East of Denver (2 page)

I started by cleaning the fridge. It wasn't as bad as it looked. The ice cream had mushed on stuff but most of the food was safe in Tupperware dated in Unabelle's old-lady handwriting. The most recent date I could find was from two weeks ago. In the freezer I found a frozen pizza, which I set to baking. I wiped clean a couple of plates. We ate dinner. The sun was going down. I didn't have anything important waiting for me in Denver; I could stay another day.

After we finished the pizza, I started washing the dishes. I sent Dad around the house looking for dirty cups. If he was away too long, I'd holler for him. “What are you doing, Pa?”

“Not sure!” he'd yell back.

“Look for cups!”

He brought back a couple.

I started the dishwasher and then looked in the junk drawer for the bathroom key. I couldn't find it. Dad got curious. He said, “What're you after?”

“The bathroom's locked and I can't find the key.”

“Come on,” he said. He walked out the front door and headed toward the shed. I followed. Once there, he found a piece of welding rod and, using the table grinder, turned it into a key. Nothing fancy. Just a little flat-blade key. But he did it. When he finished, he looked at it. “What's this for?”

“Follow me.”

Back to the house. I put the key into the knob, turned it. He was proud. I was proud. It was like old times. I opened the door. Unabelle was lying on the floor, dead, fat, bloated Elvis-style.

There are good things about being an anosmiac and there are bad things about being an anosmiac. Good: I didn't smell the rot. Bad: If I had been able to smell the rot, I would have known from the second I entered the house that there was a dead lady in the bathroom. Dad didn't wrinkle his nose. Evidently, senility also takes away your sense of smell.

“We found Unabelle,” he said.

And so I quit my job and moved in with Dad.

CHAPTER 2

WHERE THE AIRPLANE WAS

The day after Unabelle's funeral, I removed my clothes from my suitcase and stuffed them into my old dresser. Thirty-six years old. I'd spent half my life away from the farm.

I sat on my bed and stared at the floor.

I decided to go thru Dad's finances, just to make sure he was doing okay. Pretty quick, I knew we had problems. I sat at the card table and tried to separate the bills from the bank statements. We were never rich but Pa was generally good with money. When everybody else was buying giant four-wheel-drive 8650s and brand-new combines, Dad got along with a 4020 and an antique John Deere 95 that didn't even have air-conditioning. He farmed his land and he farmed it well. He didn't try to own more than he could manage. And he never, ever paid anyone to fix anything. If something broke, he repaired it immediately, all by himself.

We got along okay, he and Mom and I, even in the years when hail flattened the entire wheat crop. Slowly, he expanded the farm to a little less than a thousand acres. He paid off all the land and managed to put some money in the bank. When Pa was ready, he'd be able to retire, which meant he'd rent out the land and let other people do the work while he invented things and Mom planted pretty flowers in the garden. They were going to be an old, happy couple.

Then Mom went in to the hospital and didn't come out until she was dead and all of the money was gone and half the land was sold. After that, Dad worked even harder, both to build back his savings and to fill the lonesome days. Not long after that, he started forgetting things.

At first the forgetfulness was cute, and then it was a hassle, and then it became a problem, and then it made it so he couldn't start a tractor. But he still owned some land and land was money. Before he became totally lost, he put most of that land into the Conservation Reserve Program. With CRP, the government pays farmers not to farm. It takes land out of production to reduce surplus, bring up prices, and increase habitat for critters of the Great Plains. It's goddamned amazing is what it is.

As he entered his years of decline, Dad fiddle-farted around the farm, cashed his CRP checks, and lived cheap. He'd drive his pickup around the countryside on afternoons. He mowed the weeds with the riding mower. He replaced burned-out lightbulbs. He didn't seem too upset about the situation.

Even as he got more and more senile, I thought all the money business was fine. Dad was smart. But as I was sitting there at the card table that morning, it became clear that things weren't fine. There should have been receipts for the CRP payments. But there weren't any CRP payments. The bank statements, the ones that I could find, went down, down, down. I needed to figure this out. I didn't want to figure this out.

Dad was watching TV. I brought him his shoes. Tennies with Velcro straps. He used to wear boots.

I shut off the tube. “Father, let's have a look at the estate.”

“It's hot out there.”

“It's hot in here.”

We surveyed the farm on foot. Three hundred acres, half a square mile. A few acres were set aside for the house (built 1930), shed (built 1976), grain bins (1978, '81, '82), and two buildings from the old days: the granary (1899) and well house (1912).

