Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, page 7
Rancid threw the fender down with a metallic ker-whump. “Which one of you boys wants to go fust?”
“Let me try it,” Crazy Eddie said.
Getting no argument from me, he climbed into the cavity of the upside-down fender and lay down on his belly.
“Thet ain’t no way to do it,” Rancid said. “Git up out of thar and let me show you how.”
Rancid got in the fender, sitting upright. “Now hand me the parachute harness.” For an old experienced parachuter, he didn’t seem to know much about putting on the harness, but I suppose so much time had passed since the Great War that he had forgotten. Finally, he simply tied various straps of the harness around his waist and let it go at that. Then he grabbed a cluster of shroud lines in each hand like so many reins.
“Now here’s the idear,” he said. “Eddie, you take the bundle of parachute out in front. When Ah gives the signal, you throw the chute open so the wind can catch it. Pat, you push on the back of the fender to get me goin’ so’s the chute can pull me along. Ah’ll show you how it’s done. Then you fellas can give it a try.”
Crazy Eddie and I, slipping and sliding on the icy roadway and fighting against the fierce wind, took up our assigned positions.
“Okay, ready?”
“Yeah!” Eddie and I yelled against the pounding wind.
“On the count of three!” Rancid yelled. “One! Two! ThreeEEEEEEEEEEEEE … !”
Eddie and I skated along the road, driven by the wind at our backs. There was no sign of Rancid, except an occasional blasted-out snowdrift marked by a spray of tobacco juice and claw marks that looked as if they might have been made by human hands.
After a while we stopped at a farmhouse and knocked. A skinny old man in bib overalls and a flannel shirt opened the door and stared down at us.
“What in tarnation you boys doin’ out in a storm like this? You look half froze. Come in by the fire and thaw out.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But we were lookin’ for our friend, Rancid Crabtree. He went by here on the road about half an hour ago.”
The farmer scratched his jaw. “Nope, can’t say I seen anybody go by. You’re lookin’ for Crabtree, you say. What was he drivin’?”
“An upside-down truck fender,” Crazy Eddie said.
“Yes,” I said. “And he was wearing a parachute and—”
“Oh, Mavis,” the farmer called out to his wife. “Better put some hot chocolate on for these boys. I think the cold’s about got ’em. How do you fellas feel, anyway?”
“I don’t feel so good,” Eddie said. “But I think it may have been some poison mushrooms I ate for lunch.”
“I see,” said the farmer. “Poison mushrooms. Hurry up with that hot chocolate, Mavis.”
After the hot chocolate, and not knowing anything else to do, Eddie and I returned to Rancid’s shack. Much to our relief, the old woodsman came in a short while later, looking like a tattered icicle in more or less human form. The cut ends of the parachute harness dangled from his snow-caked waist.
“You don’t look too good, Mr. Crabtree,” Crazy Eddie said with rare understatement.
Rancid sank down on a chair and dug some snow out of his whitened ears with a blue finger. “Oh yeah?” he snarled. “Wal, you wouldn’t neither if you’d been blowed halfway ‘cross the gol-dang county in a truck fender. Ah’d still be goin’ iffen Ah hadn’t had the good fortune to get snared by a barbwire fence and torn dang near to shreds and …”
As he ranted on, I heard a sad sound from outside. With one last thrust at tearing the shakes from the roof, the wind dropped away with a rattling moan. The blizzard was dying. It had been a fine blizzard, and I was sorry to see it pass away.
Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs
Caught up in the media craze of placing one-hundred-dollar bills end-to-end to see if they reach to the moon and back, as a way of making the national debt more understandable and poignant to the taxpayer, I recently laid all my fly-tying books end-to-end to see how far they reached. They reached from my writing desk to the cat box in the utility room. How far is that? Not nearly far enough, believe me.
“Look,” I said to my wife, Bun. “I laid all my fly-tying books end-to-end to see how far they would reach. What do you think?”
