Liar

by Jan Burke

  “She’s not much older than you are,” Gerald confided to Travis, “so it’s best you not call her Aunt Deeny.”

  The interior was roomier than might have been expected for a mobile home. It reeked of cigarette smoke, but was clean and neat. The furnishings looked as if they had been purchased in the ‘70s, although the mobile home itself didn’t appear to be that old. Deeny gave a wave of her hand to indicate that we should have a seat. I sat on one of two avocado-green recliners; Travis, having smoothly extricated himself from Gerald’s grasp, took the other one. Gerald didn’t seem to mind taking a seat on the gold-and-brown couch, separated from us by a heavy, imitation walnut coffee table. There was a paperback on one corner, an action adventure story, with a bookmark near the last pages.

  Deeny came back from the kitchen with four cans of Coors still in their six-pack plastic collar. She sat down close to Gerald and pulled them free, popping tops and shoving a can at each of us without asking if we wanted one.

  Gerald lifted his beer can as if for a toast, and Deeny stopped in the act of taking her first swig to hold hers up as well—so Travis and I followed suit.

  “Mi casa es su casa,” Gerald said, smiling at Travis.

  “Speak American!” Deeny complained.

  “English,” Gerald corrected.

  “Whatever,” she said sullenly, earning a reproving look from Gerald. Her shoulders drooped a little and she asked, “Well, what did you say in Mexican?”

  Gerald smiled at Travis and me, rolling his eyes. Her shoulders fell a little farther and he gave her a quick squeeze. “Oh, now,” he said easily, “don’t fret. It’s just an old way of welcoming someone in Spanish. Kind of like saying ‘Make yourself at home.” And that’s what I want my nephew here to do—make himself at home.“

  “Thanks,” Travis said.

  “I take it Arthur doesn’t know you’re here?” Gerald asked.

  I nearly missed seeing the sharp look Deeny gave him; I didn’t know what to make of it, though. Travis, for his part, was remarkably self-possessed.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that my father has passed away,” he said.

  “Arthur?” Gerald said, his eyes wide. “Arthur’s dead?”

  “Yes, sir,” Travis said.

  “No—no it can’t be. Why, he’s not even fifty!”

  “No, sir. He was forty-eight. He died of cancer.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Yes, sir. Last month.”

  “Arthur, dead a month… excuse me,” he said, rising.

  He walked away from us, down a short hallway, where I supposed the bedrooms were. Deeny got up and followed him, not saying a word.

  Travis glanced over at me. “I didn’t handle that very well, did I?”

  “There’s no easy way to tell someone something like that,” I said.

  “I feel terrible. I should have realized that he wouldn’t know. I should have thought about it before we came over here.”

  I didn’t say anything. We waited, neither one of us sure exactly how much time had passed since the Spannings went into the other room. We could hear their muffled voices every now and again, not able to make out any words, nor trying to. Travis grew edgier as time passed.

  Sitting was only making me stiffer, so I stood and stretched.

  “I don’t want this beer,” I said. “You want yours?”

  He shook his head. He held the nearly full can up to me.

  I took it from him, and picked up my own. I carried them into the kitchen and poured them down the drain. I rinsed out the cans and looked around for a recycling bin. I found a plastic grocery sack full of empty cans next to the trash can, and bent to put them in it. As I did, something in the trash can caught my eye.

  A church bulletin. From St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. I reached in and carefully extracted it from beneath a used wet coffee filter. I heard voices coming into the living room and quickly folded the paper. I had just stashed it in my back jeans pocket when I heard Deeny say, “What are you doing?”

  “Just putting our beer cans in the recycling,” I said.

  I stood up and washed my hands, while she leaned against the counter, scowling at me. I could hear Gerald talking to Travis in the other room, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. When I reached for a hand towel, she said, “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”

  “Mi casa es su casa,” I said with a smile, taking perverse pleasure in watching her eyes narrow.

  In the living room, Travis was sitting close to Gerald on the sofa, their heads bent over something. Gerald had a pair of reading glasses on. As I drew closer, I realized they were looking through a photo album. Travis looked up at me and patted the empty space next to him. “Sit next to me, you’ll enjoy this.”

  I did, then we all scooted over again to allow Deeny to sit on the other side of Gerald. She ended up draping herself over his shoulders, sitting more behind him than next to him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He reached up and took her arms in his hands, stroking his fingers along her forearms. He let Travis hold the album.

  Travis turned back a few pages. “Look! Here’s a photo of my great-grandparents. The Spannings. And that was their farm.”

  He pointed to a black-and-white photo of an elderly couple standing in front of a Model A. There was a narrow two-story house in the background, and open fields beyond. The photo wasn’t well-focused and you couldn’t make out much of their features. The man was wearing a hat, the woman a plain and modest dress.

  He turned the page forward, pointed out other views of the farm, photos of great-aunts and -uncles. With these, he had help from Gerald, who seemed moved by Travis’s enthusiasm. He smiled whenever Travis correctly named the people in the photo, studied Travis with apparent fondness as Travis studied the album.

