“What’s going on here?”
She didn’t say anything. We were very still for a long period of thought, at the end of which she abruptly got up and announced she was taking me home. I sat on the edge of the bed, running both hands through my hair, trying to revive the thrill of house painting. But as we retraced the road back through Harlowton and turned south toward the Absaroka Mountains, she talked about her life growing up, the early departure of her mother, her dislike of her father, and finally of the place itself. I found hope: maybe the house was the problem! But in this too I was mistaken. She dropped me at my door and said, “You’ve got my number. Put on a clean shirt and take me someplace nice.”
I resumed work on the nice old folks’ house. I bought a few things — a couple of scrapers in different sizes, some paper dust masks, a pair of coveralls — but everything else, starting with the ladder, I had to rent. I was more than a little aware of the escapism of my house painting endeavor: I didn’t need the money, I didn’t need the job. But what was wrong with escapism? I was in a situation that made escape in every form entirely attractive.
The ladder, an aluminum extension type, I raised to its full length and rested between the two upper windows on the sunlit clapboard of a cool, sunny morning. Ascending the first two rungs revealed the old couple gazing into my face; I freed one hand and gave them a friendly wave before climbing past their window. With each rung I had a new view of the sun making its way through the lawns and alleys of the town. Higher and higher I climbed, until an intimation of eternity infused my survey of rooftops. The chimneys were wonderfully individualized: some straight and tall, some listing to one side, some brick and wrapped in silvery flashing. A pair of schoolchildren stopped at the base of the ladder and gazed rung by rung until they found me and gave uncertain waves before moving on, occasionally punching each other or trying to grab each other’s hat. As the sun rose, I could smell the wood warming before my face, a pleasant smell that intensified as I scraped the curled old paint away until it showered and fluttered to the ground.
By the end of the day I had prepared the front of the house and started on the north side, which was less forgiving: the wood was damp from shade and the paint clung to it, requiring more diligent scraping that sometimes sent the tool astray and gouging into the soft material underneath. When it started to cool and I felt too tired to continue, I descended the ladder and made a neat array of my tools, masks, and gloves, which I covered with a plastic sheet weighted down with rocks.
Then, still in my rumpled white coveralls, I walked to the cemetery, pruning shears in my pocket and wearing a paper hat I had picked up at the paint store from a bin of promotional paper hats. I chose one with a Rottweiler on the front (I liked dogs) without realizing that it advertised a condom popular with the hip-hop culture and urged the viewer, “Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’” on one side and “Get yo freak on” on the other. In fact, I was oblivious until I noticed the excitement it created among young people along my way to the cemetery. I went on wearing it out of defiance despite the great urge to throw it away. I wished I had picked the “Do yo thang” hat I’d first spotted, but it lacked the dog picture.
The summer annuals at my parents’ graves were still managing better than any of the others I saw, and I reflected on the proprietary smugness I had acquired since first looking after this small place. In fact, it had attained something of the quality of home ground through my care, and it was hard to avoid thinking of how it might be improved. I was sure that anyone visiting family burial places looked back on their own lives as set against the time when the now dead were living. Surely that was what such visits did. At the edge of this cemetery was a small stream where I’d once fished, almost militantly, when I was expected to be doing something else.
I’d had an aquarium which I stocked by investing my savings in tropical fish that I carried home from the pet shop in Billings on the Greyhound bus in plastic bags. It was a thrill to hold those bags to the flashing light of the highway and watch the aquatic denizens within, the tetras, guppies, swordtails, gouramis, and the little catfish that was guaranteed to keep the sides of the aquarium clean. Eventually I just wanted to go fishing, to see the native fish of my world, and since this fervor coincided with my rapidly declining interest in religion, my mother concluded that unseen and possibly malign principles were at play. One Sunday as I headed out the door with my fishing rod, she confronted me about going to church. Addressing her in the elevated diction I affected at the time, I said, “An hour with those fanatics would seem like a lifetime.” She gazed at me, tears in her eyes and, calling me her angel, asked if I was able to remember that she was one of them. This was the first time that I found you could go fishing while feeling blue. I didn’t forgive myself for speaking so to the only mother I would ever have, but in the small zigzag stream that traversed a bird-filled swamp at the edge of town I seemed to dissolve into a larger reality in which acts of meanness could be isolated, examined, then joined to plans for not repeating them. It’s possible that my association of church and fishing, though admittedly unoriginal, began there and that on Sundays I still felt upon awakening the need to be fishing. I don’t think I ever imagined when crossing the cemetery with my fishing rod that I would one day find my mother and father there.
