No Bear, No Forest

Around two in the afternoon an olive-skinned girl wandered down to the lake and started skipping stones across the placid water. One of the rocks almost struck Lester McSweeney’s plastic bobber. “Would you please stop doing that?”

The girl scowled then came and stood next to him. She wore tan shorts and a crisp white blouse. The face was finely chiseled with a broad sweep of delicate, ebony eyebrows. “Catch anything?”

Lester reeled in, the line weighted down by a slimy tangle of vegetation. “Almost.”

“I don’t see any fish so I'll assume you’re having a crappy day.” The girl, who spoke with a thick guttural accent, turned and stared at him impudently. The way she sauntered about, hands on hips, one might have thought she owned Lake Winnipesauke, all the guest cabins and the humpbacked mountain range off to the east.

Lester adjusted the bobber so that the leader hung six inches lower. Having finished threading a fresh worm on the hook, he cast the line out over the water. The bobber skidded several times and came to rest near a patch of water lilies. A light breeze skimmed across the water nudging the lifeless bobber toward a rotted stump. If the hook snagged a submerged root, Lester would lose his gear, not to mention losing face with the obnoxious girl. “You see that cove off to the left?” He pointed to a curved section of shoreline fifty feet away. A ridge of emerald algae rimmed the water, which was dappled with a profusion of ivory water lilies. “I hooked a huge pickerel about twenty minutes ago, but he leaped clear of the water and threw the hook.”

The pickerel was the biggest fish Lester had ever seen—a foot longer than the bluefish he snagged in Buzzards Bay on the Cape Cod Canal. A veritable monster, Lester played him expertly with just the right amount of drag, understanding full well that to try and haul the feisty fish in without weakening him first would have been foolhardy. But, in the end, it didn’t matter. He lost the fish in the shallows no more than thirty feet from shore.

The girl scratched an earlobe. “So the fish got away?” Lester nodded. “No one else saw it?”

“Besides a collection of noisy bullfrogs and a painted turtle, no.” For the first time since the pesky girl arrived, Lester gave her the once over, eyeballing her up and down. Her hair was jet black and close cropped. The olive skin was darkened, deep baked in a permanent, year-round tan. Everything about her was clean, concise and economical. He couldn’t decide if she was modestly pretty or infuriatingly plain.

The girl smiled as though at some private joke, but it was not a particularly pleasant expression. “Lo doobim v’lo ya’ar.” Lester’s mouth fell open. “There was no bear and there was no forest,” the girl translated. “It’s a Hebrew expression.”

Lester wished the girl would go away. Far away. To another galaxy. Instead she prattled on in her coarse, mannish voice. “A fellow wanders into the forest and is attacked by a ferocious bear. He has no weapon—no gun, knife, not even a flimsy stick to defend himself. In desperation, he punches, kicks, bites and gouges until the wild beast finally runs away. Then the fellow hurries back to town and tells everyone who will listen about his magnificent adventure.”

“My name is Tovah Moshel. I am staying in Cabin 34B, if you care to visit.” Her pretty hips rocking from side to side, the girl sauntered off down the gravel path toward the guests’ living quarters.



Later that evening the McSweeneys and Moshels sat at a rustic table in the main dining room of the Lake Winnipesauke resort. The girl had a younger brother, Ari, about the same age as Lester's sister, and the two children immediately struck up a friendship. Meals were served family style - bowls of mashed potatoes flavored with cheddar cheese, string beans and baked chicken spread out across the center of the table. Mr. Moshel, a thin, fair-skinned man with the wistful, far off look of a poet or anarchist, had trouble cutting his chicken.

“Did you remember to take your medicine, Moishe?” Mrs. Moshel asked. She was a pretty woman, dark like her daughter but with a warm, engaging smile.
“Yes, I took the pills.” The man’s hands were trembling badly as he raised a slice of chicken to his mouth. He chewed at an odd angle, his chin tilted to one side, as though all his inner resources were focused on masticating the meat without choking to death. When he finally swallowed, Mr. Moshel turned to Lester. “Very tasty, don’t you think?” Whatever was wrong with him physically hadn’t effected either his sense of humor or appetite.

