Dad

by William Wharton

Then it’s the service. That poor girl with her boobs falling into our plates can’t do anything right for Mother.

  The food is mediocre at best, and expensive. I listen to Mother gripe through each course. I let her go on; she’s enjoying herself, at least it keeps her mind off Dad. I listen again to all the details of their visit to Williamsburg in Virginia with the Barlittles. It must have been ten years ago and I’m sure I’ve heard about it five times. Williamsburg is a town the Rockefellers fixed up the way it never was so people won’t ask for the money robbed from them by crooked oil deals.

  When we get home, I tell Mom I’m going to sleep out in the garden back bedroom. I show her the signal system Dad’s rigged and how to use it. She wants to know why I’m not sleeping in the house. I know if I’d said I’d sleep in the side bedroom, she’d want me to sleep in the garden. I know that. I’m not evasive enough to deal with Mom.

  But I do sleep. Mom gets through the night without any problems, too.

  But the next day I have to stop her five different times from doing crazy things that could kill her. Also, she can’t believe I can cook dinner.

  Mom has the ultimate put-down when everything goes wrong; that is, when somebody else is doing anything right without her help. It goes like this.

  “My God, look what my idiot child can do, he can boil an egg! Who’d ever believe it? I didn’t know you had so many talents, Jacky. Soon you’ll be the best water-boiler for men over fifty on Colby Lane.”

  We work through various versions of this during the entire dinner process.

  Afterward, we go in and watch TV. Mother sits in Dad’s chair with a stool pulled up to put her feet on. She has a habit of crossing her legs or feet, and the doctor has made a point about how this is bad for her circulation. It’s one of the things heart patients aren’t supposed to do. She’s always forgetting and I keep reminding her. I spend more time watching her feet than watching TV. Probably I’m trying to get even for the dinner put-down.

  Also, the back-seating on the dishwashing was overwhelming. I happen to know she’s a sloppy dishwasher, sloppier than I am, and that’s saying something. But you’d swear we were preparing those dishes for brain surgery.

  At about eleven o’clock, I get so tired I go back to the bedroom. She’s still sitting up in the chair and says she’s not sleepy yet. I don’t feel like fighting her.

  11

  Next morning, Billy really wants to drive. What the hell, he should feel I have confidence in him. If we have an accident, we’ll change places with each other just before we die.

  Today we’ll be coming down the eastern side of the Rockies and it’ll be tedious driving. We leave early, but no matter how early you take off, it’s one long line of trucks. Not many trucks take Route 70, because of the pass, but enough do; so it’s a drag and the road isn’t wide enough for passing.

  I make a rule, no passing unless we both agree. I’ve driven with Billy before. Also, I’m in charge of music. I don’t want to be nervous about his driving and at the same time have “Bobby boy” singing through his nose; telling me how he has exclusively discovered the meaning of life.

  It’s a gorgeous day. The pass is twelve thousand feet and we’re starting down. We curve along in the sunshine; massive trees and rocks, crisp creeks shining at the bottom of deep cuts. The road meanders through hairpin turns. All along are sections being built for the big highway to go through here someday.

  We’re never going to agree on passing. Billy can’t see more than seventy-five yards along the road ever, and those semitrailer trucks are at least thirty yards long. They’re lined up in front of us far as we can see.

  So after he’s put on the direction signal a couple of times and I’ve shaken my head no, Billy pushes back his seat and drives with his arms straight out. His head is tilted as if he’s looking through bifocals. Thank God, we can’t go more than thirty miles per hour.

  There isn’t much in the way of music. We’re out of range for Denver and there’s nothing but Country Western from small towns.

  I’d like to find a Glenn Miller eight-track. I wonder if they’ve made any tapes of that music. I’ll bet there’re a lot of people, people my age, who’d enjoy hearing those old tunes again… “Moonlight Cocktail,” “Sunrise Serenade,” “In the Mood”…

  I could tell Miller from the first bar. He’d set up his woodwinds to carry the theme; then his brass and percussion would move in, blend with some kind of magic weaving to pick it up. I could almost see it in my mind. It was like watching a dancer, or slow-motion pictures of a basketball player dribbling, making a shoulder fake, springing and pushing off a jump shot while fading.

