Richard Ford - Rock Springs

“I like to box,” I said. “My father did it. It’s a good thing to know.”

“I suppose you have to protect yourself too,” Glen said.

“I know how to,” I said.

“Do you like to watch TV,” Glen asked, and smiled.

“Not much.”

“I love to,” Glen said. “I could watch it instead of eating if I had one.”

I looked out straight ahead over the green tops of sage that grew to the edge of the disked field, hoping to see the lake Glen said was there. There was an airishness and a sweet smell that I thought might be the place we were going, but I couldn’t see it. “How will we hunt these geese?” I said.

“It won’t be hard,” Glen said. “Most hunting isn’t even hunting. It’s only shooting. And that’s what this will be. In Illinois you would dig holes in the ground and hide and set out your decoys. Then the geese come to you, over and over again. But we don’t have time for that here.” He glanced at me. “You have to be sure the first time here.”

“How do you know they’re here now,” I asked. And I looked toward the Highwood Mountains twenty miles away, half in snow and half dark blue at the bottom. I could see the little town of Floweree then, looking shabby and dimly lighted in the distance. A red bar sign shone. A car moved slowly away from the scattered buildings.

“They always come November first,” Glen said.

“Are we going to poach them?”

“Does it make any difference to you,” Glen asked.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Well then, we aren’t,” he said.

We walked then for a while without talking. I looked back once to see the Nash far and small in the flat distance. I couldn’t see my mother, and I thought that she must’ve turned on the radio and gone to sleep, which she always did, letting it play all night in her bedroom. Behind the car the sun was nearing the rounded mountains southwest of us, and I knew that when the sun was gone it would be cold. I wished my mother had decided to come along with us, and I thought for a moment of how little I really knew her at all.

Glen walked with me another quarter-mile, crossed another barbed wire fence where sage was growing, then went a hundred yards through wheatgrass and spurge until the ground went up and formed a kind of long hillock bunker built by a farmer against the wind. And I realized the lake was just beyond us. I could hear the sound of a car horn blowing and a dog barking all the way down in the town, then the wind seemed to move and all I could hear then and after then were geese. So many geese, from the sound of them, though I still could not see even one. I stood and listened to the high-pitched shouting sound, a sound I had never heard so close, a sound with size to it — though it was not loud. A sound that meant great numbers and that made your chest rise and your shoulders tighten with expectancy. It was a sound to make you feel separate from it and everything else, as if you were of no importance in the grand scheme of things.

“Do you hear them singing,” Glen asked. He held his hand up to make me stand still. And we both listened. “How many do you think, Les, just hearing?”

“A hundred,” I said. “More than a hundred.”

“Five thousand,” Glen said. “More than you can believe when you see them. Go see.”

I put down my gun and on my hands and knees crawled up the earthwork through the wheatgrass and thistle, until I could see down to the lake and see the geese. And they were there, like a white bandage laid on the water, wide and long and continuous, a white expanse of snow geese, seventy yards from me, on the bank, but stretching far onto the lake, which was large itself — a half-mile across, with thick tules on the far side and wild plums farther and the blue mountain behind them.

“Do you see the big raft?” Glen said from below me, in a whisper.

“I see it,” I said, still looking. It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.

“Are any on the land?” he said.

“Some are in the wheatgrass,” I said, “but most are swimming.”

“Good,” Glen said. “They’ll have to fly. But we can’t wait for that now.”

And I crawled backwards down the heel of land to where Glen was, and my gun. We were losing our light, and the air was purplish and cooling. I looked toward the car but couldn’t see it, and I was no longer sure where it was below the lighted sky.

“Where do they fly to?” I said in a whisper, since I did not want anything to be ruined because of what I did or said. It was important to Glen to shoot the geese, and it was important to me.

“To the wheat,” he said. “Or else they leave for good. I wish your mother had come, Les. Now she’ll be sorry.”

I could hear the geese quarreling and shouting on the lake surface. And I wondered if they knew we were here now. “She might be,” I said with my heart pounding, but I didn’t think she would be much.

It was a simple plan he had. I would stay behind the bunker, and he would crawl on his belly with his gun through the wheatgrass as near to the geese as he could. Then he would simply stand up and shoot all the ones he could close up, both in the air and on the ground. And when all the others flew up, with luck some would turn toward me as they came into the wind, and then I could shoot them and turn them back to him, and he would shoot them again. He could kill ten, he said, if he was lucky, and I might kill four. It didn’t seem hard.

“Don’t show them your face,” Glen said. “Wait till you think you can touch them, then stand up and shoot. To hesitate is lost in this.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll try it.”

“Shoot one in the head, and then shoot another one,” Glen said. “It won’t be hard.” He patted me on the arm and smiled. Then he took off his VFW jacket and put it on the ground, climbed up the side of the bunker, cradling his shotgun in his arms, and slid on his belly into the dry stalks of yellow grass out of my sight.

Then, for the first time in that entire day, I was alone. And I didn’t mind it. I sat squat down in the grass, loaded my double gun and took my other two shells out of my pocket to hold. I pushed the safety off and on to see that it was right. The wind rose a little, scuffed the grass and made me shiver. It was not the warm chinook now, but a wind out of the north, the one geese flew away from if they could.

Then I thought about my mother, in the car alone, and how much longer I would stay with her, and what it might mean to her for me to leave. And I wondered when Glen Baxter would die and if someone would kill him, or whether my mother would marry him and how I would feel about it. And though I didn’t know why, it occurred to me that Glen Baxter and I would not be friends when all was said and done, since I didn’t care if he ever married my mother or didn’t.

Then I thought about boxing and what my father had taught me about it. To tighten your fists hard. To strike out straight from the shoulder and never punch backing up. How to cut a punch by snapping your fist inwards, how to carry your chin low, and to step toward a man when he is falling so you can hit him again. And most important, to keep your eyes open when you are hitting in the face and causing damage, because you need to see what you’re doing to encourage yourself, and because it is when you close your eyes that you stop hitting and get hurt badly. “Fly all over your man, Les,” my father said. “When you see your chance, fly on him and hit him till he falls.” That, I thought, would always be my attitude in things.

And then I heard the geese again, their voices in unison, louder and shouting, as if the wind had changed again and put all new sounds in the cold air. And then a boom. And I knew Glen was in among them and had stood up to shoot. The noise of geese rose and grew worse, and my fingers burned where I held my gun too tight to the metal, and I put it down and opened my fist to make the burning stop so I could feel the trigger when the moment came. Boom , Glen shot again, and I heard him shuck a shell, and all the sounds out beyond the bunker seemed to be rising — the geese, the shots, the air itself going up. Boom , Glen shot another time, and I knew he was taking his careful time to make his shots good. And I held my gun and started to crawl up the bunker so as not to be surprised when the geese came over me and I could shoot.