So who cares what she thinks? The point I wished to illuminate with this comparison is simply that an unfathomable copiosity of fly-tying books exists, and I possess most of the copiosity. I have been studying fly-tying books for forty years and have yet to succeed in tying a single fly that resembles anything more than a hair ball.
The fault lies with the books and not with me, despite my childhood nickname of “Thumbs.” Here is the problem. Fly-tying books all contain a powerful spring in the binding. Whenever I reach Step 15 in the tying of a fly, with both hands fully engaged in maintaining a cat’s cradle of thread in the vicinity of a wad of feathers and fur clinging precariously to a hook, the powerful spring is activated and snaps shut like a bear trap. I lean over and open the book with my ear. Using my tongue, I flip pages back to the instructions for the fly. Holding the book open with my chin, I read Step 15 with my nose while telescoping my eyes around to watch what my hands are doing. When the fly is finally finished, I remove it from the vise and place it in my fly box. You never can tell when the fish might go for a hair ball.
The other problem with fly-tying books is that the author has deliberately designed each fly so that it will contain one material that the fly-tyer doesn’t have on hand. This requires the tyer to drive forty miles around town looking for a shop that hasn’t sold the last of the material to some guy who came in fifteen minutes before the tyer arrived. Recently I was tying a fly that called for rubber legs. I rushed down to the nearest sporting goods store, hoping to get there before the guy who always arrives fifteen minutes ahead of me. The lady clerk stared at me wearily, as she always does, her fat elbows propped on the counter.
“You got rubber legs?” I asked.
“No, just tired,” she snarled. “So whatta ya want?”
“I mean rubber legs for fly-tying. You know, the little—”
“Guy come in here just fifteen minutes ago and—”
“Yeah, I know him,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”
Boy, I just hope that guy is fifteen minutes late someday, and I’ll show him a thing or two.
When I reached Step 18 of my latest fly, I could hardly believe my nose. “Next take a pinch of white tail-hairs of calf …” it began. I repeated these words aloud, causing our cat to rise screeching like a banshee from the cat box. “White tail-hairs!” I repeated in a more moderate tone. “Who’s got white tail-hairs of calf?”
Just then my finicky neighbor Alphonse Finley barged into my den and demanded to borrow his lawn mower.
“Oh, all right,” I said irritably. “Just remember to return it.”
“You sound irritable,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s just this stupid fly-tying book,” I said. “The instructions for this fly I’m tying call for white tail-hairs of calf. Now, where am I going to find white tail-hairs of calf?”
Finley studied the makings of the fly in my vise. “Odd,” he said. “Why would a No. 16 hair ball need white tail-hairs? However, I may be able to help you out. I was driving in the country a few miles from here and noticed some calves in a barnyard. If I recall correctly, and I do, they had white tail-hairs, or fairly white, calves being what they are.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s drive out right now and you can show me where they are. I’ll ask the farmer if we can clip a few tail-hairs from his calves.”
“I assure you, my good man, that I have much better things to do than to assist you in clipping hairs from the tail of a calf.”
As I say, Finley is a finicky character. Even so, I was surprised he would dress in a pinstriped suit to mow his grass, as I deduced from the fact that he was thus attired when he came begging to borrow his lawn mower. I called this perversion to his attention.
“Dear boy,” he said, “I have no intention of mowing my lawn in a suit and tie or any other way. I’m going to hire young Raymond down the block to handle the chore for me. I’m wearing a suit and tie because I’m speaking at a luncheon this noon.”
“You’re going to pay Raymond real money to mow your lawn? What will the other bankers think? They might drum you out of the union. Listen, you go out and show me where the white-tailed calves are, and I’ll mow your lawn for free. Actually, I’ll have Raymond do it, since I’ve already advanced him the money for approximately twelve hundred lawn mowings.”
“Really? And I don’t have to do anything else but show you where they are? I just wait in the car?”
“Yep.”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Every time I get involved in one of your escapades, I end up in some humiliating predicament.”
“What could happen to you, Finley? All you have to do is wait in the car.”
