She was married when I met her but I took her fishing anyway.
She was a fender-bender, a well-put-together willowy blonde with beer sign blue neon eyes. But she was wired for 110 and plugged into 220. When she shucked her jeans, the inseam read, “Lucky You.”
Great Gawd-a-mighty!
And I was Lonesome Polecat, ragged, lean, dead meat, cut bait, gone off in love again, gone.
She feared only two things but feared them greatly, alligators and tall steel bridges, and would put herself in extreme peril avoiding either. Seemed sometimes there was two or three women tangled up inside her, each clawing up for air. I picked the one I liked best and I called her Niki Blue.
She was batshit-crazy and it was highly contagious.
You never seen such. It would have been right funny if it happened to somebody else.
I asked her to marry me in the lobby of the Royal Livingston Hotel on the banks of the Great Zambesi, but I changed my mind in a hotel room in Athens.
Georgia.
But some serious powder was burned meantime, y’all, I am here to testify. Niki Blue loved Jesus, she loved to hunt and she absolutely adored her unlimited American Express. We ’bout wore the numbers slap off it.
In the long leafs just a little southeast of Statesboro, wind in the pine-tops was whistling the first sad movement of the Georgia Symphony when we came down off the hill, our vests swinging heavy with quail.
We were in good hands that day. Doctor Tim was our guide, the plantation go-to man for just about anything—butcher birds, tree a coon, train a pup, scald a hog, fix the Jeep? “Show Tim something once,” his boss bragged, “and he can do it—even brain surgery.”
So, we called him Doctor Tim.
We leaned the guns against a convenient oak, shucked our vests while Doctor Tim broke out coffee and sandwiches. About two bites into my ham and cheese, couldn’t but notice we were one dog short, up the hill with three, down with two. We’d busted a covey, chased the singles, shot a couple of stragglers. The dog must have found one we missed, no surprise.
“Doctor Tim, I believe we short a dog.”
“That Molly,” he said. “She on point. Go ’head an’ finish yo sammich suh.”
Ever seen a dog hold point ’til you get tired? Ever see a dog catch scent jumping a log and go into point in midair? I saw it in Georgia. And more.
“Some folks gots shock collars, some gots whistles,” Doctor Tim mused. “I just hollers.”
“Well, holler her up!”
“Naw suh, I could holler ’til I drap an’ she ain’ gone break point. We go back up the hill directly.”
And so we did, boxing the other dogs, who whined and moaned most piteously when left.
Two, three hundred yards, there Molly was, alongside a mayhaw bush, locked up like a pine stump, nose to a patch of weeping love grass, a fine metaphor of our time together, me and Niki Blue.
There is a protocol in these Georgia quail woods. You shoot double guns only, side-by-side or over/under, your choice, and you leave the gun open ’til you pass the dogs, or dog, as it was when we went back up the hill after Molly. I carried my Parker 20-gauge, Niki Blue a Beretta 686 12-bore, a big gun for little birds but a very small fraction of her divorce settlement. There was a Charles Daly 20-gauge in play, too, but her ex wouldn’t come off it.
Molly trembled ever so slightly as Niki Blue snapped shut her gun, right at her flank. If you know your Beretta’s you’ll know it really wasn’t a “snap” like my Parker, more like a “thoink,” but it sounded good anyway.
I watched it all go down in slow motion and it is burned into what’s left of my brain to this day. The long-legged beauty with a fine gun, how the bird blew out of the love grass, angled low to the left, how Niki Blue swung from her shoulders to the balls of her feet with one sweet, smooth fluid motion, the pop of the shot, the fluff of feathers on the wind, the bolt of the pointer, bringing the bird to hand.
Doctor Tim’s hand, not Niki Blue’s, not mine.
“Oh Lady,” he proclaimed, “you sho ain’t afraid of that trigger!”
And she wasn’t.
And there was something about bulls. In a ditch in a picked-over cornfield northwest of Santiago del Estero, north-central Argentina, and the doves were on the wing.
“Señor, don’t you like us?” My bird boy looked at me like a spaniel.
“Of course I like you!”
“Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”
“Of course I’m enjoying myself!”
“But Señor, you only shot 352 palomas yesterday!”
Back home, the limit was 16.
How many doves can a man eat, anyway? Dove breasts on a skewer with cherry tomatoes, onions and peppers? Dove breasts pounded flat, dredged in beaten eggs and flour, fried like pancakes? Dove fondue? We even took sacks-full to the local elementary school where we fed many niños.
And how many doves can a man shoot? The record was held by some high-roller from Houston. Using three extended magazine semi-auto Benellis and two bird boys for loaders, he downed 2,004 in 12 hours. We crossed paths in Bueños Aires where he gingerly pulled down his shirt to show off his gun shoulder. It looked like a double pepperoni pizza.
Not able, or wanting, to shoot them all, I concentrated on the shot I usually miss, a bird from behind, crossing left to right. I was thus happily engaged when Niki Blue said, “I got to pee.”
“OK, Honey, just ease on down the ditch a ways.”
“But I can’t in front of all you men!”
There were exactly two of us, me and Carlos, the bird boy.
We were about 40 yards from a tumbledown fence and a brush-line. “How ’bout over there?”
Niki Blue eyed the cattle knotted up at the far end of the stubble-field. The Argentines loose cattle on harvested grain just like we do in the States. Clean up the scraps and leave good fertilizer behind. There was a bull amongst them.
“Go ahead,” I said, “he’s a quarter mile away.”
He was all of that. But he was also downwind.
Niki Blue hardly had her britches back up before the lovesick fool came bellering at a full trot. She hot-footed it back to the ditch, and the bull went straight for the piddlin’s, where he bellered, pawed, rooted around, curled his lip like he was winding a heifer in heat.
Next morning when we arrived at the same field to shoot, there was Señor Toro waiting at the gate, nose to the wind. Not sure what breed he was but he was as big and black as a Cape buffalo.
Cape buffalo. We were in Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, in a place they call the Lower Lapunde, between Mfue and the blue Nchinde Hills when my gunbearer came to me right after breakfast. “And what would Bwana like to hunt today?”
“Birds,” I said. “Today Bwana would like to hunt birds.”
Niki Blue pulled me aside. “You can’t shoot birds!”
“And why the hell not? I already shot an impala and a puku. We’ll be eating good for a week.”
“’Cause we came all this way and spent all this money and if you tell ’em you want to shoot birds, they won’t think I got much of a man at all!”
So I hunted buffalo instead, the Black Death on foot, a one shot kill at 30 yards in heavy cover. Scared me so bad, I wanted to take back stuff I ain’t even stole.
But I got off easy. She made her next man run with the bulls in Pamplona.
I can almost laugh about it now.
But not quite.
Just another love story.