The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (13 page)

Talking to Beatrice restored my spirits when I was feeling alone. But sometimes, as I’d been warned, I put my money into the phone and got nothing, not even a live hum. The receiver sounding as dead as a rock, I would slam it into its cradle, start the Cruiser, and head in the other direction, driving right past the turn to the rock house.

“Just need a carton of milk,” I would say to Irene, who ran the Cima store and adjoining post office with her rancher husband. I always did my best not to eye the red-and-white, rectangular packages on the shelf behind the counter.

Irene would give me a kindly look. Most of her clientele were lonely desert rats. “Your timing couldn’t be better. Truck just left us ten half gallons. So how’re you? Keeping busy up at the rock house?”

Whether it was her chitchat or her husband, Bob’s diatribes against the BLM, those conversations entered my veins and soothed my nerves like Valium. Sometimes I even managed to resist saying, as if it were an afterthought, “Oh, and give me one of those packs of Marlboros too.”

Irene and Bob’s kindness normalized my loneliness. They conveyed acceptance, an understanding that the state of mind was not a weakness to be overcome. You couldn’t get accustomed to it or get through it, emerging tougher on the other side. It was as real as hunger and grew out of a similar but emotional need for nourishment. They were in the business of satisfying the physical need with the staples they sold—American cheese, Wonder Bread, ketchup, tins of Spam and tuna—and the emotional need with free conversation.

“Are you ready for the dance?” Irene asked one day as I lingered in the post office after buying a book of stamps.

I gave her a questioning look.

“Didn’t you hear? It’s gonna be at the general store in Goffs.” Goffs, twelve miles south of the pay phone, was the big nearby town, population twenty-seven. “They’re thinking of having them from now on. On the first Saturday of every month.”

“Guess what,” I said during my next call to Beatrice.

“Maybe you’ll meet a man there,” she said.

“Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen.” Imagine! Men’s voices. Men’s eyes. Hands that had the potential of crossing intimate boundaries.

Beatrice was more practical and less idealistic than I was. Like Irene and Bob, she normalized my longing for companionship. I’d moved to the desert thinking I could prove I didn’t really need anyone else, including men. Men especially. They were like cigarettes. I thought of all the packs I’d crumpled and thrown out my Cruiser window on my way home from Cima, after smoking just one. I hated litterers, but that was the only way I could keep myself from having another—unless
I was able to find them when I drove back later and walked up and down the road, peering beneath bushes and risking being bitten by a Mojave green, whose venom was worse than any other rattlesnake’s.

•   •   •

I
T FELT STRANGE DRIVING THE
C
RUISER IN
dainty shoes and a dress. The parking lot was overflowing with vehicles, so I parked behind the Goffs Bar and General Store, freshened my lipstick in the rearview mirror, got out, stopped beside the propane tank to remove a rock from my sandal, then continued walking with fateful determination toward my destiny.

I had no idea the place could hold so many people, most of them strangers. There must have been twenty couples bouncing to George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” I scanned the crowd, looking for Connie, who owned the store with her husband. I’d stopped in to fill my gas tank the week before and had confided that I didn’t know how to dance western swing. “Don’t worry. Come on down,” she’d told me. “The cowboys will teach ya. It’s part of their code to dance with every woman. Don’t matter if you’re twelve or eighty.”

I was hardly in the door when one of the Overson brothers—in a crisp, white, pearly-snapped shirt and a black string tie, his face beer reddened—began proving that cowboy dictum. He didn’t bother asking. He just grabbed me and, with confident, muscle-taut guidance he’d perfected riding horses and roping calves on his ranch, reeled me around the floor.

Soon I was dancing and drinking with the best of them, having a much better time than I’d imagined possible. But I was also disappointed that most of the men wore wedding rings. Of the two who didn’t, one had a scar where his left ear should have been, and the other had tobacco stains in a yellow-white beard. Then a guy in a classy sports jacket and jeans that fit just right appeared beside me. “Want to?” He didn’t hold me any closer than the other men had, yet the dance was more intimate, his movements more suggestive, like notes played on a slide guitar rather than the banjo twang I’d bounced to with the others.

The broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, hazel-eyed charmer
cowboyed for the ranchers who owned my cabin. “So you live up at the rock house,” he said. “I’ve heard all about you.”

“What’d you hear? No one knows me well enough to tell you much.”

“That there’s this looker up there and she has a truck she fixed up herself.”

“His name is Dorf.”

“Think you could work on my truck when I get one? I’ve never been much of a mechanic.”

“I don’t know. What’s going to be wrong with it?”

“Probably everything. I tend to go for the glitter. Just show me chrome and big tires, and I’m a goner.”

He sent me away from him, spun me half around, then pulled me in so my back was to his front. For an instant we danced as if to rhythm and blues, not Merle Haggard. Turning me again to face him, he seemed to check himself. I could tell he’d felt it too.

He introduced himself as Stefan. I didn’t learn until much later that this, like much else he claimed to be and to have done, was an embellishment. His real name was just Stephen. Steve.

My relationship with the man who would become Jake’s dad was the classic tale of the responsible woman who falls in love with an irresponsible man. This was the observation of an equally irresponsible but older and more seasoned cowboy friend of his, who tried to warn me that “you can’t change a man.” But I was certain that I could sand off all of Stefan’s rough edges. Hadn’t I refurbished the rock house and rebuilt Dorf’s engine? I thought I could fix anything.

Within the year he quit drinking and I married him. Soon after, I became pregnant. And soon after that he came home nonchalantly toting a six pack. He lost jobs, we went through my money, and we had a couple of blowout fights that got physical. I resorted to looking for safety, security, and shelter in the only place I knew I could find it.

3

W
E ARRIVED IN MY PARENTS’
G
OODLAND DRIVEWAY IN THE STYLE OF THE
B
EVERLY
H
ILLBILLIES, THE BED OF OUR PICKUP PILED HIGH, OUR DOGS RIDING ON THE LOAD, AND MY HORSES TOWED ALONG BEHIND.
If anyone had told me that I would end up back in Kansas, I would have been horrified. I’d had nightmares about this while living in the rock house. I dreamed that I would wake up and, like some reverse Dorothy, discover that I wasn’t in the rugged, fanged, and taloned desert but in a weedy yard next to a broken-down old trailer house on my father’s farm. Crushing despair would greet the realization.

It was early July, and my brothers had come home also, to help with the harvest. The morning after our arrival, Stefan went to the farm with them and my father. He was to work there until we figured out our next step. At least that was the stated plan. At noon my mother and I brought dinner out to the men, just as we used to do at harvest time when we lived in the country. We dined under a scraggly elm in the farmyard.

“Oh!” my mother gasped. “Those damned dirty bugs!” She swiped at a grasshopper that had hopped onto the blanket under us. It hopped onto my lap. A beat too fast to conceal my disgust, I picked the bug up and flung it into the mowed weeds.

Stefan said, “Didja hear about the American farmer who visited this sheep rancher in the outback of Australia?”

No one answered. From this I deduced he’d been telling jokes all morning. He didn’t understand that this wasn’t a leisurely dinner. In the Mojave, cowboys were more aware of the figure they cut, whether loping a horse or telling a joke, than of getting their jobs done. Farming was serious business. It wasn’t for show. The men intended to eat and jump back into the trucks, not lollygag all afternoon telling jokes. Everyone but him had noticed the scalloped clouds in the west and knew that by nightfall those clouds might produce a full-blown storm. Rain would stop the combines. Dad’s custom cutters, who moved north as the crop ripened and had other farmers waiting in Nebraska, would
start getting antsy. If it hailed, they might as well move on. There would be nothing left to cut.

The joke went on and on. “Then the American sees this kangaroo. ‘Whoa! What is that?’ ‘What?’ says the Aussie. ‘You mean you don’t have grasshoppers in America?’”

Bruce looked away. Clark smiled faintly. Dad took a bite out of his dinner roll and grimly chewed. A tempest raged behind Dad’s eyes at harvest time, clouds or no clouds. He certainly didn’t have the patience to be entertained.

