by Brady Udall
The twelve streetlights that line Main Street suddenly come on at the same time, surprising us. Nighthawks dive and chitter over the quiet houses. All around, on every horizon, are mountains, sharp and black in the distance, holding us in like walls.
I’m the valedictorian, I get all the credit, but Waylon is the real smart one. He educated himself on the toilet. When he was a kid, he had a set of World Book encyclopedias on a shelf above the pot in the basement bathroom. He’d spend all his spare time in there, and Frank, Waylon’s father, would sometimes have to roust him out of there with a lot of threats and door-pounding just to get him to come to dinner. Now that Waylon is an adult and lives permanently in the basement, he’s set up a regular library in the bathroom; shelves of books on every wall, stacked to the ceiling. He’s got everything. Go in there, pull out any three books and you’ll have The Secrets of Oriental Sexual Massage, Wittgenstein: A Student’s Memoir and Helter Skelter—something like that. He needs a card catalogue he’s got so many books in there; when I use the bathroom I can never find what I’m looking for. But I have to admit, there is something stirring about reading Chinese poetry while taking a dump.
Right now Waylon’s into Mark Twain and I’ll go over there to visit and he’ll be in on the can with that big battered anthology on his lap, laughing to lose his teeth. He knows electronics and gardening and transmissions, he can humiliate anyone in Trivial Pursuit or argue you into a corner with the sheer number and heftiness of facts, but he never officially graduated from high school, never saw the point. He’s big, freckled and at the advanced age of twenty-one is already losing his curly red hair.
It’s at his house that we spend most of our leisure time. The place is always stocked with food and beer; it has a living room big enough to play football in and girlie magazines on the coffee table. A man’s house. There used to be a woman in it, but she died a long time ago, giving birth to Waylon. Frank keeps a small shrine to her—photographs and letters and other memorabilia—on the mantel above the fireplace. Even after all this time he’ll squeeze Waylon around the shoulders, a pained look on his face, and say something like, “It’s just us bozos left now. We’ll have to chin up and make do.”
Like two people too close to each other, too dependent, they’re always at each other’s throats, always making up.
Frank is the richest man in town, that’s why his house is so big. He owns the only gas station and grocery store in Vernon and owns stock in a number of corporations. He makes money like pigs make shit: it just piles up. He had a terrible fever when he was a toddler that roasted his brain a little, leaving him with slurred speech, bad eyesight and a limp. Now that he’s developed a serious kidney condition that requires weekly hospital visits and a dozen different kinds of medication, he’s terrified that he’s going to die. Last night, we were sitting out in the front room, sipping beer, all of us a little drunk, laughing at Frank’s anecdotes about what an asshole he was in high school. Suddenly he had a pain that doubled him over—he now says he knows what it feels like to be branded with a hot iron—and he pushed his fist into his left side as if there was something in there he wanted to kill. After awhile he stood up, his eyes wet, looking like he didn’t know where he was.
“I’m not ready to go, godammit, nope, nope, nope,” he said through his teeth, groping like a blind man for the picture of his wife on the mantel. He took it down and squeezed it so hard against his chest that the glass snapped. He gestured with the picture toward Waylon, and said to no one in particular. “I’ve got this knucklehead to take care of and businesses to run. And my grain shares are kicking ass.”
He says one of the greatest regrets of his life was not being there when the moose showed up in his backyard. This happened just before I left for college, back when there were possibilities and expectations, when every out-of-the-ordinary thing seemed like a sign.
It was a Sunday morning after a night of Coors, potato chips and movies on the VCR. Louis was in the kitchen slurping cold cereal and me and Waylon were in on the couch waiting for a game to start on TV. Frank was out making more money.
“There’s something out there,” Louis said, standing in front of the big bay window that looks out on the back deck. “Something big.”
Frank’s back yard is an unfenced piece of land that is a section of the foothills that eventually become the White Mountains. You look out there any time of the day and you’re likely to see one form of wildlife or another.
“Elk?” Waylon said.
