The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (2 page)

In my pre-creek years, I thought of worms as primarily useless, if occasionally entertaining, in the way only worms can be. Once I realized worms could be used to catch fish, I began to study them closely and soon became a scholar of worms. I read everything I could find written about worms. OK, I'll admit it, not all that much was written about worms.

In the spring of the year, before fishing season opened, worms were plentiful. They lay around on the top of the ground sunning themselves or, often, drowning in puddles, getting themselves squished under vehicle tires, and otherwise acting stupidly. Those wisely remaining underground could be clever, inventing numerous escapes from my flailing shovel. Sometimes I would notice the rear tip of one disappearing into the bottom of my excavation. Despite my making the dirt fly, I could never seem to catch up with the worm. It was as if it knew of secret worm speedways routed through the dirt.

Sensing the arrival of fishing season, all worms, even the dumb ones, began burrowing deep in the earth. Usually, the best place to dig worms was in what we laughingly called “the garden.” Each spring we would spade up the ground and plant numerous seeds, with visions of squash, pumpkins, lettuce, onions, and potatoes dancing in our heads. I vaguely recall some of the plants actually reaching a height of two inches or more before drying up and dying. It was that garden that first taught me the futility of hope. Nevertheless, the garden soil had been loosened, and that made it fairly easy to turn up a dozen or so worms in a fairly short time, at least in the months of May and June. One spring, having experienced a dearth of midsummer worms in previous years, I dug up several dozen worms and saved them in a large box of dirt. I had been told that worms like coffee grounds, so I dumped in a bunch of grounds to provide them with nourishment. Come July, when other worms had dug themselves halfway to China, I went out to the box, smugly anticipating great wiggly handfuls of its contents. Apparently high on caffeine, the worms had gone over the walls en masse. (“The next moonless night—
hic
—we make our break. Pass it along.”) No matter the cause of the inmates' disappearance, I blamed the coffee grounds. Never again did I try to store up worms.

Fortunately, we had a huge pile of cow manure out behind our barn, and worms could be found there any time of the year. They were pale, skinny fellows, as you might expect of anyone who lived in a manure pile. The fish in the creek, however, did not seem to care much for manure pile worms, although I doubt they actually knew where their next meal was coming from.

My study of worms has produced some interesting facts. I bet you didn't know that a worm has five hearts, or that there are 2,700 different kinds of earthworms. My source also says, “It's hard to imagine something more interesting to watch than an earthworm giving birth.” I'll have to put that one on my list of Fun Things to Do in My Free Time.

In another publication I learned you can go out to the typical golf course putting green, drive a couple of metal stakes into the ground, connect wires between the stakes and the terminal to a car battery, and watch about 10,000 night crawlers come flying up out of the ground. Well, I'm not exactly sure of the number, but a lot of big worms, enough to keep you in bait for years, as long as you don't feed them coffee grounds. It is my impression that some industrious people actually gather worms in this manner and then sell them. If you're thinking of taking up the practice, however, I suggest you do it in the middle of the night. I don't know what the laws are in regard to the collection of worms from putting greens, so you're on your own. I think it might be embarrassing to be arrested for worm theft. If it turns out your jail mate is a bank robber and he asks, “What are you in for?” don't tell him.

Just recently I read a report in which researchers claimed that worms don't feel pain. In all my years of baiting hooks, I have felt twinges of guilt every time I threaded a worm on a hook. Now I find out they don't feel pain—
they've been faking it
!—just to play on my sense of guilt!

If you can't trust a worm, whom can you trust?

The very best worms for fishing, I determined years ago, are those that have been power-tilled in gardens. They're tough, angry, and belligerent, and perfect for catching wily fish of all kinds, particularly walleye and other arrogant species. Power tillers are expensive, of course, but well worth the price for tough, street-wise worm: “You wanna piece of me?” they growl at the fish. “You wanna rumble? Let's see what you got!”

