Eyesores by Eric Shade

Author:Eric Shade
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4483-6
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kaahumanu

I’m Tom Teagle. This is Shitwad.

Shitwad’s real name is Freddie. He’s my little brother, little murderer. Thirty-one birds, nine raccoons, a turtle, two tom turkeys: he’s the golden boy with a twenty-two. He’ll shoot anything, season in or season out. We’ve both got licenses but who the hell checks: nobody. Shitwad has nothing against the animals he kills. So he insists. Except the birds. He hates them. I hate them. Dirty taunters, peckerheads, they give you fancy dreams of flight. But not Shitwad. He’s trigger happy. He’d probably shoot me if I wasn’t always behind him, whispering Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu.

Squirrels, birds, turtles, snakes, a brown bear eight-feet tall. The story was one Great Uncle Lucky Jim had told us: the bear screwed trees. It would latch onto a trunk and drive its hips in and out, bringing down slow cascades of leaves all over its fur while it did its fucking. And the bear, our uncle told us, would bang us like border-town whores if it ever found us in the woods. Great Uncle Lucky Jim—my grandfather’s youngest brother—is dead now. He smoked, he drank, he died of anger when his wife died first: cancer, slow and irresistible. He had a lot of land; our family was his only heir. If the bear was on the land, we inherited it too. But we’ve never seen the bear. We aim instead at everything else.

Jim left my parents the huge plot of land, it was over on Turkey Knob, nearly one hundred acres worth, with trees so thick it took a few seconds to walk a circle around them. Mom and Dad talked it over, I suppose it kept them up a night or two after the reading of the will, oh dear, oh honey, oh gosh—and sold the plot to a developer. His name was Carl something, and Carl had a dream, not a bird dream, but a land dream: he wanted to put in a golf course. His talk then filled my parents’ heads with fantasies, images of traveler’s checks and yellow highlighted miles running like piss rivers across Rand McNally maps. “Wouldn’t it be nice to see the country?” Mom would say. And Dad: “Wouldn’t it be a hoot to see the world?”

A hoot: they were due for a hoot. They put the money aside so that they could retire early, buy a top-of-the-line motor home, and cruise across country, taking snapshots of each other in front of tourist traps, cacti, casinos, men in mouse suits.

But Shitwad and I knew they’d never do it. People reach a certain age beyond which they don’t have the gonads to follow through on their dreams; there are issues of comfort at stake. What if they don’t have Lebanon bologna, what if they don’t carry our brand of pretzels?

The golf folks paraded in, the bulldozers bulldozed, the soil was chemically enhanced, six kinds of grass planted. They put in traps—hazards—sand, and water, a little pond with a concrete base. The project took two years. There was a pro shop, which we called the porn shop, and a pro, who we called Doctor Dickface.

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