CHAPTER 1
FUNERAL
I was driving from Denver to the farm with a dead cat in the back seat of my car. She was a stray I used to feed off my back step. She slept outside. She walked in the rain. Once, after a blizzard, she spent a month trapped in the sewers, where she survived by eating baby raccoons. When the snow melted, she crawled out of the storm drain, mangy and wet with a chunk of skin missing from her left side. She rubbed against my shin and got pus on my britches. She was tough. She got better. I don’t mind cats but I hate cat-lovers. I loved this cat.
Nothing can survive poor kids. Poor kids in the city in the summer are apocalyptic. They wander the neighborhood with spray paint and sticks. Tag it, break it, steal it, kill it.
I don’t know what they did to her or if they even did it. But when I found her wheezing on my back step, I could tell that something mean had happened. She was bent up all crooked and blood was coming out of her fur like sweat. I picked her up. She was a tiny thing. I held her until she died.
I put the cat in a cardboard box and waited for dark. I couldn’t bury her in the backyard. I was a renter. I couldn’t risk the next tenant digging her up and playing with her skull.
So I was driving to the farm with a dead cat in the back seat of my car with the intention of burying her in the pasture where my dad had been burying dogs for fifty years. Bing, Cindy, Jumper, Lady, Norman.
Denver to Dorsey. Two hours on a pale eastbound highway. Hawks sat on the telephone poles, watching. Juvenile sparrows dive-bombed the car.
A box turtle was basking on the highway, just begging to get run over. I hate to see a roadkill turtle. They look like bloody rocks. Not this time. I pulled over, backed up, got out, and carried it into a pasture. Got cheatgrass in my socks.
I stood in the pasture and looked west. Denver was gone. The mountains were gone, replaced by prairie, a shimmery horizon, and cumulus clouds building up for a prick tease of an afternoon shower. The dry world. It wasn’t cracked or duned up like a real desert. Just dry. Grass, sage, tumbleweeds, wild sunflowers growing in the ditches. The color was bleached out of everything.
I pissed in a ditch. The puddle huddled to itself like mercury. The ground didn’t want the moisture.
I have anosmia, which means I don’t have a sense of smell. I was born that way. I was twelve years old before I became aware of the condition. I had always assumed I couldn’t smell because I wasn’t trying hard enough. But one day, I was driving the tractor and the cab filled up with dust. Then I noticed flames coming out of the steering column. The dust was smoke. I shut off the engine and emptied my water jug on the fire. Nothing serious was damaged. But it occurred to me that if I couldn’t smell smoke, then maybe there was something wrong with me.
That night, I told my mom about my condition. She said I shouldn’t worry. There wasn’t anything wrong with me at all. I just couldn’t smell. Then she whispered in my ear. “I can’t smell either. Don’t tell anyone. They don’t understand.” She was right.
There’s lots of consequences to not being able to smell. You don’t know when you stink. You don’t know when something else stinks. But you always suspect that something stinks because people are always reminding you. When someone asks, “Who stepped in dog shit?” I don’t even bother looking at my shoes anymore. I just leave the room. It was me. Shit might as well be chocolate.
I climbed back into the car and cracked a soda pop. I didn’t feel like driving yet. I just sat there. The windows were up, the air-conditioner was broke. Let it bake. I was an Indian in a sweat lodge.
A cop knocked on the window. I cranked it down.
He said, “Everything all right?”
“It’s too damn hot.”
The cop wrinkled his nose, peeked thru the open window. “You got yourself a dead cat.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me what you’re doing with a dead cat.”
“I’m going to bury it on the farm.”
He looked at my neck. “You’re not a farmer.”
“My dad is. Was. Emmett Williams. Maybe you know him.”
“License.”
I said, “What for?”
“You want me to, I can find something.”
I gave him the license. He walked and sat on the hood of his cop car, smoking a cigarette. I watched him in the rearview. He sat there and smoked a cigarette.
He came back and handed me my license.
“Go bury your cat.”
When I pulled into the driveway, Dad was next to the shed, poking a jack handle into a juniper bush he’d planted twenty-five years ago. In a land where things refuse to grow, he treated that juniper right. It was taller than he was.
He stopped poking the bush. “You come alone?”
“I brought a cat.”
We drove to the pasture. Dad opened the gate. The barbed wire was stapled to cedar posts that had been hauled on the back of a wagon a hundred and twenty years ago by our homesteading patriarch Helfrich Williams. He was German, but he’d never been to Germany. In the early 1800s, Helfrich’s ancestors moved from the middle of Germany to Russia. They were either escaping an oppressive regime or taking advantage of some sort of Russian government goodwill offering. Whatever it was, they settled someplace called the Volga River Plain. I don’t know where that is. Another thing I don’t know is why they were called the Williamses. Not very German. But if you look at the birth entries on the first two pages of our family Bible—a Bible written in German—there’s Williamses all the way back to before Lincoln was president.
