“Plus they think I got everything handed to me because I’m an Indian. You know, affirmative action. What do you think, man, you remember any big privileges I got back in the day? You think guys named Jason and Brent are tragically, tragically getting the undeserved shitty end of the stick?”
“No,” Chip said, which he hoped was the right answer. He’d lost some of the thread of what Elton was saying, probably because he was being pissed off and sarcastic. It was a new side of the new Elton.
“Yeah, not so much. But you know something? Those guys are never going to do squat, because they have all the creativity of one of the four basic food groups. They might as well be dark green leafy vegetables or dairy products.”
“Wow.”
“The only people who have enough of a soul to make something with a soul are the ones on the outside looking in. You can’t be at home in the world and see what you need to see about it. Crap.” Elton pushed the hair away from his face. “Sorry. I get myself too worked up.”
“No, that’s OK.” He was looking in the refrigerator now. He found a pack of some kind of lunch meat in plastic wrap and set about trying to get at it. “I’m understanding you.” And he was, he did. Because this was his real tribe and always had been: the funky, the dispossessed, the out of it, the freaks and cripples. But he wasn’t any artist.
Elton said, “Look, I have to do a lap here. Circulate. Make nice. Then we can go, if you want. I’m done here, they already gave me the check.”
“Yeah?” He was mildly interested. “How much they pay you to come by and be a pet Indian?”
“I’m not telling.”
“That little, huh?”
Elton shook his head and walked off into the living room. From behind he looked a lot like the kid he’d been: round-shouldered, lumbering, intent on getting out of the line of fire.
Chip grabbed another beer to wash away the slightly sick-making taste of the lunch meat. It must have been hanging out in the fridge for a pretty long time. Then he followed Elton into the living room. The party was all revved up by now. It was a loud son of a bitch. The music was jacked all the way and the little art punks were all screeching away at each other with their lungs practically hanging out at their elbows. He didn’t see Alisa. She must have taken off with somebody else who also liked her hair color.
The same shitty electronic music had been playing all along. It was making his brain itch. He walked over to the stereo and punched the OFF button.
“Hey!”
“What’s your deal, man?”
“Put something else on. This crap blows dead bears.”
“Hey, you don’t like it, you can leave.”
Elton intervened then. “Ah, can you cut my friend a little slack? He has this nervous disorder. On account of serving in Vietnam.”
That made them gawk at him. Chip put on his best cross-eyed psycho face, like he might snap and go into a jungle warfare flashback. Funny that with all his other brain farts, that never happened.
One of the girls held up a CD. “How about Indigo Girls? Very mellow.”
“Sure,” Chip said, because whatever it was would have to be an improvement. It turned out to be girls playing guitars. Fine.
“How do you guys know each other anyway?” This from Red, who you had to figure didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. How about a nice big cup of shut the fuck up, buddy?
“He used to sleep with my mom.”
Maybe it was just another sign of the party getting a little crazy.
“Dad,” Elton said, putting an arm around Chip’s shoulders. “It’s one of those Indian-ritual things. He adopted me.”
“Son,” Chip said, since he didn’t have much choice except to go along.
Nobody knew if they were supposed to be laughing. Chip said to Elton, “Where’s your damn camera. Somebody should take a picture of the family reunion.” His ears were doing that blotting thing again. He had to shout to hear himself.
“Assholes,” he thought he heard Red say, but it was also possible he’d said something like “Hamster cages.”
The guitar girls stopped singing, and the next minute the repulsive, throbbing music was back at full volume: CRUD CRUD CRUD CRUD CRUD.
He was across the room in three strides. The stereo was on some kind of bookcase and he upended the whole fucking thing in a waterfall of smashing and collapse. Then he got his hands on the stereo console, half lifting, half dragging it, trailing its tangle of wires. He got the front door open and then kicked it shut behind him. One of the speakers had made the trip too, like a tin can tied to a car’s bumper. He stood on the top step of the porch, balanced the load, then let it fly. It hit a couple of steps on the way down and landed, thud, on one end in the snow of the front yard.
The door behind him opened and he braced himself to throw a punch, but it was only Elton, his leather coat over one arm. The room behind him was full of commotion, then the door closed like a mouth. “Come on, man, we got to get out of here.”
“Waitaminnit.” Chip left the porch and gave the stereo a final kick as he passed it. In the fresh snow of the front yard, he picked a spot and began scuffing a path with both feet.
“What are you doing?”
“Making art.”
Elton watched him for a moment, then busted out laughing. “Give me an F. Give me a U.”
“Here, you want to help?”
Elton got his coat on and started in on the other side of the yard. Pretty soon there was a complete message spelled out in four-foot-high snow letters: FUCK YOU.
Chip said, “It needs something else.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s kind of plain. I want it to blink on and off in neon. Or, how about we piss on it?”
“Can we get the hell out of here before the cops come?”
“I don’t regard it as my best work. I just want to get that on the record.”
They ran to the corner and ducked behind a hedge to travel down a side street. The wind was vicious and the body heat they’d worked up was gone in an instant. Chip wanted to make some joke about them being outsiders, but he was too cold. Elton said, “I don’t believe you tore that shit up.”
