The Grasshopper Trap

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Yeah, yeah,” Retch Sweeney says. “And I suppose you helped your grandma chop the heads off clay pigeons, too!”

  I haven’t yet told him about the deeply disturbing childhood experience I had with a clay pigeon, because he probably would only scoff. There was also an extremely traumatic event involving the bull’s-eye of a paper target, but I would rather not speak about it.

  Birds have caused me the most problems, however. Take crows, for example. I crawl on my belly over ice and snow and sharp rocks to a place of concealment above a game trail. I crouch there, cramped and freezing, until months later I hear the sounds of deer or elk moseying up the trail. I ease off the rifle safety, curtail my breathing, gently bend my trigger finger to crack the ice from it. Any moment now. Suddenly there is a rush of wings. A crow flies into the tree above me.

  “Holy smokes!” he squawks. “There’s a guy down here with a gun! What are you doing with that gun? Hey, fellows, there’s some joker crouched under this tree with a gun!” Instantly other crows take up the cry, reporting my presence to the world at large. The woods are in turmoil. I manage nevertheless to get off a single shot, but miss, which doesn’t surprise me. When it’s panicked and angling away from you at top speed, a crow is almost impossible to get in the crosshairs.

  A crow once caused my veracity to be called into question. My veracity at the time wasn’t of particularly good repute anyway, and the crow didn’t help matters. One day when I was about fifteen, I strolled aimlessly out of the house eating a cinnamon roll, and there right in front of me was a crow, perched on top of the family sedan. I was somewhat surprised, since the car was inedible and too big for the crow to steal. Continuing to amble toward the car, I expected the crow to fly off at any second. But it didn’t. It just stood there, eyeing me and my cinnamon roll.

  When I was right next to the car, the crow still hadn’t flown. I became slightly nervous. The crow did a little shuffle with his feet, and then said in a clear voice, at least clear for a crow, “Hello.” He sounded a bit like George Burns.

  I was dumbfounded, never having met a bird that spoke human before.

  “Hello,” the crow said again, possibly thinking that I was slow-witted or hard of hearing.

  I made a quick check to the left, right, and behind me, not wishing to be caught in the act of conversing with a bird, and then said, “Uh, hello.”

  The crow, it turned out, knew quite a few words, and we carried on something of a conversation, which, though it fell somewhat short of a discussion of politics or philosophy, was sufficient to cause me no little amazement. I must admit that at first I had difficulty identifying the particular topic of our little chat, but I soon deduced that for the crow’s part it involved my cinnamon roll. This was communicated to me less from the words spoken than from the crow’s cocking his head to eye the roll. I gave him half of it. He then flew off, and I never saw him again. At least I don’t think I ever saw him again, since he bore an exact resemblance to all other crows. Occasionally I would yell “Hello!” to a passing crow, but he would look at me as if I must be mad, talking to a crow.

  The crows, however, weren’t the only ones to think I was, as my carpenter stepfather put it, “about a half-bubble off plumb.” Immediately after the talking crow’s departure, I rushed into the house to report the news. It was a Sunday, and the family was sitting around the dinner table playing cards.

  “Guess what!” I shouted. “There was a crow standing on top of the car just now, and it knew how to talk!”

  All eyes turned toward me, even as they narrowed to slits of suspicion and disbelief. Lips tightened in preparation for directing slander at my person. But my mother, a woman who did not casually dismiss odd and rare phenomena as being beyond the realm of possibility, turned to my grandmother and said, “Whose bid?”

  There was the time, too, when a vicious grouse charged out of the brush and broke my arm. I, of course, had seen ruffed grouse charge people before, but it was apparently a new experience for the horse I was riding, or so I judged from its attempt to climb a mature ponderosa pine. The horse was well up into the lower branches, when … But my psychiatrist says I’m to try not to think about it, and he’s probably right.

  The Outing

  Afterwards, my mother, grandmother, and sister all wailed and gnashed their teeth and claimed that I had ruined them socially, a classic case of overreaction if I had ever seen one. You would have thought I was the first person in history to receive a dishonorable discharge from the Cub Scouts.

  What initiated the whole disaster was Mr. Wilson’s getting sick, or so he claimed, thus leaving our den of Cubs without an adult leader for our first overnight outing.

