Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (57 page)

Dwightman began struggling to express to me all that Mrs. Morgan had said, but what it came down to was this: After a woman loses her husband, she may find herself living somewhere between loneliness and relief at his passing. She can miss his contributions and at the same time be happy to be shut of his male stuff — obtuseness, poor listening, self-gratifying sexual demands
or
sexual incapacities attendant with age and disease. Some of those widows, once free, did not want a second or third marriage to someone else who would only end up dying on them. Between the burden of a man and a no-man’s-land, there should be another choice. I don’t think Dwightman was punning when he said, “Mrs. Morgan made it clear there was a gap to fill.”

To a coyote howl, he called a Shoshone word into the darkness, and there followed a silence, then a yipping of several voices, and he smiled. “They speak Shoshone. Around here anyway.”

He returned to his story. “When Mrs. Morgan finished what she wanted to tell me, she asked, ‘Do you know what I’m saying?’ I was afraid to answer. She said, ‘Speak up, Maxwell,’ and I said I didn’t know, and she reprimanded me. ‘Sure you do. You’ve told me many times you’d do whatever you could to help out in this house, and now I want to call in that pledge.’

“I was scared all to hell. She said, ‘It’s all right,’ and she sort of motioned me toward the sofa. ‘Come over here to the couch and put your hand under my shift and continue your very effective therapy.’

“I just stood there. She said real sweet, ‘Come along now. You’re a professional, and you have a patient.’ She was as cool as could be, but I was shaking so much I thought I might have to leave, but I made it over to her. She pointed to a jar of unguent and closed her eyes, and I — you know — I reached up under her housedress, and I closed my eyes too, and I did as she asked.”

Here Dwightman again fell silent, and I dared not speak until the silence became uncomfortable. I said so softly I’m not sure he heard me, And? “Oh,” he said, “the therapy was successful, and it continued more or less weekly for the next couple of years, even after her eyesight was almost gone. At a completion, I’d pull an afghan over her to leave her to a comfortable nap. I did everything I could to make it professional.

“Then she began to fail. It happened so fast there wasn’t even time for a nursing home. When they put her in the ambulance, the last thing she said to me was ‘Maxwell, you’re the best of men.’ She didn’t make it through to morning.”

He cleared his throat and said he’d like another whiskey, but he’d better not, because there was more to tell and he didn’t want to muddle it. I hadn’t touched mine. The sky in that remote piece of Wyoming was a carbon black letting even the most feeble starlight shine through from far corners of the galaxy.

Dwightman said, “A week later Mrs. Morgan’s lawyer called to tell me she’d left her entire estate to me. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough I could do what I’d wanted for a while. I turned in that goddamn blue coat and went out and bought a pickup and put a camper shell on it, and I took off. I needed to figure out two things — what I was good for and where I could live to be good for something and not be a no-count nobody.”

For six months Dwightman roamed around the West — this town, that one, none of them ideal. When his money was about gone, he became less finicky and settled on a place in Arizona where he found a house trailer for rent to satisfy his second question. The first was more difficult, but he thought he might have the answer.

“I love kids. I wanted to start a school, a day care. Early-education centers, they call them now. One for disadvantaged kids. It would focus on nature education, with several Indians as teachers. We would get the little ones outside and make the natural world a part of their lives. They’d learn the names of flowers and cacti — in fact, I wanted to call the center Kactus Kids, spelled with
K
s shaped like saguaros. They’d learn about spiders and lizards. And in the classroom they’d learn how to use their hands to make things like an Indian drum and how to imitate birdcalls — things Indians would teach them. Then later, as the school developed, they’d learn Spanish — or English, as the case might be. But they’d never be allowed to forget the dirt under their feet. If you asked one of my kids where corn came from, he’d never say, like I heard a little boy one time, ‘Out of a can, you dummy.’ I wanted to reach city kids clueless about nature. I had a million ideas and about zero dollars.”