I walked to my house, discarded my paint clothes and the stupid hat, picked up my rod, and went back to fish that small creek burbling through a woodlot that, entangled in an absentee estate, had for generations avoided being turned into tract houses. It was almost as if I were addressing my late parents: “Look, I’m still doing this.” With my rod, a pillbox of flies, and shoes I didn’t mind soaking, I loved the deceit of this little waterway, presenting itself along the sidewalk as a trickle, no more than runoff, then expanding to something you could jump across but carrying enough spring water to undercut its own banks. Only a single pool formed, turning slowly in the roots of old spruce trees, before the stream resumed its deception by emerging from the woodlot alongside a grocery store parking lot, on its way out of town.
I backed into the brush beside the pool and pulled line from the reel, holding the small gray fly between thumb and forefinger. I stood motionless as a heron and watched the dark surface of the pool. It moved, quite slowly, as part of the stream. Perhaps it was an hour before the first mayflies popped on the surface and drifted away. There were never many, but in the end a trout appeared to dine, making small drifting rings on the surface — at first opportunistically, then when the flies became more numerous, the fish fed in a regular rhythm. I cast and caught it, and held the beautiful trout with the delight I once felt holding my plastic bag of fish to the lights speeding past the Greyhound. I let it go. Then in sloshing shoes, I headed for my parents’ graves but never quite arrived there: a woman was arranging flowers at the graves of Cody and Clarice, and I stopped to watch her.
18
MY MOTHER DID NOT CARE TO HEAR war stories. She thought they were bad luck, and I suppose they were. For all my father had been through, she was really the tougher individual and she had the backing of her Big Ally. She thought that God worked in mysterious ways and if He said the War was Over, the War was Over. She saw impiety in ongoing talk about the War. After she died, my father began to have a few fellow soldiers over for drinks or meals. There was a substantial stream of them through his VFW membership, only recently revived, and as I heard the stories of their experiences and tried to relate them to the humble civilians retailing them, I experienced a profound suspicion of appearances. When mild Johnny Markovitch who worked for the rural electric company described how, when taking prisoners to the rear, an officer’s command to “hurry back” meant execute the prisoners, I could never again see Johnny — who had been so kind to me when I was a little boy — in the same way. Albert Cassidy served under Theodore Roosevelt III in North Africa and described him as just a fellow infantryman, dirty, unshaven, and reliable. Out went my views of Hudson River aristocrats. The most peculiar was Arthur Boyle, who had gleefully watched the massacre of Germans at Falaise Gap. He later joined my father’s unit at St.-Lô and was with him on a day of deep snow when the first German King Tiger — the dreaded Königstiger — burst from the woodlands. With all the pine trees falling before this monster, Arthur Boyle lost his mind and, again according to my father, never got it back. My father, sharing my genetic predisposition to detachment, had been transfixed until the seventy-ton behemoth wheeled forward under the roar of its gasoline engines, locked down, and began firing the 88. His fascination lasted until long after the war, when he drove to the Patton museum at Fort Knox to view a captured King Tiger on display there, surrounded on a hot day by schoolchildren in short pants. After explaining his past, he was allowed to sit at the controls. He enjoyed telling me it was built by Porsche. Arthur Boyle blew up when my father told him of his adventure with the Königstiger and ruined a nice barbecue. This proved to be the occasion for my mother’s outlawing war stories; she had been dragged along on the Fort Knox trip and then had to endure Arthur going nuts in her house on what she described with accusatory inflection as “a perfectly lovely summer day.” Fortunately Arthur and Johnny Markovitch had enough interest in sports, especially baseball, to successfully circumvent the war in my mother’s presence and continue to visit.