by Brady Udall
“Why move around so much?” I wonder. “And why come to Texas?”
He says, “I just move, no reason that I can think of. For one thing, I’m here looking for my older brother Bud. He loves the Cowboys and fine women. He could very well be in the vicinity.”
“How’d your father die?” I say.
“His heart attacked him. Then his liver committed suicide and the rest of his organs just gave up after that. Too much drinking. That’s when I left Wisconsin for good.”
We are passing smelters and gas stations and trailers that sit back off the road. This is a part of Tyler I’ve never seen before. He pulls the old car into the parking lot of a huge wooden structure with a sign that says “The Ranch” in big matchstick letters. The sun is just going down but the place is lit up like Las Vegas. There is a fleet of dirty pickups overrunning the parking lot.
We find a space in the back and Buckeye leads me through a loading dock and into the kitchen where a trio of Hispanic ladies is doing dishes. He stops and chatters at them in a mixture of bad Spanish and hand gestures. “Come on,” he says to me. “I’m going to show you the man I once was.”
We go out into the main part which is as big as a ballroom. There are two round bars out in the middle of it and a few raised platforms where some half-dressed women are dancing. Chairs and tables are scattered all along the edges. The music is so loud I can feel it bouncing off my chest. Buckeye nods and wags his finger and smiles at everybody we pass and they respond like old friends. Buckeye, who’s been in Tyler less than a month, does this everywhere we go and if you didn’t know any better you’d think he was acquainted with every citizen in town.
We find an empty table against the wall right next to one of the dancers. She has on lacy black panties and a cutoff T-shirt that is barely sufficient to hold in all of her equipment. Buckeye politely says hello, but she doesn’t even look our way.
This is the first bar I’ve ever been in and I like the feel of it. Buckeye orders Cokes and buffalo wings for us both and surveys the place, once in awhile raising a hand to acknowledge someone he sees. Even though I’ve lived in Texas since I was born, I’ve never seen so many oversized belt buckles in one place.
“This is the first time I’ve been back here since my baptism,” he says. “I used to spend most of my nonworking hours in this barn.”
While he has told me about a lot of things, he’s never said anything about his conversion. The only reason I even know about it is that I overheard my parents discussing Buckeye’s worthiness to date my sister.
“Why did you get baptized?” I say.
Buckeye squints through the smoke and his voice takes on an unusual amount of gravity. “This used to be me, sitting right here and drinking till my teeth fell out. I was one of these people—not good, not bad, sincerely trying to make things as easy as possible. A place like this draws you in, pulls at you.”
I watch the girl in the panties gyrating above us and I think I can see what he’s getting at.
He continues: “But this ain’t all there is. Simply is not. There’s more to it than this. You’ve got to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong and then you’ve got to make a stand. Most people don’t want to put out the effort. I’m telling you, I know it’s not easy. Goodness has a call that’s hard to hear.”
I nod, not to indicate that I understand what he’s saying, but as a signal for him to keep going. Even though I’ve had my fair share of experience with them, I’ve never understood religious people.
“Do you know what life’s about? The why of the whole thing?” Buckeye says.
“No more than anybody else,” I say.
“Do you think you’ll ever know?”
“Maybe someday.”
Buckeye holds up a half-eaten chicken wing for emphasis. “Exactly,” he says through a full mouth. “I could scratch my balls forever if I had the time.” He finishes off the rest of his chicken and shrugs. “To know, you have to do. You have to get out there and take action, put your beliefs to the test. Sitting around on your duff will get you nothing better than a case of the hemorrhoids.”
“If you’re such a believer, why don’t you go around like my parents do, spouting scripture and all that?” I reason that if I just keep asking questions I will eventually get Buckeye figured out.
