At the Jim Bridger: Stories (8 page)

Part of the reason this story hasn’t come together before, the story of my famous family, is that no one remembers they were related. They all had their own names. My father was Duncan Landers, the noted NASA physicist, the man responsible for every facet of the photography of the first moon landing. There is still camera gear on the moon inscribed with this name. That is, Landers. He was born Duncan Lrsdyksz, which was changed when NASA began their publicrelations
campaigns in the mid-sixties; the space agency suggested that physicists who worked for NASA should have more vowels in their names. They didn’t want their press releases to seem full of typographical errors or foreigners. Congress was reading this stuff. So Lrsdyksz became Landers. (My father’s close associate Igor Oeuroi didn’t get just vowels; his name became LeRoy Rodgers. After le Cowboy Star, my mother quipped.)

My mother was Gloria Rainstrap, the poet who spent twenty years fighting for workers’ rights from Texas to Alaska; in one string she gave four thousand consecutive lectures in her travels, not missing a night as she drove from village to village throughout the country. It still stands as some kind of record.

Wherever she went, she stirred up the best kind of trouble, reading her work and then spending hours in whatever guest house or spare bedroom she was given, reading the poems and essays of the people who had come to see her. She was tireless, driven by her overwhelming sense of fairness, and she was certainly the primary idealist to come out of twentieth-century Texas. When she started leaving home for months, years at a time, I was just a lad, but I remember her telling my father, Duncan, one night, “Texas is too small for what I have to do.”

This was not around the dinner table. We were a family of geniuses and did not have a dinner table. In fact, the only table we did have was my father’s drafting table, which was in the entry so that you had to squeeze sideways to even get into our house. “It sets the tone,” Duncan used to say. “I want anyone coming into our home to see my work. That work is the reason we have a roof, anyway.” He said that one day after my friend Jeff Shreckenbah and I inched past him on the way to my room. “And who are these people coming in the door?”

“It is your son and his friend,” I told him.

“Good,” he said, his benediction, but he said it deeply into his drawing, which is where he spent his time at home. He wouldn’t have known if the Houston Oilers had arrived, because he was about to invent the modern gravity-free vacuum hinge that is still used today.

Most of my father, Duncan Landers’s, work was classified, top-secret, eyes-only, but it didn’t matter. No one except Jeff Shreckenbah came to our house. People didn’t come over.

We were geniuses. We had no television, and we had no telephone. “What should I do,” my father would say from where he sat in the entry, drawing, “answer some little buzzing device? Say hello to it?” NASA tried to install phones for us. Duncan took them out. It was a genius household and not to be diminished by primitive electronic foo-fahs.

My older sister was named Christina by my father and given the last name Rossetti by my mother. When she finally fled from M.I.T. at nineteen, she gave herself a new surname: Isotope. There had been some trouble, she told me, personal trouble, and she needed the new name to remind herself she wouldn’t last long—and then she asked me how I liked my half-life. I was twelve then, and she laughed and said, “I’m kidding, Reed. You’re not a genius; you’re going to live forever.” I was talking to her on the “hot line,” the secret phone our housekeeper, Clovis Arrnandy, kept m a kitchen cupboard.

“Where are you going?” I asked her.

“West with Mother,” she said. Evidently, Gloria Rainstrap had driven up to Boston to rescue Christina from some sort of meltdown. “A juncture of some kind,” my father told me. “Not to worry”

Christina said, “I’m through with theoretical chemistry, but chemistry isn’t through with me. Take care of Dad. See you later.”

We three children were eight years apart; that’s how geniuses plan their families. Christina had been gone for years, it seemed, from our genius household; she barely knew our baby brother, Garrett.

Garrett and I took everything in stride. We accepted that we were a family of geniuses and that we had no telephone or refrigerator or proper beds. We thought it was natural to eat crackers and sardines months on end. We thought the front yard was supposed to be a jungle of overgrown grass, weeds, and whatever reptiles would volunteer to live there. Twice a year the City of Houston street crew came by and mowed it all down, and daylight would pour in for a month or two. We had no cars. My father was always climbing into white Chevrolet station wagons, unmarked, and going off to the NASA Space Center south of town. My mother was always stepping up into orange VW buses driven by other people and driving off to tour. My sister had been the youngest student at M.I.T. My brother and I did our own laundry for years and walked to school, where by about seventh grade, we began to see the differences between the way ordinary people lived and the way geniuses lived. Other people’s lives, we learned, centered fundamentally on two things: television and soft foods rich with all the versions of sugar.

