Fup

2 The Great Checker Showdown of '78

In the early spring of '77, Johnathan "Tiny" Makhurst, just turned 22, was going crazy. After a five day drenching in early February-seven inches of cold rain, limb-snapping winds-the weather cleared to a false and balmy spring, and held till the second week in March. Tiny didn't believe it at first, but after 20 days he went out and checked the ground. It was perfect. He'd planned the fence all winter, scaling it on graph paper, cleaning and oiling his tools every Sunday afternoon till Granddaddy Jake swore they'd squirt out of his hand, and now, finally, preparation met perfect conditions: the ground was just right for posthole digging- not so mushy that the blades wouldn't scour, yet not so dry they couldn't get a bite. He dug 120 postholes the first day in the field, each exactly three feet deep, precisely seven feet apart, and in a line as straight as the shortest distance between two points. He walked home that evening whistling, ate half a venison roast and a pile of hash browns for dinner, did up the dishes, whipped Granddaddy five straight in checkers, downed his nightly shot of Ol' Death Whisper, and started for bed just as Granddaddy Jake started for the door.

"Off to see your lady friend?" Tiny grinned, for that was the only explanation Granddaddy had ever offered when he'd started his nightly rambles a few weeks before.

"Better'n whacking it," Granddaddy grunted, and was gone.

The sudden, stark incandescence shocked Tiny from sleep. Dazed, confused, he seemed to hang in the bare light for hours till the heavens finally tore apart and a wrenching crack of thunder rocked the house. As it faded, the wind rose to howl at its ghost. The first drops of rain came in nervous flurries; then it poured. In a rare display of temper, Tiny hurled his pillow against the wall.

The storm was the first of three that swept in from Hawaii. Each lasted about two days, with about 15 hours of humid calm betweeen the tropical soakings. The lulls were torture for Tiny: they beckoned, then denied. Grand-daddy Jake was nearly as bad. Caught out in the first storm, he'd come down with a cold (the first of his life, he claimed) and promptly took to bed. Tiny cooked and cared for him, which mostly meant fetching his whiskey and playing hours of checkers each day (Grand-daddy Jake figuring that as long as he was laid up he might as well sharpen his moves before challenging Lub Knowland for $100 a game). Tiny had beaten Lub Knowland for $2700 before he was old enough to shave and, ten years better, could demolish his Granddaddy with the regularity of an atomic clock.

On the first day they agreed to play to the first five out of nine, and when Tiny won five straight, Granddaddy insisted they make it the best of nineteen ("so as to eliminate fluke luck," he argued), and two days after the storms had passed and Tiny was aching to get back to his fence, they were playing the best 500 out of 999,the score at 451 Tiny and 12 for Granddaddy Jake, or exactly twelve games after Tiny realized that Granddaddy was not going to get well until he won, prompting Tiny to throw as many games as he could-which, considering his Granddaddy's increasingly eccentric play, wasn't always possible.

For another three days they faced each other across the board. To look at them you'd never thought they were kin. Tiny was 22, but his round soft face made him appear six years younger, still in the stammer of adolescence. Granddaddy was 99, generally lucid, but prey to the stuttering lapses of senility. Tiny, like most men burdened with that nickname, was 6'5" standing in a hollow, and punished the Toledoes at 269. Granddaddy was 5'5" in his cowboy boots and weighed just a notch over 100-though he often allowed, upon the slightest provocation, that he was once 6' and 200 pounds before hard work and harder women shrunk him down, and that if he was still within hooting distance of his prime he'd kick your ass into cordwood and have it stacked before the slash hit ground. Tiny, fortunately, was as amiable as his Granddaddy was ornery, as placid and benign as the old man was fierce and belligerent.

The differences in temperament carried over into style. Tiny enjoyed the open, linear purity of checkers. Granddaddy favored games with hole cards, where your strength was in your secrets and you flew into the eye of chaos riding your ghost. Tiny started work at dawn. Granddaddy stirred at the crack of noon. Tiny didn't mind doing dishes. Grand-daddy cooked-a skill forced upon him with Tiny's adoption, and one which he came to strangely enjoy-but he only cooked dinner because that was the only meal he ate, breakfast skipped in sleep, lunch a cup of coffee and a shot of Ol' Death Whisper. Tiny drank a little, usually just a swallow before bed to hold back the dreams; Granddaddy drank a lot, often a pint a day, to keep the dreams moving.

