The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (155 page)

“What do you think, dog?” Willis said. “You think I got a biscuit for you?”

Then they were quiet. Tanner was miserably uneasy to be alone with Willis Lister. The grass in the yard was high, thick to the middle of Tanner’s shins, and damp. There was the kind of gray sky that can mean rain any minute or no rain for months. Tanner’s pigeon was hot and thick, bigger than the cradle of his two hands. Beside him, Willis breathed heavily from his mouth, like a deep sleeper, and after a long time said, in a low voice, “You think I got a biscuit for you, dog? That what you think?”

Gashouse Johnson came back with the shotgun and shells. He knelt in the grass to load, and Willis said, “What the hell kind of shells you using? You planning on shooting bear out here?”

Gashouse looked at the box and did not answer.

“That’s not bird shot, man. You hit a bird with that stuff, you’ll be lucky to find the goddamn thing. You’ll blow the thing all to bits.”

Gashouse loaded the shotgun and stood up.

“You really planning on shooting those hand grenades?” Willis asked.

“You know,” Gashouse said, “I honestly don’t care what kind of shells these are. I think I’d just like to kill these birds and go on home.” He held the gun to his shoulder, waiting.

“You know what boys like you do up at the pigeon shoots?” Willis said to Tanner. “There’s always a job up there for a boy your age. You think you can do a boy’s job?”

“Sure,” Tanner guessed.

“This is the boy’s job. You wait for the shooter to drop the bird out of the sky. Then you chase that bird down, and if it ain’t dead, you kill it off. Just a neck-wring’ll do it. You think you can do that easy job?”

Tanner looked at the fat bird in his hands.

“That’s a boy’s job,” Willis said. “Okay. Get behind the man, son, lest he blows your goddamn head off with his lousy shooting.”

Tanner backed up.

“Okay,” Willis said, “let’s go.”

Willis pulled one of the pigeons from under his arm and tossed it into the air. It fluttered low, over their heads.

“Wait, now,” Willis told Gashouse. “Let her get some height.”

The bird flew. It flew out and away from them, straight toward the trees at the end of the field. Gashouse shot once, a tremendous blast that knocked him over backward, almost into Tanner. The bird flew on, into the trees. Willis, still holding the second pigeon in his hands, looked at Gashouse, who was sitting in the tall wet grass, rubbing his shoulder.

“Okay,” Willis said. “Ready?”

“That gun’s a kicker,” Gashouse said. “Knock a guy right on his ass.”

“It’s the shells,” Willis said. “Plant yourself better. Ready?”

Gashouse stood and raised his gun. Willis tossed the second bird up, and it flew in the same line as the first had.

“Now!” Willis shouted.

Gashouse shot, missed, shot again, missed again. They watched the pigeon make it to the line of trees and vanish. Snipe lay at Tanner’s feet, groaning unhappily from the blasts of noise. Willis Lister stared out toward the end of the field.

“Let me ask you something,” Gashouse said. “Now, will those birds of yours eventually come back to your barn? Eventually? I don’t want you to lose two good birds for nothing.”

Willis turned to Tanner. “When I tell you, I want you to toss that pigeon of yours up in the air. Not too hard. Ready? Now! Now!”

Tanner opened his hands and raised them. The bird shifted slightly but stayed put.

“Go,” he whispered.

Tanner jerked his hands, and the pigeon tumbled forward and out of his palms. It flew briefly, then settled on a rock in front of Willis Lister.

“Shoo!” Willis waved his hat at the bird. “Shoo!”

The bird flew a few feet and landed in the grass. Willis swore and picked it up. “Sick bird,” he said, and handed it to Tanner. “Go get another one. Leave this one in an empty cage.”

Tanner walked back to the barn with the wet, heavy bird. He found an empty cage. The bird, when dropped inside, stayed where it fell, facing away from Tanner. He shut the wire door, which was still damp from Snipe’s mouth. In the other cages, the pigeons moved around, stepping and nudging one another for better positions. He found the cage with the fewest birds and, reaching in slowly, caught one by the foot. It fluttered horribly, and he dropped it. He shut his eyes, reached in again, grabbed a wing, and pulled the pigeon out. He ran with the flapping body tucked under his jacket, as if he had stolen it and was being chased.