By the time I entered junior high school, my mother’s travels had kicked into high gear, and she hired a woman we came to know well, Clovis Armandy, to live in and to assist with our corporeal care. Gloria Rainstrap’s parental theory and practice could be summed up by the verse I heard her say a thousand times before I reached the age of six: “Feed the soul, the body finds a way.” And she fed our souls with a groaning banquet of iron ethics at every opportunity. She wasn’t interested in sandwiches or casseroles. She was the kind of person who had a moral motive for her every move.
We had no refrigerator because it was simply the wrong way to prolong the value of food, which had little value in the first place. We had no real furniture because furniture became the numbing insulation of drones for the economy, an evil in itself. If religion was the opiate of the masses, then home furnishings were the Novocain of the middle class. Any small surfeit of comfort undermined our moral fabric.
We live for the work we can do, not for things
, she told us. I’ve met and heard lots of folks who shared Gloria’s posture toward life on this earth, but I’ve never found anyone who put it so well, presented her ideas so convincingly, beautifully, and so insistently. They effectively seduced you into wanting to go without. I won’t put any of her poems in this story, but they were transcendent. The
Times
called her “Buddha’s angry daughter.” My mother’s response to people who were somewhat shocked at our empty house and its unkempt quality was, “We’re ego distant. These little things,” she’d say, waving her hand over the litter of the laundry, discarded draft paper, piles of top-secret documents in the hallway, various toys, the odd empty tin of sardines, “don’t bother us in the least. We aren’t even here for them.” I always loved that last and still use it when a nuisance arises: I’m not even here for it. “Ego distant,” my friend Jeff Shreckenbah used to say, standing in our empty house, “which means your ma doesn’t sweat the small stuff.”

My mother’s quirk, and one she fostered, was writing on the bottom of things. She started it because she was always gone, away for months at a time, and she wanted us to get her messages throughout her absence and thereby be reminded again of making correct decisions and ethical choices. It was not unusual to find ballpoint-pen lettering on the bottom of our shoes, and little marker messages on the bottom of plates (where she wrote in a tiny script), and anywhere that you
could lift up and look under, she would have left her mark. These notes primarily confused us. There I’d be in math class and cross my legs and see something on the edge of my sneaker and read, “Your troubles, if you stay alert, will pass very quickly away.”

I’m not complaining. I never, except once or twice, felt deprived. I like sardines, still. It was a bit of a pinch when we got to high school, and I noted with new poignancy that I didn’t quite have the wardrobe to keep up. Geniuses dress plain but clean, and not always as clean as their ordinary counterparts, who have nothing better to do with their lives than buy and sort and wash clothes.

Things were fine. I turned seventeen. I was hanging out sitting around my bare room, reading books, the History of This, the History of That, dry stuff, waiting for my genius to kick in. This is what had happened to Christina. One day when she was ten, she was having a tea party with her dolls, which were two rolled pink towels, the next day she cataloged and diagrammed the amino acids, laying the groundwork for two artificial sweeteners and a mood elevator. By the time my mother, Gloria Rainstrap, returned from the Northwest and my father looked up from his table, the State Department “mentors” had been by and my sister, Christina, was on her way to the inner sanctums of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I remember my mother standing against my father’s drafting table, her hands along the top. Her jaw was set and she said, “This is meaningful work for Christina, her special doorway.”

My father dragged his eyes up from his drawings and said, “Where’s Christina now?”

So the day I went into Garrett’s room and found him writing equations on a huge scroll of butcher paper, which he had used until that day to draw battle re-creations of the French
and Indian War, was a big day for me. I stood there in the gloom, watching him crawl along the paper, reeling out figures of which very few were numbers I recognized, most of the symbols being
X’s
and
Y’
s and the little twisted members of the Greek alphabet, and I knew that it had skipped me. Genius had cast its powerful, clear eye on me and said, “No thanks.” At least I was that smart. I realized that I was not going to get to be a genius.

