The Grasshopper Trap Page 2

  My first mistake was to accept an invitation to go on an elk hunt with this Walla Walla crowd. None of them knew the first thing about hunting etiquette as it applies to visiting writers. As Emily Post has pointed out, it is not polite for the hosts to walk straight up and down mountains without even making a pretense of breathing hard. The approach recommended by Emily is for the hosts to feign approximately the physical condition of the guest, which in this case would have consisted of sagging against trees, making strange rattling sounds with the throat, and occasionally stopping to scrape leaf mold and dried pine needles off the tongue.

  But the important matters here are the fall from the moving vehicle and the method of scoring. It was decided at one point during the hunt that we should get into Gene’s four-wheel-drive pickup and move higher up the mountain. We had already done this several times previously, with the four of us wedged tightly in the cab of the truck. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I had been wedged against Jane, but Bill always managed to beat me to that position, and I ended up being wedged between him and the door. This time, however, Gene suggested that Bill and I sit on the open tailgate of the truck. The idea seemed sound enough at first, at least until the truck began clawing its way up a sixty-percent grade and over rocks the size of basketballs.

  Since I was holding my muzzleloader in one hand, the only really good grip I had was with the other hand on a tailgate brace. Also, I was sitting on a little domed rivet head, and I got as good a grip on that as I could manage. I was doing all right until an ice chest in the truck broke loose and tried to ride me piggyback. The ice chest caused me to lose my grip on the rivet head, and I could feel myself slowly vibrating off the tailgate. Then Bill reached out a hand to steady me, or so I assumed.

  “Better hand me your rifle,” he said. “No sense in it getting all busted up in the fall, too.”

  I handed him my rifle, even as I turned over in my mind his use of the word “too.”

  Then I was gone. I executed a perfect three-bounce routine, including the difficult stunt of pressing one’s nose between one’s shoulder blades. I also managed to work into my routine the ice chest, which had followed me off the tailgate. If no rock of sufficient size was available for me to land on, I substituted the ice chest, a bit of creativity that Bill apparently overlooked in judging my fall.

  When I regained my senses, I looked around for the truck, which I supposed would have stopped long enough to bury the body. But it was still clawing its way up the mountain, Bill perched on the tailgate, a rifle in each hand. I don’t know why he didn’t fall off, unless he was sitting on a larger rivet head than I had been.

  As was reported to me later, when the truck finally reached the top of the mountain, Gene and Jane asked Bill where I was.

  “Oh, he fell off about a quarter-mile down the mountain,” Bill said.

  “I heard he was pretty good at that,” Gene said. “Did he get off a comically droll comment before he fell?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bill said. “Does ‘Oronagiroooo!’ mean anything to you?”

  I finally figured out why Bill scored my fall a mere eight. He was going by the Walla Walla system of scoring, while I am accustomed to the North Idaho system. In the North Idaho system, we give points not only for screaming but for the originality of what is screamed. We also go in for arm-waving in a big way. I once fell off a high log over a stream and, by fanning both my arms and my legs, managed to suspend myself in midair for a few moments. I started off in a northeasterly direction, changed my mind and shifted to due north, and then set a course for the far bank. I probably would have made it, too, if I hadn’t been losing altitude so fast. I scored the fall a perfect ten, even though it was several years before I thought of a droll comment sufficiently comical to fit the occasion.

  The Human Fuel Pump

  Alphonse P. Finley and I were standing on his front porch discussing the desirability of field-testing his new snow blower on my driveway.

  “No! No! No!” Finley cried. “I know how you are around machines! Machines don’t like you. They stop and never run again. They fall to pieces and blow up and make strange noises! My lawn mower has gone ‘punkity punkity punkity’ ever since I loaned it to you last summer!”

  “Nonsense,” I replied. “That lawn mower went ‘punkity punkity punkity’ long before I borrowed it. Now be a good chap and get your new snow blower for me. You wouldn’t want me to catch an infarction from shoveling my driveway, would you?”

