“Steroids,” I said. “I didn’t know steroids existed back then.”
“We didn’t know what they were,” Didi said. She gestured at the game. “Now all those players on TV take steroids and not a one of them will ever have children. Babe says if he sees Skip again, he’ll break his neck.”
“I know where Skip lives.”
I think Babe wanted to change the subject, because when he spoke it was louder than before. “Your mama was a pistol, boy. I have to admit, that girl was a pistol.”
Seemed a weird thing to say about a girl you raped and urinated on. “She runs a feminist press in Wyoming,” I said.
He frowned. “Lesbo?”
“I don’t think so, she has a boyfriend.”
“Lesbos scare me. They was one in Woolworth’s the other day buying shotgun shells. Said she was going to shoot her husband.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Didi said.
“How did you know she was Lesbian if she had a husband?” I asked.
“Short hair and a fuzzy mustache.”
Didi protested. “Italian girls have mustaches and none of them are Lesbo.”
“Wasn’t no Italian. I can tell Italian women.”
Subject closed. We sat drinking tea and watching the game while the Redskins scored two more touchdowns. Babe didn’t seem to have any more to say about fatherhood. Partway through the third quarter he had Didi fetch his hand squeezer exercise coils so he could watch TV and build up his wrists simultaneously.
“So, you’re sure you aren’t my father?” I said.
He shrugged without looking away from the game. The Lions were finally mounting a drive. “Hell, anything’s possible. Maybe you’re just a runt.”
“I think I’ll be leaving now,” I said.
Babe ignored me. Didi took my glass. “Come back any time,” she said. “We always have plenty of tea. Babe won’t drink beer. Too many former athletes drink beer and let themselves go.”
Babe sat in his recliner, flexing his wrists. Lord knows what he did for a living. What does a person whose life is his body do when the body lets him down?
“Good-bye, Mr. Carnisek,” I said.
His eyes brightened, as if he’d received an idea. “Tell you what, come Father’s Day, you can send me a card.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I always wanted a card on Father’s Day.”
7
I stopped in my yard to watch a one-legged robin hop around the grass. She seemed as stable as the next robin—didn’t tilt to one side or wobble or anything. Reminded me of a three-legged dog a neighbor of ours owned back in GroVont. Next to my pecan tree, the robin pulled a worm out of the ground. It was a long wienie and it didn’t want to give up its grasp on the earth, but the robin kept pulling and hopping back on her one leg until the worm popped free. Then she flew off, south.
Since the World Series when Wanda left, I hadn’t been seeing past myself. I hadn’t noticed how the maple leaves across the street were a deep Mogen David wine color, and the air smelled like refrigeration. The neighbor’s black cat lay curled on the hood of their Lincoln Town Car. I saw the girl Gilia in my mind and wondered where she might be swimming, so I could go there and watch. In Wyoming this was swimming temperature, but I figured the country club pool was drained by now. Maybe she was one of those people who takes swimming seriously, as opposed to a social tanning session. She had interesting eyes.
Inside the garage, a Vicksburg golf cart hummed into the plug in the ceiling recharger. Five other models named after Civil War battles were lined up, facing the double doors. I sat on a bucket of pool-cleaning chemicals and stared at the gardening tools mounted on fiberboard on the back wall. Each hoe and hammer sat in brackets and fit into an outline of itself drawn in yellow paint on the board—like the outlines they draw around murder victims found on the sidewalk.
I had no reason for being in the garage, other than I was tired of people. Inside the house, another complicated relationship no doubt waited to be dealt with. Gus, probably, or Shannon demanding information on her grandfathers.
The truth is, meeting never-before-met parents takes a lot of emotion. Less than halfway through the process and I felt drained. Fried. Since then I’ve learned large cities have support groups for people who thought they knew who they were, then one afternoon a stranger knocks on the door and says Mother. Dad. Whatever. I don’t know what they call the support groups—Switched At Birth Anonymous, maybe—but I know they exist. One sent me a newsletter.
I found Gus dribbling used coffee grounds into the garbage disposal. The moment she saw me, her index finger crossed her lips in the international sign for Shhh.
“San Francisco by fourteen,” she said. “Bet on it.”
“I don’t know any bookies.”
“Your loss.”
I opened the refrigerator for a Dr Pepper. Dr Pepper is my one remaining degenerative addiction. “Gus, I’ve read everything I can find on mystic, ju-ju bwana fortune-telling methods, and no legitimate psychic in the country reads the future in coffee grounds put down the garbage disposal.”
She shut one thick eyelid and cocked her head over the drain. “My mama taught me, her mama taught her. The spirit ear goes way back to Africa.”
“How many generations in your family owned garbage disposals?”
Gus didn’t care to answer that one. “Going to be war,” she said.
“Me and Wanda?”
Her closed eye popped open. “United States of America.”
“I have enough problems this week without a war.”
Both eyes closed as Gus concentrated. “Against black people. The brothers and sisters going to fight men disguised as plants.”
She obviously meant camouflage suits and I was supposed to go “Wow,” but I was too worn out to pretend amazement. So I sat at the kitchen table and drank my Dr Pepper.
“You’re just like my friend Hank Elkrunner,” I said. “He thinks because he’s Blackfeet he has to say Great Spirit and bond with birds and stuff. You didn’t practice any of this voodoo jive till Roots was on TV.”
Gus straightened and turned off the disposal. She glared down at me from on high, doing something with her eyes that increased the intimidation factor beyond the normal housekeeper-boss relationship.
“Shannon tells me pretty soon you be listening to Elmore James yourself.”
“You think I might really be black like you, Gus?”
“Not like me. I been black all my life.”
Throughout my junior high and high school years a rumor floated around GroVont that my father had been black. I don’t know how the rumor got started. It may have been because in 1963 I was the only person in northwest Wyoming who used the term Afro-American. Or maybe after Lydia took up with Hank Elkrunner townfolk decided cross-racial sex turned her on.
I must admit, I didn’t deny the rumor. At times—around girls—I even hinted that it might be true. This was partly to pique curiosity, but more than mere seduction, I’d seen the photos in Lydia’s panty box and I liked the idea of Sam Callahan: outsider.
I would be the wandering poet, scorned by black and white, shunned by all, except certain women of both races who are drawn to danger like a moth to flame.
“You’re in trouble,” Gus said.
“The disposal picked a football game, predicted a war, and said I’m in trouble? What brand of coffee are we drinking?”
“The phone call say you’re in trouble. Man says get your ass over to Starmount Country Club. He says now.”