"Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?”
And that night in the farmhouse, I headed upstairs with Alice on my mind.
She wondered if she’d fall right through the earth, imagining how funny it’d be to come out among the people with their heads downwards. She’d have to ask them the name of their country -- New Zealand? Or Australia? Of course, it wouldn’t be Denmark, because that wasn’t on the other side of the rabbit-hole.
3
My single mattress lacked sheets. So did the double-bed where my father had tossed his backpack. Our upstairs rooms were separated by the only bathroom in the house, though there was no running water. And the empty toilet bowl released an acrid stench when the lid was lifted, as if rotten eggs festered somewhere deep within the plumbing.
My father said the place needed a new well. He said there was plenty of work to be done.
"The yard wants some tending,” he mentioned during our second afternoon of Greyhound travel. "Mother had this boy mow and weed when she was living, but I suppose that fellow is all grown by now. And there’s nails coming up on the porch, so I guess we can hammer them. Squirrels lived in the a attic, but I got rid of them because they kept chewing the wiring and everything. They made a real racket in the morning, and I hated knowing they were there. But Mother liked them. She said the place didn’t feel so lonesome that way.”
It’s true, the farmhouse seemed imbued with a lonely quality -- no doubt due to its isolated location. And I often wondered why my father let his mother live on the property by herself. He had purchased the land for her in 1958, right after his third guitar-instrumental single "Jungle Runner” reached the Top Ten. The house was built several years later, and Grandmother remained there until 1967, when she tripped down the porch steps, breaking her hip, and died in a nursing home soon afterwards.
"Thought about putting the place on the market then," my father told me on the bus, "but my second wife talked me out of it. And now I’m glad she did.”
For him, the farmhouse became a retreat, somewhere to hide and make music. He had the phone disconnected, got rid of Grandmother’s television. By the time I turned eleven,
it was common for my father to leave the city for a few months, taking his Rickenbacker guitar and driving east in his Buick Riviera. Only once did he invite my mother and me, but my mother said, "Fuck that, Noah. Texas is the armpit of the universe. We’ll be here when you decide What Rocks can exist without you.”
It was Grandmother who named the farmhouse What Rocks, but I’m not sure why. She was dead before I was born, so I never had a chance to ask her. Perhaps it was a joke of some sort, considering the nearby quarry existed as a constant nuisance; every other day or so there was dynamite blasting, which disrupted the sense of isolation, booming like thunder and rattling the windows.
"When I bought it for her,” my father explained, "I told her she could sell it off someday to that quarry if she wanted. I’m thinking she could’ve made a little dough, you know, selling the limestone under that property. But I don’t think she ever considered doing that. I mean, the house and land were a gift, so that’d have been rude in her mind. She was a pretty proper old woman sometimes, wouldn’t even drive this baby-blue Cadillac I got her because she thought it looked too showy. I tell you what, we could sure use that car today.”
Riding in the Greyhound made my father restless. The seat aggravated his spine, which was damaged when he slipped headlong from a stage in Chicago, landing squarely on his back. But being on the run, he couldn’t afford anyother mode of transportation. His prized Buick Riviera with white sidewalls was traded for a sandwich bag of mixed pills - Pamergan, Dextromoramide, Diconal, DF-118, Fortral, and Methadone, my mother’s favorite. And when we finally arrived in the small town of Florence, some ten miles from the farmhouse, he uttered a low groan while putting on his backpack.
Then he handed me my neon suitcase, saying, "Suppose you’re ready for a picnic.”
"Pizza,” I said, earnestly.
"Can’t eat pizza on a picnic," he said. "You should know that."
"We don’t have to have a picnic,” I said, following behind him as we moved along the passageway.
"Got to eat sandwiches. That’s what you eat. That’s what it’s going to be.”
At the Main Street grocery store, whatever cash remained went toward saltines, Wonder Bread, peanut butter, and two gallon jugs of water. And even though some minor celebrity status was attached to his name, my father’s face was far from well-known. It was like a black-and-white Western where the gunslinger saunters into the saloon; soon as we stepped through the doors -- a grubby little girl and a pale, long-haired man wearing huge sunglasses -- all heads turned toward us, all mouths stopped talking.
It wasn’t as if the store was crowded. In fact, I recall just a chubby bagger boy with a crew cut and two high school-looking checkout girls, one Hispanic, the other white, both sporting hair-sprayed bangs that curled upward like a wave.
"What time is it?” my father asked.
"S-s-s-orry, not wearing a w-w-watch,” the boy replied, stuttering painfully, his lips and jaw twisting spasmodically as he spoke. "Around four, I-I-I think.”
"It’s about four-thirty,” the Hispanic girl said.
"Then you’re still open.”
"Until five. Six on Saturday."
"That’s good,” my father said, taking my hand. "Where’s the peanut butter?”
"Center aisle, near the marshmallows, to the left.”
And when we returned to the front with our groceries, my father asked the bagger boy if he knew someone who might give us a lift.
The checkout girls glanced at each other, their grins verging on laughter.
"Where you-you-you g-going?”
"East of town, out toward the microwave tower on Saturn Road."
"Guess I-I-I could t-t-t-ake you," the boy said, unfolding a paper sack. "It’s on my w-w-ay home, if you don’t mind waiting till I-I-I’m off.”
"Not at all,” my father said. "I appreciate it, friend.”
The afternoon sun had colored the asphalt golden, and as the bagger boy drove us from Florence in his Nissan pickup, he put on a pair of dark convex glasses -- less against the bright rays spilling across the county road, I suspected, than against my father’s menacing eyewear. His name was Patrick.
"I live with my g-g-g-grandfa-fa-father,” he explained, accelerating the vehicle. "We’re going fishing to-to-to-tonight, so I-I-I'm in a bit of a h-h-h-urry."
Then he asked if we were visiting family, wondered where we were traveling from.
"Going to see my parents,” my father lied. "My girl and I live in Austin.”
I was sandwiched between them in the cab, my knees on either side of the gear shift.
"Th-th-that right," Patrick said. "Austin’s gr-gr-great! Haven’t had much of a ch-ch-chance to know people a-around here. just moved from D-D-Dallas. Not from Florence. My grandfather’s b-b-b-been here for-e-e-ever."
"Forever’s a pretty long time,” my father said.
"You bet-bet-bet-cha,” Patrick sputtered. "I-I-I think I-I-I-I’d go nuts if I-I-I stayed here as long as he-he-he has."
And while Patrick struggled in conversation with my father, I tucked my shins underneath my butt, pushing myself up, and gazed over the dashboard at the hilly landscape ahead. Cedar and mesquite trees grew along the road, in pastures lush from spring thunderstorms. This was farming country. In the distance, the microwave tower my father had mentioned loomed like a futuristic obelisk, reddish girders criss-crossing, an infrequent strobe flaring at its top.