Longshot

by Lance Allred

  As one lures a dog to its kennel with a treat, Mom did so to me with a bottle of milk. I needed my nourishment, and I loved my milk. I didn’t simply suck my milk bottles; I ripped the tips off the nipples with my teeth and guzzled the savory refreshment. When a bottle was empty, I chucked it from my solitary confinement of a bed, hit the door, and yelled “Mo’ miwk!” I was awesome.

  My parents again sought professional help after being driven to a zombielike state of sleeplessness because I wouldn’t stay in my bed. They were finally advised to put me back in bed no matter how many times I persisted. On the first night of confrontation I was put back in my bed and climbed back out on my own accord over fifty times. The next night I did so about half that amount. Then half of that on the third night. But, as the specialist predicted, I regrouped and launched a Tet offensive on the fourth night, breaking the fifty mark again.

  But my parents never gave in and continued to put me back in bed, paying my behavior no heed, as if I wasn’t distracting them in any way. After that fourth night, I never got out of the bed again. My parents were kind enough, however, to grant me the right of staying awake as long as I liked, as long as I didn’t get out of bed. I happily concurred and sang myself to sleep each night, spooning my mangy, gutted bottle.

  At eighteen months, I was fitted with two hearing aids that hooked over the tops of my ears. While we who suffer from hearing loss may not hear well, we can still feel pain in our ears. Aside from the torture of the plastic penetrating deep down my ear canal, the blast of sound that pounded into my eardrums and reverberated throughout my skull for the first time was enough to make a grown man cry. I wasn’t even two, and yet I didn’t cry: I simply took them out at every opportunity and hid them. I hated those HAs.

  It got to the point where Mom would “release the hounds,” dispatching the siblings to find my hearing aids, and then reward them with treats or even money. But I was not playing her game; they could have their quarters and cookies as long as I had my silence. I was able to enjoy the peace and quiet for several days at a time as my family searched for my HAs. Unfortunately, they always found them: in my mother’s winter coat pocket in the middle of July; between the box springs and mattress of my parent’s king-sized bed, as far in as my little arm could reach; in the tall grass beside the creek bank; even under the two-by-four framing in the sidewalk that Dad was going to fill with concrete the very next day. My sycophant siblings always foiled my schemes.

  Only after I realized that I could hear Alvin and the Chipmunks better on Saturday morning with my hearing aids did I start wearing them voluntarily, only to “accidentally” lose them again once cartoons were over.

  When I was three, I began speech therapy on a triweekly basis, and I would remain in speech therapy until I was fifteen. It was basically a friendly reminder that I was not normal.

  I always knew I wasn’t like my siblings. While they all talked really loud to me, it was when I encountered children outside of the home that I really noticed my difference. Ours was a town where plural marriage was a way of life, and thus there were gobs of kids—hundreds of bastards scattered like little ants, rummaging through the forest, all running with their own cliques, like Smurfs. Some kids were very cruel, playing with my hearing aids and making fun of the way I talked. I always had to be on the lookout for a pinecone coming my way, on a path to embed itself in my head. The only thing that irritated me more than an unforeseen pinecone in my temple was people disrespecting Neil Diamond. This fact holds true to this day. I love Neil Diamond. I adore him and will fight to no end defending his honor. I’m being neither flippant nor facetious.

  It’s no surprise I became a very self-conscious, quiet, and introspective child. There was one place I loved to go to get away from it all, and that was down by the river, where I had not a care in the world. Mom and Dad took us down there on the weekends, where we played and watched the older kids jump from the bridge.

  The Bitterroot River, which runs the spine of its namesake valley, is where my memories are. I spent many days lying on tubes, floating down the river with my father, letting my head tilt back and dip in the water, which had its own unique smell and taste; there’s no other water quite like the Bitterroot. I loved to skip rocks across her wide channels, staring up into the Big Sky, and tell her that I’d never leave.

