Beer Nuts as Bait
Saturday, July 15Ð
7:30
p.m.-
I feel like I should
be doing something else, am annoyed by a vague disquiet. Reading by the fire,
smoldering smoke lazing up then angling away, sun streams brightening the
scene behind western trees. What is this sense of "ought" I'm pestered
by? I came here to paint and read and write.
The painting is done for today, a heavy watery primer layer of oil-based porch and deck paint has been slathered to the rutty inside floor. Collected firewood awaits the next re-stoking. EZ's at my feet, asleep and unflinching as the fire restlessly adjusts, hissing explosively like an authentic skin-on bratwurst bursting its juices onto hot coals. A strange sound somewhere in the stacked wood against the cabin has baffled me on infrequent moments--just now again, like an owl trying to hoot across an empty beer bottle, making himself heard a pluckish fool.
Dolly is a panicked near-forty. She works part-time at the Store as cook, clerk, waitress, re-stocker, and local news source. She's usually there from noon to six on the days she works. It's easy to know when. Her dark gray '86 Sedan DeVille Cadillac with the fake leather roof can be seen hugging the Store's west wall, nose against the south stoop of the tavern annex. All who've patronized the Store (if only briefly for directions to the nearest casino), have been filled in on the mechanical history of Dolly's Cadillac. Arnie, the guy down the road, who owns a littery salvage concern and fixes cars in his spare time, knows her Cadillac inside and out. He's replaced the transmission with one from a '92 Camaro, wiggled a radiator in out of an '82 one-ton Dodge truck, "when they still made 'em right", and installed a "reverse-capacity differential" off an '88 Caprice wagon. The windshield leaks but Arnie assures her, "it won't next time when it don't need to."
Dolly distrusts her Caddy for long trips.
Launching her narration out near the punchline, I assume I must already know these people and the calamities she's retelling, because of the familiar way she parades them along. I sit bewildered as she escorts familiar characters ahead through this present event: "Ethel told Virgil to put the groceries in the trunk before she got back from the bathroom, and he did just like she wanted but, then, when the broccoli tipped onto the jumper cables the gas line burst just before Sady lit Marco's cigar...."
But that's Dolly's accommodation to friendliness. Everybody is family around there.
She is a writer. She writes a column, published weekly in The Askov American, a Main Street weekly newspaper filled with reports from correspondents who live in surrounding small communities. She enthusiastically recounts visits by neighbors from neighbors, and medical day trips to Duluth, heightening the impact with lavish rations of exclamation points.
Dolly came in at noon one day. Scurrying out of her jacket, she set about refilling the snuff shelf and restocking orange juice in the cooler, fussing about her domestic living conditions: the modem had melted during the night, and her hung-over husband had missed--mostly--the toilet in the dark and she had another, "migraine blower the size of Brattleboro." The whole Store heard her suffering. An old guy, sitting at Herb's table lit up with, "how dare everybody in the house be in a crabby mood and when it's your turn. Shame on them."
She did her work anyway, ignoring insensitive chauvinism.
Somebody asked, "what's the forecast?"
She shouted, "Gonna' rain tonight, tomorrow and forever!"
The UPS man arrived with a package for Herb and a mind for coffee. (Delivery men and route drivers always have a mind for coffee by the time they arrive.) Herb opened the box with his coffee spoon and pulled out a greeting card and a spray of inorganic roses with a pink plastic "50" surrounded by a cheery display of plastic hearts.
Dolly went over, whispered in his ear. He nodded, she leaned down and kissed him on the cheek.
Then the propane delivery man showed up. He ordered coffee and blueberry pie and sat at my table. We tortured through a brief round of chit-chat. Dolly came over, sat down and chattered about her world: Bruce's garage lights that don't, Delbert's cousin Abner who punched Einer for spindling a wagon wheel wrong, and Evie and Ed's appalling wreck caused by that cornstarch spill on the Excelsior Expressway last Wednesday night around 10:30 after baby-sitting at Charlene's.
