Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  “He would. . . .”

  “But when he and the Ryan girl broke up, something went out of him. He just couldn’t get himself back on track.”

  Her sense of causality was off. Gene’s derailment coincided with his father’s suicide and subsequent notoriety, but I didn’t correct her.

  Mrs. Stoddard turned and gazed toward the kitchen, remembering perhaps the hours Gene and I had spent hunched over our homework there. Her choice of subject was appropriate; while math problems stubbornly resisted my efforts to solve them, numbers gave up their secrets quickly to Gene. Then she sat up straight on her stool and coolly said, “And your life is on track, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Completely on track. Of course it is. College. Plans for the future. A girlfriend. She’s still your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  Although at the moment I was unsure of that fact, I nodded.

  “He kept calling her. . . . My God, how long did he call her, trying to talk her into taking him back?” She looked again in the direction of the kitchen. Their telephone, I recalled, hung on the wall next to the cupboard. “It reached the point where I thought of calling her myself. Can you imagine that? I don’t know what I would have said. . . . And I even suggested that he call you, his old friend.” Alma Stoddard turned a mirthless smile in my direction. “But he wouldn’t do that.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say in my defense.

  “Only later did I realize how foolish that suggestion was. Because you weren’t his old friend anymore, were you? You weren’t about to help him with that problem, were you?”

  I stood abruptly. “I have to go, Mrs. Stod—Mrs. Mauer. I’m home for the weekend, so I thought I’d see if Gene might be here. Does he have his own place here in town?”

  Alma Stoddard didn’t rise. She cupped her chin in her hand as if she were bracing herself. “He’s living in Minot now. Working for his uncle’s construction company up there.” She quite deliberately did not look at me.

  I thanked her and without escort left the house. Keogh Street in those years was largely treeless, yet just as in Marie’s neighborhood, someone in the vicinity was burning leaves. I could smell the fire, though I couldn’t see smoke or flames. Why that smell is regarded so fondly is beyond me. It is, after all, the odor of endings.

  The following day, Saturday, I was once again on the road soon after sunrise, driving up Highway 83 from Bismarck to Minot. The early start was necessary. I wasn’t sure how I’d find Gene, but I was prepared to drive up and down every street in the city until I sighted that distinctive white convertible of his. And when—or if—I came upon it? Then I would seek out its owner, and determine if he had recently driven to Grand Forks in response to a call from a Miss Marie Ryan, who required rescue or refuge from the fool who had fathered her child.

  As it turned out, Gene was not nearly as difficult to locate as I’d feared. I stopped at a gas station on the south end of the city, opened a telephone directory, and there it was: G. Stoddard, 17051½ Arapaho, KL5-2232. The station attendant provided directions to an avenue on the city’s hilly north side.

  We were no longer friends, Gene and I, but our lives continued to parallel in odd ways: We both continued to live in North Dakota, not in our hometown but in cities in the state’s northern half, and we had both rented basement apartments. His white Impala was parked in front of a stucco house that had a covered apartment entrance built into its side like a chute.

  The convertible’s top was down, and when I peered into its interior, I guessed that it had been left down all night. The day might have been warm for October, but the night had been cool and the car’s dashboard and upholstery were, at that late morning hour, still beaded with dew. Gene must have had matters more important than his car’s welfare on his mind when he pulled to the curb.

  With my palm still wet from where it swiped a path through the moisture on the car door, I marched on. The leaves littering the stairwell clattered like castanets as I kicked through them on my way down the steps to the apartment. I had not quite reached the door when I tried to formulate a plan that good sense would have said I’d needed well before I got that far.

  If Gene admitted that Marie was inside—or if his denial was unconvincing—I was prepared to push past him and . . . and what? Haul her bodily from the apartment? Carry her to my car and transport her back to Grand Forks against her will? I could as well put what love she might still have for me on a chopping block and butcher it before her eyes.

