Read Online Vintage Ford by Richard Ford - Free Book Online Page B

tossing out the weighted duck bodies to make two groups in front of our blind with a space of open water in between. I could begin to see now that what I’d imagined the marsh to look like was different from how it was. For one thing, the expanse of water around us was smaller than I had thought. Other grass islands gradually came into view a quarter mile off, and a line of green trees appeared in the distance, closer than I’d expected. I heard a siren, and then music that must’ve come from a car at the Reggio dock, and eventually there was the sun, a white disk burning behind the mist, and from a part of the marsh opposite from where I expected it. In truth, though, all of these things—these confusing and disorienting and reversing features of where I was—seemed good, since they made me feel placed, so that in time I forgot the ways I was feeling about the day and about life and about my future, none of which had seemed so good.
    Inside the blind, which was only ten feet long and four feet wide and had spent shells and candy wrappers and cigarette butts on the planks, my father displayed the pint bottle of whiskey, which was three-quarters empty. He sat for a time, once we were arranged on our crates, and said nothing to me or to Renard when he had finished distributing the decoys and had climbed into the blind to await the ducks. Something seemed to have come over my father, a great fatigue or ill feeling or a preoccupying thought that removed him from the moment and from what we were supposed to be doing there. Renard unsheathed the guns from their cases. Mine was the old A. H. Fox twenty-gauge double gun, that was heavy as lead and that I had seen in my grandmother’s house many times and had handled enough to know the particulars of without ever shooting it. My grandmother had called it her “ladies gun,” and she had shot it when she was young and had gone hunting with my father’s father. Renard gave me six cartridges, and I loaded the chambers and kept the gun muzzle pointed up from between my knees as we watched the silver sky and waited for the ducks to try our decoys.
    My father did not load up, but sat slumped against the wooden laths, with his shotgun leaned on the matted front of the blind. After a while of sitting and watching the sky and seeing only a pair of ducks operating far out of range, we heard the other hunters on the marsh begin to take their shots, sometimes several at a terrible burst. I could then see that two other blinds were across the pond we were set down on—three hundred yards from us, but visible when my eyes adjusted to the light and the distinguishing irregularities of the horizon. A single duck I’d watched fly across the sky at first flared when the other hunters shot, but then abruptly collapsed and fell straight down, and I heard a dog bark and a man’s voice, high-pitched and laughing through the soft air. “Hoo, hoo, hoo, lawd oooh lawdy,” the man’s voice said very distinctly in spite of the distance. “Dat mutha-scootcha was all the way to Terre Bonne Parish when I popped him.” Another man laughed. It all seemed very close to us, even though we hadn’t shot and were merely scanning the milky skies.
    â€œCoon-ass bastards,” my father said. “Jumpin’ the shooting time. They have to do that. It’s genetic.” He seemed to be addressing no one, just sitting leaned against the blind’s sides, waiting.
    â€œAlready
been
shootin’ time,” Renard Junior said, his gaze fixed upwards. He was wearing two wooden duck calls looped to his neck on leather thongs. He had yet to blow one of the calls, but I wanted him to, wanted to see aV of ducks turn and veer and come into our decoy-set, the way I felt they were supposed to.
    â€œNow is that so, Mr. Grease-Fabrice, Mr. Fabree-chay.” My father wiped the back of his hand across his nose and up into his blond hair, then closed