“Music has always affected me powerfully.”
“You should probably be on some kind of medication, you know?”
They walked a few more blocks without anybody coming after them. Snow started up again, small, sleety stuff, like salt. Shit. It was going to mess up the letters. “I’m hoping this is the way back to my car,” Chip announced. The cold was clearing his head even as it bit into his skin.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Listen, sorry if I dumped some funky remarks on you back there.”
“It’s OK. Probably had to get said.” His feet, he noticed, were wet. His toes felt like they’d already got frostbite and been amputated. “What are you like when you drink, huh?”
“You were always decent to me. You were just, no bullshit.”
“Well, sure. Thanks.”
“Of course, if anybody asks me about that stereo, I never saw you before.”
“Of course.”
“They aren’t all bad kids,” Elton said, sounding gloomy. “But that’s what they are. Kids. I got to get a different life.”
The snow was revving up. The sky looked like it could bust loose with some serious shit. He hoped they were almost to the car. He hoped Elton knew where they were, because he had no clue. He was glad he’d been nice to Elton way back when, or at least, nice enough. He guessed he had this talent for taking in strays.
Here was the art building and the gallery, empty-looking and glassy, and for a bad couple of minutes he couldn’t find his car, but there it was, all alone and marooned in a snowy parking lot. They got in and Elton cussed a little at all the junk on the seat. “What’s this?”
“A caulking gun. Where you want to go?”
“They got me a motel room. You want to crash? There’s an extra bed. What’s this?” Elton p
icked up Torrie’s print from the dashboard and studied it under the streetlight. “Hey. Interesting.”
“Ah.” His toes were thawing. The idea started there and rose all the way through him and first he thought it was his head going loose again, but it was just the excitement of trying to get the idea out of his mouth. “You in some big hurry to get back to Seattle?”
“No particular reason to. How come?”
“There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
Iowa
JUNE 2003
“The well checked out. The septic checked out.”
“Then the whole crud heap is yours.”
“Not until the closing. But yeah, almost.”
“You’re nuts, you know.”
“Always have been.”
Ryan and Blake stood on the front porch of the farmhouse that had belonged to Norm and Martha Peerson, and to a couple of Peerson generations before that. The blacktop road in front of the house was hogbacked and bordered by deep, weedy ditches. Across the road was a field of knee-high corn, the leaves like green straps. Here and there along the farmhouse’s circular drive you could see the remnants of the old border of whitewashed rocks. The windbreak evergreens still stood on either side of the yard, but the plowed fields now crowded right up to their edges. The sky was hot and blue and dotted with the white puffs of summer clouds.
Ryan turned to his brother. “Shall we?”
The decorative squares of red and blue and yellow glass set into the front door transom had a few cracks and missing corners. The frame had settled and Ryan had to put his shoulder to it to get it open. Different people had lived here on and off over the years, though none recently. The air inside was almost a solid thing: dry, acrid, sour.
“Oh yeah,” Blake said. “I’m liking it.”
“Tell me about the floors.”
Blake stamped his foot at different places on the entry hall’s floorboards. “Dougie Osgood looked at the foundation?”
“Yeah, foundation’s good.”
“I need to get down in the cellar.”
“Let’s do the kitchen first.” Ryan led the way. He already pretty much knew what his brother was going to say.
The kitchen had been updated at some point, but on the cheap, and any of the new feel had long since been battered down. There was an electric range with two sprung burners, and a copper-colored refrigerator. The floor was a piece of textured vinyl. Blake walked to the sink and let the water run. “Pressure could be better. You might need a new pump. Especially if you want a dishwasher in here.” He opened a cabinet. “Looks like you bought you some mice.”
“Sure. I expect there’s raccoons in the attic. Bees in the walls. Anyway, it needs new cabinets.”
“Let me do some measuring.”
Ryan watched as Blake flicked his tape measure into the corners of the room, then made notes. They weren’t in the habit of talking about things. But Ryan would have liked to know if his brother still enjoyed his work, if his manner of going about it as a series of exasperating chores was only a kind of cover for taking pleasure in it. His face was a permanent windburned red, like a farmer’s. He’d mentioned some back problems. It was work that used your body up like one more tool.
The house was stuffy, but the temperature inside was cool and not unpleasant. Ryan walked out to the mudroom porch and opened the back door. The old cow barn still stood, though bare of paint. In this direction some of the original parcel had been included in the sale. A far-off tree line marked the boundary. A few gnarled orchard trees stood in the deep grass.
When Ryan went back into the kitchen, Blake said, “Makes you wonder how they managed, back in the day. You wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken, you had to kill and pluck your own.”
“Canning. Baking. Churning the damn butter and hoping the milk didn’t spoil.”
“Eating involved some serious work, yeah.”
“You wonder if they were happy, or if that’s just a bunch of nostalgic crap.”
“They didn’t think in terms of happy,” Blake said. “Let’s see the rest of the place.”
They inspected the downstairs ceilings for water damage, and the ancient cellar. The whole house was going to have to be rewired, and the bathrooms were pretty sad. Blake said he’d seen better down at the Marathon station.
