Running Full Tilt

by Michael Currinder

  “He’s not really a talker,” I reminded him.

  Dad didn’t respond. He picked up the paper and tried to pretend he was reading when Mom came back into the kitchen.

  “I could really use a little cooperation from you two,” she said. “This place is a mess. Leo, I need you to vacuum the living room and dining room after you dust. And you,” she said to my father, “I’d appreciate it if you could get up off your ass and wash the dishes.”

  Mom stormed out of the room again, and Dad and I got moving. I finished the vacuuming just as my grandparents’ yellow Ford pulled into the driveway. “They’re here!” I yelled cheerfully.

  My mother hollered from the far corner of the house. “Leo, go help them unload the car!”

  My grandparents’ car was packed to the gills with boxes and bags filled with all sorts of crap.

  “Nice to see you, Leo,” my grandfather said with a smile. I gave him a hug.

  I went to greet Grandma, but she already had her head buried in the trunk. “Let’s cut the chitchat,” she snapped. She turned and handed me a box that felt like it was loaded with rocks. “We’ll socialize after we unload. Now chop-chop!”

  Grandma and Grandpa brought their surplus of Mason jars and Tupperware containers crammed with last autumn’s fruits and vegetables from their garden, plus two coolers of frozen beef from a slaughtered cow they split with Mom and Dad.

  My job was to unpack the coolers of meat into the basement freezer. After that I swapped last year’s empty Mason jars with the new delivery and arranged them on the pantry shelves by dates and labels. I unloaded glass jars filled with string beans suspended in cloudy green liquid, whole peeled tomatoes crammed in tight, cucumber slices fermenting in vinegar and dill weed, sauerkraut, relishes, homemade catsup—you name it. Our shelves soon looked like the work of a crazed cannibal storing his victims’ innards for future meals.

  Grandma and Grandpa never came simply for a visit. In addition to their annual food delivery, they carried out a laundry list of household projects. Unfortunately our house needed plenty of work. If Mom hadn’t prepared a list, Grandma and Grandpa would soon be scouring the house looking for cracks in the walls, pipes that showed signs of leaking, screen windows that needed patching or replacement, clogged gutters, even car repairs. They would find something that needed to be fixed, and that section of the house would become a demolition site.

  I wasn’t even finished unpacking the Mason jars when I heard the noise of the hammer in the upstairs bathroom. Grandpa was already at it. This weekend he was retiling Mom and Dad’s shower.

  Upstairs, Mom and Grandma had newspaper spread across the kitchen table. They were busy polishing the silverware Grandma had retrieved from the dining room. “Really, Elise,” Grandma said to Mom, “what in the hell happened to your husband’s hair?”

  “Mother, you promised.” Mom sounded exhausted already.

  I opened the refrigerator door and stood there for a brief moment, scanning the contents for something to eat.

  “You’re wasting energy, young man!” Grandma said. “Fix yourself a bowl of the green beans I brought you if you’re hungry.”

  I closed the door and tried to make a run for it. “That’s okay.”

  “Why don’t you go see what you can do to help your grandfather,” Mom encouraged me.

  “If he’s anything like ol’ Flat Ass,” Grandma said, “he’ll just be getting in the way.” That was Grandma’s nickname for Dad.

  “Would you please stop calling him that?” Mom begged.

  “Your husband called me Bubble Butt first,” Grandma snapped.

  “That was fifteen years ago, Mother.” Mom sighed. She looked at me and then closed her eyes, fatigued. “Leo,” she finally said to me, “go see if you can help your grandfather.”

  I looked out the kitchen window and watched Dad wandering aimlessly around the yard, trying to look busy with a rake. The man was a master at escaping these situations.

  It was important to Mom that I spend time with Grandpa and learn some basic skills. Grandpa could build or repair almost anything, but he really preferred to work by himself and rarely said a word. So when I “helped” him with a job, I mostly just handed him tools or helped clean up the messes he created.

  “Hey, Grandpa. Anything I can do to help?” I asked as I entered my parents’ bathroom. Grandpa had the floor lined with cardboard and was inside the shower, tapping the tile away with a hammer and chisel.

