My father loved horses all his life, and toward the end of the war, when the enemy could be located by the sound of their horses, he realized the end was in sight. The Germans were running out of everything, including fuel and transportation machinery, so farm horses were being commandeered to move their guns. The Allies were pouring a firestorm upon them, and increasingly the POWs were walleyed lunatics indifferent to what their captors had in mind for them.
As they approached Aachen and Germany itself, my father’s unit captured a group of German soldiers: frightened children in rags. Taken to the rear, one of the boys pulled out an antiquated pistol and shot the sergeant. The escort threw the boy up onto a roll of barbed wire and machine-gunned him. That night my father deserted. The Luger he carried to Paris he had found on a fully dressed skeleton under a tree in the Hürtgen Forest.
“Had enough?” he asked me. I said that I had.
* * *
I rarely heard about the war after that, until right at the end of my father’s life. I remember visiting him after my mother had died and I was his sole medical care, though he needed little assistance and was remarkably independent. VFW friends of his vintage were starting to fade away, mostly grateful for having lived so long. But when I visited him that day he was agitated. Radio personality Rush Limbaugh was being interviewed on television and my father was certain that it was Hermann Göring. “I thought he committed suicide at Nuremberg!” he cried. After this, my poor father began to assume he had been lied to about nearly all other things and that he could never be sure which ones they were. I can’t say his last days were good ones, for he increasingly suffered from an abstract sense of betrayal until the day that he greeted my arrival with a wry look of miserable resignation: he had begun to suspect me as well. But even as dementia swept over him, he was able to putter around in his garden and refill the hummingbird feeder. Here, shovel in hand, seated on the railroad ties that supported the earthen beds, he died. I buried him beside my mother on a beautiful June day, cottonwood seeds filling the air and new perennials popping up from some of the earliest graves. Several old soldiers attended and a veteran of the Iraq War played taps on the bugle. Seeing the headstones paired at last, I was unable to conclude that I knew these two people very well, or understood them. I would quite painfully miss them, but only as people I once knew. Religion had surrounded my mother with an impenetrable reality, and war had done something quite similar to my father. I had the sense that I had been alone since birth.
20
I WAS DRIVING EAST on the interstate in my cherished 88, skating over black ice at about seventy miles an hour. The days were getting short and I was headed to Big Timber, another dinner with Jocelyn at the Grand Hotel. I didn’t want to go that fast, but if you went slower, the big trucks would nearly mow you down and suspend you blind in a cloud of snow, ice chips, and diesel fumes. Radio reception was shitty to say the least, or else supplied fascist newscasts from the Nashville stations broadcasting overproduced studio music for brain-dead hillbillies. Looking down the unequal beams of my headlights, I saw that the windshield wipers wiped only in selected places, requiring me to raise and lower my head to find a clear view. Wildlife T-boned by unyielding traffic was pitched up on the roadside with twisted heads and limbs, strewn intestines. That we accepted gut piles along the motorway as a gift of the automobile struck me then as a grisly novelty. In other words, I hated the highway. I must have been in a dissociative state because even the word “automobile” seemed strange. I said it aloud. “Automobile, automobile, automobile!” It didn’t help. I had the feeling I wasn’t entirely sure what an automobile was.
The 88 was ruby red and the interior a red Naugahyde with white piping. The upholstery held the cold of night well into the day, even while the heater irradiated my shins. Still, I trusted it; and that is why, just past the Mission Creek exit, I was slow to respond when the driveshaft just fell out of it and the universal joint tried to beat through the floor under my feet. I thought the 88 could keep going. It could not.
I had no way to notify Jocelyn, or to call a wrecker. It was too cold to walk and the nearest sign of life, a minuscule light suspended in remote darkness, was too far. I had no choice but to wait for a highway patrolman to stumble onto me, which happened in about an hour. The patrolman called for assistance and a wrecker arrived an hour and a half after that. Wild lights of vehicles streamed by me all that time, flying on snow and ice. I could easily imagine being killed or mangled. I tried the philosophical exercise of imagining the world without me. It was easy. It was a little too easy.
I believed I could pass the time by embracing radio music. I hunted the dial until I found some rhythm and blues, where a phrase like “all night long” or “yes, it’s me” could last half a song. I didn’t usually listen to lyrics, but these tunes were really wrapped around the words and it was a pleasant exercise to listen and think. I was surprised to hear how many of the country crooners admitted sneaking out on their marriages. It came up so often that despite the disclaimers and professions of suffering a kind of exultation was implied. An equal number sought to “put a ring on your finger.” The cycling between hoped-for togetherness and feverish cheating was disconcerting. Even stranger, the glamorous barflies of the lyrics described the liquor of their choice as being wine if the song was about marrying or cheating on your spouse. If beer was the beverage, it signaled a rowdy call to arms for “country” values. There was a surprising number of quite threatening songs of patriotism, often with a semi-thudding march tempo, a gathering of violent warnings. Lots of biography on the part of the singer about other famous singers he knew or admired. Our deteriorated modern world was often deplored, from heaven, by “Hank.” God took a wider view, but Hank had a streak of sarcasm and disappointment over how sorry things had gotten. Another decried those who preferred sandals to “manly footwear.” I turned the radio off: I was sick of these people, all prison-bound, where they would be challenged to avoid sodomy by monsters from the inner city. It was easy to think like this when the driveshaft fell out of your car at seventy per.
The tow truck was driven by a nice young man named Lane who was happy to have the work. He had big work-hardened hands and wore green zip-up coveralls with a sky blue bandanna tied around his neck. His billed cap said ICE DOGS and displayed a flying hockey puck trailed by stars, and all around the edges of the cap his thick blond hair stuck out. He winched the 88 up with a cable drum, chocked the wheels, boomed it down with chains, and invited me into the cab. As we drove east, I enjoyed the elevation and the wide beam of lights that declared our progress and right-of-way a long distance ahead. The big meshing noise of the diesel seemed authoritative and reminded me of my father’s descriptions of the sound of Panzer tanks.
Lane said, “Let’s have some music for the occasion” and punched a button on the tape deck. A booming song emerged, “I’m in love with my car,” with extraordinary words—“When I’m holdin’ your wheel, all I hear is your gear”—all sung against screaming arena rock guitars and keyboards and end-of-the-world percussion. At last it was over and Lane turned it off.
“You like Queen?”
“Sure…”
“I’ve got news: that wasn’t Freddie Mercury.”
“Oh. Who was it?”
“That was the drummer, Roger Taylor. Freddie was backup and backup only on this one. But bottom line, great album. Triple platinum, to be exact. You like glam rock?”