The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories

by Patrick F. McManus

  “It’s true, though,” Tipple said. “A man is just going to be more careful in his selection of the person he is going to share most of his life with.”

  “That’s my point exactly. So how come you figure he selects his wife with more care than he does his fishing and hunting pals?”

  When I got home, I told my wife about the results of Tipple’s research. She laughed herself sick. “I can’t believe it,” she said, wiping away tears of mirth. “And Bert calls himself a scientist. Someone must have pulled the plug on his computer.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know how much time I spend checking out prospective hunting and fishing companions. A person can’t be too careful about a serious matter like that. Make one little mistake, and you can end up with a real dud.”

  “You’re telling me!” Bun said.

  One of the qualities I treasure in Bun is that she’s so agreeable.

  “Come to think of it,” I mused. “I guess I’ve made my share of mistakes in picking hunting and fishing companions. Boy, some of them were real doozies.”

  “Which reminds me,” Bun said, “your old buddy Retch Sweeney called this afternoon.”

  “Oh, yeah? What did he want?”

  “He said he wanted to remind you about the fishing trip, and that when you come to pick him up to bring an extra fly rod and waders, the rubber raft, the grub and beverage, and the bail money.”

  “Bail money?”

  “Yes, apparently he and another gentleman got into an altercation down at Kelly’s Bar & Grill, and Retch was sitting on the man, tickling him under the arms to get him to say ‘Enough!’ when he noticed the badge on the man’s vest.”

  “Badge?”

  “Yeah. What’s a SWAT team anyway?”

  “A SWAT team?”

  “Yes. Do you think it’s a serious offense to lock a SWAT team in the ladies’ john? I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was saying, he was laughing so hard. Anyway, my impression was there wouldn’t have been any problem if the prowl car he borrowed hadn’t run out of gas just north of the city limits. What do you make of it?”

  “Same ole, same ole,” I said. “He’s lying.”

  Really fine outdoor companions like Retch Sweeney don’t just grow on trees, although some persons would argue the point, Bun being one of them. I, of course, deserve some credit for making Retch what he is today. Believe it or not, he used to be a loud-mouthed, belligerent oaf who spent all his time eating, drinking, bowling, fighting, lying, gambling, hunting, and fishing.

  One day I reached the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore and told him he had better knock it off.

  “Geez,” he said in a hurt tone. “What don’t you like?”

  “The bowling,” I said. “Actually, I can tolerate bowling. It’s the bowlers, I can’t stand.”

  I’m happy to report that Retch gave up the bad habit instantly and hasn’t bowled in fifteen years.

  I must confess I haven’t been so lucky in the selection of all my hunting and fishing companions. I’ve had my share of slackers and sluggards, boors and bores, know-it-alls, nitpickers, lunatics, and lummoxes. Each of these characters in his own right was a master of disguise, who revealed his true self to me only after the last vestiges of civilization had disappeared far behind us.

  I remember one chap who pretended to be a ball of energy while we were loading the car for a trip into the wilderness. “Here, let me load that canoe for you. No, no, I can handle it myself. I’ll just slip it up there on the rack all by myself, no trouble at all.”

  The only time he bothered to lift a hand after that was when the camp cook asked who wanted seconds.

  While most of these characters were your standard dyed-in-the-wool misfits, two individuals in particular continue to occupy a special place in my memory.

  As with all of the aforementioned mistakes in my judgment of character, a chap I’ll call Ned managed to win my confidence and admiration by passing himself off as an average human being. The flaw he somehow managed to conceal until we were two days into a week-long canoe trip. I was cooking our breakfast the first morning out, when he squinted through the smoke and asked, “Have you heard the one about the two campers?”

  I said I hadn’t.

  So he told me the joke about the two campers. It was a very funny joke, and I laughed and laughed, little realizing that my response would turn loose a monster. I even thought, what a delight it is to camp out with a man who actually knows how to tell a joke.