  “Not enough room in this shower for the two of us,” he said, keeping his back to me.

  I considered that image a moment, and I had to agree with Grandpa.

  “You don’t need to stick around, Leo.” I knew he was serious, but I also knew I couldn’t leave. So I sat on the sink counter and watched him work for a while.

  Grandpa eventually got all the old tiles off the wall. “You’re still here” was all he said when he turned and stepped out of the shower. “I’m going to slip out the back and sneak a smoke before I replace the backer board.” He looked at the former shower wall now littering the floor. “I suppose you can get rid of this mess.”

  I grabbed the whisk broom, dustpan, and a plastic bag and started cleaning. A few minutes later I heard Grandma yelling, “Bernard, I smell smoke!” My dad once pointed out that Grandma had the unique capacity to shriek each word at a different pitch.

  Later, Caleb and I sat together on one side of the table, with Mom and Grandpa opposite us. Dad and Grandma squared off at the table heads. Mom had baked a whole chicken. After Caleb led the family in prayer, the bowls of potatoes, beans, salad, and bread began crisscrossing the table in all directions. Dad stood up and began hacking away at the chicken. He plunged a knife into a thigh and sawed at the joint, then used his hand to rip off a whole leg for Caleb and plopped it on his plate. That was Caleb’s favorite part of the bird.

  “That’s not the way you carve a chicken,” Grandma mumbled to my mother.

  Dad paused and let out a loud, exhausted sigh. He slowly placed the knife on the table and sat down. “Of course it’s not, Jean,” he said smugly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Flat Ass?” Grandma asked.

  “Mother!” Mom yelled.

  “What it means,” Dad said, “is there’s a right way, there’s a wrong way, and there’s Jean’s way.”

  Grandpa laughed. Caleb helped himself to a large spoonful of mashed potatoes and began making train tracks with his fork. “Right way! Wrong way! Jean’s way! Right!” Caleb repeated in a monotone.

  “Pass that chicken down here, mister!” Grandma snapped. “I’ll show you the proper way to carve a chicken.”

  Dad slid the chicken platter across the table toward Grandma. He sat down in humiliation and sipped from his beer. Mom looked at me and rolled her eyes.

  Here we go again. I kind of wished Curtis were here as my witness.

  Grandma grabbed the boning knife from the table and stuck the knife’s tip between the remaining thigh and back. With one swift incision she snapped the thigh and drumstick from the rest of the carcass. Then she deftly inserted the knife into the chicken’s back and quickly sliced the breast meat. I thought even Dad had to admit she was pretty good with a knife. She had that bird sliced up in seconds.

  “So, Leo,” she said as she rationed some chicken onto my plate, “your mother tells me that you’ve become quite the runner.”

  “I’m okay, I guess,” I told her.

  “You get that talent from our side of the family, you know,” she told me. “My brother George was a champion runner in his day.”

  “That’s what Mom tells me,” I assured her.

  Dad nearly spit out his beer. “Not this again. That old tub of lard?” he said to Grandma in disbelief. “A runner? That guy could barely waddle across the room.”

  “Watch it, Flat Ass! My brother could outrun you any day!” Grandma said as she skipped Dad’s dinner plate and served Grandpa.

  Dad didn’t take the bait. He sat quietly f
or a moment, then calmly asked, “Bubble Butt, could you please pass me the chicken?”

  “Please!” Mom begged. “Can’t you two just give it a rest? I swear it would be a lot better if you just didn’t say a word to each other!”

  “BUBBLE BUTT!” Caleb laughed.

  “Caleb,” Mom said. “That’s not appropriate.”

  “Not appropriate. Right!” Caleb repeated.

  Grandpa had a little smile on his face as he took a bite of his chicken leg. Mom tossed her fork onto her plate and glared at Dad.

  “What?” my father asked Mom innocently. “Is it entirely impossible that Leo might have gotten some of his running talent from my side of the family? I was quick back in my day.”

