Day Out of Days (15 page)

I thought I had done my level best, done everything I possibly could,
not
to become my father. Gone out of my way in every department: changed my name, first and last, falsified my birth certificate, deliberately walked and swung my arms in exact counterpoint to the way he had; picked out clothing the opposite of what he would have worn, right down to the underwear; spoke without any trace of a Midwestern twang, never kicked a dog in the ribs, never lost my temper over inanimate objects, never again listened to Bing Crosby after Christmas of 1959, and never ever hit a woman in the face. I thought I had come a long way in reshaping my total persona. I had absolutely no idea who I was but I knew for sure I wasn’t him.

Then, in the fall of ‘75, I discovered a bottle of Hornitos tequila; pure white, green label. I just stumbled across it like you do some women. I was swept off my feet. I became so completely enraptured that the rest of the world fell away and I never heard the pounding on my door until it was too late. As I reached for the knob to see who it was the entire door exploded and came off its hinges. My father crashed in through the splinters, face red, enraged, and threw me up against the wall. He demanded to know
why I had forsaken him. Why I had trained myself to walk the way I did, speak the way I spoke, wear the kind of clothes I wore and why in the world I had never gotten married. My mouth was dry. I told him in a whisper that I had no answers to any of it. I had no reasons. I was as dumbfounded as he was. The red washed out of his face. He stood there and stared at me for a long time then a slight smile appeared but it wasn’t for me. It was an “I’ll be darned” kind of a smile and I half expected him to scratch his head but he didn’t. He just turned and stood there with his back full to me and looked through the ripped-out door frame to the orange orchard across the road in perfect weedless rows. The sweet smell of the blossoms made me feel like throwing up. The perfume was everywhere that time of year. He walked away from me, straight toward the orange trees, and kept the same steady pace as he crossed the road. A car almost hit him but he never wavered. The driver leaned on the horn and kept it up all the way down to the highway. You could hear the horn fading away as my father disappeared between the trees.

I distinctly remember Andy Devine on a little bay horse in the Rose Parade, back in 1950-something. He played a character called Jingles on black-and-white TV. A big convivial man, always grinning and waving. He’d cock his wrist on top of his immense belly and twiddle his fingers as though he were tickling you from a distance. The gesture was reminiscent of Oliver Hardy. In fact Andy could well have “borrowed” it from Oliver. They both had the same impish smile too. Andy was the proverbial sidekick and always rode between Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were very straight and proper; their fringed Western outfits pressed and glittering with rhinestones. They rode ramrod straight in their matching silver concho saddles while Andy slouched in his plain old bullhide one. I don’t know if the slouch was put on or if it was an actual manifestation of his character but he seemed to enjoy being a sloppy guy. He liked his juxtaposition. He had a high squeaky voice that my uncle Buzz told me was the result of Andy’s having accidentally swallowed a silver whistle when he was a kid. I always believed that story. Why not?

Little waitress doesn’t get it when I push my half-eaten steak away and ask her for dessert, that I really want dessert. She thinks there’s something wrong with the steak. There’s nothing wrong with the steak. I’m just ready for dessert. Another thing she doesn’t get is that I have enough cash in my left boot right now to buy a small car or half the town and when I ask her if she wants to take a spin around the dusty block she doesn’t understand that either. She thinks I have ulterior motives. I tell her I’ve just come from the “Land of Milk and Honey.” She backs nervously away with my half-eaten steak on the plate and bumps right into the chef coming out of the swinging chrome doors of the kitchen. Chef wants to know what’s wrong with my steak and I tell him nothing—nothing’s wrong with the steak. All I want is dessert and she giggles as though the implication is that she’s the “dessert” and the chef picks up on this and decides I’m seriously demented road trash and starts asking me to leave. I tell him I haven’t finished my lunch yet and that I was very much looking forward to the butterscotch pie. He says the pies just came out of the oven and they’re too hot to cut and I tell him I don’t mind waiting but he says he can’t cut into any of them because it would sacrifice the whole pie just trying to get a single slice out of it. I tell him, sometimes sacrifice is necessary. I can see them all steaming behind him on a Formica shelf; lined up like little locomotives—puffing away. He tells me it’s going to take quite a while. It’s going to be at least an hour. I tell
him that’s fine, I’ll just go out and buy a paper and come back. I’ll stroll around the town and take in the sights. He says there are no sights; there is no town. But I tell him I’m a big fan of desolation. I’m fascinated by the way things disintegrate; appear and disappear. The way something very prosperous and promising turns out to be disappointing and sad. The way people hang on in the middle of such obliteration and don’t think twice about it. The way people just keep living their lives because they don’t know what else to do. He says he has no time for small talk and leaves me staring at the sugar.

