The Last True Love Story

by Brendan Kiely

  The next morning, after grabbing more provisions from the parking lot village, made up of all those who remain behind for the three-day show, we put Yellow Mountain behind us. As we speed east, the desert morphs from the mustard yellow of the New Mexican plateau into the green grassland of northern Texas, and the land sinks slowly into the wide basin of Middle America. It’s not far after the dry and dusty creek bed of the Plaza Larga just outside of Tucumcari, New Mexico that we cross up and over one final rise in the road, and the last hill, mesa, and butte are behind us, and Texas extends into what seems like the whole rest of the country, an endless expanse of grassland. Heavy clouds gather all morning, and by the time we cross the border into Texas, the storms over the flatlands look like the limbs of an enormous beast loping across the desert. Lightning flashes in the distance. At first the road is still dry, the rain approaches from the north, its wet breath hovering at the edge of the road, waiting, but then the highway bends, and we drive straight into the storm, its smoky arms wrapping around us, pulling us in.

  It is the road to Ithaca, the road to Gma, and the road to Dead Dad, too.

  I turn back to Gpa. “Do you think my father loved my mother?”

  Gpa blinks. He answers slowly. “He did.”

  “But what about later? What about when he was with the other woman?”

  “It’s hard to know,” Gpa says. He shakes his head. “Once he had gone that far, I wondered if he could ever come back.”

  “But you weren’t honest with me about him. She wasn’t either.”

  Gpa nods. He looks back out the window. “We loved you, Teddy. We still do. It’s confusing. Maybe you were too young to understand. Maybe you still are.” He pauses.

  “I don’t think I am,” I say.

  “Maybe you aren’t,” he says.

  A steam gathers tight and heavy in me like the rain clouds flattening the sky above. The world, maybe only my perspective, looks skewed, like the road ahead runs into the closing vise grip where the sky and the earth become one. It looks strange, and confusing, and yet I’m drawn to this unknown. It’s like the old Greek myth, in which Uranus, the sky, and Gaia, the earth, join and from their love all life is born.

  We’re all quiet again, listening to Corrina’s other playlist, the music she likes more, music from our lifetime: Conner Youngblood, Kimbra, Nick Hakim, Shakey Graves, Laura Mvula, Daughter, Lucius.

  But then we see signs for something called Cadillac Ranch and Corrina asks me to see how close it is to the highway. The excitement in her voice unzips me. “I can’t believe it,” she says when I tell her it’s right on the 40, a simple dip onto the Frontage Road for a mile or so and it’s right there. Another mile down the road and we’d be back on the 40.

  “We have to see it,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “It’s like this weird mecca for artists and musicians. We can’t just ignore it. We’re so close.”

  I shrug and agree to it. Somewhere in the back of my memories I feel like I’ve heard of the place before, but I can’t call it to mind. Why do some things like words or images or memories or the answers to questions on tests hover just beyond recall in the mind? Why isn’t every memory stored like a photo on the computer of my brain, and when I search for the file I want, it appears bright and clear in high definition instantaneously?

  How much worse it must be for Gpa. What he can remember and what he can’t. What he wants to remember and what he doesn’t.

  I look back at him as I’ve just agreed to another stop. It’s Tuesday. Midday. I don’t know if the time zone has switched or not, and I don’t know what time it is in Shanghai, but I assume it’s close to when Mom is packing for her flight back to LA; half a world away and still she strikes like thunder I can’t hear and lightning I can’t see, shaking me even in her nonpresence, but it occurs to me that some of the anger I feel toward her for keeping the stories of my father from me should also be reserved for the old man in the backseat, who stares out the window, watching the dirt turn to mud all around us. He’s been quiet since breakfast and when Corrina pulls off the 40, guns it down the Frontage Road, and finds the gate in the barbed wire fence that leads to Cadillac Ranch, I’m trying to find the spirit that made me want to make this trip in the first place, but I can’t. Instead, I want to do something for me. I want to spend time with Corrina, just the two of us.

