Glen Papineau

GLEN PAPINEAU SUPPOSED HE WAS IN MOURNING. HE HAD USED that word before, even thought he understood what it meant, but he really hadn’t. For one thing, mourning sounded like a formality, a stage a person was required to go through-wearing a black suit and attending a funeral-but real mourning didn’t end the day after the funeral, or the week after, or even the month after. His pop had died nearly two months earlier, and sometimes Glen felt like he’d just then gotten the call.

In his mind, he called them the day feeling and the night feeling. The day feeling caught up with him before lunch most days, a hot blanket of lethargy so suffocating it made his temples pound. He dragged himself around work as if facing a high wind. Everything took an eternity, became a laborious detail. And Glen hated details. He was built for broad gestures-all a person had to do was look at his hands to know that. A man with hands like Glen’s would do certain things, and certain other things would never be in the cards. He’d never be a pianist, for example, or a veterinary surgeon. Not that he wanted those things, it was just that he’d found himself looking at his hands a lot lately, and his hands said they weren’t there for detail work.

The day feeling was bad, no question, but the night feeling was the real killer-a bleak sledgehammer to the soul, as if some stranger had whispered a terrible secret in his ear, and that secret was how death was senseless and inevitable. The knowledge made sleep impossible. He sat up watching television, and if he didn’t want to be alone, he went to the taverns-not the smartest move for local law enforcement to drink in public, but people understood. Some even bought him beers and told him stories about his pop.

There were moments of acceptance. After all, his pop had been getting up in years, and Glen had contemplated his death more than once, though he’d imagined something long and slow-a tangle with cancer, an unnameable decline. What he hadn’t expected was that death’s visit would be so sudden. One day he’d been a vigorous sixty-seven-year-old man, running his clinic, flirting with the bakery ladies, blabbering to anyone who would listen about his winter vacation in Florida, and the next he was lying at the bottom of the stairs in the Sawtelles’ barn.

Glen, as an only child, had been responsible for the funeral arragements. There had been a detailed will, specifying that his father be buried alongside Glen’s mother in Park City. At the shop, as his father called the veterinary clinic, Glen had boxed his father’s desk, his books, the jackets hanging on the hooks. Jeannie had called all his father’s clients and referred them to Doctor Howe in Ashland. The will specified that the vet school in Madison be contacted and his practice be sold in toto rather than auctioned off, but no one seemed terribly interested in a practice in the hinterlands and Glen had gotten no serious calls. The shop stood dark and silent now, pharmacy locked down, plastic sheets thrown over everything as if it were a morgue. The place was a break-in waiting to happen, Glen thought; in fact, someone had already put a rock through one of the back windows, though nothing was missing.

So there was the day feeling and the night feeling, and those were bad, and he was drinking a little more than he used to, but Glen thought he was handling things, if not thriving, until Claude called and said he wanted to talk. Glen offered to come out to the Sawtelle place, but Claude suggested the Kettle, a tavern south of town. The Brewers were playing on the television when Glen walked in. Claude hailed him from the end of the bar. The bartender, Adam, drew him a Leinenkugel and Glen sat down next to Claude.

They watched the game and talked about Pop, how Claude remembered him coming out to the kennel back when he was a kid. Claude said some nice things about his pop. He said that, besides Glen, he thought he was probably the closest thing to family Pop had. Said he thought of Glen’s father as an uncle, which meant a lot because the Sawtelles were a small family.

It was much later when they got to Claude’s reason for calling. Doctor Howe was incompetent, Claude said. Until they found another vet, Claude intended to do the workaday medicine himself-worming the pups, treating mastitis, and so on. He’d been a medic in the navy and he knew his way around a medicine chest. Glen knew his father had some sort of arrangement with the Sawtelles, since it wasn’t practical to be running out there five days a week just to prescribe penicillin. So they had set aside a medicine chest in their barn for the supplies Pop usually locked up in his office. And now Claude wondered if Glen would be willing to sell off some of the meds in the shop pharmacy, seeing as no one was beating down the door to take over.

They were four or five beers in at that point, which wasn’t much for someone Glen’s size, but he’d also had a couple before he drove down. They watched the Brewers give up another run. Adam swore at the television as a service to the bar patrons.

“You know what I think about when I think about your dad?” Claude said. “The Hot Mix Duck Massacre.”

Glen chuckled. “Yup. That first rain-remember all those ducks quacking around the shop?”

When Glen was eight years old, the state had come through and repaved Main Street and put up street lights, the first significant improvement that Mellen had seen, on its long glide toward oblivion after its lumbering heyday, since Truman was in office. The streets had been so bad the town kids made a game out of riding bicycles down the street without crossing any pothole patches. It wasn’t easy. In some places, it hadn’t even been possible.

But instead of the pebbly tar-and-gravel asphalt that had once covered the street, the state crew had applied a new formula that went down like black, smoking glue and hardened pudding-smooth. This was called “hot mix,” presumably because they poured it from a huge wheeled furnace. The hot-mix furnace stank to high heaven for the three weeks it took to resurface the street, but it was a small price to pay; afterward, Mellen’s previously pocked Main Street was a pristine strip of smooth, black pavement.

Things were hunky-dory until the first rainy spell. One night, a couple of ducks flew by, looking for a spot to land on the Bad River. With the new street lights shining off the rain-slick hot mix, Main Street must have looked like a placid, fish-filled stream, more inviting than the Bad River had ever been. The first two ducks came in for a water landing, quacking like mad, and broke their necks on impact. Then the main flock came up over the trees, their tiny bird brains unable to figure out why their compatriots looked so odd there in the water. The result had been known ever after as The Hot Mix Duck Massacre.

The luckiest birds tumbled head over heels, shook their bills in confusion, and flapped off, but a half-dozen others became dinner for quick-thinking observers. The rest suffered all manner of injuries. The diner emptied. A strange roundup of the wounded ensued. People herded limping, stunned ducks into boxes, captured them under blankets, even shooed them into cars. A caravan had arrived at Glen’s father’s shop.

“They got so they limped around behind Pop wherever he went,” Glen said.

Claude had forgotten some of the details, but as they’d drank and talked, he’d gone from grinning to laughing out loud at Glen’s recollection.

“Yup. What I remember best is him setting them on the receptionist’s counter,” Claude said, “and talking to people as if he couldn’t see them. ‘What duck?’ he’d say. I used to fall down laughing when he did that.”

Glen remembered that, too. That was back when Claude had worked around the shop doing odd jobs. He remembered thinking back then what a striking figure Claude was-a bit of a hero to Glen, in fact. He’d been athletic. (He still looked good for-what, forty?) And another thing: Claude always seemed to have a girlfriend, which, even back when he was eight, Glen suspected might turn out to be a problem for him.