All the while, Tovah ignored everyone; she cleaned her plate and took a second helping of beans and mashed potatoes. The girl said something to her mother in rapid-fire Hebrew and Mrs. Moshel replied, “It is impolite to speak in a foreign language when other people are present.” In response, her daughter spoke again in her native tongue. Her father smiled and shook his head.

Later back in their cabin Mrs. McSweeney said, “That poor Israeli, did you see how his hands tremble?”

Her husband wagged his head from side to side but had nothing to say. Lester was sitting at the kitchen table cleaning his spinning reel. His plan was to head out early in a small dinghy that was pulled up on the sand and look for the thirty-six inch pickerel. There was no bear and there was no forest. The Israeli girl's dismissive sarcasm stuck like a jagged bone in his craw. Just because no one was present to see the fish didn’t mean it didn’t exist. It was not like he lied, pretended that he actually caught it.

Mrs. McSweeney wandered to the screen door and stared out into the darkness. A powdery moth crashed into the wire mesh and flitted away. “I ran into Mrs. Moshel in the ladies’ room. She confided that her husband has this rare, incurable disease. The poor man! He can’t work or do much of anything these days.”

“Probably came here for medical treatment,” the husband added and took a sip of lemonade.

Mrs. McSweeney started straightening up the room. “Yes, I would imagine.” She came up behind Lester and watched as he smeared a generous glob of grease onto the main gear sprocket and began closing up the casing on his fishing reel. “The daughter’s pretty, don’t you think?”

“Not my type.” He eased the handle forward until the metal line guide clicked into place then continued to work the reel for another dozen or so revolutions. The action was buttery smooth.
“So what’s wrong with the girl?” his father pressed.

“Not my type,” Lester repeated dully and left the room.



Setting the alarm for six, Lester was fully dressed and out of the cabin in less than half an hour. The row boat would surely be where he spotted it the previous day near the cove. If he could catch the pickerel - not just any respectable fish but that three-foot brute and mother-of-all-game-fish, Lester McSweeney would march right over to Cabin 34B and lay the angler’s trophy on the front stoop.

Yes, Tovah Moshel, there was a bear! Not that he had anything to prove, but the Israeli girl had figuratively tweaked his nose and the only reasonable response was probably lurking under a bed of water lilies fifty feet out in a scenic New Hampshire lake.

In May Lester and his father fished South Cape Beach in Mashpee. Lester bought a special lure for the occasion, a Rebel, Wind-Cheater Minnow. You didn’t just cast the six-inch Wind-Cheater and retrieve it like a conventional lure. Savvy fishermen used a special ‘rip and stop’ action to mimic the behavior of a wounded bait fish struggling to regain its swimming form. Surfcasting from the sandy beach, the youth hooked a four-pound striper that fought him like a demon. The picture his father took of Lester with the bass was framed and perched on his bedroom bureau.

Lester flipped his Red Sox baseball cap around so the visor was facing backwards. When he reached the water’s edge the rowboat was gone. Who besides a hard-core fishing enthusiast would be on the lake this early in the morning? He scanned the shoreline.

“Crap!” Thirty feet out in the cove the Israeli girl was rowing at a leisurely pace. “What a royal pain in the ass!” Lester decided to cut his losses and slink back to the cabin. Too late! Tovah Moshel was waving energetically. Pulling hard with both oars, the girl resumed rowing into the sandy beach.

“Were you planning to go out in the boat?”

“Well, sort of but ...” I didn’t want to commit one way or the other.

“It wasn’t a trick question. Either you’d like to use the boat or not.”

There it was again—that peremptory, autocratic tone. Lester didn’t know what he wanted anymore. This boorish girl confounded his brain, pulverized his thinking processes into mental mush. “Yes. I would like to use the boat, if you don’t mind.”

“Well, then, I’ll join you. Help you fish.”

