Free A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler Page B

This place is rich in crickets, which always make me think of my own childhood in Vietnam. But I never said anything to my son until last summer.
    I came to him after watching him slouch around the yard one Sunday pulling the Spanish moss off the lowest branches of our big oak tree and then throwing rocks against the stop sign on our corner. “Do you want to do something fun?” I said to him.
    “Sure, Pop,” he said, though there was a certain suspicion in his voice, like he didn’t trust me on the subject of fun. He threw all the rocks at once that were left in his hand and the stop sign shivered at their impact.
    I said, “If you keep that up, they will arrest me for the destruction of city property and then they will deport us all.”
    My son laughed at this. I, of course, knew that he would know I was bluffing. I didn’t want to be too hard on him for the boyish impulses that I myself had found to be so satisfying when I was young, especially since I was about to share something of my own childhood with him.
    “So what’ve you got, Pop?” my son asked me.
    “Fighting crickets,” I said.
    “What?”
    Now, my son was like any of his fellow ten-year-olds, devoted to superheroes and the mighty clash of good and evil in all of its high-tech forms in the Saturday-morning cartoons. Just to make sure he was in the right frame of mind, I explained it to him with one word, “Cricketmen,” and I thought this was a pretty good ploy. He cocked his head in interest at this and I took him to the side porch and sat him down and I explained.
    I told him how, when I was a boy, my friends and I would prowl the undergrowth and capture crickets and keep them in matchboxes. We would feed them leaves and bits of watermelon and bean sprouts, and we’d train them to fight by keeping them in a constant state of agitation by blowing on them and gently flicking the ends of their antennas with a sliver of wood. So each of us would have a stable of fighting crickets, and there were two kinds.
    At this point my son was squirming a little bit and his eyes were shifting away into the yard and I knew that my Cricketman trick had run its course. I fought back the urge to challenge his set of interests. Why should the stiff and foolish fights of his cartoon characters absorb him and the real clash—real life and death—that went on in the natural world bore him? But I realized that I hadn’t cut to the chase yet, as they say on the TV. “They fight to the death,” I said with as much gravity as I could put into my voice, like I was James Earl Jones.
    The announcement won me a glance and a brief lift of his eyebrows. This gave me a little scrabble of panic, because I still hadn’t told him about the two types of crickets and I suddenly knew that was a real important part for me. I tried not to despair at his understanding and I put my hands on his shoulders and turned him around to face me. “Listen,” I said. “You need to understand this if you are to have fighting crickets. There are two types, and all of us had some of each. One type we called the charcoal crickets. These were very large and strong, but they were slow and they could become confused. The other type was small and’ brown and we called them fire crickets. They weren’t as strong, but they were very smart and quick.”
    “So who would win?” my son said.
    “Sometimes one and sometimes the other. The fights were very long and full of hard struggle. We’d have a little tunnel made of paper and we’d slip a sliver of wood under the cowling of our cricket’s head to make him mad and we’d twirl him by his antenna, and then we’d each put our cricket into the tunnel at opposite ends. Inside, they’d approach each other and begin to fight and then we’d lift the paper tunnel and watch.”
    “Sounds neat,” my son said, though his enthusiasm was at best moderate, and I knew I had to act quickly.
    So we got a shoe box and we started looking for crickets. It’s