by Richard Ford
“Coon-ass bastards,” my father said. “Jumpin’ the shooting time. They have to do that. It’s genetic.” He seemed to be addressing no one, just sitting leaned against the blind’s sides, waiting.
“Already been shootin’ time,” Renard Junior said, his gaze fixed upwards. He was wearing two wooden duck calls looped to his neck on leather thongs. He had yet to blow one of the calls, but I wanted him to, wanted to see aV of ducks turn and veer and come into our decoy-set, the way I felt they were supposed to.
“Now is that so, Mr. Grease-Fabrice, Mr. Fabree-chay.” My father wiped the back of his hand across his nose and up into his blond hair, then closed his eyes and opened them wide, as if he was trying to fasten his attention to what we were doing, but did not find it easy. The blind smelled sour but also smelled of his whiskey, and of whatever ointment Renard Junior used on his thick hair. My father had already gotten his black-and-white shoes muddy and scratched, and mud on his tuxedo pants and his pink shirt and even onto his forehead. He was an unusual-looking figure to be where he was. He seemed to have been dropped out of an airplane on the way to a party.
Renard Junior did not answer back to my father calling him “Grease-Fabrice,” but it was clear he couldn’t have liked a name like that. I wondered why he would even be here to be talked to that way. Though of course there was a reason. Few things in the world are actually mysterious. Most things have disappointing explanations somewhere behind them, no matter how strange they seem at first.
After a while, Renard produced a package of cigarettes, put one in his mouth, but did not light it—just held it between his damp lips, which were big and sensuous. He was already an odd-looking man, with his star shirt, his head too big for his body—a man who was probably in his forties and had just missed being a dwarf.
“Now there’s the true sign of the yat,” my father said. He was leaning on his shotgun, concentrating on Renard Junior. “Notice the unlit cigarette pooched out the front of the too expressive mouth. If you drive the streets of Chalmette, Louisiana, sonny, you’ll see men and women and children who’re all actually blood-related to Mr. Fabrice, standing in their little postage-stamp yards wearing hip boots with unlighted Picayunes in their mouths just like you see now. Ecce Homo .”
Renard Junior unexpectedly opened his mouth with his cigarette somehow stuck to the top of his big ugly purple tongue. He cast an eye at my father, leaning forward against his shotgun, smirking, then flicked the cigarette backward into his mouth and swallowed it without changing his expression. Then he looked at me, sitting between him and my father, and smiled. His teeth were big and brown-stained. It was a lewd act. I didn’t know how it was lewd, but I was sure that it was.
“Pay no attention to him,” my father said. “These are people we have to deal with. French acts, carny types, brutes. Now I want you to tell me about yourself, Buck. Are there any impossible situations you find yourself in these days? I’ve become expert in impossible situations lately.” My father shifted his spectator shoes on the muddly floor boards, so that suddenly his shotgun, which was a beautiful Beretta over-under with silver inlays, slipped and fell right across my feet with a loud clatter—the barrels ending up pointed right at Renard Junior’s ankles. My father did not even try to grab the gun as it fell.
“Pick that up right now,” he said to me in an angry voice, as if I’d dropped his gun. But I did. I picked the gun up and handed it back to him, and he pinned it to the side of the blind with his knee. Something about this almost violent act of putting his gun where he wanted it reminded me of my father before a year ago. He had always been a man for abrupt moves and changes of attitude, unexpected laughter and strong emotion. I had not always liked it, but I’d decided that was what men did and accepted it.
“Do you ever hope to travel?” my father said, ignoring his other question, looking up at the sky as if he’d just realized he was in a duck blind and for a second at least was involved in the things we were doing. His topcoat had sagged open again, and his tuxedo front was visible, smudged with mud. “You should,” he said before I could answer.
Renard Junior began to blow on his duck call then, and crouched forward in front of his peach crate. And because he did, I crouched in front of mine, and my father—noticing us—squatted on his knees too and averted his face downwards. And after a few moments of Renard calling, I peered over the top of the straw wall and could see two black-colored ducks flying right in front of our blind, low and over our decoys. Renard Junior changed his calling sound to a broken-up cackle, and when he did the ducks swerved to the side and began winging hard away from us, almost as if they could fly backwards.
