King of the Mild Frontier (3 page)

But not for May Morris. I'm fifty-five as I write this, and I still believe my mother and her brother were products of divine conception, not because their behavior was in any way elevated, but because there is simply no way, even
today, that my imagination will wrap around the vision of my grandmother having sex. May Morris was one chilly lady.

So it makes sense that, though my grandfather would
never
stray, he might be quite a flirt with a vivid imagination. He took that imagination with all its flirtatiousness with him onto the island that day to wait on this stunning young woman in her brand-new Buick with the Ada County license plates.

It turns out she didn't have money for gas to put in her brand-new Buick. Either she had lost her purse or it had been stolen, but she was willing to give my grandfather her doorknob-sized engagement ring to hold if he would fill her tank and loan her twenty dollars to get home, where she would promptly put a check in the mail. He was then to send her the ring, but be sure to insure it for at least a thousand dollars, because her fiance loved her dearly and this was a truly classy piece of jewelry. She then looked sadly and longingly at the ring and started to remove it from her finger. But sadly and longingly were just the ticket with my granddad, and he told her to leave that little jewel right where it was; he could tell by the look in her supple breasts—er, eyes—that she was honest as the day was long. He filled her tank, put an extra five gallons in a can that he placed in her trunk, and pressed the twenty plus another five
in her soft, manicured hand; he gave her a stamped envelope with
Morris and Crutcher, Mobil Gas, Cascade, Idaho,
on it, and sent her on her way.

Back in the front office, my dad listened to his story, shook his head, smiled from ear to ear, and asked Glen why he didn't just take that sweet little thing over to Cascade Auto and buy her a brand-new Dodge. “That's twenty-five bucks and the price of a tank of gas you'll never see again,” he said.

“You're a good man, Crutch, but obviously not much of a judge of character. That money will be in my pocket by the first of the week.”

“Glen, that's the oldest trick in the book.”

“I'm
the oldest trick in the book,” Glen said. “Wait and see.”

“Wanna make it a little more interesting?” my dad asked.

“I'm down about thirty-three now,” Glen said. “That's about as interesting as I can stand.”

My dad reached into his pocket and took out a five, slapping it down on the counter. “There's five more says you don't get a penny.”

My granddad said, “You're on.”

I said to my dad, “I think Glen might win. That lady was really pretty.”

“I know she was,” Crutch said. “I know she was.”

By the first of the week my granddad was doubting if
he'd put a full three-cent stamp on the envelope, and by Wednesday he was cursing the United States Postal Service for making a perfectly decent and beautiful citizen of the U.S. look like a common criminal. My dad gave him until Friday, and on noon of that day, Glen limped across the street on his metal hip to retrieve the mail from our post office box. I'd gone to work with my dad every day that week, just to be there when the money showed up, but the slowness of Glen's stride and the pained look on his face as he limped back across the street said his Marilyn Monroe look-alike had done taken him to the cleaners.

My granddad was resilient, though, and by the middle of the afternoon he was comfortable with the idea that he'd been hoodwinked and was busy concocting a story to tell my grandmother about where thirty-seven dollars might have mysteriously gone.

My dad shook his head again and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, a gesture I would witness each and every time he caught me in a bonehead move until the day he died. “What were you thinking, Glen? I just can't figure out why you'd fall for that.”

My granddad smiled sheepishly, then lit up and said, “I like cookies.”

“WANNA DO SOMETHING NEAT?”
are four words that strike terror in my heart to this day. My answer was always yes when the question came from my brother. Then he'd tell me what the neat thing was, and it would always seem not so neat until he explained how what
seemed
like something that could really get you in trouble was, in fact, neat. Then I'd get in trouble.

I'm around six years old and I'm playing cowboys outside with my friend Ron Boyd and some other kids from the neighborhood. I have to pee so bad I'm about to turn into a hurled water balloon, but Ron's older brother, Joe, is not
around and we younger kids have sworn that no one will tell him we're playing Roy Rogers, lest we pay dearly, and for the last half hour or so, I've been Roy. If I go inside to pee, I stand to lose my exalted spot atop the yellow broomstick that is Roy's mighty palomino, Trigger, and I'm working my sphincter muscles like a body builder, prolonging those last precious minutes. Finally agony wins out and I drop my cap pistol to get a better grip on my penis and streak for my house. John, sitting in a chair reading a book, observes the obvious as I burst through the door and says, “Wanna do something neat?”

“Yeah, but just a sec. I gotta go to the bathroom.”

“That's the neat thing,” he says. “Go there.” He points to the four-by-five heat-register grate in the middle of the living-room floor.

“Huh-
uh
,” I say. “You'll tell.”

“Promise I won't,” he says. “Wait till you see what happens. It's really neat.”

