Birthdays
That horizon seemed far indeed, because to get anywhere of consequence in western Oklahoma you have to travel quite a spell. We lived twenty miles from Watonga, where we worked, went to church, attended school sporting events, and visited friends and family, but like most small towns, people seemed only too happy to escape it. Lauren already was informing me on a regular basis that to do any real shopping she needed to be taken to Weatherford or El Reno, each an hour off, and naturally she’d prefer to go to the Quail Springs or Penn Square malls in Oklahoma City, a distant City of Oz rising from the grasslands where we went once or twice a month to stock up on food at Sam’s or to see a movie.
So my world was limited to what it had always been—a town that was already drying up by the time I came along and long unrelieved hours on the farm where I grew up. The farm consisted of two plots of land: 280 acres where we lived on the house my grandfather built in the 1940s—always called, not surprisingly, the Home Place—and 320 acres around the section line road where sat the remains of the house my great-grandfather built in the 1920s, which we called the Old Place. The fields I cultivated were, variously, red sandy soil or dark brown soil thick with clay. The pastures in both places were rolling hills covered by grasses and hillside clumps of cedar and scrub oak, and there were oaks and towering leafy cottonwoods in the creek beds and ravines where they could sip water. Five creeks crossed our land on their short progress to the Canadian River, and my parents had dammed up two of them to create ponds, although only one was still worthy of the name, and on Saturdays I used to take the kids down to fish in it.
Like my father, I raised wheat as a cash crop, alfalfa to make hay, and kept cattle, with some chickens to tempt coyotes and provide eggs or an occasional Sunday dinner. Over the years the kids had raised a few sheep and pigs to groom and show, but like most of my neighbors, we were pretty much a cattle and wheat operation, eating our own beef, growing vegetables in a summer garden, keeping a fruit orchard.
Both Michelle and I were raised in a culture that made do—that raised its own food, cooked it, cleaned up after it. So it almost always required a special occasion to get us to a restaurant. Two weeks after my long afternoon of tractor-bound soul-searching, Michelle and I skipped Sunday evening services at the Watonga First Baptist Church and drove out to have a steak dinner at the Roman Nose State Park lodge in honor of her birthday. We could have had grilled sirloins out of the freezer, which I told Michelle halfheartedly as we drove to the restaurant. “But it’s different if we don’t have to cook it,” Michelle said. “It’s my birthday. I want somebody to serve me for a change.”
“I brought you a glass of tea the other day,” I said. “I wait on you hand and foot. I am a slave to your every desire.”
Her eyes crinkled when she smiled, and even though her face showed our twenty years together, it was a lovely face, and I told her that, too. “Happy birthday,” I said, and I leaned over and kissed her. “May God give you many, many more.”
She was wearing what for her amounted to dress-up clothes: a big crinkly skirt, a colored T-shirt with a Navajo-themed vest over it, and brown pointy-toed cowboy boots. In warm weather, Michelle attended church in a sundress; she generally taught school in faded jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She refused to get with the program, and I loved her for that. I told her that when she started getting her long hair cut and frosted by the beauty operator, I would start playing dominos with the old farmers downtown.
The hostess, who was one of Michelle’s former students, showed us to a good table with a window overlooking the golf course and the tiny lake—more like the size of our pond really. After taking our orders (T-bones done medium-well and charred), the waitress—another of Michelle’s former students—brought salads and bread, and Michelle tore into them with the joy of someone who hadn’t had to participate at all in their preparation.
“You didn’t talk to me about your day yesterday. How did the sale go?” she asked as she spread some butter on a slice of bread. I had been at the weekly cattle auction in Geary the day before and picked up some calves at a little less than two hundred fifty a head. In the spring, after they’d gained about three hundred pounds on the wheat that was now starting to sprout, I’d sell those that made it through the winter for two hundred dollars profit each, God and Mother Nature willing. All I had to do over the next six months was feed them, keep them well, keep them warm, and get them to market.
“Bought seventy nine head,” I said. “Some pretty good calves. If all goes well, we’ll be in business for at least another year.”
“What did you have for lunch?”
“Burger, fries, Coke, and a piece of pie. Mmm. Apple.” The auction barn had a little café where the cook did the miraculous, whipping up roadhouse delicacies within smelling distance of tons of manure. You wouldn’t think it’d be a stimulus for a healthy appetite, but all the same, I made a good meal between auction lots.
