Men in the Making
Page 6
You cleared the cavities, put down new hay, got the mother washed out and sewed up and the little one sucking, and then, around midnight, you could stand there smoking awhile before stripping down and hosing off just out back of the house. Afterward, on the porch in a towel, while your wife shook her head at you and handed you a cup of coffee, you told her you were sure enough glad you didn't raise elephants. You remember her laugh. You remember how it cut itself short, how she seemed always sad in the eyes those days, even that night, despite the calf you'd kept alive.
And now, now your cigarette's out and you light another one, because there's nobody around presently to tell you just how surely you're killing yourself. Thirty-nine years now you've been sucking on these things, and you guess you might as well pencil them into the Can't Fix side of the ledger. You lean against your truck awhile and blow smoke from your nose while the duster makes another low run, its engine drowning out the sound of the water you've set to flowing. And then it comes to you, something you haven't thought of once in your life without laughing. Until now. Somehow, even with the work all but done for the day and the sting of Malathion spray swirling familiar as cottonseed in the air, you don't so much as smile.
Fifteen years ago, when you could still polka three songs in a row without stopping to catch your breath, in the truck—brand new that summer, and shining—with your better half, stuck in traffic on a trip to the city, your wife, she points and laughs at a billboard above. VASECTOMY REVERSAL, it reads. GUARANTEED. "Look, sugar," she says. "Your sperm or your money back." You smile at the thought of something so silly, a fix for something that's already been fixed, and you remember that weekend some years back, after the birth of your second son, when the doctors had sliced and tugged and tied and sent you home to sit on the couch with your nuts propped up on a towel full of ice, your newest, most daring shave itching like chiggers dropped down your underpants.
You ease ahead in traffic and shake your head. She puts a hand on your knee. She's getting older, the lines cut deeper in her knuckles, but the question she asks and the shine in her eyes let you know she's not too old. Not yet, she isn't. "So what do you think, my little gelding," she says. "Wanna untie the knot?"
It's in her eyes. It's there and you don't see it.
But now you do. Now that it's fifteen years too late. Now that your second cigarette is ashed down to the filter and there's nothing left but to drive home and let this water you've set to flowing drain itself into the earth. Now you see it just fine. Through all the long days and short nights, you see it. She's in the truck, telling you with her eyes. One more, she wants. A girl this time. Someone to dress up Sundays in frills and patent-leather shoes instead of Wranglers and ropers. And the answer you need is right there in the cab with you, no need to root through the toolbox out back in the bed, but you don't give it. No, you shake your head and write the whole thing off as a joke. You sit there in traffic with her for an hour and it never hits you. You stand all but naked on your back porch less than a year later. You're sipping coffee after pulling a calf into the world, you're making jokes and still her eyes won't light up. You're waiting—just this week at the feed store loading docks—smoking and spitting and swapping stories with Grady Derrich, your friend of forty years. You've been farming your whole life, you tell him, but you'll be damned if you can get a lasting smile to grow on that woman's face.
You're getting back into your truck, and you'll be damned, but you'd always believed she never lacked for what she needed. The crop duster makes one last pass out toward the blazing horizon, and you'll be damned.
We Don't Talk That Way in Texas
THE SUMMER I turned nine, my mother packed my suitcase and drove me to the Greyhound station in downtown Tulsa. "I've told you everything I can about your daddy," she said, nodding to the bus that sat idling in the morning light. "You want to know more, you gotta go do some of your growing up where he did his."
I remember the worrisome way she held on to me, the way she waved only once before turning away and wiping her face as the bus pulled out of the station, and I remember the way she stood there a month later, holding back tears when my bus rolled back into town, as if she'd been standing there all the while I was gone, holding her breath, afraid that if she left I might never come back. In a way, it made sense to me even as I was leaving: my father had been killed before I was born; she had to let me go, had to let me learn who he'd been. But even that morning on the bus, turned around in my seat and all mixed up in my guts—even then I had the feeling that what hurt her most was not letting me go, but having to stay behind.
She'd met my father while vacationing with her parents on the Texas coast near Matagorda Bay. He'd been down from his father's farm in Shiner for the weekend, fishing with friends, and two months later he'd driven his old Chevy truck up to Oklahoma to ask for her hand and bring her back home with him. Half a year later he left for war, four months after that he was in the ground, and she'd moved from Texas up to Tulsa where her parents lived, and where I was born.
Married less than a year before she was widowed, she couldn't have known my father all that much better than I did, and I imagine what she did know was full of holes, voids she could only dream of filling. When I think about it today, I can almost put words to that nine-year-old inkling I had swirling in my stomach the morning I left for Grandpa's. I can see my mother kissing me goodbye and putting me on the bus. I can watch her through the back window as the bus rolls away, watch her standing there, her summer dress swirling around her knees, one foot on the curb and one in the highway, not waving but watching, watching her son go south, and I know she wished she were going too. Instead, she was heading north with Stan Kittridge, the balding banker who would introduce her to his relations in Chicago, and who would marry her the next summer. Who would buy us a house on the red clay banks of Hominy Creek and drive us to Dallas for Cowboys games some Sundays, and who, much to his credit, told me I could call him Stan, just Stan, though he would become over the years more like a father than the man he was to me that summer—some stranger in a necktie who never took his shoes off, who always winked at me for no good reason, and who called my mother a peach.
