So we sit in the saloon the rider once rode past, between walls of raw wood planks, each with a soda resting on the red-checked tablecloth, and I start fishing again. I say cautiously that in school we mostly learned about Harold Bluetooth, hearing very little about the Civil War, but what we did hear was about the right to hold slaves. I fiddle with my soda glass and say, thinking of our forefather James B., who in fact did look handsome in his uniform, that it’s difficult for me to see anything honorable in it.
I look up at Gloria, and Gloria looks away. My dad says that the whole thorny issue was about state’s rights. He begins telling me about the texts written around the time the United States came into existence, the Federalist Papers. You’re not going to understand America unless you’ve read at least some of it, he says, naming Hamilton, Jay, Madison, and a couple other people, really brilliant people, and I sense that we’re shifting away from the topic. They debated the rights of citizens, he says, the Bill of Rights and its ten amendments, and when he says the word amendments, I know that the topic is lost. Up at the bar a telephone rings and rings. I learn nothing about what became of the enslaved people, while the high-hatted gentlemen expressed venerable sentiments with such eternal phrases as All men are created equal. They vanished between the sentences, the enslaved, and now that old worn hobbyhorse about the right to bear arms is out of the stable. I could tell it was heading in that direction.
Gloria, who hasn’t noticed that we’re no longer discussing the slaves, but gun laws, tells my dad that she’s given me a book, the bestseller about the girl from Charleston, South Carolina, who gets a little slave girl as a birthday present when she turns eleven. That will give her a really good idea of what went on.
But my dad is stuck on the right of self-defense. As a solid Democrat, Gloria resists, and their discussion goes back and forth. Should semiautomatics be allowed? Should gunowners register their weapons, etc. Gloria really doesn’t understand why a person needs a semiautomatic. I think that guy in Florida was just dying to kill somebody, she says, meaning the man who killed Trayvon Martin. She tries explaining to my dad who Trayvon Martin was, telling him that he was just a young Black kid who’d been walking through a suburb, and in the middle of her explanation she suddenly remembers that her first husband had a cousin who still walks around with a 9mm pistol taped to his chest. And I said, Craig, why do you have that gun? She looks at us. I mean, he sat at my Thanksgiving table with a 9mm taped to his chest. And I said, Craig, who are you gonna kill in my house? He said: well, you never know.
My dad avers that a 9mm pistol taped to your chest at a Thanksgiving dinner is on the extreme end, but rolling back the law, that will only cause problems. A short time later he asks Gloria if she doesn’t own a gun at all?
Oh, yes, I keep a ladies’ pistol in my nightstand, that’s all I have, she says. Just a small one.
the barn is illuminated against an iridescent sky, strangely surreal. The sun is elongating everything before our eyes. Somewhere behind the barn, the cows moo, Anna Wagner’s husband is herding them into their stalls. We’re sitting in our separate rocking chairs on the porch, my dad with his Scotch and me with my lukewarm tea, trying to pull ourselves together to make dinner. The only one moving is Roy, who’s panting around trying to get my attention. He jangles. Someone’s tied a bundle of keys to his collar. Every once in a while a door opens over at the main house, and Anna Wagner comes out and fixes something or other, hard-working as she is, removing a sheet from the clothesline or calling out to an animal. Now we hear the door again and watch her stride across the lawn with her long, meandering steps, tattered boots, salt-and-pepper braid, big smile. Any plans for dinner? she asks as she walks, in her hands she holds a tray that she sets on the table on the eastward-facing porch. I have some chicken here, and some deviled eggs, and there’s some salad. Her friendliness is perfectly natural, and she’s already heading back to the house, she just made dinner for us, that’s all.
The cat is faster than either of us. At the instant Anna Wagner turns her back, and before we’ve stood up from the rocking chairs, it’s up on the table with a paw under the tinfoil and its teeth in a thigh. I shoo it away and loosen the tinfoil to get a look at the chicken. An entire platter of chicken legs, a bowl of green salad, and another platter of deviled eggs with chili-mayonnaise. There’s enough food here for several days. My dad tells me to throw out the chicken leg I’d saved from the cat’s jaws. I take it into the kitchen, but when I’m standing there, I can’t bring myself to throw out an entire chicken leg, so I slice off the part the cat had in its mouth.
