Dalva (44 page)

Frieda called at 6:00
A.M.
to say she couldn't come to work. Last evening Lundquist had been taken to the local clinic, a five-bed affair for minor illnesses that had been half underwritten by our family. He had a urinary infection and after being catheterized and put to bed he had disappeared. She had been up most of the night looking for him with the deputies and he had been discovered sleeping with Roscoe in the doghouse, which was a marvelous, ample structure with a weathervane and a birdhouse on the roof. Fearing death, Lundquist had walked the fifteen miles home cross-country at night. He had proved to the deputies and the doctor that he could pee, which had been the problem. Would I mind keeping an eye on him
this evening because she needed to leave for Omaha to check Michael out of the hospital the following morning? Of course not, I said, looking forward to time spent in private with the old man.

When I got out of bed my muscles were sore as if I had spent the previous day hiking or putting in fence, or had been thrown from a horse. It was barely after six and the morning was cool and clear. Peach was staring up at my window from the corral and I called out to her, which sent her wheeling in a circle, upsetting the geese. I put on jeans and a sweater and went downstairs to the yodeling of the wakened pup, whom I put outside and watched scooting to the goose cage, where he sat down in puzzlement. I turned on the coffee maker and wished that Naomi were there to talk about yesterday. I went outside and walked through the dewy grass in my bare feet, wondering if my son had driven into the barnyard when I wasn't there, or had seen me on the street in town, in the grocery store, walking on the beach in Santa Monica. Or in the British Pub between Ocean Avenue and Second Street. I caught myself short when I hoped in retrospect I had behaved well while being watched.

I put the pup—to be called Ted, I had decided—in the old kennel beside the barn, then rode Peach up and down the half-mile-long driveway bareback, regretting the lack of a saddle when she shied at a flushing pheasant. My ex-brother-in-law loved to point out that you could pay ten grand for a horse, go for a ride, and if an empty ten-cent potato-chip bag blew across the path, you could die. I told him—admitting that it was true—that people, cats, and horses liked to imagine threats and react to imaginary dangers. I reminded myself as the cock pheasant rattled off through the brush and I was clinging to Peach that I meant to stay alive. I would be more alert and less foolhardy.

I drove in to Lena's Café and went in through the back door to find her in the kitchen. She embraced me when she heard the news that there was a chance I might see my son, or my “child” as she put it. After she said “child” we looked at each other for a moment and began to laugh. We continued to talk as she managed a dozen breakfast orders at once at the stove. She began her day at four in the morning, then closed
after lunch. There was no transient business and people ate supper at home barring a special occasion that justified a long drive. Charlene wanted her to retire but to Lena the café was her life and now in her mid-sixties she still had an eye out for the perfect boyfriend. She liked to point to a framed award signed by a former governor that named hers the best chicken-fried steak in the great state of Nebraska. In the grand area between New York and California people are inordinately fond of giving each other trophies and awards.

Karen came into the kitchen in a prim blue uniform to pick up an order. She was startled to see me and blushed deeply. She looked up at the fan above the stove with a studied curiosity. Lena was kind enough to take Karen's order out into the café.

“I guess all I can say is I'm sorry it happened,” she said.

“You're not even ten percent at fault. He should know better but he doesn't.”

“Is he OK? Dad has this bad temper. I told him I never did it with him . . . .”

I shushed her and told her I hoped it would work out well. I turned over a pile of fried potatoes that looked like they might burn, feeling the wooden handle of the big spatula that had worn to Lena's grip. Karen said she was on “pins and needles” because she would hear that afternoon if the agency was flying her out to L. A. for more test photos or perhaps a contract. Looking at her I suspected the answer would be yes. I told her to let me know and I would alert Ted to keep an eye out for her. It was a neighborly gesture; she couldn't really be protected but I sensed a streak of her father's meanness that would help. All Ted could do would be to determine the level at which she was initially taken advantage of—models tended to prefer the easy confidence of rock musicians and drug wholesalers. Karen thanked me and Lena returned to say that the sheriff needed to talk to me. He had seen my car in the alley—I had forgotten that in a small town every auto bears its owner's signature.

The sheriff and a deputy stood when I approached. They both looked tired from the Lundquist escapade. The deputy felt that Lundquist had missed his calling and could have made a “mint” building doghouses for rich folks. His food was nearly
hidden by catsup. The sheriff gave me some papers for Michael to sign, saying he was glad the affair was over without anyone's getting really hurt, a euphemism I decided not to respond to. All the silverware in the room had stopped clinking and I couldn't help flashing a smile at the business folk pausing above their grits.

