Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (11 page)

Jenae throws her face into her hands as though we are the ones about to be hit.

Two years ago, I saw an accident that involved a couple of fairly slow-moving cars. It was a head-on collision, but the turning car wasn’t even moving five miles an hour and the driver of the oncoming car was able to slam on his brakes so that the impact was abrupt but minimal. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

The glass from the headlights exploded into the air, and for just a second, though I was passing in the curb lane traveling at thirty miles an hour, everything was perfectly still. There was no other traffic, no sound. It was as if time had been momentarily gathered in the space of that collision, like a pair of jacks in a fist, and nothing moved. The air spun slowly with the finest particles of glass blown from the pulverized headlights. The cars bowed into each other, head to head, their rear tires lifted slightly off the ground, the only things spinning.

And then the jacks dropped, and then came the concussion of metal and air bags and the horns and the screeching. But for a single moment it was sublime. It was terrible. It was beautiful. I didn’t want to be in awe, but I was.

The train, however, strikes the minivan between the passenger side front and rear doors and pushes it from the middle of the intersection fifty feet downhill. The train has this rectangular metal front bumper about the size of a filing cabinet, and it rams the van precisely in the middle of the door so that it can’t slide off or around but instead stays mounted right there on the front of that train like its own hood ornament.

They finally stop, the car sloughs off the bumper, and then nothing happens. Because of the glare, I can’t see the conductor or any of the passengers, but I don’t think any of them would have been hurt—it was a nice, gradual stop for them. I imagine some of them must have seen the van, especially the conductor, perched atop five hundred tons of metal and flesh as it approached what was essentially a family packaged in a bento box.

The tattooed guy drops his motorcycle, throws his helmet to the ground, and runs to the scene. Jenae smothers her face in her hands as though it’s on fire. People in the cars around us are getting out, peering over their roofs like prairie dogs, dialing their cell phones. I am frozen. I don’t have a phone with me. I don’t know any emergency techniques other than the Heimlich, and it is clear that more than that is going to be necessary. The motorcycle helmet spins, empty, on the pavement.

Now the driver jumps out of the minivan. She faces the back door and, for an instant, does nothing; she seems to be waiting for her understanding to catch up with her body.

And then I realize that I just can’t hear her. She
is
doing something. She is screaming. She begins to tear at her long hair, jumping up and down, stamping the road as if to shake it back in time. “My babies,” she screams. That’s what she’s saying. “My babies. My babies.”

I steer around the clotted traffic and drive onto campus and stop the car. I pull Jenae from where she has slumped against the dashboard and hold her until we hear the ambulance.

I had no idea how spoiled I was, no idea I still have so much to lose. I had no idea that I could lose that which I didn’t even yet have.

I need to get my shit together, I realize. We aren’t going to get another chance.

JENAE’S DAD, LEE,
and his wife, Diane, have come out to Utah for an agriculture convention. They are busy with meetings and sightseeing, but they make it a point to take us out to dinner and, of course, want to see the house.

Lee is a third-generation Republican River valley farmer in south-central Nebraska. The first time I visited their home, Lee was out by the Quonset with Jenae’s two younger brothers, John and Tyler. They were changing the transmission on an Oldsmobile and each had his own pair of pliers. They seemed painfully inconvenienced to have to put them down in order to crush my little croissant of a hand. Afterward, the brothers said nothing, picked up their pliers, and went back to their work. Before disappearing under the hood, Lee took me in for a few more seconds from behind his large tinted glasses.

“You’re from Wisconsin,” he said. “Good soil from what I gather. Hunting too.”

I looked to Jenae, who was beaming at her father. She was so proud to have me visit and meet her family and see her land that she was blinded to the fact that no one here at home was exactly eager for her to get involved with an East Coast English major who was likely a fairy.

“And cows,” I said. It was a stretch, but I knew I had to stand my ground. I was reasonably certain I could back up my assertion.

I expected some kind of interrogation or hazing ritual featuring a car battery, chain-link fencing, and my face, but instead Lee worked his pliers a couple of times and gestured back toward his boys.

