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.
From the top I saw Glen Baxter alone in the wheatgrass field, shooting at a white goose with black tips of wings that was on the ground not far from him, but trying to run and pull into the air. He shot it once more, and it fell over dead with its wings flapping.
Glen looked back at me and his face was distorted and strange. The air around him was full of white rising geese and he seemed to want them all. “Behind you, Les,” he yelled at me and pointed. “They’re all behind you now.” I looked behind me, and there were geese in the air as far as I could see, more than I knew how many, moving so slowly, their wings wide out and working calmly and filling the air with noise, though their voices were not as loud or as shrill as I had thought they would be. And they were so close! Forty feet, some of them. The air around me vibrated and I could feel the wind from their wings and it seemed to me I could kill as many as the times I could shoot—a hundred or a thousand—and I raised my gun, put the muzzle on the head of a white goose, and fired. It shuddered in the air, its wide feet sank below its belly, its wings cradled out to hold back air, and it fell straight down and landed with an awful sound, a noise a human would make, a thick, soft, hump noise. I looked up again and shot another goose, could hear the pellets hit its chest, but it didn’t fall or even break its pattern for flying. Boom, Glen shot again. And then again. “Hey,” I heard him shout, “Hey, hey.” And there were geese flying over me, flying in line after line. I broke my gun and reloaded, and thought to myself as I did: I need confidence here, I need to be sure with this. I pointed at another goose and shot it in the head, and it fell the way the first one had, wings out, its belly down, and with the same thick noise of hitting. Then I sat down in the grass on the bunker and let geese fly over me.
By now the whole raft was in the air, all of it moving in a slow swirl above me and the lake and everywhere, finding the wind and heading out south in long wavering lines that caught the last sun and turned to silver as they gained a distance. It was a thing to see, I will tell you now. Five thousand white geese all in the air around you, making a noise like you have never heard before. And I thought to myself then: this is something I will never see again. I will never forget this. And I was right.
Glen Baxter shot twice more. Once he missed, but with the other he hit a goose flying away from him, and knocked it half falling and flying into the empty lake not far from shore, where it began to swim as though it was fine and make its noise.
Glen stood in the stubby grass, looking out at the goose, his gun lowered. “I didn’t need to shoot that one, did I, Les?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting on the little knoll of land, looking at the goose swimming in the water.
“I don’t know why I shoot ’em. They’re so beautiful.” He looked at me.
“I don’t know either,” I said.
“Maybe there’s nothing else to do with them.” Glen stared at the goose again and shook his head. “Maybe this is exactly what they’re put on earth for.”
I did not know what to say because I did not know what he could mean by that, though what I felt was embarrassment at the great numbers of geese there were, and a dulled feeling like a hunger because the shooting had stopped and it was over for me now.
Glen began to pick up his geese, and I walked down to my two that had fallen close together and were dead. One had hit with such an impact that its stomach had split and some of its inward parts were knocked out. Though the other looked unhurt, its soft white belly turned up like a pillow, its head and jagged bill-teeth, its tiny black eyes looking as they would if they were alive.
“What’s happened to the hunters out here?” I heard a voice speak. It was my mother, standing in her pink dress on the knoll above us, hugging her arms. She was smiling though she was cold. And I realized that I had lost all thought of her in the shooting. “Who did all this shooting? Is this your work, Les?”
“No,” I said.
“Les is a hunter, though, Aileen,” Glen said. “He takes his time.” He was holding two white geese by their necks, one in each hand, and he was smiling. He and my mother seemed pleased.
“I see you didn’t miss too many,” my mother said and smiled. I could tell she admired Glen for his geese, and that she had done some thinking in the car alone. “It was wonderful, Glen,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. They were like snow.”
“It’s worth seeing once, isn’t it?” Glen said. “I should’ve killed more, but I got excited.”
My mother looked at me then. “Where’s yours, Les?”
“Here,” I said and pointed to my two geese on the ground beside me.
My mother nodded in a nice way, and I think she liked everything then and wanted the day to turn out right
and for all of us to be happy. “Six, then. You’ve got six in all.”