“I don’t think that’s an elk,” Louis said under his breath.
We went out on the deck to get a better look and God help me if there wasn’t a bull moose, antlers and all, trotting across Frank’s half-dead lawn with all the purpose of a businessman who needed to be somewhere that very minute. None of us had ever seen a moose in real life before and I think it took awhile for us to figure out what we were looking at. This thing, unlike the rather majestic moose I’ve seen in pictures, appeared to have been retched up from the guts of the earth: its burr-matted coat was fifteen of the most unsightly shades of brown you can imagine and what looked like gray cobwebby moss hung off its back and bowed antlers. It had almost no neck to speak of, just an ungainly peanut-shaped head set on top of a sagging trunk. The sheer ugliness of it was awe-inspiring.
“That’s a MOOSE!?” Louis said, in equal parts statement and question. He had both hands jammed in his hair.
As far as I or anybody else knows, there are not supposed to be moose in Arizona.
We watched as it ambled between a couple of apricot trees and headed right for a life-sized foam-plastic deer Frank had used for target practice back when he had a passion for bow-hunting. It had been out of commission for quite awhile, but there were still about a dozen rusted aluminum arrows sticking out of it at all angles.
The moose snorted, stamped a couple of circles around the deer and gave it a few sniffs. Its penis suddenly unfurled between its legs like some hideous, searching worm. We came off the deck to get a better view just in time to see the son of a bitch mount the deer and begin humping. All this was pulled off with a complete lack of finesse or natural skill: the way it spasmed and groaned you’d think it was wounded and dying a painful death. We jumped and shouted like spectators at a boxing match but he paid no heed. For that moose, nothing else existed in the world; I mean, he was concentrating. We shook our fists and used every swear word we knew; this seemed to be an occasion that called for vulgarity.
“Get out of here you fucker!” Waylon cried. He was wide-eyed and indignant. I guess he didn’t like the idea of this moose violating not only his father’s innocent plastic deer, but the very laws of nature.
After about thirty seconds’ worth of bump-and-grind, the deer began to crack and buckle and finally broke in half completely. Startled, the moose jumped back and shook his head a couple of times. He nosed the pieces of the deer and looked at us, absolutely perplexed. With his watery old man’s eyes trained on us, we suddenly realized how close we were: only about thirty feet—so close we could smell him. It was a heavy, evil smell, like something rotting in a damp cave.
We put out our arms, ready to bolt, and backed up slowly toward the deck while he watched. I believe he was as surprised and baffled by this whole affair as we were. He looked around, snorted once and made for the hills, crashing through the underbrush with all the grace of a bulldozer.
Once he had disappeared, we just looked at each other, a crazed glee rising up in our eyes. It was if we had witnessed the Virgin Mary. All the rest of that day we glowed.
After that, everywhere we went, people asked us about it. Now, more than two years later, I’m still repeating the story. Some of Vernon’s more spiritually inclined believe it must be some kind of modern miracle while others say there are, without exception, no moose in Arizona (it’s a fact!), especially not misshaped, rangy moose that attempt to mate with man-made objects. As far as we’re concerned, it doesn’t matter what anybody says. We don’t car
e what can be confirmed or denied: we were there, we saw him, he belongs to us.
It kills Frank that he wasn’t a witness to this marvel that occurred in his own back yard. He wonders why we didn’t shoot the damn thing, or at least take a picture of it. I have a whole cabinet full of guns, ready for use, he says, just for occasions like this. I think he’s become obsessed with it; he still talks about it all the time and occasionally he’ll wander out into the hills with his binoculars hoping to see it for himself, just once. I think in some small way he identifies with that ugly, lonesome thing, with the confusion that comes with being lost in the world, fearful of what you can’t understand, of all the unfamiliar country.
For a few years there were four of us, not just three. He had to have one of the worst names on record: Hyman Dimbatt. Not only was his first name part of a woman’s sexual apparatus, but his last you’d use for somebody who’d poured orange juice on their corn flakes. He came to Vernon to live with his uncle’s family the summer before the eighth grade. There had been problems with his family in Albuquerque that no amount of persuasion could get him to talk about.
