by Jay Varner
They would live just over a mile away, much closer than their apartment in Lewistown. Those trips to the hotel would stop, which made me happy, but they would be living right down the road from us. Lucky might show up at any moment, hauling trash and a can of gasoline. Maybe he’d even bring Ricky Trutt with him. I wouldn’t be allowed outside to play — my mother would make me stay inside with the doors locked. Helen would beg us to stop by and see them. She would grill me with questions, prying into my life at school and my friendships. And she would kneel in front of me, smiling, and ask for a hug. I felt suddenly that life was about to get much harder.
On the drive home, my father sang along to Jim Croce on the radio and tapped along with the beat on the steering wheel. When he told my mother about his parents’ new house in McVeytown, she stared at the kitchen table, silent.
“Looks like we’ll be seeing more of them,” my father said. He seemed pleased about the idea. “Boy, I never thought they’d move back to McVeytown.”
“No,” my mother said softly. “Not in a million years.”
Twelve
Many nights, when my father told my mother and me that he needed to “hop into town quick” for gas or milk, he didn’t return home for an hour. It wasn’t just the conversations with friends that slowed him down; he liked to drive around and “just make sure everything’s okay.” My mother called those trips “patrols,” and I thought again of CHiPs, how the motorcycle cops drove the Los Angeles freeways. They were in search of law breakers. My father sought fire.
“Can I go with you?” I would ask him.
“Oh, I shouldn’t be long,” he said. “Just a quick little trip.”
It would be a great story to tell my friends at school — I rode into town with my dad last night, just looking for a fire. Each October, he took me to the town fair with him, something that made me feel just as important as that day we rode together in the parade.
Though held in October, the Rothrock Fair always seemed the crowning end to summer as well as the end of any hope of warm weather again until March. The Ferris wheel, the sole ride at the fair, sat on home plate at the McVeytown playground. When the wheel’s operator took our tickets, we walked up the metal ramp and then after we sat down he locked a metal bar across our laps. The engine whirred to life, seemingly churning my father and me into the sky. Below us, the scene expanded like a miniature version of Hershey Park. Instead of bright neon, the fair looked washed in a dirty yellow glow. As we rose still higher, a chilly breeze cut through the night.
Food booths clustered along the third-base line of the Little League infield, selling hot sausage sandwiches, cotton candy, and funnel cakes. A few yards away near the visitors’ dugout, teenagers and rough-looking men lined up for a dollar sledgehammer swing at the hood of a wrecked car. Midway games lined the outfield fence: Skee-Ball, a ring toss, a dart game with balloons. Far off, near the grass parking lot in the Junior Babe Ruth outfield, the fire company ran a dunking booth. My father had already spent five dollars trying to knock Art Kenmore into the water.
Just as we were about at the peak of the Ferris wheel, we jerked to a stop, causing our seat to sway. I grasped the lap bar until my knuckles turned white.
“You scared?” my dad asked.
“No,” I said, unable to look down. I stared ahead, past the parking lot, beyond the speeding headlights of cars on the high-way, and focused on the faint hint of a blue ridgeline against an almost black sky.
“I think I’ve been to this fair every year,” my dad said. “Must be twenty years now. And each year, they’ve had this same Ferris wheel, the same games.”
The wheel jerked forward and we slowly descended. After a few more rotations, we stopped at the bottom and the wheel operator unlocked our lap bar.
We walked through the small crowd, toward the parking lot, until my father stopped and began to laugh. Art Kenmore tramped toward us, his shoulders hunched underneath a pink bathrobe. Wet hair was plastered to his head, and when he stood before us I heard his teeth chatter.
“What in the world is that thing?” my dad asked. “You look like a drowned Easter Bunny.”
“It’s a robe,” Art said. “Someone finally knocked me into that stupid dunking booth. The wife went home and got me this. She said I’d catch pneumonia if I walked around wet all night.”
“You might want to,” my dad said. “Enough people see you in that and you’ll never live it down.”
