Faraway Places

by Tom Spanbauer

  “Lard Ass,” I whispered, and wanted to laugh, but didn’t. I didn’t move.

  Old Harold P. Endicott stayed that way for quite some time, his ear to the ground, not looking around, kind of moving back and forth, like the screen door the night of the chinook, between here and there, just letting himself go, when all of a sudden he rolled over onto his side and the dogs stopped. He lay like that for a while, covering himself down there with his hands, and then, as if he had blown the whistle, those dogs started licking him all over again in the same way, from their same positions: the two on the sides going down and the two at his feet coming up, and then all of them there, in the middle, licking.

  After a while, Harold P. Endicott got up and walked back up to the house, naked except for his whistle. One of those dogs got his boots with his socks stuffed in them, and one of those dogs got his Levi’s with his shorts stuffed in them, and another dog got his shirt, another his hat, and the five of those hellhounds followed him back into the house, the big stone haunted castle house in the trees, under the snapping flag, under Old Glory up there in the wind in the sky. I held on tight to the tree to keep from falling: off the tree, off the round ball that was turning at an illusive speed, off the round ball hanging there in infinity, in eternity, in the sky. Endicott closed the door, snugged it back into home. I heard the door shut just as Endicott closed it. I wasn’t that far away.

  THE NIGHT SHE shot the moon, the moon was almost full and it was Saturday night, but it was different that night from most Saturday nights because my mother and my father had stayed in all day with the bills. There were bills and papers all over the kitchen table, from here to kingdom come on the kitchen table. Settling-up time, my father called it, and my mother called it time when the vultures get their claws in you. Both of them were acting like they acted when they were mad at each other at the Blackfoot State Fair, but during bill time they just seemed like they were mad at each other. Really they weren’t.

  The both of them sat there all day at the kitchen table frowning and my father cussing under his breath and making his knuckles white and my mother smoking his Viceroys, her voice lower, his higher, scratching numbers onto papers and putting papers into piles and then moving those piles to other piles, and then starting all over again, looking under piles for other papers, but what they were looking for was more money and it was never there.

  There was so much paper on the kitchen table that there wasn’t room to eat dinner, and dinner turned out to be only bologna sandwiches and fried spuds.

  By suppertime they had managed to clear most of the bills and the papers away, most of them, that is, except for one, the big one, the farm payment, the one they only had half of. No matter how much they figured and scratched around and looked under piles and moved papers from one pile to another pile, they could only come up with half.

  Endicott’s bill sat on the supper table like something that shouldn’t be among our things—like Montgomery Clift’s martini glass might seem if it were sitting there. My father picked the bill up a couple of times and looked at it and then looked at his checkbook again, then laid the bill back down on the table, turned it over, picked it up again, then put it back down.

  We ate supper with that piece of paper that night like it was a person there with us, like Old Lard Ass himself. I had half a mind to set a place for that bill: a knife and fork and spoon, bologna sandwich and spuds.

  Nobody said anything during supper. Usually that was the case at supper—none of us saying much. Usually there wasn’t much to say. But that night, that Saturday night, things were different because of that paper sitting there across from me, different because we only had half of what that paper said we had to have, like company with bad manners asking for more. That, to me, was something to talk about, but we didn’t talk. It wasn’t just that they weren’t talking to me about it; they weren’t talking to each other about it either.

  I figured I would be different too: I wasn’t going to be nice, start saying nice things about how things were happening, how good the bologna sandwiches were and the spuds, and what a nice pink color Old Lard Ass’s bill was, but I was scared the way I get when things get like that—my mother and my father so quiet. I was more scared than usual this time, so much going on and nobody saying anything about it, the both of them acting like everything was normal, ordinary, that there was nothing wrong.

  That always makes me scared—their acting—but this time it felt like it was just going to be too much. Too much for all of us, my mother, my father, and me. And we sat there like my mother’s pressure cooker on the stove; the dial going up and up and we were just sitting there in a pressure cooker. The dial goes past all the numbers and starts going around again, like on the swing when you go so high the swing starts going over onto itself.

  And so I said, “Pinochle. How about a game of pinochle?” I said to both of them, but really just to my mother so my father could hear, because he usually only played pinochle when there were four, when company came over and there were four. When it was just my mother, my father, and me, there had to be three extra cards called the widow so just the three of us could play.

  “We’ll see,” my mother said, which usually meant no. “We’ll see after the dishes are done,” she told me.

  “And after the baths.”

  We only took baths on Saturday and we all used to share the same tub of water—me first, then my mother, and then my father—until I started getting older two years ago. Then I got my own tub of water, but usually I went first still.

  I turned on KSEI on the radio while my mother and I did the dishes and my father sat at the supper table with his coffee and Endicott’s pink bill. The sky through the eyesore was the color of blue that skies get in movies—Technicolor ones—and the Sons of the Pioneers were singing on the radio, “Cool Water,” and then there was that dance kind of music like people used to dance to—Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.

