Duck Soup

[taking a break from the story fragments]

The advice of the haiku master is to prefer vegetable broth to duck soup and more often than not I try to follow this principle both at table and in life. But today is cold and brisk, autumn starting to hint rather agressively at the New England winter waiting impatiently in the wings. Departing from my usual lunch routine, which is fairly austere, I unexpectedly found myself at Pot au Pho, a very good Vietnamese restaurant in walking distance from work but outside the usual circuit. When I ran my eye over the menu "duck soup" was what looked good--though I had to overcome the the squeamishness that comes with being a "recovering" vegetarian. When the dish arrived it was a noodle soup with a rich, savory broth and floating chunks of duck meat with the fatty and rather thick skin still attached. In fact, the impression given was that the concoction had stewed and simmered until the duck had simply fallen apart and more or less dissolved. Knowing the Asian penchant for serving the whole fish (i.e., head attached) I was half expecting that my spoon would eventually dredge up a duck bill, but, thankfully, this didn't happen.

So it has been a "duck soup" sort of day. As I ventured back into the nippy air with a full belly, I found myself thinking of my friend Ted Enslin's story about the mountain man who would spend weeks on end in the woods, then drive into NYC, have a nice hot bath and a shave, don a tux, and head to the opera. Not that I've exactly been in the woods lately. But then again, "being in the woods" can also be a state of mind.

Mike's Parents

No one ever got invited over to Mike’s house to spend the night, and if Mike was invited to your house he would sometimes mysteriously not be able to come at the last minute. His dad drank beer, a lot of beer. When Mike wanted to ask him for something, he would go in after the third beer but before the fourth. We kids called him Mr. Jim, and when you saw him at a flea Market on a Saturday morning or something he just seemed quiet, always a little surprised to see you. Not particularly interested either, but not mean or anything. He was from Texas originally, and usually wore jeans and a denim jacket. When he sat in the kitchen drinking beer he looked like he was probably thinking about Texas. Later, after the divorce, he went back there and got a job on a dude ranch.

Mike’s mom was from Germany, which made her seem odd. She smoked a lot and had a large curved scar on her throat from where the doctors had cut out a cancerous tumor when Mike was little. I always tried not to look at the scar, but your eye had a way of wandering back there when she wasn’t looking at you. She talked German-accented English in a sort of high-pitched chirping way that Mike was good at imitating, and she liked cheap-looking glass and steel furniture that made being in her house feel different from being in the other houses in the neighborhood. She was friendly and a little silly, and she liked art. She would take Mike to museums, and on long trips back to Germany, and you could sometimes talk to her about things that wouldn’t come up with most of the other parents. Once you got to know her, you eventually realized she didn’t like Jews or blacks. Mike told me that when she talked about black people at home she called them Schwarzen.

The Animals

Frank had a blue Siamese cat named Ming who was a complete wack job. She would fix you with a psychotic stare and then do a back flip--until she got too fat. Then she would just sit on top of the TV set, with her tail swishing down while you were trying to watch Bugs Bunny. I felt sorry for Frank because he didn’t have a dog—it didn’t seem natural. But my dog was also a little nuts. We called him Rick for short, but his full name was Ricochet, because of the way he would take a fit and start zooming around the house bouncing off the walls. He was a poodle, but I preferred to ignore that fact. If you didn’t give him one of those stupid poodle haircuts with the pom-poms he just looked like a normal, shaggy dog with hair in his eyes, and that’s the way he liked it. But whenever he had to get a haircut his fur would be shaved close and the lady at the kennel couldn’t stop herself from putting a little pom-pom on the end of his tail and another on top of his head. She would paint his toenails too. When he got home he would stand outside shivering in the breeze, hanging his head and looking ashamed. Mike had a friendly old sad-eyed brown mutt named Jeannie.

The Acorn Battle

While raking leaves we had noticed that the whole yard was covered with big, fat acorns, and those acorns naturally made us think of our slingshots. Frank and I both had solid, high-powered slingshots, not the homemade kind that were always breaking on you, but the kind with real steel and a support that rested on your forearm for stability as you pulled back the pocket as far as it would go. Frank’s was better than mine because the part that rested on your forearm was made of leather. Mine was made of metal, and though the metal was covered with sponging, it still dug into your arm when you pulled back. Anyway, we went in, got our slingshots, and popped off some shots at the oak trees. The acorns zinged with satisying velocity and made a nice thunk when they hit.

