Now Is the Hour
Authors: Tom Spanbauer
Contents
1967. Rigby John Kluesener stands in the moonlight, a flower in his hair, his thumb out trying to hitch a ride on the road to San Francisco. The story of how he came to be there â of an adolescence spent on his parents' farm in Nowheresville, Idaho, of his father's misanthropy, his mother's strict Catholicism â is utterly real and totally unforgettable.
Tom Spanbauer is the author of three previous novels,
Faraway Places
,
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
and
In the City of Shy Hunters
. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he writes and teaches âDangerous Writing' classes. His former students include Chuck Palahniuk.
Faraway Places
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
In the City of Shy Hunters
For my mother
Tom Spanbauer
Â
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PARMESAN CHEESE.
My troubles all started with Parmesan cheese.
And they ended with Parmesan cheese.
My life up to now has been one big cheese cycle.
The first grade of Saint Joseph's School was the first Parmesan cheese incident.
The last Parmesan cheese incident just happened, and what just happened is the reason why I'm a free man out here on Highway 93, a flower in my hair, hitchhiking to San Francisco.
It's all pretty clear now. Amazing how clear things can get at night in the desert. The moon, a big silver dollar, so much light there's a shadow of me across the pavement. A long shadow. My feet here on the gravel, my head all the way over there on the center line.
George Serano told me once that you can tell how you feel by how your shadow looks. Tonight in my shadow there's something about my head and my shoulders, my arms too. The way my hair is sticking up, and my T-shirt on my biceps, the daisy I picked in Twin Falls poking out the side of my head. Something inside coming out that makes my shadow look, that makes me look, I don't know, full, I guess.
Like this moon. Moon's so bright I can see the lines in the palm of my hand. I can see my bloody, bit thumbnail. If I took my dick out, I could see every aspect of it. My ass too. I ought to just pull my pants
down right here, one hundred and fifty miles north of Reno, Nevada, and show that big old moon my big old moon.
Just my luck, some trucker would come along.
Just my luck.
And quiet.
Quiet as church. Not Mass or Our Mother of Perpetual Help devotions, but quiet in the empty Saint Joseph's Church. The quiet of the votive candle flame. The blue and red and yellow stained glass lying on the pew. Close your eyes and take a breath. What you smell is Catholic: oiled wood, beeswax, gold frankincense and myrrh.
The desert's even more quiet. The perfectly still sound of everything alive. Even the pavement, its dark ribbon going over the edge of the horizon, is alive. The horizon too, slow, sloping flat, every now and then an outburst of lava rock making a jagged edge. Sagebrush a darker shade of silver than the moon. Close your eyes here and take a breath, what you smell is sagebrush and bitterroot, what you smell is everything that's possible.
Two cigarettes ago, just as I sucked the yellow flame into the end of my cigarette, a coyote yelled out a big old lonesome, but not a sound since. Not even crickets or frogs. Just my tennis shoes scraping gravel. And my breath.
Maybe there was a nuclear bomb, and now I'm the only person who survived in the whole entire world.
That might not be so bad.
After seventeen years of breathing, I, Rigby John Klusener, do hereby declare there sure as hell are a few I could live without.
Why else do you think I'm out here on Highway 93, my thumb stuck out pointing to California?
What are you, six years old, in the first grade? There I was, six years old. Sister Bertha had put me on the dumb side of the room. Over on the right side near the cloakroom door in the back. Us dumb ones were supposed to be doing something in our notebooks while Sister Bertha was flashing the flash cards for the smart ones on the other side of the room. I knew every one of the words she was flashing except for
have,
and that's only because nobody'd shown me the
v
yet, plus I didn't know about the silent
e.
Anyway, Sister Bertha catches me reading the flash cards, so she says my name out loud. She says, Rigby John Klusener?
I stood up, of course, because I may not have known about
v
and the silent
e
yet, but I sure as hell knew you had to stand up straight, away from your desk, and say out loud and clear: Yes, Sister Bertha?
Sister Bertha was old and tiny. Holy Cross nun. The ones with the big halo fan thing all the way around their head. My sis, Mary Margaret, had Sister Bertha too in the first grade, and so had a bunch of my cousins. Sister Bertha was so old, she could have been the first-grade teacher for my mom and dad, even.
So Sister Bertha says, Rigby John, read these cards out loud.
I read them all out loud, all of them, no problem, that is except for
have,
and when she told me that the
v
had the
v
sound, after she told me about the silent
e,
and said the word
love
was the same way, she moved me clear across the room to the smart side, up front, right by her desk.
Been there ever since, up front on the smart side, a whole room away from dumb.
Maybe that's when Joe Scardino started to hate me. Because I got to move up front. Because I went from dumb to smart in a matter of five minutes. Plus, then I started helping Sister Bertha with extra things like wiping the chalkboard clean and getting out of class to get the chalk dust out of the erasers.
