Philco

by Ken Mansfield

  Lou is now looking at the floor, wadding and unfolding the bottom edge of his deli apron. C.J. takes over.

  “The old park Garland used to sleep in is now a matter of weeds and a place where dogs go after they eat. All those years he was alive, Garland had secretly funded the plantings and maintenance of the little garden that everyone took for granted, and no one had a clue. It turns out that the citizenry still refused to allocate any of their treasured funds for the upkeep of this dedicated public spot.”

  Lou cuts in, “C.J. and I used some of Garland’s money to buy a large, odd-shaped lot sandwiched between two buildings directly across the street from the park where Garland used to sleep. We hired the finest landscape architects and craftsmen to prepare a beautiful plaza in the once-vacant lot, and when it was all finished, to a crowd consisting of three dogs and a bag lady, we unveiled a small memorial in the middle of a carpet of beautiful For-get-me-not flowers surrounded by Weeping Willows that stretched wall-to-wall across the new lot and all the way out to the curb. We named it the Garland of Flowers Memorial Park in honor of our friend.”

  C.J. takes the reins again: “The only request Garland made in his simple will was that he be buried among the flowers in an unmarked grave, so we had Garland buried beneath that memorial. As we stood there that day staring at the ground beneath the crudely carved piece of stone, the memory of this amazing person brought loving tears, like living waters rising up from deep within our being. Garland’s memory and their essence lingered sweetly in our minds before making their way gently down our faces and back into our hearts as we realized we were standing on hallowed ground. I don’t know how long we had been standing there, but as I raised my eyes I beheld brush strokes from the hands of the Master who had taken the setting sunset behind us and painted an ethereal abstract across the back wall that hovered over the park. We were so overwhelmed by the beauty we felt weightless. We simultaneously reached out to grasp each other’s hand and bowed our heads once again in a final goodbye prayer to an old friend.

  “As we brushed the tears away and turned to leave we couldn’t believe our eyes. An enormous crowd of the unseen people of our town surrounded us. The street was filled with the homeless, the disregarded, the rejected, the abandoned…the forgotten saints who lived amongst the shadows beyond this special place. We stepped aside as, one-by-one, they filed past us, placing beautiful flowers on Garland’s grave, being careful not to cover the inscription on the stone. Each person would pause before the stone, place a hand on their heart and then kneel down and touch the words that Garland had left behind with that same hand.

  The inscription on the memorial read:

  I was hungry, and you gave me food.

  I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink.

  I was alone and away from home,

  and you invited me into your house.

  I was without clothes, and you gave me something to wear.

  I was sick, and you cared for me.

  MATTHEW 25:35-36 [NCV]

  BAR NONE

  [PHILCO]

  THE LONGER I AM HERE in Hurricane Hills the more normal things are beginning to appear. Lou and C.J. can tell I am deeply moved by Garland’s story. What they are not aware of is something stirring inside that I have never felt before…the affection I am feeling toward my newfound friends. Lou reaches over and places his hand over mine. C.J. stands still in the moment as the three of us look down at the floor together almost as if in prayer. Moments pass before Lou stands up and breaks the silence returning us to when I first walked in. “So what can I getcha? Everything on the menu is fresh today and available.”

  I order the “Garland Special,” and with the smell of pressed liver in my hair, I drift backward out of the store, returning to my place on the rail outside the deli. Woody Guthrie is still playing in the background. Even without unwrapping the sandwich I realize I have already been fed, satisfied by a partaking of delicious dimension. A scrawny, three-legged dog sits at my feet expectantly. I open up the man-sized meal and spread it on the ground before him. He looks down at it then back up at me and his stare of disbelief follows me as I stand up and head back to the hotel. I assume he will be okay with double mayo and extra olives. I look back after walking almost a block and he is still standing over the food watching me.