Gashouse Johnson and Willis Lister watched him coming, and when he was before them, Gashouse said, “Good boy,” and Willis took the bird.

“Ready?” Willis said, and tossed the pigeon up and away from them. It circled, then flew.

“Now,” Willis said. “Now!”

Gashouse shot once, and the bird dropped. Straight to the grass. Snipe took off after the bird and found it more or less accidentally, by running over it. The pigeon was still alive. It had not fallen far from them. They walked over to it, quickly. It had lost a wing.

“Get it,” Willis Lister said. Not to Gashouse. Not to Snipe. But to Tanner.

“Go on, get it,” he said. “Just a neck-wring’ll take care of it.”

Tanner did not answer or move.

Gashouse said, “Now your
father
, he could drop twenty birds in a row, just like that. How about that, son?”

“Jesus Christ,” Willis Lister said, and squatted beside the bird. He lifted it just enough to get his hands around its neck and twist, and as he was doing this, the bird made one twist of its own—a small adjustment toward comfort or resistance—and died. Willis dropped the bird on the ground.

“Stay the hell off that thing,” he said to Snipe, and wiped his hands on his coveralls.

They walked back to the truck.

Gashouse said, “If I’d have missed that last bird, I was going to start aiming at the side of the damn barn. See if I could hit the side of a goddamn barn! Ha!”

“Careful of the gun,” Willis said sharply to Gashouse. “Don’t go blowing your goddamn leg off like an idiot.”

“Time was, I used to be a hell of a good shot.” Gashouse laughed. “Of course, that was twenty-odd years ago. Could be I might’ve been piss awful then, too, and just forgot about it. Ha!”

Willis Lister spoke to Tanner without looking at him. “At a pigeon shoot,” he said evenly, “when a man brings a bird down, it is always a boy who wrings the neck.”

Tanner nodded.

“That’s a boy’s job,” Willis said. “Always has been a boy’s job.”

“You want to go for a beer?” Gashouse Johnson asked Willis.

“No.”

“What about you, Tanner? You want a soda pop?”

“Take the boy home,” Willis said. “Nobody wants any soda pop neither.”

The dress that Diane Rogers had been wearing that morning was hanging over the kitchen sink, just washed, when Gashouse Johnson returned with Tanner. It was a thick cotton dress and it
dripped steadily onto the dishes below, like something melting. She had changed into slacks. She watched as Gashouse sat at the table, Snipe at his feet.

“Tell your mother what a crack shot I am,” Gashouse said to Tanner.

“Crack
pot
,” Diane corrected.

“Come on, Diane. It was something to see.”

“Did you win any money?”

“I wasn’t betting. I was shooting.”

“I was asking Tanner.”

“I wasn’t betting,” Tanner said.

“Good for you.”

“Nobody was betting,” Gashouse said. “Nobody was even there. On account of respect for Ed.” Gashouse leaned forward and pointed at Diane. “Out of
respect
. They canceled it out of respect for the man.”

They looked at each other gravely. Then Diane laughed. She went to the refrigerator and got beers for herself and Gashouse. She got a glass of juice for Tanner.

“How bad a shot are you, anyhow?” she asked.

“I’m a fine shot. We got our shots in.”

“Where?”

“Willis Lister gave us three birds.”

“Four,” Tanner said.

“Okay.” Gashouse shrugged. “We shot at four birds.”

“Three,” Tanner said. “One was too sick.”

“Just for kicks, you were shooting?” Diane asked.

“So that your son could see what his father does.”

“One bird died,” Tanner said.

Gashouse opened his beer, twisting the cap off with a corner of his shirt over his palm. He put the cap in his pocket.

“Diane? You ever tell Tanner that Willis Lister is your cousin?”

“No,” she said. “When I was little, my mother used to say,
‘Don’t let your cousin Willis kiss you. You tell me if he tries to touch you.’”

“That’s not true.”

“Honey,” Diane said, “you were absolutely not there.”

“Could have been.”

“I don’t want to talk about Willis Lister.”

“Tanner?” Gashouse said. “Did I ever tell you that your mother was the first girl I ever kissed?”

“No,” Diane said. “And don’t tell him that again, either.”

