The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels) by R.O. Barton

with the engraving magnificently done. During a recidivistic period, I carried it, and it saw me through more than one scrape. Now my brother has it.
    These were the kind of stories I could finagle out of the Major in the years following the box of medals incident. Stories like this and him pissing himself because he was so scared while flying to a mission. Or how they’d have to pull him from his cockpit, lay him across a wing, then pull his pants down. He told me he would sometimes lay there for fifteen minutes before he could relax enough to urinate. Then he would go for five minutes. Never stories of why or how he had so many medals.
    Those stories came from other sources.
     
     
     

 
     
     
    Chapter 11
     
    The Major and his four brothers taught my cousins and me to duck hunt on the famous Catahoula Lake at a very early age. Between the five brothers, there were two duck camps on the bluffs overlooking the lake. All but the Major were either builders, plumbers, electricians, or a combination of the three. There was my uncle Roy, the oldest, then Lloyd, Ed, A. D., down to the baby boy, Donald, my father.
    I was 9 when I was first awakened in the middle of the night while sleeping in one of the many army surplus bunk beds, to the smell of coffee, wood smoke and frying bacon. Still snug in my sleeping bag, I watched the Major and my uncles move through the dim hazy light, smoking cigarettes with their coffee while breaking out the shotguns and putting shells in their hunting vests. The jocular mood of the night before being replaced by the quiet efficiency of few words, the faint smell of oil, with small clinks of gunmetal, resembling something I may have seen in a war movie.
    I wasn’t allowed to shoot a gun in the duck blind yet, but my brother Ben, three and a half years my senior, had gotten a new .410 Savage single shot for his birthday the past August and was going to hunt. I remember being so excited to be allowed to go, that I wasn’t jealous.
    I recall that morning, after a slow foggy boat trip in the 14-foot bateau pushed by an old Wizard outboard, how the duck-blind appeared through the fog like a stalking monster. It was brushed with pine boughs, still green and thick with the smell of turpentine.
    The Tucker brothers had four sites on the lake for blinds. It wasn’t uncommon in those days for disputes over blind sites to escalate into blind burnings, beatings and sometimes a shooting. Like when one pre-dawn morning, Taterbug Johnston was shot in the back with No. 6 shot, down at the boat landing. It didn’t kill him, but did knock him down, causing weeks of considerable discomfort. No one ever messed with the Tucker sites.
    As the Major got us settled in, nothing was said about the wet November cold, or if we were comfortable. We were there to hunt, and these issues were of no concern.
    When the first light of dawn raked the horizon, I saw thousands of gnats and mosquitoes in front of my face. Every few seconds I would try and shoo them away with my hand.
    The Major asked, “What’re you doing boy?”
    “Trying to get rid of all these bugs.”
    “What bugs?” he asked.
    “All these mosquitoes and gnats,” I said, again shooing them away by waving my hand in front of my face, while blowing with my mouth.
    After a moment of silence, he put his arm around my shoulders and quietly said, “Those aren’t bugs, they’re ducks. We call it ‘The Parade’.”
    I have never forgotten how, once he told me that, I just had to refocus my eyes to see he was telling the truth. There were literally thousands upon thousands of ducks, flying, darting, and falling like autumn leaves, through the blue and orange sunrise. As the ducks got closer, I could hear their calls and the air passing over their cupped gliding wings gave off a jet-like whistling sound.
    We got to watch, and listen to “The Parade” for another ten minutes, until legal shooting time. Then the shooting started. It was busy, loud, and very