Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, page 10
Toward evening, we met back at the camp and discussed our luck at catching fish.
“I told you we should bring wieners,” Birdy said.
“I’d shoot us some squirrels, but there don’t seem to be none around here,” Retch said. “I wonder how chipmunk tastes.”
As the first shadows of evening crept across our camp, we chopped firewood, smoothed out the ground for our sleeping bags, and generally prepared for the night. It was then that a strange look came over Ralph’s face. He swiveled his head about, peering into the recesses of the forest, as though surprised by the deepening darkness. Somehow, despite all his meticulous planning, he had apparently overlooked the possibility that sooner or later darkness might occur on an overnight camping trip.
Without a word of explanation, Ralph began stuffing his gear into his pack, paying little attention to neatness. He whipped his pack on, pulled his hat down over his ears, and tore out for home, leaving behind nothing of his presence but a few wisps of smoke from the soles of his tennis shoes.
We stared after him in dumbfounded silence. Presently, Birdy said, “Cripes! What happened to Ralph?”
Retch stuck a match in his teeth and pondered the mystery. “Well,” he said, “it looks like Ralph is a homer.
“A homer?” I said.
“Yeah,” Retch said. “You know, a kid that runs home every time it starts to get dark.”
“Ha!” I said. “Homer Pidgin!”
And that was how Homer acquired his nickname. I should mention that we did not hold his flight home against him, or even consider it extraordinary for human behavior, based on the humans we were familiar with. It never occurred to us to exclude Homer from future camping trips, He always came along. Apparently his pleasure in camping at that stage of his life consisted of planning the camping trip in infinitesimal detail, preparing his pack, hiking into the campsite, and joining in the futility of trying to catch enough fish for our supper. At that point he had acquired the maximum pleasure from camping of which he was capable. He then had the good sense to terminate the excursion before it was ruined by darkness.
We soon became accustomed to Homer’s style of camping. As darkness approached and the strange look came over his face, we would matter-of-factly bid him farewell:
“So long, Homer.”
“See you, Homer.”
“Have a good trip.”
Retch, Birdy, and I naturally assumed that Homer had no intention of camping through the night with us, but we were apparently mistaken. As we later deduced, Homer never even considered that he would flee home, until the very moment the urge to take flight came upon him.
What led us to this deduction was a trip we took twenty miles up Pack River, one of our grumbling parents driving us to our destination in the wild upper regions of the river. We were to camp out there for four days or until one of our parents remembered to retrieve us. Of course, we assumed that Homer would refuse to come, since the distance from his home was approximately thirty miles. But as soon as the proposed trip was announced, Homer immediately set about planning and making up his lists. We were puzzled by his intentions, still believing that he included the flight home in any of his camping plans.
We were dumped off at our campsite about seven in the morning, with the parent immediately roaring back toward town in an effort to get to his job on time. I could tell that Homer’s intentions were much on Retch’s mind.
“Uh, say, Homer,” he said casually. “You know, if a fella happened to decide he wanted to run home from here before dark, it—uh—it might be a good idea to start right about now.”
“Are you kidding me?” Homer said. “Who would be dumb enough to run home from here? It’s almost thirty miles.”
Retch shrugged. “Just thought I’d mention it.”
We went through our usual camping routine of building a ring of rocks for our fire, chopping up three cords of firewood, fishing for our supper, and then, suddenly, without warning, the sun slipped behind the mountain. Birdy started preparing our supper of fried wieners, fried potatoes, and fried pork ‘n’ beans. We were all joshing each other and messing around, when I glanced up and saw Homer standing still and silent, with the familiar strange look creeping across his face.
“Don’t try it, Homer,” I said. “It’s too far.”
Birdy looked up from his frying. “You can’t, Homer.”
Retch threw his arm around Homer’s shoulders. “Listen, Home, it’s gonna be all right. You’ll see. We’re gonna have a lotta fun tonight, burn a few marshmallows, tell some jokes, poke at the fire.”