Despite our somewhat chilly first meeting, I have seen nothing but sweetness from Lee. Though he might not have been the husband his first wife wanted him to be, in the years I have come to know him, he has been a guileless, gentle, and almost recklessly generous man who cannot enter a gift shop, truck stop, or co-op without garnering Cornhusker tchotchkes, Remington commemorative knife sets, and his-and-hers Black Hills gold rings for his children, me included.

Before Diane and Lee got married and bought a new double-wide to park permanently at the farm, she was living with her kids in a house that had been built around a trailer. When her father was finished with all but the last wall, he hooked his tractor to the trailer and dragged it out. That must have been something.

“Let’s go see the house!” Lee says when we pick them up at their downtown hotel. They have just returned from a visit to the Bingham Canyon Mine, west of Salt Lake City, which is essentially a huge hole in the shape of an upside-down mountain. They are ready to be impressed again, and more than a little curious to see what so much money can buy. The hundred fifty grand we’ve paid for Stanley’s house could have bought an entire block in the town of Orleans, where they are from, or close to a hundred acres of farmland. The house Jenae grew up in has been appraised recently at thirty-two thousand. Most farmers’ trucks cost more than their homes. As far as most Nebraskans are concerned, the only reason to spend a hundred fifty thousand dollars is a twelve-row combine or a clone of Tom Osborne.

“All right,” Jenae says before she lets them in, “keep in mind that we’re going to be doing a lot of work, okay?”

“Sure, honey,” Diane says. “Remember, we live on a farm, for the love of God.”

“Well,” Jenae says, stepping aside, “this is different. At least you can eat the things that grow on a farm.”

Lee gives Jenae a squeeze. “Come on, sis,” he says. I love that he calls her sis, but I don’t really understand it. “Don’t be silly,” he says. “Nothing could be that bad. We’re just so proud of you two. Your own house!”

We are back outside in under two minutes. The smell is so bad with the day’s heat and the windows shut that they didn’t even go into the bedroom or office. “I’m sure they’re just as—nice,” Lee says, “as the—rest of the place.”

Diane is doubled over, rifling through her purse for cigarettes or anything to burn and inhale. “And I thought mine was a pit,” Diane says. “Jesus, kids. I hope you guys know what you’re doing.”

Lee takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. “That’s some smell,” he says. “Makes the feedlot seem like a flower shop.”

Not long after, Debby, Jenae’s mom, as well as her boyfriend, Ed, and her grandparents come out to help us tidy up. They were all loaded into Debby’s Chrysler, with Ed at the helm and Grandpa George riding shotgun. It’s a big, late-model American car, but with Ed standing only four foot ten, even with lifts in his cowboy boots he has to sit with pillows beneath and behind him in order to reach the pedals. Grandpa George, on the other hand, at over three hundred pounds is so big each one of his limbs is as big as Ed.

“Get me the hell out of here,” Grandma Carol Ann yells as Ed slows to a stop. She is shoehorned behind her husband, holding an orange cooler the size of a small refrigerator on her lap. A young and energetic grandma, she pops out from the rear door like a cheerleader. “That man,” she says, pointing back at Ed, “is a menace. Jenae, do you have any iced tea for your poor old grandma?”

Ed is still parking the car, driving slowly back and forth in the rough vicinity of the curb. In rural Nebraska, you can drive your entire life without ever shifting into reverse, never mind parallel parking.

“Goddamn it, Edward!” George says. “I’ve got to goddamned urinate here.”

“That’s not the half of it,” Grandma Carol Ann says. She drops into a chair on our porch and rocks herself nervously. “It’s the bungee cords.”

Jenae and I look at each other. “Bungee cords?”

“The bungee cords!” Carol Ann resumes. “Driving eighty miles an hour down the interstate, doing just fine as you please, when he sees a bungee cord and jumps on the brake and all of a sudden you’re thrown into the back of your husband’s head. Probably did that a hundred times. I’ll kill him, that’s all. I’ll kill him the next time he so much as lets off the gas for one.”