  But I had gotten that far, and I heard in the apartment’s interior someone moving toward the door in answer to the buzzer I had already pushed twice and was about to lean on again.

  It was probably not my desperate, bloody thoughts that somehow showed in my features and frightened the young woman who came to the door. More likely it was simply the sight of a stranger.

  “Yes?” She peered around the door she was willing to open only inches. I guessed her to be close to Gene’s and my age. Her blond hair was tousled, she wore no makeup, and her eyes were still heavy-lidded from sleep.

  “I’m looking for Gene, Gene Stoddard?”

  Nothing in my manner apparently conveyed goodwill, because she didn’t open the door any wider or alter her guarded expression. “He’s at work?”

  “I saw his car. . . .”

  “Len picked him up? Like always?”

  She made every sentence into a question, a mannerism I adopted as well. “I’m a friend of his? From Bismarck?” In my case, however, the tone matched my dubiety.

  Either the word “friend” or “Bismarck” convinced her of my harmlessness. She opened the door and stepped back, an invitation for me to enter.

  My mission to Minot was completed. Marie and this young woman could not have both been at 1705½ Arapaho. Nevertheless, I felt too foolish at that point simply to walk away. I stepped into Gene Stoddard’s home.

  His place was not furnished any better than mine, but without Marie Ryan’s touch, it had nothing to raise it above the level of slovenly, threadbare utilitarianism. The couch was covered with newspapers. Empty Hamm’s beer cans littered the top of the coffee table. A bent coat hanger served as an antenna on the television that sat on a chair. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and motor oil—Gene must have been operating heavy equipment for his uncle’s company.

  The young woman reached out her hand. “I’m Joy?” After we shook hands, she stepped quickly back and folded her arms across her chest, self-conscious because nothing covered her ample breasts but her pink cotton pajama top. Her plaid pajama bottoms didn’t match the top and barely reached her ankles. Joy and Gene slept together. In the same bed. All the night through. Head to dreaming head.

  Joy had a pretty round face and a plump, shapely figure. She was self-conscious about her hair, but whenever she made a tentative move to reach up and pull her fingers through the tangles, she had to quickly bring her arm back down to cover her breasts.

  “Are you from Minot, Joy?”

  She nodded eagerly. “I work at First National? Bank?”

  “And Gene’s working for his uncle?” Raymond Stoddard, I recalled, also once worked for the construction company owned by Alma’s brother.

  “He really likes it? He says it reminds him of when he was a kid? Digging in the dirt with his toy Caterpillar?”

  His play must have been solitary. I had no recollection of the two of us on our hands and knees pushing dirt around.

  “What will he do when winter comes?”

  Her shoulders rose as automatically as the ends of her sentences, an embarrassed shrug that made me think she and Gene didn’t talk much about the future.

  “Well. Winter. It’s not here yet, is it?” That mention of time, though it was to a season rather than the hour, provided me with the opportunity to make my exit. I pretended to look at the watch I didn’t wear. “I have to hit the road. I was just driving through Minot, and I thought I’d take a chance and see if I could catch Gene.”
r />   “He’ll be sorry he missed you?”

  Yes, that was open to question.

  I was halfway out the door when I realized I had left something unsaid. “I hope you and Gene have a very, very happy life together.”

  That sentence I had no difficulty ending on a dying note of conviction.

  Upon the new planks and between the freshly painted columns, my father stood, hands on hips, a happy man on the porch of the house he and his brother had worked so hard to restore. His smile was as wide as any I’d ever seen cross his face, and though it was turned in my direction, I would learn soon that I was not the reason my father was beaming as if lit from within.

  The highway that led from Minot back to Grand Forks ran right through Wembley, so I’d phoned ahead and asked my father if I could stop there and spend the night with him and Uncle Burt. Of course, of course, he said; it would be wonderful to see me and hear firsthand how I was doing in college.

