Near Evanston
When they weren’t messing around with horses or guns or video games or whatever else snagged their flighty attention, Colton, Jake, and Cody had spent a great deal of that summer and a good part of the fall messing about with Cody’s little Mazda pickup. They’d stripped it and straight-piped the thing and put a glass pack on the tail but that little Mazda still didn’t sound any louder than a pissed-off lawn mower. Nonetheless, there they were, trying to muscle up an impression of invincibility on the dirty-iced streets of Evanston, the three of them packed in the front seat, shotguns and a dinky beat-up spinning rod in back, cans of Copenhagen on the dash. Under their legs, they’d stashed skinning knives and Jake’s swamp-rotten waders, the latter of which were now giving up scents of old frog and last season’s mud. Neil Diamond was on the player like it was summer forever and no one was ever going to grow old and luck and love were on the side of all God-fearing boys in blue jeans.
Almost none of this was true:
It was early November and the yellow light was sickly with whatever was coming to them. Town, stripped of summer ice-cone stalls and fall leaves and not yet covered with snow or Christmas lights, was depressing the way a hangover is depressing, a low-grade headache of a place that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The old railway buildings and Chinese laundries just north of downtown seemed bewildered, unwanted from another age. The low new buildings in town—EZ-tanning and payday loan-type joints so tenuous that they hung their names out on plastic banners instead of anything permanent—looked cheap and too thin for the weather. But none of this mattered to the boys. They had guns and Mountain Dew and southwestern Wyoming seemed to be there for whoever was alive enough to take it.
The reservoir isn’t much to speak of, unless you love that sort of thing. Just a big dirty hole of water on the outskirts of town, but the boys knew it like it was heaven with a side of freedom. “Money talks, but it don’t sing and dance and it don’t walk,” the boys sang.
“Honey’s sweet, but it ain’t nothing next to baby’s treat.”
“Money talks, but it don’t…”
They bounced into the parking lot at the reservoir. There were no other cars around. The outhouses had been closed for the season, garbage cans turned upside down against the anticipation of inevitable snow, the picnic sites scraped up. A sign asking visitors not to litter had been buckshot in the belly. The boys piled out of the Mazda, Cody and Colton ahead of Jake, all of them crouched low, soldierly, shotguns across their chests as they jogged toward the reservoir on a thin layer of crunchy snow. The sun had given up trying to break through the dull press of sky and had slid into someone else’s tomorrow. The cold had settled on the land like an endurance test. I don’t suppose the boys really believed the geese would be roosting on the ice-covered reservoir, or that there would be so many of them this late in the year, but there they were—dozens of geese balanced as still as decoys on a half inch of ice. “Holy crap,” said Cody.
“Shhh,” said Colton. He spat and a yellow stream flew from his mouth. A bit of tobacco fell on his lip.
“What do we do?” asked Jake.
“Open fire, boys,” said Colton. He nodded at Jake and Cody. “Now.”
And then, all at once, the three boys had their guns to shoulders, unloading on those geese as if they thought it likely the birds would try to fire back. The geese startled up, struggling to get airborne on the thin, frigid air, skidding on the ice, everything heavy with a terrible kind of possibility and slowed up like time had snagged itself on the cold. The boys pumped shot after shot down onto the reservoir and when the smoke cleared there was just one goose left on the ice, every other bird airborne, honking distress into the pale grey evening. Jake lifted his gun and fired one more shot. That lonely icebound goose gave a startled jerk, but kept waddling toward the middle of the lake. A tiny black hole of open water gaped ready for it.
“Did I hit it?” asked Jake.
“Shoot again,” yelled Colton.
But at that moment the goose skidded one final step and fell over dead just within reach of the hole and there she floated.
Then Colton was on his toes dancing like someone suspended by ropes from the sky, all arms and legs. “Your first goose, man! It’s your first goose!” His knees pumped up and down. “It’s your first goose!” And then he stopped dancing suddenly and reached down his pant leg. “Sonofa, I forgot…” He fetched up a can of Mountain Dew.