  “I’ll be the leader, then,” I volunteered. “I know how to build fires and stuff.”

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Slocum, the den mother. “That would never do. I’m afraid the trip must be postponed until some gentleman is available to lead you.”

  All the Cubs groaned, knowing it would take weeks or months for one of the mothers to browbeat her husband into leading us on an overnight outing.

  “Hey!” I said. “I bet I know somebody who can take us!”

  “You do?” said Mrs. Slocum. “That’s wonderful! Why don’t you ask the gentleman?”

  Rancid Crabtree rocked his porch chair back against the slab wall of his shack, spanged a round of tobacco juice into a rusty coffee can, wiped his chin stubble on his sleeve, and said, “Tell me again, what was it Mrs. Slocum called me?”

  “A gentleman.”

  Rancid nodded thoughtfully, apparently in agreement with this assessment of his character. “How come you and the widder Slocum was talkin’ about me anyways?”

  “Oh, why, she’s the den mother of us Cubs. Her son Richie is a Cub and every week we meet at the Slocum mansion and tie knots and stuff. Boy, is she ever rich! They even got two cars.”

  “So?” Rancid said. “What about me? Where does me being a gentleman come in?”

  “I was just getting to that. You see, we don’t have an adult leader, a gentleman actually, to take us on an overnight camping trip. So I volunteered you.”

  Rancid’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You gotcher nerve! If you thank Ah’m gonna nursemaid a bunch of you brats on a campin’ trip, you got another thank comin’. Jist thankin’ about it makes maw rheumatiz act up. Hand me thet quart jar of maw rheumatiz medicine.”

  I handed him the jar and watched him take a big enough swig to cure half the county of rheumatism.

  “I thought you might feel that way about it,” I said. “But you know how rich and pretty Mrs. Slocum is, and I thought maybe while you were in picking up us Cubs to go on the camping trip, you and Mrs. Slocum would get to talking and she would invite you in for coffee when we got back. You know, she doesn’t have a man around the house to fix things for her, just ol’ Richie, and he doesn’t amount to much, so maybe she would say, ‘Rancid, there’s something wrong with the light in the bathroom. Do you suppose you could fix it for me?’ And you would fix her light and she would be so grateful that after a while you and her would go out dancing together and after that maybe get married and you would be rich. But I suppose you’re right. Well, so long, Rancid, I got to get home.”

  “Wait!”

  I hardly recognized Rancid when his old truck rattled up in front of the Slocum mansion the following Saturday. He was wearing new bib overalls, an old suit jacket, a reasonably white shirt, and his battered felt hat. His face was clean-shaven and pink from scrubbing.

  “Rancid!” I shouted. “You look great!”

  “Don’t holler,” he said, wincing. “It harts maw hide.”

  Mrs. Slocum swept down the walk from the mansion holding out her hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Mr. Crabtree. Pat has told me so much about what a fine woodsman you are. I just know you will teach the boys some wonderful nature lore. It’s divine of you to take the boys camping.”

  Rancid blushed, shaking her hand. “Waal, Ah was a Grub once mawse
f!”

  “Cub,” I corrected him.

  “Cub, Ah mean.”

  “Oh, you’re so amusing, Mr. Crabtree. May I call you Rancid?”

  “Shore.”

  By then all the other Cubs had loaded the gear into the back of the truck and were yelling for us to get started. Rancid and I got in the cab and the other boys climbed on behind. Mrs. Slocum took out a dainty handkerchief and waved it at us as we roared off down the street.

  “Have a good time, all,” she called after us.

  Rancid grinned all the way out of town. “You see how she wanted to call me Rancid right off,” he said. “Ah guess Ah ain’t lost it yet!”

  “Lost what?” I said.

  “Ain’t none of yer bidness.”

  Rancid drove up along Pack River until we came to a Forest Service campground. He pulled in and stopped.

  “Okay, Grubs, this is it. Git off and set up camp.”

  The Cubs stared at the campground.

  “We don’t want to camp here, Mr. Crabtree,” Robert said. “This is practically civilization. We want to climb to the top of that mountain, where it’s wild.”

