The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (3 page)

OK, I thought. So maybe it wouldn't hurt to do a bit of exercising to get ready for the hunt, even though it was a couple months away.

During my lunch hour, I slipped down to the public library and checked out an armload of books on various kinds of exercise. I asked the librarian if she had a book titled
The Drinking Man's Exercise.
I vaguely recalled having heard of such a book, and supposed that it would deal with such things as elbow bending, bellying up to the bar, and tossing down shots. She said she had never heard of it and wouldn't order it if she had. She did suggest an alternative, but I told her I was interested in improving my physique, not my character. I immediately discovered that reading exercise books can be dangerous to your health. Plowing through the first one,
Let's Put the Fit Back into Fitness
, I narrowly escaped being bored to death, and as it was, went about four days afterward with the distinct sensation of having my brain submerged in a tuna casserole. The one sound bit of information I managed to extract from the book was some advice to the effect of this: Before undertaking any program of strenuous exercise, one should obtain a physical from a medical doctor. I was in complete agreement with this suggestion. Doctors are by far the best people to get a physical from, if for no other reason than they don't laugh and poke fun at you when you take your clothes off. This is not to say that they are not above cracking a joke or two at your expense. While I was explaining to my own doctor that I was planning to undertake some serious exercise, I happened to mention that I thought I had lost quite a bit of weight since my last physical.

“You didn't lose it,” he said. “It just slipped around to your rear where you can't see it.” Personally, I think it is particularly bad for doctors to laugh at their own jokes and even more so in front of their naked patients. It tends to undermine one's confidence in the medical profession.

A physical from my doctor, old Fred, is such an ordeal that you need to get a physical to prepare you for the physical. He tops it all off by hooking you up to an electrocardiograph machine and making you run on the treadmill. After a few minutes on the treadmill, I was dripping with sweat, gasping for breath, and buckling at the knees. I knew I couldn't last much longer.

“How am I doing?” I asked Fred.

“Not bad,” he said. “Now let's try it with the treadmill turned on.”

He revved up the machine to about thirty miles an hour. My legs instantly dissolved into molten lead, but I had to keep running to avoid being slurped down into the treadmill innards. All the while, old Doc Fred stood there munching on a doughnut and drinking a cup of coffee.

“I don't think you understand, Doc,” I finally croaked. “I'm going to shoot a deer with a rifle, not run him down on foot and strangle him with my bare hands.”

“Stop whining,” he said kindly. “You're nearly finished.”

“You're telling me,” I gasped.

When the physical was completed, he fed all the information into a computer, which spewed out a stream of paper filled with a mass of graphs. Then he sat down to interpret the results for me.

“Oh, oh,” he said frowning. “A&P Iron has dropped thirty points. I'd better schedule you for a couple of operations.”

“What? What!” I exclaimed. “Does that mean I'm done for?”

“No, it means I am. This is a report from my stockbroker. Now let's take a look at
your
printout. Ah, I see you have some squiggles here in the cardiovascular section.”

“Uh, are squiggles serious, Doc?”

“I've never had anyone die from squiggles, but we'd better keep an eye on them to make sure they don't develop into doodles. Actually, I have to say you are in excellent condition, even for a man twice your age.”

“Great!” I said.

“Of course that doesn't mean you couldn't drop dead stepping over the cat.”

“But I wanted to run up and down mountains, camp, hunt, fish!”

“That's all right,” he said. “Just don't step over any cats.”

After receiving a clean bill of health and another bill I interpreted as an attempt to recoup his stock market losses in one fell swoop, I immediately started shaping up for the impending hunting season.

The first exercise program I tried was from a book called, simply,
Yoga
. I chose it because yoga could be performed in the privacy of one's own home and didn't require making a public spectacle of one's self, as did, for example, jogging. Somehow Finley heard I had taken up exercising and kept glued to the window hoping to catch me in the act.