Homer didn’t take off for home, but he didn’t relax either, and the strange look remained. It seemed as if a huge invisible rubber band stretched between Homer and his house, growing ever tighter, and at any second would snap him in the direction of home.
About ten o’clock we climbed into our sleeping bags under the lean-to we had built as a precaution against rain. Homer hadn’t said a word all evening, but at least he was now in his sleeping bag. The rest of us began to relax a bit, assuming that Homer’s urge to flee home had given in to reason. We were about to drift off when all at once we heard the frantic scrabbling of Homer stuffing gear into his pack. Without further notice, he rushed off into the night.
We lay there silently for a while, thinking about Homer scurrying the thirty miles home. As we were mulling over the odds of his making it, lightning flashed and thunder boomed. Then rain began to pound down on our lean-to and, of course, on Homer, out there all alone in the night, racing madly down the road.
“Poor old Homer,” I said. “Think he’ll make it?”
“Yeah,” Retch said. “Probably by about next Tuesday.”
“We should have tried to stop him,” Birdy said. “We had a responsibility to—”
“Shut up, Birdy,” Retch said.
Suddenly it happened. A long, loud, quavering screech came down off the mountain above us. We had never heard anything like it before, the kind of sound that spikes your hair and raises goosebumps the size of peas.
“Cr-cripes,” Birdy whispered. “Wh-what was that?”
“I d-d-d-d-don’t know,” I explained.
“It was s-s-somethin’ b-big, though,” Retch whispered. “Wh-where’s my .22?”
“Y-you didn’t bring it,” Birdy said. “We brought w-w-wieners instead.”
Then the screech came again, louder and closer this time.
“J-j-jeeeez,” Retch said. “I think it’s coming for us.”
“M-maybe it’s just s-some weird bird,” I said.
“You really think it’s only a b-b-bird?” Homer said.
“Y-yeah,” Retch said. “Probably only a b-b-bird. A b-big b-b-bird, though.”
“G-good,” Homer said.
“Homer?” I said. “You’re back?”
“Homer’s back!” yelled Birdy.
“Hey, Homer!” Retch said. “What brought you back, Homer?”
“I don’t know,” Homer said. “I just thought, what the heck, I might as well spend the night with you guys.”
We never did find out what made the horrible screech in the night, and we never heard it again. It did, however, make the night memorable, almost as much as did the last flight of Homer Pidgin.
A Boy and His (Ugh!) Dog
Retch Sweeney’s dog, Smarts, has distinguished himself over the years as the least aptly named animal with which I’ve ever been associated. Retch, of course, thinks Smarts is the Einstein of hunting dogs. For example, as Retch and I were driving his old sedan out for a little bird hunting the other day, Smarts interrupted his pastime of slobbering down the backs of our necks long enough to emit an excited yelp, causing my eardrums to vibrate like bongo skins during a Jamaican festival.
Retch chuckled. “Ol’ Smarts said he can’t wait to get out there and start rounding up pheasants for us.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said irritably.
“He didn’t?” Retch said. “What did he say then?”
“He didn’t say anything. Dogs don’t talk.”
“Well, excuuuuuuuse me!”
“Don’t get your tail in a knot,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t stand all the anthropomorphizing going around nowadays.”
“Me neither,” Retch said, turning thoughtful. “I think it gets spread by toilet seats in public restrooms. But what’s that got to do with dogs talking?”
“Anthropomorphizing,” I explained patiently, “means the attribution of human characteristics to animals or even inanimate objects.”
“Holy cow!” Retch said. “It’s even worse than I thought. I can tell you one thing, I ain’t using public restrooms no more!”
“Let’s forget it,” I said. “All I meant was, I don’t like people pretending their dogs talk, that’s all.”
“Oh yeah? I just so happen to recall you letting on that your miserable old dog Strange used to talk. How about that?”
“That’s different,” I said. “Strange did talk. He could say more with one raised eyebrow than Smarts could yelping night and day for a week. But I’ll admit I didn’t care much for what he had to say.”