I was embarrassed. While Clark and my parents had come to our wedding in the Mojave and had given Stefan the benefit of the doubt, our current circumstances didn’t testify too well on his, or my, behalf. And my brothers and I rarely came home at the same time. This should have been a celebratory occasion. I sat beside Bruce, whose admiration I longed for no less than I had as a child, when he resented me for usurping his role as the youngest. Across from me sat Clark. When I was twelve, he had let me stand on his feet so he could better teach me the jitterbug. And when I was little, he would tie me in knots until I said, “Click click,” releasing the lock. I wished it were that easy now. Click click and voilà! I would escape this mortifying moment.

If not for three nights ago on the trip here, when we’d camped in the Utah desert; if not for Stefan having kicked his dog, Bear, in the ribs for getting underfoot when we were putting up the tent; if not for the dog’s yelp echoing in my ears, I might have roused a laugh in support of my husband. But I was preoccupied, as I’d been ever since that incident, adding two plus two. If Bear and I were on the receiving end of his violent impulses, it could happen to our baby. Seeing that sweet, mild-mannered dog punished so severely, my chest had begun draining of the last remnants of love. Ever since, it had been filling with the embalming fluid of resolve.

That night we lay together in the darkness of the basement bedroom my mother had assigned us. Stefan complained that I hadn’t upheld him among my family.

“What do you mean I didn’t ‘uphold’ you?”

He pinned me beneath him and struck me with his open hand. It was almost a play slap, and I saw right through it. He was intentionally breaking the promise he’d made not to lay a hand on me ever again so he would have an excuse to go get a drink. “Do you want me to leave now?” he asked.

“Yes, please. Now.”

In less than five minutes, he was gone, bar hopping to Denver in our pickup, a newer Ford that I’d cosigned on. I went through the house’s ashtrays, looking for the butts of Bruce’s and our cigarettes. Finding one with a half inch left, I lit it and took two puffs of burning filter, then crushed it in the empty driveway. I’d smoked for seventeen years and had been trying to quit for the last five. But in that clarifying moment, with Jake on his way into my life, I understood that my priorities must change. I would not let Stefan come back, and I would not smoke another cigarette.

Unable to make my feet descend the stairs to the basement bedroom we’d shared, I slept on the living-room couch. As humiliating as my predicament was, lying there at the center of the home I’d instinctively run to was a comfort. In the morning, I heard my mother starting the coffeepot and stirring batter for pancakes, a ritual when we kids visited. Then she noticed me. I’d lain awake most of the night dreading the question she was about to ask.

“Julie?” she said, with such innocent concern I couldn’t bear to open my eyes. “Why are you here? Where’s Stefan?”

•   •   •

A
S
C
LARK PASSED ME THE PANCAKES,
I
dropped my napkin on the floor so that, picking it up, I could wipe away tears. “Want some cholesterol for those?” he asked when I resurfaced. He was offering me a yellow brick on a saucer. Since having a heart attack a few years before, at forty, he’d reinvented himself as a triathlete and lectured us all frequently on risks in our diets.

Mom said, “That’s not butter. That’s margarine.” After a visit to Dad’s cardiologist, where she’d learned that Dad’s heart was working at only 25 percent capacity, she’d performed this remarkable feat for a
farmwoman. Gone were the fried chicken, pork chops, and steak. Gone the mashed potatoes and gravy. Her recipe file had filled with low-fat and low-sodium dishes.

“Should get some butter,” Bruce said. “Growing babies need fat.”

“So do old men,” Dad said. “She’s starving me to death.”

Instead of judgment, my family offered ordinariness. Stefan was probably sleeping off a hangover in Denver, expecting that as soon as he apologized, I would let him come back. That was the pattern he’d grown up with, the pattern from his own previous relationships, and he’d probably assumed it would be our pattern.

When the first call came, his empty apologies were like being exposed to a viral disease I’d already had and was now immune to. I hung up. But the calls kept coming. He was staying in Denver at a cousin’s house, and his promises began to ring more sincerely.

I now understood why I had come home. If I were anywhere else, I would have been tempted. At night, I hugged my pillow, pretending it was him. I wanted our life back, the one we’d had before his drinking had undermined it. I recalled the square dances we had gone to every week—I in a bright-pink, full-skirted traditional outfit complete with bric-a-brac, he in his turquoise cowboy shirt with white piping and his white hat. What fun we had being teased by everyone. Not about our clashing outfits, although they certainly did clash, but for the bloom that love had put on our faces. Since returning to Kansas, I’d had an ultrasound. That Stefan would never be an acting father to the son I’d conceived with him was too brutal a truth to absorb.

