“Well, Minnow’s no longer with us. And the old boat is just setting there doing nothing.”
The next morning before daybreak, Jimmy and I were in Minnow Milton’s living room with the lake slapping underneath and the sash thrown up. There were still old photographs of the Milton family on the walls. Minnow was a bachelor and no one had come for them. I had my father’s twelve-gauge pump propped on the windowsill and I could see the blocks, the old Mason decoys, all canvasbacks, that I had set out beneath the window, thirty of them bobbing, wooden beaks to the wind, like steamboats viewed from a mile up. I really couldn’t see Jimmy. I had wheeled him in terror down the gangplank and into the dark. I set the blocks in the dark and when I lit his cigarette, he stared down the length of the holder, intently, so I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I said, “What fun is there if you can’t shoot?”
“Shoot,” he said.
“I’m gonna shoot. I was just asking.”
“You ain’t got no ducks anyways.”
That was true. But it didn’t last. A cold wind came with daylight. A slight snow spit across the whitecaps. I saw a flight of mallards rocket over and disappear behind us. Then they reappeared and did the same thing again, right across the roof over our heads. When they came the third time, they set their wings and reached their feet through hundreds of feet of cold air toward the decoys. I killed two and let the wind blow them up against the floating house. Jimmy grinned from ear to ear.
I built a fire in Minnow Milton’s old stove and cooked those ducks on a stick. I had to feed Jimmy off the point of my Barlow knife, but we ate two big ducks for breakfast and lunch at once. I stood the pump gun in the corner.
Tall columns of snow advanced toward us across the lake, and among them, right in among them, were ducks, some of everything, including the big canvasbacks that stirred us like old music. Buffleheads raced along the surface.
“Fork me some of that there duck meat,” said Jimmy Meade in his Ohio voice.
We stared down from our house window as our decoys filled with ducks. The weather got so bad the ducks swam among the decoys without caring. After half a day we didn’t know which was real and which was not. I wrapped Jimmy’s blanket up under his chin.
“I hope those ducks keep on coming,” he said. And they did. We were in a vast raft of ducks. We didn’t leave until the earth had turned clean around and it was dark again.
LITTLE EXTRAS
David and Rita were starting their life together. David was a hard-working twenty-two-year-old with the strong features of his Norwegian parents and the muscles his manual work produced. Rita — a Miss Montana Runner-Up — was admired for her terrific ambition. They were married up the Valley in August and moved into the double-wide on Rita’s father’s ranch. Rita helped her father with the cows and the books, while David worked at the grain elevator in town. Rita wanted a house immediately and they had already saved for a down payment. When Mr. Penniman, the grocer, passed away, David approached the lawyer who was handling the estate, asking if he and Rita could buy the house. The lawyer, who was known all over Montana as a ladies’ man, pulled his mouth to one side and gazed at the couple before answering. “There will have to be an appraisal.”
“We know that,” said David. He really didn’t.
“And there is an heir, a daughter.”
“Oh,” said Rita. The lawyer, a Mr. Neville, looked at her.
“She won’t want that house. She’s well off. But she may want a thing or two for sentimental reasons.” She noticed how very thin and well-dressed Neville was, and there was something appealing about his sneering delivery when talking.
“We wouldn’t mind,” said Rita. David looked at her, curiously weighing her words. These domiciling arrangements seemed thunderous after an unexceptional small-town courtship. They looked at the house every day, a pretty white house that had been painted and fussed over all its life. When the appraisal came, David had to go home from the elevator, take a shower, change, and meet Rita at the bank. The bank officers went along with them, and they bought the house as is with the understanding that Mrs. Callahan, the grocer’s daughter, could have a day in the house alone, to select mementos. There were beautiful things in every room. David and Rita packed the contents of the double-wide in the back of David’s truck. Mrs. Callahan used a U-Haul and a crew to empty David and Rita’s new home. Rita wept all the way back to the double-wide. That night Mrs. Callahan called to say there were no hard feelings.
Neville, the lawyer, phoned up the following morning in response to five panic messages from David and Rita. “You said you didn’t mind her taking something for sentimental reasons.”
“We didn’t expect her to clean out the whole house,” said David.
“You should have thought of that at the time,” said the lawyer. “You bought it as is.”
Rita got on the line and said, “She took the stove and refrigerator.”
“Whatever,” said Neville. “I’ve got calls waiting.”
Neither David nor Rita could stop everything for this crisis. But it was a fact that they couldn’t move into their new house until they had saved for furnishings. When David went back to the banker, he said, “I’m afraid you have been treated badly. But this can’t be solved by me. You’re going to have to learn this lesson and go on with your lives.”
“So, we do nothing?”
“I tell you what. Why don’t we try this. I’ll wangle you an invitation for Mrs. Callahan’s rodeo party. And you and the wife just put your best faces on and make a pitch to get your things back. Whether you do or not, you’ll learn even more about life. Take it from your banker.”
The night of the rodeo, David thought he was too tired to go. His muscles were sore from loading grain and salt and steel T-posts. But Rita was excited. David tried to be touched by her belief that they would get everything back. Even Rita’s father thought that David would have to take on some of Rita’s optimism and eye for the main chance if he was ever to get out of the elevator and go places. But he got dressed. So did Rita. By the time they put on their cowboy hats, they didn’t know what to think. David took some aspirins and carried a beer to the truck.
They could hear the crowd roaring before they ever got there. There was a glow of light over the rodeo grounds. The bleachers were full and they had to edge their way past people’s knees for a long way before they could sit down. They could see Mrs. Callahan and her companions in the reserved seats. Rita got cotton candy and visited school friends sitting all around them. David didn’t want to move until after the saddle broncs. Before the calf roping, a man came onto the field and penned sheep with quick little collies on whose backs rode monkeys in cowboy suits. Rita sat back down with her cotton candy. “I can’t believe her,” she said, staring across at Mrs. Callahan and her friends, who now were leading a cheer for the dogs and monkeys. Then it started to rain hard. During the bulls, it became such a wallow, people headed for their cars. The roundup banners popped in the wind, and the hard beer drinkers got under the bleachers with their coats pulled up over their heads and jeered passersby.
Mrs. Callahan lived on the edge of town where it broke off into big pastures. Her place seemed almost like a ranch, with a few small buildings set away from a two-story gray house with white trim and big rose-cluttered trellises around the doors. There were a lot of cars parked in the driveway and in the yard; the rain-covered cars shone in the house lights. They were not really a cross section of the town’s cars, and it made David nervous to be going in there at all. Rita, on the other hand, strode toward the house combatively. It got worse inside, where they could see their furniture scattered among the antiques. Everyone who David and Rita had ever consulted about their teeth or their bodies, their finances or legal matters, was there, gathered around a tank of Everclear punch. Dr. Dillingham went past, fastening hundred-dollar bills to his forehead with saliva, announcing, “This is how I meet girls in Las Vegas.” When Mrs. Callahan doubled over with laughter, the lawyer Neville deftly spooned pickle relish into her hairdo. It went unnoticed.