Winter Dreams

Mulak Reader - Winter Dreams

This is one of the very best short stories I’ve ever published. Winter Dreams was done specifically for a collection that Ducks Unlimited was assembling and ultimately called Windward Crossings. I like the fact that I tell the reader how the story turns out right there in the first sentence, yet the story still hangs together fairly well. I got a couple nice pieces of fan mail from people who’s opinion I respect, and took some comfort from them saying my story was the best one in the book. I based the story sketch on a favorite symphony by Tchaikovsky, and the first draft had musical notation that was left off in the published copy. What you get here is the original.

Winter Dreams

Overture:
     I dreamt last night that Max was alive again. There he was, on the other side of a room full of people. I recognized things about him I hadn’t even realized I remembered: The way he would throw his head back when he laughed, his way of scratching at his beard and leaning forward as he spoke, his restless movements. He was wearing the new insulated waders from the last time we hunted together – the same ones he had on when they found him after he put the barrel of his shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out. I tried to make my way to him, but as is the way of dreams I kept breaking through the thin ice underfoot and could make no progress. “Max!” I called out to him – I had things to ask him, I said - but he waved me away and replied that he couldn’t answer my questions now.
    “Max!”
    Max.

Dreams of a Winter Journey

allegro tranquillo

     Max’s car followed as I wove through the suburban streets toward the new duck hunting spot along the highway. A thick pre-dawn mist covered everything, and the reflective road signs were obliterated, but I knew where we were going. I pulled over and parked beneath a street lamp. Max’s new Blazer pulled in behind me.
     Almost in juxtaposition to the gleam of his new car, the old waders he wore were patched in several places and his pumpgun looked as if he hadn’t cleaned it since last year. Thinking back, it had looked that way on all the previous opening days we had hunted together, and I wondered out loud if he ever cleaned the thing.
     “Just the insides.” He said, quoting the punch line from a joke we both favored. Max had a way of laughing as he spoke. He shouldered my decoy sack and started off. It was characteristic of Max that he was in a hurry even though he didn’t know the way. I caught up to him and we followed my flashlight beam off into the darkness. This was our first hunt at this new spot, made recently available through the engineering efforts of a clan of beavers. We crossed a brook and passed the turn where I would later take a swipe at a drake mallard with my wading staff, and continued along a snowmobile trail. On an earlier scouting trip I had marked a direct route through the woods and swamp to a likely looking open patch of water out in the flooded timber. I used a series of reflective thumbtacks, which now showed up little better than the road signs had under the heavy mist.
     All the while Max was bubbling over. “I’m getting all the right signs from that little blond in the office.” I could almost hear him grinning in the darkness behind me. “Things are almost ripe for the picking.” Ten years my junior, Max was in his invincible 30s. Although I didn’t always agree with the things he did, I couldn’t help rooting for the guy. Go Max.
     “I envy you, Maxwell.” I said back over my shoulder. “There really is nothing in life like a new affair. It’s the friendliest thing people can do - Kind of like shaking hands, only if feels a lot better.” It was a line we had both used before, and we laughed again. “Just remember, Mr. Married Man, that the essence of all wisdom is caution.”
     “Yea, yea, yea.”
     In retrospect, maybe Max was asking me to talk him out of it as we walked in that morning. He knew things had their consequences, but sometimes enthusiasm gets the better of judgement. It might have been one of those signal moments in life that come upon all of us unannounced as part of the infinite progression, but one which held the potential for immense change. I might have saved my friend. Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward, and I plodded on.
     We came to the edge of the swamp. Abruptly, the line of glowing thumbtacks ended.
     “What’s up?” Max stopped behind me.
     “Somebody took down our markers.”
     No matter where I played the beam of the flashlight, nothing glowed back at me. We could find our way out to an open spot without the trail markers, but I was at a loss to explain what had happened to them. During the ensuing struggle through the flooded brush Max shifted the weight of the decoy sack and inadvertently dropped his gun into the water. In the moment it took to retrieve it I shined the light at his feet. Something underwater glowed back.
     “Here’s one of your thumbtacks.” He said. “It looks like it’s the beavers that don’t want us out here.”
     When I searched around I found another marked sapling that had since been cut down. Out farther the flashlight located a marked tree that they had overlooked. “There’s what’s left of our path.” I said. “We’ll be okay if you can get your gun to work.”
     Max held up his shotgun and let the water drain out of it, then worked the action a few times. “That’ll pass for a cleaning.” He grinned at me. Go Max.
     We found an opening in the flooded timber and put out the decoys, then waited in the knee-deep water beneath the trees. “I’m going to need another patch on these waders.” Max lifted his right foot out of the water. “This foot is already swimming.”
      Thinking back, that beginning with so many things going wrong set the theme for a day without melody: Wood ducks piled out of the swamp but wouldn’t decoy to our mallard spread. We stayed too long at what proved to be the wrong spot and ended up not getting much shooting.
     But if Max was disappointed, he never let me know. There really is nothing like a new affair to put an optimistic spin on life and Max’s fortunes seemed to be looking up. It was full speed ahead.

