In the Loyal Mountains

MY GIRLFRIEND AND I drove my uncle around the Texas hill country during what was to be the last year of his life. We did not know then that they were his last days—though he did, I think—and we always had a good time. I’m married now, and this girl we drove around with, Spanda, is not my wife, and I was never fooled into believing that one day she might be. All this happened a long time ago; I have been saying it’s been ten years for so long that by now it is truthfully more like twenty.

Uncle Zorey was single and had never been married, never had children. It’s possible that he spoiled me. Zorey owned a machine shop, and custom manufactured large cranes and bulldozers, and he always had money, unbelievable amounts of it. My father and mother used to laugh about it, because he never seemed to know how to spend it. My father was a professional golfer of sorts. He was thirty-eight years old then, and still trying to make it on the big circuit, the tournament circuit, and he and my mother traveled a good bit. I was their only son, and I stayed with Zorey when they went on the road. My father and mother were very much in love, and loved to travel. There was not the least bit of resentment from them that Zorey was so rich, while we were not. The fact that they enjoyed his company so much was one of my favorite things about him.

I had been born with one leg a few inches shorter than the other—a cruel joke, because it threw my golf swing way off—and understandably, my father gave up on my chances of becoming a pro by the time I was seven or eight. He had the grace, perhaps given to him by sport, not to push me. He had compassion for people weaker than himself. Although my father loved golf, he was a better person than he was a golfer. But he was still a very good golfer, just not among the best, and he’d won or finished high often enough to raise me and to support my mother.

My father had, and still does have, a bad back, and I remember that my mother was always rubbing it. After a match, when my father limped home, she massaged it with a rolling pin. In school I was teased about my father—this was in Texas, back in the sixties. It was widely believed that golf was a sissy’s game, with the manicured greens, the caddies, the little electric golf carts, and the natty way of dressing. For a while I tried to convince the other kids in school that my father’s nickname was Mad Dog, but it never caught.

When he was home, my father walked around the house with a plastic jug of aspirin in the pocket of his robe, and he was always opening the jug and shaking a few out, swallowing them dry. He wouldn’t let himself take anything stronger. I would never ask him how he was feeling—I thought it might remind him of his back pain, if he had somehow managed to put it out of his mind.

 

I remember Uncle Zorey coming over to our house for dinner whenever my parents got back from one of their road trips. It would be a feast, a kind of reward for his watching after me. Mom would do all the cooking, but because Uncle Zorey was an outdoorsman, and because he liked wild game best, he would bring over the food: pheasants and grouse from hunting trips he’d gone on in South Dakota, and venison roasts, and fresh fish he’d caught from one of the many lakes north of Houston. My uncle was a pilot, and often flew by himself to one of these lakes, landing at a grass airstrip outside a tiny backwoods town. He’d give one of the local men a hundred dollars or so for the use of a boat and go out on the lake and catch fish. Sometimes the local man asked to go with him, but my uncle always wanted to be alone. He was a good fisherman, and a good shot. His freezer was always full of fish and game.

At dinner we talked about my school, my fathers golf game, or my uncle’s recent fishing trips. We also talked about things my mother was interested in—politics, wars, morals—and about her childhood, which she missed. My mother came from a large family, and grew up on a farm in Missouri. She loved talking about that farm and about the things her brothers and sisters used to do—there were nine of them in all—and the trouble they used to get into. She talked about cold mornings, about doing the laundry by hand, and about what a thrill it was to get new shoes—all the old things. She was reliving her history, and we listened to her with awe.

She was the one who killed the chickens on Sundays for the big dinner after church. One of her older sisters would hold the chicken down on a tree stump, setting its neck between two nails driven into the stump, and my mother would hit the neck with the hatchet.

“One-Chop,” my mother said. “They called me One-Chop.”

We ate so much while listening to her stories. We stayed up late and ate and drank far into the night, as if trying to gain ground on some ache or loneliness that had slipped in while my parents were away. They let me drink, too; I was sixteen or seventeen by then. Zorey ate the most and drank the most. No matter how much food my mother fixed, no matter how many bottles of wine were opened, we finished everything, with Zorey leading the way. At midnight or one in the morning, we’d all be groggy and full, and stumble off to bed.