  “That’s my grandfather,” Travis said of a grimy, barefooted boy in overalls. The boy, about twelve years old, wore a cap at a rakish angle; his charming smile had been passed down to the next two generations of Spannings.

  Travis stared at the photo for a long time before turning to another section. There were photos of the maternal sides of the family, and a few of the town in Missouri that was closest to the family farm.

  Eventually Travis came to photos of Gerald as a young boy. There were not many photos of Gerald and Arthur’s immediate family. One showed Gerald at about the age of five standing next to a chair shared by two smiling toddlers.

  “Those were your aunts,” he said softly. “Lizzy and Mary Lee. They never got to be much older than you see them there. Those were the hardest years. Farm was lost and we would just stay wherever we could. I think we were with one of my aunts then. There were two other little babies didn’t even live long enough to take a picture of them. A little boy, Charlie, and another girl, Bonita. That about broke your grandmother’s heart. I didn’t get to know the babies, of course, but I sure missed Lizzy and Mary Lee.”

  “What happened to them?” Travis asked.

  “Oh, the babies just never were likely to live; they were both born in the winter, and one came early. They each only lived a few days. And the girls, they caught a fever and I guess they just weren’t strong enough to fight it.” He ruffled Travis’s hair. “So I was pretty excited when your daddy came along. I’d started to think I wasn’t ever going to have anybody else to play with.”

  Travis smiled and turned to another page. There was a grainy photo of Gerald, about nine, standing with his father and several other men in the doorway of a boxcar.

  “Look at that sorry bunch of stiffs,” Gerald said, laughing.

  “Who took the photo?” I asked.

  “Oh, I think it was one of the wives of the other fellows. She stayed with my mother when my mother was pregnant with Arthur. Mama didn’t want to leave the sugar beet farm. She said she wasn’t going to have any more babies after this one, and she wasn’t going to lie down in some hobo jungle to give birth to her last child.”

  There was a photo of a well-dress
ed older man standing in what might have been a very dignified pose, had he not had his hand on the shoulder of a grinning young rascal of about twelve.

  “That’s me and Papa DeMont,” Gerald said.

  “I’ve heard a lot about him,” Travis said, and studied this photo closely.

  Gerald glanced quickly at me, then said to Travis, “Then you know he owned the sugar beet farm. Miss Gwen’s daddy. He was good to the children. His permanent workers—like me and your grandparents—lived in little old houses, but compared to what we were used to, they were palaces. Old Papa DeMont always made sure no one went hungry. And he’d bring treats for the children. He was just plain good.”

  On the next page was a wedding photo. Travis stared at it for a long time. Gwendolyn stood between Gerald and Arthur, her smile faint but serene. She was wearing a simple dress and pillbox hat, not a bridal gown and veil, and she held a small bouquet. She was not an unattractive woman; she had dark hair and big brown eyes. Arthur, tall but clearly hardly more than a boy, stood smiling tensely at her side. There was something different about him in this photo, something that went beyond that tension.

  Gerald, who at the time would have been about twenty-six, looked much older than my cousin did now, at nearly the same age. In the photo, Gerald’s smile was one of satisfaction. If I hadn’t known the history behind the marriage, I would have pointed him out as the groom, though both Spanning brothers were young enough to have been her sons.

  “Was Arthur generous with you once he had married Gwendolyn?” I asked.

  His eyes narrowed. “Did I get a payoff when they were married, you mean? Hell, no, and I didn’t want any, even though I was the one that always took care of Arthur, gave up everything for him. DeMonts wouldn’t believe it, so I got together with Gwenie’s lawyer and signed an agreement saying I’d never get a penny of Papa DeMont’s money.”

  “So Arthur never loaned you money?”

  “His own,” he admitted grudgingly, then added, “by that I mean he loaned me money from his own business. That gardening business. DeMonts never could believe that Arthur made a little bit of his own money.”

  “How well do you know Horace DeMont, Gwendolyn’s uncle?” I asked.

  “That old good-for-nothing?” Gerald scoffed. “I know all I need to know. He thinks he’s better than anyone on God’s green earth, but the truth is, he lost every nickel he owned speculating on the stock market, and for a time he was as much a vagabond as any Spanning ever was. In fact, Travis, your grandfather met him on the road, and that’s how we came to the sugar beet farm, because even though old Horace was complaining, my daddy could tell there was plenty of work to be had.”

  “Horace DeMont was a vagabond?” I said in disbelief.

  Gerald laughed. “Oh, yes. Him and that brat of his, Robert. In fact, one day when he was looking down his big nose at us, I told Bobby that my daddy had once seen him giving testimony at the Sally Ann in Chicago. He denied that he was ever any mission stiff. But later, when people started romanticizing about what it was like to ride on Old Dirty Face he bragged he had done it, like he was Jack Kerouac himself, to which I said, ”Yeah, except Bobby wasn’t a hobo, just an old moll buzzer.“ That made him mad as fire.”

  “Speak English!” Deeny interrupted.