“Ha!” Retch said, as if he had just won an argument. “I don’t remember you was very proud of Strange, neither.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said. “I tried to be, but it was impossible, particularly after we learned he was an incorrigible lecher.”
“I didn’t know that. I thought he was mostly mutt with a little spaniel mixed in. How come you to keep a worthless, disgusting dog like Strange anyhow?”
“We didn’t keep him, exactly. He just sort of hung around—for about twelve years.”
As I explained to Retch, when Strange first started hanging out around our place, I didn’t pay much attention to him. I thought he was just passing through our farm on his way home. I fed him a few scraps from the dinner table, thinking he would be gone in a day or two. Weeks later he was still loitering around the house, hitting me up for a handout at every opportunity. When it became apparent that he was intent on establishing a permanent relationship with us, I decided I had better think up a name for him.
Since I was doing a stint in the Cub Scouts at the time, I thought at first that I might name him Scout. It soon became apparent, however, that he was untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, mean, disobedient, uncheerful, unthrifty, cowardly, dirty, and irreverent. I decided it wouldn’t be right to name such a dog Scout.
My mother suggested Stranger, still hoping the dog might be passing through. For a few weeks, we called him Stranger, but this was soon shortened to Strange. The name fit. In the years to come, we would learn only how well.
Strange lived in a dog shack in our backyard. It was a doghouse, of course, but the rest of the family cruelly referred to it as the dog shack, because I had built it with my own two ten-year-old hands. Driven by powerful but vague ambition in those years, I had intended the doghouse to be a replica of a medieval castle, complete with towers and battlements. The project turned out to be much more complicated than I had first imagined, and I finally gave up on it, after completing only one tower (often mistaken for a chimney—but why would anyone think a dog needed a chimney?), a half-dozen battlements, and the drawbridge. Visitors sometimes expressed curiosity about the shallow ditch around the dog shack. It’s surprising how many people don’t recognize a moat when they see one.
The dog shack matched nicely Strange’s shabby pretensions of nobility, and he seemed not to mind it particularly, although he chose to ignore my instruction on how to raise the drawbridge.
During the early part of his excessively long life with us, I still hoped Strange would exhibit some talent or characteristic to make me proud of him. None became evident. He would slouch around making rude comments, swearing, belching, burping, gagging, and in general engaging in any disgusting activity that occurred to him, and many did. Visitors would recoil at his approach, perhaps expecting not so much that he would bite but that he might try to mooch some change for a bottle of cheap wine or sell them some dirty pictures.
More than anything else at that stage of my life, I wanted to be able to brag to the kids at school about some neat trick my dog could perform. I tried to teach Strange to fetch sticks, but he would only shrug and say, “You threw it, stupid, you go get it.” He refused to roll over on command, stand on his hind legs, play dead, heel, sit, or even acknowledge that he had been spoken to. Then one day a marvelous thing happened. Returning home from school, I glanced at the roof of our house, and sitting up there like a degenerate prince surveying his domain was Strange!
My dog climbed houses. Now that was something to brag about. Why he climbed the house, I could not even speculate. How was fairly easy to determine. He obviously had climbed a stack of firewood, jumped from it to the back porch roof, and from there made his way to the roof of the main house.
There was no way for me to know, of course, that my dog’s learning to climb houses was not an isolated incident, but was instead a line of fate that would converge with other lines of fate upon a single point in time and space and produce what is commonly thought of as a coincidence. In this case the coincidence would also be a near-catastrophe. Somewhere it is written that any coincidence traced back far enough will prove to have been inevitable, and I’m sure that must have been the case here.
These were the converging lines of fate:
(1) The long history of genetic malfunctions that eventually combined to create Strange; his aimless meanderings that brought him to our farm; and finally his learning to climb to the roof of our house.
(2) All the genetic and societal forces that combined to shape the particular rebellious nature of my stepfather, Hank; his deciding to grow a beard; and most important, his fractious relationship with my mother’s cousin Winnie.
