by Mitch Cullin
“Me and your brain,” he reminded her.
“Forgive me. I stand corrected.”
A fairly recent development in Debra's ongoing evolution was the avoidance of beef and fatty foods, relying instead on a diet of soy products, organic vegetables, chicken breasts, and brown rice. This conversion began when she watched a CNN special report about mad cow disease; soon afterward, while she was asleep in their bed, the disturbing images of infected, spasmodic cattle and humans repeated in her mind, jolting her awake beside Hollis.
“No more beef,” she had announced, nudging him with an elbow: “Hey, no more beef. We can't eat it anymore.”
“What is it?” he said, only half conscious.
“Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.”
“What are you saying?”
“It's cannibalization. They're using meat in stock feed. They're feeding them to themselves.”
“I don't understand.”
“Cows are eating cows, and we're eating the cows that do that, and it's coming back to haunt us. People are dying because of it, and they don't know why for sure. But it's pretty obvious, we ‘re paying a price for toying with nature. Stuff like this always happens when we go against the natural order of things, right? So, please, promise me—no more beef.”
“Okay,” he mumbled, “I promise—no more beef.”
Later Hollis wouldn't confess to the steakhouse dinners which he and Lon consumed during their swap-meet pilgrimages, nor did he point out to Debra that their dormant sex life had been reinvigorated by purely unnatural means: a small 100-milligram pill taken before intercourse, increasing blood flow into his penis, providing an erection which lasted for more than three hours. Although such a laboratory-designed gift wasn't enjoyed without a few minor side effects, including shortness of breath, flushing of the face, and a slightly upset stomach. The drug also brought temporary changes to his color vision, casting their lovemaking in a blue-green tinge (“Viagra vision,” was Lon's nickname for the condition—as he, too, had endured that aquamarine, swimming, goggles-like sensation). The side effects, however, never prevented Hollis from using the pill, and—until she was rushed into surgery—he and Debra had attempted sex on a weekly basis upon arriving at Nine Springs. Then, as opposed to her younger self, she made few excuses whenever the old urge had arisen in him—a headache wasn't claimed, cloying shyness wasn't feigned now that age had banished her modesty.
But if Viagra had sexual side effects, so did ovarian cancer–related surgery. Except no one had addressed the sexual component for Debra—none of the doctors or nurses had brought up postoperative issues involving vaginal dryness and atrophy from a loss of estrogen, or the possibility that the quality of her sex life would change dramatically. Nor was she prepared to exit the hospital with more than a complete hysterectomy and, weeks thereafter, discover that her libido had somehow also been removed. Perhaps, she had explained to Hollis, her lack of sexual interest resulted from a combination of stress, chemo, and an altered body image: not to mention the pain which accompanied intercourse, or the scar which defined her pale-white abdomen, or—as she would ultimately conclude—the fact that the organs she had always identified with her womanhood were forever gone.
“You're still beautiful to me,” he told her, reaching for her breasts. “You're still the most beautiful woman I've ever known.”
“Well, I better be,” she said, giving his hands free rein, closing her eyes when his lips pressed against her neck.
Yet following her surgery, in the moments succeeding their halfhearted attempts at intercourse, Hollis sensed her dissatisfaction—not so much from the lazy aftermath of sex, or from the heightened pleasure their bodies had endeavored to reach; rather, it was a vague reproach, a kind of indirect longing for something he couldn't know, an absence, expressed with the shifting of her figure, how she had turned her back to him, sighing or yawning prior to napping, the sheets becoming a warm membrane which then separated their skin. Once they were finished—wads of Kleenex dotting the carpet, the K-Y personal lubricant set aside—silence frequently overtook her; on occasion, however, she spoke, saying things which seemed out of context to his lingering ardor: “It's double coupons at Safeway this Thursday, don't let me forget.”
“I won't.”
He felt he hadn't touched her, hadn't touched her at all.
“And remind me to call Viv to get her sand tart recipe. It'd be a nice treat for the drama league's potluck next month.”
“Okay.”