Twenty minutes later we drove into the farmer’s yard. Sure enough, Finley had been right. Half a dozen calves with white tails were moseying about in the goo of the barnyard. They were quite a bit larger than I had expected, more the size of adolescent cows than calves, but they did have white tails. How would fish know where the white hairs came from? Would they care? They probably would, at least if they had ever seen a calf mucking around in a barnyard, paying little or no attention to proper hygiene, but that wasn’t my problem. My problem was how to ask the farmer if I could clip some tail-hairs off one of his calves.
I decided on a direct approach: “Sir, this may seem like an unusual request, but I could use a few of your white tail-hairs to tie flies with. You have plenty of them and I doubt if they’re of any use to you. I’d even be glad to pay, and I’ll clip them myself.”
Unfortunately, the farmer failed to respond to my knock on his door, and I assumed that he must have gone to town to buy feed or barbwire, or whatever it is farmers do away from the farm. It seemed unlikely to me that the farmer would miss a few tail-hairs or that he would care one way or the other about the loss. I scribbled out a hasty note informing the farmer of my intended acquisition and inserted three one-dollar bills as payment. Having no idea what tail-hairs go for these days, I guessed that three dollars would be more than adequate. Perhaps, I told myself, the note and the money would alert the farmer to a whole new market, the tail-hair market, which in the long run might prove more profitable than the calves themselves. Not a little pleased with myself over this contribution to the economics of agriculture, I headed for the barnyard.
I climbed through the barnyard fence and extracted from a pocket my folding fly-tying scissors, looking around for a promising candidate. Much to my somewhat nervous surprise, for I had expected the calves to be suspicious of strangers, the herd of a half-dozen or so converged upon me and began nuzzling my clothes with their slimy muzzles. I attempted to shove away the friendliest of my assailants, but they were a stout and aggressive lot. Apparently disappointed that I didn’t conceal a feedbag somewhere on my person, they began to bump me about in a rather rude fashion. Trying my best to ignore their brazenness, I selected one of the nasty beasts and began to work my way down his back in the direction of his tail, but the calf, suspecting that I was up to something not in his best interest, quickly swung his rear end away from me. He had repeated this maneuver several times, when I heard a supercilious chuckle from Finley. He was standing there, one foot propped on a fence board, thoroughly enjoying my lack of success.
“C’mon, Finley, be a good sport,” I said. “Give me a hand here.”
“You must be mad,” Finley replied. “Do you think I want to get calf slime or worse all over my new suit?”
At that instant, the other calves lost interest in me and wandered off to other parts of the barnyard, while the one in my embrace amused himself by trying to suck the buttons off my shirt.
“It’ll only take a second, Finley,” I said. “Just come over here and hold the calf, while I clip off some tail-hairs. Then I’ll drive you back to town for your luncheon.”
“Oh, all right.” Finley tiptoed through the barnyard ooze, complaining about its effects on his shiny black oxfords. “What shall I grab on to, the ears?” he asked in a whiny tone scarcely conducive to arousing confidence in his skill as a calf-wrangler.
“No, I’ll hold him by the ears until you can get a good grip on his tail. Leave the white hairs hanging down, so I can slip back and cut some off.”
A grimace puckered Finley’s face as he gingerly took hold of the calf’s tail.
“Got a good grip?” I asked. “Okay, I’m letting go of the ears.”
“Just hurry, that’s all I—!”
The calf had lunged forward. Finley’s feet spun in the muck. Flailing his legs wildly in an attempt to regain his balance, he pulled the tail straight back from the point where it was hooked onto the calf, thus saving himself from a disgusting fall. The calf, deciding it had had enough of Finley’s uncouth intimacy, charged across the barnyard. Finley sailed after it in the angled posture characteristic of water skiing, a sport at which luckily he is proficient, for the calf’s tail made an extremely short tow rope.