I stood a full ten minutes in front of the bank waiting for it to open, wishing I had eaten some fried food at Lena's. In the cool morning air I could still smell the kitchen on my sweater. I was on the sunny west side and stared at the Edward Hopper shadows on the east side of the street. I waved at an old man opening the hardware store, remembering him in his early middle age when he helped Grandfather train bird dogs on pen-raised quail. Each year the life on the street was sparser and all the storefronts needed a little paint and repairs. There hadn't been a truly good year for farmers since the grain embargo seven years before, and the beef business was a victim of change in eating habits and bad foreign-trade policies. It occurred to me that I might see it become a virtual ghost town in my lifetime but then there had been bad times before. There were very few new cars around and even the water tower needed a coat of paint. Lena said that of the eighteen graduating seniors only two were staying in town, and one of those was semi-retarded. The UPS had an opening in the county and there were three hundred applicants. There was work for the capable way over in Omaha or Lincoln but it was hard for people to accept that their land, or their houses in town, had sunk to half the previous value.

The bank opened and I fetched the second trunk with an air of busyness to avoid the socializing that would bring about a discussion of hard times. I no longer knew any local people well enough to be asked for a loan, but I was aware Naomi had somewhat extended herself in this direction. I suspect rich people tend to live with each other in community compounds to avoid these unsecured loans, and the bruised consciences of seeing friends and acquaintances making the slow trek into insolvency. In farm communities people often carry each other well past hopelessness. I had noticed repeatedly there were fewer children playing on the streets than there used to be, and when I drove past the ball diamond on the way out of
town there weren't enough boys to make two teams so they settled for some girls.

A few hours later, on Naomi's porch swing I realized the degree to which I had been knocked off balance by the event in Omaha. My skin began to prickle and my mouth grew dry. Nothing would be the same again but then I hadn't wanted it to be, as if nothing could be preserved past that point unless it was vital. Only myths last, my professor had said, because myths are vital. I hadn't thought much about that. What did it mean that I was forty-five and barren two-thirds of my life? I talked to Paul about it in Mexico but knew that after that first was lost I wouldn't have borne another anyway. At the diamond the boy hit the ball into the air and it stayed in the air ever since they began playing the game. There is always the first horse, usually a pony. The first dog. The first lover, real or mostly imagined. Now on the porch it was as if there was too much oxygen in the green air of June, and the son had doubtless driven down this road, perhaps glanced through the porch screen to see Naomi sitting here talking to the dead in the evening. It was too large to be understood, it was not meant to be understood except to sense how large it was as if we were particles of our own universe, each of us a part of a more intimate constellation. The reach from the porch to three crows sleeping in a dead cottonwood down the road was infinite. So were father, mother, son and daughter, lover, horse and dog. I was on the porch on a hot afternoon in June, and before me on hundreds of June afternoons Sioux girls looked for birds' eggs here, buffalo whelped, prairie wolves roamed, and far before that—in prehistory we're told—condors with wingspreads of thirty feet coasted on dense thermals in the hills along the Niobrara.

Back inside I rechecked the music room and Frieda's rather elaborate arrangements for Michael's new study, with everything moved over from the bunkhouse, including Karen's nude photo stuck in a Gideon Bible in the middle of the desk. I didn't disturb her little joke, mostly because it was quite funny. In the kitchen Frieda had stocked the refrigerator,
and there were recipes for broths and purees on the counter, plus a case of an adult version of baby formula.

I thought of opening the second trunk of journals but sat on it instead. I had had my turn years ago and now it was Michael's job. I felt a little sorry for him. All the suffering had leavened my own at the time, and had helped explain my family's character to me. The images fluttered in my mind, focusing for a split second then passing on to others: the Bible, fruit trees, buffalo, Aase, He Dog and Crazy Horse, Sam Creekmouth missing one ear, a field of gathered buffalo bones; all full of earnestness, a journal of work, love, and grief, becoming a journal of madness and starvation, becoming a journal of madness partly drug-induced, because by the time of the Ghost Dance peyote had made its way up, from tribe to tribe, to the Lakota. After Wounded Knee Northridge had seen far beyond and through what we at present call, with an air of banality, the “back wall.” Our world is so drowned in suffering I suppose it meant more that it was a blood relation, an ancestor.

I borrowed a barnyard pullet from Naomi's freezer and drove home. I was a little desperate to do something as ordinary as to cook old Lundquist dinner. There was also the temptation, since my life had become inadvertently bold, to visit the room below the basement and get it over with. From the journals and Paul I pretty much knew what it held but I also realized it was terribly important to resolve the whole thing by actually seeing it.

When I drove in the yard Lundquist was sitting on a milks tool in the shadowed, open door of the barn with the pup on his lap and Roscoe at his feet. I got out of the car and approached quietly since he and the pup were asleep, though ever-watchful Roscoe bared his teeth, then growled softly in recognition of his master's snooze. The pup awoke and wriggled off Lundquist's lap which startled the old man.