The crickets file their evening melody. Roy sits on the bench beside my dad. He has already learned that my dad is an easy target. His eyes follow every movement my dad makes with his fork. You got your share, he tells the dog. Still, a short time later he gives the dog another morsel. There’s no end to it.
A horse whinnies in the meadow. Suddenly the horses run wild, their hooves pounding across the prairie in the mystical twilight, the brown mare glistening in the lead, the spotted stallion behind. Then they stop abruptly, just as suddenly as they’d sat into motion. The image remains long after the moment ends, a glimpse, an incredible vision of the horses’ manes splitting the wind, their muscles working beneath their skin, and then everything is at once normal again.
A magnificent animal, my dad says.
I wish they’d do it again, I say.
He begins to tell me of his wife’s various failed attempts to have a pet. Caring for an animal is impossible for her, every time they’ve tried, it has ended badly. One pet after the other, a pig, a goose, dwarf parrots, an oversized dog that was kept penned in a basement. It was a disaster, he says. It’s the first time we’ve discussed his wife since we arrived. Does she know that he’s here? What did he tell her? And what is the actual reason he’s not allowed to see me anymore? It could be a good time to ask, but I won’t. That’s his business. It’s so quiet here. Out on the horizon, the earth and sky are trying to meet in a narrow, dark-blue stripe. It’s better not to know the details, to not even be interested in them.
Somehow Johnny Depp manages to enter the conversation. My dad wants to know what Gloria thought of him, what she meant by: He’d do. I’ve told him about our bar excursion in San Antonio.
Probably that one could put him to use? I suggest.
Honestly, I think he’s a real sleazebag, my dad says.
We stand, and while one of us carries the bowls into the dark house, the other keeps an eye on Roy who’s keeping an eye on the leftover chicken. But my dad likes some of his films, he says, and names one, it’s based on what’s his name, H.P. Lovecraft. It’s considered incredibly bad, but I’ve enjoyed it. He knows it’s on Netflix, why don’t I try and find it?
We sit on the sofa and watch the film on his computer. My dad points out characters and explains their intricate family relations, something about some twins and a mother who mates with a demon. The details are lost. Last year, I sat wide-eyed on a sofa in St. Louis clutching at grains of sand, and my siblings asked: Don’t you get bored with Dad? They didn’t understand that I would have given anything for a little more of what bored them. Now we’re sitting here, and my head gets heavy. I can afford it. Time moves through me like a body through water. What a luxury just to let go. I lean my head against the back of the sofa, and sleep slides over me like a blanket.
my dad had quite a bit to take care of when he was down at Gussie’s before she died, so he’d never had time to visit his childhood friend Jon Swartz. A lot was going on with my grandmother, especially during the past few years, and especially when he found out the women he’d hired to take care of her, clean the house, go shopping, change the bedsheets, had been stealing from her for some time. A small fortune. Gussie wanted to remain in her own house, and my dad had tried to arrange it, but it was difficult. The two Mexican women had been a solution. Somehow he took care of the situation without involving the law, not for the sake of the women, but for Gussie
’s. What made him most nervous was the disappointment she’d feel if she discovered that she’d been used, because she was very fond of them and had complete trust in them. That’s probably why she’d signed their checks without hesitation when they were heading into town.
Gradually, as she grew older and even more confused, my dad’s concerns regarding the right thing to do became more urgent. Should he let her stay in her own house or move her to a nursing home, and if so, which one? And there were financial matters, her various investments, which my dad handled with Doug Field.
Then Gussie died, at home, right before Christmas, at the age of ninety-seven. My dad stood in the kitchen of number 23 in St. Louis talking to Elizabeth, the woman who cared for her. She’d called him earlier to let him know it was time for him to get on an airplane, in the meantime he’d purchased a ticket, but then Elizabeth called again.