  But scarcely had I finished wiping my eyes with my handkerchief than he said, “I bet you haven’t heard the one about the eyes and handkerchief. Well, it seems. . .” and away he went with another joke. It was funny, too. By the fifth joke in the endless series, I had exhausted all my joke mirth, even though I continued to laugh at each one, simply to be polite.

  “It’s getting late,” I said. “We had better get the canoe loaded.”

  “Wait! Wait!” he cried, grabbing my arm. “You’re going to love this one. It seems. . .”

  The deluge of jokes continued for the rest of the trip. If we were shooting at rapids, dodging rocks, fighting the grasp of a whirlpool, I would hear over the roar of the water, “Hey, Pat, you’ll love this one. It seems. . .”

  I think the only safe way to select an outdoor companion is to hook him up to a lie detector.

  You: “Do you tell jokes?”

  Candidate: “No, I hate jokes.”

  You: “OK, you pass.”

  Candidate: “I should mention that I fatally wounded my last two hunting companions.”

  You: “No problem. You pass.”

  One other thing I’ve learned is that when you are hunting with a new companion, never tell him the truth. When I was young and didn’t know any better, I worked in a public relations firm. One day I mentioned something about deer season opening soon. “Hey, great, another hunter!” the fellow next to me said. “I’ve just taken it up! What say we go deer hunting together?”

  “Well, all right,” I said. He seemed decent enough. Now even though I worked in public relations, I felt one should always tell the truth when asked a question. Yes, yes, I know now that that is really stupid, but I was about to get a lesson in lying. Never, never lie halfway. It will do you no good. If you’re going to lie, go full throttle with the biggest one you can come up with.

  One day, Fred, as I’ll call him, asked me to join him and his girlfriend for lunch. I said sure. We met the girlfriend at the restaurant. I managed to conceal my shock. Agnes was the homeliest girl I had ever seen. She turned out to be very nice, and I ended up liking her a great deal.

  A week later, Fred and I headed up into the mountains on our first hunt together. He was driving. Off on my side of the car, the mountain dropped off sharply. I imagined the wheels of the car occasionally knocking rocks off into space. That’s when Fred turned to me and asked out of the blue, “Say, what did you think of my Agnes’ looks?”

  I must admit I was startled by such a personal question. My public relations background should have come to my rescue, in which case I would have said, “Why, she’s gorgeous! She should be in films! I can’t imagine what she’s doing with a homely guy like you.” And so on. Instead of lying through my teeth, I lied just a little bit.

  “She’s not so bad,” I said, gazing out the window into the distance and trying to be kind.

  Fred almost drove off the mountain.

  We swerved this way and that, sometimes out in empty space and then back on the highway again, and so on. Finally, Fred shouted. “Not so bad! Not so bad! Why she’s beautiful!’

  So what do I know! Beauty must actually be in the eye of the beholder.

  That’s something to remember when you’re going to spend a night out in the mountains with a guy armed with a loaded gun. Tell full-blown lies and never back off even for a second, even when your hunting companion asks what you think of his girlfriend’s looks. Even if she is the most beautiful girl you have ever seen, improve on her sta
rtling beauty and do so generously. You will still fall short, but never so far as saying, “Not so bad.”

  The same goes for the camp cook. When he says, “How was breakfast?” you say it was the best breakfast you have eaten in your entire life.

  He says, “I thought the fried potatoes were a little overdone.”

  You say, “Not at all. I loved the crunching sound they make.”

  Unless you actually enjoy camp cookery and want to take it up yourself, tell the camp cook his meals are the best thing you’ve eaten since you last visited France. Indeed, come to think of it, his cooking puts those French chefs to shame, particularly his bacon flambé. So you’ve never been to France—what’s the problem?

  Hardly anyone knows how to tell a decent lie anymore, and if it weren’t for politicians and fishermen the sport might die out altogether. What really frightens me, though, is that recently I have run across a number of younger anglers who don’t seem to have the slightest notion about even the fundamentals of good lying, let alone know anything about the relationship of lying to fishing.

  One young fellow, for example, was telling me about how he had this nice trout almost netted, when it suddenly threw the hook and got away. Since he was so young, I decided to play straight man for him.

