And Now We Shall Do Manly Things Read online

  Dedication

  For Rebecca, the love of my life

  Epigraph

  Well, you sure do have an interesting way of looking at the world.

  —Jim Heimbuch

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I: WINTER

  1. An Unexpected Beginning

  2. Three Months Earlier

  3. I Want to Hunt

  4. My Sporting Life

  5. Coming Out of the Hunting Closet

  PART II: SPRING

  6. Long Road to Iowa

  7. Into the Lion’s Den

  8. Consider the McRib

  PART III: SUMMER

  9. Comfort Breeds Carelessness

  10. Education

  11. The Interstitial Time

  12. Instruction

  PART IV: FALL

  13. Preparation

  14. The Drive to Iowa and My Missing License

  15. Hemingway’s Shot

  16. The Asterisk*

  17. Hunting Alone

  18. Lust

  19. Karma

  20. Vindication

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Craig J. Heimbuch

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  WINTER

  1

  An Unexpected Beginning

  We were just finishing packing up the car to head back to our place in Cincinnati when Dad asked me to go downstairs with him.

  When I was young and my dad would call me down into his workshop, it usually meant trouble. Maybe my grades had been less stellar than I had led him to believe. Or maybe I had stretched the truth a bit about completing my chores. Either way, a trip into the workshop with Dad seldom resulted in warm, fuzzy father-son bonding—more likely it was a disappointed glare and a good long talking-to.

  But that was then. Now that I’m married and have three children, visits to the workshop usually involve a woodworking project with the kids or the never-ending retrieval of my college belongings that have been stored there for more than a decade—you never know when that freshman term paper on Chaucer might come in handy during a job interview.

  I followed Dad down the stairs past the stuffed northern pike and the bearskin mounted on the wall. I’ve never been comfortable with the bear. The fish is one thing. I grew up fishing, and while I may have chosen a different pose than the curled-and-about-to-strike one opted for by the taxidermist, I recognize Dad’s pride in that particular fish. There’s also a tasteful piece of driftwood. I like that very much.

  The bear, on the other hand, gives me the creeps. It’s all soft fur, claws, and teeth. And the eyes—I swear it’s looking at me, pleading with me to be taken down from the wall of the dim basement. “Put me in a ski lodge,” it’s saying to me. “I want bikini models lying on me. I want to be the set of a late-night Cinemax movie. Please!”

  “Dad,” I said, “we have to get going. I don’t want to get home too late. What do you need?”

  “I want to give you something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just something.”

  Fine, I thought, let Dad be mysterious. Since my dad doesn’t often veer toward the sentimental, I figured it was something practical. A coupon for Home Depot, perhaps, or an extra set of hex wrenches.

  Instead, Dad reached into the rafters and pulled down the keys to the gun safe, which was mounted on a wall in the back corner of the workshop. He unlocked it without a word and pulled out a twelve-gauge Winchester over-under shotgun and handed it to me without much fanfare or flourish.

  “What’s this?” I asked rather dimly.

  “It’s a twelve-gauge Winchester over-under shotgun,” Dad said.

  “Yes, but what is it for?” I asked.

  “For shooting.”

  Dad has always had a way with words.

  “No,” I said as I tried to clarify, “why are you giving it to me?”

  “I just thought you might appreciate it,” he said.

  I must admit, it was a beautiful gun. The deep-brown wood, the dark-gray barrels and brushed silver-colored parts. I liked the way it felt in my hands—its heft and size, the particular angularity of the grip and stock.

  I have a certain familiarity with guns. I understand their basic workings, having grown up in a gun-loving extended family, and can appreciate a beautiful gun when I see one. But don’t confuse familiarity with comfort. Although I have fired more guns than most of my suburban peers, I have never fully immersed myself in the shooting and hunting culture of my family. My dad is a hunter. He’s killed deer and bear and all sorts of birds. But even his bounty pales in comparison to that of his brothers. My uncles are the kinds of guys who spend rainy Saturday mornings watching worn VHS tapes of Alaskan hunting adventures (one in particular involving the downing of a wolverine seems to be the favorite). They spend their vacations hunting, plan for their trips all year long, and have passed their enthusiasm on to their own sons, my cousins.

  This moment, however, marks the first time in my life Dad has made an overt gesture to welcome me into the fold. That I didn’t ask for a gun, and am entirely too old to be receiving my first one, doesn’t seem to have factored into his thinking. It’s as if my dad just woke up that morning and decided it was time for me to be armed. I imagined him standing over the sink, a fresh cup of black coffee—he only ever drinks it black and told me that I’d better learn to do the same as you never know when someone might be out of cream—in hand, and with a manly stretch groaning, “I’m going to give Craig a gun today. Yup, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  My dad is not a man who prides himself on his possessions. He always taught us that doing was better than having, that a man is measured by the sum total of his experiences not his net worth. He does not have a large collection—eight guns total—but this is the only one I remember him buying. He showed it to me right after he bought it, holding it up in front of him, examining it under the bare bulb hanging from the workshop ceiling like a museum curator holding an ancient relic.

