Snapper Read online

  Some people describe the sound of a tornado as akin to a freight train, which is like comparing a wolf to a beagle. I have sat, with Lola and a brace of beer, directly beneath rolling trains on the Dogtown trestle bridge over the Ohio River: they’re rhythmic, clattering, dependable, and their sound, though loud, suggests a sort of restrained power. As I clutched my head between those poplar roots what I heard was purely chaotic, an unhinged and unpredictable malevolence, demon song; lightning struck twice nearby and I could not hear the thunderclaps because the whole chorus of hell overwhelmed them. God, perhaps suffering a midlife crisis by now, was off seeking deliverance on all the coasts of dark destruction where every wave sounds the rush and crumble of ruin. I found it hard to sympathize.

  Abruptly the sound diminished and I was in a predictable, chummy sort of thunderstorm. The leaves settled and the rain poured and the call-and-response of lightning and thunder drifted slowly away from me toward the west. I became aware of some aches in my arms and back and legs. These developed later into bruises. I don’t know what hit me but to look at me a week later you’d guess that I was a spectacularly inept toreador. All around me were lethal-looking branches freshly shorn from their trees.

  That tornado left a six-mile swath of houses in splinters and twenty-nine dead after touching down four miles away from where I cowered in the mud. As if God had driven his Camaro through there with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a rented blonde in the other, AC/DC loud on the stereo. I don’t know how you can look at an occurrence like that without concluding that God is white trash, but you don’t say that kind of thing in Indiana.

  I didn’t know about the damage yet, of course. I knew only that I appeared to be okay, so I ran to the truck. It was scratched and dented and probably needed a creative paint job, but nothing was smashed, so I got in and headed for Lola’s house.

  I was astonished to see Gerald on his front lawn inspecting a branch there, wondering what neighbor’s tree had donated it. Everyone was doing this, of course—by this time, twenty minutes later, the sun was out, and the sidewalks steaming. Across the street a pin oak had dispatched one wall of a garage attached to a family home, but this far from the funnel cloud damage was minimal. Still, I had thought that Gerald must have been in the forest, too, with some tornado-evasion technique that he had used dozens of times before. He was perfectly dry, in clean clothes, outside his house. I was one big shade of mud, like something extracted from the shallows of a stagnant pond.

  He was alarmed. “You were out in that?” he said.

  “We work in all weather,” I said.

  “Did I say that?”

  “My interview,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I’m fine. I’m glad you’re fine. I came to check on Lola.”

  “Oh.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  He didn’t reply. I looked at her house; a large branch lay on the roof and had dislodged several shingles. I repeated myself.

  “She hasn’t been home for two days,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  I couldn’t tell you whether either of my neighbors had been home for a month. But then I didn’t live next to Lola. In ordinary circumstances, I would have drawn the correct conclusion: that she had made a new friend who had invited her back to his nest. In the aftermath of the storm I was too worried to think straight, and I approached her door in a panic. If she was inside, she was undoubtedly safe but probably freaked out. Moreover, she knew that I had been in the forest and was probably quivering with worry for me.

  She didn’t answer.

  I went around the corner to the window of her kitchenette. I had made a hasty exit from that window once and I thought I could unlatch it with my pocketknife. I was right. To my surprise I found Gerald over my shoulder.

  “You’re breaking and entering,” he said.

  “She does it to me all the time,” I said. She had done it once. In those days a cell phone was a shoe-box-size thing you plugged into your car battery, and if you owned one you probably had a speedboat or a pilot’s license or a wine cellar too. I didn’t think twice about letting myself into Lola’s, mud and all, during an emergency.

  “I’ll let you in the front door,” I said.

  All the dishes were clean in the kitchen. I peered in the bedroom on the way to the front door, and the bed was made. I let Gerald in. On the living room sofa lay an open book, but there was always an open book on her sofa. It was never one I’d given her.