“One’s still out there,” I said, and motioned where the one goose was swimming in circles on the water.
“Okay,” my mother said and put her hand over her eyes to look. “Where is it?”
Glen Baxter looked at me then with a strange smile, a smile that said he wished I had never mentioned anything about the other goose. And I wished I hadn’t either. I looked up in the sky and could see the lines of geese by the thousands shining silver in the light, and I wished we could just leave and go home.
“That one’s my mistake there,” Glen Baxter said and grinned. “I shouldn’t have shot that one, Aileen. I got too excited.”
My mother looked out on the lake for a minute, then looked at Glen and back again. “Poor goose.” She shook her head. “How will you get it, Glen?”
“I can’t get that one now,” Glen said.
My mother looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going to leave that one,” Glen said.
“Well, no. You can’t leave one,” my mother said. “You shot it. You have to get it. Isn’t that a rule?”
“No,” Glen said.
And my mother looked from Glen to me. “Wade out and get it, Glen,” she said in a sweet way, and my mother looked young then, like a young girl, in her flimsy short-sleeved waitress dress and her skinny, bare legs in the wheatgrass.
“No.” Glen Baxter looked down at his gun and shook his head. And I didn’t know why he wouldn’t go, because it would’ve been easy. The lake was shallow. And you could tell that anyone could’ve walked out a long way before it got deep, and Glen had on his boots.
My mother looked at the white goose, which was not more than thirty yards from the shore, its head up, moving in slow circles, its wings settled and relaxed so you could see the black tips. “Wade out and get it, Glenny, won’t you, please?” she said. “They’re special things.”
“You don’t understand the world, Aileen,” Glen said. “This can happen. It doesn’t matter.”
“But that’s so cruel, Glen,” she said, and a sweet smile came on her lips.
“Raise up your own arms, ’Leeny,” Glen said. “I can’t see any angel’s wings, can you, Les?” He looked at me, but I looked away.
“Then you go on and get it, Les,” my mother said. “You weren’t raised by crazy people.” I started to go, but Glen Baxter suddenly grabbed me by my shoulder and pulled me back hard, so hard his fingers made bruises in my skin that I saw later.
“Nobody’s going,” he said. “This is over with now.”
And my mother gave Glen a cold look then. “You don’t have a heart, Glen,” she said. “There’s nothing to love in you. You’re just a son of a bitch, that’s all.”
And Glen Baxter nodded at my mother, then, as if he understood something he had not understood before, but something that he was willing to know. “Fine,” he said, “that’s fine.” And he took his big pistol out from against his belly, the big blue revolver I had only seen part of before and that he said protected him, and he pointed it out at the goose on the water, his arm straight away from him, and shot and missed. And then he shot and missed again. The goose made its noise once. And then he hit it dead, because there was no splash. And then he shot it three times more until the gun was empty and the goose’s head was down and it was floating toward the middle of the lake where it was empty and dark blue. “Now who has a heart?” Glen said. But my mother was not there when he turned around. She had already started back to the car and was almost lost from sight in the darkness. And Glen smiled at me then and his face had a wild look on it. “Okay, Les?” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“There’re limits to everything, right?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Your mother’s a beautiful woman, but she’s not the only beautiful woman in Montana.” And I did not say anything. And Glen Baxter suddenly said, “Here,” and he held the pistol out at me. “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want to shoot me? Nobody thinks they’ll die. But I’m ready for it right now.” And I did not know what to do then. Though it is true that what I wanted to do was to hit him, hit him as hard in the face as I could, and see him on the ground bleeding and crying and pleading for me to stop. Only at that moment he looked scared to me, and I had never seen a grown man scared before—though I have seen one since— and I felt sorry for him, as though he was already a dead man. And I did not end up hitting him at all.
A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I still can feel now how sad and remote the world was to me. Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he’d never seen before—something soft in himself—his life going a way he didn’t like. A woman with a son. Who could blame him there? I don’t know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone’s life to be the expert.
My mother had tried to see the good side of things, tried to be hopeful in the situation she was handed, tried to look out for us both, and it hadn’t worked. It was a strange time in her life then and after that, a time when she had to adjust to being an adult just when she was on the thin edge of things. Too much awareness too early in life was her problem, I think.
