Homage to Hemingway: To Have and then Lose the Damn Thing

Then there was lunch.  You had to stop and eat it; that’s the way it was.  You had to stop hiking up the long dry slope and sit down and eat the lunch.  If you didn’t eat it you might keel over and then your face would go sideways down onto the dust and you’d smell the dust deep in your nostrils and your cheek would look all fat and spread out against the dusty trail.  So you would reach into your rucksack until your fingers touched the flat metal sides of it, and you’d fish it up out of the rucksack, and set it on a rock and just look at it for a while.  It wasn’t like other cans.  The shape was different.  It was partly a square and partly an oval.  And it had a blue paper covering, with a picture of it.  And it said Spam in big letters.  That was all.  Just Spam.

You took it into your hands carefully.  Your hands were careful because your belly was really running the show now, and you remembered how easy it was to knock the key off the top of the can and lose it.  Your belly reminded you not to lose the key by being careless, so your hands were very careful.  Remember, your belly said, without the key you can’t get the goddamn thing open; you can never get it open.

You took the key like it was a goddamn relic.  You held it in your hands like a bullfighter holds his hat; some bullfighters are very picky about their hats.  You held it between your index finger and your thumb.  Then your belly said something else but it only came out as a rumble.  When you lived in the Michigan woods a wrinkled old Indian hunter had taught you how to tie flies.  You could feel the ancient skill in your fingers again as you sat beside the trail clasping the key tightly, hardening yourself, making sure you were steady before you put it in.  They may have shot off a few of your important parts in the war but you could still hold a goddamn Spam key.

When your head was clear and you were focused, you fit the little slot in the key onto the thin strip of tight metal that circled the can.  It seemed a little strange to be putting a slot onto a projecting strip of metal instead of vice versa but you didn’t want to think about that.  That was for shrinks or sexual symbolism people at big universities where they drank tea in the afternoon.  With a slight twist of your fingers you began to roll the thin metal strip onto the key.  You were careful not to let the rolled-up metal lose its symmetry, or else it would go haywire.  It could go haywire.  You knew it could.  You’d seen men whose Spam coils had gone haywire.  It was bad.  You didn’t want to look but you couldn’t look away.  You made sure you didn’t look in the men’s eyes, at the defeat in those eyes.

So you rolled the metal up carefully and you did it right.  It rolled up like a carpet or like a sleeping bag that for some mysterious reason rolls up like a goddamn sleeping bag is supposed to roll up.  And as the key moved along the side of the can you could see a line of pink under the metal, where the metal came up.  You felt good.  But your belly said, Don’t get cocky.

So you bore down again and you worked the key slowly and respectfully, and then the top of the can came off and you could see the hump of it there in the can.  It was a lovely pink mound and it shone a little in the sunlight.  You weren’t thinking about women or sexual symbolism or anything like that.  You were only thinking about lunch and what you had to do.

So you set the lidless can down on a rock, with the lovely pink mound sticking up out of it a little.  But you checked the rock for ants first.  Those little sons of bitches didn’t know the first thing about working a Spam key and they didn’t deserve to climb up onto that luscious pink mound and sink their little mandibles into it.

Then you got your knife from your rucksack.  You lifted the pink mound out of the can, and it came out with a delicious sucking sound.  Using the knife carefully, you scraped the yucky clear stuff off the mound.  With your knife you flung the yucky stuff off into the bushes, and you didn’t care if it landed on some son of a bitch ant and he had to wallow around in a huge puddle of transparent crud that seemed to have fallen from an uncaring sky.

Then you reached deep into your rucksack until you felt something a bit squishy, and you pulled it out with a grunt of satisfaction.  And you pulled two pieces of bread out of the plastic bag with balloons on it.  Then you settled the beautiful pink mound down onto one of the pieces, and you fit the other piece down over it, like fitting a hat onto a man’s head, maybe a bullfighter’s.  Then it was ready.

But suddenly it was no good.  It had been good but now it was bad.  It was bad because a chipmunk had come up out of his hole and was chattering at you.  The chipmunk came out of his hole because a lot of people drove their cars to this trail and they brought their kids and the kids would roll big globs of white bread with their fingers, because they couldn’t finish their sandwiches, and they’d throw the globs of bread to the chipmunks, and this chipmunk figured you owed him some.  He reminded you of a Masai warrior at Ngorogoro who didn’t understand about novels and only wanted you to pay him for taking his picture.  And when the chipmunk started chattering all of a sudden at your elbow he startled you, because you thought he might bite your butt.  And you dropped the pink mound into the dust of the trail, and the pasty white rest of it too, and now you were looking down at it.  It lay there like a wildebeest haunch after a lion kill, or a corpse on a Spanish field, or a man’s lunch that he could never have.  The sun was very hot.

But you had to go on.  You looked at it for a long time, but then you turned up the trail and went on.  There was no other choice.  For a man can be distraught but he can’t stay depleted.

When you looked back, those crowding little sons of bitches were having a field day.