“You let ’em see you,” Renard said in a hoarse whisper. “They seen that white face.”
Crouched beside him, I could smell his breath—a smell of cigarettes and sour meat that must’ve tasted terrible in his mouth.
“Call, goddamn it, Fabrice,” my father said then—shouted, really. I twisted around to see him, and he was right up on his two feet, his gun to his shoulder, his topcoat lying on the floor so that he was just in his tuxedo. I looked out at our decoys and saw four small ducks just cupping their wings and gliding toward the water where Renard had left it open. Their wings made a pinging sound.
Renard Junior immediately started his cackle call again, still crouched, his face down, in front of his peach crate. “Shoot ’em, Buck, shoot ’em,” my father shouted, and I stood up and got my heavy gun to my shoulder and, without meaning to, fired both barrels, pulled both triggers at once, just as my father (who at some moment had loaded his gun) also fired one then the other of his barrels at the ducks, which had briefly touched the water but were already heading off, climbing up and up as the others had, going backwards away from us, their necks outstretched, their eyes—or so it seemed to me who had never shot at a duck— wide and frightened.
My two barrels, fired together, had hit one of Renard’s decoys and shattered it to several pieces. My father’s two shots had hit, it seemed, nothing at all, though one of the gray paper wads drifted back toward the water while the four ducks grew small in the distance until they were shot at by the other hunters across the pond and two of them dropped.
“That was completely terrible,” my father said, standing at the end of the blind in his tuxedo, his blond hair slicked close down on his head in a way to make him resemble a child. He instantly broke his gun open and replaced the spent shells with new ones out of his tuxedo-coat pocket. He seemed no longer drunk, but completely engaged and sharp-minded, except for having missed everything.
“Y’all shot like a coupla ’ole grandmas,” Renard said, disgusted, shaking his head.
“Fuck you,” my father said calmly, and snapped his beautiful Italian gun shut in a menacing way. His blue eyes widened, then narrowed, and I believed he might point his gun at Renard Junior. White spit had collected in the corners of his mouth, and his face had gone quickly from looking engaged to looking pale and damp and outraged. “If I need your services for other than calling, I’ll speak to your owner,” he said.
“Speak to yo’ own owner, snooky,” Renard Junior said, and when he said this he looked at me, raised his eyebrows and smiled in a way that pushed his heavy lips forward in a cruel, simian way.
“That’s enough,” my father said loudly. “That is absolutely enough.” I thought he might reach past me and strike Renard in the mouth he was smiling through. But he didn’t. He just slumped back on his peach crate, faced forward and held his newly reloaded shotgun between his knees. His white-and-black shoes were on top of his overcoat and ruined. His little pink carnation lay smudged in the greasy mud.
I could hear my father’s hard breathing. Something had happened that wasn’t good, but I didn’t know what. Something had risen up in him, some force of sudden rebellion, but it had been defeated before it could come out and act. Or so it seemed to me. Silent events, of course, always occur between our urges and our actions. But I didn’t know what event had occurred, only
that one had, and I could feel it. My father seemed tired now, and to be considering something. Renard Junior was no longer calling ducks, but was just sitting at his end staring at the misty sky, which was turning a dense, warm luminous red at the horizon, as if a fire was burning at the far edge of the marsh. Shooting in the other blinds had stopped. A small plane inched across the sky. I heard a dog bark. I saw a fish roll in the water in front of the blind. I thought I saw an alligator. Mosquitoes appeared, which is never unusual in Louisiana.
“What do you do in St. Louis,” I said to my father. It was the thing I wanted to know.
“Well,” my father said thoughtfully. He sniffed, “Golf. I play quite a bit of golf. Francis has a big house across from a wonderful park. I’ve taken it up.” He felt his forehead, where a mosquito had landed on a black mud stain that was there. He rubbed it and looked at his fingertips.
“Will you practice law up there?”
“Oh lord no,” he said and shook his head and sniffed again. “They requested me to leave the firm here. You know that.”
