Callisto (2 page)

So I started to read, but then got so hot even with the windows rolled down I couldn't concentrate and had to put the book aside and napped for a short time, maybe an hour. I woke up feeling thirsty, but not for Captain Morgan, more like an ice-cold Coke. Not one vehicle had gone by in that time, so it looked like rescue was not coming down the road anytime soon. I tried starting the engine. It caught and I got
rolling again, only the car sounded no better than before. I kept the speed down and limped along that way exactly thirty-seven minutes and then it died on me same as before, only this time fate was kind and I come to a stop a few yards from someone's front gate, only there was no gate, only fence posts either side of where a gate ought to be and a long curving dirt driveway leading to a farmhouse set way back from the road, the only one in those parts, real isolated.

I started up that driveway on foot. It was in a neglected state with a washout halfway along where the land dipped a little and you could see the spring rains runoff had done damage there. I was expecting a dog or three to come running at me like they always do from a farmhouse yard, but there was no dogs at all. It was a ramshackle place, neglected like the driveway, a two-story clapboard house with a porch on three sides, all badly in need of paint with a flaking propane tank alongside like a midget submarine. You can see places like this all across the plains states, a few big old shade trees overhanging it and liable to cause damage to the roof next time a twister comes through, and a big old barn with a beat-up Dodge pickup parked inside.

I went up some sagging steps to the porch and knocked on the screen door. The front door was open so I could see down the long hallway. There wasn't a sound coming from inside except a steady ticking from an old grandfather clock big as a coffin stood on its end halfway along the hall. I knocked again and called out, “Hello? Anyone home?” Well, there wasn't. I knocked a little louder with no result and Helloed some more, louder than before, only it brought no result still. They were all away someplace else and were the kind that
leaves their door open with no fear of thieves. There are still country folk like that, but their numbers are getting dwindled real fast what with criminality being everywhere nowadays like it is.

I was thirstier now than before. Maybe there was a tap in the yard but I couldn't see it. I wanted water, which is a free commodity and not like stealing, even if I had to take it from the kitchen and not from the yard. So I opened the door, calling out again, and stepped through into the house. There was that old farmhouse smell from the cracked linoleum floor and faded wallpaper, all of it needing replacement. The clock ticked away deep and slow, like it was measuring out time from a hundred years ago when everything moved slower than today.

The kitchen was right where I expected it to be. There was mess everywhere along the counters and the sink was crammed with dirty dishes. This was not a proud household. I could smell rotten food somewhere, the old-fashioned pantry maybe, or the trash bin that needed emptying. Someone needed to go through that place with a bucket and mop and a scrub brush too, but that was none of my business how people choose to live. There was a swivel tap over the sink and I already saw glasses standing like troopers on parade on the overhead shelf. That shelf needed cleaning too. I would not have allowed that kind of grime if it was my place. I took down a glass and filled it, then drunk it all in one long swallow, then filled it again for a more leisurely drink.

“Put it down,” says a voice behind me. It was not a scared voice, not angry either the way you might expect seeing as I wasn't invited. I turned nice and slow with the glass still in my
hand. The guy across the kitchen was a little older than me. His T-shirt said
Bad to the Bone – and Proud of It
. He had a baseball bat in his hands. He hadn't shaved in a day or two and there was a kind of twitchiness about him that didn't appeal. If I was a smaller man than I am I would maybe have been a little bit alarmed by him holding the bat like he was. I thought, At least it isn't a gun.

“Afternoon,” I said.

“Put it down.”

I put the glass on the counter without taking my eyes off of him. His hair was standing out all wild from his head and his eyes were strange. I waited for him to say something else, but he just kept on staring and holding the bat ready to slug me if I made a move towards him.

“I had car trouble,” I said to explain myself. “I'm down at the road. I knocked but nobody come. Thank you for the water. I was thirsty.”

He still said nothing.

“I'm Odell Deefus, from Wyoming.”

“That's a nigger name.”

“I knew a black kid in school called Alan White. You can't tell just from a name.”

The clock ticked on while he watched me watching him. Then he lowered the bat.

“You can't be too careful,” he said, still not relaxed at all, but not jittery and alarmed like he was up till then.

“I knocked, then I figured there's nobody home. I needed that water.”

“Go ahead.”

I picked up the glass and drunk it down, keeping my eyes
on him but trying to look casual. He was wearing sneakers, so that's why I didn't hear him coming. I set the glass on the counter. “Thank you. I'll be getting back to my car now.”

I had to walk past him on my way out of the kitchen. He stepped back a little to let me by. People do that when you're six-three. If I was five-eight he'd still be giving me grief about the water and maybe threatening to call the police, but he was shorter than me by a good six inches and just wanted me out of his house, which is understandable. He followed me down the hall past the grandfather clock, all the way to the screen door.

When I'm on the other side of it he seemed to find some manners at last and says, “Overheated radiator?”

“The car's a junker. Could be anything.”

“I'll take a look. I always fixed my own cars.”

“Okay.”

He leaned his baseball bat against the wall next to the doorway and come outside. We crossed the porch, went down the rickety steps and across the yard to the driveway.

“Hot day to get car trouble,” he says.

“I know it. The engine's been sounding bad for three hundred miles. I'm lucky I got this far.”

“Where you headed?”

“Callisto. Signing up with Uncle Sam.”

“Huh?”

“The Army. They've got a recruiting office there.”

“The Army?” He made it sound like something bad.

“I tried other work. It all goes nowhere.”

“The Army'll send you to Iraq. You want to go up against those jihadis?”

“Someone has to.”

“It's Iraq's business, not ours. They don't need no outside interference. We should keep our nose out of it.”

I heard the exact same line many times before. It's what most people were thinking, and I could see why, but when you need to be making decisions about where to go in your life, that kind of argument doesn't stack up so high against serving the nation and making life better for people outside America.

