Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“It was only a joke, taking the gun.”

“No. It wasn’t a joke.”

“Are things really as bad as all that between you and Tom?” I asked.

“Things have always been that bad,” Johnny Tennant said. “But now they are beginning to show, because I do not have much left that he wants.”

I did not say anything. I was sorry that he felt bad, and that this last trip was not turning out well for him. Most of us had come because he wanted us to, because he had planned it for us, and because we were sorry for Johnny Tennant — but there wasn’t anything we could do, really. The Clam Point Chowder, Poker Playing and Duck Hunting Society was something left over from a long time ago, when we were all a lot younger. Things like that are always more important to some members than to others, and with us it was Johnny Tennant who had inspired it, kept it going, and to whom, now that the shooting didn’t amount to much and the members were scattered and the lease had run out, it was important that we get together for one last day of shooting.

I guess that it all became more important to Johnny as it became less important to the rest of us. He took care of the boats, he kept the decoys in repair and spent a good deal of his time in the shack on the point. He was our gunsmith, and reloaded our shotgun shells to a powder-and-shot ratio he had figured out to be most effective for the kind of shooting we had along the channel. Johnny’s troubles probably had some relation to all this. They kept quietly overtaking him, one by one: the business that he started with Tom Randall, which did not do well as long as Johnny was in it; the woman who could not make up her mind between them; and then Johnny giving up both the business and the woman. But he did it carelessly, with a shrug, and the only difference we noticed was that Johnny Tennant spent more time at the shack on the point and more time alone, carving minutely detailed miniature ducks for the rest of us to hang up in our dens at home, and working on the inlays and engraving of his own favorite shotgun.

He had started with very complicated checkering of the stock and forearm, and then he had gone gradually into steel engraving, high-relief chiseling, and gold and ivory inlays. He reproduced a scene of the point itself on one side of the receiver, and the channel blind on the other, with ducks flying and the dog retrieving — until the gun itself was a glittering encyclopedia of our times together on the point. Gun engraving is a highly specialized art in itself, and I do not know how Johnny’s work compared with the real immortals like Rudolph Kornbrath or Arnold Griebel or Joseph Baver, but the gun was very beautiful.

Now the gun was out in the point blind with Tom Randall, and whether it was just because of thoughtlessness or a poor joke, the hunt was not the way Johnny had planned it; the whole thing was spoiled for him.

It began when Tom Randall dropped his own gun into the marsh. We had eaten breakfast in the shack by lantern light with the windows covered: fried bread, heavy with bacon grease, and eggs and potatoes in a mixture that would kill a man at home in the city, but out here in the marsh would burn just brightly enough in his belly to keep him from freezing to death. Then, bundled up in seaters under the shooting coats, walking clumsily in hip boots, we followed Johnny out into the frosty starlight and down the quarter-mile of trail through the oak scrub to the place where the boats were pulled up under the cypress.

Johnny pushed the skiff out and stepped into it himself. “I’ll take the point blind alone,” he said. “That way maybe I can turn some of the high fliers coming out of the refuge and bring them in so you all get some shooting.”

He uncased his gun and the starlight sparkled on the inlays as he slipped three shells softly and invisibly into the magazine.

“You’d better keep that museum piece covered up,” someone said, “or it’ll scare the ducks in the next county with its reflections.”

“I’ll keep it in the shade,” Johnny said, chuckling. He sounded very happy then. “It’s a pretty thing, though.”

That was when Tom dropped his own gun into the marsh, into a foot of water and another foot of ooze. He was trying to push a boat out, holding the piece under one arm, and his hands slipped on the frost-wet gunwale and he dropped the gun. It was not hard to find, but it would take an hour, and daylight, to clean it up so that it was safe to shoot. Randall stood darkly in the water and swore.

“Never mind,” Johnny Tennant said patiently, pushing the skiff back ashore. “I’ve got another gun up at the shack you can use. It’s only a 20-gauge that I use to keep the squirrels honest, but it’ll do.”

He left the skiff and ran lightly up the trail in the darkness while the rest of us stood around uncomfortably, not talking.

“The light is coming up fast,” Tom Randall said suddenly. “If we’re not in the blinds by first shooting light, we’ll never see a bird within range.”

“What do you suggest?” I said.

Tom Randall stepped into the skiff and sent it skimming out into the channel. “This,” he said. “I’ll take old Johnny’s boat and shotgun and go on out to the point blind myself. He can shoot with one of you.”

“Johnny won’t like it.”

“Johnny won’t mind,” Tom Randall said, laughing, although no one laughed with him. “Johnny doesn’t mind anything.”

He was gone when Johnny came back with the 20-gauge, but it appeared that he was right. Johnny just shrugged and got into the boat with me, and we matched with the others to see who would take the channel blind and who would take the others. Then we poled off into the darkness, feeling for the channels in the grass to the open water.

And of course there had been no shooting. The sun came up clear and full and burned the frost off the marsh. The warm air from the Gulf moved up the river, and the birds getting up off the refuge climbed their aerial staircase straight up into the wonderfully blue sky, and no one truly cared except Johnny.

A little later the mud hen came back across the channel, swimming in narrow suspicious circles, but pressed by curiosity to see what had frightened it the first time. It was forty yards from the point blind, craning its neck, when Tom Randall fired. The charge of No. 4 shot splattered against the water, catching the bird in the center of a lethal pattern four feet in diameter, and presently the bird floated feet up, dead in the water.

“It shoots as good as it looks,” Tom Randall’s voice said across the water. “I think I’ll keep it.”

Johnny Tennant sat on the platform in our blind, not smiling. The retriever, awakened by the gunshot, peered out at the distant mud hen, and then, in the absence of a command to fetch, went back to sleep.

“He’s a very funny man,” I said in disgust.

Johnny Tennant shrugged. “I suppose he had to try it,” he said. “He couldn’t just look at it.”

“I’m really very sorry. We didn’t have a chance to stop him.”

“It doesn’t matter... Maybe he thought it was safer to take my gun than take the one I was getting just for him.” He smiled a little this time.

“Sure,” I said. “You might have fixed up the 20 just for him, with a nice plug rammed down the barrel, or something.”

“That isn’t a good idea. A ballistician could tell if a gun blew up because the barrel was plugged.”

He smiled again, almost wistfully. “If I wanted to kill a man accidentally in a duck blind,” he said, “there are better ways.”

The sun was warm in the blind and there was no swell in the channel, but suddenly I felt the touch of a cold wind blowing.

“A worn sear,” Johnny said. “Or a cracked bolt in the block, so that the receiver would come right on back into your face after a shot. And when you use hand-loaded shells, it would be easy.”