  Grandma couldn’t help herself. “Ha! I’ll race you right now. Once around the house!”

  “No, thanks,” Dad replied, laughing. “I don’t want to be responsible if you have a heart attack.”

  “Niles!” Mom yelled.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Grandma said. “I’m fit as a fiddle! C’mon—Niles versus Grandma Jean. Winner gets bragging rights to Leo’s talent.”

  I looked over at Grandpa, and we couldn’t keep it in any longer. We started laughing. Then Dad gave in. Grandma was the only one who remained stone-faced.

  Dad looked over at me with a coy grin. “Leo,” he said, “could you please ask Speedy Gonzales over there to pass the salt to Slowpoke?”

  “Niles!” Mom yelled.

  “It was a compliment,” Dad offered. He actually sounded contrite.

  Mom got up and left the table. I finished my food, excused myself, and went downstairs to hide in my room. A few minutes later I heard Mom and Dad yelling at each other in their bedroom above me, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I wanted to go out and run, but my stomach was too full.

  I lay on my bed thinking about Dad and Grandma’s dinner drama, and I started laughing again. If only Curtis had been there to see it. He wasn’t going to believe this dinner story.

  33.

  THAT CRAZY DINNER SET THE TONE for the rest of the day. As long as Grandma and Grandpa were around, I tried to keep my head down and maintain a safe distance. An hour after dinner, I was in my room trying to write a history paper for Ohlendorf’s class against the backdrop of Grandpa’s buzzing and whining drill.

  Dad knocked on my door. “How can you write a paper listening to that sound?”

  “It presents a challenge,” I admitted.

  “Any interest in getting the hell out of Dodge for a while?”

  “I’m game,” I told him.

  “What do you say we head over to Fairmount?”

  “It’s winter, Dad. Do horses even race in this weather?”

  “They’ve got simulcast television, son. We can watch horses race all over the planet—Australia, for Christ’s sake. It’s the ultimate escape.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  “I told your mother I needed to go to the office to get some work done. Head out the back door and meet me in the garage in five minutes,” he told me.

  Inside the car Dad took his phone out of his pocket, turned it off, and tossed it in the glove compartment.

  “Crap,” he said to me, and winked. “My battery just died.”

  “Mine too,” I said, tossing my phone in beside his.

  He started the car. “Leo, my boy, sometimes everyone needs a little break from the home front.”

  “Amen to that,” I said.

  Dad sometimes went to bet on the horses on Tuesday afternoons. The racetrack was outside the city, in Collinsville, a town across the river, a good thirty miles from home. Sometimes he took me there in the summer.

  I loved the ride to Fairmount. We crossed the Poplar Street Bridge over the river, and I watched the barges loaded with coal sliding up and down the Mississippi before we skirted the edges of East St. Louis. I stared out the window and processed the change of scenery and thought about how people’s lives can become so different in just twenty minutes’ time.

  “Your grandmother sure is a piece of work,” Dad said, finally breaking the silence.

  “For sure,” I agreed.

  “Never a dull moment in our house, I tell you.”

  “Never a dull moment is right,” I mumbled.

  The skyscrapers disappeared and the highways opened up into farmland still lined with row upon row of hacked and hollowed cornstalks.

  “You still duking it out with your brother at night?” he suddenly asked.

  “It’s not just at night,” I reminded him. “I never know when he’s going to lose it.”

  “Leo, I’m working on it. I promise you. We’re in a little over our heads with the new house at the moment. Between the payments and one thing after another needing a repair or replacement, we’re bleeding money. Your mother and I are a little stressed.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “We also feel better knowing you’re with your brother in the event that something happens.”

  “Whatever,” I said, trying to shrug it off. “Like it would make any difference.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked defensively.

  “Nothing.” I turned my head and stared out the window, signaling I was done with this conversation. This was supposed to be a break from home, I thought, for both of us.

  Every time we pulled into the Fairmount parking lot and saw the grandstand, Dad made the same dismal declaration: “This is the last stop for most horses, Leo. If a horse can’t win here, it can’t win anywhere.”

