Calling Home

by Janna McMahan

  10

  Roger carried his rod and tackle box through a field of fiercely overgrown fescue dotted with ox-eye daisies. As he entered the cool of the trees that edged the field he stopped to admire a blanket of mayapples, a slick canopy for insects on the ground a foot below. Roger went around so as not to crush the mayapple stand and stepped off a short ledge down into the limestone bed of the creek. Water oozed out of undercut banks from subterranean streams that ate at the earth’s guts. It had rained hard the last couple of days and the creek ran strong. New fish might have washed into his favorite hole.

  The water was still chilly, but mint already lent its heady fragrance to the air. Larkspur, goldenrod, and tiny violets clung to the hardscrabble limestone of the bank. Shiners darted past Roger’s feet. Crawdads backed away and water skaters skimmed the surface of pools out of the main flow. He walked down the creek, stopping occasionally to listen for birds, to examine a snake he saw entwined in tree roots. He could move almost noiselessly if he chose. He sometimes sat still for hours watching snake doctors cruising for luckless insects among the grass and moss that enveloped the rocky edges of the stream. His thin body folded over as he stared down into the water like a giant fishing spider watching and waiting for something interesting to come along.

  A bottlenose turtle caught his attention and Roger crouched to watch its jerky process of devouring a minnow. It extended its neck and tossed the tiny dead fish back and down its throat a half inch at a time.

  Roger heard voices. Intruders in his favorite spot.

  “Cast over there. They like to hang out under limbs.” It was Will, probably fishing with one of his friends. Roger smiled.

  “You got a hit!” An unrecognizable male voice.

  “Damn. C’mere. I got him.” Roger heard the fish’s splashy struggle as Will scooped it out of the water. “Sunfish. Not much good meat on him.”

  “He’s a pretty little thing, though,” the man said.

  “I’ll toss him in the basket so we don’t hook him again.”

  “Got a nibble,” the man said. He had a fancy fishing vest with a couple of lures hooked on a pocket and a goofy hat with flies sticking out all over it. “Come on, you sum-bitch.” The guy jerked his rod back to set the hook. The spool whined as the man let out line, then it made a rhythmic low clicking as he reeled in again. Such an unnecessary way to fish in a creek. Who was he trying to impress?

  “Got a good one?” Will asked.

  “He’s strong.”

  “I’ll get the net.”

  “Shit. Don’t bother. He spit it out.”

  Will walked to the bank, sat down, and lit a cigarette. “Maybe we need to move on down. There’s another good hole not far.”

  “Suits me.”

  “Jim, you ever fish below the dam?” So it was Jim Pickett. Roger had seen him sitting next to Virginia at Will’s games. Seemed like he was always touching Virginia—had his arm around her acting like he was keeping her warm earlier in the year. Now that it was getting hot he’d rub his leg up against her. Next thing, they’d be holding hands. He always stopped by the dugout on his way to the concession stand to talk to Will. Probably giving out baseball advice. Jim had played ball when he was in school. He probably still thought he was hot shit. So it wasn’t enough that he’d been coming around to date Virginia, now he had moved in on Will, too.

  “Yeah, when I lived here before,” Jim Pickett said. “I liked to fish down below the dam, but I never caught nothing but suckers.”

  “Once I caught a twenty-pound cat.”

  “I don’t much care for catfish.”

  “You a bass man?”

  “Yeah, and bream.”

  “They’re plenty of bream in Green River, too. You got any waders? It’s cold, that water coming out of the bottom of the dam, but I don’t like bank fishing much.”

  “I could get some.”

  “All right. We’ll hit Green River next time.”

  Jim pulled a couple of beers from a small cooler and handed one to Will. “You hear anything back from Western?” Roger knew that Western Kentucky was looking at Will. Everybody in town knew. But you would have thought that Roger had no connection to Will, the way people avoided talking to him about it. Only his buddies at the trap shoots allowed Roger a little pride. It wasn’t like Roger hadn’t thrown a few baseballs to the kid. He’d done a lot of toting Will back and forth to practice. But now, most folks in town looked in another direction when they saw Roger coming, like it might pain them to say something nice to him. Like the last few months had wiped out every good thing Roger had ever done in his life.

  “Haven’t heard anything yet,” Will said.

  “They’d do good to get you. You’ve had a hell of a season.”

  “Yeah, I’ve done okay.”

  “Bullshit. When’s tournament play start?”

  “Next week.”

  Will smoked and Jim opened his tackle box and started searching through the trays for another lure. Then he said casually, “What’s your daddy got to say about you going to play at Western? I bet he’s proud as punch.”

  “Shit. I don’t think he even knows.”

  “What? Sure he knows.”

  “I ain’t heard nothing from him.”

  “He don’t come around?”

  “No.”

  “He never comes to see your momma?”

  “No. He left and that was that. Why?”

  “’Cause I’m interested in your momma. I want to be sure she’s over him before I get all invested in courting her. You know what I mean. Plus, I don’t want your old man to show up at my door in the middle of the night with a shotgun.”

  “He’d never do that. He’s too chickenshit. Besides, he doesn’t care about us.”