The worms you buy at gas stations and other places of business are mostly raised on worm farms. They have grown up pampered and coddled and simply don't have the menacing personality of your power-tilled or even your manure-pile worms. One word of caution, though, should you ever buy commercial worms. If you go into a backwoods gas station and find a large, rough-looking woman behind the cash register, don't ask, “Do you have worms?” My friend Retch Sweeney did that a while back. He should get out of his full-body cast any day now. I'm exaggerating. The cast covers only part of his body. I won't mention which part.

I took the metal box from Bun and dropped it in my vest pocket.

“Perfect,” I said. I guess she must be aware she's married to a scholar of worms. How great can that be!

Shaping Up for the Hunt

T

he exercise fad in this country is reaching epidemic proportions. You can't have a simple business meeting anymore without your associates comparing their tennis elbows, shin splints, charley horses, and athlete's feet. It's downright disgusting. Even my boss walked up to me the other day and asked if I would like to see his Adidas. I said, “What do you think I am, a pervert or something?” It turned out he was talking about his new pair of tennis shoes!

Exercise addicts are bad enough, but the pushers are worse. Everywhere I turn, somebody is trying to get me to take up jogging, bodybuilding, isometrics, yoga, kung fu, karate, or some other form of premeditated self-destruction. I tell them I'm an outdoorsman and just
being
an outdoorsman is adequate exercise.

Take, for example, my experience of loading a canoe on my car rack the other day. Knowing how even the slightest breeze can foil the success of this maneuver, I sacrificed one of my few remaining hairs to a test of wind velocity. The hair drifted quietly to the ground. Thus assured, I grabbed the canoe and, with a movement so smooth and graceful the vessel scarcely grazed my protruding eyeballs, snapped it straight up over my head.

At that instant, there arrived on the scene the strongest gust of wind recorded in our state in over half a century. The canoe sailed over the top of my wife's rose garden, mowed down a picket fence, ricocheted off a telephone pole, and turned end over end twice before starting to skitter across the street. At that point, and none too soon, I managed to release my grip on the thing and narrowly avoided being run over by the Avon lady.

My injuries were confined to an imaginative but tasteful reordering of my skeletal structure and a bad bruise on my leg where an unsuccessful attempt had been made to substitute a canoe thwart for a left femur. In those thirty seconds, I had enough exercise to last the average person for five years, but I can't seem to convince anyone of the fact. If you don't spend two hours a day running around in a sweatshirt, health addicts think you're either courting thrombosis or deliberately trying to antagonize the deodorant companies.

A while back I was slumped over the breakfast table performing my usual morning ritual of gluing my psyche back into some semblance of a human consciousness with caffeine, nicotine, cholesterol, and the headlines of the morning paper, when I happened to glance out the kitchen window and catch sight of my neighbor running down the alley in what appeared to be his pajamas. Now, Al Finley, a rather portly chap, is a member of the city council but is otherwise of good reputation. He usually conducts himself in a dignified and rational manner, so it was natural for me to assume that he was being pursued by someone, probably one or more of his dissatisfied constituents. While I was still pondering the vagaries of the political life, he ran by again, this time in the opposite direction.

By gosh, I said to myself, there must be more than one after him, because somebody obviously headed him off at the end of the alley and drove him back this way. After he made a couple more passes up and down the alley and was beginning to show signs of exhaustion, I decided to do what I could to save him from the mob. I stepped out on the back porch and yelled, “Jump the fence, Finley, and I'll hide you in the coal bin! I don't care what it is you've done.” He gestured weakly at me in a manner I can describe only as unappreciative and kept on running.

“All right!” I shouted after him. “Let them get you. It'll serve you right!”

As I was walking by his house on my way to work an hour later, he emerged unscathed from his front door. He said he hoped he hadn't offended me by rejecting my offer of sanctuary. I said that it was all right, and you couldn't expect a person to be civil when he was running for his life.

“I wasn't running for my life,” Finley replied. “I was jogging.”

“Jogging? What on earth for?”

“I've already lost two inches around my waist,” he said.

