Savage Season

  At one rally held at a Unitarian church, I met Trudy. I looked across the heads of long, straight hair and Afros and saw her on the other side of the room talking to a pear shaped girl in a flowered dress that belled and dragged the floor.

  God, but Trudy was beautiful. Painfully young, a prototype for Eve. Long gold hair rippled to her waist and her eyes were so bright green they looked supernatural. Spangles of silver hung from her ears. She was wearing a white midi-blouse, a blue jean mini-skirt and wooden clog shoes. Beneath the midi was flat brown stomach and a marvelous belly button, and beneath the mini were legs like God would have given his very own woman.

  I got over there without running and introduced myself. We made shameless small talk, mostly stupid mumblings, some of it about the war.

  Pretty soon we had our arms around each other and we were out of there. We both lived in dorms then, and as the dorm mothers were furiously against fucking, I took her to a parking place that was to become our haven, and we did what we had wanted to do since the first moment we laid eyes on one another. We generated so much electricity upon that pine-covered hill, I’m surprised we didn’t cause a forest fire. I feel certain we didn’t do the shocks in my old Chevy much good.

  This went on for a time, and things got better and hotter. And on the night of my fondest memory, when she wore the zebra-striped outfit, we decided to rent an apartment and move in together.

  We pooled our money and found a little room on the grubby side of town and lived there for two months. It got better yet, and we decided to get married. It was a simple wedding with lots of flowers and barefoot guests and a female minister younger than Trudy.

  God, those were odd times. If you missed them, and you know someone who went through them, soaked it all in, and you catch them late at night, after maybe a beer or two, or the kids are all in bed and the TV’s dead, and you say, “Hey, what were the sixties really like?” There’s a good chance they’ll say “It was magical,” or “It was special.”

  For a time it sure seemed that way. Peace and love seemed like more than words. We thought everyone could live in a world full of mutual respect, long hair, and cooperation. It was as if the sky had split open and God had given us a ray of light, and in its glow, wonderful things happened.

  An example being the sparrow incident the night after our wedding.

  We dropped the apartment and rented a small house on the edge of town. It wasn’t much of a house. The ceiling in the living room was too low and the plumbing squeaked like giant mice.

  Trudy turned on the back porch light and went out there to toss some potato peels, and found a sparrow sitting on the porch. It was weak and nodding and couldn’t fly. She called me and I looked at it. It was a baby, and as far as I could determine, there were no wounds on it. It seemed sick.

  I picked up the bird with some reluctance, because I had once been told if birds smelled the human scent on another bird they would peck it to death, and carried it into the house. I got an old shoebox and tore some newspaper up and put it in the bottom of the box and the bird on that. I got an eyedropper and used it to give the bird some cold beef bouillon.

  That was the procedure from then on. First thing in the morning, and between classes, we would give the bird bouillon and clean its box and put fresh paper in the bottom. At night we stood over it and looked at it and clucked our tongues like parents worried about a sick child.

  About this same time, I went to work part time in a restaurant in LaBorde, and brought home scraps I thought the bird might eat. At first he wouldn’t touch them, but after a while he ate them out of my hand. Noodles were his favorite. I suppose they were as close as he ever got to worms.

  The bird got stronger. He started flying around the house. You could open doors and windows and he wouldn’t fly out. He liked it in there. He liked us. He’d light on our shoulders and our outstretched palms. He cheeped a lot, and because of that, we named him Cheep. The only time he showed distress was when we weren’t wearing black. Guess because I had on a black Tee-shirt and Trudy a black peasant dress the night we found him, and he bonded to black.

  We were so excited about our bird, we dyed everything we owned black. On those occasions when we did buy new clothes, they were always black. That way Cheep stayed happy.

  Sweet alchemy was thicker in the air than radio waves then, and it seemed especially thick around Trudy and me. We thought it would last forever.

  But even the best looking apple can contain a worm.

  When 1970 rolled in just a few weeks after we were married, the Vietnam War still raged on. The relatively innocent smoking of grass had been exchanged by many for pills and shit-filled needles. The wonderful, if admittedly hokey, beauty of Woodstock had to stand shoulder to shoulder with the senseless tragedy at Kent State.

  Our bird continued to fly about the house, but the magic of the era was gone. A deep, dark awareness that perhaps it had never actually existed settled in; we had glimpsed some shopworn cards up the magician’s sleeve, and with each passing moment, the glow of the act was dimming.

  The sixties were dead. They may never have lived.

  I began to feel guilty about hiding out in college with my deferment when so many were dying in Vietnam. Asking that everyone be peaceful and love one another wasn’t enough. I wanted to make some statement against the war, and I didn’t want to hide behind a deferment to do it. I was one of those who felt our original cause in Vietnam was just, but that it had become a political nightmare. The government we were defending, in spite of cries of “We are a democracy,” showed little evidence of being different from the one we were fighting. Our role there was as aimless as the flying Dutchman. We took a hill, we gave it back. The American dead stacked up. Seemed to me, we ought to have known when to cut our losses.

  I talked to Trudy long and hard, and it was the sort of thing she loved. Noble involvement. It lit her like a torch.

