Like Family

by Paula McLain

  “That,” said Bub, “is a jackalope. Half antelope, half jackrabbit, very rare. Maybe only a dozen or so have ever been seen.” He scratched his nose. “Betcha this picture’s worth a hundred dollars.”

  This was our game. His game, rather. I was fourteen; he’d been my father for five years, and in that time, he’d never lost his pleasure at seeing just how much of any story I would swallow, never lost the surprise of finding that, indeed, I’d take most, if not all, of anything. Once, on a drive into the foothills below the Sierras, we saw horses grazing along unbelievably steep grades. When I asked Bub why they didn’t just tumble down the hill, he said that that particular breed of horse was a “kant.” Their legs were shorter on one side so they could keep their balance. Left-legged kants could only walk around and around the hill clockwise, and the right-legged kants could only go the other way.

  I believed him too. Believed though we had our own horses, twelve of them in all, different breeds and temperaments; though we’d spent I don’t know how many Sundays at the livestock auctions without ever coming across a horse with longer legs on one side. Bub grinned and my sisters snickered, and I felt silly — but not so silly that I’d doubt him the next time. Kants and jackalopes and merpeople, these were fine things to think about. Real gold on river bottoms and ten-foot catfish and Sasquatch in the foothills, looking for a wife.

  Before we left the general store, each of us was allowed to choose two of the hard candy sticks that filled the many jars along the fountain counter. They came in every possible flavor, barber-pole-striped and wrapped in noisy cellophane, a nickel apiece. I picked sarsaparilla twice because Bub said it was an old word we didn’t even use anymore.

  “It means root beer,” he said. “But sarsaparilla says it better, don’t you think?”

  I did and was rewarded with a postcard version of the jackalope picture, which I kept safe from stickiness all the way to Uncle Floyd’s house, through Delano and back out along a county road, past loping hills, past mesquite and mariposa twisted and bent over like old women trying to wish their feet into water.

  FLOYD WAS BUB’S UNCLE on his mother’s side and was, according to the aunts, something else. A hoot. A real firecracker. When we drove up, he was sitting up on the porch in a big rocker surrounded by stacks of faded newspapers, dusty knots of nails and fishing tackle, empty feed bags, paint cans and several garden tools with rusted heads. Floyd wore jeans with no shirt or shoes, and a huge straw sombrero — bright pink and green and yellow — flopped this way and that on his head. Pinched between his knees was a square bottle of Jack Daniel’s. As near as I could tell, he’d been drunk all day.

  It was well known but never brought up that Floyd chased women, most notably Bub’s sister, Gloria, when she was in her early twenties and married herself. Gloria had managed to wrestle free of Floyd and straighten herself out, and now she was the one sane adult in Bub’s whole freakish family. But how had Gloria been led astray in the first place? Why was anyone the way they were? My sisters and I had been left over and over, shuffled all over Fresno County like cards in a bent, sweaty deck, and in a way, we felt we were more normal than any of these cousins or uncles; more normal than Noreen, who chewed tobacco and kept half a box of Kleenex stuffed in her bra and a chain of safety pins attached to everything she wore, just in case; more normal than Tina, who had lived in one house her whole life and still wanted her mother to do everything but tie her shoes for her.

  As we climbed out of the car, Floyd called, “Hey,” and flicked one of his hands in hello, but didn’t stand. “It’s too hot to move,” he said, and we had to agree. You could have roasted a turkey in Floyd’s yard. Several large hardwoods shaded the peeling clapboard house, but they didn’t help much. Late-afternoon light busted through to rest on the lawn in patches as big-boned as Floyd’s three huge dogs.

  Freed from the hot backseat, I realized my green terry-cloth shorts were damp through. When I pulled them away from my legs, the skin underneath felt raw and new. I approached the porch slowly. This was my first time meeting Floyd, and although I tried to glimpse some of the dirty dog in him, except for the sombrero, he looked like any man sitting on a porch to me. The grown-ups grunted hello and pawed one another like circus bears, then went inside. Us girls stayed out to explore Floyd’s yard, which looked a lot like our own in terms of clutter. There were piles of scrap lumber and abandoned car parts, and little mounds of leaves and trash waiting for a good burn day. Tina found an old pit for horseshoes, and we played for a while, mainly because the game gave us permission to throw something big and heavy across the yard at one another. This was the reason we liked lawn darts too, and why when we went out shooting pigeons with BB guns, we were much more interested in aiming at the toes of one another’s boots than at anything that might fly.