“I see,” I said, deciding not to pursue the subject. It was clear the strain of fleecing taxpayers over the years had undermined his sanity, and I had no wish to nudge him further into the abyss. Nevertheless, he chose to explain.

“Have you forgotten hunting season is coming up in less than two months?” He gave me a look of having made everything clear. “You ought to do some jogging yourself.”

“Look, Finley,” I said gently. “I've hunted deer since I was twelve years old, and not once in all that time has a situation arisen requiring me to jog after them. Besides, the deer don't like it, and it makes the other hunters nervous.”

He stared at me vacantly, then got in his car and drove off shaking his head. It was a sad spectacle to witness, even in a politician.

As if I hadn't had enough trouble already for one day, when I arrived at the office somewhat later than usual, my secretary was a picture of torment: legs and hands clamped together, teeth clenched, eyes bulging, face the color of an overripe pomegranate.

“Uh, sorry I'm so late, Midge,” I said. “If you need to step out for a moment, I'll answer the phone.”

“Whew!” she said, sagging into her chair. “I was just doing my daily isometrics.”

“That was my impression,” I said, “but I'd prefer you not do one in the office.”

“Isometrics are an exercise for toning up the muscles!” she snapped.

Actually, I knew all about isometrics. I told Midge about the time my friend Retch Sweeney caught the exercise bug, and how, before he recovered his senses, it cost him a good deal of embarrassment and nearly his life. Once, when returning from a fishing trip, Retch stopped at a little roadside diner conspicuous for its total lack of other patrons. The steak he ordered and the price of it aroused in Retch the suspicion that the place was run by a combination of highwaymen and horse thieves.

After the main course and while waiting for his dessert, Retch decided to pass the time profitably by performing isometrics, an exercise he hoped would convey the impression that he was a physical fitness buff and could turn deadly should the gang attempt to rob him. As it turned out, the cook and the waitress had never heard of isometrics but were well practiced in the latest first-aid procedure for saving a person strangling on his dinner. The cook caught Retch in a crushing bear hug from behind, driving all the wind out of him with sufficient force to blow all the flies off a mound of hamburger ten feet away.

“Say your name!” the cook shouted, driving his balled fist into Retch's solar plexus. “Say your name!”

As soon as Retch recovered enough to speak, be blurted out, “Retch! Retch!”

“It ain't working,” shouted the waitress. “He's still retching!”

By this time, the cook was using Retch's rib cage as an accordion, squeezing out, among other things, a tune Retch thought he recognized as either “Turkey in the Straw” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Just before the waitress made a last-ditch effort to reach down Retch's throat with a pair of spaghetti tongs, Retch managed to clear up the misunderstanding. The cook and the waitress had themselves a good laugh and as a gesture of goodwill allowed Retch to leave the premises without committing further assault on his person.

Although I generally question the veracity of Retch's stories, I told Midge that I thought this one was true. She said she didn't believe a word of it and that Retch and I had probably made it up, simply to poke fun at the new health fads. As a card-carrying health sadist herself, she took the opportunity to express her opinion that I could use a bit of exercise myself.

“Ha!” I said. “Hunting season is coming up. That is all the exercise I need.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Listen, you spend a lot of time running around in the woods all by yourself. Have you ever stopped to think what would happen if you suffered a fatal infarction way off in some wild place?”

Up until that point, I hadn't even realized infarctions could be serious, let alone fatal. Since Midge reads health magazines all the time, though, I figured she must know what she's talking about. With the acumen of a life-insurance salesman, she had succeeded in igniting in me some doubt about the length of my longevity. I sat around the rest of the morning, enveloped in a heavy gloom relieved by occasional twinges of fear. I thought about suffering a fatal infarction on my next hunting trip, and how my companions would grieve, sitting around the campfire talking about what a great guy I had been, and how out of respect to my remains perhaps they should cut the hunting trip short by a day or two, depending on the weather and if anyone had turned up some really fresh signs.