“Zorey, you were insatiable,” my father would say as he and my mother went down the hall, leaning against each other, to their bedroom. My father would look back over his shoulder and say, “Zorey, you were just an animal!” It was a joke they’d had between them for many years, a joke that began with their father. Even then, I had heard, Zorey had an enormous appetite and a brute strength; their father’s nickname for him was “Animal.”

“Good night, Jackie,” my uncle would say to me, pausing at the doorway of the guest room. “Good night all.”

I remember stumbling into my room, reeling drunk, pretending I was a gut-shot actor in a western, spinning in the dark, pretending I had caught a bullet in the stomach. Clutching it with both hands, I would do a slow triple spin, all for Hollywood, and topple to the bed, land on my back, and fall instantly asleep.

 

I am a plain man. What I do for a living has little to do with the way I sometimes feel about things. I’m an accountant, and a junior one at that. I’d like to be someone with power, sweeping power, the power to change things, to right wrongs—a judge, a lawyer, a surgeon—but because I am not any of these things doesn’t mean they aren’t in me.

My uncle was a crook. His death was a suicide, and it came when he felt the evidence closing in. There were questions arising from (where else?) the construction companies’ accounting departments; there were letters and queries from lawyers, polite at first. All of these things are in his dusty files, his long-ago files, which I felt the need to remove from his house after his death, and which I now keep in my attic. It must have been a very tough time for him near the end, with no way out. I wish that he’d never been found out, that he could have gone on forever. There was no fishing in prison, is what must have been on his mind, no woods in which to hunt, no grass airstrips to float down onto on hot June weekday afternoons.

What could he have been thinking? It is not right for me to try to guess. But it is fair for me to remember.

 

My mother might have thought it was a burden for my uncle to keep me while they were on the road. I don’t think she ever realized what fun we had—my uncle and I, and then, once I hooked up with her, Spanda.

Spanda came from the wrong side of the tracks—although in Houston, at that time, there really were no tracks, literally or figuratively. She did not attend my school, and she sometimes didn’t even attend her own. Spanda was not a nice girl. I thought she was lovely—and she was lovely—but she was a little rough, a little mean, and she did not have many odds in her favor except to be rough and mean.

My leg excited her, the shorter one. It’s not proper or relevant to go into how much it excited her; it was her business and mine. But it did—she loved the leg—and though she did not love me, it was the first rime I had ever felt such a thing, someone attracted to my leg, and to me, and it gave me a confidence I needed badly. It didn’t hurt, either, that Uncle Zorey was almost always around, his pockets bulging with dollars, like a caricature of an old-style Texan, the kind people used to love until they learned to make fun of him—generous, big-hearted, with loose money spilling from him like water. Uncle Zorey liked Spanda too, and he saw to it that she always got what she wanted when she was with me, saw to it that she was always happy.

We were both seventeen. This was clover for me. I believed in things rather than understanding them. What we are talking about here is innocence, no different from anyone else’s.

Uncle Zorey was as wild as a big kid when he was away from my parents and away from his office. When I got in from school, those times I stayed at his house—which was many times that year, because my parents were traveling all the time—my uncle would change out of his suit and into a pair of old coveralls, go out to the driving range, and hit golf balls.

The driving range would be nearly empty on those afternoons, and my uncle and I were able to practice our swings in peace. There might be a woman or two—matronly, yellow-haired women, overweight, dressed in tight bermudas, with meat-eating spikes on their shoes, to better grip the earth for the long drives that seemed to give them so much pleasure. I was used to their looks—looks of pity, and what they thought was knowledge—and it was easy to ignore them.

Even hitting one-legged, as it were, even hitting off balance, I had my uncle’s great, strange strength. After several weeks of practice, I was hitting the ball farther than we could have hoped for. But I could not hit it straight. With my twisting swing, I sent the ball into a wild, sail-away slice, or almost as bad, into a horrid, rocketing hook.

