Non-Fiction
Faking It
artwork by amina
"Them game wardens frown, really frown, if you put feed on the wooter to git the birds," Cody informed me conversationally. We were outside West Ocean City, driving through reed-covered wetlands towards St Michael's river. Like all Eastern Shore natives he said 'wooter' instead of 'water'. So did Jeanne, his sister. It was a December morning, bitterly cold, yet the windows on the Ford pickup were down. The wind whipped at my face, blistering it. I tried not to show the pain - I didn't want Cody to change his mind at the last minute about taking a city boy hunting. "Yeah?" I said. "Yeah," he replied, turning into a lane flanked by winter-bare loblolly pines. At its end was a small clapboard house. Jim, his younger brother, was waiting in the front yard, smoking Marlboros and throwing sticks for his black Lab, Scooter, to fetch. He, like Cody, had on thick jeans, yellow workman's boots and sheepskin-lined Levi's jacket. "Hey," Jim said as he slid in beside me. Scooter jumped into the back of the truck with practiced ease. "Hey," I answered. Cody revved the truck back on the road. Jim sat smoking, gazing out at the flat marshland dotted with glinting water surfaces. The wind lashed at his face. He didn't seem to notice. We were going to check on the 'duck blind'. Tomorrow I was going goose hunting. I had met Jeanne in a small sports bar off Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC. On the weekends I would join the regulars to watch football. American football, that is, to whose lure I had finally succumbed. It had edged me into drinking beer, something I had steered clear of these past years. But there was no getting around it now, not if I wanted to watch football with the guys in a neighborhood bar. One day a green-eyed blonde sitting next to me turned and said, "Is that a Cincinnati cap you're wearing?" "Yup. Plain as day." "No kidding." Her name was Jeanne. "I didn't think anybody rooted for Cincinnati outside of Ohio," she said wonderingly. The Cincinnati Bengals had been on a losing streak for the last decade, and was the butt of jokes everywhere. I was losing bets with Mike, one of the regulars, who was mockingly starting to quote Yogi Berra: "It's getting late early out there." "It's just a rough patch. We'll be back," I said in my best Terminator voice. She laughed at that one. "Haven't seen you here before," I said. "I'm new to town. From Ocean City, on the Eastern Shore." "I see," I replied, not seeing at all. I was hazy about what lay on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay. "And you?" "From Bangladesh." "Huh?" And so it went, the whole nine-yard bit: where Bangladesh was, how it was home to the Royal Bengal tiger, and which was how I'd become a Bengals fan, for the orange tiger stripes of its team colors. "Well, I never…a Bengals fan from Bangladesh!" She was a court reporter up on the Hill, worked in DC five days of the week, and went home to her boyfriend, a carpenter, on the Eastern Shore for the weekends. "Know what," she finally said, "you oughta meet my parents. They'll love ya, they're always going to places like China, or the…the…the Silk Route, is that it, for their vacations, and they can never find anybody in Ocean City to talk to about it." That was how I got acquainted with Maryland's Eastern Shore. Jeanne and I would head due east from the Beltway, and get on Highway 50. We would stop in Annapolis for crab cakes, cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, drive through sleepy counties named Talbot or Dorchester till we reached West Ocean City at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Ocean City was farther out on the sea, atop a strip of barrier reef. We would cross a little bridge to get to it, to the pounding surf and tearing wind of its beach and boardwalk. I became fast friends with Jeanne's parents, George and Suzanne. At our first meeting George asked me if I'd ever had a Manhattan. He was a tall, wiry figure, deeply tanned from a lifetime out in the sun. He was on the city council and built houses for a living, which on the Eastern Shore meant he worked harder than the dozen men he employed in his construction company. "No," I said. "How long you been in the States?" "Ten, eleven years." "Well, 'bout time you had one." He fished out a huge highball glass with a sailboat etched on it from the freezer, and made Manhattans in it with Canadian Club whiskey and sweet vermouth. After a month of this I went one up on them, toting along Sazerac rye whiskey on my trips. "Canadian Club and maraschino cherries, that's not Manhattans," I lectured them. "During Prohibition they had to make do with Canadian whiskey and that's how those guys got into the act. You want r-e-e-a-l Manhattans, you gotta use Kentucky hunnerd-proof rye." George and Sue chuckled and drank their CC Manhattans anyway. They knew I'd gotten that from some book. I'd bunk in the topmost room with the picture window and wake up mornings to sunlight crashing around me, then go down for boardwalk hash browns and eggs overeasy. Seagulls cresting waves. Oysters and siestas. Four months later I was even sliding into Eastern Shore speech. I would say 'git' instead of 'get' while over there, and note that their grandson, Sam, had "put r-e-e-a-l hurtin' on the pizza." It made George and Sue chuckle even harder. But try as