By now I have to go so bad I'm dizzy, and only my death grip is stopping me from peeing into the wall like a strip miner.

“Just take down your pants and pee down the grate,” he says. “I promise I won't tell. I'd do it myself, but I don't have to go.”

“Have you ever done it before?”

“Lots of times,” he says. “And see? I never got in trouble for it.”

“No, sir…”

“You'll be sorry if you don't. It's really neat.”

“Okay, but you
promise
you won't tell.”

He crosses his black heart.

In the same nanosecond my pee hits that hot furnace, the yellow steam rolls up around me like I'm Mandrake the Magician in the middle of a disappearing act, which I'm not but
really
wish I was. I know instantly from the
sssssssssss
and the horrific stench that I better not be making plans to play Roy Rogers again soon. I best be rehearsing my role as a jailbird, because it is going to be a
long
time before I leave my room.

This is a job for bawlbaby. My eyes squint and my lips roll back over my buckteeth and not one tear comes out because every drop of water in me is shooting out like I'm trying to arc it across the Grand Canyon.

My brother calmly closes all the windows.

When the last drop sizzles off the top of the hot oil furnace, I stand, gazing dazed through the yellow mist. “You said you wouldn't tell.”

“I won't,” he says, “but what are you going to tell Jewell and Crutch when they come home and smell this?”

“You better open those windows.”

“And let the whole neighborhood smell it? Then you'd
really
be in trouble.”

John could always get me to help him pound those last few nails into my coffin for him. He not only got me, he got
me
to get me. I'm running around closing the rest of the windows for him so the neighbors won't form a mob to run my parents out of town for having me as a kid.

True to what I now know my brother already knew, he didn't
have
to tell on me. When Jewell walks through the door carrying my baby sister, the aroma fills Candy's tiny nostrils and sets her off like a siren. Besides, if you're from
Mars,
there's no mistaking that smell. The good news is that Jewell is so mad she doesn't know exactly how she wants to kill me, so I get a short reprieve “until your father gets home.”

I can truthfully say I don't ever remember my father hitting me, but somewhere I got the idea he could hit really hard, and I always put that idea together with this particular incident. So if my dad ever warmed my butt, it was in response to my doing something neat onto the oil-furnace fire through the living-room grate. But make no mistake about it: Whether or not my father hit me, it didn't change my behavior one bit. The claustrophobic horror of those first few seconds, and the telling and retelling of the tale, are far more natural consequence than I need to never again pee
down the heater. It is good that May and Glen live just across the street, because our house is uninhabitable for at least four days and we have to wait two days after
that
for the curtains to get back from the dry cleaners. But I don't go down totally alone. It is widely believed I am telling the truth when I say John told me to do it (“I was just teasing. Geez, I didn't think he'd really
do
it”) but his is a misdemeanor and mine a felony that spawns another of those unanswerable questions I will hear throughout my elementary-school years: “If your brother told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

Of course I would, if he made it seem neat.

 

There are plenty of wanna-do-something-neat? stories, each more embarrassing than the last, but my brother's real coup had to be the time he shot me in the head with a BB gun and didn't spend one second behind bars for it.

My father would never let any of us kids have a BB gun. “I'll let you have a twenty-two when it's time,” he'd say, “but a BB gun is a toy and that makes it dangerous.” We would be allowed to own and shoot a real weapon when we were of age for a hunting license and when he was convinced he had taught us the gravity of holding in our hands a weapon that can kill. So how badly do you think each of us longed for a
BB gun? Of course John knew how to get his hands on one.

We had moved into the big house near the beginning of my second-grade year and found new friends in the Young brothers, Eddie and Richie. Their dad, along with his brother, owned Cascade Auto, the place my dad thought my granddad might as well have gone to buy his pretty blond felon a new car. Eddie and Richie Young could unerringly identify any car made within the last fifteen years that drove down Main Street; and they could have shot the windows out of any one of them because they had a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

One of many grievous errors I could never convince my parents they were making was that of appointing my brother baby-sitter whenever they left home. Cascade, as I've said, is a small town, and in those days so safe no one even locked the doors to their houses or cars. Nine- and ten-year-olds were routinely left to baby-sit younger siblings, and I am lucky to have lived long enough to say it was a bad idea, at least in the case of John Morris Crutcher. They must have known it wasn't a great idea because they left my sister, Candy, with our grandmother. “You don't know what he's like,” I'd tell my parents when they were getting in the car.

“Oh, it can't be that bad, Chris,” my mother would say. “You always overdo it.”

Oh, yeah?

I'm seven and John is two years and nine months older. No sooner than the dust clears our driveway, he asks, “Wanna do something neat?”

“What?”

“This is something
really
neat.”

The yellow steam rolling out of the heat register, forever staining my T-shirt and my reputation, is little more than a distant memory.