Tiny fished with flies he tied himself, much to Jake's disgust; Jake used worms, had always used worms, saw not a goddamn thing wrong with using worms, and claimed they'd be serving snowcones in hell before he'd even consider fishing with a bunch of chicken feathers lashed to a hook.

Tiny chuckled, good-natured and constant. Granddaddy cackled, snorted, whooped, yipped, and roared.

Tiny had a full set of strong, well-formed teeth. Granddaddy had a strong, well-formed set of gums, plus five teeth, two of which met, giving him a jump on the gristle.

Tiny didn't like to dream. Granddaddy Jake dreamt constantly now, like a stick carried by the river.

Their differences, however numerous, were superficial; their similarities were few, but had some bottom: they were held by the bewildered love they felt for each other, a kindness beyond mere tolerance, a blood understanding of what moved their respective hearts. At first, Jake had tried too hard to draw Tiny out of his shell, bombarding him with candy bars and baseballs and toy trucks, fishing poles and chocolate chip cookies, complete attention and total, doting permission. When Lottie Anderson mentioned to him that kids Tiny's age liked sandboxes, Granddaddy had Barney Wetzler down at Wetzler Brothers Gravel deliver 30 yards of choice river sand. Figuring every boy should have a dog, in a month's time Granddaddy Jake had gotten him four: a pair of Walker pups, a Brittany spaniel, and a hardheaded Beagle crossbreed named Boss (who, without benefit of Grand-daddy's whiskey, lived 18 years as Tiny's constant companion till a huge wild boar called Lockjaw opened him from scrotum to collar. Boss, by sheer mean will, had made it home to scratch at the door before he died.)

When these excesses of good will drew a barren, if polite, response from Tiny, Grand-daddy Jake had taken a jar out on the porch to wonder it through his mind. It took him awhile to get a firm grasp on the obvious: Tiny was devastated by his mother's death, and since only time and maybe a little tenderness would cure that, he decided to just be who he was and go on about his life, and if the boy wanted to join in, that was fine and welcome, and if he didn't… well, Jake was used to fishing by himself. Real feelings take time earning the trust to keep them true and, Jake reckoned, an immortal like himself had, if nothing else, plenty of time.

They also shared their passions, which were different in kind but not intensity. From the moment Jake had tasted the first batch run off from the dying Indian's recipe, his passion had been the refinement of whiskey; he pursued its perfection with the ardor of an old alchemist seeking the Philosopher's Stone. As he explained to anyone who'd listen, it wasn't so much purity he was after-hell, you could damn near buy pure alcohol-but something more precious: molecular character.

In the late '60s a hippie had wandered out to the ranch one day. After announcing in a slow vacuum-eyed drawl that he sought and welcomed all forms of mental transformation and had heard that Jake made a beverage imbued with such mind-altering properties, he offered to trade two tablets of LSD for a fair sample. Granddaddy screeched and ranted about how he hated drugs and should shoot his worthless longhaired dipshit ass for trying to corrupt his grandson, but since it was one of the few times that anyone had actually wanted to try Ol' Death Whisper, he relented-though he refused to trade. The longhair, who identified himself as Bill the Thrill, insisted on the optimum dosage, which Granddaddy, using his own tolerance as a guide, calculated to be around a pint. The longhair, though visibly shaken after the first swallow, managed to get down six or seven more quick gulps before he collapsed on the front porch and began writhing in such a way that Boss, Tiny's cantankerous and ever-horny Beagle, had come over and tried to hump him. This action caused a mental transformation in the longhair that was rather hard to follow, but as near as Grand-daddy could ever figure it, the longhair feller must of thought he was a raccoon or something, for he immediately bolted for the walnut tree in the front yard, went up it in a single gigantic bound, and spent the next three hours sitting among the bare limbs hunched over like a sick buzzard. The first hour he wept. The second hour he laughed. The third hour he was silent. At the start of the fourth hour he pitched forward and fell like a sack of wet grain. He broke both arms. On the way into the hospital, he offered to buy Granddaddy's stock on hand and all future production for $20 a pint in exchange for sole distributorship. In a few years it had become a cult item among certain connoisseurs of drooling oblivion, and Granddaddy Jake was able to maintain the $300,000 balance in his and Tiny's joint account.