  “How big was he, Bob?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’d say nearly two pounds.”

  “Two pounds?” I said.

  He backed off a little. “Well, maybe only a pound and a half.”

  “A pound and a half!” I yelled. “Nobody has a fish get away that weighs only a pound and a half!”

  “They don’t?”

  “Of course they don’t,” I said. “I myself never allow a fish to get away that weighs less than five pounds. Usually they weigh a whole lot more. If they weigh less, you might as well keep them.”

  Bob didn’t even know what I was talking about. “No lie?” he said.

  “No lie?” I cried. “Of course, a lie! What do you think fishing is all about anyway?”

  “Catching fish?”

  I shook my head solemnly. “The greatest joy in fishing comes not from the fish you catch, but from the lies you tell about the ones that got away.”

  He seemed deeply moved by those simple words and said he had never heard that before. Then I could see that I had been a little hard on him. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about learning proper lying but that he just hadn’t been raised right and lying had been left out of his education.

  “Didn’t your old man teach you any lying when he was showing you how to fish?” I asked kindly.

  Bob became indignant. “My father doesn’t lie!”

  “Not your father,” I said. “Fathers don’t teach their kids to lie. I mean your old man.”

  “What old man?”

  “Every kid has an old man,” I said. “If he’s really lucky, he’ll have a dirty old man. How else would he learn to spit between his teeth, roll his own smokes, cuss properly, and lie?”

  “I missed out, I guess,” Bob said. “Nope, I didn’t have an old man, dirty or otherwise. . .”

  There was the problem. You just have to feel sorry for a youngster who has been deprived like that. It occurred to me that maybe the population is getting so out of whack that there aren’t enough old men to go around anymore. I decided to do what I could for Bob and sat him down right there on a rock and proceeded to give him a short course in the fine art of lying.

  “I don’t like the idea of lying,” Bob said.

  I nodded. “I can understand that. Lots of folks like yourself simply don’t have the proper upbringing. I tell you what, Bob, I’ll teach you how to speak the truth that works just like a lie—even better, sometimes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It works like this. Let’s say you come back from a fishing trip and somebody asks, ‘How did you do?’ ”

  “‘Terrible,’ you say, telling the truth. ‘I didn’t catch a fish over twenty pounds.’”

  “Twenty pounds,” Bob said. “I’ve never caught a fish over twenty pounds.”

  “Right. So you’re telling the truth. But the fellow you’re talking to will think you normally catch fish over twenty pounds, and that’s why you appear disappointed. But you haven’t told even an itty-bitty lie, have you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, there you go, Bob.”

  “I wish I’d had an old man.”

  I smiled. “Tell you what. I’m not quite an old man yet, but I’ve been thinking about getting into the business. Maybe I’ll practice on you, Bob.”

  “Gee, that’s great, if you can teach me to lie without really lying.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “Creative lying is just the start of what you can learn from an old man,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do on you, Bob, I can see that. We’d better get started. I’ll probably even be an old man by the time I’m done.”

  A Chainsaw Kind of Guy

  B

  arney Wapshot’s wife gave him a chainsaw for Christmas. I was furious. Barney is not a chainsaw kind of guy. It’s unlikely he will ever use it to make chainsaw comments to guys at his golf club: “I was going to crank up my chainsaw the other day and cut down a few trees, but then some guests showed up for drinks and hors d’oeuvres by the pool.” I hate that sort of pretense, particularly in a guy whose wife gave him the chainsaw in the first place. If you’re a real chainsaw kind of guy, you go out and buy your own.

  Whatever on earth prompted Winnie, that’s his wife, to give Barney a chainsaw, I don’t know. Maybe she was sending him a message like, “I wish you were more like Pat—he’s a chainsaw kind of guy.”

  Or maybe Winnie was thinking about the economy. Anytime the economy goes to heck in a hand-basket, people start thinking about chainsaws, and how they could go out in a national forest and cut enough firewood to last through the winter: “At least we’ll be warm, even if we have to huddle around the fireplace.”