  Corrina parks near the fence, between what has become two puddles the color of milky coffee. Beyond the fence, a couple of hundred feet from the road, ten strange, particolored totems rise from the earth. It’s a cow pasture, and in fact, there are innumerable black cattle grazing in the green field beyond the art installation. There’s a sign on the fence:

  STATE OF TEXAS PROPERTY

  GRAFFITI

  Painting of Anything

  on This Side of Fence

  IS ILLEGAL

  And another one just beside it:

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  DO NOT

  TOUCH OR DISTURB

  THE CATTLE

  The signs are close enough to the entrance of the pasture that no one heading in could miss them, but as we walk closer, dragging Gpa with us through the muddy path toward the cars, it seems everyone has ignored this sign, because the ten cars, as they turn out to be, buried hood-first in the ground, ass up in the air, are all spray-painted in electric pinks, greens, yellows, blues, purples, and reds. They are all Cadillacs of the past; giant fins hug their trunks. I hold Gpa’s hand as we get through the gate and begin to make our way toward them, but he’s moving slowly and eventually I let go and stomp through the caramel-sticky ground to get to the cars with Corrina. I look back, and he’s still making his way, and that feeling burns bigger and hotter within me and I just don’t want to look at him anymore, I don’t want to worry about him, at least for a while. I want a break.

  Corrina tells me about how she first heard the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s version of the song “Cadillac Ranch” but learned they were covering a Springsteen song. As she tells me more about this strange obsession she developed for the place, I find myself staring at the phrase GB loves Brit, glowing in a phosphorescent green on the roof of the closest car.

  There are spray cans littered around the cars, all of which I assume are abandoned because they’re empty, but I begin picking them up and trying them, seeing if I can make a mark of my own on one of the cars. Corrina joins me, there’s no one else there, and we weave in and around the cars, trying can after can, until eventually I find a blue one with something left, and I step into one of the cars that has the door missing and spray onto what would be the floor of the car but is now an upright wall. I make two Vs with curls coming off their peaks, my abstract little birds, flying into the mess of color behind it. I can’t help it. I have to show Corrina. She finds me, and she has another can in her hand. Yellow.

  “Look,” I say, pointing to my birds. “It’s us.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know, but I know we’re going somewhere together.”

  “Which one is you?” she asks.

  I point to the one behind, following the other. She grins and sprays an H beneath it. She sprays a C underneath the leader.

  She’s rolled the sleeves of her gray V-neck into the fake tank top again, and her shoulders are wet from the rain. I point to the spot where her shoulder meets her bicep. “Can I kiss you, right there?”

  She nods, and when I do, she buries her lips in my nest of curls and kisses the top of my head, and we’re about to make out, right there in the half-buried, hypercolored Cadillac, when Old Humper starts barking hysterically.

  “Oh my God,” Corrina says, stepping out of the car. “Where’s your grandfather?”

  I’ve been trying to trap my anger at him inside, because I know it isn’t fair, but it’s what comes out of me first. “Fuck!” But fear comes next and it’s much stronger. “Oh, shit.”

  Old Humper barks again and again, and I find him deeper within the muddy pasture
, closer to the cattle. At first I think he’s playing a game, maybe, just trying to take a new role as herder, but I can hear the warning in his voice, and I know he’s barking for me. Which means he’s barking for Gpa.

  Corrina and I run toward Old Humper. The cattle have moved much closer, and some of them must think we’re bringing food, because they look up at us and start coming even closer. Old Humper now bounces back and forth, barking at the closest cattle, trying to redirect them, and as I get closer, I can see Gpa standing beside one of the cows. It lifts its head and turns, and when it does, it knocks Gpa down in the mud. We can’t see him behind some of the other cows, and we keep running. When we reach him, he’s just sitting there in the mud, looking into his lap like a child.

  “Gpa, are you okay?”

  He looks up at me in sad, frightened confusion.

  “I can’t get you home, if you stay out here in the mud.”

  “I’ve failed you,” he says, not really looking at me.

  “No you haven’t. What are you talking about? I’ve failed you. I shouldn’t have brought you out here. I’m sorry, Gpa. I’m sorry.”

  Old Humper barks, again, at another cow that comes too close.

  “No,” Gpa says. “No matter what you did, Jake. No matter what you do, those can’t be my last words to you.”

  “Gpa, come on. You’re okay. There are no last words here.” But I know he’s not talking to me. I’m not sure if he really thinks he’s talking to my father again, or if he’s just talking to himself.