Before my visit that summer, all I'd known of Grandpa Havleck was sharp words and sharp steel. Every year since I could remember, he'd sent me a new pocketknife for my birthday, and though I'd handled them endlessly, pulling out the blades and inspecting the engraving for some secret message, all I'd ever found was the manufacturer's name and the grade of stainless steel. When I'd ask my mother about him, she'd frown and find something that needed doing around the house, something to keep her hands busy while she talked. "He's a bitter pill," she told me, "and I don't want you thinking that's how your daddy was, 'cause he wasn't. He was outgoing and loud sometimes, but always kind. Your Grandpa Havleck, he's all eaten up on the insides with guilt, says one thing and feels another. Deep down, though, he's good people. Has to be, else he couldn't have fathered your father."
Before my trip, I was warned to expect some strange behavior, a little ribbing here and there, a bunch of what my mother called "macho hooey about Texas-this and Texas-that."
What I didn't expect, even after having spent most of August with the old man, was for him to sit me down in the porch swing out back of his farmhouse in Shiner, fish a cold bottle of Lone Star from the cooler he kept by the door, and slap it into my hand.
"There you go, boy," he said, and once he'd pried the caps off the bottles, he slipped the bottle opener into the chest pocket of his T-shirt, gave it a little pat for safekeeping, took a swig of his beer, and then shot me a look of disgusted confusion.
"Whatcha just looking at it for?" he said. "Go on, you little Okie. Drink it. That there's a Lone Star you got, and if ever there was a little Oklahoma green-ass in need of some liquid Texas, it's you."
Grandpa hiked his jeans up under the enormous hump of his belly and rubbed his head, which had been bald, he claimed, since he was nineteen and came down with
scarlet fever. Four days and nights, a temperature so high the whites of his eyes went red as a July sunset, and when the fever broke he'd washed up, looked in the mirror, and run a comb through his hair for the last time. "It all come out," he'd told me one night. "All at once, four swipes of the comb and it was as gone as gone can get." Now I held my beer and marveled at him: at his head, slick and shining in the sun, a large vein snaking its blue way above one eyebrow; at his stomach, so slumped and low-slung you couldn't see his belt buckle. This was not the kind of man a boy disobeyed. This was the daddy of the daddy I'd never met, the man who, according to my mother, had walked his twenty-year-old son down to the recruiting office in Shiner as soon as the draft was reinstated. The man who told the recruiting officer, "This here's my only son, and he'd rather fight than farm. I figure if he's got to go get himself killed, he'd better damn well die a Marine." The man who, when he got word that my daddy had done just that after being taken down by friendly fire, went back to that recruiting office, slammed the purple heart my mother had gotten in the mail on that officer's desk, and told the man the Havlecks didn't have any use for a dead man's medal, so why didn't the Marines just melt it down and make some bullets and teach their boys how to shoot them straight—maybe at the enemy for a change.
In a matter of hours I would learn that these stories were more legend than history, more talk than truth, but at the time, sitting there on the porch with a bottle of beer in my hand and nine years of mystery still roped tight inside me, all I could see was an enormous frowning man. This was a man you didn't mess with, no matter what my mother said about his talk being hooey, a man who wanted me to drink what he'd given me, so I took a careful swig, and it was cold on my teeth and bitter down deep in my throat and altogether surprising the way only a boy's first beer can be.
"Now we're talkin'," he said, and after he'd polished the rest of his off with one turn of the bottle, he proceeded to inform me that even though the Spoetzl Brewery was just five miles away in downtown Shiner, and even though it was made in Texas, Shiner beer was still more Czech than Texan. They imported all the fixings, he told me, all the barley and hops and—hell, maybe even the water for all he knew. And the guy who ran the place, Walter Dudek—Pure-D Euro-peean. A nice enough guy, sure, but no Texan.
I took another drink, my cheeks awash with a first-beer flush, and I wondered if I was drunk already, if my increasing confusion about Grandpa was the product of good beer or bad memory. "But you're Czech," I said, "aren't you? I thought all we Havlecks were."
His face went fierce, his chapped lips parting in disbelief, the skin atop his head bunched up in distasteful furrows. "The hell I am," he said, setting his empty on the porch rail and letting loose a groan when he bent over, opening the cooler for another. "My daddy was Czech. Sure enough, no getting around it. Landed in Galveston when he was twenty-one. But me and your daddy, we're Texans, though one of us is a dead Texan. And you, boy, you're a dustbowl-loving Okie." He shook his head and bubbled his beer and made a clicking sound with his tongue. "Sorry to say it, son, but it's the God's honest truth. Your grandma, God keep her, she even dug up some dirt out here in the yard and sent it in a box up there to Tulsa so you could be born over Texas soil, and boy, I'll never know why in the hell she did it, I really won't, but she used UPS instead of Tex-Pak. Can you believe it? Got-damn, boy, do you know who owns Tex-Pak?"