“For one thing,” Buckeye says flatly, “and you don’t need to go telling this to anybody else, but I’m not much of a reader.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Look here,” he says, taking the menu from between the ketchup and sugar bottles. He points at something on it and says, “This is ‘a’, this is a ‘t’ and here’s a ‘g.’ This says ‘hamburger’—I know that one. Oh, and this is ‘beer.’ I learned that early on.” He looks up at me. “Nope, I can’t read, not really. I never stayed put long enough to get an education. But I’m smart enough to fool anybody.”
If this were a movie and not real life I would feel terrible for Buckeye—maybe I would vow to teach him to read, give him self-worth, help him become a complete human being. For the climax he would win the national spelling bee or something. But this is reality and as I look across the table at Buckeye, I can see that his illiteracy doesn’t bother him a bit. In fact, he looks rather pleased with himself.
“Like I’ve been telling you, it’s not the reading, it’s not the saying. It’s only the doing I’m interested in. Do it, do it, do it,” Buckeye says, hammering each “do it” into the table with his Coke bottle. He leans into his chair, a wide grin overtaking his face. “But sometimes it certainly is nice to kick back and listen to the music.”
We sit there quiet for awhile, me doing my best not to stare at the dancer and Buckeye with his head back and eyes closed, sniffing the air with the deep concentration of a wine judge. A pretty woman in jeans and a flannel shirt comes up behind Buckeye and asks him to dance. There are only a few couples out on the floor. Most everybody else is sitting at their tables, drinking and yelling at each other over the music.
“Thanks but no thanks,” Buckeye says.
The woman looks over at me. “What about you?” she says.
I panic. My face gets hot and I begin to fidget. “No, no,” I say. “No, thank you.”
The woman seems amused by us and our Cokes. She takes a long look at both of us with her hands on the back of an empty chair.
“Go ahead,” Buckeye says. “I’ll hold down the fort.”
I shake my head and look down into my lap. “That’s quite all right,” I say. I don’t know how to dance and the brace I’m wearing makes me walk like I’ve got arthritis.
Buckeye sighs, smiles, gets up and leads the woman out onto the floor. She puts her head on his chest and I watch them drift away, swaying to the beat of a song about good love gone bad.
When the song is over Buckeye comes back with a flushed face and a look of exasperation. He says, “You see what I mean? That girl wanted things and for me to do them to her. She wanted these things done as soon as possible. She asked me if I didn’t want to load her bases.” He plops down in his chair and drains his Coke with one huge swallow. It doesn’t even make him blink.
On our way home he pulls into the deserted front lot of a drive-in movie theater and floors the accelerator, yanking the steering wheel all the way over to the left and holding it there. He yells, “Carnival ride!” and the car goes round and round, pinning me to the passenger door, spitting up geysers of dust and creaking and groaning as if it might fly into pieces at any second. When he finally throws on the brakes, we sit there, the great cloud of dust we made settling down on the car, making ticking noises on the roof. The world continues to hurtle around me and I can feel my stomach throbbing like a heart.
Buckeye looks over at me, his head swaying back and forth a little and says, “Now doesn’t that make you feel like you’ve had too much to drink?”
Simone and I are on the roof. It’s somewhere around midnight and there are bats zooming around our heads. We can hear the
swish as they pass. I have only a pair of shorts on and Simone is wearing an oversized T-shirt. The warm grainy tar paper holds us against the steep incline of the roof like Velcro. Old pipes have forced us out here. Right now these pipes, the ones that run through the north walls of our turn-of-the-century house, are engaged in their semiannual vibrational moaning. According to the plumber, this condition has to do with drastic changes in temperature; either we could pay thousands of dollars to have the pipes replaced or we could put up with a little annoying moaning once in awhile.
With my sister’s windows closed it sounds like someone crying in the hallway at the top of the stairs. My parents, with extra years of practice under their belts, have learned to sleep through it.
Simone and I are actually engaged in something that resembles conversation. Naturally, we are talking about Buckeye. If Buckeye has done nothing else, he has given us something to talk about.
