Faraway Places (9 page)

I sat and watched the water there for a long time. I sat there until way past suppertime and thought about things, one thought leading to another, but mostly leading to the nigger, to Geronimo, all the time the sky getting bigger and darker. There were two butterflies on the grass just sitting there, not flying, though their wings were still going. A green-and-blue dragonfly shined in the twilight as though it held sun from the day. Hawks glided past between me and the moon, just hanging up there, glowing.

After a while, I got up and looked for the nigger, but not very hard. I knew I wouldn't find him.

I went back to that spot the next day—Sunday after the red flags, confession, and Mass, after breakfast and the chores, and sat there again in the sunny place all day. There was no sign of the nigger, but I came back a week later, on the next Saturday. Still there was no sign of him.

But I did see something else that day. I didn't see the nigger, but I saw Harold P. Endicott.

I WANDERED DOWNSTREAM
because the wind was snapping Harold P. Endicott's big American flag and it got to be an itch, that flag. Old Glory snapping was an itch I just had to scratch.

I waded downstream and really didn't let myself know that I was going to Harold P. Endicott's. I just spent my time looking at things in the river and on the banks—trees, rocks, water skip
pers—that flag calling me over there the whole time, snapping for my attention, and I followed, taking my time, stopping and going with no apparent destination, though really I had a very definite one.

I climbed up an elm tree on our side of the river and sat there on a big limb pretending not to be where I was because Harold P. Endicott's big old haunted house was right there in front of me, just across the river, the cool dark grass of his back lawn sloping up to the stone castle walls. And above the haunted castle, above it all, was Old Glory, right there in front of me.

I was thinking about America, all those new things I was learning about America—Manifest Destiny, Inalienable Rights, and the Pursuit of Happiness—when all of a sudden Harold P. Endicott himself came out the back door of his house—the second time I had seen him walk out the back of a house that way—but this time he wasn't hitting any woman. He stepped out of the shade, into the sun, and stretched. He looked around, then blew on the whistle that hung around his neck. In seconds he was surrounded by his hellhounds.

When I saw those hellhounds come running around the house, believe me, I wished I wasn't there. I cussed myself good for getting so close to one of those forbidden people, but mostly so close to those hellhounds that could probably smell me. I got that deep feeling in me like I had to go to the bathroom, that fear feeling, and I started to move, so slow I felt like I wasn't even moving. I made it from the middle of that branch to the trunk of the tree, and when I got to the trunk, I made myself just another limb and I made myself smell like the tree.

Harold P. Endicott played around with his dogs, rough-housing with them. Then he threw sticks into the river for them to fetch. One time, one of those hellhounds was right below me under the tree, looking for the stick that Endicott had thrown there. I breathed tree and tried to grow elm leaves. But after a while, after I watched him playing with his dogs, Harold P. Endicott just seemed like any other old man in his backyard,
having fun with his dogs, no problem; running back and forth on the lawn with his dogs at his heels in the afternoon.

Old Endicott sat down on the grass then; I could see that he was breathing hard. He took his hat off and wiped his head. Then he took his boots off, and his socks, stuffing the socks into his boots as he lay down. His hellhounds surrounded him in a perfect order, like they had been trained to be at those places: one dog at his head, a dog on each side of him, and two dogs at his feet. The two dogs at his feet started licking his feet and in between his toes. The dog at his head started licking his bald head and neck and ears. Harold P. Endicott sat up and looked around and then undid his shirt. The two dogs on each side of him started licking his belly and up his sides. Endicott raised his arms and the dogs licked under his arms. Endicott kind of squirmed when those two dogs got under his arms. He sat up and looked around again and then undid his Levi's, pulled them off, and his shorts too. He took off his shirt and stuck his shorts inside his Levi's. Then all he had on was his whistle. Then those two dogs started licking him down there, up his legs from his feet; the two dogs at his sides licking him down from his arms to below his belly, then down to as far as the other two dogs were licking up. All of those dogs went on that way for quite some time, and then Harold P. Endicott rolled over onto his stomach—because one thing always leads to another, I guess—and the dogs kept licking him from their assigned positions. At one point, Harold P. Endicott got up and knelt. He bent over and the two dogs at his feet went to him and licked him back in there while the other dogs sat back obediently and watched.

“Lard Ass,” I whispered, and wanted to laugh, but didn't. I didn't move.

Old Harold P. Endicott stayed that way for quite some time, his ear to the ground, not looking around, kind of moving back and forth, like the screen door the night of the chinook, between here and there, just letting himself go, when all of a sudden he rolled over onto his side and the dogs stopped. He lay
like that for a while, covering himself down there with his hands, and then, as if he had blown the whistle, those dogs started licking him all over again in the same way, from their same positions: the two on the sides going down and the two at his feet coming up, and then all of them there, in the middle, licking.

After a while, Harold P. Endicott got up and walked back up to the house, naked except for his whistle. One of those dogs got his boots with his socks stuffed in them, and one of those dogs got his Levi's with his shorts stuffed in them, and another dog got his shirt, another his hat, and the five of those hellhounds followed him back into the house, the big stone haunted castle house in the trees, under the snapping flag, under Old Glory up there in the wind in the sky. I held on tight to the tree to keep from falling: off the tree, off the round ball that was turning at an illusive speed, off the round ball hanging there in infinity, in eternity, in the sky. Endicott closed the door, snugged it back into home. I heard the door shut just as Endicott closed it. I wasn't that far away.