One day he thought he’d try to control his nagging tendencies toward anger and arrogance, cruelty and malice, by reminding himself that he wouldn’t live forever and that everything he saw squirming in front of him would soon vanish from the earth. When that didn’t work he tried allowing the sweet sensations of nature to penetrate his tough hide: glittering morning sunlight speckled through the drifting ginkgo leaves, for instance; the cool breeze playing across his ragged face; distant sounds of children rollicking in the schoolyard. When that didn’t work he began conjuring up memories of sexual conquests, going clear back through his teenage years; girls came floating back to him; girls of all sizes, tinged now and then with the glowing aura of love. Whatever that was. What was that? Had he mistaken something temporarily ecstatic for something else? Something lasting? Or was he just getting all worked up in a lather of delusion? How easy it was to get carried away. Erection and all. When that seemed to lead nowhere he tried the old trick of total acceptance. Relinquishing completely to the two-sidedness of his nature. He bucked and whined through it. The warp and weave, as they say; trying to catch his balance, crashing then retrieving the old goose step as good as new. When
that wore out he tried the impossible mental exercise of putting himself in the place of another; walking in their proverbial shoes; seeing the inevitable end of civilization through their eyes. The horror show with a twist, if you like. When all that finally failed he chopped off his left index finger just below the first knuckle after the manner of the Arapaho ritual of grief over ancestors lost in battle. He wrapped the gushing wound in oak leaves and held it high above his head, squeezing it tight with his right hand. His good hand. The hand he wrote with. He tried to restrain his breath from galloping away.

So—sounds, say—favorite sounds.

Um—mockingbird. Meadowlark. Crickets, for sure. Distant hounds.

Hounds?

Yes.

Like dogs, you mean?

No, hounds.

In people’s yards or what?

No, hunting. Chasing.

Game?

That’s it. Wild things. Pigs mostly.

I see. And that reminds you of days gone by, does it?

Yes.

When was that? When were these days?

When I was a hunter.

Did you kill things back then?

Yes. I ate them.

Meat.

Yes.

How long ago was this?

Long, long ago.

In the distant past?

Memory fails me.

But you have faint tracings?

Hardly anything comes back.

So, you gave it up?

It just left me.

So what did you replace it with?

What.

Hunting—following the hounds.

Nothing.

But what do you do with yourself now?

I wander around from place to place.

Aimlessly?

What’s there to aim for?

That must get old after a while.

I don’t know what else to do.

Someone hunting in the night. Shooting repeatedly along my tree-line. Dull sudden thuds, then blank. Then shots again. Someone wanting something dead. Each time the shots come I see his finger squeezing down: fat, black and blue, oily knuckle. In the pauses nothing moves but the fan and night bugs. Out of nowhere, hard little red June bugs come crashing into the porch light, hit the screen door, and go crashing to the floor. They’re all around me now, spinning on their backs, dying between my bare cracked feet. I’m just sitting here and this happens. It’s beyond belief.

Horses are calling each other across big acres. Acres of fresh-cut hay where the tractor’s stripes lay dark and flat against the blue-grass morning. These are the fastest horses in the world. These are the horses the Arabs want, the Irish, the English, the Germans. The whole world converges on this tiny spit of Dixie limestone to throw money in the air as if it were confetti. These horses don’t know their day is coming to wear a paste-on hip number and parade in tight circles while the bid-spotters scream and their sale electronically climbs into the millions. Those anonymous bidders don’t see them now, the way they are, racing along black fence lines, screaming across stands of hickory and locust; sensing something in the air, something coming to get them, from far far across the high seas.