My uncle would sit on a soda crate, sweating, toweling his face with a handkerchief and drinking beers, which he kept in a little ice chest by his side. I would swing harder and harder, but along with my uncle’s strength, I had my father’s back. At times it hurt so much I wanted to tell my uncle that I didn’t want to play golf anymore. But then I’d see his look of childlike expectation as he sat there on the wooden box and studied my swing, and so I took my best cut, and away the ball would soar. Sometimes I got so frustrated that I would shout as loudly as I could—at the frustration, and also at the cramps in my back—and the lady golfers would move away from us, pack up their clubs and leave. My uncle liked the shouts, and he would nod, take a sip of beer, and lean forward and hand me another bucket of golf balls.

My father was having a very good spring. He won one big local tournament, and for the first time in several years was selected to play in a prestigious tournament overseas. He was getting offers again to do endorsements, but he wisely rejected them and concentrated on his golf, and did even better.

He was often written about in the sports pages of the papers, and I was proud of him, but also felt a little guilty from all the days in school at a younger age when I tried to change his name and wished he’d competed in a sport more violent, more bloodthirsty than golf. The newspapers were always saying what a gentleman he was, what a good sport, and how he brought class to the game, class to the city.

I began to eat aspirin the way he did. My uncle never saw me doing it, but I started not long after my father won his tournament. My uncle and I stopped golfing around this time, and I felt a flood of relief. Though I may be attributing too much scheming to Zorey, I wonder now if he knew all along what he’d been doing—filling me with all that golf—eliminating all doubt, all question of what was and wasn’t possible. I was delighted never to have to pick up a golf club again, delighted never to have to watch the game being played again.

 

Uncle Zorey brought Spanda home from work with him one day later that spring, saying simply that her father worked in his plant and that she was new in town, and didn’t know anyone. She wanted to meet someone her own age, and so my uncle had volunteered me for the job. He hoped I didn’t mind.

Lies! Many children are wise at the age of seventeen, but I was not one of them. I believed my uncle, as did so many other people. Spanda looked like an Indian, with dark eyes and long black hair. Often she wore faded blue jeans and a purple tie-dyed shirt. She never put on makeup. We got along famously from the start. It doesn’t matter what I think now—wondering whether we would have gotten along so well were it not for my leg, and more importantly, for my uncle, and his money.

We played cards and listened to the radio; we went for drives with my uncle, who took us along in his truck. At night Spanda came to my room downstairs and slipped into bed with me. My uncle slept upstairs, and slept heavily. He got up only after I had left for school.

Spanda was angry at a lot of things. She had a wonderful vocabulary of curse words, which she used against any and all incarnations of the establishment: traffic lights, policemen, rainy weather. But she was never angry at me or my uncle. I felt like a hero. And I think that upstairs in his bed, as he drifted into sleep, perhaps imagining things, I think that my uncle, too, probably felt like a hero—as well he should have, as well he should have.

 

Into the hill country we’d drive, once summer came. The rough, rocky country there was in no way like the rest of Texas, certainly not like the gentle, windy gulf coast where we lived. We stayed in hotels in the German tourist towns—Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels—getting separate rooms, one for Spanda and me and one for my uncle. We stopped at beer gardens and sat outside in the shade, drinking cold beer and eating huge amounts of food, my uncle usually ordering one of everything on the menu. We would walk up and down the wide streets of the little towns, window-shopping in the dazzling heat, with hardly anyone else out, the heat far too great, and buy whatever Spanda desired, whatever my uncle saw and wanted: an old sewing machine or a rocking chair in the window of an antiques store, fresh-baked loaves of bread, a gingham dress for Spanda, a walking stick for me. Then we would put more beer in the ice chest in the back of the truck and head for the wild country. We drove up twisting white caliche roads into mountains of cedar and rock and cactus, the heat rising in shimmers and mirages, then sailed down into the small valleys between the hills, rattling across creek bottoms and high-water caution dips, through water-seeking live oaks. We barreled along, my uncle with a beer in his hand, one foot mashed on the accelerator and the other foot propped up and hanging out the window. Spanda and I would drink beers too. She sat in my lap with her arms around me, her hair swirling, her eyes fuzzy and distant, looking out at the countryside.