I shook my head that I didn't.
"Lady Bird Johnson, that's who. We're talking Texan from titties to toenails."
Out back of the barn, Grandpa's prized bird dog, Alamo, was raising Cain in his kennel. Grandpa hollered, "Easy, Allie," then he took me tight by the back of the neck. "Listen, boy. You hear it?"
"The dog?" I asked, wondering if maybe the old man had gone deaf the way he'd gone bald—all in an instant.
"Not the dog, boy. What the dog hears. Bobwhite quail, way out in the pasture, bobwhitin' their little feathered asses off."
I turned my ear to the south, but all I could hear was the dog howling and the buzz of mosquitoes and the almost liquid hiss of the wind swirling in the scrub grass, rattling the crippled-looking branches of the mesquite tree by the barn. I looked up at Grandpa, who still had me firm by the neck, and shook my head.
"You can't hear 'em?" he asked. "Not even a little?"
"No, sir," I said, the way my mother had taught me.
"Well," he said, smiling, "me neither. Can't hear shit, matter of fact, but that dog can. You better believe that dog can."
I laughed and took another sip of beer and Grandpa gave me a playful shake before turning me loose. "You know what, boy? It's a damn shame we didn't get that soil up there in time. You might have made an okay Texan."
I finished my beer and Grandpa pulled me another from the ice. Hard as he was to understand, and callous as he could be sometimes, I couldn't bring myself to feel much of anything but respect for him—not, anyway, with him finally smiling and giving me beer and acting like he might, somewhere in the deep-down insides of him, love me like the son he'd lost, so I asked him—I said, "That would have counted? If the soil would've been under the bed?"
The sun was going down, and Grandpa looked out west over his field of August cotton to where the sky was blistered with clouds. "Hell, boy, I ain't gonna lie to you—probably not. Probably wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference." He swiped his fingers over his bald head like he expected to find his hair grown suddenly back into place. "But I don't reckon it could have hurt."
There always were, in Grandpa's way of speaking, lessons to be learned about the way Texans did things, or didn't do them, and to me, they began that summer to sound like his way of talking about my father without speaking of him directly. The morning after I'd arrived in Texas, three weeks before Grandpa gave me my first beer, after a nighttime storm that threw hail hard against the roof and softened the soil with rain, he took me out to the dog kennel where his pointer, Alamo, was curled up in the shade. He scratched the dog on the neck and took a long look inside his floppy ears and filled the food and water bowls, all the while whispering, "That's right, Allie. Just a few more weeks and we'll put you on the birds."
Out back of the chicken shed, he reached into a burlap sack and threw feed around on the ground the way Stan dealt cards when he and my mother played gin after dinner most nights. Then Grandpa took hold of me by a belt loop and pulled me out to the pasture. "There you go," he said, spitting down to direct my attention toward a glistening pile of cow flop in the grass. "Looks like a good one to me, kiddo. Reckon you can give her a good stomp?"
I looked up at him, at the tight smile of his lips, at the thin thread of spit that still swung from the stubble on his chin. "Go on," he said. "Texans don't ever mind a little shit on their boots."
After I'd stomped around awhile, playing a crude game of hopscotch from cow patty to cow patty, Grandpa looked at my boots and laughed and said he thought that would probably do for starters. "We're going to have to teach you to use the boot jack," he said. "If she ain't haunting the place already, you better believe your grandma will be rattling chains tonight if you track that stuff through her house. She never could abide that." Grandpa pulled the neck of his T-shirt down and scratched at the skin beneath all the wiry white hairs he had growing there, his lips still working all the while, like he'd lost his voice but not the will to make words. Pulling his hand from his shirt, he looked me up and down. "She never could," he said.
"Did my daddy do that?" I asked. "Track mud in the house?"
Grandpa looked down at me and then back out toward the west. "Mud and some worse," he said, and for a long while he stood there, looking out over the pasture and cotton fields, digging around in his ear with a pinkie finger like there was something stuck in his head he couldn't dislodge. When he turned back my way, his eyes widened as if he were surprised to find me still standing there.
"What's a boot jack?" I asked.
"A boot jack, boy, is what you use when you're done working. Which we ain't."
The sun was coming up in full now, and the chickens scurried around as if fueled by the heat. As I was climbing onto the tractor, my boots lost hold and I smacked my shin so soundly against the foot plate that the pain sparked and caught fire and licked its way up my leg and into my guts. My mouth flooded with spit and I thought for sure I'd be sick. "Well," Grandpa said, slapping the tractor seat with the palm of his hand, "you ain't in much danger of riding rodeos anytime soon, but this is just a tractor, for the love of God. Try her again."
Once I'd worked my way into the seat, Grandpa pulled himself up beside me, sitting on the rear-wheel fender while he taught me how to pull the choke out and count slow to ten before cranking the engine. While I sat there, squinting into the sun and feeling the machine rumble and growl beneath me, he got down with a groan and hooked up the disc plow. And then it was time to drive.