  The Bitterroot River is my lifeline. It’s where all my dreams and hopes are held most precious. It’s where my heart will always be. It’s where I will be when I die. And it’s where my future children and loved ones will find me and talk to me whenever they need me. That’s where I will be. I have already achieved immortality, for my memories are there in the water, in the bittersweet smell that emanates from the water and the banks of sage and rough sand. My memories are alive down there in the Bitterroot, and my memories are what make me.

  2

  The offbeat gait thundered down the hallway, reverberating throughout the house like a sledgehammer. Only my father could make that noise, and he made it only when he was unhappy, which was only when someone had distressed Mom. Due to earlier construction accidents, one of Dad’s legs was shorter than the other, and this made his gait distinct. I knew he was coming for me. I sucked in a breath of defiant air. He pushed the door open, his beet-red face twitching in displeasure; his Tourette’s was acting up again: his neck and eyebrows twitched spastically, inextricably linked like a marionette doll’s.

  I did my best to stare back at him without fear, but the first thing I saw from the corner of my eye was the unmistakable yellow paddle: a foot-long, six-inch-wide, inch-thick paddle that my father had carved and my mother painted yellow, with bouncy lettering proclaiming Because We Love You. By this logic, I was a very loved child.

  But I came to reason that my father’s handy skills provided me with more comfort overall than the discomfort caused by one single yellow paddle. It was a luxury to have a father around who could fix any wire short, pipe leak, or wall crack, and, most important, it was a luxury to live in a home you could say your father built with his own two hands. I grew up in a Tudor-style home, one of many homes in the town my father built with his own hands, for free, for the good of the cause. This one he got to keep for himself. The house stood out like a beautiful woman in an all-boys school, among all the other trailers and half-finished houses that were to remain forever so because the patriarch had another home to build for another new wife and couldn’t finish the job.

  After three good whacks—don’t worry, New Age parents, I’m not scarred, and I will spank my kids, too—Dad sent me downstairs to apologize to Mother. I sauntered out, rubbing my numb butt, plotting and scheming how I was going to rid myself of that darn yellow paddle.

  Once the punishment was over, Dad told me I was going with him down to the local home-improvement store. I jumped into the gold Buick, the fourth installment in the endless line of beater A-bodies Dad bought and wore to their graves that for many years accommodated all seven of us Allreds at once. As we drove, the awkward tension of what had transpired an hour earlier—Dad cricketing my ass and all—was palpable, and not even the Fleetwood Mac Rumors album in the tape deck could break it. Deciding to be the man in the situation, all savvy and adult, I took control and asked, like any five-year-old kid, “Dad, why aren’t the people in Russia free?”

  We pulled up to Dunbar’s. I loved that store. I loved the smell of fresh sawdust and Elmer’s glue: it was euphoric, not to mention hallucinogenic. Dad made the usual rounds, collecting two-by-fours, caulk and glue, drywall, and other assorted items, while letting me play with his measuring tape, which rolled up in a heavy steel case bigger than my hand. That thing weighed at least three pounds. Dad got a lot of mileage out of it. It was the perfect babysitter.

  After the bill was settled, Dad displayed his efficient packing skills, which I have yet to see matched. Somehow forgetting that his car wasn’t a truck, Dad calculated its every crevice, positioning the newly bought plywood and two-by-fours just so, angling them in cris
scrossed patterns, from one rolled-down window to another, and then drove home, entertaining me with stories of his childhood with his forty-three brothers and sisters, the parents of my four hundred–plus cousins.

  I helped Dad carry in the wood and had grand visions of me swinging a hammer, all chiseled and buff, standing in sawdust and laughing at splinters that dared to hurt me. I was ready to be a man, to feel the sweet sting of sweat in my eyes. Sadly, none of my father’s building and carpentry skills have passed on to his children. Hoping for a hammer, I walked up to Dad, who was working under the sink or twisting wire in a circuit, and asked, “Can I help, Dad?”