Land of Mists, Land of Gloom

andante cantabile ma non tanto

    We stood beneath the now-leafless swamp maples and watched the beaver house emerge out of the darkness. It was a raw, misty morning, the end of the first half of a split season. In the distance we could hear the noise of the highway as a low and steady backdrop against which played the first mutterings of mallards.
     Max got out his call, then tucked it back into his jacket again after a study of his wristwatch. He looked at me and grinned a toothy grin. “Well give ‘em ten more minutes.”
     I nodded and shivered. The decoys had swung around and answered the flow of the flooded swamp. “I’m glad we finally found this spot. That little bit of current might keep it open when things begin to freeze-up.”
     The far off mallards continued their soft mutterings. Then, for something to fill in the silence, I asked, “How’s it going with that one from the office?”
     There was a long pause. After I was sure I had asked the wrong question, Max said, “I’m going to break it off.”
     “Oh?”
     “I think Linda knows.” Linda was his wife.
     “Deny it to the end, Max.”
      There was another long silence before he said, “Maybe I should come clean. I hate the way I feel.” Max was suffering from something most of us had outgrown shortly after high school. I couldn’t know it then, but his disease-of-conscience would prove fatal. It was my turn to be silent, but I jumped in with both feet:
     “Maxwell, don’t be crazy. You’ve got to consider alternate endings when you do that sort of thing. It’s one thing to tell the truth, but something else to hurt somebody with it. In that sort of situation women see themselves as victims with a right to revenge. My advice, Max? Don’t tell her. She’ll never forgive you.”
      Then, like a bug that turns so abruptly in flight that your eyes cannot follow, the conversation twisted away from me.
      “You don’t care for Linda, do you.” Max said.
      Had I said that? His statement was too close to the truth to be dismissed with a one-liner. So I took the offensive. “Max, I hardly know her. Really. Since you’ve gotten married I’ve spent a grand total of, what - 10 minutes maybe? - In her company. Whatever my impression of Linda might be, mostly it consists of things you’ve told me about her.”
     The unspoken part said that there was a very real possibility that Max didn’t like his wife, either. It was something out of key, and I didn’t dare say it out loud. Max, it seemed, wanted to trust someone, and although I was nominated I wasn’t sure I had ever earned that trust. Weeks earlier I had mismanaged a chance to keep him out of trouble in the first place, and now I felt a need to prevent him from getting in deeper. It was clear he was heading for the land of gloom. Part of me wanted to change the subject, but it bothered me that my advice hadn't expressed the entire idea.
     “Happiness, essentially, is pretty much not being unhappy.” I told him. There weren’t many things I had learned from my own failed marriage, but that was certainly chief among the few.
      The distant ducks continued their sotto voce muttering and the sky lightened. In my mind I played back what the dreary things I had said: My advice to an honest man was to lie – of course he wasn’t going to listen. Had I only clouded the issue?
     “I might as well piss in my waders and warm up my feet.”
     “What?” I looked at Max expecting I don’t know what. He held up his booted foot.
     “Another leak.” He said.
     I laughed, more from relief that he was himself again than from amusement.

Intermezzo/scherzo

Allegro scherzando giocoso

     Max and his wife came to a party at the house just after Thanksgiving. If things had been going badly between them, it seemed they had made-up and were back to dancing in waltz time.
    “Everything’s okay.” He said to me in a private moment. “I told Linda all about it and she’s cool.” I must have looked surprised, because Max said, “Surprised?”
     I started to tell the truth, but then instead told not the truth, but something true. “The only genuine good is the forgiveness of wrong. I believe that, Max. If she’s really forgiven you, you’re a lucky man.”
    “I am.” He said. “I couldn’t be more pleased to get all this off my chest.”
     Max’s wife, for her part, didn’t seem pleased with me - or maybe she was pleased that I was confirming her worst expectations of Max’s hunting buddy and confidant. Their relationship, which had never been easy to fathom since it consisted mainly of adult people acting like love-struck teen-agers,
now seemed to be buoyed by a law of physics nobody could understand.
     I grilled some of the ducks we had been shooting. “Will I find any pellets in them?” Max’s wife asked.
     “Nah.” Max said. “We only take head shots.”
     That, of course, is every hunter’s non-serious boast, but then I saw Max wink at his wife, and they exchanged a look that said “head shots” had another meaning for them. There was some groping under the table, and several other couples turned away and rolled their eyes in exasperation. Things were back to normal, it seemed.

