In Reach (5 page)

Late in the night, while Ellen was in the bathroom, Tom crept into the bedroom. Trent hadn’t moved, his slim body stretched out like a sheeted corpse. He’d fallen asleep, his mouth slack and hanging, his breath foul and dear. Tom sat on the opposite side of the bed, afraid to touch him, afraid he’d waken.

He wished Trent had been the one hurt. No, no, not his head bashed in, not that, but the usual boyhood hurts, something of the body only, something that could heal into a scar and be shown off later in life to a girl who would laugh with him about narrow escapes and the stupidity of youth and trace the scar with her tongue, her teasing touch awakening him to hunger and love. He realized too late that he was making noise, sucking in big gasps of air. Trent rolled over and looked into his face.

“Dad?” Trent said. His voice high and young.

Tom tried to smile. “I’m here, son.”

“Is Alex all right?”

Tom swallowed. “He’s fine. He’s sleeping in his bed.”

“I tried to be a fireman.”

Tom nodded, but his lips would not shape consonants. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth, he would start to howl. He muttered something like a groan, but it seemed to quiet Trent. The boy closed his eyes, turned on his side, and fell like a weighted anchor back into sleep.

Still later, after Ellen had fallen into a fitful sleep on the couch, Tom walked over to the hospital. He didn’t know what he would do once he got there. He saw only one couple in the waiting room. They looked beat down, the woman frowsy and glassy-eyed, her hair thin, dry, and spiked like cactus. She wore a short-sleeved shirt, her elbows sharpened to knobby points. A man sat beside her on a chair tipped back against the wall.

His belly hung over a silver belt buckle of Mount Rushmore. He wore jeans and a plaid collared shirt, wire-rimmed glasses. He looked bookish and tough and like he could beat the crap out of Tom.

Tom peered up and down the halls but saw only a metal cart missing one caster and listed sideways. Looking for punishment, he sat down on a molded plastic chair and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You Manson’s folks?”

Expecting anger, reproof, he was unprepared for the way the woman brightened. “D’you know Manson?”

Tom shook his head. He couldn’t give Trent up to these people. “No, no. I heard . . . how’s he doing?”

“Twenty-seven stitches. And a concussion.” The woman’s voice swam in horrified awe.

“A kid did this to him,” the man said. He fisted his hands on his thighs. Big hands and hard, like knots of wood.

“But he’ll be all right?” Tom said.

“Doc’s checking on him,” the woman said.

Tom raised one trembling hand and stroked his jaw. “Helluva deal,” he managed to say.

“Another boy . . . he used a rock. Why would he do that?” The woman’s eyes, red-rimmed, bore into him. Tom inspected his shoes, fixed his attention on a jagged tear in the carpet.

The man dropped the chair legs to the floor. Tom winced, but the guy with big fists only leaned into Tom’s face and spoke, man to man. “You know how it is. New kid in town. He’s always the target.”

“Hold on,” Tom said. He straightened his back along the wall, the desire to confess urgent.

“I told Manson, he’s got to protect himself.” The man’s voice rose in a whine, a tornado gathering momentum.

“He’s not that kind of boy,” the woman said. She lifted one side of her mouth, a twisted tooth gleaming. Tom could see the image she held of her son, doe-eyed, feeding bits of bread to ducks. Climbing into bed between cowboy sheets.

“You got kids, Mister?” the man asked.

“Yeah. Two.”

“Boys?”

Tom squirmed. “Yeah.”

The man opened and closed his hands, his fingers red and battered and mottled like sausages. “How do you stand it?”

“What do you mean?”

“People aren’t nice. You have to teach your kids not to be nice. If you don’t, they get hurt.” He stopped and gestured down the hall, too choked up to go on. While Tom tried to think of something to say, the man stood abruptly, walked down the hall, and out of the hospital.

“He’s gone,” the woman said.

“No. He, uh, he just stepped out. He needs some air.”

She smiled that crooked smile again. “He goes. He’ll be gone a month, maybe two.”

“A month?”

“Last time it was six.”

Tom looked down the hall, anything to get away from this woman’s sad eyes. “Do you want me to get him back?”

She shook her head. “Won’t be no use.”

The doctor beckoned from the doorway, and the woman stood and stepped into her son’s room. Tom sat and stared down the empty hallway, seeing the listing cart leaned into a wall, the tear in the carpet under his shoe, everything broken, and then that stringy red-haired kid who flailed a bat at a car.

