East of Denver (8 page)

An arc of flaming spit flew off the end of the rod. Halfway thru his spin, Dad saw me standing there several paces away. His eyes widened. His mouth said, “Oh shit!” He let go of the iron, but it was too late. Napalm flung toward me. I turned sideways and got splattered with whizzing pelts of liquid fire.

I know you're supposed to stop, drop, and roll. But, really, it was a few drops of burning plastic. They stuck to my shirt and jeans. I patted them out. By the time Dad had run up to me, there was nothing but some smoking holes in my clothes. Little things, no bigger than a raisin.

“Gee whiz,” said Dad. He took deep breaths.

I showed him my palms. There were little bits of charred plastic stuck to them. “Not even a blister.”

“I dang near burned you up.” He touched my shirt, making sure all the fires were out.

“Aw, hell.”

“I thought I was all alone.”

“You were. I mean, I just got back from Keaton. I was talking to the banker.”

“Crotchfield?”

“Crutchfield, yep.”

Pa nodded. “I believe he's flying my airplane these days.”

Something popped in the burning barrel.

“Yep, he's flying it.”

Pa's eyes squinted. He got a look. It was real quick and then it was gone. “Let him fly her. I don't have any business in that thing.”

I wanted to say, “What are you talking about?!? He stole your plane!” But I didn't say anything. In that little chunk of brain that still held his soul, Pa knew what that banker bastard had done. Pa also knew that he couldn't fly a plane anymore. And he knew that between the two of us, we didn't have the money, wit, or mean-headedness to get back what Crutchfield had took.

We played with the fire until it went out and then we ate dinner and watched TV and went to bed.

I didn't sleep very good. First, I contemplated doing cruel things to the banker. Then I thought about Clarissa McPhail and whether I'd ever want to look at her again. Then I wondered what kind of dreams Pa was having downstairs in his bed.

CHAPTER 11

LIVERS, TONGUES, AND KIDNEYS

When I got up the next morning, things were clear. Sometimes that happens when you go to sleep with a lot of things on your mind.

First off, we'd been screwing around too much.
I'd
been screwing around too much. Drinking and going to softball games and putting us in dangerous situations. In a world full of temptation, the only way to keep out of trouble is to keep out of the world. We had to hole up.

I resolved to never let anyone take advantage of Pa ever again. Not a banker, not a drunken anorexic, not a paraplegic fuck-up, and definitely not me. Henceforth, Pa and I were going to hunker down. Avoid the townsfolk.

Food and gas, that's all we needed. We had both of those in abundance. We had a three-hundred-gallon fuel tank, a deep freeze, and a pantry full of canned food, and in a couple of months, we'd have a garden. On top of that, we had a shed full of tools and piles and piles of scrap metal. There was nothing we couldn't do.

In the country, your home is the universe. If you do it right, you don't ever have to see anyone, ever. That's how my ancestors did it. They dug a well with shovels. Made a house out of dirt. Grew crops, milked cows, shot jack rabbits.

We could do it just as good as them.

Just like turning a switch, the outside world disappeared. Me and Pa on the farm. Like Huck and Jim floating on the river, without the river. Every morning, while Pa was figuring out how to put on his britches, I took a walk around the property. The birds would gather in our little stand of trees and make their morning racket. The cottontails liked to sit on bare patches of dirt and bask in the morning sunlight. Dad had quite a few guns. I figured that someday I'd use one of those guns to shoot one of those rabbits. I'd skin it, spit it, and cook it on a fire. For now, they were pleasant to look at.

After my walk, I'd go inside and help Dad reassemble his razor. It was an electric, which he dismantled every single morning. He'd unplug the power cord, remove the head, take out the blades, and shake the grey beard dust into the sink. He could never put it back together. The parts would migrate to the kitchen or his nightstand, but I always found them. Put it together, then turn it on and put it in his hand. He shaved pretty good except for his throat. Every few days, I'd make him tilt his head back so I could run the razor over his Adam's apple. He enjoyed it with a look of a dog when you're scratching its ears.

With enough time, he usually dressed himself good. He'd put on two or three shirts. He took them off, one by one, if he got hot. If it was hot enough, he'd take off all his shirts and walk around sweating thru his grey chest hairs. You get used to it.

He didn't always put on socks on his own. But I was strict about socks. I made him put them on even if he didn't want to. When you don't wear socks, your feet sweat and you can catch a fungus.

Breakfast was whatever. We didn't differentiate between meals. Kidney beans and frozen peas. A TV dinner. Graham crackers. It was all food. Find something in the pantry or the deep freeze, heat it up, eat it. Pa, especially, didn't care what we ate. He had strong teeth. Once, when I wasn't paying attention, he ate half of a frozen sausage before I could thaw it out.