  “But what about your momma. Does she still care for him?”

  “She took all of his pictures out of the house. I don’t know where. She could of burned them for all I know. He’s dead as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Now he’s your daddy and you shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “Any fool can make a baby, but it takes a real man to be somebody’s daddy.”

  Roger hid in the weeds while his son and Jim Pickett packed up. Will let the fortunate sunfish go for another day, and they tromped off down the creek like two water buffalo, Will trailing the empty mesh basket. Roger remained still until they were out of earshot, then he crept back up the creek to where his car leaned off the road shoulder in the weeds. Roger gripped the leather steering wheel and thought about the time he took Will to the Land Between the Lakes. The boy couldn’t have been more than ten on that trip to Lake Barkley. Will kept getting his line caught in submerged limbs and Roger had to cut it and restring his bobber and hook half a dozen times. But lo and behold, Will got a big hit and Roger thought the fish was going to pull the rod right out of his little hands. He had leaned in to help, but Will said, “No, Daddy! I can do it.” And he had. It took the boy a good fifteen minutes to reel in that fish. Nine-pound three-ounce bass. Best catch of the whole trip. That was the first thing Roger ever mounted. He had been amazed at Will’s determination to get that fish in the boat. That boy always could do anything he set his mind to. Will hung that big bass right over the head of his bed. Roger knew it was still jumping over his son at night, all gray with dust. It was one of his favorite trophies, right up there next to his Mr. Baseball award and Little League MVP.

  The Trans Am dodged a couple of potholes and slid into a space at the back of Bootsie’s Beauty Boutique. He reminded himself again to paint a sign so his shop would look more like a real business. He was thinking about calling it Central Kentucky Game Mounts.

  Roger unlocked the door and stepped into his showroom. His displays were coming together nicely; there was a lot more space here than in the shed behind his house. Deer heads lined the walls, their vacant eyes followed a person around the room. He had quail hunkered down in tall grass and a pheasant perched on a log. In a big glass case he’d done
an Eastern striped turtle display, and a couple of diamondbacks were coiled in brush. He liked to make displays realistic, lifelike, so he put his animals in their habitat by adding leaves and lichen and pebbles in the right spots. He picked up driftwood at the lake for fish displays and collected stumps and limbs for squirrels and birds. It was so much better than a stiff animal that wasn’t in context. Last week, one of the teachers from the high school called to ask if some vocational students could come by to see his shop. He was working on a big barn owl he wanted to finish before the group came. He would have to scavenge a plank off an old tobacco barn for that one.

  The deep freezer in the workroom made a comforting hum, and fog licked his arms when he reached inside to examine the tag numbers on the plastic bags. He found the bag with the deer cape that matched the number on the horns he would be working on and pulled it out. He put the hide on the side of the aluminum sink to thaw and started on a five-point buck that somebody had brought that morning. With his currier knife, he expertly sliced a Y-cut between the animal’s ears, down the back of its neck, and then around the antlers. He peeled the hide from the skull, gently pulling forward until the ears turned inside out. He sawed the rack off and ran his hand over the velvet of the horns. It was odd this guy had velvet at this time of year. It had been a pretty thing, young, with a freckled muzzle and long lashes that made Roger think of Bootsie’s eyes heavy with mascara.

  He trimmed bits of muzzle and hollowed out the ear channels, flicking the debris into the deep aluminum sink. He coated the hide with alum to start the drying process, then he hung the cape on a line alongside six other hides. Deer season started in November, but you wouldn’t know it by the way men around here hunted all the time. Roger was never at a lull, never without a deer to work on. He had done 150 mounts already and it wasn’t even June yet. Not bad for a fledgling business, but sort of sickening when you considered the disregard for open season.

  Roger tossed his cigarette into the sink and lit another. What he really wanted was big-game business. Taxidermists who worked with bears and big cats made tens of thousands of dollars off each mount. But all the big game had been run out of Kentucky a hundred and fifty years ago. Back then, they say there weren’t even deer in Kentucky, but supposedly the Ohio River froze and deer came south across the ice into the state. Some say this happened about the same time the coyote came in. But the coyotes have been about killed out along with the bobcat and nearly all the big predators that kept the deer in check, so what did it hurt if some deer got bagged out of season? That was one less deer to eat somebody’s garden or to jump into a windshield.

  “Catch anything?” Bootsie stood framed by the doorway, a long cigarette caught between her pink talons.

  “No.” Roger considered the mold for this freckle-nosed deer. Should he use the alert position? Resting? Sneaking? Choosing the right position was important.

  “You weren’t gone long.”

  “Changed my mind. Decided to come back and work some.”

  “I had two perms this morning.”

  “I thought it smelled pretty loud in there.”

  “You’re one to talk back here, Mr. Formaldehyde.”

  “I don’t use formaldehyde.”

  “Well, whatever that preservative is you use.”

  “It’s tanning stuff.”

  She ran her hand over a deer’s neck. “It’s so smooth.”

  “Don’t mess up the fur.”

  “I swear, if I have to pick out one more little old blue-haired lady today I’m going to scream. They all think they should have hair like Doris Day and all the kids still want Farrah Fawcett. Shit. Half the people in the town don’t know it’s nineteen eighty. Disco hasn’t even hit here yet.”

