Shame-12

Domino Buddies

When I picked my folks up at the airport in Oklahoma City the next afternoon, Dad and Mom wobbled slowly off the plane and up the ramp toward me, younger and fitter specimens of humanity striding briskly past them and into the arms of loved ones. I realized for the first time that this might be the last trip both my parents would make back home, that they would die, not eventually but soon, and that I would then be exposed to the world as the pretender I had always known that I was. As long as I had my folks to hide behind, I guess I thought I could avoid the full responsibility of being an authority figure; as long as you’re a kid to someone, somewhere, I think it’s okay if you’re still not completely grown up, but that day of reckoning was approaching, coming toward me, in fact, a whole lot faster than my parents were.

But at last, they reached me. Dad shook my hand, his grip as frail and skeletal as tumbleweed.

“Good to see you, John,” he said, and he smiled.

I smiled back and gave him a reluctantly accepted hug.

I could feel every rib in his back.

“Johnny!” my mother squawked. She threw her arms around my neck, and I breathed in the rosewater and must of her skin, an old woman’s sachet.

“Hey folks,” I said. “Good to see you. Merry Christmas!”

“My Lord, what a pilot,” my mother said, as though with her half-dozen flights she constituted an aerial authority equivalent perhaps to the FAA. “Bumpy trip. I thought Poppa was going to be sick.”

“I have the constitution of an ox,” he muttered. “Airplanes don’t make me sick.”

“Now. Poppa, remember how the last time we came home, you spent half the flight to Phoenix in the lavatory,” she said, and my father rolled his eyes so that I could see. I ushered them slowly from the waiting area and up the long walkway from the terminal back into the airport proper.

“We’ll grab your bags and off we’ll go,” I said. “I’m parked downstairs close to baggage pickup.”

My dad put his hand on my arm and held me back for a moment. “How does the wheat look?”

For a second, I remembered my horrifying dream—Trent and his questions about the farm. Then I realized, what else do farmers—or ex-farmers—talk about?

“It’s real pretty,” I said. “We’ve had nice weather and some rain. It’s real green and about six inches high.”

Mom shook her head sadly and told the ceiling, “My husband will be asking about wheat with his last breath.”

“And your son’ll be telling me,” Dad said, giving my arm a bony squeeze and letting out a wheezing cackle.

We passed the security checkpoint where people were lined up to subject themselves and their baggage to inspection on the way in. A burly cowboy with silver-tipped lizard boots set the scanner beeping, and a blush spread across his already rosy face when the black woman at the scanner directed him to take his boots off and try it again.

“The airport in Phoenix is much nicer than this,” Mom said as we crept toward the exit at a roaming cow’s pace. “Where are those carts to haul people around?”

“It’s not that big an airport,” I said. “This is Oklahoma City, not New York City, in case you forgot while you were gone.”

When their baggage was collected and loaded in the truck bed and we had pulled out of short-term parking, I headed off down Meridian Avenue toward the highway. As we passed Chili’s, I asked, “Did you eat on the plane?”

“Breakfast on the flight to Dallas. Nothing on the flight up. But I think we’re okay. Are you hungry, Poppa?”

“I want a hamburger,” he said. “A big one. With cheese and tomato and pickle. And bacon.”

She looked daggers at him. “Poppa, you know you’re not supposed to eat fried foods,” she said, and Dad contritely folded up his desires and put them away.

I wondered at what point life would begin to encroach that strongly on me, at what point my fight with those extra ten pounds would be transformed into an epic battle with cosmic forces determined to do me in. And moreover, I began to wonder as I pulled onto the interstate and headed west, at what point do the things you give up to stay alive start to outweigh the pleasures of being alive?

“Do you miss hamburgers, Dad?” I asked, and he raised his right hand as if I’d called upon him to testify.

“I miss everything,” he said, “but at least I still have my family and my church and my TV shows.”

I chuckled. “You still watching Unsolved Mysteries?”

“Sure thing.” And that affirmative response launched him into an involved—in fact, to judge by the incredible degree of complexity, I’d also have to add, confused—account of a long-missing young woman, a single mother who had disappeared seven years ago on a night out. Last seen getting into a car with some men she had known since high school. No evidence of foul play. No evidence of anything.

“Left her little girl all alone in the world,” he said, and his voice quavered a little as he went on. “She’s all growed up now, but she hasn’t never forgot her mother. Hasn’t never stopped wondering what happened to her. The TV people were talking to her, and she told them, ‘I remember.’ She told them, ‘It won’t never get behind me.’”