“You know how wives are,” Art said, rolling his eyes. “Has to stick me in this thing? I think I’d have been just fine.”
My dad nodded and toed at the ground. “Sounds just like Teena. I’ve heard all that bellyaching before, believe me. They say that ‘I am’ is the shortest sentence in the English language. Know what the longest is? ‘I do.’”
Art smiled and nodded. “Ain’t that the truth?”
“So you helping out with the chicken and waffles tomorrow night?”
“You know it,” Art said. “The auxiliary is going to start cooking in the afternoon. Hopefully we can pack them in.”
“We made out pretty good last year,” my dad said. “And if we want to get a new tanker, we’ll have to do good tomorrow too.” He paused, arched an eyebrow, and looked at Art again. “You know, maybe you can wear that robe, do a dance or something so people will throw some dollar bills at you.”
“You wish.” Art smiled and shook his head. “I’ll see you tomorrow then, Dent. You too, Jay.”
I followed my dad to the parking lot. He boosted me into the passenger side of his truck and then climbed into the driver’s side, buckled his seat belt, and turned the key. The engine ground for a few seconds and then growled to life. He revved the gas.
“Buckled up?” he asked. “Want to cruise around a little? Check out the town?”
My dad made a left onto John Street and passed a dozen or so homes — ranchers, trailers, two-story houses with garages. Each yard had been decorated for fall: jack-o’-lanterns glowed on front porches; dead brown cornstalks were tied around light posts; and gourds rested in windowsills. We passed the brick Methodist church on the left, the stained-glass window unlit that night. Next door to it, the Presbyterian church sat dark as well.
When we pulled in front of Rothrock High School, my dad stopped the truck. Some of the kids at school had told me stories about their older brothers who had snuck inside Rothrock and waded through the flooded basement. He stared a moment, as if thinking back on his past, and then pressed the gas.
By the time we pulled into our driveway, it was already close to nine — my bedtime. Before sleep, I kissed my father’s forehead like I did every night. He sat at the kitchen table, reading over the day’s mail.
“Good night, kiddo,” he said. “Be good tomorrow.”
“Are you going to the fair again?”
“Yep, chicken and waffles tomorrow night, so I might not see you,” he said. “You’ll probably be asleep by the time I get back.”
But I wasn’t. The next night, he came home early; it was barely even dark yet. His face looked pale and tired as he told my mother and me what had happened. He said that while helping serve the dinner, he felt his abdomen tense with a sudden stomachache.
“It wasn’t that bad at first,” he said. “I thought maybe I caught a bug or something.”
He said that he had felt run-down over the past few days. Planning the McVeytown Volunteer Fire Company booth for the Rothrock Fair hadn’t exactly been easy for him. There had been schedules to balance with the other men, sign-up sheets for the different events — chicken and waffles on Friday and plans for barbecue chicken on Saturday. Plus the company had to wax the fire trucks for display, yet another task my father had inherited as fire chief. He even had to remind some of the guys to make sure their wives, girlfriends, or mothers ironed their uniforms and polished their shoes.
But as he stood behind the long counter of the booth “shooting the breeze” with some friends from town, the sight of the gluey waffle batter became near noxi
ous. After he watched one of his men ladle thick gravy over sliced chicken and golden waffles, my father ran from the booth into the grass parking lot and vomited.
He shook his head and said, “I don’t know what got into me.”
Before bed, I kissed his forehead, and the skin felt moist and cool on my lips. I worried that he wasn’t sleeping enough or eating right — those were two things my mother always made sure I did, or else I would get sick.
“You feeling better?” I asked him.
“You know me,” he said, and patted my head. “Fit as a fiddle. I have to be.”
A few weeks after the fair, however, the stomach pain only increased. My dad’s appetite seemed to vanish — his cheeks hollowed and his eyes looked sunken. His once snug T-shirts now looked baggy. His waistline shrank and his jeans hung limply. At dusk, as he stepped out of his old pickup, his long legs seemed to move slower than usual. He winced when he eased down into his La-Z-Boy. He unlaced his boots and slid them off with a thump to the floor. Then he fell asleep with a copy of Firehouse magazine on his chest.