(3) The continuum of factors that led to the creation of Winnie’s haughty personality, her fractious relationship with Hank, and her peculiar compulsion to visit us for a week or two every year.
Beards were not popular in that era, and that, as much as anything else, was probably why Hank decided to grow one. He was a man who enjoyed going against the grain of society, or at least what little society existed locally. Winnie, who harbored no great fondness for Hank in the first place, associated beards with comic-strip anarchists who went around carrying bombs that looked like bowling balls with fuses. The stubbly growth of beard seemed to prove her suspicions about my stepfather.
Hank, for his part in the relationship, regarded Winnie as a “mindless twit.” Her arrival for the annual visit produced considerable unease for the family, an unease that was well founded, even though Mom had browbeaten Hank to be on his best behavior on this particular occasion. Since even Hank’s best behavior left something to be desired as far as Mom was concerned, the tension in our house during Winnie’s visit could have been “cut with a knife,” to use my mother’s phrase.
“Good heavens!” Winnie greeted Hank immediately upon her arrival. “What is that horrible hairy growth on your face?”
“A beard,” Hank mumbled, picking up Winnie’s suitcase to lug to the upstairs guest room.
“Uh, I think the beard’s kind of … of … dashing,” Mom blurted out with a faint laugh, hoping to extinguish the fuse smoldering in Hank’s eyes.
“Really?” Winnie said. “Reminds me more of tree moss. I suppose various flying insects might find it irresistible, though. Hee hee.”
Hank scurried upstairs with the suitcase, clearly straining to be on his best behavior. Throughout the next few days, Winnie never missed an opportunity to poke fun at Hank’s beard. It seemed to have become an obsession with her. Oddly, Hank never responded with any of the biting and usually off-color wit for which he was locally famous. My guess is that he took considerable pleasure in Winnie’s loathing of his beard, and the more she pecked away at him about it, the keener was his enjoyment.
And then the fates converged.
After breakfast one morning, Winnie announced that she was going to take a long, leisurely bath, and departed upstairs. Hank shook his head in disbelief. “Another bath,” he chuckled. “Why that’s the second bath she’s took in less than a week. What a twit!”
“Now, now,” Mom said soothingly.
Hank and I then went out to clean the rain gutters on the roof. I held the ladder while Hank climbed it to dig away at the muck in the gutter. Strange, already perched on the roof, wandered over to breathe his road-kill breath at Hank.
Hank gasped and choked. “Git out of my face!” he snarled, taking a swipe at Strange.
Strange showed Hank his teeth, made a couple of rude remarks, and then wandered off to another area of the roof, the one containing the dormer window to the bathroom where Winnie was taking her leisurely bath.
As we learned later, Winnie, naked as a noodle, had just emerged from her bath and was drying her hair with a towel prior to putting on her spectacles, without which she was considerably nearsighted. At that very moment, Strange decided to prop his paws on the sill and peer in through the window. Winnie was staring vacantly in the direction of the window. Slowly her eyes came into focus, or as much focus as they were capable of without her glasses. Where, on the other side of the glass, was a hairy, leering face—peeping at her.
As Mom said later, Winnie’s shriek could have wilted the flowers on the wallpaper. It started at a high, marrow-chilling pitch and went up from there, quavering off into a range beyond human hearing. Among the members of the family, all of whom suffered temporary nerve damage, Hank was the closest to the source of the screech. Following his natural instincts, he took off running at the first high warble. He said later that he noticed right off that he was having trouble getting traction. Then he remembered he had been standing on top of a ladder. Fortunately, he had not traveled any great distance when he remembered the ladder and was able to reach back and get a hand and finally one foot on it. He said the exertion of getting back to the ladder took so much out of him that it might have been better just to take the fall and be done with it. But he said he thought Winnie was being murdered, and if he happened to get knocked unconscious in the fall, he would have missed out on it.