Tiny's passion was fences. Granddaddy Jake was convinced that Tiny's astonishing growth spurt between the ages of five and nine was due to the fact that he wanted to build fences so bad he'd forced himself to grow big enough to handle the tools. By the time he was twelve, Tiny was building fences that any master would admire, and by twenty his fences were so strong and graceful that the same masters were forced into envy. He worked in stone, picket, post amp; rail, and wire, but he liked the traditional California sheep fence best of all: 36" high sheep mesh stretched on 4x5" redwood posts with a single strand of barbed wire at the top. He like working in wire because wire twanged, and there was nothing that brought him deeper satisfaction than plucking the top strand of barbed wire and listening to it resonate all the way around the circuit of the fence. Lub Knowland called the fences "Tiny's guitars" and claimed to have heard their distinctive tones on a particularly clear day while he was fishing Beeler Lake in the eastern Sierras, some 200 miles away. Most folks however credited this claim as typical Lub Knowland bullshit.

Nobody was surprised that Tiny built excellent fences, for by temperament he was patient and precise. But nobody could understand why he built them, for Tiny and Granddaddy didn't run any stock, and since coyotes had eaten the Bollen brothers out of the sheep business two years before, none of their immediate neighbors did either.

Granddaddy Jake called him on it one night after dinner: If you ain't fencing nothing in, maybe you're fencing something out."

But Tiny just shook his head and mumbled, "Naw, they're just fences, that's what I like to do."

Granddaddy almost pursued it, then let it slide, repeating with friendly derision, " 'Just fences, shit! That's like saying my whiskey is just something to drink."

Tiny, thanks to the bitter vigilance of Emma Gadderly at the Social Welfare Office, had to attend school. From the first grade through his high school graduation he received straight, solid C's, seldom spoke in class, had many pleasant acquaintances and no close friends. In his first day of gym class in high school, the football coach, who had ambitions for the head post at the local J.C., actually got down on his knees and begged Tiny to come out for the team. Tiny said he would like to but he had to get right home after school and work on the ranch fences. The same thing he told Sally Ann Charters when she asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. The same thing he told Herbie and Allan when they wanted him to go with them to Tijuana over the spring break to get their car tuck-and-rolled and carouse the whorehouses. The same thing he told the basketball coach and the track coach. The same thing.

He was content working on his fences. He planned them in the winter, built them in the spring and summer, and made posts in the fall, splitting them out of redwood, finishing them with broadaxe and drawknife till at ten feet you'd swear they'd been milled. By the time he was out of grade school he'd built line fences around the ranch; he spent his high school years cross-fencing, rebuilding, and working on gates, forging his own hinges, fliers, and bolts. When he received his diploma, he started over, perfecting them. He had numerous offers at outstanding wages to build fences for others (two came from as far away as Montana), but he always said, "Gosh, I'd like to help out, but I just got too much work on my own place-and I kinda have to look out for my Granddaddy."

Tiny and Granddaddy Jake also shared the sufferings that inevitably attend serious passion. In Granddaddy's case, the cause of his pain was Emma Gadderly, for she-having discovered Jake's still-demanded action from Sheriff Hobson, who, sworn to his peaceful duty, came out and made Granddaddy move it. Until she discovered it again. It was a pain in the ass to keep moving it constantly, seriously irksome to have her leaning on his life, and he invariably included her in his oath-soaked screeds against the mendacious and venal, the tainted and corrupt, mentioning her in the same slimy company as card cheats, beer drinkers, and a sprinkling of his ex-wives. Tiny's nemesis was wild pigs. With their gristled snouts, powerful necks, and purposeful greed, wild pigs are the natural enemies of fences. They like to poke their snouts under them and rip upwards with wanton delight, creating a comfortable passage for their rotund bodies under the upsquashed arch of wire, and if that fails they just tear the fucker down. Tiny had seen three cases where they'd bitten right through the wire. One pig in particular was a personal torment. Lockjaw, so known because he'd never been heard to utter a sound, was a legend in the coastal hills both for his size and the wantonness of his destruction. Tales-subject to the usual human exaggeration-abounded, and even if you reduced them by half, he'd still tore up every garden from Humboldt County to the Marin line, killed enough lambs to keep the valley feedlots in operation for at least five years, rooted enough earth to make tractors blow gaskets in envy, bred so many sows that if they were lined up snout-to-tail they would stretch the length of the San Andreas fault, and all the while eluding the best hunters in northern California. To Tiny, he was the embodiment of suffering. Not only had he destroyed untold stretches of his excellent fence, he'd tore Boss up so bad he'd died. Tiny had taken to hunting Lockjaw occasionally as part of his fence maintenance program, but Lockjaw was not only silent, he was sneaky-and he got a lot sneakier after Tiny put a 100 grain.243 bullet hole through the tip of his left ear at 200 yards. Lockjaw retaliated by trashing Tiny's fences whenever he needed to pass through on his way to a seep-spring wallow he favored on the back of the ridge. There had been skirmishes going on for at least ten years, but it had flared into war when Boss died. Which was one reason Tiny was so antsy to get back to his fencing when the last Hawaiian storm had passed: he'd taken down the northern stretch to rebuild it, and since it had been down for almost half a month Lockjaw might think he was giving up.

