Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  Roger and Eleanor Fairchild soon started a belated family of their own, adopting two kids. By the time Dairy turned eighteen, he was a high school dropout who was too old anymore for anyone to even try to control.

  “They kicked him out. Just told him he’d have to live somewhere else. Eleanor told me later that Roger said it was either Dairy or him.”

  And so, for the second time in seven years, Eleanor evicted her own child. I’m wondering how the Fairchilds’ two youngest children turned out.

  When I hear all this crap, and I think about how Peggy took care of her own unforgiving mother in her later, helpless years, I want to take the next plane south and give my old dope-addled mom a very big hug.

  “We kind of offered to let him stay here,” Harshman says, but I can’t imagine the offer was especially heartfelt, given Dairy’s track record.

  Instead, Harshman says Dairy stayed in Worcester, rooming with some friends, doing whatever work a high school dropout with an attitude problem could find.

  “And then, he just disappeared.”

  His mother would try to keep in touch, which understandably wasn’t easy. One day, Harshman says, she realized it had been eight months since anyone had seen him. His friends said they always figured he would come back. He had a tendency to disappear for weeks if not months on end, then come back with outrageous stories about adventures on fishing boats or scamming tourists out on Cape Cod.

  The cops didn’t seem to have much interest in finding him. Nobody had much interest, I’m thinking but not saying. After a while, everyone forgot about Dairy Flynn.

  “Later on, Eleanor never wanted to talk about him. I tried a couple of times, but she’d just cut me off, say something like, 'we couldn’t save him,’ and the conversation would be closed.”

  He gets up once, to show me a photograph of Dairy Flynn, circa 1971. He looks a little like his sister. He also looks pissed off.

  I see no sense in mentioning the fate of the 1964 Vees to August Harshman, other than to mention that most of them have gone on to their reward.

  He gives me directions to the cemetery where Frances Flynn is buried.

  “Oh,” he says, as I’m leaving, “did you want something to drink. Some water, maybe, or coffee?”

  I tell him no thanks, and not to bother to get up. I can let myself out. He and his dog are more than willing to take me up on that.

  The cemetery is easier to find than Harshman’s house was. Frannie’s grave is a challenge, though. The graves aren’t in any sort of order, not parallel or perpendicular to each other for the most part, just rambling all over the hill that overlooks the town.

  Finally, I find it. Harshman said he hadn’t been out to see her grave for a couple of years. “I go to enough funerals as it is without keeping up with all the already dead.” But Frannie’s grave looks better kept than most of the ones around it. There are no other Flynns residing here that I can see. I know from my afternoon interview that her father isn’t buried anywhere, and that Eleanor is resting in peace back in Worcester.

  Somebody, though, has sure as hell been here.

  Frances Flynn’s gravestone seems to be of the cut-rate variety, and it’s adorned only by her name and dates of birth and death. On top of it, though, slowly wilting in the Vermont April that feels like Virginia February, are two dozen yellow roses.

  I HAVE an eight P.M. flight back to Richmond, and it’s four thirty already when I start toward Albany. I’m barely out of Wells when my cell phone goes off.

  Just as I answer and determine that Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon is calling me, I drive into a deep, dark valley, and I lose the reception. I know my life has been changed in wondrous ways by the invention of the cell phone, but sometimes I just want to throw the damn thing out the window.

  When I get to the top of the next hill, with a view of what must be the Adirondacks in front of me, I call back.

  “Willie,” the voice on the other end says, “Jumpin’ Jimmy’s got some real bad news. Les is gone.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  FRIDAY

  Les took his final turn for the worse about two yesterday afternoon, Peggy told me when I got back last night.

  She, Awesome Dude and Jumpin’ Jimmy were there. Les looked over at Peggy and squeezed her hand, and then he squeezed it harder, and then he let go.

  This time, the hospital was a little more diligent about keeping an eye on him, or maybe it was just Peggy screaming at the top of her lungs that got help there in a hurry.

