(I can use his name here, because he's dead. His wife, the charming Lillian who I had a sophomoric crush on during high school, is dead. His son, much older than me and who I never met but always considered a wimp because his wimpy photograph which was prominently displayed in the Bowles home looked like the greasy slick-black-hair photo of a wimp ... he's dead too. So is my father, but that's another story and I don't want to talk about it because I miss him every damned day. Anyway, nobody cares any more and if the truth be told between the Marlboros and the Jamisons and the late-nites typing on a computer, I live an unhealthy lifestyle so I probably won't be around long enough to worry about any suits who want to sue me.)
Where was I?
Oh, right. I was being morbid.
Charley was not an easy guy to be around. Long-story-short, he was the most amazingly negative person with whom it was ever my displeasure to have to share the front seat of a '49 Chevy pickup at 5am of a Saturday morning on the way to the hunting grounds. And he had early morning gas, probably due to his unhealthy diet, but this is a subject about which I have lately learned to be MUCH more tolerant of so I don't hold that against him, as much as I would like to.
If we had been Neanderthals, and didn't have Chevy pickups yet, and I had been bigger and stronger and as agressive in spirit as I was in my mind, I might have done the world a favor and brained ol' Charley with a rock I had picked up as we were crossing the veldt on the way to the hunting ground some dark and dreary morning. Guess I was just born too late.
But since I was born in the Dawn of Technology, the story turns out a whole lot different. Charley lived long enough to get too old to hunt, took up golf, lost most of his vision when he took a golf-ball in the right eye when some golf-idiot was too lazy to yell FORE! or Charley was too deaf to hear it, and he died ten years later in his sleep.
Some stories just refuse to offer a happy ending.
So let's ignore the ending, and strike right into the middle of the story. That's the only part I really care about anyway, 'cause I don't think about Charley more than twice a year, and even then I either spit on his memory or give thanks to God for him
I gotta tell you, that last one really hurts.
Charley was the original Grumpy Old Man.
You think I am prejudiced? Get this: Charley was the math teacher at Helen McCune Junior High School in Pendleton, Oregon. He was my 7th grade math teacher, and he was famous as The Punisher. He had this flat-board paddle that he kept on the floor beneath his desk, and if you acted up in his class -- he would grab his paddle in his right hand and your right ear in his left hand (it's an anatomical thing) and march you into the hall and POW! POW! POW! lay right into you. None of this "we're going to talk to the Principal" stuff. No privacy. He loved to give it to you just outside the door to the classroom, so all of your pals could hear you squeal like a pig.
Yeah, he nailed me one lazy late-spring day. I don't remember why he paddled me; I was probably smarting off in class but it doesn't matter. My butt still stings. It was a "bum rap" by any interpretation of the term.
He was so good at
He took The Paddle down to the woodworking classroom in the school basement and drilled holes in it. Thankfully, I was into the 8th grade by then and not immediately available for his 'test drives'. I was in the First Year Algebra Class of Mister Requa, who only threw books at kids who seemed inattentive in class. Kewl, I could learn to dodge algebra textbooks. Mr. Requa was a wimp compared to Mister Charley Bowles.
About the time I as in about the 9th or 10th grade, I was really getting into hunting. I had gone on my first deer hunt when I was 13, and was three-for-three on Western Blacktail Deer. I hadn't been exposed *(yet)* to the exquisite agony of hunting Elk in the snow with a party of 50-year-0ld drunks who partied all night and farted in the trailer, so I still thought hunting was a great way to spend a day. Me, the rifle, the mountain tops, the dawn patrol, the wily deer .... life was SWEET!
The rest of the year, we hunted ... jack rabbits.
Jack rabbits made deer look like easy prey, because when Deer run they only bounced every three or four paces and they didn't bounce that high (unless a barbed-wire fence was in their way.) Jack Rabbits bounce whenever they feel like it, and they feel like it often. Nailing a running slash bouncing slash totally dash unpredictable jack rabbit was the greatest sport in the world, the best possible training for hunting. If you could hit a running jack one time out of three, you were God with a thirty ought six!
Deer were flighty. Jacks were tough. We didn't hunt Jacks with a .22, because they could be two counties over before they realized they were dead. You had to hit them with a center-fire cartridge, splay their insides all over every sagebrush in the quarter-Section, and still they would be squealing pitiously when you walked up to them with their entire midsection missing and you wondered how they could still be alive.
Some people chose to stomp not-yet-dead Jack's head with their boot heel to finish them off. Me, I kicked 'em in the head. I'm not entirely sure yet whether that was more effective in 'putting them out of their misery', but they ended up behind the sagebrush and stopped that annoying whimpering squeal they made when they were hurt real bad.
It reminded me too much of the hallway outside Mister Bowles's seventh grade mathematics room at Helen McCune Junior High School. I didn't like that. Didn't like the way it made me feel.
It made me feel bad.
It took me several years to realize that this means I wasn't Mister Bowles, Junior.