The weather had held clear for almost three days, but he was still caught in the checkers marathon with his ailing Granddaddy, who, although claiming he felt just horrible, hadn't coughed or sneezed in four days, consumed his daily jar of whiskey with his customary relish, and generally looked as pert as ever- almost becoming hearty as he closed the gap in the checkers match, cackling with delight as he hit Tiny with moves he'd never seen nor heard of, much less imagined-moves like the Biloxi Blitz, the Double King Kong Dick Twister, and, most dependably, the Ol' Switcheroo-moves so incomprehensibly foolhardy that Tiny had to stretch his talent to succumb to them.

On the first day of April, the score knotted at 499-all the night before, they held the playoff at high noon. Tiny brilliantly maneuvered himself into a position where he could be triple jumped for a king, and though it had taken Granddaddy Jake two moves to see it, he finally seized the opening and eventually won.

"Gotcha with the Triple Dip Overland Sledge-Hammer Nut Crusher," Granddaddy crowed as Tiny ruefully shook his head. "Last time I used it was against Pud Clemens up in Newport 'round' '46, '47. But don't feel bad Tiny; you played real good early on when I was weakened with the pneumonia, but I just eventually wore you down with experience."

"You made a great comeback" Tiny agreed. "Wish you could whip that cold as easy."

"Oh, I'm better today-not prime, but passable… might even get out of bed."

"What do you want for dinner?"

"Hell, long as I'm getting up anyway, I might as well rustle up the grub. Should get another batch cooking, too; supply is falling behind demand. And besides, if you don't get back to work on the North Fork fence pretty soon, Lockjaw's gonna be wallowing under the front porch."

Tiny was out the door and gone. But when he topped the ridge fifteen minutes later, eager to finish digging the last 100 holes, he saw a sight that enraged him: he'd left the dirt from each previously dug posthole tidily rounded to the left of each hole, and now not a pile remained-they had been trampled, scattered, and generally ravaged. Even before he saw the distinctively huge tracks etched in the damp remains of the first few mounds, Tiny knew it was Lockjaw. This wasn't merely a case of wrecking something in your way or defending yourself against some berserk macho beagle snapping at your face; this was maliciously deliberate.

Tiny allowed himself one ringing curse worthy of his Granddaddy, then started cleaning the mess up as best he could. He soon discovered that most of the mounded dirt had been pushed back into the postholes, and was diligently scooping them out, working down the line, when he noticed that one of the holes near the end was particularly devastated: it looked like it had been rooted, chewed, and rolled on. Flicking the sodden muck from his fingers, Tiny went to investigate.

The earth around the hole had been torn down to the clay layer, the slash and gouge of tusks visible around the rim. The focused destruction puzzled Tiny until he started scooping out the hole. Near the bottom, half buried and three-quarters drowned, he found a newly-hatched duckling, its feathers matted into a ball of muddy goo.

Tiny was perplexed. There were no ducks on their ranch or on any of their neighbors' that he knew about, and he'd never heard of any ducks nesting on bare ridgetops. Holding it in the hammock of his left hand, Tiny took it back up to the house to see what his Grand-daddy thought.

"What the fuck is that!" Granddaddy screeched when Tiny laid the mud-encrusted duckling out on the kitchen table where Jake was finishing his fourth cup of coffee and reading an old copy of Argosy.

"A baby duck, I think," Tiny said, and went on to explain how and where he'd found the bird while his Granddaddy examined it, peering down close and occasionally prodding it with a gnarled finger, muttering to himself, "Hardly alive except for a heartbeat, and even that's ragged." He looked up at Tiny: "You sure it was Lockjaw?"

"Yep," Tiny nodded, "tracks were in clay… unless you know of something else that would leave a pig track six inches long and sunk in about finger-deep from the weight it was packing."