Inside, it’s the exact opposite of the outside. It’s like a movie set in here. Tropical banana plants, palm trees, miniature tangerines, exotic purple orchids, caged parrots screaming their heads off, finches twittering. The fireplace and baseboard heat are cranked up so high the ceiling’s dripping. Outside—just on the other side of the tall, doubled-paned bay windows—it’s nine below zero and even though the gigantic sun will soon be blazing high over the frozen St. Croix River, the ice remains eighteen inches thick. Thick enough for employees of the Andersen Windows company to drive straight across it from Wisconsin to the Minnesota shore and save a half-hour’s commuting time. At the crack of dawn you can watch them through these steaming windows starting out with their headlights gleaming, crawling along in weaving amber lines through the fishing huts and little square tents, smoke wisping out their vent pipes. Fishermen huddle inside these tents frying bacon and walleye, tossing back schnapps and listening to rabid talk radio throw opinions at them from a world far away. They’re happy campers watching for the slightest twitch of fluorescent green bobbers. I don’t get it myself. I was raised near the Mojave where we slept with the windows wide open and watched the distant foothills burn through the night.

The electronic chimes from the brick Lutheran church tower are playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with crisp mathematical precision in the chill morning air. The melody line pierces the windows of every house in the neighborhood. No one escapes. It is a spectacular, bright fall day in the St. Croix River Valley; powder blue skies, fluffy clouds, no wind to speak of. The kind of day, as they like to say up here, that is the reason they all suffer the most godawful winters on earth. It is also the fifth day in a row that bombs have been falling on distant Kabul and Kandahar.

The hardwoods along the banks of the Mississippi are blazing yellow and orange. Bald eagles and giant osprey cruise the inlets for walleye. In the distance, delicate sailboats and fishing skiffs ply the little harbor in silent slow motion. Everything here is quiet and peaceful beyond words:

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war
with the cross of Jesus going on before

Every evening this little yellow dog of mine comes rushing up to meet me; nervous, panting, turning in circles around my legs. I don’t know what it’s all about. It’s as though she expects me to save her from some demon in the woods. I try to tell her I have no answers to it. No solution. I’m scared the same way myself, sometimes. I don’t know what about. There’s something out there lurking, though. No doubt about it. I can hear its fiery breath behind the old black locust. I can see it sometimes swooping through the fields. Sometimes it hovers right above me. I don’t look up. I keep my eyes tight to the ground. Right in rhythm with my walking stick.

Weeding my garden in the pitch-black dark. In the cool of the night. And the mockingbird raving as though it were light. And the moaning train. And the cow calling and the calf answers back. And the candle hysterically beaten in the breeze.

It’s all adding up.

These delicious mornings he takes his black coffee out on the stone porch and just sits in the old Adirondack chair, handmade in Wisconsin out of raw red cedar, water stains running down the wide flat arms. He just sits there sipping and listening to the mockingbird go through its wild variations; watches geese and canvasbacks winging down across the lower pasture; hears the long trucks moaning east and west on distant Highway 64. A woodpecker hammers away at the dead hackberry. His gray gelding comes trotting up the fence line snorting for carrots then walks off grazing through pink clover. He’s a happy man. No question. The sun is pulling steam out of the ground all the way down to the river. The smell of rotting hay and mulch fills him. The giant irises he’s planted are just beginning to explode into lavender and white plumes. A jeweled hummingbird travels down the whole line poking its head into each bearded bloom then just vanishes off into the woods. Red-winged blackbirds surround him, making their watery croak. His yellow dog sleeps on her side; stretched out across the flat river stones, soaking up the last coolness of morning through her flat ribs. The man lights a half-smoked cigar, sips his coffee, and cracks open
The Astonished Man
. He wants nothing more. He might just sit here all day, he thinks. He might just sit out here all year until the snow flies. Why not? What’s to stop him?