And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn’t lived yet. In a year I was gone to hard-rock mining and no-paycheck jobs and not to college. And I have thought more than once about my mother saying that I had not been raised by crazy people, and I don’t know what that could mean or what difference it could make, unless it means that love is a reliable commodity, and even that is not always true, as I have found out.
Late on the night that all this took place I was in bed when I heard my mother say, “Come outside, Les. Come and hear this.” And I went out onto the front porch barefoot and in my underwear, where it was warm like spring, and there was a spring mist in the air. I could see the lights of the Fairfield Coach in the distance, on its way up to Great Falls.
And I could hear geese, white birds in the sky, flying. They made their high-pitched sound like angry yells, and though I couldn’t see them high up, it seemed to me they were everywhere. And my mother looked up and said, “Hear them?” I could smell her hair wet from the shower. “They leave with the moon,” she said. “It’s still half wild out here.”
And I said, “I hear them,” and I felt a chill come over my bare chest, and the hair stood up on my arms the way it does before a storm. And for a while we listened.
“When I first married your father, you know, we lived on a street called Bluebird Canyon, in California. And I thought that was the prettiest street and the prettiest name. I suppose no one brings you up like your first love. You don’t mind if I say that, do you?” She looked at me hopefully.
“No,” I said.
“We have to keep civilization alive somehow.” And she pulled her little housecoat together because there was a cold vein in the air, a part of the cold that would be on us the next day. “I don’t feel part of things tonight, I guess.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Do you know where I’d like to go?”
“No,” I said. And I suppose I knew she was angry then, angry with life, but did not want to show me that.
“To the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Wouldn’t that be something? Would you like that?”
“I’d like it,” I said. And my mother looked off for a minute, as if she could see the Straits of Juan de Fuca out against the line of mountains, see the lights of things alive and a whole new world.
“I know you liked him,” she said after a moment. “You and I both suffer fools too well.”
“I didn’t like him too much,” I said. “I didn’t really care.”
“He’ll fall on his face. I’m sure of that,” she said. And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t care about Glen Baxter anymore
, and was happy not to talk about him. “Would you tell me something if I asked you? Would you tell me the truth?”
“Yes,” I said.
And my mother did not look at me. “Just tell the truth,” she said.
“All right,” I said.
“Do you think I’m still very feminine? I’m thirty-two years old now. You don’t know what that means. But do you think I am?”
And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings. And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide. And I said, “Yes, I do.” Because that was the truth. And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.
And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man. I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.
REUNION
When I saw Mack Bolger he was standing beside the bottom of the marble steps that bring travelers and passersby to and from the balcony of the main concourse in Grand Central. It was before Christmas last year, when the weather stayed so warm and watery the spirit seemed to go out of the season.
I was cutting through the terminal, as I often do on my way home from the publishing offices on Forty-first Street. I was, in fact, on my way to meet a new friend at Billy’s. It was four o’clock on Friday, and the great station was athrong with citizens on their way somewhere, laden with baggage and precious packages, shouting good-byes and greetings, flagging their arms, embracing, gripping each other with pleasure. Others, though, simply stood, as Mack Bolger was when I saw him, staring rather vacantly at the crowds, as if whomever he was there to meet for some reason hadn’t come. Mack is a tall, handsome, well-put-together man who seems to see everything from a height. He was wearing a long, well-fitted gabardine overcoat of some deep-olive twill—an expensive coat, I thought, an Italian coat. His brown shoes were polished to a high gloss; his trouser cuffs hit them just right. And because he was without a hat, he seemed even taller than what he was—perhaps six-three. His hands were in his coat pockets, his smooth chin slightly elevated the way a middle-aged man would, and as if he thought he was extremely visible there. His hair was thinning a little in front, but it was carefully cut, and he was tanned, which caused his square face and prominent brow to appear heavy, almost artificially so, as though in a peculiar way the man I saw was not Mack Bolger but a good-looking effigy situated precisely there to attract my attention.