Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  I was four at this time and not a baby anymore. I had my frog in a jar with me, and my frog was my friend. I opened the jar and let my frog hop away toward a tree, so no one could eat him. I said, “Good-bye, Frog.”

  No one knew I was out there alone, and no one saw me run, run, run up the hill to meet my daddy (“Pick me up, Daddy, pick me up!”), the wind whipping my dress like in a flying dream. I was waiting for my daddy to bring in the tanks at the end of the day. I didn’t know where the tanks came from, but I knew they just appeared up there every day—first the distant roaring sound of them, then the first one appearing seesaw-tilt wobbling at the top of the hill like a dollhouse tank, like the green lead miniature tanks with moving parts that Daddy had on his desk at home.

  It toddled down and crawled, and then another and another olive green robot toad roaring and rolling over the top of the highest hill, then a lower hill, and then rolling toward me, the top parts swiveling, towering more and more hugely on the dirt road before me, and then they stopped. And then the toads’ tops popped open and some men came out.

  “What have we here?” and “Who might this be so far from home?” they were all saying.

  Then my daddy was getting out of a jeep that drove up beside the first tank, with another tall man helping him, and then another, and one of the men picked me up and lifted me up to the top of this huge tank, like onto the back of an elephant, then into the trapdoor and down into the small dark space full of glowing dials and lights. Then they drove the tanks again, riding with me down toward home.

  The men knew how to do things. They handed me up and down, in and out. I was so little to them, they could just lift me, put me on their shoulders, toss me around in their big warm men’s hands. I would have done anything for more of this.

  “Daddy, Daddy, pick me up, Daddy, pick me up!”

  But Daddy could not pick me up when his feet were bad like right then. We walked home, back to the apartments, where Mama was with that fussy new baby they said would be somebody for me to play with, but she was much too small.

  I ran along beside Daddy’s tall, stiff legs, his two canes at that time, his uniform, his medals and ribbons, the patches like hearts on his sleeve, all saying that he and all the men were part of something big, an us-protected circle within which they knew how to believe, join up, join in, and be part of things. They could do what was required to belong. I wished I knew what to do to belong.

  On tiptoe later, I looked at the medals and ribbons laid out on Daddy’s dresser. My hand just reached out.

  When He Saw Me

  While awake, Daddy cannot be still. His knees are moving, his fingers are tapping and drumming to the rhythm of something inside him. I spy on his left hand one day, with its short fingers, clean nails, pink skin with brown freckles across the back. Mama says he has small hands for a man of his size, and that when he was young and would get into fights a lot, his small hands were a problem for him.

  His hands seem to belong to someone young and innocent, not the person we are all so afraid of when he comes home from work on a bad day, comes charging in from the garage, and we would have known from the way his car hit the driveway and by the speed with which he would have made it to the back door in that walk he has that is not exactly limping, but making lurching forward look purposeful—we would know, we would just know, the way you know when you swing a bat that this one’s going to be a foul, and even though the bat hasn’t hit the ball yet, you know it’s too late to change it, there’s nothing to be done, because it’s already in motion and this one is just going to be a foul.

  And everything has to be just right. If something at dinner was wrong, he would throw the corncobs on the floor, for example, there being no plate set out for them the way he wanted, or he would hurl a whole tomato aspic across the room, because didn’t she know he had to have something to chew on?

  But mostly, Daddy likes to eat better than he likes most things. He lunges into each bite as he eats, surrounding and attacking each forkful as though in an act of capture, going faster and faster, as though accelerating toward some climactic moment, and when he does this, his eyes seem to glaze over, as though not only consuming but also being consumed, merging with something in which to be lost, the way he told me one time he was lost in the morphine they gave him when his feet were crushed in the first place, and he spent years in hospitals and body casts like the one at Valley Forge, where I saw him that first time. I heard he later cut that itchy cast off himself and went running around yelling, like he wasn’t supposed to do, hurting himself again, so they didn’t know what to do with him. Nobody ever knows what to do with him. They just had to put him in a new cast.

  At home, all you can do is to get out of the way in time. Anything might happen. Usually, he just breaks things. Sometimes he falls down. He even breaks his own bones a lot.

  But he doesn’t seem to care about hurting himself, because he wants to have things a certain way. Like when they operated on his feet the first time and he would not have a general anesthetic, because they wouldn’t promise not to cut off the worse one of the feet, because they said he would never walk on them because of the pain, but he wouldn’t let them do it. After that, he did make himself walk, even though the feet were always hurting, especially that one worse foot, and he is constantly moving and twitching and jigging them. At a movie, he cannot just sit there, but is up and down the whole time, getting popcorn and drinks, going to the bathroom, or just walking around, and while in his seat, his feet are moving up and down in the aisle, or his knees are going back and forth, and then sometimes something in the movie is not just right, so we all have to get up and leave right in the middle.

  Even sitting at home, it is the same way, feet moving up and down the whole time, in those brown lace-up, oxford-type shoes.