One brisk winter morning, when I was 15 or 16, Pop (I always called my father "Pop", 'cause I liked him) and I were hunting Jack in the desert/sagebrush country near Umatilla, Oregon, on the breaks of the Columbia river. There was a bite to the air, scattered unmelted snowdrifts on the ground, the sagebrush looked sparkley frozen where Jack Frost had applied his second coat of varnish, there were icicles dripping from the rusted barbs of the wire fences separating BLM grazing grounds, and Jack was feelin' lazy. Jack wasn't running today. He was moping in his warren with his pregnant lady, getting lucky (Lady Jacquiline was alway pregnant, had just birthed a litter or was about to birth a litter ... much like the girls in Pendleton High School, but do you think I ever got lucky?), but that didn't slow down her running/bouncing gait if she was out & about and who could tell the master from the missus when they were cruising the foxweed patches?)
The third party of our little impromptu hunt was Mister Bowles (I always called him "Mister Bowles, instead of "Charley" like Pop did, because I didn't like him. I mean I didn't like Mister Bowles, not that I didn't like Pop.)
We had gone on a sweep around 11 o'clock, three abreast with Pop in the middle. I don't know why Pop always put himself in the middle between me and Mister Bowles, who I still sub-vocally referred to as "Mister Bowels" as all the rest of the kids did who had either experienced or witnessed his 'special attention'. But we had made 3 or 4 cloverleaf hunts, with little success, and met back by the bitchin' 49 Chevy Pickup that Pop used for a hunting truck, and talked it over whether to make another sweep or give it up for the day.
It was cold -- bitter cold -- and I was all about hot chocolate and giving Jack a little time to settle down before we went out to hunt some more.
The grown-ups had enjoyed the day, weren't disappointed by the lack of rabbits, but were tired and cold, and (probably with the wisdom of experience) would just as soon have called it a day. Lucky me, they went along with the Hot-Drink Party Ticket and acceded to an early lunch. We could decide later whether to hunt some more, or to pack it in. These essential manly decisions were always best decided with coffee or chocolate steaming up their bifocals, and so they yielded to my adolescent agenda.
Get the picture in your head.
We're standing around, loaded rifles cradled in the crooks of our arms, ten feet from the truck. We decide to take a break rather than just bag it, so we haven't unloaded yet (as we usually do just before we cross the last fence before the truck.)
As I'm starting to fiddle with the bolt of my .30-06 that Pop made me from a sporterized 1903-A3 springfield, Mister Bowles pontificates:
Boy, point that gun another direction. You've got it pointed right at your father's leg.Painfully pulling my head out of my ass, I look around and realize ... the sumbitch is right. It pains me to admit it, but he's right.
Swinging the rifle from the left ( where it was pointing at Pop's leg) to the right (cheerfully ACROSS Mister Bowles' leg .. the sumbitch), I achieve a pointing direction which is so safe, it ought to even satisfy the anal retentive (why did nobody every teach me that phrase when Mister Bowles was alive? It applies so perfectly to the sumbitch!) I tap the bolt to unload the chambered cartridge.
If you know the 1903-A3, you can see what happens next.
Realizing that it's nearly impossible to raise the bold on an 'A3 with the safety on, I flip the safety from SAFE to OFF.
The rifle goes BA-LOOOWEY!
Birds take wing in the bush.
My face is white.
Pop's face is white.
Mister Bowles' face is red.
Nobody speaks for the longest ten seconds in the history of human civilization. I wait for Mister Bowles to say ... "Well!"
Or "I told you so!"
Or even "If you hadn't moved your muzzle, you would have blown your father's laig clean off, you miserable little termite!"
I would have welcomed any of these punctuations, but he didn't say ANYTHING.
Not then.
Not later.
Not ever.
I waited for 20 years, until Mister Bowles dies, for him to say "I told you so!"
I waited another 15 years, until Pop dies, for him to say ... well, almost anything. Except for the one thing Pop said to end that eternal ten seconds.
"Well, it could have happened to anyone."
That's all he said. That's all anyone said. Ever.
My God, I didn't want to be forgiven. I didn't want Mister Bowles to be right, but he was. I had pictures in my mind of blowing Pop's leg off, and him dying before we could get him to somebody who could help because I SURE didn't know what to do to keep him from bleeding out in the sand and the foxgrass in the middle of that lonely, rusty bobwire-rimmed sagebrush patch. Short of actually having shot somebody, being forgiven so EASILY was the only thing I could think of that would be worse than that Mister Bowles was right, and I was wrong.
The grumpy old man I loathed had saved the life of the man I loved, and only incidently saved me from a life of self loathing.
...
Now I am a grumpy old man.
I look around me, and I see things. I see them so clearly, I wonder that those around me don't recoil in repugnance at the wrongs they see. I wonder how I can see things so clearly, when I would not have noticed the 'wrong-ness' only a few years before. Maybe I've become more observant. Maybe I've become less tolerant.
I am a grumpy old man, and while I know that I may sometimes infuriate those who fall under my baleful eye, I can't avoid the calling.
Grumpy old men.
They may not know the right thing to do.
They probably know all too well what is the WRONG thing to do.
I'm not really old. I couldn't possibly be a Grumpy Old Man already.
Could I?
God forgive us.
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