The Summer Son

by Lancaster, Craig

  I was still there when LaVerne arrived. I rose from the bed and crept to the door, cracking it just far enough to hear what she and Dad said.

  Dad sounded agitated, and I couldn’t blame him. We had come a long way, our nerves were shot, and Marie had left the meter running while she went off to who knows where. Dad told LaVerne to let me watch television until I fell asleep, and he added that she should feel free to send me to bed if I gave her any lip. LaVerne told him that she expected no trouble.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dad said.

  “Jim, I’m sure it’s nothing,” LaVerne said. “Marie’s probably just out with some friends and lost the time.”

  My father expelled a heavy sigh.

  “She knew I was coming. I called her from Pocatello.”

  I waited for the close of the door and Dad’s boots thudding across the porch in his short, angry gait, then for the pickup to fire up. When the sound of the engine grew faint, I opened the bedroom door and walked out.

  “You’re really growing up,” LaVerne said, admiring the height I had tacked on in the two years since she had last seen me. “You’re nearly as tall as your dad.”

  “I guess.”

  I saw no similarly transformative change in LaVerne. She had to have been in her mid-forties, and she had a deep, natural beauty that didn’t need burnishing. There’s a saying about ranch women: when they’re thirty, they look fifty, and when they’re eighty, they look fifty. That was true of LaVerne. She wore no makeup. Her long, brown hair was pulled into a tight ponytail. Ranch work in all sorts of weather had carved deep lines into her face, giving her an appearance that wasn’t haggard so much as experienced. Her deeply tanned arms rippled with muscle and sinew. There was no ranch job LaVerne couldn’t do. I couldn’t help but contrast her with Marie, who was so meticulous in primping herself. I was one of the few who had seen Marie before she’d had a chance to put on her face and do her hair, and the difference could take your breath away. LaVerne, I suspected, rolled out of bed looking like this.

  “Where’s J.C.?” I asked. LaVerne’s husband had a good twenty years on her and was a jolly soul.

  “He’s got matters at home demanding his attention. It’s you and me, kiddo. What would you like to do?”

  “Can I call my mom?”

  LaVerne glanced at the clock. It was coming up on nine. “It’s getting a little late,” she said.

  “Not in Washington. It’s an hour earlier.”

  “So it is. Well, go ahead then.”

  Mom seemed happier than usual to hear from me.

  “My prince! Where are you now?”

  “We got to the ranch tonight.”

  “A week off, huh?”

  “Yeah. I get to ride my motorcycle tomorrow.”

  “Mitch, be careful on that thing. I don’t like them.”

  “I will.”

  Because she insisted, I always wore a helmet. It had saved my hide a time or two. Dad’s ranch was full of ruts and uneven patches of ground, all capable of setting my bike down or sending me over the handlebars. What Mom didn’t know about this, like so many other things when it came to time spent with Dad, didn’t hurt her.

  “I heard from Jerry yesterday,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “He called at dinnertime. You’re not going to believe this. He joined the Marines.”

  “The Marines? Really?” I wondered what Dad, the strident Navy man, would think of that.

  “That’s exactly what I said. He enlisted in Salt Lake, and he’s down in San Diego for boot camp.”

  “Why the Marines?”

  “He said the job there with your dad toughened him up and he was ready for it.”

  “Did he say anything about why he left?” I knew the answer to this, of course, but I wanted test her knowledge. That she hadn’t screamed bloody murder and demanded that Dad send me home posthaste was a good sign that she had no idea about what took place in Milford.

  “He just said it was time to get serious about something. He said drilling with your Dad isn’t a good career. Having lived that life, I agree with him.”

  “You sound glad.”

  “I’ll worry about Jerry. That’s what I do. But I think he made a good decision. He’s smart. He’ll do well.”

  “OK.”

  “What’s your Dad up to?”

  “He went to get Marie.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re there all alone?”

  “LaVerne is here.”

  “Who is LaVerne?”

  “She’s a neighbor. Do you want to talk to her?”

  I looked over at LaVerne, who raised an eyebrow.

  “No, that’s OK.…Mitch, one other thing. Your baseball team won their last two games. I was there for the last one. They gave out trophies. Yours is here waiting.”

  “Neat. Did you put it in my room with the others?”

  “Of course. Your coach said they loved having you on the team and to say hello.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You bet, sweetie. Be good. Call me next week, OK? I love you.”

  “Bye, Mom. I love you too.”

  Mom’s nonchalance about Jerry’s decision to join the Marines confused me. On one hand, I was happy that she seemed OK with it; that would certainly make it easier for me to tuck away the details about why he left. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but wonder how she might feel if she knew about that night. This was clear: I wouldn’t have been in Split Rail had she known. That being the case, discretion seemed the only sensible play.

  I pulled out my wallet and thumbed the three twenty-dollar bills Jerry left me. They had become a security blanket. When I was sure Dad wasn’t around, I would open my wallet and touch Jerry’s money. It was my connection to him.

  I hoped like hell I’d never have to use it for the purpose he intended.

