The Summer Son (7 page)

“Hi,” Brenda said, to no reply from either of us.

“Boys, say hello to the woman who might become your new mother,” Dad said.

I wanted to throw up.

Brenda giggled.

“Are you out of your mind?” Jerry said. “What the fuck did you do all night?”

Dad grinned at my brother. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Brenda giggled again.

“Oh man, this is so fucked up,” Jerry said.

“Brenda, go on to the bedroom,” Dad said, pushing his new friend toward the hallway and giving her a swat on the ass for good measure. She stepped through the door and closed it.

“No, no, no, no,” Jerry said.

Dad cut him off.

“Boys, your new mother and I are going to go to sleep now. Let’s keep it down out here, OK?”

As Dad bobbed toward the bedroom, Jerry grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “There’s no way in hell you’re…”

Lightning quick, as if his drunkenness were a mirage, Dad spun Jerry around, twisting his arm behind his back. Grabbing Jerry by the collar, Dad smashed my brother’s face against the refrigerator door.

“No way in hell I’m gonna do what? What have you got, tough guy? You’ve got nothing. Fuck you, Jerry. Fuck you if you don’t like it.”

He pushed Jerry to the floor, and then he turned and walked through the bedroom door.

I cried. Jerry sat on the floor, his nose bloodied.

A couple of minutes later, the telltale sounds started on the other side of the door. I had never heard sex, never seen sex, never really contemplated sex, but I knew what it was the moment the sound hit my ears. I cried louder, uncontrollably. For me. For Jerry. For Dad, who didn’t deserve my tears. For Marie, who surely did, no matter her faults.

Dad yelled at me through the door.

“Stop that goddamn crying, Mitch.”

Jerry pulled himself off the floor and sat down beside me. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders, and I sank my head into his chest, muffling the cries that wouldn’t stop, no matter how much Dad berated me.

“It’s going to be all right,” he whispered, and he stroked my head. “Shhhhh. Shhhhh. It’s going to be OK.”

M
ORNING CAME AGAIN
, and once more I awoke before Dad. When I was a child, Dad’s anxiousness about work stirred him before the sun arrived, and he had to jab at me to get me moving. Now, no longer burdened by the rigors of a job, he slept soundly, while I lay a room away, cracking open my worries.

I thought about the call I would have to make to change my ticket to something open-ended. My flight home, as it stood, was twenty-four hours away, and I suspected that I needed longer than that to settle things. I wondered, too, what Cindy would think of that. Was she ready for me to come home? Or was she happy to be rid of me?

The old man snoozed. I dressed and left the house.

I drove along Lewis Avenue toward downtown Billings, still stretching from its slumber. I found the way out to the south and crossed Interstate 90, to the patch of ground that I had to visit. It was awfully early to be parking a car in front of a stranger’s house, so I continued past our old place and drove to Coulson Park, along the Yellowstone River. A good, brisk walk would get me back to what I wanted to see, and it would do me some good.

I delighted at the beautiful fall day. I saw one hardy jogger out for a morning run, but aside from him, the park was mine. As I stared at the water and Sacrifice Cliff behind it, I could pretend that Billings and its hundred thousand residents—all of them behind me from that vantage point—scarcely existed. A half turn, however, would bring it all into view. The downtown buildings, the refinery, the highway and the city streets, the rimrock that cradles the city.

I recalled how the town had always plucked at my senses. My earliest memories of the place rested not in the visual but in the olfactory. The refineries, the sugar beet factory, the meatpacking plant, now gone—these were things that could push a stench across the city, a foulness that couldn’t be moderated by those things that appealed to other senses. In the later years of detachment from Dad, with that wall of anger and grudges standing between us, the thought of Billings would braid my guts. I’d left important things undone here for a long time. My presence demanded that I confront them, if I dared.

Sacrifice Cliff inspired another thought, one drawn by my voracious youthful reading. In 1837, sixteen Crow Indian riders climbed atop their terrified, blinded horses and rode off the cliff to their deaths. To them, it was the price of appeasing the gods and stanching the smallpox that shredded their people. Brought to this land by the white man, the disease killed the Crow in multitudes.

It had always struck me as a heartbreaking story, but on this day, it conveyed needed perspective. The disease that ran through the Quillen family, not near as fatal as smallpox but every bit as insidious, didn’t compel me to climb Sacrifice Cliff and launch myself to my death. I just needed to turn around and face what was behind me.

Ten minutes of brisk walking carried me to Charlene Street and the house that I had been born in. Though it sat just sixty yards or so from the interstate, the house enjoyed seclusion, thanks to the four large cottonwoods that buffered it from the street. I looked the house over as I approached, trying to reconcile the haziness of memory with what I saw. When we lived there, the place was the drab white seen in many of the houses of the time. A subsequent owner had splashed it with a pleasing sea foam tint.

I walked past the house a few hundred feet, away not wanting to be the odd guy standing in the street and staring into a home early in the morning. Once I had covered a comfortable distance, I turned around for another pass.

