed at Jinx’s intimations and proximity. I’m not sure why. She might have been too smart for me at that stage of my life. Now that I was somewhat shriven by circumstances and Jinx had begun to accept me as an unadulterated friend — someone to go birding with or share a ride to racquetball — I saw more in her. My mistakes seemed to accumulate like channel markers behind a boat. But at least I had a friend; I was sure of that.
Jocelyn came into town a couple of times a week, and we usually slept together after I’d taken her to dinner or helped her stock an odd array of supplies: hose clamps, fuel bladder, energy bars, distilled water, anti-icing spray, electrician’s tape, multipurpose tools. I wasn’t much interested in what these things were for, and my casual inquiries were waved away wearily. I had always been wary of sex as something which imposed a not always welcome bonding; it reminded me of those old movies in which a storm strands a group in a bus station or some likewise unpleasant place and they all slip through layers of unearned intimacy, like it or not. I actually fell in love with my aunt, who shooed me away after getting what she wanted. But this was different. I had not bonded with Jocelyn. I was not at all sure I liked her. And while I realized it was irrational to make the connection, the more I saw Jocelyn, the more trouble I had with the 88. At first it wouldn’t start, because power was only intermittently getting from the ignition to the solenoid. I had to change a headlight, which was unreasonably difficult as there was no room to get a hand or tools in there. Once I had it running, it smoked too much and I drove through town followed by a white cloud. Otherwise, it went along okay until the following Saturday, when having made love to Jocelyn again, I began getting alarming noises from the water pump and idler pulley, which, combined with the smoking exhaust and unreliable starting, made me think my car was about three fucks from the wrecking yard. I didn’t actually believe this; it was just a feeling, an association. If we could have made love just once without my car going haywire I believe that feeling would have gone away. It was disquieting. I had gotten used to the non-working dome light, the malfunctioning passenger-side window, and the water trapped in the trunk lid, but the correlation of these new failures to my sex life was unusually troubling. My car had run beautifully for five days when I ran into Jocelyn behind the IGA store and we had a bit of a grope. Jocelyn went on her way and I went on mine, but for the first time in over a hundred thousand miles there was a screeching knock in the steering column which was never resolved, while the heater blew only cold air. I realize that this was some sort of automotive route to erectile dysfunction, and I enjoyed all the attendant irony, but what else was I to conclude?
At some point I said to the old man, “Tell me, Pop, what made you desert?” We had just brought a load of well-weathered cow manure from Gladys’s ranch for him to spread around the raised beds of his cherished vegetable garden. I couldn’t have gotten a bigger rise if I had shot a big-game arrow through his thorax. He stiffened, lowered the handles of the wheelbarrow, and turned to me very slowly.
Everyone must look back over their lives and consider what the big mistakes were. This surely was one of mine. If this spell of forced leisure had a mission, it seemed to be this review as to how I got to this place. It was dawning on me that only while working did I focus on what was under my nose.
My father made me see how demoralizing hedge warfare was, a lethal enterprise on a sort of chessboard, where the terrifying art of ambush became a cerebral exercise. My father’s longing for his native plains became more emphatic as woodlands became death traps. Months of digging in had given him a fear of daylight and transformed him into something of a homebody once he had a choice. Night had been a friend, and the terror of German flares had altered his diurnal habits stateside; my mother told me it was a long time before walking around in broad daylight gave him much pleasure. He had befriended a Mormon officer from Idaho early on and stood near him on a sunny afternoon when the officer’s map board flashing in the sun gave him away to a German sniper; a distant crack and his new friend fell at his feet. A bout with scabies had made him, once home, a fervent bather: even when we were on the road cleaning rugs, wherever we stopped he sought out the water source, the tubs and showers. My father was not a particularly reflective man, but watching prisoners transported to the rear perplexed him; late in the war young Wehrmacht grenadiers were packed in trucks like the ones used to haul cattle, though in this case far more crowded than would be considered acceptable for livestock. The only signs of the penned humanity were the streams of urine and vomit seeping from between the planks on the sides of the lorries. In circumstances where he had been advised to “eat every chance you get and piss every chance you get” this dismal image never left him. The ethnicity of the truck’s contents faded in the mind of a man who had once thought of killing the enemy as life’s greatest pleasure. A word or two from comrades might have had a similar effect, for in every unit there were thoughtful individuals who doubted that war made any sense in the first place. He was given profound pause as he watched a captured German medical team ordered to treat Allied wounded: his description of their care and efficiency might have had something to do with my early enthusiasm for medicine, as it was the first war story I ever heard from him but it was about making people well.
He disclosed a substantial litany of experiences that inclined toward dismantling a human mind: the silence of incoming mortars, the endless hover of flares, the scream of rockets, the otherworldly burp of the Schmeisser machine pistols. And of course, the 88s. Because of my impertinent question, I heard this, if not for the first time, in greater detail than ever before. My father’s gaze remained level, his eyes fixed on mine as he answered my question.