It happened that I was in New York City at the time, celebrating Christmas with another family. I was standing in their kitchen when I got the message from my dad. The telephone hung next to a fridge covered with children’s drawings. Gussie actually died when I was talking to her, he said. She was asleep, not awake, but she died when I was talking to Elizabeth. So at least I was there in that sense. He was on his way down. I stayed in New York. I had no money to travel, I hadn’t paid for the trip to New York City myself, and I didn’t want to disappoint the other family. On Christmas Eve I danced around the tree in the Danish church in Brooklyn, and my dad flew down to Texas by himself and buried Gussie alone.
after gussie died, my dad had a great opportunity to see Jon Swartz, since he was in the area. But it became evident that perhaps the obstacles had been caused by something else, because making plans with him turned out to be impossible. To all of my dad’s suggestions, he’d remained strangely evasive and vague. He’d been difficult to reach via email, it took days for him to respond. And my dad, who didn’t have a cell phone, couldn’t call.
The last time he’d been down here, a few years ago with my brother, had been to participate in a school reunion. He’d finally have the chance to reunite with his old friend whom he’d gone to school with since first grade, and who was one of the four boys who, like him, had become a university professor. They’d stayed in contact over the years, first by exchanging letters and a rare phone call, and finally via email. Jon Swartz’s interest in old-time radio programs, comic books, and the various curios and collectibles that are part of that world is even greater than my dad’s. He has expert knowledge of pop culture, my dad says, and is highly respected in some rather nerdy circles. I know my dad has sent him some journals that I was the editor of back in my school days, stories, short pieces I wrote, and comic strips, which I’d made a number of during high school, and in response Jon Swartz had sent his daughter’s writings to my dad. Jon lived only forty-five minutes away, in a suburb of Austin, a drive down to the old high school, that’s all. Let’s see, Jon wrote in an email. But he never showed.
My dad’s theory is that his old friend has grown eccentric. Not eccentric like everyone does when we get old, but really eccentric, an odd duck, or a hermit who has good days and bad, but perhaps mostly bad. Though my dad didn’t say it directly, I picture a man who weighs four hundred pounds, keeps an unkempt beard and long hair, and who seldom showers. My dad imagines that it’s his friend’s possibly problematic appearance that kept him from their high school reunion. Typically, he says, the most successful people are the ones who show up to those kinds of things.
My dad has written to him again, and it’s the same story. No response. We picture him scratching around like a beetle between stacks of comic books, strangely reclusive. He sits in his house among all the dismal, swaying piles, veiled in darkness, flies swarming around him, peering through a pale chink where the daylight enters. Dare I go out among people today? No, no. Can’t today. Maybe tomorrow. My dad never got to see him whenever he visited Texas.
We take a ride to Grandma Clark’s house, the one my dad grew up in, where he and Jon built a fort in a hackberry tree. A hackberry tree, my dad says, is considered a ‘low-class tree.’ I sense that his grandmother cared about such things, he always describes Grandma Clark as a real lady of the old school, a type one didn’t mess with in the South. Someone who did what she could to maintain standards. To maintain in hard times, of which she’d seen quite a bit.
At one point, my dad and Jon tore the treehouse down and, to Grandma Clark’s great disappointment, repurposed the wood for their comic book stand, which in addition to selling comic books and being the command center for the area’s children, sold ice-cold soda that, to Grandma Clark’s horror, caused truck drivers to park along the road between Austin and San Antonio and waddle stiffly to the booth to slake their thirst.
We get out of the car and look at her house; it’s on a corner lot and is now painted pale yellow, a modest wooden house that’s only slightly larger than what Gussie and her family later moved into.
What did you write to Jon Swartz anyway? I ask.
Just to let us know if we could arrange something, my dad replies. You know, while we are here.
Maybe we should just drive up there?
Unannounced? It’s a long drive.