“Funny how this house always seemed so big, when we were kids,” Ryan said. They were standing in the upstairs hall, looking into the three narrow bedrooms. Sunlight slanted across the bare floors. A white dresser stood in what had been the girls’ room, supporting a mirror in a frame of painted roses. He crossed the floor and bent down to look into it. Mistake. The mirror was dim and wavy and God knew he was looking old these days, but he was 47, not 147.
Blake was rocking the radiator back and forth where it joined the wall. “You might want to get some ductwork done. I’m just saying.”
“Yeah.” At some point the Peersons had added a little room off the kitchen, a sleeping space for a grandparent, maybe. There was nobody now alive that he could have asked.
Back down the steep-pitched stairs. “I need a smoke,” Blake announced, heading out to the porch. Ryan followed. “So how much money you want to spend here? Because you could just keep going.”
The legend of his money wasn’t going to die anytime soon, even though a lot of the money had. His family didn’t understand how divorce vaporized money, since none of them had ever got divorced. They didn’t much understand what he did for a living, just something with computers, so there wasn’t any point in explaining that what they’d begun to call the tech bubble hadn’t felt like a bubble until it burst. He still had two kids to support. He’d moved into an apartment in the city, he’d cut way back, he’d had to work like hell to keep his company from going under, and there was no guarantee it would ever come back to anything like what it had once been.
There had been seven fat years, and now there were seven lean ones, all this with the country gone into an ugly, shaky tailspin with braying headlines about the enemies among us and the need for mighty and muscular vengeance.
But he’d wanted the farmhouse. And it had come cheaper than almost anything with four walls and a roof, though Blake was surely right, it was going to suck up money on a major, full-time basis.
His sister Anita had told him it was on the market. Anita was now the local real estate queen. Her picture—smiling, impeccably got up, hair sleek and gilded—presided over billboards, full-color supplements in the Sunday paper, even the flaps of grocery carts, which were now used for advertising. “Come On Home,” her ads urged, with commercial solicitude. She’d made agent of the year twice now.
Good old Anita. She was hardwired to end up on the top of whatever heap she chose to climb. He had to give her credit for getting out there and learning the trade, getting certified, putting in the hours. And for finding a job that allowed her to exercise her particular combination of charm and bossiness.
“Norm and Martha’s old house is for sale,” she’d told him over the phone. “Just listed.”
“I would have thought they’d already knocked it down for the acreage.”
“They never got around to it.”
They hadn’t phoned much over the years, aside from holidays and birthdays, but ever since their mother died and he and Ellen had parted ways, Anita seemed to think he needed some sort of female monitoring.
“Huh.” He didn’t have any immediate reaction. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even thought about the place.
Anita wanted to know about Anna and Sam, how were they, what was new with them, and he told her the things he’d saved up for just such an occasion. Anna was still on the volleyball team. Absolutely vicious competitor. He guessed he didn’t find it strange to have an athletic kid—they were doing so much to encourage girls’ sports these days—a little snort from Anita suggested she had some opinion about this, though he couldn’t guess what it was—but Anna’s intensity? She must have come up with that on her own.
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And Sam, age eleven, took karate lessons, played computer games—didn’t kids used to collect bugs or rocks?—and wanted to be either a computer-game designer or a race-car driver when he grew up.
Anita said it was great that he worked so hard at being a dad. She’d seen so many divorced guys just give up on their kids. Ah, well, Ryan muttered, as if to suggest modest agreement.
The truth was, his kids had mostly given up on him. They lived with Ellen, and his participation in their lives was always a disruption of some sort. They were polite, for the most part, and uncommunicative, in large part, with him, and even though some of that was just kids being kids, he had upended their lives and by now they were used to it, and to his absence.
Anita said, “You should bring them out here for a visit. I haven’t seen them in the longest time.”
“It can be a little tricky, with everybody’s schedule. You know, softball, summer enrichment courses . . .” Ryan was imagining the battle to the death that would result if he announced his intention of taking them off to Boredom City, Iowa. “But I’ll work on it. How’s everybody there? How’s Dad?”
“Pretty good. He’s planning a trip to the Grand Canyon. He says he’s never seen it. I know. We’re trying to talk him out of it.”
Ryan knew better than to say, Good for him. He asked about Anita’s family.
Anita said that Matt was still in Los Angeles, being a music bum. When he wasn’t in Amsterdam, or Prague, or some other place you’d never heard of, and she worried about his flying when there were terrorists everywhere and she guessed he made enough money to live on, but honestly, there were some things you just didn’t want to know.
Marcie was still working in the office part-time and taking courses. She was all about the boyfriend and buying clothes and going out and Anita figured they’d be paying her car insurance and medical a while longer, until she got serious about either the boyfriend or earning her own keep. Kids. She didn’t remember, did they used to sit up nights thinking of new ways to drive Mom and Dad crazy?
Jeff was fine; he said hello.
They’d got off the phone and a couple of weeks later Ryan called her back and asked, just out of curiosity, how much they wanted for the old farmhouse.
The Year We Left Home Page 33