Lester stared at her morosely. "Fishing is a solitary pursuit. It’s not like playing baseball or ballroom dancing."

"Of course not."

“Let me get my gear situated.” The plan was to row slowly back and forth as close to the lilies as feasible to entice the pickerel out.

Conditions were ideal. The water was calm with early morning temperatures in the low seventies. It wouldn’t stay this cool for long, though. Tovah sat at the stern of the rowboat next to the rod. “It’s a good day to get a tan, don’t you think?”

“Yes I guess so.”

The girl sprawled out, her pretty legs askew and slender chin tilted up to catch the sun. Fifteen minutes passed. “Shouldn’t you have caught something by now?”

“It doesn’t work that way.” They had already made a full pass around the outer perimeter of the cove and Lester was directing the prow toward the deeper water nearer the center.

“What’s that?” The girl said, indicating a well-thumbed paperback wedged beneath a jumble of nylon leaders and lead weights. She reached into the tackle box and wriggled the book free.

The artwork on the cover depicted a band of cowboys riding through rugged hill country somewhere in the Midwest. A huge lake or river loomed in the far distance framed by a handful of scraggily pine trees. “Louis L’Amour,” Lester said. “He’s just about the greatest Western writer in the whole world.”

“Cowboys and Indians.” She tossed the book dismissively back into the box. “Shtooyoat!"

"And what exactly does that mean?"

"Shtooyoat!" she repeated with the same gruff insistence. "Childish nonsense!”

A person could blaspheme God almighty—spit in the face of the Virgin Mary—but, where Lester McSweeney was concerned, you couldn’t say a bad word about Louis L’Amour. He had read the collected short stories and frontier tales from cover to cover plus all four Hopalong Cassidy novels. Lester was halfway through the saga of the Sackett clan, averaging a book a month.

Just about everything the boy knew about life—betrayal, greed, sacrifice, courage and cowardice—he’d gleaned from his cowboy books. Lester was trying his damnedest to think of something insulting to cut the snippy foreigner down to size, but all he could manage was, “Louis L’Amour’s the smartest guy I know. He’s my hero.” Almost before he opened his mouth, Lester regretted his words. The remark sounded stupid. Utterly childish and inane. Shtooyoat!

“Ever kissed a girl?”

His mind went blank. “What?”

The Israeli sat up now and stared at him. “Have you ever smooched, sucked face, French kissed, got it on?”

“Well, yes.”

“How many times.” she pressed.

A dragon fly flitted across the bow of the small boat and settles on the golden centerpiece of a lily. Its transparent wings were tattooed with a delicate fabric of veins. Lester was feeling dizzy, lightheaded from all the rowing and the rising humidity. “I don’t know. A half dozen times.”

Tovah let a hand slip over the side and scooped up a handful of water. Her expression was neutral, utterly impassive. “We went to a restaurant Sunday night.” She directed her remarks at the dragon fly. “My mother ordered boiled lobster, a delicacy we seldom see in the Middle East. When you answered a moment ago, your cheeks turned the same color as the lobster’s shell.” Only now did she look him full him the face. “Why did you lie? Why couldn’t you just say, ‘No, I never kissed a girl.’?”

The boy could feel his cheeks burning even hotter than a moment earlier. This was too much! Lester threw the oars aside and began reeling in the line as fast as he could. He had to get rid of this deranged Semite.

There was no middle ground. You couldn’t fish. You couldn’t just laze about in a rowboat. You couldn’t –

“Ask me.”

He stowed his gear in the bottom of the boat and was pulling for shore with choppy, visceral strokes. “Ask you what?”

“If I ever kissed a boy.”

No, he wasn’t going to play this foolish game. They were less than fifty feet from shore. Lester would haul the boat up a good ten feet from the waterline, tie the mooring rope to a bush - a double half hitch to show the arrogant Israeli that he knew something about knot tying, if nothing else, and storm off. No goodbyes, no small talk, no nothing.