“Like to made me cry.” My mom sighed with something close to pleasure. “Lord have mercy.”

“So did they catch them?” I asked.

“Who?” my dad asked.

“The people who made off with her mom?” For they had to have caught somebody, there had to be some point to such a story as this, some kind of justice.

“Look at those boats,” my dad said, looking out his window. We were passing the back lot of Boyd Chevrolet, where Mr. Boyd always lined up enormous dump trucks and speed boats and tractor trailers along the highway frontage to show that he was not just any car and pickup Chevrolet dealer, but rather a purveyor of all forms of modern conveyance. “You been fishing lately?”

“Not in the last week or two,” I said, and I gave up on solving the unsolved mystery. “If the weather holds, I’ll take you down to the pond while you’re here. You want to come with us, Mom?”

“Lord, no,” she said. “You boys are welcome to that. These days, only fish I want to see are on my plate looking up at me. I’ll stay around the house and help Michelle.”

“The Hooks are coming out for Christmas dinner,” I said. “They were with us Thanksgiving. When’s Candace supposed to get in?”

“Said she’d get on the road tomorrow,” Dad growled. “I worry about her, young girl driving all those miles by herself. The roads aren’t safe these days.”

“Amen,” Mom said.

Unlike them, I knew that when Candy arrived she wouldn’t be alone; she’d told me in her last letter that she wanted to introduce the family to Arturo all at once to lessen the surprise for us (to say nothing of the shock for him), and this looked like her best opportunity, although it added yet another complication to a holiday season already so full of them that I felt that if I had to accommodate anything else, I might just split open like a wet paper sack.

“How are the kids enjoying school?” Mom wanted to know.

“Not as much as Michelle does, and not half as much as they ought to be,” I said. “They don’t know how good they have it. I’d give anything to be learning things instead of watching calves chew.”

“None of us know how good we have it,” Mom said. “You know, you should go back to school yourself. It’s not too late for you.”

I felt a pain shoot through my chest, and I had to clench my teeth for a moment before answering. “That train left the station a long time ago, Mom.”

“It’s not too late,” Mom repeated. “You’re still smart as a whip. All the books you read—”

“Smart isn’t everything,” I said. “I’m almost forty years old, as you probably remember. And there’s the money—”

“We could help you with the money,” Mom said. “Couldn’t we, Poppa?”

He looked at her as though she were dangerously insane. “How many kids can one man have in college at the same time?” he asked, but this negative impulse was followed by a grudging nod. “I suppose there’s no point us having money if we can’t use it on a good cause.”

“A lost cause,” I said, although the idea of going off to school curled up the corners of my mouth. I saw myself walking down a hallway and into a college classroom, felt the hard seat of the desk beneath me, heard my name called: “John Jacob Tilden?”

But the me I saw responding was a me with an unlined face, bushy sideburns cut level with my earlobes, a head full of brown hair.

A me I hadn’t been for twenty years.

Yes, a lost cause.

“Why didn’t you offer to send me to college before now?” I said, trying hard to keep the bitterness out of my voice and mostly succeeding, although I could not keep it out of my throat, my mouth, my stomach.

“You never asked,” Dad said. “Only thing you’ve ever asked of us was if you could make a place for yourself and your new family on the farm. I always thought Trent would be the farmer.” He shook his head and then looked out the window away from us. “I miss that boy.”

“Lord, Lord,” my mother seconded.

“It won’t ever get behind us,” I said, so quietly I don’t think they even heard me over the road noise.

“Well, the Lord has His reasons,” Mom said, wiping her eyes, although it sounded as though she might be willing to be talked out of that opinion. “All things work for good to them that love the Lord.”

“Amen,” Dad said, a long sigh falling away to nothing. “God is good.”

The highway whined underneath our feet, and we rounded a long gradual curve heading down into the Canadian River Valley. Ahead, a red Dodge Daytona, just pulled over by a highway patrol cruiser, lights flashing, eased to a stop and the driver’s side window began to roll down.

“How fast you going?” Mom wanted to know as we approached the blinking lights.

“Speed limit,” I said. “A little over.”

“He’s already got one on the hook, Momma,” Dad said. “He won’t worry about us.”