“Well, I don’t remember it spoiling your dinner.” And she crinkled her eyes at me again, as if to say that she knew nothing on God’s green earth would ever do that. Fact is, if I didn’t get out and run with the kids during basketball practice I’d look like Pavarotti, and as it is, I have a gut that never quite goes away. I’ve grown to accept it, like I’ve learned to accept the white hairs sprouting on my chest and at my temples, my own set of wrinkles around the eyes. I accept them, even though I get a twinge deep in my gut when I look in the mirror and see a middle-aged man looking out at me.
“Uh, right,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else.” I took a deep breath, let it out, went on to another subject. “I went out and shot baskets with B. W. this afternoon before I came in to get cleaned up. He took me two games out of three. Good games, though.”
“Oh. Oh.” Michelle laughed and then caught herself, covering her mouth with her napkin. “That reminds me.” Michelle drew herself up proudly. “National Honor Society met Friday before school. B. W. was elected president.”
“This I have been told,” I said, chewing my food thirty times the way my mother taught me. “What’s the latest on the Lauren makeup crisis?”
“Oh, it gets better. She wants to know if she can double-date.”
“Maybe with us. Was that her intent?”
She gave me a look of derision, and deservedly; what junior high kid wants to be seen with parents or even wants to acknowledge their existence? “I think not. Let’s present a common front. What do you think?”
Cherry, our waitress, came back to ask us if things were okay, which they were. “I think the usual things,” I said when she walked off. Where Lauren was concerned, I was against makeup, against double-dating, against the onset of puberty itself. Like the progressive parent she was, Michelle tried to keep me up-to-date on Lauren’s physical changes, but to be honest, I didn’t want to hear about that, didn’t even really want to learn secondhand by pulling training bras out of the dryer or carrying in grocery sacks containing feminine hygiene products. Ideally, I would have preferred for Lauren to remain prepubescent until the moment before her wedding.
I didn’t have my head in the sand. I mean, I watched the news, I talked to my buddies over coffee every morning at McBee’s, and I heard firsthand from Michelle that girls Lauren’s age were having sex, that these days twelve-year-olds were having babies. And as somebody whose entire life was changed by becoming a parent, I was scared to death that Lauren would accidentally screw up her life and not the least bit sure I knew how to keep her from doing it. Although at the time it would never have occurred to me, I think I longed for Rocket Ron Reagan, for the bad old days of the cold war; I missed the looming specter of nuclear destruction and the knowledge that the AWACS base at Tinker Field—not far away, outside Oklahoma City—was a primary target for all those Soviet ICBMs.
Back then I could submerge my purely personal fears; how could you obsess about kids and crops when the world as we knew it might disappear any moment into mushroom clouds? But now that the Berlin Wall had come down, I was forced to think about too many other things.
“I think we probably need to give her The Talk,” Michelle said after the waitress cleared off our salad plates and set down our steaks. We had wondered when to say what to Lauren about sex, although she probably knew more about sex as a seventh grader than we had in high school.
“Forget that,” I said, cutting up my baked potato so the butter and sour cream could fraternize more freely. “I say let’s confine her to her room for the next eight years. And what do you mean ‘we’? I didn’t notice you anywhere around when I was giving B. W. and Michael The Talk.”
“Well, let’s think about it.” This, or something similar, was Michelle’s way of deferring action I had spoken out against. She actually would think about it; I’d forget about it, and the next time she brought it up, I’d have to try to deflect her reasoned arguments with bluff and bluster.
“Oh, that reminds me,” I said. That, or something similar, was my way of changing the subject. “I had a talk with Bobby Ray over coffee this morning.” My old friend and teammate Bobby Ray was now another of the group of farmers and farmer types who met daily at six or seven for caffeinated rural fellowship. Despite his round of business failures over the years, he had amassed enough personal capital to get elected to the school board, so my talks with him were sometimes farmer to farmer, sometimes lord to vassal. “He said the money was iffy for new uniforms this year.”
Michelle was chewing vigorously, but she managed to curse around the steak before turning bright red and looking left and right to see if anyone had overheard. “They don’t pay you a cent for coaching. And those uniforms have holes in them. How can he say such a thing?”