As I approached again, I saw a man in the driveway stooping for the morning paper. He spotted me and gave a wave.

“Morning.”

I stopped. “Good morning.”

I lingered, fighting with myself over whether to say anything else, and then I plunged ahead.

“I was born in that house.”

“Really?”

“Yep. June 4, 1968.”

“How long did you live here?”

“Till about ’71. My dad was here until around ’77, so I came back a few times.”

“We bought the place in ’94.”

“Looks real good. I like the color.”

“Thanks.”

I gave the man a wave.

“Well, have a good day.”

I was five steps away when he spoke again.

“Do you want to come in and see the place?”

Memory is strange. It enlarges places and spaces. Until that morning, standing in my old bedroom for the first time in more than thirty years, I had always pictured it as a much larger room. In reality, it was only about eight by eight, big enough for a bed and a dresser. The owners, Don Newcombe and his wife, Angela, had converted it to storage.

The rest of the place, too, bore little resemblance to my faint recollections. The shag carpet popular in the sixties and seventies was long gone, replaced by Spanish floor tiles (“Did that ourselves,” Don said). The living room walls, once a faux-brick vinyl that I remember Dad putting up one day in ’75, were stripped back to their original form and coated in soft pastels. Whatever imprint the Quillens had made here had long since been overtaken by others’ concepts of home. My pilgrimage to stare at an assemblage of drywall, nails, and lumber suddenly seemed silly. This place held no answers for me, no truths to satisfy my questions.

“Do you still live here in Billings?” Don asked as we said our good-byes.

“Oh no. California. I’m just here for a visit with my dad.”

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” he said. “Come back any time.”

It was a nice but unnecessary offer. I liked the Newcombes, but their house was one of thousands in Billings. Nothing more. I knew that now.

I walked to the car, shaking my head at my naïveté.

I found Dad in his recliner, munching on a bowl of cold cereal.

“Where you been?”

“I went for a drive down by the old house.”

“Which old house?”

“Our old house.”

“That one over by the river?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t seen that place in years,” he said.

“I was there a few months ago, too.”

Dad seemed startled, and that startled me.

“Why?”

“I think about stuff.”

“That’s one of your problems, Mitch. You think too much. You always have.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

As if I could. As if I would.

“No, Dad, you said it, so come on with it. I think too much. I always have. What does that even mean?”

Dad stood up from the couch and walked into the kitchen to rinse out his bowl.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” he said.

Typical. He had made a cottage industry out of taking vague shots at me, only to retreat to “I don’t want to talk about it” or “I didn’t mean anything” when he was challenged. I wasn’t going to let this pass.

“Listen, old man, there are a lot of things we’re going to talk about before I go home, and this is probably the easiest of them. So let’s have it.”

Dad bristled, and then he leveled his guns.

“You want everything to have significance, to have some big meaning, and some things just don’t,” he said. “Some things just happen. I figure you’d have learned this by now, but you’re just the same as always, with your head in the goddamned clouds.”

“Things just happen?” I mocked him. “Do you think Mom leaving just happened? That Jerry just happened? That all those years you didn’t call me and I didn’t see you just happened? You don’t think there’s some reason for all of that?”

“I think you think I’m the reason.”

I laughed right in his face.

“Oh God, man. I know you’re the reason.”

“You don’t know shit,” he said, flinging his spoon into the sink.

S
ILENCE DESCENDED ON US AGAIN.
Dad showered and dressed, then left wordlessly, climbing into his pickup and driving away.

I turned my attention to the calls I needed to make.

The first went quickly, and expensively. I ate the return ticket and would have to buy a full-fare one-way ticket when I was ready to leave. (Ready to leave? I was ready when I arrived, I fumed silently.)

The second, to John Wallen, proved more wrenching.

“If you won’t be back tomorrow, when will you?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Huh.”

I waited.

“I can’t close these deals without you.”

“I know.”

“But you’re not coming.”

“No. Not tomorrow.”

“Whatever. Do what you have to do.”

He hung up.

Finally, I called Cindy.

“I don’t know where we are,” I said to her first and inevitable question. “What are we supposed to be talking about? I come here, and all I can think about is what’s happening back there and what happened thirty years ago with him. But I know the point of it is what’s happening now with Dad. How do you get a foothold on something like this?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know the past has everything to do with why you and he are where you are. I don’t think you can talk about now without talking about then.”

“We can’t talk about then without pissing him off,” I said.

I told her about our morning fight. We had glanced off the topics that mattered, like a rock across a pond. And even that had built a taller fence along our border. As I relayed this to Cindy, I realized that it all sounded familiar. That’s exactly what she and I had been doing for months, bouncing from grievance to grievance and settling nothing.

“Where is he now?” she asked.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything. He just left.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I guess I’m going to wait for him. Then I’m going to try to talk to him again, this time without pissing him off.”

“I like that plan.”

So did I, aside from the fact that I had not the first clue how to manage it.

