Piper

by John E. Keegan

  He lowered a slice of meat into the small frying pan with the dent in it where Dad had driven a stake for my tent in the backyard. “I thought I could save up for a camper or something. One of them aluminum airstream jobbies with the steps that fold out. That’d be slick, huh?” His flights of fancy resembled the ones Mom painted, but his chances of ever pulling off such a ludicrous scheme were about as good as the chance those kids in her birdnest would wake up some morning and fly.

  His meat was sizzling. “You’re not eating your food groups,” I said. “That stuff is pure cholesterol.”

  “I’m having an egg with it.”

  “That’s what I mean. You need vegetables. You know, those pesky green and orange things that grow in the ground.”

  “Where’s Tom?” We went through this every night. It was as if he forgot Dad worked at the newspaper. “Why doesn’t he take you fishing or bowling?”

  “I don’t like to fish. It’s boring.”

  “Sittin’ in your room is boring. Believe me, that’s why I have my dogs.”

  “That’s why I have this,” I said, pointing to Lolita. My finger left a smudge on the plastic holder and I tried to wipe it off with the side of my hand, which made it worse. Damn. Willard wouldn’t let me read and now I couldn’t see the print. “Besides, Dad’s swamped at the paper.”

  “No man on his deathbed’s gonna cry ’cause he didn’t put in enough hours at the job.” He flipped the Spam with the point of his knife and the pan attacked the virgin flesh with a crescendo of voracious sizzles. The black scab on the top side made it resemble real meat. “What’s he do down there anyway?”

  I didn’t want to tell Willard what I suspected was really going on, but I’d overheard Dad say the paper was hurting. Everyone was getting as much news as they wanted on TV. “Print media is a dinosaur,” he’d told me, but that hadn’t stopped him. The Herald Stampede was the only paper in the country that had run a six-part series on “The Decline of Excellence in American Arts and Letters” under Tom Scanlon’s byline. He must have felt sometimes as if he were howling into the wind. Seven years ago, somebody had listened to him though because he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize in beat reporting for his series that led to the County Executive’s indictment for taking kickbacks on the construction of a sanitary landfill that never opened. The big papers had missed it.

  Business at the Herald was punk enough that they’d laid off several staff, and started using the press for printing junk mail, greeting cards, and school workbooks on the side. Although we never had much money, Mom always made sure we ate well, buying the best cuts of meat and organic fruits and vegetables. Now we were eating canned vegetables and ice milk instead of ice cream.

  “Carlisle wants to turn the paper into more of a high society thing,” I told Willard, saving him the messy details.

  “A what?”

  “You know, personal interest stories about people who are loaded. Who just got back from Italy and who’s going next.”

  Willard had a puzzled look on his face.

  “It’s a joke, Willard. There is no high society in Stampede.” My rice was done and I flipped off the back burner and slid the pan onto a newspaper. “Dad could have been a Pulitzer prize winner at the Washington Post and Carlisle’s got him babysitting a glorified handbill for the local merchants, running pictures of widows with wrinkled necks in costume jewelry.” I picked up the lid on the rice pan, forgetting to use a pot holder, and dropped it to the floor. “Ouch!”

  Startled, Willard’s egg went half into the Spam pan and half out as he cracked it. He licked the egg white off his fingers. “Them Carlisles could buy the Post.”

  “That would take class and John Carlisle doesn’t have enough of that to shine his shoes.” I licked the burn on my thumb and waved it in the air.

  “They say never argue with someone who buys ink by the gallon.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Sometime I would have to find out what he really thought of the Carlisles. He’d been around long enough to have seen the full cycle, from the homesteaders to the freeloader.

  I sat at the table in the nook to eat, not bothering with my book. Willard ate his fried egg sandwich standing up, as if he was in a hurry to get back down with the dogs. The catsup that he’d added to expand his food groups dripped onto his Scott towel. As he paced the floor and rattled on, I looked at his right ear, the cauliflower one that had been bitten off in a fight in the asparagus fields. Willard wasn’t that shy about sticking up for himself. Mom told me that when Willard lost his ear the doctor had to attach it to his groin so it would heal before they sewed it back on his head. I wished sometimes Dad had some of that spunk. The Irish were supposed to be the ones with the hair-trigger tempers, but Dad was always the consummate gentleman.