We walked out to the runway. The overgrown runway. It had never been much more than a strip of mowed weeds. Now, you couldn't tell it from the rest of the prairie. All around was pasture that used to be wheat fields until the government started paying Dad not to farm. The wheat fields Dad had farmed for fifty years were full of rabbits, mice, and badgers all citied among the bunchgrass.

We walked past a stand of juniper trees that we'd watered by hand once a week until their roots got deep enough to survive on their own. It took years to teach those trees to live off the land. Most of them were still alive, but they had the twisted, dusty look that things get when they're not where they belong.

Every farm has a row of equipment, lined up and ready to mangle dirt. We inspected our holdings. The John Deere 4020 tractor, with three flat tires. A drill, which is a wheat planter. Dad had apparently failed to clean it out the last time he used it; little wheat plants were growing out of the hoppers. A disc, which is a weed killer, now obsolete in the low-till era. The ancient combine, which harvested wheat, with the windshield busted out. Everything had thistles growing up to the axles.

Farmers like their landscapes well kept. Dad had always made sure that the area around the house was mowed. The ditches and everything, acres of it. Mowing was my job. Hours and hours bouncing on the seat of a riding lawn mower. I hated mowing. It was all sneezing and flies and dust stuck to the sweat on your forehead.

The farm hadn't been mowed for at least two years. The place looked like shit, like one of those abandoned homesteads you see.

We stood in front of the grain bins, the giant, corrugated galvanized tubs that city folks mistake for silos.

Under our feet was a slab of crumbling concrete, the last remnant of the original sod house built by my great-grandparents a hundred and twenty years ago. I used to play inside that house. One day, Dad knocked it over with a bulldozer and shoved it into a hole in the ground. When I cried, he said, “It was ready to fall down. I didn't want it to fall on you. Anyway, it was ugly.”

We stood on that foundation, scratched weeds with our heels.

“This is our dominion,” I said.

“Hard to believe,” said Pa.

“Hard not to.”

We went to the shed, the laboratory where Dad's genius sprung forth. If he wanted it, he built it. If it broke, he fixed it. He was a machinist, a carpenter, a mechanic, an electrician, an inventor, and an artist. Since we didn't raise livestock (Pa once said, “I grew up with cattle. I feel no obligation to grow old with them”), there wasn't much to do during the winter on the farm. He spent that spare time tinkering.

When Pa was fifteen years old, he built an internal combustion engine out of scrap metal. When he was twenty, he made a calculator using a box of spare electronics parts he found at a farm sale. There was nothing he couldn't do. Even when he was working like crazy after Mom died, he still made time for his projects.

In one corner of the shed there was a stack of antique one-lung engines that he'd restored. When he got tired of fixing one-lungers, he built a miniature steam engine from scratch. He cast the flywheels, cut the gears, machined the governor. He built it. After that he turned an industrial fan into a jet engine. He was attaching it to an old John Deere R when his brain stopped working. It remained a half-finished tractor that looked like it was beamed in from the future. Dad looked at it carefully, like he wasn't sure where it had come from. I found a tarp and covered it up. It seemed more respectful.

His tools were spread all over the universe. Time didn't freeze for Dad; it slowed down real gradual. He didn't wake up one day and stop working. He kept trying until he couldn't do it anymore. And even then he still went out to the shed when he forgot he couldn't do anything. He moved things, organized them. All his gloves were piled on the workbench. A pile of bolts here, a pyramid of empty oil filters there. He'd stacked WD-40 bottles and spray paint on top of his oil-burning stove. The place was like a confused obsessive compulsion and it was eerie.

Dominating the shed, though, was the empty space that had once been occupied by the airplane. A four-seater, single-engine, high-wing Cessna 172.

Dad was raised in the forties and fifties when jets were amazing. When everybody wanted to be the first man on the moon. He got his pilot's license right out of high school. He flew anywhere, whenever he could. Landed on dirt roads when there was no runway.

Airplanes weren't unheard of in that part of the country. A handful of farmers had planes. They used them to survey the land or make quick trips to Denver. And of course there were the crop dusters zooming across the country all summer long. Still, planes were special. Like owning a fancy sports car. Dad took good care of his plane. Even if he got too senile to fly, I couldn't imagine that he'd get rid of the thing.

“Where's the plane, Pa?”

“Oh, it's gone.”

“You sell it?”

“Yep, I suppose.”

“You sold it?”

“Looks like it.”

“Get some money for it?”

“It's gone, isn't it?”

“I wish I could have taken one last ride.” Sort of. Riding in an airplane with a senile pilot has its downsides.

Dad stood on the empty concrete floor, right where the cockpit would have been.

I said, “I miss it.”

He said, “Yep.”