"And you say the posthole you found him in was all chomped up?"

"Torn to hell."

"Well goddamn," Granddaddy wagged his head, "I 'spect ol' Lockjaw spent the night trying to eat this poor fucking bird." He chortled with delight. "Must've drove him total crazy, a tender little morsel just outa reach."

Tiny grinned. "I can just see him with his snout rammed down that posthole, slavering and chomping."

"Probably wasn't so funny to this sad little bastard though," Granddaddy gestured toward the mud-smeared duckling stretched out on the red and white oil cloth covering the table. "Must've been like looking up the business end of a double-barrel.12 gauge." The duckling stirred weakly, as if recalling the sight.

Granddaddy quickly bent over it and pressed an ear to its chest. He listened intently. "Sweet-leaping-jesus," he barked, jerking upright, "its heart is commencing to quit. Tiny, fetch a jar of Death Whisper from the cabinet-this calls for some emergency first-aid."

While Tiny got a jar of Granddaddy's best, the old man was taking the dropper off a bottle of Vick's nosedrops. When Tiny unscrewed the lid and set the jar on the table, recoiling slightly from the fumes, Granddaddy squeezed up a dropper-full and, prying the duckling's bill open, administered it with a decisive pinch of the bulb.

The effects were instantaneous: the duckling, eyes bulging, began to flop around on the table, cheeping wildly.

"Well, we got its heart pumping good," Granddaddy beamed. "Now we best get him washed off and see how he looks."

An hour later the duckling, dried to a fluff, was running around on the tabletop waving its stubby wings and peeping happily.

"How do you think it got in that posthole anyway?" Tiny asked as he and Jake watched it frolic.

"Damned if I know… I don't even have an interesting theory."

"Don't make any sense at all."

"Sure wouldn't be the first time/' Grand-daddy grumbled. Then, more sharply, to Tiny: "We gonna keep him? Or her, as the case may be."

"At least till he's healed up, sure."

"Shitfire, he looks healed up fine right now-look at him romping on that table."

"I mean till he's grown up enough to take care of himself."

"Well then, we better give this critter a name so he knows who we're talking about."

"Tiny smiled. "I thought up a good one already." He paused for effect: "Posthole."

"That is pretty good," Granddaddy agreed, "but I got a real good one: Fup."

"Fup." Tiny repeated blankly.

Granddaddy gave him his full, five-toothed grin: "Fup Duck. Ya get it? Fup… Duck."

"That's a terrible name," Tiny groaned.

Terrible or not, and despite Tiny's resistance, Fup became the duckling's name, a decision rendered by common usage at the next Saturday night poker game. The players-Ed Bollpeen and his boy Ike; Lub Knowland; the Stranton brothers, Happy and PeeWee; and Lonnie Howard-laughed at Jake's addled wit, but also appreciated its strange accuracy, for something was indeed fucked up. They assumed that the duck's ultimate origin was an egg and believed that Tiny had found it in his diggings up on the North Fork ridge, but nobody could figure how it got from the egg to the posthole.

"Maybe its mama dropped it when she was flying through the storms," Lonnie Howard suggested as he peeled back his hole card for a look.

"You ignorant dunghead," Granddaddy barked scornfully, "ducks don't fly around with their young'uns tucked under their wings-that'd be like trying to piss and whack off at the same time."

"Well how do you figure it then you old geezer?" Lonnie shot back.

"I didn't get to be 99 years old by fool speculation," Granddaddy replied. "It's hard enough separating the good stuff from the bullshit without adding to the whole mess by wanting to know what you ain't gonna know."

"But you haven't told us what you know," Lub Knowland offered. "Which as near as I can make out on the subject of ducks ain't diddleyshit."

Granddaddy picked up the pile of money in front of him and showered it out onto the center of the table: "I'll bet that much that you don't even know what kind of duck that is"- he pointed a gnarled and shaking finger at Fup, asleep in a cardboard box under the woodstove.

"I suppose you do," Lub said dubiously, "though I'd say it's a mite early to tell."

"That's true," Ed Bollpeen added softly. "They all look pretty much alike till they feather out."

That started it. It ended with everybody except Tiny and Happy putting $100 and their prediction in a general pool: whoever named Fup's species and sex correctly took it all, with any dispute to be settled by John Coombes, the local vet.

There was no dispute. In two months' time it was plain that Fup was a hen mallard. Granddaddy Jake took the money with a crass, gleeful laugh of satisfaction.