  An empty house, however familiar, is always unsettling, as though it resents you. And Lola’s house in particular was not so much clean as beaten into spotless submission—something I always found at odds with her character—and to see it without her was somehow to witness its pain.

  “I guess she wasn’t home for the storm,” I said pointlessly. Gerald nodded. He looked a little uncomfortable, but I didn’t realize that he didn’t suspect the nature of my relationship with her until I said I was going to change clothes. I was pretty sure I had some old jeans and a T-shirt beneath her bed. His face turned as red as his beard.

  “I’m sure she’s safe,” I called to the living room. Gerald made no reply. I went to the adjoining bathroom to wash my face and hands. When I returned to the living room I found Gerald on his knees with a wet paper towel, trying unsuccessfully to remove some mud that had come from my boots. He looked more at home than I felt.

  “She’s an Indiana girl,” I said. “I suppose she knows what to do.”

  “The storm isn’t the problem,” he said. “I told you she’s been missing for two days. Virgil doesn’t have any food. Or water.” Both bowls on the kitchen floor were empty.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll clean that mud up. The cat food is under the sink.”

  “I think that if she had planned to be away for any length of time she would have asked me to feed the cat,” he said. He meant because he lived next door, but he sounded possessive about it, as if letting him feed Virgil would have been a special personal favor she granted.

  “Has she ever asked you to feed the cat before?” I said.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  Not yet? So much turns on a single syllable. Was Gerald waiting, heart in hand, for Lola to ask him any favor at all?

  “But you thought she’d get around to it,” I said.

  “If she were planning to go away for any length,” he said defensively. “Someone should water her plants.”

  “Would you like that honor, Gerald? Maybe you could check her mailbox while you’re at it.”

  “That’s illegal,” he said. “So I’ll leave it to you.”

  I was beginning to frame an idea. That is, my storm-induced anxieties gave way to wisdom borne of experience. A few months previously Lola had been involved with a comparative literature professor. She got bored with him eventually, but perhaps she had changed her mind. Though probably not. “He said my interpretations were too facile,” she had explained, “and we were talking about breakfast.”

  I didn’t think I should share this information with Gerald.

  Virgil materialized at the sound of food rattling into his bowl. I don’t know where he had been, but he paid no attention to us.

  “Where does she work?” Gerald said, much more to the point. I’d bet whole oil wells on Gerald finding the female of any other species. But she didn’t exactly work. She’d received several grants and fellowships throughout her academic career—she was an exceptional student. She also collected small fees for nude modeling sessions at the local Arts Center, and managed to live on them in summer. I didn’t share this with Gerald, either.

  In any case, she would have fed Virgil.

  “She didn’t plan to be away,” I said.

  “How do you know that?” he said.

  “I mean you’re right. She would have asked me to feed the cat.” I didn’t mean to be a bitch. It just happened.
/>   The front door opened, and Lola appeared there with one arm around an embroidered silk shirt and lavender corduroys flared above the pointiest black boots I had ever seen. I didn’t recognize the man inside them, but that was unimportant. We were all interchangeable anyway. He could be Nashville or he could be Memphis or he could be Hamamatsu, Japan. Let X = job, let Y = hairstyle, let Z = favorite film. Lola’s whim was axiomatic, verging on proof. Lola stared at me, her mouth a perfect O. She hates to be discovered. I searched for something caustic to say, but Gerald spoke first.

  “We were just feeding the cat,” he said.

  Lola launched into an unbearable display of gratitude and pleasant surprise, and she chirped introductions as though none of us had the least thing in common (his name was Darian, almost as pretentious as those jester boots. I decided he was someplace scummy and dull like Indianapolis). Virgil began to insult us by rubbing his sides on those corduroys.

  “Wasn’t that storm just thrilling?” said Lola.

  “Awesome,” said Darian.

  “Nathan was out in it,” said Gerald.

  “Awesome,” said Darian.

