Having found nothing better, Cassidy thought he might return to his bag boy job at the base commissary, but then the Monday following the last day of school, Trapper Nelson called him from a pay phone at the Pantry Pride.
“You interested in a job this summer?” Trapper said.
“Holy cow, are you kidding me? I hate bagging groceries. I’d rather shovel crap than bag groceries.”
“Well, that’s about what I’m offering. Come on down to the Jupiter Hilton and I’ll buy you a Coke. We can catch up a little and discuss a little business.”
Cassidy hadn’t ridden his old ten-speed in months, as there was an unwritten law governing the maximum age at which it was still cool to pedal yourself around town. He was well past it, but this was no time to stand on ceremony. It took him less than fifteen minutes to get to the Hilton, where Trapper was waiting on the bench in front of the store, eating four moon pies and drinking from a quart bottle of T.G. Lee milk. Sitting on the bench was an opened Topp Cola waiting for him.
“Youngblood!”
“Hey, Trap. Long time no see. How are the tropicals?”
“All signed, sealed, and delivered, except for one rock beauty. I couldn’t bring myself to sell her. She has become a permanent resident. I could swear she recognizes me. When I come into the cabin she swims over to get as close as she can to me. She’s amazing.”
Cassidy sat, out of breath, and greedily tilted back the bottle. It had been a hot, thirsty three miles of pedaling. After a minute, he could almost talk.
“I know. They have real personalities. But hey, what’s this about a job? You’re not pulling my leg, are you?”
“I almost wish I was. The jungle cruise business has just about gotten out of hand. Dave Booker brings boatloads of twenty-five to thirty tourists by most days of the week.”
Trapper, it appeared, had become a polished entertainer. He donned his Tarzan loincloth, wrapped himself in harmless snakes, and fake-wrestled sleepy old alligators. The crowd never failed to swoon. He would give a little tour of the camp, showing off whatever happened to be in the cages and pits at the time: bobcats, raccoons, lynxes, alligators, turtles. And, of course, Willie the parrot was a great favorite, sitting on low branches and begging potato chips from the kids. (“I tell them to brush the salt off first. It’s not good for him.”)
“But basically, what it boils down to is that I need help running Trapper Nelson’s Zoo and Jungle Garden. That’s what I call it now. I even had postcards printed up! Those tourists will buy anything that isn’t nailed down,” said Trapper. “It pays seventy-five cents an hour and I’ll provide lunch. I need somebody to help me work up the trinkets and doodads, clean the cages, feed the critters. I mean, heck, it’s getting to the point I don’t even have time to go check my traps anymore. I like making money, God knows, but this really is getting out of hand. It’s even starting to affect the Thursday night poker game. Last week the tourists barely had time to clear out before Jim Branch’s boat pulled up. And he brought Joe Kern and Judge Chillingworth with him. I didn’t have a thing ready for them. They joked around about it, but I could tell they were irritated. That ended up being a big night, too. At one point we actually had two separate games going. I didn’t think they’d ever leave.”
Trapper took the last bite of moon pie and finished off his milk, shaking his head.
“I still don’t get why they’d come all the way up there by boat just to play poker,” Quenton said.
“Yeah, well, come talk to me after you’ve been married a few years, Youngblood. You can tell me how much your wife likes having a bunch of your fishing buddies coming around, drinking bourbon and smoking cigars in her house.”
“Yeah, but they could find someplace to go closer to town, couldn’t they?”
“Sure, but they like a little taste of the primitive. My place appeals to their frontier spirit. Why, some of those guys even bring guns with them, pistols. Lay them right on the table in front of them. I think it’s supposed to be a joke, but it doesn’t seem that funny to me.”
“Why don’t you tell them to cut it out?”
“Well, I guess because I’m not used to bossing around circuit judges and state attorneys, Youngblood. I’m just the innkeeper. I provide a woodsy refuge from domestic bliss.”
Cassidy finished his drink and they sat watching the few boats heading out the inlet for some weekday fishing.
“Hey, Trap,” said Cassidy, “you ever been married?”
Trapper sighed. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
“Yeah?”
“There was a girl, back before the war. We ended up getting married before I got drafted. Lucille was her name.”
“What happened to her?”
“Oh, I went off to basic training and left her running the camp. She got bored, I guess. She up and took off. Place was a mess when I got back. I didn’t know where she had gone, so I got a lawyer and published a notice in the newspaper and divorced her. I still don’t know where she is.”
Cassidy was surprised to see him looking wistful for a moment. His name had been associated with a number of young ladies over the years, but if he ever mentioned one, it was always lightheartedly. Lucille must have been different. Several seconds went by before Trapper snapped out of it.
“Hey, so about this job. Can I count on you?” Trapper said.
Cassidy pretended to ponder it for a few moments.
“Do nuns wear sensible shoes?” he said.
* * *
The footwear choices of various postulants aside, Cassidy was delighted to be heading out to Trapper’s camp first thing the next morning.
On the way over he was thinking about how he was going to deal with his friends’ reaction to this. He had already taken a lot of grief over the years, with some people dubbing him “Little Trapper” and “Trapper Nelson, Jr.” This was considered quite an insult by a few people around town who still believed Trapper Nelson was some kind of shady character, but Cassidy considered it a compliment.
He couldn’t believe how much there was to do around the place. As elaborate as the camp had grown over the years, Trapper had been managing it single-handedly, except for a few weeks during the summers when relatives came down from New Jersey to stay in his “guest cabins,” primitive log structures he had built to rent out to hardy souls willing to rough it for a few nights.