After breakfast, we pulled weeds in the garden. The tomato plants were growing. Most of the rest of the seeds—the onions, carrots, cabbages, and corn—had poked themselves up from the dirt. The garden was doing all right.

After weeding, we'd take a walk around the farm or go inside for a nap. Then lunch, then more weeds or walking or wandering or a nap. After dinner, it was TV time, then brushing of teeth, then bed.

We didn't talk much.

In the third week of June, it rained for five days straight. It was the monsoon season. The landscape shifted from bleached brown to sage. Buffalo grass turned green. Dew hung on everything. The bare wood of the granary was soaked dark.

One afternoon, it rained too hard for us to go outside. Not a downpour, but the kind of rain that made you want to stay in and listen to the pat-pat on the roof.

I pulled out the old photo album. All photo albums are the same. Just like all dreams are the same. They mean the world to the person who owns them and they're boring as dirt to everybody else.

Funny-looking '70s pants. Dad with an Amish beard. The family in front of the Christmas tree. Always the family in front of the Christmas tree. Trying to imagine that the baby in that picture is you. Trying to imagine that the pretty gal in the tintype is your grandma, or that the woman sitting at the piano is your mom.

That woman was my mom. I held the photo for Pa to see. “There she is,” I said.

Most senile people lose their short-term memory but hang on to the old stuff, the foundations, the bygone days, which they recite over and over until you want to kill them. You know, Great Aunt Beatrice can't remember what happened five minutes ago, but she knows exactly what she was doing the day Kennedy was shot. Pa's senility was weird. First, it had hit him early. He was only sixty-two and his brain was already three-quarters gone. Second, he didn't have his foundations anymore. He was losing everything.

Pa looked at the picture. Mom at the piano in the church. She was wearing a crafty Christmas sweater. Her mouth was open. I imagined she was singing “Glo-o-o-o-o-o-ria.” The preacher's wife probably took the photo. I'm sure Dad and I were standing at a pew just out of the frame. There would have been maybe thirty people in the church. Dad and I would have been singing like clowns and elbowing each other. Mom would hear us but say nothing. She was just glad to have us there for our annual Christmas Eve appearance. They let everyone hold candles on Christmas Eve.

I think both of us would have gone to church more often if Mom hadn't played piano. Since she was always at the piano, we never got to sit next to her. What would be the point of going to church if we couldn't sit with the person who invited us?

Dad said, “Merry.” He was trying to read Mom's sweater. “Merry Christmas.”

“You know who that is?”

“Seems like I should know that gal,” said Pa.

Sometimes it's necessary to leave the room. Come back a few minutes later with a handkerchief and a runny nose. He didn't notice that kind of thing.

It was raining real gentle.

When it stopped raining, we cleaned out the deep freeze. The deep freeze was in the well house. Before the Rural Electric Association rolled thru the country, farms got their water by way of a windmill. The windmill pumped water up from the Ogallala Aquifer and into a huge tank, which was planted on top of the well house. Like everyone else in Strattford, we had converted our well to electric fifty years ago. This made the windmill unnecessary. Over the years, Dad had dismantled it and reused the metal for various projects.

The well house remained, though. Mom used it mostly as a garden shed. In addition to the hoes and fertilizer, there was just enough room for the deep freeze.

When I had first moved back from Denver, the freezer was filled up full. On top was nothing but frozen dinners. Beneath those were Tupperware dishes filled with Mom's homemade cookies and banana bread. Since I'd been back, we had eaten everything on those first layers. Now all that remained were blocks of meat wrapped in butcher paper and stamped in red block letters that read “liver,” “tongue,” and “kidney.”

Mom used to buy sides of beef from the Keaton Locker. We would gobble down the ground beef, chuck, rump, steaks—all the good stuff—but none of us wanted anything to do with the low-class meats. Mom grew up poor. Leaving that low-class meat in exile at the bottom of the freezer probably made her feel a little rich. As for me, I just didn't like livers, tongues, and kidneys.

Still, Mom couldn't bring herself to throw the meat out. Probably because she grew up poor. We must have gone thru a half dozen sides of beef over the years. Now the deep freeze was three-quarters full of nothing but those livers, tongues, and kidneys.

Dad and I were poor now and it looked like we might have to eat some of those cow parts. I took a liver from the top of the freezer and thawed it out. When I peeled back the butcher paper, it was freezer-burned, leathery, no good. That meat wasn't just low-class; it was inedible. If the stuff on top was bad, then everything below it would be bad, too. Enough food to feed a football team for a month and all of it was dried-up white.

We loaded hundreds of pounds of no-good meat into the back of Pa's pickup and drove out to a pasture.