  I clear the front entrance, and once inside the hotel, I discover my calico lady has not moved. I go to the check-in counter to see if I can get her to do something similar to what humans do. It’s been a long day and I am feeling a little salty. This front desk routine has become a bit stiff in its repetition. Something has to give.

  Standing almost face to unmoving face, I give into an earlier impulse and hit the ringy-dingy bell in front of me really hard expecting her to jump out of her skin. Without flinching, she looks me straight in the eye and flips me the bird. Now we are getting somewhere—it’s just her and me and it’s gettin’ real.

  The whole lobby atmosphere changes into soft ambience, with music playing softly in the background. I lean gently forward and ask, “Dear lady, do you know where I can get a cold beer?”

  Without breaking facial stride, she recommends The Sundance Saloon. “It’s just a hole-in-the-wall place, but it’s great for cold drinks…I kid you not,” she says. Though her response is expressionless, I sense an edge of sarcasm, and I am sure she knows she is being a bit whimsical. “It is the only place in town with ice,” she adds coyly, which, at this point, makes her word count border on conversational. I nod in appreciation, thank her for the recommendation, give her a knowing wink, and stroll out of the hotel walking like I’ve had already had a few drinks. Once out the door I take a right and head straight for The Sundance, which, according to her meager instructions, is on the next block, two doors down from the corner.

  I pass no one on the way, but get excited when I hear the lively music and sense the bright lights as I head in their direction. There’s a slight breeze blowing down the street that bounces off the boardwalk and up into my face. It has a certain softness that makes me feel invigorated like a young dude heading into town looking for excitement. Pushing open the swinging saloon doors seems to trigger an effect on the way I am walking—morphing from a jaunty gait to a haughty swagger. From her description I was expecting a dingy watering hole, but the bar is carved right out of the old Western movies. The Sundance conjures amalgamated reminiscences of Missouri speakeasies, Texas roadhouses, and mid-western saloons like the one in Deadwood, South Dakota where Doc Holiday used to get “likkered up” and where Wild Bill Hickok bit the dust. The bar is massive and magnificent with lots of mirrors and colorful bottles. A grand staircase winding its way upstairs to the naughty rooms, dancing gaslights, and happy music give the place a puzzlingly cheerful feel.

  Since I am obviously the only customer in the place, it appears I can sit anywhere I want. I find a stool at the end of the bar and instead of just sliding between it and the bar I feel compelled to swing my left leg over it in a cowboy and his faithful horse kind of way. The bartender is standing “at ease” with one hand behind his back and the other across his waist with a perfectly folded white towel draped over his forearm. He is dressed for the situation: a starched white shirt, a striped vest, and a bright red bow tie that sets off his ruddy face and handlebar mustache.

  Once it is clear that my posterior-most portion is officially situated, he joins me at the end of the bar. He props his left leg up on a small keg, throws the towel over his shoulder, and, leaning forward, places his right hand over the other resting on the raised left knee.

  “My name’s Levi, and I’ll be that all day. What’s your pleasure, pardner?” he asks in a whiskey-tinged drawl.

  I am tired, thirsty, and a little bored. I order a cold draft beer with a shot of rye whiskey and a branch water “back.” As he sets my booze down in front of me, I realize that as far as I know, I have never had a “drink” before. I wonder how I even kno
w the words to select the libations staring up at me in liquid wonder from the shiny, dented, dark mahogany bar-top. It’s curious that fragments of memories have been coming back to me all day, but in such tiny bits that I can’t tie anything together. I lift up my shot glass to Levi and say, “Here’s to you kid” (though I’m not sure why) and then I down its contents. He walks away shaking his head in response to my amateur toast. Although, it could have something to do with me coughing and gagging immediately after my first swig.