“We did get in some new basketballs this week.” I sighed. “Leather balls at forty bucks a pop. But, Shell, it’s not like we’re talking about football here. They’d find the money for football uniforms.”
“Football.” She raised her eyes heavenward and shook her head. “Football is a stupid game. It’s a game for human tractors. It doesn’t require grace or stamina—”
“It’s the only sport people in this state care about anymore,” I said, and it occurred to me that, free coach or no, as far as some folks were concerned, Watonga High School basketball could disappear, could sink into the swamp, leaving only a few disconsolate bubbles behind to mark its passing.
“Oh well,” I said. “That’s life.”
“Hey,” she said, laying down her knife, “we should hold a benefit concert. Basketball Aid. I’ll invite Jackson Browne and the Boss.”
“Right. I’ll give Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel a call.” I checked my pockets. “I think I’ve got their numbers right here.”
“Sting.”
“Oh, right. And Bonnie Raitt. And John Mellencamp.” We were both laughing again, and the evening went on its appointed way. It was a good birthday.
So I forgot about the impending fiscal crisis in boy’s basketball to concentrate on nursing eight sick calves back to health. It wasn’t until practice actually began a few weeks later that I remembered Bobby Ray’s warnings, and then it was only because before our first practice I took a look in the closet where our game jerseys were hanging and got a good look at them; they had so many holes in them they were starting to look like our mesh practice jerseys. But that was a problem for later; I had my mind on the here and now.
As always, on the first day of practice I had a mixture of old hands and new talent. Most of the young kids hung back around the edges as the lettermen shot. Tyrel Sparks was the exception—only a sophomore this year but totally fearless. I’d been watching him play schoolyard ball for three years. Jimmy Bad Heart Bull and one or two other boys would be joining us after football ended, but for the most part, these twelve would be my team. I stood back for a moment, caught up in the possibilities of a new season, and watched them shoot, listened to the sound of basketballs thudding dully against the hardwood floor and echoing off the upper reaches of the old gymnasium, breathed in the dim odors of decades of perspiration and floor wax.
When they’d had a few minutes to shoot around and get warm, I blew the whistle and gathered them all together for the first time, an event I had anticipated for weeks, an event I had lost sleep over for days.
I had never really thought of myself as a coach. I was once a smart player, and I loved the game. But I never planned on being a coach; fate dropped me into the position. I read the few books on coaching basketball available at the Southwestern State University library in Weatherford, books written by coaches of NAIA champs in the 1950s, books that extolled the virtues of the two-handed set shot, books illustrated exclusively by line drawings of white players with crew cuts. They added nothing to my knowledge. Everything I knew about coaching came from my own high school years under Von Parker and from repeated viewings of Gene Hackman in Hoosiers.
I had coaching philosophies: I favored good aggressive man-to-man defense, transitioning from defense to offense by moving the ball upcourt quickly, and, on offense, a mixture of crisp ball movement and individual initiative. But even with some idea of what I wanted, it was all I could do to speak when I stood in front of a team at the first practice, whistle around my neck, clipboard in my hand. On this afternoon, I lifted my head, looked briefly at each of them—including B. W., who was grave and only blinked at me—and forced the words out in a low, neutral tone.
“My name is John Tilden. Some of you I already know. The rest of you I’ll get to know if you stick around. You can call me ‘Coach’ or ‘Mr. Tilden.’ I don’t care much which.”
I paused for a moment. The boys stood in various degrees of nervous discomfort, standing arms crossed or not meeting my eye, waiting for me to go on. Their anxiety gave me extra confidence. Pitiful, wasn’t I?
“Twenty years ago I played on the team that won that state championship.” I pointed to the faded banner hanging proudly on the wall of the gym next to the scoreboard. “I can’t promise you the same kind of success. All I can promise is that we’re going to work hard, we’re going to get in shape, and we’re going to have fun. We’ll win as many games as we’re supposed to if we do all of these things.”
Then I started them on drills—dribbling to the foul line and back, to midcourt and back, to the other foul line and back, to the far inbounds line and back. I had them do touch-pass drills, bounce-pass drills, baseball passes. I had them dribble to the far end of the court and back, alternating dribbles between their legs.
