In Open Spaces (34 page)

Finally, about the time it seemed this damn thing was never going
to show up, a pickup came creeping over the ridge. We all looked at each other, confused about why anyone would drive their pickup so slowly, until a minute later, when something followed the pickup over the tiny ridge. The first we saw of the second vehicle was a big, gleaming silver blade, slick and shiny so that it looked white in the sunlight. It was a bulldozer. The big tracks along its sides rolled along the road, throwing dust straight into the air, forming the now-familiar cloud. The driver sat exposed, working the steering levers and occasionally reaching up to pull his hat down over his eyes.

And as they came close to our turnoff, the driver of the bulldozer waved to the pickup, indicating the turn. And somehow, from the way he moved, the shape of his body, and maybe just because it’s the way things are sometimes, I suddenly recognized him. It was Jack.

And at the very moment I recognized him, I heard Rita behind me. “Oh, my god.”

Mom inhaled a quick, gasping breath, and Teddy started looking around at all of us, gazing up into our faces with questioning eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“It’s your father,” Rita said to him.

“It is?” Teddy looked out at the lumbering machine in disbelief. George turned and barged inside the house, slamming the door.

My heart pounded and I felt my tongue swelling up in my mouth, as if it had been stung by a bee. The sweat gathered around and on my forehead, under my arms, and on my upper lip. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve.

We stood frozen in fear or anger or whatever each of us was going through as we watched this man we hadn’t seen for ten years maneuver the huge piece of machinery through the gate, which was barely wide enough, then guide it off the drive and kill the engine. The pickup, which was brand-new, pulled right up to the yard and stopped. The fattest man I’d ever seen poured from the cab, causing the pickup to tilt to one side.

Jack hopped down off the bulldozer and strode toward us as if he’d just come in from a long day in the fields. He wore a big smile, and his walk was confident, anxious. The other man waited for Jack, then turned and joined him.

They stopped about twenty feet from us. Jack held his hands out as though he expected us all to run up and fall into his arms.

“The troublemaker is back!” he announced.

The other man laughed, not noticing that none of us did. Then the fat man looked us all over, moving his head around as he looked at each face, and walked toward us, then particularly right toward me.

“That you, Blake?” he asked.

I was completely baffled as to who he was, and how he would possibly know my name. But there was no denying that he knew who I was. He held out his hand and stood right in front of me. I shook it.

“David Westford,” he said. “We met in Omaha a long time ago.”

“I’ll be damned,” I mumbled. I never would have recognized him. He must have weighed a hundred pounds more than he had fifteen years before. “So how you been?” I asked, but I wasn’t really looking at him or interested in what the answer might be. Once I knew who he was, my attention was back to my brother, and everyone’s reaction to him.

“Fine,” David Westford said. “Never better.”

Teddy stood right out in front of us all so he could get a good look at his father. Mom straightened her spine. Rita took a step back, crossing her arms. Dad made the first move, stepping forward, not all the way, but within a couple steps. He put his fists on his hips and lifted his chest a little, taking a deep breath.

“So, what exactly do you expect us to do, bend down and brush the dust off your boots?”

Jack let his hands drop to his sides. He stood like that for a second or two, just standing, not showing anything in his face. He looked off to the side, out into the fields, and took his hat off, rubbing his other
hand through his hair. Then he put his hat back on and faced Dad again.

“I guess I didn’t expect nothing except that I wouldn’t get drawn and quartered, that I might get a chance to sit down with my family and have a meal and maybe give them an opportunity to benefit from my success.”

He turned and held his hand out to the bulldozer. “I come to offer my services to my family. If there’s anything this country needs right now, it’s water, and if there’s anything that’s going to help people get water from where it is to where they need it, it’s irrigation. And if there’s one thing that’s going to make irrigation easier…” And again he turned and gestured to the machine.

The whole speech was so pat, so polished, that I knew he’d been practicing it all the way from Belle Fourche or wherever he came from. That bothered me. He sounded like one of the guys that came through trying to sell things—carpetbaggers. He sounded like the same old Jack.

