The Rake

Grand Forks, North Dakota, September 1969

Last Saturday, after the ardent petting—after the movie, after the snack, after the giggles—Henrietta came to terms with what she knew, now, was Reuben's grand design. He was delicately concrete about it: it would take place in a duck blind. Not—he said with scorn—not at the Hop See Lodge. That was the handy motel across the river, in Minnesota. Hop See was a single-story caravansary in its second decade of operation. All that was required there of a patron was a driver's license and, of course, cash—fifteen dollars for twelve-hour access to a bedroom.

The Hop See also had conventional uses. Last November, during an overcrowded football weekend, Henri had booked a room there for Bruce Seringhaus, her young cousin. Bruce would share the room with another football fan, also in town for the game, from the University of Minnesota. The two would be strangers, but never mind. The other occupant would be duly registered with the University of North Dakota as a student from the visiting team's college looking for inexpensive lodging for the Saturday night, after the game.

Bruce was only eighteen, but he announced haughtily to his willowy twenty-year-old Canadian-born cousin that he was not
willing to share “any old room” with “any old visitor” (never mind that he lived in shared quarters at his own university), “not even if he's a member of the football team. I'd rather sleep in the gym.”

Henrietta soothed him by contributing half of the room's cost, allowing the stranger to be displaced. So Bruce had the Hop See room to himself, and he could have drowned his misery over the humiliation of his team's loss in solitude, except that he didn't drink.

Reuben scolded Henri for being extravagant, but she cut him off by saying she was certain he would have done the same thing if
he
had an eighteen-year-old cousin coming to town to see the big game without a place to stay. Reuben smiled indulgently and leaned over, in the common room, to give her a light kiss, spilling his curly blond hair over her blue eyes and slender nose.

So much for the Hop See. The idea of the duck blind in place of the motel appealed to her, though she felt a shaft of fear, and the dull pain of sin coveted, and acquiesced in.

Still, leave it to Reuben, dominant in all matters. He too was a senior, handsome, spare, and agile, at twenty-one a formidable figure in the student body. He lifted his head and smiled first with his eyes. Then his teeth flashed out. The grin was quick, mischievous. For Henrietta Leborcier it was captivating, a prologue to the momentous event, planned now for the following Saturday.

Reuben always had interesting ideas, she reminded herself as she sat across from him in the library. This one, Reuben con
fessed, had taken much of the summer to gestate. It was climactic, whatever else you might call the prospective surrender of your virginity. She looked up at him, his head bent over the book, his teeth gripping the eraser end of the pencil that dangled from his lips. A trace of a furrow could be seen on his forehead as he engaged the text. She crooked her finger, interlocked with his, and he looked over at her. He gave a wide-eyed smile, moving his book out of the way, as if removing anything that might stand between him and his Henrietta of the light brown hair, which framed her carelessly freckled oval face and blue eyes. He leaned over and, observing the solemn silence of the Chester Fritz Library, spoke in a whisper. They were seated in a corner of the large room, safely removed from the librarian's desk. Their requisitioned books were open on the table between them, and they each had one hand under the table, their hand-clasp shielded from casual view.

“Tell me more about the duck blind.”

“Well sure, Henri!”

Reuben seemed not quite old enough to be a college student, let alone a senior. But his smile now managed a trace of cosmopolitan knowingness. He did not try to disguise his excitement over the plotted enterprise, just four days away, at Rico's father's duck blind.

Speaking in a husky whisper, he described the site. “The twin blinds are closed down except during duck season, and that runs from the end of September to sometime in November, maybe December. Rico—Eric—has been going out there with his dad ever since he was little, way before he could fire a gun, though he's pretty good at it now, he says. Says he got twelve ducks last season in two mornings of shooting. His dad owns
one blind, his dad's law partner, Al Knudson, the adjoining blind. They go out together pretty often during the season. The blinds are shut down the day the duck season ends—Monsanto & Knudson aren't about to break the law, though they're good at letting their clients get away with it.”

“Don't be cynical, Reuben.”

“What else do you think lawyers are for? Maybe I'll become a lawyer. If I do, you can go ahead and break any law you want. Anyway, Rico's dad and Al Knudson go hunting often—they're there for sure at dawn on the first day of the season. Ahead of that first outing, they send Rico—he started doing this in high school—to clean up the blinds and do a little provisioning.”

Henri nodded pensively, though her thoughts were not on hunting.

Yes, she said after a pause, apart from everything else planned for that night, she was curious to lay eyes on a duck blind. “I've never been in one before. As a matter of fact, I don't…shoot ducks. Not yet. Maybe,” she smiled, and flexed her finger, “I'll take up duck hunting after Saturday. Saturday. It'll be just us?”

“You and me, and Rico and his new girlfriend. No reason to keep them away—is there, Henri? You know we're talking about two
separate
—separated—blinds. They're adjoining, but there's a partition between them. So Eric will bring Linda—I don't think you've met her; nice young thing.”

Henrietta winced. She wondered whether she too was a nice young thing.