  I always assumed it was his favorite. He’s used it maybe twice, so giving it to me was beyond generous; it was confounding.

  “Dad,” I said, “don’t take this the wrong way, but you aren’t dying, are you?”

  “No,” he said with a chuckle.

  “You sure? No cancer? Heart disease? Diabetes?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “Because if you’ve had a myocardial infarction, you can tell me,” I said. “Or if you’re going blind . . .”

  This went on for ten whole minutes—me running through every debilitating disease and condition I could think of only to be reassured time and again that he was in perfect health and that everything was in order. No, he and Mom did not have a suicide pact and, to the best of his knowledge, there was no mob contract out on either him or me.

  I remained incredulous.

  “You’re just coming to an age,” he finally said, “when you might get interested in these kinds of things, and I wanted you to have this.”

  I’d never owned a gun—never even had the thought of owning one. Sure, I’ve enjoyed shooting at s
oda cans and paper targets in my uncle’s yard, both as a kid and as an adult. But shooting was a vacation thing for me, something I did while visiting my relatives in Iowa. Sort of like people from Kansas who spend their holidays skiing in Colorado—it’s an activity so tied to a specific place in my mind as to not be considered anywhere else.

  So the idea of having a gun was completely foreign. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do with it. I was excited (who isn’t when receiving an unexpected gift?), but I also had some trepidation. Where would I keep it? It’s not as if I had bought a gun safe in anticipation of the day when I might randomly be given a shotgun. It was as if he had just handed me the keys to a bulldozer. It was great and exciting, but using it would require an adjustment to my day-to-day life.

  Not dwelling on the why of the situation any longer, Dad launched into a lengthy list of hows—how to take the gun apart and put it back together, how to clean it and maintain it, how to store the ammunition and how to use the trigger guards. He covered so much ground so quickly, I should have been taking notes.

  “This is how it comes apart,” he said, flipping a recessed switch forward and breaking the gun into three pieces. “And this is how it goes together.” With a couple quick snaps it was whole again.

  “Got it?”

  “Um,” I said, “can you show me one more time? You know, I just want to be sure I really got it.”

  Again, a flick of the switch and the gun was in three pieces. This time he handed the pieces to me and I fumbled with them for a while before he grabbed the pieces and snapped them together as if by rote. Twice more he demonstrated, and with each successive flick and snap my confidence waned.

  It was a master’s class in firearms taught over the span of five minutes. I couldn’t recall my father giving me so much detailed instruction and insight in such a dense burst before. I mean, Dad was always there if you needed help with homework or your taxes, but he wasn’t the kind to give instruction or unprompted life lessons. As a teenager, the only advice I got about sex was an admonishment to not die of a venereal disease.

  So Dad’s effusive instruction on how to care for and handle this gun, while wildly out of character, was also oddly touching. I felt like he really cared. This was the father-son moment I had always been suspicious of in those movies of the week, and yet, here it was, happening right before me. Okay, so, at thirty-two, it wasn’t exactly a scene from The Wonder Years, but I’ll take what I can get.

  I asked him to cover one more time the necessary implements to clean the weapon and demonstrated that, finally, I could indeed take it apart and put it back together. He gave me a case, geometric and sturdy with shiny metal sides and two hefty locks—I was tempted to handcuff it to my arm—and a hundred rounds of ammunition.

  He gave me one last bit of instruction, or perhaps it was more admonition before closing the safe and leading me back upstairs. “You better be careful,” he said, “and not fuck this gun up.”

  A random gift, thorough instruction, and an unwarranted use of profanity? I began thinking of other medical conditions. Something was definitely out of the ordinary.

  Mom must have known what Dad was doing, because when I came back upstairs, she gave me a big, excited hug, the same kind she gave me when my wife surprised me with a thirtieth birthday party. Mom and Dad said their good-byes to my wife and kids, and I went out to put my new gun in the car—along with the portable crib for our daughter and our sons’ stuffed animals.

  We pulled away, and I gave a second look back over my shoulder at my parents waving from the front porch. I believe Dad was smiling a little larger than usual.

  “What was that all about?” my wife asked before we reached the end of the block.

  “Um.” I hesitated. “He gave me a shotgun.”

  “What?!”

  “Yeah, he gave me his favorite shotgun.”

  “But you’re not a gun guy. Why did he do that?”

  “Because he wanted to.”

  “Well,” she asked, “what’s it for?”

  I paused a second to consider the complicated answer. Should I tell her about family legacy? About fathers and sons? About his hopes that one day I would follow in his sporting footsteps? Should I tell her that I had no idea what prompted this generosity?

