His Tools                                                                    for my father   His instruments: cunningly arrayed, the picks and probes, the nippers and syringes; the darkroom, with its burgundy gloom and chemical tang; the treasure chest; the spit sucker, connected to an ordinary vacuum cleaner down, down in the crawl space, where he would dispatch me at night to open its carapace and wring out the brainlike sponge inside, sopping with the spit and blood and toothgrit of a thousand strangers.   His tackle: the tangle of cowbells and leaders; treble hooks embedded in petrified velveeta years after the last gingerly trip onto the ice; the stinking, slime- crusted creel, flecked with the tiny mirrors of trout scales; the boat, battered aluminum, the bailer roughly cut from a clorox bottle, the stubborn outboard motor and its rock-scarred propeller, the paddle, the trolling rods with black reels like spaceships; the net.   His guns: the Savage .250, always cleaned, always oiled, and the scope, carefully calibrated every September; the boxes of shells, brass casings with steel- jacketed points fatal to antelope and deer and elk by the freezerful; the pistol I shot just that one time, into a steaming heap of antelope guts that bled what looked like mustard and stank of sage, while the dads wiped their knives on their pants and laughed.   His woodshop: ball-peen hammers, sewer snakes, keyhole saws, wire-strippers, friction tape, files, rasps; the vise; the mighty Shopsmith with its screaming blades, its motor that made the lights go brown; the rubber mallet (“General Anesthetic”); the all-in-one solutions he was such a sucker for — pliers with wrenches for grips, nests of screwdrivers, splays of allen keys like fingers; the paint-spattered drill, the plastic packs of bits, all the useful sizes missing.   His flute: the touch-burnished keys, lip-plate left with the brass impression of his mouth that softly, gradually kissed away the silver from under the embouchure hole, seventy years of school band, army band, city band, orchestra, of weddings and funerals, of weekly rehearsals and Sunday Mass, of Bach and Mozart and Sousa and Anon.; the case, an elegant blue- velvet-lined coffin; and his piccolo: sweet miniature, a toy.   His car: dented and scratched after decades of trips to the office, lumber yard, wild goose chases; to Alcova, Pathfinder, Casper Mountain; to band practice, choir practice, Gilbert & Sullivan; to Saint Anthony’s, Fatima, Saint Pat’s, the Knights of Columbus, the ADA, the National Guard, the Lions and the Elks; to poker; and his keys, dangling from a souvenir keyring of a bank long defunct, hanging next to so many other keys that don’t open anything anymore.     © Michael Fleming New York, New York October, 2004