by Brady Udall
We’ll drive up this morning, stay the night at a motel somewhere and come back tomorrow. We’ve got the back of the Subaru packed with a cooler of food, overnight bags and a whole toiletry case full of everyone’s medication. They all seem a little giddy, like kids going off to camp. I asked them and nobody could recall the last time they took a trip. Hugh says he thinks he might have gone to Detroit one time, but he’s not sure.
We drive into town and stop in front of Ansie’s tiny Roadside Craft and Jewelry store. I blast through the front door, making a surprise entrance, like the Nazi SS in the movies. Ansie is on the other side of the counter gluing little colored beads on strips of leather and Gogo gives me the hairy eyeball from behind a piece of petrified wood.
“Come on,” I shout. “Close up shop. We’re headed for the Canyon. All you need is a camera and some fresh underwear. We’ll provide the rest.”
Ansie is looking out the window where Tormey is on the other side of the car, relieving his faulty bladder on a cactus.
“Holy Jesus,” she says.
“Look,” I say. “I haven’t seen any tourists around here in days. We’ll be back tomorrow. You won’t be losing any business. You don’t come and you’ll regret it.”
I go past her, back into her bedroom. I open the top drawers of her dresser.
“Where are you going?” she says, following me.
“We are going,” I say, throwing a purple brassiere and matching panties at her. I’m brazen, I don’t remember doing anything like this before; it’s like this balmy weather has burned all the shame right out of me. “We are going to the Grand Canyon. Get a bag to put this stuff in. Get some tennis shoes. We might do some walking around.”
“Wait, wait,” she says.
Throwing more clothes on the bed, I say, “Hurry. We’ve got to get going. No time to lose.”
Before she knows what’s happened, she’s buckled in, heading north on 260. We’ve got the windows rolled down, our faces pressed against the sharp breeze. Gogo’s ears are whipping like dish towels on a clothesline.
About five miles out of Payson, Ansie looks over at me and says, “Shit, you.” She’s been bamboozled and she knows it. I can tell by the changing expressions on her face that she doesn’t know whether to laugh or be pissed off. Just ahead of us a single doe springs across the road and vaults, at least eight feet in the air, her hindquarters a flash of white against the blue shadows, over a barbed-wire fence and into the trees.
“That was one lively horse,” Tormey says.
We have the road pretty much to ourselves; every few miles a car or truck comes in a gathering rush and is gone, leaving us as we were before, the owners of the road. The big, blank sky, the pines turning to cedar and juniper as we come down out of the high country, the tiny yellow butterflies careening in the brush—all of it, ours. Iris teaches us a few lines from one of her favorite songs, “You Got One Big Thang” and we rap it together with Ansie providing the percussion by slapping the dashboard.
Less than an hour into the trip Hugh starts worrying out loud that his seat belt is too tight and could disrupt the process of his digestion and Tormey announces that he thinks he might have wet himself. Not to be left out, Iris tells us that she wants to go nowhere near the Grand Canyon, that if it’s all the same to us she’ll just wait in the car. “I’ve not come this far,” she says, “to end up falling in a big hole.”
Ansie turns around and helps Hugh with his seat belt, checks out Tormey who was only imagining he’d wet his pants, and tells Iris that she doesn’t have to go anywhere she doesn’t want and that she might just stay in the car with her. I act like I’m completely absorbed with driving and let her take care of everything. She seems a natural at this. She helps Tormey take his gout medicine and cuts up an apple and distributes the slices to everybody. “You have a fetching pair of knockers,” Hugh points out as she’s hanging over the seat and Ansie snorts and giggles like a schoolgirl.
About a mile out of a little town called Garner’s Hope, there is a loud pop and then a grinding noise in the engine. I get out and look stupidly at the machinery under the hood. I know nothing about cars or engines, barely know how to go about changing the oil. If this were a broken condom dispenser, on the other hand, I’d have it fixed in a snap. Everyone stands behind me in the swirling dust, regarding the oil-caked motor like mourners at a funeral. “Could be a blown rod,” Ansie says, “or maybe not.”