  “I should know better,” Gpa says. “There’s always grace. No matter what, there’s always grace. I should have looked for it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, son.”

  Corrina looks at me. She’s squatted down next to Gpa and she’s rubbing his back. “What did you say to him?” she asks him, because she knows I’m too afraid to ask, even though I want to know. “It’s okay,” she says, holding him around the shoulders. “It’s okay.”

  “ ‘You’re no son of mine,’ ” Gpa says. “ ‘You’re too selfish. You’re no son of mine.’ ” He stares at the ground in front of him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  Corrina keeps telling him it’s okay and that it will be fine and that we should get him back into the car, and I want to speak, but the words aren’t coming. Finally they do. “I love you,” I say to him. “I love you, Gpa.”

  “Yes,” Corrina says to him. “What about Teddy?”

  “Teddy,” he says, looking at her. “He’s my only chance to make it right.”

  I am both there and not there in that moment. I am both the son and the grandson. The Prodigal Son, sort of, the one who’s actually here and not supposed to blow it all for everyone else. But I am both the center of the world and a speck so small and so far from shore, the tide might carry me away. And this feels good—to have my own needs washed into the swell of Gpa’s and Mom’s. Like we’re one family again.

  “I want to go home,” Gpa says.

  “We’re trying, Gpa. We’re trying.”

  I’m not sure which home he means in the moment, but it sure as hell isn’t a mud pit in Texas in which he drowns in his own guilt.

  If there is any grace in this world, as Gpa says, I believe it is up to us to make it so.

  Corrina and I each take a shoulder and lift him. We carry him out of the pasture, past the DayGlo cars, and Old Humper steps out ahead of us, leading the way back to the Blue Bomber. The mud is everywhere. It covers our shoes. Gpa’s pants and shirt are black with it. Corrina and I are both wearing shorts and the mud paints our legs with abstract globs and drips. Old Humper’s heavy with it too.

  But sometimes I think we find ourselves right there in the shit because we have to rise up out of it. Try, because you must. I keep talking to Gpa, telling him we’ve made it this far and that we’re continuing ahead, and as I get his shoes off and begin to scrape the mud away, I look back into the pasture and think about Gpa doing this very same thing in the mud of Vietnam, a lifetime earlier, dragging one of his boys through the rain to someplace safer, telling him he’d make it home, because we can’t give in or give up in this life when it’s the only life we’ve been given—all for the grace of it all.

  Corrina digs through Gpa’s bag in the trunk for a clean shirt and pants, and I’ve got Gpa’s muddy ones off and have him standing beside me so I can wipe out the backseat of the car, when a maroon minivan pulls up alongside the gate to Cadillac Ranch. Six kids around our age jump out of the minivan. They all wear the same baby-blue T-shirt, some youth group, and I see a man with the same T-shirt sitting in the driver’s seat. He looks straight ahead at me and Gpa, and while I know it must look strange, I’m pissed he keeps looking. The kids stare too. They have to pass us to get to the gate, and they all giggle and snicker as they approach. Not one of them will look me in the eye, and no one asks if we need any help. I stand, try to make my body a screen for Gpa, who’s standing there in his underwear and T-shirt, and I’m trying to think of what to say to these gawking assholes, when Corrina pipes up.

  “Hey!” she yells at them. “Have some decency!” She steps away from the car and waves them on with her arms. “Give the man his dignity!”

  They rush past us and head for the gate, quiet as they go, but one of them bursts out laughing as they step into the muddy path to the cars.

  Corrina hands me Gpa’s nonmuddy clothes, the ones he wore on the day we left, and I set them on the now-clean seat. I dig out one of my own T-shirts and dump half a water bottle into it and wash Gpa’s face and neck and hands with it. Corrina helps me get the clean guayabera on him and sit him on the edge of the backseat. He’s still pantless, and I squat down in front of him and wash the clumps of mud from his ankles. I wash his feet. Gpa remains quiet and compliant through all of it, and I don’t know if he’s confused or tired or just raw like any person feels after a long cry, but he lets us clean him up and get him tucked into the backseat.