  “My Carol was high society,” Willard said. “Almost didn’t marry me, you know.” He wobbled his head, pulling up his recollections slowly like a bucket from the bottom of a deep well. I thought he was going to tell me again about the wedding in the Okanogan Valley when he fired his rifle into the church ceiling. Willard had trouble remembering where Dad worked, but his memories of Grandma Carol were always resplendent in their detail. “I fixed a Valentine’s Day dinner at her house once when the parents were away. Chicken fricassee and rice. Put a cup of them candy hearts next to her plate for dessert and she held it under the light, stirring it with her little finger. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was looking for the jewelry. Can you beat that? I couldn’t afford bus fare and she was looking for diamonds.” Tears of lost joy welled in the corners of his eyes, but I was stung by the insensitivity of the woman who’d turned out to be the love of his life.

  “I never really knew Grandma Carol.”

  “She was a real fussbudget. But I finally came through. Proposed to her in a hot springs under the moonlight and you know what her first question was?”

  I shook my head.

  “Where’s the ring?”

  Now tears were welling in my eyes. Willard was obviously blinded by his love for this woman. Rather than turn bitter though, he’d taken her uppityness as a challenge, proof of her good breeding.

  5

  I was the first one to arrive at the double-sided billboard on Horse Heaven Highway. Nothing of importance in Stampede was beyond walking distance, even though most people drove everywhere as a matter of course. While waiting for Dirk, I checked out the latest advertisements, which were illuminated by spotlights. One side featured a larger-than-life blonde in high heels on an ottoman with a bent knee cupped between her hands, revealing two perfect legs in pantyhose. The board that faced motorists on their way into town had an inscription in a formation of cumulus clouds that read: “If there’s a heaven, you’ve just found it!” It was signed by the Greater Stampede Chamber of Commerce.

  Mom used to say Stampede was a time capsule people had buried under a corner of the state. “Civil rights is still a debatable issue here,” she said. “And they haven’t dared crack the lid on women’s issues.” Even though I knew what she said might be true, it always hurt because I knew that, like it or not, Stampede was always going to be part of me. If Stampede was impaired, I was impaired.

  I hitched myself up between the braces to the running boards and looked back down towards the highway. The billboards were about fifty yards beyond the four-way stop that represented the city limits. Dirk and I had discovered years ago that the police turned their cars around at the intersection and, unless they went beyond the city limits and shone their spotlights directly into the crossbeams, there was no way they could see us. Dirk used to fill his pockets with pea gravel and fire his slingshot at passing trucks. There was little risk of injury. He had trouble hitting the ones standing still at the truck stop.

  The billboards were a perch from which we could play God—hand the stone tablets to Moses, or make soldiers in the plaza march goose steps. I used the billboards to practice my Mark Antony speech before the freshmen elocution contest and the en
closure did for my oratory what the shower did for my Janis Joplin. Of course, when the real thing came, the gymnasium soaked up the drama in my voice like a thirsty desert.

  “Hey, give me a hand.” It was Dirk, with one foot braced against the diagonal below me.

  “Where you been?”

  He was puffing and reaching up for me. “I had to … do the beds.”

  “The beds?”

  His hand was sweaty and I slid mine down so I had him by the wrist. “You know … Thursdays … change the sheets … ouch, you’re pinching me!”

  The slingshots and Cokes Dirk used to cop from the cooler at Ned’s and stick in the pockets of his Army fatigues eventually gave way to filter cigarettes we’d sneak out of our parents’ packs, one at a time so they wouldn’t be missed. I hadn’t felt that good about stealing Mom’s cigarettes, but I figured she’d live longer if we smoked some for her. She later gave up on her own when she started doing yoga. Dirk was the first one to bring a “brewskie,” a Lucky Lager that tasted like elk urine. We were hunters and gatherers then, venturing into the world to see what contraband we had the courage to snag, bring back to the billboards, and ingest. Dirk brought wine cooler in a Gatorade jar once and I outdid him with a couple of jiggers of Gilbey’s in a jelly jar that he spit all over the front of his Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. We smoked our first pot from one of his dad’s pipes that was all mossy and chewed up on the mouthpiece. Holding the smoke in his lungs the way he’d seen Peter Fonda do in Easy Rider, Dirk put his arm over my shoulder and let his hand dangle against my chest. Even with the dope there was no sexual chemistry, but I let him do it for practice. His and mine.