Or, lately, she summoned people and places which rarely entered his thoughts, evoking memories of their old ranch-style home in Arcadia, wondering if the new Taiwanese owners were taking good care of its gardens: “Do they have birds-of-paradise in Taipei?” Maybe her deceased family members were discussed, maybe a trifle concerning her only sibling: “Jackie's a mess. She phoned this morning, looks like Fred is off the wagon.” Or she didn't turn from him at all, although she avoided his gaze—propping herself up with pillows instead, taking an aromatherapy bottle from the bedside table, a vexed expression crossing her face while she inhaled the cherry oil which conjured the cough drops her father had sucked like candy: “How strange. Daddy keeps popping into my head these days, and I'm not sure why. I guess I keep thinking he never had anything like this, you know. Just that same old house, pretty much those same rooms from start to finish. I wish him and Mother had settled somewhere else. It might've been a lot better for them, if they'd had something like this to look forward to. I think Daddy would've appreciated the desert, don't you think?”
“Probably,” Hollis said, the cherry-oil scent filling the space between them, his deceased father-in-law then appearing in a haze of cigarette smoke (Marlboro fuming at the man's chapped lips, crossword puzzle book folded across the lap of faded jeans). “Can't see why ol’ T.J. wouldn't.”
And Hollis knew that Debra, too, was remembering the man exactly as he was envisioning him—alone in the living room of a West Texas farmhouse, sitting upright on the right end of the couch, empty Lone Star cans by his slipper-covered feet, a cluttered TV tray before him, the Magnavox flickering several feet away with the volume set low. The No. 2 pencil held by his liver-spotted hand slowly deciphered the puzzle—jotting an answer, or erasing a wrongly chosen word—but presently the pencil stopped moving and the man's head slumped forward, eyes shutting while a cigarette continued to be savored, his thoughts propelling him elsewhere for a little while; then her father shuddered once and coughed, startling himself. Raising his head and eyelids, exhaling more grayish vapor, he returned from whatever daydreams were just experienced to the stagnant room where his body resided, the pencil soon resuming its methodical work.
12
At the outset of their first proper meeting, Hollis had readily perceived his future father-in-law as a recondite, intractable soul. Just prior to being introduced in the large backyard of Debra's family farm—an isolated homestead named What Rocks, buffered by thirty acres of land, surrounded by cotton fields and, beyond, the limitless sweep of West Texas plains—he watched the man loitering among brittle, yellow grass. Not wearing any pants but clad with a plaid bathrobe which didn't fully conceal a white undershirt, black dress socks, and red slippers, Debra's father watered a lone mesquite from a green hose which snaked through the grass to where he was standing and had been lifted up between his pale, hairless legs, hoisting the rear hem of the bathrobe; the tree in front of him was gray and looked barren save for a number of empty Dr Pepper bottles someone had slipped over branch ends (the durable bottles often set in motion by the fast winds coming off the plains, clanking hard against one another at times like a primitive wind chime—yet never shattering).
“Nobody around here calls me sir anymore,” the man would soon tell Hollis, crimping the hose while extending his free hand. “Mostly they call me T.J., so you call me T.J., all right?” And that brief overture revealed more than Hollis had expected: for the words were flavored with midday alcohol and stale tobacco, spoke
n lazily by a mild-mannered, clean-shaven face harboring an unkempt head of thinning brown hair; the surprising firmness of the simultaneous handshake had loosened the man's robe, displaying the inelegance of a lean body impregnated by a hefty beer gut and the garden hose pressed against the crotch of baby-blue boxer shorts.
“Pleased to know you, T.J.—”
“Said you're Hollis then?”
“Yes, Hollis—Hollis Adams.”
Nodding slightly, and with a degree of wryness, T.J. said, “Well, that's fine—nice making your acquaintance, Hollis—Hollis Adams,” resuming his watering, showing no concern that his bathrobe had now completely unfastened.