In the 1870s, the Russians decided to murder all the German immigrants living on the Volga River Plain. Shortly before the Russians burned his village, young Helfrich Williams and his wife, Margaretha, packed up, moved out, and jumped on board the first ship headed toward America. Three weeks on the ocean and a miserable train ride later, they marched across the prairie until Helfrich stamped his shoe in the dirt and said the German equivalent of “We’re home.” Then they huddled together underneath a washtub to avoid a sandstorm. The Homestead Act promised paradise and, unlike many of their neighbors in that rectangle of the Great Plains soon to be known as Strattford County, that’s exactly what Helfrich and Margaretha found. To them, paradise was any place where they didn’t kill you.
The cedar posts were still solid. Good for another hundred and twenty years. Dad stepped out of the pickup, hugged a post, slipped the latch off, and dragged the gate out of the way.
I pulled the car into the pasture. Dad closed the gate and climbed back in.
He asked, “Where are we gonna do this?”
“Same place as Bing, I guess.”
“Bing?”
I said, “Your first dog.”
“We buried him?”
“I wasn’t born yet.”
“Bing. Here, Bing.”
Dad’s senile.
We bumped the car over the bunchgrass until we found a spot. A draw, a low place next to a high place. Here was sand like a real desert. Someone had dragged in a dead cottonwood tree to slow erosion.
We slid our shovels into the sand. Sweat dripped into our eyes. We slung the dirt over our shoulders, scoop after scoop. I wasn’t going to quit until Dad got tired. Dad wanted to prove that at sixty-two, he could outshovel me. He won. The hole was big enough to hold a goat.
I dropped the cat into her grave. She was stiff now, like she’d been taxidermied. The sand was moist beneath her. We scraped the dirt back into the hole.
Dad patted the earth with the heel of his sneaker. “You got any last words?”
“The end.”
“Here, Bing.”
On the way home, we stopped in Dorsey. Dorsey is a wide part of the highway. There are no side streets. There are no traffic lights. Just beat-down houses and busted-up cars.
Briefly, in the early 1900s, Dorsey was on the way up. This was when they called 36 the Airline Highway. The Airline Highway brought cars. The cars brought travelers who stopped for gas and maps and hamburgers.
On Fridays, the citizens of Dorsey used to roll a portable bandstand into the middle of the road. They diverted traffic with burning bales of hay. There was live music and dancing. Then Eisenhower laid down Interstate 70 forty miles south and all the traffic disappeared.
The following businesses are gone: the Dorsey Grocery, Scamper’s Fuel Stop, the Airline Motel, the Airline Café, Gabby’s Mexican Restaurant, McPhail’s Used Cars, the Corsair Roller Rink, the East Pacific Swimming Pool, the Lil’ Dimple Golf Course, and Poeller’s Automotive. The following businesses are open: Hi-Country Telephone, U.S. Post Office, Dee’s Liquor.
The bandstand is firewood. The musicians are dead.
We went to the liquor store. Three kinds of beer, a shelf of dusty liquor bottles, faded bikini posters. Vaughn Atkins’s mom was reading the Strattford Messenger behind the counter.
I’m not sure Dad had ever been inside Dee’s Liquor. Getting drunk was never one of his priorities.
Vaughn’s mom said, “Looks like you got yourself a farmhand, Emmett. Get any work out of him?”
“He can’t take the heat.”
She said, “Scorcher.”
He said, “Hotter than a popcorn fart.”
I set a twelve-pack of longneck bottles on the counter and asked, “What’s Vaughn up to?”
“Worthless as ever. Sits in the basement all day.”
“I should visit him.”
Vaughn’s mom shrugged.
I said, “Anyway, not this time. I’m headed back to town tomorrow.”
I reached for my wallet. Dad pulled his out first. He said, “I got it.”
He handed Vaughn’s mom a hundred-dollar bill. She puzzled for a moment. I took the wallet from Dad’s hands, found a twenty, and swapped it for the hundred. Vaughn’s mom said thanks, but she looked at me like I was no good. Like I didn’t need to be letting my poor, confused pa buy beer. Or maybe like we didn’t buy enough. I’m not much for reading people.
On the way home, Dad leaned forward with his nose almost touching the windshield. “I sure like the way those big birds fly.”
I followed his eyes until I spotted two hawks circling way up high. Below them, a tractor was dragging a rod weeder thru a field, all dust and exhaust. Farming turns up mice. The hawks get fat.
I parked my car in the shade of the locust tree next to the garden patch. “It’s time for a beer.”
“We have beer?” asked Dad.
“Yup. We earned it. We put a cat into her eternal resting place. Let’s sit on buckets and drink a beer.”