  Soon enough it was time for supper. Floyd lived alone, and since his idea of cooking meant opening up a can of pork ’n’ beans or slicing potted meat to put on crackers, I was glad we’d brought groceries from the general store for Noreen to prepare: black-eyed peas and beet greens, corn bread and okra and a salty ham hock with skin like a wrinkled pink glove. Everyone drank lemonade except for Floyd, who was still working on his bourbon. I knew enough to know you had to watch out for a drunk, but Floyd seemed to be the good kind, sweet and sloppy, not too loud. His arms swung around when he talked, just missing the lamp.

  After supper, the adults started up a dice game, banishing us to Floyd’s living room, where the carpet looked to be three completely different shades of dirty. There was no TV, no Sorry, no Sears catalog featuring women in goofy underwear. We looked through Floyd’s tackle box for a while, making little pyramids of the lures and sinkers and greasy rubber worms; we read one another’s fortunes in the cluster of glass grapes on Floyd’s coffee table: You will befriend a dog with three legs and a flea problem. Beware the Bazooka wrapper that conceals a dirt clod. At nine o’clock we gave up and went to bed cranky, too bored even to pick a fight. We laid our sleeping bags down so that no one’s feet touched anyone else’s feet or worse, stuck right in anyone’s face. We pinched our eyes and pretended to be asleep, and then, miraculously, we were.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up with my heart thumping the way it does when you can’t get your bearings. Something big floated close to my face, but when I flinched back, I saw it was the couch, scratchy as a dish sponge, inert. Rising up on my elbow, I could see the various lumps of my sisters in their bags and, across the room, Floyd, fast asleep in the living-room chair. Instead of a blanket, he was partially covered by the sombrero, and his mouth was open so wide I could have tossed a nickel in and not hit teeth. He started to snore a little as I watched him, a puppy-dog snore, light and wheezy, but soon got serious about it. His lower lip began to wobble as he blew out, Fred Flint-stone style. Just when I was sure he was going to wake the whole house, he woke himself, choking on his own breath. He sat up, blinking, and looked straight at me, or seemed to. It was hard to tell because he didn’t say a word, just sat there with his eyes unfixed but pointed in my direction.

  Everything was so quiet that I could hear the mantel clock and the small clock over the stove ticking apart, off a bit, competing. My sisters were still except for Penny scritching her feet back and forth against the silky lining of her sleeping bag, one foot cuddling the other. When I looked up again, Floyd’s eyes were still open and unmoving. Was it because I didn’t have my glasses on that his face looked mild and dreamy, so strangely young that I could almost see why a twenty-year-old Gloria would fall for him all those years ago? It was just us two awake in the whole world. Was Floyd waiting for me to say something? Or did he just want to let the moment be?

  “Hi,” I ventured quietly, conspiratorially, and at just that moment, he snorted loudly and started up again, rattling away, getting louder with each exhale. He was asleep, sound asleep with his eyes wide-open, like a zombie. Like the living dead with a sombrero. He’d never been there at all.

  THE
NEXT AFTERNOON, WE all climbed into Floyd’s truck — kids and dogs in the back — and went to visit Floyd’s new girlfriend, Goldie. She lived in the same town, not ten minutes away, with her own house and yard. When we nosed up the dirt drive, her collie, Maxine, let go a happy yelp and danced up to Floyd’s open window. Clearly, Floyd was a favorite. Over near the barn, Goldie stroked a massive red gelding with a currycomb. Seeing us, she fluffed her own hair up with her free fingers, slapped the gelding affectionately on the butt and walked over. She wore a man-size faded-blue Western shirt, tight Levi’s and boots, the heels of which lifted dust as she crossed the yard, smiling.

  Floyd greeted Goldie by throwing both of his long arms over her shoulders to grab her firmly on the ass. This drew a cluck of appreciation from Bub, snorts of Well, I never from Noreen and Hilde and flushes from us girls. Sex, particularly grown-up sex, had us simultaneously baffled and fascinated and grossed out. Yuck, I thought, but kept looking.

