Dove Season (A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco) Read Free

running too damn early. Among the range of noises that one could rise to, the faint thud of a shotgun from a quarter mile away was far less abrupt than most alarm clocks.
    A couple of shotgun reports popped again in the distance. Dove season was a month and a half away, but many of the locals appeared to view the legally defined season as more of a guideline than a rule. Dove season was the calendar event of the Imperial Valley, always starting on September first. It made the Imperial Valley Mid-Winter Fair look like—well, a county fair, which was what it was. I could remember Pop handing me a shotgun when I was ten. Not to hunt, but to patrol the fields. To keep any unwanted bwanas from trampling the crops. Even a prepubescent can be intimidating with a loaded shotgun.
    There was a time when people like Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper would come down for dove season. Hunt in the day, then drink and gamble down in Mexicali at night. It was still just shooting birds, but something convinced me that it was different back then. The days of Papa and Coop had long passed. If I followed the sounds of the shotgun, I would find a group of drunk-by-noon ’necks sitting in folding chairs on a ditch bank in hundred-degree heat shooting at the bird of peace. The kind of thing that makes frog gigging look majestic.
    The house hadn’t gotten any cooler overnight. I sat up on the couch, still dressed from the night before. The stink from my sweat-soaked clothes offended even me. I let my mind catch up to my eyes and looked at the clock on the mantel. If it still worked, it was eight thirty. A solid three hours of sleep.
    I lit a smoke, cracked my back, and walked to the window overlooking the front yard. The trees and lawn had lost the battle and the war. The grass was shades of brown and yellow, the hedge was spider-infested, and the scattered trees were dying of thirst. One tree had surrendered. It stretched across the lawn on its side, dead roots ripped from the ground. With the cloudless sky and bright, shining sun, it looked like a beautiful day. Looks can be deceiving. It was sure to top one hundred. Egg-frying on the sidewalk was a regular summer segment on the local news. They reserved cats without tails and water-skiing squirrels for the winter.
    I grabbed one of my bags, went into the bathroom, stripped down, and jumped in the shower. The water pressure was weak, and there was no hot water. Not that I would have used it. I made a mental note to start a to-do list of things to fix around the house, starting with the air-conditioner and the water. I knew my home maintenance chores would be infinite, but I had the time. The house was broken, almost overwhelmingly nonfunctional. What had once been a beautiful house was now closer to an enormous lean-to.
    A dozen years ago, when it was just me and Pop, this place was never going to make the cover of Architectural Digest . Two men living together, contented pigs in our own mud. However, I had my chores, and they kept the house from getting past a certain point. It was apparent that after I left, Pop had no reason to keep the place up even to that minimum degree. The house would be laughed at by Mediocre Housekeeping magazine. If something hadn’t bothered Pop, he hadn’t bothered fixing it.
    The air-conditioning was busted, the water pressure was weak, the hot water heater didn’t work, the basement was flooded, the flooded basement was plagued with frogs, the paint and stucco were chipping, some kind of animal was living in the crawl space, some other kind of animal was dead in the air ducts, the electrical system was spotty, the roof leaked, and I was pretty sure there was a beehive in one of the walls because I could feel the humming vibrations with my hand. All that under stacks of magazines, catalogs, books, and ten-year-old mail that was covered in a quarter-inch of dust.
    It couldn’t hurt to keep busy. Might as well clean, organize, and repair. I liked to believe that I