In the rearview I could see the tall black patrolman walking up to the car and a slender female arm offer up a license and registration. That arm, unaccountably, made me think of Samantha. I saw her arm reaching out to me for a hug when she arrived at our place at Thanksgiving, felt my own heart stand still and the world around us collectively hold its breath as we met for a minimal contact, side-to-side embrace. But I could feel the pressure of her hand on the top of my shoulder long after I’d said hello to her kids, long after she’d deposited her load of pie on the cabinet, and even now, I could feel her touch like a burn that stays tender long after a fool sets his hand on something he shouldn’t have.

“I hope you faithful folks have been praying for me,” I said. “This reunion could be the death of me yet.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Mom said. “Everything will work out.”

And as far as they were concerned—even if they had known what they did not know—everything would. The world had an order, preordained, and the mind behind that order was a generous and kindly one. End of story.

While there had once been a time I was willing to believe such a thing, I had done so entirely on faith, not on evidence, although I guess that’s what we all must do in the long run if we’re going to believe in anything. Peace of mind depends on how much faith we can muster and how steadfastly we can hold on to it, and that might explain why lately, I had almost no peace of mind.

We got off Interstate 40 at the Geary/Watonga exit, passed the Cherokee Trading Post—which was not an actual Cherokee trading post, of course, but a Texaco station, restaurant, gift shop, and KOA campground.

“Okay,” I said at last. “I’ll trust you on that.”

“Oh, don’t trust us,” Mom said. “Trust God.”

“Okay,” I said to stop the conversation. I had forgotten how present God tended to be in every conversation with my folks.

After creeping through the dying town of Geary, where Officer Gary Monday sat vigilant in his police cruiser just off Main Street, we drove on into almost-dying Watonga instead of straight out to the farm so the folks could judge for themselves how the town had fared since their last trip home. We drove past the Homeland, for several years now the only grocery store in town, past the bowling alley and the Anthony’s store on Main, and as we were passing the barbershop on Main, Dad made a sort of hooting noise and told me, “Pull over there,” pointing toward a parking space next to two old men shuffling up the sidewalk in striped gray overalls and white felt Resistol hats.

When I stopped and shut off the engine, Dad opened his door and slowly lowered himself to the pavement. One of the men raised a hand in greeting, and his partner nodded.

“Should we get out?” I asked. “Just to be sociable?”

“This won’t take long,” Mom said. “Domino buddies.” And she sniffed at this frivolity; although she herself was inclined to play a game or two of dominoes when family came together, she didn’t much hold with a man leaving his family behind and pushing dominoes around with a group of men who were probably bad influences. I guess she figured she had gotten Dad off to Arizona just in time to prevent both his physical and moral collapse.

Dad got back into the truck, and the two men passed on into the barbershop. As the second man reached the door, he turned and raised a hand again, then stepped inside.

“Me and that old boy was raised up together,” Dad told me. “But we growed apart.”

We drove back to the main highway and headed toward home, past the Sonic and Kentucky Fried Chicken, past the liquor store Phillip and friends robbed three owners and half a lifetime ago.

Thinking about the way my own life worked, I realized that while for me it was half a lifetime ago and didn’t matter in the slightest, for Phillip it was an everyday thing. It still looked back from the mirror at him every morning.

It was his life.

I had to try harder to reach him.

“But how?” I asked Michelle that night after we’d gotten my folks stowed in B. W.’s room, and gotten him set up on the couch (he’d refused to stay the night in Michael’s room, which more and more looked like it was going to be preserved as some sort of museum kept in loving memory of our poor lost boy, drawers forever full of dingy white socks and frayed Jockey briefs, walls forever plastered with posters of Aerosmith, Van Halen, Nirvana, Iron Maiden, dresser covered with the toiletries that he’d left behind, mostly unopened bottles of Brut from Michelle’s parents every Christmas and a half-full bottle of Drakkar Noir, the cologne he’d decided he liked when Mindy Stallings told him she liked it on him and had stopped liking when he stopped liking Mindy Stallings).

“Well,” Michelle said, pulling on one of her warm socks, “you just have to be persistent. Don’t give up.”

“I am persistent. I’ve always been persistent. What good does it do? He won’t talk to me.” I raised my hands palm up in front of me. “No one will talk to me. Phillip doesn’t have a phone. Michael does, but he won’t answer it. And I’m not much good on the phone anyway. I can’t imagine what the other person is doing. If they’re paying attention to me or watching the Cowboys or making faces about how much they hate talking to me.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’d be doing that.” Michelle pulled on her other fluffy sock.