  SPLIT RAIL | JUNE 30–JULY 1, 1979

  LAVERNE AND I SETTLED into the den to watch TV. Isolated as Dad’s ranch was from the big stations in Billings and Great Falls, the reception was poor. Dad eased that a bit by installing a monstrous antenna, but still we watched through the electronic snow drifting across the screen.

  I stayed alert through Alice and The Jeffersons. After that, my eyelids grew heavy. I slumped against LaVerne, who wrapped me in an arm as sleep and dreams washed over me.

  We stood in a semicircle, the five of us: me, Jerry, Mom, Dad, Marie. We were in the middle of a dry lakebed that stretched in all directions to the horizon. Our bare feet sank into the parched white sand.

  Each could see the faces of the other four. Everybody else stood perfectly still, but I didn’t. I craned my neck around at each of them, and my mouth formed words—“What’s going on?”—but no sounds.

  Mom said, “I have to go,” and she peeled away from the group. She looked beautiful—luminous and sunny, wearing her favorite blue spring dress. Finally, my mouth worked. “Mom, where are you going?” She continued a few paces, then turned and waved at me, as if urging me to join her. She looked as though she were saying something, but I couldn’t hear it.

  “Mom!” I yelled.

  She turned and kept walking. Soon, she was a dot in the distance.

  Then Jerry said, “I’m gone too.”

  He set a hand on Dad’s shoulder as he left, and I watched with incredulity as Dad’s shirt and muscle crumbled, leaving a gouged-out crater.

  “Where are you going?” I called to Jerry. My brother never turned around, disappearing into the haze just as Mom had done only moments earlier.

  Marie stepped through the distance toward Dad and stood before him. She pushed her sunglasses atop her forehead and dug into him with her brown eyes.

  “Good-bye, Jim,” she said, and she slapped his face, shattering it. I shielded my head as pieces of my father rained down.

  My father, whole and beside me just moments earlier, was now just a stump of sand, no more than a foot high. And then he wasn’t
even that. Marie kicked away what remained of him as she headed for the horizon, like Mom and Jerry before her.

  I tried to scream, but my lungs expelled no air. I tried to move, but the sand swallowed my legs, rendering them useless.

  Tears running down my face, I saw with dread the coming darkness and the desert’s yielding to the chill of night…

  The slam of the front door pulled me from sleep. Beside me, I felt LaVerne jump too.

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to make sense of where I was. The TV signal, now a test pattern, broke a hazy trail of electrons through the dark. My heart thumped in relief that I was in the ranch house, not mired on a dry lakebed in God knows where.

  Marie’s voice clacked like a typewriter, but I couldn’t make out her words. Dad shushed her.

  LaVerne and I climbed to our feet and made our way to the front room.

  The tension was palpable, something LaVerne picked up on right away.

  “Well, I see you folks are here in one piece, so I’ll be saying good night,” she said, and she scooted for the door.

  “Thank you, LaVerne,” Dad said.

  He turned his attention to me.

  “It’s one in the morning. Why are you up?”

  “I fell asleep in front of the TV.”

  “Hi, Mitch,” Marie said.

  “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t start making nice,” Dad said.

  “Screw you, Jim. I can say hello to my stepson.”

  Dad wheeled on her.

  “Screw me? What do you know about it, whore?”

  Marie dashed away, cutting across the room. I watched this unfold as if on the fifty-yard line at a football game. The whole sickening scene played out in front of me.

  Dad pivoted in the direction she had skittered and kept moving toward her.

  “Don’t touch me, Jim.” At the back wall, Marie grabbed a figurine from the mantel and flung it at Dad. The piece shattered against the floor at my feet. I watched the pieces of it skitter across the wood. Out the window, I saw LaVerne’s pickup disappear down the lane.

  I screamed. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

  For the first time, the adults in my life did as I demanded.

  “You’re being stupid,” I said. The totality of the day—the long ride, the cowering at Dad’s scoldings, the dream—sent tears down my face. I was angrier than I was scared, and I was plenty scared. Time apart had done nothing to mend the fray between Dad and Marie.

  Marie stared daggers at Dad and then walked back across the room and knelt in front of me. She tried to hug me, but I pushed her away.

  “No.”

  “Mitch, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I don’t care.”

  Dad came over, and he set a hand on Marie’s shoulder. She bristled.

  “Settle down, sport.”

  My chest heaved as I fought with my breath. My tears, which I hated, fell in open defiance of my desire that they hold back.

  “I’m sick of it,” I said.

  He reached for me, and I slapped at his hand.

  “Leave me alone.”

  An edge crept into his voice. “Now, Mitch.”

  “I’m sick of it!”

  Marie clasped me by the shoulders. I grew tense at her touch, but I didn’t resist.

  “We’re done,” she said. “You shouldn’t have seen that.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “You’re right. It’s done. It’s over.”

  I slowly gained control of my tears and sniffling. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.

  “I just want everybody to get along.”

  Dad said softly, “OK, sport. We’re working on it.”

  We played nice for a few minutes, and then Dad suggested that I go to bed so I could get an early start.

  “No chores tomorrow,” Dad said. “You can ride all day.”

  I plodded down the hall. I wanted to cry but couldn’t find the energy for it. Dad and Marie could tap a limitless well of conflict, but I could take only so much. I’d had my fill.

