Two

I’VE NEVER BEEN much of a drinker. So after three beers I was nearly falling off the stoop. But Steve was just winding up. I stumbled to my feet.

“I’ve got some chores to do,” I said before wobbling off toward the barn. Goats and chickens don’t take care of themselves.

Steve limped along behind me. “Can you make a living off this farm?”

“I get by. I’m a simple guy.”

We passed by the piles of junked cars and gutted appliances scattered about. Thanks to Jessica, they were neater piles than they used to be, but rust and weeds were taking over.

“What’s all this stuff?” Steve asked.

“I like to tinker.”

He stopped dead. Looked at me with excitement. “Me too. I was a mechanic in the army, and I’ve been building engines since I was ten.”

Halfway through the barn door, he spotted my old shotgun hanging in its case on the wall inside. It pulled him like a magnet. “Does this work?”

I shrugged. “I suppose. I hardly ever use it.”

He peered at it. “Needs a bit of oil. I’ll fix it up for you.”

The goats had set up a racket, so I used that as an excuse to go inside without answering him. Inside, there was more junk. Old radios, toasters, lawn mowers—anything folks wanted to get rid of. I know I shouldn’t take it all, but it’s hard to say no. I have fourteen old lawn mowers, some of them buried so deep in raspberry canes that I can’t even find them.

While I fed and milked the goats, Steve pawed through the junk. He was muttering like a kid in a candy store. “Some of this stuff is worth money, you know. Clean it up, replace a part or two, and you could sell it on Kijiji.”

Kijiji. Jessica has been on me too to advertise my handyman business on the Internet. But computers and I don’t get along. Like the kids I went to school with, they mock me when I don’t understand. I’m a back-to-basics guy. I jury-rigged an antenna so I could watch TV, but I never bothered with the Internet. I have all the entertainment I need right here in my yard.

I finished the chores and headed back to the house. My head ached. I wanted to crawl into bed, but Steve was still going strong. He showed no signs of leaving. Back in the house, he opened up the fridge. Pulled out a pot and peered inside.

“That’s soup,” I said.

“That ought to do us for supper with a hunk of cheese and bread,” he said.

“Shouldn’t you be getting back?”

“Back where?”

“Well, to town. Or wherever you’re staying.”

Steve glanced up the stairs. “You got an extra bedroom up there?”

So Steve stayed the night. Not the quietest guy in the world. He woke me a few times, pacing and muttering. I was going to need earplugs if he stayed long.

The next morning I struggled awake at eight o’clock, surprised that Chevy hadn’t woken me. Downstairs, Steve already had the eggs frying and toast ready. Chevy was sitting happily at his feet, catching scraps.

“Uncomfortable bed?” I asked.

He looked puzzled, then shrugged. “Just stuff. Nightmares. I hope I didn’t yell.”

“It’s fine,” I lied. “You can try sleeping downstairs if it helps.”

“It’s not the bed. It’s a pretty good bed for a hundred years old.” He poured me a coffee. “I’ve been thinking, this is kind of the first day of the rest of my life. I’d like to explore my options a bit. I could earn my keep around here. Maybe sell some of that stuff for you, help with chores, while I figure out what’s next. I got nothing keeping me in Calgary.”

That freaked me out. I’ve been on my own a long time. I like my own company, and all that stuff he wanted to sell was my stuff. “I don’t know, Steve,” was all I said.

Steve put a plate of eggs down on the table in front of me. “You ever heard of anyone called Wild West?”

I’d been replaying old conversations and meetings in my head most of the night. The name rang a distant bell, but I couldn’t think why. “Don’t know. Maybe,” I said, picking up my cup. It took two hands, as if it weighed a hundred pounds.

“Who’s your father then?”

“Don’t know that either.”

Steve sat and rested his elbows on the faded-blue-flowered table. “But you must have some idea. You’ve been living here your whole life. Relatives must have talked. In a small place like this, everyone talks.”

“Not to me they don’t.”

He cocked his head and studied me. I could see the disbelief in his eyes, which had dark rings around the blue. Just like mine. My mother’s eyes were brown.

“Don’t you want to know?”

I thought about it. When my mother died, I’d gone searching for his identity. I’d always figured she’d tell me when I was old enough to handle whatever surprise she thought it would be. But when she smashed up her car and broke every bone in her body, I realized I’d have to find out on my own.