In truth, not everyone had called him T.J.; to his two daughters he would forever be Daddy, to his wife, Ida, he was Father (she was Mother to him), while others knew him redundantly as Junior Jr.: the enterprising son and heir apparent of Junior, a rancher who had inherited his own father's thriving cattle ranch—more than eight hundred head of cattle by 1926, about twelve hundred head by 1929—until the black blizzards of the dust bowl years rained long-term ecological and social devastation on the Panhandle, that protracted drought abetting the near-simultaneous collapse of the American economy. When, finally, there was no more feed for the starving cattle, no more grazing found on the dirt-swallowed prairie, Junior reluctantly sold his entire herd to the government slaughter program, taking $15 per head for young cows, $10 per head for old cows. Thereafter, he paid all his ranch hands and employees a decent parting wage, temporarily closing shop—he assured them—in full expectation of better days on the horizon. Still, the dusters continued rolling across the plains, along with countless bankruptcies and foreclosures; fearing he could lose everything, Junior divided the ranch into nine parcels, selling most of his property at a loss while keeping thirty acres and the stately Victorian family home T.J.'s grandfather had had built. But that sacrifice didn't prevent him from cursing such bad fortune, from assailing the sandstorm consuming his diminished land—bounding outside as his wife and son sat mystified at the dinner table, shouting obscenities in the midst of the blinding abrasive swirl—and, overcome by hopelessness, dropping on his knees while pressing the barrel of a Colt revolver against his jawbone; the resounding crack-shot then echoed back from where he had come, surpassing the wind's low hum, signaling his departure to the grit-tainted rooms and hallways of a lonesome, darkened house which hadn't been graced with sunlight or sky for nearly a week.
But in its heyday, the huge, neglected three-story house—erected on a grassy hill overlooking the plains, a crumbling monument to the decorous age of cattle barons—and its run-down bunkhouses had provided shelter for more than thirty people, although by the time Hollis arrived there in early 1951, the sole occupants of What Rocks were T.J. and his family (the individualistic foursome having plenty of space in which to carve out their own territory, navigating around one another with a curious mixture of intimacy and disregard). Adopting Queen Anne styling—the exterior consisting of brick, sandstone, and marble, the interior fashioned with mahogany and oak mantels, coffered ceilings, cornices, and parquet floors—the house was already a grand anachronism when compared to the newer, efficiently sized homes springing up in nearby towns and distant cities. As such, at least half of the interior wasn't utilized—the doors of some rooms kept shut year-round, several passageways dulled by unbroken, thickening dust layers. Behind a given entrance could be a gloomy, musty, vacant bedroom which needed mousetraps and a fresh coat of paint, and yet the adjacent living quarters might be bright, clean, furnished, with the wood floors shining.
Eventually, as both daughters married and moved away, less than a third of the What Rocks house became used (most of the ground floor, a bathroom on the second floor). While Ida maintained a regular workweek at the county courthouse, T.J. found it harder and harder to venture past the gates of the property, shunning the weekly domino games he had once enjoyed in town, arranging front-door delivery for his beer, gin, cigarettes, cough drops, crossword puzzle books. Subsequently, he was no longer encountered anywhere, not appearing at Ida's side when she repeatedly won elections as county treasurer, or attending the funeral services for departed friends. Some of those who had known him throughout the years began discussing T.J. discreetly, exaggerating him in a manner which made children wary of the imposing residence outside of town, the eerie hilltop house where the human spook named Junior Jr. crept at night. He would, in fact, creep out the remainder of his life inside the vacuous home, growing old faster, it seemed, than his peers, sometimes mumbling continually but addressing no one—often crossing from one room into the next with eyelids half open, as if he were trapped within a dream he couldn't escape.
Yet decades before T.J. died, Hollis had recognized something of himself in his reclusive father-in-law, had, in his own way, experienced similar lapses which likely summoned a disparate mix of mental imagery: the vast cotton fields T.J. had helped farm since the dusters subsided and the maze of two-lane backroads running for hundreds of miles through endless, un-ambivalent prairie—interwoven with lush, dense tropical islands abruptly seared black and left smoldering by the contrivances of warfare; the inability to reconcile such polarized worlds had irrevocably shaped him, Hollis was positive. But only after T.J.'s passing did Debra, too, begin to contemplate that lurking disparity, suspecting then that his visions must have gradually consumed him like an incurable malady while, at the same time, he had quietly resisted them without much success. So, in hindsight, she concluded he had started drinking to moor himself to the present—among the clutter of the living room, on the couch, with the TV rarely turned off—doing so to lose consciousness of the widespread battles which had urged him from his small town, enticing him overseas with the kind of heroic possibilities which could rouse those who truly longed for peace: your country needs you, the posters on Main Street had importuned; and T.J. answered the call, leaving his young wife and daughters behind, going westward in his Rambler, sporting new blue jeans and shined leather boots, inhaling exhaust and cigarette smoke as the flatlands stretched out ahead and ultimately guided him to the ocean.