  While I carried my suitcase up the front walk, Uncle Burt came out too, and both brothers watched me approach. Whether it was Burt or my father who was in charge of preparing their meals, the food must have agreed with my father. Since he and my mother had separated, he had gained weight, and now the brothers truly looked brothers—a matched pair of tall, smiling, balding big-bellied men. There it was, I thought, the body of my future.

  My father and uncle were both eager to show me the work they had done on the house, but before we went inside, we had to walk around the outside of the house so they could show me what was not there but had been in their youth—the outhouse, the poles that first brought electricity and then telephone service to the house, the huge garden whose harvest fed them throughout the year, the pit and the barrel in which the family burned much of its trash, and the barn where their father stabled his horse and the small buggy it pulled through the streets of Wembley.

  Upon entering the house, I was immediately taken on another tour, and as we moved from room to room, the brothers continued to take turns telling me about the remodeling work. They had even tried to furnish the house according to their memories. My father, who had never shown the slightest interest in the way my mother decorated our home, now boasted about how the iron bed frame in the largest bedroom was just like the one that once held their parents’ mattress, which had also been covered with a blue coverlet. The rocking chair in the parlor was a duplicate of the one their father had sat in while reading the Wembley Daily News after working all day at the drugstore.

  Then, once I had been shown the claw-foot bathtub, the wainscoting, the newel post, the coved ceiling, the brass doorknobs, and the leaded glass windows, the three of us sat down at the dining room table (its mahogany surface gleaming like a mirror). For the first time in my life, my father offered me a beer. I accepted, and then as we three men who shared a last name raised our bottles of Budweiser, my father revealed that he and his brother had at long last solved the mystery of Raymond Stoddard’s motivation for murdering Monty Burnham, or so they believed.

  Raymond’s father, I was reminded, had worked for the railroad, a job that didn’t make him wealthy but provided a steady income and a comfortable life for his family. In fact, they were sufficiently well fixed that the senior Mr. Stoddard was able to purchase a vacation place, rare indeed among North Dakotans of that generation. Their little cabin was on a lake in northeastern North Dakota, not far from Wembley.

  I recalled that Gene often lamented having to spend two weeks of his summer at Lake Liana. It meant he had to miss part of the Little League season, and to make matters worse, there was nothing he particularly liked to do at the lake. Fishing didn’t appeal to him, and that was the activity his grandfather and father engaged in from dawn to dark. Whenever Gene’s grandmother saw him idle, she would put him to work, doing everything from hauling water to picking blueberries. His grandparents were strict and insisted that the lights be turned out early every evening and that everyone go to bed in order to rise early the following morning. For Gene, the time spent at the cabin was more punishment than vacation.

  Gene’s feelings about the place were not, however, the family’s feelings. Everyone else loved the cabin, no matter how dilapidated it was or how primitive living conditions were there. After his retirement from the railroad, the senior Stoddard managed to spend as much time there as in Wembley.

  Until, that is, his and his wife’s health began to fail. She developed a heart condition that made even walking across a room a venture that taxed her to the limit. His bones became brittle; he fell and broke a hip. A coughing fit cracked a rib. He shrunk and stiffened; bending down or raising an arm overhead was next to impossible. Then, as if to make his diminution complete, his wife died, and his spirit shrunk to match his body.

  Given those circumstances, his beloved Lake Liana might as well have been on the far side of the moon, so inaccessible was it to him. Others now spent vacations at the cabin that he had worked to make livable, and upon their return he had to listen to their reports on how many fish they’d caught, how many glorious sunsets they’d witnessed, how bracing was the morning air.

  His health worsened. Pneumonia put him into the hospital, and as he lay in the room he believed he might never leave alive, a visitor came and presented Mr. Stoddard with a business proposition.