Roadrunners scurried across the road in front of our mad flight, and browsing herds of little deer leapt away from us in alarm, vaulting gently over barbed-wire fences and disappearing, with flagging white tails, into the thick tangled cedar. Hawks circled overhead, and vultures too. We headed for an obscure range that we knew about, a small chain of mountains in the central part of the state that was not even on the map: the Loyal Mountains.

A stream called Willow Creek flowed through the range, along which were many great boulders and sandbars and the huge, shady live oaks. Uncle Zorey drove across someone’s pasture, bouncing the truck over rocks and logs, still with his foot hanging out the window, and singing “Red River Valley.” We’d drive until we couldn’t go any farther, then get out and hike up the canyon, following the creek upstream to a cool spot we knew, where we could picnic, nap among sweet ferns, and go swimming in a pool beneath a small waterfall.

We’d stay until dark, drinking Jim Beam and shooting pistols—my uncle kept several in a tool chest in the truck. He’d lug the chest as though it were full of stolen gold while Spanda and I carried the ice chest. All three of us got unbelievably drunk. Spanda floated on her back in the pool, naked and sun-dappled beneath the canopy of oaks, her long hair floating all around her. Zorey sang and shot at the boulders, and the bullets ricocheted with mean, zinging whines. It was impossible to imagine what my father and mother would have thought, had they been able to see us.

“Yeah I’ve played the Red River Valley,” he would bray, “and sat in the kitchen and cried...”

The water was deep beneath the waterfall. Spanda and I would climb up onto the boulders above the pool, both of us naked now, and would practice our best dying-actor, shot-from-the-stagecoach falls while bullets flew around us. My uncle wasn’t drunk, so much as just crazy.

Later, too tired to drink any more and too tired to attempt the long drive back to Houston, we would check into a hotel in the nearest town. Uncle Zorey would give us some money for supper and the keys to his truck, then go off to his room, where he sat up in bed with all the lights on, watching television.

Spanda and I were always ravenous after the long afternoon of play, and the drinking. With the alcohol beginning to lose its edge, we’d eat barbecue, then go back to our room as if we were adults, as if we were married—as if we had all of life figured out—and make love on and off through the night, falling into it as if diving from one of those boulders. Now that I am older and have seen more, I realize, sadly, that it was more of a dutifulness with which Spanda moved, there in the dark.

But sometimes I awakened from sleep and she would have the covers pulled back. She’d be sitting up in the bed, looking at my leg. I caught her doing this several times, and at first I was flattered, and felt special. When it happened more and more, it began to trouble me a little. Thoughts would come into my head about Spanda, and where she had come from, but they went away, or I put them away.

In these hotel rooms, right after I made love to Spanda and was about to fall asleep, I could hear the TV next door in my uncle’s room. I heard the sound of the news, usually, and then my uncle’s voice, talking to the person on the television. He would argue with the weatherman about the forecast, or with the sportscaster about the replay of a close play at the plate.

Once, as I lay there listening, I heard the sportscaster talking about a golf tournament, the one my father was in, and I heard my fathers name mentioned. Spanda was already asleep, and I sat up to hear better, but my uncle must have gotten up then and turned the set off. I felt bad not knowing whether my father was winning or losing.

 

I never asked Spanda over for any of the dinners at my house. I knew better than to even mention her to my parents. “Pass the lucking meat loaf, please,” I could hear her saying after a glass or two of wine. I could see her getting up from her chair, coming over and sitting in my lap, and putting her tongue in my ear. These were the thoughts I had then, though I realize now that she probably would have been charming—and so I wish we had invited her, even once, just so she could have heard my mothers stories.

“My sisters and I had a pet Brahma bull named Skippy,” my mother said. “Every year we got to ride him to school, on the last day of school. He was so tame, so gentle.”

My uncle would listen with exceptional interest—with a hunger.

“In the winter we used to hook him up to a harness and use him to pull people’s cars out of the snow, after they slid off into the ditches,” my mother said.