My mother shook him awake. “What’s wrong? You never sleep like this.”
“Just closed my eyes for a second,” he said. He smiled and blinked a few times.
“You should see a doctor.”
“Doctor?” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t have time to see some doctor. Besides, don’t you find it a little weird that doctors call what they do ‘practice’?”
“Don’t joke about this,” my mother said.
He tongued at his mustache and looked at my mother. “All right. When I find the time, I’ll go. But I’m going to be busy this week.”
One night at dinner in mid-November he shook his head and blinked his eyes to stay awake.
“Well, I can tell you one thing,” he said. “I’m not missing buck season because of this.”
“You’re not going, are you?” my mother asked. The first Monday after Thanksgiving marked the annual start of deer-hunting season. For two or three days, my dad would stay at a cabin owned by my uncle Jed, my mother’s brother. It was one of the few times each year when he was out of communication with the firehouse, and when he used his sick days from Overhead Door.
“I’ve gone buck hunting every year since I was twelve,” my dad said. “I can’t miss it.”
“You never get one anyway,” I said. My father hadn’t shot a deer since before my birth. It’d become a running joke between us.
“Just you wait until you go out there in a couple of years,” he said. He waved his fork and smiled. “Even if you do see one, you still have to be a good shot.”
“But you never even see any,” I said.
“Well, you just never know, this might be my year.”
That week, just before his thirty-first birthday, my dad finally went to the doctor. He was anesthetized and the doctor inserted a camera down my father’s throat that snaked through his insides for clues. My father brought home a videotape of the procedure and watched it on our TV.
“That’s my stomach,” he told me, freeze-framing the image. He crouched in front of the screen and stared at what looked like wet red walls. “Can you believe that? Bet you never thought you’d see the insides of your dad’s stomach.”
“Did they find anything?” I asked.
“An ulcer. They gave me some drugs, should clear it up,” he said and snapped his fingers. “Just like that and I’ll be all better.”
My dad went buck hunting that year and, once again, returned with nothing to show for it. The ulcer medication seemed to work — his appetite returned and he quickly added back the pounds he had lost. Work on the hole in our yard stopped for the winter. The cement wouldn’t form in the cold weather, my dad said. The bricklayers hoped to return in February and finish the cinder-block walls for the basement. My dad had planned on digging the septic tank and hooking up the pipes before winter. Now, he would have to wait until warmer weather.
Lucky and Helen visited on Christmas Eve.
“Ho, ho, ho,” Lucky said. He stepped into the living room and removed his corduroy coat. He wore black dress pants and a white long-sleeved button-down shirt. Helen, holding plastic bags full of gifts, followed him inside and smiled. With her mouth open in surprise, she stared at the Christmas tree standing in the corner of the living room.
“Oh, Lucky, look at their tree. Isn’t that special?”
“That a real one?” Lucky asked.
My dad shook his head. “Artificial one this year.”
Lucky examined the tree, twisting the plastic pine needles in his fingers, and nodded. “Probably better. Those real ones burn up pretty fast. Could be a hazard.”
My mother carried a chair from the kitchen table into the living room and placed it in front of the television. She sat down and crossed her arms, looking impatient.
Lucky walked past her and sank into the couch. He slipped off his polished dress shoes. Helen carefully placed the presents on the floor and then sat next to Lucky. Her weight caused his body to tilt a moment before he repositioned himself.
He turned to her. “Well, get the presents out, let’s go.”
Helen shifted her weight again and then stood. She furrowed her brow as if thinking about what to say next. “Denton, I’m going to use the toilet first.” She walked through the kitchen and toward the bathroom.