THE NIGHT SHE
shot the moon, the moon was almost full and it was Saturday night, but it was different that night from most Saturday nights because my mother and my father had stayed in all day with the bills. There were bills and papers all over the kitchen table, from here to kingdom come on the kitchen table.
Settling-up time
, my father called it, and my mother called it
time when the vultures get their claws in you
. Both of them were acting like they acted when they were mad at each other at the Blackfoot State Fair, but during bill time they just seemed like they were mad at each other. Really they weren't.

The both of them sat there all day at the kitchen table frowning and my father cussing under his breath and making his knuckles white and my mother smoking his Viceroys, her voice lower, his higher, scratching numbers onto papers and putting papers into piles and then moving those piles to other piles, and then starting all over again, looking under piles for other papers,
but what they were looking for was more money and it was never there.

There was so much paper on the kitchen table that there wasn't room to eat dinner, and dinner turned out to be only bologna sandwiches and fried spuds.

By suppertime they had managed to clear most of the bills and the papers away, most of them, that is, except for one, the big one, the farm payment, the one they only had half of. No matter how much they figured and scratched around and looked under piles and moved papers from one pile to another pile, they could only come up with half.

Endicott's bill sat on the supper table like something that shouldn't be among our things—like Montgomery Clift's martini glass might seem if it were sitting there. My father picked the bill up a couple of times and looked at it and then looked at his checkbook again, then laid the bill back down on the table, turned it over, picked it up again, then put it back down.

We ate supper with that piece of paper that night like it was a person there with us, like Old Lard Ass himself. I had half a mind to set a place for that bill: a knife and fork and spoon, bologna sandwich and spuds.

Nobody said anything during supper. Usually that was the case at supper—none of us saying much. Usually there wasn't much to say. But that night, that Saturday night, things were different because of that paper sitting there across from me, different because we only had half of what that paper said we had to have, like company with bad manners asking for more. That, to me, was something to talk about, but we didn't talk. It wasn't just that they weren't talking to me about it; they weren't talking to each other about it either.

I figured I would be different too: I wasn't going to be nice, start saying nice things about how things were happening, how good the bologna sandwiches were and the spuds, and what a nice pink color Old Lard Ass's bill was, but I was scared the way I get when things get like that—my mother and my father so
quiet. I was more scared than usual this time, so much going on and nobody saying anything about it, the both of them acting like everything was normal, ordinary, that there was nothing wrong.

That always makes me scared—their acting—but this time it felt like it was just going to be too much. Too much for all of us, my mother, my father, and me. And we sat there like my mother's pressure cooker on the stove; the dial going up and up and we were just sitting there in a pressure cooker. The dial goes past all the numbers and starts going around again, like on the swing when you go so high the swing starts going over onto itself.

And so I said, “Pinochle. How about a game of pinochle?” I said to both of them, but really just to my mother so my father could hear, because he usually only played pinochle when there were four, when company came over and there were four. When it was just my mother, my father, and me, there had to be three extra cards called the widow so just the three of us could play.

“We'll see,” my mother said, which usually meant no. “We'll see after the dishes are done,” she told me.

“And after the baths.”

We only took baths on Saturday and we all used to share the same tub of water—me first, then my mother, and then my father—until I started getting older two years ago. Then I got my own tub of water, but usually I went first still.

I turned on KSEI on the radio while my mother and I did the dishes and my father sat at the supper table with his coffee and Endicott's pink bill. The sky through the eyesore was the color of blue that skies get in movies—Technicolor ones—and the Sons of the Pioneers were singing on the radio, “Cool Water,” and then there was that dance kind of music like people used to dance to—Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.

I'll be down to getcha in a taxi, honey
,

better be ready ‘bout half-past eight
.

I asked my mother how you fox-trot.

My mother looked at me like she knew what I was doing—making things nice—and her look was a good one, one that said thank you, I'm glad you're still trying to make things nice, and she took her hands out of the dishwater and shook them off and dried them with a dish towel. My mother walked up to me and put my left hand on her right shoulder and my right hand on her waist and she told me to make a box with my feet, make a box, she said, one, two, three, four, she said. But she told me I was two left feet. Then she said, Come on, Dad, let's show our son here how to fox-trot. And sure enough, my father got up and took a hold of her. He kind of leaned down a bit to her and she raised her shoulders like she had shoulder pads on and they fox-trotted, all around the room, all around the supper table they fox-trotted, making boxes one, two, three, four, like Montgomery Clift and Hedy Lamarr, around that piece of pink paper on the supper table, my mother smiling on her tiptoes like she was wearing her high heels with no toes in them, and my father with a romantic look on his face, making that romantic look so I could see it, my father dancing and looking that way.

And then we took our baths, me first, them still fox-trotting. I could hear them there in the kitchen. I watched myself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet, listening to them in the kitchen, and then I smelled the coffee from the percolator and when my mother got done with her bath, and my father got done with his, we played pinochle. I had coffee too—in the special cups that matched the saucers—and chocolate cake, and my mother shot the moon in hearts, just exactly the right cards in the widow for a family.

And when I was in bed later, she came in and stood over me. She touched the covers and then walked to the window and looked out at the moon—the almost full moon she had just shot—and she said, “Good night.” I had to agree. Even with Endicott's bill there, it had been a good one.

THE NEXT MORNING
, when we got up, the hawks were back in the poplars in front of the house. As soon as my mother saw them through the front room window, she crossed herself and went for her rosary.

ON OCTOBER
22 my father put his Sunday suit on even though it was a Monday, gassed up the Oldsmobile, and drove into town smelling like Old Spice. He drove to Harold P. Endicott's Bank and Trust on Main Street and Jefferson in Wind River with only half the farm payment. Then he drove back home with the news that we had to leave because we had lost the farm for good.