In my first yoga posture, I attempted something called the Lotus, from which posture I was finally able to extricate myself by snagging a cane from a corner next to the door and prying my legs apart. It was then that I perceived yoga would be an absolutely useless exercise when it came to shaping up for the hunt. No, there had to be something else. I quickly reviewed all my hunting experiences and immediately came up with the perfect exercise for hunters: standing still!

People who are not outdoor sportsmen don't realize how much time is spent standing still while hunting. Very often, a hunter will stand still behind a tree, while a mile away a deer also will choose to stand still. The first one to move loses. Brilliant! I immediately got up off the floor and stood still in front of the television for thirty minutes straight. It was exhausting, but one must do what one must do in order to shape up for the hunt.

A Bit about My Writing Life

I

have just taken the measure of Mark Twain's autobiography, the edition published in 2010. Despite small type, it is two and three-quarter inches thick. My own autobiography, which I am starting at this moment, twenty minutes after two, the ninth of January, 2011, a snowy afternoon, will not be so thick. Its main advantage over Twain's is that it can be read in a matter of minutes as opposed to years. As with Twain, I will not let facts stand in the way of a good story, but for the most part will stick to the truth as I know it. In regard to pertinent events that occurred before I was born, all that would be hearsay. I cannot vouch for any of it. Much to my disappointment, my family apparently contained no known bandits, murderers, pirates, bank robbers, or even any common criminals.

Counting my own father, we did have a couple of war heroes. The other one was my great-grandfather, Archibald Hall, who fought for the North during the Civil War. One of the interesting things about him is that he was wounded during one of the many battles in which he was a participant. I was perhaps only six or seven when my grandmother told me about her father's getting wounded in the Civil War. Needless to say, I instantly became enormously proud of my great-grandfather. Later, however, Gram told me the wound consisted of getting one of his big toes shot off! This struck me right away as a suspicious wound. Think about it. There are the big toes, tramping along in the dirt and mud, and one Confederate soldier says to another, “Bart, I bet you can't shoot off one of that Yank's big toes.” Well, it would be an impossible shot. Also, had I been in my great grandfather's shoes at that moment, with a whole army shooting at me, I can tell you my two big toes would have been moving very fast. They wouldn't be standing around just waiting to get shot off. Then there was the possibility that if you got a big toe shot off, you would be sent to the rear, to a hospital, or even all the way home. Getting a big toe shot off would be like having one of the Rebs do you a favor. Big toes aren't of that much use anyway. All my pride in that wound evaporated. A big toe! Years later, when I was doing some research on my ancestors, I discovered that my great-grandfather wasn't in the infantry but the cavalry! His big toe was way up there on the side of a horse and easy to pick off. Furthermore, I learned that Archibald Hall fought in nearly every major battle of the Civil War from beginning to end. He apparently wasn't someone to be bothered much by the loss of a big toe. Anybody named Archibald, of course, learns to be a fearless fighter early on.

My grandmother told these stories sitting in the dark by our old wood-burning stove whenever the electricity went off and the lights out, her rocking chair squeaking away as she created magical pictures in the dark.

During World War I, my father, Frank McManus, received a commendation from his commanding officer, Major Douglas MacArthur, chief of staff of the Rainbow Division during the war. The commendation was for defending a particular hill. When I was six, he died of cancer, which I believe was the result of his having inhaled a dose of mustard gas during the war.

My mother, Mabel, was a country school teacher. She earned $75 a month teaching all eight grades, putting on plays for parents, Christmas parties for the pupils, cooking the hot lunch at noon and serving it, getting our drinking water out of a creek, hauling in the firewood, and keeping the old barrel stove going, its sides eaten through by heat and rust, but the holes putting on a wonderful light show across the ceiling during the dark of night.

This was at the old log school house far back in the woods near Priest Lake, Idaho. The two years we spent at that school pretty well shaped my approach to life. I ran free for two whole years, when I should have been in first and second grade. Mom never paid much attention to my education, her time and energy used up on the pupils she was paid to teach, so I was allowed to run wild along Goose Creek and in the surrounding woods and mountains whenever I wanted, which was most of the time. During winter, I went to sleep every night listening to wolves howl as they made their nightly hunt along the ridge above the school. “Send Pat out!” they seemed to be howling. “Send Pat out!”