“As a matter of fact,” she answered her own question, “I never kissed a boy. Not yet, anyway. And needless-to-say, I’m still a virgin.” She made a disagreeable face. “Now was that so hard?”

Lester gave one last pull on the oars and let the boat glide the last few feet into the sandy shallows. “Congratulations on both counts.”

Tovah watched him secured the nylon rope. She tore a sprig of purple lupine from the side of the trail and twirled the wildflower under her nose. “My father can’t control his hands. They shake quite badly.” She spoke in a casual, off-hand manner. “Sometimes I have to cut his food, help him with his socks or button a sweater. But I don’t do these things in public.”

Lester had already turned away and was headed in the direction of the visitor cabins. He pulled up abruptly. “He has some incurable disease. Your mother mentioned it.”

“A medical condition… is that what she said?” The Israeli girl sighed and threw the flower away. “Sugar-coated lies are so much easier to swallow than bitter truths.”

Lester turned and came back to where the girl was now sitting in the beached rowboat. “Yes, I did hook a 36-inch pickerel over there in the cove, but the stupid fish got away. No, I never had sex or kissed a girl either.” He climbed in and sat opposite. “Now will you tell me why your father’s hands shake so badly?”

Fifteen minutes later, after Tovah Moshel had answered Lester’s impertinent question, the boy leaned forward and kissed her on the lips—a drawn out, sweet, annihilating gesture. “We’re both still virgins, but at least that’s out of the way.”



At three o’clock in the afternoon the Wasserman family arrived. They drove up to the resort office in a brand new Lincoln Continental. Lester, who had accompanied his sister to the shuffleboard court, watched the family pile out of the fancy car. The mother, a pear shaped woman with calves as thick as bowling pins, had difficulty prying her rump out of the passenger seat. The father was also huge, well over six feet with a pendulous gut. A Cuban cigar wedged in the corner of his fleshy mouth, he was decked out in Bermuda shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt. The son, who looked to be a year or two older than Lester, was quite handsome with a mop of black hair and bushy eyebrows that offset his pallid complexion.

“Hey, I like your beanies!” Sylvia shouted.

Both father and son were wearing Jewish skullcaps. The father scowled at her before lumbering into the motel office to announce their arrival.

“Cripes, Sylvia!”

Later that evening, the Wassermans sat opposite the McSweeneys and Moshels at the supper table. “Hey, boychik,” Mr. Wasserman was staring straight at Lester. “Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?” Lester’s lips were moving furiously but no audible sound escaped his lips. “What about you, Morris?” He turned to his son. “Rain gonna damage the North American rhubarb crop this year?”

Like the straight man in a comedy routine, the boy delivered his punch line without missing a beat. “Not if it’s in cans.”

“Enough with the corny jokes, Herbert.” Mrs. Wasserman chided.

The food, pasta with meatballs and a tossed salad, arrived and the guests began passing dishes around the table. Herb Wasserman turned to Lester’s father. “What’s your line of work?”

“Hardware,” he replied. “And yourself?”

Mr. Wasserman took a piece of Italian bread and slathered it with butter. “Footwear.”

“Which chain?”

Mrs. Wasserman laughed in a high pitched, squeaky voice. “My husband doesn’t sell shoes.”

“Actually,” Mr. Wasserman added by way of explanation, “I buy in bulk from overseas distributors then resell in the domestic, wholesale market. Think of me as a middleman, sort of like a sports lawyer who negotiates deals.” Lester glanced about the table. Tovah clearly had no interest in anything the portly man was saying, but the adults were listening attentively.

“Our town boasted several shoe manufacturers,” Lester’s father noted, “but they all went bust in the late fifties, early sixties. Stetson Shoe Company just up the road a piece in Randolph—they closed down. Couldn’t compete with the overseas markets.”

