The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (12 page)

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 startling 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.

Eventually, we got our own chainsaw, a much smaller model, and it was a marvel. One fall when I was a sophomore in college, I went home for a weekend, and in one afternoon my girlfriend and I cut up enough firewood to last my folks all winter. I zipped through trees and cut them into eight-foot lengths for my girlfriend to load into the back of a pickup. We hauled them home where the two of us finished cutting them up into firewood lengths with a circular power saw. It was amazing that a skinny girl and I could accomplish so much in a single day. I never saw Olga again after that and often wondered what happened to her.

As an adult, I have never been without a chainsaw. Back in the time when Bun and I had young children at home, we would pile all the kids into the family car and tow a trailer up into the mountains to cut our winter's wood. The youngsters loved it. Oh, how I remember their shrill screams as I pried their fingers off the beds and sent them out to get into the car for yet another adventure into the mountains for a load of firewood. It was a fun time.

My friend Retch Sweeney is a chainsaw kind of guy. You might even think of him as a chainsaw addict. He sets the throttle on his saw fairly high, so the chain continues to rotate and pulls the saw along the ground, something Retch calls “saw creep.” He says he's thinking of buying a leash and attaching it to the saw so he can walk behind and be pulled up the mountain by it. Retch is what you might call the Ultimate Chainsaw Kind of Guy.

Then, of course, there's Barney Wapshot. He's had his saw a whole week and probably doesn't even know the words you use to get a chainsaw started. Maybe I'll go over and teach them to him. The economy being what it is, I might have to borrow his saw someday.

The Lady Who Kept Things

T

here was once a small, plump, good-natured lady who lived in a great, old house with her cantankerous husband, Harold. She was about the best mate a man could have, and he was about the worst mate anyone could have.

The lady, whose name was Emma, had a peculiar habit, however, which was that she never threw anything away. Her closets bulged with heaps of clothes, and stacks of magazines, and balls of string, and boxes of buttons—in short, just about everything that had ever entered into the life of Emma was still there someplace, boxed or bundled up in the great, old house.