“Tell me what it
is
.”

“Wait here.”

He returns, Eddie Young in tow, packing Eddie's brand-new BB gun.

I've got him now. “You're gonna get in trouble. We're not supposed to have those.”

“We're
not
having it. It's Eddie's.”

“Yeah, but we're not supposed to even have it around.”

“Shut up. Now do you want to do something neat?”

I eye the gun. So forbidden.
So
neat. “I guess. What?”

“You go down and hide behind the tree, then whenever you're ready, run as fast as you can along the ditch and we'll shoot at you.”

Our front lawn sprawls over a gently sloping hill clear down to Main Street, the only paved street in town and also
Highway 15, the lone state highway connecting southern and northern Idaho. Thick pine trees stand on the north and south ends of the lawn and a shallow gravel ditch runs its length, next to the highway.

“No, sir. I'm not doing that. What if you hit me in the head?”

He points to the sky. “Look, dummy, it's almost dark. We'll barely be able to see you, much less hit you in the head. It's like the shooting gallery at Zim's. Come on, it'll be neat.”

The image of the shooting gallery does it. About forty miles north of Cascade, six miles outside an even smaller town called New Meadows, is Zim's Plunge, a swimming pool fed by natural hot springs. It is open year round, even on the coldest days of a snowy winter, and going there is a truly special treat. No one leaves Zim's without spending a few dimes in its shooting gallery, which consists of a primitive electronic rifle holstered about twenty feet from a small plastic bear behind glass on runners. The bear has an electronic target on both sides and on his stomach, and if the light from the gun hits that target, the bear rises to its hind legs and roars, turns a one-eighty, and heads the other way. Once you get him on his hind legs, you can keep him there by firing into the target on his stomach. He roars and kind of jerks one way and then the other until you miss. No matter
how many times you hit him, nothing happens more than a roar and a reversal of direction. He does not drop to the ground like a rock the way I do when the first BB my brother fires hits me square in the temple. Porch lights switch on in all three houses on adjacent blocks as I lie on the ground holding my head, screaming what I know are probably the last sounds I will make. Eddie Young snatches his BB gun and runs for home as my brother races down the hill to my side.

“What's going on over there?” a neighbor hollers. “Chris Crutcher, is that you making all that noise?”

“It's okay!” my brother yells back. “He just fell down. I'll take him in the house.”

I scream louder, my temple pulsating. John takes my hand away from my head and feels the spot where the BB hit. There is a small bump. I scream louder. “Shut up!” he says. “I'll get you in the house.” The pain isn't all that bad, really. The
thud
of the BB scared me more than it hurt me, but I have him on the ropes, because he has shot me in the head with a BB gun we weren't supposed to have and he is in big trouble now and I can even imagine my parents will from now on make
me
the baby-sitter, should I pull through. I scream even louder.

“You better shut up,” he warns. “The BB is in your head and if you keep screaming, it will work its way to your brain.”

I suck back my next scream like a black hole.

“Fastest way to get anything to go to your brain,” he says, “is loud noise.” He picks me up and helps me up the hill.

“Maybe so,” I tell him, “but you're really in trouble now. You're gonna get it. I'm tellin'.”

“You can if you want,” John says, “but if Jewell and Crutch ever find out you have a BB in your head, you're
really
in trouble, way more than me.”

“No, sir…”

John shrugs. “Don't believe me.”

“How am
I
in trouble?”

“They'll want to get it out,” he says. “If you just leave it alone it will come out by itself, but you know grown-ups. You'll have to go to the doctor. He'll put you to sleep and cut it out with a knife. A lot of guys don't make it.”

Man, this is
no
fair. “Don't worry,” he says. “I won't tell.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, well, you know, if you don't make me.”

“I won't make you.…How would I make you?”

“You know, like being a jerk, or not doin' me favors.”

I promise I won't be a jerk and I'll do all the favors he wants if he will please, oh, please not tell Jewell and Crutch I have a BB in my head, so they won't take me to the doctor to have my head knifed open.

My brother extorted late-night glasses of water, extra desserts, and cover-ups until I was nearly in junior high school, all because I had a BB in my head. Instead of a brain. In fact, I didn't have either.

I didn't have the heart to gun down my four-year-old sister in that same ruthless fashion, but a few months later I did talk her into
swallowing
a BB, then coerced favors from her with an altered version of what happens when a BB works its way from your stomach to your heart. My ploy worked until just after breakfast of the next day when Candy, famous for rifling through her stools looking for corn, found the BB.

I told that story to my parents sometime in my late thirties, at another of those Christmas get-togethers, and John, by then a respected Seattle accountant, listened carefully, even smiled in places, and denied it like the older brother he is. He said, “He's a fiction writer, for crying out loud.”

Both my parents are gone now; they died without knowing for certain.