by Deb Caletti
I watched the paragliders until the sun snuck behind Mount Solitude. The shadow it cast quickly stole all of the summer heat, and so I decided to head home. Past Moon Point, right after the tiny Foothills Church with its white steeple, that’s where the Becker estate is. Construction men worked on that house for nearly two years. The only thing that was on the property before then was an old remnant of an earlier building, broken segments of brick and stone, a single fireplace, something that once was, only no one remembered what that something was. Then one day a bulldozer suddenly arrived, followed shortly after by men in orange vests directing traffic around all of the equipment that was coming and going. Traffic backed up badly on Cummings Road for three straight months. First there was the smell of fresh tumbled earth, and then the smell of mud, and finally of cement and asphalt, new wood. The day the driveway was poured and work began on a pool, my mother, a terrible driver, knocked down a record of five orange traffic cones as we wove through a narrow channel. The lawn was laid out using the same method as does Poe, our dog, when he snitches one end of the toilet paper and trots off—it was unrolled that same way. Instant lawn. Green as money, Sydney’s father said, but it wasn’t really true. It was brighter than that, bright as cartoon grass. Sydney’s dad just had lawn envy.
The stone wall, that’s what took the longest. After the wall itself went up, masons with cement-splattered overalls came day after day to add small tiles of intricate designs. The disappointing thing about the wall, and the iron gates that were added last, was that after they went up you could no longer see what was going on behind them. So we filled in the details on our own. The house inspired gossip all around Nine Mile Falls. First the owner was a movie mogul, then a chain-store tycoon, then the owner of a hotel; he came from southern California, Florida, Boston. Everyone agreed that the piece of property had been too long overlooked as one of our best, set against the firs and evergreens of Mount Solitude, a segment of Fifteen Mile River running through the back of the property.
The truth about the Beckers was not nearly as interesting as the stories. John Becker was from Seattle and made his money as an early stockholder in Microsoft; he and his wife, Betsy, had two sons, Evan and Travis. After we had all of the facts, stories continued to circulate. It was as if we had a need to make this house and the people in it more than they were; maybe the size of the place required a story big enough to fill it. Evan and Travis went to private schools; Evan had supposedly been kicked out. Travis had been arrested. Girls were always claiming that they were dating one or the other, or both at the same time. Every four or five months, John and Betsy were said to be getting a divorce, with plans to put the house up for sale, but no sign ever went up.
That day, after I watched the paragliders, something relatively rare happened—the gates were left open. Not to say that this never occurred; just usually, to your bad luck, you only noticed it too late, when you were zipping past in the car and what you saw was only from looking back over your shoulder. This time they were open, and I was on foot and alone. It was like something out of The Secret Garden. A hidden place that compelled you to go forward to a mystery that lay beyond. I pictured myself at that point in the old movie, when it goes from black and white to color as she steps through the gates. All right, let’s be honest. I trespassed.
I stopped when the house was finally in view. I let my eyes take in that beautiful yard and the oak tree picturesquely just left of center that the construction workers managed to leave in the ground. I saw it there, then. This motorcycle. All gleaming chrome, parked there so boldly, so wrongly, right on the lawn. Think of a defiant act—think of a boy in black leather talking back to a policeman, think of a stone thrown through a plate of glass—that’s what that motorcycle looked like. Stepping too close to the edge, saying no, or yes, and not caring about the consequences.
Right then one of the garage doors went up, giving me the fright of my life. I felt frozen in place, and I wasn’t sure if I would seem more guilty staying where I was or walking on after I’d already surely been spotted. I don’t even know why I felt so bad when it was really only a glimpse I had been stealing. My feet, by default, made the decision whether we were staying or going—they wouldn’t move. So as the door went up, same as a curtain when a play is starting, revealing Travis Becker on that almost stage, I was still standing there, staring.
I didn’t know it was Travis then, of course. I only saw this boy, good-looking, oh, God, with a helmet under one arm, looking at me with this bemused smile. Right away I got that Something About To Happen feeling. Right away I knew he was bad, and that it didn’t matter.
In spite of all of its odd wonders, Cummings Road can be a dangerous place, at least for animals. We’ve got a lot of wildlife here. Nine Mile Falls is across Lake Washington from Seattle, in the thick of the Northwest. Some people, at least my assigned fourth-grade pen pal, think this means we live in log cabins and shoot bear for breakfast. Please. It’s Safeway and Lucky Charms for us, just like for the rest of you, but it is true that we’ve got plenty of animals—deer, raccoons, rabbits, the salmon in Fifteen-Mile River that runs through town. We also have coyotes and wolves and countless other things. My school was shut down last year because a cougar was spotted on the grounds, and a brown bear once wandered around the shopping mall nearest to us, probably looking for a good sale on bear items. A full-grown buck with huge antlers ran down Main Street one time, as if fleeing from a bad domestic situation.
