Mount Misery by Angelo Peluso

Author:Angelo Peluso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Talos
Published: 2014-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

The bait shack had been open for business almost two hours when Jack Connors walked slowly up the stairs leading to the front door. While he was in good shape, jogging and mountain biking regularly, sixty-four hard years had begun to take some of the spryness from his legs. His double tours of duty as a US Marine scout sniper in the jungles of Vietnam had had the most impact on his physical and mental aging. He rarely talked of his combat experiences, but when he did, Jack would often respond to inquiries about the Vietnam War with his own altered version of a famous quote by Henry David Thoreau, “The mass of Vietnam vets simply lead lives of quiet desperation.” Jack had seen more than his share of the horrors of war, and he had perpetrated many of his own horrors in the name of honor and duty. To this day, he had endured his own personal times of quiet desperation. Jack wasn’t ashamed, nor did he ever feel a sense of guilt for what he had done for his country. He did what he knew was right and necessary, but sometimes late at night he would see the faces again as clearly as he had seem them through the scope mounted on his sniper rifle. Faces frozen in time and mind just as they were before he held his breath and squeezed the trigger.

Jack would have preferred to have been on the water at first light but he'd had a late night carving mallard decoys for one of his duck hunting buddies. He specialized in working decoys, those that are actually used for waterfowl hunting rather than purely decorative “birds” whose only functional purpose is to sit on a display shelf and look pretty. His carvings were all about function rather than form. Jack’s decoys were in local demand by hunters as well as collectors of American folk art, but these days he only carved for his friends. When the demons of his scout sniper days would relocate to his consciousness, Jack found comfort in carving, the feel of wood and the shape of an evolving duck. The creative process cleared his mind and his soul. His were oversized decoys called magnums, much larger than the real-life ducks he hunted. Jack found that the bigger the “deek,” the more easily it caught the eyes of greenheads. He painted his decoys with a unique impressionistic style that worked well to fool waterfowl. It took a lot of concentration and finishing time to transform blocks of basswood into an impression of a live mallard. When asked how he did it, Jack would say that every block of basswood had a decoy locked inside and it was his gift to give it freedom. Jack carved and painted birds throughout the previous night until he was completely exhausted. His head didn’t hit the pillow until almost two in the morning and even then, the faces in the scope kept haunting him. This late morning start would have to do.

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