Finale

andante lugubre

     It was the day we had waited for. The thin ice had formed overnight, and we had broken out openings in the flooded timber with our wading staffs. The freeze-up was underway, and the birds were being driven to whatever open water was left. We had taken a pair of blacks at legal, having watched them hop-scotch from one open pocket to the next until they had finally seen our decoys in the moving water in front of the beaver house.
     Max had thrown out the old patched waders and now had a brand new pair that he had bought the day before. I would later remark that I had misinterpreted that as a sign that in the middle of his personal turmoil he still held out some hope for the future.
     “She’s gone.” He said, quite abruptly.
     “Who?”
     “Linda. That bitch."
     I chose not to acknowledge Linda’s bitchood. Instead I repeated what I had heard. “She left you?”
     “A couple days ago.” He shook his head. “I’ve really screwed up my life.”
    “I thought you said everything"was okay.”
     He lifted his palms, not quite an answer.
     Forgiveness – the real kind - is more often heard of then actually seen, and Linda had finally reacted predictably. The tragic quality of Max’s situation bordered on operatic.
     "You can’t beat yourself up over this, Max. If Linda’s left you it’s because she wanted to go, not because of something you did or didn’t do. Whatever it is you’re feeling guilty about was only the excuse she used for leaving. She left. Forget guilt, Max. You make yourself happy or unhappy – it’s what you make of it now.” I had told myself the same thing when my own marriage went south. But now, as then, I sounded like someone trying to convince himself of something he didn’t quite believe.
     Max began to say something, but stopped. Here, and on all the other sorry times when I’ve tried to go back to that morning in my memory, I wish I could know what it was he was about to say.
     We stood with our backs against the flooded maples, wearing our silence like heavy coats until a single drake mallard flew over. With the sun up now behind us, we could see his colors clearly as he winged down the swamp, 40 yards up. As he passed, Max offered him some feeding chatter and then a couple of loud calls, but to no avail. A minute later the drake came back, returning to where it was that he came from, still 40 yards up. I gave him a lead of two boxcars and pulled. Like a long trap shot, there was a moment when I was sure that I missed, but then the bird collapsed, one moment pale gray and rust in the sunlight, then a dark form when the shadows from the distant trees intersected his fall. He became larger and larger, then quickly passed behind and broke the ice with a crash not 30 feet from us.
     Before I could make the retrieve a half-dozen low silhouettes glided over the beaver house and banked around the decoys with their necks craned. They passed behind us, and I could hear their quiet murmuring and the air in their feathers. When they reappeared in front their number had grown by two. They circled behind us again, and when they came back into sight three birds had broken from the flock, a hen leading two green-headed drakes. Their posture in the air changing and they eased downward. Max shot once and drew feathers, then again as his bird climbed. I followed Max’s two shots with one of my own that completed the illusion that it was all being played out in ¾ time. For a long moment the bird hung in the air, his wings beating, then, like a note held too long, simply fell. The flock departed leaving the drake at the center of a ring of ripples in the open water.
          Our shooting brought more ducks up off the open areas of the swamp, and the scene was played out all over again. While some were circling, others crossed beneath them, trying to get into the open water with our decoys. Max talked and the ducks answered and kept coming, and the smell of gunpowder filled the still air. Then there were more in the air, and the illusion became that of a rondeau that repeats upon itself: No sooner had the crescendo signaled the last of the action when the next flock arrived and began circling. For a stretch of perhaps fifteen minutes it was, in the dictionary definition of the word, fantastic: Mallards and mallards and mallards. Feathers floated in the air after each flurry, and the sound of our guns might well have been the thunder of kettledrums in a finale.

Coda:

     We were almost out of the woods. The heavy weight of two limits of ducks in the strap over my shoulder was like a pleasant bass beat, playing it’s own counterpoint against the march time of our trek. Our cars were in sight, parked just across the brook.
     Something moved in the bushes. It was a drake mallard. Max stopped. “Damn. We must’ve put a pellet into that one.” His voice was on the edge of whatever line it was his mind had been walking all morning.
     “Limit or not, we shouldn’t leave him here to feed the foxes.” I shrugged off the loaded duck strap and laid my gun down.
     Max worked the action of his pump. “I’ve still got a shell left.”
     “Save it for something important,” I remember saying. I actually said that. Then, with my wading staff held like a baseball bat, I walked in after the mallard, but when I got close he leapt into the air and flew off. I laughed out loud, but when I looked at Max he was staring off after the duck. For once he was a cipher, and if there was an expression on his face I couldn’t read it at the time.

* * * * *

This site was last updated 09/22/06