The Not-so-Tragic Death of Arthur davis mack

The last thing Kenneth Wayne Mack’s daddy said before checking out was: “Son, your bird dog will be a dauntless companion.” Arthur Davis Mack, Art to his friends, spoke these words while trespassing in another man’s apple orchard on November 12, 1984, at 8:16 a.m., with his nine-year-old son and a black Labrador puppy at his side. At 8:17 a.m., not two breaths after Art said what he said, a massive coronary dropped him like a sack of rocks. He fell onto his side and rolled back in the grass and gave out a gurgle of air.

Little Kenny stood staring down at Art, whose .410 Browning shotgun lay balanced on his great belly. Rotten apples all around his head like an off-kilter halo. Beside the corpse, panting in the summer heat, was Jamocha, a present to a son Art had not met until the week before, after he was paroled from Cummins State Prison. It was the prison Gator McKlusky escaped from in White Lightning, 1973. Kenny liked movies and books and knew nothing of hunting or guns or bird dogs, but he wanted to be a good son to his wayward daddy, who had knifed a man at a stock car race when Kenny was still unborn. So, when Art fell dead, Kenny was disappointed, in part because he would never know his father—but mainly because he was really looking forward to shooting something that day.

A crow went rawk in the distant trees.

Kenny looked down at the Browning. He looked over his shoulder, toward the one-story farmhouse where Art said some old soup-eaters lived with their spinster daughter. He looked back at Art, on the ground. Kenny glanced at Jamocha, who gazed vacantly into space in that happy-dog way, tongue dripping spit and not a care in the world.

Nine-year-old Kenny bent over and picked up the heavy gun. He pulled back the hammer and set the stock against his shoulder. The long barrel wavered.

Rawk-rawk, went the crow.

He swiveled toward the sound and squinted down the sights. Saw apple trees and sunshine.

Jamocha whined.

He swiveled toward the puppy, put the sights on her. Saw a cute chocolate face.

Suddenly, in the grass, Arthur Mack sat up straight, as if on a springboard. Eyes wide, mouth open, he made a sound like this: “Huhhhhhhhh….”

And Kenny swung the barrel one last time and said, loudly and clearly, just like the Duke in the closing of True Grit, 1969: “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”

Then he jerked the trigger.

BWOOM!

The blast knocked him on his butt, and Jamocha the bird dog ran away into the orchard. Kenny never saw that dog again. A few years later, when he told this story to his bunkmate in a boys’ home in Little Rock, Arkansas, the bunkmate, who was five years older than Kenny, with an air of world-weary wisdom that could only come from being kicked out of six foster homes before hitting puberty, said, “Shit, man. That ain’t the way a real bird dog acts.” And so, it turned out, Arthur Davis Mack—as in most things the man ever did or said—was wrong right up until the end: Jamocha had not even been a bird dog, much less a dauntless one. Kenny lay awake all that night on his bunk and stared up at the ceiling and thought maybe she got taken in by the soup-eaters and their spinster daughter. He liked to think she had a real good life.