But I was not going to insult my parents’ generosity by continuing on a ridiculous, even dangerous, path. We Bairs were not melodramatic people. We were emotionally contained and sensible, what my parents would call decent people. Stefan, they now knew, was not decent.

My longing lost its heat when, after weeks of my resistance, Stefan showed his true colors by shouting insults at me. Shaken by his vitriol, I hung up the phone, pulled on my dignity like an apron, and returned to the kitchen to help Mom. Finally, he returned to California in the truck, leaving it up to me to make the payments.

•   •   •

S
TUCK.
W
HENEVER
I
RECALL HOW
I
FELT
that first summer home, I see myself standing in my father’s tail-water pit, my tummy stretching the bright stripes of the swimming suit I’d bought to impress Stefan shortly after we met. The tail-water pit was a topographic feature that hadn’t existed in my childhood—a bulldozed, rectangular pond that collected runoff from Dad’s flood-irrigated fields.

Dad kept it stocked with bullheads and channel catfish. He stood holding a cane pole over the water, his grin communicating that I was making a fool of myself. Thanks to the diet Mom had imposed on him, he was at a healthy weight for the first time in my memory. But it pained me to see how much he’d aged. What hair he had left had gone from the gray I last remembered to almost white, and folds of skin hung at the front of his once thick neck. Instead of overalls, he now wore dark-blue baggy jeans, and instead of his gray work hat, a Farmers’ Co-op cap shaded his face. But the same gold teeth bejeweled his smile. The same hulking, somewhat stooped shoulders and frog’s back, together with the beaked hat, created a profile reminiscent of his huge four-wheel-drive tractor, the chartreuse-green Versatile. Because his land was flat and treeless, I could still see the tractor where I’d parked it, a half mile away on the summer fallow I’d finished cultivating that morning.

I had no money and no health insurance and was determined not to accept any more help than I was already getting from my parents unless I earned it. Each morning I rode out to the farm with Dad and drove tractors for pay. At least I could hold my head up about that. When I was a kid I’d begged him to let me drive tractors. Anyone could tell that was the most important work on the farm, and I’d wanted to be as important as my brothers. My mother had put her foot down.
No daughter of mine is going to bake out there in the sun like a man!
But a lot had changed since then. The tractors all had cabs now with air-conditioning, my brothers had both refused to pick up the farming mantle, and I had acquired enough confidence and skills in the desert to finally be a boy on my father’s farm.

Make that a pregnant boy.

Before my feet became so mired in the clay bottom that I would have to ask Dad to pull me out with a rope, I pushed off and swam a few tentative strokes. A white pickup appeared on the gravel road, swerving as the driver braked, then sped back up, causing a cloud of dust and road sand to rain onto the water. I paddled to the shore, if you could call the mud bank a shore, grabbed a willow branch and pulled myself out.

“Feel refreshed?” Dad asked.

I slapped a fly off my clay-streaked, sticky thigh. “God, no.” The water had been tepid and full of silt, and the afternoon felt more sweltering than before. Having left my sandals where I’d gotten in, I picked my way barefoot through the weeds. “Ouch! Damn!” Wobbling on one foot, I lifted the other and yanked a goat-head sticker from my heel.

“You almost had old man Noelstrom and his pickup in there with you. He’s probably never seen a naked woman outside Sears and Roebucks
.
”

“I’m not ‘naked,’ Dad. And neither are the women in catalogues. They have underwear on.”

He gave me that
I-guess-you’re-telling-me
look.

“You should have seen me in the Mojave,” I added. “I did swim naked there.” I wasn’t concentrating on our exchange but was mourning the end of my swimming life. It was over. Although I might be able to immerse myself in clean, cold water if I used the loader tractor and moved that stock tank I’d noticed in the implement lot into the farmyard.

“Je-sus Christ,” Dad said. With a flick of his hand, he dropped his pole in the knee-high kocia weeds and stomped off toward his pickup.