Hymie had a great sense of humor. You’d have to, I guess, with a name like that. He was taller than the rest of us by almost a foot and walked around in an apologetic hunch. We tried to teach him to play basketball but he had no talent for it. He couldn’t put the ball in the hoop from a foot away! He was a klutz and had the body of a freak but at least he was hilarious. He’d trip and dive headlong into the wall, books and pens flying everywhere, just to make you smile. When we got old enough to think we were men, we’d spend the night at Waylon’s and play poker and smoke Swisher Sweets. Hymie would perform some antic Jerry Lewis hilarity and I’d laugh so hard that I once chucked up a whole night’s worth of Michelob and corn chips right on the biggest pot of the night.
Hymie was with us for nearly three years. After a summer day spent hauling hay on his uncle’s alfalfa field, Hymie and a couple of the wetback farmhands went to cool off at the Cannon. The Cannon was a corrugated steel culvert, about twenty yards long with a diameter of two and a half feet. It is still the only channel that regulates the irrigation water from the reservoir canal to the fields south of town. If you went at a time when the gates were up and the water was rushing out, you could sit down at the culvert’s mouth in the cold roaring current and let it take you full force through sixty feet of blue darkness—your own screams slamming back in your ears—and then surging out, shot like a pea from a straw, newly born in the bright light of day, plunging ten feet, arms and legs flailing, into a foaming muddy pool. This used to be one of the sublime aspects of summer in Vernon.
Hymie was the first to go in that day, and as it turned out, the last ever. When they went to the other end and couldn’t see any sign of him, the wetbacks got worried. They looked into the culvert, but the water was extremely high and all they could see was blackness. They thought maybe Hymie had played a trick on them, gone through the Cannon, gotten out of the pool and hidden behind a bush just to give them a scare. I can imagine them, their eyes wide with concern, yelling “Hymie? Hymie? Dónde está?” By the time they got someone who could shut the gates down, Hymie had been in there over fifteen minutes. They found his long, naked body wrapped around an ancient wooden tennis racket that had somehow become wedged crosswise in the middle of the culvert. His wristwatch was found a hundred yards away at the bottom of the ditch and his underwear out in Henderson’s milo field a few days later. Nobody knows what became of his pants. For months after they put steel grates over both ends of the Cannon, you could hear parents and the older citizens around town saying how it takes someone to die for people to get serious, for precautions to be taken.
Hymie’s folks showed up a day later looking pale and stricken, like war refugees, and took his body back to Albuquerque. Waylon, Louis and I went to the funeral together but the directions his uncle had given us weren’t accurate and we got lost. We were sixteen, I had just received my driver’s license and none of us had ever driven in a town with stop lights before. I still hadn’t mastered the art of making a left turn in traffic, and we had people honking at us and giving us the finger. I got spooked and began driving like someone with no concept of what a brake or a gearshift was; I drove over medians, ran red lights and nearly had us on our way to early funerals of our own.
While Hymie was being eulogized and lowered into the earth, we were in a Winchell’s asking a fat black lady for directions home.
I’ve just gotten off work and leaves are tumbling down on the hood of my truck. It’s not evening or afternoon, but that perfect in-between time when you can see the molecules of the air. I’m not ready to go home to my empty little trailer by the reservoir, so I’m driving around, smelling the wood smoke that’s trailing out of Vernon’s chimneys.
I pass the house where my family lives, the house I lived in my entire life until I went to college. I park on the other side of the street, intent on going inside to say hello, maybe talk with my father about the Oklahoma job, but instead I walk around to the side of the house where Marty Isaacson, our next-door neighbor to the north, has an acre plot of corn that adjoins our property. I stand in the old brittle stalks and watch. I’m across from the kitchen window, which is situated just above the sink. The light coming out of the house is almost blinding. My mother comes into view and I step back deeper into the corn. She is washing something in the sink, talking back over her shoulder, and my father’s voice is in the background, a low thrumming. He is the principal of the high school, town council chairman, always talking on the phone. Somewhere in the house I hear a toilet flush.