  I’ll be down to getcha in a taxi, honey,

  better be ready ‘bout half-past eight.

  I asked my mother how you fox-trot.

  My mother looked at me like she knew what I was doing—making things nice—and her look was a good one, one that said thank you, I’m glad you’re still trying to make things nice, and she took her hands out of the dishwater and shook them off and dried them with a dish towel. My mother walked up to me and put my left hand on her right shoulder and my right hand on her waist and she told me to make a box with my feet, make a box, she said, one, two, three, four, she said. But she told me I was two left feet. Then she said, Come on, Dad, let’s show our son here how to fox-trot. And sure enough, my father got up and took a hold of her. He kind of leaned down a bit to her and she raised her shoulders like she had shoulder pads on and they fox-trotted, all around the room, all around the supper table they fox-trotted, making boxes one, two, three, four, like Montgomery Clift and Hedy Lamarr, around that piece of pink paper on the supper table, my mother smiling on her tiptoes like she was wearing her high heels with no toes in them, and my father with a romantic look on his face, making that romantic look so I could see it, my father dancing and looking that way.

  And then we took our baths, me first, them still fox-trotting. I could hear them there in the kitchen. I watched myself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet, listening to them in the kitchen, and then I smelled the coffee from the percolator and when my mother got done with her bath, and my father got done with his, we played pinochle. I had coffee too—in the special cups that matched the saucers—and chocolate cake, and my mother shot the moon in hearts, just exactly the right cards in the widow for a family.

  And when I was in bed later, she came in and stood over me. She touched the covers and then walked to the window and looked out at the moon—the almost full moon she had just shot—and she said, “Good night.” I had to agree. Even with Endicott’s bill there, it had been a good one.

  THE NEXT MORNING, when we got up, the hawks were back in the poplars in front
of the house. As soon as my mother saw them through the front room window, she crossed herself and went for her rosary.

  ON OCTOBER 22 my father put his Sunday suit on even though it was a Monday, gassed up the Oldsmobile, and drove into town smelling like Old Spice. He drove to Harold P. Endicott’s Bank and Trust on Main Street and Jefferson in Wind River with only half the farm payment. Then he drove back home with the news that we had to leave because we had lost the farm for good.

  I was in the loft of the barn scaring up pigeons when I heard the Oldsmobile drive into the yard, heard him shut the engine off, heard him slam the door of the Oldsmobile. I heard the screen door slam next, which I expected, but then I heard him yell something and the screen door slam again and then I heard my father below me unlocking the saddle room door. I got down onto the floor quick where there was a hole in the floorboards and I could see my father at the saddle room door in his Sunday suit unlocking the saddle room door with his right hand. In his left hand were two bottles of whiskey. At least I thought it was whiskey in those bottles, and as it turned out it was. It was Black Velvet, and when he got that saddle room door unlocked, my father walked in there and closed the door behind him, locked it, and started drinking that Black Velvet down. He didn’t come out at six for supper, and as things turned out, he finished up both of those Black Velvets by suppertime at six o’clock the next day.

  In the kitchen at suppertime that first night, my mother put the food on the table, the roast beef and the mashed potatoes, and the string beans and the coleslaw and the bread, and the gravy. She even started the coffee up for my father for after supper, her hair the way she always combed it out for him at suppertime, her lips with lipstick on them, the clean apron she wore over her red housedress on, but my father didn’t come in for supper still.

  My mother stood at the kitchen window, the good one that faced out into the yard with the doily curtain and the red geranium in it, ready for him like that, her left hand drawing back the curtain, the hand with the wedding ring on it. My mother waited and the light changed from day—blue and yellow—through the colors of the rose window at church: orange and light red, navy blue to black. My mother waited until nighttime.

  When darkness fell, the light went on in the saddle room and you could hear my father singing, “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen,” the waxing moon, even fuller than the night my mother’d shot it, rising over the ridgepole of the barn.

  There were big white fluffy clouds going over the moon, white like the moon, when the saddle room light finally went off. It wasn’t long before I could see my father walking across the yard like he was trying to walk normal. I watched him from my window upstairs.

  I wondered if my father could see us—his wife and his son at the windows, her down in the kitchen and me in my bedroom. If my father could see us, I wondered what he thought of us then. Then I wondered what it felt like for him to see us watching him walk like that.

  My mother came into my room like she had two nights before after shooting the moon, but this night it was different, that left eye of hers was so far gone it looked like the eye of a fish dead and floating in a fish bowl. My mother pulled the covers of my bed back and fluffed the pillow up and stood there waiting for me to get into bed like I was still a kid. I already had my pajamas on, and she said that I could brush my teeth in the morning. I got in bed and my mother pulled the covers over me like I was still a kid and she stood there for a while in the dark in the moonlight. From downstairs we heard my father open the door. We heard the screen door spring stretching. That night the screen door spring stretching like that sounded like angels singing, glorious and sorrowful both.

  “Looks like we’ve lost the farm for good,” my mother said, and I didn’t say anything.