  Goldie was older than Bub and Hilde but younger than Floyd — forty-five or forty-six, I guessed — and was still quite pretty. She had a round, tan face, tired brown eyes and superfine frosted hair I can only call beige. Her coral lipstick crept up past one half of her top lip as if she’d put it on without a mirror. Though Goldie had been married before, she was childless.

  “This is my baby,” she said, rubbing her thumbs behind Maxine’s silky ears. “Aren’t you my baby? Yessums.”

  Floyd had been married for some twenty years to Dot, whom everyone still liked. They had three children: John, Michael and Carlynne. John and Mike were in their early twenties and married and talking about starting families. Carlynne was nineteen going on eight. She couldn’t read or write her name and got picked up at her house three days a week by one of those miniature school buses and taken to special classes where they taught her to make change and separate lights from darks and plan a menu around the food pyramid. I never knew what to say to Carlynne. When she was in the room, I held my book way up in front of my face, hoping she’d leave me alone.

  “What are you reading?” she’d ask, and I’d point to the cover, though I knew this was mean. “Oh,” she’d say, walking away. Just that, just “Oh.” I do remember one really good day with her though, when she came out to the house to go riding with us. Bub got her settled on my pony, Queenie, because Queenie was hefty for a Shetland and would take Carlynne’s weight better than Chip or Velvet or Teddy Bear. It had rained the night before and the fields were still a bit soggy, so we skirted the road for a while, then cut over to the dry ditch.

  Usually the ditch was so water-robbed it turned the dirt into parchment paper. Dust would rise up in little poofs from the horse’s hooves when we cantered through. That day, though, the rain had stirred the ditch bottom into a soup of mud and manure. When we clicked the ponies into a trot, mud rained up, flecking my glasses so I couldn’t see a thing. Carlynne wore glasses too, and I could see she was struggling to stay on, flop-flopping way over to one side, which was never a good thing. We slowed the ponies back to a walk, but Queenie was too fired up. She kicked her rear hooves a little, whinnied and took off like a shot toward home. That was one thing about Queenie, she was barn sour and bitchy, and probably knew before we had left the yard that Carlynne wouldn’t be able to rein her in.

  Once Queenie broke loose, the rest of the ponies took off after her. We let them because we wanted to help Carlynne, calling out advice at her back — tell her to whoa, stop kicking your legs, jerk back on the reins — but Carlynne couldn’t even sit up straight the way Queenie was flying through the ditch. They rounded a tight corner, and then we heard a yelp and a loud oof. When we caught up, we saw Carlynne plopped right down in the middle of the ditch on her backside, feet straight out, hands back. She looked so funny there, nearly unrecognizable in her mud bath, and we shouldn’t have laughed but we did. When we finally hauled her up, we lost it altogether because under her was a Carlynne-size dent, a perfect impression of her ass.

  After several tries, we got Carlynne boosted up on Patches behind Tina and started for home. We rode for a few minutes with no noise except the reins slapping a little on the horses’ necks; then Carlynne suddenly popped up with “That was fun.” I thought she was being sarcastic at first — that’s certainly how I would have said it — then it occurred to me that Carlynne didn’t do sarcastic. She wasn’t old enough for that and might never be. Although her body was a woman’s, Carlynne was in every other way a little kid and, like little kids, could say what she thought straight out and mean it. That made her lucky — lucky and different in a good way, and for that one muddy minute, I was happy to be jealous of her.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER the visit to Floyd’s, we were in the car again, this time to Dos Palos to visit Bub’s aunt Birdie and her husband, Lester. They had a little farmhouse on a ditch bank and kept hogs and willful chickens. In their big garden out back, empty bleach jugs spun upside down on poles, the sides slit at increments and bent out like a pinwheel. When a breeze came, the jugs clicked like playing cards in bicycle spokes, keeping, in theory, the rabbits and blackbirds at bay. Noreen stayed at home this trip, but we brought along Cousin Krista for her considerable entertainment value. She’d say anything to anyone and was the one person in Bub’s large, peculiar family that we felt absolutely comfortable with. Krista was now twelve to my fourteen, and in the five years we had known her, she’d only gotten more adorable. Her heart-shaped face was buttery with a tan and clear-skinned; even her lashes and eyebrows glinted with sun.