“The mainland Chinese,” Mr. Wasserman noted, “can produce sneakers for pennies on the dollar. Labor and operational costs are minimal. I buy a container load—five, ten thousand at a time then locate my own markets here in the good old US of A.” Lester sensed that the imposing man was getting a bit theatrical. “Admittedly it’s a bit speculative, Machiavellian, but so what? As the saying goes, carpe diem.” He cracked an insolent grin. “Make the best of present opportunities!” His wife tittered in her high pitched squeaky laugh and everyone turned their attention back to the food.

Shortly before dessert was served, Mr. Wasserman asked, “Is that an Israeli accent?” When Mr. Moshel nodded in the affirmative, the man added, “We’re making alyiah next year.”

“Immigrating to the land of milk and honey,” his wife added for the benefit of the non-Jews at the table.

“That’s very nice,” Mr. Moshel smiled pleasantly. He folded his hands in his lap, lacing the slender fingers together and causing the tremors to extend from the wrists up the forearm before petering away at the elbows.

“Do you speak the language?” Mr. McSweeney addressed his remarks to Mr. Wasserman.

“My wife and I studied at the Hebrew Teacher’s College in Brookline.” He gestured with his eyes in the direction of his son. “Morris also took a crash course last summer, but he could use some help with grammar.”

Lester stared at Morris Wasserman who, from the moment he arrived, had been ogling the Israeli girl. The Wasserman boy had changed skullcaps opting for a more stylish one fashioned from a plaid fabric and held in place by a single bobby pin. He wore a lemon colored sports shirt with an Izod logo, tan boat shoes and an expensive looking gold wristwatch.

“Say,” the wife interjected, “maybe your lovely daughter could help Morris with his dikdook.”

Dikdook. Lester cringed inwardly. The word sounded vulgar, pornographic.

“Yes, everyone struggles with grammar,” Mr. Moshel said. “It’s the most challenging part of any new language.”

“Well I assure you,” Mr. Wasserman speared a meatball with his fork and waved it in the air, “Morris will prove a quick study. He’s a straight-A student and president of the honor society.”

Mrs. Wasserman turned to Mr. Moshel. “Are you native-born Israelis?”

He nodded in the affirmative. “We lived on a kibbutz, a communal farm, in the Upper Galilee. Harvested mostly citrus—oranges, grapefruit, lemons. There was also a small herd of cattle.”

“Any problems with the Arab population?” Mr. Wasserman inquired.

“The PLO lobbed Katyusha rockets down on us from the Golan heights and Lebanese foothills. On occasion, they infiltrated at night to plant moakshim in the fields.” He glanced at his daughter.

“Land mines,” Tovah translated without bothering to raise her eyes from the food.

Mr. McSweeney shook his head somberly. “Heck of a way to live.”

“Yes,” Mr. Moshel agreed, “but what’s a person to do?” He took a sip of water. “The fruit trees, which were our livelihood, required constant care.” The brief exchange had exhausted Tovah’s father. His eyelids drooped precariously and he hunched forward balancing on his elbows.

“What part of Israel will you be settling in?” Mrs. Moshel asked.

“The West Bank … a new settlement near Hebron.”

The Israeli woman glanced nervously at her husband and dropped her eyes. “The West Bank is Palestinian land,” Tovah entered the conversation. “It doesn’t belong to Jews.”

Mr. Wasserman who was chewing a piece of bread, choked on his food and had to take a sip of water to clear his throat. “We captured the West Bank during the Six Day War. It’s ours now.”

Tovah spun pasta onto her fork, guiding the noodles with a tablespoon. She seemed in no great hurry to respond. When the fork was properly loaded, she raised it to her lips. “If you choose to live on land that for centuries belongs to someone else, that makes you a thief - a lousy thief and a bully.”

Mrs. Wasserman’s eyes alternately grew inordinately large then squished tightly together as though Tovah Moshel had sprayed her with pepper mace. Her fleshy chin flattened out and lips puckered reflexively in a pugnacious scowl. The woman looked like her head was going to explode. Turning to Mr. Moshel she hissed, “You allow your daughter to insult guests and fellow Jews at the dinner table in such a manner?”

“My daughter was simply expressing a heartfelt conviction and nothing more.”