“Between your legs, Frank,” I called to one of the new boys. “Not off your legs.” B. W. and the seniors could do this without thinking, but some of the new boys always had trouble. “It’s not a hot dog move,” I shouted out as they struggled slowly upcourt, sometimes bouncing the ball off their feet and chasing it off the court, sometimes bouncing it off more sensitive parts of their anatomy and doubling over. “It’s a way to keep part of your body between the ball and the man guarding you.” In a week or so I’d change the drill so that they guarded each other on the way upcourt, all to demonstrate what it was good for; while it wasn’t always an appropriate move, they could do it when they needed to if they’d done it repeatedly, and that was the idea behind all of these drills—repeating actions until they became second nature, until the body had memorized them like the brain memorizes a face or a line from a song.
We worked on some very basic plays: screen and roll, backdoor passes, dribble penetration, and passing out to the perimeter. Kids these days don’t think much about passing thanks to watching the NBA, people playing one-on-one even when it’s five-on-five.
After we’d done drills, I let them scrimmage full court, four-on- four, winners keep the court, until all of them had had a chance to play at least once. They played hard, with exuberance if not always great skill, and there were some nice moments: Tyrel faking his brother off his feet and Martel returning the favor on his end of the floor, Micheal Wilkes driving the baseline, Bird Burke dropping in the fadeaway jumper from twenty, B. W. directing traffic. They were pretty much done in by the time everybody had played, drenched with sweat and bent over, clutching their shorts and puffing for air, the sure signs a player has given it everything he has.
They were almost finished.
“Okay,” I said, checking my watch for effect. “Twenty laps around the court. Winner doesn’t run after practice tomorrow. Go!” And off they went, shoes squeaking, jostling for position, an initial pack like the starting line of a marathon. Micheal Wilkes or one of the Sparks kids would probably win; they were the best natural athletes on the court. But sometimes B. W. or one of the others, someone with less pure physical ability but more want-to, would get caught up in the contest and surprise everyone. That, too, was part of whatever strategy I had.
While they ran, I shot baskets, starting off with one at the free throw line, a daily ritual, and then around the perimeter at about twenty feet.
“You ready?” came the voice from behind me. Carla Briggs—tall, her long brown hair in a ponytail—stepped around the hard-puffing Ramiro Garza, already mired toward the back of the pack, and joined me on the court. Carla was three years out of college, our high school girls’ basketball coach; she also taught history. I liked her, although I knew she was too bright and too intense for us to keep for long. She brooded over each loss as though it were a battle fought over actual territory, as though actual human lives were lost. Because of her, the girls played miles above their potential, and they won more games than anyone had a right to expect given the middling pool of talent we drew from, which meant that someday soon Carla would move on to some 5A basketball powerhouse or maybe a college assistant job and I’d be left to break in a new one-on-one partner.
Until then, I had a partner in crime. She would often come by after her sixth-hour class and shoot with me once my practice ended. Usually we’d end up playing one-on-one as the boys finished their laps and either collapsed into the bleachers to watch or trudged back to the showers. We also sat together on those occasions when both teams went on a road trip, but at such times, even though it was harder for us to talk, I draped myself across the seat behind her instead of sitting next to her in the narrow confines of the bus. You see, despite the fact that Michelle sometimes dropped by after school herself to shoot with us or to chat with Carla, I had to be careful not to spend too much time alone or in conspicuously intimate circumstances with Carla. Rumors started easily in a small town. Even though my civic spirit in coaching the team had been noted and applauded and I had been largely forgiven for my one youthful indiscretion, the past always seems to be sitting within easy reach of anybody who wants to pick it up.
“How do your kids look this year?” she asked, launching an effortless arc from the top of the key.
“God only knows,” I said. I rebounded her made shot and bounced the ball back out to her. “Yours?”
“Better and better,” she said, shooting again with the nonchalant flip of the wrist that I ached to pass on to my kids. “We could win a few games this year.”
“I don’t doubt that,” I said, passing it out to her again. “You warm?”
For answer she drove the baseline, gave me a head juke to get me in the air, and stepped around me to lay it off the backboard.
“Ah,” I said, passing it to her to check. “New move.”
“Had to do something,” she said, giving ground slowly as I dribbled back into her. “You waxed my butt the last couple of times we played. I couldn’t stand for that.” And, of course, she couldn’t. That was one of the reasons I liked her.
