Fucking and duck hunting
In the muggy September afternoons, the Saint Louis city streets were alive with baseball fans in red shirts and red hats converging on Busch Stadium for the Cardinals’ final home stand of the season. The Cardinals weren’t in the pennant chase that year but still the faithful came, like a sluggish bright-red river when viewed from the height of my hotel room.
I spent most of that afternoon on the phone with family members back east, fulfilling the behest of my dying mother in Washington State to prepare them for the end. She didn’t want to talk to any of them, not even her ex-husband, my father, for whom she still had a soft spot. She wanted to die in peace at my home in the Pacific Northwest, tended by my wife and children and me, and had tasked me to inform the rest of the family while protecting her final privacy.
This trip to Saint Louis on behalf of the Washington State Patrol was the only one I had not been able to cancel. I had spent a large part of the summer working the night shift at the Seattle Goodwill Games joint forces security office, so I could have whole days with her as the cancer eroded her defenses. It was an arrangement heartily endorsed by my Patrol chief — a kindness you don’t forget. Other members of the joint force, from FEMA to the Seattle Police Department to Postal Inspectors, took more than their share of my watches to give me even more time with her in the really rough patches — also something you don’t forget.
We knew her time was close, but she wouldn’t hear of me blowing off the meeting in Saint Louis.
“I won’t die until you get home,” she promised — and kept her word. I never doubted her for a minute.
But those phone conversations were tough going, and I was wrung out when I finished the last one. The red flood was still encroaching on the stadium, so I bought a Cardinals cap and joined them, to clear my head. It would be my fourth major-league stadium, after Baltimore Memorial, the Dodgers’ Chavez Ravine and of course the Mariners’ King Dome.
The Cardinals lost. The Pirates had already clinched their division, so the game was meaningless in that regard. It was fun to watch the casual élan of the Pirates, honoring the tenets of the game with crisp play despite the meaningless game in the standings.
Baseball is good for so many things, and that day its message was that life goes on. Even when it’s rough or meaningless, you do the work you know how to do: the Zen of baseball.
After dark, the downtown streets became deserted and somehow sinister, as if some malignant zombie force owned the night. My joke to the black men who sold me my Cardinal’s cap (“the only city in America where a white man can wear red without risking a drive-by shooting by the Bloods for being uppity or the Crips just because”) had met with incredulous laughter. After sundown it wasn’t funny. When I asked a hotel night porter where I could find an all-night diner, he said there was a good one close by.
“But don’t go walkin’, y’heah? Take a taxi unless you got a cah.”
The undertone of fear in his voice reminded me of stopping for gas at a convenience food store just off the interstate to the Saint Louis airport. The store’s doors were barred from the inside. The white teller sat in a bullet-proof cage at one end of the building. The surly black guy ahead of me was dressed in a bulky black Oakland Raiders parka and wool watch cap though the night was hot and humid. I wondered if it was racist to think he might be packing an Uzi and was glad I had my six-inch .357 under my shirt-tails.
He ordered a quart of milk. The clerk went into the store to get it. She made him count his money into a reinforced scoop, like one through which you might feed a dangerous prisoner. But she was the prisoner. Then she squeezed his carton of milk through the slot. The tension involved in that simple transaction made me feel like a stranger in a strange and hostile land. She looked at me as if I was crazy to be out driving around at that hour.
“You really need all this protection?” I asked her.
“Oh, yeah.” End of conversation.
The night I drove up to “Jimmy’s 24-hour Diner,” the bright lights gleamed off marked Saint Louis patrol cars outside. (They spell the “Saint” everywhere in St. Louis.) I began to relax. Not only because of the badges and guns, but because cops, like truckers, know where to eat.
Several cops were in residence, chowing down and reporting events to their uniform patrol sergeant. Several shootings being worked was the summary, three fatal, and their shift still had hours to run. They pretty much had the place to themselves.
The sergeant was busting an occasional lazy move on the blonde waitress, indifferent to the mayhem his men reported. She was handing it back proficiently and in good humor. It was clear she liked him.
All cop conversation halted when my $600 cell phone rang in my hip pocket as I was digging into my omelet. This was back when a cell phone was the size of a beige brick with a thick rubber antenna, like a scaled down version of the Army walkie-talkies I used in another life.
The cops made no pretense they weren’t listening to me.
Miami Vice was the hot TV show then. The big cell phones had been cemented in the imagination of the public with nocturnal drug deals. Even the imagination of real-life cops it seemed. In this case though, it was my own State Patrol dispatch center, in faraway Olympia. As Patrol public information officer, I was on 24-hour-call no matter where on the planet I happened to be.
Some of our troopers had been involved in a pursuit with shots fired on Interstate Five. The media wanted details. My omelet cooled as I took notes in my old spiral reporter’s notebook and then dialed Seattle Associated Press to dictate a press release. When I finished, the Saint Louis sergeant was looking me over.
“You with the state? I heard you mention troopers and a shooting on the Interstate.”
“I’m with a state, yes. But not this one. Washington State. Here on a traffic safety convention.”
“Dispatch tracked you down, huh?”
“Ever know a good dispatcher who couldn’t?”
He grinned broadly. I spoke the language. He waved his subordinates back into the night, to assist harried detectives in a canvass at one of the fatal-shooting locations. What he said next caught me completely off-guard.
“You a duck hunter by any chance?”
“Does it show, even in a suit?”
“The Ducks Unlimited club tie kind of gives it away,” he said with a chuckle. “I ought to be a detective, but why work that hard? I’m a duck hunter too.”
He had read a glowing outdoor magazine article about Washington State duck hunting, and wanted to know if it could really be that good. He had never lived anyplace but Missouri, and did all his duck hunting on the Mississippi River.
So we talked duck hunting. He used his portable radio to periodically quarterback the movement of uniforms from shooting to shooting, and take requests for assistance from detectives. He told me about his camouflaged 18-foot jonboat, which happened to be built by the same company mine was. I told him I had an outboard jet motor on mine and we called them jet sleds in the Northwest.
He grumbled about the interstate highways intersecting in his jurisdiction. He said the easy access funneled too many bad guys into town from both directions, Chicago and Kansas City. Do a crime, hit the interstate; it was just too easy and tempting, and made his whole precinct a big fat target. He confirmed my impression that the traveling criminals, together with the gangs, turned the city into a combat zone after dark.
But he had two weeks’ annual leave scheduled for the opening of duck season. Said the bad guys could have the run of the place for all he cared; he needed to cleanse his soul out on the big river. He actually used those words. He was a duck hunter all right.
He was happily detailing the toils he would soon endure, laying out as many as 150 bluebill decoys off a big sandbar on the river, when another of his men joined us for coffee.
“Sarge never talks about anything but women or ducks,” the cop told me.
The sergeant winked at the waitress, tipped his chair back on its hind legs, and made a memorable pronouncement.
“Listen to me, son,” he said. “There are only two things in this world that matter a damn. Fucking and duck hunting. But you can only hunt ducks three months out of the year!”
Before too long, both were called away. The blonde waitress and I had the place to ourselves. “Quite a philosopher, our sergeant,” I said.
