The next day, a cold, rainy day, Dad stayed at my place while I took my crew up to Martinsdale, where we’d hired a crane to drop the bed of an old railroad car onto cribbing to make a bridge over a creek. We’d brought in a stack of treated planks for the deck, and I had a welder on hand to make up the brackets, a painfully shy fellow with a neck tattoo who still had his New York accent. Five of us stood in the downpour and looked at the creek rushing around our concrete work. The rancher stopped by to tell us that if it washed out he wasn’t paying for anything. When he was gone, Joey, the welder, said, “See what a big hat can do for you?”
I’d left Dad at loose ends, and I learned later that he’d driven all the way to Helena to see the state capitol and get a lap dance and then slept it off at a Holiday Inn a half mile from Last Chance Gulch.
I’ve been told that I come from a dysfunctional family, but I have never felt that way. When I was a kid, I viewed my parents as an anthropologist might view them and spent my time as I sometimes spend it now, trying to imagine where on earth they came from. I was conceived soon after Dad got back from Vietnam. I’m not sure he actually wanted to have children, but Mom required prompt nesting when he returned. I guess Dad was pretty wild back then. He’d been in a lot of firefights and loved every one of them, leading his platoon in a daredevil manner. He kept wallet pictures of dead VC draped over the hood of his jeep, like deer-camp photos. His days on leave had been a Saigon fornication blitz, and it fell to Mom to stop that momentum overnight. I was her solution, and from the beginning Dad viewed me skeptically.
One night, I crept down the stairs in my Dr. Denton footies to the sound of unusually exuberant and artificial elation and, spying from the door of the kitchen, saw my father on his knees, licking pie filling from one of the beaters of our Sunbeam Mixmaster, tearful and laughing, his long wide tongue lapping at the dripping goo. The extraordinarily stern look on my mother’s face above her starched apron, as he strained upward to the beater, disturbs me to this day.
I have a million of these, but disturbance, as I say, is not trauma, and besides I moved away a long time ago. I came to Montana on a hiking trip with my girlfriend after college and never went back. I’ve left here only once, to join a roofing crew in Walnut Creek, California, and came home scared after two months. I saw shit at parties there that it’ll take me years to forget. Everyone from the foreman on down had a crystal habit. I had to pretend I was using just to get the job.
Dad returned from Helena and sat in my kitchen with his laptop to catch up on business while I met with Dee and Helen Folsom out on Skunk Creek, leaving the whir of the interstate and veering into real outback within a quarter mile. I was building the Folsoms’ first house, on a piece of ground that Dee’s rancher uncle had given him. Not a nice piece of ground: it’d be a midwinter snow hole and a midsummer rock pile. The Folsoms were old enough to retire, but, as I mentioned, this was their first home. They were poor people. Dee had spent forty years on a fencing crew and constantly massaged his knotty, damaged hands. Helen cooked at the high school, where generations of students had ridiculed her food. I could see that this would be a kind of delayed honeymoon house, and I wanted to get it right.
The house was in frame, and Helen stood in what would be the picture window, enchanted by not much of a view — scrub pine, a shale ledge, the top of a flagless flagpole just below the hill along the road. Her expression would not have been out of place at the Sistine Chapel or on the rim of the Grand Canyon. One hand was plunged into the pocket of her army coat while the other twirled a pair of white plastic reading glasses. Dee just paced in his coveralls, happy and worried, pinching the stub of his cigarette.
I had cut this one to the bone — crew salaries and little else. The crew — carpenter, plumber, electrician — sensed the tone of things and worked with timely efficiency. Dee had prepared the site himself with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. We had a summer place for a plastic surgeon under way at Springhill, and if I’d looked a little closer, I might have seen it bleeding materials that managed to end up at the Folsoms’.
While I was at work, Dad was wandering the neighborhood, talking to my neighbors. After a few days, he knew more of them than I did, and I would forevermore have to be told what a great guy he was. But by the time I got home, he was in his underwear with the portable phone in his lap, nursing a highball and looking disconsolate. “Your mother called me from the club,” he said. “I understand there was some dustup with the manager over the sneeze shield at the salad bar. Mom said she couldn’t see the condiments, and it went from there.”
“From there to where?” I inquired peevishly.
“Our privileges have been suspended.”
“Golf?”
“Mm, that, too. Hey, I’ll sort it out.”
I nuked a couple of Rock Cornish hens, and we sat down in the living room to play checkers. Halfway through the game, my father went into the guest room and called my mother. This time she told him that she’d bought a car at what she thought was the dealer’s cost. Dad shouted, “Asshole, who got the rebate? I’m asking you, goddamn it, who got the rebate?” I heard him raging about the sneeze shield then, and after he quieted down I heard him say plaintively — I think I heard this — that he no longer wished to live. I always looked forward to this particular locution, because it meant that they’d get back together soon.
I’m not lacking in affection for my parents, but they are locked into something that is so exclusive as to be hermetically sealed to everyone else, including me. Nevertheless, I’d had a bellyful by then. So when my father came back to finish the checkers game, I asked him if he’d enjoyed the lap dance.
“ ‘Enjoy’ isn’t quite the word. I’m aware that the world has changed in my lifetime and I’m interested in those changes. I went to this occasion as … as … almost as an investigator.”
“You might want to withhold the results of your research from Mom.”
“How dare you raise your voice to me!”
“Jump you and jump you again. Checkers isn’t fun if you don’t pay attention.”
“I was distracted by the club thing. I’m red, right?”
At some point, I knew he would confide that he and my mother were considering a divorce. They’ve been claiming to be contemplating divorce for half of my lifetime, and I have found myself stuck in the odd trope of opposing the idea just to please them. I don’t know why they toss me into this or if only children always have this kind of veto power. I do care about them, but what they don’t know, and I would never have the heart to tell them, is that the idea of their no longer being a married couple bothers me not at all. My only fear is that, separate, no one else would have them, that I’d get stuck with them one at a time or have to watch them wither away in solitude. These scenarios give me the fantods. Am I selfish? Yes and no. I’m a bachelor and hope someday to be an old bachelor.
My father picked at a bit of imaginary dust on his left shirt cuff, and I suspected that this was the opener to the divorce gambit. Cruelly, I got up and left the game half finished.
“Can you pardon me? I was slammed from daylight on. I’m all in.”