  I had every record Miller cut. When I was fifteen I bought one of the first portable record players. The replacement battery was the size of a motorcycle twelve-volter. The thing cost a fortune. I’d play Miller out there in the aviary for my birds. It was heaven playing those old 78s, three minutes on a side, listening to Glenn Miller having a concert with my birds. I even wrote him once about it but didn’t get an answer.

  While I was in the army, my folks moved from Philadelphia to California. I’d packed my collection carefully and put it in charge of Joan; she was fifteen.

  Joan tried to keep them on the floor of the back seat with her but that space was needed for suitcases to go in and out of motels, so they packed them in the trunk of the car.

  They drove right across the desert in midsummer. When Joan unpacked the records, they were baked together into one solid wavy thick record, the thickest Glenn Miller record in the world.

  During the war, I’d dream about those records. When I got home, I was going to play them for at least two weeks getting myself straightened out. I’d make up different concerts in my mind, trying to remember the music.

  So I came home. After about an hour of welcoming, I ask where my records are. Joan motions me to follow her. Nobody says anything. She takes me into her room and from the bottom of her closet brings out this black, round lump. I cried. At that time I could cry easily. I was having a hard time keeping myself from crying about almost everything.

  I was in a tent in the middle of a muddy field being transported back to my outfit after being wounded the first time when we got the news Miller had disappeared. I’d been being shuffled from hospitals to repple-depples for almost a month. This place had a genuine old-fashioned bed-check-Charley type who’d come over our field at chow time and bomb the tents from an antiquated monoplane. There wasn’t any antiaircraft unit around, so we’d all run out to fire M1s and BARs at him; our before-chow evening target practice.

  I think this nut dropped those bombs by hand over the side like W.W.I. They were handmade jobbies built from strapped-together masher grenades; about half didn’t go off. Another fanatic doing a German-style, old-man-Hemingway scene.

  He’s just done his little circle and dropped two bombs. They both dudded in a muddy field and we didn’t hit him. I’m going back to the tent for my mess kit when the mail clerk of this transient company comes by, passing out copies of Stars & Stripes. I open mine and there is it. “MAJOR GLENN MILLER MISSING IN ACTION OVER CHANNEL! SEARCHERS INDICATE PLANE IS PROBABLY LOST!” I can’t believe it.

  I go back to my tent and let it soak in privately. All the music, the church dances, what seemed my wonderful abbreviated childhood, finished. I felt cheated; cut off from the best part of my life; knowing it would never be the same again.

  Sure, this is true for everybody and everything, even without a war or critical deaths. But I’d been sustaining myself on the illusion I’d be going back; not only going back in the geographic sense but going back to the way it was, continuing where I’d left off.

  Squatting there in the tent, in that spring evening, I let go. I was almost late for chow.

  The cowboy music on the radio is incessant. There can’t be more than ten different tunes they use; only the words are changed. I try listening to those words and they’re American all right, upside-down America or maybe insid
e out.

  I reach over and switch it off. Billy smiles.

  “God bless you, kind sir. Five more minutes and I’d’ve pulled out the trusty six-shooter and put one right through my Stetson.”

  I started laughing. God, it feels good to laugh. It seems I haven’t laughed out loud in six months. And normally I’m a big laugher, with a terrible snuffling walrus guffaw. I laugh so hard I worry I might be getting hysterical. Billy’s laughing too, I think mostly at my laughing.

  “Dad, what this world needs is some new cowboy songs, maybe porno lyrics closer to the way it is.”

  We go through tunnels and there are incredible rock formations, beautiful as Bryce. Probably somewhere along in here we’ve crossed the Continental Divide.

  You can tell we’ve passed over something. From here on, everything’s different. It’s the first long step east. It’s a giant step to Europe when you go over that big rock hill. This side is more civilized, tame. It’s less exciting, sure, but a hell of a lot easier to live with.