  “It’s my favorite foster cousin Penny,” she shrieked when we picked her up at Gloria’s, running to throw her arms around Penny’s neck, nearly downing her. “And my other favorite foster cousin,” she said, leaving Penny to come and maul me. “My most other favorite foster cousin of all.”

  When Krista said “foster cousin” it wasn’t only not an insult, it was a compliment, the best kind of in-joke. She was making fun of the way everyone else acted like they treated us so well and of how grateful we were supposed to be. She could do an absolute dead-on impression of Hilde getting mad and puffy and ridiculous, and had only perfected her Stevie Nicks over the years, tossing her hair, flipping an imaginary skirt: Thunder only happens when it’s raining.

  Krista was the only thing that made a weekend at Birdie and Lester’s bearable, where before the breakfast dishes were cleared, everyone was talking about what we should have for lunch. They didn’t have a TV, so we played crazy eights and old maid and Chinese checkers on a set missing too many game pieces. Penny didn’t want to go outside because she had listened too well when Bub told the story of the time a rooster jumped at his face, trying to spur him, and how he had to whack it with a shovel four or five times before it would die. So we stayed inside. We sprawled on the floor, picking at the nap on the carpet, pretending to have long conversations with our make-believe boyfriends on an old rotary phone that was as heavy as a cast-iron skillet. Finally, Hilde and Birdie got tired of us and told us to go out into the yard, roosters or no.

  No doubt about it, Dos Palos was a hole, the land dry and flat, sunbaked to a single pale brown-green color. The sky was thin and white, and the sun was white. Dust devils ripped along the dirt roads, going nowhere, stirring up less than you’d think. The soil pebbled like cornmeal in some places and was so flaky and riddled with cracks in others that you could push a stick in and pop out a thin, flat chunk of earth like a puzzle piece. Underneath, the soil was much darker and slightly moist to the touch, as if it had once known a whole lot of water, was maybe even underwater, a lake bottom or the bed of an enormous river. Now it was just the bones of that, the dry ghost of something better.

  We skirted the roosters, which did seem to be looking at us with some menace, and headed out to the barn, where Bub and Lester were getting ready to go fishing on the Delta-Mendota, a man-made canal full of catfish and carp. Once, on a fishing trip there, I caught a sucker fish nearly a foot long. I fought hard for him and was so proud and so attached to the idea
of the fish that I carried it around on the stringer for a good part of the afternoon. I named him Harry and told Bub I was going to take him home and put him in the goldfish pond in our yard. He said fine, but why didn’t I let him swim around in the bucket until we got ready to go so he didn’t dry right out? I did finally put him in some water, but it was too late; he flopped over once and then lay still, floating at a strange angle, his gills popped open and stuck there looking stretched out, like the neck of a cotton T-shirt that would never lay right again.

  We lobbied to go with Bub and Lester to the Delta-Mendota, but they said they didn’t want us along this time. They would help us get set up to fish there, though, along the ditch out front, which was some four feet across and shallow, its brown current tugging at weeds and water bugs.

  “Are there really fish in there?” Tina asked. She stood barefoot on the bank in a pair of Bub’s cast-off jeans and one of his white undershirts, but it was Hilde’s influence that showed in the downturn of Tina’s mouth as she looked dubiously at the ditch.

  “Sure there’re fish,” said Lester, “but if I was you, I’d get at those crawdads instead.”

  He took up five feet of fishing line, tied an old, spent spark plug on the end for a sinker and then wrapped a piece of raw bacon around that. We watched him toss it in and watched the slow list of the line as the water moved around it. There was no hit, no sudden dip indicating a strike, so we were surprised when Lester started drawing the line back in and even more surprised to see the crawdad surface, holding hard to the droopy bacon, looking like a cross between a baby lobster and a bug.

  “Now, when you get about twenty of them,” said Lester, “that’ll be enough supper for one of you.” He cackled, and he and Bub moved off toward the truck.