“You're crazy if you do it,” he says.

“I want a regular paycheck and a career. That's what they're offering.”

“Someone big as you, you should get on a football team. Are you fast?”

“No.”

“I bet you could block pretty good, though.”

“I never cared for football that much.”

It's true, I never did join the team in school, even when the coach kept on at me to be part of something proud. It's hard to be proud of something when you're from Yoder, Wyoming, population 2774. And my old man, he wanted me to be on the team so he could have something to brag about. Maybe I didn't want to do it because of that. Me and the old man never did see eye to eye about a single thing, which is why I left home after school was all over and done with. He told me good riddance, said those very words to me. It hurt when he told me that, but I never did let it show. I paid him back by leaving without saying another word, just got on a bus down to Colorado and worked there awhile in a Denver car wash with a bunch of drop-outs going nowhere. I have never once
sent a letter home to him or called on the phone. If my mother was still alive I would have, but not for him, that washed-up son of a bitch. He had no call to look down on me. All he ever was, after he got busted out of the police force down in Cheyenne for reasons he never disclosed, was come home to Yoder and work at the gas station out on the interstate ringing up change. Some big achievement.

We got to the car and he looked under the hood, then said to turn the ignition. The engine rattled to life, then quit again, then restarted. “Sounds like shit,” he said. “Why don't you drive it on up to the barn. I can't work on it out in this sun.”

“Okay.”

I kept it firing all the way up the driveway to the yard, where it quit again. He come walking up behind me, shaking his head. Together we pushed it inside the barn next to his truck. On the Dodge's door it said
Dean's Lawnmowing
with a telephone number.

“That you?”

“That's me, Dean Lowry. Get the hood up again.”

He got a set of tools and started poking around in the engine bay, every now and then telling me to start it up, which it never did. After about twenty minutes he says, “I can't see where the problem is. You might need a complete overhaul on something old as this, engine rebuild, the works. Probably cost you more than the car's worth. What'd you pay for it?”

“Seven hundred.”

“Hey, take it to the scrapyard and they'll give you fifty bucks for the parts, that's my advice to you.”

“Getting it there's the problem.”

I looked at the rear of his truck and saw the towbar. He saw
me looking and says, “I'll haul you in tomorrow, it's too late today.”

“Thanks, Dean.”

When you use someone's name for the first time it changes things between you, breaks the ice. Frankly, I wanted him to like me enough to let me stay overnight. There was nowhere else for me to go with a dead car anyway. We both looked at the Monte Carlo, him with contempt, me with something like shame, both of us wondering where to steer the relationship next. Finally he says, “Nothing more we can do here. Come on in the house. Did you eat today?”

“Pancakes for breakfast at Denny's.”

“I hate to cook, but you can help yourself to whatever's in the kitchen.”

“I'll do that, thank you.”

“Better bring your stuff inside, you aren't going nowhere else today.”

A little later I'm breaking eggs and chopping ham with Dean sitting backwards in a chair watching me. “You want some of this?” I offered. “I make a pretty good omelet.”

“I don't eat pigmeat. I quit that.”

“Just plain then.”

He shook his head and put a cigarette in his mouth. “These are the next things to go, and beer. There's a sixpack in the fridge if you want it.”

“You on a health diet?”

“You might say that.” He flicked a lighter and squinted at me through blown smoke. I concentrated on the pan, flipping the eggs around and feeling hunger clutch at my guts when the smell got to me. When it was done I dished up and sat
opposite him at the kitchen table to eat. He watched me wolf it down like I'm a starving man.

“Someone your size, you must need a big food intake.”

“Just average.” I munched and swallowed and felt bliss rush through me. There is nothing like hunger to make you appreciate being alive to satisfy it. All of a sudden I liked Dean more than before, even if I didn't appreciate him blowing smoke across the table. Me, I have never smoked, never wanted to.

“You live here alone?”

“Yeah, except for my aunt. This is her place.”

“She's not around today?”

“Nope, she went visiting.”

“Callisto?”

“Florida. She'll be there awhile.”

Florida is where
The Yearling
is set, back in the swamp and piney woods. I felt a little bit envious. “Is she taking in the wild woods while she's there?”

“She'd only get her ass bit by gators. She likes the beach when she visits. Fort Lauderdale, Miami, places like that with airconditioning, that's what she likes.”

I finished the omelet and wished I'd made a bigger one. The beer sounded good. “Okay for a brew?”

“Help yourself.”

I got one out of the fridge and sat down again. He watched me pop the cap and start drinking, then he got up and fetched one himself. So much for the health diet.

“I'll quit tomorrow,” he said, winking. I laughed at that. He wasn't such a bad guy. We could get along until I was out of his hair and signed up for the Army. He blew a crooked smoke ring and admired it. “So,” he says, “you want to go kill Muslims.”

“I just want a steady job. They're not so easy to come by without a graduation certificate.”

“You've got to have one of those to get in the Army.”

“No, they're desperate for enlistees, so you just have to sit for a simple test, I heard, to show you're not a moron.”

“Well, you look the part anyway. They'll make you a recruiter maybe.”

“That'd suit me fine.”

“So you don't care about the Muslims and all that shit over there?”

“We started it, so now we have to finish the job, that's how I see it.”

“But you know we never should've started it.”

“Everyone knows that.”

“Except Bush.”

“I bet he knows it, only he can't say so out loud.”

“Somebody should kill that guy,” he says, which is treasonous talk nowadays, especially to say to a stranger. “But then we'd get the other guy, the VP with his fingers in the war machine and big oil. Fuck the whole bunch is what I say. Every time they open their mouths another turd flops out. You can't trust a damn thing they say, not anymore.”