Dad turned to Mom. “You s’pose we got enough to feed a couple of swindlers?”

David laughed, again not noticing that none of us did. Or maybe it just didn’t matter to him.

Mom shrugged. She looked over at Rita, whose arms were still crossed. Rita looked down at her shoes, and for the first time, Jack turned his eyes toward her. Without thinking, I moved in Rita’s direction, taking two steps to the side until I stood in Jack’s line of vision, directly between him and his wife. He eyed me, his lids lowered, then a slight grin curled his lip, and he turned his head to the side.

“Is this Theodore?” he asked, moving slowly toward his younger son.

Teddy stepped a few steps closer to his father, his hands behind his back, and stood up straight. “I’m not real fond of that name,” he said. “I like Teddy better.”

Jack laughed, and I noticed his teeth were shiny white. He’d had some work done on them, either caps or false teeth. He looked as though he’d done fairly well for himself, which went against most
every scenario I’d imagined during his absence. I had generally pictured him either parked in some dingy small-town bar or riding the rails, working odd jobs. But under the coat of dust, I could see that the dungarees and work shirt he wore were new, with no holes. His boots were also hardly worn, and the band on his hat was leather, and polished. His stomach was flatter than it had been last time we saw him.

“Well, shall we eat?” Mom said, turning quickly toward the house. Dad and David Westford walked close behind, then Rita, who took one last glance at Jack before going inside. Jack’s eyes followed her, measuring. Then he turned to Teddy, who stood unwavering, studying his father up and down.

“So how old are you, Teddy, nine or ten?”

“Eleven,” Teddy answered with conviction.

Jack looked at me, a touch of amazement in his eye. “Has it been ten years?”

I just stared at him.

“It sure has,” Teddy said with no hint of bitterness. I felt a great swelling of pride for this kid, who had as much reason as anyone to hate this man but who seemed ready to forgive everything right on the spot. I thought back to Jack’s return from the army, and to how angry I had been. And I knew that most of the credit went to Teddy’s mother, whom I’d never heard speak badly of Jack in all the time he’d been gone.

“God damn,” Jack said into his shirt. “Ten years. Time sure does pass quicker than you think.” He looked back at Teddy, whose steady gaze seemed to unnerve him. He patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, then turned to me. “So should we go on inside?”

I didn’t respond at first. The range of things I could have said, wanted to say, questions I would ask, covered such a wide swath that it was impossible to focus on any one thing.

“Hey, I didn’t expect a big hug or nothing,” Jack said. “I might do dumb things sometimes, but I’m not that stupid.”

“We’ll see about that,” I muttered.

“Fair enough.” Jack nodded.

We walked inside, where Mom and Rita were getting the food ready while Dad set the table. George stood off to the side, away from the nervous energy, in the corner. David was the only one already seated at the table.

“Where’s Bob and Muriel?” Jack asked.

I answered after a moment in which nobody seemed anxious to. “Bob’s living in his own house near the river with his wife. Muriel lives in Butte. She’s married, too.”

Jack shook his head once, absorbing more new information. “And how you doing, George?” He nodded toward the mirror image of himself crowding in the corner. He moved toward George, a little more sure than he had been outside, feeling more comfortable in his old home, as minutes passed and no one told him to go away.

When he got within a few feet of George, he held out his hand to shake. But instead of shaking, George hit him, a fist right to the jaw, a crack of bone that happened so fast that even those of us who were looking right at them didn’t register the act for a second or two. A collective gasp rose like a chorus, and those of us who weren’t looking turned their heads toward the sound of the punch. Everything stopped. George whirled and marched out of the room, not appearing to fear retaliation so much as having finished what he intended to do.

Jack stood motionless for a full minute, sixty seconds of him standing with his back to us, and us first staring at him then looking at each other, dazed. Would he leave? Would he go after George? Or turn on us all, and start in about not being wanted? But when he turned, he had his head tilted to the side and he let out a big, heavy sigh that puffed his cheeks out. He started nodding.