“Yes,” I said. His breathing was easier. His face seemed calm. He looked handsome and youthful. Whatever silent event that had occurred had passed off of him, and he seemed settled about it. I thought I might talk about going to Lawrenceville. Duck blinds were where people had such conversations. Though it would’ve been better, I thought, if we’d been alone, and didn’t have Renard Junior to overhear us. “I’d like to ask you . . .” I began.
“Tell me about your girlfriend situation,” my father interrupted me. “Tell me the whole story there.”
I knew what he meant by that, but there wasn’t a story. I was in military school, and there were only other boys present, which was not a story to me. If I went to Lawrenceville, I knew there could be a story. Girls would be nearby. “There isn’t any story . . .” I started to say, and he interrupted me again.
“Let me give you some advice.” He was rubbing his index finger around the muzzle of his Italian shotgun. “Always try to imagine how you’re going to feel after you fuck somebody before you fuck somebody. Comprendes? There’s the key to everything. History. Morality. Philosophy. You’ll save yourself a lot of misery.” He nodded as if this wisdom had just become clear to him all over again. “Maybe you already know that,” he said. He looked above the front of the blind where the sky had turned to fire, then looked at me in a way to seem honest and to say (so I thought) that he liked me. “Do you ever find yourself saying things in conversations that you absolutely don’t believe?” He reached with his two fingers and plucked a mosquito off my cheek. “Do you?” he said distractedly. “Do ya, do ya?”
I thought of conversations I’d had with Dubinion, and some I’d had with my mother. They were that kind of conversation— memorable if only for the things I didn’t say. But what I said to my father was “no.”
“Convenience must not matter to you much then,” he said in a friendly way.
“I don’t know if it does or not,” I said because I didn’t know what convenience meant. It was a word I’d never had a cause to use.
“Well, convenience matters to me very much. Too much, I think,” my father said. I, of course, thought of my mother’s assessment of him—that he was not better than most men. I assumed that caring too much for convenience led you there, and that my fault in later life could turn out to be the same one because he was my father. But I decided, at that moment, to see to it that my fault in life would not be his.
“There’s one ducky duck,” my father said. He was watching the sky and seemed bemused. “Fabrice, would you let me apologize for acting ugly to you, and ask you to call? How generous that would be of you. How nice.” My father smiled strangely at Renard Junior, who I’d believed to be brooding.
And Renard Junior did call. I didn’t see a duck, but when my father squatted down on the dirty planking where his topcoat was smeared and our empty shell casings were littered, I did too, and turned my face toward the floor. I could hear my father’s breathing, could smell the whiskey on his breath, could see his pale wet knuckles supporting him unsteadily on the boards, could even smell his hair, which was warm and musty smelling. It was as close as I would come to him. And I understood that it would have to do, might even be the best there could be.
“Wait now, wait on ’im,” my father said, hunkered on the wet planks, but looking up out of the tops of his eyes. He put his fingers on my hand to make me be still. I still had not seen anything. Renard Junior was blowing the long, high-pitched rasping call, followed by short bursts that made him grunt heavily down in his throat, and then the long highball call again. “Not quite yet,” my father whispered. “Not yet. Wait on him.” I turned my face sideways to see up, my eyes cut to the side to find something. “No,” my father said, close to my ear. “Don’t look up.” I inhaled deeply and breathed in all the smells again that came off my father. And then Renard Junior said loudly, “Go on, Jesus! Go on! Shoot ’im. Shoot now. Whatchyouwaitin’on?”
I just stood up, then, without knowing what I would see, and brought my shotgun up to my shoulder before I really looked. And what I saw, coming low over the decoys, its head turning to the side and peering down at the brown water, was one lone duck. I could distinguish its green head and dark bullet eyes in the haze-burnt morning light and could hear its wings pinging. I didn’t think it saw me or heard my father and Renard Junior shouting, “Shoot, shoot, oh Jesus, shoot ’im Buck.” Because when my face and gun barrel appeared above the front of the blind, it didn’t change its course or begin the backward-upward maneuvering I’d already seen, which was its way to save itself. It just kept looking down and flying slowly and making its noise in the reddened air above the water and all of us.