I have the feeling of something empty opening up inside me, an expanding hollow feeling like homesickness, here, ten yards away from my own house. With the mulberry trees out front, the smell of chicken enchiladas from inside, the splintered dent in the garage door I made coming home late one night, it’s the most familiar place in the world to me, but it’s not mine, not anymore. I had a good life here as a kid—so good it almost makes me feel guilty. I know I should be somewhere else, working to make my own place, busting my ass to become the successful, independent guy everybody expects, but something—a fluttering in the stomach, the weight of my own insides—keeps me where I am.
My two little brothers come out into the front yard and start playing Wiffle ball. They are supposed to be raking leaves before supper but no one is supervising, so they’re working on their fastballs and sliders. They’re calling each other cocksuckers, just quiet enough so no one inside can hear them. My mother turns and laughs at something. She has white, beautiful teeth.
It has become night without me realizing it and I am absolutely invisible, lost in the corn. I’m not happy or sad or anything. I stand there watching for a long time, until the air is blue-black and the cold has taken the feeling from my feet and hands.
“I don’t know about that,” Louis says. “Shit, I don’t know. How much you say a month?”
“Two thousand minimum. With overtime you can make three and a half.”
It’s late and we’re driving around town, cruising, in Louis’ grizzled old VW Bug. I’ve just finished telling him about the mobile-home job my father is urging me to take. Waylon is working the late shift at the gas station, so it’s just the two of us.
“We’d have to be in Oklahoma City by December first,” I say.
“That’s in what, ten days? That’s the weekend we were going hunting.”
I shrug, pick up an old, dirty Sports Illustrated that’s among the garbage under my feet and page through it.
“You said something to Waylon?” Louis says.
“I figured I’d ask you first. We can talk to him on the way over to Payson tomorrow night.”
“You going to do it?” Louis says, like he’s daring me to say yes.
“It’s twice what I make at the mill. The three of us could go and we’d have a party, we could roll cigarettes with five-dollar bills.”
“All that money
,” Louis smiles. “Think of the women.”
“And Albuquerque’s right on the way. There’s our chance to pay Hymie a visit.”
Though it’s been over five years since the day we couldn’t find the cemetery, we’ve yet to go back to give it another shot, to pay Hymie our last respects. We’ve planned trips to see him so many times I can’t count, but always, it seems, there’s something getting in the way.
“Man,” Louis says with a far-off look in his eyes, studying a ketchup stain on his shirt for a long time. Hymie’s death seems to have affected Louis more than anyone. He won’t discuss it, won’t even say Hymie’s name, and when I tell him this is the kind of thing he needs to talk out, he just shakes his head: no, no, no.
He spits on a paper napkin and starts rubbing the stain out of his shirt. There is no need for him to actually look at the road; we’ve driven these streets so many times we could do it blindfolded.
“I just have all this shit to worry about,” Louis says. “You know that lawyer my pop just hired?” He goes into a long explanation about the latest news of his parents’ ongoing divorce: alimony, division of property, and so on. Right now, Louis is a sort of go-between for his mother and father, and he sincerely believes that if he can manipulate everything properly, his parents will get back together. They love each other, he told me once, I just have to make them remember that.
The reasons behind the divorce everybody knows—this is a small town—and the story is quite simple: Mrs. Tilousi was making trips to Santa Fe every week or two where she was supposed to be involved with the production of a book on Native American photography, but instead, as everybody but Louis’ idealist father could guess by then, was really having an affair with the photographer. Mr. Tilousi never realized that his wife, a fervent, fast-moving woman, could not be confined in a tiny place like Vernon. I remember spending the night at Louis’ once when I got up to go to the bathroom, and there she was, alone in the front room, looking out the window, dancing to an old Sinatra song and kissing her own hand.