“Which way should we start marching?” Hugh says.
“No marching,” I say. I imagine one of them wandering out into the road, getting flattened by some hell-bent semi and my heart does a little jump-stop. I hold out my arms like a school crossing guard. “Let’s get back in the car. I think this thing will start. We’ll try to make it back to the town we just came out of.” Ansie goes to retrieve Iris who has already strayed out into the brush to pick the tiny yellow flowers that are just budding out on the tips of the sage.
I stay on the shoulder of the road, keeping the speedometer between five and ten miles an hour, grimacing at the terrible clanking and pinging in the engine. It sounds like a crowbar loose in there. “Oh Lord,” Ansie says, covering her mouth and nose, and just then the stench hits me. At first I think it’s the engine, but it only takes a second to realize that Gogo, apparently spooked by the loud noise, has taken a dump under the seat. We hang our heads out the window and curse the day Gogo was ever born. Hugh, who is unlucky enough to be strapped down in the middle, holds his nose and howls indignantly.
I pull into the only gas station in town and everyone, including Gogo, bails out before I make a complete stop. The attendant, a large dusty man with a lumberjack’s beard and the name Reece sewn in cursive on the breast of his striped jumpsuit, appears out of the tiny office and informs me that there hasn’t been a mechanic in town for at least ten years. He takes a look under the hood and says, “These Japanese makes are vastly overrated, don’t you think? You can use the phone to call a wrecker out of Payson.”
Hugh eyes the big man distrustfully, retreating slowly, his back to the car, and says, “Don’t come near me, Reece.”
I sit down at the desk in the office and page through a greasy phone book, looking for numbers. I dial and look out the smokestained window of the office at the scene outside: Ansie has just finished cleaning Gogo’s mess and has the cooler open, handing out sandwiches and cans of Coke. She is looking a little harried, her face polished with sweat. Hugh is fiddling with Iris’ hearing aid and Tormey is sitting on the front bumper, sharing tortilla chips with Reece and Gogo. The phone ringing in my ear, I sit there watching though the dirty yellow glass that blurs my vision and it hits me that finally, in some way, I have all the things I ever wanted.
Somebody answers on the other end and not remembering what I’m doing on the phone, I hang up and go outside. Tormey gets up and gives me a hug, crushing the bag of chips between us. Ansie holds out two sandwich bags and says, “Pastrami or ham?” I’m speechless. Everyone looks up at me and I just stand there in a puddle of oil, grinning like an idiot.
The Wig
My eight-year-old son found a wig in the garbage dumpster this morning. I walked into the kitchen, highly irritated that I couldn’t make a respectable knot in my green paisley tie, and there he was at the table, eating cereal and reading the funnies, the wig pulled tightly over his head like a football helmet. The wig was a dirty bush of curly blond hair, the kind you might see on a prostitute or someone who is trying to imitate Marilyn Monroe.
I asked him where he got the wig and he told me, his mouth full of cereal. When I advised him that we don’t wear things that we find in the garbage, he simply continued eating and reading as if he didn’t hear me.
I wanted him to take that wig off but I couldn’t ask him to do it. I forgot all about my tie and going to work. I looked out the window where mist fell slowly on the street. I paced into the living room and back, trying not to look at my son. He ignored me. I could hear him munching cereal and rustling pa
per.
There was a picture, or a memory, real or imagined, that I couldn’t get out of my mind: last spring, before the accident, my wife was sitting in the chair where now my son always sits. She was reading the paper to see how the Blackhawks did the night before, and her sleep-mussed hair was only slightly longer and darker than the hair of my son’s wig.
I wondered if my son had a similar picture in his head, or if he had a picture at all. I watched him and he finally looked up at me but his face was blank. He went back to his reading. I walked around the table, picked him up and held him against my chest. I pressed my nose into that wig and it smelled not like the clean shampoo scent I might have been hoping for, but like old lettuce. I suppose it didn’t matter at that point. My son put his smooth arms around my neck and for maybe a few seconds we were together again, the three of us.