  “Whatever happens tonight,” she said, “I don’t want you coming out of your room. There’s trouble enough without you two getting into it. Promise me,” she said, and I promised.

  My mother left the room then and closed the door behind her and there was only darkness, save for the moonlight in the room. I could hardly make out my confirmation certificate and the picture of the guardian angel helping the two kids across the bridge.

  Pretty soon I could hear them talking in the kitchen, my mother talking like she was whispering, though she wasn’t, my father talking loud in the way I had never heard him talk in front of her before, saying those words in front of her and in a strange voice—a drunken voice, I figured—and the both of them were calling each other Joe and Mary. Later on, I could hear my father puking in the bathroom and then later I could hear my mother crying in the bedroom.

  In the morning, I didn’t go to school. Nobody even thought of it, including me. My father still had his suit on. He was sitting in the front room in the early-morning light that was the color of eggshells. There he was: in his suit, on the davenport like he was company, holding on to the second Black Velvet. The first Black Velvet was in the kitchen on the draining board. My mother had rinsed it out.

  When I saw my father sitting there in his Sunday suit in that light holding on to the Black Velvet that way, and my mother wearing lipstick and her hair the way she wore it for him, and nobody even thinking about getting me to school, I got scared in a way I had never been scared before.

  My father sat there in the front room through breakfast, passing up on the mush, the eggs fried just the way he liked them, and the toast. He didn’t even have any coffee.

  My father sat there through dinner, passing up on the roast beef from the night before when he didn’t eat supper, the potatoes, the gravy, the string beans—reheated; the coleslaw, the baked bread, the peach pie—his favorite—and coffee again.

  Even though it was Tuesday, my mother didn’t bake bread. She didn’t do the ironing. She just sat at the kitchen table smoking Viceroys, waiting for my father to eat.

  My father sat there drinking from the second bottle of Black Velvet all through supper—no roast-beef sandwiches, no potato salad, no corn on the cob, no peach pie, still no coffee for him.

  But then, just about the time that supper was usually over, my father stood up and drained the last of the Black Velvet from the bottle and let the bottle fall to the floor on the carpet. Just about the time my father usually took his paper into the front room or out on the front porch with his coffee, my father walked down the hallway of the butterflies and dice. He walked into the kitchen and my mother was waiting for him with the rolling pin. My mother was in the kitchen with her hair that way for him, lipstick on her lips for him, wearing her clean apron over her red housedress for him, with her rolling pin in her hand for him. When my father stepped into the kitchen, my mother unlatched and came on him fast from behind from where she had been standing. She swung a good one but missed him by a yard, lost her balance and fell down by the stove, her hair falling down in front of her eyes, her dress up, her legs bare all the way up to her panties. My mother stood up again real fast and cranked up for another swing, but my father stopped her, hit her in the mouth with his fist clenched tight. He hit her the way one man hits another man in a fistfight or boxing; the way Harold P. Endicott hit that woman Sugar Babe. My mother’s nose and mouth went red and she went down fast into the pile of kindling by the stove.

  My father hit me the same way when I went after him. I heard a loud buzzing and I felt like puking. I landed on top of my mother by the stove. My father said something about the way the two of us, my mother and me, were lying there, and then walked out the kitchen door, slamming the screen door behind him as he left.

  I just lay there for a while looking at things. I had never seen the kitchen door from that angle. Looking out the eyesore from down there, I saw more sky than I’d ever seen from inside before. Then one of those hawks flew by—framed for an instant by the eyesore. That bird let out a screech that was just like the screen door spring stretching. I don’t know how I ever could have thought it sounded like angels.

  I looked over at my mother. Her eyes were open and she was staring u
p at the ceiling, holding her hand over her nose and mouth. Her eye was worse than ever. It was like she had finally seen too much. I got up and got a washrag wet and gave it to her and she began to wipe the blood away.

  “Go after your father,” my mother said. “He needs you now.” And after she said that, she crossed herself. Then she got up and walked into the hallway of the butterflies and the dice and into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

  THE DOOR TO the saddle room was open and where the .25-20 usually hung was just the red outline on the wall. I ran to the river to old Harold P. Endicott’s house. Everything along the way looked like that missing rifle; things were just outlines of themselves—the barn, the house, the toolshed, the trees, the pig pen, the river, even the clouds. As I ran I wondered why I was thinking that things looked that way. I figured it was because I was scared. Things always seemed different then. But I never stopped running, scared as I was. I never stopped even when the rain started. Even when the skies grew black and opened up. I never stopped until I got to Harold P. Endicott’s, where Old Lard Ass had got his licking; never stopped until I heard the shot.

  This is what I saw: my father holding the gun on Harold P. Endicott, who was sitting in a lawn chair under the eaves of his house near the back door, his hellhounds surrounding him, all of them looking at my father like murder. I don’t know why, but I was relieved for all of us that my father didn’t catch old Endicott like I had caught him that day.