Tom left the hospital and walked a few blocks in the night to clear his head. He wandered into the city park and sat down on a rubber swing. The metal S-hooks cut into his thighs. He rocked himself back and forth and thought of Manson’s father and the open road. He pictured himself alone in a bar, in a dingy motel room, in his car on a highway in Montana driving 110 miles an hour into a flat horizon with nothing more weighing on him than where he might stop to refuel. Just get in his car and go. He could. He closed his eyes and tasted freedom like acid in his mouth. Eventually he wore himself out thrashing about, and he turned his face toward the house where his wife and sons lay sleeping, warm and vulnerable. He remembered to breathe, in and then out, not so hard, and he stilled to the rhythm. Morning light began to break, and then there was nothing left but to let his feet lead him home.

Don’t Call Me Kid

Jason enjoyed the thought of disappointing his father. All week he rehearsed the moment when his dad would drive up in his big Jeep Cherokee, and Jason would flatly announce, “I’m not going.” Why should he help his father relive some Wild West fantasy that had nothing to do with him? He laid on the busted chaise longue in his backyard in Des Moines, dragged his fingers through the too-long grass. He was fifteen, on summer vacation, and he let his dreams carry him. On Tuesday, he imagined his father’s face elongated in surprise. On Wednesday, he heard his dad’s voice quiver with rage. On Thursday, all he saw of his father were his hands gripped on the steering wheel. On Friday, Jason got out of bed early and looked in the mirror. Schmuck, he said. And then he began to pack.

“That all you’re taking?” Dave asked, when he pulled into the driveway. Jason sat on the front step, a backpack at his feet. Sticking up out of it were his sketchpad and two books he was currently reading,
The
Catcher in the Rye
and
The End of Nature
.

“What else do I need?” Jason didn’t get up. He didn’t look at his dad. He scuffed his Birkenstock sandal against the sidewalk and pushed his John Lennon rimless glasses up on his nose. He wore a tattered Grateful Dead T-shirt and cutoffs. “You got the big gun, don’t you?”

“I hope you brought some long pants. You’ll need them for riding.”

Jason didn’t answer, just heaved his pack into the rear seat of the black Jeep and climbed into the front. He looked over at his dad and stifled a laugh. Dave had exchanged his stockbroker image for the Marlboro man: tight Levi’s, white yoked shirt with pearl inlaid snaps, snakeskin cowboy boots. His belly was shelved on a belt buckle the size of Rhode Island. Jason glanced in the backseat; sure enough, there was a cowboy hat, black with a pheasant feather sticking up from the band.

“Don’t you think you’re going to be hot? It’s July. Must be a hundred degrees.”

“That’s why you wear this stuff.” Dave sped across two lanes of traffic. “To keep the sun off.”

“Mom sent sunscreen,” Jason said.

Before they got outside the city limits, Dave had laid out his plans for the trip. They were on a buffalo hunt. He’d set it all up from his bachelor apartment. He called Cabela’s, a big Western store out in Sidney where Nebraska bumps into Colorado. A guy named Shorty knew a rancher down by Lewellen who had wild buffalo on his rangeland.

“I drove over yesterday from Chicago,” Dave said. “I’d have called you, but I figured you were busy.”

“Yeah,” Jason said.

They rode in silence. Interstate 80 stretched out like film off a reel. Jason stuck the earphones that hung around his neck into his ears and tuned into his music. He liked the old masters, Coltrane and Davis, guys he was sure his dad had never heard of. His dad had lived through the Sixties without even changing his hairstyle. Once, when Jason asked him how come he hadn’t paid attention to Dylan or the Stones or the Dead, his dad said he guessed he’d listened to the wrong radio stations. “Besides,” he said, as Jason should have known he would, “I had to work my way through school.”

Eventually Dave tapped on Jason’s arm to get his attention. “Why don’t you park that thing?” He motioned to Jason’s Walkman and hitched his thumb toward the backseat.

Jason took off the earphones, but let them rest in his lap. He turned to look out the window. Miles and miles of cornfields. A few trees sheltering scattered farmhouses. All the way from Omaha to the panhandle, where his dad was from, the road stretched flat and endless, a line extending into nothing. There were no traces of the family left out there. His dad had taken him to Reach once when he was younger. Jason’s parents were still married then, and they’d stayed together in the downtown Deluxe Motel, six ramshackle side-by-side units. A sign in the manager’s office boasted of running water and
TV
in every room. “This is where I grew up, Son,” his dad had said. “This is the town that made a man out of me.”

Dave drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. After a few more miles, he cleared his throat. “How’s your mother?”