Michelle called my name when we were tied at ten and distracted me enough that I practically gave Carla a seventeen-footer.
“I’m going home to fix dinner,” Michelle called from the sideline; she was wearing boots and knew I wouldn’t allow her on the court proper.
“I’ll be along in a second,” I called back, dribbling as Carla watched warily. “Just as soon as I—” and in mid-sentence I cut to my left, then stopped to pop a jumper “—finish this game.”
“Sneaky,” Carla said.
“Learned it from you.” I waved as Michelle exited.
I won seventeen-fifteen, and dinner was ready and on the table when I got to the house, thick juicy fried hamburgers for everyone but Lauren, who had a bowl full of green stuff in front of her and a paranoid look on her face as she looked around at her dining partners.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I am now a vegetarian,” Lauren said. “I will no longer be a party to the beef conspiracy.”
“The what?” I looked across at Michelle, who shrugged. Not her idea, this.
“The beef conspiracy,” B. W. said, already three bites into his second burger.
Lauren speared a slice of cucumber. “I’ve decided to quit FFA,” she said, crunching happily. “Or at least stop showing cattle. I refuse to be party to their exploitation.”
“Okay, now you’re just quoting somebody,” B. W. said.
Lauren stuck out a green-flecked tongue at him.
Future Farmers of America, blue jackets, and livestock contests had been a part of Lauren’s life since she was conceived. Before, even. I stood staring at her. Something must have kidnapped my sweet, beef-eating daughter and replaced her with this Stepford Vegetarian.
“Beef is high in cholesterol,” Lauren explained to me, crunching. “And Mrs. Anderson said cows overgraze the land and release millions of tons of ozone into the atmosphere, or something like that.”
B. W. shook his head. “It’s methane, or something like that.”
“Whatever.” She arched her eyebrows dramatically. “Anyway, now you know. What are we going to do about it?”
I sat down and picked up my first greasy burger, a slab of thick melting Watonga cheddar on top, spread top and bottom with Selmon Brothers barbecue sauce, just the way I liked it. “Lauren, we raise cattle. Our family has always raised cattle. That’s what we do.” I took a bite, and dear Lord, it was good. “Anyway, people love hamburger. They love a good steak.”
“Why don’t we at least raise emus?”
“Emu?” I blinked a couple of times like the poleaxed steer I was, looked at Michelle as though to say, she’s your daughter, and tried to turn my attention back to my food. It almost worked; I was almost able to block out the ode to emus that followed.
It was pretty sad; not yet forty years old and I was already hopelessly behind the times. Either that or I was being treacherously undermined by some kind of secular humanist seventh-grade science teacher. Why didn’t Mrs. Anderson spend more time teaching them that life in a one-horse town could be hazardous to their long-term development instead of turning my daughter into an advocate for flightless birds?
Of course, that night when she couldn’t go to sleep, whom did she call? Her cow-murdering father.
“Tell me a story,” she said, as she still sometimes did when I looked in on her and found her still awake, and I went into her darkened room, the vague outlines of teen love gods whose names I didn’t know peering from posters on the wall.
“Doesn’t it ever get spooky to have all those guys watch you undress?” I asked. “The correct answer, by the way, is yes. It will always be spooky to have a guy watch you undress.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said as I sat on the edge of the bed and she wriggled away so as not to be pinned down by the comforter. “Try not to be so strange.”
“What kind of story do you want?” I asked, knowing that it didn’t really matter, that all she really wanted was the sound of my voice. The next morning she never seemed to remember the stories I told.
“You pick,” she said, and yawned.
So I told her a story I’d recently heard Robert Bly tell a gathering of men on a PBS special on television. It was supposed to symbolize something about manhood, I guess, since that was what the special was about, although I had just watched it because Michelle wanted to listen to Bly, one of her favorite poets. Anyway, it was the only story I could remember just at that moment.
“Once upon a time there was a king and a queen. They lived in a castle, and near the castle was a vast and dangerous forest.” As she settled farther down into her pillow, I told her that the king had sent a small group of hunters, then ever-larger groups of hunters into the forest, and none of them had ever returned, and soon nobody went near that forest. Her eyes closed, and she began to breathe regularly. “When a young man came along looking for adventure, the king told him that if he was looking for adventure he could point him in the right direction, and so off he went into those woods alone, except for his dog.” By then I could hear her snoring, but sometimes if I stopped she would jerk back upright and demand to know what was wrong, she was listening, so I kept going.