As the Second World War approached its atomic conclusion and T.J. returned to What Rocks upon receiving the Purple Heart (a bullet having torn away the top joint of his right thumb, a minor injury in light of the graver wounds sustained by many he had served with), his earlier borderline alcoholism soon became a full-time vocation. Yet he pretty much limited his drinking to the living-room couch, the TV tray functioning like a desk and holding the few items he required. On occasion Hollis had drank beside him there—the two men sucking cough drops, sipping from Lone Star cans—but while both were veterans, the fifteen years between them, as well as T.J.'s uneasiness with small talk, made any casual rapport difficult. Still, Hollis had wanted to somehow engage his father-in-law like a confidant, to ask, “Just how awful was it over there? Was it as terrible for you as it was for me?”
Except they never would speak of their wartime experiences, would never utter more than what was required in the moment—the television usually prompting their unsustained remarks, laughs, nods of agreement, or halfhearted cheers. Nothing stirred up the man's ire. Nothing provoked debate or notable commentary. The closest they ever came to sharing an insightful exchange occurred while watching a network documentary about Martin Luther King Jr., the black-and-white program flickering through a bluish, fuzzy glow. “You know, King was an amazing man,” Hollis had remarked at the start of a commercial break, attempting to gain his father-in-law's perspective.
“Yep,” T.J. replied without hesitation, eyes fixed on the screen. He took a thoughtful drink from his beer can, then added: “There's one nigger who had something going for him.”
All the same, Hollis—like Debra—had viewed him as a tolerant man, not as someone inclined toward hatred; T.J.'s head had often shook at what the nightly news reported—the Tet offensive, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spr
ing—resigned sighs escaping like a kettle's first shuddering gasp. Before secluding himself at the big house, he frequently drove down to Nigger Town, playing Chicken Foot well past midnight, nursing gin and orange juice with grizzled black men who were fated to pause in front of his unsealed coffin (put to rest late one March, months after his failing liver had become a pitiful filter, his dribbling urine turning redder than wine). When seeing him inside the casket—rosacea-tainted skin retouched by the embalmer's garish palette, eyes now permanently shut, arms placed at his sides, wearing a brown polyester dress suit—it was impossible to glimpse a handsome sailor upon that emaciated, inanimate form. During the war, however, he was an attractive man in uniform, bearing a superficial resemblance to Tyrone Power—although his luck wasn't as good as his looks: separated from his naval unit while fighting the Japanese on the island of Tinian, forced to take refuge with frontline marines, witnessing innumerable variations of death in the southwest Pacific which, later on, he avoided talking about, hoping instead to dismiss it all from his mind even as he never could. Those final weeks of his life unfolded at the V.A. hospital in Amarillo, where—after seeing a news report about HIV-tainted blood reserves—T.J. refused any transfusions out of fear he might contract AIDS, pleading instead for cigarettes while remaining oblivious to the fact that he was already a dying man.
Shortly following his passing, Hollis and Debra assumed the chores Ida didn't have the will to perform, entering the guest bedroom where T.J. had slept alone (an untidy sanctuary near the living room, down the hallway and, seemingly, a long distance from the much larger bedroom he ‘d previously shared with his wife). On a brisk spring afternoon, they packed his belongings, dusted the furniture, polished the floor, washed and folded the linen. Then they tackled his mothball-steeped closet, sorting through clothing—what to keep or throw away, what to donate—climbing atop a stool in order to retrieve cardboard boxes stored well beyond their reach. One box held homemade fishing tackles, one was stuffed with issues of Life. Another box contained hundreds of photographs and negatives, most bound by rubber bands yet given a rough chronology; there were various shots of T.J. as a ranch kid, as a high-school quarterback, as a farmer, as a smirking entrepreneur in a community not yet made anxious by combat reports (sharply dressed outside his Ford dealership, his gas station, his Bobcat Bite diner—the businesses he divested himself of at the end of the war); portraits of him wearing his navy attire, the spotless uniform appearing as white and smooth as his skin; images of him at a port tavern, hoisting a beer bottle, laughing.