People drive too fast on Cummings Road. Regular cars whip down it in the darkness; semi-trucks on occasion, too, come so fast in the other direction that your windows rattle, and on rainy days you are sprayed with blinding splats of water. People have lost their lives on that road, but of course it is worse for animals. Almost every morning you’ll see a dead animal or two, a deflated lump of fur, the thick side of a deer. You get so used to seeing something like that out there that your heart sinks automatically and you end up sending compassionate feeling to a clump of carpet that fell out of the back of someone’s truck.
Sometimes you feel very sorry for those animals, and other times you run out of pity and become impatient with their stupidity. You wonder why, with all of the lulls in traffic, they will choose that moment to dart out across the road. I mean, an animal’s instinct for survival is supposed to be so keen, right? Yet here is the rattling of a semi, coming closer and louder with every second, and the wind starts rumbling, the street shaking, beams of headlights blaring from the darkness, and boom! That’s when the animal shoots out from its safe haven and meets his end. You know how when people die, they are supposed to see a single brilliant light? my mother once said. These animals see a pair of them. I can’t help but think that sometimes it’s opossum/raccoon/deer suicide. Like this poor opossum has simply had enough of rooting around for food, fighting the troubles of daily existence, tired of being just so ugly, and says to himself, Now! If so, there are a lot of depressed animals out there, and more depressed opossums than any other species.
“Seventeen,” my brother, Chip Jr., said from the backseat of the car the day after I had first seen Travis Becker. Chip Jr. unzipped his backpack, fished around inside, and took out a small spiral notepad. I heard the tick-a as he pressed the end of his pen into working position with his thumb. He entered the new number into his book, then clicked the pen closed again. This was Chip Jr.’s roadkill tally. Seventeen was the number of days the two raccoons, whom we named Romeo and Juliet for their joint jaunt into death, had been lying in their spot on the side of the street.
“I wonder if I should call someone,” my mother said. “I never know who to call.” It was a mystery who picked the animals up—they would be there and then they’d be gone. I’d never once seen it happen. What a job.
“It beats the record of that opossum. Fourteen days,” Chip Jr. reported.
“Love is rough,” I said. I knew nothing about this personally. The only person I’d dated thus far was Sydney’s cousin, who visited one summer
from Montana. He was allergic to bees. He jumped around like a tribesman during a rain dance whenever he heard anything that buzzed even slightly—a fly, Sydney’s electric toothbrush.
My mother started singing some song. “Romeo and Jul-i-et,” she sang. She rolled down her window a bit and stuck her nose out to smell the nearly summer air. “Ahh,” she said.
She was in a good mood. I knew why. “You’re messing up my hair,” I said to her.
“It’s a mess already,” Chip Jr. said.
I looked over my shoulder and glared at him.
“It looks like the dog’s.”
“Quit kicking the bottom of my seat.”
“I wouldn’t put my foot near your butt for a million dollars,” Chip Jr. said.
“Guys,” my mother said. But she wasn’t really paying attention. I think we both wanted her to. We wanted her to keep being our mother and not be transformed into this other woman that we knew was coming. We were throwing bombs in the road, trying to divert her attention, trying to make her remember who she really was. One thing was for sure—my mother would have been a lot better off had Chip Jr. and I been in charge of her heart.
We passed the spot of empty land by the roadside where something different was sold nearly every day—peaches, lawn ornaments, fresh fish, wagon wheels. That day it was bird feeders, to which I gave a passing glance, and then we went by the Becker house. Sometimes it is like your mind has a plan that it hasn’t even told to the rest of you yet. My heart thudded, bouncing around like Chip Jr. when Sydney’s family got a trampoline for their backyard. The gate was closed.
“Look,” my mother said. She did this little snort through her nose. Poor Joe Davis, minister of the tiny Foothills Church, had a problem on his hands. A few years ago the church had bought a signboard, one of those kind that sits on the ground and has stick-on letters. Ugly, my mother says, for a church that has a steeple and looks like it belongs on a Christmas card. The sign is sometimes used for church news, CHRISTMAS EVE SERVICES, that kind of thing, but more often for a simple quote that Joe Davis, or maybe Renny Powell, the young guy who takes care of the grounds, thinks is something we could all ponder until they decide to change the sign. The problem is, someone always swaps the letter G for the letter D. Today the sign said DOG IS LOVE.
“Dog be with you,” I said.
“And also with you,” my mother answered. She was not what you would call traditionally religious.
We arrived at my brother’s school first, but instead of dropping off Chip Jr. in front like she always did, my mother parked.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“I just . . . I’ve got something to tell you guys,” she said. Her open window had loosened some of the hair from the braid she wore, giving her that frazzled look of someone who’s just pulled a sweater over her head.
“Look.” I pointed. “You’re frizzy.”
She gave herself a distracted glance in the rearview mirror. She smoothed her hair down with her hand, tried to get one especially flyaway piece to stick down with one finger and spit. “It’s your dad,” she said.
“If this is a news flash that he’s coming, we already know,” I said. “At least I already know.”
“I know he’s coming,” Chip Jr. said.
My mother stopped fussing with her hair, whirled around to look at Chip Jr. and then at me. “How do you know he’s coming?’