  Here’s where tame animals start. The people aren’t tame yet, neither are the plants much, no real agriculture.

  Back on the other side it’s all wild: wild plants, wild rocks, wild people, wild skies, wild water and wild animals. The only exceptions, a few people-ghettos like Los Angeles or San Francisco.

  We’ll be going through some of the most extensive tame-animal country in the world, straight across Kansas, four hundred miles of prime tame-animal country. When we cross the Mississippi, tame plants really start; and on the other side of the Appalachians tame people.

  We’ve come out of the mountains and are on straight four-and-four highway. This is our payoff. Billy seems hypnotized. I look over and we’re going eighty. Christ, there’s a fifty-five-mile speed limit.

  “Look at the speedometer, Billy; heh, heh, heh, we’re really moving.”

  I don’t lay it on, just say it the way I’d say, “Look at that yellow cow out the window there.” But he does slow down, slows to sixty-five. After eighty, it feels as if we’re going thirty.

  There’s nothing out the windows; the road doesn’t curve an inch; like a flat railroad. And tame animals, cows, steers, are out there all around us.

  Billy’s started laughing and giggling to himself. Sometimes he hums and then marks time with his left foot.

  “Listen to this, Dad; the first meaningful set of Western lyrics since ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.’”

  He starts singing, a blend of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie. He’s using number three of the cowboy tunes.

  “In the valleys and the hills of the Oregon wood,

  Not a chain saw screams like Frieda’s could.

  Fightin’ and acussin’ are a logger’s game

  But they all go quiet at Frieda’s name.

  “Then there’s a chain-saw solo. I could do it on a guitar easy.”

  He starts humming and razzing, making noises that are supposed to be a chain-saw chorus.

  “Then it goes—wait a minute—Yeah!

  “Frieda has elbows like an elephant’s knees;

  Some people say she stands when she pees;

  She just ain’t much for the birds and bees,

  But you oughtta see Frieda fellin’ them trees.”

  He does his buzzing, humming, razzing again. There’s a long quiet while he’s putting the next part together. He’s still beating it out with his bare foot and giggling.

  “OK, here it is, I think.

  “Frieda met her end one dark, gray day,

  Fellin’ two at once or so they say;

  The logs cut easy and she wondered why,

  Then saw the saw sticking through her thigh.”

  We have some more mouth noises. I never knew he could make so many different sounds; he almost does sound like a guitar. I’ve heard him make all the motorcycle noises but this is something new to me.

  He pauses briefly, but then he’s off and running. We’re both laughing now.

  “Frieda fell to one stump, then to the other,

  Some even say she muttered MUTTHUH!

  She looked straight up at the trees spinning round;

  Then, with a sigh, Frieda hit the ground.”

  He’s buzzing and laughing so hard he can hardly drive. He even forgets to keep his foot on the accelerator and we’re doing a legal fifty-five for the first time all day. I’ve got tears in my eyes and my sides hurt; definitely working up a hysterical laugh. I’ve got to watch myself.

  About five miles farther on we pull up for gas and some lunch. The lunch stand is a converted trailer chocked up on railway ties. A lightweight swinging aluminum door latches shut behind us.

  Along the back is a counter and there are two tables on the side we came in. We order hamburgers, then sit at one of the tables. There are no other customers. It’s almost two, late for the lunch crowd. We order milkshakes with the hamburgers.

  Now, there’s something about an American hamburger in America; it’s like French bread in France. Maybe it’s the atmosphere, or the grass the cows eat, but an American hamburger in America is something special.

  And these hamburgers we have in this jacked-up trailer are sensational. We spread them with everything: relish, mustard, catsup, mayonnaise. Those hamburgers leak out our fingers. The milkshakes are solid ice cream, stiff enough to hold the straws straight up. If there were an American equivalent to the Michelin Guide, this place deserves three stars with an asterisk.

  Counting the milkshake, I’m probably putting back on three pounds in one sitting. I lost almost twenty over the past five months, twenty I could well afford to lose, and now I’ll be packing them back on.

  Pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers, milkshakes; by the time we get to Philadelphia I won’t be able to squeeze behind the wheel.

  I’m still waiting for Billy to elaborate on his reasons for leaving Santa Cruz. I didn’t even know he’d left school till he showed up at Mother’s. I asked then if he’d walked out in the middle of the quarter but he said he didn’t even start.

  He’s been up in Oregon working as a choker, living out Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, I think. I only wish he’d told me, for income tax purposes at least. I’m carrying him as a deduction and if he’s getting W-2 forms I’m in trouble. All I need is the IRS on my tail.

  I can just see Billy up there in the woods, no experience with that kind of life or even work itself, and he’s choking: hooking cables on felled timber. Lord! It’s like me going into the infantry when I’d never even had a BB gun or firecrackers. I know Billy did get hurt; he told me that much.

  We drive on, skipping all the big towns. Once you get off the highway, you’re dumped into local traffic. None of these towns have any real interest. When you’ve lived in Paris for over fifteen years, it’s hard to work up a big interest in Abilene, Kansas, even if Dwight D. Eisenhower did spend his profitable boyhood there. The most you can hope for is a town like Denver, which is a smoothed-over Westernized imitation of Chicago, which is an imitation of New York, which is an imitation of Paris or Rome or Athens or London.

  For dinner we stop and have another pizza. We haven’t had a pizza for over twenty-four hours. We get a big, green salad too, because we’re plugged up. The salad’s more expensive than the pizza, but we both definitely need grass-type food. Later, we find a motel well off the road.

  This is a true Midwest town, all separate houses with porches, everything wood or fieldstone; sidewalks.

  After dinner, Billy and I walk around. The people on the porches stare at us.

  There are locusts or crickets in the trees, making the most god-awful noise. It sounds like an electric generator gone mad; the buzzing comes from every direction.

  At the edge of town we see a lit-up baseball field with cars parked all around it. Now, Billy has never played baseball. He doesn’t even know the names of the positions. If I said shortstop, it wouldn’t mean anything to him. Like as not, he’d think it’s some soft drink or a deodorant for men.
/>   But, God, as a kid, I lived, breathed, died for baseball. There was no way I could’ve survived in my neighborhood if I didn’t play. Our year wasn’t spring, summer, fall, winter. It was baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey. We squeezed the kite, roller-skating and swimming seasons in the spaces.

  By March I’d be down in the cellar taping up balls and bats. Soon as the snow was gone we were throwing balls against steps, getting our eyes and arms in shape. We had more damned varieties of games we played against cement steps with tennis balls. Then, all summer long, it was baseball. We went from after breakfast till nine o’clock at night. We’d keep games going when you could only see the ball if it was against the sky.

  We’d play three or four nine-inning baseball games every day. The second game was at lunchtime and the unchosen usually got to play then. Bringing your lunch was an admission of defeat.

  Mornings, I’d put on my ragtag baseball uniform, crowned by my Philadelphia A’s baseball cap, fill a milk bottle with water, hang my glove on the end of the bat, tuck a ball in my pocket and go down to the baseball field. There’d always be a bunch there ready to play. It was usually choose up; we rarely had regular teams; but we always had more than enough to make two full nines, and it was tough competition getting chosen. There were whole rituals for the choosing process, involving swinging a bat round your head three times after catching it and then hand-fitting around the bat. After the teams were chosen, there were backup jobs for the unlucky: scorekeeping, umping, shagging fouls and hunting lost balls.

  It was interesting how the slotting happened, how you found out just what you could play according to your skills and abilities. At first, I caught because I wasn’t agile or quick enough to play infield and I wasn’t a good enough hitter to play outfield, even right field.

  But I wasn’t strong enough to be a good catcher either. When Ray Ziggenfuss moved into the neighborhood, it wasn’t long before I knew my days as catcher were over. Ray was strong, quick with his hands and he could hit. He could hit well enough to play outfield but he wanted to catch. A kid named Mickey Mullens was the other catcher and he was good, too. I was about to be slotted as foul-chaser and lunch-bringer.