For the first time in her life Simone seems to be seriously in love. She’s had boyfriends before, but Simone is the type of girl who will break up with a guy because she doesn’t like the way his clothes match. She’s known Buckeye for all of three weeks and is already talking about names for their children. All of this without anything close to sexual contact. “Do you really think he likes me?”
This is a question I’ve been asked before. “Difficult to say,” I tell her. In my young life I’ve learned the advantages of ambivalence.
Actually, I’ve asked Buckeye directly how he felt for my sister and this is the response I got: “I have feelings for her, feelings that could make an Eskimo sweat, but as far as feelings go, these simply aren’t the right kind. There’s a control problem I’m worried about.”
“He truly loves the Lord,” Simone says into the night. My sister, who wouldn’t know a Bible from the menu at Denny’s, thinks this is beautiful.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve begun to see the struggle that is going on with Buckeye, in which the Lord is surely involved. Buckeye never says anything about it, never lets on, but it’s there. It’s a battle that pits Buckeye the Badger against Buckeye the Mormon. Buckeye told me that in his old life as the Badger he never stole anything, never lied without first making sure he didn’t have a choice, got drunk once in awhile, fought some, cussed quite a bit and had only the women that wanted him. Now, as a Mormon, there is a whole list of things he has to avoid including coffee, tea, sex, tobacco, swearing, and as Buckeye puts it, “anything else unbecoming that smacks of the natural man.”
To increase his strength and defenses, Buckeye has taken to denying himself, testing his willpower in various ways. I’ve seen him go without food for two full days. While he watches TV he holds his breath for as long as he can, doesn’t use the bathroom until he’s within seconds of making a mess. As part of his rugby training, he bought an old tractor tire, filled it with rocks, made a rope harness for it and every morning drags it through the streets from his neighborhood to ours, which is at least three miles. When he comes inside he is covered with sweat but will not accept liquid of any kind. Before taking a shower he goes out onto the driveway and does a hundred pushups on his knuckles.
Since they’ve met, Buckeye has not so much as touched my sister except for some innocent hand-holding. Considering that he practically lives at our house and already seems like a brother-in-law, I find this a little weird. Buckeye and his non-contact love is making Simone deranged and I must say I’m enjoying it. The funny thing is, I think it’s having the same effect on him. There are times when Buckeye, once perpetually casual as blue jeans, cannot stay in one spot for more than a few seconds. He moves around like someone worried about being picked off by a sniper. He will become suddenly emotional, worse than certain menstruating women I’m related to: pissed off one minute, joyful the next. All of this is not lost on Buckeye. In his calmer and more rational moments he has come to theorize that a bum gland somewhere in his brain is responsible.
I sit back and listen to the pipes moaning like mating animals behind the walls. Hummingbird Lane, the street I’ve lived on my entire life, stretches off both ways into darkness. The clouds are low and the lights of the city reflect off them, giving everything a green, murky glow. Next to me my sister is chatting with herself, talking about the intrigues of beauty school, some of the inane deeds of my parents, her feeling and plans for Buckeye.
“Do you think I should get baptized?” she says. “Do you think he’d want me to?”
I snort.
“What?” she says. “Just because you’re an atheist or something.”
“I’m not an atheist,” I tell her. “I’m just not looking for any more burdens than I already have.”
The next morning, on Sunday, Buckeye comes to our house a newly ordained elder. I come upstairs just in time to hear him explain to Simone and my parents that he has been endowed with the power to baptize, to preach the gospel, to lay on the administering of hands, to heal. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in his Sunday clothes: striped shirt, blaring polyester tie and shoes that glitter so brightly you’d think they’d been shined by a Marine. He’s wearing some kind of potent cologne that makes my eyes tear up if I get too close. Damn me if the phrase doesn’t apply: Buckeye looks born again. As if he’d just been pulled from the womb and scrubbed a glowing pink.
“Gosh dang,” Buckeye says, “do I feel nice.”