Mom flunked me in second grade. I once heard her tell friends that her daughter, Patricia, six years my senior, was very smart, but Pat was “slow.” Many years later, we came across my second grade report card in her papers. Under the part that said “Reason for Failure,” she had written, “Too many absences.” When you think about it, that is a remarkable achievement, for someone who lives at the school. As I say, those two years at the little log cabin school shaped all of my future life. From then on, my major goal was to achieve as much freedom as possible. Rich was OK, but I could live without it, as long as I was free.

Patricia eventually became widely known as “the Troll,” one of the most popular characters in my humor pieces. I am happy to report she was immensely proud of the title, and sometimes received letters addressed only to “Troll.”

At age seven, I taught myself to read. I pulled a third-grade reader off the shelf, climbed up on my bed, opened it to the first story, and told myself, “I'm not leaving this bed until I can read this story perfectly.” I already knew phonics, from having been raised in country schoolrooms practically from the time I was born. I sounded my way through that story a dozen times. Eventually, I perceived that the story was about peanuts, mainly about how they were grown. It was the stupidest story I've ever read. The only interesting thing I learned from it was that peanuts are grown under the ground, not on top of it, as I had assumed. But from then on, I knew how to read.

At supper that evening, I told my mother, “I learned to read today.”

She said, “That's nice. Pass the potatoes.”

When we moved back to our little farm three miles north of Sandpoint, Idaho, I frequented the county library at least once a week. The librarian back then remains one of my heroes. Her name was Mary McKinnon. Mary directed me to all kinds of books over the years, including my days as a graduate student in college. She had put together a wonderful library on the second floor of Sandpoint's City Hall. For some unknown reason, I became fascinated with the Bobbsey Twins books when I was in third grade. Even now I can recall their names—Flossie and Freddie. (Or maybe Fanny and Fred? My memory isn't that good anymore.) No doubt Mary tried to direct me to more advanced reading, but I doubt she succeeded until I had read every last one of the Twins series, at least those about Flossie and Freddie. Looking back, I have not the slightest idea what so fascinated me about those two chubby little characters.

Early on in life, I decided to be an artist. In my mind, painting would give me the greatest degree of freedom. I would paint pictures and sell them, and then be free to do whatever else I wanted. When I reached college age, my high school art teacher told me that the art department at Washington State College was the best around. So I decided to go there, even though it was out of state and my tuition would be much higher than at the University of Idaho. Fortunately, I had made and saved quite a lot of money working for farmers the summer after my high school sophomore year, and construction the summers after my junior and senior years. One of my best jobs was as a high-scaler, where my crew of four hung by ropes over sheer cliffs and cleared them of loose rock. It was dangerous work—but the advantage was that if the foreman wanted to yell at you, he had to come down the side of a cliff on a rope to do it. Then one day a high-scaler on one of the crews got killed, and the superintendent decided that from then on no one under eighteen could work as a high-scaler. I was seventeen, and so lost the best job I've ever had. There is a great sense of freedom that comes from dangling over a cliff on a rope.

The following year, I enrolled at Washington State College as an art major, with the intent of becoming another Norman Rockwell. Alas, the WSC art faculty hated Norman Rockwell and his art, particularly his
Saturday Evening Post
covers. As a result, I was totally lost in regard to what direction I might pursue in terms of a future career. At the same time, I was not doing well in Freshman Composition. My instructor, one Milton Pederson, was tough! Every week, we comp students had to write a composition. After five or six weeks, I had received nothing but Ds and Fs.

Then one day, Milt said, “Look for the telling detail,” and it was as if a bomb went off in my head. Suddenly I knew what writing was all about. My grades began to improve. Right away I had a major breakthrough: a D-plus! Then came a C-minus, followed by a whole C, and so on to the end of the quarter. On my last essay, Milt awarded me an A-plus and a recommendation for Honors English. My essay, by the way, was about Norman Rockwell. Scarcely had I learned what an irony was than I had committed one.