This was a different pasture from the one where we buried my stray cat. You don't put rotten food in a pet graveyard. It's disrespectful. This pasture was further south. It had been in the family for decades, maybe even a century. It used to be a wheat field until Dad put it in the CRP program and sent it back to its native state. To get there you had to drive on a two-rut road. That field was the first place I ever saw a rattlesnake.

In the corner of the pasture was an ancient cottonwood tree next to an old, dead windmill next to the foundation of an old, dead house. The existence of that tree only reinforced the notion that trees don't belong in Strattford County. It lived, somehow, but it was bent. Branches thicker than my waist tried to grow up tall but then gave up and curved to the earth and then tried again and failed. All the bark was gone. Nothing but white wood. The tree looked like it could have been a thousand years old.

We wandered around the foundation of the house.

“You know,” said Pa, “this here is an important piece of land.”

“Why so?”

“This was the old.” He snapped his fingers. “You know who I'm talking about.”

“Relatives?”

“No! They were.”

Walking along the outline of the foundation, we deciphered where the bathroom had been, the kitchen. Some barbed wire, the door from an old car, all rusted.

“Look here!” said Dad. He pointed to a sod brick. “That's old.”

We found a few more bricks, something that could have been a corner post. We traced the outline of a sod house.

“You think this is an original homestead?”

“That's right,” said Pa. “Your grandma lives here.”

“My great-grandma?”

“The Schleichers.”

I said, “That sounds about right.”

The Schleichers were from Dad's mom's side. Those sod bricks were made by my ancestors. I wondered if any of them had anosmia. I picked up a brick. It looked like a big square dirt clod. I squeezed it and it fell apart.

“I don't think you should do that,” said Dad.

“I agree.”

While the cow livers thawed in the back of the pickup, we wandered the pasture. We followed a meandering trail, looking down every few steps to avoid prickly pears. Buffalo grass. Sagebrush. Grama. Yucca. Watch for rattlers.

We walked until the pickup was small. We found the skeleton of a cow. It was cleaned up, bleached. I dragged a rib across the top of the spine, hoping it would sound like a xylophone. It went clunka, clunka.

“This here's the skull,” said Pa.

“That looks like a pelvis to me.”

Pa dragged his heel thru the dirt. “I don't know about that.”

When you find a cow skeleton, you look for the skull. You bring the skull home and hang it on something. The person who finds the skull gets to feel proud. Saying that thing was a pelvis, that took away Pa's pride. I looked around for the real skull. Couldn't find it. Someone else must have got there before us.

The ground was etched with tiny animal tracks. I said, “Pa, does that look like a lizard to you?”

He peered into the dust. “Looks like dirt.”

“You can see where it was dragging its tail.”

We bent our heads to the ground. We found more lizard tracks, bird tracks, ground squirrel tracks, and lots of dog-looking footprints. I said, “Those look like they were made by wolves.”

“They were made by coyotes.”

“They're so big.”

“Coyotes have big feet,” said Pa.

As we walked further, the coyote tracks were everywhere, as if the footprints had rained from the sky. I studied one, pretending to be a boy pretending to be an Indian. They looked brand-new, like they'd been put down five minutes ago.

Pa said, “Look here!”

He'd found the den. It was a hole, big enough for a baby to crawl into. I crept toward it.

“They know you're looking. They won't come out of that hole for nothing.”

“You think they killed that cow?”

“Coulda been a steer,” said Dad.

We retrieved the pickup and drove it to the coyote den. We peeled the butcher paper off the livers and left them piled up as a gift to the coyotes. When we were done, our hands were numb with cold and covered with cow blood.

With the deep freeze empty, we went on a canned food diet. We had a huge pantry, which Mom always kept stocked in case of a blizzard. No need to go grocery shopping yet. Mom was still feeding us.

At lunchtime, while the beans or mixed vegetables or whatever were warming up on the stove, I'd plunk the piano and Dad would sing. His favorites were “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Old MacDonald.” When he sang, his eyes closed halfway. When I was growing up, Dad never, ever sang. But he liked to do it now. He was transported. I'd never seen him like that. He was a terrible singer. Didn't know the words. Didn't matter. He was focused.

After lunch, he'd lay on his back on the carpet and nap for an hour.

One afternoon, I went out to the shed and decided to get the riding mower running. I put some gas in the tank and, amazingly, it revved right up. When I showed it to Dad, he jumped in the seat and started putt-putting it around. It became a hobby for him. He enjoyed mowing, it made the place look nicer, and it kept him out of my hair for half-hour chunks. He had a hard time keeping track of where he went. He left random scribbles of mowed swath. Over the course of a week, he'd cover the whole place. It was good to look out and see the weeds trimmed.