  “Yeah,” Henry joined in. “We want to climb the mountain. If we camp here, we won’t even get to carry our packs. It won’t be like a real camping trip.”

  The rest of us Cubs shouted agreement.

  Rancid slapped his leg. “Gol-dang, what am Ah thankin’ of? ’Course it wouldn’t be like real campin’. It’s been at least a week since the b’ars et thet pore fella up on the mountain, but they’s probably not real hungry already. Gitcher packs on and let’s go.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Richie. “This campground seems pretty good to me. Why don’t we stay right here, close to the truck?”

  The other guys said the campground was looking better to them all the time. “Who wants to climb an old mountain anyway?” said Norm.

  “I didn’t hear anything about bears eating anybody,” I said to Rancid.

  “Shut yer yap and go fix a fahr,” he said. “Ah got to step behind them trees over thar and prepare maw rheumatiz fer a night on the hard, cold ground.”

  As soon as camp was set up, the Cubs started begging Rancid to teach them some nature lore.

  “What kind of insects are these, Mr. Crabtree?” Delbert asked.

  “Jist yer basic wild bugs,” Rancid said, cutting a chaw of tobacco from his plug.

  “What’s the name of that bird flying around up there?” Melvin asked.

  Rancid squinted up at the sky. “Iggle—a baldheaded iggle. Bet you Grubs never seed a baldheaded iggle before. Went bald from baby iggles askin’ it so many questions. Now why don’t you boys go poke sticks in the fahr or somethin’?”

  That night as we sat around incinerating marshmallows, Rancid hunched over the campfire with a blanket around his shoulders. “This was yer idear,” he growled to me out of the corner of his mouth. “The gol-dang skeeters is eatin’ me alive. Ah know’d Ah shouldn’t of took no bath! Even iffen Ah wake up daid in the mornin’, Ah’m gonna hunt you down and whup the tar outta ya fer gittin’ me inter this mess.”

  “But …” I started to say.

  “Mr. Crabtree,” Delbert broke in, “why don’t you tell us some ghost stories? Something real scary!”

  “Don’t know no ghost stories,” Rancid muttered.

  “Don’t you know any scary stories at all?” somebody asked.

  Rancid thought for a moment. “Hmmmm.” It was his wicked hmmmm. “Waal, Ah know one true story thet’s purty skeery. But it’d bore you Grubs. Naw, Ah don’t want to tell it.”

  “Tell it, Mr. Crabtree, tell it!”

  “Oh, all right. It seems thar was this woodcutter lived up in these hyar mountains. Might still be runnin’ ’round these parts, fer all Ah know. Anyhow, he went crazy. Fust thang anybody know’d he’d gone crazy, these campers was found all cut up in itty-bitty pieces. Crazy ol’ woodcutter must have snuck up on ’em in the dark of night … What was thet? You Grubs hear somethin’? Oh, probably warn’t nothin’. Now this crazy ol’ woodcutter …”

  Driving back toward town an hour later, Rancid hummed and sang and beat time to his own tune on the steering wheel, every so often interrupting the tune to go “heh heh.”

  “There wasn’t any crazy old woodcutter, was there?” I said.

  “Who knows? Might hev been. Dum dee dum dum heh heh. Now here’s maw plan. We go back to maw place, you and t’other Grubs camps out by maw shack, and in the mornin’ Ah hauls ya all back to town and nobody knows the difference.”

  I tried to ignore the premonition unfolding in my innards.

  Presently we came to a roadhouse ablaze with lights. “Whoa, hoss!” Rancid said, hitting the brakes. “The night’s still young. Let’s see what’s happenin’ in thar. Ah’ll stand you and t’other Grubs to some pops.”

  Looking back, I suppose our little group marching into the roadhouse must have presented something of a spectacle, the tall, lanky mountain man trailed by what appeared to be eight pint-sized Union cavalrymen.

  “You can’t bring those kids in here,” the barman barked at Rancid.

  “Ah thought Ah jist did,” Rancid replied calmly. “Set ’em up a round of pops.”

  Snarling, the bartender set a row of glasses along the bar and, without asking our preference, filled them with orange pop. Rancid wandered over to a card game being played by some hard-looking men. “What do ya call this game?” he asked.

  “Stud poker,” the dealer said.