Vernon
Vernon is the Arizona nobody knows about. It’s ponderosa pine, blue spruce, frost on your windshield in September, elk crashing down out of the mountains in the spring. We have our fair share of old folks, but not one of them owns a recreational vehicle. We have no swimming pools! We are tan, yes, but only on our faces and arms. I’ve been to Phoenix a couple of times and I thought I was in hell.
These days we are down to about eight hundred souls and getting smaller all the time. Years back, the government placed restrictions on timber cutting, really putting a clamp on everything. Before that, we were something of a boom town: we had a motel and a roller skating rink and a bar with go-go dancers. This was when I was a kid and had no idea that Vernon was not the only place in the world. Now, we get hunters that stay a few days, and occasionally several tourists will wander through, take a look around and get right back in their cars and head for someplace that has a McDonald’s.
I left Vernon for a semester to go to college. People around here are convinced of my intelligence. Isn’t he just smart? they say. My mother does nothing to discourage this kind of talk. She spends a lot of her time reminding everyone what a talented guy I am, the person I could some day be if I used just a tenth of my God-given abilities. When she talks about me she uses the word potential a lot.
I was the valedictorian of a class of nineteen and I got a tuition scholarship to Northern Arizona. Not only that, I was the quarterback of our eight-man football team, MVP of the state championship game two years ago. In a little place like Vernon, there has to be someone everybody can throw the weight of their hopes on, and I guess for awhile, I was it.
My parents drove me to Flagstaff to help me get settled in my dorm room. When it was time to say good-bye they stood in the doorway, their faces pinched with emotion. They were holding hands, as if being on a college campus reminded them that such a thing was still possible. My roommate, who was a complete slouch, didn’t have the decency to make himself scarce for a couple of minutes. “You’ve got big things ahead of you,” I think is the line my father said that day, there in the musty dorm hall that smelled like Lysol and old sweat. Or at least it was something like that, something positively corny but also magnificent because it was coming from my old man who was so damn proud he looked like he was about to bust a vein in his head.
I liked college, liked the concept of it; I was free to do anything I wanted. Just the idea made me ridiculously happy. Like my Uncle Tim says about his first venture out into the world: it was the first time I ever got to meet people I never met before. And there were pretty girls everywhere. And beer! Every time I turned around somebody was handing me a beer. But I had this nervous feeling I couldn’t get rid of, like something in the bottom of my gut slowly eating at my insides all hours of the day. I couldn’t sleep. I was free to sleep until three in the afternoon if I wanted to, but the only time I could get really unconscious was in the middle of my classes. After one semester I came back to Vernon to stay.
Waylon and I hooked up in kindergarten. He taught me the dirty words he knew, I gave him the chocolate milk from my lunch; one minute we were five-year-old strangers, still the sons of our mothers, and the next we were friends for life. Who can remember what it was to be a child?
Louis (say it like the French) came later, in the third grade. His father got the foreman job at the tiny reservation-owned sawmill up by Camp Creek. Louis was an Apache, had long hair like a girl, and looked utterly bewildered out on the playground that first day. A couple of the nastier fourth-grade boys did what comes natural: they beat the hell out of the new kid. The next day a few more kids were getting ready to knock Louis around when he pulled a bayonet out of his coat. The thing was double-edged and a foot and a half long. He had stolen it from his father’s collection of World War II artifacts—a Nazi infantryman’s bayonet. He held it with two hands, like a sword, and he had a look in his eyes that said he wasn’t going to take any more shit. What a fantastic sight: a skinny, long-haired Apache kid, letting out shrieks and war whoops and chasing around a bunch of white boys with a bayonet. In the rush to get away, Arty Lowe, one of the kids who’d helped rough him up the day before, slipped on a patch of old snow. Louis jumped on his back and rested the bayonet’s point against Arty’s head. The rest of us stood there, stunned and electrified. We all waited for him to skewer Arty’s head like a melon, or better yet, scalp him. Instead, Louis gave him a good kick to the gut, just to let everyone know he was serious. That was enough for Waylon and me. Even though most everybody steered clear of him after that, we decided that this was somebody it wouldn’t hurt to have on our side.