I might, I could never bring myself to say 'wooter' - it'd always come out as 'water.' I'd never be an Eastern Shore good ole boy. I was faking it. Within six months I was family. George had bought an old house on Hurley's Neck back of the Nanticoke river, on a sprawl of seventeen acres, and it was marvelous for a Bong like me, brought up to disdain manual labor, to see how he transformed it, with lumber, nails, power drills, hammers and saws, strippers, paint thinners, paint and carpeting, into a thing of balance and finish. And at night, with the sky a dazzling dome of stars, I'd see quick red foxes run in the beam of torches. Saturday nights George would take us out for steaks and shrimp at the Surf 'N Turf. One time Cody yawned and let slip that hunting season was about to open and he had to "git me some gus"- 'gus' was how he said 'goose.' I perked up. "You mean take Joes out on shoots?" The Eastern Shore was smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Flyway (the East Coast winter migratory route of ducks and geese flying from the frozen north to the warm south), and hunts organized by locals for outsiders was an industry. Ocean City itself, aside from being a tourist-beach town, was also a primo marlin fishing spot, with charter boats hauling well-heeled types out for deep-sea battles. "Nope," Cody replied, nodding towards his three boys chowing down like there was no tomorrow. "To put food on the table, we eat gus during huntin' season." "You ever hunt?" George asked. I said, well, sort of, couple of times. My father had taken his 12-bore shotgun on a road trip from a town called Chittagong to a beach named Cox's Bazar, missing snipes and herons by a mile. There also had been some odd ducks in a place called Sylhet. But an honest-to-goodness hunt, nope. "Do I git to go?" I asked Cody afterwards. "No way," he said. "You bein' a fool Bengals fan and all..." We stood at the edge of a vast lake. Scooter ran around sniffing, his coat glossy, as a stiff breeze ruffled the water. We craned our necks at the sky looking for geese. After about ten minutes Jim said he saw some. I couldn't. Cody spotted them too. Jim pointed out a patch of sky, and though I looked and looked I couldn't see them. Only after five more minutes of eye-straining did I see some specks in the western sky, seemingly miles away. It was a marvel how Jim had picked them out. We checked the duck blind, a wooden stand cunningly concealed among the tall grass on the water, to see if it stood firm and the lines of fire were clear. The next morning we set out in the pre-dawn dark. It was godawful cold. Even Scooter was sniffling in the back. I shivered beneath my heavy lumberman's woolen shirt, though for once the windows were rolled up. The three of us washed down sandwiches with coffee as the ghostly countryside drifted past, in clumps of grey. At the lake we parked the truck at a distance, unloaded the shotguns and duck decoys swiftly, and sloshed over in our waders to the blind. A few days back I had been given a crash course in the 12-gauge Remington 870, which took getting used to because of the American-style pump action to eject an empty shell casing and chamber in a new one. We floated the decoys on the water and hunkered down in the blind, with a wispy line of light showing in the sky. Scooter lay tautly beside me. Cody and Jim checked, and re-checked, the guns, draining the last of the coffee. Jim stood up to look for geese. "I see 'em," he said after some time. Cody and I stood up. Faint in the distance, was a small flock of geese. They seemed very high up. "Jesus, they're way too high," I muttered. "Not to worry," Cody said. We crouched down, and peered up through the grass. The geese flew in closer, then closer still, as Jim took out a reed blower and startlingly, loudly, began to make geese calls - a series of short honks and moans. They sounded amazingly real, carrying clearly in the still air. Scooter lay motionless, his nose quivering. Suddenly the geese were above us, honking back, circling. As I looked on, they did what looked like a flip and glided downward in one swift skimming motion. Just as they closed in beside the decoys, Cody and Jim stood up and fired. They were incredibly fast, aiming, shooting, pumping out the spent cartridge, pivoting with the startled, wildly veering geese, and firing again. Four geese, one after the other, toppled into the water. Even with two guns blasting at such close quarters, Scooter never even twitched. As soon as the first one hit the water, he dove in. I was still crouching when he brought it in. A Canadian goose, all plump body and pearl-grey down. With workmanlike efficiency Scooter deposited it, and turned back to get the others, swimming with hardly any splash. Later they bagged two more, while I never even got to raise my gun. Six fat birds in the back of the pickup for the trip home, with Scooter nestling among them. That afternoon, thoroughly basted, one slid straight into Sue's oven, a goose roast to accompany the evening Manhattans… "George," I remarked later, "those puppies were too fast for me. Damn." "That's cuz," Cody said, "you ain't a r-e-e-a-l redneck." In the ensuing hoots of laughter nobody heard my protests…only Scooter cocked a sympathetic head at me. "Good doggie," I said as I patted him.
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