  “Take long to larn it?” Rancid asked. “Mebbe Ah’ll set in fer a hand.”

  “Rancid,” I said, “we’d better go. We’re supposed to be camping.”

  “Don’t pester me, boy. Ah’m jist gonna play a few hands to see if Ah can git the hang of this, whatcha call it, stub poker? You Grubs go shoot some pool or play the slot machines, but stay outta trouble.”

  All the Cubs agreed later that it was one of the more interesting evenings of our lives. Delbert said it was just like in the movies, and Melvin said no, it was even better. They were referring to the fracas that started when one of the cardplayers yelled something about cheating, and the card table got knocked over, and Rancid shouted, “Quick, fetch me one of them pool cues!” And we all thought he wanted the cue to play pool with!

  One by one the parents of the Cubs came down to the sheriff’s office in the predawn hours to pick up their sons. It was a memorable scene. I particularly remember Mrs. Slocum coming in, snatching Richie by the hand, and heading for the door without saying a word to me or Rancid, who was arguing with one of the deputies. I knew right then that my career in the Cub Scouts was over. Then Rancid noticed Mrs. Slocum dragging Richie out the door.

  “Ma’am!”

  Mrs. Slocum stopped, turned slowly, as if she had been quick-frozen and was coming unthawed. “Yessss, Mr. Crabtree?” she said through her teeth.

  “Uh, ma’am,” said Rancid, “Ah suppose this means you won’t be wantin’ me to fix yer bathroom light.”

  I, the Hunted

  Five minutes more and I would once again have escaped to relative safety. From the baying sounds, I knew the pack had picked up my trail and was now circling to my rear. The scrawny tree into which I attempted to blend like the bark itself offered no cover from that direction. Ahead of me lay an open grassy area. I had no choice but to cross it and seek concealment among some bushes on the far side. Employing the technique of the scurrying squat, I raced into the open—and right into the trap that had been laid for me on the grounds of Delmore Blight Grade School. Curses!

  Rupert Skraggs, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, snapped his famous half-nelson on me. Through bulging eyeballs I saw the clever ruse with which he had tricked me—a blind assembled out of a group of quivering fourth-graders! His baying pack, consisting of Wilfred Hogmire, Fats Moon, and Clarence Simp, had been but a diversionary tactic to flush me into the open.

  “You boys stop your fighting this instant or I’ll send you to the principa
l,” screamed the harried teacher condemned to playground supervision.

  Even as Skraggs sighed and loosened his half-nelson, dropping me with a plop to the ground, I wondered at the rarity of playground supervisors who could distinguish between a fight and a beating-up.

  “You lucked out this time, punk,” Skraggs snarled. “But I’ll get you after school.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I croaked, massaging my Adam’s apple back into something resembling its original shape. “You don’t scare me, Skraggs.” I chose not to explain why I had spent the lunch hour imitating the bark of a tree.

  “We’ll see about that, you puny little rat!” Skraggs snarled.

  “Yeah, and you got dandruff,” I retorted. I made a mental note to work on my repertoire of insults. Dandruff, for pity’s sake!

  The bell rang, mercifully ending the lunch hour.

  In retrospect, I now see that Rupert Skraggs taught me some important lessons. During my grade-school years, when I was still too young to hunt, he provided me with the opportunity to serve an apprenticeship as the hunted. Nothing so well instructs a hunter about hunting as once having been hunted himself. Off and on during the years I was incarcerated in grade school, Rupert Skraggs would hunt me for weeks at a time. I learned to move quickly, silently, covering my trail as I went. I learned to take on the protective coloration of my surroundings, whether the school playground, a vacant lot, or the movie theater. I even learned to catch Skraggs’s scent when he moved upwind of me, although anyone who sat near him in a hot, humid classroom would scarcely be impressed by this achievement.

  Skraggs had lain in ambush for me in fourth grade. When I was in second, he was in fourth, when I was in third, he was in fourth, and when I finally made it to fourth, Skraggs was still there, as if waiting on stand for me to come to him. He was then promoted right along with the rest of us, just as if he knew how to read and write. I suppose the reason for his promotion related directly to the teacher’s dislike of having a fourth-grader who sported a mustache and sideburns.