“You can tell,” I said.
“It’s obvious,” Chip Jr. said.
My mother did something then that made me feel strangely unsettled. She blushed. It was one of those glimpses into your parents’ own humanness that you could do without. “Oh,” she said. She rubbed her forehead with two fingers like she had a headache starting. “Well, at least you guys could be excited about it.”
“Yipee,” I said.
“Yipee eye oh kay yay,” my brother said.
“Git along lil’ doggie,” I said. It was a dog-theme morning.
“Ride ’em up, move ’em out,” Chip Jr. said. These were the times I liked him a lot.
“Stop being mean,” she said.
We were all silent. She was right. We were being mean. After a while I said what I could.
“Of course we’re excited, Mom,” I said. “He’s our dad, isn’t he?”
My father is a performer in a roller coaster amusement park with a Western motif. He’s good at what he does. He’s a singer. They have this saloon there where he performs, with swinging doors and a long shiny bar, and the tables have playing cards shellacked onto the tops. The only things that aren’t too accurate, in my opinion, are the waitresses. No one wore skirts that short then. For that matter, you couldn’t get surgical boobs either. There are more huge round things in the Palace Saloon than in a bowling alley.
The Gold Nugget Roller Coaster Amusement Park is a state away from us, in Oregon. I went there once. The amusement park is supposed to resemble a miniature gold-mining town, with fake buildings that house things like the Iron Horse Shooting Gallery and the General Store. An old steam train circles the place and gets robbed by bandanna-masked villains on the way. The best roller coaster is an old wooden one that goes through a mineshaft. I guess part of the reason it is so scary is that it looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. The time I rode it, the woman in the car ahead of me lost her hair ribbon on one of the descents. It fluttered down and away, probably landing somewhere on the Buckaroo Bumper Boats that were below us. Next to the Red River Theater, where they play John Wayne movies for the old people and roller coaster phobics, is the Palace Saloon, with shows at noon, two, and four.
All of the shows are supposed to be different—“Singin’ Round the Campfire,” say, versus “The Wild Ride Rock-’n-Roll Show”—but my father does them all. His music comes from a boom box hidden behind a bale of hay, or he plays his own guitar, and he changes his clothes from outlaw black to sincere cowboy with a red scarf and fringe vest.
As I said, he’s good. It is, after all, what he left for—to make it in show business, though I know he had a different kind of show business in mind. He still does, actually. He always has that next big maybe—a producer who wants to find him a record deal, a country singer who is considering recording the song he wrote. His voice is beautiful, it really is. When I was there, the people who had straggled in, and who sat fanning themselves from the heat with a menu and drinking Cherry Cokes and eating curly fries, applauded loudly and even whistled when he was done. The women did, anyway. He told each show’s audience about his next big maybe. Handed out photos of himself where he looked like a Ken doll in a Stetson. But I never went to see him there again. There was something about those curly fries that made me sad.
My father was a musician when he met my mother. He was singing part-time for a group called the Wailin’ Five that performed at high school dances and at a bar or two. During the day he worked loading trucks for a frozen-fish factory, where my mother was a secretary while she went to college to become a librarian. My mother was dating the president of the frozen-fish factory, who was twice her age and who asked her to take out her spiral writing pad during dates to jot things down that came to his mind. Today he’d be one of those people with the cell phones permanently attached to his ear, answering its ring during his kid’s school play or talking on it as he walked hand in hand with his date. I’ve seen that happen. Once we saw a guy talking on his phone while he was ice skating on Marcy Lake, which is one of the most perfect spots you would ever see during the winter, surrounded by snowy hills that look lush and soft as a doughnut rolled in powdered sugar. If you could interrupt that to be on your phone, the pair of you ought to be joined in wedded bliss, if you ask me. Anyway, according to my mother, Mr. Albert Raabe was that kind of guy.
Mr. Albert Raabe, though, made a mistake one day when he trusted Chip McQueen, factory worker, to drive my mother home from work. Chip was asked to do this favor by Mr. Raabe himself, who had a sudden important meeting. Word of this task spread fast among my fathe
r’s friends at the factory; the boss’ girlfriend, after all. They decided to demonstrate their support—they plastered a huge JUST MARRIED sign on the back of my father’s car.
Neither of my parents knew the sign was there right then, since the car was backed into one of the tight spaces of the factory lot. My father couldn’t understand why everyone was honking at him. He made sure his lights were on, his brights off, his turn signal in the neutral position, even that the belt of his raincoat was not hanging out the door. His confusion rapidly turned to annoyance. He even swore under his breath at a bakery truck, whose driver laid down on the horn long and loud. He almost flipped off a car of kids who were beeping madly and swerving around them in what was supposed to be a jovial fashion.
After he dropped off Ann Jorgensen at her doorstep, Chip McQueen went home, where he still lived with his parents. His mother, my grandmother Ellen, woke him in the night. She had gone outside to scare off two fighting cats and had seen the car in the driveway. Was there something he needed to tell them, she asked?