  With her blessing, I decided to quit college and allow myself to be drafted. When it came time to step forward and take the induction, I would refuse. I’d go the prison route instead. That would be my statement.

  This was the time of the lottery, and I was drafted almost immediately. I was disappointed my draft notice didn’t say Greetings. I had always heard that it did.

  I went to Dallas, took my physical, passed, and refused to go.

  The army tried to give me outs. I give them that. One officer even suggested I make a break for Canada. The war had soured even his way of thinking, and he was a lifer.

  But I refused to run.

  It was suggested I sign as a conscientious objector, but again I refused. C.O. status meant you thought fighting for anything, even your life, was wrong. I didn’t believe that. Had I been around during the fighting of World War I or II, I would have gone and done my bit. The causes were just and the wars were fought with a conclusion in mind. I was an idealist, not a coward.

  So I went to Leavenworth. Trudy and some of her friends came to see me from time to time and told me “right on” and how brave I was, and it felt good to hear it. They wrote me nice letters.

  But that good feeling didn’t last. It didn’t relax me at night when I could hear the cons snorting and coughing and crying and farting and sodomizing each other. And there were guys in there who had bludgeoned their grandmothers to death who thought it their patriotic duty to kill me for not signing up to shoot gooks. If I hadn’t been a pretty tough country boy with iron foundry muscles, I might not have made it.

  Trudy kept coming to see me, but her friends dropped off. She kept writing, but the friends quit. She sent me clippings in her letters that told me what was going on outside, about the causes being fought for, the ground gained, the ground lost.

  Then her visits thinned, and finally stopped. Next to last letter I got from her went on about how brave I was again and compared me to a number of counterculture heroes. It said Cheep had died and had been buried in a cream corn can out back of the house, and that she had met a man
named Pete who was big in the ecology movement and they had this thing going. The last letter told me that the thing she and Pete had going was now really going, and she was filing for divorce. Nothing personal. She thought I was the bravest man she knew. It was signed like all the others: Love Trudy.

  I did my time. Eighteen months altogether. I had planned the day they let me out for a long time. I thought I would come out on a bright warm day with my fist held high, and Trudy would be there looking sexy and soft in a short wind-blown dress that would give me a good view of her long brown legs, and as the music came up, sweet but triumphant, she would run to me with those legs flashing and give me a kiss that would knock me silly from head to toes. Then she would load me in a car and drive us away.

  But when I came out it WEIS cold and drizzling. I had to talk a guard into calling someone to drive me to the bus station. Between paying for the car and the bus, the money I had when I went in and the money the government gave me for the nonstimulating manual labor I did inside was almost gone. Needless to say, I didn’t feel like raising my fist.

  I went back to East Texas and found out I didn’t want to help the underprivileged anymore. I realized I was one of them. I got a job in the rose fields outside of LaBorde, and that’s where I met Leonard. He was a Vietnam vet and a certified hardhead. He didn’t like my views on a lot of things, but he didn’t hold them against me either; I gave him someone to argue with. He was a martial artist, boxing, kenpo, hapkido, and he revived my interest. When I was in high school, until the time I met Trudy, I had been heavily involved in that sort of thing. Guess I dropped it later because I didn’t feel it fit my new peace and love image or something. Anyway, I had been away for a time. I was glad to get at it again. I got better than ever before. It helped me work out some frustrations.

  After a while, Trudy started coming around, and each time she went away she left me a bigger wreck than before. Built me up with promises, then left me sudden and flat. She always found a new man who was big in some movement or another. Supporting lettuce workers or saving seals from the business end of a Louisville Slugger.

  Each time she left, I told Leonard I was through with her. And each time it was a lie. But the last time, after the Great Drunk, even I believed it.

  And now she was back.

  All this was going around and around in my head when she came in buck naked and put her arms around my neck and bent and kissed me on the ear. The minty clean soap smell and the aroma of sex came off her in waves. I reached up and touched her hand where it rested on my chest.

  “I woke up and you were gone,” she said.

  “I got thirsty.”

  “I got horny. Come back to bed.”

  I stood and took her in my arms and kissed her. She was shaking from the cold. I opened my robe and stretched it around her as far as it would go and held her to me. Her hands played at my sides and rump, and finally around front where she took hold of me.

  “You’re pretty ruthless,” I said, “treating an old man this way.”

  “You don’t feel old, sugar.”

  We went back to bed, but this time she didn’t let loose with the laugh I liked. She lay there when we were finished and finally eased out of bed and picked up her panties and pulled them on. I hated that. I liked the view. Covering up that downy crotch of hers with panties was as vile an act as tossing a wet bath towel over the face of the Mona Lisa.

  “It’s cold,” I said. “Come back to bed.”

  “Hap, I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.”

  “Not that you ever are. But this time, don’t feel so bad. You haven’t had a lot of time to lie.”

  She walked to the window and stood with her back to me, looking out, hugging herself. She turned slowly, her arms crossed over her breasts. “You sound pretty vindictive.”

  “Guess I was starting to pretend again. But you’ve put me back on track.”

  “It was always good for us, wasn’t it Hap? The sex, I mean.”

  “For a little while, more than the sex.”