  “We watched through the window of the Square Knot Café,” said Lola. That was an extremely stupid thing to do, and I nearly said so. Instead I said, “Awesome,” but she missed my point entirely. She was adroit like that, and this charade could have gone on indefinitely without some decisive action on my part. Her laughter, which usually had for me a quality of an elixir escaping a vial, seemed abruptly like an aerosol can aimed at my face.

  “Gerald,” I said. “Let’s go to your place. I have a question about square roots.” He followed me out and back to his front porch, where we sat for a half hour without speaking. He was the more forlorn, because at least I should have seen it coming. I stood up to go but had a second, better thought.

  “Gerald,” I said. “When was the last time you went out and got blind drunk?”

  He peered at me as though he had just spotted a Lesser Mississippi Mud Thrush, last verified nearby in 1936. I would need to coach him on technique.

  II

  Snapper

  I doubt anyone outside Southern Indiana knows what a stripper pit is. They don’t exist anywhere else. This is sometimes embarrassing for me in conversation, if I say I spent many happy adolescent hours there. People think I’m talking about Thong Thursdays at Fast Eddie’s. The British Broadcasting Corporation once sent a reporter by boat to Evansville to investigate the wild ways of the inhabitants—the kind of thing they used to do in “deepest Africa,” I think. We are Hoosiers after all.

  On a technical level a stripper pit is what remains of a bituminous coal mine, but strip mining is not like other mining. Picture vast granite cliffs topped with coniferous trees, deep lakes of calm cerulean blue—imagine a majestic Norwegian fjord somehow misplaced among rolling cornfields—that is what a stripper pit looks like. At the bottom of those lakes you’ll find old refrigerators and stolen cars and bags of kittens. It is Southern Indiana.

  Before the mining company got to it, it was woodland or farmland or, in some cases, small towns. The beauty of strip mining, if you’re a mining company, is that you don’t have to dig for your coal: you just scrape everything off the top for several surrounding square miles. Then you scrape yourself a lucrative pit where the bituminous is piled deepest. Some people will tell you it’s anthracite, but they’re wrong: even the coal around there is second-rate.

  The only downside to this kind of operation is that even Hoosiers won’t tolerate the total obliteration of the landscape for long.

  So if you were a strip mine in about 1973 you found yourself suddenly filled with water and stocked with fish. Your hillsides were covered in alien trees—the mining company was footing the bill and they weren’t fussy. Overnight you got used to deer and raccoons and possums, rattlesnakes and songbirds and foxes, wild dogs and butterflies. Not long after that you lost count of the hunters and anglers and campers and delinquent kids setting fire to things.

  I used to go to various stripper pits in Warrick County with my friend Shane in his ’79 Chevy Silverado. His dad still keeps it running. Shane’s dad is a poet. Hoosier poets aren’t like other poets. Last time I saw him the three of us pinned a beer can to a tree and threw knives at it all afternoon. Shane and I, with our “scientifically-balanced” mail-order throwing knives, began to get the hang of it after a couple of hours. Shane’s dad, a big man with a snowy beard that makes you think of Poseidon, stood twenty feet away with a rusty old kitchen chopper and he nailed it every time. Underhand. Poets in New York and San Francisco can’t do that.

  My dad was a mathematician, and he shared an office with Shane’s dad. That tells you something about the University of Evansville back then. It’s better now; it has to be. There’s a new one on the other side of town.

  Our dads got along very well, made jokes about how writing a sonnet and proving a theorem were essentially the same thing. They weren’t sociable after hours, though. My dad stayed home reading cheap thrillers he got from the library by the armful. My mom read Book Club books. Shane’s dad liked to take his wife skinny-dipping when the kids were out. Shane told me this, not his old man. You still notice the way those two look at each other, and they’re both north of sixty now.

  Our families in general weren’t that close, not back then. All kinds of convoluted things happened later between my brother and his sister and me and his other sister. Shane made jokes about marrying my sister. But the time I am talking about, when I was sixteen and he was a year older, it was just us, and we spent a lot of time at the stripper pits, as I said.