“Well, anyway, my point is that it doesn’t matter how persistent I am if I can’t even talk to anyone.”

“Write a letter,” she said, now properly clad. She flexed her red-toed feet, purred in satisfaction.

“Write a letter,” I repeated.

“You know. Paper. Envelope. Stamp.”

“I’m familiar with the concept,” I said. “I just hadn’t thought about it. It seems so—remote. You write letters to people—”

“—you don’t see everyday.” She nodded and took my hand in hers. “So. Write a letter.”

I sighed. “All right,” I said.

She rose, rolled her shoulders. “I’ve got to go to sleep. I’m tired out from talking with your folks. They can never seem to remember that I already love Jesus.”

She climbed in between the sheets. I pulled the comforter over her, arranged it around her ears, and sat down at her side after she had snuggled into the mattress and found a comfortable spot.

“They’re old,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“My parents. They’re old.”

“They sure are,” she said.

“It scares me.”

She turned her head toward me and opened her eyes. “Scares you? Why?”

I shook my head. It seemed like another thing, on top of all the others. Why even talk about it?

“J. J.?”

I shook my head again, but with resignation; it was bedtime, so I had to speak the truth. “I’m afraid that they’re going to die, Shell. I mean, now I know they’re going to. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when that happens.”

She sat up and gathered me into her arms, pulled my head down onto her breast, stroked my hair. “I’ll be right here,” she said. “You know that. I’ll always be right here—if you want me to be.”

“I know,” I said. Did everything have to come out into the open this baldly, this late at night, when truth telling was the law? How had we stumbled into this particular darkened corridor?

She squeezed my hand. “What else do you know?”

I shook my head and sighed. As long as we were telling the truth, there was something else. “Why on earth did you invite Samantha here for Thanksgiving? You’ve never liked her.”

“Of course I’ve never liked her,” she said. “Why should I? Do you like Bill?”

“I loathe him,” I said. “I’d like to see him trampled by cattle. You haven’t answered my question.”

“Do you really want to know?” She fluffed her pillow, preparing, perhaps, for my saying no.

“I do.” I did not say, “Tell the truth,” for that would have been superfluous. I simply anticipated the blow, felt my stomach contract in preparation.

“Because,” she said after a long pause in which I knew she’d been trying to think of the gentlest way to say what she had to say, “twenty years is plenty long enough for a man to mope after what might have been. It’s time to make yourself understand that. Time to be here with us instead of somewhere else. Because part of you has always been somewhere else, no matter how I tugged and snatched and fought. With Samantha, or at least somewhere off down a road you didn’t take.”

“Don’t cry,” I said, for she was crying and smacking her pillow with her fist now instead of fluffing it.

“I think I’ve earned a cry or two, John Tilden,” she said. “Don’t tell me not to cry,” but she did quit smacking her pillow and rested her head on it, and I held her hand and stroked her head, and shortly afterward, she was asleep.

“Amazing,” I said, and shook my head. The sleep of the righteous.

I wandered down the hallway and back to the study to check on my writing supplies, maybe write a letter or two.

I was up late, but Dad wanted to go out early and look over the farm he had known so well, so after I’d fed and watered the calves and we’d had a good breakfast of egg substitute, turkey sausage, and real coffee, hot and black as night, we climbed into the truck. As we pulled around the house, Frank jumped in back and up onto the wheel well, his head hanging over the sidewall of the bed, his tongue lolling. We drove down our long driveway, an eighth of a mile to the road, then on around the section line to the Old Place.

I stopped at the gap, opened it, drove the truck through, closed it behind us before driving on. Normally the passenger gets out to open the gate, but for the first time, Dad didn’t clamber out without speaking. He didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask.

We bounced down through the pasture, toward the old barn, Dad holding onto the armrest with white-knuckle force.

“Take a right,” Dad said when we reached a pasture intersection—a place where two pickup tracks intersected, although the path we turned onto was much less used and had all but disappeared. It went to the foundation of the old house, the place where Dad’s parents first lived when they got married and where Dad himself lived until he and Mom got married and built the place where we now lived. There was nothing left of the old house but the concrete foundation, atop a low rise and surrounded by dark green cedar trees, although once there were no trees here and you could have seen all the way down the valley to Whirlwind Creek.