  Winnie would certainly be right if she thought I was a chainsaw kind of guy. In fact, I have two chainsaws. Three, if I count the electric. The electric’s OK for trimming limbs around the house, but totally useless for cutting firewood out in a national forest, unless you have an awfully long extension cord. Besides that, it makes only a wimpy little sound rather than a decent roar.

  The other two saws are gas models, but one of them is broken. Actually, it may not be broken, because I took it apart and repaired it myself. On the other hand, you don’t want a chainsaw to explode on you. Those saw teeth flying all over the place can really hurt, particularly if you’re not a chainsaw kind of guy.

  What happened was that my chainsaw was spewing gas all over the place, which alerted me to the possibility that something might be wrong. I should point out here that no chainsaw kind of guy ever wants to take his saw into a chainsaw repair shot, except as a last resort. First, he tries to fix it himself.

  WARNING: Do not try to repair your chainsaw yourself, unless you are familiar with gas engines and sharp instruments flying about, and know what you are doing.

  The problem with my chainsaw, I quickly deduced, was that the little plastic hose that runs from the gas tank to the thingamajig had come loose. Right away, I guessed that this was the reason the saw was spewing gas all over the place. I slipped the hose back on the doohickey and fastened it down with a glob of acrylic something-or-other I’ve had on a shelf in the garage aging for the past nine years. So far, I haven’t worked up the nerve to pull the starter cord, but sooner or later one of my sons-in-law will be over, and I’ll be able to give him a little experience with a chainsaw.

  Anyway, I mentioned to my wife, Bun, that I’ve been thinking about buying another chainsaw. I said, “You know what with the economy being what it is, we might want to put in a good supply of wood from the national forest, enough to last us through the winter, just in case. That way, we would at least be warm, even if we had to huddle around the fireplace.”

  I should mention here that Bun
is not a chainsaw kind of wife. Furthermore, I don’t like to hear a woman respond to a serious suggestion with a laugh.

  “Haw!” she laughed. “You’re not getting another chainsaw until you get rid of the two you already have out in the garage. I stumble over one or the other every time I go out there.”

  I tried to explain to her that a chainsaw is almost impossible to get rid of. If you’re giving it away, the potential recipient already knows it probably doesn’t work. The garbage people don’t want you sneaking it into your garbage can, and the dump people have no category for chainsaws that are spewing gas all over everything. They view them as threats to the environment. What’s a dump for, anyway?

  So I’m keeping my chainsaws.

  I have been associated with chainsaws all my life, since I was a teenager. Before that, we used a big crosscut saw. Back in those days, you would have a logger friend haul you in a couple of buckskin tamarack logs in the fall, each one slightly smaller than a railroad tank car. After school each day, the kid in the family would go out and saw a block off one of the logs. One block, split up into heater chunks and cook-stove pieces, was enough to keep the home fires burning for a day. Sometimes, unless your friends were really smart and wary, one of them would come home with you and help you saw off the block of firewood.

  I was only seven or eight the first time I ever sawed with a partner. He complained that I was “riding the saw.” That’s an expression you don’t hear much anymore. Anytime someone wasn’t doing his share of the work back then, he was said to be “riding the saw.” I heard it a lot. The expression must have been very popular in those days. What it meant was that after you had pulled the saw to your side of the log, you were supposed to relax your arm so that your partner didn’t have to pull both you and the saw back. You usually didn’t commit this sin until your arms were about to fall off. It wasn’t that I didn’t know about riding the saw, but simply that I kept forgetting. As a seven-year-old, I had a lot of other things on my mind.

  By the time I reached my teens, chainsaws had come along. For a person who had spent his early youth riding the saw, I thought they were one of the greatest inventions of all times. A logger we knew would loan us his chainsaw when he wasn’t using it, and my stepfather and I would mow down trees like tall grass and whip them into firewood lengths. The saw was only slightly heavier than a Buick. It had a chain on it that could slice through a log like a knife through butter. Once my stepfather fell on the saw, and we had to take him home in quart jars. No, only kidding. Fortunately, the saw wasn’t running at the time of his fall. He did get some really nice scars, but I thought it a rather risky way to get them.