I slalomed the past, searching for a genetic base to my wandering. Dad had grown up in a genuine log cabin and had inherited a fraction of crackpottery. My own fisticuffs with the world proved that I bore my generation’s share of the family darkness. When I was twelve, Dad quit his job as a traveling salesman and came home for good. He grew a beard and wore mail order African dashikis. He tuned in to distant airwaves, turned on with bourbon, and dropped into the family. Our absent father had become a stranger who never left the house.
My brother and I spent all our time outside playing baseball, using plates from the kitchen as bases. Soon we ran out of plates, a fact that Mom accepted with an equanimity fed by years of facing cryptic boy-stuff. Lacking brothers, she’d had no experience with young boys. She was like a straw boss of immigrant workers — she didn’t speak our language, and regarded our alien ways as best left alone. Mom preferred not to tell Dad about the plate shortage until he was in a receptive mood, a wait that could conceivably require the passage of a season. He’d blame her, and we were too broke to buy new dishes.
Mom’s grand solution was paper plates. She’d gotten hold of a dozen somehow, probably through VISTA, since they prowled the hills giving away combs, key chains, and toothbrushes. To make the paper plates last, we used them over and over until they were heavy as hubcaps. Every Saturday we ate fried chicken, Dad’s favorite meal. For dessert he split the bones and sucked the marrow. He finally lifted his plate for seconds and the bottom dropped like a trapdoor, dumping his cache of bones to the table. He immediately accused me of having booby-trapped his plate.
“No,” I said. “Mine’s the same way.”
I lifted my plate and a chunk of mashed potato slid through the opening. My siblings followed suit, attempting to head off Dad’s phenomenal and unpredictable rage. When he got mad, which was not infrequent, the house was tense as a cancer ward until everyone apologized. To avoid these awful times, we coalesced to maintain the illusion of normalcy at any cost.
Dad hunched his bony shoulders, preparing for either a ten-hour tirade or face-saving laughter. His greatest fear was of duplicating Caesar’s deathbed epiphany, and each of us was a potential Brutus, Judas, or Delilah. Everyone looked at Mom. Affairs didn’t often come to this, but when they did, her reaction was crucial. She hated to take a side. Her usual stance was a balancing act between loyalty to her children and to her husband. She raised us, but Dad controlled us. If so much as a hound dog refused fealty, it disappeared in a South American fashion and was never mentioned.
Mom calmly tipped over a bowl of peaches. Thick juice ran across the old formica. Dad plucked a peach from the table and ate it. I stuffed a handful of beans down my gullet and we finished the meal eating like Romans.
It was late that night, lying in bed, when I decided to save my money and head into the world.
A decade later I was in it, facing the end of autumn. During cold weather bums and birds headed south, and I wintered in West Texas, working as a painter of houses built rapidly during the oil boom. Entire towns were materializing near oilfields. Trucks brought stud walls and rafter frames, predrilled for electrical wires. Young trees waited for holes, their root balls wrapped in cheese-cloth. Mats of damp sod arrived by flatbed truck. As soon as the interior work was complete, a family moved into the house.
Outdoor painting was the last stage, and I hired with a contractor named Bill, a former gunnery sergeant in Vietnam. Half the crew was Mexican and the rest were ex-cons or marginal ruffians. Bill paid us in cash at the end of each day, saying, “You have two choices, boys. You can save for a convertible or spend it on poon-tang. I’ll go your bail once. Just once.”
Bill always wore some article of military clothing-a hat one day, boots the next, a web belt on another day. He was prone to silent crying, apropos of nothing. No one mentioned it. He was also good-looking and gentle, very popular with the women whose houses we colored. After an incident in which a woman exposed her breasts to me while I was on a ladder, I asked him if he’d ever gotten laid on a job.
“The problem is what to do with your wet brush,” he said. “If you lay it on top of the bucket, it gets too dry. And if you stick it in the bucket, the paint gets up into the handle and ruins the bristles.” He glanced at the bleak landscape beyond the carefully watered lawns. “Indoor work with latex is the best.”
The woman whose house we were painting couldn’t decide what color she wanted. We had several different buckets, and were instructed to paint giant swatches on the front of the house. After lunch, the crew lounged in the shade while the other wives in the community congregated to give opinion. They carried infants, whom they regarded with the same detachment as they did the patches of color on the siding.
“You know, Judy’s baby has already got a suntan,” one mother said. “I’m going to get mine in the sun today.”
“I can’t make mine shut up crying long enough to dress it,” said another.
“Take and push half a Tylenol up its butt. That quiets mine right down. Regular, not extra-strength.”
The husbands took little interest in their homes, confining their aesthetic concerns to clothing. Boot toes ran to amazing points, as if designed to spindle a spider in a corner. They wore the biggest hats in the West, decorated with huge feathers. In local bars, the men spent most of their time accusing each other of having “knocked my feather.” Such an insult was tantamount to a Kentucky warning shot, the French musketeer’s slap in the face, or the New York faux pas of daring to look someone in the eyes for more than ten seconds.
“Hey!” someone would yell. “You knocked my feather.”
People backed away from the victim, who stroked his feather while glaring at the perpetrator. The accused man stared back. Each stretched his body to full height, squinting, jaw thrust out, gauging his chances in case things got downright western. After a minute of staring, both men turned slowly away feigning reluctance. After witnessing this rite, I spoke with the men involved. Each claimed to be a descendant of original settlers. One was a dentist. The other worked as an accountant. Both were a little put out that oil hadn’t been discovered on their land.
When occasional trouble actually erupted, it was the wrestling-across-the-floor sort, until one man exposed his genitals in surrender. A little while later they’d be drinking together. The Kentucky style of brawling is similar to the Viking berserker — all out, using whatever is at hand, aiming for the throat and crotch. Texans seemed to consider anything shy of a gunfight little more than sport. Since I couldn’t trust myself to follow house rules, I spent the better part of four months dodging feathers.
After work one Friday, Bill and I were in a tavern drinking beer and shooting pool. A neckless man with a body like a wedge called Bill a feather knocker. Bill turned away. The man followed, saying that Bill was a chicken with a yellow stripe up his back a mile wide. There were three guys backing him up. As casually as possible, I picked up an empty beer mug in each hand. Bill saw me and shook his head. The man stepped close, yelling so fiercely that saliva sprayed the air. Bill leaned to the man, their chests nearly touching, and began talking in a low voice. Then he walked back to the pool table and sank a combination shot as if he’d been concentrating on the game all along. The other man stood immobile for a couple of minutes before returning to his bar stool.
I asked Bill what he’d said.
“Simple,” he said. “I told him that if we fought, all we’d do was rip our clothes, and women didn’t favor men wearing tore-up shirts. I said there was nothing wrong with fighting but I didn’t feel like it today.”