After my grandparents died but long before I was born, Dad tore the house down and used the boards to add on to the barn at the Home Place. That’s all there was to that house, boards. No plumbing, no wiring. He often told moral character-building stories to me when I was a kid about how he grew up toting buckets of water from the cistern down back of the house, about cold baths with rough lye soap stinging his skin, about lonely late-night trips to the outhouse in pitch darkness.

Now the foundation of the old house was almost hidden by the cedars clustered close by, and I resolved to cut down more than a few of them for firewood next winter.

I pulled up as close to the foundation as I could, and we climbed out.

“You know, John, memory is a funny thing,” my dad said after walking up the concrete steps and onto the floor of what would have been the front bedroom. “I always thought this place was bigger.”

“I’ve always thought of it as really small,” I admitted, stepping past him to what must have been the kitchen. “I always wondered how you did it.”

“It was a hard life.” He looked around, pointing at this corner and that as if placing furniture. “But we were happy.”

What did he see when he came up here among the aromatic cedars?

I didn’t know. He’d shown me pictures, told me his stories, but there were other things on my mind, impediments in the way of my understanding. “Dad?” I asked finally.

“Uhm,” he said, still seeing what had been.

“Have you had a good life?”

It stirred him out of his reverie. He looked at me owlishly, his head tilted to the side as if to better regard this improbable question. “Of course I have,” he said at last. His tone indicated that there was no doubt in his mind.

Maybe there wasn’t.

“Is there anything you regret?”

He knelt to pick up a petrified bit of branch on the floor and turned away from me. “Of course there is.”

I stepped across the space between us, space that suddenly seemed to have dwindled. “You’ve had regrets?”

“Of course I have.” Again the owl look. “What person with a thinking brain in his head goes through life without regret?” He shook his head. I would have given anything to know what he was thinking. “Things don’t always happen the way we want them to. Whenever you step through a crossroads, you leave three paths behind.”

I stooped down next to him to pick up my own twig from the foundation, turned it this way and that in my hands. “You never told me any of this,” I said. “Why didn’t we ever talk like this before?”

He rose to his feet to regard me. “Son, what earthly good would it have done?”

I stood up. “It would have made a difference to me,” I said, a little more forcefully than I wanted. I shook the twig once or twice before I let it drop. “It would have made a difference.”

He turned his head to the side and regarded me with bright eyes. “You talk to your own young ones about your fears and sorrows?”

“No,” I admitted. “I want to protect them as long as I can from all the heartbreak out there.”

“No different for me,” he said gruffly and turned to toss his twig off into the cedar forest. “Anyway, your mother says there’s a reason for everything that happens. Providence in the fall of a sparrow, she says.”

“Do you believe that?”

He fixed me with his gaze. “Don’t you?”

“I’m trying to,” I said.

“No different for me,” he said, and he turned away. “Take me on around the section line.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and I watched his slowly departing back for a moment with a warm glow of love lighting my chest that I hadn’t felt for a long time, if indeed I had ever felt it for him in that way.

Then I scurried on to catch up to him so he wouldn’t turn and scowl at me for making him wait.

“Your trouble,” he told me between bounces, as we drove back uphill across the pasture, “is you think too much.”

“I’ve been told that,” I said. “I wish that were my only trouble.”

“You’ve done well for yourself,” he went on. “Raised good kids. Honored your parents. Found a useful place for yourself. Provided for your family. Done just fine.”

“I could dispute most of that,” I said, bouncing so high off the seat that I almost banged the ceiling. “But the most important thing, it seems to me, is that even if I’ve done everything you say, I didn’t always want to. Mostly didn’t want to.”

He smiled. “Got done all the same, though, didn’t it?”

“The Lord loves a cheerful giver,” I quoted. We pulled up to the gap.

“The Lord loves everyone,” Dad said, and folded his hands into his lap.

End of story.

And it was; the rest of the morning we talked about cattle, about a part I couldn’t buy for the combine and would probably have to weld up myself, about the price of wheat. The moment, whatever it was, wherever it came from, was gone, but I would always treasure the memory. It was the longest and most genuine talk we had ever had, and on the way home, I stole an occasional glance at my father, who now seemed like an altogether different person from the man I had set out with earlier that morning, the man I had loved and feared for forty years.

We were raised up together; we grew apart.

But maybe, toward the end of his life, we grew back together again.

At least, it gave me comfort to think so.