All of us who loved Bob were hoping for a miracle. But miracles are rare, and it didn’t happen. I don’t think we can fault God for that, or shake our fist at this summer forest and the mountains all around. We know, don’t we, what the deal is – that passage we all have to make.
Surely Bob’s life did boast its share of miracles, large and small. And I believe there may have been one of the big literal sort, way back in the beginning. I don’t refer to his birth, which as far as I know involved none of the supernatural forces associated with Christmas. I have in mind a day when I was five and Bob, still a toddler, was run over by a car.
We were living in officers’ housing at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Our father, who had fought in the World War, was now called back into the Army for Korea, to his dismay. He used to say the best thing about the Army was that practically everyone in it couldn’t wait to get out.
On this day a workman had come to fix something or other. The housing was new, sod hadn’t been laid yet, so Bob and I were outside playing in the dirt. Doubtless I was supposed to keep an eye on him. When the workman finished we walked behind his car to watch him load things in the trunk. Then I stepped away but Bob stayed put. I can still see the rear wheel rolling over him as the car backs out. His head toward me, the tire on his middle.
I see also a room in the infirmary and an Army doctor tapping Bob’s knee with a rubber hammer. Unusual for those days, the doctor is a woman. Bob’s bruised up. Our mother’s there, beside herself. Of course no one believes me, that Bob was run over by the wheel. The doctor says he seems okay – but keep a close watch on him.
What I should have done in the first place.
To me, after that, Bob’s sixty years in this life are miracle enough. I can’t explain how he survived what I saw. But somehow I feel that accident has been the root of our whole relationship, Bob and me. As kids, and as adults (sort of), we raised our share of ruckuses but we never really fought. We’ve been close, though we led very different lives. Bob’s always wanted to peer deep into the mysteries of trunks. I’m the one who’s backed away.
The two of us inhabited the same bedroom until I was a junior in high school and Bob was in the seventh grade. I had model airplanes hanging from the ceiling; he had impertinent decals from Mad magazine on the walls. What, me worry? What’s the latest, Dope? And even back then Bob wasn’t the neatest guy. Clutter seemed to tag along happily wherever he went.
We both loved nature, the outdoors – Bob so much that he always wanted to bring it back indoors with him. He had the instinct of the collector, the keeper, the old-time naturalist. I liked to climb trees and watch birds and sketch them; Bob’s tastes ran to primitive things, salamanders, turtles, frogs and toads – I think because he could catch them, hold them in his hand and squint back at them, square in the eye. He squirreled them away, so to speak, all over the house, in bowls and jars and shoe boxes with holes punched for air. Our mother lived in mortal fear of what might dart, hop, or squirm out whenever she pulled a curtain or swept under a bed. And with good reason. Time and again Bob would drop a box or leave a lid off and a scaled or horned army would fan out and destroy the domestic tranquility, just when she was getting over the previous great escape.
Only last week I asked Bob why he’d liked all those frogs and toads so much. He thought for a moment, and then answered, sensibly, “Doesn’t every kid like frogs and toads?”
For one long summer he kept a young raccoon, the cutest, most abominable of all his wild pets. Charlie, he named it, though a better name, we found later, would have been Charlene. When it came to seeking – peering into trunks – Charlie and Bob were soul mates. The biggest difference between them was the leg count. You couldn’t keep either one in a cage.
Every night, without fail, Charlie would escape. He, or she, could undo any hook or latch and push concrete blocks off the lid of his screened enclosure in the yard. Then he’d pry open a basement window and wander at large in the house. Once, around midnight, he made a clean sweep of a shelf of Mason jars full of fruit, smashing them all on the floor. Charlie was crafty, for sure. One evening when Bob was letting him run in the yard, I watched him creep up behind our mother, nip her on the ankle, then dash up an apple tree. From that lofty perch he scanned the pandemonium below in obvious satisfaction.
Many years later Bob would make this up to Mother – the coon, the newts, all the rest. When she was in her nineties and living alone, Bob went back to Ohio to spend several weeks with her every winter. Toward the end he spent half of every year taking care of her.
Maybe – though the idea might not appeal to her – he learned his care-giving by feeding and sheltering all those wild pets. He loved catching nightcrawlers and bottling up live bugs, to feed them. In due time he turned each pet loose, better fed than when he found it.
The hardest one to let go was Charlie. Fall came and both our parents were firm – Charlie had to be back in the woods before winter, to hibernate. The poison day came when Bob and I and our dad drove Charlie out to a farm on Big Walnut Creek and said goodbye.
Bob was heartbroken. As I am today. But surely Bob didn’t miss the lesson of that autumn day: part of love is letting go.
There’s a batch of related lessons that somehow Bob learned far better than I ever have. They’re all in the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke: Don’t become attached to mere things. Only store up your treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. Consider the lilies, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. Don’t worry about what to wear. Don’t worry, period. That last one’s not only from Luke, but also from Mad magazine.