  After he serves my third round, (and by this time I have dropped the branch-water back), he leans over the bar and begins telling me a story, as all bartenders have a tendency to do when the days are long and the customers are few. It’s just him and me and he is reminiscing about a deep and personal time in his past—a home time, a growing up time. He drawls on and I drift away, following his recollection into this other place. A shot glass appears in his left hand from out of nowhere and he begins carefully polishing it with the clean white towel that had slipped down his forearm into his right hand without my noticing. The motion has a pattern, but not in tune with anything apparent—more with the rhythm of his heart I think. His movement and demeanor remind me of Lou, except his wrinkled hands are beer-stained and withered from washing glasses instead of slicing pickles and sausages.

  “There was this lady who lived up the road…”

  12

  ONE SIZE FITS ALL

  [LEVI]

  “I DON’T THINK ANYONE can really talk about being country unless they actually did grow up in the country. It would be like me—a potato-bred, backwoods, blue-eyed boy—trying to paint a picture of life in a Detroit ghetto. When I refer to being country, I am not talking about wearing cowboy boots, living in a Dallas suburb, and line dancing on Saturday nights. I mean deep, lonely, poor, back road stuff—small towns and rugged, simple people who basically mind their own business and use their allotted energies to work, worship, and do the best they can to stay alive.

  “We were poor. We slept on straw tics (flour sacks sewn together and filled with soft straw—if there is such a thing as soft straw). We all slept in the same room, my parents, my brother, and me. On Saturday nights we took our baths in one of those long, oval, galvanized tubs that was higher at one end than at the other. My mom boiled water in teakettles on the wood stove, and then we took our baths one after the other in the same water. She washed our pajamas that same day. I will always remember that fresh feeling when we went to bed right afterward. All of this was done on Saturday night so we would be clean for church on Sunday. We didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was in high school. If you want to be liberated from an evening of peaceful slumber just take a hike at two in the morning on a winter night down a path to an outhouse about fifty feet from the back porch.

  “We lived down a dirt road that ended at our barn. When I was in high school I would get a ride home from a classmate after the weekend dances at our youth center in town, and the headlights would shine dead on to that outhouse as we pulled into the driveway. My dad was not much for concerning himself with the success of my social life, but he eventually realized he was getting no peace until that outhouse was moved to a less visible location. I got my way and he dug a new hole on the other side of the barn and moved the little building there where the outhouse would now be hidden and the aesthetics much better, but no one in the family liked the extra footage added to our nocturnal missions.

  “Our milk came from our own goats, the eggs from our chickens, the fruit and vegetables from our gardens and trees. We also had a confused pig that thought the reason we were feeding him so well was because we liked him. Our main meat and poultry source was derived from the misfortunes of the deer and pheasant that wandered too close to the fence lines running along our place and down into the canyons. My dad was a good shot—a frugal man who did not like to waste bullets. Mom made our soap, everyday clothes, and candles. Christmas presents were usually something that could be handmade from white pine, our region’s main crop. School clothes were bought once a year, budgets ranging as high as ten dollars each for my brother and me. By shopping at the Army/Navy Surplus Store that expenditure resulted in two cotton shirts—one short-sleeve and one long-sleeve—and two different colored cotton T-shirts. This allowed me to have different combinations of outfits for the first four days of the week, leaving Friday to be a repeat of what I wore on Monday. Levi’s® jeans and shoes were purchased as the need arose. My younger brother never really had to suffer the hand-me-down humiliation. Having so few clothes, I wore them out, which meant they seldom made it to the next generation. The reason I put so much effort into mixing up my limited wardrobe, and why I’d had a regular job since I was twelve, was out of a desire to be like the other kids. As I grew older I wanted more clothing options and was willing to work in order to pay for it myself. My motivation for better things guaranteed the regular admonition from my mom that ‘Pride’s gonna rear up one day like a snake out of the dirt and bite you on the butt.’