To make friends, Dwightman joined a small, progressive church group with a weekly meeting led by any member willing to give a devotion or perhaps a talk without any particular religious focus. When it came his turn, he told them about his dream of Kactus Kids. By then, he’d found an empty lot for sale on the edge of the city, and he showed some snapshots of it: a weedy, rocky, ugly place but with open access to the desert behind. After the meeting, a woman came up to invite him for coffee the next morning.

“We talked about our histories. Mine was just no-count stuff, but hers was pretty colorful until she lost her husband, and her life sort of turned drab. She was especially interested in how I’d come to think up the center. She knew a Zuni man who would be perfect to teach elementary weaving, including to the boys too. You know, Zuni men do the weaving. Or they used to, anyway.”

Several days later Dwightman received in the mail papers indicating she’d put down in his name a payment on the lot. There was a note from her saying now he had something tangible to lend credibility to his fund-raising. “I was fired up and went out and after a couple of months of soliciting, I made the first payment against the principal. But then things got tougher. The easy contributions were gone.

“The lady and I became friends. I helped her with chores, and she would bring me groceries. She said if I had to put on a blue coat again I’d never get the center built, so she’d make sure I had time to work on it. The next year, she had enough confidence in my plan to pay off the mortgage, not that it was all that much. And she paid for some dental work for me too.”

That December she asked Dwightman to accompany her to a Christmas party. He liked the request because he had come to feel more comfortable with women his senior, and he enjoyed hearing about their lives. Most of them had stories. And for them, here was a handyman who could rewire a lamp or trim toenails or get a rattlesnake out of a garage.

He said, “I guess it was inevitable, but she and I got involved in a way something like with Mrs. Morgan. And like Mrs. Morgan, she was as generous as she could afford to be. She even paid a local builder to draw up blueprints for the center so I’d have another means to attract contributions — small as they were. On my birthday she said she might pay to start the building, but she thought, despite our age difference, maybe we should be married. I asked for a little time to think about it. I had nothing but bad memories of marriage, and I told her so. She said to take my time, she’d leave the offer open. So things went on. Then at dinner one night she told me she’d had a bad diagnosis and a worse prognosis. Now, marriage wouldn’t be fair to me.”

Dwightman paused again, collected himself. “Her treatments really flattened her, and the damn things didn’t do one goddamn thing to help. She was just very sick from them. Then I lost her.”

Putting everything on hold in Arizona, he went off in his pickup again, but the second time, his question had sharp focus: how could he make Kactus Kids a reality? “I knew the answer all along,” he said. “I knew about oiling hinges to keep doors swinging open, but I didn’t really like the answer. I mean, would you?”

I said I didn’t think I knew what the answer was, and he said, “I could offer something people wanted, and Arizona has quite a few childless widows with estates they’ll never use up. So why let bureaucrats and politicians get it? It’s called escheatment, but it ought to be cheatment. And if it’s not the bureaucrats, then it’s some evangelist who’s going to take the money and give not one damn thing in return except more requests for contributions, and that money will go to buy them a Cadillac. That dough’s not going to help a little kid whose mom is a crackhead or whose dad is beating the family up.”

He looked directly at me, I think to ascertain my response. “Sure — by then I knew the answer, and I knew without doing what I could do so well, the center wasn’t ever going to get built.”

Somewhere in California, Dwightman wheeled his truck around and returned to his trailer in Arizona and laid out his criteria as if they were part of a business plan: each widow would have to have some means but no children or at least no close contact with her children. “Everybody knows,” he said, “a widow’s kids watch her money like it’s theirs.” He would avoid anyone who no longer had concern for problems of this world, and there would be no spinsters because they had too little experience with men; romantic involvement would be verboten because each woman would have been told of his other “house calls.” He had learned both his “Korean dysfunction” and the resulting mastery at physical therapy were assets giving him the equivalent to professional qualifications, and a woman was safe with him, and transmission of disease was impossible.