“Mom’s fine.” Neither turned their heads away from the road in front of them.

“Thought maybe she’d say hello this morning.”

Sometimes Jason couldn’t believe his father. Where he got off. “She was at work.”

Dave flipped a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket. With practiced moves, he tucked a Marlboro between his lips, found the lighter in the bin between the seats, lit the cigarette, and slid the package home. He was blowing out the first puff as Jason rolled down his window.

“I got the air on,” Dave said.

“Yeah, well, you’re contaminating it.” The wind blew his longish blond hair across his face. One end caught the corner of his mouth; another smacked his eye. Still, he kept his window down.

Dave took two more long draws. “Shit.” Dave stubbed out his
cigarette in the ashtray. “In my day, it was the kids who smoked, and the parents who told them not to.”

“Maybe we’re smarter now.”

“Than what?”

Jason shrugged his shoulders. Rolled up the window.

“Smarter now than then or smarter than your parents? Which is it?”

Jason did not answer. He knew his dad in this mood.

“Let me tell you something, kid. You don’t know everything. And you’re not the first kid who thought he did.”

They rode a few more miles in silence. Then, without turning his head, Jason said, “Don’t call me kid.”

They stopped in Grand Island for gas, Kearney for lunch at McDonald’s. Dave ordered a Big Mac Meal Deal, dipped his French fries first in mayonnaise, then ketchup. Jason had a salad and chicken nuggets, no sauce.

Once they were headed west again, driving straight into the amber sun, Jason took out
The Catcher in the Rye
.

“I read that,” Dave said.

“What’d you think?”

Dave shrugged. “Don’t remember much about it. Except it’s about a kid who’s kind of lost.”

Jason thumbed down the page corner. “Holden Caulfield.”

“What?”

“The kid you think was lost. His name is Holden Caulfield.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“Except it’s the culture that’s lost.”

“Huh?”

“That’s the point. Of the book.”

Dave didn’t say anything for a mile or two. “It’s not normal,” he finally said.

Jason grunted, hoping his dad would shut the fuck up.

“The way you see things. You’re kind of twisted.”

Jason squinted, pictured an eagle in flight, soaring, soaring, up and away.

“Not that it’s your fault.”

“Leave Mom alone.” He made his voice hard, flinty.

After a few more miles, Dave said, “Remember that time we went on that baseball tour?”

Jason looked up from his book. It was two years after his father walked out on them. Jason was eleven, and they’d gone on a whirlwind tour of major league baseball games. Each night in a different motel room identical to the one from the night before, reeking of cigarettes and chlorine, Jason endured a quiz. He recited players’ names,
ERA
s, and analyzed what went wrong on second base in the third inning. He kept the baseball cards stuffed in his bottom desk drawer, hidden under snapshots and debris. Every time he chanced upon them, he knew he should throw them away. But then he’d remember hot dogs and pretzels and sitting by his dad, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Now he said, “Not really.”

“You had your nose in a book most of that whole trip,” Dave said.

Jason shifted in his seat. His legs seemed to have gotten too long for the car, and he didn’t know what to do with his elbows. The air in the Jeep felt close, clammy on his skin. He actually put his palm on the roof over his head, as if he might shove the top open and find some relief.

Jason dropped Holden Caulfield on the floor and reached for his sketchpad. With quick strokes of a soft-leaded pencil, he drew a boxy car, high-wheeled. He drew a sun, oversized and glaring, and a long, white ribbon of road. Sticking out the windows of the boxy car, he drew twigs. They jutted and poked at crazy angles, twisted one over another, completely jammed the car. Then, he
turned the twigs into French fries, the ends drenched with drippings. He added spokes to the high wheels, and between the spokes, he inserted chrome emblems that looked something like baseball cards. His father might have said something to him, or he might not. Jason was out of reach.

The farther they went across Nebraska, the longer the road seemed to get. It stretched like taffy, like time when there’s nothing to do. They decided to stay overnight in Ogallala. Dave pulled up to a Super 8 along the interstate. They had supper across the viaduct in a tourist trap called Front Street: saloon with swinging doors, red lights, sawdust on a wood floor, honky-tonk piano player, and a menu that offered beef or buffalo. In one corner, on a raised stage, a poker game was shrouded in heavy smoke. Satin-and-lace women draped over the arms of fringe-vested men wearing holsters and chaps. Jason looked at the crowd and tried to guess which were tourists and which were locals. Some of the men looked tanned and leathery, some were even bowlegged. But then, Jason knew most modern ranchers drove sports vehicles and sat around in computerized offices. For all he knew, the guys in the crowd who looked like real cowboys might be actors. Or stockbrokers in disguise like his dad.