I wasn’t in the best shape in those days, so I didn’t get far by asking. I tried listening, hoping to catch a stray word. I tried watching blue-eyed men from the sidelines. Did any of them cry at the funeral? Did any of them visit her grave? Did any of them show a soft spot for me?

I went through a lot of theories. One possibility was my high school math teacher, whose dark-blue eyes still made the girls all fluttery. He was her teacher the year she got pregnant.

Another major contender was Todd, who ran the marina. He’d have been much older than her, but he had the money in the town, so he could pretty much get whatever he wanted.

I’d tried coming at the puzzle from another angle. I do that when I can’t get an engine to work. What kind of girl had my mother been, and what kind of man would have interested her? I only had kid memories of her, mostly of her sitting on the porch smoking cigarettes and listening to Elvis. Or dancing with me all dreamy-like in the living room. Humming along. She’d loved Elvis. For years after her death his smoky eyes had looked down at me from posters all over the walls. There was still one in the bedroom where Steve had slept.

I figured any guy she liked would have had to look like Elvis. Jessica said women fell for him because he was dangerous and sexy, with killer eyes. Of the kids in my mother’s high school class, the ones still in town after all these years had beer guts and buzz cuts. No one who looked like Elvis had stayed in Lake Madrid.

I shrugged a bit. It was too complicated to explain, especially with a hangover. “It seemed like a dead end,” I said.

“But you must have theories.”

“Like I said, dead ends.”

“Jesus H., Rick. Someone knows! Or suspects. What about your mother’s family?”

“We lost touch.” Actually, we’d never been in touch. That was another sore point that I didn’t want to share with a guy I barely knew. I knew where they lived, and when I was younger I used to drive over there, park down the road and watch the house. I knew my grandfather had been a carpenter. He still puttered around the house, but his back was all bent out of shape, so he couldn’t work. I knew my grandmother had a bad temper. After I saw her kick their dog, I didn’t want to meet her anymore.

Steve got up to clear the plates and wipe the crumbs from the table. The guy sure was neat. Must have been the military. “Well, this is a good excuse to get back in touch,” he said. “Let’s work our way through the possibilities. You have something to go on now. An Albertan who came here thirty-five years ago to visit a friend from the oil patch. Can’t be too many of them.”

My brain cells were beginning to come to life. “And what are we going to do if we find anyone? They’ll probably deny everything. How are we going to prove it?”

“DNA.”

“From all the guys it could be? They’ll never agree.”

“We won’t know unless we ask. Who knows, maybe they’ll be excited to find out they have two sons. Like I was thrilled to have a brother.”

A thought suddenly clicked into place in my awakening brain. It was a question I should have asked right at the beginning. “How do you know that? How did you find me?”

Steve tapped his temple. “The old noggin. After my mother died I was cleaning out her things. I found a letter postmarked Hawley Bay, February 1985. It was signed Your WW. He said something had come up and he couldn’t leave till he sorted it out. I figured the something was you. So I paid a private-eye buddy of mine to do a little digging, and he came up with all the babies born in Hawley Bay in 1985. None fit the bill. But when he expanded his search to nearby towns, bingo.” He pointed at me. “There was a little boy born in Lake Madrid in June 1985, father unknown.”

“But…but…” My head reeled. I felt like I was in free fall. “That doesn’t prove I’m your brother. Just because the letter was postmarked Hawley Bay doesn’t mean your brother was born around here. You could have the wrong place, even the wrong year.”

“But I don’t think I do,” he said, his silvery blue eyes staring into mine in a way that gave me the creeps. “But there’s one way to find out. DNA testing ourselves.”

The free falling got worse. “Oh no. There’s only one doctor in town, and his nurse has lived here forever. The whole town will know before we’re even out of the office.”

Steve laughed. “On the Internet, you doofus! We order the kit on the Internet. You swab your cheek and mail it back to them, and they tell you how you’re related. No one here has to know a damn thing.”

He made me feel like an idiot. Like the world was galloping away from me, out into a future I didn’t know or understand. Jessica makes me feel like that sometimes. I like keeping things simple, but it seemed like I was going to get dragged into the future no matter what.