The waiters were bringing out desert, a cherry cobbler with whipped cream. “And what are your thoughts about Jews living in Hebron?” Mr. Wasserman twirled his wedding band with the thumb of the same hand. The man was smiling or, at least, his lips were, but the eyes belied a ruthless, brittle-minded obstinacy.

Tovah’s father gazed congenially at the large man. He poured a splash of cream into his coffee and had to steady the cup with both hands as he raised the warm beverage to his lips. “Believe me, Mr. Wasserman, you don’t want to know what I think about the matter.” There was no more conversation, and after the meal, the Wassermans rose abruptly and scattered from the dining room.



In the morning the McSweeney’s drove to an Audubon bird sanctuary ten miles up the road. The strip of land nestled in a white pine forest crisscrossed with rocky streams and wetlands. At the visitor bureau Mrs. McSweeney announced, “Everyone pee before we hit the woods.”
Near the top of the first trail Lester’s mother spotted a piping plover with its scalloped black collar and russet colored wings. Then just a short distance away she sighted an American Golden, a close relative to the plover. “Mr. Moshel seemed a bit better at breakfast, don’t you think?” Lester asked.

They approached a small trestle footbridge that spanned a gully. “Hard to say,” his father replied. “He’s only in his forties and an invalid.”

Mrs. McSweeney hurried ahead as they approach a rest area with an information board alerting visitors to recent sightings of uncommon birds. Two American oystercatchers and a Virginia rail were seen on the island of Shoals on June first plus a Sandhill Crane only a few miles down the New Hampshire coast a day earlier. Mrs. McSweeney pulled out her Sibley’s Birding Guide for a quick reference. Sometimes she also brought along Mac’s Field Guide to water birds of the Northeast Coast. The prudent woman had sealed several pages of her Mac’s guide in waterproof plastic for easy reference; the brightly colored pictures featured head and wing markings as they appeared in various seasons. Winter plumage, which was frequently much lighter and less dramatic, could easily confuse even a veteran bird watcher.

“Seventy-five black scoters were spotted along the coast, mainly off North Beach in Hampton,” Mr. McSweeney read from the list as his wife thumbed through her manual. Neither Lester nor his father shared the mother’s passion for birding, but they readily got caught up in her zany enthusiasm. Up ahead on the trail was a tulip polar with a thick spread of golden leaves. Mrs. McSweeney located an outcropping of rocks overlooking a meadow and was scanning the brush and foliage with her Eagle Optics birding binoculars. The waterproof lenses featured nitrogen purged fogproofing. Nobody—not even Lester’s father—had a clue what nitrogen purged fogproofing was, but it sure sounded special and his mother claimed that the lenses remained clear even in the worse weather.

“Mr. Moshel isn’t sick,” Lester said. “Least not in the conventional sense.”

“Is that so?” his father slowed to a halt and lowered his voice. “What’s the matter with him?”
“The Israeli Army court-martialed him. They sent him to a military prison for half a year.”

As Tovah explained it sitting in the beached rowboat, Mr. Moshel served three years as a tank commander in the Israeli Defense Force. Following the second invasion of Lebanon he returned from fighting in the northern campaign and muttered, “Maspeek! Enough! This is no war. It’s a goddamn massacre! I will not kill defenseless civilians.”

Bogade. Traitor.

When he refused to return to active duty, the military banished him to a prison in the Negev desert south of Tel Aviv where the food was inedible, living conditions intolerable. Eventually his health broke down. The IDF agreed to release him on one condition: the man recant his foolishness and immediately return to his military unit. Sick as he was, Mr. Moshel opted to serve out the remainder of his prison term.

Up ahead, Mrs. McSweeney waved her binoculars over her head, indicating that she had finished studying the meadow and was continuing on down the trail. Mr. McSweeney kicked at the loose dirt and a stone went skittering into the underbrush. “The War in Lebanon was an ugly business.”

“Do you think Mr. Moshel’s a traitor?”