  Dirk settled himself onto the plank with his legs hanging into the void next to mine. We had to remember to place rather than slide our hands on the boards in order to avoid slivers. Once when he was wearing cutoffs, Dirk took a sliver as long as a pencil into the back of his thigh that pinned him to the board, and I had to drag his butt the opposite direction to free him. Now, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, took out a pack of unfiltered Camels, and tamped one out for me, which I refused. It wasn’t anything highly principled on my part. I still enjoyed a smoke once in a while, particularly with a beer, but I didn’t want to immunize myself against the few pleasures life had to offer by indulging when I could give a damn.

  He took a first, rabid drag with his eyes closed, leaving the cigarette in the corner of his mouth on the exhale. Smoking was a way for Dirk to prove his manhood without having to work up a sweat or risk physical harm. Each time a car went by, the lights washed the insides of our perch, a space that resembled a medieval gallows. I was enjoying the smell of Dirk’s Camel, but then I had always been drawn to toxic aromas. The fumes at the gas pump reminded me of the times our family had gone to the outdoor movies. The fireplace smoke that billowed into the living room when Dad forgot to open the vent was Christmas dinner. Dirk’s cigarette reminded me of those bygone days when I thought I was as normal as everyone else.

  “That dork’ll make someone a wonderful wife,” Dirk said, when I told him about my meeting with Carlisle at Marge’s.

  There were plenty of theories as to why John Carlisle had never married. Some said it was because he was so well-educated he’d priced himself out of the local market so to speak. Others who were less charitable said it was because he was still whoring around. At a time when the town was losing everyone who made it past high school to higher paying jobs in Seattle, however, most people were just grateful he’d chosen Stampede as his home. Of course, John Carlisle didn’t need a job, and he had the most imposing home in Stampede, a chalky yellow Queen Anne at the top of the hill with steeply-pitched gable roofs, turrets, and a porch with turned posts and a balustrade. His house was the main attraction on the Historical Society’s Christmas walking tour of the town’s Victorian homes. Last year, there was a ribbon on the master bedroom doorknob with a sign that said no visitors allowed, but Condon Bagmore snuck in anyway and said he found a box of Trojans in the drawer of the nightstand. Considering the source, I didn’t put much stock in it. I just hoped this year the Jacuzzi would be blocked off.

  Dirk picked a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “The guy’s helpless. I guess that’s why I was his yard boy. I hoped somebody would kidnap me and they’d make Carlisle pay the ransom.” Dirk had always craved the idea of instant fame and complained about the guys who’d taken shots at the President or mailed pipe bombs around the country and became household names overnight. He was always dreaming of a shortcut.

  I kicked him on the ankle bone with the side of my shoe. “Thanks for the support, Dirk.”

  “You’d do the same for me.”

  “Hey, you didn’t ask me up here to talk about John Carlisle.”

  He snuffed out his cigarette against the wall and flicked it out over the top of the billboard. Then he pulled out his pack and tamped out a fresh one, his fingers tense in the flare of his match. He took the first big drag, the one that carried all the sweetness the way the first chew on a stick of gum did. “I’m pussy-whipped, Piper.” Nobody but Dirk talked this way. He seemed burdened with the historical jargon of teenage angst.

  “Who is it this time?”

  “Rozene Raymond.”

  My brain seized at the mention of her name. Rozene Raymond was the Makah Indian girl in our class with the mermaid chest and Mona Lisa smile. Even I got goose bumps around Rozene. “You haven’t gone out with her. How could you be pussy-whipped?”

  “I’ve stopped studying. I’ve memorized her class schedule and walk out of my way just to run into her at breaks. She’s the last thing I think of when I fall asleep.”

  I looked over at him to make sure he wasn’t putting me on. “And she doesn’t even know you exist.”

  “I’m just a beefy white kid with a mild case of acne who’s got the hots for her.”

  I probably had no business prying into this, but I couldn’t help myself. “What’s so special about her?”

