OCR Text |
Show Blue Run/47 to set camp before New Year's. That was opening day, when the big money rolled up New Orleans-these red-faced men in rental cars filled with ribeye steaks and George Dickel, they'd roll in half happy, ready to shoot something The building was a cinder block job with four cold bedrooms full of bunkbeds with those tree-shaped air-fresheners hung up under the box springs Ruby'd stack towels at the foot of each bed, along with a box of Remington number four magnums, a bag of peanuts and pint bottle of Ancient Age-gifts from the host, Daddy, who'd get tipped two hundred dollars a man when it was all said and done. A huge fireplace lit up a half-dozen mounted mallards and wood ducks, along with a six-pound crappie and somebody's Boone & Crockett citation whitetail deer, green Christmas tinsel strung between tines. Above the kitchen stove hung a collection of cast iron cookwafe such as might never be seen outside the fish shacks and duck clubs of the Arkansas delta. Out back, a room was heated for waders, a dozen pairs of them hanging like little upside down men. I used to go out there when I was still a girl, after Daddy got his leg cut off and got hooked on morphine, after the divorce. See the afternoon sun in winter come through a window that looked out over a turnip field to the west, beyond which stretched Bayou Meto, where daddy'd float his flat bottom on days before season, between Christmas and the new year. We'd string yo-yos baited with live shiners set four feet deep for crappie. Daddy'd scull the flatbottom through the stumpy water, from one tripped yo-yo to the next, unhook crappie and smallmouth and the stray blue channel, throwing them flop at my feet. Once, on a morning when the sky glowed pink and orange, the air went simply black with mallards, a whole world of them A j whole world of ducks. The sound of their wings beating air, their voices grainy and hilarious so we got fall-down laughing sick, both of us, me and Daddy, him a little happy, maybe, a snort in |