  She picked up my robe from where I had dropped it on the floor and put it on. She climbed into bed, crossed her legs, and sat looking at me.

  “Hap, I need your help.”

  “I’m tapped out for money. I got maybe fifty dollars, that’s it. Fifty cents in change.”

  “I didn’t come for money.”

  “But you always come for something, don’t you? Long as it doesn’t have anything permanent to do with me.”

  “I don’t want to argue. It’s just that I need your help. I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask.”

  “Maybe I can.”

  “I want you to do it, because this time you’ll profit. This time will make up for all the other times.”

  “Nothing can make up for those times.”

  “This might go a long way toward it.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Hap, my love, how would you like to make an easy two hundred thousand dollars? Tax free.”

  3

  Early next morning I left Trudy asleep and rattled my old green Dodge pickup over to Leonard’s place. He had a little house off the same dirt road I lived off of, and he was only about five miles away.

  I parked up close to the house, got out into the cold morning air, and tried the front door. It was locked. I got the key from its hiding place beneath the porch and let myself in.

  There was a fire in the fireplace, though it had dwindled considerably, and the house smelled like coffee. I followed my nose to the kitchen and found the pot and poured a cup. I called Leonard’s name, but he didn’t answer.

  I checked to see how his handiwork was coming. He was rebuilding his sink cabinet due to termite damage. Had precut boards stacked by the sink, a hammer and a bag of little facing nails and a bag of long nails for the wall boards. He’d been doing the work a bit at a time, and as usual with that kind of thing, his craftsmanship was excellent. Me, I couldn’t put on a rubber without directions, then I might get it inside out.

  I took the cup with me out the back way and walked down to the dog pens and the barn. The barn was an old-fashioned affair, once bright red and now rust-colored with big double doors and a hayloft. The pens were six long steel wire runs, and each held a spotted bird dog, and at the end of each run was a large dog house, built against heat or cold or terrific winds, and they had flap doors that closed off when the dogs went in or out. The dog in the pen closest to the barn was called Switch for some reason, and he’s Leonard’s favorite. Which is not to say Leonard wasn’t crazy about all those big dumb bastards. He went hunting with them as often as he could, not so much to hunt, but to see those spotted beauties run.

  I went by the pens, and the dogs barked and leapt. I put my fingers through the wire as I came to each run, and the dogs licked them in turn, wagged their tails and yipped.

  When I got to Switch’s run, I knelt down and spent more time with him. I hated to play favorites, but hell, there was something special about Switch. There was a kind of sad nobility in his eyes, like maybe he had seen some things he’d rather not have, but was the wiser for it. Which was damn silly, of course. Even a smart bird dog is a pretty dumb variety of dog. But he did have some class. He was protective of Leonard, too, and if he didn’t know you and he was loose and you were standing too close to Leonard, you had to watch yourself. He’d leap at you and try to tear your face off, without so much as a bark or warning growl.

  From the barn I could hear a steady thumping and knew Leonard was making that sound. He was regular about that sort of thing, even if the night before he had been up until two A. M. drinking.

  I downed the rest of my coffee, finished petting Switch, stood up and leaned forward on the pen and looked out at the thick dark woods back there; they seemed to be expanding as the sunlight widened and redefined them. Leonard had a beautiful place here. The creek was maybe a little too close to the house and he’d steadily been losing his land to erosion, something his having trenches of gravel put in alongside the creek h
adn’t helped. For a while it was okay, but soon it broke down and the gravel started to wash away, and now sometimes in the summer we’d go stand out there on the bank and throw gravel at the water and later sit on his porch scraping it and the clay out of the treads of our shoes.

  When we were really in a Huck Finn mood, we’d go down to the Robin Hood Tree, a big oak in a clearing in the woods behind Leonard’s house. I don’t know who all that woods belonged to, but in our minds that tree belonged to us. We’d named it that a few years back, after the big tree Robin Hood held his conferences under in Sherwood Forest. We sometimes went there to talk and enjoy the woods. Occasionally Leonard brought his rifle so he could pretend to be scouting for squirrels. But we always ended up at the Robin Hood tree, sitting with our backs against it, talking until nightfall.

  My place was nice but I had to admit, I prefered Leonard’s to mine. I let the look of the place soothe me while I thought about what Trudy had told me last night, and tried to figure out some way to convince Leonard to go in with me. Leonard hadn’t been part of Trudy’s thinking, but he was damn sure part of mine. I tried to tell myself it was because I liked Leonard and wanted to see him make some money, and though this was true, I knew too it was because I had come to depend on him so much. He had bailed me out of hell so many times, he had become my spirit guide through life.

  Inside the barn the light was weak, but I could see Leonard working over the heavy bag he kept hanging from a rafter beneath the hayloft. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a pair of gray sweatpants, low-cut tennis shoes with white socks and a pair of worn bag gloves. His face and hard upper torso looked like wet chocolate, and when the light caught him right, the thick beads of sweat gave the impression of greasy boils covering his skin. He was snorting plumes of cold exhaust.

  I put the coffee cup on one of the two-by-fours that helped support the unadorned wall, leaned back and watched. I guess I stood there a full five minutes before he noticed me.