“The young man walked deep into the forest and it became darker and darker, and ominous shapes moved all around him as he walked through a murky bog. Then all of a sudden, a monstrous hand reached up from the water and yanked his dog under.”
Her breathing was deep and regular. I thought about stopping—but I was close to the end, and I didn’t want her to sit up and say, “What happened?”
I patted her reassuringly. “Now, the young man didn’t panic. He just stood there for a moment, reflecting, and said, finally, ‘Well, this must be the place.’”
I sat there watching her chest rise and fall. I counted to three hundred—five minutes, or thereabouts. I placed my hand gently on her forehead, prayed for her safety and for wisdom. Then I got up and slipped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind me.
Michelle and I had adjourned to the living room after dinner, and while I had been telling Bly’s story, she had put on the Eagles’ Hotel California and was listening to “Wasted Time.”
“Everything okay?”
“Lauren wanted a story,” I said, as I leaned over her shoulder and nuzzled her cheek.
She turned her head to kiss me fully on the lips. “What story did you tell her?”
I went around and sat across from her. “I told her the plot of that Mickey Rourke movie we saw that one time. You know, the one set in Brazil, with all the naked women?”
She rolled her eyes and went back to her grading. I got out my pen and paper and started writing letters.
I wrote my parents, happily living out their golden years in Arizona.
I wrote my baby sister Candace at the University of New Mexico, lovely Candace, who came along as a menopause baby (although of course my mother would never use that word, referring as it did to a bodily function) after Michelle, Michael, and I moved into this farmhouse and my mom and dad were forced back into the same bedroom for the first time in my awareness.
My folks were inclined to regard Candace as some kind of miraculous replacement for my big brother, Trent, who graduated from Watonga in 1967, joined the Marines to fight communists, and was killed during the Tet Offensive at the siege of Khe Sanh. Most of the time I was inclined to agree with them, although, of course, even the most wonderful children can’t replace those you lost, something those who think that the book of Job has a happy ending just don’t understand.
I even wrote one of my rare letters to Samantha and Bill in Rockwall, Texas, a letter addressed to both of them although I didn’t like Bill and imagine he returned the feeling. Still, it let us preserve the illusion of lifelong friendship.
Everyone tells me that letter writing is a lost art, and all I can say about that is, if it’s true, it’s a shame, a crying shame, as Oz would say. I never liked the telephone and would rather have had a few heartfelt lines penned as the mailman approaches than an hour of telephone talk, the voice in my ear a parody of intimacy.
Maybe it was true that I had never been farther than Dallas—well, I’d once been to the ocean at Galveston on a youth trip—but it wasn’t true that I never got out of town. I left almost every night, transported on the broad backs of words. While Michelle graded her papers and made out lesson plans, I wrote letters, little bits of myself carved paper-thin and stuffed in envelopes that would wing across the country, carrying me to all those places—all those people—I couldn’t see in person.
Michelle said she did not believe in letters. She said that with computers and the information superhighway coming, paper would be as obsolete as Pop Rocks, the Oh Henry! bar, and the record player.
But, of course, she said this while a turntable in the cabinet behind her filled the air with sweet music.
I just smiled at her and kept on writing.
Michael’s nineteenth birthday fell not long after Michelle’s, and she and I crossed our fingers that with his teen years almost left behind he would now become a model son and citizen. Hey, it was worth a shot; we didn’t see anything else on the horizon with much of a chance of changing him short of an exorcism or a lobotomy.
The whole family—Lauren and B. W. with various low degrees of enthusiasm—prepared to throw him a party. We called those friends of Michael’s we knew and could stomach and invited them to come out to the house for dinner; we even called Michael’s girlfriend, Gloria, a twenty-four-year-old woman with black hair, clothes, and fingernails. I always thought she looked like the consort of Satan in an old Hammer horror film, but Michelle liked her, since Van Morrison and U2 both wrote songs entitled “Gloria.”
Michelle arranged with Mike’s manager at Pizza Hut to give him the evening off. I gave my team the afternoon off and set out a dozen thick T-bones to thaw. Lauren baked a chocolate cake. B. W. did Michael’s chores, although it wasn’t really to recognize the birthday—he had been doing most of Michael’s chores for years.