  I kicked off my shoes and set them by the closet. Off too came my socks and my T-shirt, and I shimmied out of my pants. A few minutes after my head hit the pillow, just as my eyes grew heavy, I heard Dad and Marie turn their guns on each other again, this time in the bedroom opposite mine.

  The words were quieter now, delivered in low tones so as not to rouse me. It was a senseless consideration. I lay in the dark, my eyes open, and took in every syllable.

  “I hate it here,” she said. “I hate being with you out there. I deserve better.”

  “This is the deal,” Dad said. “You knew it when you married me.”

  “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t keep up. You’re bleeding us dry, gallivanting around. I come home and find you in Billings—”

  “I was just having fun.”

  “It looked fun, you and that guy.”

  “He’s just a friend. Not that you’d know—”

  “He was friendly, that much was clear. He can be friendly with a busted nose.”

  “Oh yeah, big man Jim. You can’t understand it, so you’ve got to hurt it.”

  “Whore.”

  “I didn’t do anything that you didn’t do first.”

  “Lying whore.”

  I turned over, wrapped the pillow around my head, and said a silent prayer that it would end soon. It seemed to me, as I lay there in the dark, that Jerry had made the only sensible decision.

  He had gotten out.

  BILLINGS | SEPTEMBER 21, 2007

  HOURS AFTER THE STORM, morning came and brought an air of uneasy consideration to the way Dad and I dealt with each other, one that hadn’t existed until after we had rolled around in the dust in Split Rail.

  I’d seen enough violence in my life to know that good things rarely come of it, but in our case, the scuffle cut through some of the deep divisions between us. Dad knew I wasn’t going anywhere until I was satisfied with where I stood with him. Perhaps for the first time, I knew it too.

  I awoke the way I had all those years earlier, with Dad shaking me from slumber.

  “Mitch, let’s get some of those doughnuts,” he said.

  I blinked my eyes to chase away sleep, and there he stood, a floppy grin stitched across his face.

  We rode in my rental while Dad fiddled with the radio again. At the grocery store, I held the box open while Dad counted out six doughnuts from the self-serve bin. At the coffee kiosk, he poured two cups, and unprompted, he added my cream and sugar, looking up and smiling at me.

  It was like we were normal people or something.

  “What’s your plan for today, Pop?” I asked between bites of jelly doughnut.

  “Errands.”

  “Yeah? You need some company?”

  “Nope.” He looked at me. “I could use your help here, anyway. You know how to use a lawnmower?”

  I gave him a quick look to gauge his intent. He twinkled.

  “I’m pretty sure I can figure it out.”

  “There’s a push mower and a rake in the shed. Can you whip this yard into shape?”

  His patch of lawn ran as long as the double-wide and about ten feet deep. It wouldn’t be much of a job.

  “You pay overtime?” I asked, and Dad laughed.

  Just before nine a.m., Dad left. “I’ll be back pretty soon,” he said on his way out.

  “Sure you don’t need company?”

  “The mower and the rake are in the shed,” he said.

  I chuckled. “I’m on it.”

  I listened as Dad’s little pickup sputtered to life and he sent it rattling down the lane, and then I turned back to the morning’s newspaper and my third cup of coffee. The yard could wait.

  The cutting duty, like so many things, had gotten away from Dad, and I had to make three passes with the push mower to saw down every long blade of grass. My back took um
brage at the raking and bagging of the cut grass, but that was my own damned fault. At this stage, I lifted more drinks than weights, and my body merely told me, in a language I could understand, that I had been an idiot.

  I finished in an hour. The cuttings were bagged and tied and sitting out with the trash bins. I dragged the rake back to the shed.

  I was about to lock up when a box in the rafters caught my eye. In marker, in Dad’s jagged hand, was written Letters/papers.

  I peeked outside, gazing along the entry road. The assumption that I was being surreptitious made me feel foolish, but the more I contemplated what I was about to do, the more on-point caution seemed. I asked myself a question: if Dad were to walk in and catch me digging through this box, would he be upset?

  Despite the answer, I stepped inside the shed and dragged down the box.

  Forty-five minutes later, I stood in the darkness of the shed, trying to get my head straight.

  I had known only the faintest outlines of Dad’s upbringing. He was born in Havre, Montana, the only child of Raymond and Luetta Quillen. When he was eighteen months old, his parents died in a car crash, hit head-on by a farm truck. Dad, in a bassinet in the back seat, survived. With no siblings and no one stepping forward to claim him, Dad ended up in the St. Thomas Home orphanage in Great Falls, where he stayed until he was of legal age. Then the Navy took him. That was Dad’s story, although he never talked about it with me. Details came to me in scraps of conversations I wasn’t intended to hear. As I grew more curious about him, Mom filled in a few details she knew. What I found in the box changed everything.

  There, underneath his discharge papers and information on long-ago bank accounts and old payroll stubs, I found a stack of envelopes, bound together with rubber bands. Each had the same return address, from someone named Kelly Hewins, from a post-office box in Havre, penned neatly in cursive.

  December 11, 1963

  Dear Jimmy,