The propane man already knew about these matters because he nodded.
This afternoon during a lull while clerking at the Store, she shared her fantasy tattoo with Leon and a frequent visitor, straining a right leg out across the table, dramatically outlining that a she-cougar on her shin would be just right, but the prospect of pain had, so far, prevented her from going through with it. She knows a lady friend who once got a long slender dragon needled to her upper thigh. She swung her chair into open view, spread short-shorted thighs wide, inviting us to ogle a smooth expanse of bare upper thigh beginning three inches near her groin ... without apparent shyness or notice that the two male observers no longer heard her words, but instead were considering the scene. She seemed oblivious to the effect this sort of demonstration works upon a man's physiology. She compensates for a dull existence with a husband who pays her no mind, and a fortieth birthday looming in two weeks. Is anybody listening?
Sunday--
Got up around 8:00 this morning. Primer coat of paint is dry, even where I impetuously drained out the last of it near the north door. It's a tip-toe sensation to walk across shiny new paint underfoot, like sacrilegious defilement. Got coffee water heating, then sat by the fire to read. (Am three-fourths through The Fountainhead after two weeks; a Contemporary Literature assignment.) Sky cloudy, air became heavy with moisture during the night. Rolled a Top cigarette. (Meg claimed today that a man down the road, recently diagnosed with lung cancer and given six weeks to live, was told by his physician to quit smoking, "but, if you must smoke, smoke Top." I thought the days of doctors' tobacco testimonials ceased back in the forties. His claim was to Top's purity and freedom from sickening chemicals.)
Finished coffee and set about laying the second coat of paint. Decided yesterday to do the living room in two stages. The paint rolled on like wallpaper, thickly filling raised grain and nail holes. Backed myself out the south door, emptied the leftover paint into the bucket, cleaned up with white gas. I cautiously sidled into the kitchen across the narrow stove mat, re-heated coffee, poured it, turned and strode straight through the new paint ... instantly gooey-slick underfoot. Two bright footprints, two more on the rubber mat beside the door, then two fainter ones on the steps outside. Grabbed the roller and dipped it into the nearly empty bucket, and covered my tracks perfectly. No one will know ... except for two bright "Desert Sunset" footprints in a place where they oughtn't be.
10 a.m.-
Herb came upon an immature bald eagle while fishing on Grace's Lake last week, tangled in fishing line, lunging and leaping against invisible tethers. It was freed and brought home. He dialed a call to an Audubon facility some miles away, prompting a response from an eagle Expert who picked the bird up and whisked it away for evaluation. She's bringing the eagle back today at 1 p.m. for release at the same spot it'd been found.
I took the camera to the Store for recharging. AT&T Don and Herb were there, discussing Axel, who'd stayed at Don's for the night, being too unconscious to drive home.
"He got up around 3, couldn't sleep, smoked a couple cigarettes, drank a couple beers, then slept again. He got up again at 5:30 for another smoke and a beer."
Don came for breakfast around 8:00, "just as Axel got up and opened another beer."
"Speak of the devil." Axel walks in, beer in hand, red-eyed, ratty orange baseball cap settled low, the bill hiding his face in semicircle. He poured coffee then slumped at the table.
We talked for fifteen minutes. I left when Axel got up to get beer and Herb arose to deliver breakfast menus to an elderly couple dressed in church clothes.
12:45 p.m.-
Arrived back at the store for the eagle event. Axel, slobbing down a can of Busch and rising to make his way to the cooler for another was shirtless and comfortably less refined than this morning, eyes boiling red, speech aggressive and slurred and stridently loud, garbling to Dolly that he was "git'n tar'd" of reading her name in the court report.
"No, you've read Bruce's more off-ten than mine. In fact, remember, I got out of that speeding ticket?"
"You gah'ouv it?