  In the end, I gave the only answer I knew would not come across as dreamy or fanciful. I told her—

  “For shooting.”

  2

  Three Months Earlier

  I thought the mustache looked pretty good.

  It wasn’t Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind; it wasn’t even Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I. But it was my first attempt at real facial hair and I was surprised by how well it was coming in, even if it was a little more dirty sand in color than what I had hoped. Plus, it was for a good cause. Every November, men around the world sign up for the “Movember” program to help raise money and awareness for prostate cancer research and prevention, and as the editor of an online magazine catering to the lifestyles of an older male demographic—men right around the age when they schedule their first prostate exam—I felt it was my duty to kick in. The way it works is that men grow a mustache and ask people to sponsor them. It’s sort of like one of those charity walk-a-thons they have on junior high tracks where walkers get pledges of money based on their performance. A dollar a mile or two bucks an hour. Except there was no real measurement of length or endurance with Movember. You just signed up and, by doing so, you committed to the full thirty days of growing, pruning, and cultivating a mustache. Some of the men I knew who were participating were lucky. They were natural-born facial hair growers. Two days in, they looked like Burt Lancaster, suave and sexy as if stolen right from the pages of a late 1970s GQ.

  I thought mine looked all right, but my wife hated it. She didn’t understand why I needed to grow facial hair in order to support prostate cancer.

  “Can’t you just give them some money?” she asked, and I told her that me having a mustache was like writing a check, except other people wrote them on my behalf and all I had to do was hold out until the end of the month. “Yeah, but what about the pictures? All the pictures we’re going to have from when Molly was born and you’re going to look like a porn star.”

  She had a point. I suppose that if I was able to look at myself the way she saw me, my proud crumb duster would look like little more than a dusty accident, a spot missed on consecutive face washings. Without a hat on or my glasses, I looked like a hobo. With them, I looked like a chimney sweep. Either way, it probably wasn’t the best image. I could imagine my newborn daughter, years from then, looking back through pictures from childhood and wondering if dear old dad had gone on some sort of strike around the time of her birth.

  I went into my mustache experiment with a little trepidation and an open mind and was pleased to see that after just a couple of weeks, it covered my entire lip in one long strip. No bald spots, no patches of cat hair. Not full, not thick. But good enough for the time being, even though I knew it had to go eventually. Marriage is like that. Stay with the same person long enough, love them deeply enough, and you find even your simplest fantasies and indulgences become less important than the other person’s fancies.

  I checked it out in the rearview mirror of our minivan one last time as I pulled around from the long-term parking lot to the circular, covered drive. After a little more than two days in the hospital, Rebecca and our newborn angel, Molly, were coming home. I can’t really explain my fascination with the mustache, particularly given its relative unimportance at this time in my life, but for some reason it felt novel and masculine in a way I have seldom ever felt. Just the night before as I was getting our sons, then six and three, ready for bed, our oldest, Jack, had asked me if I was going to be a cowboy. Not for Halloween, which had passed three weeks before, or for some exotic prank, but as a job. He wanted to know if I was going to leave my work as a writer and
an editor to ride the open range. It was the first time I had ever felt like someone’s hero and I had my mustache to thank for that. My plan was to keep it as long as possible, but shave before we had the first round of professional photos taken as a family.

  Molly was a welcome addition to the family. My wife and I had held each other’s hand tightly—uncomfortably—in the ob-gyn’s office as the technician had sprayed her belly with warm, gelatinous goo and pushed the sonogram wand (a bit too forcefully if you ask me) into her stomach. The tech paused and asked if we wanted to know the sex of the baby and we shared a knowing and meaningful look for a split second before simultaneously saying yes. It wasn’t that we would not have been happy with another boy. It wasn’t that at all. We loved having boys.

  Jack had been a surprise of sorts. We had been married just over a year. I was working as a newspaper reporter in a small once-great industrial city between Cincinnati and Dayton, covering local politics and writing the occasional humor column that was greeted with tepid reader response. My wife had been a first-grade teacher and after four years away for college and nearly two away following our wedding, we were trying to decide if the right thing to do was to move back to Cleveland where both our families lived and would, presumably, protect us from the strange anxiety of being a young couple facing the world all alone. We went out for dinner at a fancy restaurant we drove past in the three-block area our suburban community passed off as a downtown, talking over a bottle of wine and steaks. We came to the conclusion that five years was the key. We’d work a little while longer in southwest Ohio, then move home to Cleveland, where we would live near our parents—themselves separated by less than two miles as Rebecca and I were high school sweethearts. I would try to get a job working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer or apply to law school, and she would work in our old school district. At the end of five years, when we were in our late twenties and had, presumably, been to Europe and the Caribbean and purchased a house, we would start a family of our own.