My father laughed. “We used to use Zorey,” he said. “Zorey lifted up the back ends of cars and trucks that were stuck.”

My uncle smiled modestly. “Those days are over now, I guess.” He looked down at the table.

“They certainly are,” my father agreed. He held his big hands out in front of him, strong hands. Arthritis was already beginning to set in, and he had only three or four more years of golfing left, of being good at it.

My mother poured us each another glass of wine. It sparkled in the light of the chandelier. We toasted to the future.

 

My mother and father were not home much that summer. I feel now almost as if I aggravated my uncle’s condition, though I know he enjoyed watching me, and influencing me. When he could not travel to the Loyal Mountains, but instead had to stay in Houston for business meetings, he would take us in the evenings to the fanciest restaurants in the city. He’d buy Spanda a new dress and give me money to rent a tuxedo. I’d have the tuxedo shop pin up the cuff of my left leg, and we would go out to dinner and to a baseball game afterward, still wearing our tuxedos, Spanda still in her evening dress.

Some nights we would drive out to the county airport where Zorey kept his plane, out west of town, in the flat rice country. We’d park and walk over to Zorey’s small red and white Cessna. He didn’t keep it in a hangar, but simply tied it down to eye bolts set in the ground, so the plane seemed more like a tethered animal. He would run his hands over the plane, feeling its smooth surface, the coolness of the metal. A few times he asked if we wanted a ride. I always did, so we’d get in, and he would start the engine. The engine would catch, cough, and roar, and the little lights on the instrument panel would come on, illuminating my uncle’s face with an eerie green light. My uncle would be transfixed, serious as never before.

Spanda crouched on the floor in back, terrified but trying not to show it, one hand gripping my uncle’s seat, the other clutching my seat, for it was only a two-seat plane and I was the copilot. I think she felt very strongly that this was not part of her duty, and its possible that this, unlike anything else, was the part she did for love, if indeed there was any. Then we were spinning, turning toward the runway, lumbering across the grass—my uncle paid no attention to the paved taxiway. The moon shone down on the runway, making it look wet and shiny, like the beginning of a newer, finer, more glorious life, something inviting. Then the best part, putting the throttle in all the way.

My uncle was a good pilot, and it was hard to tell when we had left the ground. Once up above the airport, we could see the lights of the city to the east, but always we would bank and turn back into the darkness, away from the disorientation of all those streams of light and the silhouettes of tall buildings. We’d fly above the prairie, circling in the dark over the rice fields. It might seem that he would be a wild pilot, prone to doing loops and barrel rolls and figure eights, whether he had been drinking or not, but up in the air, with everything at stake, he was the picture of calm, the picture of my father, even: responsible, cool, and caring.

The little plane’s loud roar forced us to shout to each other whenever we wanted to say something. Mostly, though, we looked back at the city and at the darkness below us. Sometimes, feeling chivalrous, I held Spanda’s hand, squeezed it, and she would smile weakly in the greenish light.

We’d land when the gas gauge showed less than half empty. We tied the plane down and listened to the engine tick as it cooled in the night. Farther off, we heard crickets and the sound of the interstate. Driving home, with the radio playing, my uncle would be as calm as a mare, would not sing along with any of the songs, would not backtalk any commercials that came on. He was thinking about something else, and he looked tame, like someone else.

His plant was on the way to his house, and we would often stop there and drive through the chain link gate, putting a card in a slot that automatically opened the gate. My uncle parked in the lot and got out of the truck to look at the frozen steel and iron machines lying silent in the night, big floodlights all around the yard. I did not understand how anyone could do this for a living, did not even understand how such boring-looking steel machines could make smoney, or be worth anything.

 

In August, during the worst of the heat, Uncle Zorey discovered that he had gout. He took medications for it, and had to stay off his feet. He got an electric wheelchair so he could continue to work, and that was when Spanda and I began to drive him around. We headed up into the Loyal Mountains every chance we got.

My uncle was a poor patient, and refused to change his diet. He rode in the passenger’s seat, with Spanda sitting between us, her legs on either side of the stick shift. She had to be careful not to bump his foot with hers, because it would cause him intense pain. He was in pain anyway, and was trying to suffer it silently, but he was not as good at it as was my father. He bellowed whenever we hit a bump, and would immediately take a swallow of whiskey or shake down a few of the pills he was taking.