“Well, I guess I had that coming,” he said, with no trace of humor. He said it sadly, and truly. He held his hand to his jaw, resting it there as if preventing the jaw from falling off his face. And he stepped to the
table, where he sat down next to David, who seemed oblivious to the world around him, acting as if people hitting each other was a daily occurrence.

Jack’s response, or lack of one, set everyone back into motion again. Dad finished setting the table, Mom and Rita placed the food in the center, Teddy and I walked into the kitchen to see if there was anything else that needed doing, while David Westford rubbed his hands together, staring at the food. He cast a couple of quick glances at Jack, and it made me wonder what Jack had told him to expect from this homecoming.

“Where did you get the dozer?” Dad asked Jack as we ate. It was the first anyone had said since we sat down.

Jack tilted his head toward David Westford. “Bought it from David.”

“That’s right. You were selling farm machinery even back when I met you,” I said to David.

His pink face brightened, and he nodded. “Ah, so you do remember me.” He smiled. “That’s right, Blake. That machine out there has made me a very rich man, even with things going the way they have the last few years.”

This seemed pretty obvious, considering most people in America couldn’t afford food to maintain the bulk he carried, much less gain a hundred pounds. His bravado embarrassed everyone, and silence again fell over the room. We focused on our portions of canned venison, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cooked carrots.

“You didn’t drive that thing all the way from Omaha, did you?” Dad finally asked.

David laughed loud and long, much too long, making everyone uncomfortable again. “No, no,” he said. “We shipped the machine by train to Belle Fourche, and drove Jack’s pickup up there to pick it up.”

“That’s your pickup?” Dad asked Jack.

Jack nodded, eyes down.

There’s little doubt in my mind that everyone at that table was going through the same thing I was that night. The questions asked were not what we wanted to know—not even close. Nobody gave a damn about where the bulldozer came from, or how they got it there, or how Jack and David happened to meet, although that was quite a remarkable coincidence.

What we really wanted to know, nobody asked. But the questions were there, sitting on the end of our tongues, waiting to be sprung, to have their shells cracked open so some things could be explained. But we couldn’t do it, and we all knew that. There was no chance of asking Jack where he’d been for the last ten years, or where he’d gotten the money to buy not only a bulldozer but a new pickup, and some new teeth. Even Teddy, whose curiosity was without bounds and who probably wanted to know worse than anybody, knew the rules. He did not ask. Instead, we resorted to small talk, chitchat.

“Weren’t you from St. Louis?” I asked David.

He answered immediately, talking right through his food. “Yes, I am from St. Louis, Blake. Still live there. Just happens that Omaha is part of my territory, as it was when we met.” He shoveled another forkful of venison into his mouth, without pausing to take a breath. He somehow managed to chew and talk very quickly at the same time.

“You seen any good baseball games lately?” he asked me.

“No, no, you couldn’t really call anything we play around here baseball compared to what we saw in Omaha,” I said.

I was just about to change the subject, thinking that David might bring up something that I didn’t want to have to explain, when he asked, “How about that tryout? You had a good deal there.”

I shook my head, not elaborating. “I’ve tried to keep up with that
Paige fellow through the years,” I said quickly. “He’s not still pitching for Mobile, is he?”

“Satchel?” David said. “Oh, no…” as though everyone should know. “No, Satchel hasn’t been in Mobile for a long time. I think he pitches for a team down south now, Charlottesville or something like that. I don’t follow the nigger league like I used to.”

David Westford plowed right on ahead with his patter and his chomping. Jack looked embarrassed by David’s behavior—not to mention his manners—and I concluded that he probably didn’t know David very well. Might have even met him just long enough to make the deal for the bulldozer. I thought I had perhaps managed to maneuver my way around the topic of my tryout, but the delay was only temporary.

“What tryout is he talking about?” Mom asked.

“Yeah.” Dad looked at David, then at me. “What’s he mean?”

David looked up at me, and Jack started chuckling. “Looks like somebody’s got himself a secret,” Jack said. “Somebody besides me.”

“It was nothing, really,” I said. “I just tried out with a guy when I was in Omaha that summer. It was nothing.”