Dave plopped his beer down on the table, sloshing the foam over the side. “I’d buy you one, kid, but I don’t want to get arrested.” He set a root beer in front of Jason, frosty mug.

Dave lowered himself to the straight-backed chair, stuck one booted leg out in front of him, tipped the chair back on its heels. “You’re probably the only guy in here wearing an earring.”

Jason tossed his head to lift a blond wave off his eye.

“What’s next? A tattoo?”

Jason felt Dave looking at him. He wanted something from him, Jason didn’t know what. He picked up his mug of root beer. He’d have preferred a Coke. His dad—fake costume, fake beer.
The fake poker game over in the corner was heating up to a staged gunfight. Pretty soon they’d be caught in a fake crossfire.

“Look at that big guy.” Dave pointed to a mounted buffalo head that loomed over the bar. “Once king of the prairie. Here’s to you, you poor sonofabitch.” Dave lifted his glass to the buffalo and drank.

Jason wished his dad would just eat so he could get out of here. He felt sick to his stomach. One of the cowboys in the poker game accused another one of cheating.

“My dad was one of those guys who couldn’t adapt. Happy growing sugar beets on a few acres, then the war came along. After that, the name of the game was progress.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “Can’t accommodate, you’re obsolete.

Jason said nothing. He’d heard this sob story before.

Dave took a swig of beer, ran his tongue over his lips. He gazed into the glass eyes of the buffalo. “I was just about your age, full of myself.” He paused. “Told my mother that if I ever had kids and couldn’t provide a decent living, I hoped somebody’d take a shotgun to my head. I was quite the little hard-ass.”

Jason thought about the checks his mom got every month in the mail. Maybe they bought his dad peace of mind, but they didn’t mean squat. He dropped his buffalo burger into the red plastic basket and shoved it across the table. “I can’t eat this stuff,” he said. The basket collided with his dad’s beer, then dangled precariously on the edge of the table before falling to the floor.

Dave leaned his head forward and surveyed the damage. He picked up his beer and raised it to his lips. Holding the beer suspended, he looked at Jason. “Suit yourself,” he said.

After supper, Dave insisted that they drive ten miles north to the Kingsley Dam. The landscape shifted as they moved out of the town limits. Cornfields gave way to yuccas and sage. The air was drier, the sun more insistent, the trees huddled around low
places or watering troughs. In the distance Jason spotted a lone windmill keeping vigil on the prairie.

“I remember fishing in Lake McConaughy,” Dave said, driving north. “One time, our whole family went. Camped out right on the sand. White bass every time we threw in the line. We must’ve hit a school. Caught so many we ran out of bait. Mom had a couple shiny buttons, so we tried those. Worked just like a minnow. Dad decided we should use fish eyes. Damned if they didn’t strike at those. A guy up around the bend wasn’t catching a thing, yelled at us, wanted to know what we were using for bait. I asked Dad what I should say. He said, ‘Tell them the truth, Son.’ So I yelled back, ‘Fish eyes.’” Dave snorted. “’Course the guy didn’t believe me. Let out a blue streak.”

Jason was silent. He was thinking about fish eyes, iridescent silver and green. He saw the empty sockets of the eyeless, dying fish.

They stretched their legs by walking across the dam. The lake itself was narrow and twenty-six miles long, east to west. The sun squatted low on the horizon, orange and coral fanned above it like a peacock’s tail. Buttons of color shimmered in the sun-streaked water. Along the shoreline sprouted pockets of willow trees, here and there a cottonwood. Cattails waved in the marshes. Jason and his dad stood and propped their arms on the railing.

“Beautiful,” Dave said.

“Nobody fishes with fish eyes,” Jason said.

After breakfast next morning, they set out to find the ranch. Jason wore his jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. His dad wore his Western regalia with a clean red plaid shirt. They drove to Lewellen, all the way around the south side of the lake, its waters glistening now and then through a gap in the hills. They passed Ash Hollow and Windlass Hill. Dave told Jason a lot of pioneers died there until they figured out a pulley system to get their wagons safely
up and over the ridge. They went past a hillside cemetery, boots upside down on every fencepost.

“What’s that for?”

“Pointing home,” Dave said.

When they got to Lewellen, they couldn’t find the cutoff to the Porter Ranch. Dave circled through the three-block town, then turned back and circled again.

“There’s a gas station back there,” Jason said.