A
Stack of Pine Trees
Louis
E. Bourgeois
The
voices are still there thirty years later, nothing has changed.
Mr. Rodriquez is still yelling at Mike Brown for blasting his
plump gray squirrels out of his backyard with a double barrel
twelve gauge. Mike and I will risk our lives to kill whatever
we want.
On
this particular day, there was a logging road behind Mr. Rodriquez’s
house that had cut through a thick grove of pines years ago and
we’re walking the trail and there are flies as thick as storm
clouds hovering over the body of a rotting deer someone undoubtedly
wounded one night as they poached the deer with a headlight, and
the deer must have lopped away with a gut shot and finally collapsed
here on the logging road where it died an agonizing death in the
early dawn light a week or so earlier. Mike takes out a cheap
pocket knife from his jeans and starts hacking away at the little
deer antlers, a three pointer, and ties both sets of antlers around
his neck with his shoe string and just as soon as he brings his
arms from around the back of the neck, we both spot a decaying
pile of branchless pine trees that long ago was left behind by
a team of pulpwood cutters because these logs were just not big
enough to bother hauling in to be processed at the mill.
Around
the pile are shallow but wide pools of water where a stout looking
green heron pecks away at water bugs and crawfish—neither
of us have ever seen a green heron before, it’s not until
later after I’ve looked it up in the forty-year-old bird
book my father gave me from his youth that I know what kind of
bird it is, but for the moment Mike and I are startled to see
such a strange bird out here in the highlands of our piney woods
village. We thought we knew all the birds in the area because
we thought we’d shot them all. Mike raises the pellet rifle
that we’re sharing and fires the last pellet we have and
we hear the plunk of the pellet but it’s high above the wing
and we both take after this bird that can’t fly anymore but
most indeed can run like hell. He runs like Road Runner in those
old cartoons and hides in the pine logs and here we are straining
to move the logs that haven’t been moved in over a decade
perhaps in order to get to the bird. It takes half the day to
move all the logs from the top of the pile to get to the bird.
Mike spies him first and then grabs him quickly and tries to wring
its neck but the bird was a survivor. He didn’t want to die
at all and it made this eerie croaking sound the whole time Mike
tangled with it. Finally, Mike pulled out his cheap pocket knife
from his back pocket and starts cutting into the bird’s gut
sack and when he’s finished, a dozen or so silver minnows
poured out of him like a slot machine.
Mike
and I looked at the dead bird and the minnows that had poured
out of its stomach, and in our young kid’s way both commented
on how strange life was.
1980
***
Louis
E. Bourgeois lives on a wheat farm in North Mississippi. His
latest book, OLGA, was published by WordTech in 2005. Currently,
he is completing a memoirs collection titled The Gar Diaries.
©
Louis E. Bourgeois