The message took my body a piece at a time, loosening each joint and muscle on the way up and then filling my face with a strange warmth, which I knew immediately was relief.

I was free.

I immediately took a job doing landscaping and general cleanup and maintenance at the San Jacinto Resort Motel on the old Hempstead Highway. My friend Jeff Shreckenbah worked next door at Alfredo’s American Cafe, and he had told me that the last guy doing handiwork at the motel had been fired for making a holy mess of the parking lot with a paintbrush, and when I applied, Mr. Rakkerts, the short little guy who owned the place, took me on. These were the days of big changes for me. I bought a car, an act that would have at one time been as alien for me as intergalactic travel or applying to barber college. I bought a car. It was a four door limegreen Plymouth Fury III, low miles. I bought a pair of chinos. These things gave me exquisite pleasure. I was seventeen and I had not known the tangible pleasure of having things. I bought three new shirts and a wristwatch with a leather strap, and I went driving in the evenings, alone south from our subdivision of Spring Woods with my arm on the green sill of my lime-green Plymouth Fury III through the vast spaghetti bowl of freeways and into the mysterious network of towers that was downtown Houston. It was my dawning.

Late at night, my blood rich with wonder at the possibilities
of such a vast material planet, I would return to our tumbledown genius ranch house, my sister off putting new legs on the periodic table at M.I.T., my mother away in Shreveport showing the seaport workers there the way to political and personal power, my brother in his room edging closer to new theories of rocket reaction and thrust, my father sitting by the entry, rapt in his schematics. As I came in and sidled by his table and the one real light in the whole front part of the house, his pencilings on the space station hinge looking as beautiful and inscrutable to me as a sheet of music, he’d say my name as simple greeting. “Reed.”

“Duncan,” I’d say in return.

“How goes the metropolis?” he’d add, not looking up. His breath was faintly reminiscent of sardines; in fact, I still associate that smell, which is not as unpleasant as it might seem, with brilliance. I know he said
metropolis
because he didn’t know for a moment which city we were in.

“It teerns with industrious citizenry well into the night,” I’d answer.

Then he’d say it, “Good,” his benediction, as he’d carefully trace his lead-holder and its steel-like wafer of 5H pencil-lead along a precise new line deep into the vast white space. “That’s good.”

The San Jacinto Resort Motel along the Hempstead Highway was exactly what you might expect a twenty-unit motel to be in the year 1966. The many bright new interstates had come racing to Houston and collided downtown in a maze, and the old Hempstead Highway had been supplanted as a major artery into town. There was still a good deal of traffic on the four-lane, and the motel was always about half full, and as you would expect, never the same half. There were three permanent occupants, including a withered old man
named Newcombe Shinetower, who was a hundred years old that summer and who had no car, just a room full of magazines with red and yellow covers, stacks of these things with titles like
Too Young for Comfort
and
Treasure Chest.
There were other titles. I was in Mr. Shinetower’s room only on two occasions. He wore the same flannel shirt every day of his life and was heavily gone to seed. Once or twice a day I would see him shuffling out toward Alfredo’s American Cafe, where Jeff told me he always ate the catfish. “You want to live to be a hundred,” Jeff said, “eat the catfish.” I told him I didn’t know about a hundred and that I generally preferred smaller fish. I was never sure if Mr. Shinetower saw me or not as I moved through his line of sight. He might have nodded; it was hard to tell. What I felt was that he might exist on another plane, the way rocks are said to; they’re in there but in a rhythm too slow for humans to perceive.

It was in his room, rife with the flaking detritus of the ages, that Jeff tried to help me reckon with the new world. “You’re interested in sex, right?” he asked me one day as I took my break at the counter of Alfredo’s. I told him I was, but that wasn’t exactly the truth. I was indifferent. I understood how it was being packaged and sold to the American people, but it did not stir me, nor did any of the girls we went to school with, many of whom were outright beauties and not bashful about it. This was Texas in the sixties. Some of these buxom girls would grow up and try to assassinate their daughters’ rivals on the cheerleading squad. If sex was the game, some seemed to say, deal me in. And I guess I felt it was a game, too, one I could sit out. I had begun to look a little closer at the ways I was different from my peers, worrying about anything that might be a genius tendency. And I took great comfort in the unmistakable affection I felt for my Plymouth Fury III.