  Never breaking away to make eye contact, Dad said with a grunt, “Not right now, but you can sit down there and watch.” This was something every one of us kids was told. It was a rite of passage in the Allred home. Instead of giving me a hammer, Dad gave me a piece of sandpaper. I don’t know why I ever let myself think it was going to be any different than the time before. Dad never let me handle his tools. Nope: sandpaper was all I got. By this time, at the ripe age of five, I had done enough sanding for my father to build a wooden battleship. Dad still won’t give me a hammer to this day, just a smile and a piece of sandpaper.

  It was after a second fall from a ladder, and a second break in his left leg, as he lay in a hospital bed crying, not knowing what to do, that my father decided to go back to college. He was poor, had eight children, and was going nowhere. My family isn’t quite sure how they pulled it off financially, sending my father to college while building a new home. But they did. Three years later, my father graduated first in his class from the University of Montana, with a bachelor’s degree in history and a teaching certification, and we had our own home.

  My father’s going to college was an outrage to the men on the Council. In the Allred Group, you didn’t need education. All men in the Group held the priesthood—the power, given by God, to act in His name and with His authority. They held it in their hands when they gave blessing to others while being inspired by God. Those who were deemed God’s most worthy followers were inducted into the authoritarian Council. The Council was also referred to by all members of the Group as the Priesthood with a capital P. All male members had the priesthood and could lead and guide their own families, but only the Council had the right to lead and counsel all Group members in all matters. That meant they could make decisions affecting everyone. As in “The Priesthood has decided that it is now permissible to marry first cousins.” These Council members, some of whom did not even have a high school diploma, were very vocal about my dad’s going back to school. His increased knowledge only added to his threat (and his being a son of the Prophet was threat enough). He was told that an education would destroy his faith. (At least they were right about something.)

  But I looked up to and respected my dad. Dad always seemed to have an answer for whatever was bothering my young mind. I found him one day next to his most recent drywall project. “Dad, where did God come from? Who was his dad?”

  “Well, son,” Dad paused, staring at his aluminum palette heaped with joint compound that he held like Picasso, “that’s a question every young boy and every forty-year-old man wants to know the answer to.”

  Dad taught me that we study history not for miscellaneous data, but to learn vicariously from other people’s mistakes. Life is much easier if one is able to do that. But as Dad explained, many are unable to learn from others’ mistakes, let alone their own, and often think they are the exception, allowing history to repeat itself. Through my father, I learned I was no better, nor of less worth, than the next person, and if subject A performs an action to ugly consequences and subject B earns a similar fate, I will probably experience the same.

  Later that night, as everyone was filtering off to bed, which was when my mind came out to explore the world, I watched my father playing games of solitaire, reflecting in silence at the kitchen table as he shuffled the cards and then flipped them over to memorize them. He never maneuvered them; he just memorized them.

  “Dad, isn’t that cheating?”

  “No. I’m just memorizing what is there so I can win.”

  My father had no qualms about rationalizing the fact that he was cheating at solitaire.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son?” he asked as he observed the one-eyed jack.

  “Why was President Kennedy shot?”

  The next morning my brother Court and I lounged in the kitchen with our Audrey Hepburn of a mother. “Boys, don’t make noise just to make noise,” Mom said, standing at the sink. I sighed, got up, and began to put away my pots and pans. They were my amazing musical instruments. I couldn’t understand why Mom didn’t appreciate them. But never one to be deprived of enjoyment, I quickly ran to my Tonka truck, which sat in the corner of the kitchen with long, worn treads in the linoleum where I had passed the truck hundreds of times before.

  “Lance, would you like to take this outside and put it in the garbage for me?” Mom asked.

  “No.” I was an honest child.

  “Lance, I will try that again. Take this outside to the garbage, please.”

  Acting as though she were asking for my left eye, I got up and took the bag outside.

