“Abe Douglas said the crows are picking his corn,” Mr. Richter said.
Mr. Richter leaned into the hot trailer from the outside stoop. A striking man whose face was somewhere between Clint Eastwood and Garrison Keillor, he was tall enough to wedge his elbow into the corner of the doorframe and still keep his blue coffee mug level. He spoke to Frank, Rory, John, and me at the round breakfast table. Frank, who was seventeen and Mr. Richter’s oldest, was black-bearded, adopted, and just about the coolest teenager I knew. He was pinning the wings of sparrows, wrens, and finches to a mortarboard, kills from days and weeks before, the wings dried and flattened so they lay well and were easy to study. A pile of wings was ten inches from my bowl of cheerios, so I was mindful of my spoon.
“I’ll pay you $5 a crow,” Mr. Richter added, sipping his coffee.
“We’ll get those crows, Mr. Richter!” Rory exclaimed.
Frank’s friend Rory was cleaning his .22 for the third time, looking down the sight at the Cheerios box like he might fire through every hole he saw. With eyes that rarely blinked, Rory was red-headed, pale and energetic. He got excited about killing things in a way that made me nervous.
“We’ll need to use the blind,” John suggested.
I sat closest to John, my twelve-year old friend and Mr. Richter’s other son. Lean and tall, John was a younger version of his father. He was a swimmer, and the chlorine kept his skin taut and free of pimples, a look I was jealous of. “Moonraker,” a popular video game at the time where a buggy bounces over lunar hills, could have been played on my face.
I didn’t know much about birds, but I knew crows were smart and almost impossible to track and shoot. The weight of the challenge created a silence that made Rory jittery, and he polished his gun faster. The quiet invited my mind to wander. I counted how many o’s still floated in my bowl; I wondered if the red blotches on a brown sparrow wing was blood; I imagined a crow hiding in the deep thicket of Frank’s impressive beard. The Richters stayed still and alert, like the hunt had already started.
Frank stopped pinning wings. He lifted the colorful board and leaned it against the trailer wall. He looked up at his father, and his expression didn’t change. Mr. Richter took a sip of his coffee, then turned away because the issue was decided.
It was my third fall hunting on Mr. Richter’s property outside of Nacogdoches, Texas. The first two seasons, John and I had wandered through farmer’s fields and piney swamps armed with BB guns. I had a spring-loaded relic from my Uncle, but John carried a more modern BB gun with airpump action. We never killed anything, not even close, just plugged holes in rusty aluminum cans or shattered a beer bottle or two, if we got lucky. But Frank didn’t want us wandering around busting glass and scaring crows, so he told us to join them in the blind. We had to be quiet and still, which delighted me, but we also had to be useful, which meant we needed to arm ourselves with something more than BB guns. Frank and Rory each carried a .22 rifle and had a shotgun strapped to their backs, so they had arms to spare. I didn’t want to mention I promised my Mom I wouldn’t touch a .22 or a shotgun – it was the only way I was even allowed on these trips. My Mom was born and raised in Queens, and her father was NYPD. Guns were used by people to shoot other people.
“I‘ve never shot anything more than a BB gun,” I ventured as we walked, two by two, to the Douglas cornfield.
“Jesus,” Rory said.
Frank clambered down into a ditch and came back with an empty plastic milk gallon. He told Rory to place it on the fence post twenty yards away. Rory dug his boot into the ditch’s incline, rested the butt of his .22 on his raised thigh, and considered the horizon.
“Put it there yourself,” he answered.
Frank put his hand out for my BB gun, and I let him have it. He handed his shotgun to me.
“Both hands, Tommy.”
He showed me how to hold the weight of the shotgun by cradling the stock between my forearm and waist, then how to snap the muzzle open to chamber a round of red cartridges. He said to always keep the muzzle to the ground until I was ready to fire.
“Are we done with school yet?” Rory asked, trying to appear aloof by continuing to look away. Rory couldn’t do aloof, though; he had an itchy-trigger body, not just an itchy trigger finger.
“As soon as you put that jug on the post,” Frank answered, showing me how to click the safety off.