Probably didn't help.
Like there was the day Sister Bertha asked the class to point out the color orange to her. There wasn't one student who raised his hand. Maybe it was afternoon and everybody was sleepy. Maybe all the kids were just so bored they couldn't dredge up the simple answer to the simple show-me-the-color-orange question, I don't know. What I do know is that I remember thinking I was surrounded by a room full of druts, so I raised my hand, and when Sister Bertha called on me, I stood up straight, away from my desk, and said, Orange is the color of an orange, Sister Bertha. And she said, What color is that? She said, Show me where in the room you see the color orange.
The way I think of it now, that day when I looked around the room, everything was in black and white like on
Ed Sullivan
or
Bonanza.
I looked all over the room, and there wasn't one stick of orange color anywhere on anything. So I said, I have something orange in the cloakroom, Sister.
Which I didn't. I was lying through my teeth, which I think is the
only thing that separates the dumb from the smart. So Sister Bertha lets me go into the cloakroom.
The door swung open into the cloakroom, and soon as that door opened, the smell hit you. Bologna sandwiches, Wonder Bread, mayonnaise, mustard, boiled eggs, ripe apples, and a kind of pee smell mixed in with wet wool, and oranges.
I searched all over that room for an orange, inside every coat pocket, inside lunch pails, brown bags, but not a single orange, orange rind, or anything the color orange.
That's when I found it, and when I found it, I remember I swore to God and went down on my knees.
It was a miracle. A true miracle. The inside lining of my winter coat was orange. I slipped my coat on inside out, stood for a moment in front of the cloakroom door, took a deep breath, then
swung
the door open.
Sister Bertha! I exclaimed. Here is the color orange!
The whole rest of the day I got to wear a gold star on my forehead. Scardino must have hated that. I mean, I don't remember if he hated it or not, but, looking back, it's amazing how clear things can get.
Something else I can see clearly now. That day when I went looking for something believing I was going to find it and did. Nobody taught me that. Sure as hell didn't get that from Mom or Dad or Sis or Sister Bertha. Or the Pope. And it's got nothing to do with smart. Smart doesn't get you beyond fear, doesn't set you free.
Looking for something you know you're going to find. Ever since that day in the cloakroom, I've been doing that. I mean when the fear didn't get in the way. The secret is not to let the fear get in the way.
Still doing it. For example, just look at me out here in this night the color of ice cubes.
Miracles are out there somewhere. You just got to find them.
It wasn't very long after that Joe Scardino asked me to go home with him after school. I don't know why he asked me. Maybe even he didn't know he hated me yet. And for some reason, I don't know why, I was allowed to.
My parents never did allow anything too different.
Differnt.
That's how my parents said the word:
differnt.
We had cows to milk, stock to feed, chickens to feed, eggs to gather,
and some kind of more specific chore depending on the season, like, say, pick potatoes, shuck corn, can tomatoes, whatever, there were always chores and more chores to do, and dinner and supper to fix. Dishes to wash and dry. Always some kind of work that was so very goddamn important to do. Plus, we had to drive twelve miles to and from church and school, and that took up gasoline, so I don't know how I ended up at Scardino's house after school.
The point is, I ended up there, and what happened next is how it all started. After that day, it became a regular thing. Joe Scardino regularly beat the crap out of me over the next eleven years.
Parmesan cheese.
Joe Scardino was Italian â the only Italian I knew besides Regina Rossi, and she was in the second grade and a girl.
Plus, you got to understand that going to Joe Scardino's after school was my first time out alone. Oh, I'd done things alone before, but always with Sis. That was the problem with me, Dad said, that I was always with Sis. Sis'd say jump, and I'd say how high. And if it wasn't Sis, it was Mom. Those females turning me into a crybaby, a wuss, a girly-boy.
Hell, now that I'm looking back on it, I agree with him. It isn't that I liked them putting me in dresses and making me tea and playing paper dolls. I would've sooner been with him than Mom or my sis any day. But I ask you, did he ever step in and say, Come on, son, why don't we do something together, just you and me?
Forget it. Never in a million years.
Walking
home from school felt strange. Sis and I had to take two buses, and it took over an hour and a half to get home. For Scardino it was only three or four blocks.
I don't remember much about the walk except for the elm trees we always drove by in our Buick on our way to Sunday Mass on Elm Street, and that Scardino and I wore our winter coats and caps and mittens, and that we banged our lunch pails against the elm trees and against a white picket fence. Scardino's lunch pail was square and had Black Beauty on it, and my lunch pail was the shape of a hip-roofed barn and it looked like a barn too, red with white trim around the doors and windows and a green roof.