That’s when Mike, Frank’s next-door neighbor, came out of the house. By the following year, fifth grade, Mike would be my best friend, but at this point I didn’t know that and I didn’t care for him at all. The situation was that Frank was my best friend, but it wasn’t really clear whether Frank’s best friend was me or Mike. And since Mike lived right next door to Frank, and I lived several miles away, Mike had an unfair advantage. Whenever Frank and I wanted to get together we had to make phone calls and arrange for one of our parents to drop one of us off at the other’s house. Whereas Mike and Frank could just walk out their front doors and start playing catch, or whatever. Anyway, when Mike came out of the house either Frank or I, I don’t remember which, tossed over an acorn by way of greeting. And of course Mike tossed one back. So one of us, Frank or I, returned fire. We weren’t using our slingshots, since they could definitely put an eye out, but just throwing. Pretty quickly, though, the throws got harder. After a few exchanges, we weren’t just tossing but really taking our best shots and then ducking for cover behind trees or cars or trashcans. Frank was a skinny kid without too much of an arm, but I had some good speed, and Mike was a tricky lefty with pretty good pace too. Of course it was two against one, but sometimes in war that’s just the way it is.

“Hey, that hurts!” Mike yelled, but we just laughed.
“I’m serious guys, it really hurts!” he shouted. You could tell he meant it, but at the same time the sight of an opponent on the run was too much for us. We pelted him some more until he made a break for the house, and the last few acorns actually bounced off the screen door after it closed behind him. Frank and I looked at each other. We were both cracking up, but feeling a little guilty too. It seemed like a good time to jump on our bikes and let things cool off for a while, before Mike’s mom could come outside and chew us out.

Story in Fragments

Six weeks since the surgery so now I'm finally done with the sling, and not a moment too soon. The next step will be to get my range of motion back with physical therapy. I've been off the blog for quite a while now, dealing with recovery from surgery, getting back to work, and reeling from a death in the family that has been hard on everyone. Lately, for some reason, my life has been swirling before me in fragments of story, and I've found myself wanting to write some of these fragments down, thinly transmuted into fiction. At this point it really is a matter of fragments, and I have no idea whether they will eventually add up to something more coherent. Here goes:

***

We were just about done getting all the leaves raked into piles. I had spent the night over Frank’s house, and Frank’s mother had a way of getting some work out of you if you spent any time over there. He had the only backyard pool in the neighborhood, but you never got to swim in it unless you put in some cleaning and maintenance first. Now it was leaf season, so here we were. When we got done raking we were going to play our favorite game: war. Our specialty was World War II. We had been raiding the library for probably a year now, and we had seen plenty of movies, so we knew all the equipment, all the armaments—the tanks, the airplanes, the machine guns, the sidearms. The Germans were the bad guys but they had all the coolest stuff: the Luger pistol, the Schmeisser submachine gun (or “machine pistol,” as the Germans called it), the Panzer tank, the Messerschmitt fighter plane. The American Sherman tank had a rough-and-ready, “can-do” feel to it, and you could get pretty gung-ho imagining you were driving one of those around, but the Panzer tanks were definitely cooler, scarier. They weren’t made just to get the job done, they were designed for world domination.

But really, whether you wanted to play American or German depended on your mood. If you felt like being noble, plucky, determined, self-sacrificing, and resourceful, you played American. If it was a cunning, amoral, and brutal sort of day, you went German. Then you favored the lightning-quick assault, the blitzkrieg. The sight of a line of Panzer Tiger tanks, cresting a hill at close to 40 clicks an hour, the muzzles of their 88mm guns pointed straight ahead—this might very well cause your enemy to just shit his pants right there on the spot.

Sometimes we left the whole good guy/bad guy thing to a coin toss, and then you just had to get yourself into the right frame of mind. I wasn’t sure what sort of mood I was in today, but the leaves were swirling in red and gold and it was the kind of bright, spectacular autumn day that made you want to stay outside as long as you could, the kind of day when you would really feel, as they always said on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “the Thrill of Victory...and the Agony of Defeat.” Right when they said that last part they showed the famous clip of that ski jumper taking a really nasty end-over-end wipe-out that just seemed to go on and on forever.