Rory grabbed the jug in a huff and stomped through the drainage ditch to the fence post. Cows grazed three hundred yards past the fence, but Frank assured me I wouldn’t hit them. Rory jammed the jug on the post and was walking away when Frank told me to raise the shotgun to feel its weight and get my bearings. Frank backed up, keeping an eye on me and telling me to move slowly. I was used to the rusted springs of my old BB gun, and rested my finger too heavily on the trigger. The gun went off before I had it level, exploding a chunk out of the embankment like a landmine. Just out of range, Rory ran to safety with his hands over his head like a disturbed housewife.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell’s wrong with this kid?”
Frank and John didn’t yell at me, but their expressions asked the same question.
“I – it’s – it’s the trigger. I’m used to my BB gun trigger. It’s stiffer. I’m sorry.”
Frank walked over and lowered the still-smoking shotgun and aimed at the bank before taking the gun out of my hands.
“I didn’t think of that,” he said, frowning and tugging his beard. “My fault.”
My shoulder ached where the shotgun butt, unsecured and loose, had jabbed me.
“It’s all right, Tommy. It was an accident,” Frank added.
“What? What?” Rory stumbled down through the ditch with his hands cupped over both ears like I had blown his drums out. “This pimply little idiot almost shoots me and you say it’s all right?”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, feeling more sorry that my lunar pimples were so noticeable than for almost shooting Rory.
“He said he’s sorry,” Frank said. “He won’t use the shotgun.”
“Damn straight he won’t!” Rory said, like it had been his idea. “How are we supposed to bag any crows with this kid?”
Frank responded that we were wasting time and light. He told me to hang back with him, letting John and Rory walk ahead. I thought Frank wanted to lecture me, but he didn’t say anything, just kept an eye on Rory, who was talking his younger brother’s ear off. Rory was criticizing John on his choice of friends, for bringing such an “idiot” hunting. I continued to feel bad, having had high hopes about sitting quietly in a field all day, my talent for quiet on full display. I told Frank I should just stick with my BB gun, that maybe I could “wing” a crow (a term I heard Frank use the night before), slow it down so that others could pick it off.
“You’ll wing a crow with that gun of yours, huh?” Frank asked. He kept his eyes on Rory, who was still complaining, the back of his neck starting to match his red hair.
“Yeah!” I answered, getting carried away imagining hitting a crow for Frank to pull down.
“All right then. Let’s see that gun of yours.”
Frank took my BB gun without breaking stride. He extended it with one hand, cocked his head, closed one eye and aimed down the short barrel at Rory’s butt, which he nailed dead-center from twenty yards.
“Aghhh! What the hell? Jesus Christ! What the hell?”
Rory wheeled around and trained his .22 on me, then saw I was unarmed. I put my hands up. Frank did not break pace, the BB gun now trained on Rory’s genitals.
“You need to keep quiet up there. You want to scare off all the crows?”
Rory still had the gun on me but his eyes on Frank. Frank reached Rory.
“You want to bag some crows, don’t you?” Frank asked.
“You didn’t have to shoot me, asshole,” Rory answered.
Frank pushed Rory’s muzzle to the ground.
“Yeah, well, unlike the pimply faced kid, I wanted to.”
I thought we’d set up right in the middle of the cornfield, but Frank explained the crows had “memorized” the fields and would know if anything was out of place. Better to set up beside the fields, near some trees, where the blind would mesh with the landscape. The blind wasn’t more than a wide strip of camouflage canvas and two tent poles. The four of us barely fit underneath, Rory and Frank taking the ends, with John and me squashed in the middle.
We started our crow stakeout around 7 a.m. Frank knelt on one knee, his body leaning forward and his binoculars and gun at his side. Rory lasted about fifteen minutes before pulling out some beef jerky, which he chewed loudly. The sun came over the pine trees by eight, and Rory stripped off his coat and swore about the “stupid” October heat 'til a quarter past. He asked Frank if they had brought enough water to drink. Frank didn’t respond.