  Old Humper’s a mess too, but luckily he’s a short-haired dog, and although the Blue Bomber’s going to stink of him, at least he’s relatively easy to wipe down. Corrina and I find another T-shirt and clean and dry him as best we can, and get him in the backseat with Gpa, just as the kids come back from their romp by the Cadillacs. This time they’re quiet as they pass us, but still gawking, still speaking with their eyes, We are us and you are them. The man in the minivan watches us the whole time—not like a creep, more with a lazy, bored look, as if he’s too used to watching life on the TV screen instead of right there in front of his fucking face, where he might get off his ass and actually go live in it.

  That’s what I yell as they pull away from the fence. “Go live in it!”

  Corrina laughs. “Okay,” she says. “I guess we should get back on the road ourselves.”

  “Wait.” I try to find a clean spot on the T-shirt in my hand, but there isn’t one, so I take my shirt off and use it to wipe the mud from her cheek.

  “Hendrix, are you giving me the shirt off your back?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Oh, that’s so sweet.” She says this in a mockingly saccharine voice, but it’s because she teases that I know she loves it.

  “For you? Anything I can.”

  “You are nearly naked.”

  “True.”

  “Would you give me your shorts?”

  I hesitate. “Like I said. For you? Anything.” Then I smile. “I might be a bit cold, though.”

  She laughs. “Keep your clothes on, Hendrix, and drive us to Tulsa.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. And no shortcuts.”

  I get in the car, and Corrina gets in too, and she fiddles with her phone for some music while I pull back out onto the Frontage Road.

  “Charlie,” she says. “Maybe this is one you like?”

  Gpa’s still quiet in the backseat, and even Old Humper’s whimpering for a little attention. I wish there was a way to map Gpa’s mind, to know where he goes when he’s confused, or if he go
es anywhere at all. Meet him wherever he is, Dr. Hannaway once told me. Don’t ask him to come to you. As Corrina shuffles through her enormous database of songs, I know she’s trying hard to find one that will help him, one that will mean something and keep him present and connected with the one thing he wants most now, Gma—at least his memory of her—and I think of how Dr. Hannaway’s words are so important to the way I think about Corrina, too.

  “I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home,” Grand Funk Railroad. 1970. Closer to Home. Gpa begins to sing along with the song, softly, more saying the words in his squeaky voice than actually singing, but mostly staying with the song. The lyrics repeat and repeat and gather momentum, but somehow they also tell a story, which, of course, I like too. But Gpa fades. He doesn’t stick with it. The words sputter, as if he’s swallowing some; the lines are half broken. What happens in a mind like that, I wonder, the world a window with rock-punched holes and the jagged pane still standing?

  We’re back on the 40, sailing toward Amarillo’s small skyline, as I think about this song that’s playing, a song I now know is pretty typical in its rhythm, blues infused, a rock anthem that builds on the repetition of the lines, as the stanzas repeat the way sometimes lines do in poems. Gpa knows the words because he’s heard them so many times, but he can repeat the words because of the rhythm, the pulse, the music in the lines. As the song builds and as Corrina sings along with it, hoping to lift Gpa with her, I think about what it would be like if I wrote Gpa a song, or a poem, a poem with music and repetition, something he could tap into, one poem that tells the story of him and Gma, something he could repeat for himself like a record that keeps on spinning and never comes to the end.

  CHAPTER 21

  WHAT I KNOW ABOUT THE TRUTH

  The rain eventually stops and the clouds begin to break up as we put the Texas Panhandle behind us, and halfway through the state of Oklahoma the toll roads around Oklahoma City force us to zig and zag and slog along the small routes up and into Tulsa. It takes longer, but we do it, and the only real complication is finding a place to stay. We need showers and beds and a place to keep Gpa quiet and calm and settled. Nobody wants a dog, or if they do, they’ll only accept a credit card payment, which we can’t do, because if Mom has spoken with the folks at Calypso, she knows something is up. If she’s checked our joint account, she’s put two and two together because I withdrew as much cash as I could when we were back in LA. If she’s come home early and found the Blue Bomber gone, the Great Empty Blue even emptier, and even Old Humper vamoosed, she’s looking for us right now, and so are the cops, and because we’ve made it this far, we can’t give in now.