  “Hmmmm,” Finley said. “Let me study on that for a minute. Hey, I got an idea. Maybe you could go down to the store and buy a new snow blower of your own. How about that?”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “You know I fish and hunt. I’ve got guns and rods I have to buy. I can’t be wasting my money on snow blowers.”

  Just then a battered old four-wheel-drive pickup pulled up in front of my house.

  “It’s Retch Sweeney,” I said. “I wonder where he got the new pickup.”

  “I would scarcely call it new,” Finley snorted. Al doesn’t care much for Retch and frequently refers to him by certain crude anatomical names. “I wonder what that elbow is up to now,” he said.

  Retch got out of the truck and walked toward us, beaming. “What do you think of my new truck?”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “It looks as if it would go anywhere.”

  “Hmph,” Finley said. “It looks as if it’s already been there.”

  “Ah, it’s just been broke in good,” Retch said. “When I get done fixin’ her up, this baby will climb trees if I want it to. First thing I’m gonna do is put a wench on the front bumper.”

  “You’re going to put a wench on the front bumper?” Finley said. “That’s certainly a novel idea. Why would you do that?”

  “Why, to pull logs out of the woods with, and to drag the truck out of mud holes when it gets sunk in too deep.”

  “I see,” Finley said. “You would need a pretty husky wench to perform those chores, I should think. Or perhaps you mean ‘winch’?”

  “Winch, wench, what’s the difference?” Retch said, turning around to admire his truck.

  “In your case, probably not all that much,” Finley said. “Still, I do rather like the idea of a wench riding around on your front bumper.”

  Retch was too excited by his new purchase to pay much attention to Finley’s needling. He invited both Al and me to go for a ride with him. “We’ll run her up into the mountains and try out the four-wheel drive on some really rough terrain.”

  I was a bit hesitant. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that four-wheel-drives, like rubber rafts, will take a person into places he ought not to go. On the other hand, I couldn’t disappoint Retch, and besides, I thought it might be fun. Finley, however, declined.

  “First of all,” he said, jerking a thumb at me, “it’s against my better judgment to associate with him in an enterprise in which a mechanical apparatus of any kind is involved. McManus apparently is surrounded by a powerful magnetic field that does strange things to machinery, like making it go ‘punkity punkity punkity.’”

  “Now, stop exaggerating, Finley,” I said. “Retch won’t know you’re joking.”

  “I am not joking! Besides, gentlemen, I am going to spend the rest of this cold, miserable afternoon curled up in front of the fire with a good book.”

  “It’s all right, Finley, I understand,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “When I get old, that’s how I’m going to spend my afternoons, too. Okay, let’s go see what that truck of yours can do, Retch.”

  “Hold it!” shouted Finley. “I’m going!”

  Much to his amazement, Finley enjoyed riding around in Retch’s four-by-four. We took the truck up into the mountains, plowing easily along through foot-deep snow. Al had never been in the mountains right after a fresh snowfall, and was delighted with the beauty that surrounded us on all sides, the evergreens bundled up in coats of ermine, tall pines streaming with wedding veils of snow, cree
ks winding dark and shining through downy whiteness, and finally the mountains turning a delicate shade of pink in the pale light of the setting sun.

  “This is marvelous!” Finley exclaimed.

  “No kidding,” Retch said. “And I ain’t even put her into low gear yet. Now let me show you what this baby can really do.”

  “I was referring to the scenery,” Finley said. “Wait! Stop! You’re going off the road, you crazy kneecap!”

  “Cool your jets,” Retch said. “I’m just going to take her up this old skid trail and over the top of that knob.”

  “Knob!” shouted Finley. “That’s no knob, you clavicle, that’s a peak!”