“You say that now,” Ed says, ambling around the front of the car, immensely proud of his big-city parking job. “But there’ll come a day, by God, when you need one—hit a deer, say, and want to take it home for the meat—and what are you gonna use to lash it to the hood? Grandpa’s belt, maybe, but short of that, you’ll be high and dry.”

“I heard that, Edward.” Grandpa George is preparing to extricate himself from the passenger seat. He’s such a large man it appears that the car has been built around him. “Not very goddamned funny,” he says, “never you mind the fact that I don’t wear a belt with my overalls. Come over here and give me a hand so I can pummel the ever living shit out of you.”

Debby walks right past me, kisses Jenae on the cheek, and goes inside. “I need to lie down,” she says.

They are here to help. It is going to be interesting.

“Matthew,” Ed says from below, shaking my hand Napoleonically hard, “do you have any idea what they charge for bungee cords at Bosselman’s? You’d never believe it, so you might as well go ahead and guess.”

We drive Debby and Carol Ann to the house and fix them up with ripped T-shirts they can use for face masks, and they set about the unenviable task of cleaning the bathroom. Jenae and I are going to spend our first night in the house, so her family can sleep in our apartment. Despite the massive amount of work that lies ahead of us, little of it can be done before the carpet is torn up, and as most surfaces are going to be taken down to bare wood, there isn’t that much for them to do. Nonetheless, after nearly two hours they have exhausted all our cleaning supplies and have to go to the store to re-up, leaving me alone with George and Ed.

We have specific instructions to come up with a project that doesn’t involve exotic dancers or anything else that will get Ed’s angina up or blow out Grandpa’s knee. The women aren’t sure that either of them—never mind me—has any home renovation skills left in them. Ed fancies himself a jack of all trades, based on the premise that if one can install hydraulic hay bale lifts on stake-body pickups, then one can do just about anything. He is also an aspiring masseur, aromatherapist, RV deliveryman, and soon-to-be Internet debt collector.

“Got to stay diversified,” Ed says, and he does, with respect to both work and women. He is an immensely likable man who would do anything you asked of him so long as it doesn’t come with too tight a time frame. He lives with his father, two hours away from Debby in North Platte. They met while country swing dancing, in which he is regionally famous for his ability to whip around women several times his own body weight. He is so popular that the only break he gets from dancing all night is to sneak out to his truck to change his sweat-soaked shirt. In a state where the only way you can get men on the dance floor is to tell them that there are Oklahoma Sooner fans hitting on their women, a guy like Ed is a hot commodity.

Grandpa George clearly thinks that Debby is wasting her time with a man as diminutive as Ed—barely big enough to serve as one of his own meals—but George used to play accordion at the dances back when his body could handle it, so they have an appreciation for similar things. And when you factor in Grandpa’s taste for the “dancers” at the Tower Nite Club up in Holdrege, they make as good a pair as tomato juice and beer—the unofficial state drink. George has been “retired” for years following a suspicious electrical fire that leveled a warehouse he was working on, so while Carol Ann checks bags at the grocery store, he spends his days fooling around online with classic-car chat rooms and softcore amateur porn, but in his heart he is still a workingman. He had, after all, built their house in Oxford, Nebraska. He also jacked it up to add a basement and later replaced the entire roof himself. It wasn’t his fault that the meteorologists failed to predict that one of the worst storms in Furnass County history would strike when his house had the top down. Water flowed from their ceiling fan for days.

Given their collective résumé, I decide to pick a project that can succeed or fail with little consequence.

Our garage has two doors. When Stanley showed me the place, he gestured from the backyard at the free-standing structure. “Garage door works good,” he said. “Don’t know if you can put an opener in it on account of the double header I’ve got in there for swapping out the transmissions me and Dad used to do on the side. The mandoor, on the other hand, is gonna need a little work.”

I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.

“Mandoor?” I said. I thought it might be a neighborhood gay bar. In Boston, I lived around the corner from a place called the Ramrod. Anything was possible.

“I know,” Stanley said. “It’s pretty bad, buried as it is behind that sorry excuse for a rose bush the tenant lady tried to plant there. Guess she didn’t want nobody using that entrance, come up and give her a scare.”

I assumed a thoughtful pose.

Stanley shook his head at my denseness.