  The shoes have to be of the softest leather, the best, sometimes handmade, and they must be hard to find, since the two feet are different sizes and shapes since the war, so he either has to buy two pair or he has to have them specially made to measure. But then his feet hurt all the time anyway.

  His feet are so stiff and so square, they look almost like wooden feet, and he walks on them in a way that seems just as if they are wooden feet, because the ankles can’t move, so they have this stiff look. If you could see them without shoes and without those thin dress socks he always wears, then you would see how wasted and white and woodish they appear, and why he walks on them as if he is walking on stilts. In a way, they actually are stilts that have been fashioned in the early days of plastic surgery, but made of bone and flesh and also nerves, with pink raised scars all around the tendons and the square heels and the ankles, bony and lumpy in an oddly defined sort of way, man-made approximations of feet.

  And of course these feet are always getting injured and reinjured, like the time when Mama and Daddy went to Nassau with their friends, and Daddy didn’t believe them when they said there were stinging sea urchins on the beach, and so he wound up with a swollen foot full of stinging sea-urchin quills, as well as with a bad sunburn, because he also didn’t believe that he couldn’t stay out in the sun as long as anyone with his redhead’s skin, and so the next day he was stuck in his hotel room while everyone else was out on the beach again, and he didn’t know what to do with himself in the room all day.

  He got curious about a little metal trapdoor that was in the ceiling of the bathroom of his hotel room, so he found a screwdriver and undid all four screws, and the metal trapdoor fell corner-down right on the instep of his now triply injured foot, so he wound up in another hospital.

  He came back from that trip angry, breaking things every day, and he paced up and down the kitchen on one cane, eating three whole packages of Nestlé’s cooking chocolate, and when he did that, he got the same look on his face that I had seen before when I watched him pull a bottle out of the wood bin that was in the brick fireplace. I saw him turn that bottle up, and as he drank, I saw him lunge toward that bottle with his face, as though
he were Alice plunging in that instant through some looking-glass boundary in his own mind, and his face had the look of standing in a strong wind.

  When he first came back from the hospital at Valley Forge, he was in leg casts and couldn’t get around except on heavy wooden crutches, so there wasn’t much he could do except make models of boats and planes and tanks and things, over and over again.

  There was one model boat he was working on for a long time. It was a good one, made of balsa wood, and he would sit for hours absorbed in working on it and not moving much at all. But then one day there was a piece he couldn’t find when the boat was almost finished. We looked and looked, but he couldn’t get that piece and he couldn’t get anyone else to get it right that instant. He got so mad that he took his crutch and smashed that model boat into bits and pieces, and then it was ruined.

  He had really liked that boat, and had been working on it for a long time and had bought the stuff to paint it. It was going to be blue and gray wih a red stripe, and I had helped him to pick out the colors, but now he had crunched it into a hundred pieces that could not be put back together. He’d ruined everything.

  I didn’t want to talk to him much for a long time after that, which made him even madder. After those casts came off, he went from crutches to using two canes, and his feet hurt a lot then, and he had a hard time learning to balance on those two canes and would fall down a lot, such as the time when he had the two canes and it was dark and rainy and the car lights and the streetlights were shiny on the pavement like streaky-colored mirrors, and we were all hurrying, and my mother said to him, “Don’t cross now; you’ll fall.” And the look he gave her, I thought he was going to hit her, but instead he leaned on those two thin canes with all his weight and he lunged out into the street. It was raining hard and there were cars, and he went lurching across as well as he could, but his weight was on those two thin cane tips, and one slid out from under him and he fell down hard, slipping and sliding in the street, with cars screeching and skidding on the mirrored wet pavement, but he glared right into their grilles, baring his teeth and yelling and cursing, and then he looked back at my mother and me as if we were the same as the car grilles, and then he struggled up, saying not to help him, goddammit, and to get away from him, and then he hit at the car nearest with one of the canes, and then he took off his nice new overcoat, which was now all wet and grease-stained, and he threw it in the street, and then he was mad and wouldn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the night.

  I was getting to where I didn’t want to talk to him all that much, either. Not too long after that, when it was my fifth or sixth birthday, he gave me a pair of tall wooden stilts, and he made a point of saying that I had to learn to use them all by myself, but I never did learn to use them, and those red-and-green-painted stilts are still leaning reproachfully against the back wall of the garage. Once in a while he will get this look in his eye, and ask me why I never learned to use those stilts.

  After that, he went back to the surgeons and said that he had changed his mind and that he wanted them to go ahead and amputate that foot that was always hurting him the most, but now he could already walk, so they refused to do it, so he has to live with himself like that.

  He always wants to get any things that might be bothering him away from himself. He will fling those things, just hurl them away, and out into the abyss of intolerable imperfections out there orbiting aimlessly, forever banished from his awareness and from his sight.