We waited. I thought I heard a crow in the distance at one point but wasn’t sure. Rory said he was bored. Frank kept his eyes on the horizon. He looked through his binoculars at one point, but wouldn’t tell Rory if he saw anything.
My legs, tucked underneath me, started to cramp. I didn’t want to move, wanted to stay as still and alert as Frank and John, who seemed to be watching and listening to nothing as intently as if it was something. They were tuned into a frequency I couldn’t pick up.
Frank broke his silence by handing John the crow call and telling us to walk straight out and then in a half-mile diameter around the blind and blow the call every hundred yards or so. He hoped we could flush the crows his way.
“Now you’re talking,” Rory said, kicking John out of the blind and spreading himself out.
East Texas is mostly level, with large pines for shade, so we kept our diameter tight but always underneath the pines since the noon sun had inched overhead. John had squirreled away some strips of jerky when Rory wasn’t looking, and we chewed on those for awhile. We found some hay bales and climbed on top, where John let out some strong squawks with the call. No answer. We lay down in the bales for a rest. I was starting to have a hard time believing crows existed in the entire world, let alone Texas. I told John that it seemed like Frank really wanted to kill a crow, even more than Rory.
“My Dad used to hunt around here, too, when he was young,” John answered. “I don’t think he’s ever hit a crow.”
John read the bird books his older brother had finished, keeping on the tail end of his brother’s knowledge. While we lay in the hay bales on our backs, chewing the rest of the jerky and passing a water bottle back and forth, John talked about crows. I vaguely remember some of the facts… how scientists couldn’t quite decipher the crow language because they heard at a frequency lower than humans. How some crows had learned to use bait for fishing, or how to drop nuts into car traffic to bust them open. How most cultures referred to the crow as the intelligent trickster, and that they had become so efficient that they had time for play, which developed their intelligence, becoming the leisurely middle-class of birds. John was just delivering the facts of the matter, letting me make the connection that there was no way we would kill a crow. Seven years later, that skill to subtly empower his audience would get him elected as our senior class president by a landslide. The next time John blew the call, I was prepared for the silence.
When we made it back to the blind, Rory was napping but Frank was still leaning forward on one knee, expectant. Rory woke when we sat down and said we must have scared off all the crows.
“Let’s ditch this for the swamp and shoot some water moccasins,” Rory said. “We might run up against some deer on the way, too.”
Frank kept his eyes on the sky. Rory lay back down, pulling out a baseball cap to tip over his nose. We waited another hour, but nothing happened. Frank said it was time to go home.
We were walking two by two on the dirt road, Frank and Rory in front, when the crow cawed behind us. I turned and spotted the lost crow, desperately wheeling and trying to change directions mid-air, when Frank and Rory opened fire, and the black bird exploded.
“Hell yeah!” Rory yelled.
I had hit the ground because of the double-blasts from behind, and there was a ringing in one ear, but I heard some weak croaking in the woods. I spotted what was left of the crow in the underbrush, dragging itself, somehow, away. Tired of instructions and permissions, I scrambled after it.
It was easy to catch up to the crow, a medical marvel for moving at all. Its feathered blackness had erupted from the center, clots of blood and guts streaming all over, from glossy beak to oily-rich feathers to shaking claws. I crouched down and watched its black eye turn pale. The crow kept up the struggle against death, and it was impossible to look away.
I felt Frank behind me. I thought he tapped the barrel of my BB gun because I had it improperly aimed at the sky instead of at the ground, but then he drew it from me. He trapped the crow’s head to the earth with my gun. A meek, spring-loaded pop, and it was all over.
“C’mon Tommy.”
I helped him scoop the remains into a plastic shopping bag. We rejoined John and Rory on the road.
“Hell yeah!” Rory emphasized.
I knew John and Frank wouldn’t be as delighted with a kill as Rory – who possibly could be? – but they were more grim and silent than usual. Even Rory sensed it.
“What the hell, Frank? What gives? We got a crow, didn’t we?”
John and Frank exchanged a look as easy to miss as the flap of a bird’s wing.
“You used your shotgun on the bird,” Frank said.