A shed is a big room. A cathedral. Up in the I beams, sparrows made clicking noises. Dad looked up. “I've been meaning to shoot those things.”

“Remember when you used to take me up?”

“In the plane?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose.”

“You used to scare the crap out of me.”

“You're easy to scare.”

“That time we were flying back from La Junta and we got hit by the thunderstorm. Remember that?”

“I suppose.”

I knew he didn't remember so I narrated. “I don't know what we were doing down in La Junta, but we were flying home and one of those afternoon thunderkickers popped up in the middle of a blue sky. Quick as a blink, rain was splattering all over the windscreen. The plane was bouncing up and down and left and right. You were flying by instruments only. You said not to worry. And then something went wrong. We stalled. I remember that stall alarm buzzing. We fell forever. If I hadn't had my seat belt on, I would have floated right up to the roof of the plane.”

Dad said, “Floater.”

“Somehow, you righted the ship. You tugged the wheel and twisted that airplane until it was pointing the right direction. We shouted like banshees when we busted out of that rain and into the clear sky.”

“Clearly.”

“You told me, after we landed, that you hadn't known which way was up. You said you'd never been so scared in your life. The next day, you went over the whole plane, looking for what went wrong. Finally, you found it: a twig stuck in the air-speed-indicator dealie. It was giving you bogus readings. We could of died.”

“I think some of that may have happened.”

He crawled into an imaginary cockpit. Held the steering wheel. Smiled into himself. Closed his eyes.

“Dad, did you really fly a loop-de-loop in that plane?”

“A loop-de-what?”

“Did you go upside down?”

“Like this?” He spread his arms and skipped a circle.

“You said so once. I was just a little kid. You said you did a loop. Would have been twenty, thirty years ago.”

“You know better than me what I did.”

Down nine stone steps into the basement of the house, all the way into the coal bin, a small square room lit with a bare lightbulb. Weak light, black walls, lots of shadows. We had upgraded to natural gas years ago. Instead of coal, the bin was filled with shelves stacked with ancient electronic equipment. A box of vacuum tubes. An oscilloscope. A twenty-pound voltmeter. Things that Dad understood, once. He caressed them all. Wiped dust. “I kept all this junk so I could show you how to use it. I don't suppose anyone would want it now.”

Elsewhere in the coal bin, a computer purchased for $2000 in 1982. Wires, a soldering iron, cables, a Heathkit amplifier. An electric motor I made for 4-H. The trophy I won for that motor. Let me clarify: Dad made the motor. I won the trophy.

Farther in the basement, the cinder block walls were damp. I imagined it smelled like mold. I found a milk crate filled with quart jars. I pulled one out, held it under the light. I said, “Think these are still good?”

“What are they?”

“Pickles. Mom made 'em.”

He said, “When did she make pickles?”

“She made them before she died.”

Upstairs, in the kitchen, in the light. We pried the lid off the jar. I reached for a pickle. It turned to mush.

“Limp,” said Dad. “That's one pickle that wishes it was still a cucumber.”

I didn't feel like cooking dinner so we went to the softball games. In the summer, they had games every Friday night in Keaton, the sister city of Dorsey. Nine-mile drive. The Lions Club played host, ran the concession stand, paid for the lights. We sat in the bleachers and watched the Keaton State Bank take on the Dorton High School seniors. Dorsey and Keaton didn't have enough kids for separate schools so they built one exactly halfway between the two towns and, after much discussion, decided that “Dorton” rolled off the tongue more easily than “Kearsey.” Kindergarten thru twelfth grade. Even with two towns, they were lucky to pull in ten students per grade.

The kids from Keaton said, “Guard your horsey when you ride thru Dorsey.” The kids from Dorsey said, “The people in Keaton need a beatin'.” Of course, since the majority of us were farmers, most of the kids didn't actually live in Dorsey or Keaton. But you picked a town for yourself and stuck to it.

Even though there was no scoreboard, it was obvious the bank was getting their ass handed to them.

Someone slapped me on the back of the head. “Shakespeare Williams!”

D.J. Beckman, a balding, red-faced, thick-necked jackass sat down next to me.

I'd known D.J. since we were both kindergarteners. That didn't mean I liked him. He came from Keaton. Okay basketball player. He could dunk but he couldn't pass.

He punched my shoulder. “What the fuck are you doing out here?”

“I'm hanging out with Pa.”

“How long?”

“'Til I find an excuse to leave.”

“So you're here for good.”

“Here for something.”

We watched the game. The pitcher for the Keaton State Bank was a fat girl I didn't recognize. She couldn't toss for anything. She was wearing a boob tube. Her face was goopy with makeup.