  There wasn’t much they could do, though. The hemorrhage probably would have taken out someone in much better shape than Les. They did all they could, wheeling him away to work their magic while others herded Peggy, Awesome and Jimmy to the “family room.” A professional trained in delivering bad news came in shortly after three thirty and told them what they already knew.

  “I wish I could have seen him one more time,” Peggy said, knowing that the Les she loved for the last twelve years had left several days before they hauled his body away.

  “WE SHOULDA got married,” she says. We’re sitting in her living room and, yes, she’s already had something to smoke, and it’s not yet nine o’clock. Wanna make something of it? “He offered to, but I said I hadn’t had very much luck with marriage, and he said whatever suited me, suited him.”

  BY THE time I got in last night, half of Oregon Hill was at Peggy’s house. My mother won’t have to cook for a year, if she can keep all this crap from spoiling. Nobody misses a death pageant up here, even if they haven’t spoken to the deceased in ten years. Even Jerry Cannady, stepping briefly outside his pest persona, went down to KFC and brought a bucket of chicken to add to the redneck bacchanalia. People I hadn’t seen in years were there. Walker Johnson very considerately brought a twelve-pack of Blue Ribbon with him. We toasted Les and I congratulated him on making bail.

  “Goat posted it,” he said. “I don’t think he’s too proud of me.”

  I told him that kicking the punk’s ass was the honorable thing to do. He seemed pleased.

  I sat with Peggy and then, with Cindy’s help, started making all the arrangements nobody ever wants to make. I am thankful that Les didn’t tell us he wanted his body shipped back to Wisconsin or frozen like Ted Williams’s head. As was Les’s custom, he kept it simple, doing what caused those around him the least trouble. He’d made it clear that a cremation was fine with him. Still, there were a thousand things to do, and we couldn’t get Peggy to quit obsessing.

  Cindy was already at my mother’s house when I got there.

  “Peggy,” she said, putting her arm around her after she’d worried out loud for about the fifteenth time about finding a minister, “go smoke something. We’ve got this covered.”

  THIS MORNING, I have to face the abyss without the nervous energy that kept me going last night.

  Now, it’s just sad. I mean, I really am going to miss Les Hacker. I am not used to mourning the people who are really close to me. Sure, I’ve seen three wives come and go, but they’re just not sharing my address. They’re not gone for good, not gone-gone. When I was a kid, I saw father figures decide that they weren’t really ready for commitment, then sat with Peggy when she told me, more than once, that it was just me and her, that we were well rid of the sons of bitches.

  None of that prepares me for this. And my duty, as the secondary mourner, is to try to help Peggy get through it.

  “What am I going to do?” she says. Her eyes are all puffy and she can’t sit still.

  I tell her that she’ll do what she did before Les came along, which starts her crying again. Awesome Dude is shaking his head at me. My interpersonal skills apparently have sunk to subDude level.

  I tell her that I will always be here. For better or worse, so does Awesome. But it sucks, without a doubt. Peggy has been as self-sufficient as anyone I’ve ever known. She raised a kid with a suspicious tan here in Alabaster Acres with damn little help from anyone, daring anybody to suggest she wasn’t worthy of th
eir respect.

  “Sometimes,” she told me once, after I’d been sent home from school again for fighting, “you’ve got to just keep hitting them until they respect you.”

  She carried her own weight and mine, somehow finding the money to send me to college. And then, when love or even endurable male companionship seemed to have grabbed the last train out of town, she met Les Hacker. Les brought a blessing and a curse with him. The blessing was that, for the first time since she was a teenager, she had someone she could lean on, 24-7. The curse? It couldn’t last forever. Peggy let her guard down, let love and trust slip in the back door. Now, with Les gone, it’s like taking a kid from an orphanage, letting her live with a big, happy family for a few years, and then sending her back.

  It is not enough to suggest that my mother should be happy for the good times they had. That pearl of wisdom can wait for a time when common sense starts edging grief out the door.

