grasshoppers, the dogflies from hell. I’m usually ready for some serious rain and a killing frost. Especially one that’ll kill dogflies.
(Takes a sleet storm to kill grasshoppers. They just hunker down in the broom sedge and wait for sunshine. I’ve flushed grasshoppers five inches long on a sunny January day.)
So far, the nights had been cool enough to start coloring leaves and brown off most of the weeds, but one last dogfly had somehow managed to survive and it had been circling my head for several minutes, eluding my flailing hands and waiting for me to lower my guard long enough so it could land on bare skin and dig in.
Exasperated, I started to duck into a thicket of hollies to get away from it, then recoiled in automatic reflex.
Hanging upside down between two young holly trees was a spider that looked like a tiny yellow-and-white hard-shell crab, and I had almost put my face through its large delicate web. One minute the dogfly was following my head. The next minute it was entangled in the sticky strands. The more it struggled, the tighter it was held and already the spider was hurrying over, playing out more sticky threads of silk to tether those kicking legs and buzzing wings before they could break loose.
“Hey, cute trick!” said Kidd. “I never saw anybody do that before.”
If a man thinks you’ve deliberately maneuvered a pesky winged bloodsucker into a spiderweb, why tell him it was a pure accident? Can it hurt to have him think you’re uncommonly clever in the ways of the wild? Especially when he’s so crazy about the outdoors himself?
Picture six feet three inches of male lankiness. Long skinny legs. Flat belly. A face more homely than handsome. Crinkly hazel eyes that disappear when he laughs.
Kidd Chapin.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation.
You know how you’ll see pretty shells lying on the sandy beach, cast up wet and lustrous from the ocean floor, so colorful you can’t resist picking them up? You know how, months later, you find them dry and dull in a jacket pocket or stuck down in a desk drawer, and you wonder what on earth made you bring them inland?
Kidd Chapin’s a wildlife officer. I found him down at the beach back in the spring.
So far, I haven’t once wondered why I brought him home with me.
Not that I have, actually. Not in the literal hang-your-jeans-in-my-closet sense. For starters, he has his own house on the banks of the Neuse River above New Bern, and he’s assigned to cover an area down east.
“Inland” is complicated by the fact that I live in the middle of a small town with an aunt and uncle. My own quarters are relatively separate, with a private entrance which I seldom use, and no, I don’t think Aunt Zell would get out her scarlet thread and start embroidering my shirts if I chose to let Kidd use that entrance. I don’t know if it’s manners, my abiding awareness that it
If I were eighteen years old again, maybe I would. Maybe I’d even stand on the front porch and make a speech about hypocrisy and honesty, about personal freedom and modern morality.
But I’m a district court judge. I know the value of hypocrisy. I’ve also learned a little bit about discretion as I’ve passed thirty and race toward forty:
If Kidd’s still around after Christmas, I may finally think about getting my own place. In the meantime, instead of taking him into my bed like a mature woman whenever he drives over, we sneak around Colleton County like a couple of horny teenagers. His new minivan has four-wheel drive, tinted windows and seats that let down flat, and it’s been up and down just about every secluded lane and byway along Possum Creek.
Kidd and I were out on the back side of my daddy’s farm that warm Sunday afternoon. We’d been to church that morning with Nadine and Herman, the brother who worries most about my soul. We’d eaten dinner with Minnie and Seth, the brother who cuts me the most slack. (Being the closest thing I had to a campaign manager, Minnie’s also the sister-in-law who’s least interested in seeing me married. She’d rather see me in the state legislature.) Now we were out running a pair of young rabbit dogs Kidd had just bought. They were barely past puppyhood and eager to please, but they didn’t have a clue and if you didn’t watch them every minute—
Well, let’s just say we both got distracted for maybe a bit more than a minute. By the time we came up for air, the dogs had got into the woods and across the creek and sounded as if they were heading for Georgia.
Kidd whooped and hollered, but they were too excited to mind and there was nothing for it but to jump back in the van and go chase them down. We both had our heads out the windows, listening for the dogs, when we rounded a corner of the field and surprised a huge flock of blackbirds. As one, they rose from the earth in a great rush of wings to settle raucously in the trees around us.
All through spring and summer, grackles and starlings are little-noticed birds. In the fall, though, they band together by the thousands in flocks so large that it can take a full two minutes for them to cross the sky. Their chatter was so noisy that the dogs could have been just beyond the trees and we wouldn’t have heard them.
When we got to the homemade bridge across the creek, Kidd wasn’t sure he wanted to risk his van on something built out of hickory logs and some scrap two-by-fours.
“It’s strong enough to hold a tank,” I assured him. “Shorty and Leonard and B.R. drive over it twice a day.”
“Who’re they?” Kidd asked as we crept across, going maybe half a mile a minute.
“Some of Daddy’s old tenants from when he was still suckering tobacco by hand. He lets them live rent-free on our side of the creek, but they work for part-time wages at Gray Talbert’s nursery and this is their shortcut.”
Kidd breathed easier when his back wheels were on firm dirt again. Not me. I’m never comfortable on Talbert land.
G. Hooks Talbert is head of Talbert International and a power player in the reactionary right wing of North Carolina’s Republican party. He has a hundred-acre country estate near Durham with a private airstrip and a couple of Lear jets. He also has two sons: one’s a grasshopper with the morals of a cowbird; the other’s a conscientious ant whose morals are probably whatever G. Hooks tells him they are.
