The stench of rotting God-only-knows-what hung in the air like spider webs on a trail in the early morning. A concerning amount of buzzards seemed to have taken up permanent residence at what passed for a boat ramp. I spent that morning canoeing Lake H, attempting to dust off a few moorhens. But the strange birds stayed tucked back into the weeds. Easy targets but impossible to get at with my human-powered Royalex craft. Because of that, I spared most of them along with a waterlogged grackle that I propped up on a dry spot.

All just the same. What I sought that morning wasn’t the central ingredient to a nice sauce piquant. Instead, that was just a cover for some space to ponder. A few days prior, my dad had broken the news that our longtime neighbor, Paul, passed away.

Mr. Paul, as I called him my whole life, lived in a house trailer a short drive over a bush hog lane from us. He was usually drinking coffee at SkyMart, perusing the local pawn shops, or hanging out with/helping my dad with something. He was Dad’s best friend and like an uncle to me. They had been cops together long before I was ever a thought.

Mr. Paul grew up in our part of the county. The son of a local farmer, he went to school in what is now the community center. He was a long-time member of the volunteer fire department and the land manager for an out-of-town landowner. The 2008 financial crisis saw that land sold, causing Mr. Paul to lose that gig along with some sweet hunting permission for us.

One of my Mr. Paul stories involves him, my Dad, and me cutting firewood off a fallen tree. The trunk lay in such a funny way that it needed to be propped up in order to get the chainsaw through it. Naturally, my thigh was volunteered. Paul already had his response to my mother ready in case things went south.

“What blood curdling scream?”

Mr. Paul also had a lot of ups and downs in his life. Dad trusted him with his life. He’d been on a helicopter in Vietnam as a crew chief and door gunner. He didn’t talk to me about much of it. There was one night they had to land in the jungle and stay until morning. His outfit also had a kleptomaniac pet monkey. ‘Nam was probably the very beginning of his end. Years later, he developed diabetes along with heart and dental issues linked to toxic exposures. Also, like so many of his generation, it took decades for the VA to catch up to him. Makes you wonder if the PACT Act had come around sooner. Regardless, Mr. Paul passed away peacefully in his recliner. No muss, no fuss. No drawn out, painful medical procedures. We should all be so lucky.

I snapped back to that hot morning on the lake. There are buzzards all over my truck. They’ve torn the rubber gaskets on my bed cover and laid rotting shits all over the vehicle. I chased them off and began to vent my frustrations to an unsuspecting passerby who happened to park next to me. His response: “Well, I had an accident myself.” Confused, I inquired “Well did you hit one of these awful things?”

“Nope. I shit my pants.”

Who’s unsuspecting now?

Eventually, he drove off but was soon back to retrieve his wallet out of his soiled britches. Or possibly it was all a story so I wouldn’t go looking for the body he stashed for the gator disposal.

We’ll never know but I wondered what Mr. Paul would have thought about that.