Sometimes a car is coming and I just watch the ducks fly down the river and keep the shooting to myself. It might be a game warden or a deputy sheriff. I have an idea somewhere in my head that it is against the law to shoot at ducks from a bridge.

I wonder if I am right.

Sometimes I don’t look to see if there is a car on the road. The ducks are too high to shoot at. I know I’ll just waste my ammunition, so I let them pass.

The ducks are always a flock of fat mallards just in from Canada.

Sometimes I walk through the little town of Elmira and everything is very quiet because it’s so early in the morning and God forsaken with either rain or cold.

Whenever I walk through Elmira, I stand and look at the Elmira Union High School. The classrooms are always empty and dark inside. It seems as if nobody ever studies there and the darkness is never broken because there is no reason to ever turn the lights on.

Sometimes I don’t go into Elmira. I cross over the black wooden fence and go into the marshy field and walk past the ancient religious shed and follow the river down to the lake, hoping to hit some good duck hunting.

I never do.

Elmira is very beautiful but it is not a lucky place for me to hunt.

I always get to Elmira by hitch-hiking about twenty miles. I stand out there in the cold or the rain with my shotgun, wearing my royal duck hunting robes and people stop and pick me up, and that’s how I get there.

‘Where are you going?’ people say when I get in. I sit beside them with my shotgun balanced like a sceptre between my legs and the barrels pointing up at the roof. The gun is at an angle, so the barrels point towards the passenger side of the roof, and I’m always the passenger.

‘Elmira.’

Coffee

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords. I once read something about coffee. The thing said that coffee is good for you; it stimulates all the organs.

I thought at first this was a strange way to put it, and not altogether pleasant, but as time goes by I have found out that it makes sense in its own limited way. I’ll tell you what I mean.

Yesterday morning I went over to see a girl. I like her. Whatever we had going for us is gone now. She does not care for me. I blew it and wish I hadn’t.

I rang the door bell and waited on the stairs. I could hear her moving around upstairs. The way she moved I could tell that she was getting up. I had awakened her.