“That’s what I had out, man – I told you I’d be looking for deer between the cornfield and the swamp.”
“But you hit him clean with your .22, Frank,” John offered.
“What’s eating you two?” Rory asked.
Frank and John wouldn’t say, which was starting to get on my nerves, too. We followed the dirt road home and found Mr. Richter in the doorway with his blue coffee mug, leaning outside instead of in. I would have bet he hadn’t done much besides turning around if it wasn’t for the sweat stains that darkened his white T-shirt.
Frank walked up to his father and dropped the crow at his feet.
“What’s this?”
“We bagged a crow, Mr. Richter!” Rory explained.
The afternoon breeze picked up, and the plastic bag crinkled. Mr. Richter’s legs were long enough for him to push the bag open with his boot without leaving the stoop.
“Crow, huh?”
“Yes, sir!” Rory replied.
Mr. Richter took a long look down his leg like it was the barrel of a gun. He sized up what he saw.
“How can you tell?”
John seemed to take a knee at that pronouncement, deflated. Agitated, Rory looked around like the explanation was something just out of range of his gun.
“What?” Rory asked. “I don’t get this.”
Mr. Richter watched his two sons. You’d be hard-pressed to pick which one didn’t have the same blood by the way they communed.
“Unsportsmanlike,” Mr. Richter answered.
He said the long word so slowly it felt like four. And I remembered that term from last fall when Steve Mueller joined John and me hunting. Mueller was our age but his folks bought him a .22 semi-automatic, bullets firing as fast as he could squeeze the trigger. We spent several minutes watching Steve trying to blast a squirrel out of a pine tree, hitting more tree than prey, Steve’s curses matching the angry chattering of the squirrel that bounded from limb to limb with bark and cones exploding all around. We didn’t hear the roar of Mr. Richter’s orange Suburban until he was almost right on top of us. He blew a cloud of dust around us and then emerged from it, a magic trick.
“Unsportsmanlike,” he told Steve. He took Steve’s gun and drove off before the dust from his entrance had settled.
Rory wouldn’t give in as easy as Steve.
“But you said $5 per crow. And this is a crow.”
The quiet deepened. Mr. Richter had run for the Texas Senate in the mid-70’s and only narrowly lost. It was rare to hear anyone challenge his decisions, even someone like Rory.
“My sons understand the rules. They should have explained things to you. You don’t use shotguns on birds, only .22s.”
Rory looked to Frank for back-up, but Frank stayed as quiet as if he was still in the blind, not even reaching for his beard. I watched John, a future lawyer like his father, weighing matters in his mind. I understood his point earlier about the .22; John could argue that Frank had played by the rules, maybe find the .22 bullet hole in the heart or lungs and wrangle for $2.50. But the Richters didn’t wrangle or compromise or mince the truth; a bagged of exploded crow was a bag of exploded crow. John stayed quiet.
I wished I knew what Frank was thinking. I wanted him to salvage a black wing from the mangled bird, then flatten and dry it for his mortarboard. The large wing would eclipse most of the smaller wings but brighten the survivors. Frank would hang the mortarboard on the wall in the trailer, a defiant act, a reminder a crow had been brought down, one way or the other. Wasn’t the crow a trickster, a rule-breaker deserving to be tricked? The wing would hang as a tribute, a lasting memory, because memories are too powerful to be left to chance.
But that was my imagination mincing and parceling the matter. That’s not what happened at all. Frank retrieved the bag at his father’s feet. He grabbed a shovel from behind the trailer. He dug a hole deep in the woods. And he buried the whole thing.
Tom Molanphy received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. His nonfiction has appeared in Pilgrimage, Desert Call, Blood Orange Review, The Fiddleback, Red Ochre, and Glasschord magazines. His lesson plan on creative nonfiction was included in the 826 Valencia anthology Don’t Forget To Write. His short story, "Of Subareas and Public Bathrooms," appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Curbside Splendor magazine. Tom teaches undergraduate and graduate writing and literature at the Academy of Art University. He also taught composition at the University of San Francisco, and he occasionally tutors at 826 Valencia in San Francisco.