  Roger grinned up at her, “We don’t do disco around here. This is rock ’n’ roll country. Don’t you know that, darlin’?”

  “Stop poking at that dead thing and come in here and look what I got,” she said. Roger followed her to the front of her shop. “Ta-da!” Bootsie swept her arms toward a cassette player on a shelf. “Hi-fi!” she squealed. She punched a button and the Bee Gees’ voices quivered into the room. Something about dancing shoes. Bootsie grabbed the back of a swiveling beauty shop chair and leaned way back. She hung there a moment and then flung her long hair forward, and her hips swiveled like they were on greased ball bearings.

  Roger watched her with his mouth slightly open.

  “Come on,” she said. “Dance with me.”

  “Looks like you’re doing okay on your own.”

  “Come on. Don’t be a poopy head.”

  “Somebody might see us.”

  “So what? I don’t care what people think.”

  “Hum,” he said and crossed his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. Bootsie came toward him on those tall shoes, her magical hips rotating side to side.

  “Do I need to shove a dollar down your pants?” he asked.

  In an instant her smile was gone. She was startled, like he had slapped her.

  “What?” He heard that apologetic tone in his voice. The one that surfaced so often when he was with women.

  “Nothing.” She hit the eject button and the music abruptly stopped. She grabbed a broom and started sweeping the hair that ringed the chairs into furry piles. “Go on in the back.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “Well you did, so go away.”

  “Wait. Let’s not fight again. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  She swept like her life depended on it. “You think I don’t know what these people around here are saying about me?”

  “Oh, so you do care what people think.”

  “You’re the one who left your family high and dry. Not me. So don’t talk to me about what people think. Seems to me you’re the one who doesn’t give a damn.”

  “That’s low.”

  She gripped the broom tightly. “Look,” she said. “You’re right. I got a business to run. I can’t do anything to offend my customers in this fucking one-horse town, so drop it.”

  He stood there trying to find something to say that would fix things. The broom swooshed across the floor and twenty women with various colors of hair peered at him from posters along the wall. He used to think they were seductive, but now they just looked judgmental. Roger took the dustpan and pressed it against the floor for her. She swept in a mound of hair and he dumped it into the trash.

  “Isn’t Will graduating soon?” Bootsie asked as she swept, swept, swept.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, what are you going to give him for a graduation present?”

  “He don’t expect nothing from me.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  She started rearranging the combs and brushes and cans of hairspray in one of the two cubicles along the mirrored wall.

  “He got a senior athlete award this year,” Roger said.

  “You should be proud of him.”

  “I am.”

  “So let him know.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand, but it’s better if I stay away.”

  “You left your insane wife, not your kids.”

  “It’s better if I don’t. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why don’t you try me?” She turned to face him with an honest, wide-eyed expression. “What is it with men? You never say what’s really on your mind. You do things and never explain why.”

  “It’s between me and his mother.”

  “Fine. It’s none of my business, but you’re a piss-poor daddy if you think your son doesn’t expect you to acknowledge his high school graduation.”

  “Well, I might go.”

  “Are you going to lurk around in the back like you do at his ballgames?”

  “I don’t want to ruin nothing for him. Or for his momma. That’s why I just stay away and let them have their glory.”

  11

  Kerry unhooked the grommets on one side of the plant bed while Shannon unhooked the other
side. When they rolled back the canvas, a swell of heat rose up and stunned Shannon, stinging her eyes and making her immediately think of the chilled water in the cooler on the back of the truck.

  “You know the only reason I’m doing this is so I’ll be tan tonight,” Shannon said as she hiked up her tube top. “It’s going to kill my nails.”

  “Aw, keep those gloves on and your fingernails’ll be fine.” Kerry looked at her sideways. The sun made him squint. “Besides, it ain’t your fingernails I’m interested in.”

  “Shut up, you pervert.”

  Kerry walked to the truck and grabbed a bundle of burlap sacks. He tossed one at her feet. “God, am I glad these are it.”

  “Are there enough slips for that last acre?” Shannon asked. She squatted and began to gingerly pull the tender tobacco from the plant bed and laid them neatly inside the soggy burlap. In a couple of months, these skinny slips would become a field of bright green plants with broad, gummy leaves.

  “Looks like it. Thanks for helping. We can’t find anybody much to help anymore. Now I know why people used to have such big families.”

  “I don’t mind. I like being outside.” Her shoulders tingled with new freckles.

  “You can come pick hornworms off the tobacco any time,” he said.

  “Ha. Ha. Did you ever talk to your daddy about beneficial insects?”

  “Shannon, you can stop with that ecology stuff. Pop don’t care.”

  “Farmers around here spray way too much poison on their crops.” Shannon straightened up and stretched. “When it rains, all those chemicals run right into our drinking water. Everybody in the county is on well water, and where do you think that comes from? Huh? And we eat fish out of every stream and pond around here.”

  “Don’t go debate club on me now.”

  “Speech club. Don’t you even care about the greenhouse effect?”

  “You pay too much attention to that old crying Indian on TV.”