“What were you doing with that in your rods?” asked Cody.
“So it won’t freeze.” Colton pulled the tab and took a sip. “Cheers, boys.”
“Holy cow,” said Jake, looking out at the dead creature floating in the little hole of water in the middle of the iced-up lake. “I wish I had a dog right now.”
“Here,” said Colton, handing the soda to Jake. “Hold this.”
“What you doing?”
“The redneck retriever.”
It was almost completely dark and Colton had already tried pushing logs across the reservoir after the goose, throwing rocks at it, and, finally, slogging into the water in Jake’s leaky extra-large waders, breaking ice with his chest as he went, the dinky little spin rod from the backseat of Cody’s pickup flailing ahead of him, trying to catch the goose on an oversized lure. From the Mazda, where they had their feet up against the heater, Cody and Jake shouted directions out the window, but whatever they said, the fishing line wasn’t very long and the lure kept landing close enough to Colton that the boys could hear the plunk as it hit the ice. Then as Colton got out to waist-deep water, “You can’t swim!” Jake reminded him.
“It’s not so deep,” Colton shouted back. But a few more steps and the water started to come over the top of the waders.
“You can’t swim!” Jake repeated.
“He can’t swim?” said Cody.
“Not so as you’d notice,” said Jake.
“Holy crap,” said Cody.
“Dog-paddle,” said Jake.
“This is how you see on television about people dying,” said Cody.
“He’ll certainly freeze,” observed Jake.
“Most definitely,” said Cody.
The two boys watched their friend for another few minutes. Then Jake said, “You hear about the kid they found up in Sublette?”
“Nope,” said Cody.
“Cops found him in the desert with his head in a badger hole.”
“Doing what?” asked Cody.
“Dead.”
“Holy crap,” said Cody.
“They say he’d been there for months. Sunbaked from the ass down.”
“With his head in a hole?” asked Cody.
“Yep.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yep.”
“Crazy freakin’ sonofabitch,” said Cody, looking out the window.
“Should we go fetch him?” said Jake after a few more minutes.
“Colton?” said Cody. “Fetch Colton? Since when do you think he’d listen to us?”
Colton tried a few more casts from chest-deep water, but he wasn’t even close to catching the goose. “Okay! I’m coming back,” he shouted at last.
By the time Colton climbed back into the pickup he was most definitely starting to lose higher functioning—his systems shutting down from hypothermia—and the way Jake tells it, Colton didn’t have an excess of higher functioning to lose in the first place.
“Man, you’re frozen like a frozen thing,” said Cody. “You coulda died out there.”
Colton was too bunched with cold to speak, his lips pressed together and blue.
“We got to get these waders off you,” said Jake. “You’re soaking, man.” So Colton was wrestled out of the waders. Then Jake sat rubbing Colton’s hands and Cody turned the heat up and complained about the pickup getting so steamy it was like the freakin’ Amazonian jungle—all they needed was them snakes and bugs and freakin’ Injuns with them bones through the noses—and this went on until Colton started singing between chattering teeth, “If I should die before I wake, feed Jake…”
“Oh brother,” said Jake. He looked at Cody. “His brain must be turning back on. He’s being a retard.”
“Think,” Colton said, wringing his socks out with shaking, white hands. “How we gonna get that goose?”
“Can we forget the goose?” said Jake. “You’re about froze to a standstill.”
“I ain’t gonna forget your goose, man. It’s your first goose. And anyway, my dad’s gonna tan my hide if he hears I left a dead goose out there.”
So the boys sat in the truck listening to Cozy Country 106.1 FM for another twenty minutes. Then Cody said, “Happy yet, Colton? It’s completely freakin’ dark. Can we go home now?”
“Can we come back tomorrow with a bigger rod?” asked Colton. “Maybe if I just had a bigger rod.”
“Whatever you need to do.”
“It’s Jake’s first goose, man.”
“I know,” said Jake. “But there’s no sense drowning for a dead goose.”
Colton gave Jake a look like he was thinking maybe there was.