This was familiar work for Cassidy. He had often “volunteered” around the place in the past, but money rarely changed hands. He was usually rewarded with gopher tortoise stew, fried gator tail, or some smoked sailfish or barracuda.
Cassidy got to work hosing out the cages of the various creatures. Robert, the bobcat, who looked like a peaceful tabby until he was approached too closely, was content to cower in the back of his cage while Cassidy worked. After cleaning, he filled Robert’s bowl with scraps of mullet and turtle from the cleaning tables. Then he fed whole mullets to Stumpy, a ten-foot alligator who would have been twelve feet except part of his tail and most of one foot had been bitten off in battles with rivals. There were a pair of raccoons in separate cages who hadn’t been named yet. Fastidious creatures, they cracked freshwater mussels and rinsed them off in the large water bowl Cassidy refilled for them. Trapper arrived as Cassidy was finishing emptying the traps of mice and rats that had been caught overnight, dumping the little carcasses into a zinc bucket for the delectation of the numerous snakes currently in residence.
“Good morning’s work, Youngblood. Come on up for some lunch,” Trapper called.
Cassidy washed off at the hose by the cleaning station and sat down at one of the picnic tables under the chickee hut, where Trapper had laid out sandwiches, a citrus fruit salad, and iced tea.
“Wow,” said Cassidy. “Store-bought! What gives?”
“I splurge on occasion,” said Trapper through a mouthful of ham sandwich.
“I guess so. Somebody told me you sold a bunch of land to some developer. It was even in the paper. Is that true?”
Trapper shrugged. “You can’t believe everything you read,” he said with a mysterious smile.
They ate in silence for a while until Willie the parrot flew over. If he didn’t see anything worth begging for, he would fly back up to his limb and scream “cracker!” at them, so Trapper broke off a piece of crust from his sandwich and held it out.
“Cracker?” Willie said.
“Well, it’s food, if that’s what you’re asking. And if you take it and drop it on the ground, that’s all you’re getting,” said Trapper.
Willie snatched the crust greedily and flew back to his limb, where he stood on one foot, holding the bread with the other.
“You’re welcome,” said Trapper.
“His manners don’t seem to have improved much,” said Cassidy.
“I’ve read that mentally they’re like two-year-olds. That seems about right to me. And no two-year-old I’ve known ever read Emily Post.”
Cassidy finished his second sandwich while Trapper was on his third. There was one more left and Cassidy was pleasantly stuffed, but with Trapper around no food ever went to waste.
“Hey, Trap, did you ever get a chance to talk to Mr. San Romani about the training stuff?”
“Glad you reminded me. Be right back.” Trapper went to his cabin and returned with a handwritten envelope, which he handed to Cassidy. The top flap had been neatly sliced, probably by one of Trapper’s fillet knives.
Cassidy took out the two sheets of lined paper. The handwriting was small and very neat:
Dear Vince,
How are things on the Loxahatchee? Sounds like the trapping business is finally beginning to wind down. I hope your other ventures can take up the slack.
I can’t believe you actually had Gary Cooper come to visit! Mr. “High Noon” himself! My mom and dad are big fans of his and I sure am, too. I would have given anything to be there!
How did the visit go with Connie and Phil and little Flip? Bet they had a great time, as usual. The new improvements to the irrigation system sound terrific. Bet it’s nice to have a real engineer-type guy like Phil Sr. around to help out once in a while.
To change the subject, I’ve looked over the suggested workouts the coach gave our young friend. As you and I have discussed before, almost any training program can produce results compared to doing nothing, so I want to say first of all that there is nothing particularly “wrong” with anything I saw.
But here’s the thing: there is an awful lot of really slow running in there, three- and four-mile jogs and such. It seems like to me if our friend is trying to get ready for basketball, after an initial conditioning phase he’d want to be doing some moderate to long intervals several times a week, then add wind sprints as the season approaches. And it doesn’t seem like there’s nearly enough weight lifting in there, particularly half-squats. All the jumpers and most of the basketball players I know do tons of them, and your guy hardly has them spending any time in the weight room.
Well, that’s my take on it, anyway. I suspect that young Quenton already understands much of this after the program we put him through back in junior high.
I hope he’s able to run some cross-country in the fall. It shouldn’t interfere too much with basketball. Plus, I’d really like to see him run track in the spring. He might be surprised at what he can do if he sets his mind to it.
Well, that’s it from the Midwest. Best of luck with your projects, and let us know if you ever get out this way.
Your friend,
Arch
“Well, that’s kinda what I was thinking,” said Cassidy, rubbing his eyes. “You know, after last season we all figured this year would be just amazing. Now, I don’t know.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Bickerstaff hasn’t had much to do with basketball since his college days in the forties. He still thinks a jump shot is a show-offy kind of trick shot. Plus he doesn’t like the point guard system we had last year. He wants to go back to using two guards, which means I’ll be playing with Carroll Morgan in the back court.”
“I thought he was pretty good.”
“He is good, but he gets in the way when I’m trying to bring the ball up court. That’s one of the reasons Coach Cinnamon made me the point guard in the first place. I didn’t need the help handling the ball, and it opened another slot for a big man. Plus, poor Carroll can’t throw the ball into the ocean.”
“Hmm. So what are you going to do?”
“Right now”—Cassidy stood up and gathered plates and glasses—“right now I’m going to go throw a bunch of snake heads and turtle shells into the formaldehyde vat so you can have them ready to foist off on a bunch of people from Wisconsin next week.”
“And don’t forget . . .”
“I know, stretch the hides, catch some mullet, irrigate the garden, and feed the turtles. Got it. But I gotta be out of here by four so I can meet Stiggs and Randleman at the base gym. I’ve got to let them know about the new workout schedule I just made up.”