  Andi’s here, too. She’s been a rock for her grandmother the last two weeks. I ask her how she’s able to get so much time off. She says there are a million restaurant jobs out there, and anyone who thinks she ought to put work before family can kiss her butt.

  I tell my daughter that I don’t know how she could have turned out so well, considering who her father is. She tells me to shut up.

  In the early afternoon, I step outside on the porch to have a smoke.

  My old buds are here. Abe’s gotten off early from his custodial duties, and we’re joined by R. P. McGonnigal and Andy Peroni. Andy, ever mindful of the solemnity of the occasion, asks me if I’m screwing his sister. I tell him to go inside and ask her himself.

  “I can’t believe you still smoke that shit,” R. P. says. Hell, we all smoked when we were kids. It was the manly thing to do. Like underage drinking and getting arrested, it was part of the Hill rites of passage.

  I tell him that I’m only doing it to keep my weight down.

  “You oughta try it,” I tell him, knowing that Richard Petty McGonnigal is as vain as a cheerleader about his appearance.

  We tell the stories we always tell. Some of them never even happened, or at least not the way we remember them now. I know that Andy Peroni never pissed in the baptismal fount at the Baptist church just before a few sinners were saved one Sunday morning, but he always meant to, and that’s practically the same thing. Our stories, like our waistlines, have evolved.

  “Les was a prince,” R. P. says, and we all nod.

  “He’s the only one Peggy never kicked to the curb,” Custalow says. We agree that this is high praise indeed.

  I’ve smoked my second Camel and am about to go back inside when Abe pulls me to the only corner of the porch that isn’t awash with mourners.

  “Rand was asking about you today,” he says. “He said to tell you that he’s gotten another call. Whoever’s calling him seems to think that somehow Rand can get that guy out of jail by not pressing charges.”

  By this time, I’m about ready to let the world do what it will with Raymond Gatewood. I don’t like the son of a bitch. But the evidence seems to be undeniable to just about anyone except our fine police chief that Gatewood isn’t Les’s shooter. Or, if he is, it’s a hell of a coincidence, because somebody’s been picking off the ’64 Vees for about twenty-seven years. I’m pretty sure Raymond Gatewood wasn’t killing people before he was toilet-trained.

  “He says he’s afraid to go outside.”

  “Well, Gatewood hasn’t talked to anybody except me and his lawyers, unless he’s got somebody in the lockup who’s trying to do him a favor. And I tend to believe him when he says he doesn’t have any friends. He’s worked pretty hard at that.”

  I start to go inside again. The funeral’s going to be on Monday, and I’m starting to feel like Peggy. We’ve got a hundred things to do. There are still cousins in Wisconsin who haven’t been notified, although if they were close, I suppose one or more of them might have hauled their asses down here before Les died. I know Peggy got the word to what family Les had left up there.

  “Wait,” Custalow says, putting his hand on my arm. “There’s something else.”

  Abe doesn’t usually talk for the sake of talking. If he has “something else,” it’s probably worth my time to discover what it is.

  “I found something,” he says, “but I want to show it to you. It might be nothing, but you need to see it.”

  I promise Abe Custalow that, as soon as I can spare a few minutes from dealing with my mother’s (and my) grief, he can show me what he’s talking about.

  Abe has to get back to the Prestwould. I hesitate for a moment, then pull out another Camel. I’m not quite ready to go back in there yet.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SATURDAY

  Abe Custalow has, as has often been the case in our fucked-up, intertwined lives, shown me the light.

  The first time I saw him, I think Abe was whipping some boy’s butt for calling him a bad name reflecting on his Native American heritage. Abe did that pretty regularly for a while, until kids got tired of getting their asses handed to them. We became friends, probably because neither of us was a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the All-White Club. My African-American heritage was and is barely visible to the naked, unbigoted eye, but kids overhear their parents and some kids, in case you’ve forgotten, can be cruel as a hanging judge.