About six, I went out to fire up the charcoal grill and was joined by our old hound dog, Frank, not much of a help with charcoal but something of an authority on steak. I saturated the charcoal with lighter fluid, stepped back, and flipped in a match. There was an eyebrow-singeing whoomp, a miniature Hiroshima fireball, and I walked back inside to season the steaks while the charcoal burned down.
I met Michael coming down the hall from his room and ventured some conversation. “You want to come outside and help me with the steaks?”
He stepped around me as though I were a street person who had wandered into his path and walked out the back door, straight toward his truck, my last Chevy except for one.
I had a bad feeling about this exit. I followed.
“Where you headed?” I asked brightly. He turned to look, and his keys jangled in his hand as he prepared to get into his truck.
“Out,” he said, and he climbed in and slammed the door behind him.
A miniature Hiroshima went whoomp in my gut, and I was around the front of the truck in a flash, grabbing the door handle and pulling it back open. “Just where do you think you’re going?” I asked.
“Wherever I want,” he said. I could feel my pulse pounding in my temples, and I was sure that at that moment I didn’t present the most pleasing sight. Maybe if I’d been a little angrier a long time ago, things could have turned out different.
I kept my hands tight at my sides, struggled to pronounce these words calmly: “We’re having a party. For you. Your friends are coming.”
“No, they’re not,” he said, a touch of impatience in his voice now. “I told them to blow this off and meet me in town.”
I tried one last time. “Michael, we’re having a party for you. Here. Now. Your family has planned it.”
He wouldn’t look at me, just leaned over so that he could turn the key when I was finished. “I didn’t ask you to do that,” he muttered, and then he spoke a vile word, just loudly enough for me to hear, and he cranked the engine to life.
I leaned in some myself and cocked my head sideways. “What’s that?”
He revved the engine.
I took his arm above the elbow, none too gently. “Michael, what did you say?”
“I said I don’t want a birthday party,” he said, snatching his arm out of my fingers, and now he looked up at me and his eyes burned with hatred. Hatred. “Do I look like that big a loser to you?” He snorted. “A birthday party? Dad, are you trying to ruin my life?”
Maybe you should never ask a man questions when he’s angry, or maybe some lunatic germ of errant truth-telling betrayed me. “Why not?” I said. “You ruined mine.”
And it was out, impossible to take back, impossible to pretend that I hadn’t ever thought it.
Impossible that I hadn’t meant it.
“What?” he asked, and for a second his eyes were wide and his face was more stricken than angry.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was, sorrier than I could ever express. Shame burned in my cheeks now instead of anger. “I’m sorry I said that. It’s not true.”
“I know it’s not true,” he said, and his voice rose into a higher register. “You screwed up your own life.” He pointed a finger. “You did it. You were so hot to get into each other’s pants that you didn’t think about anything else, did you? You didn’t think about me, didn’t think about how my whole life people would talk, point their fingers.”
“No,” I said, and the fireball was gone, and I suddenly felt very tired and very old. “We didn’t think at all.” I turned to go.
“You didn’t want me, did you?”
I looked back at him. His gaze was direct, piercing, and I was not used to it, not from this young man who hadn’t met my eyes for what may have been years. I wished I could lie, tell him that I had been excited, tell him that I looked forward to his birth with the anticipation shown by the shepherds in Judea.
But that was a lie.
“No,” I said. “Not when your mom first told me. I had other plans.”
He smiled now, a horrid smile, maybe because for the first time he had found a place of congruence with me. “I guess you thought that your life was just totally screwed.” He didn’t say this, exactly; he actually used that same vile word, and while normally I would have told him that such language was not welcome around me, it seemed like the least important thing in the world at the moment.
“Yes,” I said. It was true. “That’s what I thought then.”
“And what do you think now?”
I took a deep breath. “I think it all turned out for the best.”
He shook his head, smiled as though I amused him. “That’s pretty weak, Dad.”
I felt a momentary smolder at this, but it was quickly gone. It was pretty weak. Still, I had to say something. “This is the only life I’m going to get, far as I know. And I did get something good out of it, after all. I got this family.” I actually managed something like a smile. “I got you.”