“Ha!” Gashouse laughed, and slammed the table so hard that Tanner’s juice quivered in its glass.

“You have a girlfriend these days?” Diane asked. “Some poor little thing?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Blond?”

“Brown.”

“Brown?”

“Brown hair.”

“Blue eyes?”

“Brown.”

“Well. That’s not your normal taste, Gashouse.”

“Brown skin, too.”

“How about that?”

“She’s pretty much brown.”

“Well.” Diane took a long drink of beer. “Sounds beautiful.”

They both laughed.

“She’s okay,” Gashouse said. “She’s no you.”

“Neither am I, anymore. Not these days. I’m too old.”

“That’s not true. That’s a damn lie. It’s always nice to sit with you, Diane. It always has been nice to sit with you.”

“Hm,” Diane said. “Saved up any money?”

“Five thousand bucks in the bank.”

“As we speak?”

“Just sitting there.”

“You owed Ed about that much just last winter.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I don’t know. Seems to me, a man who owes five thousand dollars one minute and has five thousand dollars the next minute hasn’t really saved that money. He just hasn’t spent it yet.”

“Maybe,” Gashouse said.

“Don’t spend it all on that girl.”

“Come on, Diane.”

“I know you.”

“I should hope the hell so.”

“She call you Gashouse?”

“She calls me Leonard. Lee-oh-nard . . .” Gashouse drawled in three long syllables.

“How old is she?”

“Twenty,” Gashouse said without blinking. When Diane didn’t answer, he added, “Turning twenty-one next week.”

Gashouse waited, then said, “Next Thursday, as a matter of fact. Yes, sir. The big two-one.”

Diane tucked one of her feet under her body and asked, “What’s her name, Gashouse?”

There was a beat.

“Donna,” he said.

Diane did not respond.

“Having a big party for her, actually,” Gashouse went on. “For her and her friends. Her little school friends. Hell, you know how girls are.”

“Gashouse,” Diane said kindly. “All your lies are safe with me.”

“Diane—” he said, but she cut him off with a slight and elegant wave. An authority of silence.

They did not speak. Young Tanner Rogers had been sitting with one foot on his chair all this time, and he had untied the lace of his wet boot. He was practicing knots with the short length of damp rawhide lace. It was too short a lace for complicated
knots, but he was repeating smoothly a simple knot of three steps—a rabbit around a tree and down a hole, a quick, snug pull. Diane looked at her son’s hands, working. She got up for a paring knife, and when she sat down, she laid her own hand on the table, palm up.

“Give me that dirty paw,” she said.

Tanner gave his right hand to his mother. She gripped it in all confidence. With her paring knife, she dug under his thumbnail just firmly enough (shy of the pink bed of skin) to pull up a thin, crumbling line of brown dirt. She wiped the knife on her knee, then cleaned the next nail and the next and the next. Gashouse Johnson watched. And Tanner watched, too, sitting still, with his left hand hovering over the knot he had made—a sportsman’s knot, a modest knot—that will hold and hold, but can release, too, with a quick tug, in emergencies or at the end of its usefulness.

I
N THE GOOD
, good days when the Ruddy Nut Hut was across the street from the Tall Folks Tavern, there was a steady passage of drunks from one place to the other, every night. It was as if the two bars were one bar, weirdly split by the four fast lanes of First Avenue.

Ellen owned the Tall Folks Tavern, and the Ruddy Nut Hut was her husband Tommy’s. They had been married for fifteen years, separated for thirteen, hadn’t slept together in two, and held no particular interest in the politics of divorce. Tommy was a fabulous drunk. It was impossible to get kicked out of his bar—not for fighting or falling down, not for being broke or under age. Tommy delivered every possible permission. Ellen delivered famous bartenders. Not all of her bartenders were great beauties, but several were. The others had their own specialized appeal, such as immediate sympathy, great wit, or reassuring alcoholism. Ellen always kept one bartender who was good with names, as a guarantor of hospitality, and she always kept one mean bartender, because there are people who crave that, too. There are people who crave a mean girl who calls fat guys “slim” and throws ugly drunks out by hand. If it was not somehow possible to fall in love with a girl in five minutes,
Ellen would not hire her. She had done very well this way, brokering these particular and necessary loves. And Tommy, too, had done very well.