“Too hot to do anything else.”
As we were walking toward the shed, Dad looked at the box of beers in my hand. He said, “We’re only going to drink one, right?”
“Unless you want more.”
“We should put the rest of them in the fridge before they get hot.”
“We can do that after.”
“We should put them in the fridge.”
The distance from the house to the shed was thirty-three yards. I ran that thirty-three yards a million times as a kid. At the moment, we were halfway there. Dad stopped walking.
“I don’t wanna walk back to the house, Pa.”
“I’ll do it.” He reached for the beers. I held them. He tugged the box. I let go. Dad was a pain in the ass. Always, ever since I was a kid. He made up his mind about some stupid thing, and if you don’t like it, you’d best find a way to pretend that you do.
I followed him toward the house. He said, “You don’t have to come with me.”
“I gotta make sure you don’t screw up and put ’em in the freezer.”
He looked hurt. Sometimes I forget.
The house was a mess. Shit was broken. Water was sprung. Mold. Bugs. A hovel.
“Unabelle been around lately?”
He looked at me like I’d asked the dumbest question he’d ever heard.
Unabelle Townsend came by mornings and evenings to check on Dad. Tall, skinny lady with pretty grey hair. She gave him a D- in twelfth-grade English in 1963. She gave me a smiley face in elementary art in 1979. Retired in 1983. Nicest woman you ever met. For the past couple of years, she’d been helping out: laundry, food, oral hygiene. Her husband had died sometime in the nineties and I suppose she enjoyed having someone to care for. She talked to Dad about the weather and cleaned up his messes. She listened when he was willing to talk, calmed him down when he got mean.
I rephrased my question. “How long since Unabelle’s been here?”
“Hard to say. Since yesterday, I think.”
Nobody but Dad had been in this house for at least a week. Maybe a month. It made me mad. Mad at Unabelle for leaving him alone, mad at Dad for being helpless. I said, “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I don’t need to call you for every little thing.”
He couldn’t dial a telephone, that’s why he didn’t call. I should have brought him to live with me a long time ago. Except he couldn’t live in Denver. He’d get lost and show up dead on my back step with blood in his hair. I didn’t want to bury my dad in a pasture.
I sat him on his recliner and tuned the TV to a John Wayne movie. “Don’t move.”
I dug thru piles of trash until I found a phone book. I called Unabelle. No answer.
I went thru every room, just looking for something. Windows were open. Flies were thick. This house contained my childhood and it was covered with filth. The bathroom door was locked. He had locked himself out of the bathroom. Where’d he been shitting?
Goddamned pit. Twinkies. Cassette tapes. I didn’t know where to start.
I went back to the kitchen. The beer was still sitting on the counter, getting warm. I opened the fridge. Ice cream, melted over a half-eaten microwave pizza. Dad appeared. “Everything okay?”
“I don’t know how you do it, Pa.”
He was sad. I was sad.
He said, “I’m not good at things anymore.”
“You don’t have to be good at things.”
“I used to be able to fly.”
“We’ll take care of it. I’ll find Unabelle and make things right and we’ll take care of it.”
I started by cleaning the fridge. It wasn’t as bad as it looked. The ice cream had mushed on stuff but most of the food was safe in Tupperware dated in Unabelle’s old-lady handwriting. The most recent date I could find was from two weeks ago. In the freezer I found a frozen pizza, which I set to baking. I wiped clean a couple of plates. We ate dinner. The sun was going down. I didn’t have anything important waiting for me in Denver; I could stay another day.
After we finished the pizza, I started washing the dishes. I sent Dad around the house looking for dirty cups. If he was away too long, I’d holler for him. “What are you doing, Pa?”
“Not sure!” he’d yell back.
“Look for cups!”
He brought back a couple.
I started the dishwasher and then looked in the junk drawer for the bathroom key. I couldn’t find it. Dad got curious. He said, “What’re you after?”
“The bathroom’s locked and I can’t find the key.”
“Come on,” he said. He walked out the front door and headed toward the shed. I followed. Once there, he found a piece of welding rod and, using the table grinder, turned it into a key. Nothing fancy. Just a little flat-blade key. But he did it. When he finished, he looked at it. “What’s this for?”
“Follow me.”
Back to the house. I put the key into the knob, turned it. He was proud. I was proud. It was like old times. I opened the door. Unabelle was lying on the floor, dead, fat, bloated Elvis-style.
There are good things about being an anosmiac and there are bad things about being an anosmiac. Good: I didn’t smell the rot. Bad: If I had been able to smell the rot, I would have known from the second I entered the house that there was a dead lady in the bathroom. Dad didn’t wrinkle his nose. Evidently, senility also takes away your sense of smell.
“We found Unabelle,” he said.
And so I quit my job and moved in with Dad.