  “It is hard to imagine someone growing up harder country than I did, but by comparison to the way my mother grew up, we were the Rockefellers. Starting from the day she was born to the day she died, the word ‘simple’ never stopped her for a minute. Something about my mom, who was so beautifully plain and honest, fostered a deep love, and all my affection got piled up in her. My mother’s core and her exterior had only the breadth of God’s love between them. Some of her other oft-repeated sayings were, ‘You’re breathing a scab on the end of your nose.’ Translation: she felt I was off in some wrong direction with my thinking. ‘You just showed your butt’ was the ever-ready response when I did something foolish that other people could see. Then there was the always popular, ‘Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face,’ when she felt I was getting ready to make a poor decision. For some reason most of her censures had to do with my nose or my butt. I decided early on that I was never going to have my dreams analyzed or dig too deeply into how that affected my life in later years. My dad never had much to say as far as growing up instructions were concerned. He was mainly there in case I needed a really big whuppin’ for my really big mistakes.

  “I am glad that the northwestern prairies and mountains are the ‘where’ and the ‘way’ I grew up. I learned a lot from the backwoods, including knowing I did not ever want to be that poor again. I feel my experiences in the fields, hills, canyons, rivers, streams, woods, and mountains that surrounded this remote area planted something deep into my being that is more special than anything I can ever understand. My common upbringing gave me an uncommon slant on matters later in life. It was easier for me to transition out of that desolate countryside into the big city than it would have been to do it the other way around.

  “Life was simple and the rules were few but clear. A man’s word and reputation were definitely his most prestigious possessions. Honesty and a fair shake in all matters was a given. This way of life was deeply ingrained in the very soul and being of the country folk. It was once explained to me that there were practical logistical mechanics beyond Christian moralities that created this way of life. In the country and in small communities, everyone depended on the support of all neighbors in the surrounding sparse society. A man caught lying, cheating, or stealing should plan to move out fairly soon after his folly because he would no longer be able to survive in the obvious isolation from the rest of the neighbors.

  “Because there was a lot of space between people there was not a lot of sharing of knowledge. Most of us kids had to rely on information that had been “lap-fed” or “behind-the-barn-taught” on our own acreage. This guiding wisdom propelled us into adulthood. Some of this stuff was quite bizarre even to us.

  “One of the most peculiar examples of this had to do with a family that lived up the dirt road about a half-mile from our place. The Jacobsons were our closest neighbors and a hard family to know or understand. Their two boys, Zechariah and Zephaniah, were not al
lowed to come all the way out to the dirt road that ran by their small farm except to go to school or church. In subtle defiance of that standing rule, they would sometimes inch their way down the rutted path that ran between the fences from the road to their house and barns. They would get as close as they could to the road before being called back, usually by their dad. When they were summoned back you never really heard any names being called—just a deep guttural yell that suggested immediacy. The old man was big, and his name augmented his imposing demeanor—Daniel Jeremiah Jacobson. Even though he was usually viewed from a distance (and most likely while my brother and I were running away looking over our shoulders), we could pretty much tell he was not smiling. He worked at the sawmill down on the river with my dad for over thirty years, and I don’t believe they ever had a conversation. I do know though, that if our barn ever caught on fire we would have 100 percent of that big man’s body and heart out there helping us.

  “Even more reclusive was his wife—not by her choice, but by the way he decided things should be. She was a stout woman who wore her hair pulled back tightly and had a scruffy, faded to gray, black denim cowboy-like scarf perpetually tied around her neck. Although I had only managed glimpses of her over the years, either from the road or on the rare occasions that she would go into town with him and the boys, I can remember her wearing only gray, baggy homespun garments—a dark gray apron over a medium gray dress—adding a bulky gray sweater when the weather dictated. The most striking thing about her appearance was the big clodhoppers she always wore. Clodhoppers were men’s heavy working boots—thick, ugly, and strong enough to kick away a Sherman tank if it came into your yard. The word on the rural routes was that he made her wear them so other men wouldn’t be attracted to her. Now, she was a good woman, but I think she had been effectively removed from the social mainstream by that point. The only thing he could have done to cover up her natural beauty any further or make her more unattractive would have been to throw her in the mud and run over her with his tractor a few times.