Mr. McSweeney was staring at a patch of bunchberries with clusters of turgid, reddish fruit dangling from the plant. Further down the ravine a profusion of hollyhock, their ivory petals stained with purple bleeding toward the edges, spilled over a granite ledge. “Hell no!” He rubbed his jaw between a thumb and forefinger before bolting off down the trail without further elaboration.

After traipsing over three and a half miles of rugged trails in the midday sun, Mrs. McSweeney never saw a single oystercatcher, Virginia rail or black scoter, but she did spot a blue-winged teal, which was so gorgeous she talked incessantly about the magnificent bird all the way back to the cabin.



There was no bear and there was no forest.

Mr. Moshel, the tank commander, would have stood a better chance fighting off a rabid grizzly bear barehanded! Even Lester’s father was at a loss for words when he learned what happened to the Tovah's father. Out of a sense of decency, the boy had glossed over some of the more unsettling details! Nothing made any sense.

There was a story in a Louis L’Amour collection - Caprock Rancher - about a crusty cowboy with a broken leg who outsmarts a band of outlaws. It was one of Lester's all-time favorites. The injured rancher shows the gunslingers for what they are: a band of cowardly hooligans. Toward the end of the story, the leader of the desperadoes, an ornery psychopath named Hazeltine, is reduced to a whimpering bloody mess with all the piss and vinegar beaten out of him by the rancher’s teenage son.

Instead of fighting off a band of unruly gunslingers, Mr. Moshel had the entire Israeli army to contend with. Not a fair fight. Short of a miracle, it didn’t seem to Lester the sort of material even a literary magician like Louis L’Amour could do much of anything with. No, not even Louis L’Amour could fix what was broke on Lake Winnipesauke. The master storyteller would have to revise the sordid history of Western civilization, rework the bogus script.

Perhaps in the new and improved version, Lester McSweeney would marry the persnickety Israeli girl and travel west. They'd build a log cabin in the wilderness country of Oregon, buy cattle, preferably Durhams that they could graze and breed on the open range. Lester would purchase a rifle, maybe a .56 caliber, 360 grain Spencer plus a .44 caliber derringer to hide up his sleeve with a rubber band. The Spencer could blast a hole as big as a frying pan in any nasty varmints, two-legged or otherwise. For horses, he would get buckskins - mustangs used to living out in the wild in all sorts of weather.

The Moshels could come and visit any time they felt the urge. In the rarified, high-country mountain air, Mr. Moshel’s health would quickly be restored and the only time his hands would ever shake again would be to applaud the antics of his half dozen, give or take a few, grandkids. And of course with her nitrogen purged, Eagle Optics binoculars, Lester's mother could study native birds of the scenic Northwest. She might even spot a Beckwicks wren with its elegant brown tail arched over a slender back. Lester and his new bride, Tovah McSweeney, would live off the land, can berries and fruits, smoke fish like the Indians anticipating the winter shortages of fresh game; they would hunt and trap until their cattle business was firmly established then trade their home grown produce for cloth, spices and other necessities

.


Tovah Moshel’s penchant for uncompromising honesty was too much! Even Lester, recently graduated from middle school knew better than to say every fool thing that stumble-bumbled into his adolescent head. To save face and avoid embarrassment, Mrs. Moshel shamelessly fibbed about her husband’s physical affliction. Tovah had no qualms about telling Lester or anyone else who cared to listen the ugly truth. If the Israeli girl chose to ridicule him over the phantom fish that got away, that was one thing. Tovah was stubborn, opinionated, arrogant, combative, insolent, uncompromising and utterly disinterested in anyone else’s point of view. A boorish blockhead wrapped in pig-headed certitudes, she edited and filtered nothing that escaped her lips. Like that nutty business about first kisses and virginity - people didn’t talk that way. At least normal people didn’t. Later that night as he was lying in bed, a stab of pain, more like an inconsolable grief, coursed through Lester’s body. The boy was shattered by the purity of his feelings. First love—it snuck up on tiptoes, beguiled, tantalized and scared the bejeezus out of him.