“Rico's not going to let on to her, not until they're in the car, that he's planning to spend all night at the blind. She'll think it's just a visit. Linda will be surprised,” he chuckled. “Though she
wasn't looking, I'd guess”—he was speaking as if to himself—“to spend the night alone back in the dorm. But they'll be in the Monsanto blind. We'll be next door, in Knudson's blind.”

“Will we actually see any ducks?”

“I dunno. Forget the ducks. You can always see ducks in the zoo.”

“No, you can't, Reuben.”
Darling dumb Reuben.
Sometimes he made her impatient. “Just because ducks don't vote doesn't mean you have to be that ignorant about them. There aren't any
ducks
in the zoo, stupid. No one would guess you were a…an experienced reporter, let alone editor in chief of the
Dakota Student
. Never mind. What are they like, the blinds?”

“I've never actually seen them. Rico says they're small but complete units. Each has a bed—or at least a mattress—behind the opening you stand up to shoot through. There's a partition between the two—I mentioned that. The hunters go out to the blinds the night before with their dog, a retriever, which has its own kennel outside. They set the alarm for an hour before dawn.

“The two blinds are laid out parallel. That gives the two hunters max view over the lake when the birds circle down. At the base, where the two blinds join, there's a table of some sort, where the hunters can eat. There are gaslights for illumination and a gas stove, Rico says, and basic kitchen stuff, and plenty of blankets, plus the bedrolls we'll bring. Outside they have a heavy canvas tent staked down, enclosing the pair of blinds. It's the color of dry reeds—camouflage. And it's zipped shut until time comes to look out for the birds. It doesn't get exactly hot in there during hunting season, Rico says, but the wind is blocked and the stove gives out a good amount of heat.”

“Makes me shiver, just thinking about it.”

Reuben stroked her hand. “Saturday night's not a time you'll be shivering. At least not from the cold.” Reuben tightened his hold on her hand. For appearance's sake, he ostentatiously turned a page of the heavy book that lay before him. He would concentrate on the 1787 Philadelphia Convention some other time.

He spoke with the excitement of a boy—which he technically was, until “the day before yesterday,” as Henri had referred to Reuben's twenty-first birthday in the letter to her father in Paris.

“There's a big old wooden icebox by the stove, Rico says. That would be empty now, in the off-season, but Rico's going to bring a couple of ice blocks and a few bottles of this and that to drink. We'll probably bring hot dogs we can fry, and rolls we can heat, and maybe a pumpkin pie or something. In the season the blinds would be stocked with Monsanto's and Knudson's booze, but Rico says if we want any we'll have to bring it.” Reuben slipped a foot out of his moccasin, edging his toes onto her ankle. He offhandedly turned another leaf in his book.

Henri said, “When will we go to the blind? Only after the football game is over, right?”

“Of course, we can't miss the game. And I have to put in an appearance at the paper. The
Dakota Student
can't have its first party of the year without its editor in chief! Still, we should be able to get to the blind maybe eight, nine o'clock.”

Again she nodded, in disciplined acquiescence. “And this is only Tuesday. Saturday's a long way off.” She stopped herself. “I mean, actually it's just around the corner.”

He turned his eyes from his book to her eyes. Her cheeks had reddened. “Scared?”

“Yes. Sort of…. Are
you
scared, Reuben?”

“Yes, I guess I am.” But quickly his face lit up. “Maybe Rico and Linda will sort of beef us up!”

“Is he…an old hand?”

“Of course! Rico's twenty-three!”

She loosened her fingers from his and closed her book. She got up and walked with it to the librarian's great mahogany desk, with the green felt surface and the iron-gray containers for three-by-five cards.

Reuben's eyes followed her. But he didn't pursue her. Henrietta liked it about Reuben Castle that he knew when not to talk, when not to react defensively to her occasional withdrawals from the scene or to changes in her mood, usually tranquil. Sometimes, after one of her silences, she would search out what it was that had disturbed or distracted her, and perhaps try to talk it out with Reuben. Sometimes she would just let matters rest. This time she smiled to herself. She'd let matters rest and maybe talk to him later about what had to be done to end the war in Vietnam. Or to end ROTC on campus. Reuben Castle was the number one political protester at UND.

What would she think to say—to talk about—on Saturday night? They hadn't spoken together at all about how things would be, well, afterward. But she did wonder about it, wonder anxiously. What would it be like waking up on Sunday morning with a naked man in bed with her?

Reuben had himself thought about it in lascivious detail, but not without apprehension. He took refuge in a studied air of in
souciance. Condescension could be useful. He grinned. Would Henrietta expect to be driven to Mass on Sunday?

He interrupted his irony with practiced ease. He loved that too about her, the sophisticated child of a widowed French professor, able to handle two worlds at once. Henri had lived half her young life in France, picking up from the French many of their habits, but not their inattention to the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath. Henrietta always went to church on Sundays, so there would be no surprises on that score for Reuben Castle, who thought nothing of it that she would be going from the duck blind to her church.