"Yeah. Barney Fife never sent me anything in the mail."
Eagle lady arrived around 1:15 in an extra-long van with government plates. Young and vibrant in T-shirt and shorts and sandals, and a remarkable bruise on an inner calf. (Herb reckoned her boyfriend missed his aim.) Another young lady emerged companionably from the passenger side; a friend brought along to share the momentous event. Both evoked a sense that they'd have fit perfectly into the early 70's, exuding politic ideals like sharing the earth, helping mankind do better and, "Taking the time today to help others enjoy tomorrow," as stenciled on the back of Eagle Lady's shirt. Decent level-headed souls who know who they are and what's important in life.
Dolly phoned Meg and Herb next door. They emerged immediately as though they'd been sitting on kitchen chairs inside the door. Axel swayed out into the parking lot, with the rest of us trailing. Dolly held the door wide and shouted another story. Leon led the way in his truck, Meg and Herb followed in theirs, then Eagle Lady, then Don and I in his pickup. Axel and his dog Pepper took up the rear, weaving through dismal billows of dust ... rattling-bang, headlights on for safety inside the murk.
Graces Lake is a fifty acre bog surrounded by swamp. Its only access is over a sinking sand trail, dumped through cattails by the DNR some years ago. Barely room for five vehicles on the landing--never mind a boat trailer--it offered a sunny stage to set Eagle free.
The crowd gathered loosely around the van. Pepper jumped out of Axel's open door, roamed through legs, peed on dusty tires and nearby brush, and flipped up a twig for us to throw. Eagle Lady opened the side door and inserted her hands into a pair of thick elbow-length leather gloves.
It's difficult to recognize competence (or lack of it) when nothing is known about a specific skill. Especially one requiring gloves like that. Eagle Lady appeared confident of her task ... fresh-faced good looks aside. Inexperience is often concealed behind fertile vernacular, so as to appear right, and we think Experts know more than me. Sometimes not.
Eagle Lady launched into a timely lecture about proper avian maneuvers, molting treatments, indicative maturation characteristics, and told us to get away fast when eagle eyelids constrict. (She's likely given this talk a few times to field-tripping third graders.)
"Okay. Let's go ahead. What I'm going to do is like, grab him and try to get him into a position called a 'cast,' so I'm like, holding him so his (performing an upward curving motion with both arms) belly is facing you guys and I like, have his feet, and his wings and I go like, like this." She flings both arms high, like a basketball granny shot.
"And I'll toss him up and let him like, go."
She turns to open the Pet Porter dog cage.
"Ooo, you want Pepper out here?," suggests Meg to Axel.
(Pepper is directly behind Eagle Lady, staring, panting.)
"Peh'er, git in the truck ..." Axel whistles wetly, leans down to Pepper's face and points to his truck. (Meg titters) "Peh'er!, git'in the truck (Pepper heads toward the open van door)--naw, na' 'at truck. Peh'er! (Continuing to point) G'wan now ..."
Pepper ignores. Axel tips back his can and totters backward.
Eagle Lady reaches
in with gloved right hand, and extracts the bird by a thigh, pulls it out,
head down, dangling, wings limbering wide, an impossible spread. Grabbing
the other leg, then binding the two together in one hand, she collapses eagle's
wings against its body ... now swinging it upright, respectfully imposing.
Axel belches, then
sneezes. Eagle Lady's friend flinches and swipes at the back of her neck.
It is impossible
to know the largeness of an eagle from afar, lazing along high on cloudless
updrafts. I see an eagle soaring and know it's large. But comparative size
means nothing. Only when the seven-foot wingspan of an immature eagle is held
near a human body for comparison does it become impressive. Curving three-inch
beak jutting between attentive eyes. No panicked flapping, only a vivid capacity
to do with itself--because of itself--what man can only covet.
Eagle Lady weaves
through the crowd like trying not to slosh a too-full goldfish bowl.
"Peh'er go
lay down!