“Alaska,” Louis says, waving a trident-shaped stick towards the north. “That should be a consideration. There’s thousands of dollars in pulling the guts out of fish.”
It’s a week before Thanksgiving, the end of an unseasonably warm November day, and we’re sitting atop Pud Mineer’s woodpile, facing west where the sky is smoldering and shriveling up on itself like a burning piece of plastic. Some evenings when the air is calm and we don’t want to be inside, we sit up here, each of us on a nice flat log, to discuss matters while we look out over Vernon’s yards and rooftops. Up here on the lower slope of Sawtooth Peak, old Pud, a onetime rodeo clown who died in his sleep last winter, found a level spot with just enough room to put his trailer and to build up this mountain of wood. It must be thirty feet high, maybe a hundred cords; he would have had to live another eighty years just to use half this wood. Nobody ever accused Pud of being a pessimist.
“I’m not going anyplace where they charge five dollars for a gallon of milk,” Waylon says, reclining on a piece of aspen, his head resting against his bunched-up jacket.
“There’s a point,” I say.
Louis says, “Fuck milk. I’m talking money here.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“No, you’re talking dairy products. Maybe you could tell us the price of cheese and yogurt up there. That would be helpful. How much is a quart of eggnog?”
It seems like every week we come up with a new plan, a place to go, a way to make money and adventure. This is one of our favorite subjects, but talking about it hasn’t gotten us far; there’s always something stopping us from leaving, some excuse or another. I haven’t said anything about the job my father called me about a couple nights ago: an old Navy buddy of his is starting up a company that manufactures mobile homes in Oklahoma City. He plans to begin next month and would hire anyone my father recommended, as long as they’re at least twenty-one and not members of a union. We qualify on both accounts, with Louis, the youngest of us, having reached the legal drinking age just last week. It’s a good-paying job that would last at least a year. I decide I won’t tell them yet; I prefer talking about job opportunities in far-off exotic places that fill your head with the sound and color of dreams.
“There’s also gold mining in Alaska,” I say, trying to keep the conversation on track.
Louis says, “I hear you can get away without paying taxes up there.”
“Maybe they’d let me get away with murder,” Waylon says.
“
I’d come back to haunt you,” Louis grins. “My spirit will live on forever. I’d enter a bear and bite you on the ass.”
Waylon laughs and Louis whoops in the direction of the peak and waits for an echo that doesn’t come. Even though I know this heap is as solid as the Egyptian pyramids, I have this fear that someone is going to yell too loud or move the wrong piece of wood, and we’ll go down, buried under an avalanche of dead juniper and pine.
We’ve heard a rumor that Mrs. Naegle, the ample-breasted wife of Sheriff Naegle who lives in the adobe house down the slope a ways, about fifty yards below us, likes to hang out the wash and water the grass in the nude. We’ve been up here on at least a dozen different occasions and we’ve yet to see her so much as leave the house, clothed or otherwise. We don’t mind waiting; all we have is time.
“You know what’d be something?” Louis says. “Light this wood on fire. In the middle of the night. Everybody’d think it was sunrise. You’d have roosters crowing and people getting up to go to work. It would be some kind of supernatural phenomenon. They’d put it on the news.”
Waylon fishes around in his pocket and produces a Bic lighter. “Be my guest,” he says, handing it to Louis. Louis takes the lighter, cradles it in one of his palms, smiling faintly and squinting, as if it is an object that holds great sentimental value for him. Darkness begins to gather down in the valley, rises up from deep in the woodpile to curl around our feet.
Louis puts the lighter up to his mouth and presses the button that releases the propane without igniting it. Once he’s got a mouthful of gas, he purses his lips and moves his cheeks around like a wine taster. Then he opens his mouth wide, flicks a spark into it, and for a few seconds a transparent blue ball of fire hovers trembling over his tongue, a thing with a brief life of its own, making his teeth glow from within like tiny Chinese lanterns, finally collapsing on itself and guttering out with a faint popping noise.