I fell asleep in Dad’s recliner, and the images that came to me were familiar. I saw Dad as a young man, just coming off the USS
Hornet
from his Navy hitch in Bremerton, Washington. I saw my mother, young, blonde, and beautiful, a carefree nineteen-year-old, embracing the hippie lifestyle nearly a decade before the term would be in the common vernacular. A coincidental meeting had sown an unlikely union.

Mom had gone with her University of Washington roommate, who was from Bremerton, to that town for the weekend. That same weekend, Dad’s ship put in and he walked away from the service. Boy met girl in a waterfront bar.

Figuring out the first, animal attraction was no great trick. Dad was young, vital, and good-looking. Mom was younger still and so beautiful. The part I’ll perhaps never understand is how someone like my mother—vivacious and bright, well on her way to a college degree—could find someone like my father appealing intellectually or emotionally. She never bothered to explain it to me, and I never asked, so I’ll just have to accept that she saw something in him. For a few weeks, Dad bummed around Puget Sound, spending as much time with Mom as her classes would allow. She took him to Olympia to meet her parents, and by all accounts that was a debacle. Grandpa, a county judge, didn’t care for Dad’s lack of education or his bawdy, off-the-sea persona. Grandma simply thought that her daughter, her only child, could do better.

Neither judgment mattered a few days later, when Dad told Mom that he was heading back to Montana to join a drilling crew. Mom dropped out and went with him, her parents’ objections be damned.

I wished I knew those people as they were then—their motivations, their dreams, their innermost thoughts. My grandparents are dead, and they rarely talked about Mom and Dad to me. Mom is gone too, and she had little to say when the conversation drifted to her life with Dad. She would tell me to look forward, not back, and such counsel frustrated me. Everything I wanted to know was behind me. I could more easily cut out my own heart than ignore it and move on.

I knew only the traces of Mom and Dad’s life together: meeting, running away together, marrying, having Jerry, having me, splitting up when I was three years old. For all practical purposes, an accounting of our lives as a nuclear family was lost. So many people took the story with them, and Dad wasn’t giving it up.

My dreams of Mom and Dad in their youth—images that I conjured from imagination and the few mementos I had of them from that era—always carried a darkness, a menacing presence that I could not bring into focus or stop from overtaking them.

My eyes fluttered open, and I caught my breath.

The house remained empty, except for me and my fleeting grasp on what had passed through my head.

When Dad returned, I tried to put the fight behind us.

“Hey, Pop.”

“Sport.”

“Where have you been?”

“Cemetery. I bring her flowers on Wednesdays.”

I smiled. I didn’t have words for that. I found his tenderness toward Helen endearing and jarring. It challenged many of my assumptions about the man, and although I empathized with his loss, I couldn’t help but think that we—that I—had been denied such devotion.

“I wish I could have gone with you.”

“I like to see her alone.”

“I understand.”

He plopped heavily into the couch.

“Do you need anything, Pop? Something to eat or drink?”

“No. Just let me sit awhile.”

We watched television for about an hour, and Dad chuckled gently at the situation comedies he preferred. Then he surprised me.

“Let’s dig up some flowerbeds.”

“Now?”

“As good a time as any.”

Outside, I found that Dad didn’t have a cooperative effort in mind. He aimed to use my labor to reclaim flowerbeds lost to the year he spent caring for his wife. He put a shovel in my hand and pointed me to the sorry boxes that fronted the double-wide.

“What did you have in here?” I said, looking at the forlorn husks of former plant life.

“Bellflowers. I’m going to put in some columbines in the spring.”

Under Dad’s watch, I dug out the clumps of dead flowers, which went easily enough. Then I got on my hands and knees to pull up the insurgent weeds, and that was much more difficult. I used muscles that had lain dormant during my office-space years, and they carped at the rude awakening. In the heat of the day, the sweat rolled off my neck, down my back, and into my drawers.

Once, I stood, put my hands on my hips, and swiveled my back, trying to loosen up.

“It’s harder than I thought it’d be,” I said.

“This is nothing.”

“Says the guy sitting on the porch steps.”

Dad lit off the stairs, grabbed the shovel from my hands, and started in on the box on the other side, the one I hadn’t gotten to yet. He dug viciously and expertly into the sod, sending displaced plants into the gravel of the driveway. What I had taken twenty minutes to do, Dad accomplished with a few turns of the shovel.

“Get the picture?” he said, putting the shovel back into my hands. “I’m not staying out of it because I can’t do it, Office Boy. I’m giving you a chance to work, which will do you some good. You haven’t worked hard a day in your life.”

I bit my lip. I didn’t want another go-round. I went back to work.

Once the flowerbeds were clear of vegetation, Dad handed me a key to the shed behind the double-wide, so I could retrieve the hand tiller.

“You do one and I’ll do one,” he said, pointing at the beds. “I don’t want to wear you out.”

“No, I’ll do both.”

I would have loved the help, because I was already worn out. But I wasn’t going to give Dad the satisfaction.

I couldn’t have won with either choice. The old man looked plenty satisfied, watching with a shit-eating grin as I worked over the second flowerbed.