Leon, braced like
a Minolta-sponsored combat photographer, snaps a photo as she baby-steps past.
Nearing the water's
edge, she orders the crowd to "stand back." Pepper barks. Eagle
startles, topples and dangles upside down. (Axel quips: "you oughta'
git a whip and a shair.")
Wings are re-folded
and eagle is righted.
"Peh'er!"
Eagle lady walks toward the water and stops at the edge.
"You guys like, ready?"
As one we exclaim, "yes we are!"
With a great upward heave she launches Eagle out over the water.
He flaps, mighty wings whooshing, then sinks to the water ten feet from shore, wings spread like feathery pontoons.
"Oh no!"
Pepper, alert to the new commotion, angles toward the water, head low, eyes terrible. Snuffling.
"Pepper!"
It is not Axel who issues this stormy command. Pepper hesitates without retreat, swinging side to side, nose sniffing.
"Everybody like, get away from the water, okay?"
Eagle Lady coaxes Eagle onto shore. Pepper circles, whining. Wings, dripping
wide and strutting on the sand, Eagle looks like comedy, an intoxicated penguin
on roller skates, flapping useless wings. No fear. Only bewilderment. Eagle
Lady lunges. Eagle lurches away, a toddler with a new game. Pepper closes
in, head low, eyes enthusiastic.
Meg: "Maybe Pepper should go in the truck!"
Eagle Lady crouches, stalking Eagle through reedy shoreline grasses. A sudden stream of two-way radio "dit-dots" erupts from Axel's DNR radio. Eagle bolts deeper into the three foot-high grass. Meg titters: "it's all going to be fine.
Another charge, thigh seized. Eagle dragged by one leg, lifted, swung upside down. Both legs gripped tightly. A loon cries out over the lake.
Axel yells "God damnit. C'mere Peh'er!"
Eagle Lady holds the flapping Eagle upside down, trying to fold him back up. "I know!," she coos. "I'd be pissed too."
Indecision. This audience benefits none but itself. Eagle would do better if we were not there. So would Eagle Lady in her task ... freed of this intrusive gawking crowd. Old guy with an enormous video camera, his wife in full dither wearing her restaurant apron, order pad peaking above a front pocket, their son with his neck-strung camera sniping at Mother to, "put that stick down! It'll only encourage him to bark! What's the matter with you? PUT IT DOWN!"
Axel, shirtless, beer can in hand, throwing belligerent instructions to Eagle Lady to, "le'me give a go at it," and, "Let's have a barbecue!" and, "gimme the gloves," reddening moment by moment with sunburn and beer; AT&T Don standing silent, without prop or impulse to interfere.
"Stick him on the lightbar of my truck."
Axel's suggestion draws Eagle Lady's glance along his gesturing finger.
"I don't think so."
"I'd take the a'tenna off ...? How 'bout we keep him for longer an' sell him at a zoo?"
She winces, turns away, scanning the sky for guidance.
"You could put him on the cab of my truck. (AT&T Don) It's high. He'd get a good launch from there."
Axel blurts: "We c'stick him on the hood of my truck and I c' back way up and drive fast at the water den slam on the brakes. Den he'd fly. Hah-Hah-Hah." (He's serious)
Eagle Lady is growing uncertain, optimism diminishing to tight-lipped resignation over this ordeal; sensing that these are good people only trying to help with something they know nothing about. Sometimes that makes it worse. Impossible to snap and shout at interfering decent folk. Nothing to do but grip the lip and dog-DAMN-go-away! through this debacle.
A yellow disposable camera materializes in Axel's left hand. He leans in low and close for an Eagle mug shot, clicks, stands, sways and announces, "got it!"
Lady decides AT&T Don's idea is all she has left. He lowers the tailgate--a ledge three feet high. She raises an unsteady foot but, holding the bird with both hands, can't boost herself up. Don puts his hands out, palms up, places them under her buttocks and pushes. She rises and stands. (Other males, I notice, covetously observe this act.) She sets Eagle scrabbling across the oxidized sheet metal. He finds balance.