We don’t know what’s holding him back, I say, thinking of all the times my own hang-ups held me back with my dad, without anything good ever coming from it. Let’s try to eliminate as much resistance as possible by not letting the initiative be up to him.
Write him and tell him that we’re coming to pick him up. Then we’ll drive somewhere to eat, his choice, on us, I say grandly. Let him pick the time, make it easy for him to just say yes.
It works, he gives us a time, but as we’re on our way up to Austin, I suddenly get cold feet. What have I gotten my dad into? I fear the worst; all too graphically, I imagine the kind of state we’ll find him in. Maybe he grows spinach in plastic buckets and communicates with beings from outer space. And what do we do if he’s having one of his bad days? Is there someone we can call? How do we fit him in the car if he’s so fat he can’t walk? I tell my dad that we’ll have to be stoic and calm if he turns out to be disfigured.
The gps lady announces that we’ll reach our destination around the next corner. I get butterflies in my stomach. When we turn the corner, the first thing I see is a completely ordinary-looking man my dad’s age standing outside of a house waiting, clean and proper in a dark-blue polo shirt and tobacco-brown cap.
As soon as we’re out of the car, the mystery is solved. I’m impressed you are still driving, John. He says that he’d been convinced that his daughter would be driving since she was coming along.
I reply that I’m not as practiced at driving as my dad. I take the wheel on short trips, mostly to practice, but on longer trips he drives.
Incredible, Jon Swartz says. Standing with his hands at his side, he gazes at my dad with undisguised admiration. It’s been a long time since he’d been forced to give up his car. Not having one makes him so damn dependent. Ever since he got cataracts, his son’s been driving him around, but it has to fit into his son’s work schedule.
Do you wanna see the house before we leave? he asks. Of course. He lets us into a long hall and apologizes for the strong cat odor. We walk through a living room with a beige sofa, the carpet is also beige, everything appears to be beige. Orderly and clean, but without a woman’s hand to maybe add a single colored pillow, potted plant, or framed photograph of the family. He says the cats aren’t allowed in the back room he wants to show us. He opens the door to what is clearly the jewel of the house. It’s like stepping across a threshold from a black-and-white world into Technicolor, a platonic paradise, the ultimate boys’ room. Like a museum guide, Jon Swartz shows my dad the most expensive treasures, shelf after shelf of collectibles, plastic action figures, some of which remain in their original boxes. Bookshelves lined with science fiction and comic book series like the ones my dad wants to pass on to me. Tin canisters with comic book heroes, a glass
case stuffed with badges, framed drawings, above them yet more plastic figures, lined up in rows. This is also where the family photos are, daughter, son, and grandchildren framed alongside Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy and Captain America, his entire extended family.
Back on the street Jon Swartz says, before we get into the car: Oh, I nearly forgot. He doesn’t finish the sentence but disappears into the house to retrieve something important. Soon he returns with a book he’s written, Handbook of Old-Time Radio, a bound thesis that must be at least four inches thick. With great humility, he hands my dad the book as though it’s nothing, and yet everything. This is for you, John, he says. I want you to have this. His only extra copy. His riffles through to show my dad that he’s thanked in the foreword.
The restaurant is pitch dark. Maybe it’s nice when you have cataracts. I’ve forgotten what I ordered, and when the food arrives it’s drowning in melted cheese, so far as I can tell. I poke it with a fork but can’t determine what’s what. I eat the edge, something doughy, maybe a tortilla, and listen to their conversation. Harold, Harold, what the heck was his last name? You may remember when I broke my arm. In unison: In the off-roader, with Jimmy. Now, he died, Jon Swartz says.
As always, my dad speaks the least. Once again, we’ve gone through a door together, and we see. Family, old friends, alternating before us, holding their lives in their hands. We are their witnesses, eyes, ears, one consciousness in which all this strange and useless beauty is stored for an instant.
Fragments of life, people I don’t know and never will know.
… He went out and shot cows that were not his—with Jimmy …
… He could have had a telescope, a microscope, anything he wanted. And then he got a chainsaw and cut off his finger …
Lone Star Page 32
