Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing
By Patrick F. McManus |
Like Twain--or more contemp-orary humorists Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor -- Patrick McManus shares the belief that life's eternal verities exist primarily to be overturned. In McManus's world, all steaks should be chicken-fried, strong coffee is drunk by the light of a campfire, and fishing trips consist of men acting like boys and boys behaving like the small animals we've always assumed they were.
In this, the tenth hilarious collection of his adventures, wry obser-vations, and curmudgeonly calls for bigger and bigger fish stories, McManus takes on everything from an Idaho crime wave to his friend Dolph's atomic-powered huckleberry picker to the uncertain joys of standing waist-deep in icy water, watching the fish go by.
Excerpt from
Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing
The Old Man was sitting across from me at the kitchen table in his cabin, polluting the air to lethal levels with a large illegal cigar someone had smuggled in to him and that his doctor had ordered him to stop smoking anyway.
"I know Doc ordered you to give up those cigars," I said. "Your smoking them is bad for my health."
"That's because you're a panty-waist," he said. "This is a fine cigar, and if you had any taste at all, you'd appreciate its lovely aroma. Hemingway always brought me a couple boxes from Cuba when he came up to hunt with me in Idaho. Now. there was a man! They don't make men like Hem anymore, yourself being a case in point."
"I've heard all you Hemingway stories and don't believe a one of them," I said, "But they've improved over the years."
"Practice makes perfect," he said. "I ever tell you the time I outshot Hem on a grouse hunt? He wouldn't speak to me for two days afterwards, he was so mad. So then I let him beat me in arm wrestling, and then he was okay. I loved grouse hunting best of all. Almost best of all. Say, I got an idea. Let's go grouse hunting."
" You're too old and almost blind," I said, kindly. "You can't see more than ten feet ahead of your nose. How are you going to shoot grouse?"
"You leave that to me," he said. "Now don't just stand there with your mouth hanging' open. Get me down one of my shotguns. The French twelve-gauge side-by-side will do."
"You gave that gun away years ago," I said.
" Well, that was a darn fool thing for me to do. Who'd I give it to."
"Me."
"You! I would never give you a shotgun. You must have stole it."
"Nope, you gave it to me. It's mine now, and I'm keeping it. Anyway, it's much too fine a shotgun for a dirty old man like yourself. It's a gentleman hunter's gun. It's surprising any decent gun dealer would sell a fine instrument like that to an unsavory character such as yourself." |
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