Axel seizes a splintered posthole digger handle and begins waving it menacingly, thrusting it toward the bird. Meg, seen through the truck window, is sneaking sideways, smiling up, cooing sweetness to Eagle, offering a handful of beer nuts she'd brought along as bait. Eagle staggers away in fright.
Eagle Lady's friend, holding the back of her neck, graciously declines a swig of Axel's beer.
Eagle has found a precarious balance on the roof. Not moving, wings half-furled for balance like a tightrope walker, surveying his gang of voyeurs. Eagle Lady fetches a pair of binoculars and scans for a solution to her sun-drenched dilemma.
"We could have a cookout," offers Axel.
Herb says, "The nest was blown down two weeks ago in the storm."
Eagle Lady again takes charge, suggesting that this eagle perhaps is, like, not about two years old as was earlier believed. Rather, he's too young to fly.
"Maybe he needs to fluff his wings?" (Axel)
Eagle Lady soothes the crowd by stating that she'll whisk the youngster to the Raptor Center in St. Paul where he'll be taught to fly, where he'll be safe. Then she'll alert us all when it's time for his re-release. She grabs Eagle from the pickup roof, folds wings and claws into themselves, hastens to the van, inserts him into the dog cage.
Meg says, "he's hungry and needs a good rest." She sets the bag of beer nuts beside the cage on the van floor.
Door closed.
Nice words about how it's not yet time for, "wild majesty to be free." Eagle Lady and friend jump into the van and slam the doors. Much backing and turning, steering wheels crimped, sand scoured by tires. She smiles into her rearview mirror, surges away. Party's over. We submerge into hot trucks.
Axel shouts about barbecue, arcs another empty beer can into his pickup and whistles at Pepper to git in. Meg sits low in her passenger seat, sun glinting off the windshield, Herb, glancing back at the expanse of red truck he's negotiating around thickets. Leon sneers knowingly at the fate of this day and climbs into his Ford. Axel isn't ready for it to end, lurching aside to direct traffic on the narrow swamp of land as another truck and trailer pull in. AT&T Don picks up Axel's half-drunk beer from the sand and we head out.
Turning onto the gravel I see an open bag of beer nuts in the ditch.
Parking at the Store Dolly throws the door wide, questions and answers streaming simultaneously.
Door dents screeching against sheet metal, Don and I dismount and go inside. Herb's already sitting at the table, smiling and nodding to himself.
Axel lights a cigarette and sits down beside Herb. Dolly jabbers. Don sits at the round table. Meg has gone back to her other life next door. Leon is not there.
Axel takes a beer from the cooler and stands shirtless and weary, passions keen, present-tense words still vivid on his lips. He sits back down and stares at a point on the tabletop's design, cigarette bobbing between lips, smoke whisking away, wind from the fan blowing hard hot air. A tidy older couple steps inside, he clad in plaid shorts and tennis shoes; she non-descript and nearly invisible, soothing him. Dolly rushes with menus and gladness and verbal assault.
Herb mumbles a joke, directed at Axel but with everybody else in mind, though loud enough only for Axel to hear. Herb's face beams mirth and grins at us all. Axel cackles dully and farts, then re-centers his gaze back down at the table.
Dolly launches a
new narrative. Axel loudly recounts a fire he once fought while on duty for
the DNR. Herb's telling another joke. AT&T Don is summarizing the Eagle
Episode. And I sit, trying to capture something
from the chaotic voices. Four conversations running simultaneously. Four people
talking, eyes flitting from one to the next, for someone to hear. Old couple
has quietly submerged into their menus. Fan drones, hummingbirds soar and
perch, then evaporate outside the screen, bug-zappers "zit" in the
kitchen, the sun flares bright. Everything is just right.