And as I found the duck over my barrel tops, my eyes opened wide in the manner I knew was the way you shot such a gun, and yet I thought: it’s only one duck. There may not be any others. What’s the good of one duck shot down? In my dreams there’d been hundreds of ducks, and my father and I shot them so that they fell out of the sky like rain, and how many there were would not have mattered because we were doing it together. But I was doing this alone, and one duck seemed wrong, and to matter in a way a hundred ducks wouldn’t have, at least if I was going to be the one to shoot. So that what I did was not shoot and lowered my gun.
“What’s wrong?” my father said from the floor just below me, still on all fours in his wrecked tuxedo, his face turned down expecting a gun’s report. The lone duck was past us now and out of range.
I looked at Renard Junior, who was seated on his peach crate, small enough not to need to hunker. He looked at me, and made a strange face, a face I’d never seen but will never forget. He smiled and began to bat his eyelids in fast succession, and then he raised his two hands, palms up to the level of his eyes, as if he expected something to fall down into them. I don’t know what that gesture meant, though I have thought of it often—sometimes in the middle of a night when my sleep is disturbed. Derision, I think; or possibly it meant he merely didn’t know why I hadn’t shot the duck and was awaiting my answer. Or possibly it was something else, some sign whose significance I would never know. Fabrice was a strange man. No one would’ve doubted it.
My father had gotten up onto his muddy feet by then, although with difficulty. He had his shotgun to his shoulder, and he shot once at the duck that was then only a speck in the sky. And of course it did not fall. He stared for a time with his gun to his shoulder until the speck of wings disappeared.
“What the hell happened?” he said, his face red from kneeling and bending. “Why didn’t you shoot that duck?” His mouth was opened into a frown. I could see his white teeth, and one hand was gripping the sides of the blind. He seemed in jeopardy of falling down. He was, after all, still drunk. His blond hair shone in the misty light.
“I wasn’t close enough,” I said.
My father looked around again at the decoys as if they could prove something. “Wasn’t close enough?” he said. �
��I heard the damn duck’s wings. How close do you need it? You’ve got a gun there.”
“You couldn’t hear it,” I said.
“Couldn’t hear it?” he said. His eyes rose off my face and found Renard Junior behind me. His mouth took on an odd expression. The scowl left his features, and he suddenly looked amused, the damp corners of his mouth revealing a small, flickering smile I was sure was derision, and represented his view that I had balked at a crucial moment, made a mistake, and therefore didn’t have to be treated so seriously. This from a man who had left my mother and me to fend for ourselves while he disported without dignity or shame out of sight of those who knew him.
“You don’t know anything,” I suddenly said. “You’re only . . .” And I don’t know what I was about to say. Something terrible and hurtful. Something to strike out at him and that I would’ve regretted forever. So I didn’t say any more, didn’t finish it. Though I did that for myself, I think now, and not for him, and in order that I not have to regret more than I already regretted. I didn’t really care what happened to him, to be truthful. Didn’t and don’t.
And then my father said, the insinuating smile still on his handsome lips, “Come on, sonny boy. You’ve still got some growing up to do, I see.” He reached for me and put his hand behind my neck, which was rigid in anger and loathing. And without seeming to notice, he pulled me to him and kissed me on my forehead, and put his arms around me and held me until whatever he was thinking had passed and it was time for us to go back to the dock.
My father lived thirty years after that morning in December, on the Grand Lake, in 1961. By any accounting he lived a whole life after that. And I am not interested in the whys and why nots of what he did and didn’t do, or in causing that day to seem life-changing for me, because it surely wasn’t. Life had already changed. That morning represented just the first working out of particulars I would evermore observe. Like my father, I am a lawyer. And the law is a calling which teaches you that most of life is about adjustments, the seatings and reseatings we perform to accommodate events occurring outside our control and over which we might not have sought control in the first place. So that when we are tempted, as I was for an instant in the duck blind, or as I was through all those thirty years, to let myself become preoccupied and angry with my father, or when I even see a man who reminds me of him, stepping into some building in a seersucker suit and a bright bow tie, I try to realize again that it is best just to offer myself release and to realize I am feeling anger all alone, and that there is no redress. We want it. Life can be seen to be about almost nothing else sometimes than our wish for redress. As a lawyer who was the son of a lawyer and the grandson of another, I know this. And I also know not to expect it.