  Since the old man would never again cast a line into Lake Liana or spend a night under the cabin’s roof, and since he could not divide the place equally among his sons and daughter, who were in any event liable to squabble over the property after their father was dead, wouldn’t Mr. Stoddard prefer to sell it himself and thereby exercise some control over the cabin’s future? If you sell it to me, the visitor argued—pleaded—you can be sure that the cabin will be as well cared for—as loved—as it has been with a Stoddard as owner. The visitor even shed a few tears as part of his petition.

  The old man was sufficiently selfish and grudging that this appeal worked on him. From his hospital bed he signed the papers that deeded the cabin and the waterfront land on which it sat to his visitor. The salesman—swindler, some might have it—who talked Mr. Stoddard into this transaction paid the dying old man exactly what the original purchase price had been.

  When Raymond learned of the sale, he was furious, but though plenty of people told him he could have the deal nullified—an enfeebled old man in a hospital, for God’s sake!—Raymond refused to do anything. If his father was going to be that petty, then he, then the entire family, would have to live with the consequences.

  Like his father, Raymond had loved the cabin, and as long as his father was alive, Raymond blamed him for what he had done. Once the senior Stoddard died, however, Raymond transferred his rage to the man who had talked the old man out of his property. That smooth-talking son of a bitch was none other than Monty Burnham.

  My father sat back, and then it was left to my uncle to explain the sources and the evidence that they had uncovered and relied on in piecing together their story.

  Their research started, strangely enough, on the occasion of my high school graduation. Burt had been at our home when the news came of Bob Mullen’s drowning at the river, and the tragedy brought back to him his own graduation celebration. It too had been held by a body of water, though one much more benign than the Missouri River. The family of one of his classmates had a cabin on a lake about forty miles from Wembley, and they convened there for a night of bonfires and beer drinking. Burt could recall many of the specifics of that evening—including an altercation between two classmates—but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember whose family owned the land that was the site of the celebration. Ordinarily he might have been able to live with his curiosity unsatisfied, but for some reason this little mystery nagged at him.

  He went for long drives in the country around Wembley, searching for the cabin or the lake. Finally, on the shores of tiny Lake Liana, he found what might have been the site of his graduation night celebration. The cabin, however, looked much different from the way he remembered i
t, and he might have marked that down to another of memory’s inaccuracies, except that memory usually tricks us by enlarging the buildings of our past. We return to our elementary school classroom or high school auditorium, and we’re shocked to discover how small it is. Then Burt realized what had caused the disjunction between memory and reality. The cabin had recently been remodeled and was almost doubled in size because of an additional story having been added.

  Dorling was the little town nearest Lake Liana, and a gas station attendant there was able to tell Burt who owned the cabin. It was the Burnham family. Of course—that made sense. After all, Monty was in the same graduating class, so it would stand to reason that the Burnham cabin could have been used for the party. Burt had a vague memory of Monty on that occasion—was he involved in that fight with another classmate? Burt also seemed to recall that it was Monty who departed early from the party. But he wouldn’t have left his own family’s cabin, would he?

  But Burt had to live with these uncertainties and inconsistencies until quite recently when he had a chance encounter with another member of the Burnham family. Monty’s cousin, Irv Schmitz, came into the pharmacy to have a prescription filled, and Burt asked him what had happened with the cabin. Oh, it was still in the family, Irv said; Monty had been so proud of the deal he’d made to acquire the cabin that no one would ever consider selling it. Monty’s sister and her husband had completely remodeled the place, and all the branches of the family took their turns vacationing at Lake Liana. Not much questioning was needed to get Irv to divulge the particulars of Monty’s negotiating coup. “There was nothing,” Irv said, “that old Monty appreciated more than talking someone into or out of something.”

  At that point Burt pushed his chair back, just as my father had earlier when he’d finished his portion of the narrative. And there the brothers sat, two aging fat men finally contented that yesterday was fixed, its mysteries solved, its story complete. Of course any explanation for Raymond Stoddard’s behavior that had him acting to avenge the loss of an ancestral property would be especially satisfying to those two. They were, after all, living in their own reclaimed, restored past.