He was unconvinced. Maybe what I had to say didn’t matter; maybe he’d had this conversation or one like it in his head so many times that now he couldn’t hear anyone else.
“You would have been happier without me,” he said.
I put my hand on his arm again as he prepared to close the door, but gently this time. “I thought so once. Not now.”
He shrugged off my hand and shifted into reverse.
“Michael, please don’t go,” I said, and again felt shame washing through my veins, a father reduced to pleading—pleading—with his son.
He looked at me, and now there was nothing in that gaze, not anger or fear or even pity; there was just nothing, like he was looking at a tree or a mailbox.
I stepped—almost fell—away from the truck, and Michael slammed the door shut and sped off. At the end of the driveway, his truck became a wispy cloud of dust rising from the road to town.
I walked to the barn, climbed up into the bales about twenty feet off the floor, and leaned back on one, the hay bristling against my back and neck, the smell of dust and decay strong in my nostrils. The smell brought to mind another fall afternoon I’d sat in this barn.
Years back, Michael had decided to stop playing junior high basketball. He wasn’t good at it; he’d gotten other things from his parents besides athletic skill, I guess, but still it hurt me to hear him say he was giving it up. “I hate it,” he had said then, his lip curled with contempt. “I think it’s a stupid game.” And nothing I could say in the next few days could convince him to just have fun with it. He turned his head away, walked back into his room, and turned up his heavy metal.
But there was an afternoon a week or so later when I had pulled the truck around back of the barn to load some hay, and I heard the sound of the ball bouncing on the slab of concrete my father had poured as a makeshift basketball court. I walked through the back of the barn and stopped far enough inside that I couldn’t be seen. I sat down on a bale of hay and just watched as Michael shot and missed, shot and missed, his form awkward and ugly. He stood there at the free throw line, missing shot after shot, and he was sobbing like his heart would break.
I can’t say for sure why he was shooting baskets when he thought I wasn’t around any more than I can say why it made him so sad that he was no good at it. All I really knew was this: I had struggled to love Michael since the day he was born, and maybe I didn’t do such a good job of hiding it. At the very least, he must have noticed that we didn’t have much in common. Maybe Michael thought I would love him more if he were a basketball player.
Sad.
What’s even sadder is that he was probably right.
After awhile, he checked his watch and dragged himself off toward the house, the ball bouncing behind him. And I just sat there in the hay and watched him go.
Michael probably didn’t remember that afternoon. But I always would, and I had always kicked myself for not talking to him, for not trying to build some kind of bridge between us.
It was hard, and never got easier. How could people so alike not understand each other in the least?
Did he think he was the only one who had ever had the desire to get in his truck and run?
I had had my share of those impulses over the years: to stop farming and find a vocation, discover what I could have made of myself; to find out whether Samantha still felt any of the things that had led us once to talk about a life together; to leave Michelle and the kids and a twenty-year accumulation of responsibility, disappear forever, become an unsolved mystery.
But I never acted on any of those temptations. Any of them. Whatever else I was or had done, whatever words I might have used to describe myself—disappointed, stolid, intelligent, quiet—the words I most wanted to apply to myself were simply these: decent and honorable. At times in my life, that decency had seemed an almost intolerable weight to bear, but who knows? Maybe at other times, without my knowing it, it may have buoyed me up, floated me across raging rivers that otherwise might have dragged me under.
Maybe in trying to do what I believed to be the right thing, I had actually done the right thing, at least on occasion.
This, at least, was my fervent hope.
When I heard Michelle calling from the house, I got down from my perch in the hay. I walked across the yard to the patio, where she stood looking down at the charcoal, now nicely white.
“I think it’s ready, J. J.,” she said.
“He left,” I said, and my voice broke. Michelle put her arms around me, and I bit my lip to keep from betraying anything else.
“I know,” she said. “I’ll bring the steaks out.” And she pulled back to look at me, and I could see the sadness—my sadness—reflected in her eyes. But she brought out the T-bones on the platter where I’d laid them out after rubbing them with cracked pepper and I put them on the grill, and you know what?
The sound of them sizzling and the smell rising up with the smoke didn’t just make me hungry. They were some of the best steaks I ever ate.
Lauren’s cake was pretty good too.
I could almost feel glad there was more left for the rest of us.
Almost.