He rode with a shotgun in his lap and would shoot at the coveys of quail we often saw huddled along the road, bathing in the dust. If he killed any, he would have me go back and pick them up. He’d clean them in the truck as I headed for the Loyals. Spanda sat grim-lipped, looking straight ahead, out the window. Feathers swirled around the truck as he plucked the birds, putting the entrails and feathers in a brown grocery bag that he had brought for that purpose. The insides of quail smell rotten for some reason, even when freshly killed, and we had to drive with the windows down in order to breathe.

Wherever we stopped for the night, Zorey would cook the quail in his hotel room, over cans of Sterno he’d bought at a convenience store. He skewered the birds on a coat hanger and cooked them for an after-dinner snack, basted with butter and pepper, as he watched the news and Spanda and I thumped around next door.

Mornings in the hill country were, and still are, beautiful—a heavy dew, even in the summer, and the sounds of roosters, and of cattle lowing. As his gout got worse, my uncle could not make it to the picnic spot anymore, so Spanda and I would go by ourselves. My uncle insisted on this, and he stayed in the hotel room with a six-pack of beer. When we returned, he would have stacks of paper spread out over the desk and the bed—papers everywhere, frantic-looking, and an adding machine plugged in, and the bottles of pills, and the Jim Beam half gone. I could tell that the accountants’ inquiries and all the other loose ends were troubling my uncle, and I wished there was something I could do to help him. I wished I knew about numbers, knew how to line them up so they all made sense. I wanted to go back up into the Loyal Mountains with him, wanted to pass through the small towns with him and Spanda, and eat, and drink, and drive the back roads.

 

It was raining when the news came that my uncle had shot himself. We were all three at home, my mother, my father, and I. I wanted the news—a phone call—to be taken back, to go away somehow. My father wilted and sat down on the couch. His face was ashen. It was as if he weren’t my father anymore, as if he weren’t anyone anymore—as if he’d had his identity taken away—and I felt that I had betrayed him somehow.

My father had his head in his hands. “I need to be alone,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” my mother said. She came over and sat down by his side. I did not know what to do or where to go. I stood there and watched them sitting on the couch together.

“We should have seen it coming,” my father said, “should have seen it coming like a freight train.” He was shaking his head, and my mother’s arms were around him.

“No,” she said. “No.”

After a long while my father’s color started to come back. He stood up and said to us, “I have to go identify the body now.” I thought what an awful task that would be. It would be like looking at himself, and worse, there would be the guilt.

“Do you want me to come?” my mother asked. She looked over at me. “Do you want us to come?”

“No,” my father said. “I will be all right.”

 

My father is retired now, and a grandfather. His back still hurts him, but he is silent about it, as ever. My mother still tells us stories about her family and her childhood, but there’s a loneliness, and the stories are not devoured with as much eagerness—can never be devoured with as much eagerness as they once were by my uncle. On my dresser I have a picture of my father from twenty years ago. It is from a golf tournament, and he is wearing the winners jacket—the victor.

What lies ahead? Sam, my son, is strong, and prone to tempers. Sometimes, knowing the past—and not knowing parts of it, too—I am frightened almost to the point of paralysis. Sam may become some kind of athlete. He is often sweet, but can throw horrible tantrums, or can turn distant and moody. He is only three years old, but when he reminds me of something, I overreact, and it is my wife who has to calm me.

“He is so strong,” I say. “Already, he’s so strong.”

Or when he’s crying, and has his fits, and turns his back on us—so cold, as if he doesn’t need us!—I panic, and it feels as if there is nothing I can do.

“Hold him,” my wife says when Sam grows distant, sometimes for no reason. She’s large with our second, coming soon, but she shows no fear, no worry, only a willingness to dive into the future.

She picks Sam up and hugs him tightly, holds him close to her, strokes the side of his face, and smiles at me.

“Hold him like this,” she says, rocking him and smiling at me. “Like this.”