  We paid our buck-fifty admission to the track and bought a couple forms, and then Dad led me to the Top of the Turf on the third floor of the clubhouse. We grabbed a window table overlooking the track, and Dad flipped on the simulcast beside our booth. “This is the best of both worlds, Leo,” he explained. “Not only are we out of the house, but we get to pretend we’re there,” he said, pointing toward the television.

  The green caption at the bottom of the screen read, YONKERS.

  The horses onscreen were pulling the jockeys around the track in these measly little two-wheel carts at what seemed a painfully slow pace. “Where’s Yonkers?” I finally asked him.

  “New York,” he explained vaguely. “It’s harness racing, my boy.”

  Dad never liked to bet on only one horse. He preferred races that offered exacta and trifecta betting, picking two or three horses from the eight or nine in the field and predicting their order of finish. These bets required more careful study of the race form but a higher return on the wager. Dad didn’t waste any time that evening. We left our coats at the table to stake our territory, then bulleted to the windows to place a bet on the next race at Yonkers.

  As we returned with our tickets in hand, Dad told me to take a good look at the men sitting around us. “You just remember something, buddy,” he began, and I knew what he was going to say next: “We’re here for kicks. If we make any money, it’s just a bonus.”

  This was another one of our rituals at the track. This time Dad targeted some poor guy about his age, in a red flannel shirt, seated alone at a table in front of his own private television.

  The guy was sipping beer from a plastic cup and eating a hot dog. Dad put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me close to him. “See that guy over there, Leo?” Dad kept his voice low so no one but me could hear him.

  “Yeah?” I whispered, knowing exactly what would follow.

  “I promise you that guy has got absolutely no business being here,” he said with disgust. “Absolutely no business.” He looked the guy over and slowly shook his head. “I’m willing to bet he’s about to piss the rent away. Probably got a wife and kids at home right now wondering where he is.”

  I thought about mentioning that Mom might be doing the same thing, but I kept my mouth shut. A waitress in a tight black skirt and shiny red top was making her way toward our table. She was giving Dad a goofy smile, but he had his head fully buried in the race form and was l
ooking for his next bet.

  “Niles?” she said. “How are you doing, my silver stallion?” She giggled. “You’re never here on Saturday nights.”

  Dad looked up at her, momentarily startled, and then his eyes started shifting back and forth between her face and mine. “Hello, Sheila,” he finally managed. “This was kind of a last-minute decision.” He nodded toward me. “Sheila, this is my son Leo.”

  “Well, aren’t you a handsome young man,” Sheila said to me, extending her hand and winking.

  “Nice to meet you, Sheila,” I said politely.

  Sheila placed her hand on Dad’s shoulder. “Should I get you the regular, Niles?”

  Dad nodded.

  “And what will you have, sweetie?” Sheila asked.

  “I’ll take a Coke,” I told her.

  Sheila kept her hand on Dad’s shoulder, then bent down closer to his ear and spoke softly. “By the time I return with these drinks, Niles, I want to know what horse I should put my money on in that eighth race.” Sheila winked at me again and nodded at my father. “This silver stallion knows his ponies.”

  Sheila spun and strutted her way back to the bar to retrieve our drinks. Dad nodded toward the door, signaling it was time to make a quick exit from the Top of the Turf. “I know a better place where we can watch the races,” he said with a sense of urgency. “Follow me.”

  “What’s wrong with this place, and what about our order?” I asked, trying to keep up with him.

  “Don’t worry about the drinks. Just keep moving,” he directed me. “Next race starts in two minutes. I’ll get you another drink.”

  We headed downstairs and clear across the pavilion to the Black Stallion Room and grabbed a booth in the corner. We didn’t have a private television, but the Yonkers race was showing on one of the televisions hanging on the opposite wall.

  “So who’s Sheila?” I probed.

  “What do you mean, who’s Sheila? You just met her.”

  “What I mean is, how did you and Sheila meet?”

  “Sheila works here,” he assured me.

  “It seems like Sheila knows you pretty well,” I said. “Are you having an emotional affair with her?”