  Retch and I chuckled. Obviously, Finley had no idea what a four-wheel-drive vehicle was capable of. He continued to shout, whine, and screech as the truck growled its way up the side of the mountain. We wound in and out among the trees, climbed over rocks and logs, and eventually clawed our way to the top of the knob. By now it was nearly dark. The skid trail, if indeed it was a skid trail, dropped sharply down the other side.

  “By gosh, I bet this ol’ truck can handle that grade even in the snow,” Retch said, gunning the truck over the top.

  “No, no! It’s too steep, you bellybutton!”

  As for Finley, he was too paralyzed with fear even to speak.

  Miraculously, the truck clung to the earth and, twisting and grunting, carried us along a narrow ledge with a drop-off to the right and an ice-covered cliff to the left. The floor of the cab was awash in cold sweat by the time we arrived safely at the bottom of the canyon.

  “How about that!” Retch said.

  “Mumph,” Finley replied.

  “Phimph,” I added, discarding a handful of upholstery.

  “One problem,” Retch said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s too narrow to turn around down here. We’re going to have to go back up the mountain in reverse.”

  Finley moaned cravenly. “I knew I should have stayed home and read a book by the fire. Now I’m down in the middle of a frozen canyon in the dark and there’s no way to turn around and I’m in the company of two maniacs! This is the ultimate!”

  Actually, it was not yet the ultimate, for at that moment the truck’s engine began to make a peculiar sound.

  “Huh,” Retch said, his forehead wrinkling. “I never heard anything like that before. You ever hear an engine go ‘punkity punkity punkity’?”

  “Once or twice,” I said.

  “Ye gods!” cried Finley. “It’s McManus’s magnetic field at work!”

  Then the engine stopped altogether. The three of us got out and raised the hood. Retch and I prodded and poked at the engine in the routine manner and with the standard absence of any hope of determining the cause of the malfunction, let alone of repairing it.

  Suddenly, Retch snapped his fingers. “I know what it is! It’s the fuel pump! The fuel pump is shot!”

  “Phew!” I said. “I was really worried there for a minute.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Retch said.

  Finley stopped whimpering. “You mean it’s okay? You can fix the fuel pump?”

  “No, can’t fix it,” Retch said.

  “Oh, you have a spare fuel pump then?”

  Retch and I looked at Finley. “Sort of,” we said in unison.

  “Thank goodness,” Finley said. “Look, I take back all the nasty things I said about you guys. I won’t ever do that again.”

  “Promise?” I said.

  Retch and I went into action. We quickly removed from the engine compartment the tubing and reservoir tank of the windshield-washing unit. This activity caused Finley a certain amount of puzzlement, but there was no time to explain. It was growing colder by the minute, and both Retch and I were aware of the dangers of hypothermia.

  Once the window-washer tube and the reservoir were extracted, we used the tube to siphon gas from the truck’s gas tank into the reservoir. While Retch was reattaching the tube to the reservoir, I removed the air-filter cover from the carburetor.

  “The way it works,” I explained to Finley, who was standing about rubbing his hands and stomping his feet, “is that we use the reservoir and tube to dribble gas directly into the carburetor.”

  “Ingenious!” cried Finley.

  “Yes, it is, if I do say so myself,” I said.

  “But how do you fix it so just the right amount of gas is dribbled into the carburetor?” he asked.

  Retch and I couldn’t help but smile at the naïveté of the man.

  “Well, it’s like this,” I said. “One of us has to sit on the fender, with his feet in the engine compartment, and hold the tank in one hand and the tube in the other. Then he squeezes the tube so just the right amount of gas goes into the carburetor. It works like a charm.”

  “Oh,” Finley said. “Well, which of you two is it to be?”

  “I thought you might ask that, Al, ol’ buddy,” I said, “but the problem is this, you see. Retch is the only one capable of backing this rig up the side of the mountain and working it along that narrow spot without getting us all killed. And I’m too big to fit into the engine compartment, bad as that makes me feel. That leaves you, Finley.”