  And if he can’t hurl the things away from himself, then he will thrust himself away from the things, and out of the scene at hand right that instant. For example, it might be that a friend he had known for thirty years, having gone to high school together, or having spent the war in hospitals together, or something like that, and it might be that Daddy and this friend would be sitting in a country club dining room with white tablecloths or even in a café on the border, with Mexican waiters in aprons standing around, and this friend might just say something that might strike Daddy as indicating a fundamental breach of some kind, or maybe he would think it indicated some sort of betrayal or personal insult, as he was constantly on the alert for such things, and then my father would suddenly shoot from his chair, knocking it backward, would throw the wooden table with all its cutlery and crystal to the floor, and then would go charging out of the room as fast as he could in that stiff-legged walk he had, and then he might never speak to that old friend of his again, just to show that that was how strongly he felt about it.

  And suffering the consequences of showing how he felt about it was something that he didn’t mind doing, and the fact that people didn’t know what to do with him or how to handle the situations he would cause didn’t seem to bother him, as if that was something that was just in his body, as if the way he had to live in his body was such that he had to show and act out everything. As if that was just a fact of reality and what other people chose to do about it was their own affair.

  Sometimes that worst foot bothers him so much that he has to go back to using one crutch around the house, just for a week or so. One day while he was doing this, I was five or six, and I didn’t want to go to school. I was hiding out in the backyard hoping they would just forget about me for long enough that I could miss the bus and skip school for just that one day, but my mother was yelling around the house for me and was getting mad, until finally she started yelling out the back door for me. Then Daddy came clumping out, still in his bathrobe and on one crutch, and furious that I would dare to defy them like that. I realized that I had made a big mistake. I hunched down behind the newly cut woodpile, hoping that he wouldn’t see me, but after calling out a couple of times, he headed straight for me. I could see him through the spaces between the stacked logs near the top of the pile, and I was looking around for an escape, and then his crutch sank into the ground and he fell.

  He fell heavily, right into some uncut branches, and scraped his hand and arm. Lifting up just a little, I saw him through the woodpile furiously struggling with his legs and feet and with his bathrobe and the crutch, his face turning redder and redder, and then he picked up a hatchet that had been left by the uncut wood and he started hitting his crutch with it. He got up on one knee and hacked and hacked at that crutch, until he was chopping it in two.

  I hunched down low behind the woodpile, and he just kept on hacking and hacking and hacking. It seemed as if he had forgotten about me and about the yard and even about the crutch and everything, and that all he was thinking about was the hacking that went on and on, and there was no other place for me to hide. And then everything stopped.

  I got up slowly to where I could peer between the logs and see him, and I could see that he had stopped hacking and was looking at the foot that was right there in front of him. It was the worse one of the two, and he was just staring at that foot with that hatchet in his hand. And that was when I knew I had to get out of there right that minute, and so I jumped up and ran from behind the woodpile and across the yard, and that was when my father looked up and saw me.

  Lennox Lane

  Now we live outside the city limits in a Dilbeck ranch-style house spread as far as a small two-bedroom could spread across our suburban-pioneer acre-and-a-half lot. White-painted brick, wood shingles, gravel drive, three-board white-painted fence all around, roses and more roses climbing and blooming along the fence, up on the house, onto the roof on one side, blood red roses every one, small, tight blooms, branches lined with thorns, and hardy climbers all.

  A sprawling prickly pear cactus that my mother backed into and accidentally sat on one day while dragging a sprinkler across the newly seeded lawn in her apron and high heels is dead center in front, next to the fence. She was mad all summer about Daddy’s laughing so hard while picking out the spines.

  I know that cactus does bloom, pink petals opening to relentless sun glaring across the narrow ribbon of sticky tar and gravel country road, bluebonnets and buttercups nodding on the parkway in spring, flowering briefly
before they get mowed.

  At this time, there are blankets of bluebonnets and cactus in front yards north of town. Late summer and fall, tumbleweeds roll along the road out front, stick in the glossy black tar, and are mashed into the tar by the occasional car or pickup truck. They pile in drifts against the fences along our country roads, our country mailboxes, different sizes of tumbleweeds, different types.

  There are still septic tanks and telephone party lines.

  There are woods and creeks and culverts to play in, and neighborhood kids and dogs and cats and even chickens wander the yards at will. There are rattlesnakes and tarantulas, scorpions, horned toads, bees, wasps, hornets, and ants of several kinds.

  Daddy goes back to work at the job he had before the war, at Lone Star Oldsmobile and Cadillac, his father’s business. And when all the men come home from the war and buy a car or two, they make good money.

  Some days, Daddy comes home from work in a good mood, and some days not. And what he might do then, you never can tell.

  Here I am, sitting on the steps in the garage one day, when his car barrels up and suddenly stops a few feet from where I am sitting. I want to hide, but it’s too late, so instead I try to act casual. To my surprise, he clump-CLUMPS up to me, hands me a lollipop from his pocket, grins, says, “Here, kid,” and then clumps on in the door.

  Now Mama is putting us to bed after dinner and looking like she’s been crying, and we don’t know where Daddy went, roaring away in his car.

  Now it’s bright white morning again, with everyday let’s-get-busy schoolbooks and socks, with hurry-up, everything-is-just-fine voices, May-May humming and singing with the kitchen clanging and kitchen sizzling, and time to start hurrying again.