  The all-white guys who later gravitated to us are still, along with Abe, my best friends. The ones who are left, R. P., Andy and Goat Johnson, are quite simply there for me. And nobody’s been more “there” than Abe.

  He taught me how to fight and how to keep from having to fight. He taught me how to know the point at which either fight or flight was inevitable, and how flight was just going to lead to another fight later on, so land the first punch and as many in a row as you can afterward, just to make your point.

  After a while, nobody in his right mind called Abe a Tom-Tom, and nobody laid the n-word on me more than once. If the boy was bigger, I just waited until later and ambushed him, using whatever foreign object was at hand.

  “They don’t deserve a fair fight,” was the way Abe Custalow, all of nine years old, explained it. Made sense to me.

  Most of the kids I went to school with were decent, as kids go. A few of them, though, needed etiquette lessons. We gave them, free of charge.

  Abe was always big for his age. I wasn’t, so it sometimes was necessary to get people’s attention. A kick in the balls usually did it. I did spend a fair amount of time in the principal’s office, and once in a while I got suspended, but Peggy always stood behind me if my motives were pure, and sometimes even if they weren’t.

  “Just try not to get your butt killed,” she told me once, when I was eleven. “Some of those little bastards might use more than their fists.”

  I found that out one day, a year later. Billy Ray Pitts had come to Oregon Hill when his father got five years in prison for his role in a bank robbery. Billy Ray, his brother and his mother, who’d been living somewhere on the North Side, had rented a place over on China Street, perhaps to be closer to Mr. Pitts, who now resided at the state penitentiary over across Belvidere. Billy Ray was ugly as a mud fence, with bad teeth and the onset of what would become a near-terminal case of acne. And, he was mean. It was said that the apple had not fallen far from the tree.

  We were in the sixth grade. Billy Ray, being new to the neighborhood, hadn’t learned all the social graces that made living in Oregon Hill so much more pleasant. He had not learned, among other things, not to fuck with Abe Custalow and Willie Black.

  He was fearless, which isn’t a bad thing, as long as you don’t combine it with a near-fatal case of dumb. He had made a few borderline get-your-ass-kicked comments in school, at recess and in the lunchroom, and we let them pass, but Abe told me one day, a week before it happened, that there wasn’t going to be but one way to shut up Billy Ray Pitts.

  Billy Ray seemed to be assembling a little gang of like-minded future criminals around him
. And then, he stepped in it.

  The day it happened was in late September, so he had only known us for a few weeks.

  He followed us home from school, staying half a block behind us. He had a couple of his new disciples with him, fifth-graders. They seemed to think it was funny when he’d throw a pebble, sometimes hitting us, sometimes not. Abe and I were handling it pretty well. I looked over once, for my cue, and Abe was smiling, like he was savoring an upcoming hearty meal of whip-ass.

  Then, Billy Ray said the magic words.

  Abe remembers it as, “Hey, it looks like Pow Wow the Indian Boy and the nigger are asshole buddies. Maybe they ought to get married.”

  I don’t remember it quite like that, but I do remember the n-word.

  When we dropped our books on the sidewalk and turned around, the fifth-graders sized up the situation in about two seconds, and then Billy Ray Pitts was on his own, just him and his mouth.

  He started out standing his ground, and then, with us running toward him and his former acolytes hightailing it in the other direction, he turned and started running, too. Too late. I tackled him before he got to the corner, and we proceeded to kick his butt across the corner and halfway to his house. I’ll admit, we were enjoying it. We’d let him get up and try to start running, then Abe would kick him to the curb or trip him, and we’d stomp him some more. The fifth-graders saw it all, staying at least a half block away, now firmly on our side.

  By the time he got to his house and inside the front door, we were feeling our oats pretty good. We called him every kind of pussy we could think of. We banged on the front door and the windows. His mother was at work, and I guess Billy Ray’s little brother was hiding under the bed by this time.

  We were about to leave when the door opened. Billy Ray Pitts stepped out with a shotgun in his trembling, twelve-year-old hands.