And that’s Bob, all the way.
Fortunately, Charlie was followed by Homer – who didn’t nip ankles. Bob got Homer for Christmas, a beagle pup. We hunted with this near-human dog for a dozen years, Bob and my father and I. But again the deep kinship was Bob’s alone. When Bob was away – especially when he went off to college in Montana – and anyone spoke the words “Where’s Bobby?”, Homer would roll his eyes up and howl a long lament for his missing pal.
So much, I guess, for letting go.
Homer stayed home when Bob went to Africa, too. It was the mid-sixties, the tag end of true hunting safaris in East Africa. Bob and Dad went – it was summer and I was guiding anglers on Yellowstone Lake. I don’t recall what Bob shot with a rifle on that safari, but I do know what he whacked with his Wham-O slingshot. I’m sure it was his proudest trophy, though not a drop of blood was shed. The safari, it seems, was plagued by troops of baboons. They screeched and heckled from the treetops when the hunters were stalking some animal on foot. The native Africans had least use of all for these nuisance primates.
So on a day that will live in history, with a raucous troop in the trees, Bob whipped out the slingshot he’d brought from home, picked up a rock, and let fly. The rock found its target, the hairless rear end of a really huge male baboon. There came down a howl of pain and a hideous clamor from the outraged troop, and they all swung away as one, out of sight and mind.
The Africans, tall and muscled and toothless, mud-caked men of the earth clad in little more than loincloths, laughed and laughed. Okay, I know – it wasn’t much fun for the baboon. But my brother was a kid. With a slingshot. It had to be one of his finest hours. The story found its way back home to his friends, and after that, they all called him Bwana Bob.
One more. I hardly need say there was a bit of the entertainer in Bob. The comic, in particular. Many years ago Charlotte and I were in Idaho to make a documentary film on the Salmon River. It was a raft trip and Bob had come over to see us off. But then, the night before embarkation, the producer, sensing an opportunity, invited Bob to come along.
So we went out to the motel lot and Bob started yanking stuff from the back of his station wagon. Clothes and equipment of all kinds, an Eskimo death mask, everything in clots and wads and incredible knots. In minutes Bob had arcana scattered all over the parking lot. There had to be sorcery involved. So much dunnage and tonnage couldn’t possibly fit in a single car. The producer came out and saw it all and rubbed his hands in glee.
The one thing Bob lacked was rain pants. It was October already and the spray in the rapids was going to be cold. Without rain pants he’d freeze. He poked around in the stuff and plucked out a pair of secondhand fishing waders he’d bought somewhere. The only problem was, he’d never tried them on. The legs were way too short. So he got out a knife and simply cut the feet off. Now, presumably, he could pull the waders up to his waist.
Well, the next morning Bob walks down to the riverbank, dressed up and ready to float. Only he’s not quite walking. Instead he’s advancing with a kind of stutter-step waddle – his legs, in the waders, looking about half their normal length. He’s got the waders lowered and duct-taped to his shoes, to seal out water. The crotch is nearly down to his knees. “Check this out,” he says, tripping weirdly across the sandbar and making stabbing motions with a stick of driftwood like the neck of a guitar. “The Chuck Berry duckwalk.”
Fast forward to four nights later. We’re a long way downriver, loafing around a campfire with a long day of rafting and filming behind us. The producer has wasted no time revising his shooting script to put Bob in the action. In fact he’s now the life of the film. But now we’re just relaxing, all of us, getting good and warm before heading for the tents. Many bottles of homemade wine have been drained, and with the warmth we’re feeling dopey.
Maybe it’s the brother in me, but I worry a bit: Bob vanished from the firelight a while ago and hasn’t come back. I’m thinking about getting up for a look – only thinking – when there comes a rustling sound from the darkness, a scrabbling on rocks, and then, breaking into the light, in walks a roaring ogre, not so much walks as waddles, its face murky and swollen and haloed with coarse hair like a grizzly’s, or maybe like an Eskimo death mask.
“Look out!” the producer shouts tipsily while wobbling to his feet. “It’s Saucecrotch!”
Bobbing and weaving, he went after the wadered ogre and tried to figure out where its knees were, for a tackle.
Not long ago, in our mother’s house in Ohio, I came across a letter she’d written to her own mother when Bob would have been three or four years old. She tells about a popular song of the day, “I’m Gettin’ Nuttin’ for Christmas,” and how Bob got it a bit mixed up. Singing and dancing around, he revised it, happily, as “I’m Gettin’ Nutty for Christmas.”
So keep that in mind on those dark days in December.
Son, brother, bemused uncle to my three amused daughters, Bob was always the best. I could tell you more, but won’t right now. Because really there’s never any end to Bob.
Parker
Pattee Canyon, Montana
August 26, 2010
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