  He sputtered and coughed from the smoke, his voice strained as he tried to catch his breath. “Shit … where do I start? Those burning black eyes, her lips, the taper of her ankles.” He reached up and held onto the overhead brace. “I could die and go to heaven if she’d just look me in the eye once and whisper my name like it meant something to her.”

  “You’re wasted, Dirk. Take up the marathon.”

  “Come on, don’t do that. How can I turn her on to me?”

  This was the blind leading the blind. I’d never seduced anyone or been seduced. Dirk was my friend, my only friend, but I wasn’t sure I really wanted him to get to where he was heading. This would have been the right time to say something about the strange mixture of passion and panic swirling inside me, but I couldn’t. I answered instead. “Mom told me women like vulnerability.”

  “Hey, perfect. I’m a basket case.”

  “I think you’re missing the point.” I remembered a line from Yeats Dad had recited—Do not love too long, or you will grow out of fashion like an old song—but I couldn’t figure out how to use it. “Show her who you are and the rest will follow.”

  “You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  “Bite your ass. I’m trying to help.”

  What I liked about Dirk probably bore no resemblance to what Rozene Raymond wanted from someone. There was a profound sense of confusion, even duplicity, in Dirk that I trusted. One of my fondest memories of him was the time he played the lion in the Wizard of Oz in grade school. You couldn’t have recognized Dirk through the costume, but as much as he hated his Gestapo father he dearly wanted him to see that play. His dad didn’t show for the performance and Dirk cried afterwards out by the girls’ kickball backstop, a scene more moving than anything he’d done on stage. It wasn’t as if Dirk was an innocent. I was still mad at him for the time he copped one of my mom’s cotton candy brassieres and I found it in a drawer in his room when I was looking for a cigarette. He said he took it because he liked her.

&nbs
p; As we climbed down the billboards and headed back toward town, we passed the power transformer next to the highway and it was humming and buzzing. In summer, you could always hear crickets chirping from the alfalfa fields below the billboard, but as the temperatures dipped in the fall they disappeared and took their show somewhere else. A semi braked for the four-way stop sign and its hydraulic brakes hissed at us as we crossed the street.

  “Let me ask you something, Piper. Am I sexy?”

  I knew this wasn’t the time to scrutinize the evidence. I looked him up and down, searching for the right words. “You’ve got warm eyes.”

  “That’s all, warm eyes?”

  “And presence … and a sense of humor”—from the slouch of his eyes, I could tell I wasn’t convincing—“and a sexy voice.” I reeled every video I could think of through my brain. “You remind me of Alec Baldwin.”

  His face brightened. “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  He socked me on the shoulder and I knew I’d said the right thing.

  After we said goodbye in front of the Eagles Lodge, I sat down on the sidewalk and leaned against the building, watching Dirk head home. I tried to picture Rozene Raymond and Dirk together. Why not? She’d never lack for attention, or would she? I remembered Mom telling me how Dad had written sonnets to her and picked roses from people’s yards when they were courting. “Your dad would pose for me while I sketched him,” she told me. “He said he’d follow me wherever we had to go for my art career.” She didn’t have to tell me the rest of it because I knew what came next: Dad disappeared into his journalism and Mom had to paint her own flowers.

  Frankly, I couldn’t be sure Rozene would be able to hold her own against Dirk’s video collection if the truth were told, but maybe my cynicism was born of my own attraction for Rozene. An attraction that scared me. When Mom was alive we’d never talked about that possibility and I wasn’t sure for all her sexual savvy how she would have accepted it.

  At the last Christmas party for the newspaper staff in the Eagles Lodge, when Rozene’s mother still worked for the newspaper, Rozene was there in a burgundy jumper and pumps that made her look like a model. I found myself standing at the edges watching her chat with people, exuding an unconditional warmth she withheld from no one. She was naturally shy, a straight-A student, but because she was part Makah Indian she’d never penetrated the cliques at school. The nerds as well as the turds teased her. She seemed oblivious to it though, busying herself with school work, trying out for girls intramural basketball, always carrying her head high, sitting wherever she wanted in the lunchroom. There was an amazing stillness about her that I thought had to be wearing. I could only hope she stuck needles in voodoo dolls in the privacy of her own bedroom at night. Secretly, I hoped her heart was as dark and twisted as mine.