  “Oh, sorry honey, I just fall into that way of talking whenever I think about those years on the road. Well, here’s how it is: There are hoboes, and there are tramps and there are bums. A hobo is a working stiff—he’s a migrant worker, that’s all. His labor built this country much as anybody else’s. You don’t believe it, go pick fruit for a summer, or herd cattle or dig ditches or lay rails. Hoboes did all that. That’s what we Spannings did when we were riding rails—we looked for work, went wherever we could find it.

  “Now, a tramp is just a fellow who doesn’t believe in working if he can avoid it, but he keeps moving. It’s a kind of philosophical thing with some of them, I supposed you’d say. Sometimes they call them scenery bums. That’s not the same thing I mean when I call a man a bum, though.

  “A bum is a man who stays in the city, usually down on skid row. He’s not working, he’s not moving, he’s on the bum.

  “Now, the categories aren’t so neat, and any man may take a turn at being one or another of those fellows, mostly depending on how fond he is of old redeye.”

  “Redeye?” Travis asked.

  “Whiskey.”

  “And Sally Ann?”

  “Salvation Army. A mission stiff is a man who spends a lot of time getting saved so that he can get free flops and food.”

  “Old Dirty Face?” I asked.

  He smiled. “A freight train.”

  “And what’s a moll buzzer?” Deeny asked.

  “Guy that mooches off women. That’s what old Bobby did, and his old man, Horace—why, he probably taught him all he knew. Then they got in some kind of trouble over it out in Boise back in the summer of ‘40 and the town clowns threw Bobby in the jail. Now, most fellows would see that as part of the deal and not fuss over it. But I think the charges must have been something out of the ordinary vag charges, because old Horace cried to his daddy about it.”

  “What are town clowns and vag charges?” Deeny asked.

  “Oh, sorry, honey. Town clowns are police. And vag charges are vagrancy charges. But they treated old Bobby like he was some kind of yegg, and as much as I don’t like him, I don’t think he was ever a yegg.”

  “Which is?” she asked, not hiding her irritation.

  “Well, I mentioned hoboes and tramps and bums, but there was another class of people out there, and they spelled trouble for everybody else—the yeggs. Those were the real hardened criminals—safecrackers and gangs of thieves and killers and people who did things I’d just as soon not mention. Horrible things. They were out there riding the rails, running from the law, raising the devil. They were really more dangerous to the hobo than just about anybody, but a lot of the local cops didn’t see any difference between a yegg and a hobo, so they treated us all the same.

  “Anyway, Horace cried to his daddy and Papa DeMont bailed Bobby out. He brought them home and read Bobby up one side and down the other. Told him to haul himself up by the ass pockets and act like a man.

  “I guess somewhere in all that Bobby heard what he needed to hear— but more likely he just had the jam scared out of him when he got arrested. But for whatever reason, Bobby got all respectable after that. Even fought in the war. And I hear tell that old Horace is still alive, but he must just be living on his meanness. Doug, his oldest boy, he died awhile back. I don’t know if Bobby’s still around or not.”

  “You must have been fairly young when Bobby was arrested,” I said. “How do you remember that?”

  “Oh, well, first off, because Papa DeMont liked my dad—Travis’s grandfather. And because my daddy knew his way around that part of the country, Papa DeMont sent him up there, along with Zeke Brennan-—”

  “Zeke Brennan?” Travis said. “He must have been young, too.”

  Gerald laughed. “I’m talking about Ezekiel Brennan, Senior. He was the father of your daddy’s lawyer. Old Zeke didn’t drive, but your grandfather did. So they were going up there with the bail money and bring the two of them back. School just got out for the summer, and my dad took me with him. Papa DeMont let my dad take one of his cars, and that was my first ride in an automobile over any great distance. A big old Bentley. That was some car. I suppose that’s mainly why the trip stayed in my mind. And Papa DeMont didn’t usually lose his temper with people, so it was something to see him so mad at the two of them.”

  There were a few other photos in the album, but not many. Most were of Arthur and Gerald together. A few were pictures of the sugar beet factory, apparently taken not long before it closed down.

  “How long did you work there?” I asked.

  “Oh, let’s see. We first came out here in 1938, when I was just about to start school. It was after the girls died; your grandmother decided she
never wanted to live where it was cold again, and she found work in a cafe in the off-season, so she stayed here. Your granddad wanted me to get an education.”

  “Were you able to go to school?” Travis asked.

  “Oh, yes, for a time. And some of my schooling was on the road. Whenever work at the factory got a little slow, my father would take me with him and we’d go rambling, hire out wherever we could. I met some amazing fellows in those days. At the time, during the Depression, there were some highly educated men riding the rails. And the road itself will teach all kinds of lessons you won’t get in a classroom—some good, some bad. Anyway, we never left for very long at a stretch, because he didn’t like being away from your grandmother. I did go to school here pretty regular up until your grandparents died. Then it was up to me to take care of your daddy, and Papa DeMont always made sure I had work on his place after that.”