  Possibly I have heard such wailing and gnashing of teeth before, but I couldn’t remember when. I asked Retch about it, and he said he thought this was about the best wailing and gnashing he’d ever heard, but he wished Finley would get finished with it so we could start driving out of the canyon. A blizzard was in the making.

  We showed Finley how to clamp one leg against the wheel well down by the generator and to prop one foot against the radiator cap so that leg wouldn’t slip into the fan and get chewed up. We warned him not to allow himself to get bounced forward onto the battery, because battery acid can eat the rear end right out of a pair of pants and usually doesn’t stop there. To his credit, Finley paid a good deal of attention to all this advice. Finally we instructed him on how to regulate the flow of gas into the carburetor, and at last we were ready to make our run up out of the canyon.

  Retch and I got in the cab, and an instant later the engine roared to life. I shouted out the window to Finley and asked if he was ready. He replied with a stream of crude anatomical terms and something about a good book and a fire. I took this as the signal he was as ready as he ever would be.

  The truck tore backwards up the mountain, whining, bellowing, and kicking logs and rocks in all directions. There was a good deal of strain on me, because I had to keep yelling out the window, “More gas, Finley! Less gas, Finley!” And so on. Since all I could see of Finley was his rear end, kind of pinched down on the fender, I could never be quite sure if he heard me or not. I thought the very least he could do was to shout back a reply of some kind, just so I would know he had heard. But that’s the way Finley is—inconsiderate.

  Scarcely twenty minutes later we backed onto the main road and were able to drive forward, with Retch leaning out his window so he could see around the open hood. He complained of the cold, and said he hoped Finley appreciated the suffering he was going through just to get him back to his warm fire. I said I doubted he would, because that just wasn’t the kind of person Finley was—appreciative.

  When we reached the highway and headed back to town, it occurred to us that we had driven over twenty miles on the mere two quarts of gas in the window-washer reservoir.

  “You know what?” Retch said. “This is the best dang mileage I ever got with this truck.”

  “Maybe you should hire Finley to be your permanent fuel pump,” I said, and we had a good chuckle over that little joke.

  We didn’t know that the gas in the reservoir had long ago been used up and that somewhere along the way the fuel pump had started functioning again. Finley had discarded the empty container, an unconscionable act of littering, and was now merely crouched under the hood trying to thaw his hands over the engine block. This no doubt surprised some oncoming motorists, or so we assumed from the erratic swerves the
vehicles made as they passed. Many people have never seen a man crouched in the engine compartment of a truck speeding through a blizzard, and the few who have may choose not to believe it anyway.

  Even the boys at Pete’s Gas Station apparently had never before seen such a spectacle, judging from the way they gathered around and stared slack-jawed at Finley.

  “D-don’t anybody s-say anything,” Al growled, “not a w-w-word!”

  Someone commented later that the older Finley gets the more crotchety he becomes, and it’s true. As I often tell him, he is indeed becoming old beyond his years. Otherwise, how explain his spending most of the following day in bed? Since Finley was too feeble to answer the door, his wife was kind enough to loan me his snow blower to clear my driveway. When I was almost finished, I noticed Finley glaring down at me from his upstairs bedroom window. I guess he had been awakened by the ‘punkity punkity punkity’ sound of his new snow blower. Old age tends to turn people into light sleepers, no question about it.

  ’Twas a Dark and Dreary Night

  Back during my single-digit ages, I often thought about running away and joining the French Foreign Legion. The uniform was nice, and I liked the idea of riding horses and camels across the desert. Only one thing bothered me. I wondered if the Legionnaires were issued night lights. My love of adventure had its limits. I could easily imagine a battle-hardened Legionnaire sergeant reporting to his company commander, “Looks grim, sir. We’ve run out of food and water and the ammunition’s nearly gone. Worse yet, we’re short on fuel for the men’s night lights.” With my luck, I’d be the one whose night light ran out of fuel first.