The Night Swimmer Read Free Page B

of some shitty ten-dollar Australian red, or a six-pack of some esoteric, locally made beer. They would regale themselves with tales of former exploits, their wild youth, a teenage drunken mission to a suburban strip mall, the rathole hostel in Amsterdam, always with murmurs of amazement and self-satisfaction. Then after an hour or two these people shutting it down to head home, talking about babysitters and papers to grade and early mornings and then it would be ten o’clock and Fred and I standing in our empty kitchen, a half pitcher of martinis left, shouting at each other.
    *  *  *
    I awoke to the smell of frying meat. In the kitchen Ham was cooking a pile of bacon. It was ten minutes after four. While Fred and I got dressed he stuck the bacon between slices of white bread and wrapped them individually in tinfoil, then set them in the cooler, already packed tight with ice and beer. Fred’s johnboat was chained to a tree down at the beach, and we drove the Rover down onto the sand to unload. The sky was still obsidian but I could feel the Green Mountains at our back, casting a cold shadow. The lake had a light chop, the wind low and insistent, pushing the water into neat, angular peaks. With the three of us, the cooler, and the guns, we had about two inches of freeboard. I tried to back out again, but Ham wouldn’t hear of it. He was still wearing his pin-striped suit, his hair at odd angles.
    We motored out to Crab Island and anchored in a small cove near the shore, close to some overhanging brush. There were birds everywhere, squawking in the trees, lighting out for their morning fly, hitting the water, ducks, gulls, terns, cranes, all kinds of things flying around. We could have swatted them out of the air with tennis rackets.
    Mother of god, Ham said, we are gonna get a few.
    Ham broke out the guns and I could tell by the way he was fumbling with them that he had only a rough idea of what he was doing. He was jamming ammo in the wrong places. He tried to hand me one, a real beautiful thing that had a kind of lacy scrollwork on the butt depicting mountain ranges, but I told him no way was I going to shoot a bird. He and Fred sorted out the shells and loaded up and got them pointed in the right direction. I grabbed a pair of earphones the size of softballs out of the gun case and clamped them on my head, bringing everything to a low hum.
    What are we looking for, Fred said, what kind of duck?
    That little fucker right there, Ham said, and swiveled his piece over and let go with both barrels at a fat brown bird that was paddling toward the boat, probably looking for a handout. The water exploded in a geyser in front of it and the bird leapt into the air. Then all the birds in the vicinity let out a collective shriek and took off in all directions, like someone let them loose at a parade. Ham was fumbling for shells that rolled across the bottom of the boat, the sharp smell of gunpowder in the air, Fred waving the barrel of his gun around like a lurching fool.
    They went through the ammo in about two minutes. The only things they hit were a couple birds that never got into the air, and now several half-mangled birds struggled on the water at varying distances from us. Fred looked a bit green, gripping the edge of the boat, his shotgun broken open and the barrels hanging in the water. The fat brown duck, the one that Ham had opened up on, was closest to us, only about twenty yards away, and appeared to have been winged; he couldn’t get the flight process going. The shotgun pellets had churned up his feathers, soft downy tufts smeared with blood. Iwas hoping he would get up and out of there. Ham dug around in the case and sure enough came up with two more shells. I took off the headphones and the audible world rushed in.
    That fucker there, he said, we are gonna have Peking style.
    Fred made a noise, some kind of grunt, as Ham sighted the duck again.
    For a moment I saw my hand swinging in a