I sat cross-legged in front of the artificial tree and wondered what they would give me this year. Like most kids, my year revolved around Christmas and whatever gifts I would receive, yet whatever Lucky and Helen had given me in the past had been so insignificant, I couldn’t even recall it.
“You excited about the new house?” Lucky asked. He looked toward my mother. She stared at the window, not paying attention. “Hey woman, I asked you something.”
“Teena?” my dad said. “Dad asked you something.”
“Get the wax out of your ears,” Lucky said. “You want this new house or not?”
My mother looked toward Lucky. “Yes. It should be nice.”
The four of us sat, waiting on Helen, when we heard what sounded like a thick burst of air or a tear of paper. I looked toward my mother — she sighed and closed her eyes. My dad sat still, as if nothing had happened.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Farting,” Lucky said. His voice was loud and angry. “Helen. Helen, close the door. You want the whole world to hear your bowels?”
When Helen finally returned, she pulled three boxes from her plastic bag and handed one each to my father, mother, and me. I recognized the wrapping paper — she made sure we carefully undid the tape so that she could reuse the paper each Christmas.
Lucky stood up. “Going to the car. Have to get another present.”
With my grandfather gone, my parents and I opened the packages in unison and seemed to look at one another at the same time. The three of us each held a red sweatshirt. In big block white lettering, the front of my shirt read BOY.
“Lucky helped me with this,” Helen said. “I think they’re just darling. Go on, show each other.”
My father’s shirt read DAD; my mother’s said MOM.
“I think it was such a cute idea,” Helen said. “When you go to Hershey Park, you can each wear your shirt. Isn’t that a nice idea?”
“Yeah,” my dad said. “That’s great, Mom.”
“We can’t wear a sweatshirt,” I said. “Not to Hershey Park. It’ll be ninety degrees when we go. We’d sweat our heads off.”
Lucky walked back inside carrying a large box. I couldn’t imagine what my grandparents would ever buy that might be so big. Lucky stood next to me, holding the box above my head.
The package slipped from his hands and I ducked out of the way. It crashed on the floor next to me.
He stared a second and then said, “Open it, boy.” It sounded like a threat.
I opened the box. Inside was a stationary punching bag, a flimsy thing that stood four feet tall and looked too hard to actually punch. I
stared at it, disappointed yet again.
“Isn’t that special?” Helen said. “Lucky always does pick such nice gifts.”
“I figure he needs to build coordination,” Lucky said. “You’re a puny boy.”
My dad walked Lucky and Helen outside when they left. My mother and I looked at each other for a moment.
“If you want, I’ll tape a picture of Lucky to the punching bag,” she said. “Maybe that’ll give you some motivation. I know I’d rather punch something with his face on it.”
We were still laughing when my dad came back inside.
When February came, not only was the ground still frozen, but my father discovered that he had bought the wrong pipes for the septic tank. He also had to locate the well so that we could have running water. Lucky had promised to show him the location, but was too busy packing and readying for his own move. My dad called a friend with a backhoe to dig up the septic tanks and well — an expense he had hoped to save by doing the job himself — and ordered new pipes. He explained all of it to my mother at dinner one night.
“What can go wrong will go wrong,” he said. “But don’t worry. It’ll be ready in time.”
“Is it ever going to be finished?” I asked. “It seems like you’ve spent years on this.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “Don’t worry. The new house will be here in March.”
“The trailer,” my mother said. “And it has to be here by March. The dealership wants it off the lot. They’re bringing it no matter what.”
“First off, it’s going to look just like a house,” he said. “Second, when it comes, I can hook a lot of the electrical stuff up myself. That’ll save some money.”
My dad explained that he wanted to furnish the basement. He envisioned a corner office for himself, a play area for me, a separate area for his tools. He would run phone line, cable, and install electrical outlets and lights.
“Do you even know how to do all of this?” my mother asked. Her eyes looked worried. “It’ll be safe?”
“Trust me,” my father said. “I’m the fire chief. Safety’s my middle name. And I learned it all from Dad.”