I rushed after the two of them, hoping to get my white tail-hairs while Finley still had the calf in hand. Upon glimpsing me in hot pursuit, the calf, alas, broke into a frenzied gallop, with the result that Finley’s shoes now sent up two curling and overlapping wakes of barnyard muck. The other calves, caught up in the excitement, stampeded ahead of Finley and his calf, all of them bellowing and bawling and in general creating an uproar typical of the bovine species. I must say the whole hullabaloo was beginning to get on my nerves, particularly the bellowing, not the least of which came from Finley.
I wondered briefly if perhaps Finley might be enjoying himself, since as a child I had often played grab-the-cow-tail in our own barnyard. As the calf rounded the corner of the barn, however, and as Finley cut a wide arc and jumped the curl of his own wake in the classic manner of the expert water skier, I was disabused of the notion that the man was having fun. His spectacles were askew on his nose, his eyes protruded like soft-boiled eggs from egg cups, and his pinstriped suit had acquired a splattered effect not unlike that of a Jackson Pollock painting, only in a bland monotone lacking aesthetic appeal.
It was upon rounding the corner of the barn myself that I discovered that the farmer was home after all. In a nearby field, two men, one of them presumably a hired hand, were tinkering with the innards of a tractor. They straightened and turned to determine the cause of the commotion, namely Finley’s skiing, rather stylishly I must admit, behind one of the farmer’s calves. Naturally I can’t say for sure, but judging from the expressions on their faces, I would venture to guess this was the first time the farmer and his hired hand had witnessed an event of this sort.
Approaching the far end of the barnyard, the calf gunned itself into a right-angle turn, at which moment Finley let go of its tail and skied gracefully into the fence, to which he clung in an attitude that suggested extreme agitation. The farmer and his hired hand moved somewhat cautiously in Finley’s direction, each carrying a large wrench, and neither perhaps entirely dismissing the possibility that, instead of a mere prankster in a business suit, they might be confronting a lunatic.
At this point I decided that Finley, after all, was an articulate person and fully capable of explaining the situation as well as I. Just in case that wasn’t well enough, I returned to the car and revved up the engine, pausing only briefly to remove from the farmer’s door my note and the three dollars. As I told Finley when next I saw him, I certainly wasn’t going to pay for white tail-hairs I didn’t get.
Nude, with Other Wildlife
In my youth, there were two things I wanted to be when I grew up: either a mountain man or an artist. Deep down, I had a strong preference for mountain man, but even at a young age I realized that course in life was closed to me because of a severe handicap—acute fear of the dark. I had given much thought to inventing a portable night-light suitable for mountain darkness, but its bulk would have been impractical. It was too easy to imagine a band of hostile Indians closing fast on me as I galloped uphill, towing my night-light. So I opted for artist.
From age seven to ten, I worked very hard at becoming a wildlife artist. My first efforts revealed enormous talent, recognized only by my mother. I would show her one of my drawings, and she would say, “Very nice maybe you’ll be an artist when you grow up have you seen my car keys?” Without such encouragement, I surely would have given up, if for no other reason than the ridicule directed at my art by my sister, the Troll. Once I had the bad judgment to show her a picture I had drawn of a mallard duck in flight. She turned the drawing this way and that, studying it intently.
“I’ve got it!” she exclaimed, as if I had asked her to solve a puzzle. “It’s a dead chicken run over by a car and flattened out on the road, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“But why did you put that dog collar around its neck? Chickens don’t wear collars.”
“It’s a pet chicken,” I said.
“What’s the dead chicken got in its mouth? Looks like a piece of toast.”
She was referring, of course, to the duck’s bill. I was still in my straight-line phase, and I suppose it was possible for a person ignorant of art to mistake a duck’s bill for a rectangular piece of toast. Later I would experiment with curved lines.
Although I worked exclusively on wildlife art, I also wanted to paint nude women. I never mentioned this to my mother, and certainly not to the Troll, since our family was devoutly religious and probably would have been upset by a ten-year-old boy bringing home nude models to paint. With the exception of my dog, Strange, I was the only deviate in the family.