I can handle Buckeye the Badger and Buckeye the Mormon, but Buckeye the Elder? When I think of elders I imagine bent, bearded men who are old enough to have the right to speak mysterious nonsense.
I have to admit, however, that he looks almost holy. He’s on a high, he’s ready to raise the dead. He puts up his dukes and performs some intricate Mohammed Ali footwork—something he does when he’s feeling particularly successful. We all watch him in wonder. My parents, just back from prayer meeting themselves, look particularly awed.
After lunch, once Buckeye has left, we settle down for our “Sabbath family conversation.” Usually it’s not so much a conversation as it is an excuse for us to yell at each other in a constructive format. As always, my father calls the meeting to order and then my mother, who is a diabetic, begins by sighing and apologizing for the mess the house has been in for the past few weeks; her insulin intake has been adjusted and she hasn’t been feeling well. This is just her way of blaming us for not helping out more. Simone breaks in and tries to defend herself by reminding everyone she’s done the dishes twice this week, my father snaps at her for not letting my mother finish and things take their natural course from there. Simone whines, my mother rubs her temples, my father asks the Lord why we can’t be a happy Christian family and I smirk and finish off my pistachio ice cream. Whenever Buckeye is not around, it seems, we go right back to normal.
Not only does Buckeye keep our household happy and lighthearted with his presence, but he has also avoided any religious confrontation with my folks. Buckeye is not naturally religious like my parents, and he doesn’t say much at all, just goes about his business, quietly believing what the folks at the Mormon church teach him. This doesn’t keep Mom and Dad from loving him more than anybody. I hope it doesn’t sound too bitter of me to say he’s the son they never had. Buckeye goes fishing with my father (I’m squeamish about putting live things on hooks) and is currently educating my mother on how to grow a successful vegetable garden. They believe a boy as well-mannered and decent as Buckeye could not be fooled by “those Mormons” for long. They are just biding their time until Buckeye comes to his spiritual senses. Then they will dazzle him with the special brand of truth found only in the Holton Hills Reformed Baptist Church, the church where they were not only saved, but where they met and eventually got married. They’ve tried to get Pastor Wild and Buckeye in the house at the same time but so far it hasn’t worked out. Up until now, though, I would have to say that Buckeye has done most of the dazzling.
One of my biggest worries is that I will be sterile. I don’t know why I think about this; I am young and have never co
me close to having a girl. About a year ago I was perusing the public library and found a book all about sterility and the affliction it causes in people’s lives. The book said that for some people, it is a tragedy that transcends all others. In what seems to be some sort of fateful coincidence I went home and turned on the TV and there was Phil Donahue discussing this very topic with four very downtrodden-looking men and their unfulfilled wives. I didn’t sleep that night and I worried about it for weeks. I even thought about secretly going to the doctor and having myself checked. I guess I believe my life has been just a little too tragedy-free for my own comfort.
This is what I’m thinking about with a rifle in my hands and Buckeye at my side. We are in a swamp looking for something to shoot. One of the big attractions of the Mormon church for Buckeye was that they don’t have any outright prohibitions against shooting things. Buckeye has two rifles and a handgun he keeps under the front seat of his Oldsmobile. I’ve got a .22 (something larger might aggravate my shoulder) and Buckeye is toting some kind of high-caliber hunting rifle that he says could take the head off a rhino. My parents took Simone to a fashion show in Dallas, so today it’s just me and Buckeye, out for a little manly fun.
I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem as if we’re actually hunting anything special. The afternoon is sticky full of bugs and the chirping of birds tumbles down out of old moss-laden trees. A few squirrels whiz by and a thick black snake crosses our path, but Buckeye doesn’t even notice. I guess if something worthwhile comes along, we’ll shoot it.
I tell Buckeye about my sterility worries. He and I share secrets. I suppose this is something women do all the time, but I’ve never tried it with any of the few friends I have. This sterility thing is my last big one and probably the one that embarrasses me the most. When I get through the entire explanation Buckeye looks at me twice and laughs.