The day after the trip to the Audubon bird sanctuary, Lester heard a horse whinny. Zigzagging through a stand of willows, he followed the braying and snorting to a small stable hidden away behind the main dining room. A brown mare with three white stockings from fetlocks to knees was grazing on the vegetation, cropping the grass and clover right down to the bare earth. Lester reached through the pole fence and ran a hand over the animal’s withers. Several bales of fresh hay were neatly stacked in a barn adjacent to the outdoor pen.

Lester spied a metallic object abandoned in a clump of goldenrod. Reaching down he retrieved a small cap gun. The barrel had broken off, the left side of the handle smashed. He pulled the trigger and watched as the hammer sprung back and the chamber shifted one, make-believe slug to the right. For his tenth birthday he begged his parents for a pair of cowboy guns and matching holsters. Not just any firearms. Lester insisted on Colt 45 six-shooters, the original Peacemaker model.

‘You can hear the hoofbeats & smell the gun smoke of the old West!’

Or at least that’s what the sappy promotional material guaranteed. The gun that tamed the Wild West. Prized by the U.S. Army, frontiersmen, cowboys and Indians as they blazed new trails. Jesse James, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid lived by this gun. Lester’s set was nickel plated even though the military version was gun blue. Another saying on the side of the box boasted: 'God made man, Colt made them equal.' Saturday morning an hour before the McSweeney clan left on their Lake Winnipesauke vacation, Lester strapped the double holsters around his waist and stood in front of the full-length closet mirror practicing his quick draw. He could shoot from the hip and twirl both barrels simultaneously a full 360 degrees on taut index fingers. God made man, Colt made them equal. The macho sentiment had a comforting ring.



The kiss changed everything.

Though the lake was loaded with pickerel, largemouth bass, sweet perch, slimy, bottom feeding horned pout—some people called them bullhead catfish—and god knows what else, all Lester could think about lately was the feathery caress. The way the dark-skinned girl snaked her lanky arms around him, wrapping Lester in a bear hug until the succulent kiss was finished. Even then, she held on for a full half minute longer.

The night before the vacation ended, Lester escorted the Israeli girl down to the coral. The brown mare was huddled between a swaybacked nag and sorrel gelding. He waved a bag of carrots in the air, and the horses shambled across the muddy pen to where they were waiting. They ate noisily mashing and grinding the carrots into orange pulp. “Give me a kiss,” Tovah murmured. He obliged her. “The Boston Red Sox are the home team?”

Lester eyed her quizzically. She had never expressed any interest in baseball. “Here in New England, yes.”

“And David Ortiz’s the best hitter.”

“Ortiz and Rodriquez. Manny Rodriguez. They’re both batting up over three hundred.”

The Israeli girl leaned against his chest and raised her chin expectantly. After a flurry of kisses she cradled her cheek against his chest. “Tom Brady?”

“The Patriot’s quarterback. Their stadium's in Foxboro.” The horses had drifted away and were huddled together at the far end of the coral. “Since when did you become such a sports enthusiast?”

Somewhere in the darkened New Hampshire countryside an owl hooted. The smell of fresh mown hay and fetid horse dung permeated the warm air. A good half mile away, an animal barked like a dog—a convulsive burst of short, feral yips. Coyotes had raided a chicken coop the previous night. They also ran off with a plump bunny from the resort’s petting zoo leaving only the severed head. “Our life in Israel is finished. My father says we will stay here and become American citizens.”

A horse pawed the ground, a staccato pitter-patter. “Where will you live?” Lester asked
“For the time being, with my mother’s relatives in Brighton.”

Lester did some reckoning. The red line MBTA train ran to Park Street where the green line ferried passengers the length of Commonwealth Ave. “I’ll come visit you every weekend.”

“What about your fishing?”

“Fishing?” He raised her hand to his lips, kissed the palm then all five fingers. The crickets were out in force now, beneath a full moon and myriad of stars.