Dwightman had come to understand how loneliness can be deadly and how he could treat it. He developed a short list of clientele. He said, again intending no pun, “I never let there be more widows than I could handle. I knew their birthdays, favorite flowers, whether they liked to dance or play cards.” Dwightman could sing a heart-tugging tenor rendition of “Danny Boy,” but above all he knew what could make a woman smile. “For certain widows,” he said, “I don’t mind telling you, I was a dream come true.”

He stared into the Wyoming night, and then, without a word, he pulled himself up slowly from his chair and walked off. I sat waiting. Then I figured,
That’s that,
and got up to leave, when I saw him coming back. Even before he sat down again, he said, “One time a client referred to me as her ‘escort,’ and I told her that an escort uses the money for himself — or herself — but mine was going for a school for kids who needed a leg up. Oh, sure, I had to take some of the money to support myself, but living in a trailer and driving a ten-year-old pickup pretty well showed I wasn’t spending much on me.

“My hope, of course, was always for significant contributions for the school — money that went beyond any rendered services. And that happened sometimes. I’d show the ladies the architectural sketch and take them out to the site, but some of them only cared about self-gratification, and if I saw that, I’d move on. And if I heard somebody complain about ‘these damn kids today,’ I’d close the account, so to speak. Understand, not every situation was what you might call intimately personalized.

“I believed there would come along somebody to step up big and build the school and endow it and let me put her name on it, and then I could give all my time to the real work. I had a couple of teachers lined up. I wrote up subject outlines. You should see the one I called ‘Thinking Like a Hopi.’ Everything in it was about balance, and nobody can teach that better than a Hopi, and I had the teacher for it too.”

One September Dwightman met a woman, notably attractive and somewhat younger than usual but with the means to take the plan all the way. They got on well, oddly well because she was agreeable to everything, even to the point of immediately paying for a concrete understructure. The cement had hardly dried when she told him if her deceased husband’s name was on the building and hers on the mortgage, she might underwrite the cost of the entire school.

At that point, Dwightman stopped once more. He motioned toward the sound of owl hoots, and he said, “Beautiful, but I don’t think they speak Shoshone. Magpies do, though. I’ve heard them dress me down in Shoshone — from a safe distance.”

And then he continued. “If the land title wasn’t in my name, then I’d just be a blue coat employee again, so I had to question the offer. I mean, it looked like a little concrete got poured to hook me. Maybe I made the mistake of being too direct about my hesitation, because she got mad as hell. I’d never seen her like that. She walked out, accused me of manipulating
her,
and the next thing I know, she’s threatening me with a lawsuit. Accusing me of being a grifter.”

It was the first time I saw Dwightman show bitterness, and he had to take a moment to settle himself down. “Hell,” he said, “even if I’d had the money to match her high-priced lawyer, my defense would be full of details no judge would accept. Who would understand my special line of work?” Here he repeated part of his story before finding his way back. “She sued me for the cost of the concrete, and I ended up having to hand over the lot. Six years of work — my whole dream — gone because I’d miscalculated one person’s character.

“A month later I found out it had been a scheme all along, ever since plans for a new road that would go in down the hill got announced and suddenly gave that property real value. She was a front for a real-estate bunch. If only — 
if only
I could have held on just a little longer, then
I
could have sold the land and somewhere else built the finest kids’ center in the Southwest. If you go past my old lot sometime, you won’t see any school. What you’ll see is a big condo and a bunch of fat-cat snowbirds living there for a few weeks every winter. Some of them are widows, and I’ll tell you, I’ve had ideas about starting again, but I’m too old. But I’ll tell you this too — that woman slammed a door with oiled hinges the hell in my face. She broke my dream, and I failed my dad. I mean, what’s the goddamn truth? I’ve never not been nothing but a no-count nobody, and now it’s too late.”

He stopped. The coyotes were really at it, and we listened. Then, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear him over the yipping, he said, “There for a while, don’t you see, there for a while I came damn close to doing something.”

Dwightman lifted his glass toward the sky and said, “Beware deceptive bastards out there,” and he drained his whiskey. “Knees getting stiff,” he said. “Time to walk,” and walk off stiffly he did.