  When I came back in, she handed me a plate of winter squash with brown sugar on it. “I have a treat for you!” she said enthusiastically. My mother: the queen of treats. There was no fridge, no cupboard too bare that my mother, the ever resourceful woman, couldn’t scour to find a treat to make. I sat down and happily ate the squash; Court scowled at it, preferring something more junky—which would explain his bad teeth.

  She came up to me and started lightly and repetitively smacking my head: “Oh, you’re just so cute I want to beat you! Squeeze you until your head pops off!” A perturbed look covered her face, which conveyed the frustration she endured at not being able to properly express how much she loved us. These threats were known as “Allred terms of endearment.”

  My mother, Tana Mosier Allred, was raised in the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in Salt Lake City before her parents went through a painful divorce. Following the split, which was due to my grandfather’s infidelities, my grandmother was looking for something to hold on to, something to give meaning to her suffering, something greater than herself. She found Rulon C. Allred. She took her four daughters, my mother being the oldest at sixteen, and moved them up to Montana. She had an older son, twenty-one at the time and on an LDS mission in Japan, who would come home to no home at all. And she had an older daughter, long since married and on her own.

  My father was twenty and my mother sixteen when their marriage was arranged by Rulon. My father was in love with someone else, a woman he met in college, a woman outside of his extreme faith. Though she was LDS, she was certainly not a fundamentalist. My father didn’t wish to upset his father or family and went along with his father’s wishes. After all, Rulon was a prophet of God.*

  Mom gave birth to her first child ten months later, when she was seventeen. She quickly added another four, me being the final and most glorious project in her twenty-sixth year.

  My four older siblings were Raphael, Vanessa, Tara, and Court. Court and I were the two boys, with three older, nagging sisters to delegate their chores to us and then turn right around and tattle on us at every opportunity.

  Mom was kind enough to make me and Court some karate suits, which we donned whenever we watched The Karate Kid and then ran upstairs to imitate to the best of our ability the Daniel-san Crane stance. Court and I would assume our meditation stances, each bowing to the other, and then I would often sucker-punch him in the gut, leaving him on the floor, gasping for breath in the fetal position, while I strutted out of the room, tightening my black belt.

  When I was five, my parents took me to get my first dog, a Norwegian elkhound mix. I found the ball of fluff sleeping underneath the breeder’s porch, hiding in the shade. We took him home and named him Szen, a minor mishap on my mother’s part
, who mistook it for “Sven” in a telephone conversation with a friend while they were talking about Norwegian names.

  Although I won’t always mention him throughout my story, let it be known that Szen was the perfect watchdog and my own personal protector, always by my side. He never slept on my bed but always beside it, within reach throughout the night. Even though a mix, he was a beautiful dog, smart as hell, and well mannered, thanks mostly to my mother’s training. As a five-year-old I had kindergarten only in the afternoon, and Mom, Szen, and I passed the mornings away doing whatever we pleased until I left for school. He was my dear friend.

  Notice that I spoke about the dog before I did my siblings. That was intentional.

  Raphael, or “Ruffles,” was the eldest and eight years my senior. We kept our distance, or more accurately, I kept my distance from her. She was a tomboy with attitude who rode horses and had a permanently braided ponytail. She had a fat black cat who was just an extension of her intolerant self.

  Raphael showed no hint of emotion or love or anything of the kind toward me. She simply tolerated me. Every so often she would deign to speak to me, but usually in the form of a command. At the age of twelve, Raphael made the commitment to become a medical doctor and would lose herself, as well as her love of horses and Piers Anthony novels, in her studies because she was a dork. But she always found time, or made the time, to torment Vanessa, who in turn tormented Raphael by simply choosing to exist.

  Vanessa, the second-oldest child, was my caretaker, my second mother. She loved for Mom to leave on errands so she could assume the protective role over me. She loved to show me off and take me places. At the school Halloween party, she took me by the hand and introduced me to everyone she knew…. Scratch that: just everyone.