  Shane thought he’d be a poet, too. He’s now a librarian with three kids, but back then people laughed at him a lot. He would stare dreamily skyward and someone would say, “Look, guys. Craddock wants to be a bird.”

  His shoulder-length hair and gypsy earring didn’t help.

  It was the same kind of ribbing his dad must have endured when he went through college on a football scholarship. He’d sit on the bench during games reading Shakespeare. Nobody pushed either of them too far, though. Shane and his dad are both well built.

  I was going to be a philosopher. The university had one, and he spent most of his time buying drinks for flouncy co-eds. That was probably the best career plan I ever had. Ecology and the study of songbird decline came later. Philosophy might have been more cheerful, because at least it is already dead.

  We stuck close together at school, as you can imagine, and in the evenings and on weekends especially we’d kick around in the stripper pits. Sometimes we took fishing gear, but we never caught much. We built fires and talked and ate beans from the can using a bowie knife as a spoon. We skipped a lot of stones. We skipped a lot of stones. Thirty-four hops was my personal record. I have very long arms.

  We’d see people sometimes and say hi, but never stop to talk. I am eternally grateful we never encountered Shane’s parents in the nude. They must have known some smaller, more secluded pit.

  Shane had a tendency to talk rhapsodically about The Faerie Queene and other things I’d never heard of. I thought my job was simply to argue with anything for the sake of arguing. He felt that he was communing through the ages with the great spirit of Edmund Spenser, and I told him he was full of it. These sessions probably did us both good. For two summers running we went out there almost daily, and our parents didn’t make us look for jobs. They must have thought it was doing us good, too.

  “Just don’t step in anything,” my dad said.

  We found an old green aluminum rowboat upside down on a hillside and covered in last year’s leaves. If it had been near the water we might have left it alone, but the hill and the leaves suggested it had been abandoned, or so we said. The owner couldn’t possibly hope to find it again except by accident. We stowed it where we could get to it, bought some cheap plastic oars, and started to take it out now and then.

  We didn’t talk so much in the boat. Talk echoed, and it was mesmerizingl
y still if you stayed quiet. We were “encircled by the hem of heaven,” Shane declared once. If you stayed absolutely still the lake reflected the cliffs and trees and sky so faithfully you felt you were sitting in the center of a globe comprising two identical but separate worlds.

  Shane picked me up one morning and he had someone else in the cab, which surprised me. I knew him by sight from school but I didn’t realize that he knew Shane, and I couldn’t see why Shane had brought him along.

  “Name’s Eddie,” he said, holding a hand out for me to shake. I shook it.

  “Name’s Nathan,” I said.

  We talk about firm handshakes and limp handshakes and so on; Eddie had the handshake of someone who is genuinely glad to see you. It’s a trick I think politicians must have, and it’s rare. Eddie was handsome, with an angular jaw and dark floppy hair and the sort of crooked grin I used to practice in the mirror but never mastered.

  Instantly I knew something was awry, because Shane didn’t say anything. Ordinarily he could be facing a firing squad and he’d still offer you a cigarette. I didn’t know a thing about Eddie then, so I couldn’t figure it out.

  He’s now very wealthy, even famous as the proprietor of Fast Eddie’s. I have never been there myself, but I can recap the national scandal he caused. His is nominally a dining establishment, full name Fast Eddie’s Burgers & Beer, but he inaugurated a thong contest in which lady customers participated for free drinks and dinner. You would have thought that only in Evansville would they take him up on it, but after the first furor he was copied everywhere. For professional titillation he would have needed a license, but by outsourcing it to the customers he made a mint.

  The dictionary definition of Hoosier is “a native or resident of Indiana.” The commonest usage in all four states bordering Indiana, and even as far west as St. Louis, is as a synonym for idiot, redneck, lowlife, loser, bumpkin. Reviled on all sides, Hoosiers do not make much of their distinctive name, nor generally think much of their native state. Indiana is rural, agricultural, and surrounded by bully states with great confidence in their own sophistication.